Always Read the Job Description
Princess Luna and the batpony accompanying her alighted on the grass some distance away from the main part of the Castle of the Two Sisters. They stood before an ivory tower whose exterior seemed to proudly gleam with the reflected light of the full Moon, as if unaware of the many centuries that had passed since it was erected. Its walls were smooth and undamaged, lacking any signs of wear, inviting the ponies to partake in its mystery.
Luna stopped the guard with a raised hoof. “Halt, Starshine. Though this tower has been the closest to a place I could call home for many years, I cannot say for sure what we will find once we enter it.”
“Is it that dangerous, Princess?” When Starshine raised her eyes to look at Luna, she tried to make herself look calm and collected. Her behavior did not truly reflect how she felt about the prospect of being sent to explore a forsaken magical building fresh out of guard training, but the young mare was not about to miss her one chance of impressing the princess.
“The uppermost of floors very well might be.” Luna’s ear swiveled, picking up a faint sound coming from inside. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “We should begin soon; if we wait too long, the book might no longer be there. I’ll go up, and you head to the basement. We’ll meet back here once we find the book or reach the end of the path.”
“Of course, Princess.” Starshine saluted smartly, swallowing the lump growing in her throat.
“Do not worry, Starshine. If I didn’t believe you to be good enough for this mission, I would not have picked you,” Luna said as a small, enigmatic smile played upon her lips. “As long as you go straight ahead, never swerving from your path, no harm will come to you.”
At that, she turned towards the tower and cast a quick spell that revealed the secret basement entrance. Satisfied with the result, she briskly trotted upstairs, leaving Starshine alone with her thoughts.
The ancient door opened with the slightest creak and a shiver ran down Starshine’s spine. She quickly suppressed it and descended into the hidden basement. The foundations of the tower were old—very old. So old, in fact, that their very architecture seemed alien to the young batpony more used to cozy villages and spacious grand halls of Canterlot. The stairway leading her downward was nothing like those; it was a claustrophobic, damp thing, with cobwebs stretching from ceiling to floor, and made from uneven boulders arranged by ancient magic.
The stairway led to a corridor, yet that brought no comfort to the mare bravely pushing onward with the hopes of proving herself before her liege. The corridor was not much larger than the stairway, with suits of Night Guard armor lining up the walls and observing her in their quiet vigil. Here and there, a bookshelf broke up the monotony of the place; the words on the covers of most of its books threatening and strange. Starshine stopped to examine a familiar symbol she saw on one of the ancient volumes; it was a copy of the Windigian Saga—a classic Unicornian epic considered lost to the ages.
Her eyes skimmed one of the longer descriptions, prompting her to close the book with a gasp as soon as she felt the protective enchantment woven into the antiquated prose. She put the book back, refocusing on the task at hoof; learning about the lore of bygone eras would have to wait. After taking a deep breath to steady herself, she trotted into the depths of the tower, pointedly ignoring the gazes that the armor suits cast her way.
Princess Luna closed her eyes and sighed contentedly. There were so many memories bound to these halls and all their peculiarities. Every crack in the walls had its own history; every sword scratch brought fond recollections of her younger years, when Equestria was not yet tamed. Chucked into an out-of-sight corner was her heavily annotated guide devoted to a language not spoken since before the ponykind’s rise to prominence. She levitated it with a fond smile.
Luna cleared her throat and tried to sing some of the book’s opening invocations. Though her voice was out of practice, the sound rang out across time and space all the same, and a pair of shadowy tendrils sprouted from the floor to seize her. She rolled her eyes and stomped them out with her hooves before they could open their toothed maws.
Luna addressed the void with a huff. “Still holding a grudge, are you? It is most childish behavior for someone your age.” The book was flung behind her back, landing almost in the same spot she found it.
After rounding another corner, her hoof caught on a bit of string. In a flash of magic, Luna conjured a hiltless sword made out of concentrated moonlight and swung it in front of herself, cleanly deflecting the two silver bolts aimed at her neck.
“I must be getting older myself,” she said with a grin. “I don’t remember putting this here.”
Luna paused in front of an oak door that was blocking her path. She gave it a weak push. Behind it was a dark chamber with a large, circular table. The windows were shuttered, and the golden chandelier that was hanging from the ceiling was extinguished. Luna entered the room, lighting her way with her horn and the sword.
