The Blueblood Papers: Old Blood

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9

Chapter 1

The Blueblood Papers: OLD BLOOD

Prince Blueblood and the Tomb of Shards

Explanatory note:

The following extract from what has become known as ‘The Blueblood Papers’ by our close circle of memorialists, archivists, and historians is unusual in that it does not deal directly with the major battles and political intrigue that took place during the Changeling War, though Prince Blueblood briefly alludes to the military and political situation in this extract. I had reservations about the decision to share this particular extract even within our circle, owing to the disturbing revelations contained within that remain a closely-guarded state secret. However, after close consultation with Princess Cadance of the Crystal Empire and Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, we are in agreement that such knowledge should be shared amongst our circle so that you may use it to combat this hidden threat, should it present itself once more. Indeed, it has been a threat akin to a weed or a cancer, always returning when thought vanquished for good.

Before you read the following extract, I must make it clear that its contents remain a state secret and must be maintained as such. I am aware that some of our circle are prone to idle gossip about these papers, treating them as one would a series of exciting adventure stories instead of the serious scholarly work that they are, and I have tolerated this knowing that it would be impossible to stop and that I ought to be content that my nephew’s memory is being kept alive. However, in this case I insist on a total prohibition of discussion of the contents of this extract beyond the members of our circle. Any leaks, and I will know who is responsible, will be punished to the full extent of the law.

As before, I have taken it upon myself to edit the extract, limiting direct edits to merely correcting minor spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors for readability. Though Prince Blueblood demonstrates startling skills of recollection in putting together these private memoirs, his tendency to restrict himself to events that he had directly experienced or held strong feelings about (and very often write at length about them despite having little to do with the matter at hoof) can prove frustrating for those desiring a more complete examination of the historical events he describes. Therefore, I have added explanatory comments in the text where appropriate, which are in parenthesis, italicised, and written red ink. In the main, however, the text remains Blueblood’s own testimony.

H.R.H. Princess Celestia

***

If you, dear reader, whomever you are, have paid close attention to what I have written in these private memoirs (and if you are reading them, I’m either long dead or you’ve broken into my home), you would know that what usually happens after one of these instances of accidental or dubious heroism is that everypony present gives me a collective pat on the back, I’m told that I’m a very brave stallion and I am given a medal to show for it, and then I am shoved back to the frontline to do it all over again. This particular ‘adventure’ I’m about to relate here ended rather differently, with ponies in black suits and black neckties whisking me away to a dark cell somewhere, the location of which still remains a mystery to me but I can make some educated guesses as to which S.M.I.L.E. basement safehouse it was, and informing me in rather threatening terms not to breathe a word of what I found down there to any creature one is capable of having a conversation with. They did not, however, stipulate that I could not write it all down in a secret document that, I hope, will not be read until long after my inevitable demise, whether by old age or by the blade of a lover’s husband, and this would no longer be an issue for me.

It is a great relief to me, in my advanced years, to finally relay what I saw in the crypts under Fort Nowhere, but I suppose I ought to put things in their proper historical milieu - to set the scene, as it were. I had escaped from Marelacca with a hoof-full of other captured Equestrian soldiers, some slaves the ponies had brought over from the Badlands, and a crew of Changelings who fancied their luck in a cosy prisoner of war camp out in the empty, boring middle part of our fair realm to wait out the end of the war. It was something of a bittersweet farewell, as though I was desperate to return to a place not swarming with Chrysalis’ feared Blackhorns, I could not help but fear for those I had left behind, in particular, Spring Rain and her family. However, when it became readily apparent that our arrival in Equestria would not be the triumphant return Square Basher and I had hoped for, especially when we finally crash-landed in an empty part of the kingdom and were forced to spend an extra two days locked up in the cells of a rural police station, populated by half-drunk yokels who were convinced that the Changelings had singled out their tiny hamlet to be the spearhead for their invasion, I soon found that I had more pressing matters to deal with.

I had hoped for a nice, lengthy convalescence in the company of some attractive nurses in Canterlot, as I had done after being flogged half to death, but unfortunately for me, the wounds I had suffered in my latest daring escape were judged to have been ‘superficial’ by a bored doctor who clearly had a long line of ponies to see and wanted to clock off work on time for once, and I was sent packing once again to the Badlands with scarcely enough time to receive the most pathetic and grovelling apology I’d ever received in my life from a village sheriff mortified to learn that he’d locked up the real Prince Blueblood as I left. However, Lady Luck saw fit to grant me one of her very rare boons, which, as ever, was merely a velvet curtain draped over a precariously-stacked pile of horrible misfortune about to fall right on top of me as I admired said metaphorical curtain.

Still, most ponies were rather pleased to see me back when I slinked back to divisional HQ, which surprised me, frankly. The others, including Sergeant Major Square Basher, presumably had their own little soiree away from the boring old officers. Major-General Garnet organised a little welcome party for me, overflowing with cake and wine, and had invited, well, I hesitate to call them friends but given the nature of our ‘work’ it somehow felt insufficient to merely call them colleagues. ‘Comrades’ is probably the word that I’m looking for.

“Look at him,” sneered Blitzkrieg as I wandered in, “he’s got a bloody suntan. Did you enjoy your holiday, Prince?”

“Be nice to him,” insisted Starlit Skies, though he couldn’t contain his amused smile. It was merely the typical Trottingham manner, to be unaccountably rude to one’s own friends; if he was nothing but polite and courteous, it would mean that he despised me utterly. “Not everypony could survive being locked up in a Changeling camp for as long as he did and get out in one piece.”

“And blow up an entire Changeling fleet,” said Sunshine Smiles. The intact side of his face mirrored the scar as he smiled with genuine pleasure at seeing me. However, it occurred to me that sometimes ponies spoke about me in much the same manner as Shining Armour gushed about his favourite silly comic book heroes, and that, I considered, might be the real reason behind the irritatingly enduring nature of my supposedly heroic reputation. “My adjutant owes me five bits, now.”

“I’m only worth five bits?” I said, in mock outrage.

“It looked like a close-run thing.”

“I’m always nice,” snapped Blitzkrieg, as he reached up and patted me on the shoulder with some force, the small pegasus straining a little to reach. “Good to see you back, mate. We’ll be in the Queen’s Hive in no time with the Commissar with us.”

He, however, was quite abruptly shoved out of the way by the rapidly approaching form of Colonel Fer-de-Lance. Blitzkrieg’s violent outburst of expletives was ignored as she all but threw herself upon me, wrapping her hooves around me in an embrace, and planted a kiss on each cheek in the Prench manner.

“A true soldier of Equestria has returned to us!” she exclaimed loudly, releasing me from the hug. A half-empty glass of wine floated close to her, and judging by the slurring of her words in excess of what was usual for her Prench accent, she’d already had quite a few by that point. My cheeks flushed red in embarrassment at the attention. “Ah, Prince Blueblood, your courage and honour is a shining beacon to us all! I knew that Chrysalis could not keep you from us. Here’s to many, many more victories to share!”

I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel touched by the gesture, even if those ponies were ultimately misguided and my entire contribution to both escaping Changeling confinement several times and blowing up Operation: Sunburn was mostly due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In truth, the feeling that ponies would actually be pleased to see me, and genuinely so this time, was an odd one that I still have yet to get used to.

The rest of the party was spent with me regaling the other guests with what had happened, and though the tale I told was rather less sanitised than the stories I would tell to my fellow nobles in Canterlot, I naturally tweaked the narrative a little to make sure that I came out looking perfectly heroic. They didn’t need to know too much about how Fort Joy was actually rather pleasant, at least as far as prison camps went, and certainly my little dalliance with Square Basher was left between her, me, and now you. I almost, almost, felt happy to be back, until I recalled that once this little party was over, it was straight back to work, which meant even more mortal terror and blood.

The war had entered another ‘quiet period’, as the historians of today like to call it. Oh, ponies and Changelings still fought and died, but if the slaughter was to be plotted on a line graph then this particular moment would have been at a small valley next to two rather large peaks. Both Field Marshal Hardscrabble and General Market Garden had been very busy while I was away, and I’d missed out on quite a bit of bloody action. Look it up in a history book if you want all of the gory details, but suffice to say that the two sides had taken turns to bash against one another repeatedly, and now, as I stumbled back to divisional HQ with the apparent expectation that I’d simply return to my duties as though I’d merely taken a bit of time off for Hearth’s Warming, both sides had retreated to lick their wounds, glare menacingly at one another across the gulf of No Mare’s Land, and throw the occasional half-hearted punch to remind the other that there’s still a war going on. All the while, Princess Luna’s merry bands of partisans were up to all manner of mischief behind enemy lines, just as Chrysalis’ infiltrators would pop up every now and again to wreak havoc on our supply lines or disrupt a public holiday.

So on that alone, I suppose I could have counted myself lucky, but this was an even rarer instance of luck striking not just once, but thrice. While I was away being pampered at Camp Joy and almost burned alive again in Marelacca, there was an election of sorts. White Hall had been voted out and Fancy Pants was voted in, which resulted in something of a change of direction for the war effort. See, Field Marshal Hardscrabble had been very busy in the intervening time between my capture and my escape; he had hurled Market Garden’s First Army head-first into Chela’s war-swarms again and again with little in the way of appreciable gain, at least in terms of colouring portions of the map liberated by our gallant forces. The strategy of grinding down Chrysalis’ armies to the point where they could no longer resist was working, according to Hardscrabble, but the public, whose loved ones were being sacrificed upon that grim altar of war, had little stomach for the ever-growing casualty lists reported in the newspapers and made their displeasure known in the ballot box, at least those who could vote at the time.

I am ignorant of politics, among many things, but with regards to politics I do so wilfully. A prince is supposed to be above such things, aloof and regal, but it is impossible to remain truly isolated from its effects. After all, I’m merely one Commons vote away from losing everything, should they deem my stipend no longer worth it.

“Fancy Pants campaigned on finding a new way to end the war,” explained Hardscrabble, as he brought me up to speed on everything I’d missed over brandy and cigars. Well, I drank the brandy and he sipped warm apple juice; like many recovering alcoholics, he seemed to gain a sort of vicarious pleasure from watching others drink, and I was all too happy to oblige him. “The problem, sir, is that some ponies at home still believe that this war can be won quickly without bloodshed, even after Princess Twilight Sparkle’s reforms.”

“The numbers make for rather grim reading,” I said. It would be especially grim, I considered, if my name was to be added to those ever-lengthening lists. “To play Tirek’s Advocate, to be clear, can you truly fault them if they lose their stomach for war in this way?”

Hardscrabble frowned into his apple juice, which had been poured into a small whisky tumbler, and shook his head. “I know what they think of me,” he said, at length. “That I am throwing away lives with nothing to show for it. I do not waste lives, sir, I am no Iron Hoof. I spend them. Callous as that may seem, I have been brought in to bring a swift end to this war and that is what I am doing. To drag it out by fighting timidly and cautiously would only extend the suffering of ponies at the front, at home, and those still held in Changeling bondage. This war ends in only one way, sir—the complete destruction of Chrysalis’ swarms on the field, and nothing else will bring us the victory we seek.”

Now, in a twisted sense, he had a point. I did not particularly care for that point, but, I had to admit, there was a certain sense of cold logic to it. Lives as currency, the price one pays for victory, was the entire morbid calculation of war, and he seemed to prioritise speed over thrift on that account in the hope it would all balance out in our favour in the long run. It was enough to make me feel quite queasy, and not least because my life was very nearly ‘spent’ like that on several occasions, and would inevitably continue to rest in his metaphorical bank account for some time to come. Still, in truth, I have never thought Hardscrabble to be a truly callous general, not in the way that Iron Hoof was, despite his words. I believe, without much in the way of proof, mind you, but I like to think myself quite good at reading ponies to better manipulate them, that these losses affected him deeply, and that in this calculation he truly believed that this high tempo of operations would ultimately save lives in the long run. The truly psychotic commanders tended to be rather poor ones, and, thanks to the Commissariat, tended not to last long.

“And just how does Prime Minister Fancy Pants” -I felt even more nauseated saying that; one’s faith in the electorate drops with every election- “believe he can end this war, if not by fighting?”

Hardscrabble smirked, as if at a private joke. “By first negotiating. His official position is that Queen Chrysalis is not unreasonable and can be negotiated with.”

“He clearly has never met her.”

“That hasn’t stopped him. It’s only his official position, sir.”

“But Princess Celestia decreed that there can be no peace negotiation with the Hives while Chrysalis remains Queen,” I said grimly, nursing my snifter of brandy. It would be nice, I thought, to have a conversation with ponies that didn’t involve war, and thought to call upon Fine Vintage for an invigorating and detailed discussion about the merits of the ‘92 Neighpa Valley merlot versus the ‘93. “And the Changelings still seem terribly attached to their tyrant of a Queen, for some reason.”

“Precisely, sir,” he said, nodding as I spoke. “He knows this as well as you and I, but he must make those overtures to a negotiated peace to satisfy his campaign pledges, even if they are fruitless. Princess Celestia remains our Warmistress, and I have no doubt as to her commitment to our strategy. However, she must still bend to the fickle whims of her ponies, and that is what separates her from Chrysalis.”

“That’s all well and good,” I said; a break at the frontline was still a break nonetheless, and I could use that time to try and find a way to find myself promoted out of it. “But what does that mean for us?”

“There is to be a pause in the offensive, a bit of ‘breathing space’ to allow our battered forces and theirs to recover, before resuming the push, perhaps with a more limited goal.” Hardscrabble shrugged, but carried on fervently. “But I won’t dare keep the pressure off Chrysalis entirely. We are bleeding her, sir, bleeding her dry. Her best troops are arrayed against us, but they have only the old and the sick guarding their slaves and their occupied land, and soon they’ll not even have that. Then we will have our breakthrough. It will just take longer now.”

General Market Garden, however, saw it quite differently, when I finally summoned the wherewithal to call upon her. She had regarded my return with particular disinterest, as though my capture on her watch had nothing to do with her direction of the battle, which I found particularly galling.

“Oh, Blueblood, you’re back from your ‘holiday’,” she said, as though I’d merely waltzed in from a brief cruise in the Bahaymas, barely looking up from the various papers and maps on her map table (one that was still larger than Hardscrabble’s, as if to prove something). I almost expected her to ask me if I’d brought her anything.

As I understood it, Market Garden had received a not-inconsiderable amount of opprobrium, which might have explained her frosty reaction to my return, as though my capture and imprisonment had been my fault, just to annoy her. It would have been more convenient for her, perhaps, had I not returned at all.

“It was about time,” she said, once the other terse pleasantries had been dispensed with and she could speak about her favourite topic - what she had been doing. “The ponies are exhausted and our supply lines are stretched thin. They were thin before we even started this offensive and now they’re even thinner; single track roads in some places, with ponies and mules hauling wagons through bandit-infested country. Push them too far and they’ll snap, ponies and supply lines.”

I have to admit that I was quite surprised by her show of care to the poor souls under her command. Well, it was far more than what I was used to from any other general officer I’ve had the misfortune to meet.

“It’s my job to win this war,” she told me, with a truly enviable amount of self-assurance, “but it’s also my job to make sure there’s still an Equestrian Army by the end of it, that enough of our colts and fillies can go home.”

Judging by the sheer amount of paperwork on her desk, Market Garden had been far from idle during this ‘quiet’ period, and she had thrown herself into it with the same sort of fervour as one would expect from an all-out offensive. Planning, her favourite thing to do, had occupied her entire effort now, and just idly perusing the paperwork (she was also explaining it to me in excruciating detail, but her words merely passed through my ears without being registered at all by my brain) told me that she had something major in the works. The frontline had edged ever closer into the rotten, clogged heart of Chrysalis’ failing regime, and all of the great sweeping arrows on the maps pointed directly to one place: Teratoma Hive.

“The centre of Chrysalis’ war machine,” Market Garden explained, when I finally deigned to pay attention. “The Queen’s Hive might be its brain, but Teratoma Hive is where the weapons she cannot buy and steal are made. If we take that, then all resistance will crumble, but I tell you, Blueblood, it will be a brutal fight.” She smiled in an uneasily happy manner. “Fortunately, you have me in charge, and I’ll make sure that it’s done properly.”

I’d heard that before from her, and had earned the scars that proved otherwise. Nevertheless, I asked her if it was wise to be speaking so openly about her plans. Market Garden shrugged and pointed out that even though the enemy was always listening, it was patently obvious to anypony with more than two brain cells what her next target would be anyway. That intelligence wouldn’t help them, she assured me, as the force she was about to bear down upon Teratoma Hive would be nothing short of overwhelming. She was, if nothing else, perfectly predictable, and made up for that with the twin advantages of an obsession with planning and a fetish for truly excessive firepower. That, at least, gave me some measure of what I was now hell-bent on avoiding.

For the third instance of miraculous good fortune, this all happened to coincide with the time Major Starlit Skies had taken it upon himself to write a pamphlet, in between all of the violent slaughter, apparently, and said book had become something of a bestseller in my absence. This particular screed, titled ‘Harmony Tactics in Theory and Practice’, was one of those types of books that ponies had bought in droves but barely anypony outside of military circles had actually read, and was thus instead relegated to looking stately upon one’s bookcase. Indeed, it did look elegant, being a small, slim book tastefully bound in midnight blue cloth and with its title and author’s name printed in silver. He had gifted me a copy, signed by the author, when he stopped by for a friendly visit; his beady little eyes sparkling with delight behind his half-moon glasses as I opened to the first page to find Red Coat’s name listed first amongst the list of acknowledgements. Mine was fifth, after Princess Luna, his mother, and Colonel Sunshine Smiles, but I let that slide.

I didn’t read it, and still haven’t after all these years. I have far more edifying things to do with what limited time I have left on this world than to waste it reading a lengthy and dry treatise on finding more efficient ways of killing Changelings. Drinking and whoring, for one, which I did in abundance with the camp followers who always tag along on the heels of an advancing army. While there were plenty of pictures, they were all boring diagrams of military structure and battlefield manoeuvres, interspersed with far more maths than any book had a right to possess. Instead, I did as any sensible pony ought to have done and instead read what other ponies thought of the book, and I was rather surprised to find that those who did, Market Garden included, tended to have rather a high opinion of it. For those of you who remain unfamiliar with the work that revolutionised infantry tactics during the war and for reasons that I understand perfectly are not inclined to invest the time to change that, I shall do my best to summarise by what I can remember.

While Princess Twilight Sparkle had done a sterling job of reforming the Royal Guard into the Equestrian Army from the top down, unit tactics hadn’t changed much since that von Pferdwitz fellow, whose work I also hadn’t read, first put pen to parchment. Well, that’s not exactly true, of course, as they didn’t have muskets or teleporting runners back then [Unicorns have always used teleportation spells to relay messages quickly in battle since pre-unification days, but the reforms were the first to formalise them into an organised system], but the principle remained: the regiment, made up of companies each approximately one hundred strong on a good day and each of which consisted of ponies of one tribe, formed the basic tactical unit on the battlefield. This, Starlit Skies explained in his book and over lunch one day when I was forced to admit to him that I still hadn’t read it, was much too restrictive for the new technologies and larger armies of modern war, and hampered the ability for officers lower down the line to make decisions in response to developing situations. His theory ran that it was precisely this sort of rigidity and inflexibility that led to me being trapped atop Hill 70 in the first place.

Starlit Skies’ proposal was for greater integration of the three tribes into almost every layer of the military structure, right down to the platoon level. The idea behind this, as far as I could tell, was that this would allow for far greater flexibility for officers to adapt to and exploit changing developments on the battlefield. The other side of the metaphorical coin in this was that more independently-minded officers in charge of smaller, mixed units would require far greater and closer coordination between them, lest they all run off and do their own thing and the entire battle line falls apart. I wasn’t quite so sure about all of this myself, as the old Royal Guard that I knew seemed to think that officers leading their own units with any sense of autonomy at all was an inherently dangerous prospect that bordered on outright heresy, but I was, and still am, very much an amateur when it came to this sort of thing. It turned out that I was wrong on that account too, and the military establishment embraced that idea with the fervour of a recent convert to a cult. I suppose most of the old guard had either left or wisely shut up after Twilight Sparkle’s reforms went through.

“It’s merely an evolution of the old tactics,” he explained, and though I had confessed to not having read his book despite my repeated promises, he showed no sign of irritation or disappointment. “You remember your history, don’t you, young stallion? Your family were there marching with the Princesses as they conquered Equestria, and it was all three tribes working together that made the old Royal Guard such a potent force on the battlefield. Each tribe makes up for the others’ deficiencies on the field, supports one another, and so their efficacy is increased exponentially. And this relationship only becomes greater the more closely integrated the tribes become. That’s harmony at war. Of course, it means everypony has to get along, more or less.”

[This is a very brief but adequate summary of the so-called Harmony Tactics adopted by the Equestrians late into the war, of which Starlit Skies’ pamphlet was a key influence, but was mostly a summary of ad hoc changes to tactics and command structure that were already taking place. Blueblood has missed much of the nuance here, in particular the influence of native tribal warfare and their guerilla campaigns against Changeling occupation, which prioritised small, mobile units that would wear down large swarms with small but repeated attacks, as well as rapid developments in weapons technology, particularly musketry and artillery. Furthermore, the proposed changes were in large part a reaction to Hive Marshal Chela’s innovative tactics that did away with the massed, swarm tactics that had previously characterised the Changeling way of warfare. Although his description only skims the surface of Harmony Tactics, it will suffice for this particular entry in the memoir and requires no further elucidation on our part.]

Tactics don’t just change overnight, and the Guards Division, which had already been pushed through the wringer in those repeated attacks between that debacle on Hill 70 and my vaunted return to duty, was pulled from the frontline to rest and retrain around Fort Nowhere, which by that point had turned into something of a major logistics hub for the First Army. What had been little more than an ancient fort in which Diamond Dogs once squatted had become almost a small city in its own right, supporting the tracks of rail that brought ever more weapons, ammunition, food, water, and ponies to the front.

For me, however, as an independent commissar attached to the Guards Division, it meant a lot of paperwork and reports that, yes, the chap who dreamt up all of these ideas was implementing them correctly and what not. My days were largely spent in the manner that I had longed to ever since I unwillingly donned the commissar’s cap; safely ensconced behind a desk with only paperwork that I couldn’t delegate to somepony else, usually my aide Cannon Fodder, to do, aside from the occasional tedious meeting, and, most importantly, with nothing trying to kill me for once. I had plenty of free time to indulge, and while the environment lacked the sort of louche bars and refined gentlecolts’ clubs that I was used to in Canterlot, it still provided its fair share of adequate entertainment in the form of the officers’ mess, RASEA shows of varying entertainment value, and, as always follows an army on the march, mares of the night.

I mention all of this not because it’s interesting, it’s certainly not to me and most sane ponies out there, but merely to set the scene, as it were. For a time I was safe once more, but the war, impossible to truly escape from, was a dark cloud on the horizon that slowly but steadily loomed ever closer, and with each passing day it became more and more difficult to ignore. The reports that piled up ever higher on my desk, endless drivel about how well both the new recruits and the old veterans alike took to the new Harmony Tactics (barring the occasional inter-tribe falling-out that required me to intervene, get everypony sit in a circle, and teach them the importance of working together to kill Changelings), only made the inevitable more and more stark. I was running out of time to find a way to worm out of going back to the frontlines, and my requests to be promoted further up the chain, which I had assumed would be a sure thing considering I was effectively foal-sitting Market Garden already, had gotten nowhere. Ponies seemed to expect me to want to be close to the action, if not actively in it for whatever reason, and I could only assume had conveniently ignored my repeated requests for a comfortable office job a safe distance from the front.

Without a clear way out I threw myself further into diversions, in particular the aforementioned drinking, shows, and whoring. I must have put many sons and daughters of bartenders and prostitutes alike through college in those short weeks, and for that I hope they are very grateful. So when a particularly large diversion from the impending offensive swam into view, I seized it, and for that I would not only end up very nearly killed far from any frontline, but also uncover a rather unpleasant secret that I am still not allowed to speak openly about.

I’ve made my fondness of the Daring Do series of novels very plain over the years; they’re not things that a prince of my particularly lofty standing is supposed to enjoy, but I found that there is space for pulpy, escapist adventure stories alongside lewd Prench poetry and pretentious musings on the nature of Harmony and Friendship in one’s library. So when I learnt that A. K. Yearling herself would visit Fort Nowhere to read extracts from her latest book to the soldiers there as part of an RASEA show as well as accompany some manner of archaeological dig in the strange ruins beneath Fort Nowhere, I practically leapt at the chance to meet her.

It’s a very rare occurrence that I’m thoroughly starstruck; as usually it is I who has that effect on other ponies, it was a rather novel experience to be on the receiving end for once. I waited at the bustling train station just beyond the repaired walls of Fort Nowhere for her to arrive, alternating between sipping from my hipflask and anxiously puffing away at a cigar as I observed the trains coming every few minutes, laden with boxes of supplies that were unloaded by large teams of heavyset ponies and mules, and then carrying on to the next supply stop. It was from one such train that A. K. Yearling herself disembarked with her entourage, and though she was an unassuming kind of mare, the sort to blend into a crowd quite readily, she stood out spectacularly amidst the burly, sweaty loggies carrying heavy boxes of stuff around the station and swearing profusely as they did so.

Even then, I like to think I would have recognised her from the photographs in the dust jackets of her published works. I shouldn’t need to describe to whoever reads this what one of the most prolific and popular writers of my generation looks like, but I shall give you lucky readers my initial impression of her: she was a rather small, compact little pegasus mare with hunched shoulders, and appeared to be approaching the wrong end of middle age judging by the mane streaked with grey that peeked out from under her floppy grey hat. Her merlot cloak concealed much of her body, and despite the intense heat and humidity of the Badlands that turned my wool uniform into a sweat-soaked towel she didn’t seem to be suffering from it. As I approached, first tossing the remaining stub of my cigar away onto the train tracks, her sharp, rose-coloured eyes scrutinised me carefully from behind oversized glasses, and I felt more than a little bit like an interesting specimen under Twilight Sparkle’s microscope; it was probably just a writer’s thing, I assumed, as her sort must be constantly looking out for interesting ponies on which to base new characters and stories.

“Miss Yearling!” I said, barely capable of concealing my excitement. I felt like I was about to explode with glee; there she was, the A. K. Yearling standing before me! This must be how ordinary ponies feel when they meet me, I considered. “Welcome to Fort Nowhere.”

She looked me up and down with that same scrutinising stare, before apparently deciding that I was worth basic courtesy and smiled with a small but noticeable nod. “Prince Blueblood,” she said, rather tersely. I feared I might have insulted her, somehow, but it must have been a long and unpleasant journey here, thought I, especially crammed into a goods wagon for several hours. “Thank you, I wasn’t expecting a royal welcome.”

“I make a point to greet each of our honoured guests here when they arrive.” Well, just the ones that I like, at least. “The soldiers are very much looking forward to your reading, as am I.” My breath caught in my throat; I had something important to ask her, but the thought that it would be even more unbecoming of a prince to even consider it and that it might somehow annoy her almost stopped me, however, I feared that I would not have the chance to do so again. “I hope this isn’t too vulgar of me, but may I have your autograph?”

Her eyes widened in surprise, very briefly, but her peculiarly detached expression returned almost immediately. “I didn’t know you are a fan, sir,” she said, retrieving an elegant fountain pen from under her cloak, and as she did so I saw a glimpse of her body; from what little I saw, she looked a damned sight more athletic than her posture otherwise implied. If she lost the unfashionable cloak, hat, and glasses she might be very attractive for her age.

“My servants recommended it to me.” Blast, that was a stupid thing to say to her, and she was standing there expecting me to give her something to sign. I patted down my pockets with my magic, and realised that I’d left my old, dog-eared paperback of Daring Do and the Marked Thief of Marapore I’d selected specifically for her autograph next to my cot in my office. A moment of panic took me as I tried to find something, anything, that A. K. Yearling could sign for me. All that I had on me was a few sheets of folded paper, which, when I fished them out of my jacket pocket, I found was a draft copy of a letter to be distributed to the soldiers that I had to proof-read and expunge of anything liable to cause offence with some boring old prudes in Canterlot. It would have to do.

[This is likely a reference to an incident early in Market Garden’s career where she had distributed to the troops under her command a written warning against venereal disease and a reminder to use contraceptives when visiting prostitutes in the form of a risque limerick. While well-received among the soldiers, and indeed cases of venereal disease dropped after the pamphlet was distributed, it caused a minor controversy in Canterlot as the general seemed to be encouraging prostitution. However, she argued that soldiers will indulge in that particular activity in off-duty time regardless, and that they ought to do it safely to maintain combat effectiveness.]

She took the folded paper, and though her eyes widened as she glimpsed some of the possibly top-secret words on it, she scribbled her signature elegantly in an empty space in the corner and hoofed it back to me. Though I felt a little embarrassed, I reassured myself that it was unlikely to be the strangest thing that she had to sign before. Faust knows I’ve had some peculiar items and body parts thrust under my nose alongside a felt tip pen. Still, I would treasure it forever, and find a way to explain to Market Garden why I had a reclusive author’s autograph on her draft letter and why I had to keep it forever.

The loud, obnoxious sound of a pony clearing his throat to gain attention mercifully put an end to this awkwardness. I looked past A. K. Yearling to see a doddering older unicorn stallion just behind her, wearing a white shirt already stained with sweat and a paisley bow tie that was playfully askew. The sharp, bright light of the Badlands sun caused his coat to shimmer, and I realised he was a Crystal Pony, and likely very out of his depth in the sort of climate that was the precise opposite of his frigid homeland to the north. He hunched, and appeared to be almost embarrassed when I looked at him, all but shrinking away from my gaze. Behind him were a few other Crystal Ponies, also wearing what looked like a uniform of short-sleeve shirts, ties or bow ties, and pocket protectors stuffed with pens. Nerds, the lot of them. I felt a sudden urge that I had not felt since foalhood to shake them all down for lunch money.

“Sorry, everypony,” said the older stallion, with an almost pathetic amount of meekness and embarrassment. I nearly felt sorry for him, but that urge to dunk his head in a lavatory and flush was rising. “I’m Doctor Corded Ware,” he reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled, slightly damp piece of paper. “We’re with the Royal Archaeological Society of the Crystal Empire. Miss Yearling is going to help us with our dig under your fortress.”

“Oh, is it my fortress now? I have so many already.”

He coughed awkwardly at my silly attempt at humour, so I peered at the paper hovering before me in a deep purple aura and skim-read the words on it, and everything seemed to be in order. I might have spent a bit too long reading it just to make him and his colleagues sweat a bit more, before nodding approvingly.

“Yes, I was expecting you,” I said. “Looking for new material for your next book, Miss Yearling?” I could hardly contain my excitement; if I played my cards well, I could be treated to an advance copy of the story, read it before everypony else, and be the envy of the Commissariat’s book club.

“I’ll be providing Doctor Corded Ware with advice and technical support in the course of his investigation,” she said haughtily, and then added, “as well as looking for new material for my next book.”

I recalled that A. K. Yearling had earned a doctorate in archaeology in her youth, which always provided her novels with that extra sense of authenticity that separated it from the pretenders out there. I have to admit that I felt that minor sense of awkwardness a rich idiot like myself feels when in the presence of one’s intellectual superiors; I hadn’t even passed high school and I was standing before a group of rather clever ponies with many pieces of fine paper to prove it.

“I’ll show you to your rooms,” I said. “But first, hold still please.”

Though we were rather far from the frontlines, it never hurt to be too careful, especially when enemy infiltrators had been caught causing mayhem as far afield as Vanhoover and the Crystal Empire. So I zapped them each with the Changeling reveal spell. A. K. Yearling barely reacted, but the others flinched as though I’d splashed them with cold water, as the wave of dispelling magic washed over them. None of them were Changelings, which I found a little odd; the enemy, in spite of all of its tendrils in every aspect of Equestrian society, sometimes did a poor job of imitating ponies, and without a detailed description of a specific individual they would often rely on stereotypes that tend not to stand up to close scrutiny. We once caught a Changeling masquerading as a Prench pony in the Prism Guards, and it was the stripy shirt, beret, and the string of onions around his neck that gave it away. Yet standing here before me were a collection of classic nerds, complete with unfashionable glasses on some, hence my unbidden desire to bully them. I could only conclude that some cliches are in fact grounded in reality.

[It has been theorised that the infiltrators referenced by Blueblood were intended as diversions, to distract Equestrian security services from the more skilled drones infiltrating Equestrian society.]

I had hoped to spend some alone time with our true guest of honour, A. K. Yearling herself. Not only did I have a thousand questions about my favourite stories to ask her - how does Daring Do have time to go on adventures and curate a museum? How much does Daring Do really weigh? There seems to be more to Daring Do and Caballeron’s rivalry, did they ever have sex? - and so on, but, as we walked together and I noticed her athletic form move beneath that concealing cloak of hers, I saw that, despite her apparent age, she was still very attractive and clearly took care of herself, aside from the lack of make-up that I would imagine was due to a reclusive author such as herself not being supposed to care about such things.

It was Corded Ware, however, who monopolised much of my time in the walk to their rooms and in the meeting thereafter. His questions, announced in a reedy, nasal tone that grated on my nerves, were all about the battle that had taken place there a mere few years ago.

“It’s hard to imagine something like that happened here now,” said A. K. Yearling as we crossed the central courtyard to the keep. Indeed, the memories of that rainy, blood-soaked night, as ponies and Changelings slaughtered one another over the ground we walked upon, were still vivid in my mind as they still are now, and when I looked up at the forbidding sight of the keep looming above us I could not help but picture a certain nocturnal Auntie bellowing war-cries from its highest tower. Still, she was right; the courtyard had been paved over and the shattered walls that surrounded it had been rebuilt, stronger and thicker than before. Soldiers still drilled there, and this time it was the turn of the Prism Guards to march aimlessly up and down the square to the bellows of a Sergeant Major, while Lieutenant-Colonel Fer-de-Lance observed, imperiously sipping red wine from a crystal goblet throughout. The entire area looked so pristine and clean, but each time I blinked I could catch a glimpse in my mind of a ruined square littered with mutilated corpses.

“The reports said that the Changelings came up through the tunnels?” asked Corded Ware, as we passed through the main gates on our way from the train station.

“Yes,” I replied, though I was far from eager to relive that particular night. “While the main force assaulted the walls, another group infiltrated through the old tunnels under the fortress. We fought them off before they could take the keep.”

“And the Diamond Dogs?”

“Changelings as well.” There was still a fair bit of dispute about that in my mind; that the enemy would leave the entire place completely spotless, not to mention what that traumatised puppy tried to tell us, didn’t quite mesh with what I knew of the way Changelings do things. I like to think I have gained a fair bit of experience with that, though all of it was against my will. Then again, they were nothing if not unpredictable, at least early in the war when they still had leaders with both imagination and initiative, before Chrysalis had them all removed for lacking both loyalty and the means to bend reality to win her this war.

“They came up through the tunnels and killed the Diamond Dogs to lay a trap for the Royal Guard?” There was a current of scepticism in his voice; an academic such as he would be the sort to ask all manner of awkward questions that the military would rather not have answered.

“That is the official line, yes.”

“Is it safe?” asked one of the other archaeologists, one who, judging by his youth and the abundant spots on his face, was merely an intern of sorts.

As far as the Changelings went, nothing could ever truly be considered ‘safe’; the enemy still lurked in the shadows, ready to strike when our most stringent security lapsed even for a moment. Fort Nowhere was still a fortress, and the tunnels beneath it had remained sealed since that fight, but one could not discount the thought of a secret enemy mining operation that would take this vital artery in our tenuous supply line.

“Probably,” I said with a shrug, which only made him look even more worried. “We’re far from the frontlines, not that has ever stopped infiltrators, but we’ve had no indication that they’re using the tunnels to get in. The enemy prefer to hide themselves amongst the groups of poor refugees fleeing the fighting, the vile cowards.”

[The invasion of the Changeling Heartlands triggered a wave of refugees fleeing north to Equestria to escape the fighting, which provided the enemy with a route to infiltrate Equestria. Nevertheless, Equestria welcomed all fleeing the war with open hooves, and despite some political backlash, Changelings escaping Queen Chrysalis’ tyranny were afforded the same help and protection as ponies, with many joining Odonata in the Changeling Reconciliation And Progress group (later remained the Organisation for Changeling Liberation). Though he rarely mentioned it, Prince Blueblood opened his palaces to house refugees.]

“Perhaps you will join us?” said Corded Ware. “Just in case, and I’m sure you’re curious as to what’s really down there.”

Join a group of boring nerds poking around ancient, abandoned ruins that might be filled with Changelings? There were better ways for me to spend what limited time I had left before rejoining the fight, but, I considered, it would allow me to spend more time with A. K. Yearling here. I could have backed out there and then, and made an excuse about having some valuable work for the war effort to do and they would have accepted it at face value, but, damn him, Corded Ware was right. Part of me was intrigued about what really lay beneath my hooves, and what really happened to those Diamond Dogs. The thought of joining the author of my favourite series of stories since I was a colt in the closest thing approaching a real Daring Do adventure, only without the morally-bankrupt rivals, lethal traps, and ancient guardian spirits, was a terribly exciting one that the little wide-eyed foal in me could not resist.

