Chapter 4
Lock and Key
The old city gave Derpy a deep sense of unease as she winged her way through its soot-blackened reaches. These were places where pegasi like herself had once lived, worked, gone to school, shopped, grown old -- and died. The distinct lack of ghostly moans and unexplained phenomena left her fairly certain the city wasn't haunted, but it certainly felt like it was.
Finally, after some time, she found her way to the place where the two huge wings stood, and brought herself to lite on a small, dirty cloud near their base. She looked up at them in awe. They were gigantic, taller than the tallest towers of Canterlot Castle, and even in their torn and blackened state, they seemed majestic, somehow.
"I don't have time to gawk," said Derpy. "I just gotta get this box dropped off, and go home. Now, where would this pony be?"
Having said these words, she recalled the zebra's rhyme.
"Below them lies a secret tomb," she said, and then she gulped, and whimpered out the next line of the poem: "Accursed is that place of doom."
Still, she steeled her will, and walked to the cloud's edge. She looked down, and beheld something she had not noticed before, so transfixed had she been by the destruction that surrounded her.
Down on the desert floor, there stood a structure of brown-gray stone. It was round, and seemed to be full of sand. She could tell little about it from here, but curiosity and a need to see her job done drove her to step forward and spread her wings, gliding downward in a wide, hesitant spiral.
As she grew nearer, what the structure was became apparent: It was a stadium or coliseum of some kind, or at least the remnants of one. Time and the desert winds had piled so much sand within it and around it that only its topmost reaches were still visible, but even so, what little Derpy could see had a distinctly familiar architecture.
"This doesn't look like a tomb, at all," she said. "It looks like the Cloudoseum back in Cloudsdale."
She continued downward, and finally set her hooves on the sand. She did not land inside the structure; she was too afraid to enter it unbidden. Instead, she put herself down outside its front gate -- or what little of it remained visible, anyway. Though only its top third still protruded above the sand, what Derpy could see of the portal looked just like the main entrance of the Cloudoseum, but for the fact that it was built of stone. No shutter, portcullis, or other means of preventing passage through it remained, but the eeriness of its similarity to something so familiar was enough by itself to keep Derpy from wanting to step inside.
She stood there awhile, taking in the antiquated, sand-weathered edifice, and as she did so, Derpy became more and more convinced that this place must have, in some way, been the inspiration for the design of the Cloudoseum. The lines and form, though not identical, were far too similar for anything else to be true.
"But the Cloudoseum was commissioned by Princess Celestia just a few hundred years ago," said Derpy. "Does that mean she's been here?"
"Well of course she's been here," said a scratchy, wavering voice from somewhere in the shadows of the huge archway. "She used to be quite fond of the games when she was younger, or so she told me, once, when first I took this post."
Derpy felt her heart leap into her throat, and hopped quickly backwards and away from the source of the sound. She felt the muscles in her wings tighten, ready to carry her away at the first sign of danger, but what emerged from the archway did not seem dangerous, at all.
It was a pegasus stallion -- pale orange, and very, very old. His face was drawn and wrinkled, and he had a mustache which was waxed and curled in a fashion that had not been popular since decades before Derpy was born.
"Yes, there were all sorts of games here in those days," he said, "races and jousting and horn fencing and the like."
Derpy looked the stranger over carefully, becoming more aware all the time that the pony before her was as much a relic as the place in which they both stood. He wore barding emblazoned with the Crest of Celestia's Solar Guard, but it looked like no armor Derpy had seen on the Solar Guard as she knew them. Its design was simpler, having fewer plates and chainmail voiders to cover the areas this sparser plating would have otherwise left exposed. It had been gilded gold, once, as was the custom of the Solar Guard, but that was only evident in the few thin patches of the precious metal that remained in the crevices and recesses where the plates were joined to one another. Mingled therewith in these recesses, and in a few spots here and there on the chain links of the voiders, there were only the few barest specks of rust. For the most part, however, the entire suit gleamed the bright, silvery white of burnished steel, the gilding being long worn away by the fastidious polishing and maintenance the armor seemed to have received, for likewise its brass fittings and buckles shone bright, with only the slightest hints of tarnish in those tiny recesses where a hoof or a muzzle could not easily push a polishing cloth.
