The Black Archive
It was called the Black Archive.
It lay buried deep beneath the heart of Canterlot, secure in the bowels of the mountain, deeper even than the old mine shafts that zig-zagged underneath the city and the palace. It was accessible only to a select few, growing fewer by the day, but in a different timeline Raven had been granted access to this place, and nothing had changed in the years before then.
She remembered coming down here with Bon Bon – or Sweetie Drops, pick your preference in names – several years from now, to secure desperately needed weapons that had lain locked away here for years, decades, even centuries.
Raven now came down here again, to secure desperately needed weapons. One, at least.
The archive to which she was bound had once been both the repository and the headquarters of an elite bureau, an agency of protectors who had served Princess Celestia and Equestria in secret: hunters of monsters, defenders of the helpless, acquirers of relics and pickers-up of trifles no less dangerous for being unconsidered. The organisation had been wound up some time ago, in one of Princess Celestia’s less wise or far-sighted moves. Raven remembered arguing with Celestia about it in a few years time, rebuking her for short-sightedness in this, when those who had served her so faithfully and with such skill and valour would have been sorely needed. Yes, the Elements of Harmony had been found again; yes, Equestria had been at peace; yes they wouldn’t have fared well against Nightmare Moon or Discord or the like, Raven accepted all those arguments, but to disband them? To wager all upon the fact that these years of peace and plenty would last forever? To pin all hopes on Twilight Sparkle and her friends? Foolishness! Foolishness and folly so severe as to verge upon treasonable! By the time the call had gone out to recall all these former agents to the colours, by the time that the word rang forth that Equestria had need of them once more, there were too many who had died or found retirement too comfortable to leave or had simply lost their skills and gone to seed in idleness.
Lightning Dawn had not approved, and neither had His Exalted Majesty the King of Kings. These ponies were spies, spies and saboteurs, it was dishonourable to employ such a rabble of vagabonds under the flag of the Light. And besides, did not the might of the Star Legion keep them well enough protected?
Not well enough. They had never been secure enough.
The Fire of Heaven burns within my blood. With this flame I will light a way through the darkness, and turn to ashes all who oppose me.
Not enough. Never enough.
It would be too late then. It would also be too late by then. Raven understood that now. You had to stop it from happening, stop the perils from ever darkening this fair land of Equestria. She had to keep this world safe from harm. Whatever she had to do. Whomever she had to hurt, it was all worth it in service of that goal.
Sweetie Drops, or Bon Bon, was one of those who had answered the call to return to action. Though her skills were a little rusty, though she had a best girl waiting for her back home, still when the call had rung out she had answered. So long as Princess Celestia wanted a mare, there would Sweetie Drops be. Telling Lyra that she’d died had been one of the hardest things that Raven had had to… or so it had seemed, before things had got even worse; now it barely registered on the scale of hard things.
It was Sweetie Drops who had brought Raven here, to this rather small statue of a manticore rearing upon its hind legs, scorpion tail poised to strike. The statue sat in the middle of Canterlot, on the corner of two otherwise quite unremarkable streets, letters picked out in metal upon the plinth recording that a pony named Saving Grace had sponsored the raising of this statue:
Saving Grace
Paid for the erection of this statue as a donation to the city of Canterlot where she was born and lived out her life.
Her true donation, of course, had been to found the now defunct organisation and construct the headquarters into which Raven was about to break in.
She looked around. There was nopony nearby, and nopony watching her. Raven approached the statue, one hoof emerging from the shadowy recesses of her cloak to lightly push the letter E in ‘erection’; the metal letter slid backwards into the stonework of the plinth with a grinding sound. Raven’s hoof touched more letters: the N in ‘Saving’, the T in ‘Canterlot’, the E in ‘lived’, the R in ‘born’. ENTER, not very subtle but also not very easy to forget even if you were a harassed agent, or a former agent who had been out of the game for a while. One by one, Raven pressed the letters down into the plinth of the statue, and waited.
She had no need to wait too long, it was barely a moment before she had pressed ‘enter’ before that entire wall of the statue receded into the plinth by several inches and then retreated down into the ground, leaving a gaping black hole inviting her in and downwards.
Raven had to duck a little to get inside, walking into the statue plinth to stand upon the small and ancient elevator that led the way down and down into the Black Archive. She remembered what a tight squeeze it had been the last time she had been down here, with her and Sweetie Drops sharing this little platform. It did not seem much larger sharing it with none but herself. Fortunately she wasn’t planning to bring anything large up with her.