“Of course,” I said. Besides, if something unfortunate was to happen to A. K. Yearling in those tunnels before she finished her next book, I would be hunted down by a mob of her adoring fans and promptly ripped into ribbons. I’d best make sure that didn’t come to pass.

Had I known the truth of what was hidden in those tunnels I’d have grabbed my sword, hijacked a cargo airship, flown straight back to Marelacca, and taken my chances with the resistance there instead.

Chapter 2

I left A. K. Yearling, Corded Ware, and the other archaeologists to settle themselves into their quarters in the keep. The ancient interior had not escaped the renovation effort, and now served as a bustling records office for the Equestrian Army, ostensibly in support of all of the supply lines threading through the Badlands. However, though much of the old rooms and halls which had once housed long-dead ponies of worth aeons ago had been converted into offices, stationery store rooms, and the occasional barracks, a few were reserved for visiting guests, which our esteemed visitors now occupied, though they were unlikely to rank amongst the most luxurious hotels in Equestria. I myself had been granted the use of a tiny, square office to double as my quarters for the time there, just barely large enough to swing a dormouse, let alone a cat, while Cannon Fodder, in what I can only deduce was a deliberate joke, was assigned the much more spacious room adjacent to mine. However, though I could have ordered him to swap, he had already slept in it, and I was not willing the chance of picking up any one of his no doubt fascinating skin diseases.

That night, I invited A. K. Yearling to dinner in the officers’ mess and she accepted. I’d heard that the best way to ingratiate oneself with a writer is to feed them, rather like befriending dogs. However, either the archaeological team were under the mistaken impression that her invitation also extended to them or she had decided that dinner with just me was such a ghastly prospect that she invited them to join her and soften the experience, because after I’d spent about an hour changing into black tie, and fretting about whether or not it would be ostentatious of me to wear my medals (Drape Cut not being around to tell me what was correct made dressing myself rather more difficult), I popped down to the mess to find the staff grumbling about having to push some tables and chairs together because ‘that prince’ can’t count how many guests he’d invited.

Still, despite my manifest disappointment, I’d managed to secure a prime spot right next to the guest of honour, on her left, by staring down the spotty nerd who thought he’d grabbed the chair first. Corded Ware sat on her right side. I considered, perhaps, that it would not be so bad after all, and in the presence of her colleagues she would not feel quite so intimidated with the thought of sitting with a prince all evening. Still, I was rather surprised to find that they had blagged their way past the staff, who would otherwise have not normally allowed guests in such a state of undress through the velvet rope that separated that hallowed ground from the miserable world outside. I could only assume that they had given my name to the staff, who, and I like to think that I knew the keen and obsequious mind of the serving class quite well, would remember if these guests of mine misbehave and thus blame me.

Unfortunately for Yours Truly, all anypony else wanted to do was talk shop, and I soon gave up on attempting to follow the conversation. Archaeology, that is real archaeology, and not the fun adventures the very fictional Daring Do gets up to in her stories, is actually very boring. I only remember snippets of it, which were replete with confusing words and phrases that might as well have been in code for all I knew. After a while, I insisted on taking part, even if that meant making an idiot of myself, if out of spite at being ignored.

“According to Professor Pit Comb’s theories, the Crystal Empire’s outpost was built atop a more ancient Haygyptian necropolis, likely dating back to the reign of Pharaoh Hamon-Rei, that had been abandoned in the Late Pre-Classical Era,” said Corded Ware excitedly over a starter course of goat cheese tarts, spreading out an array of papers covered with diagrams and maps on the table to the consternation of the waiters. Our guests didn’t detect the slight raising of an eyebrow at that sight, but I certainly did. “Layers upon layers of civilisations, like a cake.”

“Pit Comb also suggested that the purpose of an outpost so far from the Crystal Empire was for trade with the pony tribes in the Badlands,” said A. K. Yearling. “But you think it must be something else?”

“Why would anypony build a trading post on top of a tomb?” he said with a shrug. “It just doesn’t make sense, but now the Crystal Empire is back we can finally have Crystal Ponies examining the site.”

“A necropolis?” I piped up, my interest finally piqued. “That sounds exciting. Is it cursed?”

“No, sir, curses aren’t real,” said Corded Ware, as one would to an annoying but well-meaning foal that one wasn’t allowed to slap into silence. Then, turning back to A. K. Yearling, he continued, “The length of time between its abandonment and its discovery by the Crystal Empire remains uncertain. It’s been difficult to estimate either from the written record alone, so it’s possible, but unlikely, that the Crystal Ponies didn’t know its purpose.”

“What about mummies?” I asked, quite innocently, I assure you.

Corded Ware leaned over and peered at me past A. K. Yearling, who was rolling her eyes and drinking with enthusiasm from her glass of white wine. “Yes, sir, there will likely be mummies in a Haygyptian necropolis,” he said. Before I could ask another daft question, he added, “No, they will not attack us, they have been dead for thousands of years.”

“Well, it happened in Daring Do and the Thousand Year Door.”

A. K. Yearling shot me a queer, rather intense look. “That’s fictional, sir,” she said. Her tail flicked, and I took that to be mere irritation or embarrassment.

They carried on with their dull chatter, and sometimes one of the other archaeologists would pipe up with a comment about something or other, interspersed with strange and arcane words like ‘amphora’, ‘seriation’, and ‘coprolite’. The main course, mushroom risotto again, came and went, and the wine I’d ordered went down all too agreeably, and by the time a fine dessert of creme brulee made an appearance I’d already polished off much of the bottle myself and was certainly feeling its effects. Clearly excluded from the conversation, either by choice as an outsider or simply because I was too uneducated and stupid to follow, I had allowed my mind to wander.

I hadn’t visited the keep’s dungeons since the battle, not having much opportunity or desire to even if they weren’t sealed by stone, but I certainly recalled vividly the memory of Twilight Sparkle discovering the chamber filled with those maddeningly chaotic pictograms. For once, Princess Celestia’s Most Faithful Student going off on a Twilecture was not the most immediately disturbing thing in the room, and though much of it could be attributed to my own battered mental state at the time, which hasn’t seen much in the way of improvement over the years, I still could not discount the eerie and unpleasant feeling I felt down there. I liked to think that I could shrug off such things, after all, at least two of my homes are purportedly the most haunted buildings in Equestria along with the Castle of the Two Sisters and the lavatories of my prep school if one believes in those old superstitions, but it was difficult to fully discount the distinctly unpleasant sensation I felt down there as being entirely in my own head.

This particular site had seen a great many civilisations occupying it over the long millennia, as I recalled, and Equestria was merely the latest in that long line; the Haygyptians were first to build what Twilight Sparkle had called a ‘temple-tomb complex’, whatever that meant, then the Crystal Empire moved in for whatever reason, then a tribe of ponies built a fort atop what was a convenient spot near a strategically vital area, and after a period of absence a pack of Diamond Dogs had turned the place into their den and were subsequently exterminated by the Changelings. A cake of civilisations, as Corded Ware put it. As I mulled this over in my head, and pretended to listen to what Corded Ware was droning on about something called hieratic script, something had occurred to me in such a striking manner that I could not help but blurt it out as though I’d made a fascinating discovery.

“Weren’t you there?” I asked, silencing their no-doubt fascinating discussion about ponies long dead. “Corded Ware, I mean,” I carried on, as everypony stared at me with perplexed expressions. “For the rest of the world, it has been thousands of years, but for the Crystal Ponies it’s only… what, when did the Empire return? A couple of years ago? Don’t you remember what this outpost was for?”

Corded Ware exchanged a few blank looks with his fellow archaeologists and A. K. Yearling, who was by now trying to shrink into her seat and hide behind her voluminous hat. “Sir, the Crystal Ponies were enslaved by King Sombra, if you recall. There’s very little of that time that we would want to remember.”

I’d well and truly stuck my hoof in it yet again, and then proceeded to smear it all over the walls and draw rude pictures. That, however, still just did not add up in my mind; they were clearly very clever ponies, and I assumed that one did not join an archaeological society on merely a good word and a recommendation from a friend. It would be safe to assume that even though they had been enslaved by Sombra’s evil regime, they were at least high-ranking serviles who presumably worked in some sort of civil service, rather like those clerks I’d encountered working for the Changelings in the fortress keep of Virion Hive, as opposed to the ones who mined crystals all day. However, this was supposed to be a polite dinner, not an inquisition, so I ignored the impulse to carry on questioning until I teased the truth, whatever that was, out of them. One could not be expected to recall the exact purpose of each and every single little outpost of what had been a vast and sprawling empire, I supposed.

I was no stranger to the social faux pas, and had some experience in smoothing them over. “Ah, sorry,” I said. “I’m merely eager to find out what’s down there. My family has a few ancient Crystal Empire artefacts in the vaults in the Sanguine Palace, ones that escaped the Empire’s disappearance and might pre-date the reign of Sombra himself. Artefacts of great artistry that hint at a fascinating culture before the rise of the tyrant. Perhaps, once this war is over, you might like to take a look at them? They’re merely gathering dust down there.”

That seemed to smooth things over somewhat, and the researchers carried on with their no-doubt fascinating discussion, leaving me to stew in mild embarrassment and wine. However, the mention of my family’s secret vault seemed to attract A. K. Yearling’s interest at last, and she finally deigned to speak with me.

“I’ve heard of the House of Blood’s vault,” she said. “You have the surviving cultural history of entire tribes and nations long vanished hidden under your palace.”

At first I thought she was speaking to somepony else, so she gave me a little nudge with her hoof to prompt me to answer. “As I said, gathering dust. A great many of my ancestors were inveterate hoarders, picking up whatever trinkets they could from wherever they travelled.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “They belong in a museum,” she said.

That old song and dance again; when somepony decides that I haven’t suffered enough minor irritations for one day they would make a noise about how I ought to return some of those items in the vault to whatever obscure tribe my ancestors had pilfered it from, and, frankly, I’m not terribly fussed about the contents of a part of the Sanguine Palace I’ve stepped inside perhaps twice in my entire life. The trouble, however, is that while I would be perfectly happy for them to take whatever it is that’s so valuable to them, and thus free up some extra space for one more wine cellar or what ponies these days call a ‘stallion cave’, another, more traditionally-minded member of my extended family would talk about how Great-Great-Great Uncle So-And-So had stolen it fair and square and that our family locking it away where no one can see and appreciate said artefact is actually preserving it. The two sides would argue for a bit, drawing in academics and the like to support their cases and perhaps somepony might threaten to sue or a duel might be fought, but ultimately nothing would happen at all and the status quo would continue until such a time somepony else decided to have a go.

“Yes, I agree,” I said, which seemed to surprise her a little. “At least some of the things down there ought not to belong to the family. We’ve yet to do a proper inventory of the vault, as the war’s getting in the way, and I’d imagine a few of the heirloom pieces down there might be quite dangerous. Who knows what enchantments Prince Coldblood’s codpiece might possess.”

A.K. Yearling paused, squinting at me, as if to try and figure out if I was joking about that or not (I wasn’t). “Are there any items that belonged to Princess Hotblood in there?”

“I have a few of her things down there,” I said. “I don’t recall what, exactly. Some letters, I believe, a few of her minor personal effects - I think one of them is a comb - and some bits of ceremonial armour, among other items that I can hardly remember.”

She stared at me, eyes wide in fascination as she listened to me list off the various bits and pieces that remained of one of Equestria’s ancient heroines as though they were merely collectibles that I had lying around the place. “Very little of the material culture around the Nightmare Heresy has survived,” she said. “Even less of the other alicorn princesses. To find anything that existed in that time that might shed light on what really happened back then is already an incredible achievement.”

“There are my aunts, of course,” I said, wondering why historians simply don’t go and ask either of the two immortal beings who were present for many of the key parts of Equestrian history. “I’m sure if you ask nicely, they’d be happy to acquiesce to a little chat about the ancient past.”

“Obtaining an interview with either princess is impossible,” she said, with the air of a pony who has tried repeatedly and failed. I would assume that even Auntie Celestia might be reluctant to speak of the most traumatic events of her life over and over again, as despite such things as being forced to banish her sister to the moon having occurred countless mortal lifetimes ago, alicorns have long memories to go with their long lifetimes. That, and considering that she had a country to run and a large celestial body that all life on Equus is dependent upon to look after, she might have just been too busy to answer such endless questions. [The other reason that I rarely give interviews is that I have already said as much as I can possibly remember about those historical events over the past centuries. However, I welcome those who might provide a unique perspective on a particular topic, and they should use the proper channels by writing a letter. Please do not attempt to do things like break into my bathroom to ask me questions about the Unicornian Reformation or the Fourth Pegasopolis Civil War while I’m bathing, as has happened in the past.]

“I might be able to put in a good word for you,” I said. “What is your interest in my long-dead ancestor, anyway? Looking for more material for a new book?”

“I’m always looking for more material,” she said, then hastened to add, “but not for a Daring Do story, this time.” She gave me another scrutinising look, and said in as polite a tone she can muster for such words: “It might not be for you.”

“Give me some credit, Miss Yearling, I can read other things too.” I smiled to show that I was only partially joking about that. “I’m well aware that you’re a real archaeologist, too, and I’d be quite interested to hear what you find out about my more famous ancestors.”

“I received a grant to write a paper on ancient alicorns, to sort the facts from the myths. An audience with the only two ponies who were alive at the time of the Nightmare Heresy would be very helpful, but not as helpful as examining the real material artefacts. And to think, it’s been sitting in your vault this entire time.”

[Part of the vault is now open to the general public, on days that the Sanguine Palace is open to visitors. There one can view not only ancient artefacts related to Blueblood’s ancestors, but items that belonged to Prince Blueblood himself, including his star spider silk vest, his collection of swords which includes his trusty sabre, and Slab.]

“I’ve had other priorities on my mind,” I said. “Fighting a war, for one, but I’m sure victory would bring many opportunities for such talented researchers such as yourself and your colleagues to take a look around the contents of the vault.” Few things helped boost a royal’s standing in the eyes of the public, aside from a particularly saucy scandal where one comes out on top or, as I’ve demonstrated, being seen as a war hero, like patronising academics. I suppose it helps one make up for one’s own lack of intelligence and education to invest in that of others, while reaping some measure of the praise without having to do much more than write a cheque and make occasional inquiries to ensure it’s not being spent on more personally edifying things like drinking.

The prospect of poking around in a large, sprawling, underground dungeon filled to the brim with all manner of very old things seemed to get A. K. Yearling to finally warm up to me. We carried on chatting, even as the nerds around the table realised it was past their bedtimes and slinked off one by one, about the sorts of things that I have squirrelled away in the family vaults. At least, I spoke of the things that I could remember were down there, like Coldblood’s favourite scalpel and his collection of as-yet-unopened poisons. Some things I might have embellished a little, but I trusted that whatever else she found down there would surpass her expectations. I understood, at last, that perhaps she was rather tired of everypony asking about her Daring Do books, rather like me with my military service albeit much less traumatic and nightmare-inducing for her, and for once wished that ponies would speak to her about her true passion: archaeology and things belonging to ponies who have been dead for thousands of years (and the two ponies who have been alive for thousands of years, of course). I like to think that I was far from the most annoying fan she’s ever met, because I’ve met a few myself whom I’ve considered having locked up for the crime of correcting a prince on matters of Daring Do lore, at least until my drinking that night inevitably brought me across that threshold again. The wine was finished, and we’d moved onto the port and cigars - well, I smoked, and Miss Yearling declined on that account.

We stayed quite late, and the mess had cleared of all except those most dedicated to the Bacchanalian pursuits and those who had fallen asleep at their tables, and I did what I always do in the company of an attractive mare and invited her up to my quarters to continue the discussion. Now, keep in mind that by that point I was quite drunk, and she was, at most, a little tipsy; I could approximate walking in a straight line and speak in what I thought at the time were coherent sentences, but as ever, I thought it best to keep going and hope that I wouldn’t disgrace myself too much.

Though it was very dark by the time A. K. Yearling and I emerged from the officers' mess, the frantic activity in Fort Nowhere had scarcely quietened down. The monumental effort to build up the necessary supplies for Market Garden’s next Big Push could not wait for such things as darkness and normal sleeping patterns, and ponies on the night shift continued to labour loading and unloading those supplies. Night and day the interminable toil proceeded, only lessening somewhat with the setting of the sun; at least the noise of the trains coming and going gave me an excuse for the lack of sleep, besides the habitual nightmares of all that I have endured in this war thus far.

“You know, I used to try writing my own Daring Do stories,” I said, as I invited her into my quarters. Even though I was quite drunk, it was not lost on me that she did not look particularly comfortable and I wondered if I’d overstepped the mark considerably. In truth, I don’t entirely recall my intentions that night; I might have thought to seduce her but decided against it, or perhaps I merely wanted to continue our interesting discussion without the mess staff glaring at us and tapping their watches. In an odd way, I suppose, fans come to think of themselves as knowing the creators of their favourite works, to form something of a twisted, one-sided ‘friendship’ of sorts with them.

As I lit a few candles to bring a little light into the rather gloomy chamber that I called my mercifully temporary home, I saw the same expression on her that one sees on Rainbow Dash just as she discovers that the cider has run out. She collected herself quickly. “Fanfiction?” she asked.

“I suppose one could call it that,” I said. “Foalhood scribblings, really. Daring Do whisks a young prince away from a life of royal drudgery for fun adventures. Hardly high literature, but it kept my spirits up when my parents confiscated my book collection after they decided it was beneath our noble rank. I don’t think any of them survived after they found out about it, but I have a few that I can still remember, more or less.”

“It’s not a good idea for authors to read fanfiction,” she said, her voice quite stilted and awkward. “Or hear about it. It leads to all sorts of legal problems that I’d rather not get into.”

“Oh, come now, I wouldn't dream of suing you.” Or anypony, for that matter; such problems were best sorted out on the field of honour than in court. Still, I could tell that I was making her more uncomfortable, though, my instincts, clouded by drink though they might have been, told me that there was something else occupying her mind. I put it down to the no doubt difficult task of researching and writing her next book, and while I have only written one book in my life, a gentlecolt’s guide to the best brothels and bordello that Prance has to offer the young stag on the Grand Tour, besides these lengthy ramblings here, I could imagine that there was quite a bit of work involved in writing real literature. “What I mean is that your stories provided a measure of… escape for a certain young colt trapped in a world of rigid royal expectations.”

She gave me that odd look again. I had overstepped the mark, so I tried to ease the situation a little by opening up my fully-stocked drinks cabinet and offering her a nightcap.

“No, thank you, I’ve had quite enough,” she said, though I was uncertain whether she meant of the drink or of me. However, that she hadn’t run off already implied it was more the former, and I decided that I’d probably had enough too and shut the cabinet. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought that she was trying to tell me something rather important, to her at least, but hadn’t quite summoned the necessary courage or found the correct words to do so, which must have been quite worrying for a writer.

“Blueblood.” A. K. Yearling still stood at the threshold of my door, with only the tip of her snout crossing it, apparently struggling to make up her mind about whether or not to commit to entering. To say that her behaviour was peculiar would be to undersell it, and at first I simply put it down to the reclusive writer possessing the social skills of a baked potato, but even through my drunken haze I could understand that there was something else at the root of this. So peculiar, in fact, that her omission of my royal title barely offended my regal temperament.

In the end, however, she gave up on it. “Good night,” she said, with a slight bow of her head, “we’ll start the preparations for the excavation tomorrow. I look forward to working with you.”

***

I was determined to put the strange incident out of mind, and in the morning, after another night of restless sleep and while nursing a particularly unpleasant hangover, I had more immediate problems to contend with. Nothing life-threatening, at least not yet, but irritating nonetheless. A. K. Yearling and Corded Ware were up early and busied themselves organising the excavation; I found them in one of the smaller conference rooms in the keep, pouring over maps and diagrams and chatting excitedly about what they hoped to find down there. I stayed a short while, just long enough to remind myself that archaeology was a little more involved than merely digging a big hole and seeing what things you can find down there, and I left them to get on with it. If Miss Yearling seemed at all perturbed by the little social disaster that took place the night before, she made no sign, aside from being about as distant as she was when I first met her.

However, as I made my rounds that morning with Cannon Fodder, reminding everypony that I still exist and pretending that I have a real job to do, what should have been a routine stroll around the camp before retreating back into my room for a well-deserved nap was rudely interrupted by one of the archaeologists having an altercation with that irritating bureaucrat Pencil Pusher. I could already hear raised voices in the corridor, and I knew that this morning’s walk was not going to be as dull, tedious, and uneventful as I’d hoped. Perhaps I could have pretended that I never heard it, however, I recognised Pencil Pusher’s clipped, insufferably smug tone, which had become a little high and squeaky being raised, quickly followed by the more nasal tone of one of the archaeologists, and I knew that I had to put an end to whatever mess he was in the process of making before it would develop into a more severe problem. I trotted onwards, Cannon Fodder behind me and making an awful racket with his armour as he followed, before this could develop into a larger problem that would require even more of my incredibly valuable time and effort to deal with.

Throwing the door to the small store room open with excessive force had the desired effect of silencing the argument. Pencil Pusher nearly jumped out of his neatly-pressed service uniform in shock. There were a few crates in this windowless store room, which was inadequately lit by a small lamp hanging from the ceiling. The esteemed quartermaster was accompanied and dwarfed by two burly stallions who worked in the regimental stores, who I presume he’d brought along for muscle, in case the thin, reedy fellow from the Crystal Pony archaeology group took all leave of his senses and decided to resort to violence. Still, having been subjected to the quartermaster’s single-minded dedication to the rules at the exclusion of all sense and logic, I could very well understand if this researcher responded to whatever questioning being inflicted upon him with brutal violence. It would be funny to watch, I considered as I surveyed the scene.

“Ah, Commissar!” exclaimed Pencil Pusher, his voice rather squeaky as he tried to collect himself. “I was about to send somepony to fetch you! I simply cannot work under these conditions.”

“What is it this time?” I snapped; it was best to cut to the heart of the matter with these sorts of things.

Pencil Pusher cleared his throat noisily and smoothed down the front of his already-pristine uniform. I noticed that he was brandishing a crowbar, which floated awkwardly besides his head in his grey aura. “This civilian is refusing to allow us to check the contents of these boxes!” he said, his voice petulant like that of a foal complaining his friend refuses to share. “Regulations state that all shipping must be examined by approved personnel before they can be stored on a military site.”

As much as it pained me to admit it, Pencil Pusher was in the right on this matter; letting anypony store whatever they wanted in a military supply depot was just asking for all sorts of trouble, and, now that it had been pointed out to me, I was very curious to know what was inside the box that the archaeologists didn’t want us seeing. “What’s in the box?” I asked.

“No idea,” said Pencil Pusher.

“Not you.” I approached the archaeologist, who flinched from me as though I was menacing him with a large sledgehammer. “What’s in the box?” I repeated.

“Archaeological equipment!” he said, a little too quickly for my liking. Granted, he could just have been nervous, and indeed he certainly looked it, but whether he was nervous purely because of the tall, scary commissar-prince with skulls on his uniform or because he had something to hide remained to be seen.

“Then you won’t mind us taking a look?” I said.

“I-” He looked left and right, as though trying to find a way to dart around me and escape out through the door. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Why not? Is it dangerous?”

“No, sir!”

“Then surely if it’s only ‘archaeological equipment’, whatever that might be, then there’s no harm in letting Pencil Pusher here do his job?”

“Well, no, I guess not, sir.” The archaeologist chap pawed at the ground and lowered his head, but his ears were still pricked up with worry. “But this is highly sensitive archaeological equipment. You might break it.”

Pencil Pusher scoffed, apparently insulted. “I deal with equipment that our soldiers depend on with their lives every single day. I think I can handle a few… what’s in there anyway, spades for digging?”

“No, no, it’s much more complicated than that. It’s, uh, magic.”

One did not need to be a master detective to know that he was hiding something in those boxes, and for once I was in the rare situation of siding with Pencil Pusher here. My interest piqued, I wanted more than anything to find out what was inside that box and why this bespectacled little nerd was so adamant that I should not know its contents. More than that, I was also a little insulted that he thought he could get past me with such a blatant lie, and if me being ostensibly an adult and the social mores that came with it forbade me from grabbing him by his hindlegs and shaking him upside down until he caved in, then I would have to satiate my bullying urges through merely embarrassing him.

“Open it,” I ordered.

“But-”

“This is a military site,” I said, “and we are at war. Everything that comes here must be inspected for contraband. We’re opening the box, and if, as you say, everything inside is perfectly safe and harmless, then you have nothing to fear from a little inspection. Unless, you are trying to hide something?”

Trapped by my unassailable logic, the archaeologist could only say, “We have nothing to hide, sir!”

“Then you won’t mind us having a look inside.”

Pencil Pusher grinned with such a smug little smile at his minor victory that I briefly considered withdrawing that order, but it was best to let him have his little moment of glory. The archaeologist started to protest with incoherent mutterings about just how delicate the contents of the box were, but I silenced him with the number four stern look, and he wisely shut up and stepped back, head bowed, as the regimental quartermaster raised his crowbar and thrust the pointy end into the thin gap between the lid and the box itself.

“I assure you, the soldiers of the Night Guards are consummate professionals,” I said, in what was probably the greatest lie that I had ever uttered in my entire career. “If there is any damage to the equipment inside, we will compensate you and your team.” Out of Pencil Pusher’s wages, I mentally added.

The cheap wood made an ominous creaking noise as Pencil Pusher applied pressure to the crowbar, and the lid began to lift free from the box with loud snaps of breaking nails that reminded me of distant musket volleys. Before the lid was off, I could see the malignant green glow of whatever was inside, and it poured out into the room like a miasma. With a final burst of effort, the top was torn clean off, revealing the contents that our nerd friend here had thought he could get away with smuggling inside our camp.

“What the bloody hell?” exclaimed Pencil Pusher, as he handed his prized crowbar to one of his very bored-looking underlings. He peered down into the open crate with an expression that was equal parts curiosity, confusion, and wariness at its contents.

“I can explain,” said the archaeologist, but rather than follow through with that assertion, he merely let it hang in the air like Cannon Fodder’s odour after consuming a large bowl of baked beans.

Gripped by that same curiosity, I stepped closer to peer inside the crate. There, piled up in a rather haphazard way, either through the carelessness of the pony who packed it or that of the ponies who transported it here, were glowing crystals, each roughly the size of my hoof. They were approximately spherical, but certainly not uniform in exact shape or size, with several appearing to be shaped rather more like eggs or melons. Each, however, glowed from within with a peculiar green light, and with the lid off I could feel the magic radiating off of it. This being another time where I wished I’d paid more attention in magic class instead of drawing pictures of genitals in the air with magic to upset Twilight Sparkle, I couldn’t place it, but nevertheless it felt strange and unnatural, unlike any magic that I’d felt before. It set my teeth on edge, and I could feel something tingling just on the end of my horn, just barely at the crest of perception.

“Strange-looking shovels,” I said. Against my better judgement, I reached inside with my hoof to touch one of them.

“Please don’t touch them, sir,” said the archaeologist, twitching with anxiety. “They’re fragile.”

I withdrew my hoof. “Fine,” I snapped, “but I demand the truth. What are they?”

“Like I said, sir, archaeological equipment,” he said, and when I gradually raised my eyebrow in growing disbelief at his brazenness of maintaining the obvious lie, he launched into a panicked explanation that came out as a stream of words. “They, uh, detect concentrations of ancient Crystal Empire magic! They’re very rare and very old, predating King Sombra’s reign, which is why you mustn’t touch them as the slightest misalignment could break them irreparably! They’re completely harmless, I assure you!”

Now, call me suspicious if you will, and I’ve been called far worse before, but I didn’t quite believe him. However, I didn’t have much in the way of real evidence to call his claims into question, besides a general feeling that this didn’t really add up, and I was willing to give the poor chap a little bit of leeway on that account. He certainly seemed agitated, but that could just as readily be explained by Yours Truly in a scary uniform interrogating him in a darkened room. The previous night’s discussion had already made me feel a little on the stupid side, and I didn’t fancy making myself look even more of an idiot in the eyes of our learned guests yet again.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” insisted Pencil Pusher. “In accordance with the regulations, I shall be impounding these… whatever they are. They will be returned to you once I am satisfied that they are ‘completely harmless’.”

In truth, I was about to let it slide. After all, this had wasted enough of my valuable time, which I might have otherwise spent brushing up on Crystal Empire history so as not to embarrass myself in front of its esteemed researchers again, and I was quite willing to let the Crystal Ponies have their weird magic things, even if I didn’t entirely trust them. However, this particular nerd’s subsequent response to Pencil Pusher’s rather harsh but understandable ruling was what tipped my compass from just letting it go to realising that there was far more to these strange little spheroids than he said.

“No!” he exclaimed, lunging forward to position himself in between his prized glowing spheres and Pencil Pusher, who still brandished his crowbar in what he probably thought was a menacing pose. “You can’t!”

“Why not?” I asked. “If they are completely harmless, as you say, then you have nothing to fear and nothing to hide. Unless, there is something you’re hiding?”

My irresistible logic had once again pinned him into a metaphorical corner, and he stood there, jaw flapping wordlessly and uselessly as he tried to come up with some sort of counter that would make all of this unpleasantness disappear. I have to admit that the bully within me enjoyed watching him squirm. However, it was as he began to stammer out an excuse of sorts that Cannon Fodder, who had merely been hovering silently in his usual position just behind me and to the left, was finally taken by that same sense of curiosity about what all the fuss was about. My magically-inert aide approached the crate full of these glowing orbs, and as he stepped closer, the eldritch green luminescence within each flickered, sputtered, and then died, to leave a crate full of inert, dull crystal globes.

A plaintive ‘Oh no’ was all that the archaeologist could muster.

***

“Sir, this is completely unacceptable!” snapped Corded Ware. He had evidently found out about what had happened with his ‘archaeological equipment’, and I assumed that his embarrassed and distraught colleague had told him. He found me in my office, where I had spent the afternoon sleeping off a rather heavy and boozy lunch with Captain Fine Vintage. “Those orbs were extremely valuable, and your soldiers, who obviously have no respect for the past and clearly cannot read signs, opened them.”

“I’ll ignore your disrespectful tone for now,” I said, thoroughly annoyed at having been woken from my nap. I’d managed to convince the other archaeologist that the contents of the crate must have been damaged when Pencil Pusher opened the box with his crowbar, and that clearly Cannon Fodder had nothing to do with it. Though his unique ‘gift’ was gradually becoming common knowledge, I still made an effort to keep his rare condition as much a secret as I possibly still could. “Perhaps it has escaped your notice that we are at war right now, and you and your team are here only on the sufferance of Their Royal Highnesses’ Equestrian Army. It can be very easily taken away. I have but to give one order and you will all be sent back to the Crystal Empire with nothing to show for it.”

“This expedition is funded by the Crystal Princess,” he sneered. “What will I say when I tell her you are obstructing our work here?”

“You might know her as Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, but I know her as my cousin Cadance,” I retorted; it was always silly when ponies tried to name-drop other members of royalty with me, as if I wasn’t related to most of them. “While you are here you are subject to military law, and I’ll not have members of your team interfering with their work. Pencil Pusher was correct, and perhaps if your colleague had shown due deference to his authority we might have avoided the damage. All goods, whatever they are, brought into this fortress must be checked thoroughly, or have you forgotten that we fight an enemy that changes its form at will?”

Corded Ware snorted; he was clearly angry, but even considering the loss of those apparently irreplaceable orbs, his anger seemed disproportionate. Granted, that might have been due to Yours Truly not particularly caring about the field of archaeology, or that he was clearly in the wrong here and had, as many rather prideful ponies including me do, decided that rather than surrendering to common sense he would instead commit more fully into his wrong-headed argument. “We are on the very cusp of discovering something spectacular, sir, and your soldiers are getting in the way of that.”

“And whatever it is you hope to find down there will still be there after this war is over,” I said. “What’s so important in that crypt that it can’t wait until after Queen Chrysalis has been vanquished?”

“Our history, sir.” Corded Ware’s voice took on a more pleading tone, clearing hoping that if logic wouldn’t sway me, then attempting to evoke sympathy would. “So much of our past has been lost over the millennia. We Crystal Ponies find ourselves in a new, strange world we no longer recognise or feel a part of. Finding what our ancestors did before King Sombra may help us reconnect with the world, and why we should bother fighting for it.”

I could have sent him and his fellow nerds home, and I was very tempted; they were becoming more than a mere nuisance, and that incident had set the paranoid part of my mind into a veritable flurry of frantic conjecture on just what they were up to. However, that would also have upset A. K. Yearling, and that was what nudged me into relenting. “Very well,” I said. “But you must cooperate with the authorities here, or you’ll be on the first train home. Is that clear?”

“Crystal.”

Chapter 3

The preparations for the upcoming excavation continued with about the same effort for Market Garden’s next offensive, and as the days wore on, the two would continue to interfere with one another to an irritating degree. Still, it kept me busy, and sorting out minor irritations like an archaeologist getting lost in the fortress and accidentally wandering into the General’s office where she kept her top secret documents gave me at least some excuse to get away from the more serious work, where my decisions could affect the outcomes of battles to come and the lives of everypony involved.

[As an unfortunate consequence of the war dragging on, particularly with Hardscrabble's new strategic doctrine in place, several ponies were arrested as Changeling sympathisers for committing acts ranging from vandalising government property to attempted espionage. The Commissariat's job was to clamp down on such dissent within the military, and though Blueblood's glossing over this incident may seem odd, it is likely a reflection of his disdain for the supposed overreaction of those around him, and the encounter was still documented in official records. Since an application of the Changeling reveal spell would not be sufficient, Blueblood conducted a brief interrogation, in which a bottle of brandy was involved, concluding with the suspect's prompt release.]

The incident with those strange glowing orbs continued to nag at me like an itch in a hard-to-reach place; far be it from me to think that my silly paranoia trumps the intelligence and experience of highly trained and well-educated academics, but said instinctive distrust has kept me alive these past few years of war and that it persisted in quietly poking me in the the back of my brain with a stick inclined me to think that there really was something more to them. However, they were gone now, having been rendered useless by Cannon Fodder, so it was something of a moot point. That said, the first rule of paranoia is that when somepony else goes to great lengths to conceal something from ordinary, routine scrutiny, then it is usually only the first time that they have been caught in the act and they are likely to be hiding a great many other things. I was determined to find out, but if I did the usual commissar routine of shouting at everypony and threatening firing squads until somepony cracked and told the truth, then they would have simply gone home and I’d be left wondering what that was all about, and so I would have to tread somewhat carefully. In practice, this meant going along with whatever it was they were doing, while keeping an eye out for the inevitable denouement.

As for A. K. Yearling, if I didn’t know any better I’d have said that she was avoiding me. That is not to say that she was outright rude or hostile to Yours Truly, but whatever bond we had formed over that dinner had clearly been broken prematurely by the peculiar incident right after. Each time that I saw her since now involved merely an exchange of pleasantries and a spot of chatter about the upcoming dig, and I made sure to resist the persistent urge to pester her with yet more questions about her Daring Do stories. Perhaps, I considered, it was better to maintain a level of professional distance, at least until the excavation was finally complete. I attended, and was thoroughly bored by, a number of meetings where they planned the excavation in as much detail as possible. Market Garden, I thought, would have been very impressed, and A. K. Yearling might have missed her opportunity to do her part for the war effort by serving on the General’s staff as the chief orderly in charge of counting staplers.

In one such meeting Southern Cross was in attendance, and was likewise bored to tears by the goings-on. As A. K. Yearling and Corded Ware went on and on about something or other to do with dating early and late Crystal Empire pottery, the two of us sat at our corner of the conference table quietly playing noughts-and-crosses on the meeting notes to try and pass the time. I lost three games in a row and Southern Cross grinned with insufferable smugness, but he could not gloat in his victory for long when it finally came to the part of this overly-long and tedious meeting that required his presence.

“Captain Southern Cross,” said Corded Ware, and said engineer looked up with a start from where he was doodling a constellation next to the site of my most ignominious defeat in our battle of wits.

“Yeah, mate?” he answered, suppressing a yawn at the same time so that he sounded like a drunk slurring his words.

“How long will it be until the blockage is cleared?”

“A couple more days,” said Southern Cross with a shrug. “Only because we did such a good job of blocking it in the first place; nopony here wants Changelings coming up through their basement again.”

Corded Ware frowned and shook his head. “Could you not speed it up?”

“We could.” A small smirk formed on Southern Cross’ mouth, as it tended to do before he had something he thought was clever to say. “We could do it in a day, and wreck all of the very old stuff in the basement that by rights probably ought to be preserved. What’s left of it, I mean. We’re engineers, mate, you can have us do things quickly or do things properly, but not both at the same time.”

