//------------------------------// // Chapter 13: The Dark One // Story: Daring Do and the Iron Pyramid // by Unwhole Hole //------------------------------// Daring Do was no Wonderbolt. She, in fact, rather disliked them; she had always gotten the impression that their showiness was a result of arrogance, overconfidence, or even conceit, which stood in stark contrast to her own preference for privacy and independent endeavors. Like all things in her life, flight had been taught to her by tutors. She supposed they had been selected in an attempt to teach her to demonstrate her own superiority, as was the case for all members of the Perr-Synt family, but she had never shown much talent for it. She only bothered to study it because it was the one thing her sister could not do better. Still, she was fast, young, and well-trained—and as she flew, she was able to fully understand the extent of what her father had given her. While she flew forward, breathing rhythmically as her fluffy wings beat through the stormy air, Honor struggled to keep pace. Daring Do, while not an especially fast Pegasus, had grown up with an excellent diet and the best of all possible medical care, rendering her unknowingly almost perfect in terms of biological condition. It was not something she had ever noticed or perceived; to her, it was normal. In fact, she had always considered herself sub-par in the face of the racial superiority of her father and sister. Honor, though, had spent his life in the eternal shadow of famine, and what food he had was vastly inadequate for a thestral. No doctors remained in his culture, and any knowledge of medicine they had once possessed had been lost—if it had even existed in the first place. No doubt he carried with him a great many parasites, and the remains of conditions that he had accumulated in his youth but never been given the opportunity to heal. Even with his body protected from the burning sunlight, and even though his armor was exceptionally light, he was breathing hard and wheezing severely, struggling to keep up with Daring Do as they moved across the desert. So while Daring Do was kept aloft by her feathery wings, hollow bones, and distinctly avioid lungs, Honor was kept moving by pride alone—and that was not enough. He began to fall back, unable to keep up. Daring Do looked down at him, and she saw behind him the waves running through the red sands, with the enormous bodies of the tatzlwurms occasionally breaching the surface like serpentine wales. They were following the two fliers, waiting for them to land--or fall. She looked into the distance and, ahead of them, saw the assembly of sand propelled by magic that carried Seht toward the populated town to the north. A machine of hose-like legs sprinting at ridiculous speed across the desert, the storms and wurms fleeing his path as he moved ever more rapidly. “I can see it!” cried Daring Do. “Come on, Honor! It’s not far, we can do it!” Honor groaned, falling back. “I can’t,” he said. “You have to! I can’t do this alone!” “I won’t make it!” his wings faltered, and he reached for the sword on his back. “You understand what is at stake, and you know what must be done—but you will have to do it without me!” He unsheathed the sword and threw it. Daring reached out and caught by the loop in the hilt, realizing immediately that it was remarkably heavy. Far heavier than a normal sword, and far heavier than any pony weapon ought to be. She was immediately astounded that Honor, in his inherently weakened state, had managed to last so long carrying it—and that Dignity bore an even heavier one. Daring took the blade and nodded. Honor did so too, and then fell back, dropping his speed into a glide to prevent him from falling to the deadly sands below. Daring accelerated, pushing herself into a final sprint, her spry and fluffy wings beating relentlessly as she tore through the stormless wake behind Seht. She managed to gain on his position, drawing nearer until the full extent of the assembly it drove was visible. The enormous serpentine legs spread out before her, moving in a way reminiscent of now living creature, all surrounding a flat platform or plinth, like a sandstone altar. Daring descended, feeling her feet touch down on the sand platform. The effect was immediately disorienting; although the motion of the limbs of the platform were spastic and wild, the surface itself was perfectly level, without even the slightest hint of vibration or motion aside from a warm breeze and the motion of the seemingly endless horizon shifting past. Seht was lying at the front of the platform, staring forward, his limbs neatly folded below him. As Daring landed, his articulated mask turned, and a mechanical eye focused on Daring Do. Upon seeing her, he slowly rose to his feet. Daring Do clasped Honor’s