Both the prison and Cliff’s lab had originally been part of the extensive basement of the Crystal Palace, but had since been assimilated into the bunker they built to replace it. Luckily, both had escaped with only minor damage when the Palace collapsed. Cliff was especially grateful that he didn’t have far to go tonight. He wasn’t in the mood to explain to anyone why he was covered in blood.
Cliff walked into his lab, fighting the urge to destroy something. Over a month of work, and he’d managed to copy the wrong ability. Brilliant, just brilliant. He let out a sigh and looked around.
His lab wasn’t very big, maybe twenty feet wide by fifteen feet deep. A three-foot wide workbench took up the far wall, and the entire thing was covered in runes, gems, and enchantments in a way that could charitably be labeled organized chaos. The rest of the walls were covered in blackboards or cabinets.
Cliff shoved the umbrum crystal into the far corner and sat down in front of his desk, brushing his clawtips over a framed sonogram, his one and only picture of his unborn daughter. “It looks like I won’t be able to get home as soon as I was hoping, but don’t you worry. I’ll be there for you, no matter what.”
There were just some things he’d need to do first. Cliff found a blank sheet of paper and pressed his right hand against it. A simple spell transferred the rune from hand to parchment. He would have to experiment with that rune later. Physical threats would mean little or nothing if he could transform into shadows at will.
At least something good had come from his screw up.
Out of habit, Cliff checked the automatic enchanting station he’d built and removed the two dozen anti-aura gemstones it had completed in his absence. In another day, the astral chargers in those gems would fill them up completely, and they’d be ready for use in combat. Fresh gems replaced the completed ones, and then Cliff made his exit.
He climbed a few flights of stairs before reaching the front door. Cliff felt a little bit of grim satisfaction as he passed through the extremely thick and magically reinforced doors. The Crystal Bunker, as ponies called it, had none of the whimsical beauty of the Crystal Palace, looking like a giant upturned bucket, but it certainly kept the Crystal Heart safe. Ten solid feet of enchanted diamonds and steel made up the outer walls, with a second and a third layer farther inside. Cliff wasn’t sure if there even was a path to the Crystal Heart itself.
Once outside, Cliff jumped into a small river on his way to the meeting area. The water was surprisingly warm and comfortable, thanks to Winter Wrap-up a few days ago. More importantly, it washed away most of the blood on his armor.
He reached the kitchen for the Everfree Platoon and paused to take a deep breath before stepping inside.
Faint light from the inside illuminated the two most famous ponies in all of Equestria, Celestia and Luna, sitting at one of the tables.
“At last you arrive,” Luna said. “How went your experiment?”
Cliff couldn’t meet her gaze. “Not the breakthrough I was hoping for, Princess.” He took a seat on Celestia’s side of the table, just because it happened to be closer. “I was studying the wrong ability and will have to start over from scratch.”
“I’m sorry,” Celestia said. One of her large wings reached out and wrapped around his shoulders.
“It is regrettable,” Luna said. “We must proceed with option two before the Alliance can attack our citizens once more.”
Cliff nodded unhappily before leaning over the table. “Here’s the layout of the main Ice Spire Cave.” He quickly drew a glowing map. “Their prisoners are probably being held in one of these caverns,” he tapped three spots, “but this one by the rune lab is the most likely.”
“And the faulty rune in their defense system is here by the edge of the cliff, correct?” Luna tapped another spot.
“Yeah,” Cliff said quietly. “Are you sure you don’t want anyone to come along? I can guide you through the cave too, and Shining Armor’s shields would be really helpful if a fight broke out.”
Luna shook her head. “Nay, this war has struck down too many of our citizens as it is. We alone shall attend to these more dangerous missions.”
Celestia tightened her wing around Cliff. “I know this is difficult for you, but the Alliance will not surrender until they are in a position where they cannot possibly defeat Equestria. For the good of all, we must strike a mortal blow as soon as possible.”