He spoke of the tomb’s entrance chamber beneath the fortress’ keep, a few storeys down directly under our hooves, that had been the way inside the ‘temple-tomb complex’ that remained unexplored, except perhaps by a band of Diamond Dogs and the Changelings that had allegedly wiped them all out. It was ancient, yes, and had been repurposed as a dungeon and torture chamber by the Badlands pony tribe that had later occupied and then abandoned this fortress atop it, yet the desperately old carvings that predated Equestria’s founding by untold millennia had remained more or less intact. It had survived the many thousands of years since, until our sappers were forced to demolish a large section of it with explosives to stop the enemy from coming up through those same tunnels during the siege here. A great loss to the world of archaeology, of course, but given the rather desperate circumstances we found ourselves in during that awful battle, an acceptable one. Following that, subsequent teams of engineers had worked to seal off the tunnels as securely as possible, and now all of that needed to be undone so Corded Ware and company could go poking around below.

“I’d like to avoid further damage to the site,” said A. K. Yearling. “If it can be avoided.”

“We’re here for the old Crystal Empire outpost,” said Corded Ware, irritation starting to colour his face and expression. However, he then collected himself and sighed. “How quickly can you clear it?”

Southern Cross frowned, squinting at the old archaeologist, and took a sharp intake of breath, as labouring ponies do when somepony asks them to do something unwise but they can’t just say it. “I can always ‘speed up’. Send in the stallions with pick axes and hack through all the rubble and thousand-year-old masonry with fancy carvings. We can do it all in a day if we don’t care about damaging all of that irreplaceable stuff, if that’s what you really want?”

I could see the expression of dawning horror develop in slow-motion on A. K. Yearling’s face, and Corded Ware squirmed awkwardly in his seat. “The entire purpose of this excavation,” he began, “is to uncover the Crystal Empire outpost. Everything else is secondary.”

A. K. Yearling shot her colleague a sharp glare, and looked as though she was restraining herself from leaping over the table and slapping him. Southern Cross appeared not to know how to respond to that, and merely shrugged casually and muttered something quietly to himself about this entire meeting being pointless.

“That,” I said, and everypony snapped to look at me as I said my first words in the meeting that weren’t the usual opening pleasantries or an inquiry about whether or not we’ll be served biscuits soon, “is a very strange attitude for an archaeologist to have.”

My suspicions about the stallion sitting opposite me were only growing more aroused by his odd behaviour. Of course, he was an academic, and ponies who spend their entire lives immersed in books and fussing over others who are long dead are very odd by their nature anyway, like a certain purple Princess I could name. There was more to him and his little band of fellow geeks than their appearances, which were simply too stereotypical to be believable but I suppose such cliches have some grounding in reality, would otherwise have implied, but all that I had by way of evidence were a few odd things that would hardly stand up in any sort of tribunal except one where I had bribed the judge.

“What’s the rush?” I asked, while he continued to brood silently to try and come up with some sort of answer that, I assumed, would make me shut up. “Surely whatever’s down there is unlikely to walk away?”

He quickly realised that he had overstepped the mark, or that his cover had slipped, as the paranoid part of my brain hastened to correct. “Of course,” he said, looking and sounding very sheepish all of a sudden. “Forgive me, the ancient Crystal Empire has been my life’s work. I’m glad I have colleagues to ensure that my pursuits do not blind me from the principles of archaeological research.”

I remained unconvinced by that, but interrogating him on this point and thereby dragging out this meeting seemed like a waste of my valuable and limited time, and there was a seat at the bar in the mess with my name on it just waiting for me. All I could do, aside from drag him to one side and threaten him with a flogging if he didn’t give up all of his secrets, was go along with it. There was, I reassured myself, always the possibility, however remote, that it could all be very innocent. I’d learnt by now to trust my instincts, but I had made the fatal assumption that such things applied exclusively to matters of war and that the warning signs were merely them being misapplied to a group of socially-backward bookworms instead of the sort of socially-backward officers I was used to working with, and so, in the name of just getting on with it, I put it all to one side. This felt more and more like a Daring Do story by the second, and not one of the better ones too; I half-expected the door to burst open and Caballeron to storm in with his henchponies because the author had written herself into a corner and needed to move the plot along. I reminded myself that this sort of thing was fictional, as said author herself had explained, and that the reality of archaeology was much more tedious, sedate, and safe than otherwise implied. Besides, I didn’t fancy looking like a complete idiot again after that debacle at dinner a few nights ago.

The meeting came to a gradual but greatly anticipated conclusion, for my backside had become numb after sitting still for so long and I was feeling rather restless. Southern Cross agreed that the blockage could be at least partially cleared within a few days, preserving what was left of the ancient carved walls and pillars for posterity while allowing sufficient space for a team of ponies to slip through with relative ease. This satisfied A. K. Yearling, and though Corded Ware sulked like a foal denied more ice cream, he glumly acknowledged defeat and nodded his agreement to the plan.

That evening, A. K. Yearling delivered on her promise to read a chapter from her greatly-anticipated next book, Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds, for the soldiers as part of an RASEA show, and I felt rather sorry for the comedy juggling act that was to follow immediately. Now, I’ve attended a great many of these shows before, as often on the frontline there’s not much else in the way of entertainment besides drowning one’s sorrows in liquor or seeking the comfort granted by hiring the services of another pony for the night, and both of which were, if accepted, at least somewhat frowned upon if done to excess. I had yet to see a show with such an attentive audience as her’s. They tended to be rather raucous affairs, you see, since the audience was made up of very bored young stallions and mares whose jobs entailed no small amount of personal risk to themselves, and as such all shows were audience-participation numbers regardless of the intentions of whichever unfortunate entertainer was hauled out in front of them for their amusement. The good ones knew this, anticipated it, and therefore built it into their routine, while the bad ones, which outnumbered those with talent, made up for the lack of entertainment value when heckled, booed, or otherwise driven off the stage. By contrast, the crowd that I saw that evening was the most well-behaved I’d seen thus far, and would have put the regulars at the Royal Opera House in Canterlot to shame for the atmosphere of hushed and attentive reverence they created.

They hung on her every word, as the saying goes, as A. K. Yearling described Daring Do’s obligatory descent into whichever ancient dungeon filled with traps that were somehow still working after so many thousands of years. Despite her desire to be a known and recognised as a serious academic, she remained a natural storyteller, and the way that she held the rapt attention of ponies who, were it any other author, would usually providing their own live commentary to the story or throwing things onto the stage, was a testament to that fact. Her voice filled the ancient hall, which once would have held banquets and entertainment for petty lordlings, and I too found myself taken in by what seemed like a spell cast over us all.

The chapter ended on a cliffhanger, with a particularly lethal and overly-complicated trap triggered and some manner of bloodthirsty mythical beast on our gallant heroine’s tail. We would all have to buy her book to find out how Daring Do escaped this one when it was finally published, and as the audience stomped their hooves and roared their approval I had a grim and unpleasant thought about how many of them, including Yours Truly, would survive General Market Garden’s next push to read it and find out what happens next. Her subsequent mobbing by her adoring fans prevented me from congratulating her and from providing a helpful critique that, now that I think of it, probably would not have been received well by her.

There was only one further minor hiccup along the way -- it didn’t actually inhibit the progression of the excavation, but it did, as these things often did, settle into my mind and continue to nag at me. Earthshaker, Chieftain of the Jerboa tribe (it was apparently no longer considered appropriate to call them the Rat Pony tribe, but I continued to do so in private if only because of what he in particular had done to me) was present in the fortress to attend to some important inter-tribe affair to do with their continued support in our war, and to avoid any particular tribe being seen as favoured it was decided to hold this on ‘neutral’ ground. They were organising, you see, and I’d already expressed my private concerns to Princess Celestia that they might prove a threat to Equestria if they ceased squabbling amongst themselves and started working together. She reminded me that we were fighting for friendship for all ponies and to worry about one threat at a time, before ordering another round of cake and diverting the conversation to something banal.

[Though relations had been strained by the massacre at Virion Hive, Earthshaker’s distrust of Equestria remained an anomaly amongst the Badlands tribes, who, on the whole, supported our war against the Changelings. The potential threat of a united Badlands hostile to Equestria had also been raised by a number of officers in the military and some politicians, whose fears would later prove to be completely unfounded in the years of cooperation that followed. As for the cake and the conversation, my nephew had chosen to raise this at a party, and for one evening I would have liked to avoid talking shop.]

In the short term, I’d already had my worries about General Market Garden ruining our vital alliance with these tribes by opening her mouth and offending one of the natives, particularly the contentious Earthshaker who, though he saw the evident necessity of it all, remained decidedly unhappy on the necessity of cooperating with the ‘servants of the Tyrants of the Sun and Moon’ as he continued to call us, but our illustrious General was easily distracted with the job micromanaging the army’s supply lines and mercifully left dealing with the locals to more socially capable officers. If the delegates were offended by her infrequent appearances they did not care to voice it.

For reasons that ought to be obvious, I avoided Earthshaker as much as possible beyond the bare minimum required by basic courtesy. However, it was impossible to avoid him completely, and eventually we were forced into a mutually unpleasant situation where we had to make polite and civil small talk while we both waited for Major General Garnet to arrive so this meeting could start. I don’t exactly recall how the topic of the upcoming excavation had come up in the conversation, besides desperately trying to find something to chat aimlessly about once talk of the weather had finally run dry. Nevertheless, when the news was quite casually brought up, he frowned disapprovingly at me.

“The tombs below this fortress are cursed,” he said.

“How so?” I asked. “Is it anything I should be worried about?”

“That depends if you’re stupid enough to disturb the ancient dead,” he said solemnly. At first I thought that he was joking or trying to unnerve me, but either he was extremely dedicated or being honest, and it was the insult that nudged me into believing the latter.

“I’ll make sure the grave-robbing is kept to an appropriate minimum, then.”

His expression did not change, and I knew then that he was being deadly serious. “Our stories tell us of the king who once lived in this castle, knowing that ponies of an empire long fallen had delved deep beneath his throne and buried their dead and their treasure below, and despite the warnings from his priest, his curiosity overcame his good sense and ordered an expedition below. The dead there rose from their tombs and slaughtered the entire castle, and the kingdom fell.”

Major General Garnet had by then finally arrived (it turned out he was delayed because he was giving an impromptu lecture on postage stamps to a hapless clerk) and the meeting began at last, so I hadn’t the time to question the Chieftain further about this particular story. In what I could only assume was a measure calculated to spite me, he left before I could prod him for further details, and, well, given that my back would still ache from time to time with the flogging he’d personally given me even after those years had passed, I could be forgiven for not wanting to speak to him any more than I truly had to.

I did, however, ask Corded Ware and A. K. Yearling, our experts, about this particular story when I next met them in the officers mess for dinner.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” snapped Corded Ware, and he must have seen the arching of my eyebrow at that remark and thus added a quick ‘sir’ to the end of that. “It’s merely a legend, a myth, from a superstitious tribe of backwards savages.”

Ordinarily, I would have agreed with him, but the fact that this sort of thing might have happened again with the Diamond Dogs much more recently had led me to believe that there was a chance, however slim, that there really was something to these old ‘legends’. Nightmare Moon, after all, was merely an old ponies’ tale right up until the moment the sun failed to rise.

“Local stories can help us in uncovering what really happened,” said A. K. Yearling. “Tales become twisted, distorted, exaggerated, and so on with each telling, but there’s often some truth behind it. Perhaps the king opening the tomb happened to coincide with a disastrous event that ended his kingdom, like a war or a plague, and over the years the stories spread and ponies believed the two events were directly linked.”

I suppose I was in no real position to argue; decades of research and study versus my strange hunch that something was wrong was hardly a fair comparison, and so I quietly accepted A. K. Yearling’s sensible explanation for it all and simply carried on with things. Curses aren’t real, as Corded Ware had said, and the dead don’t rise from their graves until such a time Faust grows bored with her creation and decides to start it all again from scratch.

The engineers cleared the blockage by hoof on the following day, having been bribed with extra beer rations, extended leave, and tickets to an exclusive burlesque show to pull an all-nighter, and the archaeologists, each giddy with excitement, immediately descended into the dungeons to begin their excavation. This basement area was the only part of the entire fortress that had not been ‘renovated’ at all by the military, and remained more or less in the same state as it was after the engineers had collapsed a large section of it to keep the Changelings out. I felt a strange and foreboding sense of deja vu as I descended with the team down the spiral stairs to the dungeons, and the way that the spirals would reverse direction for no reason that seemed obviously logical took me by surprise once more. The stairs also went down considerably further from the ground floor than one would otherwise expect from what was effectively a basement, and I had the rather unpleasant feeling that the native ponies who had built this in the first place did so to make entrance and exit to what lay below as difficult as possible.

At the bottom of this winding, labyrinthine set of stairwells was a modern addition in the form of a large wooden door, which had been reinforced with sturdy metal bars and iron studs in case any Changelings somehow made it through the rubble. The light from my horn danced upon its surface, and standing before it I was stricken by an unexplained sense of foreboding. I knew exactly what was behind it, though I had not visited the dungeons since the night of the battle here, but the irrational fear that some manner of grotesque monster, dragged up from the darkest depths beneath the keep, lay in ambush behind it had wormed its way deep into my mind. The weight of my heavy sabre strapped to my back was a reassuring one, as I swallowed my trepidation, gently pushed the door open, and shone the light of my horn through the widening gap.

The broad, underground chamber with the low ceiling supported by squat pillars was much as I remembered it, aside from the fact that over half of it was buried in a large pile of rubble. There was a gap cleared, about the height of a large pony and just as wide, reinforced with sturdy wooden beams. Despite the bright light emanating from my horn, much of it was still shrouded in an opaque, murky darkness, resembling a black fog that had somehow coalesced from the depths below and seeped into this chamber. The rusted old chains and manacles were still attached to those pillars, as though the engineers who worked down here feared what ghosts they might anger if they removed them, and I shuddered to think what it must have been like to be chained up down here and forgotten. As before, the truly maddening array of pictograms carved into the walls made one dizzy just looking at them; I recognised some Haygyptian there, not that I could ever figure out hieroglyphics or have much cause to add that dead tongue to my repertoire, but much of the other peculiar chicken-scratch designs seemed impossible to be considered a true language. Whether or not they were truly conveying information, had mystical or arcane purposes, or were the product of a deranged mind remained to be answered, but, I thought to myself, perhaps with this little archaeological expedition I might finally receive some answers.

I ducked my head to enter a dungeon apparently built for ponies about a head shorter than me, though A. K. Yearling seemed to have no such trouble as she followed me inside. She gasped audibly in amazement, and when I looked over my shoulder at her I saw an expression of wonder on her face, in stark contrast to the sensation of dread that simmered within me. The evidence of the engineers’ work was plainly evident to see all around, ‘contaminating’ the site as the esteemed author put it; hoofmarks in the thick layer of stone dust were everywhere, as were great areas where whatever equipment they used had cleared much of it, but true to Southern Cross’ word, the rubble his sappers had cleared from the blockage there remained intact, piled up neatly in the corner for the archaeologists to tinker about with as they pleased. However, they appeared, at least to my untrained eyes, to have cleaned up after themselves, and nothing of the modern world that I could see had been left behind, leaving only those old things, predating Equestria, if in a slightly disassembled state.

The archaeologists followed, but this was rather old hat to them, I imagined, as their responses were a little more subdued. Besides, they were really after the ancient Crystal Empire stuff below, so for them I would assume this was merely window-dressing. A few of them carried bags of equipment, which they had insisted on carrying themselves despite spindly backs of some of these nerds, having rejected my offer of inflicting that onerous duty on whichever soldiers had misbehaved this week and required a boring punishment. Cannon Fodder was last, remaining a respectable distance to avoid snuffing out the light of my horn if he wandered too close. The team busied themselves at the gap cleared by the engineers, where Corded Ware had discovered that the unintended side effect of trying to make Southern Cross’ ponies rush their work meant that the gap was a little too tight to allow them to push their laden bags through. I left them to it, for I’d be damned if I was going to help him overcome the consequences of his own decisions, and instead accompanied A. K. Yearling as she examined the carvings on the walls.

She seemed to have a better idea of what they were about, and indeed this was the most animated that I’d ever seen her in these few short days. I could barely keep up as she went from wall to wall, pillar to pillar, pointing out some of the more interesting carvings. One depicted an ancient pegasus myth about how they received their wings from their old heathen gods so they can chase the sun and moon, and another simply read ‘Gertrude was here’ in Old High Griffonic. A particular carving caught my immediate attention: it depicted a large alicorn rearing on her hind legs, with a flowing mane and tail, wielding an enormous sword in her mouth earth-pony style, and the sun emblazoned on her cutie mark. Above, in Ancient Ponish, a language I could read, was the word ‘Cimmareian’.

“Hello, Auntie,” I said. I didn’t expect that an image of Princess Celestia would turn up here of all places. [I travelled a lot in my youth, before I was crowned princess.]

Miss Yearling, however, was fascinated by a rather more striking thing on the wall, one that I recognised from my previous visit here. It was not a carving like the others but a painted fresco, and depicted a stylised pony’s skull within a halo from which three lines emerged from below to give the impression of an ascending comet.

“The triumph over death,” she said breathlessly. “King Sombra was obsessed with alicorn immortality. His followers must have painted this on the wall.”

“I’ve seen it elsewhere,” I said. “In an old city, now inhabited by a tribe of Badlands natives. They weren’t terribly hospitable last time I visited there, so you’ll have to forgive me if I wouldn’t want to accompany you on a trip there.”

“The Crystal Empire must have spread its influence farther than we thought.” She tapped her chin, and peered at the curious symbol through her thick-rimmed glasses. “They were the dominant power in Northern Equestria, and we knew they established colonies far to the south, but all of this implies they had a much greater presence in the Badlands than historians first realised.”

“But why?” I asked, and A. K. Yearling turned and looked up at me with a peculiar smile on her lips. “I’m sure the ponies who live here won’t forgive me for saying this, but I’ve been in the Badlands for a few years now and there’s not a lot of anything interesting or valuable here.”

“Now you’re thinking like an archaeologist,” she said, her tone suddenly friendly and warm, which took me by surprise. “The evidence we find often reveals more questions than it answers. Just what were the Crystal Ponies doing down here?”

“I think we’re about to find out,” I said.

The Crystal Ponies had managed to squeeze through the gap with their equipment, and now it was our turn. The sappers had been very thorough in collapsing that portion of the chamber, for which I was immensely thankful for years ago when Changelings poured through this basement, and so the blockage itself was no mere wall of broken stone and paving, which had necessitated clearing a deep tunnel to allow us egress to the other side. I let A. K. Yearling through first and the slim pegasus slipped through the gap effortlessly, as though she had squeezed through such tight, partially collapsed structures before. However, when it came to my turn, I found that I had considerably greater difficulty, and the rough stone chafed painfully against my flanks until I wormed my way through to the other side, popping out like a champagne cork and falling in a heap on the ancient stone paving. I certainly would not have put it past the likes of Southern Cross to have instructed his sappers to clear a gap just small enough to inflict the maximum amount of indignity on me. Cannon Fodder fared little better than I, as he still wore his old suit of bulky Royal Guard armour to this little expedition and had gotten stuck. This necessitated a great deal of tugging on his forelegs, while the burlier members of the archaeological team tried to dislodge a few of the blocks of rubble around my aide’s armoured backside.

When my aide was finally freed and everypony on the other side of the blockage, we carried on. On the other side of the cleared tunnel the chamber itself looked much the same as it did before: the same pillars, the same rusted iron chains, and the same maddening scrawl carved onto the stone. However, at the far end, which I had not seen before in my brief time here years ago, as my attention was directed elsewhere, was a large wooden door set into a great and ornately carved stone frame. The heavy planks of aged wood were reinforced with metal bars, which seemed out of place here.

“It looks like a recent addition,” said A. K. Yearling. “The Badlands ponies?”

“Metal ore is a rarity here,” I said. “We use it to barter with the local tribes, and they tend to use it to make weapons and armour. I don’t know why they’d use it on a door here, unless they wanted to keep somepony out, or in.”

[My nephew can be forgiven for not mentioning so, but some Badlands tribes used the metal—particularly steel—to fashion farming tools. The rocky soil in the region was too rough and thick to be easily worked by bronze or stone, but high-quality steel allowed reclamation of land once thought impossible, improving the tribes' ability to conserve precious water.]

“Likely just another local superstition,” said Corded Ware dismissively, as he brushed past us and casually pulled the door open. The ancient hinges squealed in protest at being disturbed from their thousand year-long rest, and rust flaked off to collect in a small pile on the floor. Beyond that, a set of yet more stairs in a tight corridor receded into a pitch black darkness below. “Come along, we’re here for our legacy, not theirs.”

I exchanged glances with A. K. Yearling, who, apparently acknowledging and sharing my assessment that Corded Ware was acting strangely even by his usual standards, shrugged in response and followed the lead archaeologist into the dark depths. Well, I thought, I could have turned back, made an excuse about some important work to do with the ongoing war effort, and left them to it, but a certain unpleasant adage about the death of cats applied here. My hooves might have been itching, but I ignored the usual warning sign from my subconscious that something was wrong and followed along anyway; I had to know what happened, and that desire for answers had overridden my paranoia, and besides, there was nothing immediately threatening to life, limb, and sanity yet.

As we descended down those steps, the light from our horns forming a bubble of illumination around our small group, it occurred to me that once we’d finished for the day I’d have to climb all of them back up again. I made a mental note to ask Twilight Sparkle to teach me how to teleport, as not only would it be simply more convenient to teleport straight to my favourite seat at the bar in the Imperial Club, it would also help get me out of further messes. At any rate, the descent dragged on interminably, but when we finally reached the bottom and spread out into another underground chamber, I checked my watch and saw that only a few minutes had passed.

Mercifully, the ceiling was much higher in this room, so I could finally stand straight without having to tilt my head down. The light from our horns could only banish a small portion of the gloom, but within our island of light I could see that it was in much the same style as the previous room: tall pillars, covered in those same maddening carvings, supported the tall ceiling, and all around on the ground we saw that the ancient layer of dust had been disturbed, but not recently. Hoofprints, heavy boots by the looks of them, had scuffed the stone, and I could make out claw marks too. Here the air was stuffy and warm, and presumably ancient. I noticed that there were no chains attached to the pillars, as in the room before, which implied to me that the Badlands ponies hadn’t appropriated this room for the use of imprisonment and torture.

We spread out somewhat, and thus the unicorns were better able to illuminate more of this chamber. This revealed a row of sarcophagi along the length of both of the side walls, each arranged to stick out towards the middle of the room. Each sarcophagus had an ornately-carved lid, depicting a pony, presumably the one whose mortal remains lay within the stone box, in solemn repose. Though these representations were unique, they were all carved in exactly the same pose: resting on their backs, with their forelegs folded over their chests, and their blank faces staring up at the ceiling.

Ms Yearling didn’t exactly make a ‘squee’ noise when she saw them, but it was a close enough approximation. She darted over with a speed that seemed at odds with her age, crouched down, and peered closely at the array of Ancient Haygyptian hieroglyphs carved into the side of the sarcophagus.

While she did that, however, Corded Ware ignored the no-doubt fascinating artefacts and strode confidently to the door on the far end. I turned to Cannon Fodder, who, as ever, remained unfazed by the very old things dating back to the days when the word ‘Equestria’ was merely a geographical expression, and nodded in the head archaeologist’s direction. “Keep an eye on our friend over there,” I said. “Make sure he doesn’t get himself in trouble.”

“Yes, sir.” With that, my aide trotted on over to where Corded Ware and his team crowded around the door.

I approached A. K. Yearling at the sarcophagus, and peered over at the blank expression on the effigy on the top. It was painted, though the paint itself had faded over the course of the many thousands of years, and depicted pale grey pony clad in what might have once been vibrant robes. She wore a headband of some description, painted yellow presumably to approximate gold.

“It’s very rare to find Haygyptian tombs this intact,” she said, not looking up from the hieroglyphs. “Most tombs we find have already been looted by grave-robbers long ago. This one holds the mummy of a priestess. Judging by the style of the engraving, this was from the early kingdom, centuries before Princess Celestia was even born and when the unicorns moved the sun and moon with magic. It says she burned out her magic doing this, and spent the rest of her life serving as a priestess.”

To my surprise I found myself rather interested in all of this; all the talk about the technical aspects of archaeology had thoroughly bored me, of course, but to find the summation of an entire pony’s life contained within a carved stone box and preserved through the endless aeons was strangely fascinating. It made me wonder what sort of legacy I would leave, interred within a similar stone box in the family mausoleum, assuming that there was enough of me left to bury after the Changelings had finished with me. This, perhaps, is what archaeology was really about; not just the made-up adventures or the faffing about with digging and dating old things, but the lives and stories of the ponies long dead who came before us.

“So why wasn’t it?” I asked. A. K. Yearling shot me a blank look. “Looted, I mean. It’s seen Crystal Ponies, Badlands tribes, and even Diamond Dogs living in the fort above us. If your friend over there at the door is correct, the Crystal Ponies even went poking around inside this crypt for Discord knows what reasons. And that story about the king who lost his kingdom after looking around down here, would he also not have ransacked the place too, or is the alleged curse that quick? Either nopony’s made it this far, or everypony who descended down here was unusually conscientious about maintaining the sanctity of this tomb, or somepony’s been tidying up after them.”

“You know,” she said, smiling, “you might have made a decent archaeologist.”

“I suppose I would have to find something to do after this war is over,” I said, sotto voce. “But doesn’t this all seem a little odd to you?”

“Yes. Exciting, isn’t it? Come along, sir, we won’t find those answers just standing here.”

With that, she trotted off to join Corded Ware and his team, who appeared to be having a little bit of trouble with the door. I wandered closer, taking my time and affecting to show that I wasn’t really all that impressed by the very old and rather pretty things all around me. There, the door was of a Crystal Empire design, and thus crafted from the very material that they revered so much, and set into a frame likewise made out of that same crystal. In the stark light of my horn it shimmered brightly, and inside its semi-transparent structure I could see shifting shapes of greens and purples gently swirl like smoke from a freshly-extinguished candle. I could feel the magic radiating from it, much like those peculiar spheres that they had tried to smuggle in earlier, but muted somewhat.

Corded Ware himself stood before the door, his horn glowing with a deep green aura and his eyes were screwed up in concentration. His fellows had gathered in a semi-circle around it, and as I joined them with A. K. Yearling I saw Cannon Fodder leaning casually against the wall, staring boredly at the proceedings.

“I don’t understand it. It should just open,” muttered Corded Ware under his breath.

“Having trouble there?” I asked, doing my best not to sound amused at his evident struggling. “Can’t we just knock it down?”

“It’s sealed with magic,” he explained, the aura from his horn dimming into nothing. “I know the spell, it’s the same as the ones we used in the Crystal Empire, but it just doesn’t seem to work.”

“Perhaps it’s a different spell?” I posited; I knew precisely why his magic just wasn’t working, and the reason was standing there next to the door happily and very messily munching on a chocolate ration bar, but, well, given that he’d made me feel rather stupid on several occasions, I didn’t feel particularly inclined to be helpful to him that day.

“I know the spell, sir,” he snapped, clearly growing more irritated.

“I thought you said you weren’t here,” I said, remembering that conversation we’d had in the mess earlier. “How would you know the spell, then, if you were just another one of Sombra’s slaves?”

Corded Ware rounded on me abruptly, eyes narrowed in disgust, and I’d wondered if I stepped a bit too far over the line. “I read books, sir,” he hissed, with the unsaid implication that I don’t. “And I’d thank you not to bring up that tyrant’s name so casually again.”

I mumbled a half-hearted apology and instructed Cannon Fodder to go and help the other archaeologists with their luggage. With my aide out of the way again, Corded Ware attempted the spell once more. His horn lit once more, radiating a sickly green light that flowed forth into the crystal door before him. This light sank into the shimmering surface, melded with the strange luminescence within, and with an ominous rumble of crystal grinding on crystal the door opened before us. A sharp but brief blast of cold, copper-tasting air struck us, picking at the folds of my sweat-soaked and dusty uniform, and swiftly faded. Beyond, through this yawning portal, amidst the ancient gloom that the light of my horn seemed too feeble to banish, I could see things glowing in the distance with peculiar green and purple tones that put me in mind of an infected wound. My horn tingled in response to the old and malignant magic radiating from whatever those glowing things were, and I felt the desire to turn and run seize me by the throat.

Corded Ware, however, breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and he smiled broadly at the sight beyond the crystal door. “Well, then,” he said, “destiny awaits.”

Chapter 4

“Well, this is all very ominous,” I said to A. K. Yearling, as we marched into the ancient chamber. “Do long-abandoned tombs often glow like that?”

“Only the haunted ones,” she said, grinning to show that she was joking. I, however, didn’t find that particularly funny, and you, dear reader, might begin to understand why when I describe this hall in greater detail.

The space was about the size of the interior of Canterlot Cathedral, but with none of the light and airiness about it. Where the spiritual centre of Equestria was designed and built in a way calculated to demonstrate the true majesty of Faust’s creation and our glorious part in the story she has crafted for this world, this entire space seemed to be entirely constructed in such a way as to evoke the very opposite feeling. Granted, that might have been due to my own expectations colouring my own perspective of things, but it is difficult to describe the interior of this vast hall in anything approaching appealing terms. The darkness that surrounded us was suffocating, more so than in the rooms leading here, and seemed more than merely the absence of light that is Princess Luna’s night sky, which makes what little light remains in the stars and the moon seem all the more glorious for it, but an unnatural thing that absorbed and quelled whatever illumination dared to try and banish it. It gnawed at the very edges of the glow of my horn like a rabid beast upon wounded prey, until I feared that I too would be consumed by the gloom and lost forever.

Yet as more unicorns followed me inside and added their own illumination to my feeble light, and my eyes adjusted with irritating lack of urgency to the darkness, I could make out more clearly the features of this thoroughly unpleasant place. Vast pillars held up a tall, vaulted ceiling that to me seemed to reach much further than the depth of our descent would otherwise allow. There seemed to be little to no ornamentation to the entire vista, merely clean, straight lines that appeared to my untrained eyes to be just too perfect to be made by mortal hooves. Much of this furnishing was crafted, or perhaps grown, from sleek crystal that shimmered with the feeble light of our horns, and as we walked our metal horseshoes ran out like the tolling of bells on the crystalline surface. Those lights in the distance, towards which Corded Ware was leading us towards, were the only other sources of illumination here, and even they, glowing unnaturally, could only pierce the oppressive darkness as though they were lamps seen through dense fog.

Speaking of the apparent leader of this expedition, he strode confidently towards those lights and his entourage followed. In fact, only A. K. Yearling and I were at all perturbed by our surroundings, though she took this all in with a sense of quiet awe as opposed to the abject terror that I felt. Cannon Fodder remained thoroughly unbothered by all of this, for which I was thankful; the sound of him chewing on his chocolate bar, usually exceptionally off-putting as he tended to do so with all of the grace of a griffon helping himself to a nice, tasty rat, actually helped to dispel some of the bleak atmosphere of this place. His habitual lack of tact exemplified that when he ruined the reverential tone that Corded Ware and the Crystal Ponies were trying to maintain when he blurted out:

“How did the Changelings get through the door?”

Corded Ware stopped and turned to face me, and not, curiously enough, my aide, as though I was somehow responsible for everything he said and did. “What?” he asked.

“It’s a perfectly valid question,” I said, feeling strangely reluctant to be speaking for Cannon Fodder, but I wanted to know the answer, too. Every little discrepancy was adding up, each a small piece to the mental puzzle that was becoming very readily a giant exclamation mark in my head. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed that I didn’t think of that particular problem myself; I had been there, after all, and sent engineers and soldiers to desperately plug the entrance from which the enemy were spilling out into the keep, and I hadn’t thought to consider that I should be seeing where they had all come from. “How did the Changelings get through the magically-sealed door? Did they also read books?”

He held that stare, and I could see the impatience in his eyes at having his ‘destiny’ delayed by my needling of this rapidly-unravelling cover story he’d raised around his true intentions. “Maybe,” he said, presumably having failed to come up with a more convincing lie. “How should I know? I’m an expert in the Crystal Empire, not the Changelings. Perhaps they came up through an alternative entrance.”

“I didn’t see one in there.”

“Perhaps it was a hidden alternative entrance.” He snarled at me, and I felt the patrician urge to slap it out of his stupid face. “I am on the cusp of rediscovering our ancient history, and you keep on interfering with these pointless questions. If you don’t want to take part in this venture, then go back upstairs and let the professionals manage this. Until then, be quiet, and you might learn something for once.”

Well, that was that. I tend not to lose my temper very often, but right there I was very tired of being pushed around like that, of being just on the verge of finding out the truth of what this fellow was really about but always having it yanked away from me like a dog being tormented with a treat just out of reach. Now I was about to bite him, metaphorically. I raised my hoof to strike his cheek. “How dare you presume to speak-”

It was A. K. Yearling who stopped me from doing something that, perhaps in hindsight, I ought to have done earlier. She darted in with surprising speed and alacrity for her age, intercepted my hoof before I swung it, and quite firmly guided it back down to the ground. As the clarity of good sense finally cleared the haze of aristocratic indignation and I realised what I was doing, I saw that his fellow archaeologists had quickly swarmed to his side, ready to pounce before I could complete the swing of my hoof before Ms Yearling stopped me. Something seemed different about them, no longer timid and easily cowed, but ready to defend their boss should the need arise, as it very nearly just did.

“If you two could stop behaving like foals for a moment and focus,” she snarled. “Professor Corded Ware, Prince Blueblood is allowed to be curious about the circumstances of a battle he took part in years ago. And Prince Blueblood, archaeology is a slow, careful process, and you aren’t going to get those answers immediately. Now, we have work to do.”

The silence that descended wasn’t just awkward, it was downright hostile, as we held one another’s gaze in the cold, oppressive gloom of this ancient place. That stallion was up to something, I was now sure of it, but that little quantum of doubt, that I was an uneducated imbecile with irrational fears up against frightfully clever and rational ponies, remained. If A. K. Yearling was satisfied with Corded Ware’s integrity, then who was I to contradict her? And if it turned out that I was right all along, I could at least indulge in a moment of insufferable smugness as a result.

Corded Ware was the first to blink. “Fine, so long as there are no more interruptions,” he said.

“I’m quite eager to see where this all leads,” I said, by which, of course, I meant that I would be keeping my eye on him. It was at this point that I belatedly realised that I ought to have brought a team of soldiers with me as insurance, but, perhaps, considering what happened next it was better that I hadn’t -- fewer lives to weigh on my conscience now.

“Good,” said A. K. Yearling, with the air of a teacher who had just convinced two foals to stop fighting and make up. “Now let’s get on with it.”

We did indeed ‘get on with it’ in that same hostile silence as before, which allowed my overactive imagination to make all sorts of monsters out of the half-glimpsed shadows in the darkness all around me. My nerves remained twitchy, and I found myself almost jumping out of my hide at every unusual noise emanating from the stillness all around. The air, I noticed, was cold, and much more so than one would expect for this part of the world even underground; it felt more like the climate of the frigid north, where these Crystal Ponies came from, and I silently wondered to myself if the original inhabitants had magically enchanted this place to evoke the feeling of home. This place still radiated that ancient magic, and though I could sense that most of it came from those peculiar lights that Corded Ware was leading us towards, I detected that it was more faintly coming from all around too, as if the walls themselves were magic. I, of course, claim to be no expert on such things, but from what little that I could remember from magic school I knew that there had to be some sort of mechanism maintaining all of this magical equipment, and that it was unlikely to still be working after these untold millennia, or however long it’s really been, without somepony or something keeping it all in working order.

“I say,” I said, more to fill the absence of any noise besides our hoofsteps and my aide still feeding, “Prof, is this what you expected to find down here?”

“Hm?” He glanced over his shoulder at me, irritation in his eyes at having this moment marred yet again by Yours Truly being annoying. “Yes, of course.”

“And what, pray tell, is it?” I made a show of looking around at the high-vaulted ceiling and the tall pillars that supported it. “This is an odd-looking trading post.”

Corded Ware sighed in frustration. “That’s because it isn’t.”

As we neared those glowing lights, I quickened the pace to catch up with him, only for his associates, no longer appearing as the weak nerds that my foalish instincts had yearned to bully, to close in on me. It is remarkable how much a mere change of posture and attitude can do to hide one’s true nature, but in my defence and, well, everypony else’s, we had little reason to think otherwise of these ponies beyond my now-vindicated paranoid conjecture. They stood taller, no longer hunched as though they’d spent a lifetime pouring over books, and their stride so much more confident; had Corded Ware here given the word they might have pulled me limb from limb.

“Then what is it?” asked A. K. Yearling, her suspicions finally catching up to where mine had already crossed the metaphorical finish line and had wasted perfectly good champagne by spraying it all over a pretty mare in a sash. “You said you didn’t know. That was the whole point of this expedition.”

“Fine,” snapped Corded Ware. “Allow me to illuminate you.”

