Daring did not listen to her sister, and she ran. Through the empty camp, ignoring all sound she was making until she slid onto the ground and collapsed in front of Seht. The larger pony turned her mechanical eyes to face her, staring without emotion.
“Daring Do. Why have you returned to me so soon?”
“Because I’m finally making a choice.” Daring stood up, running to the side of the assembly where one of the was-staffs connected to the spell assembled beneath the stand.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping away her tears. “I can’t fix it, but I can still make it right!”
Daring grasped the staff in her teeth, ready to pull it out and deactivate the containment spell—but was stopped by something cold pressing against her neck.
She stopped and turned her eyes slowly, her gaze tracing up the mottled red blade pressed against her neck to the pony that was holding it.
“You will not,” said Honor.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“I serve our traditions and nothing more. She must remained contained. I will do what I have to do to make sure the world remains safe.”
“Can’t you see that this is wrong?”
“It is tradition--”
“Your name isn’t ‘tradition’, Honor! What’s the right thing to do?”
Honor’s hoof shook. “She is evil. She will destroy us. I have to protect us. Even you. Don’t make me do it. Please, Daring, I do not want to.”
“And you will not have to.”
Both Daring and Honor turned their eyes to see Wisdom and Dignity approaching, flanked by several griffons.
“Wisdom,” said Honor, not fully relieved.
“She has been deceived by the monster's lies. Her mind is too weak.”
A shadow appeared beside Daring Do, and before she could even react Dignity’s hoof was slammed into her back, in the space between her wings. The whole world seemed to flash with white brilliant light and Daring felt herself thrown to the ground, where she was kicked hard in the stomach. Then she felt pressure as one of her hooves was pulled behind her.
“Do not injure her excessively,” sighed Wun, appearing from between two tents, completely nude. Caballeron, behind her, had hastily put on his shirt but not his ascot. “I should have expected this,” she said, looming over Daring Do. “You cannot be a rational, sane pony. You are having trouble realizing that this is all terribly reasonable. Mundane, even. Taking you on this trip was a mistake. You are clearly quite unready to have left Singapone. And from this behavior, I doubt you ever will be. You do not have a reasonable perspective of how this business is meant to operate.”
“Honor! This isn’t right and you know it!”
Honor looked at her, and then looked away, unsure what to do.
“Let her go!” cried a squeaky voice. Curiosity leapt toward Dignity, bearing her sharp teeth, and was promptly grasped in Wun’s magic and struck hard against one of the halves of Seht’s sarcophagus, enough to render her dazed as she was dropped to the ground. Wun picked her up again, bashing her against the stone a second time to render her fully unconscious.
Honor clutched his blade, but several of the griffons raised their blunderbusses.
“I will forgive my sister for attempting this theft. She is simply misguided, confused by her limited life experience. But if you filthy bats attempt to interfere with my business when I am this close? That I cannot tolerate.”
Seht shifted in her sphere. The motion caught Wun’s eye, and their gazes met.
“You are precious to me,” said Wun. “The revenite has barely any value in comparison to the very last dark unicorn that will ever exist.”
“In this world, only three ponies have shown me kindness,” said Seht, her voice cold. “Who treated me like a pony. And yet you abuse them. And, once again, hope has betrayed me. I was too optimistic.”
Wun frowned. “What, exactly, does that mean, my beloved?”
“I do not belong in this world. My path is now clear. I cannot avoid my task.”
A light ignited behind Seht’s mask, where her horn was hidden. A small circular rune traced itself in the air, and began to blink in several places, forming a pattern.
“What is it doing?” demanded Wisdom.
“It does not matter,” said Wun, smiling. “No magic she casts in the field can escape. She can do nothing.”
Caballeron’s brow furrowed as he looked to the flashing patterns of the rune, and as he turned in the opposite direction, toward where it was facing—toward the Pyramid.
His eyes widened. “But she still has line-of-sight!”
“What?”
“LINE-OF-SIGHT! She still has line-of-sight!”
It was too late. Before anyone could interfere with the path, Duat’s forward sensor array had detected the distress beacon. Long-dead synapses fired in its synthetic brain. A creator was in danger.