“I know.” Cliff tried not to think about Tornado, or Crystal, or any of the other dragons that would die tonight. “Good luck out there.”
“Thank you, Cliff.” Celestia pulled her wing back and stood up. “We will return shortly. In the meantime, you should consider how you will tell Fluttershy about the months you spent living with the Alliance.”
Cliff blushed. “I’m hoping to tell her in person.”
Luna stood up as well. “Then we shall do all we can to end this war tonight and let you speak with her as soon as possible.” Then she lit up her horn, and both her and Celestia disappeared in a burst of light.
-_-_-_-_-_-
Heart was lying against the far wall of her cell when the pony guards returned. Blood covered her arms and torso, and her breathing was labored.
“Oh my Celestia,” one of the guards said. He was carrying a bucket in his magic but set that down so he could run to the door. “What’s wrong?”
“Magic fatigue,” Heart replied weakly. “Getting healed takes a lot out of you.”
“I’ll weaken the drain in her cell a bit,” the other guard said. “Just enough to help her replace what her body used up.” He approached the wall to the left of her cell and pressed something.
“We brought you some water,” the first guard said. He lifted the bucket in his magic again and pushed it under the flap where her meals were delivered.
“Thank you,” Heart whispered. Whatever they had done to her cell was having an effect. It was getting easier to breathe at least, but she didn’t let it show. She slowly pushed herself up on all fours and approached the bucket. A quick check confirmed that the water inside was comfortably warm. Heart took the small cloth dangling over the edge and began to methodically scrub herself clean. “Where are you two from?”
“Canterlot, born and raised,” the first guard said.
“… Same.” His companion also had a bucket full of water, and something that looked like a collection of rags on the end of a stick, which he was moving with his magic to scrub blood off the floor.
“How about you?” the first one asked.
Heart couldn’t tell them apart, but from the way he was behaving, she suspected that this guard was the one who was being affected by her suggestion spell. She sank the cloth she had been given into the bucket, watching at the water turned red. “A small coven named Redstone, the same as Cliff Runner, but only when I was a hatchling. My parents moved around a lot, so I didn’t really have one coven that I could call home until I moved to Moss Hills.”
“That must have been difficult,” the first guard said.
She shook her head. “I liked it, actually. Every time we moved, I got to make dozens of new friends, and when we met up at a gathering, I’d introduce my new friends to my old ones and make them all friends too.” Heart sighed. “Life was a lot simpler in those days.”
The second guard paused in his efforts to clean the floor and looked at her skeptically. “You mean in the days before you led an army of murderous dragons to slaughter the ponies of the Crystal Empire?”
“Oh come on, Rule,” the first guard said. “I know you’ve heard their conversations too. She was just trying to help her friends.”
“This isn’t the time to get into that again,” the pony, who was apparently named Rule, said.
The first guard tried to argue, but Rule just cut him off. Eventually he sighed and turned back the Heart. “Sorry about him. We just have some differences of opinion about this war.”
“I understand,” Heart said. “Honestly, I’d almost be willing to switch sides if it just meant I could look up at the stars one more time.” She pressed her palm against the bars of her cell and stared up at the ceiling longingly.
The pony guard put his hoof on the opposite side of the bars. “I … I wish I could arrange that. I really do.”
He was finally in position. Heart was tempted to give the signal right then, but she needed one last bit of information. She smiled gratefully at her guard. “Be careful, you don’t want your shoe to slip and let me out by accident.” She nodded toward his armor covered hoof.
For a moment, the guard’s face showed indecision, and Heart thought that he might actually set her free, but then he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, pulling his hoof back.
Crap! Now he was out of position again, but at least the expressions on both guards had verified that their armored boots were what opened the cell doors. “It isn’t your fault.” Heart kept her palm against the bars, but let her gaze sink to the floor. “After everything I’ve done, they’ll probably execute me as a war criminal soon anyway.” She paused and looked up nervously, letting a few tears fall down her cheeks. “Maybe … if I’m lucky, my execution will be outside and at night.”
