Starlight peered in nervous fascination over the edge of the lift platform as it descended, swaying lightly from a magically-conjured cable feeding from the crane machine above. Nobody had thought to install a real elevator. Nobody had needed to, Valey said, since she could fly and she was the key. The crane was just a failsafe in case any yaks needed to get down.
The light twinkled up at her from indefinite depths below, stirring something in her heart that she felt desperately compelled to believe in... yet the urge to reach it had diminished. Perhaps the reality of diving down a bottomless hole and her sense of self-preservation was winning out over whatever sway it held on her.
Valey wasn't helping. "Yeah, I skydive here for fun all the time. You'd think the actual sky would be better for that, but it gets stupidly cold above the wind barrier, and this is way higher..."
Even then, Starlight lay on her belly, purposefully keeping her legs out from under her and her tail wrapped around Maple's nearby hoof as an anchor. There was something down there, and she was too suspicious to tell if she wanted it or if it wanted her.
"Starlight, are you alright?" Maple nudged her, moving closer and putting a hoof over her back in safety. The platform swayed with the motion, Gerardo and Neon Nova sitting on the opposite side for counterbalance. "This place is creepy, but it looks like it's really affecting you."
Starlight didn't stop looking down. "It doesn't feel creepy. It feels good. Which makes it creepy, since ponies aren't supposed to feel this way about creepy-looking holes in the ground." She swallowed. "It feels familiar, but if I'd ever been to a place like this before, I'd remember it! It feel like... there's something down there that's supposed to be mine."
Maple looked over the edge with her. "It's just an empty black hole, Starlight. It feels like we're descending beneath the world. I can't believe there's anything down there, and I might not even after I see it."
"Huh?" Starlight looked up at her, worried, and then back down at the distant star. "You mean you don't see it?"
Maple frowned. "See what?"
Starlight slumped, going cold.
"Hey, maybe," Neon Nova offered, "you feel that way 'cause you're a unicorn! There's some pretty wicked magic in the rocks and even air of this place! It might be resonating with your horn!"
Gerardo perked in alarm. "When you say 'wicked...'"
"He means cool," Howe corrected. "Neato. Epic. Awesome. All those words with an absolutely chilling effect on the soul of the one who hears them, like they have come into a presence they are unworthy to..."
Starlight tuned him out, feeling her horn. For the most part, she had been avoiding doing magic since the last time she used Shinespark's airship to repair herself. All she could think of was using her horn as a light on their trip to the Copsewood power breaker, and her teleport to punch Valey. That was enough to make her feel non-perfect, right? Teleports were difficult. Granted, she was getting better at them with practice, but still. Yet, for some reason, her horn wasn't bothering her in the slightest.
Could the place's ambient magic be doing that? If so, no wonder she felt unusually right there. Maybe there actually was something good about it, if it could dampen her issues. Then again, Shinespark's machine had supposedly worked by removing something, so if that was the case...
She brought her hoof to her forehead, experimentally feeling her horn. It was surrounded by the fuzziness of a magical aura.
Only her sudden tension stopped her from jumping, and potentially falling off the platform.
She heard nothing, the familiar shimmering that came with her aura completely absent. She couldn't see her horn, but imagined that if the others could see something, they would have asked her what she was casting long ago. And when she tried to light her horn for real, any trace of energy was plucked into thin air with the gentleness of a good-night kiss, preventing it from flickering to life.
Starlight gulped. At least she knew one thing: if whatever was in the pit was sapient, it wasn't trying to hurt her. Because if it was, she would already be dead. Taking as much comfort as she dared from that knowledge, she clung to the platform, trying not to stare into the depths as they were lowered closer to the distant star.
The lift reached the bottom.
It was an abrupt stop, the pit coming to a perfectly flat end. The stone beneath them - at least, Starlight thought it was stone, though it didn't sound like it to her hooves - was a dark shade of pink, cut off visibly from the rest of the rock with enough architectural precision that it had to have been put there instead of occurring naturally. And that implied someone had built it.
The tunnel walls around them, still perfect in their vertical bore, were permeated by midnight-blue veins of energy sluggishly moving their way upward, letting off enough of a glow that Valey didn't need her plundered lamp to keep the place lit as brightly as a very clear night. They had started about three quarters of the way down and greatly increased in intensity, and Starlight presumed they made up the star she had seen. As the lift drew closer, the others began to see it too, though at much more limited range than Starlight had. Maybe it was her eyes. That was an explanation she could like.
"Fascinating," Gerardo said for the third time that descent, reaching out to touch one of the veins now that they were no longer confined to a swaying platform. "They look almost like mineral deposits. Raw mana, I presume, so concentrated on its journey to the surface that it appears to temporarily alter the substance of the rock it moves through. I have a hard time imagining that the surface generators have nearly the efficiency of a piece of equipment that could be placed down here. The scientific possibilities were this chasm to be explored are beyond astounding..."
"Meh. I've explored this place pretty well already." Valey was working on the platform, getting her forehooves beneath it and shoving it aside from where it had landed. "It's not as big as you'd think. Exploring it is easy. But yeah, it probably would make scientists completely flip. You can sort of see why the yaks would want to keep it all to themselves."
