The brown walls of the tunnel were made of crystal, and as the pegasus looked down through the uncovered entrance hole, every facet reflected failure.
Flash had received an extensive briefing packet upon his arrival in the Empire, and he'd made sure to read all of it. He always did, with every packet which had awaited him at the brief pauses during hundreds of gallops of reassignment-forced travel, because if he knew what he was getting into, there seemed to be slightly less chance of bringing it all down on top of him. And by the time he'd figured out that was never going to be the case, reading the packets had become habit. Besides, it gave him something to do on the long nights when nopony would talk to him.
The Empire's briefing had mentioned the tunnels, as they were a potential issue in a number of Guard duties. Not all of them had been found, some of them effectively went nowhere, and none of them led out.
In the early part of Sombra's reign, there had been resistance. Not immediately: he'd done an incredible job of masking his true intentions while he'd been taking over, along with carefully, silently removing those who'd had the strongest suspicions. But after the mask had been kicked away, once the atrocities began to mount, some of the crystal ponies had started to plan out means of fighting back. Ponies who wanted to resist needed means and places to gather and plan, and so tunnels had been carved throughout the Empire, running between the homes of what had never become the kernel of an army. The secret police had uncovered just about all of those ponies, because pretending to be somepony who was willing to fight was the best way to infiltrate. And once they had been purged... the next group of crystals had desperately pushed towards the border storms, believing that a tiny chance of emerging from the cold alive was better than a certainty of warmth, shelter, and shadows. None of them had ever made it.
The tunnels were something the Guards had to be aware of, because nopony had found them all. They were a potential risk to citizen security, as an entrance could open into just about any home. But there was another hazard to their existence, because Sombra had never been a pony to waste resources. Magic was exploited, corpses were experimented on until he reached the point where he needed a fresh corpse (created through an equally fresh law), and as long as he had tunnels, he was going to use them.
The majority of the tunnels were short: little cylinders of crystal and stale air within the earth. But some connected. There was a minor network running under the Empire, if you knew where (or how) to look. But at any moment beneath the surface, you could never be entirely sure if you were in one of the crystals' tunnels, or in one of those which had been claimed as his. Places where he'd been experimenting with new spells, traps, methods of both rooting out those who might resist him and creating part of that never-ending supply of corpses. And Sombra, who understood security and knew having an immovable Heart was bad enough, had scattered his workshops, using the tunnels as just one more means of doing it. Nopony could ever be sure of where to search for their loved ones, or pick a place where they could lurk in wait with any degree of safety. Decentralization had contributed to his reign and, following his death, made it impossible to know if the last of the shadows had truly lifted.
Flash had been silent all the way to the entrance, and part of that came from bracing himself. The strength required to face whatever was about to happen took nearly all resources away from speech, and those words would have been pointless anyway. He couldn't protest an order. He couldn't tell the Captain about -- everything. He didn't understand why his officer was sending him down into the tunnel at all, not when the Captain knew how Flash could seemingly make anything go wrong. Not when there was another life at stake.
But the rest of that silence... when Iron Will had picked Flash out at the Cabinet meeting, the pegasus had felt a thought going through his head. It was still there.
Don't say anything.
And he didn't know if that thought was truly his.
They were in the sunlight, minotaur, pegasus, officer and a small cluster of Guards standing a short distance away. Only the first three were close to the hole, and just enough Sun got past them to glitter off the facets far below.
Iron Will was sitting in the street, large hands moving around each other, steadily tying a series of knots into the thick rope he'd requested after getting his first look at the drop. "Almost done," he announced. "Another minute, maybe. Been a while since I did this, and I'll need to test it before we lower it down there."
The Captain nodded. "All right. Final review, then." He glanced back at the other
real
Guards. "Is the evacuation complete?"
"Yes, sir," the largest mare said. "All citizens are out of the area. As you ordered, we added an extra two blocks to the original radius, just in case."
Another nod. "Good. Let's hope that's enough. Private?" Flash forced himself to look at his officer. "You have one job. You watch him. And you may not even have to do that because Iron, if the sparks start building around you --"
"-- I clear out," the minotaur said. "Not arguing that, Shining. I'm basing this on the spells not reacting to me." The left hand, still holding rope, raised up enough to tap a bent horn. "This doesn't light up. Can't cast, can't counter. So if there's magic, I leave."
