//------------------------------//
// Chapter 23: Translation 
// Story: Daring Do and the Hand of Doom 
// by Unwhole Hole 
//------------------------------//

The door creaked as Daring Do pushed it open. There was little light on the far side, save for a dim beam of light coming from the overcast sky that barely managed to push through a tiny, dirty window only to illuminate the thick dust that was floating lazily by. 
The white Pegasus with the strange eyes was exactly where they had left her. She was still tied to the chair, and did not even look up when Daring Do entered. Daring Do found it only slightly unnerving, as she was unable to tell if the mare was awake, asleep, or staring at her with profound but expressionless hatred. 
“Hey there,” she said, entering the room slowly. The mare did not move, although several tiny lenses and metallic irises in her eyes adjusted their angle to track Daring Do. Whether that really meant anything was unclear; Daring Do was almost sure that her eyes would track even if they were removed from her skull. Her gut told her that the Pegasus was watching, though. Watching and perpetually listening. 
“You’ve been here for over a day,” continued Daring Do. “I talked to Sweetie Drops. She says we need to leave you here, tied like that. That you’re a danger to us. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The mare made no motion. Daring Do took that to mean that she was refusing to reply. 
Daring Do sighed. “You tried to blow me up. Frankly? It’s not the first time. And I’d be okay with it, too, if it had just been me. But you put a lot of innocent ponies in danger. Including Rainbow Dash.” She paused, and shook her head. “And you can’t tell me why you did it. I guess it was orders. Or maybe you had some reason to that you thought was right. But it’s not right. You’re a Questlord? A knight? Well then act like it. If you have a problem with me, take it up with ME.” Daring Do reached into her pocket and drew a knife. She carefully unfolded a long, gleaming blade. “Because if I have a problem, I’ll take it up with you.”
She took a step forward and the mare stiffened almost imperceptibly. Instead of struggling to get free, the white mare seemed to be steeling herself defiantly, as if she knew what was coming but was prepared to take it. Seeing a girl so young respond like that made Daring Do feel nauseous. 
The knife slid forward. The Pegasus closed her eyes, proving that she did in fact have eyelids. The gesture was pointless, though; no matter what, she would be able to see what was being done to her. Her eyes quickly opened wide, though, when she saw the ropes falling away from her and the knife imbedded in the wood of the chair.
Her motion was almost instantaneous. In a flash she was across the room, as far away from Daring Do as she could get. She stood on a counter, hunched in a defensive position. There had been debris throughout the room, and she had taken an old pencil in her mouth as if that would be enough to defend herself. With the amount of training she seemed to have, Daring Do reasoned that it probably was. And then some. 
Despite seeing this, Daring Do smiled. “Yeah. I know what it feels like to be tied up. Believe me.”
The mare did not reply, as she could not. However, she seemed to grow more confused as to what was going on. 
“It’s fine,” said Daring Do, closing the pocket knife and putting it on the table beside her. “Sweetie Drops can kiss my cutie mark. I’m not going to keep you here, why would I?  You don’t know anything, and I haven’t told you anything important. So just go home.” Daring Do turned and left the room. She paused at the doorframe, though. “Oh. You can keep the knife if you want. Yours broke on my whip. And don’t bomb me again. I don’t like it.” She paused again. “Also, you’re probably hungry. We’re having late breakfast downstairs. We have soy bacon. You can have a meal before we go.” 
Daring Do then finally left. The Pegasus stared, dumfounded for a moment. Her grasp of the language that Daring Do was speaking was impeccable, as was her comprehension of countless others. Despite that capacity, though, she could not comprehend what was happening.
Yet, after a few moments, she found that she really could smell soy bacon, as well as eggs and something with peanut butter- -and found herself carefully and silently walking toward the door, following the exact same path that Daring Do had taken, ultimately toward the same destination. 

“I can’t bucking believe this,” growled Sweetie Drops. She pressed her hoof against her temple, right on the spot where she would have had a horn if she were a unicorn. “Let me get it straight. One more time. From the top. You untied her, and let her go. Just like that?”
Daring Do leaned back on her chair. “Forgive me for having empathy. So what if I let her out anyway?”
“So what- -did you listen to anything I said?! She’s a well-trained operative from a terrorist organization of Templar knights obsessed with overthrowing the current government! One who, might I remind you, tried to turn you AND four city blocks into cinders less than twenty four hours ago. And you untied her.”
Daring Do leaned forward over the table. “Yeah. I did.” 
