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.