"And you're careful in there," the Captain repeated for the third time. "Touch as little as possible. Let the analyzer do the work. Watch where you step. Don't go charging around like a --" and abruptly stopped.
Iron Will just grinned. "Okay, I know that was about to be as speciesist as Tartarus. Let's hear it, Shining. Like a what?"
After enough time had passed for the creation of three more knots, "...like a bull in a cordial shop," emerged from between the Captain's teeth.
"Oh." The minotaur's skin flushed under the short fur. "Yeah. Seriously, if the castle is gonna keep buying from that place, either they've gotta start making deliveries or we need to send somepony a lot smaller for pickup. Lapis, maybe... okay, done. Somepony fly this edge up to the top of that building and anchor it? Let's see if it'll take my weight."
A pair of pegasi cooperated, and Iron Will moved. The Captain watched closely, as he was one of the few who had the field strength for a rescue if something went wrong. Flash had a little more trouble observing the process: there was a lot of Sun bouncing around the area, and some of it was trying to get past his latest pair of sunglasses. But he saw enough to recognize that the quick construct was holding, even though the process was still awkward: even with hands doing most of the work, hooves trying to find purchase on curving, swaying hemp was something which required extreme care.
"All right," Iron Will decided as he stepped back onto the road and the pegasi carefully lowered the rope ladder behind him. "It'll hold. So let's go."
The Captain looked at the minotaur. Then the hole. Over to Flash, and then the hole again.
"I don't like this," he said.
"Yeah, we've been over that," Iron Will stated. "It's still happening."
"I don't have armor which fits you. We could hammer some more things out into rough pieces if we just waited --"
"-- can't wait."
"You'll use the hoof guards?"
That triggered a snort. "Buckets."
"Use them." It hadn't been an order: it couldn't be with a minotaur. But it was as close as the Captain could come. "I've disarmed his traps. I know how much Sombra loved to take part of a leg off below the hock. Ponies limping on three hooves and a stump must have made him laugh. And you're two hooves short on that to start. I know they're just crystal buckets you can tie to your legs, and I know you'll have to get them off if you need to try running or climbing that thing in a hurry. I still want you wearing them."
The response felt oddly soft. "All right, Shining. I'll use them."
The sapients looked at each other for a few seconds.
And then, in full hearing of the Guards, "Don't take him."
Ponies often spoke about Flash as if he wasn't there, perhaps in the hopes that it would somehow make that true.
"He's coming," Iron Will said. "We already talked about this."
"I've got eight Guards here. Any one of them is willing to go down there with you. I'm --"
"-- we talked about that, too."
Flash was looking at the Captain when the strangely quiet words hit, and so saw the single second when the pain was visible. And then it was gone.
"I don't understand why you think he needs to be down there," the Captain stated.
"I don't either," the minotaur shrugged. "Haven't had a chance to really think about it yet, not through all the details. It's just a feeling. Almost a thought. Some of what you were saying..." He trailed off, shrugged again, then bent down and began to gather up the ladder.
"I told you about him. All about him."
It sounded as if two of the Guards had just swallowed back nervous laughter, and one hadn't even bothered to try.
"I know," Iron Will replied. "And that's why I'm thinking. Let's go."
This tunnel was one of the larger specimens. Sombra had sometimes needed to move corpses in bulk.
Flash flew in first, which was awkward: the entrance wasn't quite wide enough to accommodate a full wingspan, which meant he had to go into a dive and then immediately pull out of it. Similarly, the minotaur had some issues in getting his shoulders past the hole, and some hasty angling was required before the horns were clear. But eventually, all hooves were resting on crystal again, and the Captain's field carefully lowered their equipment: the analyzer (in a heavily-padded saddlebag), two glowsticks, a pair of rope-tied buckets which had been ordered to serve as hoof guards, and two hastily hammered-out pieces of mostly-flat metal with shorter lengths of rope connecting them. Iron Will picked that up and carefully got those ropes balanced across his shoulders, allowing the metal to cover most of his torso and back. (It still took some angling to get past the horns.)
"Anything happens to me," he said, "somepony take care of my goats." And started down the tunnel.
Flash, uncertain of whether to hover behind him or trot, turned to follow --
"-- Private."