She didn’t flinch when the door was shut behind her, and the chandelier erupted in a blueish, ghastly glow. A dozen spectral, skeletal figures with glowing eyes materialized around the table, their crossbows and cutlasses pointed directly at the princess.
“Would you kindly put that blade away?” asked the ghost of a stallion wearing a captain’s hat, who was shuffling a deck of cards directly opposite of her. “We only want to play a round or two.”
It didn’t take Starshine long to realize that the corridor stretched too far to fit under the tower. She trotted past several crossroads, where the path would intersect with another tunnel leading into the unknown, and although many of them looked far less unwelcoming than the road ahead of her, she heeded Luna’s advice.
In stark contrast with her expectations, the corridor eventually became much more spacious. The boulders of its walls gave way to polished marble lit up by evenly spaced sconces. It was no longer a single corridor but a labyrinthine network of identical passages running in parallel. The armored silhouettes of guards remained a common sight, but the bookshelves filled every bit of free space, bearing a veritable mountain of books, scrolls, and more arcane means of preserving information. None of the titles were written in languages that Starshine could recognize—much less understand—and when she tried to borrow one book from the shelf, her hoof slid off of its cover as if it weren’t there.
The wind picked up all of a sudden, whistling its discontent through the visors of empty armor. “Trespasser!” it seemed to whine in an accusatory tone. A single suit of armor collapsed somewhere in the distance, the clang resonating through the open spaces of the endless library.
Starshine jumped with a startled squeak and turned around, holding her spear with shaky hooves. She stood motionless for several excruciatingly long seconds, but the movement she thought she saw out of the corner of her eyes was no longer there.
Though the incident unsettled the young guard greatly, at no point did she consider abandoning her mission—so strong was her determination to prove her worth as a member of the noble Night Guard. Moreover, she trusted her Princess, knowing that she wouldn’t have sent her in alone had she suspected some terrible dangers lurking in the depths. Starshine had sworn to follow Princess Luna’s orders, and she wasn’t about to leave without the book.
The library appeared to understand her intent, bending its corridors to guide her further down and ahead. Its layout made no sense to Starshine, who at one point could swear she walked in at least three separate directions at once, stretching herself far beyond what should be possible for a pony. Yet when she looked down at her hooves, they were still in the right place.
Her journey was interrupted by a huge stone gate standing in the middle of yet another identical corridor. The inscription above it read “Lost & Found” in contemporary Equestrian. Swallowing her fear, Starshine stepped through the gate into the unknown.
Luna yawned and laid the cards on the table—two Princesses and three Captains. “I believe that this game is over.”
The two remaining sailors looked at their own cards and then at each other, their sightless eyes sinking deeper into their skulls. “Impossible!” bellowed the mare on Luna’s left, drawing her cutlass and jumping across the table. “You will not leave this room alive.” All the defeated sailors immediately followed her lead.
“I was almost worried you’d be reasonable.” Luna replied with a grin and leapt over the mare’s blade before launching herself into the air off of her back, driving the assailant into the ground with a powerful flap of her wings. Not wasting a second, she closed them again and dove at the most unprepared pirate, conjuring the moonlit sword in the air mid-slash. He dissipated before his skull hit the ground.
Three more specters were coming at her, their eyes glowing with savagery as they attacked Luna in unison. She effortlessly parried two of the strikes, using their force to launch into a deadly pirouette that let her cut through the third’s blade and bones alike in one smooth motion. Noticing a mare aiming a crossbow at her, she deliberately slowed down and stepped to the right, finishing one of the pirates stunned by her display of skill. When she felt the marksmare press the trigger, she teleported away, letting the oversized bolt pierce the last of the three sailors.
By that time, all the ghosts had shaken off their initial shock at the sight of Luna’s maneuvers, and the pegasi among them took to the air to corner her. She reappeared in the center of the room and took out two more with an upward swing, just as a quick, conjured shield saved her from the dagger somepony flung at her from behind. She dodged four more pegasi by diving down, and threw her sword at them like a boomerang. Though they all dodged it without issue, they could not dodge the chandelier cut free by the sword's return. She caught the blade with her magic and, with a spin, decapitated a pegasus sneaking up on her.
