Equestrian Concepts

by Achaian

Chapter Ten, Part Two: Fire and Golden Eyes

Chapter Ten, Part Two

Fire and Golden Eyes

The dust had settled.

Ditzy looked up, felt the broken stone she lay against, and saw at once two armored heads, one with the usual slight curve of Eris’s frown, the other a straight black color, watching the distance aside.

“She’s up,” Eris said, and abruptly turned her attention to other things.

Far from free of her waking sensation, Ditzy saw Eris ascend to stand atop a nearby stone block as the unnamed guard watched her with reserved interest.

“You kept saying things about your mother,” Eris spoke without giving her the least bit of attention, instead keeping sharp eyes on the edges of their vision.

At once, blood shot back into her brain and brought terrifying perspective, and Ditzy flipped upright, wild, wings flared. With hard eyes the two watched her upsurge of movement, yet only one deigned to act.

“What is it?” The unnamed guard asked, tensing slightly, concern shaping his words.

“She’s crazy…” Both heard Eris muttering off to the side. His annoyed eye slipped to her, but only for a moment as he reiterated his question. Through heavy breaths, Ditzy managed to answer.

“Nothing, just an old memory…”

An old nightmare…

The dark-coated guard gave a measured, respectful nod. “Aphelion,” Eris called, and he moved away from the recovering Ditzy.

How many years now? How many years since she died; how many years have I been haunted and blessed by her memory? And here, in this place, threatened by the world to adopt her fate and I still miss her…

Ditzy stumbled although she had not stepped, gasped in the cold air and let it out in small shudders. Dust kicked up by her upsurge thickened the air around her, but it was much less than she had known. It was nothing compared to what had happened, years ago and half a continent away, a morbid ghost of memory.

She remembered the bright sunlight on the filth of the ghetto, rags hanging on strings strung inbetween high-rise apartments stricken deep by poverty. The air wretched with the smell of uncleanliness and garbage. One chose selectively to not see and hear the black dealings in the alleyways, muggings beatings, worse. The eyes were greedy and hungry: looking for any opportunity to get a release, to get ahead, but most of all to get out. There were no rules and no morals but survive. There were no consequences for actions as long as you got out. The desperation of the place pervaded the senses and the mercilessness cut you through to the bone. She remembered being small, so small among such desperation and hatred.

Ditzy gasped in the cold air, eyes focusing on the broken rocks below, focusing on anything but the past come to mind.

The tenements that composed the ghetto were enormous. Far too large to be properly maintained, far too large to hold themselves up.

Ditzy had lived in one of those tenements.

It’s gone, it’s gone, I’m out, I’m out…

One of the others kicked a rock cracking against some other rubble, and Ditzy convulsed in a repressed shudder at the sound.

But I’m still in here.

~~~~~~~~

“I don’t care,” Aphelion responded in an authoritative voice that somehow managed to be only slightly louder than his normal one. “She’s only tried to get out, even if she’s quicker to action than you are. I am going to hear what she has to say and I am going to give it the weight it deserves.”

He endured Eris’s hissing protests for another minute, and then abruptly walked off, leaving his furious subordinate to stew and hopefully get over her indignation in a timely manner.

Sometimes that was what was necessary to deal with Eris.

Aphelion sighed to himself. While judgmental, sharp, and stubborn, Eris was an especially useful part of the guard. The peculiarity of their particular predicament was only furthered by the team Luna had put together. He knew Eris through his wife (also a guard, but of another division) and she had started to make a name for herself with her stealth and perseverance, although he wished her a little less perseverance in this regard.

Stepping back toward the recovering iron-blue mare, Aphelion took note of her shocked state, but something moving on the edge of their pool of light caught his eye before he made it to her.

~~~~~~~

Tick stumbled along blindly through the cave, quiet as a mausoleum, every unexpected twist jarring his senses. There’s no pattern, no sense, no anything…

All his thought was useless here. His years of wandering frustrated him now: Tick knew he should be able to navigate a cave, yet the labyrinth defied him. Unnaturally smooth and worked sections cropped up at random, without rhyme or reason, resurgent blasts of cold wind resetting his senses. It was an endless vault. It might as well have been his tomb.