We’d reached the lights by now, which, as we drew closer, were revealed to be from some sort of crystalline panel that looked as though it had been grown from the floor itself than constructed and placed there. It was about the size of a ping-pong table, circular, with a thin pillar in the direct centre that reached up and disappeared into the darkness, presumably reaching the shadowed ceiling. The lights emanated from a series of crystal nodules protruding from it, arranged in a manner that seemed haphazard to my ignorant eyes but probably had some sort of real reasoning behind it.

Corded Ware’s horn flashed with a particularly pustulent shade of green magic, and he directed this at the panel before him. Light then filled the entire hall. I blinked away the stars that danced before my eyes, and the glare died down gradually until I could finally take in the entire vista that had finally been revealed to me.

The hall was long and narrow, relatively speaking, and along its sides were arrayed a great number of perfectly uniform and identical crystal cylinders. They were somewhat opaque, but were just translucent enough for me to make out something vaguely pony-shaped within each. I was put in mind of those pods the Changelings used to store and transport prisoners, but without their distinctly and disgustingly organic construction. There must have been hundreds of them, not that I was in the right frame of mind to start fastidiously counting them. The entire chamber itself looked thoroughly sterile, crafted out of clean, sleek crystal and glittered in the bright light shining from the lamps in the high ceiling, and despite its apparent age, not a speck of dust remained on the floor, nor on the panel or those strange cylinders.

“Impressive,” I said, trying to sound anything but impressed and likely failing miserably in the process. It truly was stunning, and far from the dusty old ruin that I had expected. “But I’m no less ‘illuminated’ than I was before.”

Corded Ware smiled, and it was a smug, self-satisfied sort that I yearned to wipe off his face with a chainsaw. “You, Prince Blueblood, were so very close to figuring it out,” he said. “But your lack of commitment is your undoing. If only you had pushed just a little bit harder, then you could have stopped what is to come.”

I stepped forward, and his cronies moved to bar my way. Cannon Fodder, having finished his chocolate bar, moved to my side, his hoof reaching for the spear strapped to his back.

“Corded Ware, what’s going on?” demanded A. K. Yearling. She too, marched to my side without fear, all but attempting to force her way past the bodyguards. It was then, rather belatedly, that it all fell into place for me, and the feeling of vindication over my suspicions was quickly overridden by both the embarrassment that it had taken me so long to see what had been staring me in the face and fear over what it truly meant.

“You were there, weren’t you?” I said. “Here, I mean. More than a thousand years ago. You’re no mere archaeologist.”

“Finally, the stupid Prince gets it,” said Corded Ware, his smile growing ever more smug. He untied his bow tie and wrenched it from his neck, letting it fall to the ground, likewise tossed his glasses away, and he allowed himself to stand straighter, radiating the sort of authority that I normally only saw with supercilious commissars who exercise their authority in petty and meaningless ways. The group of ‘archaeologists’, now revealed to be his henchponies, parted to let him approach and stand face-to-face with me. “Yes, Prince Blueblood, I was there. We were all there, one thousand years ago, when the Crystal Empire brought King Sombra’s perfect order to Equestria.”

“You mean slavery, I suppose,” I said. Then, to A. K. Yearling, I remarked, “just like Chrysalis, really. I suppose she’s not all that original.”

Now, I expected that this quiet, introverted author approaching the wrong end of middle age to be as absolutely terrified of this turn of events, utterly predictable in hindsight, as I was pretending not to be, but if anything she seemed rather more put together than I. In fact, I’d have said that she had somehow lost about three decades of age, and stood tall, alert, and ready to fight or flee at a moment’s notice. It was the same reaction that I had seen in trained soldiers, of course, and perhaps to a lesser extent in the likes of Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash when they were exposed to mortal peril in my presence. She said nothing, apparently content to let me take the lead for once, but I assumed that now that it had become abundantly clear that my paranoia was right all along, she felt it best to keep quiet and let the alleged war hero take charge.

“Everypony knows their place in the King’s order,” sneered Corded Ware, though I began to doubt that was truly his name. “Not like now, where you raise commoners to become princesses.”

“And what would your place be? I can’t imagine there was that much need for archaeologists in Sombra’s time; there was barely any history to uncover.”

Corded Ware chuckled and shook his head. “Ignorance is alive and well in this time, I see,” he said. “Has so little of our glorious history survived to this day?”

I could keep him believing that I was little more than an imbecile, which I found never required too much effort on my part as ponies seemed to just assume, with some justification, that I’m not terribly clever, and let him waste time indulging in puffing himself up by validating the suspicions I’d had about him since about the time I’d met him. The panel seemed important, as it continued to glow ominously and the magic radiating off it was like the glare of a lighthouse piercing through the dense fog. If I shot it with my magic then it might do something to scupper whatever plan this ancient maniac standing before me had concocted, but one of his guards stood in the way. Not that I was particularly concerned at all with hitting one of them, as distasteful as I found the thought of killing, but I had but one shot at this and there were enough of them to strike me down before I could get a second shot. Yet, if I could nudge Cannon Fodder close enough to the panel to shut it off before it could do whatever it was supposed to do…

“I see what you’re doing,” said Corded Ware, the grin on his face was gone, and the blank expression that replaced it was all the more jarring and horrifying for its absence of emotion. “There’ll be no villain’s exposition from me for you to exploit. Seize them, and hold the Prince down while I fetch his mask and awaken the shards.”

The two closest stallions did just that, grabbing me by my upper forelegs and then forcing me to the ground with a strong application of force to my scarred back. I fell upon the floor, bashing my chin against the cold, crystalline surface in the process. Cannon Fodder shouted something, but I was unable to turn my head to see what they were doing to him and A. K. Yearling, yet some sort of struggle persisted judging by the sounds of shouting going on. I tried to push up against the two pinning me down, each with a forehoof placed upon my back and pushing me against the ground with sufficient force that breathing became a chore. They were far stronger than their all-too-convincing disguises had otherwise led me to believe, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

With my head on the floor and my lower jaw aching and ringing with the impact, I could just about see Corded Ware’s four legs step towards the panel. He bent over, fiddled with one of the glowing things, and I heard the clanking of some ancient machinery followed by a deep hiss of escaping air from seemingly all around, yet from my position on the floor I could scarcely see anything else of what was going on. However, I still had the use of my horn, and his shiny crystal flanks presented an absolutely perfect target I could hardly miss. Unfortunately, this thought also occurred to his henchponies, and the one on my right raised his free hoof directly in front of my horn.

“The moment your horn starts glowing,” said Corded Ware, not bothering to turn his head to look at me as he spoke, “he will snap it off before you can fire a single shot. You will be a much more useful servant to me with your horn intact.”

Judging by the ease at which they pulled me down, and I was still not exactly on the light and delicate side back then, I was assured that his confidence was not misplaced. Still, it meant that he did not plan on killing me, at least not yet, which gave me time to figure out how to get out of this, though I admit that it looked pretty damned bleak from where I was.

Corded Ware then turned from the panel, and held in his magic a mask made from a dark metal, with narrow slits for eyes and two red spikes protruding from the top and centre that put me in mind of the peculiar diadem that his fallen King was often depicted wearing. I had no idea what it did, but something told me that it was decidedly not merely for ceremonial purposes and that it should go nowhere near my face. I thrashed my neck from side to side, but the second of those strong stallions placed his hoof on the top of my head, knocking off my cap in the process, and pinned it down.

“That’s better,” said Corded Ware, as he crouched down next to me with the mask hovering in his magic close by. “Do you have any idea how frustrating it was to pretend to be this weak and feeble academic for so long, how insulting it was for a stallion of my station to have to ingratiate myself with the likes of the two of you? To awaken in a world that knew nothing of my King’s perfect order except Equestrian lies, and to have to tolerate that false Princess sitting on his throne, and to hide myself amongst those I once commanded in his name until I can finally enact his Contingency?”

The mask moved closer, and I saw Corded Ware grinning at me through its slitted eye holes. Despite what he said earlier, he could not help but indulge in gloating over a beaten adversary. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“A Nightmare Night costume mask,” I spat. “Did you get it from Barnyard Bargains?”

He laughed mockingly. “Get one last quip in while you can, dear Prince. When I put this mask on you, you as you know yourself will cease to be. A mindless, obedient servant, incapable of even completing bodily functions without my permission. There won’t be enough of you left inside to even pray for the release of death. But before that happens, I want you to see this, and you can receive those answers you desire.”

I still couldn’t see what was happening to A. K. Yearling and Cannon Fodder, but the cessation of sounds of struggle from over there did not fill me with much hope. This felt like the end, and not at the hooves of Changelings either, but by this petty, power-hungry lunatic indulging in a fantasy of an empire long-destroyed. He turned, mercifully taking the mask with him for now and with a barked direction, the strong pony pinning my head down grabbed it by my chin and forced it to the right to see somepony emerge from the closest of those crystal tubes.

The entire front swung open on a hinge on the top, and a peculiar, shimmering, silvery liquid discharged onto the floor and spread like mercury. The pony inside, if it could even be called such, fell from its upright position on hindlegs onto all fours, where it shivered and wobbled precariously like a newborn foal. There seemed to be something very wrong with it; it was a Crystal Pony, certainly, but where a normal Crystal Pony, if one could ever be called ‘normal’, was a pony that happened to look as though they were made of a sort of organic crystal, this one looked like a lump of inorganic crystal hewn by a clumsy artisan in a rush to resemble an alicorn, with a long, spiralled horn and a pair of wings made from interlocking slabs of thin crystal. Within its chest something glowed, and I realised that it was the same light as those mysterious orbs that Pencil Pusher had found earlier. Its four legs were sturdy, though they shook with what I took to be years of underuse, and its joints clearly hinged in some way to allow movement. Its sharply angular head bent down to the ground in a jerky, mechanical motion, and its jaw opened to discharge more of that mercury-like ichor onto the ground. Whatever it was, it did not look well.

“What in Tartarus is that thing?” I blurted out.

“That ‘thing’ is the future, Prince Blueblood,” said Corded Ware, beaming with pride as though he was a father presenting a son who had just earned his cutie mark. “The shards were our failures in our quest to conquer death itself. We extracted a soul from its body, and placed it within a vessel of undying crystal. Only, the soul didn’t take well to being removed from its body. They began to lose themselves. Still, they make excellent soldiers: obedient, loyal, they require neither food nor water, and they have no will of their own. A convenient accident made useful by the unparalleled genius of the King’s archmages, of which I was- ah, still am a member.”

This thing, the ‘shard’ as he had named it, lifted its head up and stared at Corded Ware. Its face was blank, not in terms of expression, but in terms of features. There was nothing there, no eyes, no mouth, and no nose; merely an empty, blocky slab of crystal carved or grown into the approximate shape of a skull and a muzzle. Yet even lacking eyes as it did, I could sense the tortured presence within, staring at me, and hating me with a fury that it was incapable of articulating.

[The knowledge required to extract a soul from a living being and place it within an object has been suppressed over the years with good reason. Corded Ware is correct in that a soul cannot survive intact without its physical form and vice versa, and all attempts to prevent the gradual decay of the ego, the sense of ‘self’, once removed and captured ended in costly failure. No good can come from this line of research beyond the purely theoretical and it will remain suppressed, as its practical implementation is nothing less than a form of spiritual torture. Just in case any of the few ponies cleared to read this gets any ideas about picking up where Corded Ware left off, pursuing this will be punished by petrification.]

“They killed the Diamond Dogs,” I said, as the whole horrible picture formed before my eyes. “And destroyed the Badlands pony kingdom here, just as in that story. At least they were good enough to tidy up after themselves.”

“The shards, ever loyal, are carrying out the last set of commands they received,” explained Corded Ware. “Keep this place safe and secure for our King to return, destroy all interlopers, and clear up any evidence of their actions. The Changelings must have dug a tunnel into the previous chamber, but the shards still filled up the hole. That is how they bypassed the magic door.”

“And those orbs you tried to smuggle in,” I said, “they contained souls?” An instant sense of revulsion struck me as I pictured in my mind that box of crystal spheres, and how my aide’s presence had caused them all, each apparently having held the living essence of what had been a pony, to go irrevocably dark. Perhaps, I thought, that Cannon Fodder’s abilities had merely broken the spell that kept the souls trapped within and finally released them into eternal rest. A better fate for them than to remain trapped within those crystal prisons.

“Yes, from a secret cache in the Crystal Empire.” He sighed. “Part of the Contingency. No matter, there are others, and there are enough already here to make short work of your army above, and once we activate the other tombs out there, we will retake what was ours. Our King may be banished again, but through me his legacy will live on.”

I felt my stomach give way; there were more of these hideous places out there? How many, filled with those murderous, soul-damaged husks, those ever-so-loyal killing machines that were the remnants of a long-dead and scarcely-missed empire, were dotted all across our fair realm, each awaiting the order to rise up? It didn’t bear thinking about, not until I could free myself and warn everypony else, assuming that they didn’t think I was mad for it.

“There is an entire crack division of Royal Guards above,” I said, trying and likely failing to inject some confidence in my words. “Battle-hardened veterans who have won battles that make the ancient wars you’ve seen look like schoolyard scraps, each armed with weapons your backwards mind couldn’t possibly comprehend. They’re no band of Diamond Dogs or Badlands savages, they are disciplined and efficient soldiers, and once they find out I’ve gone they’ll come down here and put an end to your silly little rebellion before it even starts. Let me go now, and I can arrange some form of clemency for you and your ponies.”

It was all futile, of course, to try to negotiate with the pony who believes he has all of the cards when I have none, but it was worth a shot. He stood there, smiling the insufferably smug smile of a pony who knows that he has won and has all the time in the world to indulge in that feeling of triumph, and waited for me to finish voicing my empty threat. At the end he shook his head, and said, “I think a demonstration is in order. Bring his friend, the stallion.”

My head was still held firm, so I could not turn it to see what was going on behind me, but I heard some sounds of struggle. Cannon Fodder was dragged forward, still clad in his heavy armour, and tugging in vain against the two burly stallions who held him.

“Over here.” Corded Ware pointed to a spot, just before where I was still pinned to the ground and next to him. Then, addressing the crystal monster still vomiting quicksilver like Yours Truly after a late evening, “Kill him.”

With jerky, unnatural movements, the shard lifted its head up straight and looked straight at Corded Ware, its face blank and its body rigid and still as though it was a statue. A moment passed, as my aide continued to pull at the strong hooves holding him in place, and Corded Ware observed with visibly mounting frustration.

“Didn’t you hear me?” demanded Corded Ware.

“It appears that a thousand years have left it a trifle deaf,” I said.

Corded Ware ignored me, and stepped closer to the shard, who continued to observe him without the slightest hint of anything resembling emotion or recognition. “I am His Majesty’s Thaumaturgist, and you will obey me. Kill this pony!”

I felt a sudden blast of intense heat. The shard’s horn flashed with a malignant green light, the air split with a metallic shriek, and Corded Ware was gone. In the split second between the last moments of his existence and the cessation therefore, I saw a glimpse of his body, bathed in that horrible glow, disintegrate, as if peeled layer by horrible layer to the bone in a less than a fraction of a second, and all that was left of him was a small pile of ashes, scorched bone, and the mask he was holding. The air tasted foul, as smoke rose from the smouldering crater where the would-be tyrant stood. The shard turned its attention to the two ponies holding Cannon Fodder. One turned to flee, but was likewise caught in the light and reduced to grey powder. The second was frozen in terror, and stood perfectly still as the warped creation killed him.

[Performing such a potent disintegration spell several times in succession without burnout should be impossible for most ponies. Where the requisite energy stems from confounds us to this day, but it is suspected that souls themselves were consumed to fuel their spells.]

Thinking Cannon Fodder had been slain, I let out a wordless, anguished cry, and pulled myself free of my captors. Whether I was filled with an insensate rage-fuelled strength or two burly stallions were stricken with such justifiable fear that they loosened their grip on me I do not know for certain, but I threw them off me with ease. I staggered to my hooves only to see my aide standing there perfectly unharmed, and only a little bit alarmed at what he had just witnessed.

The others ran. Before me, the shard stood there, regarding me with an inscrutable coldness. There seemed to be nothing behind where its eyes should be save for malice and madness. The thing hesitated, as though it tried to ascertain what exactly I was, but I was not about to stand around and hope for it to come to a favourable conclusion. Fear, colder and sharper than that I had ever felt before or since embraced me. There was no time to feel relief at Cannon Fodder’s inexplicable survival, and I resorted to the usual response to such mortal terror by turning on my hooves and running away, diving behind the panel for cover, and straight into the very last pony I’d ever expected to see.

Daring Do, as I’d always imagined her from the stories: a slim, lithe pegasus with a build that put one in mind of a coiled spring ready to burst into action, wearing a crumpled linen safari jacket that seemed to contain multiple shades of tan and a battered pith helmet that looked as though it had been fished out of the Amarezon many times.

“What?” was all that my fevered, fraught nerves could muster to say at the sight of a beloved fictional character come to life before me.

“I’ll explain if we survive, Blueblood!” she yelled, her voice not all that different from A. K. Yearling’s. “Now, run!”

The order was completely unnecessary, as I was already sprinting past her. The other pods in the hall were opening, too, and from each, another shard stumbled out into the hall on quivering legs. Given the vastness of the hall, I could assume that there were hundreds of the wretched, soulless things. I was not about to stop and count them, being much too busy running for my life. Fleeing the way we came from would mean running through a gauntlet of them, and I’d be dead before I could even make it past the first pod, which only left fleeing deeper into the underground complex. We galloped into the darkness, while those things massacred the remaining Crystal Pony researchers. I would have liked to have rescued one to interrogate them, but given their subterfuge, my near-death experience, and the fact that this was all their own fault I couldn’t feel particularly sorry for them.

The sharp, metallic sound of their lethal rays accompanied that of our horseshoes pounding on the crystal floor. My heart pounded frantically in my chest, gripped tightly in the icy hold of mortal terror; Changelings were a threat I knew, even if they were inherently sneaky and liable to attack without warning, but these things were something else entirely. There was no love lost between Corded Ware and me, but I hardly wanted to suffer the same fate as he. Besides, I told myself in an inane attempt to stay calm, it would be terrible form for a Prince to deny his people a funeral without even ashes left.

The hall stretched on before us, seemingly into infinity, until through the darkness and the feeble light of my horn I saw the far wall. Here the hall shrank somewhat, to the point that I could see the ceiling and the walls either side. There were no metal tubes occupied by slumbering husks here, but instead giant statues, each depicting an austere and stern-visaged Crystal Pony standing upright on its hindlegs, holding an ornate staff.

“The door!” shouted ‘Daring Do’. It was another one made of shimmering crystal, and my suspicions that it was sealed with magic were confirmed when I barged into it, shoulder-first, and painfully bounced off it.

I didn’t know the spell to unlock it, but panic can do one of two things to a pony: reduce them to a useless, gibbering wreck, or purge the mind of the distraction of conscious thought and allow one to act purely on impulse. Reaching out with my magic, my heart hammering in my chest, I could sense the network of energy maintaining the lock. Had I the time I could find the weak point and dispel it, but time was not a luxury we possessed. I would have to brute force my way through. The spell was powerful but ancient, its cohesion peeling away at the edges. All I had to do was apply enough strength and the arcane lock would be undone.

[Prince Blueblood had the potential to be a powerful unicorn, but has admitted to lacking the motivation and discipline to study for it, as his reports from the School for Gifted Unicorns attest. He was, however, capable of drawing upon large reserves of magic, but had insufficient skill to wield it properly.]

“Blueblood!” I heard Daring Do scream above the din of my own thoughts. I spun around to see her up in the air, hovering just behind the closest of the huge statues, pushing between its shoulders to try and send it toppling over. In the distance, through the gloom, a multitude of bilious green lights glowed, accompanied by the sound of heavy hoofsteps on the crystal floor. They were coming, and they were already close.

She’d never tip the thing over on her own, but lacking wings to fly I could hardly help that way. Yet the upright rear legs of the statue were quite thin, being of a rather stylised design. I summoned enough magical energy to make my horn hurt and directed it as a blast to those legs. The shards emerged into view just as my magic struck the statue’s legs - there were a dozen now, lined up in ranks, their chests glowing with the light of their twisted, mutated souls, and their horns, lit with that foul magic, directed squarely at Yours Truly.

I heard Daring Do cry out with exertion. Where I had struck the crystal statue’s legs had cracked under the force of my magic, but it was enough. The cracks spread across the width of the statue’s limbs, and then shattered, and the entire top three quarters of this ancient monument came toppling down onto the shards, whereupon it shattered with a tremendous crash and broke into a pile of glittering rubble before us twice the height of a pony. A feeling of triumph swelled within me, but was quickly deflated when Daring Do swept down from above, landed, and shouted in my face.

“That won’t hold them for long,” she yelled. “Open the door!”

Biting back the instinct to demand a ‘please’ from her, I dashed back to the door. My horn still ached from the exertion just before, but still I poured as much raw magical power into the arcane lock as I dared to without burning myself out.

“More of them are waking up, sir!” Cannon Fodder shouted, his dull monotone only slightly inflected with something akin to panic.

That was enough to motivate me to push past my limit. White-hot daggers plunged into my brain. Just as my vision clouded at the edges, the world turned slightly grey, and my hooves began to tingle, the spell unravelled. The concentration of magical energy binding the door shut burst, and I felt the backlash as though I’d been punched square on the nose. Somewhat dazed, I hazily saw Daring Do and Cannon Fodder through the stars before my eyes together buck the crystal door wide open, whereupon it struck the adjacent wall with a hefty thud.

“Come on!” She grabbed my foreleg, and, being much stronger than she looked, pulled me through the door. My hooves obeyed the command to run about half a second later, and together the three of us scrambled into the corridor, pausing briefly to slam the door behind us as though that might stop our pursuers, and fled into the dark corridor.

Chapter 5

We galloped through a maze of twisting corridors and doors, empty rooms and ones filled with all manner of strange and arcane devices I had no hope in Tartarus of understanding even if I felt inclined to stop and examine them. I daren’t look over my shoulder, but the sight of those Crystal Pony things, ‘shards’ they were called, massacring the archaeologists was scorched into my mind like the burn marks on the floor that indicated where Corded Ware was reduced to ashes. It was dark, but I could not light my horn for fear of attracting those horrible, murderous creatures, not that the sounds of our panicked flight were any less of a clear indicator. Yet without the light of my horn my eyes adjusted to the darkness somewhat, and the faint glow from the crystal walls all around certainly helped.

Yet we could not keep running forever. For all I knew we could be going around in circles, wearing ourselves out and thus leaving ourselves exhausted for when they would eventually catch up with us, and so, with my limbs starting to feel as though my horseshoes were filled with lead and my lungs were burning with the exertion, we stopped in a small, secluded room. We barricaded the door with a bench, and all sank into a corner to try and take stock of the grim situation that we now found ourselves trapped within. As for me, sitting there with the cold crystal against my flanks and my back, sucking in lungfuls of stale, ancient air to try and still the rapid beating of my heart, there was one confusing, albeit rather less urgent, conundrum that I needed answering immediately.

“Daring Do?” I asked.

Said fictional character was sitting next to me, ears alert and eyes on the door. She looked real enough, and certainly felt very real when she pony-handled me through the door earlier. “Yes?” she answered, looking up at me with expectant eyes.

“Care to explain what in Equus is going on?”

“Professor Corded Ware was a high-ranking officer and researcher in King Sombra’s regime, and posed as a harmless archaeologist to gain access to-”

“Yes, yes, I’d managed to work all of that out myself,” I interrupted, waving my hoof dismissively. “And he’s right. Was right, I should say. I ought to have put it all together myself early, and I very nearly did. No, what I’m getting at now is why are you real?”

“Ah.” She trailed off for a bit; I imagined that this might be a rather tricky conversation for her to have with ponies who saw through her very convincing disguise. “A. K. Yearling is a cover. I am Daring Do.”

I snorted in response; I’d just seen a deluded servant of a recently-resurrected and now-gone tyrant awaken crystalline servants and then be disintegrated by them before my very eyes, but this revelation was still the most absurd thing I’d witnessed in what was proving to be a very eventful day for me. “It’s all real?” I asked, and she nodded in response. “Ahuizotl? The Griffon’s Goblet? Doctor Caballeron?”

“There’s some artistic licence involved,” she said, with the air of a pony admitting some great sin, like eating kittens for sexual pleasure. “I skip over some of the boring parts of archaeology. My readers don’t want to hear about the amount of time I spend in the library or arguing over which dating methods are the best, they want exciting action.”

“I think I’d rather have the boring bits back now.” While when I was much younger I’d dreamt of being in a Daring Do adventure, as with most things a foal imagines about adulthood the reality was far worse; nopony was ever disintegrated by crystalline killing machines in one of her stories, or she omitted the gorier elements from her ‘stories’ along with the tedious minutiae of her work. “If Doctor Caballeron is real, why hasn’t he sued you or ‘A. K. Yearling’ for libel?”

“It’s only libel if it’s false,” she said, with a small smile on her lips. “He’ll risk having all of his crimes exposed in court.”

“I see.” I didn’t, really, and was about to press her further on this before she preempted me.

“Blueblood, we have more important things to worry about right now. I can tell you all about this later.”

“Prince Blueblood, if you don’t mind.” We might be facing certain death, but that was no reason for her to forget her manners, thought I. “And I suppose you’re right on that account. We have to get out of here and warn everypony about those things. If they’ll believe me, that is.”

I stood up and paced around the room in a circle. We had the great misfortune to have found a room without any other doors save for the one we just came in through. There, Cannon Fodder stood guard with his spear, as though that might do anything against the hard crystal bodies of the shards that were no doubt hunting us as we spoke. Despite muskets and bayonets being ubiquitous now, he still stuck with those trusty old weapons out of habit. I had a theory that his status as a Blank had the same effect on technology as it did magic, which was all rather silly as I had seen him use an escalator before to no ill effect.

It was those shards that had wiped out those poor Diamond Dogs, leaving zero trace of their massacre besides one frightened pup who was no doubt racking up quite the fee in bills with whatever equivalent their kind had for therapists specialising in trauma. Either they were on our tails or preparing to awaken more of their slumbering undead to do the same to the unsuspecting soldiers in the camp above us, and neither seemed particularly healthy for me. All that we could do, from where I was standing, was try to get out of here in one piece to warn everypony above and pray that my warning about the capabilities of the Guards Division to now-disintegrated Corded Ware was more than just a desperate bluff. I certainly wasn’t going to try and stop them, even with the Daring Do by my side.

This room appeared to be a storeroom of sorts, and besides the layer of dust that covered everything like a fine dusting of grey snow it seemed to have been left in much the same condition as it had been when the Crystal Empire disappeared. There were a few heavy benches along the walls, a few of which we had repurposed as a flimsy barricade against the door, and some boxes piled up along one wall. These boxes were made of wood, and I surmised that there were some things that the ancient Crystal Ponies found to impractical to make out of their ubiquitous crystal, however, these had rotted somewhat over the centuries, and some had collapsed in on themselves and spilled their equally decayed contents on the floor.

“What were those things?” I asked. “Truly?”

“They are exactly what Corded Ware said.” Daring Do was pacing as she spoke, apparently to work off nerves or the same growing dread at our hopeless situation, or perhaps it was her way of thinking things through. “Sombra’s contingency plan, if his war with the Two Sisters, Celestia and Luna, turned against him, which it did. An army forged from unliving crystal, powered by extracted souls that failed his experiments in immortality, that was supposed to be activated when his curse on the Crystal Empire finally lifted.”

“Only it hasn’t worked out for him.” He hadn’t counted on my aunties personally storming his castle and sending him back into the shadows where he belonged, as the story went.

[I can still remember the look of shock on his face just before Luna and I attacked him in his bedchamber. The war between King Sombra and the newly-formed kingdom of Equestria had dragged on for seven years, and while his forces were engaged in a siege of Canterlot (then a fortress rather than a city) my sister and I assaulted his castle. When it became clear that he was outmatched, he turned to shadow and fled into the icy wastes, and in a fit of spite laid his curse upon the Crystal Empire.]

I still struggled to understand why his devious plan had failed in such a spectacular fashion. It seemed as though the shards they’d summoned had failed to recognise Corded Ware as a suitably high-ranking officer in Sombra’s hierarchy, which to me implied that either he was not as important as he had attempted to imply or that the souls that powered the shards had been so degraded by their thousand year-long incarceration in these unnatural forms that they lashed out at the source of their torment. Both explanations seemed equally plausible to me, not that it mattered in the short term; it was something to ponder later if we ever made it out of here with our lives.

“Did you know?” I asked. “Did you know who he really was? About all of this down here?”

“No, I’d have stopped him,” she answered.

“You said you were looking for inspiration for your next book.”

“Yes, a serious work of archaeological research, not another ‘Daring Do’ adventure story. I knew about the shards, but I thought that whatever magic powered them had disappeared by now. I certainly didn’t think that a respected academic like Professor Corded Ware would turn out to be a Sombra loyalist.”

“I think given your track record with Doctor Caballeron, you might have suspected something.”

“Caballeron is far from a ‘respected academic’ these days,” she said sniffily. “Besides, I can’t go around suspecting everypony I work with of treason.”

“I’d say you’ve found your next adventure regardless.” I could detect no hint of deception in her voice or demeanour, but she was a writer and clearly had experience in lying extensively to maintain her disguise so I couldn’t tell. Again, it was another purely academic question that was best saved for mulling over a nice glass of celebratory whisky in the mess later, should I survive. Still, I felt like an utter fool, more so than usual, as the only reason I didn’t act upon my now-justified paranoia was because I wanted to avoid embarrassing myself in front of her by being strange.

I paced another lap around the room; things certainly looked grim, of course, but the fact that these shards were an unknown quantity, as opposed to the Changelings I’d spent the better part of two years fighting and running away from, made it worse. There was a horrid inscrutability about them; a drone fights out of a fanatical devotion to his Queen and his Hive and in the hope that victory will sate the ravening hunger within him, which, although monstrous, were still understandable motivations to fight. These shards killed with a dispassionate coldness that was far more unsettling, and based on what I’d seen married up with Rex’s story of his tribe’s extermination, put me in mind of a farmer eradicating pests in a barn.

“There is one other thing,” said Daring Do, rising to her hooves.

I stopped in my circuit of the room, and saw on her face the same odd expression that she had when she accompanied me to my quarters a few nights ago. Again, I assumed that she wanted to tell me something rather important, but for whatever reason this mare, who had no issues standing up in front of a group of terribly judgemental soldiers and delivering an excellent reading of a fictionalised version of what she did last month, seemed to struggle somewhat with speaking.

“Well, out with it,” I snapped, pacing about in irritation. “If we linger any longer, those shards won’t grant us the time for you to tell me whatever it is.”

“I’m your half-sister.”

Well, that stopped me right in my tracks. It had been a day of striking revelations, but at least I could say that the business with Corded Ware was very obvious in hindsight. I suppose the one about A. K. Yearling being Daring Do as part of an elaborate double-bluff of sorts made some sort of sense, in a way. This, however, had come completely out of nowhere, and my addled mind could only arrive at one simple way to interpret the fact that I was related to a fictional character.

“Very funny,” I said, and she pulled a queer look in response. “Luna!” I called out. “You’ve had your fun, but it’s time for me to wake up from this daft dream now! The part about the King Sombra loyalists was very convincing, but this is just a step too far. I’ll be sending a letter to Auntie Celestia about your choice of pranks first thing.”

“Stop shouting!” hissed Daring Do. “They’ll hear you.”

“Oh, forgive me for being a little upset at finding out I have a long-lost half-sister who happens to be fictional, but I have had something of a difficult morning, so I think I’ve earned that right.” I stopped in my tirade, realising that she was, of course, right, and sucked in a deep breath of that curiously cool air. When I exhaled I felt as though I’d purged much of that from my system. “Very well. Assuming that this isn’t a very elaborate prank played on me, I’ll humour you. Just how in blazes are we related?”

“We have the same dad,” she said. “My mom was a waitress in a cocktail bar in Canterlot, working to put herself through college. Dad and her had a one night stand forty years ago.”

“And you were the result?”

Daring Do paused, frowning intensely as though she’d just thought of something bitterly sarcastic to say but thought better of it. “Yes, Blueblood.”

It probably ought not to have come as too much of a shock in hindsight, marital vows being considered merely a polite suggestion was as much a tradition in my family as the Hearth's Warming games, but it was startling nonetheless. Maths was never my strongest subject, but I attempted to work out the sums in my head and came to the conclusion that dear Father must have been about seventeen or eighteen years old when that happened, and put Daring Do at almost twenty years my senior. It certainly would have been before the arranged marriage to Mother was even thought of, and so another bastard foal from an aristocratic family was hidden away to silence any awkward discussions about inheritance.

“He never let me call him ‘dad’,” I said. “I would assume that meant you never had the misfortune to meet him.”

She shook her head. “He visited Mom and me often, and always brought toys for me. We’d play and talk. We used to play a game about exploring dungeons and finding treasure. He would never stay for long but I always looked forward to his visits. I think he gave us some money too so we could get by, at least until he disappeared, but I was already working on my doctorate by then and the visits stopped. I remember him as being nice.”

Now that got my dander up, but I like to think that I hid it well, as mortal peril tends to push such trivialities aside for rather more pressing matters. She had said a lot of words and all rather quickly, which to me implied that she had very much wanted to find her younger half-brother for quite a while and talk about everything. Yet still, the feeling stabbed at me; so the bastard foal here was granted the privilege of paternal affection and I, the real, legitimate heir, had only coldness and unreachable expectations thrust upon me instead. That vindictive old stallion was capable of ‘being nice’, as she’d put it, if he so chose to, and that revelation only made me despise him more.

“Did he ever tell you about me?” I asked, trying my damnedest to keep from raising my voice in anger.

“No, but he never told us who he really was either,” she said. “Mom only told me who he really was after he went missing. I think she wanted to make sure that me being a secret princess wouldn’t go to my head.”

“You are not a princess,” I snapped, louder and more forcefully than I’d intended.

“Relax, I’m not interested in claiming your title even if I could,” said Daring Do, rather too flippantly for my liking. That was something of a relief, however, as the thought of explaining all of this mess to envious members of my family was not a comforting one, should I survive, that is.

It was ridiculous to believe, yet the ages matched up exactly now that I had time to work it out properly in my head. It was certainly possible that my dear old father had a youthful dalliance with a stranger and had neglected to take precautions, Faust knows I’ve had my fair share of one-night stands with all manner of mares, but the thought that the miserable old bastard and I shared something in common beyond mere blood was a deeply uncomfortable one. There could be any number of illegitimate half-siblings out there, and I wondered how many were likewise allegedly-fictional characters from story books.

Still, now that I looked at Daring Do with this revelation fresh in mind, I could see some measure of a family resemblance: our cutie marks were similar, being compass roses, though that was rarely a firm indicator as my experience in a number of paternity scares can attest; but there was a certain patrician air about her, despite one half of her blood being from the common stock, that exuded a certain sense of entitlement, and where mine came from blood alone it was clear that hers originated with a supreme sense of personal confidence. She might have had the slim, slender build of a pegasus, and short in stature, but as with me she inherited our father’s sharp, patrician features. I could see some element of him, and frankly it sickened me.

“I’m still not sure I believe you,” I said.

“Blueblood, I’m not after any titles or recognition,” she said, reaching into the chest pocket of her safari jacket and removing a horn ring, which she presented to me. Examining it, I saw the family crest clearly on the signet ring and on the inside was the maker’s mark from the Canterlot armourers. There were only two possible ways she could have gotten her hooves on that—either, as she was trying to prove to me, my father had given it to her as proof of her bloodline; or she had stolen it. Considering that she essentially stole things for a living, though usually the owners were far too dead to complain, I couldn’t exactly dismiss the latter explanation.

“Very well,” I said, “so what are you after?”

Daring Do pulled an odd look, though it was brief. She looked as though I’d deeply insulted her, but she mustered some measure of self control and said, quite firmly, “We’re family. I’m not ‘after’ anything from you, except that.”

I saw my father’s face before my eyes again - disapproving as always, sneering in contempt as I failed to live up to his impossible expectations. I remembered the pain of being beaten, the loneliness of being locked in a room alone for days over some small infraction, and my mother’s damning silence throughout all of this. Daring Do had said that father brought her presents, and he did the same for me. Every material possession I ever wanted was mine, but I know now it was little more than a way for him to make up for his cruelty or justify it to himself. I had always thought that it was merely all that he knew, being the way his father treated him, or that it was all simply in his nature, but to learn that he was capable of at least a pretended normal family relationship between father and child was a veritable kick to the face. It was a long time ago, even then, and I was never one to give the beastly old stallion the satisfaction of occupying my thoughts even after his disappearance, but the revelation brought everything that I had buried out in the stark, bright light of Celestia’s sun. He chose to behave in that manner to me.

It was Cannon Fodder who reminded me of the peril we were all still in. He had ignored this very unexpected family reunion and was instead doing his job by standing by the door on guard while I was busy wrestling with this latest unpleasant revelation. “Sir!” he exclaimed, though keeping his monotone voice at the level of a stage-whisper. “I think they’re coming.”

