“This can’t exist.” Eric slung his satchel in front of him, flipping it open. He lifted out a tablet and started scrolling through its contents with one hand. “It defies everything we understand about archeology. This is late Roman construction, on an island they never knew existed. If there were colonies in Greenland, we would’ve known. Their ships never could have crossed the ocean.”
Jacob made his way over to one of the pillars, inspecting the writing. They were unfamiliar shapes, like sticks rotated and overlapping in various positions. He had seen them before, though he couldn’t say where. “What kind of writing is this?”
Elise trotted over to the pillar beside him, looking up. “It’s called cuneiform. Maybe our first writing system, though there is some debate.”
Jacob glanced once down the chamber. It was about two hundred feet long, with an arch-like doorway on the other end that seemed to be sealed with something. No rot or decay that he could see, though that might be a product of how long it had been sealed. “Twilight Sparkle didn’t make this.”
“No, she didn’t.” Harley was still on her knees, staring down at the floor of dusty mosaics. “I didn’t think it was real either, Eric.”
Jackie stood beside her, one hand resting on her shoulder. She seemed to be looking at the same patterns. “There are ponies on the ground.”
There were. Jacob hurried over, clearing away some of the snow with a brush of telekinetic force along the ground. There were three images, their figures distinct and recognizable. Jacob did not know much about historical art, though he would’ve judged them far closer to Renaissance than Roman. Dimensions, perspective, and shading were all preserved.
The first depicted a crowd of ponies, with members from each of the three basic tribes. They looked beaten, bruised, clothes threadbare and many had wounds. In the very center of the image was a pale earth pony with a pink mane and no cutie mark. She looked frightened, desperate, clawing for the offered hoof of a vague, smoke-like entity.
Harley recoiled from the image, hissing under her breath and retreating to one of the pillars. “This is it. Queen Chrysalis always said… but the ponies were always so convincing. They made their own version sound so plausible.”
Jacob followed her to the second image, passing between the massive stone pillars. The same crowd of ponies now looked strong and healthy, with a village behind them. Each one had a little red thread around their flank, wrapped around their Cutie Marks. They had them now, every single one tied to the intricate web of red connecting to the same smoky creature as before. The white pony now had a familiar Cutie Mark, a bright stylized sun Jacob had seen a thousand times. “What is this?”
“Fate.” Harley glared down at the smoky creature. “That’s the closest word you have, but it doesn’t fit. Ponies sold themselves to her in exchange for their lives. Before anything you know about them. Before Hearth’s Warming, before the princesses… we were weak. No more magic than anything else, and much smaller.”
“We?” Jackie asked.
Harley didn’t respond. “The way we tell the story, it was some Minotaur warlord’s slave who met her. Her master had beaten her sister to death, the story doesn’t say why. Fate offered many things. Magical might to defy the dragons, life for the sister, and a new story to live.”
“I’m gonna see if I can get this door open!” Michelle called from the other end of the room. “You all keep on with your scavenger hunt or whatever.”
Jacob ignored her. As he looked closer, he could see a second figure behind the earth pony, a pale blue one with the moon on her flank. “What does your story say ponies gave in exchange?”
“Choice.” Harley spat. “We became characters in her story. Many heroes, but all pawns.” She started walking forward again, crossing the distance to the third and largest of the murals. “My progenitors rejected Fate’s deal after their parents had accepted it. They regained their freedom, but were cursed forever. Worse than what they had been when they started. Doomed to wander as hated parasites forever.”
Jackie hung on her arm, comforting. Or trying, anyway. She didn’t interrupt, and Harley continued. “This third image… it isn’t part of the story.”
An empty doorway of curving metal seemed to be welcoming a flood of ponies, still bound by their Cutie Marks, though looking despondent. A crowd of barely-clothed humans with primitive farming tools circled on the other side of the door, one of them with a hand extended towards the ponies. The scene seemed to depict the flow of time as he looked right, and huts became a little town, with ponies and humans working beside each other. The city grew bigger the closer to the wall he looked, and the threads binding the ponies got smaller. Eventually there were no ponies at all, only humans with strange hair and lots of broken shackles at their feet.
Harley dropped to her knees in front of the illustration, looking between it and the assembled humans. She spoke very quietly now, almost reverently. “The queens said there were others who had rejected Fate. We only knew they had escaped, where the slaver’s hooves couldn’t find them.” She looked up, and met Jacob’s eyes. “Humans aren’t her slaves—you don’t have Cutie Marks without ponies around to destroy the spell.”
“But… that isn’t what they told us.” Jacob shivered, forcing himself to look away. “Discord took over Equestria, they said. Ponies hid their magic so he couldn’t find them.”
“Maybe they did.” Harley rose to her feet again, with Jackie’s help. “Maybe they didn’t. I don’t think this temple would lie, though. This version of the story…” She gestured back at the other two illustrations. “Celestia has erased it. The books that tell it are all forbidden in Equestria, and only my kind remember.”
“Does that mean a changeling called us here?” Eric hadn’t followed them through the room, but he had apparently been listening. He held a tablet between his hands, taking pictures of the writing on the pillars, of the illustrations from different angles. “Twilight wouldn’t be trying to share illegal information, would she?”
“I doubt it. A changeling wouldn’t know about this place any more than the ponies did. Whoever called us here… knows Earth well. Princess Twilight might know secrets like that, but there are other princesses. The code could have been waiting for us to find for a long time before Unity fell.”
Jacob heard distant noise—a storm brewing on the surface, he suspected. That would fit with the little flurry of snow down from the opening. Just now, he couldn’t be bothered to care.
“This doesn’t change our mission here!” Danni called out towards them from the door, her voice frustrated. “Maybe you should stop worrying about abstractions and see if you can help us get this open?”