I shouldn’t be lost here. This is stupid.

Tick remembered falling instantly after stepping in, the sharp cry of surprise and his spread wings battered by the angular rock as he fell. Luckily his fall had not struck his still-stinging wounds from a few weeks ago, although it had surely added a few more. After pulling the painful mess of his body upright, Tick had pondered where the others had gone, yet he couldn’t determine the jagged shaft he had fallen through in the dark. Ill-equipped for the venture, he had crawled and chosen the passage that seemed to lead the most directly up.

There ought to be a way out of here, having been dropped in here, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this damn place doesn’t have one.

There was the thinnest and most indistinguishable of lights in the cave, or perhaps it was only his imagination. Yet the minute luminescence promised progress to his whirring eyes, and with wordless determination Tick strained to catch its path. Scrambling along the morass of shadow and rock, the light grew into a distant aura; he floated over the rocky ascent now, confident; he had adjusted as best he could to the light fainter than a distant star. Then he ascended over the lip of the grotto.

First he noticed the blade-like pillars and leaves of rock, a forest of stone, a wide grove of grey ashen trees. Wide they scraped to the ceiling: a cast of color from the earth and all the material found within, tinged forever by the shadow and the glow that pervaded the grotto. Jagged lines glistened, twinkling and sharp, metallic hues hiding in veins among rocky growth; it grew from both the ground and the ceiling and sometimes seemed a web. Like a misty forest caught before the dawn, it glistened with the promise of discovery.

Tick stopped as if he had flown headfirst into one of those living pillars, eyes wide and open.

What have I discovered?

Yet he felt eerie, the cold wind prodding him, and the still-distant aura of light far off in the shadowed repose of the grotto-grove. Tick watched for a while in the hopes that he could glimpse more of the endless phantasm of stone carved in the life of the forest, but the primal urge for light moved him before he regained coherent thought from the silent reverie of the place.

Tick floated down, silver eyes watching the cascading flashes of the veins of mineral and metal along the columns and odd branches of the place. The ground of the place was dark; he was startled to crunch against gravel as he landed. Irregular rocks complicated a straight path, and he did not trust himself to avoid all of the many protrusions above. The sheets and breaks of stone like leaves cast still more threatening dark against the nearly intangible glow from the center.

It’s almost a forest… no, Tick thought, shifting in thought as the gravel crunched underneath him. It’s what it might be like if there were trees of rock. Not quite bark and limbs, but there’s a resemblance. I’m no geologist, no archaeologist, but this place can’t be all natural… can it? There were worked sections earlier in those caves. This is…

Tearing himself away from speculative thoughts, Tick shook his head at the distraction and crept closer towards the glow, wincing at the crunch of gravel and clacks of larger stones. Sound rebounded; Tick hovered along out of ancient fear and a sourceless respect for the place.

The light is coming from over there. That looks like a clearing.

Floating through the webs of thin stone leaves, Tick caught sight of what lay before him.

A pool? A… lake?

He strained his eyes of varied shade. Whatever minute glow that allowed him to see had not strengthened.

No use. We’ll see when we get there.

Tick moved on, but the whisper of movement far above snatched his attention. The twisting spiral of something falling.

Eyes shot wide in the dark. Wings slammed into veins of the pillars and his throat caught somewhere between silence and a strangled yell as memory charged into mind. Tick felt the chill of the water and the long days that had led up to the moment, the agonizing seconds before his only companion had dived to put an end to it, the morass of death’s watery embrace that was so reluctant to let them go—

Tick yelled and thrashed as the light faded and he tried to force his way through stone, around stone; the pillars of the earth between him and the lake barred him in. He was quick—but he was blind, and there was nothing he could do as his memory screamed that he had gone under the water and he must go after him; there was nothing he could do as his fading sight shouted that Ditzy had gone under the water and there was not much time left for her.

