//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4: The Quest Begins 
// Story: Daring Do and the Hand of Doom 
// by Unwhole Hole 
//------------------------------//

The wing, as anticipated, was sealed with an iron door. A.K. cursed under her breath, even though she had anticipated this. Apart from containing numerous spells and texts by Starswirl the Bearded, the wing also contained a number of texts on arcana and on subjects deemed unsuitable for a general audience. Entering it would normally have been impossible without and appointment- -and an appointment would need to be secured using credentials from an organization like the Royal Archeological Society. In essence, there was no way A.K. Yearling- -or Daring Do- -would have ever been allowed in. 
Twilight, however, approached the muscular guards with impudence. 
“Lord Princess,” said one of them. He was clearly the elder, although the differences were subtle in the ranks of the Royal Guard. A.K. assessed that he was at least twice as old as her, even though he looked like a colt- -and even as he felt his eyes wandering across her arthritic but still incredibly well muscled wings. “I see you did not arrive in a skin-tight catsuit this time.”
“Catsuit?” said A.K., raising an eyebrow.
Twilight laughed awkwardly. “That’s an…interesting story.”
She turned to the guard. “I’d like to request entry.”
The younger of the two eyed A.K. and Rainbow Dash suspiciously. “I don’t know if we can do that, Princess. This wing is restricted. I don’t know if we can just- -”
“Shut your cake-hole!” hissed the older guard. “You darn rookie! This isn’t something we can debate! If the Princess says jump, you don’t even hesitate to ask ‘how high’! If I get demoted because of your sorry rump- -” He seemed to realize that the Lord Princess was listening, and he cleared his throat “My apologies,” he said, bowing deeply. “My comrade is a new recruit. And we’ve been on high alert ever since a significant classified text has been stolen. Your Divinity is of course free to enter. Please forgive us.” He bowed again, and this time lit his horn to force his partner to bow as well. As he did, he also levitated the keys into the lock and opened the door. 
The three visitors entered the wing and were immediately surrounded by the scent of dust and old paper. Twilight breathed it in deeply.
“Hey, Twi,” said Rainbow Dash. “I think the younger one had the hots for you.”
Twilight blushed. “Oh. No. That’s just part of their duty, me being a Princess and all.”
“Exactly.”
Twilight blushed harder. “So. I’ll go- -um- -look for those books now…heh heh…” 
Twilight immediately vanished into the stacks of scrolls and ancient texts with practiced precision. A.K. sighed and took off her shawl and hat. The library was dry but sweltering, and no one was around who did not already know that she was, in fact, Daring Do. 
This only seemed to excite Rainbow Dash further, but Daring Do ignored her, instead electing to sit down on a bench at the base of a massive hourglass. It was an odd decoration, especially considering how it seemed to actually be functional. From what Daring Do knew about Starswirl, though, he was an expert in time and space manipulation, so the motif was correct- -even if it meant that, despite Twilight’s confidence, he probably knew very little about what she had actually wanted to research. 
“Are you okay?” asked Rainbow Dash. She sounded genuinely concerned.
“Yeah,” lied Daring Do. In actuality, her legs and knees ached badly. The teleport had only exaggerated what was already a growing problem for her. She was acutely aware that she herself was neither an expert on slowing the effect of time nor a unicorn with a lifespan measured in centuries. 
Rainbow Dash sat down beside her, but quickly took to the air again, slowly circling the hourglass. “So,” she said. “You’re looking for those…exmort things…”
“Exmoori,” corrected Daring Do. “And yeah. I am.”
“You’re working on something, aren’t you? Tracking down an artifact?”
Daring Do frowned, but there was no point in hiding it anymore. She produced the folder with the rubbings and opened it, sliding one of the pages out as she did so. She then gave it to Rainbow Dash, who took it gingerly. 
“None of this makes any sense to me,” said Rainbow Dash after a second.
“Me neither. Hence the research. Not everything I do is exciting adventures into tombs and old temples.”
“But…it always ends up there, right?”
Daring Do shook her head. “Yes,” she admitted. 
