Death Valley

Bitterroot backflapped to push her shovel deeper into the soil. “You really never went grave robbing?”

“Nope,” Amanita said as she dumped another pile of dirt outside the grave. She tried to avoid using her horn so the physical labor would drive her tiredness away. Tempus Mortis wasn’t a dangerous spell, not remotely, but she’d rather be clearheaded than tired. Fortunately, the dirt was still somewhat loose from the funeral.

“Then where’d you get the bodies to work with as a necromancer?” Scoop, dump.

“Fresh murders. Circe said-” Scoop. “-the closer a body was to death-” Dump. “-the easier it was to work with-” Scoop. “-so I should stick with using those.” Dump.

“Huh. Is that true?” Scoop, dump.

Amanita shrugged. “Looking back, probably not.” Scoop. “I bet it was-” Dump. “-one of the ways-” Scoop. “-she controlled me.” Dump. “If I thought it was easier to work with recently-dead ponies-” Scoop. “-I wouldn’t strike out on my own and go grave robbing.” Dump.

“Not a bad idea. Look at what happened to her when you did strike out on your own.” Scoop, dump.

“Heh.” Scoop. “Yeah.” Dump.

Clouds drifted through the sky, staining the moon the orange of rust. The misty breath of the two grave robbers wafted from their mouths like smoke from a sputtering chimney. Wind whistled and howled like a ghost through Tratonmane, magnified and echoed by the cliffs; it was the only sound in the valley. The only ponies up were the ones clawing open the earth to get at the dead. It’d been a while since Amanita had been so calm.

Graves were liminal spaces, a place the living set aside for the dead in the border between the wind and the earth. Reality could grow thin in them as two worlds reached out to one another. You could talk to the dead anywhere, but there was a reason most ponies went to cemeteries to do it, even if they didn’t know why. You were closer to the dead in graveyards and they were closer to you. It was why most ponies shivered when they walked past them. It was why Amanita felt so comfortable, there in that slowly-growing pit marked with Pyrita’s headstone..

With each thrown shovelful of dirt, the barrier between life and death grew more and more hazy. She could feel it. Whispers just beyond the edge of hearing, brushing at her awareness more than her ears, and only because she knew what to be aware of. Bitterroot’s ears were still up rather than folded back, so she wasn’t feeling anything.

Related to the grave, anyway.

“Are you-” Scoop. “-feeling okay?” Amanita asked. Dump.

“Not really, but I’m feeling better,” Bitterroot said immediately. Scoop, dump. She didn’t snap it. It wasn’t something she spat out to get answering the question over with. It was just something she knew the answer to. “I can just- focus on this.” Scoop, dump. “And in case you haven’t noticed, I like having stuff to do.” Scoop, dump.

“Okay.” Scoop. “Let me know-” Dump. “-if that-” Scoop. “-changes.” Dump.

“Mmhmm.” Scoop, dump.

The hole grew deeper and deeper. Scoop, dump. Amanita wondered what she’d say if someone happened to walk outside and see them. Scoop, dump. They were… less averse to her being a necromancer now; maybe she’d just tell the truth. Scoop, dump. Tratonmane was hiding something important, and she was just getting information she needed to know. Scoop, bump, dump. It wasn’t her fault they were limit-

Bump?

Amanita nudged her shovel through the dirt again. Bump.

“You heard it, too, right?” Bitterroot asked, grinning.

“Yeah.” Amanita crouched down and wiggled her hooves into the dirt. She soon found wood and herself grinning. This was shallow for a grave, but with the ground this cold, maybe it was the best Tratonmane could easily manage. “Be careful digging. We don’t want to break the casket.” She switched to levitating her shovel for finer control.

As Bitterroot cautiously dislodged dirt and rocks from the edges of the lid, she asked, “So are you gonna call up her spirit to ask her or use that Tempus Mortis spell?”

“I’ll start with Tempus Mortis. Calling her up’s harder without any emotional connection, and besides, I’d rather not disturb anypony I don’t have to.”

“Said the grave robber.”

“I’m just messing with the body, I’m not yanking them back to the world of the living for a quick chat. Big difference.”

Bitterroot snorted.

Between some levitation from Amanita and some careful maneuvering from Bitterroot, the two were able to uncover the casket and pry the lid open in the pit. There was Pyrita, her face drawn and waxen and sunken in death. Ponies more than twelve hours dead never looked like they were sleeping. Amanita found herself grinning again. Almost there. Balancing on the rim of the coffin, she put a hoof on the body-

“Y’know, sometimes I don’t get you.”