Fear pushed its way into my mind, forcing out all of the other emotions fighting with one another for attention and driving me to some sort of action. There was nothing like mortal terror to temporarily resolve lingering foalhood problems that I’d thought were long-suppressed. There was no obvious exit from this room, besides the one we just came through, and there was every chance we’d run into those horrible, murderous crystal things hunting for us in the halls beyond. Perhaps we could fight our way out, but I didn’t know how well swords and my limited magic would fare against their solid crystal forms. It appeared that we had no choice but to risk it, that is, until I noticed something that I ought to have picked up on earlier.

“It’s cold in here,” I said.

“What?” blurted out Daring Do.

“There’s a draft,” I explained. “Can’t you feel it? There must be air circulating around in here through a duct or we’d have all suffocated by now. Corded Ware said that the shards were maintaining this place in anticipation of Sombra’s glorious return.”

Daring Do, my apparent elder half-sibling, seemed patronisingly impressed that I was not the total idiot that I often appeared to be, and paced around the room to help me find its source. The chances of it being big enough to fit even the slim pegasus here, let alone Cannon Fodder or me, was remote, but one must hold onto hope, no matter how slim. She found the source of the draft, probably using some manner of pegasus sensitivity to shifting air currents or some such, in the corner of the room, obscured by a large wooden desk that fell apart with a tremendous clatter and a shower of rotten splinters when I shoved it out of the way. The air duct was a rectangular hole in the wall, close to the bottom, and covered with a metal grate that my magic ripped from the wall with relative ease and causing only a minor flare-up of the persistent headache occupying my skull. It seemed wide enough to admit a stallion of a sufficiently healthy frame such as myself, though it would be a tight and unpleasant squeeze to get through.

“Sir!” shouted Cannon Fodder. He’d stepped back from the barricaded door, spear in hoof and ready to thrust as though that might somehow break their hardened crystal bodies. The door shuddered on its hinges as something quite heavy had hurled itself against it, but the sturdy bench we’d dragged across it held firm.

[Why the Shards did not simply disintegrate the door as they did the 'archaeologists' seems odd, considering they had ample power to do so, but it is likely they had standing orders to avoid causing permanent damage to the structure they were assigned to protect if possible.]

That was more than enough to spur me into action. ‘Ladies first’ didn’t apply when murderous killing machines were at the door, so I darted past Daring Do before she had a chance to act and threw myself into the vent. It did hurt when my shoulders struck the sharp edges, and more so as I squeezed through, but the shaft beyond the grate flared out a little, and once I’d negotiated my flanks through the opening without any assistance from Daring Do I found I could crawl through, albeit with significant discomfort and at a slow pace.

I lit my horn, banishing only a small iota of the gloom all around us. The air duct stretched onwards into darkness. It was much too narrow for me to turn my head comfortably, but I could tell from the noises behind me that both Daring Do and Cannon Fodder had followed me inside, with one or the other receiving an unenviable view ahead. I could feel the cold metal surrounding my body like a coffin, and as I crawled forth on my belly like a snake it occurred to me that the Crystal Ponies must have brought metal from the north to build these. It was strange that my mind wandered to such things, but I suppose that it was better than fretting about what was creeping up behind us. However uncomfortable and tight this narrow metal tube was, I could at least be grateful that it was clean after all of these many, many years, and at that thought my forehooves began to itch.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Somepony or some thing had to keep these air ducts in working order, and, not being an expert in such things, I doubted that the machinery here would keep going on its own for so long even if it was based on ancient, long-lost Crystal Empire magic, which would only entail the shards sending something to crawl inside the ducts just as we were.

I felt a poke on my right hindleg, and the jump reflex caused me to bash my skull against the ceiling of the tunnel. “Why have you stopped?” Daring Do hissed.

Something moved in the darkness beyond, a tiny flicker of something reflected by the dim light of my horn. Whatever it was advanced quickly upon us, and I saw that there was not merely one single thing bearing down but a multitude of crawling things. Their crystal carapaces glittered in the pale glow, being made of the same stuff that those shards were. They resembled scarabs, but each was the size of a large rat, and they skittered towards us on spindly legs. Each lacked eyes or any other facial features besides a pair of razor-sharp mandibles that looked as they would have no problems ripping through flesh.

I didn’t answer Daring Do, but I think my wordless yelp of raw terror conveyed the turn of events quite well. We were trapped, and in a blind panic I fired a single blast of magic. The ensuing headache felt as though I’d been punched square in the horn. The light briefly illuminated the air duct in its entirety, and revealed that there were far more of them streaming straight towards us. The blast struck the first rank, whereupon those creatures shattered into glittering pieces that were rapidly crawled over by the ensuing wave.

“What’s going on up there?” shouted Daring Do. I could feel her moving about behind me to try and peer around my flanks.

In my state of panic, the only words I could muster were: “Creepy-crawlies!”, which were insufficient to describe the danger we were in. I tried to scramble back, but two ponies were directly behind me, not that I would have been able to crawl backwards fast enough to escape the oncoming horde without them in the way. However, as my flailing hooves struck the metal I heard hollow ringing, not the dull thuds that would indicate we were encased in stone. Without thinking to consider that there might be a frightfully long drop down, I aimed my horn directly down between my hooves and directed as much magical energy into the metal as I possibly could.

I must have fainted with the exertion, because the next thing I knew I was on the floor in a large room and in considerable pain. My head pounded with the most appalling headache I’d felt since waking up from a three-day bar crawl in Canterlot, and my vision swam and lurched as though I was on a ship in a turbulent storm. I heard the sounds of shouting dimly, and when I tried to stand up foul-tasting bile rose up the back of my throat. Blinking away the stars, I saw Daring Do, Cannon Fodder, and one of the archaeologists fighting back against the swarm. Looking up, there was the jagged hole in the ceiling that we must have fallen through, and those scarabs poured through it and fell upon us.

Attempting to summon more magic to blast the little bastards only made that headache even worse, and my horn sputtered and sparked uselessly, leaving me no recourse but to either join in the fight or run away. Daring Do fought viciously, darting out of the way of lunging of snapping jaws only to hurl herself back in to deliver a knock-out punch that shattered their crystal bodies. It would appear that ‘artistic licence’ did not apply to her fighting capabilities. Cannon Fodder, missing his armour as he must have disrobed to squeeze into the air duct, had to resort to frantically stomping on the scarabs, and despite them skittering all around him he appeared to have suffered no injuries. As for the surviving Crystal Pony, he’d grabbed a broken chair and swung it clumsily at the chittering creatures.

Running away was not an option with so many witnesses, so despite my brain feeling as though it was two sizes too big for my skull and with every muscle aching I charged into the fight. Even attempting to draw my sword with magic was too much for me, so I resorted to hooves. Their bodies were hard but brittle, and a forceful stomp shattered them into gleaming shards. The savage things gnashed and bit at me, one sank its mandibles into my foreleg and blood guttered from the stinging wound when Cannon Fodder tore the scarab free from me and dashed it against the wall. Another leapt up from the ground, but I spun on my hooves and bucked it into pieces. My aching forehooves slipped, the pain from the gash on my leg blinding out all other sensations, and I fell on my face once more.

I tried to stand once more, but I felt those creatures swarm over me, sensing that I was vulnerable. Cannon Fodder shouted something, but I couldn’t make it out over the fog of exhaustion that now clouded my mind. In contrast to the silent shards, these scarab-creatures chittered and buzzed like the oversized insects they resembled, or indeed Changeling drones. I felt their legs, pointed and sharp, digging into me as they swarmed my fallen body. On instinct I rolled as though my clothes were ablaze, and swung my hooves wildly in an effort to free myself of these things before they could bite somewhere vital.

“Get them off me!” I screamed.

One scarab crawled its way up my chest, clinging onto me by sinking its jagged limbs into my tunic, and I looked up into its blank, empty face and those mandibles spread wide to plunge into my eyes. I grabbed the horrible little thing with my forehooves and wrenched it from my face, feeling the scratches against my cheeks and scalp only dimly through the panic, and threw it away blindly against a wall.

I managed to stand again, though I nearly slipped again when I put weight on my wounded leg. The horde had thinned. Cannon Fodder, still miraculously unharmed by the creatures, was methodical in dispatching the remainder, while Daring Do tended to the surviving archaeologist’s wounds.

Upon seeing this strangely un-vaporised Crystal Pony my relief at surviving quickly turned into anger. It was his fault that all of this was happening, and with Corded Ware dead I was going to make damned sure that this lone survivor knew it. So I hobbled on over with all the grace of Yours Truly attempting to navigate to the bathroom seven drinks in on a night out on the town, wincing with each stab of pain that a step with my wounded foreleg.

“What in Tartarus was that?!” I shouted, my throat hoarse.

The Crystal Pony looked up at me with the most pathetic, apologetic expression imaginable. He was amongst the youngest of them, I remembered, barely out of adolescence perhaps, with a pale blue, shimmering coat and navy blue mane and tail. His cutie mark was of a brush that at first I thought was one used for shaving, but I eventually identified as one others of his profession used for brushing away dust from ancient artefacts.

“Scarabs,” he said, his voice trembling with adrenaline and fear. “Haygyptians used them to maintain their tombs. We repurposed them to maintain our research institutions.”

“Nasty little blighters, aren’t they?” I remarked. From what I’d seen, Sombra and his underlings had a penchant for taking things that were perfectly harmless and making them perfectly harmful - they could have weaponised butterflies for all I knew. The entire floor here was littered in their smashed remains, broken shards of crystal that, taken all together, might be worth something on the gem market perhaps. “How in Equus did you survive?”

“Same as you. I ran.”

“I made a tactical retreat,” I insisted. “However, the end result is much the same. I’ll be blunt, I’m not happy at this turn of events, and by and large it’s all your fault, seeing as how you’re the only Crystal Pony left alive. I am going to ask some questions and you are going to give me plain, simple answers, and then you’re going to help us get out of here.”

“You’re bleeding.” The stallion stared at my leg, and I followed his gaze down to see where blood flowed freely from two gashes there, and blood pooled at my hooves. I’m no stranger to seeing blood, as a number of the more archaic family rituals used to involve splashing about in the stuff until I put a stop to those ghastly and messy practices, but seeing it pumping out of me was enough to make me feel quite faint.

Daring Do was at my side in an instant, and, starting to feel a little weak on my limbs, guided me to sit down. She produced a long, rolled-up strip of cloth from her satchel and wrapped it around the wound, where the off-white cloth was almost immediately stained bright crimson, and guided my hoof up in the air to try to stem the bleeding.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said, her tone curiously soft, and I realised that she was slipping into the role of a big sister looking after a younger sibling. Well, that swiftly ruined my attempt to threaten and intimidate this Crystal Pony into confessing everything, but there was also another way around this.

As the pain in my leg dulled to a low throb, I finally calmed down enough to look at my surroundings. We were in a room with quite a high ceiling, and the long drop down from the jagged hole in the ceiling explained why I was in considerable pain and covered in bruises. This room looked to have been an office of sorts, perhaps the kind of administrative centre where the likes of the Crystal Pony sitting before me might have worked more than a thousand years ago. The wooden tables and chairs had long since rotted away into useless piles of broken planks, and the bookcases filled with ancient books looked as though they might collapse into piles of dust if I so much as looked at them.

“I take it things haven’t exactly gone to plan for you,” I said, while Daring Do continued to fuss about my wound. “Your King’s little contingency plan has not proved to be as easily controllable as that Corded Ware chap had first thought. Now they’re hunting you down, and if you want to live long enough for me to consider arranging a pardon for the treason you’ve just committed then we’re going to have to work together on getting out of here. Do you understand?”

The stallion mulled this very basic conundrum over for a bit longer than I thought was strictly necessary, until he finally arrived at the only course of action available to him. “Yes,” he said. “Look, I didn’t want to go ahead with this crazy plan, but he made me do it!”

“Don’t give me that,” I snapped. “You had every opportunity to tell me the truth before it came to this, and now those shards are loose in a vital military facility in the middle of a war. You’re lucky that I need you alive to get out of here.”

Daring Do, apparently finished tending to my wound, sneered and said, “This isn’t helping and you’re wasting time.” She then turned to this hapless stallion, sat next to him, and rather patiently started asking him the sorts of questions I ought to have been asking him in a voice that was just too low for my hearing, still rather damaged from exposure to nearby artillery fire and Princess Luna’s voice, to pick up clearly.

Well, that was me told off, and I certainly felt admonished by it. Ordinarily, I’d have stood my ground and told Daring Do to let me, the allegedly professional commissar, manage this. However, this time I was truly out of my depth, and far more so than usual. If I was any more out of it I’d be on an entirely separate continent to my depth. It was certainly not, as one might assume, simply because she was my older sister that I felt compelled to acquiesce to her in this regard, but I supposed given what I’d just been through I was hardly in a fit state of mind to interrogate a survivor who had just seen his friends and colleagues massacred and likely felt about as miserable about this situation as I did.

Somewhat embarrassed, I trotted away to see what Cannon Fodder was up to. My aide was pottering about the room, kicking away at the shattered remains of the scarabs. I couldn’t quite understand how he’d escaped that fight with not even a minor scratch on him, even though he had shed his armour and wore nothing but the set of protective underwear that stops the plates of mithril from chafing uncomfortably against one’s skin. Perhaps he was merely lucky, or the scarabs had a sense of smell. However, this, coupled with the fact that he stood directly in front of the shard that killed Corded Ware before my eyes and it ignored him entirely, reminded me of how his presence had dimmed the lights in those glowing orbs earlier, and the start of a theory began to form in my mind.

[The newer patterns of Equestrian armour included a set of linen underclothes worn under the plate armour for added comfort. When away from the front, soldiers would just wear the underclothes in camp unless on a specific duty. Cannon Fodder likely expected trouble and assumed Prince Blueblood was aware as always or continued to wear his armour out of habit.]

“Cannon Fodder,” I said, “did those things attack you at all?”

My aide looked around at the shattered remains at his hooves, then over his sweat-stained clothes and grimy coat. “No, sir.”

“Even when you were destroying them?” My view of the fight was limited, as it usually was in such scraps, to what was necessary to merely keep myself alive, but from what little that I could see the scarabs seemed to have completely ignored him even as he smashed their crystalline bodies to pieces. Daring Do appeared to have suffered only minor, superficial cuts, compared to the rather nasty bleeder I’d taken,

He shook his head, dislodging a shower of dandruff from his closely-cropped scalp. “No, sir,” he repeated.

Now, I knew enough about his condition to remember that magic within a certain radius of Cannon Fodder’s horn simply did not work, aside from certain spells that required the barest amount of magic such as basic telekinesis and the sort of innate magic that allows pegasi to fly and earth ponies to grow crops, and that radius was approximately five feet or so, give or take a few inches. I wondered, perhaps, if that condition rendered him invisible to those creatures, and if by sticking close enough to him we all might be likewise shielded from their sight. That optimistic and encouraging thought lasted until I remembered that the ponies restraining him were likewise turned to dust.

“Alright, he’ll help us,” said Daring Do, interrupting my thoughts. She trotted on over, leaving the stallion sipping water from a canteen in the corner. “His name’s Dust Pan, and he was Corded Ware’s slave, doing admin jobs for him. Corded Ware was Sombra’s expert on Haygyptian studies and developed the shards based on ancient experiments in mummification.”

“But why did they vaporise him?” I asked. Not out of any concern for him, of course, that was the only reason why I was still alive.

“The soul is not supposed to survive outside the body or wherever it’s meant to go after death.” She suppressed a shudder. “They’re filled with so much hate for what’s been done to them. One thousand years of isolation would do that to anypony. That’s what he thinks happened, anyway.”

“Just ask my Auntie Luna,” I said dryly. “Does he know anything that can help us now?”

Daring Do nodded. “Yes. There is a source of magical energy deep within the complex that powers everything here, and if we destroy that then that should cause a chain reaction big enough to demolish much of the tomb here, hopefully without damaging the camp above.”

“And burying us alive in the process.”

“I was coming to that. These complexes were connected by a network of portals. They’re on a backup source of power for emergencies, so when we blow the main source it should still be active.”

“I don’t like betting my life on ‘should’,” I remarked with a sigh. The portal, too, could spit us out somewhere else filled with these things, or perhaps just somewhere far from civilisation like Appleloosa, but I knew that she was already aware of that and didn’t need me to point out the obvious. Anywhere else was an improvement on here. “And I’d trust that fellow as much as I would a Changeling, but we don’t have much of a choice here. Fine, let’s just get this misery over with, shall we?”

Chapter 6

Daring Do seemed to trust our new companion a little too readily for a pony who had been betrayed no less than four times over the course of her adventures as described in her books, but perhaps she had developed a system for accurately testing the loyalty of ponies who would be side characters in her next story. Dust Pan might have once been in league with the now-vapourised Corded Ware, but, assuming that his words were true, it was not by choice. I might have complained that he was not to be trusted, but given that the shards hunting us didn’t differentiate between their former masters and anypony else unfortunate enough to be in their way, his fate was inexorably entwined with mine. Still, that certainly did not mean that I was going to take my eye off him for a moment: the rational choice was for all of us was to all work together, but at the same time it would have been perfectly rational for him to come to me and raise his concerns that his boss was planning to unleash a horde of mindless killing machines upon the world, so I could not entirely put it past him to do something very stupid in the name of his long-gone king.

We trudged out of the room, leaving behind those scarab things as smashed and broken shards of crystal, and walked along another uninvitingly dark corridor. I had pocketed some of their remains, not as souvenirs but as evidence in case I’d managed to get out of there and, when questioned about where Corded Ware and the others were, nopony believed a tale that I myself was struggling to believe despite living through it. The sharp pain in my foreleg had dulled to an aching throb, which flared with each step, and a bright red spot had formed on the makeshift bandage Daring Do had tied around the wound and was spreading.

After stumbling about a bit in the almost pitch-blackness, Dust Pan pointed out that I might as well light my horn. “They can see us in the dark anyway,” he said.

“And how do they do that?” I asked.

“They don’t have eyes to ‘see’ in the same way we do,” Dust Pan explained. “They can detect the magic that exists in all living things.”

That Cannon Fodder had been consistently ignored by both the shards and their little scarab servants continued to nag at me, and I had developed a little theory that, if right, could give us a slightly better chance of getting out of this alive. Dust Pan had now all but confirmed it.

“Not through walls, I hope.”

“We did not make them with that feature,” he said, with a tone of voice that uncomfortably implied to me that he was storing that idea for later.

Carrying on a bit more in silence, the tense hush that was broken only by the sound of our hoofsteps and my own ragged breathing was becoming intolerable. Dust Pan seemed to know where he was going, and the thought that he was taking us directly back to the shards had occurred to me in a rather loud and persistent manner too, but the quiet assurance that he was unlikely to be that suicidal did much to help keep my paranoia in check. I was still slowly coming to terms with the news that not only did I have a long-lost half-sister but she was also a pony I believed to be little more than a beloved fictional character, which was starting to make me question my own existence as a flesh-and-blood pony living in the real world and I wasn’t quite ready to deal with that particular existential crisis just yet. Crystal killing machines and ancient plots were things that I could rationalise and understand, but Daring Do being real, related to me, and had nothing but fond memories of my utter bastard of a father was something that my mind still struggled to wrap itself around.

“So,” I said, to fill the silence. “What was it like? The old Crystal Empire under Sombra, I mean.”

Daring Do shot me a look over her shoulder, but otherwise said nothing, instead keeping her attention on the corridor ahead. However, Dust Pan didn’t seem particularly offended by my rather insensitive question. Few ponies had seemed to show much interest in how ponies lived under Sombra’s tyranny, being rather more interested in the bright future that awaited the Crystal Empire as a vassal state of the kingdom it tried and failed to conquer over a thousand years ago.

“Sombra was the dictionary definition of the word ‘tyrant’,” he said rather quietly. “He ruled through fear, not just in the sense of the threats of or use of force, but your real, innermost fears. Torture was a form of art back then, and the Inquisitors could do it without leaving a mark on your body. He demanded total obedience and conformity -- we weren’t individuals, but I suppose you could say we were treated like mere parts of a whole, to be used as needed and cast off when worn out, like cogs in a clockwork machine. If you couldn’t, then that’s what the masks were for, the ones like the one Corded Ware tried to force on you. They would bend your mind to his will, make you as subservient as those shards, while the real you is trapped inside your body. Every moment of my life was watched, observed, and scrutinised for the merest sign of treachery.”

“He can’t have watched all of you all at the same time,” I said. “Or whatever secret police he had.”

“They didn’t need to. Everypony else would do it for him. If everypony was afraid of being arrested on the mere suspicion of committing treason then they were more than eager to inform on their neighbours, if only to keep the suspicion off our own backs.”

“How ghastly,” was all I could manage to say to that. It reminded me of what Odonata had said of how Queen Chrysalis ran things in the Hives, though she was able to better cement her power with a poisonous ideology that had, admittedly, worked quite well for her up until she decided that picking on the isolated pony tribes in the Badlands was insufficient and go after the biggest and strongest one in the world. One might accuse Sombra of making that same mistake, but from what little I can recall of reading about ancient history Equestria back then was more of a loose collection of squabbling unicorn kingdoms, earth pony fiefs, and pegasi city-states held tentatively together by oaths of fealty to the Princesses than the unified kingdom it is today. Chrysalis’ ideology at least offered a carrot in the form of the vain hope that the Changelings’ hunger might finally be sated in addition to the stick, whereas Sombra’s ideology seemed to be entirely made of sticks. One struggled to think of what Sombra might have offered his subjects in exchange for their servitude. That Chrysalis also controlled the supply of love for her starving subjects would also explain the longevity of her vile regime compared to Sombra’s.

“Why do you ask?” he said.

“Simple curiosity,” I answered with a shrug. “Ancient history is something of a little hobby of mine, as my family is positively steeped in it. I think an ancestor of mine was slain in battle against King Sombra himself. Until recently, all we had were scraps of parchment and Princess Celestia’s memories. It’s one thing to read about all of this in books, but quite another to hear it from a pony who lived through it all.”

[Pale Blood, the first Duchess of Canterlot and sister to Blueblood’s ancestors Princess Hotblood and Prince Coldblood, was killed in the Siege of Canterlot leading a sortie from the fortress to keep Sombra’s forces distracted from our assassination attempt on King Sombra. Blueblood appears to have misremembered the specific details of that battle.]

“It’s not ‘ancient history’ or a ‘hobby’ for me.” With that he trotted on ahead to walk next to Daring Do, who was more content to carry on the walk in respectful silence. Well, that seemed to have offended him, despite having been reasonably content to illuminate me on the finer details of life under Sombra’s rule. I suppose it must have been rather difficult for the Crystal Ponies to have awoken in a world that has changed beyond recognition, having missed the last thousand or so years of more ‘recent’ history, and everypony treating them as interesting antiques.

This meant that I was left alone with my thoughts again, which were not particularly friendly company even when I have the rare good day. Cannon Fodder was not one for idle small talk, and despite my best efforts to inquire about his thoughts on this latest mess he could only remark that it was ‘just another fight like any other, sir’, or some variation thereof.

“This is a long corridor,” I said, once the feeling that the quiet was getting to me popped up again. “Why did they build everything so far away? It’s like a bally maze down here.”

Daring Do was the one to answer my question: “Academic consensus is that it’s to confuse and exhaust invaders or saboteurs. It’s also why Sombra had a fondness for stairs.”

“Well, it’s working,” I said. Even my special talent struggled to keep track of where we were in these winding, labyrinthine corridors. I hoped that it meant that we were drawing closer to where we needed to be.

Dust Pan chuckled grimly. “Paranoia was the order of the day back then,” he said, shaking his head. “Spies were everywhere, even in these remote research installations. It just meant that I was always late for duties, which would mean extra beatings.”

At last, the corridor opened up into a sort of antechamber, curiously devoid of any furniture or ornamentation save for a large, heavy door topped with a dark crystal in the lintel. Though the room was rather small, the light of my horn seemed unable to banish much of the darkness regardless of how much magic I’d poured into it. A heavy, malignant feeling settled over us; our hoofsteps seemed louder and heavier, our breathing more laboured, and the throbbing of my quickening pulse was deeper within my ears. The door itself was of a simple wooden construction and seemed like any other door I’d seen throughout my hitherto short life, but for some perfectly irrational reason the very sight of it filled me with an unnamed dread. It was not the fear of what new horrors might lie behind it, dreamt up by the sick mind of Sombra and his disturbed set of underlings, but of the door itself. The whole thing is impossible to describe without coming across as a bit mad and silly, but as I stood there in the shadow of this simple plane of wood reinforced with iron and set in a stone frame I felt the raw malice imbued within radiate like the warmth from a fire. It stood there, silent, unmoving, and implacable, but whatever presence within, real or imagined, peered down at me, through the layers of clothes and skin and organs to what truly lay within and hated it. Or, at least, that was what was going through my mind at the time.

“Here we are,” said Dust Pan, suppressing a shudder. “It’s through here.” I felt a little relieved that it wasn’t just me; only Cannon Fodder seemed unperturbed by this peculiar door, and even Daring Do seemed unable to even look at the damned thing.

Well, I was not about to be intimidated by a bloody door. “About time,” I said, striding towards it in defiance of the peculiar fear I felt.

“Wait, stop!”

It was too late. My hoof connected with its rough surface, and it felt like touching a dead fish, all cold and slimy. The numbing sensation of cold crept up my hoof to my leg, but, ignoring it, I pushed the door open. White, blinding light poured from beyond, overwhelming me, and faded to reveal…

Canterlot. Specifically, the throne room of the Two Sisters. Vast, airy, and ornate, it was a monument to the power and authority of the alicorn princesses and their enlightened rule. The walk to the twin thrones of the Sun and Moon, both situated on the high dais up which one must ascend a flight of stairs to reach, was a long one that each visitor must take, past grand stained glass windows that illustrated key moments in our kingdom’s long and glorious history. Yet, despite its grandeur, the throne room does not intimidate; it is an open, welcoming place where Celestia and Luna can meet with their subjects, hear their worries and concerns, and do what they could to assuage them.

I walked that same path along the polished marble floor, hoofsteps ringing out like the tolling of a great bell. The throne room was strangely empty for this time of day, where usually it was filled with courtiers, nobles, cabinet ministers, and civil servants engaged in the hushed conversations that kept the complex mechanism of the Equestrian state running. It was not unknown for there to be some quiet moments here, after all, the office of the Prime Minister and Parliament had taken over much of the minutiae of the day-to-day running of the kingdom and had thus relegated the royal court to something of more of a forum for discussion and debate than actual policy making. That said, on a ceremonial, traditional, and spiritual level, this great hall remained the very heart of our kingdom. But, wait, wasn’t I…

***

“Hey, Blueblood!” shouted Daring Do. “Hello? Anyone in there?”

***

The intrusive voice faded. Celestia was there halfway down the hall, staring up at an enormous stained glass window. I was certain that she was not there before, but there she stood, impassively gazing at the ornate design commemorating some ancient victory over a long-forgotten enemy of Equestria. She remained alone in the hall, at least as far as I could see, and so I trotted on over to her.

Something felt wrong. I was supposed to be elsewhere, somewhere dark and beneath the earth…

***

“What’s wrong with him?”

***

No, I was back home at last and with Auntie Celestia, and I wasn’t going to leave the city ever again. I trotted up to her side, a rather peppy spring to my step. “Hello, Auntie!” I said.

“Oh, you’re back,” she said, not even bothering to look at me. Instead, she stared at the stained glass window, but when I tried to follow her gaze its form and colours shifted and swirled, unable to remain solid enough for me to even begin to understand what event from our long and proud history as a nation it depicted.

“Well, yes,” I said. The ‘wrong’ feeling intensified, a hollowing in my gut and a crawling on my skin, as though I’d committed some terrible sin but didn’t know what. Wait, how did I even get here? “I thought I was-”

“You failed again, Blueblood.” She turned to face me, her expression twisted into an expression of utter contempt. That look and her words felt like a stab to the heart, and I recoiled as though I truly had been. Immediately, I felt like a foal again.

“But, I can’t have!” I pleaded. “I don’t even know what I’ve done.”

“It’s what you haven’t done.” Celestia sneered down at me. She seemed to use her full, unnatural height to its fullest intimidatory effect, and all I could do was cower beneath her like a scolded puppy. “Once again your failure to act has led to disaster, and worse than the last time. An entire camp, a whole division, thousands of ponies dead because you did not stop Corded Ware before he could act. You knew he was planning something nefarious, and still you did nothing.”

“No, that can’t be right. I was just there…”

***

“Snap out of it!”

***

“I had no proof!” I spluttered out desperately. “Look, I-I can’t just accuse ponies without any proof.”

“Don’t give me those excuses. You took no action to investigate Corded Ware and you didn’t even tell anypony who might have helped you. It’s just like Second Fiddle all over again, and Scarlet Letter, and Crimson Arrow.”

I shook my head. “No, no, I stopped them, remember?”

“After they acted. Your unwillingness to lift a hoof to do your job killed those ponies, just like Gliding Moth. You knew that their incompetence would lead to avoidable deaths, and again, you did nothing to stop them. You alone could have prevented those deaths, but you were too much of a coward!” Her voice had grown angry and hate-filled in a way that I had never seen from the Princess before. “I questioned my sister’s decision to make you her commissar because I didn’t think you were ready, but she convinced me that the responsibility of that office might make you finally grow up. I see that we were both naive. You remain a selfish, spoilt little foal incapable of taking responsibility for all of the power and privilege that you have had the great fortune to be been born into”

Shaking my hooves, all I could do was stammer uselessly. I couldn’t even form coherent words. She was right; all of it was my own fault for doing nothing, all because I merely assumed that things would invariably work out for the better in the end somehow on their own.

Celestia closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh. “I bear some of the blame,” she said, somewhat absently. “When you were a foal you always had ponies to solve your problems for you, me especially. Your father tried to teach you how to be a good prince, as devoted to public service as he was, but, well, look at what he had to work with.”

“But I did my best,” was all I could think to say.

“I know,” said Celestia, nodding gently. “But it still wasn’t good enough. I see that there is only one thing that will make you learn, or at least keep you where you can no longer do harm: I now divest you of all titles royal and noble, all rank, land, and privileges thereof, and from this moment on you are a common subject of Equestria. A ‘peasant’, as you would have put it.”

With that, Celestia turned away from me and walked with her usual unearthly grace and elegance up towards her throne. The light seemed to recede from me, as though a cloud had moved before the sun shining through the stained glass windows. Stunned, horrified, my legs shivered and finally gave way until I was forced to sit on my haunches, shaking with what had just happened. I had lost everything that had given my life meaning, for without those ancient titles I was little nothing more than a useless drunk with nothing to contribute to society. It had been a long-held suspicion shared unknowingly between myself and a number of gossipy tabloid newspapers that had I the misfortune to be born a common pony I’d have died from some self-inflicted misfortune already, and it seemed that I was about to put that theory to the test. I would assume that she also included my various homes in her list of things she had just confiscated from me, so freezing to death on the streets of Canterlot seemed a likely outcome.

“What…”

She stopped and waited.

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“I don’t care,” she said, peering over my shoulder as though I was dirt she’d accidentally stepped on along the way. “Do what you want. I hear Barnyard Bargains is recruiting shelf-stackers.”

***

‘Canterlot’ melted away before my eyes, and I was back in that dingy little dungeon under Fort Nowhere. I felt the reassuring solidity of rough stone under my flanks, not the cold and smooth marble of the throne room. Rather shaken, as one can imagine, I gasped for air as though I’d run a race, and when I touched my face I found that it was wet with tears.

“What?” I said, and I was surprised to find that my voice quivered and my throat was raspy. “What was that?”

I looked around to see Cannon Fodder, Daring Do, and Dust Pan all gathered around me, all bearing looks of concern on their faces. Well, Dust Pan’s looked a little too put-on to me, but being in a rather fragile state of mind, I didn’t think to comment on it.

“You just opened the door,” said Daring Do, clearly rather shaken by watching whatever it was that just happened to me, “then you sat down and just started sobbing uncontrollably. We tried to snap you out of it, but it was like you couldn’t hear us.”

“It’s a Metus Door,” said Dust Pan, drawing away from me to inspect it with great interest. He traced his hoof over the aged wood of the lintel, apparently unaffected by whatever magic had ensnared me just now. “It traps the mind of anypony who opens it without the right key in a nightmare of their own making. They guarded the most top secret chambers in the Crystal Empire.”

“Who the bloody hell makes a door like that?” I blurted out.

“King Sombra, that’s who,” said Dust Pan. His tone was flippant and it annoyed me, but I quickly realised the implication that he was the one who had to live in a world where such horrors were merely a fact of daily life. “I wonder, what nightmare did it make for you?”

“That’s none of your damned business,” I snapped, drying my face and eyes with a hoofkerchief that I ought to have replaced a while ago. I was hardly about to admit out loud to them that my greatest fear was Celestia finding out what an utter waste of flesh I have been all of these years, though I felt to some extent that the metaphysical dressing-down I’d received was not entirely without merit. Throughout my life I always had ponies who would fix problems for me, whether they were servants whose entire jobs were to make my life as easy as possible or even Princess Celestia pulling a few strings here and there, and any real setbacks that could not have been smoothed over by those ponies were still those where I could be shielded from the consequences. It was not unreasonable to expect that I did not act in those circumstances because I’d been too used to such obstacles being removed for me, and thus carried on under the assumption that everything would work out eventually if I just left everything alone for other ponies to fix for me. After all, I had been too slow in stopping those ponies, and had I acted early then a whole heap of trouble could have been avoided for everypony involved and certain ponies would now be alive.

It was a queer thing, for I knew it now to be a cheap parlour trick to unnerve ponies stupid enough to go poking around in places that King Sombra would have preferred to remain private, but the words put in Auntie Celestia’s mouth stuck with me. All of it would have had to have come from somewhere within the dark recesses of my murky psyche, and amidst all of the various neuroses and anxieties that occupy the soup of my brain it sifted through the petty things like forgetting my lines at a school play or my mild phobia of cellophane it had zeroed in on the very thing that was bound to cause me to finally snap. ‘Your father tried to teach you how to be a good prince, as devoted to public service as he was, but, well, look at what he had to work with’ the apparition had said, and well, one could never accuse my father of slacking in trying to mould me into something, but whether or not it was a ‘good prince’ depended upon one’s definition of the term and whether or not it was worth the misery I had gone through.

“Looks like the magic’s worn off now,” said Dust Pan, and I cast a glance at Cannon Fodder who had situated himself between the door and me.

“How long was I out?” I asked.

“Not long,” said Cannon Fodder. “Less than a minute, sir.”

“It felt much longer than less than a minute.”

I felt Daring Do’s hoof touch me on the shoulder, stroking rather gently in a comforting manner that reminded me of when Celestia used to look after me as a foal. Though I knew that it was not truly her in that illusion crafted by that hideous door, I could not help but feel some irrational feeling of disgust at the thought of her, which only made me feel more ashamed.

“What’s a ‘shelf-stacker’?” I asked.

Daring Do stopped stroking my shoulder and frowned at me. “They’re supermarket employees who stack shelves,” she said. “Is that your greatest fear?”

It came across as silly when expressed like that, which rather helped me focus my mind better.

“Dammit all,” I snarled, pushing Daring Do’s hoof away and dragging myself up to my hooves to stand. “I’m fine. We still have work to do, and those crystal bastards aren’t going to stop just because I’m throwing a wobbly.”

Dust Pan smiled and waved in the direction of this open door. “After you,” he said.

“No, you first.”

He hesitated, apparently trying to work out if I was joking or not. The expression on my face must have conveyed that I was most certainly not as he swiftly looked away, muttered an apology, and stumbled through the doorway. When I saw that nothing happened to him and that the magic of the door had indeed been dispelled, I tentatively crept through the door and was relieved to make it through to the other side without suffering any further distressing hallucinations.

The room beyond was a large office, and one clearly designed to intimidate visitors. The ceiling was far higher than was truly necessary and the walk to the desk at the far end was an uncomfortably long one. I imagined Corded Ware, or whoever else might have run things here, a thousand years ago, glaring with practised menace as said visitor spent far too long crossing the intricately-woven rug depicting angular, fractal designs reminiscent of crystals, now faded into a muddy grey, to reach him. The desk itself was a large, imposing thing about the size of a billiards table and carved or grown out of solid white crystal, upon which were a collection of neatly piled sheets of parchment and books all arranged with the sort of precision that only a fastidious sort of pony with very little actual work to do can muster (I always made sure that my desk and my office looked as messy as possible, to give one the impression that I was much too busy with more important work to even begin to tidy up). At the far wall just behind the desk and chair was a large, full-length portrait of King Sombra himself, looking equal parts regal and terrifying; he appeared to regard the artist painting his portrait and, by extension, the viewer as one would an irritating beggar. However, all along the walls, much like in the vast entrance hall earlier, were crystal tubes lined up in rows, and each occupied by a faceless, motionless shard.