“Equestrian law forbids the execution of prisoners,” the guard said, leaning down so his face was on the same level as hers, and pressing his hoof against the bars across from her hand. “You’re going to be just fine.”
Perfect. Heart wiped away her tears with her free hand while tapping her tail against the stone floor in a very specific pattern.
Magic, like all forms of energy, couldn’t be destroyed. It could only change locations or form. Heart had learned through careful questioning that these cells simply gathered magic energy from inside and dispersed it into the hallway outside. It was probably the easiest form of magic suppression to design or build, but it came with one noteworthy flaw; magic was highly volatile, and could explode in high enough concentrations. For example, the kind of concentration you’d get if a bunch of dragons heard Heart’s signal and started releasing as much magic as they could.
The light around Rule’s horn suddenly flared as it came in contact with the cloud of energy being released. It was hardly an explosion, more like a small shock-wave, but that was still enough to throw both guards off balance and push the first guard’s hoof through the bars as he fell forward.
Heart latched onto the hoof and yanked his boot off before shoving her hand along with the boot back through the bars to click against the circular impression on the wall next to her cell.
Before either guard could recover, the door was open and Heart was out. She tossed the boot away and threw most of her limited willpower into a spell before grabbing the guard with his leg stuck in the door and using another spell to send a wave of terror and sadness into him.
Even standard guard armor protected at least a little against foreign magic, so Heart used twice as much power as would normally be required. Apparently that was enough, because the guard collapsed, either unconscious or too scared to move.
By then the other guard, Rule, had shaken off the blast from Heart’s allies. “Prison break!” He launched a beam of energy at Heart, hitting her right in the stomach.
Heart didn’t hit the ground until she was halfway down the hallway, where she was noisily sick.
To say that dragon vomit was dangerous would be an understatement. Their stomach acid could dissolve diamonds. Heart forced herself to scramble away from the expanding pool, spitting as much as she could even as she gasped for air.
Another beam hit her, and it wasn’t another one of those telekinetic pushes. Heart’s leg buckled as the beam of energy sliced through her thigh, narrowly missing the bone. She fell, struggling just to stay awake through the crushing pain and her empty lungs.
Back at her cell, Rule was standing over his fellow guard protectively and trying to call for help. Unfortunately for him, Heart’s first spell had surrounded the entire area in a bubble of silence. Rule could hear himself, but nothing farther away than about twelve feet would be able to hear a thing. Unaware of this, the pony guard leveled his horn at Heart and shouted something.
Heart clamped one hand over her wounded leg, trying in vain to staunch the bleeding as she finally managed to gulp down her first breath of precious air.
Keeping an eye on her, Rule checked his friend for wounds. He didn’t find any, of course.
Heart coughed weakly. “Maybe,” she coughed again, “you should worry about that drake sneaking up behind you.”
A moment later, the guard was wrestled to the ground by a white drake with yellow spikes. Behind them, a fire wyvern was making good use of the boot that Heart had tossed to him as soon as she got out. At least a dozen other dragons were already free.
Crawling slowly, Heart worked her way back to the pinned guard. “Don’t hurt that pony. We're trying to save lives, not end them.” She pulled off Rule’s helmet, ignoring his shouts of defiance. Without armor to interfere with Heart’s magic, she crushed out any fear or anger he was feeling, replacing them with trust, compassion, a willingness to help, and even physical attraction, because she would take any advantage she could get. “I’m really sorry about this, Rule,” she said honestly, “and your friend is fine, but a lot of our friends are going to die tonight if we don’t warn them.”
Rule stopped struggling and looked up at her with wide eyes and a slight blush. “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t know. You’re sure Bastion is okay?” He glanced at the other guard.
“Yes, just stunned.” Heart forced a smile, in spite of the throbbing pain in her leg and a rapidly forming migraine. She released her silence spell, mostly because she couldn’t maintain it any longer. “Okay, everydragon, we need to stay quiet. If the other guards see us, they’ll start a fight. We don’t want to have to hurt any of them.” She turned to the drake holding Rule down. “Let him up.”