The magical subsystems ignited, the exposed portions of the Pyramid igniting with brilliant red light. The internal crystal batteries engaged, and the machines within hummed to life as the hallways, dark for so many centuries, were suddenly lit with streams of scarlet.
Deep within the Pyramid, the red light reached several large tanks and their glass retracted, separating into squares and pulling away from the center. Black liquid gushed outward from them, spreading across the floors. Immediately it began to quiver, and then extended tendrils outward in every direction. These rapidly changed, merging to form arms and claws, bone and hooves. Mouths formed from the black fluid as it clawed its way forward blindly, and as soon as they had evolved vocal organs those mouths began to scream in agony—screams of agony that quickly became screams of rage as the rudiments of nervous systems formed behind them.
The failed children of the dark unicorns raced forward, stretching themselves across the floor and sprinting toward where their mummified skeletons awaited them. They crawled back into their bodies, their protean bodies grasping their ancient bones along with fragments of metal and whatever they could reach.
They were creatures without souls, and without volition. Only pain and hunger—and in their mind, the commands of Duat. To protect their creator, the memory of her mask seared into their memory from the earliest moments of their incomplete birth. When, for the briefest fraction of time, they might have hoped to been ponies.
The ground shook as abominations pulled themselves up from the sand, their mummified skeletons dripping with black flesh and coated in fragments of dark iron. For a moment, they stood dazzled in the brilliant light of the stars, but in response their surfaces bubbled and ripped as they formed innumerable red-irides eyes. Then they began to runt.
Even at a distance, their gait was horrifying. Some of them were little more than vast globular masses of bone and black fluid propelled by seemingly hundreds of pony legs beneath them, all sprinting at maximum speed, while others sprouted disproportionate arms and claws to sprint even faster. A few slithered, and a few moved like liquid, sending out tendrils to drag themselves forward—and as they drew nearer, Daring Do could hear the screaming arising from each and every one of them.
Caballeron took a step back, his mouth open and quivering. “No—no! MONSTERS! Why are there always MONSTERS?!”
“Behold, Wun Perr-Synt,” said Seht, calmly. “The truth of your genetic perfection. The final form of our shared evolutionary path. The height to which we shall all in time ascend.”
Daring Do managed to throw Dignity off her back, just as something pulled its way through the sand, casting a long shadow over her in the moonlight. Something terrible stared down at her, its face made of numerous deformed skulls, their eye sockets filled with uncountable black teeth.
The griffons opened fire, and the dark iron scrap the creature wore repositioning, forming a carapace as its flesh became dense and stone-like. Eyes formed on its surface, roving blindly across the desert, desperately searching as the creature's malformed mouths gibbered wildly. Then it saw Seht.
It reached out a vast hoof to half the sarcophagus, and one black-skinned hoof became hundreds of arms. They reached down and grasped the stone, their muscles suddenly expanding tremendously in size as its black flesh was diverted from elsewhere in its body. Under their intense force, the stone half began to crack.
“You will not take what’s MINE!” Wun directed her horn at the creature and fired. The blast brought her to her knees, but the creature was knocked back. It took a step, and then formed new legs to support itself. Its body split down the center, revealing the skulls contained within it. They articulated on their necks, still coated in dry bandages but articulated by tendrils of black material. Each and every one of them held a twisted horn that ignited with red light.
“Oh buck me...”
Wun dodged just as the blast went off. She had not been the target. The creature did not comprehend Wun’s presence. It only had one goal.
The half of the sarcophagus shattered and the thestrals were thrown back as the containment field broke. Seht stepped forward, casting a spell to draw the dew of the cold desert onto herself, winding it with gossamer magic until a pair of enormous locust wings appeared on her back. Before anypony could stop her, Seht spread her wings and, with a booming drone, lifted in the air, hovering for a moment before shooting off toward the Pyramid.
Daring Do suddenly heard screams. Not the screams of monsters, but of ponies. In the chaos, she thought that another abomination had reached their camp—but the truth was far worse. Through the tents, she saw thestrals fleeing, and in pursuit of them their own cursed armor, now covered in glowing red runes. Those who had taken it off were now pursued by it, while those unfortunate enough to have been still wearing it were now trapped within, compelled to attack their friends and families against their will.