He turned back, glanced up, saw the Captain staring down from reluctant safety.
"If anything happens," the Captain ordered, "get him to where I can see him. I'll lift him out. I could have lowered him, but..." A small head shake. "I want him alive. Unhurt. You understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you do that?"
Flash couldn't answer. And after a moment, the Captain looked away.
They both took off their sunglasses, all the better to see within the tunnel. Flash couldn't seem to spot where he'd put his down.
Sunlight followed them, bouncing from facet to facet. The glowsticks (one looped to Flash's right foreleg, the other around the minotaur's left wrist) weren't completely necessary: the original investigation of the tunnel had proven that illumination traveled a long way, even if it kept progressively tilting deeper into brown. But you never knew where the shadows might linger.
The travel time was short, and not completely silent. Hooves brought music from the floor, and the little notes changed as they bounced off the walls, deepening into something darker. (To Flash, it sounded much like a buffalo funeral dirge, at least the first three hours of it.) Neither spoke. They simply pushed on ahead. Watching, listening, waiting --
-- the little flare of light alerted him, and Flash turned just in time to see the first spark manifest over his folded left wing. It hovered there, shifted slightly over the feather. He tried another hoofstep and found it moved with him, just before the second spark appeared a hoofwidth away.
A shadow fell over him, and he managed not to start: it was just the shade from the minotaur's horns. "Guess that's the spell's border," Iron Will said. "And that's the doorway."
He gestured down the tunnel, and Flash looked.
It was a simple open crystal frame. There was no actual door present, and there had probably never been one: after all, any future corpse which had come this far was welcome to deliver itself. But the crystal in this area wasn't translucent: the brown of dravite had darkened into something they could no longer look through, and so the gap was the only means they had to scout the interior.
There were shapes on the other side of that doorway. Some of them could be identified in the light which reached the interior: a bench, several currently-open clamps for holding things exceptionally still over a workstation, one ancient device which was meant to concentrate light on a small spot. Others were unfamiliar and unusually for Sombra, just about none of them were bloodstained. Not one of the biology workshops, then.
But... there was something at the very back wall, a shape Flash couldn't quite make out with the light not entirely hitting it, something all the worse for being almost recognized...
The minotaur was inspecting himself: arms, legs, hands. He even lifted the metal sheets to check his torso. "No sparks," he reported. "And you've got the white, same as Shining said for the other pegasi. So let's see..."
Iron Will took another step forward. Then one more, and one more...
"You see anything on me?"
"No." The first thing Flash had ever said to him.
"Then I think we're looking good. Give me a few seconds here..." The buckets were donned, and another hoofstep was attempted. The left leg immediately began to slip, and the minotaur quickly braced a hand on the tunnel. "Think I found a flaw. The traction's gonna suck. Not like hooves on crystal were great to begin with." A small snort. "I take at least one tumble a day. I've been thinking about getting some shoes put on, just for as long as I'm up here. I don't know how the refractors do it." Another, smaller step: this one held.
Flash didn't know either, and the rumors said the doctors were still trying to work that part out. (For his part, even with more legs to work with, the daily tumbles averaged to four, many of which were triggered through landing.)
"How close do you wanna get?"
He blinked. "Sir?"
"Don't call me sir," the minotaur sharply replied. "You're the Guard. How close do you want to get to the door, for when I'm inside? Sounds like your call to me."
Flash tried to reconcile the idea that someone was asking for his judgment of a situation. Then he decided the minotaur just didn't know about him yet, a split-second before remembering that the Captain had provided a briefing.
"A -- few body lengths away," he finally said. "Maybe two. The Captain said one pony could come all the way up, but two body lengths is enough that I won't cross the line by accident." He knew about triggering accidents, and all the means by which he never seemed to prevent them.
"Then let's do it."
They advanced. The larger body remained spark-free. But white steadily clustered over Flash's fur, tail, flanks and wings. It wasn't enough to make him glow: the sparks didn't shed that much illumination. But it was still enough to subtly change the color of his coat, which had started as -- well, some ponies felt he was a light orange, while others considered his hue to be more of a muddled cream or distorted brown, he'd overheard a Guard describing him as some shade of yellow...
His fur didn't even know what it was supposed to be.