“Relax, they’re inert,” said Dust Pan, as he strode up to the closest one to inspect it. He peered through the translucent crystal at the shard trapped within with something almost approaching a sense of reverence, and though he was ostensibly on our side thanks to our mutual desire to survive this nightmare, I could not entirely discount the thought that, deep down, his motivations were still aligned with the sort of bizarre Sombra-ist revanchism that Corded Ware was wrapped up in. “Without an implanted soul, they’re completely harmless.”

Call me paranoid, and I’ve been called far worse before and since, but I did not entirely trust him when he said that. I’m all but certain now, looking back, but in that moment I felt as though those things were truly alive in a metaphysical sense, rather than strictly biological, and that whatever corrupted intelligence occupied the pony-shaped shell of crystal watched me through its blank face and just hated my mere existence for living where it could not. Still, I reassured myself that Dust Pan would not have brazenly waltzed right into this office if it was not safe to do so, and so I followed, head bowed and terribly afraid to meet the eyeless gaze of those ‘inert’ shards.

I felt a faint breeze and found that it came from a vent in the wall, very close to the high ceiling. Much like the air ducts we had just crawled and fallen through, it looked about large enough to admit a pony one at a time. The aching wound on my leg flared in response to the thought that had just wormed its way into my mind.

“Will any of those scarab-things come through that?” I asked, indicating at the grilled vent with my nose.

“Unlikely,” said Dust Pan. “Shards have some measure of intelligence, enough to adapt to changing circumstances, but the scarabs will always stick to their programmed tasks. Unless they’ve been re-programmed, they’ll stick to the air circulation system.”

“We’ll stay out of the vents, then,” said Daring Do. She looked around at the expansive office. “What is this place?”

“This was Corded Ware’s office,” Dust Pan explained as he led us towards the imposing desk at the far end. “Past here are the restricted areas, the alchemical laboratories and the workshops where the researchers carried out the ‘Great Project’ to uncover the secrets of alicorn immortality.”

“I thought it was all ‘restricted’,” I said. “It’s hard to have a secret research centre that anypony can just waltz into.”

“The even-more-restricted areas.”

“And the portal?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, and the portal. It’s further down, in the lowest level of the facility and past the laboratories.”

I breathed an irritated sigh. “Naturally.”

Cannon Fodder shut the door behind us and barricaded it, as he did with the last one, by dragging a rather large but decaying sofa behind it. While he was doing that, I decided to explore a little here. Though my mind was still reeling from the unpleasant nightmare the now-inert door had inflicted upon me, the knowledge that it was merely a cheap psychological trick created by a power-hungry tyrant with apparently nothing better to do with his time than create needlessly cruel doors of all things had lessened the blow somewhat. It was madness, thought I, that even the doors were evil back then.

As I pottered about the room, peering up at the frightfully-still statues in their crystal cages, I came to the slow realisation that there was nothing that the apparition of Celestia had said that I had not inflicted upon myself while in my blackest moods, and the shock of hearing it from a beloved Auntie would gradually wear off. Survival was the order of the day in this horrible war, and, if I might say so myself, I was doing something of a sterling job so far. I suppose the advantage of already having a low opinion of oneself is that when another attempts to break one down with a few ‘home truths’, one is already in agreement and that pessimism forms a perfect shield to deflect such barbs.

Still, I was letting myself become distracted from the task at hoof: survival. Dust Pan, however, seemed to be in no rush, and had drifted over to another, smaller desk in the corner of the room, close to another door at the far end that I could not help but feel a tad suspicious of now. He had described himself as being Corded Ware’s slave, and I could safely assume that this little writing desk in this dingy corner was where he was forced to work. Indeed, as I wandered closer, I could see that a rusted chain was affixed by one end to the wall behind the rotting wooden chair. I watched for a moment as he traced his hoof over the length of chain, but I felt as though I was intruding upon a private moment and so turned my attention to Corded Ware’s desk.

I wasn't sure what I really expected. Perhaps a brandy snifter with an accompanying cabinet of well-preserved libations, and a magically-powered humidor full of expensive Zebrican cigars, or whatever the millennia-old equivalent would've been. Perhaps Sombra forbade his underlings from such vices, or Corded Ware was a teetotaller, but either way, I'd allowed myself a smidgen of hope that there might be something to distract me from my plight; yet all it did was remind me of the cold, utilitarian efficiency that more accurately characterised the army than a supposed higher official.

As a rule, I don’t trust ponies who are too neat with their things. Now, there is a difference between being healthily fastidious with one’s grooming and clothing as I am, and being overly persnickety about the arrangements of one’s workplace; it is a symptom of a certain underlying malignancy in one’s own psyche, I feel, and my theory was proved correct again with this latest evidence. The parchment was piled up in a neat little stack in one corner, and there was a single sheet just in front of the chair, which had been pushed back from the desk a little. The opposite corner of the desk was occupied by a bound ledger, and despite its age it looked remarkably well-preserved. There was only one thing that was out of its proper place on the desk, and that was a quill, which had been left atop the parchment next to a rather large squiggle of spilled ink; if I had to guess, Corded Ware was in the middle of writing something when King Sombra inflicted his curse upon the Empire and whisked it away into shadow. I found the mental image rather amusing.

[The nature and the mechanism of the ‘curse’ has been subject to much speculation over the years and there is scant evidence in the Crystal Empire’s archives. It is generally accepted that King Sombra had dedicated much time and effort to prepare a number of contingencies in the case of his overthrow and that the curse that took the entire Empire out of time itself was a key part of it, with Corded Ware’s shards having been a part of the plan that was still in development when Sombra was forced to deploy it. How the curse affected the Crystal Ponies who were outside the borders of the Empire like Corded Ware remains unknown to this day.]

Daring Do likewise found the parchment on the desk interesting, albeit for more academic reasons than my mere curiosity. Well, I suppose I was interested to see if these documents provided any insight into Corded Ware’s thinking, but as I peered down at what he was working on before his King petulantly plucked him out of existence for more than a thousand years I saw that it was all gobbledygook. That is to say, though his script was fastidiously neat and tidy, the letters were all jumbled up so as to make no sense to me at all.

“A code?” I posited. The portrait of King Sombra seemed to be staring directly at me, so I turned and positioned myself so that my flanks were to him, and even then I could feel his eyes on me.

“It looks more like a cipher,” said Daring Do.

“Ponies love being corrected, you should keep doing that,” I snapped at her.

Daring Do looked as though she was about to snap back with a barbed comment, but considering that I’ve had rather an emotional day and it wasn’t even ten in the morning according to my watch she thought better of it. “Alright,” she said flatly, and then started picking up sheets of parchment to tuck away inside her satchel.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Come on, you read my books,” she said. “My job. I’m collecting evidence. Who knows what sort of secrets from the ancient world these might hold?”

She carried on, delicately taking a fragile sheet of parchment one at a time, each on the verge of crumbling into dust at her touch, and placing it delicately in a pocket inside her satchel. After taking a few of these, and I was becoming increasingly anxious at her careful slowness as I remembered the horde of shards hunting us down, Daring Do stopped as she came across a map. It was, of course, primitive by our standards, but the landmass it represented was still identifiable as that of Equestria; the west coast hadn’t been explored yet, so the cartographer had elected to leave that blank, and the eastern coastline with the Griffish Isles bore little resemblance to how it appears on modern maps. The city of Manehattan was absent as it wouldn’t be founded for another few centuries and Trottingham apparently was neither large nor important enough to warrant inclusion. The lands claimed by the Crystal Empire were shaded in a deep purple colour that had faded with age, and it filled up a much larger portion of land than the few square miles surrounding a single city it does now, extending beyond the Crystal Mountains and reaching as far south as Neighagra Falls and rather unsettlingly close to Canterlot. That one or two of the more obscure of my titled lands fell within the borders of the old empire brought me some small feeling of triumph.

I saw a few crosses marked out in red ink here and there beyond the borders of the old empire, one where Manehattan was founded some time after this map was drawn, another close to Ponyville, and another far to the south in the Badlands, among others scattered all over the place. “Dust Pan, what do these represent?”

“Hm?” Dust Pan pottered on over, having finished reminiscing about the time he was a slave. I still found it baffling that he, a former slave, would willingly fall back into service with his old master even after Princess Cadance abolished that horrid practice in the Crystal Empire, but either Corded Ware still had some leverage over his old serf or, perhaps more worryingly, if all one knows are chains then it must be harder to let those bindings go. The cage that traps the mind can be a more secure prison than the one that only holds the body.

“These markings,” I said. I’d worked it out already, but the thought was too unsettling for me to fully accept on my own reasoning alone. “There are quite a lot of them outside the old empire.”

“Oh, right,” he said, looking rather apologetic too. He tapped his hoof on the cross in the Badlands. “This one here, where we are, is the main facility for producing shards.” Then, sweeping his hoof at the other crosses dotted around on the map all over Equestria. “These were our additional sites for King Sombra’s contingency plan. This map is old - well, older - and it’s missing the newer sites.”

Well, that confirmed the uncomfortable conclusion that I’d already come to, but, still in some sense of denial about it, I grasped for straws. “‘Were’, you said. After all of these years they must be inactive? Or maybe they were only planned and hadn’t been finished before the curse came?”

Dust Pan pulled a face and then shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. “I mean, these are all the completed ones filled with deactivated shards, and assuming nothing’s happened then they’re all just dormant, waiting to be activated.”

The feeling of dread pushed out all of the other thoughts and emotional turmoil quite nicely, for there was nothing quite like the prospect of more of these tombs filled with shards scattered all over Equestria to put one’s true priorities sharply into focus. I looked over those small crosses with this new perspective, trying to connect them to cities and strategic locations in Equestria. One was in the middle of the Everfree Forest, which I could assume was trying to be close to the Castle of the Two Sisters and the former seat of the royal court before it moved to Canterlot, and I wagered that even the shards would struggle to emerge from that wild, monster-infested blight to terrorise unsuspecting ponies. However, I’d already identified Manehattan and Ponyville as prominent areas close to a dormant tomb (Ponyville only being considered as ‘prominent’ here due to the proximity of Princess Twilight Sparkle and the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony, and perhaps the important rail connection from Canterlot to the South. On second thought, I grudgingly accept that former rural backwater as a village of strategic and political importance only), and with fresher eyes opened by this disturbing news I could identify other large settlements on the Equestrian mainland nearby to them.

“I think I’ll take this one,” I said, carefully taking the map in my magic, rolling it up neatly, and tucking it inside my jacket’s inner pocket, where Slab could watch over this valuable bit of what certain officers would call ‘intelligence’. “Whatever happens, this map must get to Princess Celestia. She needs to know this.”

Chapter 7

We had not seen the shards for some time now, not since they’d wiped out most of the Crystal Ponies in the main hall, and that was starting to worry me; either we were exceptionally good at evading those murderous automata or they were silently observing us and waiting for the right moment to strike, and the former felt like the most unlikely of the two possibilities. However, since killing all of those unfortunate archaeologists had not detained them for particularly long, I could not imagine them expending quite so much of their valuable time and effort that would otherwise be better spent brooding in those stasis tubes in planning the imminent demise of just four ponies, when they could just quite easily kick the door down and destroy us like bottles of spoilt wine in the wine cellar. That is, unless they were deliberately toying with us for their own depraved amusement. I might have simply been projecting my own feelings onto what were constructs of unliving crystal that happened to be powered by a millennium-old soul forcibly extricated from its mortal coil, rather like assigning equine emotions to the instinctive behaviours of lower animals, but the feeling of utter malice and hatred and disgust for our very existence that seemed to radiate from these things felt very palpable.

Were these shards even alive in the traditional sense? Such questions have occupied my mind for some time since the events in that crypt, for their bodies were clearly inorganic shells and therefore could not be considered to be ‘alive’, yet there was some manner of animus within guiding it. Whether or not the soul trapped inside each shard operated of its own free will, if such a thing even existed but this metaphysical discussion was becoming a tad too existential for my liking already, was another matter, and not one that I or any pony with a fancy piece of paper from an esteemed university could hope to answer. The damned things were hardly of a talkative persuasion, and even if they were they were not exactly open to discussing the nature of their troubled existence over a pot of tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

I’m getting ahead of myself again. Such thoughts have popped up every now again since, usually when I am alone in my study during a late evening with nothing but the memories of years past and a bottle of agreeable cognac for company, amidst the more usual bouts of introspection that the decades since have inspired, and I am none the closer to answering those questions. Not that my life has been exactly replete with answers, for few things in war or life in general are ever resolved with a neat little conclusion that leaves everypony happy and satisfied, and we must simply make do with whatever solace we can glean from the aftermath.

The hall beyond the office was wider than the narrow tunnels we had traversed before, with a variety of doors that Dust Pan explained were offices, the contents of which were of no concern to us. The other slaves of the administrative class worked there, filing the mountains of paperwork that the research of their masters had generated. They were literally chained to their desks, I mused as I spotted the manacles there.

“Sombra had an efficient civil service,” explained Daring Do, as we crossed the long hall. “Almost everything that happened in the Empire was documented somewhere.”

“So, why didn’t you know about all of this?” I asked, perhaps in too accusatory a tone judging by the way she responded.

“Because civil servants aren’t in the habit of leaving top secret documents out where just anypony can find them, even a thousand years later. Do you leave your confidential war papers just scattered everywhere?” she snapped.

Ordinarily I’d have rebuked her for that, but nerves were frayed for all of us, and so I was willing to let this slide for now. One might think that because she was my older half-sibling I was less inclined to pull rank on her as I have always done when commoners forget with whom they are speaking, and one would be wrong on this account; if anything, that only made that familiar aristocratic urge within cry even louder with indignation, for she was the illegitimate foal who had undeservedly monopolised Father’s love. She had our Father’s contemptuous sneer, the same one he pulled every time that I’d meet an impossibly high expectation of his, and I longed to wipe it from her face.

And yet, what in blazes was I thinking? The thought that I was behaving completely irrationally came to me as a vision of a heavenly messenger descending from up on high, accompanied by a cherubic choir complete with harp accompaniments, to personally deliver a scroll written by Faust herself which informed me in excruciatingly elegant penmanship that I needed to get my priorities in order. The four of us trapped here would have to work together to get out of this miserable place in an as alive a state as possible, and it wasn’t helped by my foalish sulking.

I suppose I ought to have seen this from her perspective, too; she had just made the rather difficult decision to attempt to reach out to her long-lost younger half-brother who happened to be a rather famous prince, and who didn’t have to conceal that fame behind a rather tenuous false identity. Not to mention that she was in precisely the same mortal peril that I was immersed in, and was likely feeling just as embarrassed about her total failure to see what in hindsight was blindingly obvious as I was about my own too. I had another sister now (I couldn’t begin to think what dear Sangre and Azul were going to make of this whole mad affair, but Father having forgotten that the two even existed once the ink dried on their arranged marriage proposals drawn up minutes after they were born might soften the blow somewhat), and here was a chance at forging some sort of positive familial connection of some sort.

While I was thinking all of this through, Daring Do carried on talking. She seemed to enjoy explaining things, and it reminded me of parts of her books where she would, as herself as a character in it, deliver exposition on an obscure topic that few readers had a hope in Hades’s chance of understanding. Either that or it made her feel superior to my stunted education. “An efficient civil service meant he could hide evidence when he needed to, concealed within enormous libraries of paperwork, all enciphered, of course.”

“This hasn’t worked out the way you thought it would,” I said.

Daring Do stopped walking and blinked vacantly at me. “What?”

I suppose it was something of a non-sequitur, given that the topic of conversation was on something else entirely. “Meeting me. I assume you were about to tell me the truth when I invited you to my room that evening.”

“You were drunk.” She glowered at me. “But yes, that’s what I wanted to do, and no, I didn’t think you’d react like that.”

“And how was I supposed to react?”

“Happier, I guess,” she said with a casual shrug. Then, employing that keen analytical mind of a writer, who must invariably put themselves into the horseshoes of another pony and understand what makes them tick to write convincingly, “This isn’t about me, really, it’s about Dad, isn’t it? Look, I guess it’s upsetting to find out he had an affair, but don’t take it out on me.”

Damn her, she was close but just missed it; that my father had an illegitimate foal long before I was born was a shock, certainly, but at least within the bounds of what I would expect from him, but him having the capacity to behave like a ‘normal’ father, as a common pony might expect a father to be, and then choosing to inflict the various miseries of my foalhood upon me was what stung the most. In truth, I thought that I had worked past all of that, understanding that he, like many other ponies out there, was simply a bastard, but such wounds never completely heal and the scars may reopen when the time is least convenient for them to do so. The stallion had disappeared into the Zebrican jungle a long time ago, half a lifetime away, and was very likely dead, but despite my best efforts to get on with the life I had been burdened with free from the memory of him, Daring Do had unwittingly dug deep and exposed that unhealed scar by merely revealing her existence.

“My father was a callous brute,” I said, and I realised that my voice was quivering. “I hated him. Disappearing was the best thing he ever did for me.”

Daring Do fell into a pensive silence as she contemplated those words; I suppose hearing that from me was just as much of a shock to her as it was for Yours Truly to find out that he was capable of fatherly kindness after all. I expected her to argue back, as the character representing herself in her stories tended to be rather blunt in her speech and unafraid to give her honest opinion on things as part of her heroic, no-nonsense persona. After all, she apparently had nothing but good memories of him. In a way, having read every single one of her books multiple times I felt as though I already knew her as a pony, while what she knew of me was wrapped up almost entirely in my two public personas as a drunken fop and a decorated war hero, but the subject of her family rarely came up at all in those stories.

“Are we done?” asked Dust Pan, glaring at the two of us with great irritation. “The shards aren’t going to wait for you two to finish your messed-up family therapy session. Can we go now?”

Embarrassment made my cheeks flush hot and red, and Daring Do looked suitably admonished and sheepish at that. “We’ll discuss this later,” I said. “After we escape.”

Daring Do nodded silently, and with that topic shelved for the time being we carried on. Except, however, I could not put it entirely from my mind. Dust Pan and Daring Do led the way together, while I trudged along next to Cannon Fodder behind the two, hoping that his unique ability would somehow mask me from the sight of the shards. The mortal peril we were both in really ought to have been at the very forefront of my priorities, yet it found itself eclipsed at times by this bizarre revelation. Perhaps it was this place itself, some malignant enchantment within the stones entombing us within the earth which brought out the worst within our tortured psyches, like a more subtle version of that stupid door before.

“We’re near the portal room,” said Dust Pan, and already I felt an immense sense of relief at that, as though a great weight had been gently lifted from my back; we were one step closer to leaving this horrible place, and wherever this portal would take us better have a well-stocked bar with very understanding and sympathetic staff. At the end of this corridor was another door, and that sensation of relief was swiftly replaced by fear once more, and when Dust Pan glanced over his shoulder and saw that my poker face must have slipped he grinned and said, “Relax, this one’s just a normal door.”

“You can open it, then,” I said, with the appropriate tone of voice to convey that it was an order and not a request. Despite everything, I was still not about to trust him unconditionally.

Once again, my habitual paranoia had paid off, though not in the way I’d expected. Dust Pan sighed and muttered something under his breath, and crossed over to the apparently harmless wooden door, remarkably well-preserved after all of these years, and pulled it open. And slammed it shut immediately. Dust Pan hurled himself to the side, shrieking in terror, and a searing flash of white vapourised the door from its hinges. Blinking away the spots in my eyes, I saw, through the smoke, a roughly equine-shaped figure emerge, and a luminescent green glow swelled where the creature’s eye sockets should have been.

Fear, ice-cold and overwhelming, seized my throat and squeezed. It looked at me. I had no way of knowing, as it lacked eyes in the traditional sense, but I could feel it staring at me. The urge to run screamed in my head, but my hooves appeared to have melded with the floor and I simply couldn’t move. Yet, whatever had caused the thing to hesitate would not keep it occupied much longer.

Daring Do charged in, wings beating frantically to grant her a burst of extra speed, and collided with the creature. She and the shard went tumbling into the room beyond. I saw her swing her right hoof in a punch that would have knocked any pony thug employed by Caballeron out cold, but she only succeeded in denting the hard crystal and spoiling the shard’s aim with its horn. There was another actinic flash of light, and the beam struck the ceiling, missing Daring Do by inches.

“We have to help her!” shouted Cannon Fodder, though despite the urgency in his voice he stood still, apparently waiting for me to lead the way.

Well, dammit, I couldn’t run away now, and history would not look kindly upon me leaving not only an author with hordes of loyal fans to die but also her fictional creation too; if the shards didn’t get me on the way out then that aforementioned legion of rabid fans would besiege me in my palace and then drag me out to flog me to death with costume whips. I drew my sabre, for what good that might do against something made of solid crystal, and charged with Cannon Fodder behind me.

For all of her prowess in hoof-to-hoof brawling, the shard was stronger and tougher than Daring Do, and the two were wrapped in a mutual embrace. Together they rolled further into the room beyond, Daring Do pushing and beating her hooves against the shard, shouting out with anger and exertion, but the soulless automaton barely seemed to need to put any effort into keeping her restrained. I daren’t fire on the shard for fear of hitting Daring Do. It forced the slim, scrappy pegasus onto her back, and it pinned her down under its sleek, crystal hooves as she fought and kicked to try to free herself.

Leaping through the doorway, shoving the swinging door to the side with my hoof in the process, I brought my heavy Pattern ‘12 sabre down on the back of the shard’s neck in a wide downward swing with the aim to decapitate it. The hefty blade struck the creature width-ways across its neck and bounced off its solid crystal surface. The impact made the sword reverberate along its entire length, and I felt it as an uncomfortable sensation in my already aching horn. A few good, large chunks of crystal broke off its neck, leaving a rather nasty gouge that, had it been a flesh and blood pony, would have been a fatal wound. Instead, it barely reacted, aside from its head swivelling around on its damaged neck far further than any pony possibly could in order to face me. Its horn lit with that sharp green glow, and I threw myself away from the thing as fast as I could.

The blast briefly blinded me and a brief blast of heat, lasting less than a second, seared my muzzle. My horn and my hoof still ached and I felt awful in general, which meant that I was still alive or my post-mortal existence destination was what I’d ought to have expected given the life I’ve led. The moment’s distraction that my suicidal charge had granted was enough; the stars clouding my eyes dispersed with a few quick blinks, just in time for me to see Daring Do roll back on her shoulders, plant her rear hooves in the shard’s belly, and with a shout of exertion throw it to the side.

The shard landed on its side with a sound that reminded me of the toll of a distant bell. Almost immediately it started to right itself, but Daring Do swept in with another knockout punch to the face. It barely recoiled from a blow that I was sure would have sent me to the hospital, but her hoof bounced off its cheek and only chipped a small chunk of jagged crystal from it. Like the scarabs, the damned things were tough but fairly brittle, but unlike living opponents they could not be distracted and incapacitated by pain, and there were no soft fleshy parts one could stab, shoot, or bruise to inflict mortal damage to its body.

“How do we kill this thing?!” I shouted desperately.

Dust Pan cowered uselessly to the side and would be of no practical help, but, curled up in the corner and shaking in raw terror, eyes wide and ears turned back, he screamed, “Smash a hole in it! The soul inside will escape!”

Easier said than done. Cannon Fodder had finally caught up, and, having gathered the general thrust of where things were proceeding, hurled himself into the shard like Square Basher on rugby pitch. This time, the damned thing folded under the heavier oncoming mass of my aide. Though its limbs flailed with sharp, jerky movements as though it was a puppet whose master was having a stroke, getting a good few blows into his chest and side, it seemed as though it couldn’t ‘see’ the pony pinning it to the ground. It could, however, see me, and while its hooves continued to thrash spasmodically against the pony pinning it down it turned its head straight towards me.

On instinct I dove to the left, colliding with some piece of techno-magical apparatus I couldn’t begin to understand with a painful jolt to my chest where I struck a sharp edge. The air itself shrieked behind me as another bolt of magic tore through it and scorched the wall just behind where I had stood. I scrambled behind whatever it was I had just bounced off for cover, as if that might help me, and peaked around the other side of this blocky thing to see Daring Do had wrapped her whip around the thing’s neck and either attempted to strangle it or pop its head off like a champagne cork, while Cannon Fodder pinned it down.

“Shoot it!” snarled Daring Do through gritted teeth. “Blueblood, shoot it!”

I summoned as much magical energy into my horn as I could without it bursting, and fired straight at the creature’s head. The bright golden beam illuminated the entire room briefly, like a bolt of lightning through a window, and it struck the shard’s cranium in the temple. The light refracted through the translucent crystal skull, momentarily throwing out rays of startling light across the whole room like a mirrored ball, and then the shard’s head shattered with the sound of a champagne flute hurled with fury against a wall.

The creature became still and rigid, lacking its head, which was smashed into pieces, and Daring Do and Cannon Fodder both warily backed away from it as though it might spontaneously come back to life. The eerie glow within the shard’s body was still there, swirling like vapour within the crystalline vessel, but it gradually emerged from the jagged stump that was the neck and dissipated into the air. I stared transfixed at this thing, breath caught in my throat and my heart still pounding from the adrenaline, as this ethereal mass lingered about in the air for a moment. Images flashed in my mind, snapshots of a past life -- a family, a farm, arrest, being ripped from a physical body, and a thousand years of limbo trapped within a shell of cold crystal -- and a sensation of something I might describe as gratitude, and then it faded into nothing. It took a moment before I fully understood what I had just witnessed: an equine soul, released from the unnatural prison that kept it shackled to this mortal world, fading into whatever fate awaited it, and whether it was by the side of Faust as priests say or the oblivion of non-existence it had to be an improvement on being trapped here for so long. ‘Awe’ is not an emotion that affects me often, but this was one of those rare occurrences.

Daring Do kicked at the pile of broken crystal on the floor. “That’s one down, at least,” she said, in between ragged gasps for air. I thought her words a tad callous, but perhaps she hadn’t experienced whatever that was when its soul was released. Perhaps I’d imagined the whole thing. “Did it get you?” she asked, looking me up and down.

I gave myself a once over, and found that I’d somehow dodged those blasts with only a few singed tail hairs and a slightly torched nose. The wound on my leg had reopened and the bandage was soaked in blood, and the headache from pushing my horn too far had returned, but otherwise I appeared to be fine. “I’ll manage,” I said, being the sort of thing I was supposed to say here. “I didn’t think just shooting the bally thing would work that well.”

Dust Pan joined us and peered over at the shard’s body, now as still and rigid as a statue, as though he was scrutinising a work of art. He’d apparently recovered from his shock quite well, now that the thing attempting to kill us was quite dead, for a given definition of the term. “I think you used more power than you intended,” he said, giving me a sideways glance, “or was necessary. Your horn is smoking. Daring Do chipping off its outer casing must have helped, too.”

The throbbing against my forehead persisted, and when I touched my horn with my hoof it did feel rather warm. “Well, I wanted to make sure that I got the bloody thing,” I said. I sheathed my sword, and even that simple use of telekinesis caused an increase in pressure on my skull, as though Princess Luna was slowly squeezing my head between her hooves. “I’m not sure I can do that again without burning myself out.”

“We’ve been lucky in avoiding them so far,” said Dust Pan, then he looked at my aide, who was kicking at the shattered remains of the shard’s head with a peculiar expression. “Very lucky.”

“Let’s just hope our luck holds,” said Daring Do, dusting herself off and straightening her pith helmet. She meticulously wound up her whip and put it back on her belt. “Where are we, the portal room?”

With the imminent danger gone, I could now pay attention to where we had ended up. Now, I’m no expert on such things, as I’d failed to graduate from magic school and it’s a miracle that I can remember how to cast the spell that reveals Changelings, but the big stone ring at the far end of the room covered in all manner of arcane runes looked very much like how an old portal should. It was wide enough to admit a cart pulled by two ponies side-by-side, with a gradual slope descending from it into an empty space in the middle of this cavernous room. I would hazard a guess that this was used for sending shipments of supplies from the Crystal Empire to this remote laboratory.

“What about the power source?” asked Cannon Fodder, his words gently steering the ship of my hopes and dreams of getting out of here alive away from the metaphorical icebergs of my impatience. “Aren’t we supposed to blow it up or something?”

“I want to check if it still works first,” said Dust Pan, “before we start blowing things up.”

“If it wasn’t for those shards, we could use this portal to fix the problems with our supply lines,” I wondered out loud.

“We had to sacrifice the magic of three unicorns a week to keep it powered,” said Dust Pan, as he trotted on over and knelt down by the mechanism. “Mainly from the natives, or anypony expendable who annoyed Corded Ware. He would send out raiding parties to kidnap the locals.” He popped open a panel on the side, and I peered over his shoulder to see a mass of intricate machinery that I had no hope in Hades of understanding, however, he seemed to know what he was doing.

I couldn’t put it past some of the more bloodthirsty of our generals to seriously consider doing what Corded Ware had done, but we were lucky in that the one thing that General Market Garden truly excelled in above all others was maintaining her tenuous supply lines and being careful enough not to exceed them, no matter how much gentle prodding she received from Field Marshal Hardscrabble to get a move on with the offensive.

Dust Pan continued to tinker with the strange mechanism, pulling on levers, tapping on vials of strangely-glowing liquid, pressing buttons that made other buttons light up. What exactly he was doing I had no hope at all of understanding, but he seemed to know how this ancient contraption worked, if it still did. “Our luck continues to hold. There’s just enough charge left to activate it for a short time.”

[Portal magic is extremely finicky and requires a great deal of energy to use reliably, and even then it can be unstable if the device has not been serviced correctly. The Crystal Empire had aimed to set up a network of portals to link their research centres to each other and their capital, but this proved to be prohibitively expensive and only a few were completed before the Empire vanished.]

There was a loud, satisfying ‘clunk’ of machinery moving within the portal thing. The inner rim of it, which I saw to be somewhat separate from the main ring-shaped structure, turned with a sharp, grating noise, until the runes etched upon both surfaces lined up neatly to have some sort of meaning that escaped me. I could sense a build-up of energy as an uncomfortable tingling in my still-aching horn, or that might have just been the sheer anxiety of it all. Staring up at this large structure, I willed it to work, and I felt something akin to hope swell within me as those runes lit up like lights around the Hearth’s Warming tree. The space within the portal became opaque with a swirling morass of blue magical energy, which rippled like the clear sea in Horseshoe Bay, and through it all I could glimpse the shadowed outlines of things beyond the portal on the other side.

Before I could even think about throwing myself through the portal and leaving the three of them to sort themselves and the facility’s power source out without me, the portal vanished and the accumulated magical energy popped like an oversized bubble. I ought to have known that a portal remaining fully functional after more than a thousand years of lying dormant, even if it had been judiciously maintained by those shards all this time, was too good to be true, and once again my suspicion was vindicated. Still, as I had anticipated that it would go wrong I was only mildly disappointed by this turn of events.

“So much for luck,” I muttered bitterly to nopony in particular.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” muttered Dust Pan. He buried himself inside the cabinet once more and poked around with more machinery, and I briefly entertained the thought of pushing him inside it and sealing him in until he fixed it. “Maybe the thaumo-encabulator is worn out. We should have spare hydrocoptic marzlevanes in the workshop somewhere.”

“It’s been more than a thousand years,” I said. “The chances of it still being in perfect working order seemed low. Then again, all of the abandoned temples and tombs that Daring Do here raided were in rather good condition prior to her breaking into them, with all of the traps and puzzles still mostly operable. I guess they really did build things to last in those days.”

“They really wanted to keep out grave-robbers,” said Daring Do, and she quickly added, “legitimate archaeologists, too.”

“The shards were maintaining this portal,” said Dust Pan, his voice muffled as he was half-buried inside the guts of the machine, his flanks and rear legs sticking out from the open panel. I heard further sounds of mechanical tinkering, accompanied by quiet swearing.

While he continued trying in vain to fix the damned thing, I quickly ascertained the real cause for the device’s failure, as Cannon Fodder, apparently expressing something akin to curiosity, had wandered in for a closer look. Still, in the spirit of scientific inquiry I thought it best to test this little theory, and so instructed my aide to keep an eye on the door. As he trotted back to shut the open door and barricaded it with something, the runes flickered back into life and that queer, resonating vibration in the air returned. Just as the whoop of triumph erupted from Dust Pan’s throat like a common sports fan after their team had successfully projected the ball through the correct apparatus, I asked Cannon Fodder to return, and, without the sort of complaint that a soldier would normally give for being made to walk back and forth across a room pointlessly, those lights on the portal went out again.

“It’s him” said Dust Pan, having now extricated himself from the open cabinet. He frowned at Cannon Fodder, who stood there with his usual gormless placidity. “He’s a blank.”

“I suppose the cat’s out of the bag,” I said. The number of ponies who knew about him was becoming distressingly high, but it was unavoidable here.

“That would explain why the shards seem to be having trouble hunting us down and killing us,” pondered Dust Pan with the air of a pony contemplating a particularly tricky crossword puzzle. “He’s masking us from them. Not totally, but enough that we’ve been able to slip past them. In their senses he’s like a blind spot, projecting a field that makes us less noticeable.”

Daring Do snorted impatiently and nodded in the direction of the headless figure by the door. She rubbed at one of the many bruises that she had earned in that little scrap, wincing a little at the pain. “That one didn’t have much trouble seeing me.”

“That’s because you made yourself noticeable when you tried to tackle it.” Dust Pan hummed thoughtfully, peering at my quietly perplexed aide as he contemplated a thought that I somehow knew that he would arrive to before he did. “We’ll have to leave him behind.”

“No,” I said, and rather abruptly too; I surprised even myself with how quickly those words slipped out.

“But-”

“That’s out of the question,” I interrupted him. “Absolutely not. We are not leaving my fr- my aide behind. We’ll find another way.”

Dust Pan pulled a shocked face at me, eyes bugged out and mouth hanging open uselessly as he seemed to struggle to comprehend why I’d bother trying to save this pony’s life over mine, at least by his own warped understanding of things. Far be it from me to refuse an offer of a safe and easy escape quite so readily, but Cannon Fodder was far too useful an asset for me to simply leave behind in a tomb full of crystal horrors that we were going to blow up as part of our daring escape too. I was, however, more surprised that Dust Pan would so readily offer such a callous, if practical, solution to this grim dilemma, but he had spent his entire life as a slave to an autocratic regime that saw the lives of its subjects as nothing more than a resource to be spent.

“Sir,” said Cannon Fodder, and I almost jumped at hearing him speak for the first time in a while, “if those things can’t see me, then I can just walk out, right? Straight back to the camp. Then you can go through the portal.”

Even now, as we discussed his fate, Cannon Fodder looked entirely unperturbed by the nature of the discussion. I have often wondered if, like me, he was simply very good at hiding the urge to run into a corner and sob hopelessly about the injustice of it all, and if that was the case then he’d have certainly beaten me for the top prize in emotional repression; I liked to think that I was rather good at it, but the masque I wore had somewhat slipped over the course of this miserable morning, and I was proving to be a damned sight more irritable than I was otherwise able to conceal from ponies. Not without justification, of course, but at least I had been able to maintain enough decorum to keep the cowardly side of me that wanted to flee screaming into the tunnels from shining forth. I’d known the stallion for some years now and had come to depend on him not only for his peculiar ability to nullify magic but also his simple-minded dependability and admirably feudal approach to serving Yours Truly, but even then what thoughts popped up in his skull, what motivations propelled him to stick with me besides the simple hierarchy that placed me above him, remained a total mystery.

His proposal seemed sound, though I still felt uneasy about the thought of leaving Cannon Fodder to fend for himself, but Dust Pan pointed out the flaw with it. “If you leave us, then the shards will find us more easily.”

“Come now, you must have come up with a way to stop these things if they ever went rogue,” I said. “A magic ‘off’ button, perhaps? A built-in weakness to, oh, I don’t know, gold dust? Anything?”

Dust Pan rolled his eyes, and when he pulled that gesture I wanted to slap them out of his head. “I don’t know, I was just Corded Ware’s slave!” he growled at me. “I wasn’t involved in any of the decision making. I just took notes for him and did his stupid chores, and when something didn’t go the way he wanted he’d hit me to make himself feel better. I don’t think anypony high up enough in this project to make that kind of decision would have even considered adding a convenient flaw in their top secret supersoldiers that their enemies could easily exploit. Nopony would have thought that the shards were capable of going rogue like this at the time, or if they did they’d have kept their mouth shut to avoid being labelled as a subversive element and sent back for re-education.”

I ignored the tone of his tirade with some considerable effort on the part of my waning self-control. “That still seems like a shocking oversight for a group of ponies serving a paranoid tyrant.”

He seemed to have calmed down a little with that, and nodded his head in agreement. “Yes, well, certain things get overlooked when that paranoid tyrant is threatening executions if his pet project isn’t progressing fast enough for him.”

[Another trait shared by the respective regimes of Sombra, Chrysalis, and all other tyrants who rule through fear and terror; sensible ponies who would otherwise point out flaws, oversights, and fixable problems with their plans were cowed into silence for fear of being dismissed as ‘defeatists’. It was such an oversight in Sombra’s palace’s defences that allowed my sister and I to attack him in his bedchambers, and one that a leader more receptive to feedback would have fixed by listening to their staff.]