"Who are you?" asked Derpy, still uncertain what to make of the old, mustachioed stallion.
"Now there may be the ultimate epistemological question," said the ancient pegasus. "Who? Am? I?" He tickled at the edge of his mustache with a hoof. "Who are any of us, really?" he continued. "I am a pair of wings with a very old pony between them, I suppose, and a hundred years of questions both deeper and more mundane."
"I... really just wanted a name," said Derpy.
"Well, you should have been more specific, then," said the stallion. "Lockinkey is my name," he continued, "but that tells you very little about who I am."
He stepped towards her, his pace incredibly slow, his ancient legs trembling under the weight of his armor, and Derpy worried for a moment that they might buckle, leaving her alone in the desert with an old, stricken stallion and no available medical care. Miraculously, however, he remained aright, and his tired, aged eyes softened as he spoke again.
"To tell you who I am would require the recounting of thousands of days spent here in this place, standing guard over this forgotten metropolis and the terror that lies beneath these sands. It would require I recall many thoughts and even more feelings. It would take more than the considerable time I have lived to fully explore the experiences I have had in it, limited though they be compared to those of some ponies, and I doubt that you have nearly that amount of time to listen -- and myself even less in which to speak."
"Really, now?" asked Derpy. "Well, that's a shame, but..." she stopped mid-sentence, and then spoke again. "Could you go back to that part about a terror beneath the sand?"
"I might," said the old pony, "but for the moment, you have me at a disadvantage."
"Excuse me?" said Derpy.
"You have my name," said Lockinkey, "but I do not have yours, dear lady."
"Oh," she said. "Well, I'm Derpy Hooves with the EPS. We received a package that was listed for return service here to this place."
"A package?" asked Lockinkey. "A package..."
His face grew solemn, and he stared out at the horizon, squinting against the sun's abusive glare on the distant dunes.
Derpy realized, as the crow's feet around his eyes became even more pronounced, why it was that his face was so shockingly wrinkled.
"I wonder if it could be that it has made its way back here, at last," he said, and he turned towards the gray mare.
"Step inside," he said. "It's a bit cooler in here out of Milady's sun."
"Milady?" asked Derpy.
"Princess Celestia," said Lockinkey, "who gave me the honor of this noble post, the responsibility that lies therewith, and my one, soul purpose in life."
He turned and crept back towards where he had emerged from the shadowy archway, every step seemingly a struggle, and Derpy followed obediently, though she was still unsure whether it was advisable to do so. In time, he made his way to a small doorway. Once, it had been a relatively tall window, but with the sand piled so high, it stood just tall and broad enough for a pony to pass through. It was bereft of any shutter but an old, tattered curtain, which, like Lockinkey's armor, bore the emblem of the Solar Guard. He pushed it aside, and beckoned Derpy inward. Upon crossing the threshold, she was pleased to find that it was, as promised, several degrees cooler inside.
The room itself appeared to have once been a small lobby or foyer of some kind, but it had at some point been converted into living quarters. There was a little fireplace built of clay and set into what had once been a small window, and a small pot was suspended over the remains of a fire built with what appeared to be charcoal. Near that stood several sacks of flour, rice, and other foodstuffs that could be purchased in bulk and kept in dry storage. There was an old bed with linens that were tattered but flawlessly and neatly folded. There was an ornate table that might once have been beautiful, but was now worn almost entirely bare of varnish. It was also especially scratched and gouged in one particular spot near its head. There were a few wooden dishes that sat upon a shelf, and there was a jug of water that sat near the fireplace with a battered tin dipper lying beside it. There was also a bookshelf full of very old, well-worn books, most of which having titles that indicated them to be books of philosophy, poetry, and history. Lastly, there was a lance that hung on two hooks near the door. Unlike the old pony's barding, however, it looked brand new, as if it had rarely, if ever, been used.