Rainbow Dash once again descended to the bench, and this time remained there. “So, what exactly are you looking for?”
“I don’t really know. Not yet anyway.”
“You told Twilight about those Exmoor things. She said they were ponies.”
“More likely a kind of equid.” Seeing the confusion on Rainbow Dash’s face, she rephrased her statement. “Like zebras or donkeys. Being that are kind of like ponies but not really.”
“Oh…okay,” said Rainbow Dash, clearly not fully comprehending. Her somewhat stupefied expression belied a surprisingly perceptive mind, though. “You already seem to know a lot about them, though.”
Daring Do kicked her feet. “I know some,” she admitted. “But not much. And it’s not conclusive. I don’t have academic credentials and scientific studies, but I have a gut feeling.”
“But your gut is always right!”
“Not always,” sighed Daring Do. “But this is also more of an experience thing.”
“Experience?” Rainbow Dash was clearly confused.
Daring Do nodded. “I’ve seen the remains of a lot of old pony cultures. Some are dying out, some died out a long time ago. Almost all of them are forgotten, or will be. Heck, give it another five hundred years and all this will be forgotten too.” She gestured to the room around her. 
“And one of those civilizations was the Exmoori?”
“No. But they all reference things. Strange things. At first I kind of thought it was a coincidence, but now…”
“I don’t understand.”
“References to strange warriors who came bearing strange armor and weapons, who could defeat entire battalions but cared little for conquest. And the descriptions are always similar. Too similar.” Daring Do drew her legs up to her chest in thought. “And the interpretations are different. Gods. Demons. Foreigners, ancestors. Fear, love, reverence, stories. Only even in the oldest civilizations, those were already second-hand stories.” 
Daring Do took the folio from Rainbow Dash and tucked it into her shirt. “It’s our stories,” she said. “Like the Mighty Helm. We tell stories about them even though they were so ancient even Celestia can barely remember them. But who did they tell stories about? Who was ancient when their civilization was still young?”
“The Exmoori.”
Daring Do sighed. “Maybe? I don’t know. But I have a hunch. Those rubbings were from a fresco carved by the Mighty Helm. And the Helm weren’t artists. If they took the time to sit down and copy the inscriptions from some ancient artifact, they must have had a darn good reason to.” 
Rainbow Dash stared knowingly, her eyes almost quivering. It made Daring Do feel awkward- -but she still blushed slightly. In her mind, it had not sounded at all profound. 
The awkward tension was interrupted, ironically, but Twilight’s sudden reappearance from the radially aligned stacks. She was levitating a number of texts behind her, although she did not have the expression of one who was pleased with herself.
“You found something,” asked Daring Do, although she spoke as though it was a statement. 
“I found a lot of secondary sources if that’s what you mean,” muttered Twilight, setting the books near the giant hourglass. Doing so produced a substantial plume of dust. “As it turns out, Starswirl was a brilliant theorist and researcher of magical arcana, but he didn’t take too much interest in cultures that were otherwise not magically inclined.”
“So you found nothing.”
“Not at first, no. Well, a lot of things I found interesting, but not things you want I don’t think- -”
“Twilight,” reminded Rainbow Dash. “Focus?”
“Oh, right, right! Well, on a hunch, I decided to check the Clover the Clever Annex. She was almost as smart as Starswirl, but had a wider range of interests. And, well, she didn’t mysteriously vanish in her prime- -”
“And you found…?”
“Oh! Yes!” Twilight picked up a book and flipped through it. “Clover was aware of the Exmoori, at least tangentially. Not much is mentioned, but there’s a few passages referencing them.” Twilight’s expression grew darker. “Unfortunately, most of them are, well…not exactly academic.”
This time, both Daring Do and Rainbow Dash were confused. 
“Meaning?” asked Daring Do.
“Meaning that almost all of the references recall another wizard. One Gxurab Al’Hrabnaz.” 
“I don’t recognize that name,” said Daring Do. From the look of contempt on Twilight’s face, she was somewhat glad that she did not know it. Just saying the name made Twilight appear as though she was trying to swallow something slimy and fetid. 
