If a pony imagined a desert, they’d picture an expanse of yellow sand and blazing sun with the air dancing in the heat. That was a nice, scenic desert, the kind of place where you might find belly dancers and camels and an oasis or two. It was a nicer, much more pleasant desert than the reality of the Badlands.
Soft sand would have been far easier to dig in than the ancient dust and dry mud. The Badlands were like a salt flat and a boulder field had a baby with Tartarus and you arrived just as they put it in the kiln. The heat was deadly, the nearest river was a streak of silt that only flowed a few months out of the year, and the wildlife was venomous, poisonous, or most often both.
“Red and yellow stripes... “ Daring Do muttered, staring at the hissing danger rope that had found its way into her tent. “Hey, does anypony know if this snake is deadly? You know, like the last seven were?”
Somepony cleared their throat. Daring Do looked back at the donkey trying to get her attention. She’d hired him in town, and he’d saved her life a dozen times already on this trip. She was aware of precisely zero times her life had been in danger because unlike his employer the donkey wasn’t the type to boast.
“We’re gettin’ ready to move the slab,” the burro said. “When you’re done playing with yer little friend, you can come and watch.”
“You got it dug out?” Daring asked, forgetting entirely about the snake and flying over the broken ground to look, rushing through the small tent city that had been built around what was generously an excavation site but given a grad student’s budget, was little more than a hole in the ground. “Did you remember to brace the tunnel properly this time?”
“Properly?” The burro frowned. “That was a false entrance and designed to collapse. I was almost a donkey sandwich!”
“Yeah but that’s good!” Daring Do smiled and punched his shoulder playfully. “Traps like that can only be set off once. And you know what that means?”
“It had better not mean you want us moving a hundred tons of rock.”
“It means we’re the first ones to come here since it was sealed,” Daring Do said. “Most tombs end up wrecked by graverobbers. An undisturbed find like this is the most important discovery in the last century! They’ll be writing books about this!”
“If any of this junk ends up in a book I’ll eat my hat,” the burro muttered.
“Let’s go take a look at the slab,” Daring said. “You coming?”
“You first. I don’t feel like being flattened.”
Daring chuckled and touched down, carefully walking through the dark.
“A lot of sand still in here,” she noted. It was deep enough she could feel her hooves sinking in before hitting bottom.
“In a place like this you can’t really stop it,” the donkey replied. “Look.” He pointed to the wall. Sand trickled in a slow stream to the floor, the thin silt leaking in like it was water.
“I wonder if that’s intentional? Maybe the entrance seals itself, and that’s how it stayed hidden for so long.”
“I don’t like it. If a donkey made this, it’d be solid. Earth ponies would have put the stone together better. This kind of complicated junk is unicorn work, and you know what that means.”
“It probably cost too much and went over budget?” Daring joked.
“It means magic!”
“Oh, next you’ll go on about curses and nonsense like that,” Daring scoffed. “Archaeology is about detailed and careful work. And disarming traps. Curses are only an issue in ten or twenty percent of all digs.”
Before the donkey could comment on just how high that percentage really was, they’d arrived at the end of the tunnel, where a huge slab of granite, distinctly different from the sandstone walls, was being worked on by a half-dozen goats, torches flickering and casting wavering light over the crowded corridor.
“I can’t wait to see what’s on the other side,” Daring grinned. She grabbed one of the ropes. “Pull!”
The goats strained, Daring Do offering what strength she had. With a glacial pace and infinite, geological time, the door creaked and scraped, hot air escaping from the crack between it and the wall.
“That’s it!” Daring Do called out. “Just a little more!”
A chorus of strained gasps and groans echoed, and the team managed to pull it far enough for pry bars to do the rest of the work. The slab was moved to the side, revealing a corridor gently sloping down, not a trace of sand or dust inside, like it had been made yesterday instead of hundreds of years ago.
“It’s too hot,” the donkey said. “It’s even hotter in there than it is here.”
“If I’m right, that’s exactly what we should expect,” Daring Do said, rubbing her hooves together. “I’m going to go first. Stay behind me and don’t touch anything.”
She stepped lightly, her wings spread out for balance, scanning the floor and walls. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for.
“This part of the floor is designed to collapse,” she announced. She ushered everyone back, then took one of the crowbars they’d used to move the slab and thew it. It landed on stone tile that looked the same as the rest of the corridor to a casual observer.
The floor fell like it had been supported only by cobwebs and tissue paper, going dozens of feet down to steel spikes like the teeth in a dragon’s hungry maw.
“Spared no expenses,” Daring Do noted.
“It’s a big sun,” the donkey said, looking at the granite and copper door.
“It’s not just any sun,” Daring Do said. “That’s Celestia’s cutie mark.” She touched it gently. “I don’t see any tool marks. This had to be carved purely using magic.”
“That or they used sandpaper to clean up the work. Is this a pony tomb?” the donkey asked.
“Not a tomb, more like a vault.” Daring Do said. “I think it was deliberately hidden, like a pirate’s buried treasure.”