Breaking her fall using one of the last pirates, Luna turned to the heavily-scarred unicorn, who levitated four shortswords above himself, waiting until she got in his range. She dove under the first slash, parried the second, then jumped up, using the surface of the third blade as a springboard, and landed heavily on the fourth, pushing it down into the ghost’s skull.
The room became silent again, save for Luna’s light panting. “Just like the old days,” she remarked with a satisfied smile. When the sound of shuffling cards reached her ears, she snapped towards the captain, who was still seated at the battered table.
“Riddle me this, Princess,” he said, not looking up from his cards. “If you could beat us, why did you agree to gamble for your soul?”
Luna snorted derisively. “I did not want to attack unprovoked. That is not the Equestria that me and my sister had built.”
“And if you lost? Would you let us take it, or were you as much of a liar as those fools?” The captain put the deck aside and looked Luna in the eyes.
Luna met his gaze and her lips curled up in a sly smile. “I would let them try.”
The pirate’s expression twisted in a grimace of fear, and his skeletal countenance grew a shade more pale. Yet he could not look away from what Luna showed him in her eyes. Shaken to the core, he only whispered a question, “What are you?” before flying away in panic.
Luna made her sword vanish and looked at the room a final time. “Thankfully, the damage is not too bad. I hope this little distraction won’t make Starshine wait for me outside the tower for too long.”
Starshine stood at the outskirts of a ruined city unlike any she ever saw; indeed, she would later learn that she was granted permission to visit a place existing at a time so distant that no books or tales spoke of it anymore. The buildings were stubby and full of jagged edges, hardened by weather and built to last. Their walls were the dark crimson color found chiefly in tales of forbidden witchcraft, while their roofs were all black and perfectly even, covering the houses like blankets of the impenetrable darkness. The place was foreboding and forlorn, an air of disquieting wrongness hanging over everything and causing Starshine’s hooves to tremble the more she looked at it. That the town was of a non-pony origin was provably true beyond the shadow of a doubt, and in every detail Starshine saw another hint of its alien provenance; from the not-quite-even floors and bulbous gateways to the sickly and spindly protrusions sticking out at odd angles for no reason that the mare could discern.
The buildings were many, all of their shapes strange and unique, but there was clear intentionality in the way they were arranged, and Starshine soon found that they were all meant to be pebbles in the great mosaic of the city. Where the library was neatly ordered into sections, the city was an expressionist's painting, the details conveying meaning rather than purpose. The slight tilt she could see on the horizon told her that together they comprised a large ring, no doubt important to the message it immortalized. Motivated by a reason she couldn’t—or refused to—place, she felt drawn to the city’s center. It was like a wordless voice beckoning her from the depths of her mind, a promise of the fulfillment of her destiny that urged her not to tarry. The path she took was invisible to the naked eye, leading her between humble houses and opulent temples to long-forgotten gods.
It was one of those temples that finally caused Starshine to hesitate. In the shadow of a monumental hall that had collapsed on itself in the distant past, she felt terribly small, and in a moment of existential dread, she turned around to escape the forsaken place.
Yet when she saw what lay behind her, her internal unease bloomed into horror, for instead of the door that had led her here, a cruel, gray wasteland of scattered rocks stretched all around the city. Only then did Starshine realize that the ground beneath her hooves resembled a reddish volcanic wasteland and that the heavy black clouds obscuring the sky hid neither Sun nor Moon behind them, but merely a featureless, primordial darkness. Without any other options, Starshine continued towards the core of the abandoned town.
An eminently expensive diamond brooch rolled down the stairs. Luna waved it off and continued digging through the layer of treasure coating the floor of the topmost room in the tower.
“Ugh, they brought so much of this stuff with them!” The princess complained aloud with an undaintly groan. “I’ll never find anything in this mess.”
Her left hindhoof kicked a flawless ruby the size of a golf ball, which ricocheted off the wall and flew out the window. Luna stared at the scene blankly. Her eye twitched. She ran a hoof down her face.
It was the first time in recorded history that somepony managed to groan in the royal Canterlot voice.
