The Blueblood Papers: Old Blood

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.