//------------------------------// // Ch. 1 - Fall from Grace // Story: Memoirs of a Minutor Crystallum // by Witching Hour //------------------------------// Near Oxandria, Eqynt Sunsday, 16 Rain Moon, 1001 Equestrian Era “Wake up, sweetie,” my father said as he shook me awake from particularly erotic dream in which I was sparring with a stallion who for once in my life seemed to be holding his own. “Nooooo, go ‘way... that stallion was so sexy!” I groaned as I rolled away and covered my ears with my pillow. “I was going to fuck him into the ground.” “Well, when you’re done with that, I’m afraid I’ll have to actually put him in the ground,” my father chuckled as he nudged me again. “Now come on. We’re close to Oxandria.” Sighing and stretching before rolling off of my bedroll, I mentally reviewed why we were out in the sand and the heat, as we broke down camp. Specifically, the importance of the city that my father had just mentioned; Oxandria. Once a shining jewel in the crown of Eqynt, Oxandria was named for an ancient Equus General, Ox Head the Great, and was supposedly the final resting place of Snake Bite, the last Equus Era ruler of Eqynt and supposed final holder of the Amulet of Life. Needless to say, we weren’t here for the sights, but rather to search for that tomb. Once we finished packing away the last bits of our camp, my father pulled a map out of his saddlebag, which we had acquired from a very cranky librarian in Canterlot. Steady Quill had only relented after presenting proof to her that we were sent by the order. “Well I have good news and bad news,” my father said without looking up from the map, “The good news is the thermals will be perfect and take us right up to the temple, the bad news is that we still have to deal with this blistering heat until we get there.” “If we’re gonna get cooked, why don’t we just walk… It might get us to ‘well-done’ faster…” I moaned in annoyance. “What? And have the cooking be lopsided? No wonder your mother never lets you near the kitchen anymore,” my father retorted. I rolled my eyes and muttered, “set fire to the kitchen making toaster pastries one time…” My father either didn’t hear or ignored my comment and took off into the air in the direction of Oxandria, with me following behind. Despite my complaints, the airborne trek to the temple didn’t take too long and, save for the heat, was pleasant and allowed me to clear my head. Hopping from thermal to thermal, the currents took us high over the dunes and afforded us quite a view of our surroundings. A river glinted like a silver thread between two verdant ribbons of fertile land. In an instant, I folded my wings and dove towards it, leaving my father high above as I skimmed my hooves along the placid surface. I dodged and wove between the low-hanging branches of desert trees and the occasional boulder that broke the surface of the estuary. My fun had, I tensed and aimed directly at one such outcropping, using it as a springboard to send myself back into the sky, laughing with the rush of joy such ‘antics’ (as my father would call them) gave me. “Hope you had your fun because it’s time to work now. We’re here… and it looks like we aren’t alone,” my father said the last part in a hushed tone as he pointed to the ruins of the once great city of Eqynt. Beyond the next line of dunes, cradled in what had once been a large expanse, we came upon our goal. Stretching almost as far as I could see, the ruins of a once thriving metropolitan city filled my vision, the toppled stone archways and ruined stone houses and streets broken up only by the occasional near-dead looking tree or bush. Oh, and there were also a collection of what seemed to be JSS soldiers, complete with what looked to be one of the largest and most brutal ponies I’d ever laid eyes on: a Jaeger. This development really just underscored my whole feeling on this trip, which was to say I hated it. Its helmet and large armored form concealed any trace of equinity of the super soldier as it hefted its automatic bolter, the large pneumatic tanks giving the weapon a phallic appearance that would have been humorous had it not been an instrument of death and destruction. Jaegers were created by JSS during the Griffin-Drake War, and the last three known to exist died at the Smoking Snakes River Valley, wiping out scores of griffins. So I was understandably surprised, and more than a little concerned, to see one of these supposedly extinct hulking masses of muscle literally tearing down the walls of an ancient burial site. Despite the very limited information available on Jaegers, there was one thing that was made abundantly clear to me: AVOID AT ALL COSTS! Thank the Virtues we had smoke bombs. “When the smoke grenades go off, we won’t have much time, so move as quickly as you can,” my father instructed in hushed tones as we took cover behind the jagged ruins of a wall. “And don’t follow behind me.” “I know how to use a distraction, Dad,” I retorted, almost petulantly. There were days when I wondered if he actually acknowledged that I was no longer in training, even if I still had to report my doings to him. I’d worked my ass-end off in Coltenhagen to become an Aeris for the Minutor Crystallum. He had even acknowledged that when the council presented my copper medallion! So why did still he treat me like I’d only just qualified for my iron badge? Sighing, I rushed to grab the non-lethal bomb to catch up with my father, lobbing it over the wall just a second behind him. Thick clouds immediately started billowing from