Amanita looked up. Bitterroot was leaning on a shovel at the edge of the hole, looking down at her. “What?”

“A week ago, you were worried you weren’t enough of a necromancer to be in the Crazy Eights. Now you’re going grave robbing in the middle of the night.”

“Well… yeah, I mean… I… need to access the body for the spell.”

Bitterroot tilted her head and lowered one of her ears. “And that doesn’t strike you as necromantic?”

“Look, anypony who could cast the spell would need to do this.”

“Yet no one in the world is doing it. Can do it. Except you.”

“Bitterroot, shut up and let me cast the stupid spell on the stupid corpse.”

Bitterroot blinked owlishly but didn’t say anything.

Amanita rolled her eyes, touched the body, and gathered her magic. “Meminerim mortem,” she muttered. Physicality ripped itself apart around her.

Normally, when Amanita cast Tempus Mortis, she passed into a realm of paradigms and moments in the body’s life. The specific energies behind the spell elevated the body’s death and made it accessible. There would be little bits and bobs and a huge, impactful moment as the body’s functions ceased.

Pyrita’s body had two moments.

Amanita would’ve gasped if she’d had a body. The spell depended on the body, not the passage of the soul. If any damage done would’ve been enough to kill a body, it must’ve been enough for the spell to work with. So if Pyrita had “died” twice, then- Maybe this would be- Chronology was loose in this sort of place, but Amanita knew which one came earlier and which came later. She jumped into the later one, just to check.

She was at the Great Ash, Pyrita hanging from a noose above her. The death’s area of effect was small, not even holding the full square. Amanita looked around. Nopony within range. So… if this counted as a death to the body… She tweaked the spell just enough to jump back out to the paradigms, then dove into the earlier death.

“Stop… them…”

The sounds she heard were pained, exhausted gasps, but Amanita couldn’t help herself from getting excited. This was it. This was how Pyrita died. This was how the ley line shifted. This was the answer she’d been looking for. This was-

…This was a cave.

Pyrita’s body was lying on the rocky floor of a cave, sprawled out like she’d collapsed from exhaustion. She seemed to have been crawling for a stalagmite standing right in front of her, in a pool in the middle of the cavern. The cave itself was like a pit, round and climbing up and out of sight. Why had Tempus Mortis captured so much of it? Other tunnels branched off, but they quickly vanished in the sludge of unremarkability. This was about as uninformative as you could get; the only reason Amanita guessed the cave was in the mine was because that was where Pyrita had come out of.

She examined Pyrita’s body. Old, but unharmed. No bruises or cuts, and the scars were old. No broken bones from a fall. Had she died from exhaustion? What was she running from? Or was it the ley line? Was her death cause or effect? And what was she doing in the mine in the first place?

She did another quick examination of the cave. Given how detailed the image was, it was surprisingly featureless, with no obvious… much of anything. And if it’d been involved in Pyrita’s death, the spell would make it obvious.

There was nothing here.

…How? Was Pyrita’s death just a sad coincidence? Amanita tried to say it was, but it just didn’t fit. Decades of ponies only dying unnatural deaths in Midwich Forest, and then one of them suddenly went crazy and ran into the mine to die on the exact night the ley line soured? No. Not at all. And it still didn’t explain how Pyrita had left the mine-

…Except it couldn’t’ve been Pyrita, because if it had been, her soul still would’ve been in the living world and Amanita’s resurrection would’ve worked… So then why-

She needed to sleep on this. No matter how much she hated the idea. Maybe bounce the info off the others. Not here, not now.

Amanita let the spell collapse with a grunt and awkwardly clambered out of the hole. Upon seeing her, Bitterroot’s ears drooped. “That doesn’t sound good,” she said.

“Pyrita died of exhaustion in a cave,” Amanita muttered. She carefully levitated the lid back onto the casket. If only the casket’s inhabitant had been more helpful. “That’s it.”

“…Wait, really?” Bitterroot furrowed her brow. “That… That can’t be right…”

“It’s what I saw,” Amanita said. “Look, I can show you.” She screwed her eyes shut and focused on the memory-projection spell. Frustration made her bang it into line when it didn’t play nice and she managed to get it out quickly, but with some headache-inducing difficulty. The image of the memory snapped into being-

Bitterroot jumped back, shrieking, “TAR-!” She managed to cut herself off by clamping her hooves over her mouth, but the echo still rebounded through the quiet of Midwich Valley. She barely noticed as she stared at the image, eyes huge with shock, wings pulled tight to her sides.

