There she was once again. It appeared that her original grumblings about Mr. Trouble being the husband to Mrs. Marriage had just been proven by hard fact. They were once again in a dangerous situation that would have serious consequences should they fail. Only this time they had absolutely nopony else to help them. It seems things are improving, she thought sarcastically.
Still, it was a rare occasion for the prince to be holding her as he was. In fact, she was usually the one holding him. Perhaps it was because he had been brought to the brink of physical exhaustion so many times in the past few months. The fact that he was carrying her in his hooves while flying was testament to his immense endurance - or at the very least his willpower. The latter was probably more likely, as he used to spend the majority of his time doing the "royal" things that took little to no physical effort. That he was pushing himself for her sake was at least worth a smidgeon of appreciation.
The couple quickly reached the smooth rock surface below and Gleaming forced down a complaint when the alicorn tipped her back onto her own hooves. They may have been in a dangerous situation but may the sun be cursed if she didn't treasure what moments she could still get.
Tempo's hooves clacked against the cold hard stone behind her and she could hear the worry eek from his stride. She knew what he was going to say long before he said it. Her perception was readily attributable to her familiarity with the alicorn and her natural pessimism regarding magic worlds created by crazed overlords. She turned around to see a weary-eyed Tempo standing just out of hoof's reach, but he wasn't wearied by the flight. It was what laid before them.
"This was more than a trap," he remarked in a lowered voice. They were on one of the paths now that stretched across the rock's surface and on either side of it were rows of machines. The contraptions were of odd shapes and sizes but the purpose of each was clear.
"But I can't tell whether this place is a prison or an elaborate torture chamber," Gleaming Shield sadly commented.
Tempo approached the nearest machine. The restraints and spikes indicated torture. Perhaps it was the stains upon the metal that dissuaded him from making a detailed analysis but he didn't feel bad about looking away. "Oscura was sicker than I thought..."
It wasn't until he turned around that he noticed that his companion had run up ahead on the path. He started to become lost in reflection about the poor ponies who had gone through the Queen's tyranny, so he picked up a brisk pace and caught up to the white unicorn while she was studying yet another machine. He didn't have to ask why it interested her, however, since it was clearly different than the others. It looked more like a control panel. Switches, dials, and levers covered it as if the designer was obsessed with them.
"Controls?" he mused.
"I don't want to touch anything without knowing what it does first," she replied nervously. "If one of these controls affects the magic containment..."
"I'd rather not find out," he finished. "But I'd guess that they are all related to the nearby machines. Have you seen anything else?"
Gleaming Shield tilted her head in a "maybe" gesture. "There are some different-looking machines further along, but they look like the top of something else."
"Underground?"
"Probably."
Both ponies fell onto their rears in exasperation. "It's going to take us forever to figure all of this out and we don't know how long we have to do it," the mare complained.
Her husband placed a hoof on her shoulder for assurance. "Oscura isn't around anymore but this place still exists. It's obviously stable. At the moment anyways. There's no use in worrying about the situation. Let's just take it one hoof at a time."
Gleaming Shield's return smile was weak but existent all the same. She could always count on the stallion to stay strong. Truly there wasn't another pony in all of Equestria that had his determination and calm demeanor when the situation called for it most. It was then that a thought struck her. "Wait. Do you think there is...anypony still here?"
From the jump in the stallion's posture, she could tell that he hadn't considered it yet. Since the Queen was gone, the only resident that could possibly still be around would be...a former prisoner. The thought of such a pony being trapped eternally on the rock was horrifying. "I don't know whether I should hope so or not," he gulped.
Neither of them wanted to continue the thought but Gleaming Shield had to break the silence all the same. "We haven't seen anypony yet but we haven't explored much either. It looked like there were tunnels..."
Tempo gave a small nod. "I can fly around the surface, but you'd be better at checking the inside of this thing," he tapped the rock with a click of his hoof.
The mare wasn't taking the bait though. "Putting aside the fact that I don't want us to split up on what is obviously an asteroid of pain and death, you just hate tunnels."
Tempo tried to laugh innocently but the unicorn had already read him like an open book. "I was stuck in a cavern when we were supposed to be getting married. It was a very traumatizing experience...."
Gleaming Shield sighed. "You're a baby but I'll cut you some slack-"
"-because you're my very special some-"
WHACK!
"Don't be a goof!" the white mare scolded.
Tempo grinned all the same. "Just trying to lighten the mood, dear. This place could use it..."
Gleaming Shield couldn't disagree. She really was happy for anything that kept her mind off of what was around her. Torture and possible murder were not things for light contemplation. The perpetrator behind their current environment was long gone so she would be happy to leave as soon as possible. Her own powerful magic was simply not capable of whatever bizarre teleportation that got them in their current predicament. Perhaps she would hit the books after they got back. They would get back.
"Alright," Gleaming Shield conceded. "I'll head to that entrance at the beginning of the path. We can use magical communication if you get lost."
"If I get lost?" the stallion questioned his wife's implication. Her return look made him relent. "I'll catch up with you in a bit," he ended in a serious tone before taking to the air.
Seeing him flying away made Gleaming more nervous than she thought she'd be. It was the reality that was still hitting her. The trap that they had fallen into was far more extensive, complicated, and dangerous than either of them could have imagined. She tried not to think of there being additional traps, space rocks, and torture machines. If any of their crystal pony subjects activated such a trap in their absence...
No! She had to focus on the task at hoof.
Invigorating herself, she trotted back down the path they had traveled to find the nearest cave entrance. Just as they had suspected, there was at least one tunnel that lead into the oversized space rock. It was dimly lit by what Gleaming Shield could only assume were magical lamps. They gave off any eerie green glow that made the tunnel less welcoming than they already were. So the white unicorn just stood there for a solid minute trying to determine if going into the cave-like space was really such a good idea. The rock was who knows how old and that was not even to mention the questionable magic that kept everything as it was.