“Help you?” Jacob repeated, doubtful. “Danni, can’t you just knock it down?” He hurried up the steps. A round door was set into the wall between two arches, cut from what seemed like a single disk of stone sliced into smaller, interlocking sections. They moved under Eric’s hands, though there didn’t seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to it.
“Tried. I couldn’t kick it down. Didn’t even chip when I kicked it.”
“A place this ancient wouldn’t have survived without magic preserving it,” Harley said. “That magic would also prevent accidental or intentional damage.”
“Well, on the bright side, there are only five rings with ten symbols each. There are only 9.7 million different options to try,” Elise said.
“I’m not trying an exhaustive search!” Eric glared. “But I don’t speak cuneiform. It would probably be easier to unlock this door if I could read the combination.”
Eric had his tablet on the ground beside him, along with an open notebook covered in scribbles Michelle was making. An attempt to transcribe the door combination. “Elise and I will crack this. Everypony else, just… give us space.”
“He said every-pony.” Katie elbowed Jacob in the ribs, though there was less childish humor on her face than had been in her voice.
They waited. The storm outside got bad, blowing down periodic gusts of wind and snow. The interior had been toasty warm when they entered, but the longer Eric worked the colder it got. Eventually it became too much effort for him to keep his horn aglow, and they substituted Jackie’s electric lantern.
Jacob dozed, and he wasn’t the only one. Katie wasn’t worried enough about being seen to keep her distance, because they rested together, still bundled in their winter clothes but conserving heat as best they could.
The sound he woke to was not the wind, but the roar of helicopter blades. They echoed down from above, painfully loud in the confined space. He wasn’t the only one coming to unhappy wakefulness either—Jackie and Harley were both scrambling to their feet, drawing weapons. Elise sat up straighter, though she of course had no guns that could be operated by a pony.
“What the hell is that noise?” Eric was still working at the door, the ground around him covered in a hundred ripped sheets. Each one of them was covered with notes. Michelle sat against the wall with the tablet in one hand and a pen in the other, looking tired and dazed.
“That is a V-22 Osprey!” Elise called. “In case anyone here is wondering, Denmark doesn’t own any. I bet it flew here from Thule Air Base…”
“It shouldn’t have been able to follow us here,” Jacob said. “We didn’t land, didn’t even stop… How would they know where to find us?”
“What do we do?” Eric didn’t have to shout as loud—the helicopter was spinning down, its engines slowing. There was no windstorm above them anymore either, only silence.
“Get to cover behind the pillars!” Elise gestured to the far sides of the wall. “There’s some irregularity there, someplace to hide maybe. If it’s the Extranormal Containment Unit, they’ll probably breach with some kinda flashbang and come in shooting. Close your eyes, and cover your ears as best you can. You’ll still hear me.”
Harley had her MP5 ready in both hands, eying the cavern’s dark opening with suspicion. “Do you know how they fight?”
“Yes.” She looked to Jackie. “Put that lantern somewhere safe—they’ll all be coming down with vision, so if it takes a hit we’ll be the ones who go blind. Danni, by the wall. I think our best chance is for the rest of us to harry them long enough for them to send their reinforcements down. Once that happens, you do your stone monster thing and crush them.”
“We’re trapped in a cave.” Michelle made her way to the nearest pillar, though she drew her handgun. “Couldn’t they just drop a big bomb down here and wait for it to turn us into paste?”
“They used to do things like that.” Harley didn’t take cover, though she did take her new wand and hold it along with the gun. “But the timing has to be perfect. Unicorns can shield, or teleport it back at you. If they do drop one down, this won’t be much of a fight. I’ll return it to sender.”
There were distant sounds from above, though none loud enough to clearly identify. Metal ground on rock, boots crunched on the snow, and eventually something bounced and rattled down the rock. They all had cover by then, those who were going to fight in front of middle pillars, while those who weren’t crouched in back. He was one of those, along with Katie and Eric. Jackie and Harley had both flown, concealing themselves in the shadows near the roof. Only Elise stood in the middle of the room, unsheltered and unprotected. She had a flashlight in her mouth, and Jacob watched as she shone it towards a little silvery something as it rattled to a stop at the entrance.
It wasn’t a bomb, but a tiny metal box with thick wire running all the way up. Jacob didn’t have to wonder what it might be for very long; no sooner had it stopped bouncing than it started to talk, the voice loud enough to echo through the vaulted chamber. “I know you’re there, ponies. You probably think I’m here to kill you… but that isn’t so. Do I have your permission to come down? I would like to talk.” The voice was deep, rich, and slow, the voice of an experienced politician.
“Hell no—” Harley called, but Elise interrupted her. She shouted so loudly, that Jacob doubted a microphone would’ve been necessary for the speaker to hear her, even outside the cavern.
“Yes! We are willing to negotiate!”
Jacob couldn’t see where Harley was hiding, since he had put out his horn, but he was sure he could feel her glare as she whispered. “The fuck are you thinking? The Light Tenders haven’t ever kept their word before.”
Apparently the speaker couldn’t hear, because she continued. “Are you certain? If any of you act with violence towards myself or my guards, it will go badly. Be more unified in your answer.”
Elise whispered right back, unabashed. “That is Senator Maria Hunter. She was my boss’s boss… head of the oversight committee that controlled all containment and purification work on the planet. If she’s here, then she’s brought overwhelming odds. I would not be surprised if there was an atomic football riding in that helicopter, in case you want to try and teleport that back before it goes off.”
“Why would a senator be out in the field?” Jacob muttered.
“We should hear her out,” Elise continued. “It’s our best chance.”
Harley grunted. “Fine.”
Elise stepped forward, raising her voice again. “We will stand down! We are not surrendering to you, but we promise nonviolence during negotiation.”
“Good, good.” The voice sounded pleased. “On my way.”