The stone wouldn’t let him through.

~~~~~~~~

In her belated, returned grief, Ditzy could not help but wonder what nightmare might next mingle with those two of hers that had already passed. As the mind is prone to, she grabbed at anything that could distract her attention from the tragedy brought to present again. Through the blur in her eyes, noticed her two companions: the one Eris had called out to as Aphelion and Eris herself. Keenly aware of their shared visibility, cut off at once by the air as thick as smog not far beyond them, she noticed he had an orb as well. It lulled back and forth between moderate quietness and moderate brightness; he held a slow rhythm. That particular black pegasus at once struck her with an odd thought. Why four pegasi? A coincidence? Was it so we could get here faster? No, that shouldn’t be a problem for Luna, she has magic…

The name shook her with a profound sharp pain; Ditzy pulled herself up onto her hooves as more quick memories of Nightmare glimpsed and a daughter left behind passed her.

I won’t get out of here if I sit here and weep.

Webbed in a shroud of past misery, she gritted her teeth, called forth the inner will, closed her eyes—

There was a shout, the sound of scrambling—right in front of her, and she had faced away from them and into the ruined void!
Eyes whirled open and met, for out of the nothing had stepped Tick.

“I saw him fall—I saw you falling, into the lake; and I flew but there wasn’t any more light—” Tick began, running over his own words in a peculiar panic. Relief coursed like water over Ditzy as she felt the fear of a promised nightmare ebb away, and the thought at his odd phrasing passed as well in her absorption of his flabbergasted state.

“They don’t come out when they fall that way!” Tick shouted, eyes wide and desperate; he looked as if he had been touched by death with his pale visage, shaken and staring at the mare before him.

“Calm down, what are you talking about?” Ditzy asked after her surprise subsided as Aphelion behind her boomed: “Hold! Don’t make any moves!”

Ditzy glanced back for a moment as Eris and Aphelion half-skied and half-glided down the slope of debris, armored plates clinking to a stop beside her. Tick, his attention long lost on all others, tried to steady his breathing, the tempest-like whirlwind of his eyes and the steady thundering of his adrenaline-soaked heart. Over their concerned, curious, and cautious glances and questions, Tick explained first his own tale.

“As soon as I entered, I fell into a cave without light, some sections worked and some natural. Then I saw a glow, and I ran into rock trees, a forest of stone growing from the floor and the wall and the ceiling…”

~~~~~~~

Understanding will come with time, Tick assured himself, for me most of all. The three others had listened, and now they were as confused as him. He now sat alone, or as alone as they were comfortable letting him, about fifteen feet away from the others and behind a low wall.

The first was like the grey passage in the Canterlot library, Tick thought with unexpected clarity, but it was a thought bypassed in other pursuits. He had finished his short tale and heard theirs. Tick hadn’t heard anything that had helped him understand what was going on, yet found he cared little besides what lay at the end and the immediate danger outside.

Tick could still feel the panic echoing, his body scraping in the dark, his eyes so potent rendered useless.

The ball of light given to him in so simple yet curious fashion Tick held absentmindedly before him, examining it as it seemed in some distant way to be examining him. Tick, his back set against a large shard of rubble, seemed a lost artificer of some long-destroyed cathedral with the ball of light set before him and the haunting shadow arrayed all around. Tick’s eyes clicking in rhythm and the orb reflected their movement—or perhaps it was of its will.

They had agreed to a few minutes of rest and thinking on the oddities had separated and brought them back together. Tick was spending his lax moments slowly and casually observing the orb; he suspected there to be more to it, as there was to most everything.

What can you tell me, orb? What can I find out about you? What can this luminescent odd orb tell me? It might help me get out of here… but that’s likely wishful thinking…

What was this place before? This area served as part of the city before the fall. Or is this the city at all? To think of it, I can’t recall any sort of markers outside the large doors we entered. This could be the palace itself; it could be anything. We were supposed to be going after the library of this place. To discount dark possibilities, it’s likely not Luna trying to dispose of us. She did send us with guards, after all, despite all the good luck they’ve had.