sword. She had no idea how to use it, and it was ridiculously heavy—not to mention that by somepony surely would be getting the poke, the very idea of which turned her stomach. A halo of red light appeared around Seht’s head, and a bolt of magic erupted from his mask, arcing through the air toward Daring Do. She dodged, rolling across the platform as it struck only sand, melting it to charred glass. Daring rolled, already out of breath from the flight, and stood, holding the sword awkwardly. “Stop!” she said. “We can talk about this!” Seht said nothing. His mask charged again. Daring took a breath and did what she assumed she had to. She charged, relying on a sudden burst of Pegasus speed to take her opponent by surprise. It was an absurd motion, an attempt made by a pony who had no idea how to use a sword or how badly she had left herself open to attack—but Seht did nothing. He did not even dodge. Daring swung the blade, bringing it down against the armor of Seht’s neck, fully expecting the runeblade to do something terrible. Instead, however, it simply tapped against the metal of the mask, not damaging it in the slightest. Daring pulled back on the hilt of the blade, intending to go for a different attack, perhaps to thrust through some part that was not, in fact, covered in metal. Except that the blade did not move. The metal of the mask shifted. It changed, moving and unfurling as it formed a sheath around the blade. A new scabbard, forged from dark iron and red light. Daring suddenly cried out in pain as the loop of the sword ignited, and she recoiled from the burning heat, only to watch the crudely made thestral hilt bubble and hiss as it melted away, yielding the entirely different grip it had been formed around long ago. A beautiful grip forged from a strange striped stone—a grip with no loop, meant to be held in a unicorn’s magic. The new scabbard of the sword shifted, placing it firmly at Seht’s side. As it moved, Daring Do, now close enough to touch the hulking beast, realized that two sets of eyes were staring back at her. One was set in the mask, a pair of red jewels and mechanical components, but a second pair of red eyes were watching her from a thin slit below the chin of the metal sha figure. To Daring Do’s greatest surprise, she realized that the helmet was not a mask worn by a long-necked creature but a headdress worn by a figure with distinctly pony-like proportions. A burst of magic suddenly sent her flying back and sprawling across the platform, almost to its edge. Daring only grasped at it at the last moment, her rear legs suddenly kicking at air. There was a moment of fear until she recalled that she could fly, but the moment of confusion had given Seht a chance to approach her in a vulnerable state. She looked up and realized that not only was its body equine in shape, but it had a cutie mark: the shape of a stylized eye contained within a black triangle. Magic suddenly twisted around Daring Do’s limbs, clamping down like a vice. She found herself utterly unable to move as she was slowly lifted until she was eye-level with Seht. The eyes of the mask looked down at her, giving him a distinct sense of grandeur and size, but the lower eyes, his real ones, were the ones Daring found herself staring into. Light ignited from behind the mask, and threads reached out of it and into Daring Do’s head. She was sure she screamed as information suddenly flowed into her mind, penetrating it with prodigious efficiency. There was no shape to it, no structure, only pure chaos. A blinding white light interspersed with unfathomable colors combined with an unrelenting screech of raw noise, marked by screams of what seemed like thousands of languages speaking at once. Time lost meaning. The voices spoke both forward and backward across themselves, thoughts connecting to things that had already happened and things yet to happen, sentences that started and ended within each other and in every possible form. Daring Do’s own mind was subsumed by the tempest, unable to withstand the onslaught. Just as her brain began to overheat, an instinct struck her, and a million miles away, she took a breath. Her mind focused on a single thought, and on a single symbol. Although her Pegasus form meant it bore no power in the real world, such things did not matter in her mind. Rune magic could be wielded by any race if they only knew how, and Daring Do drew her family’s crest to the front of her mind. Instantly the waves of uncontrolled chaos began to recede, driven back in the face of the ancient seal, the one that marked the minds of each of the Perr-Synts since the dawn of their Line in the distant and unrecorded past. The one that she, too, possessed. Focusing all her strength on the mental image of the symbol, Daring Do expected to repel the attack—but