But her journey wasn’t completely pointless, she reasoned; she banished a deadly threat and reclaimed a notable amount of bits for Equestria. The smile returned to her lips. More important than anything else, the day let her live a little in the way she found herself unable to in the safe Equestria of the present. To Luna, that would have been worth the trip on its own, but she was sure that Starshine would succeed in her task, too.
She shook her head and dove outside, shutting the window with a sealing spell. After all, nopony could tell when a stash of pirate treasures not listed in their treasury could be useful.
After an indeterminate amount of time, Starshine reached the end of the ring of the inexplicably-shaped buildings. She let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and felt the soothing relief at the sight of the open space ahead; the longer she remained inside the town, the stronger her queer feeling of strangeness grew, and in every twisted corner some unnameable force was lurking, watching her with curiosity. At one point, she thought that the denizens of the town returned from their exile just to catch her trespassing in their homeland, but the pair of red eyes that led her to this conclusion belonged only to a fattened rat, who scurried away before she got close.
The buildings had no windows on the side bordering the center, their long-gone hosts unwilling to observe what transpired in the gloom or perhaps not wanting to intrude on the wonderful with their plain lives. Despite the black clouds that concealed most of the sky, a foreign blue light belonging to the oldest stars coated it in perpetual half-light, in which everything appeared more dream-like and arcane. Yet even in direct sunlight, the structure that lay ahead would have resembled nothing but those phantasies that the mind conjures in the moments before waking, when the veil between the mundane and the unreal is the thinnest.
It was a crater of prodigious size, wider than any natural formation in Equestria, and with an edge in the shape of a perfect circle. Though it was the same off-red of the city’s buildings’ walls, the substance was much clearer and more lustrous, reflecting the starlight in a gleaming aurora faintly purple in color; chiseled in its surface was a grand set of stairs leading to the innermost part of the pit. Books were strewn across the red crystal, each of them open and glowing with extraequestrian luminescence, which both imparted their knowledge to the howling wind, and hinted at the boundless wisdom of the enchantment’s caster.
Starshine wasted no time beginning her descent, for although the prospect of meeting with whatever force had made the forgotten ruins its home chilled her to the bone, she reasoned that staying in the haunted town would not improve her chances and might even make the host—who had not yet shown any malicious intent towards her—impatient. No sooner had she placed a hoof on the downward path than a sensation of cosmic insignificance washed over her, yet at the same time it granted her a fleeting moment of the kind of freedom that forever recontextualizes the limitations around one’s usual self. Her thoughts were rearranged in a logical fashion, and Starshine felt free—therefore freely did she glide to the bottom of the stairs, trusting her wings to safely carry her to her destination.
It was there that she saw the book she was after; its moon-emblazoned cover shone from its place on a lectern built into a small black dais in the center of the crater, surrounded by other books stacked in high piles. She alighted nearby and cautiously put her hoof on it.
The acute awareness of an impossibly ancient existence overwhelmed her. She fell to the ground, trying to get a hold of her own memories amidst the sea of strange visions and sensations that she was being subjected to. After the longest second in her life, a voice rumbled through her mind, asking her to introduce herself.
“I’m Starshine, eh… sir!” The mare looked around, but no change in the surrounding scenery indicated the arrival of anyone else. She got up to her hooves, feeling ever more insignificant. “I’m only here to recover—that is, borrow a book.”
Reality rippled with a booming thunder that Starshine could only guess was the presence’s laughter. The world shook to its foundations, and the dark clouds in the sky swirled. Then the stranger’s attention was on Starshine again, and it said, “I have let you enter my home and walk the halls that only four of your kind have ever seen and returned from. I have done so because I found your desire to catalog the forbidden and forgotten commendable.” The words closed in on her, seizing the young mare’s thoughts. The creature’s merriment was gone; its mental voice a terrifying whisper. “Even for a thief stealing from my domain.”
Starshine paled and tried to take a step back, but that didn’t distance her from the ominous threat hanging over her. “I’m not a thief!” she cried out with all of the courage she could muster. “Princess Luna told me it was hers!”
Just as quickly as it appeared, the stifling sensation of being crushed was gone from Starshine’s mind. “Luna sent you to me.” It was not a question, but an affirmation of a fact. Feeling the grasp on her psyche relax, Starshine spun around to take in the vision with a new perspective. The clouds parted overhead, illuminating the world with calming, blue starlight. Every book around her lost its menacing aura and glowed amicably. Even the alien contours of the ruins softened, still more ancient than any house she’d seen, but robbed of the sense of unbelonging that they communicated earlier. A sapphire-eyed cat peeked out from one of the buildings, lazily sniffing its surroundings.