Tick closed his eyes during his reflection, but then he remembered that it had been a guard that had pulled Ditzy out of the pool, and the quick suffusion of unwanted emotion provoked an image of Ditzy, standing in the ruin like a grieving valkyrie, tears shed as she stood interred in all the madness. Tick shoved that thought away, clenching his teeth with a blunt discipline marred by fervent emotion. Desperate to distract himself, he instead focused on the orb.

Quick eyes, whirling eyes, eyes that spun into a blur of grey from their usual black and white, eyes staring directly into the piercing brilliance. Tick cried out silently at the exultant flash of the orb, rays breaking straight through his eyes, taking hold of his form, taking hold of him—

For once, light pierced the solid veil, a silent explosion resounding.

~~~~~~~~~

The light of the explosion left a strange menagerie of colors imprinted on their vision like rapid blinking, haunting their eyes with what they had glimpsed in that moment. Eris saw Ditzy startle, yet she and Aphelion remained composed, and in a moment’s time she had scrambled over broken stone to check the last member of their group.

Tick, orb outstretched, held it as far away from his body as he could, his other foreleg shielding his closed eyes as the echo of a cry of pain left him.

Eris closed the few steps to him, unable to guess what had provoked the reactions; Ditzy asked him something, but she didn’t notice.

“What happened?” Eris noticed the diminishing strength of the orb, and then asked as an afterthought while Tick staggered up: “Did you get hurt?”

That flash originated from him, or around him. His eyes are going to be useless for a while.

“I know how to get out,” Aphelion announced from the other side of the low rubble wall. Behind Eris, Ditzy glanced at the sound of the voice—back at Tick—hesitated for a moment, then leaped back over to join Aphelion.

The best news I’ve heard in hours. Nearly forgetting Tick, Eris halfway turned toward the voice; then, remembering, she hit Tick on the shoulder. “Get moving. It was just a flash. You can walk it off.”

Tick scowled at the touch and the words, muttered something indistinguishable, and didn’t move.

“Hey. Move.”

Tick didn’t move. His eyes were still closed.

“We don’t have time for you to cringe like a foal.” Eris leaped onto the small divide. “Get up and stop defying rank or I’ll give you something to cringe about.”

Tick finally got up, but Eris was already off. Ditzy was listening to Aphelion as he gestured off into the emptiness and a particular vein of rubble that had fallen in a line.

Ah, progress. Finally.

“… Long ways off. Three hundred yards. But it was there, right in the direction of that line.” Aphelion finished as Eris arrived. Ditzy nodded, and then shot a nervous glance toward Tick’s hideaway.

“He’ll get here,” Eris anticipated the question as they turned their attention to her. “What are my orders?”

Aphelion said nothing for a moment. Eris thought his expression curious, and for her that usually meant danger. “Help Tick get over here first.”

Eris opened her mouth, but she knew she was wearing Aphelion’s patience thin. Without a word she turned back, her self-discipline and argumentativeness brawling. Climbing over to the divide again, she saw Tick waiting, eyes open; the cold ticking gaze gave her pause.

Weird eyes. What’s with the strange eyes out of nowhere, all at once?

Eris could not have known the golden shards in his eyes had not been there a moment before.

“Come on. They’re waiting for you.”

~~~~~~~~

This is it. It’s almost over.

Ditzy didn’t say much as they explained the simple plan. Aphelion had been fortunately positioned when the blast happened: in the one moment of light, he had seen a wall and double-doors in the distance. It had been burned into his sight for several seconds; with some quick thinking he had looked down and found a mark in the rubble that preserved the direction.

They set out, Eris in the lead.

Doubtful thoughts trailed her, but Ditzy pushed them aside. The light had been a sign, a means—it must have been. Ditzy couldn’t make herself believe otherwise. They left the rubble behind; the short walk seemed lengthened by their isolated sphere.