quickly realized that it was not an attack at all. As she focused her mind, the control of the ancient spell rendered the thousands of languages into a single one, and the blast of white light into form with meaning. Words flashed past Daring Do’s mind. Things she did not understand and could only tangentially perceive. A world shrouded in darkness, dominated by a great pyramid, above it a glow of red, a great sphere of terrible light powered by iron drawn from the recombination of imperceptible gasses within a shell of impossible magic, shrouding the world below in its glow. Of a verdant world, not of green but no less alive, of trees and shrubs and rivers carved in the shadow of the light, expanding endlessly below an alien sky—and of a strange land, a distant world, a vague image of rocky crags and half-forgotten recollections of happiness. And, in its contrast, unbearable sadness. Panic. The images became frantic. Daring Do gained perceptions of things beyond her comprehension. Of ponies. Of their bodies divided, separated into individual components, smaller and smaller, until the birth of one single fact, of each pony each one containing two lines of matter, separated and re-linked into strange helixes, desperately trying to reconfigure its very nature. Indivisible particles bound by magic and reconfigured, drawn into new and strange forms as the world became illuminated by light. Of words within them, pleading to be freed, of the voice in her head speaking a language that she could not decode. All of it rushing by, of the Pyramid, of the world, of the nature of things—and then all of it resolving to a single vision, of something too horrible for Daring Do to perceive, something she could not comprehend and only survived because of the seal in her brain. An eye that perceived her, and that no mortal creature could ever hope to perceive. “Overheating. This one is overheating. They are all so very fragile.” Daring Do felt sight return to her eyes, and the cold of the desert passing by. Her entire body was twitching, and she could feel bubbles of spittle running down from her mouth. She tried to struggle, but found she could barely move; she was utterly drained. Seht, still holding Daring Do, proceeded to the end of the platform, holding her over the edge. Then, without a word, Daring Do felt herself released and falling. Spiraling downward, Daring felt her wings move, although feebly. She could not assume flight. She was too tired, and her mind was fading. She supposed it would not hurt very much when she hit the ground. She tried not to think of the wurms. Then she felt herself plucked from her descent by familiar magic, pulled through the air and into a firm grasp. Barely conscious, she felt herself sat against something warm, firm, but covered with supremely soft black fuzz. “Huh?” Daring opened her eyes and realized to her horror that she was still moving—but not down. Rather, she was racing across the surface of the desert at incredible speed. It had not been apparent how fast she was moving when she was flying, or even from the high platform that now sat in front of her. Being only feet from the ground, though, she fully perceived the reckless pace that she was now crossing the sands. Her mind began to focus, and she realized that she was sitting on the back of an enormous beast. A beast with a canine form, but a long, thin nose. “Onward!” cried Wun. “Onward, my fuzzy friends!” Daring looked behind her, realizing that she was sitting against her sister—and that Caballeron was clinging to her back, weeping from terror at the speed around him. All three of them were sat on the back of a sha. They were not alone. The entire herd of them seemed to be following the one that Wun sat upon. None bore riders, but all traveled at immense speed, their pumping legs barely visible as their forward momentum tore sand free of the desert and it trailed behind them in a growing tempest. “What are you doing?!” cried Daring, grasping her sister to keep from falling. “We must ride the Desert Winds! Did I not say I would catch up? Do hold onto something, this one despises you!” Wun shook the reins of the creature and it accelerated, pushing forward and overtaking Seht’s vehicle. The sha were faster by far. “A single touch!” cried Caballeron. “A single touch is all it takes, and I’m atop it--” “Stop whining, only the front part is venomous!” snapped Wun. “I am a nature pony, animals love me!” “Only the bad ones!” cried Daring. “Which is not relevant currently! Onward, sha! ONWARD!” They passed Seht, racing forward across the desert, the tatzlwurms fleeing from the path from the most feared creatures in all the desert. Daring looked back, past her smiling sister, and in the distance saw the top of the platform Seht now stood atop. He was staring out at her, watching.