In Starshine’s opinion, however, the biggest change went unnoticed. The probing presence let her go, and her thoughts were once more her own; with the outflow of the cosmic suggestion, even some of the memories she thought she had forgotten resurfaced clearly and in detail.
“A token of my good will, for the misunderstanding you have suffered.” The voice was like a whisper in the wind, and Starshine had to focus to make out every word. “Take the book that you seek. I have enjoyed it greatly, but I know that it’ll be safe in your and Luna’s hooves.”
Before she could stop herself, Starshine tilted her head quizzically and asked a question into the aether, “After all of, well, this—” she emphasized the strangeness of the place with a quick flap of her wings “—you’re just giving it to me?”
“I promised I would return it in due time. Give Luna my regards; she is always welcome to stop by for a conversation.” The voice stopped in a contemplative silence, and with it, the world slowed down to a halt. When it spoke again, the deep echoes of its tone resonated with an ageless curiosity. “And so are you, if you wish. Luna knows the way. I have not conferred with your kind since the days of the daredevil wizard who sought me out himself. I look forward to our next meeting.”
Starshine blinked in surprise, stunned by the offer, but before she could respond, she was in the tower’s hidden basement again. The place looked painfully ordinary, with nothing but a few sets or armor to decorate it. There were no tunnels leading down or supernatural bookshelves with archaic lore, and—save for a single book lying on the ground in front of her—it was empty. Starshine seized the tome with her teeth and quickly trotted out of the tower, slamming the basement door shut.
“There you are, Starshine! The roasted plunderseeds are almost ready. Just take care to avoid the spikes.” Princess Luna left the makeshift fireplace and trotted to meet her guard. Seeing the book that the young mare was carrying, she clapped her front hooves with glee. “I see you've found my book!”
Starshine collapsed as soon as she was out of the tower. “I did, Princess!” she panted, equal parts relieved and exhausted. “Night Guard Starshine reporting in.”
“Excellent! I was certain you’d make it.” Luna helped her up. She smiled, her expression unreadable. “Congratulations on passing the test.”
“The test?” Starshine tilted her head, her face sporting a dumbfounded look. “What test?”
“You may begin your work in the Archives as soon as we’re back in Canterlot!” Luna replied excitedly.
Starshine jumped in surprise. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. After a moment of stammering—a moment during which Princess Luna tried her hardest not to laugh at the mare’s confusion—she managed to ask, “Princess, you knew all this time?”
“Not until I saw you being sworn in as a Night Guard, but after that… I decided it’d be prudent to have you two introduced in the tower.”
“So you really know that creature?!” Starshine stood agape. “I was afraid I’d never leave the place alive!”
Luna shook her head. “You needn’t have worried, Starshine. He wouldn’t harm a fly.” Smiling enigmatically, she added, “And especially not you.”
“But why me?!”
The princess took a deep breath and responded firmly. “You want to work with books deemed too dangerous for most ponies to know about. I needed to learn what you’d do when something went wrong.”
Starshine bowed her head meekly. “It does make sense when you put it that way, Princess. And that creature, or he if the term applies, asked me to give you his regards. He said we’re both welcome to return.”
“Would you want to learn how? I assure you that he’s much nicer once you know him.”
Starshine shuffled her hooves. “I would, Princess, but it doesn’t sound very safe.”
“Indeed, there are safer pastimes than communing with a timeless deity of knowledge,” agreed Luna, her solemn expression turning teasing. “Though I would not count your dream job among those.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Starshine. “There’s just one more thing that’s been bothering me about this entire situation. It’s not my place to ask, but…”
“Ask away; I owe you that much after putting you through that old jester’s act.”
“Okay… Princess, what in that book could be so interesting to someone like him?”
Luna levitated the book in front of the guard. “Only the most condemnable writing in the entire universe, reading which could very well melt your eyes or drive you insane. See for yourself.” She opened it with a dark smirk.
Starshine gasped. “Is it?!”
“Indeed. It is my very own foalhood diary.”
