The Blueblood Papers: Old Blood

“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!”