“We have to stop her!” cried Caballeron, who by this time was cowering behind Dignity.
The creatures, though, changed their behavior. Now that their master was free, they directed their attention onto those who had dared to imprison her.
Wun bubbled herself, the sphere shattering as she was knocked back by a blow from the creature nearest to her. Daring, though, was suddenly attacked by a suit of armor. Honor moved swiftly, knocking it back with the flat of his sword.
“Use the POINT!” screamed Caballeron. "The poke! Give them the POKE!"
“I can’t tell if there’s a pony within!”
Daring reached into her coat and produced one of the changeling grenades, pulling what she imagined was the top of it and lobbing it the nearest monster. The greenish orb exploded in a plume of mucous that rapidly hardened into something like concrete. The creature looked down, confused.
“We have to retreat!” she cried. “They’re just trying to protect the Pyramid, we have to get away!”
“NO!” screamed Wun, summoning more magic. “I’m not leaving!”
Nor did she have a choice. The monsters were fast, and had already overrun the camp—let alone the inner camp where most of the archaeologists still were, near the Pyramid itself. Daring Do found herself wondering if anypony was even expected to escape.
That was when she heard a sound overhead, the thrumming of an engine--although, admittedly, every third stroke of it seemed to be a nearly cataclysmic backfire. She looked upward to see a barely functional biplane, its running lights on and in the wrong locations. Through the light of its backfiring, overloaded engine, Daring could see that the entirety of it was overburdened with hundreds of glass bottles. Glass bottles full of whatever it was that powered the airplane--and its pilot.
She saw Caballeron, staring up that the plane, not understanding what was about to happen—but Daring did.
“Get down, you idiot!”
She tackled Caballeron just as the plane hit the nearest monster, its engine igniting the fuel. The explosion was deafening, blowing Daring Do back as flame engulfed most of the camp.
She struck the ground and bounced, turning over several times. She had shielded Caballeron, but she felt pain in her side. Something was wrong. She had been burned, and probably badly.
She sat up, finding that her clothing, whatever it was made of, had largely spared her a far more severe injury—but it did not cover her right wing. An acrid smell reached her nose. The feathers had been burned away.
“Are you hurt?”
“Get off me!”
Caballeron pushed Daring away, but when he saw her wing, his eyes widened. “You’re hurt--”
“I’m not the only one!” Daring turned back to the towering inferno where the airplane had once been. The creature’s bones had been destroyed by the blast, but its internal liquid structure was rapidly escaping, joining up with the other members of its deformed race that were now arriving.
“There’s...there’s no way anypony could survive that.”
Just as Caballeron said it, a form emerged from the flame. Although he was standing within it, and quite on fire, he did not combust. His jacket had, though, revealing the scars where his wings had once been as well as the Sarswirlian spells etched into his skin by solar laser—and the insignia of a sun that was almost Celestia’s.
He was carrying a bottle and derping with maximal vigor. Although the contents of the bottle were on fire, he proceeded to drink his ammunition and shatter the bottle over his head.
“FOR DAYBREAKER!”
He charged into the fray, still on fire, and was promptly eaten by one of the monsters.
“Um...what?”
Daring Do had little time to contemplate what she had seen. One of the creatures burst through the camp, knocking both thestrals and griffons through the air as it charged her. An outstretched limb combined with several others to form a blade, like an enormous scythe. It raised it over Daring Do, ready to lower it.
She did not have time to dodge—or to think. So she moved only by instinct, grabbing Wun’s necklace from her pocket and holding it out before her as the scythe fell.
The blade stopped inches from where she held the gem, and the creature’s eyes moved to the front of its form. Eyes that were now large and surprisingly innocent.
“Fath...er?”
It spoke with the voice of a young colt—because, Daring Do realized, it was.
She stood, putting Sobek around her neck. “Wun! I can stop her! I need to get to the Pyramid!”
“Daring, do not you dare to--”
It was too late. Daring Do had already run directly into the horde of monstrosities. They did not have brains, and could not differentiate her from the soul they recognized. They parted from her path, not desiring to attack one of their creators.