Rule climbed to his hooves, holding his head. “You don’t want to hurt the other guards?”
Heart shook her head. “If I had it my way, Rule, we would’ve called a permanent ceasefire as soon as I learned that Celestia and Luna didn’t want to pursue this war.”
Indecision played across the guard’s face, then he slowly nodded. “I’ll help you get outside, and call me Golden.”
Heart didn’t have to fake her relief. “Alright, everydragon, Golden here is going to help us get to freedom. There are more than two hundred dragons in these prisons, so we’ll have to move quickly and quietly.” She turned back to Golden. “Give a message to Cliff when you see him next. Tell him I’ll keep the Alliance from attacking as long as possible. He needs to finish that gem-creation rune fast so we can put a stop to all this madness.”
-_-_-_-_-_-
Luna flew beside her sister, encased in a sphere of invisibility as they approached their destination. The part of the mountain that Cliff had described loomed large before them. It was the only place that a non-dragon could pass through the Alliance’s defenses without setting off an alarm. Luna folded her wings just before she passed through the anti-magic bubble, dropping the last few feet to the snow-covered ground beneath. She already didn’t like how the inside of the bubble felt. The moon was still there, but she could barely draw any strength from it, like trying to breathe through a small tube.
Celestia landed beside her, though with less grace.
“Tread carefully,” Luna said with a smirk. “We would not want our foes to hear thy cake-laden flanks stomping across their ceiling.”
“I work off every last calorie, and you know it,” Celestia said, rolling her eyes.
“Indeed.” Luna started walking forward slowly, checking for any signs of a trap. “Thy workouts take up many hours each day. Perhaps thou should seek a different means of stress relief.”
Celestia kept pace with her. “Perhaps you should stop drooling over that red stallion from Everfree and just ask him out already.”
Luna blushed a little. She was fairly certain that she had never drooled over any stallion. This one just happened to be enjoyable to look at. “Perhaps we should focus on what we are doing.”
“Just perhaps.” Celestia chuckled softly. “Although I’ve caught him looking at you from time to time when you were busy with other things.”
“Truly?” Luna caught sight of her sister’s amused smile. “I meant, of course, to say that that is an interesting coincidence.”
Celestia declined to comment.
A few minutes later, Luna sensed a suitable crack in the rock beneath them. “Remain here, I will return soon.” Then she dropped her invisibility spell and evaporated into a puff of blue smoke, working her way down through the layers of rock. Soon she emerged into the central cavern for the Dragon Alliance.
It was larger than she had expected, large enough to fit a small town, and lit by glowing pools of lava. Ignoring that, Luna guided herself toward one of the small tunnels near the back of the cavern, which had a glowing line running along the wall for some reason. Cliff had believed that prisoners would most likely be held in this chamber near the rune laboratory.
Fate must have smiled upon her, because Luna rounded a corner and found a wall of energy blocking the entrance to a smaller cavern, which held several dozen ponies, perhaps fifty. It was less than a quarter of what Equestria had captured, but then again, the Alliance had abandoned the field of battle after every engagement thus far, leaving behind the wounded from both races.
Luna drew herself together and returned to her corporeal form.
“Princess Luna?” a white pegasus asked. He ran to the field that separated them. “Is that really you?”
Others heard him and ran to her as well.
“Silence, please.” Luna tapped her horn against the field, testing its strength. “You shall be rescued, but I require a moment to disable this enchantment.”
It was surprisingly powerful, maybe even strong enough to hold Luna herself.
“Are you guys okay?” a new voice asked, and it was coming from the direction of the central cavern. “I thought I heard some shouting or something.” A brown wyrm with green spikes walked into view, freezing when he saw Luna. “Oh dir-”
Luna’s magic wrapped around the newcomer, binding his mouth shut and pulling him close. “If you value your life, dragon, you will not struggle nor try to escape.”