Daring Do had remained quiet throughout that part of the conversation, but the slight smile that formed on her lips when I objected to the notion of leaving Cannon Fodder behind was not lost on me. It was an expression that might have been mistaken for approval, perhaps. “Not being able to see blanks is still a weakness we can exploit. We still need to destroy that energy source you mentioned before. Where is it?”

“It’s not far from here,” said Dust Pan. “But that still doesn’t solve our problem.”

“We’ll figure it out along the way,” said Daring Do, turning towards the door.

I couldn’t resist. “Would you say that you’re ‘making this up as you go’?”

She stopped, shot me a glare that would have cowed an angry manticore, and marched out into the corridor. I appeared to have touched a nerve, that little catchphrase appeared endlessly in her books, indicating, if those stories were really as true as she said, that she had an admirable knack for improvisation that I was about to see in action. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was in terrible danger, I’d have been positively giddy with excitement; I couldn’t deny that, in spite of said mortal peril and the uncomfortable revelations about my father, the ten year old version of me would have been so very proud of this singular moment.

The moment was spoilt when Dust Pan darted after Daring Do, shouting, “Wait! It’s not that simple!”

Of course it never was, and as I hobbled along on my wounded leg and with Cannon Fodder by my side, for the first time filled with a modicum of hope that Daring Do was going to somehow bring us all out of this mess alive and in one piece. After all, she had survived all of her adventures thus far, assuming that she hadn’t embellished the peril for artistic effect in her stories too much, and most of her allies had survived to the end, too.

In the corridor, Daring Do had stopped to listen to what Dust Pan had to say. “We need to overload the power source with more magic, only that’ll cause the chain reaction that’ll bring this whole place down, but I don’t think Prince Blueblood has enough left in him to do that without frying his brain.”

“There must be another way to do it,” said Daring Do.

“They also conducted research into blanks here, too,” he said, giving a sideways glance to my aide. “A side project, among others. Corded Ware thought it was a dead end, but he let them get on with it; anything that they thought could lead to developing an advantage over the Equestrians in the war. One of the researchers, Looking Glass, came up with a horn ring - don’t ask me exactly how it works because I don’t know - that’ll cut off whatever it is that causes magic to fail around blanks.”

“You mean I’ll finally use magic?” asked Cannon Fodder before I had a chance to say anything about this particular revelation. This was about as excited as I’d ever seen him so far from a free buffet table, not that anypony who didn’t know my aide as well as I did would have noticed any difference in either his tone of voice or his body language, but the little pricked-up ears and his marginally straighter stance certainly noticeable to me.

“Well, yes and no,” said Dust Pan, pulling another odd face. “You’ll be able to use magic, but you might also explode.”

“Oh.” Cannon Fodder deflated only slightly.

Dust Pan sighed as he apparently realised that an explanation was in order for the layponies here. His speech was quick and rapid, words tumbling out one after the other as though each was in a race to be spoken first. “A blank sucks in strong sources of magical energy around them. Special talents and telekinesis aren’t affected because one’s a different type of innate magic and the other just isn’t powerful enough unless you’re lifting something heavy. But anyway, all of that magic has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? It’s basic thaumodynamics, energy doesn’t just disappear, so when you put the ring on, all that stored magic comes flooding back in and if you’re not careful you, well… you explode. Saw it happen a few times, and Looking Glass made me clean up the mess. What a waste, those blanks were difficult to find.”

I have to admit that I was struggling to follow, so I tried to articulate it in a way that I could understand. “It sounds to me like the opposite of a nullifier ring,” I posited.

“No, it’s nothing like the opposite of a nullifier ring,” said Dust Pan, trying and failing horribly to hide his evident annoyance at this tangent. “It’s nothing like nullifier rings at all. It’s… look, I just kept the books, alright? Although, you might have been able to use one to hide yourself from the shards, perhaps.”

“The outcome of this research,” I said, “is it still here?”

“I think so,” said Dust Pan, shrugging. “Everything is as we left it when we all disappeared, so assuming the shards didn’t pack everything away while we were gone, it should all still be in the lab.”

“So, we need to overload the power source here,” I said. “I don’t think I can do that without overloading my own horn, not if you still want me to shoot shards as we escape. Thanks to Cannon Fodder and this Looking Glass fellow, whoever he was, we now have a big enough source of power to do that and it will allow him to escape with us through the portal.”

Cannon Fodder cleared his throat sheepishly. “But I don’t want to explode.” It was very rare for him to interject like that, much less question what the important ponies were discussing, but I could sympathise with his desire to remain in one, whole piece.

“It’ll be risky,” I admitted, “but we pulled through at Black Venom Pass and Virion Hive and that mess in Marelacca.”

“The Princesses protect, sir.” It was the verbal equivalent of a shrug, for him, but it signified a quiet acceptance of his fate and a trust that I would pull through as I always have done thus far. Sooner or later, fate would catch up with me to balance all of the awful near-misses I’ve had, but I’d be damned if I was going to give up trying to survive what horrors it insisted on throwing at me.

“Right, that’s settled,” I said. “Dust Pan, take us to these laboratories.”

Dust Pan, having seen that I was not going to be swayed from this course of action, nodded and indicated down the corridor, and we followed him. As we descended again into the darkness, the smile on Daring Do’s face, small but seemingly genuine, was not lost on me. I prayed that this gamble would pay off for us.

Chapter 8

“It’s around here somewhere.” Dust Pan’s exasperated words did not inspire much hope in me, but in hindsight it was ludicrous of me to expect that finding the products of Looking Glass’ research more than a thousand years after he had vanished would be easy. That is not to say that the laboratories were a mess; far from it, they were very clean and meticulously organised, and I would deduce that the shards had dedicated some time out of their busy schedule of dreamlessly sleeping in their convenient little container pods and wiping out anypony curious enough to poke around their home to tidying up. Of course, it would be redundant of me to say that I had no idea what anything inside these laboratories did, so I had even less of a clue of what I was supposed to be looking for.

“It looks like a horn ring,” said Dust Pan very unhelpfully, when, after a few minutes of me poking around in vain at the various retorts and beakers and what not that belonged more to an apothecary’s shop than a place of serious scientific inquiry, I demanded to know what in blazes this thing looked like. “Looking Glass insisted on mounting it in a chaplet, though.”

“Whatever for?” I asked, as I flicked through a pile of books on the off-chance it had been buried under there by careless shards.

“Aesthetic reasons.” Dust Pan shrugged. “It wouldn’t be there, sir,” he continued with a dismissive shake of his head, “that’s where Corded Ware had his own little side project, trying to turn lead into gold to help fund Sombra’s war against Equestria.”

I heard Daring Do laugh from where she was sifting through piles of parchment, occasionally secreting a few more sheafs into her satchel bag. “Chrysopoeia was seen as bunk alchemy even back then.”

[Turning base metals into gold has been known to be impossible by learned ponies since before King Sombra, but a few fringe alchemists continued, and still continue, to hold onto that belief.]

Dust Pan chuckled grimly. “Sombra gave Corded Ware almost unlimited resources to find something that would help him conquer both Equestria and death. It was inevitable that a few bad ideas would get through if the only criterion for funding was to impress the King for long enough to get his seal.”

“All for naught,” I mused, as I stepped away from the thoroughly useless alchemical equipment there. “Though perhaps if Sombra hadn’t wasted all of that time and effort on Corded Ware’s little pet projects and focused that entirely on defeating Equestria through conventional means, things might have turned out differently.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “A few more weeks and our army of shards might have been ready, were it not for the Princesses getting the jump on him.”

“Or they might have turned on him, too.” It was a futile, albeit rather interesting, mental exercise to dabble in the great ‘what-ifs’ of history, but given what I’d seen that day in this subterranean pit of perverted science I struggled to see an alternative. As fascinating as the intellectual debate might be, it brought us no closer to finding what we needed.

The laboratories were large, neatly ordered rooms just off this main corridor, and as I’d mentioned, they’d been so meticulously maintained over the vast depth of the years that I struggled to think that it had been abandoned by ponies for so long. However, I recalled that I had seen actual working laboratories, particularly ones managed by a certain Princess Twilight Sparkle, and they had always been an utter mess. There was still a perfect order to them, but only one that she understood, with test tubes and crystals and reagents scattered all over the work surfaces and with all manner of things bubbling and gurgling away at all times, but it gave the appearance to my untrained eye of an unrelenting chaos of stuff that I could barely have understood even if I had paid any attention in school. I wagered that if those Crystal Pony researchers had actually made it this far and saw what the shards had done to their perfectly-ordered mess they would be utterly aghast. Still, I wasn’t sure if this made our job of trying to find the product of Looking Glass’ project any easier or not.

In contrast to Daring Do’s slow, steady, and meticulous search of the lab and the rather useless pottering about of Dust Pan and me, Cannon Fodder was positively tearing the place apart looking for the thing that would finally allow him to use magic, or perhaps make him explode if he wasn’t too careful. I watched as he shoved aside ancient magical equipment, all potentially incredibly valuable items that any museum curator would sell a firstborn foal for, and wrenched open cabinets, locked or otherwise, to throw their arcane contents out onto the floor so he could pick over what remained. At the very least, if those shards were to succeed in hunting us down, then before being vaporised I could take some solace in the thought that they would have to dedicate much time and effort into tidying up this part of the complex. Over the years that he had worked as my faithful assistant, I’d never seen him exhibit much of an interest in overcoming his condition, and perhaps I assumed that he didn’t necessarily see it as something that he needed to overcome in the first place. As with any disability, a pony eventually learns to accept that there are certain things that they cannot do and find a way to live around it. I suppose a pony that has always lacked the use of their limbs would metaphorically leap at the chance to be able to walk, regardless of how accustomed they have become to their affliction. It struck me that though I trusted this peculiar pony with my life and we had both endured much together, I felt as though I barely knew him.

If Daring Do’s sensibilities as an archaeologist and as a keen custodian of the irreplaceable relics of the past were insulted by my aide’s rather brutal treatment of them, then she showed admirable restraint as he carried on destroying priceless artefacts in his frantic search. That said, I always thought it rather odd that in her stories she seemed to damage, collapse, destroy, or otherwise ruin as many old relics and dig sites over the course of her rousing adventures as she saved, so perhaps in the tradition of refraining from hurling stones from within her house of glass she wisely thought to keep her outspokenness to herself for once. That, or these sorts of alchemical equipment were so very common as to be in fact worthless to archaeologists.

The next room was some sort of surgical theatre, with a perfectly flat ‘bed’ made of crystal with polished manacles at each corner with which to restrain the subject, who would be overlooked by a gallery from which I imagined Corded Ware and his fellow researchers would observe the butchery below. Next to the base of the table was a drain, and I quickly surmised that it was for the collection of blood and what-not spilt during whatever vivisection took place here. While I am not a pony given over to base superstition, there are certain places that I have been where a great amount of suffering had taken place in the distant past, such as certain rooms in the Sanguine Palace that various ancestors of mine had once used for torture chambers, where one cannot help but feel the agonised ghosts linger there to scream their torment at the living. That feeling was most heavy around here, and I gave the table there, glittering in the golden light of my horn, as wide a berth as I possibly could.

It was in this dark, horrible little place where thoughts that had been nagging at me about Dust Pan for a great deal of time finally coalesced into something I could begin to articulate in words. His survival of the initial massacre of the Crystal Ponies was a tad suspicious, but if anything, to learn that he had deduced what was about to happen and positioned himself behind his fellows so he could escape would have improved his standing in my eyes. No, there was something else, and his frantic rambling about blanks and this mysterious horn ring lay at the core of it. He was a mere slave, one with access to a great deal of information, and Faust knows that I have learnt the lesson that serving ponies are a damned sight more attentive than we give them credit for, but, and I would be the last pony to call myself a historian here, I was not inclined to think that a society based entirely upon the institution that one pony can own many others as property would want to provide its mass servile population with a sufficiently high education as this chap demonstrated, lest they start getting clever ideas about freedom of choice, being paid, and fewer chains.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be in here!” said Dust Pan, and with just enough urgency in his voice to make me even more suspicious. “Let’s move on!”

Daring Do seemed to pick up on this too, and a mutual look and nod confirmed that we were both, if not on the same page, at least reading the same chapter. “It’s best to be thorough,” she said, giving me a small smile. I suppose her instincts weren’t entirely blunted. “We’re looking for something very small and we don’t want to miss it.”

“It’s definitely not here,” he insisted.

“How would you know?” I asked, and he pulled the usual expression that was a combination of shock and outrage that ponies pull when caught out in an obvious lie. “You seem to know an awful lot about all of this.”

“I transcribed Corded Ware’s notes and letters for him, so of course I know ‘an awful lot about all of this’.”

He had me there, I suppose; as with the Changelings, a small minority of slaves were allowed the privilege of an education so that they could perform menial administrative tasks for their masters. However, I was not about to let him off the hook so quickly, and while his attention was distracted by Yours Truly asking him the sort of questions he didn’t want to answer, Daring Do was rifling through stacks of parchment papers. “So you don’t know where this horn ring is, but you know where it isn’t.”

Dust Pan stammered uselessly for a few moments. “Well, this is an operating theatre,” he said, finally settling on an explanation, “so of course it wouldn’t be in here.”

“No, but this is.” Daring Do returned with a few choice sheets of parchment tucked under her wing, and I saw the colour drain from Dust Pan’s face in the space of a second as though it had been sucked out of him. She made a bit of a show picking out a sheet and peering at the name signed at the bottom, “Senior Vivisector Dust Pan.”

He swallowed hard. “I know how it looks,” he said. It was hardly a job title that inspired thoughts of puppy dogs and butterflies.

Daring Do turned the sheet of yellowed paper so that I could read it, and I saw that it was a log of some sort for the ‘immediate attention of Chief Researcher Corded Ware’. The ink had faded and the script was small and scratchy, but I could make out the Old Ponish words. While I can’t remember everything that I’d read on that single page, it being some decades since, there were certain entries in terse language that stood out to me even after these long years:

The third subject was a young earth pony colt, not yet reached stallionhood. He was taken from his tribe while he and his family fetched water from the nearby stream. His family was killed in the attempt, but he was unaware of their fate. He was subjected to vivisection but expired after three hours from blood loss - see log fourteen for details. Results: inconclusive. Note: the tribe may demand blood for this were they to find the truth. Blaming another tribe will keep their attention away from us, but outright war between them will reduce the number of viable specimens for us.

The fifth subject was an adult unicorn mare, a slave sold to us by a nearby tribe. Impregnated by her former master and sold to avoid a scandal. Seven months pregnant, it was agreed her condition provided a unique opportunity for experimentation. See log seventeen for details. Subject lasted thirteen hours. Results: still inconclusive.

The tenth subject was an earth pony filly. She was captured while tending the fields alone. Exploratory surgery with the intention to test the theory that earth pony magic is harnessed through one or more of the four humours was scheduled, however, the subject attempted to escape. Five guards and seven researchers were killed in her escape attempt before she was slain. One guard to be selected at random for vivisection to remind the others that subjects are useless to us dead.

I’ve seen some horrendous things over the years, and taken part in a few that even I am not terribly proud of, but the sensation of nausea, quite divorced from the general feelings of fear and physical exertion that I’d been afflicted with in this miserable place, at the cold callousness of what was described was unlike any that I’d felt before. And there, quivering before me, was the stallion responsible for it, whose name was signed at the bottom next to the seal of the Old Crystal Empire.

“You can’t judge me,” he said.

“Like Tartarus I can’t,” I hissed. “You did all of this.”

"I was still a slave." He fixed me with a glare. “I have a mother and a baby brother,” he said at length.

“What?”

“What do you think would have happened to them if I refused?” He paused for a few seconds for an answer that I could not muster. “It’s easy for you a thousand years later to say what I should have done. The future is full of ponies who say they would have, I don’t know, joined the resistance, sabotaged a crystal mine, or assassinated King Sombra, but if they really did live back then they would have done exactly the same as me and everypony else. They’d have kept their heads down and got on with serving a tyrant so that they and their families could live to see another day.”

I didn’t have a pithy answer to that. The monstrousness of what I had read he’d done and, I must admit, a certain sense of personal arrogance and self-righteousness, meant that I wasn’t quite ready to cede the moral high ground just yet. He was right, of course, a couple of decades of thinking a little too hard about this particular moral conundrum had led me to finally accept this; most ponies are cowards, I merely being better at hiding it than others, and when thrust into the sort of dilemma that required one to risk one’s own life for a greater cause they’ll prostrate themselves before the tyrant King and kiss his hooves if it guaranteed survival even for just one more day.

[Equestria had been preparing to handle the legal question of what to do with Sombra's civil service, functionaries, and other personnel for months before the war ended, as it was widely expected many would attempt some manner of defence essentially amounting to ‘mind control made me do it’. A venue had indeed been picked in the town that would become Stalliongrad for the trials, where representatives of Sombra’s regime responsible for its many crimes against both its own subjects and those of Equestria and other realms would be sentenced to work in the harsh cold just as their slaves had done. Sombra's last act of defiance in sealing the kingdom away, of course, negated these preparations. Efforts to restart the process following the return of the Crystal Empire were delayed by the Changeling War.]

“Why hide this from us?” I asked.

“I’m not proud of what I’ve done here,” he said, screwing up his face. “Ponies tend not to react well to learning that I used to cut up ponies alive.” He breathed a heavy sigh, almost as though talking about this unpleasantness was a weight off his conscience. “Look, you can moralise all you want when we get out of here, if that’ll make you happy.”

Shockingly, learning that he had been lying to us and had in fact done some particularly nasty things in the distant past, which I reminded myself was merely a couple of years ago to the chronically-displaced Crystal Ponies, only made me distrust him more. I wondered how many others had skeletons lurking in their closets; if we imprisoned every Crystal Pony who had done something objectionable in the time of Sombra then there might not be enough of them left to maintain their kingdom. “Very well,” I said. “You’re still needed to operate the portal.”

Dust Pan nodded quietly, apparently understanding that his continued survival depended upon how useful he was to me. The adjacent room from there was some manner of preparation room for the theatre; it was small, cramped, and absolutely packed with boxes and drawers full of assorted things that I hadn’t any chance at all of understanding the purposes of. Robes, yellowed with age and little more than rags now, hung from pegs by the door.

“Ah-hah!” exclaimed Dust Pan. He was partially buried inside an ornate chest, and a small pile of peculiar items were discarded around hooves. From within the depths of the chest he retrieved a what looked rather like a silver laurel wreath, much like the ones the victorious pegasi warriors of antiquity were often depicted wearing (presumably having stolen the laurel leaves from the earth ponies), and held it with the same amount of caution as one would with a stick of dynamite. Where the ends of the wreath met was a small ring suited for a unicorn’s horn, the actual device we needed.

Cannon Fodder moved to grab it, but I held out my hoof to stop him. “Let’s save that for when we have to blow up the power source,” I said. “We still need to get there first, and Faust knows how many more of those things are out there looking for us.”

He pulled an expression akin to a puppy being denied a treat, but naturally he would do nothing to contradict me, and so nodded his head and silently stepped back with his head bowed. I moved to inspect the thing, and was rather unimpressed by its appearance; I’d expected something a little more grand from the product of a top secret project of dubious ethics from more than a thousand years ago than something that would not look out of place at an amateur dramatics society’s production. The branches were lengths of wire intertwined together into a helix and bent into the shape best suited to fit upon a pony’s head, and the leaves were sheets of metal stamped out in their approximate shape and were soldered onto the wire. Quite why this Looking Glass chap thought it necessary that his device be in the shape of a pegasus laurel wreath escaped me for the moment, but I suppose it was possible that he was simply a keen fan of the classics. However, despite its thoroughly mundane appearance, as I approached it I could certainly sense some measure of magic emanating from it, though the specifics naturally escaped me.

“It looks like it’s still intact,” said Dust Pan as he inspected it, turning the device this way and that. “But we won’t know it works until we try it out.”

“And I presume we can’t do that without the shards finding us instantly,” I said.

Dust Pan nodded. It was a gamble, certainly, but I was very much used to that by now, and I struggled to think of an alternative solution to our little conundrum here. There was still the small matter of what to do after we’d blown up the power source, and if we could even make it back to the portal in time before it all caved in on us, or if the portal would still be functional. Yet I found that taking such things one step at a time, looking only to the next course of action and not thinking too much about everything beyond that, had worked quite well for me so far, though I began to wonder if that sort of thinking was what had led me into this mess in the first place.

From the laboratories, the path to the generator was a simple one. At least, that’s what Dust Pan had told us, for once we had emerged from those chambers of horrors, with the echoes of their atrocities screaming through the centuries, and into a vast chamber large enough to house several airships, I felt all hope drain away from me when I saw that it was absolutely crawling with shards. This enormous space seemed to be some combination of storage area and parade ground, for in the centre stood a company of these shards standing perfectly to attention. Around this central square were boxes, like steel coffins, stacked high, and several shards moved methodically to each one, removing the lid with expert care to reveal another such shard, identical in every way to the one that awakened it, which would crawl out of its coffin to join the formation in the centre.

[The concept of memory remaining after death, as with the shards retaining military discipline after centuries, has borne insidious fruit that larger events like Sombra's reign tended to obscure. More recently—relatively speaking—I was involved in an off-the-books case where a unicorn, fascinated by the magic Sombra employed, had experimented with creating simulacra of his own filly, which he would then cruelly murder at the slightest disobedience before reviving them in a new body, the idea being to prove that trauma, and the lessons derived thereof, persists across lives and can shape one's behaviour. It is for the good of all Equestria that such magic remains dead and buried, and I must strongly warn any who read this passage of the punishment for dark magic.]

They hadn’t seen us, otherwise we’d have been vaporised in less time than it takes for Fancy Pants to seduce a glamorous model. Thoroughly preoccupied with whatever task they had been programmed to execute and with us masked by Cannon Fodder, the four of us crept behind the nearest stack of coffins. We all crowded around my aide as closely as possible, and while I knew that he had already bathed that week and I had become somewhat used to his unique bouquet of unwashed socks, sweat, stale food, and Faust knows what else regardless, I found myself trying to keep my breathing to the absolute bare minimum. Breathing through my mouth didn’t seem to help much, either. However, though the stench was appalling even with all of the imperfectly-healed damage to my entire respiratory system, if we survived this I was determined to pour the entire contents of my fragrance cabinet at home into a bathtub and let Cannon Fodder marinate in it. Daring Do screwed up her face but otherwise did not complain, acclimated to hardship as she was judging from her published adventures, while Dust Pan was doing his damnedest not to throw up. While the blank’s field shielded us from the shards’ perception, the sound of a pony violently losing his breakfast was still bound to attract their attention.

I rested with my back against the pile of boxes, acutely aware that they were filled with more of those shards in storage. The thought that one would burst out from its coffin to slaughter us all screamed loudly in my head, and my mind projected phantom movements and sounds from within those boxes that would not let me rest. I felt thoroughly exhausted, and though the pain in my hoof had dulled to a throbbing ache and my horn no longer felt like somepony was attempting to drive it into my skull with a sledgehammer, the growing headache and nausea did much to compensate for that.

“It’s on the other side of this hall,” whispered Dust Pan, as he peered around the side of the boxes.

“Past those shards?” I asked, and he nodded.

“What are they doing?” asked Daring Do.

Dust Pan took another look around the edge, and then pulled himself back. “I think they’re getting ready to attack the camp above us,” he said. “If they haven’t been able to find us they’ll turn their attention to the intruders above us.” He swallowed hard. “We have to hurry.”

I didn’t need to be told twice, and against every instinct of self-preservation politely asking me to make a run for it back to the portal room, I nodded and asked Dust Pan to lead the way. We moved in silence, or as close to silence as we could possibly muster. The sound of all four of us breathing and the noise our hooves made as we darted from cover to cover seemed like a raucous cacophony, but the shards themselves seemed to be much too preoccupied with waking up their army to notice four ponies skulking about the place. The assortment of boxes around the chamber provided us with a good deal of cover, and as we moved we remained clustered around Cannon Fodder as closely as we could without tripping over each other’s hooves.

Waiting, crouched low and huddled uncomfortably close together, all trying not to gag from being in such close proximity to Cannon Fodder, Daring Do, who had the most experience out of all of us in this sort of thing, would peer around the side of the boxes and we waited, holding our collective breath for the signal. I could hear them, the heavy hoofsteps of the shards as they moved through the chamber, sounding more mechanical than any noise a pony would make while walking, almost in time with the blood thumping through my ears. They were close, I could almost feel them on the other side of the boxes that separated us. The sweat ran down my coat, and I felt a chill freezing my spine.

Then Daring Do would silently wave her hoof and we were off once more, across the empty space between the coffins stacked high. I was certain that the shards had to have seen us, or heard us, or even smelt the pungent odour of my aide and perhaps the scent of my fear, but thanks to Cannon Fodder’s unique ability we remained undetected thus far. We would all but hurl ourselves behind the next obstacle, pause to catch our breaths, and then wait, willing our hearts to slow, for the next signal to go. I wondered if the shards were incapable of performing two roles at once and could only focus on one specific thing at a time, which might explain how we managed to evade them thus far.

While this was all very old hat to Daring Do and Cannon Fodder seemingly trusted that all was in hoof and would work out as it always did, Dust Pan was positively shaking with fright. He looked precisely as bad as I felt, but of course I had experience in hiding such things; his slim frame shivered as though he was cold, he looked as though he was clinging to my aide’s side for warmth, and his ears flicked back and forth frantically. While I had no sympathy for him, not just for the revelation of his sadistic crimes but also that he was partially responsible for this entire mess for not stopping Corded Ware when he had the chance to, if he allowed his emotions to get the better of him and cry out in fear it would certainly attract the murderous attention of those shards and that would be the end of us all. The stallion was no soldier or adventurer, and while he must have endured some measure of pain and torment over the course of his enslavement, he hadn’t been exposed to true terror as the rest of us here had. I was hardly used to it, one never really does, but one learns to hold one’s emotions at bay for just long enough, until the dust settles and one can indulge in a private weep in the sanctity of one’s own chambers. We’d all crowded around Cannon Fodder, so I had to awkwardly lean over my aide’s back to whisper something encouraging:

“Not far now. You’ll be back in the Crystal Empire before you know it.” Granted, it was hardly the best that I could come up with, but it seemed to do the trick and calm him down enough to keep him from doing something stupid.

That all still remained to be seen, however. We still had some distance to go, but we had been exceptionally lucky thus far. As I peered around the corner, waiting for Daring Do to give the all-clear, I observed the shards going about their business. They moved with the utmost precision and efficiency, with no movement wasted, and bearing a single-minded determination to fulfil whatever task had been assigned to them. While they remained unsettlingly silent, they were also perfectly coordinated too, with none of the barked orders, banter, and threats of violence that normally accompanies soldiers doing heavy manual work. It was this silence that I found most unnerving, as the clearest indicator that despite their origins they were distinctly un-equine in nature.

Their army was growing in size as we crept along. Each time we darted from one pile of boxes to another, which were becoming smaller and sparser as more and more were opened and their contents resurrected, I would catch further glimpses of the formation, with more crystal soldiers added with each furtive look. At my guess they were approximately at a company strength, perhaps more, but certainly more than enough to wipe out the division stationed above them, completely unaware of the horror that was waiting to burst forth from under their hooves.

As we neared the door, waiting behind the last set of boxes until the going was clear enough to make our move, I heard a loud, singular ‘thud’. Unable to resist a peek, I peered around the corner of our concealing boxes to see that the entire formation of shards, more than a hundred of them by my uneducated guess, had turned to face the corridor through which we had entered this hall, and that the sound I’d heard was the entire company turning in absolutely perfect unison. They faced away from us, but I still held my breath as I observed them, fearing with some justification that their sense of sight was not entirely focused in a single direction as one would expect with eyes. Then, with that same unnerving mathematical precision, they marched away into the darkness of the corridor beyond.

“Hurry!” exclaimed Dust Pan in a hushed whisper. With the coast seemingly clear for now, he, his fear paradoxically thrusting him towards danger, raced to the door. It was a far larger affair, about the size one would expect in front of a grand cathedral, but as devoid of any particular ornamentation as everything else in this ghoulish, austere place. Again, I felt an small stab of fear at my heart at the sight of this enormous door, as my previous encounter with what he had called a ‘Metus’ door had imbued me with a distrust of doors in general that persists to this day, but Dust Pan was rather more obliging this time and began to drag one open without being ordered to. He appeared to have some difficulty, so Daring Do joined in, while Cannon Fodder and I stood guard in case one of the shards realised they’d forgotten something, such as the presence of four luckless ponies about to utterly ruin their day, and come storming back.

The door opened with a sharp grating sound, and it was one that seemingly reverberated around the entire underground complex. If the shards didn’t know we were still poking around their home, they must now. Dust Pan and Daring Do had managed to wedge the door open just wide enough to admit a stout pony.

“It’s through here!” exclaimed Dust Pan excitedly. He darted in, followed by Daring Do, but before I could follow I heard the shriek of a discharge of magic, the sound of tremendous crashing, and a shrill yelp of pain that could only have come from Dust Pan.

The thought to run away and let the two of them deal with it occurred to me briefly, but I’d already thrown myself through the gap and into the chamber beyond with Cannon Fodder directly behind me before I could act on it. With scarcely a second to assess the increasingly desperate situation, I saw a large glowing thing at the far end of this hall that had to be the source of power Dust Pan had mentioned and a number of shards in between us and our goal.

Dust Pan and Daring Do had taken cover behind an arcane control panel of sorts; the former screwed up his face in pain, and I saw that his right shoulder was scorched from a glancing shot and his nose was bleeding from where he must have launched himself face-first into the wall. Daring Do, however, swiftly took to the air, grabbed her whip, and swung it with great force. The long strip lashed out and wrapped around a support beam in the ceiling, whereupon Daring Do hurled herself at speed into the small group of shards directly ahead of me. With her hindlegs out and appropriately braced, swinging on her whip in true swashbuckling fashion, she collided with the shards and scattered them like bowling pins, and her forward momentum was sufficient to carry her through.

“Get them!” she cried.

They ought to have shot me there and then, but I assumed that Cannon Fodder’s presence scrambled their senses again, so instead their heads swivelled in the direction of Daring Do, who by this point had reached the apex of her swing and was turning around for another go. This was my opening, thought I, and so, ignoring the screaming pain in my hoof, I hurled myself into the pile.

The first shard I shot at point blank range, and its head shattered into a brilliant shower of shards that left a few nasty cuts on my face. Far be it from me to throw myself into such danger without nary a thought as to my own self-preservation, but these things seemed to be utterly lethal at range. Indeed it was a small miracle that Dust Pan had survived being shot. Closer up, they were certainly tough, but being right in their blank faces made it harder for them to aim their lethal rays without hitting one another.

A shrieking blast split the air above. Daring Do swerved at the last moment to avoid the shot, then swept in, carried forward on her wings and the momentum of her whip, and again crashed into the shards now staggering to their hooves. Cannon Fodder, too, not wanting to be left out, threw himself into the fight. He pounced upon one shard that had once again been thrown to the ground, pinned it, and then, with considerable exertion, wrenched its head clean off its neck.

“Hurry!” screamed Dust Pan. He’d dragged himself to the door again, perhaps, I thought, to try and make a run for it, but something had rather put a dent in that plan. “They’re coming back!”

Dread struck me like a pail of cold water hurled at my face, bucket and all, but I scarcely had time to acknowledge it. A shard had risen to his hooves, and it swung one such appendage in a wide arc to slap me across the face. My cheek exploded in pain and stars sparkled dazzlingly before my eyes. The force of the blow sent me back, and in a fit of panic I let loose a bolt of magic directly in front of me. With luck I hit it square in the chest, scorching the shiny crystal surface, but it scarcely staggered it.

We would be overwhelmed soon, and I could barely see straight let alone fire. My horn felt as though it was a lump of hot lead nailed to my forehead. Out of other options, I called out to Cannon Fodder.

“Catch!” I hurled the laurel wreath in his direction, but I’d misjudged. The thing flew through the air like a frisbee, too high and arcing slightly to the right.

I feared for a moment that I’d lost it, or it’d be dashed against the far wall and shatter into a thousand useless pieces, but Daring Do released her whip from the bar overhead and dived for the chaplet, wings beating furiously. She caught it in her mouth, then banked to the left tightly to avoid splattering herself against the wall, and hurled it with greater precision than I towards Cannon Fodder.

My aide reared up on his hindlegs, unbothered by the shards swarming all around us, and thrust a forehoof in the air, whereupon the spinning wreath was caught like a hoop on a stick at a fairground attraction. Then he stood there and looked at it.

“Put the bloody thing on!” I shouted at him.

The shards gathered around me. That they hadn’t reduced me to a small pile of ash and a scorch mark on the crystal floor indicated they had sufficient awareness to avoid friendly fire, but neither had they caved in my skull with their dinner plate-sized hooves; perhaps they wanted to take me alive to tear out my soul and stuff it inside another hollow shell for eternity. Others fired at Daring Do, who weaved tightly between salvos of brilliant white beams that left scorch marks on the walls. She twisted desperately in the air, exhibiting the manoeuvrability of a particularly tenacious housefly evading a rolled-up newspaper.

‘A fate worse than death’ is a cliche that never sat right with me; I didn’t think that there could be such a thing, but what I’d witnessed here had proved me very wrong. Screaming in defiance and desperation, I hurled myself at the closest shard. I don’t know if they were capable of experiencing surprise, or any emotion at all for that matter, but to my mind the expression on its blank, empty face was something akin to shock. I brought the thing down to the floor, and where it struck the hard surface a spider’s web of cracks spread across its body. Seizing my chance, I stamped my hooves down in it. The impact jolted my forelegs painfully, but my iron horseshoes smashed into the creature’s body and, where it was weakened by its fall, shattered great lumps of glittering crystal from it. The soul trapped within poured out from the hole as ghostly pale smoke and the shard fell inert.

I hadn’t time to register the feeling of gratitude from the freed soul, imagined or not, before impossibly strong hooves wrenched me to the ground. Pain exploded in my back as one of them stamped on me, perhaps in revenge, and I heard and felt something crack inside. Each breath brought a sharp, stabbing sensation in my chest. A shard grabbed my forehooves and spread them out, while another pinned down my hindlegs. I struggled against them, each movement bringing that awful agony with it, but mortal fear makes for an effective anaesthetic. Shouting, cursing, screaming, I wrenched my limbs against their grip, but they might as well have restrained me in a series of vices; they were implacable and unmoving, without the slightest bit of ‘give’ that comes with struggling against even the strongest ponies. And through all of this, whether they were sadistically toying with me or planning how best to drag me to the operating table, I wondered what was Cannon Fodder doing?

The hooves pinning me down with such strength became slack, such that I could free myself and stand without the slightest hint of resistance from my captors. Somewhat bewildered, woozy from the pain ripping through my body, I was ignored as I stood up. I’d even used one of them as something to lean on. They were all staring in the same direction -- Cannon Fodder, who wore the wreath upon his head.

My aide’s face twisted into a rictus of excruciating pain. Sweat ran in great rivulets down his filthy body, clearing channels through the accumulated grim that no soap could shift before and revealing for the first time that his natural coat was an attractive shade of pale purple. Through gritted teeth he hissed and groaned, and every muscle on his broad frame was tense with exertion.

“Shoot them!” cried Dust Pan. “Shoot them now!”

Learning to fire bolts of magic from my horn took me months of tedious study and magical exercises before I could do it with any accuracy and power, whereas now we had mere seconds and he had never used his to pick up even a teacup. Cannon Fodder trembled, his body struggling to contain all of the magic that it had snatched away over the course of his entire life, and his horn spluttered with sparks. He was trying, at least, but to suddenly have access to all of that power but with no concept of what to do with it. The shards, sensing his vulnerability, began to advance on him.

“Cannon Fodder!” I shouted. The sound of my voice seemed to snap him out of it, and he straightened up to a posture approaching ‘attention’. The closest shards turned to face me, and one moved to pin me to the ground again. It was a gamble, but I had an idea, and doing my best impression of Sergeant Major Square Basher running through line infantry firing drill, I bellowed: “Make ready! Present! Fire!”

There was a searing flash of white, a shriek of raw magical energy ripping through the air, and the stench of ozone and burning. I flinched from the sudden blast of heat, barrelling into one of the shards. Ducking beneath it, blinking away the spots in my eyes, I saw the beam had ripped through their crystal bodies and partially melted them into so much glittering slag. Molten crystal, glowing with the heat, dripped like candle wax down partially-melted bodies, to splatter on the ground to form slowly-solidifying puddles. My uniform smoked, my coat was singed, and my skin smarted with the momentary blast of intense heat. I picked myself up off the ground, nearly collapsing again when I put weight on my injured hoof. The air was dry and hot, and my nose and throat stung with each ragged breath. I was surrounded by these half-melted shards; four stocky crystal legs were all that remained of each of them, as their bodies and heads had been reduced to this liquid wax-like substance that was gradually congealing into bizarre shapes barely reminiscent of the equine frame they once had.

At least Cannon Fodder had a decent aim, thought I, as I patted down a jacket sleeve that was on fire.