The ancient elevator began to descend, rattling downwards through mechanisms older than some parts of the city, maintained by spells cast by unicorns of many generations passed. The air was stale from having lain undisturbed for too long. It got up Raven’s nose and made it itch. Just something she would have to bear. Others had, and would continue to make, far greater sacrifices for the good of Equestria.
Or might, at least. Raven could not be sure that she would need to use what she had come here in search of. As the elevator ground slowly downwards her thoughts turned inexorably to Silver Spear. His fate was… regrettable. He had been a valiant and a noble adversary to her once, and in return she had cast him to his death. She had thought it unlikely that he could best Lightning Dawn in battle; if he had then Raven would have been delighted at the fact, but this was Lightning Dawn; Raven hated him but she could not deny that he was one of the great fighters of the age. No, she had not relied on Silver Spear to kill him; besides, if Lightning fell then that would only put off the trouble until another Olympian scout arrived, and Silver Spear could not kill them all. No, Raven’s plan had been subtler than that: Silver Spear had fallen, but in the process he had ripped away that mask of gentility that Lightning had worn at first. Twilight, fool though she was, could now hardly deny that he was not the charming gentlecolt that she had thought him once. He was a killer plain and simple, no knight in shining armour but a brute without mercy or remorse.
She would not help him now, or at least Raven hoped that she would not. She would not start down the road the led step by inexorable step towards the destruction of all that she and Raven both held dear and the deaths of all whom she and Raven loved. She would not help him. She would not… she would not love him now that she had seen what he could do. Now that she had seen what he was capable of. Now that she had seen just what he was.
Or at least Raven hoped not. But she could not be sure. The folly of Twilight Sparkle knew, in some respects, no bounds at all. She had a heart that was endlessly full of compassion, and her compassion would be the doom of worlds.
That was why Raven was here, journeying down into the Black Archive, in search of something she hoped she wouldn’t have to use.
The elevator came to a stop in the midst of an underground facility of stygian gloom, where cobwebs descended from the ceiling and dust gathered upon the stone desks.
Sweetie Drops had told her once that this place had been the base of dozens, maybe even hundreds of agents at a time. Even when she had first brought Raven down here it had been a desolate and empty place, now it seemed even more pathetic somehow, perhaps only because Raven was alone…and yet, if she squinted, and let her mind’s eye briefly take over from her physical orbs she could just about imagine what this place had been like in its heyday: filled with ponies, their voices echoing off the cavernous ceiling, all of them come together to work for the greatness and protection of Equestria.
Now it was nothing at all. Just an empty shell, devoid of life, devoid of purpose; a monument to failure and obsolescence. Just as the Equestria that these agents had once sworn to defend would become just such a monument, if Raven’s plans failed.
If Raven allowed her plans to fail.
She knew where she was going. Her memories of the future, of Sweetie Drops showing her where they had kept the good stuff, guided her hooves, leaving prints in the dust on the floor which were quickly erased by the her long dark cloak dragging behind her, picking up dust the same way that it had picked up blood and regret over the course of her journey to save the world.
Her hoofsteps echoed repeatedly, the only sound in this dead place, echoing back at her over and over again, growing louder with every step she took, constantly echoing as she walked through the halls of this organisation that had been far from limited to confronting monsters. Whenever anything strange appeared, whenever an artefact started to go out of control, whenever they found something that was not suitable for being cast into Tartarus they had brought it here to their archives where, kept under stasis spells cast long ago, they were preserved, unchanging, until or unless they were needed.
Raven found the place she was looking for: a seemingly innocuous corridor of stone, one of many in this cavernous space where the upper levels ran in hollow rings around the deepest, central space. This corridor down which Raven stood, where even the spiders who had spun the cobwebs had died from lack of sustenance, did not look like anything special. It did not look like the store of an arsenal of weapons. It looked, like the rest of this place, as though it had been stripped of all valuables before the agents shut up shop. But, although the paperwork had been burned, although the agents were gone, although no one had used the elevator in quite some time the objects which had been stored here were no so easily moved. Where else could they be stored? Better to leave them here, buried beneath the mountain, and hope that their very existence was soon forgotten.
Better, at least, for Raven.
There was a lever on the wall beside her. She stretched out one grey hoof, and pulled down upon it. It resisted her, stiff with little use over these past years, but Raven exerted all the strength that remained to her, the unholy strength that he had given to her, that she had demanded in her folly, and gradually she bent it to her will. It creaked, it groaned, but it moved as she desired, eventually snapping down with a finality that suggested it might be even harder to move again.
