This particular lab had many of the same machines as the others. When Daring entered, she noted that it was a lot larger than the others. There were tables obviously meant to hold large objects, possibly artifacts of some kind. There were even blackboards set up along one wall, chalk still resting in the trays.
But none of that was what caught her attention.
Taking up one wall was an enormous gray bas-relief, depicting row after row of ponies of all three tribes in a heavily stylized fashion. The angles were hard, the perspective was off, and aside from stallion being slightly chunkier than mares, the only differing features between ponies of the same tribes were their cutie marks. Yet the carving itself was smooth, probably the work of a master, and one might even consider calling the intricate designs of the marks beautiful. There wasn’t any unifying theme to the picture as far as Daring could see; just ponies set in regular rows and columns, looking to the right. In another context, it might’ve been a fantastic find.
But here, carved into the concrete of an abandoned facility, it was something else.
“Wow,” whispered Stalwart. She sent out a few balls of light to the corners of the picture to illuminate it more thoroughly. “That’s something, alright.” She took a step forward-
“DON’T TOUCH IT!” Daring, Windrose, and Fallende yelled at the same time.
Stalwart yelped; everyone clapped their hooves over their ears against the echoes. The sounds were amplified, bounding and rebounding back on themselves, over and over and over. A good two minutes passed before Daring took her hooves from her ears. Stalwart glared at them as she got to her feet. “Was that really necessary?” she hissed.
“Do I need to tell you to not touch something like that?” asked Daring. She gestured at the carving with her spear. “Look at it! Even if it weren’t in the middle of an abandoned laboratory, just look at it! It’s got a style like nothing I’ve ever seen — and believe me, I’ve seen a lot of styles — and it’s… just… creepy. I’d bet it was some kind of ritual focus item.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know! Do you want to risk it? Maybe it drove the researchers insane!”
“Maybe the researchers went insane beforehoof and carved it themselves,” said Fallende. She leaned forward, getting as close to the wall as she could without actually touching it.
“Maybe we need to leave this whole sunblasted place right now before anything happens to us,” said Windrose flatly. She took a step towards the door and glared at everybody, one at a time.
“You can leave,” said Stalwart in a tight voice. The shadows made her scarred face surprisingly intimidating. “There’s nothing stopping you from-”
“Picked off one by one! I’m toast the second I’m out of your sight!” It sounded like Windrose was making every effort to not yell at the top of her lungs, and her words still echoed hollowly throughout the corridors.
“Think pairs’d be okay, my properly paranoid partner?” asked Fallende. “You and I can go out and let these two-” She nodded at Daring and Stalwart. “-sort out their differences over a wall together.”
“No,” Windrose said immediately. “Once we leave them, they’re the vulnerable ones, and-”
As Windrose and Fallende discussed (not) splitting the party in hushed voices, Daring walked up to Stalwart, who had taken another step forward, and reached out with her spear to keep her from getting any closer to the carving. “Listen,” Daring whispered. “Do not touch it. No, don’t-” she added, seeing Stalwart’s horn start glowing, “-don’t try to… probe it or scan it, either. It could react to magic.” She looked at the relief again and suppressed a shiver. Stalwart’s balls of light made the carvings cast twitching, elongated shadows. She half-expected the ponies to come to life, but nothing happened; they kept staring hollowly forward.
“So are we just going to leave it?” Stalwart asked. She gestured at the relief. “That is, that’s exactly the sort of thing you were looking for, and-”
“And we’ll study it when we have more than just a few people I happened to pick up at a bar for reasons other than ‘in-depth study of magical artifacts’. Can you analyze magic any deeper than ‘it’s good’ or ‘it’s bad’?”
“Well, I-” Stalwart sighed. “Not really, no,” she admitted. She licked at the cuts across the right side of her mouth. “Nothing we could use here, at any rate.”
“If we hadn’t found it in… a place like this, I’d say go right ahead. But not here.” One last look at the carving. She felt like the ponies ought to have some kind of expression, at least in their minimalist style, but she found nothing. “Come on. Let’s head out.”