“The power source!” I heard Daring Do shout. She hovered in mid-air near to this glowing thing; it resembled a furnace of sorts, being a large crystal shell housing whatever arcane reaction that kept this facility going for over so many years, and a series of pipes emerged from the top, ran across the ceiling overhead, and disappeared into the walls. The cold blue light within pulsed with a steady rhythm, and now that my senses weren’t fixated on keeping me alive for the moment I could also feel the throb of so much contained power in time with the pulses. It put me in mind of a heart of sorts.

Cannon Fodder turned his head towards it. His horn was positively smoking now, like Yours Truly puffing away on a good cigar. His stance was wide, with all four limbs planted far apart and tensed as though to cope with the enormous power he was exerting.

Another flash, though this time I was prepared and covered my eyes. The heat struck me in the face once again. The shrill whine of superheated air was accompanied by the squeal of machinery being wrenched apart. The floor beneath my hooves trembled, and there was also the sound of a tremendous crashing all about the place. Something grabbed me by my shoulders and I opened my eyes to see Daring Do, her muzzle almost against mine and her eyes wide with alarm. Behind her I saw the power source was a smouldering ruin of sloughing molten crystal, the light within had died, and with it great gouges ripped their way through the crumbling ceiling. She screamed in my face, an order that should have been redundant but still necessary to motivate my shocked self into the very necessary action: “Run!”

Chapter 9

Crawling over the debris on the floor, dodging stones falling from the ceiling, and racing towards the door, I could not help but feel a peculiar sensation of deja vu. It was an odd feeling to have while desperately trying to escape an underground dungeon that was in the process of rapid collapse just after we blew up something volatile. As Daring Do, having darted ahead to the door to the hall beyond and seen that I was struggling to keep up with my injured leg and what I presumed was a cracked rib or two, raced back to help me over and around the obstacle course of smashed masonry that barred my way, it came to me.

“An escape from a collapsing building again?” I blurted out, as I tried to climb over the broken remains of a console.

“What?” shouted Daring Do, tugging on my remaining good forehoof insistently.

I made it over the obstacle, her help notwithstanding, and trotted to the door. White hot needles stabbed into my side with every step, which was accompanied by the heavier dull ache in my injured forehoof. Still, mortal terror helped to keep my mind off just how much moving about hurt, so I raced up the steps as fast as the pain would allow, slipping a little as the flowing blood from the reopened wound had made my horseshoe rather slick. As I half-ran and was half-dragged through the door, the chamber behind me that housed the broken power source crashed into utter ruin as the ancient stone ceiling fell upon it.

“All of your stories end with you escaping from a collapsing building!” I yelled over the roar of tumbling rocks. A cloud of choking dust burst through the slightly-opened doorway, covering me in a coating of fine grey powder that glittered in the dying light.

Ahead I saw Cannon Fodder and Dust Pan standing further into the grand hall. Something shone brightly in the air, like an enormous veil of star spider silk spread across half of the entire hall, and above the low, ominous rumbling of the entire complex starting to fall apart I heard the shrieks of vast reserves of magic discharging, coinciding with the bright and brilliant flickers of orange-yellow light erupting over its surface. A shield spell, and one that even Shining Armour might, if not outright envy, at least nod approvingly towards.

“Not all of them!” Daring Do jabbed me in the shoulder on the side that had the fewest and least grievous wounds, partially out of spite judging by the chilling glare that she gave me, but mostly to get me to make a move on, I would imagine. She must have heard that particular criticism before.

With everything aching in some manner and with a few spots hurting a damned sight more than others, I hobbled after her to where Cannon Fodder and Dust Pan stood behind the shield. There, beyond the shimmering field lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree as decorated by a candle-obsessed maniac, I saw the distorted shapes of what looked like the entire army of shards unleashing a veritable onslaught of magic against my aide’s rather crudely-conjured shield.

“I’m very certain that they do!” I yelled back at Daring Do.

“Old ruins are structurally unstable and are filled with traps because the ancient ponies who built them were very petty about future generations trying to preserve their history!” she retorted quickly, probably having rehearsed that counter before.

Cannon Fodder himself stood defiantly, legs wide and head bowed with his horn a shining beacon of light. Sweat flowed down his body, and a lifetime of grime and muck and Faust knows what else was washed away to reveal a lustrous and shimmering coat. Amidst the stench of ozone I noticed for the first time that I couldn’t smell him; that all-pervasive odour, one that waxed and waned with the heat and the humidity but was always offensive to one’s sense of smell and could never be overpowered by anything short of poison gas, was simply gone. It was disconcerting in the same way that finding a familiar tree outside one’s home that one has seen every single day has disappeared without warning.

“Good show, Cannon Fodder!” I shouted above the din, or tried to at least; he always did respond well to praise, I thought. “There’s a plucky chap, show them what for!”

I might have been a bit delirious from the mixture of pain and exhaustion, as I certainly felt more than a little queer. Exhilarated, perhaps, is the word I was looking for -- exhilarated and terrified. Nevertheless, Cannon Fodder appeared to be having difficulty maintaining the shield, or rather focusing all of that energy into the desired effect. Here and there the shimmering veil crackled and split, and a couple of shots managed to tear through it to leave scorch marks upon the wall behind, which was gradually disintegrating.

Yet he roared a cry of defiance, or rather that was what I believe he intended it to be, as it came out as more of a strangle groan of exertion. The shield we huddled behind became filled with brilliant white light and was hurled straight into the shards gathered ahead of us. The magic shield struck them with the force of a speeding obese dragon crashing into an antique shop specialising in exceptionally fragile porcelain. When the light cleared and Cannon Fodder slumped over in apparent exhaustion, his horn now glowing like heated iron in the blacksmith’s furnace in a manner that I knew was not a natural aura, I saw that the assembled formation of shards had shattered into so many small, glittering pieces just like their namesake.

“We have to hurry!” said Dust Pan, as he grabbed Cannon Fodder’s unusually-clean foreleg and tugged him forward. “Before his horn burns out completely!”

So that would be the ‘explode’ part that he’d mentioned earlier. Grabbing his other hoof with my magic (even though he looked cleaner than is normal for him, which I presumed to be a side effect of his blank abilities being repressed, and my curiosity has not been strong enough to ask Twilight Sparkle and be subjected to a four hour Twilecture on the subject complete with slides and I would imagine some manner of group activity, I didn’t want to risk catching something from him), Dust Pan and I half-guided, half-dragged Cannon Fodder to the far door. He staggered along, not nearly fast enough as far as I was concerned, but the stallion was heavy even without his armour, being a rather stocky chap, and neither I nor the thin, reedy little nerd here were in a fit state to carry him.

Daring Do flew on ahead, momentarily disappearing into the murky black of the corridor beyond, then just as swiftly returned to announce that the coast was clear for now. We picked our way around the broken remnants of the shards, littered all across the cracked and tilted floor like so much rubbish after a particularly raucous garden party. Where before Cannon Fodder had melted them with intense heat, here they had been shattered into so much shining debris by the sheer force of his shield striking them at speed. Beyond, the hurled magic shield had struck the far wall, leaving an array of splintering cracks that resembled relief maps of great Zebrican rivers over its surface, trembling with whatever forces fuelled the rapid collapse of this miserable place. The great door itself had been blasted open, one hinge wrenched off, and it swung unsteadily on the remaining one.

[Throwing one’s shield is an accepted move in magical combat, though it is considered to be risky as it leaves one vulnerable to counter attack should one miss the target. The effect is also not dissimilar from the rapid expansion of pressure resulting from a conventional explosion, and so care and timing is required to avoid self-injury—'bursting' a shield spell like a shockwave too soon, rather than while holding it at a distance, often leads to concussion.]

I dared to look over my shoulder to see that the entrance to the power source was now buried under a growing mountain of masonry, and one that was steadily advancing on us as more and more of the ceiling gave way under the stress. As its disintegration proceeded, the structural integrity of this entire place would decline further, only accelerating its already rapid collapse. That realisation was enough to motivate me to push past the pain, grab Cannon Fodder with my own hooves, and drag him onwards with Dust Pan.

Daring Do landed next to me, taking my injured forehoof and guiding me ahead, and we all moved together like some scurrying, multi-legged thing through the door. A great, crashing eruption of sound and a gust of displaced air bringing yet more dust and powdered stone directly against our flanks gave us further impetus to get a damned move on, and we scrambled, hooves flailing, gasping at the stale, muggy, dusty air, through the door into the corridor. The stone floor was at an odd angle, and shuddered disconcertingly under my hooves.

“The Griffon’s Goblet!” shouted Daring Do.

I looked around, seeing only the corridor receding into an impenetrable darkness and the warm, almost reassuring glow of Cannon Fodder’s still-smoking horn. “Where?” I asked.

“The story!” Daring Do grinned; she was actually enjoying this, and I questioned whether she truly was related to me. “That one ended with me running from the creeping curse in the Everfree Forest.”

“You were still running from something!” I blurted out.

We followed our route back at a pace that was halfway between a brisk trot and a hobble. The ground trembled throughout, further slowing our progress, and every so often lurched as though we were on a cruise ship in a storm, as opposed to a dungeon buried an uncomfortable distance beneath the surface. In such cases we often skidded into the walls, and whomever happened to be on the side closest to the wall, either Daring Do or Dust Pan, would feel the full brunt of the other three of us sandwiching them against it. Chunks of varying size fell from the ceiling, the smaller ones pattering off our backs like little hailstones and the larger ones striking us like much larger hailstones.

My special talent led us around corners, feeling the gentle tug that seemed to tell me in an uncertain way that one particular route was safer than the other in a sort of meandering way back to the portal room. Dust Pan protested that we were going the wrong way, but quickly learnt to trust me when I dragged him into the next room just in time for him to see the ceiling of the hallway he wanted to merrily stroll down collapse violently exactly where he wanted to go. However, it was to my continued astonishment that we came to the portal room without further mishap, and I felt a sudden lift to my mood that in hindsight might have merely been blood loss.

Dust Pan wasted no time in sprinting to the portal’s machinery, diving into the arcane mechanism to fiddle about with whatever was needed to make it work again. It might have taken mere seconds for him to fire it up but it felt like hours, all the while the trembling of the ancient stones beneath my hooves grew more pronounced and the growling rumbles of the haunted tombs and halls falling under the mass of so much earth above became louder and louder. It put me in mind of a crawling dragon or some other monstrous beast slowly but inexorably stomping towards us. Cannon Fodder, though suffering under the agony of some manner of magical overload, helped Daring Do slam the door shut and drag ancient benches to block it.

The portal flared to life again with another flash of bright light and a loud crack of displaced air. The space within the circle was filled with the curtain of blue light once more, promising safety, home, comfort, and a well-stocked bar. Yet before I could hurl myself into it, Dust Pan forced himself past me, like Cannon Fodder trying to get a good spot at an all-you-can-eat buffet table, and leapt into the rippling wall of light and disappeared. I felt a twinge of annoyance at this, but perhaps it was better to let him test it first before me, just in case it spat him back out with his insides on the outside.

“Sir!” Cannon Fodder shouted, pulling insistently at my shoulder to all but force my attention behind us.

Shards appeared at the door, which lay in pieces on the floor along with the smashed remains of the barricade. They moved erratically; not the smooth, efficient movements of before, but jerky and spasmodic, as though whatever puppet master pulling their string had the tremors. Yet their horns lit with their foul magic regardless, and panic seized my heart. Their tomb was crashing into ruin before their eyes and being robbed of their chance to conquer the surface, and all they had left was to spitefully exterminate the interlopers.

“Shit!” I jumped towards the portal as Dust Pan had just done, but my bloody foreleg gave out and I fell flat on my snout. Daring Do and Cannon Fodder, the latter with his face still screwed up in a rictus of pain, took a foreleg each and dragged me across the polished stones. I kicked my hindlegs in an effort to speed things along, as the shards swarmed into the rooms, staggering as though drunk, and took aim directly at me. With one final burst of effort Daring Do and Canon Fodder dived headfirst into the shining wall of energy, pulling me along for the ride, just as an ear-splitting shriek of magical energy obliterated all other sounds.

It all passed in a single, timeless instant; one moment I was in an ancient, collapsing chamber deep under Fort Nowhere, and the next I was elsewhere. I suppose that’s the entire point of portals, but part of me expected something a little more grand to the act of having one’s constituent parts hurled through the empty, screaming void between worlds to emerge somewhere else entirely. At first, the sight of so many crystals all around made me worry that we’d ended up in another separate tomb of shards who might have heard about what we’d just done to their fellows, but the incongruous presence of a rather large bed, makeup table, armoire, and all the other bits and pieces one would expect from the opulent boudoir of noblepony of the Crystal Empire reassured me that the risk of being vaporised here was minimal. Tasteful hanging drapes covered enormous windows, but the mid-morning light streamed through the gaps and provided sufficient light for my eyes, already accustomed to the darkness, to see.

I was still on the floor, and Daring Do and Cannon Fodder, both having made it through safely, let go of my forelegs. The latter looked forlornly at the two broken halves of the chaplet, and already the dark patches of muck and grim were returning to his purple coat, as was his unique bouquet of unwashed underpants and general rot. Dust Pan, having gone ahead of us, stood and observed the strange room with an expectant, tense air.

“Can you make another one?” Cannon Fodder asked vacantly, and Dust Pan shook his head.

I lacked the energy to stand, and besides, the cool surface of the crystal floor was remarkably welcoming, so I felt little desire to. That I was somewhere safe, or at least appeared to be safe, was sufficient. Somepony else would come along and pick me up anyway. However, what little energy I had left was enough for me to lift my head to see the two figures sitting on the bed, both staring at me with shocked and horrified expressions, and when the recognition burned its way into my brain it unlocked a little more energy to get me to raise my head a little straighter.

“Hello, Cadance,” I said, nodding to the alicorn in pink. Then, to the unicorn in white, “Shining Armour.”

The two were still in a close embrace, the Prince-Consort had wrapped his strong hooves around his taller but thinner Princess. Both sat up in the bed, eyes wide in shock at the four ponies that had materialised inside their bedroom, and judging by how Shining Armour pulled the soft silk sheets up to conceal certain parts of their anatomy that, given the particular way he held Cadance close to him, could only have engaged in an intimate manner, our desperate escape must have interrupted their mid-morning fun time. If I wasn’t so relieved to be out of that horrible place and also in quite a lot of pain I might have laughed at the absurdity of it all.

“Oh, Bluey!” exclaimed Cadance, her pink cheeks flushing deep crimson with what was mostly embarrassment. She eyed the unlikely four sprawled on the floor at the base of her oversized bed. “And friends. What are you doing in our bedroom?”

Shining Armour glowered at me from his perch atop the bed. In contrast to his wife there was no embarrassment, only barely-concealed outrage at my accidental interruption of his performing of his husbandly duties. I could see his stocky, barrel chest heave under the soft bedsheets, and in the silence that fell as I tried and failed to come up with some response, I could hear his low, heavy breathing like a dragon about to expel flame from its maw.

“Yes, Blueblood, the explanation you’re about to give had better be good,” he said, his voice much too steady, which indicated an immense amount of self control being exerted. He wanted to leap over the bed and throttle me, I could tell, as if I’d done this deliberately to spite him, but decorum stopped him.

I couldn’t begin to explain it all, so instead I asked, “Dust Pan?”

Said war criminal prostrated himself before his rightful rulers, nose pressed against the floor and trying to look at anywhere else but the two on the bed. Whether or not he truly acknowledged them as his rulers or he still privately held his loyalty to King Sombra, as I still suspect of a number of Crystal Ponies to this day, was something I would have to ponder.

“Why did the portal lead to my cousin Cadance’s bedroom?”

“This, ah…” He pointed behind us, and I followed his hoof to see an enormous mirror set into an ornate crystal frame, carved with all manner of intricate designs relating to flowers and such forth. The mirror itself leaned against the wall, angled back so that I could only see my head. It was all very pretty, but I didn’t like the sight of myself staring back at me; I rarely did even for one so vain as I, as more often than not during those days of the war where I lacked much of the treatments and services I’d enjoyed in Canterlot I looked appalling at the best of times, but now was far worse. I was covered in glittering crystal dust, which might have suited me rather well were it not for sunken eyes set in sockets darkened by stress and pain, with their haunted, hollow expression. My mane was a frightful mess too.

“Sir,” interrupted Cannon Fodder, but I shut him up with an imperious wave of my hoof and indicated for Dust Pan to continue.

“That’s the portal disguised as a simple mirror,” explained Dust Pan. “It appears to have been moved to King Sombra’s old bedchambers. Which, um, is now occupied by the rightful Crystal Princess.”

I arched an eyebrow at the two on the bed. “Really, Cadance?” I said, unable to resist grinning. “You and Shining Armour on Sombra’s bed? I suppose that’s one way to rub it in.”

The flippant comment finally snapped Shining Armour out of his daze. He grimaced and snapped at me, “Blueblood, I thought you grew out of these foalish pranks! You have ten seconds to explain yourself before I call the gu-” He finally recognised Daring Do, who suddenly found the space between her hooves much more interesting than the embarrassing sight before her. “Is that Daring Do?”

“Sir,” repeated Cannon Fodder, more insistently this time, which was odd but I carried on ignoring him.

Cadance began to wriggle her way out from under the sheets, and I afforded my cousin the required modesty by averting my eyes. “You look awful! What happened?”

“We were in Fort Nowhere,” I began, finally summoning the energy to stand up. That is, I tried to. I planted all four hooves on the ground, as I know I’m perfectly capable of doing even after the battering I’d received that morning, but when it came to the right hindleg the damned thing just wouldn’t obey and I toppled over.

“Sir, your leg is missing,” explained Cannon Fodder.

To this day, I still don’t quite know how I’d managed to ignore the fact that I’d lost an entire leg for so long. I suppose everypony else except Cannon Fodder was distracted by Cadance and Shining Armour. A few minutes must have passed between tumbling through the portal and me noticing that what was once four was now three, and yet inexplicably it had completely escaped my notice until I tried to stand up and found I didn’t have enough hooves to accomplish what foals can do straight from the womb. Twisting my neck around, I saw that my right hindleg was severed cleanly at the gaskin -- a very neat and straight slice through the flesh and bone, but the sliced meat there was singed black and not bleeding. Then the pain hit me, as though waiting behind the door of my perception until I finally noticed it. White hot, agonising pain pierced into the blackened stump, and I screamed. I dimly heard Cadance shout for a servant to fetch the doctor.

[Blueblood was likely in a state of shock after his ordeal.]

***

“The portal closed around your leg as you were dragged through it,” explained Dust Pan. “It cauterised the wound too, otherwise you might have bled out by now.”

[It’s more likely that a blast from the shards had incinerated Blueblood’s leg as he was pulled through the portal, as a portal closing on a body part would not cauterise the resulting wound.]

“Lucky me,” I snapped bitterly. I couldn’t say that I was attached to that one leg in particular, but I took its loss rather hard; after the frankly dreadful morning I’d had, this was just the metaphorical cherry on top of a vast cake made out of excrement. Thinking back on those final seconds of our desperate escape, I recalled kicking with my hindlegs, trying to push myself faster into the portal as I was dragged into it, and it was only by luck that my other rearward appendage was tucked in as the portal closed.

The doctor, a rather elderly stallion with a limp who I would assume thought that acting as Princess Cadance’s personal physician would be a nice, cushy little job serving an immortal alicorn princess, had flapped about in a bit of a panic when presented with a real medical emergency. That is, until Daring Do managed to shout some sense into him and get him to do his job properly. After doing the usual and bandaging up the stump nicely and filling me with enough painkillers to numb everything into a pleasing, distant haze, I’d been carried to a bed in one of the palace’s many guest bedrooms and left under the temporary care of Cannon Fodder, Daring Do, and Dust Pan. My jacket, covered in more dust, had been removed and was placed on the back of a chair in a manner that would make my valet arch a disapproving eyebrow before discreetly hanging it up on a proper hanger. In the meantime, a concerned Princess Cadance and a frustrated Prince-Consort Shining Armour tried to hash out what to do with me from behind the shut door to the corridor.

Cadance was full of worry, but I was in safe hooves for now. Her husband, however, remained rather annoyed at me for inadvertently interrupting their long-planned conjugal activity; the two had their schedules dominated by both running the Crystal Empire and looking after Flurry Heart, and fate had apparently ordained that my terribly narrow escape into their bedroom was to take place in the half hour slot they’d pencilled in. It was safe to say that the romantic mood was well and truly killed.

Still, the bed was soft and comfortable. I all but sank into the plush mattress and pillows, and, on the bright side I had a lengthy recuperation in Canterlot to look forward to. If anything, losing a limb would only inflate my dubious reputation for heroics, especially if I could come up with a story more thrilling than being too slow getting through a portal while running away, and ensure that I’d be kept as far as possible from frontline duties from now on. In a way, though I was sad to lose the leg, even in my drugged-up haze I saw how I could make its loss work for me. That is, until my dear half-sister saw fit to chime in.

“Prosthetics are very good these days,” said Daring Do. In the intervening time between the doctor filling me with morphine and me being carried on a stretcher to this bed she’d found space to don her disguise as A. K. Yearling. I presumed she kept the hat, cloak, and large, thick glasses in that seemingly bottomless satchel of hers, along with all of the papers and bits and pieces she had pilfered from the tomb, and had much experience in doffing and donning her disguise very quickly.

Nevertheless, that statement had rather sunk whatever minor positive feeling I could glean from this rather depressing situation. After all, Captain Redcoat had lost a foreleg in battle and he was back on frontline duty in less than a week, and if I wasn’t careful I could very well find myself in that exact situation. She wasn’t wrong, as with the advances in medical science and healing magic brought on by the continuing war, having a new limb fitted was about as invasive as an eye test, uncomfortable but not entirely traumatic.

Silence followed. In truth, I’d rather everypony there left me and let me sleep. The doctor had not only denied my request for a bottle of Scoltch whisky but Cadance had confiscated my hipflask, so not only was I miserable and exhausted but I was also disgustingly sober - the sort of flighty, numbing sensation from the painkillers unfortunately left me with sufficient consciousness for me to think too much. I didn’t know how I was going to even begin explaining what I’d just been through; for all anypony else knew at Fort Nowhere I’d descended into the catacombs below with a team of archaeologists and a writer of fun adventure novels and then did not come back up again, and I dreaded to think what General Market Garden might be doing without my supervision.

[Princess Cadance had known about Blueblood’s drinking habit and, like many of us, were concerned about it, which is why she ‘confiscated’ the hipflask.]

“So, Blueblood,” said Daring Do, apparently finding the quiet a little too awkward to deal with. Her familiar tone still annoyed me a little, but after what we had just endured together I’d say she had earned that right. “Are we good?”

“What do you mean?” I blurted out. It must have been a commoner phrase that I was too regal to understand, unless she truly wanted to start a philosophical discussion about the morality of our actions today.

She frowned a little in irritation. “I mean the two of us. Are things fine between us? Look, I’m sorry Dad- our father was a jerk to you, but I had no idea and no way of knowing.”

“A ‘jerk’ is putting it mildly,” I said. Just when I thought I had left that wretched old stallion in the past, the memory of him came back to tell me that I could never truly leave.

She might have been a writer of stories that happened to be mostly true, but surprise family reunions in the manner that she had envisaged, involving a lot of hugging and crying and promises to make up for lost time, simply didn’t happen to ponies like me in reality. A bastard foal turning up at one’s metaphorical doorstep tends to throw the entire family’s carefully-laid plans about inheritance and breeding into chaos, not to mention the scandal. It was a queer thing, now that I think about it, that this sort of thing was commonplace amongst the nobility in Equestria such that I would imagine that there could be a convention held for the illegitimate scions for society’s upper crust, and I would opine that being forced into loveless marriages for the sake of land and titles would have something to do with it, but everypony involved undertook great effort to pretend that it didn’t happen and acted all shocked and confused when such news was inevitably made public.

Daring Do was still waiting for a proper answer from me, for some manner of acceptance, perhaps. I owed her that, for none of what our father had done to me was her fault.

“Yes, we’re ‘good’,” I said finally. I didn’t know how I was going to explain this to the rest of the family, but perhaps I didn’t need to; after all, she needed to maintain her cover as a reclusive author, and the fewer ponies who knew the truth of the matter the less likely it was going to be leaked.

She seemed visibly relieved at hearing that. Perhaps that’s all she wanted to hear from me all this time, and with luck we could put this entire messy affair behind us. Faust knows I could never read another Daring Do novel in the same way again. However, before we could continue with this touching family moment, the door swung open and one of the very last ponies that I expected to see here stumbled clumsily into the room.

“Terribly sorry,” said the Beige Pony as he blundered in. He delved into the inner breast pocket of his crumpled and oversized suit jacket, rummaged around in what had to be a voluminous cavity, and then produced a small card that identified him as an agent of S.M.I.L.E. I noticed that he looked equally unassuming in his photo as he did now and the previous time I had the misfortune to see him. “I need to have a little chat with His Highness for a moment, in private, please.”

The others stood about gormlessly, clearly not sure what to make of the slightly overweight and entirely bland-looking pony purporting to be a spy, and, well, I was not about to make an enemy of S.M.I.L.E. when I had enough of those already. “Very well,” I said. “It won’t be long.”

“Of course not,” said the Beige Pony with a small smile.

He had a name, but for the life of me I cannot remember what it was, and looking back I’m certain I’d forgotten it as soon as I’d heard it. The stallion seemed to have no unique features that remained in one’s memory, aside from a slightly stocky build and his perpetually wrinkled and ill-fitting suit, and even his cutie mark seemed to have no discernable shape. When one looked directly at him, one could clearly see the structure of his face, the precise beige colour of his coat, and whatever it was his cutie mark was supposed to represent, but the moment one’s attention was diverted away from taking in the sheer blandness of this stallion’s appearance it slipped from one’s memory like a bar of wet soap in one’s hooves. I wish I had a camera with me, but I feared what would happen to the device if it tried to capture his likeness.

The others left, though Daring Do gave me a little pat on the shoulder before going. I shouldn’t have been afraid of this unassuming, bumbling little middle-aged stallion, but his appearance, combined with the knowledge of precisely who he worked for, set off that little irrational alarm bell in my head that he wasn’t to be trusted. He waddled on over, carrying that same battered old briefcase he had before, and then sat down next to my bed.

“How’s the leg?” he asked, all friendly enough.

I looked at the bandaged stump, and it was still a shock to see it there where I expected to still see that familiar old appendage there. “Waiting for it to grow back,” I said, rather snippily.

He laughed, and it was a genuine laugh, not the sort one makes merely out of politeness or to alleviate a moment of social awkwardness. “Nasty business with the Changelings,” he said cheerfully, as he popped open his briefcase and retrieved a small box of chocolates, which I saw were from the same establishment Dorylus had acquired his wine, and placed them on the bedside table. “They’ll sort you out with a shiny new leg soon.”

“Yes, I hear prosthetics are very good these days.” I stopped -- what did he just say? “It wasn’t Changelings this time, it was-”

The Beige Pony held up his hoof to interrupt me. “I know,” he said, peering at me over his thick, square glasses. “But if anypony asks you, it was Changelings. They must have found the same old tunnels they used when you took Fort E-5150 those years ago. It’s a shame about those innocent Crystal Pony archaeologists down there, but there were so many of the enemy you couldn’t possibly have saved them all. A horrible decision you had to make, sir, but that’s what war is like. At least you managed to demolish the tunnels and stop their war swarm coming up from under the fort again before you made your escape through the portal.”

Perhaps it was the cocktail of painkillers swimming around in my system, but it took a few moments for what he was saying to fully make its way from my ears to my brain. “Are you suggesting that I lie?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling that harmless little smile behind which he concealed threats of all manner of torture should I refuse.

I had no moral or ethical objection to lying in order to salvage my reputation and thereby save my skin, but to hear another pony not only encourage me to do so but provide such a falsehood all made up for me was another matter. Call me ridiculous if one must, but I simply do not trust spooks, and his suspiciously mundane appearance and manner only intensified that feeling; the most normal-looking ponies tend to be the most sociopathic.

“But that’s not what happened,” I said dumbly, just in time for a flicker of rare insight to make itself known in my head. “How do you know what happened there?”

“Oh, I don’t know for certain,” he said. “Not yet and not in detail, but I think I can figure it out based on what we already know. The lead-up and the outcome we do know. Ponies still loyal to Sombra went to dig around in one of his old research centres to find something that would help them restore him to the throne, only they didn’t take into account a thousand years of absence would foul up everything down there and their creations turned on their masters. You, your servant, a fictional character, and the lone surviving Crystal Pony of the bunch blow up the place and escaped using a portal. Have I got that right?”

“No, Daring Do isn’t fictional after all.”

He smirked at me. “I’ll make sure to note that in my reports.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” I said. “You knew this was going to happen, or how else did you get here so quickly?”

“When the Crystal Empire returned we ran an immediate search of everypony suspected of supporting King Sombra’s regime. Princess Cadance’s speeches about moving forward and reconciliation and friendship were all well and good, but there was always the danger that certain ponies would retain some loyalty to Sombra. Now most would realise that trying to bring him back from wherever he went is futile and bury their old hatred and get on with life, but there would be some who would give it a go.”

“Like Corded Ware.” I didn’t like it -- plots within plots. At least with the horrors of frontline combat the dangers were plain and rather simple, with the enemy clearly defined and with only the occasional criminally incompetent officer to complicate matters. We all were still tools to be used and discarded when broken, but at least things were plainly laid out in uniforms and lines on maps and generals to blame when it all went wrong. This, however, as I pieced together what he was saying, made me feel used in a far more degrading manner.

He nodded. “Exactly. There is another group of Crystal Ponies; the ones who did terrible things and feel guilty about it. Guilty enough to help us root out the second lot.”

“I suppose that would be Dust Pan.”

“He did some awful things, Blueblood.” The Beige Pony removed his glasses and wiped them clean on the end of his tie, which was stained with the dried juice of baked beans. “Did you know that it’s possible for a pony’s body to survive after certain parts of its brain have been carefully extracted? It’s not life as you or I would call it, though; the husk still breathes, eats, and all that, but it doesn’t think. We have him to thank for that information, and I could go on describing the interesting but gorey facts his butchery uncovered for us, but you’ll need your appetite to recover from this. It haunts him. He’s good at hiding it from most ponies, but not from me. Persuading him to work for us and keep his past a secret was a doddle.”

It was all a bit much, frankly, though granted the blow was softened by both being grateful to survive and the dreamy haze of the morphine. I tried to sit up, which was rather more difficult with only three hooves and a couple of cracked ribs, but I managed it as that damned pony sat there and watched me struggle. All of this had been planned in advance. “If it’s a secret, then why are you telling me?”

“Because if I tell ponies they’re not allowed to know something, they’ll go to the ends of Equus to find it,” he said, popping his glasses back on. “And then they’ll share it. It’s equine nature. Besides, if it gets out, I’ll know who leaked it. Daring Do won’t because she can’t lose her cover. Cannon Fodder won’t because it simply won’t occur to him to. As for our stallion Dust Pan, he’s already one of ours. No, if I hear this has been leaked, I’ll know that it could only have been you.”

“Then what?” I snapped. Feeling rather upset at this revelation, I almost wanted to go to the Foal Free Press out of pure spite.

“I’m sure you can use your imagination,” he said, in that same friendly tone of voice.

I silently glared at him, not quite sure what to say to such a veiled threat. Well, I say ‘veiled’, as the veil might as well have been a sheet of the sheerest satin for all of its subtlety - ‘keep quiet or we will have to kill you’ was the message this almost totally transparent sheet was draped over.

“Oh, not murder,” he said. “Princess Celestia wouldn’t stand for that, but we have ways of ensuring your silence and we would much rather not have to use them. Think about it, sir, how do you think ponies are going to react if they find out there are hordes of unstoppable killing machines hidden under strategic population centres all over the kingdom, and that our friends, the Crystal Ponies, were responsible? Especially when we’re still in the middle of a war. Mass panic, or worse yet, some silly sod will try to dig them up. We can’t let that happen.”

“You really had this all worked out, didn’t you?” I asked bitterly.

“More or less,” said the Beige Pony, bobbing his head from side to side to match that irritating vagueness. “We trusted that you and Daring Do would figure out how to stop the shards with Dust Pan’s help. There was a contingency in place if you failed, but, well, let’s just say I’m very relieved that it didn’t come to that.” He patted me on the shoulder, but where Daring Do’s felt warm and reassuring, as an elder sibling comforting a younger ought to, this felt patronising. “I’ll let you work out the particulars of your story yourself, just make it as thrilling as all of your other ones and ponies will lap it up.” The Beige Pony stood up, and in a move that sparked a sudden surge of indignation in me, began to rifle through my jacket’s pockets.

“You keep out of that!” I snapped.

“Apologies, sir, but I can’t let you keep these souvenirs.” He retrieved the chunks of the scarabs from my jacket’s pockets and the neatly-folded map that I had purloined from the tombs, the latter of which he took special interest in. Then, turning to offer a small, polite bow in the form of a gentle nod of his head, he said, “I wish you a good recovery, sir.”

As he stuffed the goods into his much-abused briefcase, I called out to him, “What about the other tombs? Are you just going to leave those alone and hope for the best?”

“We have top ponies working on it right now,” he said. The briefcase snapped shut with two clunky ‘thuds’ as the locks engaged.

“Yes, but who?”

“Top. Ponies.” He spoke those words with the firm assumption that I would ask no more questions on the matter, and if that was his intention, he was correct. I slunk back into my bed, brooding rather fiercely as he offered a friendly smile that concealed all manner of extra-judicial horrors for me, and watched him waddle his way out of the room, finally leaving me alone.

I resent being told what to do by other ponies, except when it was Princess Celestia giving the orders and even then I sometimes chafed against her dictats. I was stuck, of course, and damn that pony if he didn’t have a point about how the common ponies of Equestria would react to such news. Still, it was out of my hooves and therefore no longer my responsibility, but though that burden had been lifted, the weight of the memories of that awful place persisted and would continue to persist for the remainder of my life, buried deep like the horrors of the ancient past in the hope that they would never be revealed again. For now it was over, and I was already looking forward to the next set of miseries that I would be put through, at least if I didn’t take urgent steps to avoid that, and turning over such plans in my mind helped distract me from what I had just endured that morning and the loss of my leg.

I never saw Dust Pan again after he left that day. What happened to him remains a mystery to me, and, though I suppose I felt some gratitude to him for getting us out of that place alive, I’ve not felt inclined to inquire about his whereabouts. S.M.I.L.E. were a ruthless lot in a coldblooded way that disturbed me more than even the most bloodthirsty of generals I’ve worked with, and I feared that the Beige Pony had him bumped off when he no longer proved to be useful. He may be enjoying a well-earned retirement, perhaps, under an assumed name on some tropical island far from the Crystal Empire and where anypony might recognise him for his crimes. Either way, I remain perfectly content for not having met him again.

As for Daring Do, we continued to bump into each other, both when she was disguised as A. K. Yearling and when she was allowed to be her true self. The latter was when I least suspected it and almost always accompanied some manner of mortal peril which ended in running away from a collapsing building (though one time it was a collapsing bridge), which I may feel inclined to write about at a later date. Our relationship remained somewhat testy over the years, but in our mutual old age and with our adventuring days behind us things finally softened; I suppose time and distance does that to a pony, and the memories of our father that spring up each time I see her stung a little less.

A few years after this I received a peculiar package in the post. I remember it clearly, as Drape Cut brought in the morning post as I woke up at one in the afternoon, which mostly consisted of the usual letters from my extended family requesting favours and various charities fishing for donations for their no-doubt worthy causes. It was a small rectangular parcel wrapped up in brown paper and string that could only have contained a book. The contents were such a paperback book, with a cover that was unadorned save for the title printed neatly at the top: “Daring Do and the Prince in Black”.

If any Daring Do fans have somehow acquired this manuscript and have managed to read it through to the end without a certain pony in an ill-fitting suit descending upon them, I would imagine that they are now scratching their heads in confusion about that title. Indeed, there is no published Daring Do story of that name, for I possess the only copy aside from the original author’s manuscript, and it’s a fact that’s brought me no small amount of gratification whenever I feel intellectually inferior to Twilight Sparkle. As for its contents, I can only say that it largely follows the same events that I’ve just wasted a great deal of paper to write, only in a much more entertaining way.

[It is here that this entry in the Blueblood Papers comes to an end. The story in question was published posthumously, albeit heavily edited to present it as a work of pure fiction, in what S.M.I.L.E. aims to be an elaborate double-bluff. I wish to make absolutely clear once again that the contents of this entry in the Blueblood Papers remains a state secret, and the list of consequences for revealing them to the public start at petrification.]

Author's Note

I hope you enjoyed this shorter installment in The Blueblood Papers. I'd wanted to do a relatively straightforward adventure story, one that wasn't completely tied up with the now-sprawling meta-narrative about the greater Changeling War, though I couldn't fully resist that. Blueblood will return soon in The Prince of Blood, after I take a short break to plan it.