By the time they got within two body lengths of the doorway, Flash's skin was starting to feel slightly odd, as if his body didn't entirely fit inside it any more. Like he was shrinking away from himself. He stopped, and the sapients looked at each other.
"Ready?" the minotaur asked.
Flash forced a nod.
Iron Will stepped forward, tilting head and body to get through a doorway which hadn't been designed for minotaurs, and went inside.
Nothing happened.
The minotaur's exhale resounded through the tunnel.
"All right..." he breathed. "Looks like we're okay. Can't promise it's gonna stay that way..." He reached into the saddlebag which he'd chosen to wear over his left hip, took out the disk. "This is kind of weird."
"Sorry?" Take out the question mark and it was the most dominant vocalization in Flash's vocabulary.
"Just holding this thing. Pre-Discordian. Far as I know, I've only touched one other thing that old."
It begged the question, and Flash was surprised to hear himself voicing it. "What?"
"The world." One big hand slowly moved the disc towards something Flash couldn't see: on the wall to the left of the doorway. "Okay, it's working. Taking it slow..."
Flash took off for a moment, hovered and angled his body, trying to see what the minotaur was trying to analyze. It was just enough to spot a glint of light coming off the thin edge.
"What is it?"
"Razorwhip. I think. One of those tail-mounted ones you see in museums. It's been modified."
Flash swallowed. "Modified... how?"
"The new barbs probably stay in the skin after impact. But I'm pretty sure the dried poison's gone inert."
And that was all anyone said for several minutes. The minotaur slowly moved around the workshop, waited until one edge rune on the disk flashed dark green and then shifted to something else. Flash hovered, landed, changed angles as best he could to keep an eye on everything, and felt helpless.
He didn't know what he was doing here. Why the minotaur seemed to have insisted on taking him after he'd been briefed, after he'd found out what a nightmare (capital possibly justified) Flash was, how everything the pegasus touched or approached or even just leaned against for a moment turned into disaster.
He was... afraid. Afraid for the minotaur, for whatever had to go wrong, for what he wouldn't be able to stop, for what he was practically guaranteed to cause.
And all he could do was watch, as the sparks shifted across his skin and his muscles retreated towards his bones.
At least his thoughts were mostly quiet, outside of the fear. That meant he was reasonably sure they were his.
I should go back and get somepony else. Anypony else --
Stay.
"So how'd you get your mark?"
Flash blinked. "Sir?"
"I said -- oh, never mind..." The next sound was a mix between sigh and chuckle, and he watched as the minotaur slowly moved the disk over one of the miniature spotlights. "Look, it's too goring quiet down here. I want some stories. And if there's one story every pony's got, it's 'how I got my mark'. And I ain't seen yours before. Shields, yeah: Shining's got one. And lightning bolts, here and there. But I haven't seen them superimposed. So what's the story?"
Iron Will was no part of the Guard. Flash had never heard a rumor about his having had a military career: the minotaur had supposedly opted for college. But the biped was an official part of the Cabinet, and so Flash's mind received the question as an order. "There was this girl --"
The minotaur chuckled. "Oh, this'll be good. I've never heard a bad story that started with 'There was this girl'."
Flash took a breath, watched the sparks shift around his hovering torso as he prepared to prove the minotaur wrong. "We were at flight camp together. And we -- the entire group -- were still just going through the basics. But she was ahead of everypony else. She could fly better than anypony in the cabins, better than some of the instructors. It was like she'd never even needed camp at all, not for flight, but -- that wasn't why she was there. One night, after all the counselors and safety ponies had gone to bed, she woke a bunch of us up and said -- she'd seen something. What we weren't supposed to learn until we were older. She'd worked it out, how it was supposed to be done. She didn't say what it was: she just teased us until we wanted to find out. And then she took us out over the lenticulars, got us past the camp's border -- I guess she was scouting it for a while, figuring out how she'd sneak away, and..."
The minotaur was starting to frown.
"...she had worked it out. She'd gone there before bringing us, gotten the entire area ready. And then she went up, started flying to each little cloud just above us. Pushing her hooves into them and setting off the lightning."
Softly, "I'm not gonna like where this goes, am I?"
"Sir?"