In less than a minute, they were back outside, blinking in the sunlight. Clear skies plus white snow made for a bright environment. Once their eyes had adjusted, they collected their bags again. “Remember that,” Daring said, waving at the vault door with her spear. “Something about that place is important.”
“Wouldn’t forget it for the world, my memory-minded master,” said Fallende. “Couldn’t forget it.”
“Me neither.” Windrose adjusted her bags and tightened her straps. “I mean, what, did you think that-” She stopped and frowned at one of the straps. “Huh. There’s another tag on here.”
“What’s it say?” Daring asked.
Windrose shrugged and tossed the extra tag away. “Just a name. Don’t recognize it. Rangifera.”
They made their way down the slope easily, although Stalwart kept looking back and frowning. When they reached the valley floor and Daring turned right again, for the north, Stalwart spoke up. “E-excuse me, shouldn’t we be headed that way?” She pointed left.
“No,” said Daring. She looked over her shoulder. “Why?”
Stalwart bit her lip. She looked a bit odd, but Daring couldn’t say how. “…Aren’t you headed south? Isn’t-” She jerked a hoof behind her. “-that way north?”
“No,” repeated Daring. “This is north. See the sun?” Said sun was slipping behind the tallest mountains by now.
“But…” Stalwart said quietly. “If… that’s west, then-” She shook her head. “Never mind. I… must’ve gotten turned around in that place. Never had much of a sense for direction, you know. I hated trying to navigate buildings back in the guard, and…”
Daring shrugged. She knew the feeling from labyrinths. Granted, she didn’t have any problems at all keeping her directions straight in the bunker, and was kind of surprised Stalwart could get that turned around, but still. Although, in a place like this-
On a whim, she went over her memories again, from when they first entered the facility to when they left. Nothing was wrong. She wasn’t missing anything.
Then Stalwart spoke up again. “No, no, no, we are not going north!” she said loudly. “We can’t be. Even I can tell that.” She trotted in front of Daring, bringing her to a halt. Again, Daring got the feeling that something was wrong with her face. “How in Celestia’s name,” snapped Stalwart, “can you think we’re going north when that way is west?” She pointed at the sunset.
Daring looked at the sunset, squinted. It looked fine. It was on her left, so she was going north. “Because this is north,” she said. She looked back at Windrose and Fallende. “Right?”
Fallende nodded. “Right, my oriented officer.”
“Yeah,” said Windrose. “I mean, north east south west, right?” She pointed at each direction in turn.
“Wrong,” Stalwart said immediately. She stared at Windrose. “I thought you knew your directions! You’re a cartographer, for Luna’s sake!”
“I do! What makes you think I don’t?”
Fallende whispered to Daring, “If you don’t mind, I’m just gonna climb that cliff there and look for a good place to stop for the night while you three get in a shouting match over directions, okay?” Daring nodded, but Fallende was already pulling herself up the cliff.
“You got east and west mixed up!”
Daring and Windrose exchanged Looks. “No, I didn’t!” protested Windrose.
“She didn’t,” confirmed Daring. What was Stalwart’s problem?
Stalwart blinked. “But- But you-” She groaned and ran a hoof through her mane. “Okay, look,” she said, “I’ll draw out a compass in the snow with…” She looked around and telekinetically plucked a thick branch from a tree. “With this so you can tell me why you think we’re going north. Okay? Okay. Here we go.” Without waiting for an answer, she drew a cross on the ground, muttering angry nothings under her breath.
Daring and Windrose looked at each other. Windrose opened her mouth, but Daring shook her head and made a zipping motion across her mouth. Windrose made a face, but nodded. They looked back down in time to see Stalwart scratch an И at the top of the cross.
“Oh, don’t go and reverse those, too,” groaned Windrose.
“Reverse what?” growled Stalwart. She scratched an Ƨ at the bottom.
“The letters!” said Windrose. She pointed at the И and Ƨ in turn. “Look at that! And that! Why-”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.” On the left side, Stalwart scribed an Ǝ.