“DARING!” Wun jumped back as a creature fell in front of her, lurching forward to attack—but then falling on its side, gibbering and crying out in confusion as its chest expanded. Then, with a plume of black fluid, it burst, and Cretin emerged, covered in liquid and being accosted by thousands of tentacles tipped with needles, teeth, claws and acid.
“Get back, weird tentacle thing! No tentacles can defeat Cratar Impulsum! I am solid and you are liquid, LIQUID! No liquid can defeat ME! I shall drink your mother and she will ENJOY IT!”
Wun reached out, casting a spell on him that was normally intended to vaporize things that were amenable to vaporization. Cretin, though, was not, and his body conducted the spell into the tentacles surrounding him, burning them away and allowing the monster to escape. Cretin, though, was utterly uninjured and continued to shout wildly.
“How are you not digested?”
“Because I am a form of indigestible fiber! And also immortal!”
A suit of armor charged her, and Honor interceded, knocking it back. Wun turned, lifting Cretin in the air with her magic and bringing him down on the armor like a derpish hammer, crushing it flat.
“Looks like there was no pony in that one,” she said.
“I AM THE GUTENTAG!” cried Cretin.
Honor and Dignity converged around Wun, holding off the armor as best as they could. Wun took a deep breath and summoned a shield spell around them. It was weak and immediately began to crack.
“It is the best I can do,” she admitted, falling to one knee. “One of you figure out a plan! DO IT!”
“Not likely,” said Caballeron, stepping back from the group. “I am afraid, my dear, that I am not being paid enough to deal with this.”
“Unfortunately, you are in it just as we are,” growled Honor, striking back the hoof of a suit of armor that had pushed through a hole in Wun’s shield.
Caballeron smiled. “I do believe that would be incorrect.”
He reached into his pocket and produced an object—a violet sphere of glass mounted on a brass casing. An object he had taken from Daring Do’s pocket when she had saved his life.
Wun’s eyes widened when she saw it. “That is not for you!”
Caballeron smiled at her, then stuck the spell between his teeth. He bit down and vanished in a flash of violet light.
“Coward!” cried Wun. “And a poor snuggler, you fiend! Horseson! A proper stallion offers to give is partner belly rubs! BELLY RUBS, CURSE YOUR TAIL!”
The forward portion of the shield buckled and collapsed. Wun knew that Caballeron had indeed made the right choice, but it had not been meant for him. That was the route her sister should have taken instead of paradoxically running into a horde of monsters and toward danger instead of away from it.
She, though, did not intend to leave without what belonged to her—even if that only meant her sister.
“We move forward!” she cried, presenting it not so much of an order but as an intrinsic fact. She saw one of the creatures writhing toward her, prepared to attack, and levitated Cretin, using him as a shield.
“BAD upsies!” cried Cretin, his legs starting to involuntarily paddle. “TO HIGH!”
The creature fired a plume of flechettes that exploded in a plume of fire, followed by several more attacking with devastating beams of magic. All of it rebounded from Cretin’s invulnerable body harmlessly, at least to him. The force of holding him, though, knocked Wun backward, her hooves digging trenches in the cold sand.
“What in the name of the One True Goddess are you even made of?”
“Pure, unadulterated derp!”
Honor jumped back, driving away a suit of armor. “They’re flanking!”
Wun turned, using Cretin as a shield again, deflecting something another beam of magic. The force did nothing to Cretin, but partially conducted through him and brought Wun to her knees. She could taste, and it tasted like Seht.
One of the creatures charged forward, grabbing Cretin and attempting to yank Wun’s shield from her grasp.
“Looks like I’m going in again,” he mused as he was absorbed and the digestion process began. “This time, I think I will plug my nose. I don’t like smelling things that smell me too. From inside.”
Wun tried to keep hold of him as she was struck from the side, barely managing to cast a disgracefully weak shield. All around her, the forces were converging. Daring Do had made it through, she hoped, but now her chance of retreat had been cut off. The sensation was odd, though. She had realized that she had reached her end, but felt ambivalent about it. It did not especially bother her, and that thought itself concerned her deeply.