It was made of beautifully flamed white maple full of curl and bird's eye. It had a tip of polished steel, and rather than the emblem of the Solar Guard, it bore on its vamplate a likeness of Celestia's cutie mark, rendered in what appeared to be pure gold. Derpy stared at it for several seconds until the old pony spoke.
"Let me see this package you mentioned," he said, and Derpy dug it from her saddlebag.
She put it down upon the table, and Lockinkey stepped to where it lay, so that he might examine it more closely.
"I have not seen this box for at least thirty years," he said plainly. "And in that time, rarely have I seen another pony, now that I think about it. More and more rarely, in fact, as the years have fled."
"You've lived here for thirty years?" asked Derpy.
"Much longer than that," said Lockinkey, and he smiled at Derpy's stunned expression, "but it was about that long ago that I took this box eastward, and left it with somepony who promised to find someone, somewhere who could fix what it contained. I had long believed he had deceived me, and sold it, or perhaps that he had died. Hmm... Perhaps, in fact, he did one, the other, or even both, but whatever its odyssey has been, the box, at least, has returned. But what of its contents?"
Lockinkey reached to his waist and drew from a sheath fastened to his armor a little knife so old that the wooden scales of its handle were worn almost perfectly smooth, showing only the faintest hints that they had once been finely checkered. He cut the twine which bound the box shut. Then, putting the knife away, he put the tip of a shaky hoof into a small recess on the surface of the lid, and slid it open.
What now appeared was so strange that Derpy did not even speak. Her mind was so taken aback to see the thing that Lockinkey now carefully lifted out of the box that it took several seconds for her to convince herself that it was even real.
It was an egg. More precisely, it was a bejeweled egg about the size of two hooves clasped together, and it was ornately inlaid with gold filigree. Wherever this golden lace did not wind its way across the egg's surface, it had been colored deep violet with some type of metallic paint that seemed to glitter and sparkle in the changing light as Lockinkey carefully rotated the artifact to examine its surface. Furthermore, set amongst the interlaced, golden lines of the filigree were many emeralds of a deeper green than Derpy had ever beheld in such gems before, all finely cut into multifaceted ovals. Even to a pegasus like Derpy, with no natural ability to sense enchantment, it was obvious that such a thing must be magical, and must have been crafted by somepony -- or something -- for some very specific and probably very important purpose.
It made her uneasy just to look at it, and even more to know that she had been carrying it around for the better part of a day.
"Okay," said Derpy. "That's it for me. Whatever that thing is and why ever it belongs here probably have a story behind them that I absolutely do NOT need to know. This is return service, so all I need is one or two signatures, and I'm outta here."
"But I still have not answered your question," said the old pegasus, raising an eyebrow.
"What question?" asked Derpy, and then her eyes went wide. "Oh, yeah! The terror beneath the sand thing..." She cleared her throat. "See, that's exactly the kind of thing that I meant when I said I didn't need to know. If there's some kind of ancient, evil whatsit buried around here, you can spare me the details. I'll just leave, and it can stay buried. Then, I can go home and get Tuesday off, maybe."
Lockinkey nodded very gently. Derpy wondered if it was intentional, or merely his neck straining under the weight of his helmet.
"Before you go," he said, "I must at least make sure it was properly repaired. Otherwise, I must send it back with you, again."
"What do you mean, 'repaired?'" asked Derpy. "It's fine," she said, gesturing at the egg. "Look at it."
"Wait a moment," said the old stallion, and he gently opened a trio of tiny, claw-footed legs that were cleverly folded into the design of the egg's splendid, gold-laced surface. He sat it down gently upon them, and did a thing that confused Derpy even further: He opened it.