Sweetie Drops looked as though she was about to scream, and even opened her mouth to do so, but then winced in pain and clutched her head again. “Ohhh…gosh darn it all to heck, this migraine. This is why I work alone.” She smiled humorlessly. “Yeah. Sure. Okay. Let’s just let her go back and report the location on an agency safe house, plus my identity. Sure. I can deal with that.” She suddenly became serious. “Except for the fact that she is STILL HERE!”
Sweetie Drops motioned toward the rafters of the warehouse’s main room. The white Pegasus looked down, glaring back at her over a pile of bacon she had set out in front of her. That had in fact been the first thing she had done: after tentatively entering the room, she had rushed the table and shoved her face in the bacon like a wild animal, stuffing her face with it completely. Then she had flown up into the rafters, spat it out, and proceeded to eat it slowly and carefully one piece at a time, her eyes never leaving the ponies below. 
“It’s not like we don’t have more bacon,” said Rainbow Dash. “And eggs.” She picked up an especially large boiled specimen and turned to the rafters. “HEY! Catch!” She threw the egg, which passed in a long arc. The white Pegasus caught it easily and swallowed it hole, shell and all. “Whoa!” laughed Rainbow Dash. “Like a beast! That’s what you need in the morning, you know. Protein! If you stay for lunch we can carbo-load you!” 
“Why are you not more concerned about this?!” snapped Sweetie Drops.
Rainbow Dash seemed both taken aback and slightly offended. “Because if Daring Do trusts her, so do I. And, you know, you were kind of being a jerk.”
“A jerk? For trying to keep us from, you know, NOT getting flambéed?”  
“Bon Bon. Come on. Look who you’re talking to. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m an Element of Harmony. I know a thing or two about friendship, and I know that being NICE to a pony can go a long way. Trust me on this.”
“That is not how the world works! That isn’t how ANY of this works!” 
“Anyway, there’s three of us,” said Daring Do. “And only one of her.”
“No. We basically have one and an eight of me plus one of her. FOR NOW. And if more show up?”
“Then we give them soy bacon,” suggested Rainbow Dash, pulling the remainder of the pile toward herself. Sweetie Drops slapped her hoof. “OW!”
“Don’t bogart the bacon! I need to eat too!”
“Then eat!”
“I’m too angry! Because you both are clearly too incompetent to do much of anything properly!”
Still in a huff, Sweetie Drops sat down at the table, her front legs crossed. She had turned several shades of red, and was quite clearly fuming. 
“Why does she call you ‘Bon Bon’?” asked Daring Do after a moment. 
“Because it’s my code name,” muttered Sweetie Drops. 
“It’s cute. You should use it more often.”
“It’s not supposed to be cute.”
“So, you got to choose it?” asked Rainbow Dash. “Why’d you use ‘Bon Bon’ then? Why not something cool, like…like Shadowblood Saberstroke or something?”
“I can’t believe you just said that to me.”
“That reminds me,” said Daring Do. She turned her head upward toward the rafters. The Pegasus sitting up there looked back at her, a strip of soy bacon dangling from her mouth. “You. Do you have a name?”
The Pegasus stared back silently and without moving for several seconds. Then she shook her head. It was a tiny and rapid movement, one that could almost not be seen. What it meant, though, was clear. 
“You have to have a name.”
Another long pause. Then another tiny shake of the head.
Rainbow Dash gasped. “You know what that means?! We get to name her! Oh! Oh! Can she be Shadowblood Saberstroke? Shadowblood Saberstroke! Please please please! It would be sooooo awesome!”
“No it wouldn’t,” snapped Sweetie Drops. “If she’s going to be around me I get to decide what I want her to be called. If she has to be called something, we’re going to call her ‘White’.”
“White? Seriously? That’s so stupid! You can’t name a pony after her color!”
“Why? Would that be inappropriate, RAINBOW Dash?” 
Rainbow Dash opened her mouth to interject but quickly closed it and blushed when she realized what Sweetie Drops meant. Daring Do ignored her and instead looked up at the rafter. “Alright. Your name is White now. If I say that, then it means I’m talking to you. You got that?”
A tiny nod. 
“Good. Now eat your bacon, we have business to discuss down here.” She shifted the paper plates of food and made way for her notes and diagrams, which she quickly spread out across the table.
Rainbow Dash stared at them for a moment, and then looked up at the Pegasus that they were now calling White, and then at Daring Do. “Um…Daring Do. I mean, I’m not doubting you or anything, but do we really want to go over that now? You know, with her watching?”