"It's your face. Most ponies remembering their manifests get this misty look. They're remembering one of the best moments of their lives: they can't think about it and not be a little happy again. I thought this story, of all stories, would be the one which cheered you up. And it's going the other way."
They looked at each other, across a few body lengths and the intangible barrier of the doorway.
"I can stop," Flash said, and it felt like an apology.
"Don't," and that too arrived in his ears as an order. "Lightning in flight camp? Was it your first year there? Even I know that's way young."
He managed a bare nod. "She'd figured it out, though. Well, I guess with her name, it made sense that she'd get there early." He didn't like thinking about it. About her. "And we were all just watching her set it off, over and over again, because it was fun at first. We weren't supposed to be doing that at our age, and we were sort of doing it through her, I guess. We'd -- gotten one over on the adults. But she just kept going, and -- the bolts were going everywhere. They started -- getting close. Crashing through the clouds a few body lengths away from our hooves. Some of the kids were starting to scream, and she kept going. I saw her face in one of the flashes, and -- she had this look, like she knew she was scaring us and she didn't care. She didn't care about anything, and the lighting was getting closer, she had so many clouds set up, and I..."
It isn't flying any more. She leaps between close-spaced clouds, and her face is cool and calm and considers consequences as something which happens to other ponies. She is showing off, and the increasingly terrified nature of the audience doesn't matter. If they don't like it, they can leave, and whether they flee or wind up being carried away is immaterial. The next bolt goes through the vapor a mere body length away from the smallest of the fillies, who screams, and he sees the next leap, where it's going to land, how her hooves are angled and his wings flare out, he pushes into the fastest surge of short-range flight he will ever experience, he gets between her and the filly who wouldn't let her have the already-claimed best bunk on the first day, she sees where he is and the fearful body behind him, there is a single moment in which she can still stop --
-- her hooves slam into the cloud.
"...so I don't remember my manifest," Flash quietly finished. "I woke up in the hospital and I had my mark."
The minotaur was silent for a few seconds.
"What happened to the girl?"
"Nothing," Flash bitterly replied. "She did something to nearly everypony there while I was unconscious. Said something. I guess a few ponies were scared enough to go along with it, enough that there were too many stories for anypony to sort out the truth. By the time I got out of the hospital, camp was over, and I never saw her again. Just a few of my cabinmates, who told me what had happened, how they got me out while she was -- still trying to tell them to leave me there. But nopony in charge ever believed that. The last time I heard her name was somepony mentioning that she'd gone out for the Wonderbolts. I know she was good enough to pass the practical audition. I'm just hoping she never made it through the Academy."
"Me too," Iron Will quietly said. "But -- gore it, you took a direct lightning hit as a colt and you're still hovering..."
The words emerged from his soul. "I screwed up."
The minotaur blinked. "Huh?"
"She was scaring ponies. She might have never hit anypony if I hadn't gotten in the way. She was missing by less and less, but she was still missing --"
"-- as a kid, even a talented one," the bull interrupted, "you're gonna hit something eventually." He was approaching the back wall, and the glowstick began to work through the shadows.
"She would have missed."
"You don't know --" and then, very softly, "-- oh."
They had both seen it at the same moment, in the brown-shifted light which made the tunnel feel so much like being within a sewer, and so there was a second where neither could breathe.
"They're unbreakable," Flash whispered. "He -- he couldn't have..."
"He didn't," Iron Will replied, every word forced into the air. "He cut away the base of the skull."
The minotaur turned away from the rack which held the severed unicorn horns, disk held low. After a few moments, he found something else he could put it close to, and so did that.
"It's not biology experiments," the bull quietly said. "It's a weapons shop. But there's all kinds of weapons..." Just as softly, "We'll bury them. As soon as Shining tells us it's safe to take anything out, we'll bury them." A deep breath and then, with more volume, "That's still a Tartarus of a mark, though. But I can't figure out the talent. I mean, the obvious conclusion is that you've got one for taking on lightning, but there's so many different interpretations for some of the common icons, and with something like yours --"
Tell him.
Flash spent his life listening to his thoughts, and so didn't act on many of them. But there were times when he slipped, and they typically came just before every accident, disaster, and subsequent transfer. He was stressed, the sparks were making him feel strange, plus everything which had brought him into the tunnel had started just before he would have been freed. And if it had been a pony within that horrible room, he might have found a final moment of resistance, slammed his jaw shut after the first word. He could never tell a pony. But it was a minotaur...