Amanita flinched away at the sudden sound. Somehow, she still kept the image up. “Bitterroot?” she asked, sitting by her side. “W-what’s wrong?”

“Heh. Isn’t it obvious?” Bitterroot gave a choked sort of laugh as she gestured at an empty section of cave.

Amanita blinked and looked at it, expecting- But it was the same as it’d been before. Pyrita lying dead, the rock, the dark cave around her. The scariest thing was the body, and Bitterroot had seen bodies before. “…No, it’s not.”

Bitterroot snapped to look at Amanita like a hawk spotting prey. She set her jaw and her ears folded back. “Amanita, I- I get if you’re not scared of that, but don’t-”

“Scared of what?” The darkness didn’t yield anything on further inspection, not even hazy shapes that might’ve been monsters. “There’s nothing there.”

“You don’t- You don’t see that?” asked Bitterroot, pointing shakily at the darkness.

Amanita took one last look. There was nothing to see. “Bitterroot, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Your memory’s watching me.”

Bitterroot’s heart was pounding in her throat. If she hadn’t been forcing herself to breathe, she wouldn’t have been breathing at all. Her ears rang. Her wings wanted to writhe. She couldn’t stop squirming. All those thoughts of helplessness and being overwhelmed, pushed to the side by digging a hole, came barrelling back.

It was the only valid response to seeing the… thing gazing at her.

In some ways, it looked like a poor-yet-exquisite clay sculpture of a pony. Everything was off, but Bitterroot couldn’t say how. Legs? Face? Body? Tail? Whatever she focused on, its shape was fine when she looked at it directly, only for her to catch a mistake out of the corner of her eye, a mistake that vanished when she double-checked. It was gray, dull, flat, its mane stiff as a board, its eyes utterly blank. It stood astride the blaze of a crossed circle of fire, one hoof in each quadrant, right in front of Pyrita. And it was looking straight at her.

The air was cold. She was still sweating.

“Okay, okay, uh…” Amanita was nervously jumping from hoof to hoof. “What, what do you see? C-can you tell me?”

Bitterroot took several deep breaths, looking the thing in the eye. Then she said, “It’s a- It’s like a- Like a statue of a pony.” She flinched and looked away. The pony’s colorless, lifeless gaze was more drilling than anything she’d seen from a living being. “It’s- It’s unfinished and generic. There’s no color, no detailing, nothing. Just the- the general shape of a body and tail and mane. And it’s… standing in a… crossed circle.”

“O-okay.” Amanita nodded. She wasn’t really looking at Bitterroot as she mentally cataloged everything. “What’s their tribe?”

Bitterroot forced herself to face the pony again and examine them for wings, a horn, or lack thereof. She looked. And looked. And looked. And looked.

Nothing. She didn’t know.

She didn’t know.

She was looking right at the pony and she couldn’t say what tribe they were.

Amanita seemed to know what her silence meant, because she immediately let the image fade. Bitterroot couldn’t stop staring at where it’d been. “Um, okay, uh,” Amanita said, batting the ground. “Do you… want to… tell Code? We can… If this is too much, we can-”

Bitterroot barely heard her from the way her ears were ringing. Just when she thought she was getting it together, it started falling apart again. Even necromancy was nothing compared to this.

She took a few deep breaths, tried to calm herself. Amanita said she’d be there for her. That mattered, right? Yes, absolutely. And Bitterroot stopped feeling like she needed to fly away from Midwich ASAP. Here, now, she at the very least had a shoulder to cry on. A sympathetic ear was worth far more than anyone understood until they really needed it.

She’d been afraid of the possibility that she was losing her mind, but that appearing there was… very coincidental. And that made it… somewhat reassuring? She wasn’t going insane, an unknown something was just affecting her. And an unknown something could become a known something, if they tracked it down. As a bounty hunter, the notion of tracking something was almost soothing.

But how to track it? She didn’t know what triggered her visions. The only consistency between them all was that crossed circle that she was seeing everywhere. It was on the sign, in the streets, in the library, on her neck, in-

Library.

“The book,” she said quietly.

Whatever Amanita had been saying came to a stop. She swallowed and flicked her tail. “W-what book?” she asked.

“Back when I was researching the deaths,” Bitterroot said, still looking straight ahead, “Tallbush was looking for this old book. Really old. Centuries old. He said it was the journal of the town founder. And you know what was on the cover?” She looked Amanita in the eye. “A crossed circle.”

Amanita’s mouth made a little O of astonishment and her ears drooped. Then she cocked her head. “…So what does that mean?”

