//------------------------------// // 5 Into the Labyrinth // Story: The Return of the King // by Bronyxy //------------------------------// While Twilight waited for the welcoming caress of oblivion to descend over her, she suddenly heard Sombra roar and felt a sharp pain in her foreleg that made her snap her eyes open. The sight that greeted her made her heart leap; pegasi and Bat Ponies were flooding in to the Throne Room through the hole in the roof where Flurry Heart must have been shot through! The guards wasted no time in singling out their target and launched volley after volley of spears, arrows and crossbow bolts at the distracted unicorn. One of the projectiles had ricocheted off the floor and caught Twilight’s foreleg, jolting her back to reality. Suddenly the spell holding her was broken and she was free, no longer rooted to the spot and sprang to the attack, providing magical support to the physical attacks being prosecuted hard by the guards. Sombra had been complacent; he had sealed all the obvious doors and windows that served as entrances to the castle, but had completely overlooked the hole in the roof. With his guard down ready to steal Twilight’s magic, he had been unprepared for the attack and had taken valuable seconds switching his attention away from Twilight and onto the attacking guards. Although his armour had deflected most of the projectiles, he had still been struck in a number of places and felt sharp shocks of pain from all over his body. He knew he had to defend himself and summoned a further use of the stasis spell, but when he focused, his distinctive aura of corrosive green tinged purple bubbles did not appear and the guards continued to fly at him. With sudden shock he realised that it hadn’t worked! He quickly took stock of the situation and looked on the floor around him. There, amid the pile of quickly accumulating debris, he saw a sight that shocked him to his core, the splintered remains of his discoloured horn lay discarded on the floor. Cursing his luck that some weapon had found its mark so effectively, he realised that such a messy fracture would take time to regenerate, time in which he could employ only the most basic magic. He knew that in time it was possible to regain some limited mastery over magic with a broken horn, but that would take time, and time was something he did not have. In desperation, he cast an invisibility spell and ran, the echoes of his hoofsteps seemingly coming from every direction and the guards ceased their fire as they no longer had a target to aim at. “Where’d he go?” vocalised one guard, articulating the thoughts of all of them. “There!” shouted Twilight “Follow the blood spots!” Sure enough, Sombra had taken a number of flesh wounds which had conspired together to betray where he had gone as surely as if he had left a trail of breadcrumbs. “There!” repeated Twilight “Do you see it?” The guards swept in once they knew what they were looking for and followed the intermittent red dots on the polished floor. Twilight allowed herself the luxury of catching her breath. It was over; the guards would be able to round up Sombra quickly and secure him until he faced justice. All she had to do was break the stasis spells before returning home, happy that she had played her part in a job well done. She felt a shudder run through her body as the adrenaline started to dissipate and shivered just a little. She would soon have Flurry Heart home with her parents and restore Celestia to her rightful place and everything would be back to normal. “Princess!” called one of the guards “We’ve lost him!” Twilight’s relief crashed around her hooves. She had been foalish to think it was all over; this was Sombra’s home ground after all. With renewed determination she flapped over to where she had been called from. “There Princess” reported the guard “It disappears straight into the wall.” “We have to get to him fast” said Twilight “The longer it takes us to find him, the more he can regenerate and the bigger the problem we will have to deal with.” Her horn glowed as she probed for secret levers and hidden mechanisms, scanning around the wall where the blood spots stopped. “Aha!” she exclaimed, reaching in to raise a magically concealed latch. The wall rotated effortlessly revealing a dark passageway. Twilight lit her horn and saw how the dirt had recently been gifted with a set of hoofprints and knew she had found his trail. “Come on!” she called “Follow me!” The passageway split into three and Twilight had to stop to see which way the fresh tracks led. She knew that none of them could afford to be caught between these walls if Sombra regained enough power to close them together; that thought alone keeping her highly motivated as she looked for clues. She went on ahead rather than left or right and shortly found herself on the mechanism side of another door, this time with no magic shrouding its operation. She pulled the latch and Twilight marvelled at how quietly and effortlessly these secret doors could be opened compared with all the rest in the castle that typically screamed and ground their displeasure at being called upon to work. Light spilled in through the doorway showing her that she was looking out into the Great Hall, and having quickly looked each way for further traces of Sombra, jumped out to allow those surging forward to spill out behind her. With agonising slowness, the column of guards flowed through the secret door and began to build their strength in the hall alongside Twilight, all looking around uneasily. Twilight’s horn lit and her magenta aura spread outwards, carrying a ‘reveal invisible’ spell along the length of the Great Hall. Suddenly, a guard next to Twilight shouted and she broke her spell before it had progressed fully down the length of the room, and looked upwards to see one of the massive chandeliers in freefall coming down towards them. Startled, she redirected her energy into a levitation spell, which because it was hurried did not arrest the fall of the heavy metal structure neatly as anticipated but tipped it over and sent it crashing across the hall. All around, they heard Sombra’s sinister disembodied voice laughing at them scornfully, and although it was clear he was in the room, they could not see him. Twilight returned her attention to the ‘reveal invisible’ spell and sent another wave of magenta energy along the room, this time catching somepony in its grasp, making them glow. “Fire!” cried the Royal Guard Major standing a few lengths away from