“Oh, not only is that backwards, it’s on the wrong side! Are you trying to say something?”
Stalwart whirled and not-very-lightly jabbed Windrose on the muzzle with the stick. “None. Of my letters. Are backwards,” she said as Windrose stumbled back. “So shut up.” She swished the stick like a sword, narrowly missing Windrose, and whipped around to glare at Daring. “And I suppose you want to say something to me, too?” she said. “Something about how obviously I’m screwing up?” Now, more than ever, there was something wrong with her face, like it’d been made by someone with half a memory of her.
“No,” Daring said. She nudged Stalwart’s stick aside with her spear and didn’t even think about taking a step back. “I was going to let you-”
Then she realized the problem with Stalwart’s face: the cuts across her mouth were on the right side, not the left side. And just like that, the penny dropped. “Hang on a sec, stop,” she said. “Raise your right hoof.”
Stalwart tilted her head and dropped the stick. The other scars on her face were also flipped. How had Daring missed that? “Why?”
“Raise your right hoof.”
“Is this about that carving? I feel fine.”
“Just humor me,” Daring said, her voice low, “and raise your right hoof, okay?”
Stalwart rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you’re getting worked up over nothing,” she said, raising her left hoof.
Daring’s throat went dry. She tried swallowing, but her heart had taken up residence in her throat.
“Oh, Tartarus,” whispered Windrose. She took a few steps back from Stalwart.
“What?” asked Stalwart, her voice filled with sardonicism. “I suppose this is my left hoof?” She lowered it.
“I-” Windrose clamped her mouth shut.
Daring dug through her bags, looking for- There. Her compass. The needle was still pointing at nothing, but she didn’t need that. A quick look at the cardinal directions confirmed that they were labelled with correctly-oriented single letters. “Take a look at this,” she said, pushing the compass at Stalwart. “Don’t say anything until you look at the directions, okay?”
“I- Fine.” Stalwart snatched the compass away from Daring and looked lazily at it. She did a double-take and held the compass closely to her face. “Why… Why are the letters backward?” she asked tonelessly.
“It’s not the letters,” Daring forced out. “It’s you. It’s- Your left side is on your right and your right is on your left. It’s like you’re a mirror image of yourself.”
Now that Daring knew what she was looking for, it was like Stalwart didn’t belong with them, like she’d been cut out of one photograph and crudely pasted into another. Doubt crept into her mind a little bit at a time; was she accomplishing anything by staying? The only thing she knew she was closer to was the other side of the valley, not the source of the anomalous properties of Needle Vale, and now someone had been bodily affected by it. Yet… she’d come so far, could she really turn back now? She could come back, true, but spending a day, maybe two, marching through the storm of Needle Vale again would be a pain enough just getting to Light’s Edge, let alone coming back here and going out again.
The turmoil in Daring’s mind certainly didn’t match the casualness of Stalwart’s behavior. She turned her hoof over in examination, like it was something she hoped was new and interesting. “Hmm,” she whispered. She looked closely at Daring, then Windrose. “Odd. Very, very odd.” She paced back and forth for a moment. “As far as magic alterations go, this is definitely one of the less intrusive ones. Sorry for losing my temper with you, by the way. I guess, technically, I was wrong, even if I had no way of-”
“What, that… that’s it?” asked Daring. She nervously rustled her wings. Was the valley getting into Stalwart’s head somehow? “You get mirrored and your only reaction is, ‘weird’?”
Stalwart scratched her head. “Well, it’s… Why is this a problem? My left and right are flipped, and… as far as we know, that’s it, really. I certainly don’t feel any different. Do I need to worry about anything else? Directions will be strange, but that’s it. So…” She spread her legs wide. “What do we need to worry about? Is there even anything? I don’t think so. Even my magic’s working fine. But you two-”
“Your entire body was altered,” Windrose said, “and you’re just… okay with it?”
“Your puberty must’ve been fun,” scoffed Stalwart.