Reaching forward, he pressed one of the emeralds, and it sank back slightly into the egg's surface, producing a faint click. At seams which were so finely fitted that Derpy had not even noticed them before, the front, upper half of the egg split, and two tiny doors folded slowly open, leaving a sort of half-dome which was, inside, even more stunningly inlaid than the egg's surface. It glittered and shone with what must have been a thousand miniscule jewels of all different colors, each one cut more carefully and precisely than the mare would have thought possible.
"Ah," said Lockinkey. "It is, indeed, repaired. Whoever did this must have a talent with jewels and things of finery unrivaled in all the world."
"Yeah, Rarity's pretty slick," said Derpy. "May I go, now?"
"Aren't you at all curious what this pony -- whom you seem to know, I might add -- even did?"
"I know she's good." said Derpy. "She makes dresses, too; they're gorgeous. But I get the worst feeling that if I stay anywhere near that thing, something awful is going to happen."
"At least have a look here, so you'll know what she's done," said the old pony, "and so you may properly thank her for me."
"Alright," sighed Derpy. It did only seem right to relay the old stallion's thanks. She walked towards where the egg sat upon the table. "What did she..."
And Derpy stopped dead in her tracks.
"Love of Luna," she whispered.
Inside the egg, in the middle of a remarkable diorama of the inside of a jeweled cave, there was a stunningly perfect statuette of a sleeping dragon. Derpy could not believe the sight, and though it had at first stunned her to immobility, she felt a powerful urge to draw nearer to it.
She did so, and the closer she drew, the more stunned she became at its detail. Every minute feature seemed to be rendered with perfect fidelity to a real dragon, and Derpy had seen a dragon much more closely than most ponies. Her eyes only inches away now, Derpy realized that this miraculous thing was not even cut from a single piece of stone. Every scale, tooth, and claw had to be an individual piece somehow glued precisely into place, for no chisel or paintbrush was fine enough to reach into many of the tiny recesses where careful inspection revealed as much detail existed as anywhere else. It was as if someone had literally shrank a dragon to a size that could sit upon a pony's hoof. So real did it seem, in fact, that Derpy marveled it did not breathe..
"Lockinkey," said Derpy, "What is this!?"
"It is a dragon, obviously," said Lockinkey, "or a very convincing -- if miniscule -- facsimile thereof, anyway."
"This is what's down there, isn't it?" asked Derpy, feeling her knees weaken. "The... terror beneath the sand?"
"Yes," said Lockinkey. "Xindathrana, the Hope Murderer. I have spent the last thirty years fearing day by day that she might awaken, but now, with the return of this egg, I can at last rest easy."
"Xindawho?" asked Derpy, shaking her head. "The WHAT!?"
"There are dark, dark times in Equestria's history," said Lockinkey, and he nodded at his shelf of decrepit books. "There are few books which still tell of them, and fewer who know the languages in which those books are penned. Such stories have been my company for most of my life, and Xindathrana's story in particular is long, strange, and known to very few who still live." He paused for a moment, and shook his head slightly. "And it is horrible enough that fear of seeing it played out once more has kept me here for all these years, but I am too old to much longer stand my post. So, I am glad that this egg has been returned to me, that I might at last complete the one task with which I am charged."
He looked down at the tiny dragon forever asleep within the egg, and spoke in a low voice.
"Oh Xindathrana, Murderer of Hope, ye who struck our forebears from the sky, and scorched the whole land in your rage, sleep ye now until the end of time, that both ponykind and thyself may knoweth peace."
He turned to Derpy.
"Would you like to hear the rest of the story, dear lady?"
"Uh," Derpy began, scratching at one foreleg with another. "Can I have the short version?"
Lockinkey gave a quiet chuckle.
"I suppose the short version is that she meant to burn the entire earth bare of all life, and she might well have succeeded if not for this very device. It was commissioned by Princess Celestia, made by the greatest jeweler in the world, and enchanted by a distant ancestor of none other than Starswirl the Bearded. The Princess presented it to Xindathrana as "tribute;" a gift of humility in honor of the dragon's own greatest accomplishment: her own creation of a single egg -- not naturally lain according to the course of nature, mind you, but magically cast from Xindathrana's own flesh and blood, and imbued with the agony and despair of a million dying ponies."