The mare felt small before the carved and gaping entrance of the dungeon rock's lower levels. One step and then two. The darkness quickly increased and the light of the distant sun and stars began to extinguish. The biting cold already present suddenly took a nasty turn for the worse. If there was weather than it would definitely be snowing inside the tunnel. Gleaming Shield shivered and wished she had her old scarf with her.
She kept on walking through the tunnel but it didn't change for a good while. The smooth walls and green glow of the lamps seemed to be mirrored straight forward for an eternity. Glancing behind her to the entrance, she could found she could not see it. There was probably a slight curve to the tunnel that hid it, as that was her experience with such things. She probably didn't know half as much as her husband did, though. That infant was going to get an earful about getting over his fears when she saw him again...as long as she didn't let it get to her either. That would make her a bit of a hypocrite.
The captain of the royal guard had nothing better to think of as she continued walking. She kept up her alertness all the same, as was her habit due to past training. When she was about to give up and turn around for a lack of anything actually being in the tunnel, a door materialized in front of her. She hadn't seen it until she got relatively close because it was set nearly out of the light of the nearest lamp. The door also marked the end of the tunnel.
With renewed interest, her horn glowed with low magical energy as she opened the door. The fact that it was not locked and seemed to have no lock could only mean that Oscura had not thought anypony but herself to have free access around the tunnel - or rock for that matter. The door was heavy all the same, as it was made of thick and heavy iron. Cautiously, Gleaming Shield stepped through the doorway. She made sure to check for magical traps as she moved. There was no telling what surprises might be hidden and she had more than enough reason to be suspicious. Why would everything be so open and readily available when potential prisoners were just landed on their rears upon the rock's surface?
What she found inside the new room was...darkness. She stopped short because there were no lights on in the room and only a little light from the tunnel illuminated the entrance. There was no telling what horrors were lying in that darkness. Not sure if she had faced worse things in her life, she brought up the courage to light up the room herself. Magic sparked from her horn and the dark space came into visibility.
It was large to the point that her own light failed to illuminate it all. The massive hall that laid before her was filled with an enormous amount of small cut crystals. They shined and twinkled in the presence of Gleaming Shield's light. The rock walls and pillars were smooth to the point that they resembled marble. It baffled rather than amazed the mare, however. Oscura must have used this place as one of her horde caches, she thought. Perhaps the queen thought that prisoners would be too scared to travel the tunnel or that they'd be too entranced with the horde of beautiful crystals to escape before she found them. This horde could even have been used as a sort of snare...
The white unicorn shivered at that thought. She resumed her pace forward, as there was a path between the piles of crystals that lined either side of the hall. Considering that there might be something at the other end of the hall, she largely ignored the horde and the magical lamps that hung on the walls and pylons. They had obviously been turned off or had run through their supply of magical energy.
She began a trot as she made her way farther along and the darkness closed visibility to the door behind her. It was discomforting but she knew for a fact that there wasn't anything nasty behind her. It was the simple fear of darkness that unnerved her and she was certainly mature enough to ignore it...mostly. Nopony ever really grew out of the fear. They just gained more courage to face it.
She arrived at the end of the hall to find, as revealed by her magical light, a platform that was raised from the floor of the large room. A set of stairs twice her own height led up to it and she climbed them with all of the care that the creepy hall begged for. For a moment, her horn lit brighter upon the discovery of the item atop the platform. The cage of black crystal sat menacingly in the middle of the space. Through the cracks between the bar-like crystals, she could just barely make out intricate inscriptions on the floor. The ones she could see were bizarre and nothing that she had ever seen or studied before. There was no way to get a closer look at them without entering the cage and she immediately knew that was a bad idea. Perhaps it was even the intent of Oscura for careless ponies to enter it.
Gleaming Shield trotted slowly around the cage, as it seemed to be the only thing on the platform and, in turn, the only thing left in the enormous room other than the mountains of valuable crystals. The cage did have a door. Some of the thick crystal bars were affixed to the others on a hinge, but it did not take a pony with half a brain to see the tiny inscriptions on the hinges. It was an old magical ploy. Magic could be activated automatically in the event that the hinge moved in a certain direction. Considering the fact that the item was a cage, the magic would probably slam the bars behind her and freeze the hinge.
Some dark stains came into view just inside the cage door, thus solidifying the mare's fear of what the floor inscriptions did upon the door's seal. She would have to test it all the same and, like her pink-colored stallion flying above ground, had to cautiously try everything to find a way out of the trap world. One glance to the left and one glance to the right later and she zapped one of the crystals from the horde into a levitation grip. It hovered over to her and she engaged a third common magic to open the crystal bar door of the cage. Light, levitation, and movement were all such simple things that it took only a little concentration to do them all.
Gleaming Shield opened the door as far as she could pull it and tossed the crystal inside. She only hoped that the presence of weight or matter, regardless of amount or animation, would be enough to trigger whatever the cage was designed to do. Her plan done, she released her magic on the door and the natural weight of it on its hinge made it slowly swing back. With a sudden flash from the hinge inscriptions, the door nearly came to life as it swung closed with lightning speed. The white unicorn was bathed in a green and purple hue as the floor inscriptions activated and filled the cage with their light. The eerie color seeped through the cage bars and lit the room only for a moment before plunging it back into the moody and limited light from the mare's horn.
The crystal that Gleaming Shield had tossed in was still sitting on the cage floor. It was no longer a light blue, however. It was now a black crystal. As black as the cage that surrounded it.