“Alright, fine.” Windrose put up her hooves in surrender. “But this definitely happened in the bunker, right? So we know the bunker either is or is near the source of whatever’s going on-”
“We don’t know that yet,” said Daring. “Granted, I’d be a bit surprised if that wasn’t the case, but it could just be a coincidence. If the bunker’s the source, what’s up with the river? How did we get amnesia? We only have a single visit there to go on, and it’s still too early to be making assumptions.” But it felt like she was only saying that to convince herself. She’d said she’d turn back once someone got hurt; did this qualify as “hurt”?
“Effh.” Windrose reluctantly shrugged. “I guess. But I still think we should get out of here before anything worse happens to Stalwart.”
“What happened to Stalwart?”
Everypony jumped; Daring spun around to see Fallende standing right behind her, a vaguely interested look on her face. “How did you get down here so quietly?” Daring asked. She hadn’t heard even a single footfall, a single hoof-on-rock scrape as Fallende climbed down the cliff; it was like she’d popped out of the air.
“I walked up behind you, my questioning questor,” said Fallende. “What’s up with Stalwart?”
“She’s, um…” Windrose glanced at Daring and quickly looked away.
“Left and right are backwards for me,” Stalwart said with a shrug. “We don’t know why.”
“They are?” Fallende squinted at Stalwart. “They are. Huh. Anyway, there aren’t many places to stop for the night that are better or worse than here, so I say we just camp here. It’ll make no difference, and we’re already stopped.”
“Yeah, let’s make camp,” Windrose said hastily. “Just so that if something comes up with Stalwart, we’re already prepared.”
“I’ll be fine,” Stalwart said, waving a hoof. “If I was going to fall apart screaming into a puddle of goo or something, don’t you think that would’ve happened already?”
“Maybe not,” said Windrose. “We don’t know.”
“Well, if I feel like that’s about to happen, I’ll let you know.” And it sounded like Stalwart meant it.
Dinner that evening was a bit more strained than usual. Daring kept a close watch on Stalwart, waiting for… something out of the ordinary; she wasn’t sure what. She saw nothing. Windrose stayed quiet, answering minimally, until Fallende and Stalwart simply started ignoring her. She didn’t seem to mind. Everything Daring said to Stalwart sounded forced, like someone’s ex-friend trying to repair some damage of the past without actually acknowledging it. Fallende and Stalwart, at least, got along well.
Windrose scooted up next to Daring and whispered, “Are we going to do anything about Stalwart? I mean, she seems fine, so… I guess now I’m not completely against staying here.”
Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one who’d dragged Stalwart out here. “Let’s wait until tomorrow,” Daring said. “If something’s changing her slowly, we should probably see it in the morning.”
“How reassuring,” said Windrose. “But I get that.”
Darkness fell astonishingly quickly once the mountains fully blocked the sun, with day turning to night in what felt like seconds. Fallende and Windrose retired to their tents as Stalwart set up her anti-predator spell again. Daring almost ducked into her tent as well, but turned around for Stalwart. She was pacing around the edge of camp, her magic tracing a thin line in the ground. “Hey,” said Daring. “Your magic’s working okay?”
“So far,” Stalwart said with a nod. She didn’t look up from her spellwork. “Fallende and I, we did some tests, and it doesn’t look like my horn now spiraling counterclockwise has made any change from it spiraling clockwise, to me or her. You know, I never really thought about that before. What does cause our horns to twist one way and not the other? Maybe magic has something to do with it, and that’s why-”
Tuning her out, Daring stared up at the black nothingness of the night sky. Back and forth her mind went, treading the same path over and over and over: should she stay or should she go? Even with Stalwart perfectly fine with it all, Daring knew she wouldn’t sleep well tonight. “Well, let me know if anything goes sideways.”
Stalwart saluted. “Will do.”
After a few more moments of looking up, Daring crawled into her tent, pulled out her journal, and began writing.
Stalwart’s spells seemed to work. That night, nothing bothered them. Nothing physical, anyway.