Lockinkey looked out the window to stare up at the blackened ruins above for a moment. Derpy thought she saw him shiver before he began to speak again, but even at rest, the old pony's body was so tremulous it was difficult for her to be sure.
"Xindathrana alone was not strong enough to stand against all the united races of the world, you see, but what would one day hatch from her egg would be a dragon so evil, terrible, and powerful that it would complete Xindathrana's work and wipe out ponykind -- and all else that lived -- including other dragons."
"Celestia's gift to her of this egg," said Lockinkey, nodding at the artifact on the table, "was a rouse."
He reached into the neck of his cuirass and lifted from therewithin a small, purple key suspended from a golden chain around his neck. This he fit it into a tiny recess just in front of the place where the miniature dragon rested within the little, glittering cave. He began to turn it, and, there came from within the egg the sounds of tiny springs tightening and gears grinding.
When he withdrew the key, the sharp, metallic notes of an eerie lullaby emitted from within the egg's base, and the tiny effigy of Xindathrana began to slowly rotate in place.
"This melody locks the dragon in an eternal sleep from which she can never awaken, so long as it is played in her presence just once a century. This task was last completed by my father, and though I had hoped I should have an heir who would have been next to perform this duty, such is not the way my life has played itself out. It is not often pretty young mares like yourself come to visit me, you see."
Derpy snickered at his remark, and shook her head.
"I suppose I should have tried harder," he continued. "As time went by, though, I found myself more and more unable to understand the world outside this place on those few occasions that I did venture forth to restock what few supplies I need here. In time, I accepted that I was not meant to have a family of my own."
Unlike the matter with Spike, Derpy could think of absolutely no words that might comfort the old pony. So, she remained silent.
"All that is no longer of consequence," he continued. "This day, I shall wind this music box in the dragon's hearing, and then I shall take it to Princess Celestia to be relieved of my duty. What will happen to this egg after that and whoever shall stand guard over Xindathrana the Hope Murderer will no longer be my concern."
"I'm sorry that things haven't gone quite the way you would have wanted," Derpy said, thinking of the old stallion's years of isolation, "but the box is fixed now, and I need you to sign for this delivery."
Her eyes narrowed.
"Hold on a second! Why did you ever let this thing leave this place!? And you just trusted something this important to some random stallion!?" she almost shouted, and her mouth remained slightly open as she finished her outburst.
"Of course not," said Lockinkey. indignantly. "I trusted it to my own nephew. It only seemed appropriate to place it in the keeping of a member of my own family, as the watch of this place and this box have been our duty for thousands of years. Moreover, Unlike me, my nephew at least had a family. If any of his children or their children still live, this duty will fall next to them. I took it to him, left him explicit instructions for what should be done with it, and returned to my post here so that if, in the egg's absence, Xindathrana awoke, I could stand against her."
"Listen, Lockinkey," said Derpy. "I'm sure you've got some pretty solid... uh... dragon slaying chops, but that thing?" she nodded towards the little, spinning dragon in the egg-shaped music box. "It's name is "Xindathrana the Hope Murderer. I mean, did you even tell Princess Celestia about all this?"
"I could not," he said, dropping his head. "It was my own fault the device was damaged. I could not resist the urge to touch the tiny image of Xindathrana, and I broke off one of its wings. The magic would not work if the image was not restored, but your friend has done such a fine job of repairing it that it is impossible to tell it was ever damaged, at all. I am positive it will function as designed."
The shame in his words was palpable as he explained his error, and equally so his relief at Rarity's exquisite repair.
"I was too fascinated by it; spent too much time with it open here on this very table, examining it too closely. It was made to be too beautiful and too perfect to ignore. You see, that is part of its magic. It is how the dragon was ensnared by it, for with the exception of this one thing in all the world, Xindathrana cares not for things of beauty. She cares only for despair, agony, and the suffering of others. That is why the city above lies in ruin, you see. She consumed the very anguish of its inhabitants when she burned it. It was those feelings that she focused into the magic that allowed her to create her egg, and which would have fueled the unstoppable rage of the beast meant to hatch from it."