Raven didn't much care about that. Once she got what she needed she had little intention of coming back here again.
There was a moment when nothing happened, when silence reigned beneath the earth just as it had before Raven had trespassed on the sanctity of this forgotten place. Then, with the grinding of gears and the stirring to life of dormant spells, whole sections of the wall upon the right side of this corridor began to move, emerging outwards, stone sliding awkwardly and noisily over stone, revealing that these were not stone slabs or panels of a wall but kinds of shelves; they glowed with a sickly green light, the light of that magic that kept all things in stasis, and by that same green light Raven could see, hanging suspended, all the dangerous treasures collected by the agency over the years. Many of them she knew well. Some of them she had used, some of them had been used her against her in the latter days as all things fell into chaos and confusion. Enchanted swords, armour that would drive whomever wore it mad, poisoned chalices, a gown that would burn to ashes whomsoever put it on, a mirror that would whomever looked into it to stone, a bow whose arrows would always find the mark, slippers that would keep you dancing until you died of exhaustion then make your corpse dance on a little longer; all of these lethal treasures and more lay spread out before her, row upon row of them, some of the most dangerous trinkets in Equestria. Raven paid them little mind. She had seen them all before, after all, and more than once; she was not here to sight-see or to marvel. She was here for something extra special.
And she found it, in the third row from the front, a rather unimpressive looking thing compared to most: a simple vial half-filled with a still, black substance. It might have been taken for poison, save that what was in the vial seemed to thick to slip unnoticed into a drink or a soup, and surely no one would voluntarily drink or eat something that looked so thick and black and vaguely ichorous. But that was the stasis spell at work; once it was removed from there... Raven's telekinesis was not as deft as it had been once, but she was conscious of the fact that she would only get one shot at this, and so she put all of her concentration and only a fraction of her power into gripping the vial filled with its thick black substance, and levitating it out of the stickly green stasis field.
Almost at once, with barely a moment's pause, the substance within it roared to life, the still, thick black liquid of before becoming a swirling maelstrom of motion, pounding against the vial that held it prisoner, lunging at Raven as though it sought to devour her.
It did, in a sense. This was a little droplet of pure darkness, concentrated malice, hatred, evil, this was sin itself; long ago, in ancient times when races older than ponies had walked the stars, a very clever but equally foolish archmage and scientist had had the idea that they could identify the evil within their fellow creatures and remove it. Just suck it right out of them, strip them of all sin. And thus, they reasoned, would they create a utopia where everyone was good and kind and decent. A noble thought, but a misguided one; even here in Equestria, the closest to a utopia that Raven had ever seen, there was yet darkness dwelling alongside the light. Mild darkness, to be sure, compared with what Raven had seen elsewhere, but nevertheless... it was in the nature of beautiful things to be flawed; perfection was too uncanny to look upon for too long, let alone to appreciate. Yet he had set to work, this clever, foolish creature, bending his energy towards sucking the darkness right out of people and putting it... where? Why, in a box. In a box that grew larger and larger as more and more sin and vileness and base desires got shoved away inside in a single roiling, broiling, fermenting mass of sheer hatred until the box could contain it no longer. Evil swept back into the world, consuming all it touched, corrupting them, bending them to its will until it was defeated. Raven did not know, or perhaps she could not recall, how it had been done. She did not know whether the defeat was permanent; some legends said the darkness had simply fled into deep space, to lick its wounds and recover its strength ere it returned to once more attempt to snuff out light and goodness once and for all. Either way, it had left fragments of itself behind, scattered little pieces of pure hate lingering on countless worlds, driven to seek out hosts and possess them, driven to gain strength, given to wreak havoc, given to harry goodness and righteousness whenever its strength allowed. It knew nothing of peace or restraint. It was barely capable of thought. It knew only the desire to devour all things, or else turn them to its own image.
This was the only one ever found in Equestria, thank Celestia; the only one and it was here, locked away in the Black Archive. No more. Now it was Raven's secret weapon, in case her plan to drive a wedge between Twilight and Lightning Dawn had failed. What Silver Spear's sacrifice might fail to achieve, this raw power would not. Because Lightning Dawn had seen the likes of this before, and he knew what to do to those possessed by the dark: they had to be killed, struck down at once to take the darkness with them.
The only question was: who would Raven sacrifice for the good of Equestria?