Maybe I should have asked him what he was doing. I just want to get out—I told myself I’d ask him later, but… he looks focused. He’s fine. The most important thing is to get out, to get this over with, to get back to her, and if something happened to me…

Tick can wait. This is his thing, after all, his and Luna’s, and no doubt he’s got a lot to think about. I just need to focus, get rid of this nervousness.

Nonetheless nervousness remained with Ditzy like a nag that refused to hush.

I should have told them. It’s something like he has. It made my memory come alive, and his. Do they even suspect? Does he? There could be anything waiting for us. It could be a trap, anything I’ve forgotten, and maybe theirs too…

A fair distance ahead, Eris stopped. “It’s here.”

Ancient wooden doors stood before them, the archway they sat in carved with finite patterns. What had once been painted and ornamented had suffered a thousand years of decay. The door itself was a mosaic of something, but far too worn away to determine what. Like the glory of the place, it had weathered the fall none too well.

“How are we going to—”

Without flair, Eris half-glanced at Ditzy, backed up a few steps, and rammed the door with her shoulder. It promptly collapsed, showering rotten wood and splinters down around them as the now-bare archway revealed the lit passage beyond.

Moonlight! Ditzy mouthed, cold relief like a gentle rain on her tense body.

Eris dislocated herself from the pile, rolling her eyes once she had passed Aphelion’s disapproving stare. The rest didn’t notice, consumed as they were by the sight of natural light and a promised way out. It was a relatively dazzling illumination, and a welcome one at that. There were small windows along the sides of the upward-sloping passage, some broken with chill vapors, some stained with old and thick colors. It was not a wide or tall passage, not more than ten feet wide or eight in height, and most elements of detail seemed sporadic or chaotic in their appearances. A mosaic there, a carving there, what might have been an ancient sconce rusting on a wall ahead. All life and activity had vanished from it. A once-red carpet lay on the floor, but it had dissipated and had decayed dark into a mostly-black color.

“Go slowly. Try not to touch things if you can help it,” Aphelion ordered, and he first stepped into the passage. Abstract patterns and carvings lined the stone walls, some clear and uninteresting, some ominous and extraordinary. But what was most unusual was the light once held close to them: it faded as soon as they stepped into the aura of moonlight.

Are we finally out? Are we really out of that place, or is this a trick?

They went in an unorganized fashion, but still stayed tight together. Aphelion might eye a feature suspiciously, while Ditzy gave it a more curious gaze, yet they walked onwards without significant pause. Eris, appearing bored, walked straight ahead. Around a corner they turned, and in the distance a set of unimposing doors lay.

“What’s that written over the door?” Ditzy asked, Aphelion wary, Eris lazily scanning. There was a barely readable inscription in heavily stylized letters: “Tolle et Lege.” She glanced at Tick, and for a moment thought there was something amiss about him. He hasn’t stopped, or looked at anything, he’s only gone straight ahead…

“This is the place!”

With that sudden exclamation, Tick flew at the door to the surprise of all others, and Eris leaped to stop him—but she was a hair late, and Tick burst the door open. All pretense of composure lost, he flew into the room beyond, the others right behind. Ditzy hesitated on the doorway, myriad doubts spilling into her mind, but as she stopped she saw the library itself.

The room was titanic, enormous, a colossus to put all others to shame; she was standing with the others on an insignificant balcony on the fifth floor of the library that arched beyond her comprehension. Grey stone and ancient tapestries lined the walls, from the neck-straining ceiling to the dizzying far-away floor. Incomparable shelves of expertly carved stone and wood filled the lower regions, some reaching up beyond even her perspective. Ditzy felt something was amiss among the city of forgotten knowledge—she strained her eyes—but then she saw Tick floating among the shelves, and heard his furious exclamations.

“Burned! Ravaged! Desecrated!”

Then she saw the blackened ancient scars of ash and ruin. Fire had taken this place long ago, and Ditzy’s hopes were as ashen as the books.

Author's Note:

This was entirely finished before S4E3 aired. It appears to contradict canon: it doesn't. It will be explained later.