Derpy felt her spine tingle, now fully understanding why the ancient ruins had chilled her blood and set her so ill-at-ease. She was no unicorn, but if Equestria was truly a magical land -- and it was -- then a place like that must be full of memories that could affect anypony, regardless of race. All that murder, violence and despair had been wrought in the name of creating something meant to inflict even more of it. The very thought made her bones feel cold.
She looked at the music box, and suddenly, something about its coloration -- and that of the tiny dragon inside it -- began to bother her.
"Lockinkey," she said slowly, "What happened to that egg? Xindathrana's egg, I mean."
"Princess Celestia took it," said Lockinkey. "Princess Luna advised she destroy it, but Celestia insisted that there was a life inside of it which had done no evil and did not deserve death, regardless of what it might do in the future."
Like those inside the music box on the table, the gears in Derpy Hooves' mind began to turn.
"This egg," she said, her stomach twisting slightly, "what did it look like?"
"Well, this was long, long before even my time, of course," chuckled Lockinkey, "but given Xindathrana's own coloration, and the fact that this music box was meant to resemble it in some respects, I should imagine it would have been purple with green spots.
It can't be, thought Derpy. It just can't. This all happened way, way too long ago. There's no way.
The story of how Spike the Dragon had been born was well-known in Ponyville -- that he had been hatched from, in his own words, whenever he related the tale "a cute, little purple and green egg" by none other than Twilight Sparkle as her entrance examination to Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. Was it really possible that the little dragon was the son of the horrible being whose tiny effigy now spun on top of a collection of gears and springs that were at that very moment playing a melody meant to lock her in eternal slumber?
Derpy Hooves had often been accused of being "slow on the uptake;" everything from a bit ditzy to an outright imbecile, but even she was not delusional enough to imagine that these matters were a mere coincidence. No, they could not be; Derpy was sure of it, partly because all the signs seemed to point that way, and partly because this matter would be all too well in keeping with her own luck as of late.
Somewhere very nearby, asleep beneath the desert sand, lay Spike the Dragon's mother. She was incredibly and undeniably evil, responsible for countless deaths, and she had created Spike to carry on in her footsteps.
Derpy felt her head swim. and she stumbled towards the bed, where she sat down, and hung her head.
"Are you alright?" asked Lockinkey. "Do you need a drink of water?"
"Yes," said Derpy.
The old stallion stepped to his water jug, and dipped her out a drink. he passed her the dipper, and she quickly drank down its contents. Her head began to clear, and she passed the dipper back to Lockinkey, who laid it on the table.
No, I must be wrong, she thought. Spike's a good kid. Twilight Sparkle hatched him -- not Xindawhatever. There was that one time he went a little nuts, sure, but nopony got hurt, right? I'll tell Twilight about all this, and she can ask Princess Celestia. I'm probably wrong, like usual. I mean, this was all thousands of years ago from the look of that city. Maybe Celestia did just finally destroy the egg, and anyway, there's nothing I can do about it, right? I should just go home. I don't want to be anywhere near this place, anymore.
"Well," she said, getting to her hooves, and reaching a wing into her delivery bag for her clipboard, "if you could just sign one or two forms, I suppose I'll be on my way."
"Actually," said Lockinkey, "I was wondering if you could help me with one thing."
"What?" asked Derpy, her head still clearing.
"I am responsible, at least once more, for placing this music box before the dragon, and letting her hear its melody play. Until I do this, I cannot be relieved of my duty."
"Well, go knock it out, then," said Derpy.
"It is not so simple as that," said Lockinkey. "My hooves have grown weak in my old age, and I fear I can no longer operate the machine."
"You just did," said Derpy, nodding at the music box.
"Not that machine," said Lockinkey.