“I like the sound of treasure. Means we might get paid.”
“I’m paying you!” Daring huffed.
“Barely,” the donkey grumbled. “Last time I work for a grad student with a budget as thin as my starving children.”
“You don’t have children.”
“Good thing too, or they’d go hungry with pay like this.”
“We’ll have to find a way to get this door back,” Daring muttered. “We’ll remove the hinges to avoid damaging it.”
“Did you forget the pit full of spikes?”
“The goats are filling it with sand and rubble. In a few hours we can walk right over it. Until then, care to take a look inside with me? I’ll even make sure you get mentioned when I write papers on this discovery!”
“Fine,” the donkey said. “Just make sure you get my name right.”
When they pulled the door open, the hinges were smooth and silent, taking the weight of the stone door and swinging gracefully like it was no more than a feather. Light poured from the other side, blinding after the gloom.
“What in the--” the donkey, whose name Daring Do never did remember to write down, stepped back in shock.
“The legends were true!” Daring Do whispered, once her eyes adjusted.
Beyond the door was a circular room with a dome high overhead, thin trails of gold forming a framework like a spiderweb supporting a gem the size of a chicken’s egg and glowing too bright to look directly at. The light was steady, but looking at it gave an impression of pulsing life like the sun itself.
“The Temple of the Sun’s Heart,” Daring Do said. “And that’s the Sun’s Heart itself.”
“Fancy rock,” the donkey said. “What about the statues?”
“Hm?” Daring looked away from the light. Arranged around it like they were cowering from the Sun’s Heart, four horrible creatures had been carved out of stone. They looked almost like ponies, but stretched out and smooth-skinned like androgynous combinations of pony, giraffe, and salamander, with all the worst aspects of each. All four were uniquely repellent in their own way. She stepped closer to look. “Interesting. I’m not sure what these are made of. Not quite marble, but some sort of metamorphic rock…”
“Worth anything?”
“Ah, here we are,” Daring Do said, trotting over to a wall. “Look at these pictograms.”
The donkey sighed and followed. “Are you even listening or am I just an audience while you talk?”
“They’re not in any language at all. They’re just sort of universal and general symbols. This is what you would want to use if you needed a message to be understood over extremely long periods of time when languages might be forgotten.”
“That’s what I thought,” the donkey muttered.
“I believe this is an abbreviated form of an ancient legend about chaos spirits called Pookas,” Daring Do said. “They were supposedly a race of quasi-elemental creatures of chaos that survived the Discordant era, similar to, say, windigos or the Smooze.”
The donkey took out a flask and took a long drag.
“I suppose this lends at least some credence to the idea that the creatures existed,” Daring Do continued. “I believe that this details Princess Celestia defeating them with the power of the sun and putting some sort of curse on them to keep them from ever tormenting ponies again.”
“And?”
“And this temple was built to commemorate her victory!” Daring Do smiled. “It’s from an era where Celestia was still establishing her rule, so they told all sorts of stories about her to sort of advertise her as a winner. The Sun’s Heart is a diamond containing pure solar magic. It’s a beautiful artifact.”
“Did you say diamond?” The donkey stood up, very interested now. “I like the sound of that! A diamond that size could be worth a lot of bits.”
“The Veneighs Museum is going to be getting that gem for its collection,” Daring Do said. “It’s not going to be sold. Something like that is part of the world’s cultural heritage! It needs to be somewhere ponies can come to admire it and learn about the past.”
“What you really mean is, we’re grave robbing and we don’t even get a cut of it.”
“Isn’t the excitement of discovery enough?”
“I dig holes for money.”
“And this is a much more exciting hole than your usual ditches!” Daring assured him. “I might be willing to give everypony a bonus for our good fortune. I expect Veneighs will be generous with grants. There are a few items in Canterlot they’re rather sore about not having in their collection, and this will even the score quite nicely.”
“I just don’t like the looks of them statues. Got a bad feeling about this whole thing.”
“They’re rather ugly, aren’t they?” Daring agreed. “The technique is amazing. Almost as good as the door, practically life-like. It was the style of the time that mythical creatures representing chaos and disharmony should be as ugly as the concepts they embodied.”
“Did you ever notice how many pony legends are about some kind of horrible monster?”
“Eh, most of them are just made up to scare foals,” Daring Do said. “My father used to tell me if I wasn’t home before dark, Nightmare Moon would gobble me up.”
“There some pithy pony moral with these things?”
Daring Do hovered in place, thinking. “Nah. Pretty sure they’re just ugly monsters. Let’s get some rubbings of the pictograms before anything is moved and risks damaging them.”
Busy directing the donkey with how to properly hold soft paper against the engravings and the art of rubbing charcoal just so to bring out the details, she quickly forgot about the statues as more than an item on a list of finds.
Not paying any mind to them, Daring Do didn’t notice the way their eyes gleamed in the dark, and dismissed the concerns of her workers as superstition.