He nodded, shivering in her grasp.
She loosened the magic around his muzzle. “Tell me how to disable the shield holding these ponies prisoner.”
“Just,” he swallowed, “just disconnect it from the power supply. Cut that glowing line on the wall.”
Luna flicked one wing and sent a blade of compressed air at the wall. It neatly sliced the line in two, and the glowing field dissipated.
A subdued cheer went up among the prisoners, and many of them rushed to Luna’s side, thanking her.
“Wait,” the wyrm said quickly.
Luna gave him a stern look.
He shrank back, or tried to. Her magic still held him firmly in place. “B-before you go, do you know Gemstone Aura?”
Cliff’s false name. So the Alliance still didn’t know of his true identity. Luna nodded anyway. “I do.”
“Could you tell him from Genesis that I’m not angry and I hope he’s happy, wherever he is? Please?”
A friend, then, or rather, a friend of the disguise that had been Gemstone Aura. “I will tell him.”
“Thanks.” Genesis closed his eyes and took an unsteady breath. “Y-you can kill me now.”
The former prisoners all gasped or called for Luna to stop.
Luna turned to them in surprise.
“He was always very kind to us,” a yellow unicorn mare said quickly.
“The Hurricanes ordered him to torture information out of us, but he refused,” an orange crystal stallion added.
“The wyrms and drakes even threatened to leave the Alliance if the Hurricanes hurt any of us,” somepony behind Luna said.
Luna lifted a hoof, silencing the group. “I never intended to kill him, my little ponies.” She turned back to Genesis. “Sleep now. You may hate me when you awaken, but the war will be over regardless.” She touched her horn to his head and sent him into a dreamless slumber. Next she generated a small but powerful shield around Genesis and laid him on the tunnel floor.
She shifted her attention to the ponies around her. “Prepare yourselves. I will teleport us to the surface.”
“Dragons of the Alliance,” an extremely loud voice filled the cave, rumbling up the tunnel from the main cavern. “Wake up! You’re under attack!”
That wasn’t part of the plan. Luna teleported the entire group of ponies up to her sister. The air was shockingly cold after the warmth of the caves, but Luna forced herself to stand strong. “Protect them, Sister. We must act quickly.” She started gathering her earth-pony magic.
“Stay calm, my little ponies,” Celestia said, surrounding all of them in her magical aura. “You’re all safe.” She turned to Luna. “Are you sure you don’t want my help?”
Luna managed a smirk. “Cake workouts do not make one an expert in earth magic.” She reared back and slammed both forehooves into the ground.
The mountaintop beneath their hooves rumbled and then collapsed, bringing countless tons of rocks to bear on the unfortunate dragons below. Luna and the others would have fallen too, if not for Celestia’s magic holding them all in place.
“I’ll throw them to you,” Celestia said quickly.
Luna focused her pegasus magic and propelled herself at the anti-magic bubble. She only lost control of her flight for a second as she passed through it before steadying herself and turning back to Celestia.
A blinding explosion of reds and blues filled her vision, engulfing the entire mountaintop. Luna almost didn’t see the ponies being thrown through the bubble in time to catch them.
Celestia came last, and as the explosion faded behind her, Luna saw that their plan had succeeded … sort of.
The entire top of the mountain was gone, revealing the caves beneath, but there wasn’t nearly as much rubble as there should have been. Many dragons looked wounded, but the majority of them were still alive.
That explosion must have destroyed most of the rock before it could crush them, Luna realized, gritting her teeth. The Alliance was still alive. At least we caused some damage, and they won’t be able to live here any longer. Luna looked at the ponies she and Celestia had rescued and nodded to herself. It wasn't the total victory they had hoped for, but she was willing to call this a win.
-_-_-_-_-_-
Exhausted, freezing, and covered in her own blood, Heart looked up at the roofless Ice Spire Cave. “We made it,” she whispered, falling forward against the drake that had carried her here. “We warned them in time.” Then she did the only logical thing to do in her situation, she passed out.