“That’s not surprising,” said Twilight, still staring at her book. “He wasn’t a nice pony. At all. But he was a contemporary of Clover the Clever. You could almost call them rivals.” 
Twilight set down the book so that Daring Do and Rainbow Dash could see it. One of the pages displayed a woodcut: in it, a hooded mage- -clearly meant to be Clover the Clever- -stood surrounded by light and magical runes while a deformed, vicious creature in a flowing cloak and thick armor curled below her, preparing a counterattack. 
Rainbow Dash looked somewhat disgusted. “What the heck is he?”
“No one is really sure what he was,” said Twilight. “This woodcut was from the eighth century, which was almost four hundred years after this would have taken place…but as a wizard, it’s generally assumed he was a unicorn. Before his use of dark magic deformed him.” 
Daring Do looked up from the woodcut. “I don’t like the sound of this.” 
“Al’Hrabnaz was one of the Black Thirteen,” said Twilight. “Mages hoof-picked by King Sombra to do…” She shook her head. “…to help him gain even more power. Some of them were much, much worse than Al’Hrabnaz.”
“And what, exactly, does this dark wizard have to do with the Exmoori?”
“He was apparently an expert in them,” said Twilight, clearly as surprised as Daring Do was. “That’s what Clover was referencing. That he was excavating artifacts, trying to use them to expand Sombra’s influence. Reverse engineering them.”
“To do…what?”
Twilight did not answer. She looked pale. Then she looked up. Her strange alicorn eyes met Daring Do’s. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to. The Dark Thirteen disappeared a thousand years ago…but dark magic doesn’t care how long you wait. And it’s not something I want to mess with.”
“I know,” said Daring Do. “You know who you’re talking to, right?”
Twilight did not respond or react in any way. She looked back at the woodcut and the flattened, sharp-toothed figure that represented the elder wizard. “I can’t be sure,” she said at last, “but some of his works might have survived.”
Daring Do shivered. “What do you mean, ‘survived’?”
“The Crystal Empire disappeared shortly after Sombra’s first defeat. It was preserved perfectly for one thousand years. If his books are anywhere, that’s where they’ll be.”
“You don’t know?”
Twilight shook her head. “The Crystal Empire Library is out of the Canterlot system. I don’t know what’s kept there. I don’t know if anypony knows all of it. Most ponies aren’t allowed in there.”
“Why?” asked Rainbow Dash.
“In case any of his books actually are there,” said Daring Do, knowingly. “But if he was an expert on the Exmoori, I need to take the chance. I need those books.”
“I thought you might say that. I have a contact in the Crystal Empire.”
“You’re talking about Sunburst,” said Rainbow Dash.
Twilight nodded. “He’s been doing his own research on the old texts. He’s more of an academic than a wizard, but he can help you. I’ll send word you’ll be coming.”
“You can’t just teleport us?”
“NO!” said both Twilight and Daring Do at the same time. Twilight, surprised by the concurrence of their refusal, cleared her throat. “No,” she said, more calmly. “That distance would be impossible, even for me.”
“It’s moot anyway,” said Daring Do. “I already said. No teleportation, no portals. I’ll take the train.” She pointed at the books. “Do you have a duplicating machine?”
“There’s one in the lower levels, yes,” said Twilight.
“Good. I need copies of any references to the Exmoori. And of this.” She held out the folder with the rubbings.
“I can do that- -”
“No sense in making a Princess make copies,” said Daring Do. “Just show me where the machine is.” Twilight looked somewhat dejected, so Daring Do then added: “If you want, I’ll leave you a copy of this. So you can look it over. Who knows? Maybe you’ll see something I won’t.”
Twilight’s face lit up. “Right! I can do that!” She then happily lead Daring Do back toward the exit. Before the books behind her magically closed and joined her, Daring Do took one last look at the woodcut and the deformed dark wizard, permanently engaged in battle against the great Clover the Clever. She once again had a bad feeling- -and a sensation that she was being watched. Daring Do looked up to see several sickly crows standing over the skylight.
“Great,” she sighed. “The omens just keep getting worse and worse, don’t they?”