Clang! The lift platform tipped... and beneath it, directly where it had landed, a sharply-gouged crack in the floor was visible. They were on a roof, Starlight realized, and it was only hairline, but that was enough for Valey to shadow sneak ponies to the chamber below. There were no signs of burn marks, so she presumed whoever had blasted apart the tunnel had chosen to teleport here. She gulped as Valey began helping everyone to the floor, one pony at a time.
She was the third to go, after Gerardo and Maple. Upon landing, she let out a yelp: the floor was covered in a thin layer of some sort of clear liquid. It rippled where her hooves touched it, sending refractions clear across the room, yet offered no more resistance to motion than air and left no trace of wetness on her hooves when she lifted them. It had no smell whatsoever.
Nevertheless, wary of the substance, she hopped on Maple's back, meeting no protest. Valey looked at her with a grin, then splashed slightly. "What? Scared of this stuff?" She bent down and lapped some up. "It tastes delicious, you know."
Maple grimaced at her. "I don't want to know how you safely found that out."
Valey rolled her eyes. "And you don't eat stuff off the ground to find out what it is? Boring."
Howe, Gerardo and Neon Nova were eventually dropped in. After giving them a minute to acclimate to the strange, dull-pink room, Valey moved for the only exit. It was hexagonal, low-ceilinged, and not a door but a winding tunnel.
Starlight's eyes traced carvings on the walls as they left the pool room behind, lit by the same ambient light that filled the bottom part of the pit where glowing mana was exposed to the air. The entire structure's walls must have been charged with the stuff, she realized. Ancient runes in tongues she presumed were long dead formed flowing inscriptions between murals of ponies and things she didn't recognize. Three. Six. Nine. Twelve. The patterns changed, but groups of symbols with the same numbers prevalent in their theming passed by again and again. There were never groups of two, or four, or thirteen. Someone had made that place to mean something.
Was it a castle? A fortress? A temple? A shrine? As they walked between tunnels and empty rooms, still charting a course downward, Starlight's mind rolled over and over against who would have built a structure so far beneath the world. It had to predate Ironridge. It probably predated some geographical event that had buried it, or at least shut off the intended way to get down there.
It was discovered by accidental digging, Valey had said. Though the yaks probably had something to do with it. Yakyakistan had known something was here. The way the Flame District tunnel had gone straight before turning into a vertical pit suggested they knew exactly where.
It's an amusing geographical coincidence that Ironridge is directly between the capitals of Yakyakistan and the Griffon Empire, she remembered Shinespark telling her, raving eagerly about the explorer Sosa's book she had left her. But this suggests Sosa was interested in this halfway point before he even discovered the crater. It's like he knew something was here, and came looking for it!
There was something here, all right: a giant mountain crater of infernally-hot weather, with a wind barrier and gentle enough slopes to form a full mountain economy, the upper districts producing cold-weather crops and the lower districts producing hot-weather ones. The western side of the Stone District, she recalled, was supposed to be filled with farming terraces. But what if Valey's so-called Shadow District was the real prize? What if Sosa had suspected it, and never found it? What if he had found it? What if he was the reason why the yaks had needed to make their own entrance?
Even as the ancient castle's ambient magic tried to calm her, flowing and physically soothing with a sense of rightness she desperately hoped wasn't a lie, Starlight's tension grew and grew. It had been forgotten, and she was sure the reason was good.
"Hey, do you mind?" Valey nudged her, grumbling. "You reek when you're paranoid. Seriously, I've been down here a million times. I use this place for storage! It's not going to bite you!"
That was right, Starlight reassured herself, that was right. If the castle held something immeasurably evil, Valey probably would have kept her distance as much as possible. But it was old, and it was important, so it had to have a point.
"Honestly, I don't get why you're so nervous about this place," Valey continued, walking confidently at the front of the line. "I mean, maybe if you have a phobia of caves, but it has an effect I've always found relaxing. Like someone's giving me a big, cuddly hug. Maybe you guys already have that since you're not designated public nuisances, but hey, I'll take what I can get!"
"It does?" Maple pricked her ears, leaning forward as she walked. "Huh. It just feels like a cave to me. It's old and very interesting, but I don't feel anything that special about it..."
Starlight held her silence. Valey had just described exactly the way she felt about the place, and hadn't seemed bothered by it at all.
That was what the feeling of longing was. Putting two and two together with Valey's experience and her own, Starlight realized what it was triggering in her: the castle's magic felt like acceptance. Tenderness. If it was a pony, she knew they wouldn't care about her cutie mark, and would tell her they loved her even if she got a piece of moon glass and turned into someone completely unlike who she was. A pony who, when she lost Sunburst, wouldn't run away with her but would hold her and cry with her and tell her that as mean as the world could be, that was no reason to lose heart, because there could be nice things too, and they cared about her. That was what she had been missing when she left Equestria. And it was a feeling she had found in Maple... but the castle was deeper, grander, vaster, without blemish and with room enough for everyone. She wondered how Valey ever managed to leave.