“What they did to her goes two ways. Who cares if she sees something? She can’t tell anyone. Ever.” 
“Now you’re just being cynical,” sighed Sweetie Drops. “Correct, but still cynical.” 
“When was I ever not?” Daring Do neatened the pages on the table and opened her book. “I couldn’t sleep. Again. So I was going back through the etchings again…”
Rainbow Dash gasped. “And you found something?!”
“Yes. Quite a bit of something. See, Exmoori language is a lot more complicated than most languages. The characters it uses change depending on the context and subject matter, and the context isn’t intuitive, at least not to us.”
“Meaning?” asked Sweetie Drops. 
“Meaning that different parts translate differently. Al’Hrabnaz- -” She paused, staring at Sweetie Drops, looking for signs that she might not recognize the name.
“He was a wizard who studied the Exmoori,” explained Rainbow Dash. “That’s how we’ve been translating- -”
“I know who he was,” snapped Sweetie Drops. “I’m just incredibly surprised that you were stupid enough to even get in a room with a book written by one of the Dark Thirteen. There’s a reason the agency burned them all. Well, most of them.”
Rainbow Dash gasped. “Don’t tell Twilight!” she whispered. 
“Continuing,” grunted Daring Do, “A lot of these pages are a kind of schematic. For some sort of machine. It’s all math, or their version of it, or technical descriptions. I can sort of get the gist of it but I can’t translate it.”
“Not even with the books?” asked Rainbow Dash.
“No. And that’s the weird part. Al’Hrabnaz was apparently some kind of mathematician, and he focused his efforts on what he interpreted as math. And Exmoori is obtuse enough that his theorems match up. But it wasn’t math.”
“Then what?”
“Poetry.”
Sweetie Drops balked. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” 
“I’m not,” replied Daring Do icily. “I can’t translate the actual words and descriptions of the machine, but the rest makes up a kind of epic poem. A history. The pony who originally carved this thought it was important. And I agree with her.” 
“What kind of story is it?” asked Rainbow Dash, slowly. 
Daring Do sighed. “A sad one.” She straightened her notes and opened them to the page where she had compiled her translation. “It’s their history, told as a kind of fable.”
“Great,” sighed Sweetie Drops, leaning back and picking up a muffin from the table. “Story time.”
Daring Do glared at her, but started reading anyway. 
“It states that long ago, there were six brothers. Translated, their names were Born-of-Sky, Born-of-Soil, Born-of-Ice, Born-of-Darkness, Born-of-Magic, and Born-of-White-Steel. I don’t know what the words are, just the pictographs. They represent what the Exmoori considered the six fundamental races of ponies, meaning equines bearing true cutie marks. The Exmoori were Born-of-Ice.”
“Ha!” laughed Rainbow Dash, pointing at Sweetie Drops. “You’re born of soil!”  
“Rainbow Dash!” snapped Daring Do.
Rainbow Dash immediately stiffened. “Sorry.” 
Daring Do glared at her for a moment, and then continued. “These brothers existed in a constant state of upheaval. Endless war, stretching back to the Beginning, which also translates as Towerfall. I don’t know why. Then…” Daring Do shifted the images, showing a page that seemed by its appearance alone to convey violence and chaos. “An immense cataclysm occurred, or what the Exmoori considered a cataclysm.” Daring Do slid a familiar page into place, one with a pair of strange symbols not unlike those of the hexagram of races. “This cataclysm gave rise to the first alicorns.” 
“Or the cataclysm WAS the rise of alicorns,” said Sweetie Drops silently. Daring Do did not respond except with a nod, as she had been thinking the same thing.”
“So,” said Rainbow Dash, slowly, “there were once more alicorns?”
“No. Just two. The Exmoori called them ‘Burning-Sunder-Agony’ and ‘Rending-Glow-Warmthless’. Which in their language translates literally to ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’.” 
Sweetie Drops leaned back. “Then we can guess where their allegiance was. With no one at all.” 
Daring Do nodded. “When the alicorns came, they asked the Six Brothers to join them. Born-of-Magic, Born-of-Sky and Born-of-Soil pledged their undying loyalty to the Sun, while Born-of-Darkness pledged hers to the Moon and only the Moon.”
“And the other two?” 
“They pledged themselves to no one. They continued the war. But the alliance was uneasy, and it started to change both of them. Born-of-Ice became smarter, and Born-of-White-Metal became even more cruel than he had always been. Eventually it broke down. The poem blames it on Born-of-White-Metal, that he was overcome by fear and greed, deciding to sell his brother to buy his own freedom.” 