He'd been placed in a position where he could create one more nightmare, he was distracted, and that was why the thought got through. A thought which wasn't truly his.
"-- my mark talks to me."
And the words, once released, could never be taken back.
Iron Will slowly turned. Stared at the pegasus whose face had just frozen in horror. Trapped in crystal.
"...what?"
"I didn't say anything!" Flash desperately tried to recover. "Maybe some sounds from the outside got down --"
"-- you just said," Iron Will semi-repeated, "that your mark talks to you. I know your voice. It's the only other one down here. What do you mean?"
"I'm..." He was starting to hyperventilate, and his lungs felt as if they were getting smaller with every breath. The hover was barely being maintained because every wingbeat was trying to accelerate, getting ready to flee. "I'm... please, you can't tell the Captain, you can't, I'm not crazy --"
"I know you're not."
The words had been calm. Measured. Flash couldn't hear a hint of lie, much less deflection or the forced stability which came when someone was trying to talk the clearly insane into stepping within the padded room or into the pegasus-immobilizing confinement known as a freezer. But he couldn't be sure, he didn't know...
"You were in Mazein," Iron Will said as he maintained direct eye contact. "So you know we're not exactly a one-species society. There's a pony minority. I had ponies in my hometown when I was growing up. Not really that many pegasi around, but -- enough ponies, and some of them were good friends. So I know that sometimes, a mark can sort of guide you, when you're doing something connected to your talent. And I've heard it described as something kind of like a whisper -- at least, that's the best term Twister had. She said it was really more like hearing things with your soul. But it wasn't language. Just -- feelings. Impulses, intuitions." He took a deep breath. "I know you're not crazy, Flash, because I've seen crazy ponies and so have you, just before the lightning hit. But you're the first pony I've ever heard call it talking, with actual words involved. What does it say?"
He landed, with so much more than gravity pulling him down, because he'd said the words and so there was truly nowhere he could ever go. And then he told the minotaur about the rest of it, because there was no way it could have made things any worse.
"I... have thoughts," Flash quietly said, staring at the floor and seeing the myriad faceted reflections of a failure. "And some of them aren't mine. I get impulses to -- do things. They're usually subtle, and I watch for them, I try to ignore them -- but I can't get all of them. I can't even spot them most of the time. And the strong ones are thoughts. Words. My mark thinks, and -- it tries to think for me. When I follow what it wants... that's when all the big accidents happen. I..."
Every word was the hardest of his life. Things he'd never told his parents, or all the officers. Anypony. Because it shouldn't happen, because nopony would believe it could ever happen.
"...I'm not sure what my talent is," he finished. "I wasn't conscious when my mark came, I didn't wake up for a week after the lightning. I just know it wants me to do things, and when I slip, when I cooperate by accident because I wasn't listening closely enough, everything goes wrong. So maybe it is a mark for disasters. Or the lightning did something to me, or I'm just -- broken."
He had realized, rather early in his so-called career, that saying those words to any officer would have gotten him very definitively fired. They also had the potential to have him committed into an asylum, or simply barred from sane pony society for the rest of his post-Guard life. And so he'd never used them as a solution to his nightmare, because they would have just made things so much worse.
Flash had wondered just how bad his life could become if he'd ever told somepony, and the visions which rose from his imagination had locked him into silence. But now he'd told someone...
"Shining briefed me about you," Iron Will finally said, eyes still focused on Flash's face. "All the places you've been, and most of what went wrong there. He was using it as an argument against bringing you down here. The argument. He even tried to plant himself outside that doorway for a while."
"Why --" He tried for another breath, wondered if that one would fight back the tears. "Why not have him --"
"-- because," the minotaur cut him off, "if something went all the way wrong -- Cadance can't lose both of us. And he knows that. But he hates hearing it. I'm guessing he's afraid that one day, he'll have to do something risky, he'll hesitate because he's thinking about her, and then ponies get hurt. And he hates sending anypony where he won't go, because that makes him feel like a coward. He's never talked about it, but... I'm a psychologist, Flash. Lots of people don't believe that, but you don't get into my profession without the courses, not if you want to know what you're doing. I can figure out some of what's going through heads, sometimes, even pony ones. And with Shining -- he keeps a lot of himself locked down until he gets to Cadance. A lot of the military types do. But he can't hide all of it. So I know something about how he thinks. And I know you're not crazy. I've seen crazy. But when he told me about you --" and then there was a little chuckle "-- which includes what got you kicked out of Mazein..."