Maple hadn't been missing that. She had been hurt by the world, but always had her friends at her side. Gerardo... She didn't know about his past, but had no reason to assume anything. The same went for Howe and Neon Nova. Maybe that was why they weren't as affected by the magic. They might just not have needed it. Could the thing that forced her to the edge of the pit when she first saw it have been not mind control or manipulation of her desires, but... just her?
For the first time, the possibility crossed Starlight's mind that whatever was in the sealed castle wasn't dark or manipulative, but something very, very good.
The Seventh District is anywhere better than where we're at now, kid, the voice of a bar patron whose name she had forgotten droned in her ear.
Simple! a shadow of Arambai said in her head. I go spread that around a little as a rumor in some disreputable areas. Anyone can let it slip whenever they want and nobody will think it's anything. A combination of truth and audacity is one of the most powerful secret-keepers around.
At the top of the pit, Valey greeted her and four others, welcoming them to the Shadow District, the fabled Seventh District of Ironridge. Suddenly, Starlight hoped very badly that whatever Valey had stored wasn't just in some side room somewhere, and she would get to see the heart of whatever empowered the place... if it had one.
Another tunnel opened out into a large, six-sided room with concentric engravings in the floor leading up to the center. There, a polished stone table sat, round and glittering to the point where it looked like a metallic gemstone. It had no chairs, and was a perfect size for the six of them to group around and share lunch or a conference. Lunch sounded good, though perhaps because of the stress Starlight didn't think she was as hungry as when she entered the pit.
"Well, hello, there," Gerardo remarked, striding up to the table and inclining his head, staring at it with one eye. A faintly translucent magical projection hovered in the air an inch above it: an equilateral triangle, with a hexagon inscribed minimally inside of that, and a single dot in the middle. He squinted at it. "This is the Yakyakistani Emblem of the Nine Virtues, is it not?"
Valey shrugged. "Yeah, I think that's what it's supposed to be. It usually actually has another dot kind of floating around in the middle of nowhere, but it looks like that's not here today. Poor it, huh?" She grinned. "But hey, look at this!"
Flinging back a foreleg, she swept it across the table, hoof gliding effortlessly across the polished surface. As if drawn by her movement, the emblem swirled about its center point, drawing two blurred, glowing circles in the air before the points connecting the edges slowed down enough to make out again. "Hah hah! Whirlywind!" Valey giggled and laughed, spinning it again. "Sorry, I dunno why I like doing this so much. But it reacts to being touched, see?"
Gerardo stopped the spinning with a talon of his own, then gave it an experimental rotate with much more precision. The table itself stayed put, but the projection above moved perfectly to suit him, and he beamed. "It is indeed satisfying. I wonder if this is some ancient civilization's form of arcano-technology. If so, how is it powered, and what does it do?"
"It glows and looks pretty." Valey shrugged. "Duh."
As Howe and Neon Nova wandered over to good off with the table, Starlight buried herself in Maple's mane, still sitting on the mare's back, still wrestling with what to think of the buried castle. There was one thing she could tell for certain: no amount of magic, even friendly, could replace having real ponies in her life. The idea of a lost soul sitting in the castle, waiting out their entire life there because it hurt too much to leave flashed through her mind, and she shivered. If the place was benevolent, what would it do about that? Could it revoke itself from them to force them to leave, because it knew that would be better? If it wasn't intelligent, could it even be benevolent?
"Can we keep going?" she croaked, desperate to finish their business in the place so she could figure out whether it was safe to indulge in the castle's aura... and at the very least get back to the surface so she could return to having thoughts she knew were her own.
"Valey!" Maple barked, catching the mare's attention. "This is really interesting, but aren't we in a hurry? Where's the thing you left here? I can go get it, if you want to stay and play with that table!"
"Yeah, yeah, gotcha..." Valey broke away, turning to another tunnel leading away. "Chillax, Ironflanks, it's only one more room. Hey, are you other guys coming?"
Gerardo, Howe and Neon Nova abandoned the thing as well, running to follow her.
The last passage was a spiral staircase, winding down and around in an endless flight of steps. The walls were close enough that Starlight could see scuffs on them, like someone had tried to drag something big and blocky down and kept bumping it against them. Odd. Wouldn't a place that had lasted that long be made of sturdier stuff?
The pink wall coating was chalky to the touch, and she realized it rubbed off as she scrubbed at a passing blemish with her hoof. The walls beneath were harder and sturdier, suggesting it was only a residue that had built up over the ages. As Maple stopped, waiting for a tripped Neon Nova to get back to his hooves, Starlight rubbed harder... and a final ball of uneasiness settled in her stomach as she realized what the pinkish walls looked like beneath their brittle coating.
They were made of crystal. Solid, flawless, faceted sheets of vast crystal, differing only in color from the ones she could summon.
Whoever had made that place hadn't built it - they had created it with magic, summoned it out of thin air. They had used her spell, and they had been powerful enough to make the crystals last forever. At that point, Starlight thought it was far less likely to be a who than a what... and as the stairwell evened out, pointing her into a room directly beneath the table one, she knew she would find out either then or never.