A small, nearly silent gasp came from the rafters, but it was drowned out by Rainbow Dash’s reaction. “That’s terrible!” she cried, standing up so fast that she nearly sent a bowl of scrambled eggs across the table. “They were brothers! BROTHERS!”
“It’s an analogy,” snapped Sweetie Drops. “One faction took the coward’s way out. And do you know the thing about cowards? They’re the ones who end up surviving.”
“Except they didn’t,” said Daring Do, slowly. She shook her head. “That’s the sad part. The iconography of this story, it isn’t used for new things…it means that it’s told as if this happened an incredibly long time ago, millennia before the fresco was carved.”
“Wait,” said Rainbow Dash. “You didn’t finish the story! What happened to the brothers?”
Daring Do paused. “The author…the original author, who carved the Exmoori version of the fresco…she signed it. As the last living Exmoor pony.”
The room fell silent, and it was silent for what felt like several minutes before Daring Do was able to continue. “That’s what the Hand of Doom was for. This machine, the thing that’s described here, it was designed as a desperate effort to save their species. It was a weapon. The Exmoor pony who built it was also the one who made this carving. The last.” 
“And she never completed it,” reasoned Sweetie Drops. “Or else they would still be here.”
“No,” said Daring Do. “She finished it. But she had a change of heart. Apparently, she came to realize that the cost of activating it would be incomprehensibly high. And after a lot of thought, she decided that she could not activate it. That, in her own words, ‘The Exmoori race should enter the Forever-Seep with honor and dignity, not like this, not ever’. Then she swore a powerful oath that she would remain by her machine, even in death, to guard it and prevent it from ever being activated by the unworthy.”   
“And let me guess,” sighed Sweetie Drops. “Caballeron thinks he’s worthy.”
“Or the pony he’s working for does,” suggested Rainbow Dash. She had begun to nervously eat boiled egg after boiled egg. 
“Does it say what this weapon does?” asked Sweetie Drops, picking up several of the rubbings and notes but clearly finding herself unable to read any of them. 
“It might,” replied Daring Do, “but I don’t know. What I do know is that we have to stop Caballeron from getting to it. No matter what.”
“Well, do you have a lead?”
“I do, but it’s not much.”
“It’s better than nothing,” said Rainbow Dash. “And besides, your hunches are always right! Every time!”
“If only,” muttered Daring Do. She sighed and sat up. “The artifact that Caballeron stole. Do you know what it is?”
“The Hurricane Spear,” replied Sweetie Drops with ease. “The personal weapon of Commander Hurricane herself.”
“Oh mane,” whispered Rainbow Dash, her eyes growing wide. “I didn’t know that it was THAT. That is so. AWESOME.”
“They say the spear is sharp enough to cut through anything in the world,” said Sweetie Drops.
“So,” suggested Rainbow Dash. “Maybe Caballeron needs to cut through something? Like an unbreakable door into the treasure room with the Hand, or a safe or something? Or take down some sort of giant temple guardian? Oh that would be so cool…”
“I doubt it,” said Daring Do, rubbing her chest. The Spear was indeed genuine, as she had no doubt that Wun would have made absolutely sure that it was real. She trusted her so-called sister at least that much. Yet, despite that particular part of its legend, it had broken her ribs without even so much as wrinkling her shirt. “The Spear is dull. But I don’t think that’s the part of the legend that Caballeron was interested in.”
“There’s another part?”
Daring Do nodded. “Now, this is just folklore. But the spear has a second name. ‘The Spear of Extinction’. Some ponies claim that Commander Hurricane used it to slay the last Exmoor pony in existence.”
“My grandmother used to tell a story like that,” said Rainbow Dash. “Except it wasn’t a pony. It was some sort of demon thing.”
“If they fought a war against Celestia?” Sweetie Drops leaned back on her chair. “Yeah. What else would history remember them as?” 
“This record,” said Daring Do, tapping the notes, “it was signed by a pony calling herself the last Exmoor pony. This was the pony that Hurricane slew. There’s a connection. I don’t know what it is yet, but heck, I didn’t even believe that story until now.”
“So, what?” asked Rainbow Dash. “What do we need to do?”
“We have to go to where the spear was used. To where the last Exmoor pony fell. Right now, that’s our only lead. If there’s going to be a clue to what happened and what this all means, that’s where it will be.” She looked up at all of them. “Pack your bags. We’re going to Lyskymm.”