//------------------------------//
// Mending Fences 
// Story: Sons of Damas 
// by Tatsurou 
//------------------------------//

	"And...you're sure they know what they're doing?" Sombra asked carefully as he walked between the two Royal Alicorns to the throne room of Crystal Empire castle.  "I mean, I know they're your sisters, but that other one..."

"It's complicated," Shining explained quickly.  "But trust me, with a little guidance from Radiant Heart, Twilight and Keira will have something built to track down the fragments of Princess Amore by the time we've retrieved the Crystal Heart.  I'll even be sure to put you in a Dark Shield when it's put back so you don't get affected by its energies."

Cadence chuckled softly.  "If Keira's as good with technology as you've made out, with how good Twilight is with magic I wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to supercharge such a device to summon all the pieces of Amore here and restore her even before we make it back.  Especially with everything Radiant Heart has learned about crystal magic."

"Especially after you provided Twilight with the Royal Library's card catalog," Shining added.  "You basically handed her all the knowledge of the entire Crystal Kingdom.  She'll find a way."  He frowned, tapping his chin.  "All things considered, though, it's probably best if we're far away while they're experimenting."

Sombra nodded.  "Alright.  I suppose I'll have to take your word for it."  He bit his lip nervously.  "Umm...Radiant will be safe with them, won't she?"

"Absolutely," Cadence confirmed.  "She won't come to any harm with them-"

"Physically," Shining corrected.  "She might walk about a bit frazzled and with her brains melting out her ears."  Seeing Sombra's horrified expression, he quickly corrected, "Metaphorically speaking.  Twilight and Keira are probably the only ones alive who can keep up with each other on an intellectual level."

"Oh," Sombra accepted with a sigh of relief as they reached the Throne Room.  "Now, I have my own way of reaching the Crystal Heart's hiding place, but it involves transferring through the Shadows of Umbrum.  Not only do I not want to do that anymore, Princess Cadence would not survive the transfer, nor would the Heart survive being brought back that way.  So we'll need to take the Adventurer's Path."

"Adventurer's Path?" Shining asked curiously, perking up at the name.

"I assumed I'd have some would be heroes charging in to try and get at the heart," Sombra explained.  "Rather than having to rebuild the castle every time they came blasting through, I created a path specifically meant to lure them in and eliminate them since it would seem easier - at first - than blasting through hundreds of feet of solid crystal, especially when they didn't know where they were going."  He turned to the throne.  "The first step requires dark magic."  Focusing his power, he shot a blast of dark magic into the crystal directly above the throne, causing it to cast a shadow onto the floor, revealing a stairwell leading down.  "There are actually two castles here.  This one, and its reflection in the Shadowlands.  The Adventurer's Path requires swapping bits of the two castles around to progress safely."  He calmly walked down the stairs, Shining and Cadence following.

Cadence grinned as she walked.  "Feels a lot like one of those games you used to play with your friends," she whispered to Shining.  "The kind Twilight always wanted to hear about."

"Beginning to," Shining admitted with a chuckle.  At the bottom of the stairs was a single door built into the wall.  When Shining approached it, however, the door swept along the wall of the circular chamber to evade him.  Noticing another crystal like the one above the throne surmounting the door, he spoke up.  "Shoot the crystal with Dark magic?" he deduced.

"You'd think so," Sombra offered with a chuckle.  "However, doing so would lead deeper into the Shadowlands, specifically into the Lands of Fear.  Doing so will cause the door to open into a nightmare scenario, forcing whoever stepped through to live out their worst nightmare."

"Then Light magic is what opens the path back to the regular castle?" Cadence deduced.

"Precisely," Sombra confirmed.  "Shining, would you?  While I was able to create the mechanism, there's a reason I never used it..."

"Of course," Shining agreed, shifting to the form of White Knight before firing a blast of Light magic into the crystal.  The door blazed white and opened to a wide crystal pillar with a staircase running around the outside of it in the center of a massive circular chamber.

"And now we climb the stairs?" Cadence asked forlornly, staring up at them in dismay.

"Very carefully," Sombra cautioned.  "The stairs are trapped in an irregular pattern, specifically designed to trip up anyone who tries to learn the pattern of traps.  If you can't sense the magic of the traps - and they're made of my magic embedded in such a way that you need my magic to sense them - you'd have to check every stair as you go.  And some of the traps are designed to be triggered by checking."  He grinned widely.  "Most of that type are the ones that turn the staircase into a ramp and send a flood of water down from the top, washing you straight to the bottom.  And the last step always has a trap that does that whether checked or not."

"How...how many stairs?" Cadence whimpered.

"374,925, and the traps randomly kick in somewhere after the first 500 but before the thousandth," Sombra proclaimed proudly.  "The tower's bigger on the inside."

Shining burst into laughter.  "Okay, once we've found a way for you to live in the Empire without fearing the light of the Crystal Heart, you have got to GM an O&O session!  That is positively wicked!"

"That's still around?" Sombra asked in shock.  "Radiant and I used to play that while we were young...especially when I was too sick to go to the Crystal Fair."

"Well, the rules have changed over time," Shining pointed out.  "Still, I don't think the basic concepts behind the game have changed all that much."

"Well, why don't you test me as a GM?" Sombra asked with a wide grin.  "How would you climb this?"

Shining glanced around, examining the pillar and the stairwell from all angles to find an advantage.  "Are the undersides of the stairs trapped?"

"What?" Sombra asked, confused.

"Well, the underside of the stairs kind of looks like a ramp," Shining indicated, pointing straight up.  "If you cast a spell to reverse gravity and one to reduce friction, you could slide right up - or down - to the top.  Unless you put traps there."

Sombra's jaw dropped.  "...well blow me down.  You can do that with magic now?"

"I'll take that as a no," Cadence giggled as she worked the gravity spell to send them to the top of the tower.  As they slid along, Shining and Sombra continued to discuss Ogres & Oubliettes.  She was glad to see Shining had found a 'gaming buddy' in the Crystal Empire.  He hadn't had a good session since Spike and Twilight moved to Ponyville...