Instinctively, "I'm sorry."
"Nah," Iron Will shrugged, and metal bounced against his chest. "Wasn't my house, and no one got hurt. But when Shining gave me the last of it -- well, by then, he'd agreed that I had to go down here. Didn't like it, but he saw my point: that if you're not a pony, you can't trigger a spell meant to be set off by ponies. He just didn't want me down here with you. Because he doesn't exactly love me. We're not friends, and I don't think that's gonna happen for a while. But he doesn't want Cadance to lose me, so he told me all about you, all of the accidents... and it started me thinking."
Flash swallowed, and tasted salt from where the tears had run into his mouth. "About what?"
"I don't know," the minotaur admitted. "It's deep thought. I haven't told myself what it's about yet, because I'm still trying to work it out. There's just something in all those stories, when you hear them one after the other. I don't have a mark, but I still have intuition. And after he finished, I told him I wasn't doing this unless it was with you."
The pegasus blinked.
"Which," the bull finished, "is what really pissed him off. In case you were wondering. That and knowing he had to let me."
"You know," Flash slowly stated, "that I'm a disaster. That bad things happen everywhere I go. And you decided -- that you wanted me down here, where anything could go wrong, and I just told you my mark doesn't work, the one thing every pony can count on works against me --"
"Yeah," the bull cut him off. "And now I'm thinking about that, too. Doesn't change the job." He turned to the right, and bucket-covered hooves awkwardly shuffled. "Some of the other Guards talk about you."
"I know." He'd managed to keep the words from being bitter, even when they'd left their taste on his tongue.
"Didn't put it together with your face. I hadn't seen you before today."
"The Captain -- isolated me on assignments. After the first week." He was still reeling inside: unfocused, dizzy in a way which had spark-covered hooves barely steady against the floor. He'd confessed...
Move closer.
His legs shifted forward. (The sparks intensified.) He had to keep a closer watch on the minotaur, even through wet eyes.
"I was thinking," Iron Will said, "that every one of those stories, for the Guard stuff, has the same line in it. Once you change a few words."
Still reeling, trying to figure out if there would be anything left of his life once they reached the surface, "'Flash Sentry was there.'"
A careful head shake, with the range of motion restricted to keep the horns from hitting anything which was hanging from the ceiling. "'And nopony was hurt.' Or 'and no one was hurt.' Over and over."
Take off.
He was too unsteady on his legs. It made more sense to hover.
"That can't last. Eventually, I'm going to get someone. That statue could have toppled towards the kids. I can't stay too close to ponies. I don't --"
"Hold up." A big right hand had just been raised, palm out towards Flash. "I just saw -- something..."
The volume had dropped a little on the last word. The tone had risen.
"Sir?"
"Over on that wall." A little gesture, the smallest one the minotaur had made. "Didn't see that earlier. That's -- interesting. That is really interesting." Bucket-covered hooves shuffled forward. "Think I'm gonna get a closer look at that..."
He sounded fascinated.
No, it was worse than that. He sounded relaxed.
Urgently, "Sir, I can't see what you're looking at." He was shifting his body, trying to change the viewing angle, and his thoughts slipped him that much closer to the doorway.
"It's okay... I'll just take a good long look and then I'll -- tell you what it --"
Flash turned his head, trying to see, and that was when the first of the sparks went into his eyes. It forced him to look away. To look down.
He would never fully see what was on the wall. He could tell that there was a design painted there, but all he could make out was the edges. Nothing could ever bring him to describe the colors and when he tried to think about the geometry of the triangles, he would realize that one of them had been bent through two hundred and seventy degrees.
Most of what he saw was Iron Will, and that was from the metal-covered pectorals down. How the minotaur's arms had gone slack, the analyzer limply dangling from the fingers of his left hand. The complete ease in the big body's posture, as if he was prepared to stand where he was for a very long time.