Twilight immediately upon seeing the illuminated form, and in response a hail of projectiles was directed swiftly towards the rapidly fading glow. The laughing stopped and galloping hooves could be heard once more, throwing down the gauntlet for another round of ‘cat and mouse’. With the tell-tale glow having now dissipated and their quarry on the move again, the Major barked out the “Hold your fire!” command and the guards responded immediately by flying directly towards the point at which their target had last been seen. Even though their wings were faster than the fleeing unicorn’s legs, he still gave them the slip and once more they were forced to look for blood spots and other traces that could indicate where he had gone this time. Twilight flew over and inspected the scene with the help of her magic and quickly discovered another secret door; the castle that she thought she knew seemed to be alive with secret doors and passageways that she doubted even Princess Cadence knew about. Carefully she opened the hidden door and lit her horn before going in, the guards following close behind. After about twenty feet she saw a misaligned wooden rectangle on the floor and immediately recognised it as a trapdoor that hadn’t been properly shut; clearly, he had followed the path down to wherever it led, so that was to be their path too. Without hesitation, she pulled the trapdoor back and saw a flight of stone stairs extending as far as the light from her horn would allow and set off down them, noticing that the air seemed somehow damper and mustier than it had before. This was clearly one part of the castle that had received few visitors over the years. At the bottom of the stairs she placed her first forehoof onto an unkempt floor covered in a random assortment of gravel, burnt embers and straw, underneath which she assumed it was earth because her hoofsteps came back sounding muffled rather than echoing sharply as she would have expected from flagstones. There was a definite chill down here coupled with a pervading dampness that made her suddenly feel on edge, so she cast a light spell on the whole room, the brightness blinding her temporarily. When her eyes began to adjust, she could see exactly what this room was, and sincerely doubted that it would ever make it onto the mainstream tourist trail, although a few adult special interest parties may gain something from the experience. It was a torture chamber equipped with all sorts of mediaeval looking implements for causing pain and discomfort, if not far worse. Further investigation showed that the room was not simply one that had been closed up and forgotten about, but that there were ponies still restrained in these hellish devices, those that could move turning to face the new arrivals and some even groaned a weak request for help . Twilight was so stunned at what she saw, she forgot temporarily about Sombra, but snapped herself quickly back to the task at hoof; something was wrong about the look and the feel of the place. Ordinarily, she would have been the first to help out these unfortunate souls, but something played on her mind and she quickly cast another spell. Suddenly, her eyes grew wide in stark fear. “Quickly!” she shouted “About turn! We ’ve got to get out of here now! IT’S A TRAP!” The guards piling into the room were unable to stop with the momentum of those following on behind who hadn’t heard the command, while those trying to force their way back up could not fight the tide that pushed them inexorably back down again. It was a shambles. From every angle all around them they suddenly head Sombra’s sinister echoing laugh. Twilight shouted her order again, this time with more than a hint of desperation evident. Up above, word had got through and guards emerging from the torture chamber flooded back into the passageway. One of the guards in the room next to Twilight suddenly grabbed her and thrust her headlong up the stairs over the heads of the others very much like Shining Armor had done with Cadence once, and she gave out a startled “Eeeep!” sound in response, crashing unceremoniously into the walls of the corridor above. Behind her, the aperture through which she had just been propelled started to grow opaque and the guards beneath found a solid barrier crystallising before their eyes. In a few seconds, the hole had disappeared completely, revealing nothing but a flagstone floor under the wooden trapdoor. It had gone, and along with it all the guards who had not got back up the stairs in time. Twilight was angry, powered by a fury that few had ever seen. There would be no mercy for Sombra now, Princess of Friendship or not, he was going to pay. She pushed forward along the passageway, seething to herself with a boiling anger and blasted the door that she found at the end clear off its hinges rather than stopping to undo it. “WHERE ARE YOU SOMBRA?” she demanded “I AM GOING TO TRACK YOU DOWN AND SO HELP ME, I WILL DESTROY YOU FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!” Even the guards furthest back in the passageway heard her this time and looked at each other with surprise, her display of raw emotion earning her the respect from any guards who may have harboured unspoken doubts about her commitment. That level of raw emotion coupled with her alicorn magic meant she was primed and ready to explode in some direction or other, and they were glad to be on her side. Twilight knew now that Sombra had come this way; the trapdoor had been a diversion, a cruel but effective one. She had recognised the pleas for help as being in an arcane tongue and that the ragged clothes being worn by the victims were of a type that was a long way off contemporary fashion. Her spell had confirmed the time charm on the torture chamber and realisation had quickly hit her that it must have been projected through time, and that it had been summoned to trap them all and then send them off through time once more to end up only Celestia knew where. It was all so obvious now she came to think about it; there was no other exit, so Sombra would never have gone in there in the first place because he could never have got out! It had been the perfect distraction for somepony as naturally compassionate as her, and very nearly claimed her. She was truly sorry she couldn’t help the victims, but even more so that brave guards had been lost, including the one who had recognised they were in danger and thrown her clear. She hadn’t even known his name, but made a vow to honour him as soon as it was safe.