“No idea. But you know where Tallbush put the book? In his office. Right over there.” Bitterroot pointed at the near wing of the town hall. “So let’s find that book-” She stood up and rustled her wings. “-and find out what it says.”

“Break into the office of the pony who looks like an angel?”

Bitterroot flinched, but nodded. “Yeah. I’m not sure he really is an angel, anyway. I mean, he has an office.”

“…You’re not wrong… You, uh, want to talk about it?”

“Not really, but only because I think that book has better info than you or I do.”

“Yeah, probably. You feel alright?”

Did she? She did. Huh. “Yeah. Really.”

“Alright. Let’s fill the grave back in, first,” said Amanita, jerking her head towards the piles of dirt.

But now that they were filling in the hole rather than digging it up, Amanita used magic to quickly push much of the dirt in in a few passes. It barely even took a minute to fill the hole back up, and soon they were rounding the corner of the town hall. As they approached the front door, Amanita asked, “Do you know how to pick locks? Bounty hunter and all.”

Bitterroot flared her wings as she shrugged. “Kinda. I’ve picked up a thing or two on the job. Enough to know that…” She pushed at the door; it swung right open. “…in a town this small and this close, ponies rarely lock their doors,” she finished as she walked inside.

“…How many bounties have you kidnapped from their homes in the dead of night?” Amanita asked.

“Just one.” Bitterroot turned around. “Doing that sort of thing a lot kinda gets the public screaming for your head. But that pony would’ve screamed for my head if I looked at her funny, so this wasn’t really a change. I-”

As she talked, a twinkle of starlight caught her eye and she briefly glanced upward. Her words slammed to a halt as she noticed the window over the door.

A circular window with two perpendicular beams forming a cross.

Fear began worming into her veins.

“…Bitterroot?” Amanita asked. She crept forward, like she was trying to avoid spooking a skittish animal. “Is something-”

“Cross,” coughed Bitterroot. She pointed upward, flicking her hooves in directions that were supposed to be tracing out the window’s shape. “It’s the-” Swallow. “It’s the symbol.”

“The…” Amanita followed Bitterroot’s hoof; when she saw the window, her ears twitched. “There are plenty of windows like that!” she said in the voice of a used-carriage salesmare at the end of her rope. “It’s a coincidence. Yeah. Totally.”

“Amanita, you lying isn’t making me feel any better.”

“Sorry,” Amanita whispered, her ears back.

Shivering in a way that was out of place in the hall’s relative warmth, Bitterroot headed deeper in.

Assuming Tallbush’s office was the room across from the library, Bitterroot tried that door. Locked. After a quick jaunt back to her room, she retrieved a pick and tension wrench from her pack and some dusty skills from her head. Unlocked. Thank Celestia it’d been a simple one. The room beyond was small and bureaus lined the walls while a desk sat in the center. What wasn’t in the drawers was cluttered, but seemed to be organized. All the clutter, mostly books, was in neat piles, at least. As they inched around on the narrow strips of floor, Bitterroot said, “It’s not very distinctive. Brown cover, about yea big-” She demonstrated with her hooves. “-and the circle on the cover. It didn’t even have a title.”

“Got it,” said Amanita. She began picking through one of the piles.

Bitterroot reached for her own pile when she paused. It’d been important to Tallbush. It was old. And between the two, that wasn’t something you just threw in a pile with everything else. It could get damaged. So if he wanted to keep it safe, where… Desk? She began looking through drawers. Most of them just had bureaucratic-looking papers, but one of them was locked. Out came the picks, out came the drawer-

There was the book. It sat on a cushion- No, it was cradled in a specially-made cushion in the drawer so that it wouldn’t be too jostled by the openings and closings. The crossed circle winked at Bitterroot in the darkness; she didn’t know what the wink meant, but she was going to find out. “Amanita,” she said, carefully pulling the book out. “I got it.” It felt heavier than its size should’ve allowed.

“Already?” Amanita craned her head to look. “Wow, that is nothing.”

“Told you. Let’s get out of here.”

They sat in one of the benches in the main hall and Amanita lit a lamp. The book didn’t have any sort of lock on it, but Bitterroot still had to struggle with herself to open it. Maybe there weren’t any answers in here, just like Pyrita’s death hadn’t had any answers. But if there were answers, and she didn’t like them-

“Bitterroot?” Amanita asked. “Want me to do it?”

“No, I got it,” Bitterroot said. She cracked the book open. The cover flexed with the ease of one opened and closed more times than could be counted. “I just have a lot to think about right now.”

If she didn’t like the answers, she’d get help from her friends.

She started at the beginning, nearly three hundred years ago.