Long enough for the metal blade now slowly unfolding itself from the floor, taking aim just below knee level, to make certain he would never stand again.
"SIR! IRON!"
The minotaur didn't respond.
And then Flash, moving on something which could be called instinct, a pony who could no longer afford to differentiate between his thoughts, went through the door frame.
Decaying spells fully registered a pony body, surged. Magic which had laid in wait for centuries found a fresh target. Thaums sizzled, light inverted, the shadows peeled from the walls, and the world went mad.
The sparks around his body coalesced. He was covered in glimmering white, he could barely see, there was just shadows and one of them was shaped somewhat like a minotaur, he was trying to fly when it felt as if his wings were collapsing on themselves from the outside in, bones were grinding against each other within his joints and he heard himself scream in pain, something else which the minotaur didn't respond to --
-- on instinct, the signal was sent to his eyes, which no longer cared to work with light. Light was necessary for reading, making out faces and features and every little bit of the world. But he was a pegasus, and that meant he could gauge ion charges at a glance, steer on the heat which the magic of his species shifted across the seasons. And until that moment, he'd never known it was possible to deliberately close the light out and let the rest of his vision guide the way.
It wasn't perfect. He couldn't think with the pain screaming across inverting nerves, but he didn't have to. The minotaur was a patch of warmth. He was holding something slightly cooler, which his fingers had slightly heated along the edges. There was a cold thing rising from the floor. He had to get the warm thing away from the cold thing. That was all.
He didn't have much time or distance to get up speed, but he'd already been in the air when it had started. It helped.
He drove an armored shoulder into the metal-covered back, and his mere bale and a half, charging across the distance, was still enough to stagger the minotaur. Bucket-covered hooves stumbled, the big body slipped forward, and the cold thing swung, the blade missing by a distance Flash never wanted to measure.
But the spells were still reacting. His feathers were vibrating, his tail shivering so quickly as to make the base feel as if it was about to shake off his body. The minotaur wasn't talking, wasn't trying to move on his own and Flash was still aware of his own screams, he tried to recover from the impact but his shoulder was hurt, impacted even through the armor, he slid down the wide back and felt his left foreleg slide across something round and carved with runes along the edges...
What happened next wasn't light. It wasn't heat. It wasn't anything he'd ever experienced and it was nothing he would ever go through again. Something came off the disk. It was the smell of music. It was the heat of sugar. It filled a room of pain and fury, drove the shadows back. The energies were pushing at each other, and he heard something crack. Much to his surprise, it wasn't his wingbones: the sound had been a wooden one. One of the workbenches had shattered. Then something on a wall exploded. And more cold began to rise from the floor.
There was no time to think. No time to plan. Just a minotaur who wouldn't answer him, just barely standing and sliding a little towards that horrible image, far too much mass for Flash to ever dream of lifting, he couldn't carry the big bull, he couldn't do anything.
The minotaur slid forward a little more.
All he could ever do was make things worse.
Slid.
He didn't have time for that either.
After the next disaster (just a few hours away), after he'd been fired and sent to the train station to await the final ride -- only then would he find out how it had looked from the outside.
Nopony saw all of it. There was a period when nopony could see much of anything, because there had been a high-pitched noise, a whistle neither pony nor minotaur mouth could make, and then the light (not white, not prismatic, not anything) had surged out of the hole. The few who'd been looking directly at it wound up continually wearing sunglasses for the next three weeks, even at night. Everypony else had to blink away dazzle and tears, and then the Captain had moved first, getting to the edge just in time to see.
It was speed and force, somepony would say later. Flash had pushed himself into the minotaur headfirst, in just the right place to make the bull fall backwards, and had done so while flying so fast that the seconds it would take for the big body to drive him into the ground were instead ones where they were both sliding. The bucket-covered hooves skidded along the crystal tunnel's faceted floor, Flash put everything he had into acceleration and trying not to lose altitude too quickly, but it was a losing battle, and he started to feel the surrender coming at the moment the warmth of Sun touched his fur.
He began the final drop, skidding past their only hope. Felt the weight beginning to press against his neck.
And then there was a faint tingle against his skin, as if a limb had started to fall asleep and brought his entire body along for the ride.
The Captain's field bubble yanked, twisted to angle them out of the hole, and brought them both to Sun eight seconds ahead of the flames.