the projectiles, providing the cover we needed to try to make a break for the tomb. We had everything going for us; concealment, knowledge of the location… All we had to do was use them. My dad took wing, jumping to the top of our ruined wall and pushing off, making an arc that would clearly curve out to the left as he vanished into the smoke. I peeled right, a breath behind him. I rolled to my side, darting between ponies and buildings barely visible in the obscuring cloud. Suddenly, I felt a clip at one wing that turned rapidly into a crushing grip. I couldn’t stop the cry that escaped my mouth, nor the shriek it quickly turned into when my other wing fell into that vice-like grip and I was thrown into the ground. I couldn’t breathe to cry out more. The wind left my lungs and the world went white as pure agony seared through my nerves. Color bled back into the world slowly, and still swirled even as the armored monster drew its hoof back to crush my skull. I tried to force myself to move, to roll out of the way, to do anything but simply lay there, staring up at this herald of death given pony form, but nothing in my body would respond to my desire to survive, caught in the paralyzing fear of my oncoming demise. I was going to die. That was all there was to it. The Minutor Crystallum would give my family some story about a tragic accident abroad… Perhaps a terrorist bombing in Iraquine? But the truth would be that I died on the scorching sands of Eqynt, and only one pony, my own father, would know that. Through the ringing tinnitus and my pulse throbbing in my ears, I flinched away from a sudden change of air pressure and a muted thud of an explosion. The sudden presence of a warm fluid on my face jerked my eyes back open in time to see the Jaeger slowly tipping to one side, a jagged piece of shrapnel sticking out of its forehead like some sick and twisted imitation of a unicorn’s horn. As my vision grayed and faded, I saw the ruptured and smoking tanks of the bolter, and my father’s terrified face as he scrambled to get to me. “Hold on, sweetie. We’ll get you home.” His voice faded with the rest of the world into blissful nothingness as urgent hooves lifted me from the sand. I woke several times over the next few days, but never for long. My few waking moments made me wish I had not. The doctors kept me strapped down, but even the slightest twitch near my shoulders and wing joints sent waves of agony down my spine. I didn’t need to see the doctors to know how dire my condition was. I could feel it. I always feigned sleep when my family came; my mom, my brothers and sisters, and my nieces and nephews. Uncle R.B. came once even… But I couldn’t stand to see the pity in their faces, hear the regret in their voice. What good were those feelings? Pity couldn’t fix what had been irreparably broken, and all the sympathy in the world couldn’t return what was now irretrievable. Worse than the pain I was in, perhaps, was the look on my father’s face on the few occasions I was awake when he visited. I could see guilt clearly in his green eyes; the self-recrimination for me getting caught and not him. I’d always been considered the precocious baby of the family, the one always carefully guarded from the mistakes of the older siblings. It’s why my father hadn’t let me try for my apprenticeship with the Minutor Crystallum until I was sixteen while he’d let my oldest brother, Red Sky, join the librarians of the Vicus serve the order at twelve. I would never change my decision to join the Ipsum spies of the order… but perhaps I’d wish that part of that exploded canister had found its way into my body as well. Death was better than a life without wings. Canterlot General Hospital Canterlot, Equestria Watersday, 26 Rain Moon, 1001 Equestrian Era I woke groggily to the feeling of warm light on my face. Irritably, I brushed back a lock of my mane out of my face and looked around slowly, trying to ignore the dull throb emanating from my back near my shoulders. The solid architecture was a dead-giveaway, along with the view outside of mountains and the spires of what appeared to be a castle, that I wasn’t in Hurricane Memorial as I’d expected, but in some land-based hospital. ‘Probably Canterlot… It’s the only city that has a castle shy of the Crystal Empire’s capital, and since everything’s not made of crystal, that’s safely eliminated,’ I thought to myself, frowning at the puzzle of why I would be far from pegasi doctors that specialized in… I broke my thoughts off quickly then, unwilling to consider the reason for the muted pulse of agony along my spine. I heard the door then, opening to admit somepony to the room I occupied. My first glimpse of the pony was of a clipboard surrounded by a silvery-blue halo of magic that hid the pony’s face, but not their grey body and blue hooves, nor their mane of sky and deep cobalt blue or the white doctor’s coat with blue frames sticking out of a pocket. As the clipboard floated over to the bed to hang from a hook on the footboard, and the magic pulled those blue-rimmed glasses out of the pocket and placed them on their face, the doctor smiled slightly in greeting, her sapphire blue eyes gentle behind the lenses of her spectacles. “Good afternoon, Monkey Wrench. My name is Witching Hour and you’re at Canterlot General. I requested your transfer from the hospital in Cloudsdale.” And that’s how I met Doctor Witching Hour, then-scion of House Grey and Princess Luna’s student. You could say now that the rest is history, but history leaves out so much.