The mask clattered to the floor, its barbed connection posts still dripping with black liquid. It lay inert, as it no longer served any purpose.
Seht walked past the sarcophagi that her friends would never awake from, to the wall behind them. To the door of that they which had stood in fruitless defense of for so many thousands of years. Her horn lit, casting red light over the surface, and the smooth iron began to shift, revealing the seams of the machine hidden beneath.
The spell was unique. One forged long ago, in the time of her very first self and devised long before that. An artifact of the Darklands: a door that could not be forced or broken. A door that would only respond to the appropriate key
Seht approached the hole in the center of the door and inserted her horn into a hole at the very center of the device. The machines within reacted and she felt the snap as her head was suddenly pushed free, the door accepting the sacrifice she had offered.
The door retracted into itself, opening for the first time since she had closed it five thousand years before—and now for the last time.
She entered the room, her horn already regenerating, feeling her body suddenly awash in silent magic. There were no lights, and yet she perceived a glow that illuminated her path as she walked across the wide, perfectly flat floor.
Two short columns arose form the center, and Seht took the puzzle spheres from their tops, arranging them without even bothering to look, levitating them in her magic and entering the correct codes to reactivate Duat's primary diagnostic systems.
Red magic flickered in front of her, and then a set of translucent panels appeared. Seht looked down and them.
“Odin...? Hera...?”
It was far too late, though. All of the other marks had gone black. Only one remained, at the very top of the ring.
“So it is only us that remain.” Tears dripped down her face and onto the floor. “I am sorry I am so late. It seems I overslept.”
She shifted to a different panel. What she saw did not surprise her. The Cores that had once powered Duat had long-since demised unto the furthest realm. Their souls had departed and their bodies had lost almost the entirety of their cellular integrity. The storage centrifuges, however, will still chornolocked.
Seht looked upward, toward the center of the room. Sitting at the center of the blackness, suspended in the air by no apparent magic or support, sat a small three-sided pyramid. It was no larger than a pony’s head, and its surface was made of metal—although a metal that was most certainly not iron.
Seht looked up at it, her tears now flowing freely. Tears at seeing it, and the ones she had held at the sight just outside the door. Tears she could no longer contain. The sight of a rusted alligator mask lying in the dust, along with the others. A mask that had covered a face she would never again see.
And then she lowered the spheres, activating the internal systems. The machinery that powered the Pyramid roared to life as the centrifuges began to spin, driving the last of Duat’s magic through its systems for one final task.
Seht was the last of them, and it had fallen to her. It would be completed, and the path that fate had assigned her would, at long last, be concluded as well.
The ground shook with tremendous force. Sand began to shift as the ground cracked. Wun was knocked to her knees, her spells collapsing around her from the world being turned on its head.
The creatures stopped their attack and suddenly screamed in terror, fleeing in every direction and diving into the sand, departing as quickly as they could from the unfamiliar vibration.
Wun had no time to comment or to rejoice. In the distance, her eyes turned to the Iron Pyramid as the black, thestral-carved blocks began to tumble away from it—and as it rose upward from the sand, effortlessly pushing them out of the way.
Rock crumbled and was torn to fragments as sand collapsed around the rising pyramid like water, a flow of red sand sliding off the perfect and uncorroded iron it had for so long obscured. As it came, dust rose around it, turning the air deep scarlet—but through it, the shadow of the Pyramid could be seen growing every higher.
The camp nearest to it, now abandoned, was torn asunder in an instant, buried in the sand—and the wave seemed to draw nearer and nearer at incredible speed.
And yet Wun could not run. She could only look upward, staring in awe as it rose from the sand, rending the mountains that had grown over it so long ago. The volume of it was hundreds if not thousands of times greater than of Hissan’s Pyramid. There was no buried temple beneath, or complexes built into the sand and deep below ground. Only the Pyramid, buried for so many millennia. A vast monstrosity of iron, forged in a single piece.
Then, in the distance, her eyes saw motion. The inner camp had been evacuated, and the monstrous mummies had fled—but she saw something nonetheless. Through the dust, the thin black of a whip wrapping around the open door of the Pyramid, formerly at ground level—and a pony climbing up it.
“Daring! NO!”
Wun stood and took one step before the Pyramid fully left the ground. In an instant the world was consumed by the glow of the nearest of its three thrusters, a gargantuan engine with an aperture the size of a small Equestrian city, its internal mechanisms expelling an unfathomable plume of magic. All sound vanished in the silent roar of the spells, and the desert blew outward, a storm of molten sand and rock driven by the force of the Pyramid's incomprehensible lift. Wun’s only recourse was to bubble herself and those around her as the dust and force of the spells knocked her back, rolling her across the sand.
There was nothing she could do. The Iron Pyramid took flight upward, vaporizing the sand directly below it and leaving only an impossibly deep pit and shattered mountains where it had once stood. Above the dust, it seemed to be moving so slow, its engines leaving a vast trio of slowly spiraling contrails. Wun could not follow.
Which meant that it now came down to Daring Do, and Daring Do alone.
Daring Do barely managed to pull herself into the Pyramid before its ascent suddenly accelerated, forcing her to the ground from the rapidly accumulating g-force. Although she could not perform the math in her head, her Pegasus instincts let her know that she was gaining altitude, and fast.
Looking out the open door, she saw the entirety of the desert stretching out before her, and only iron below her. The Pyramid was just as large as she had remembered it in Seht’s memories—and she now understood how it had reached the far north, and what her visions had meant. Of a vast Iron Pyramid, suspended over the civilization forged below, holding aloft its synthetic star.
She stood, fighting the downward force of the rising Pyramid—and she began to run. Because her instincts told her something else. Something bad was happening. The monsters had been a distraction, cover for Seht to get here, and Daring Do did not know why—but she understood that it was something truly terrible.
Ignoring the pain in her burned wing, she charged into the darkness of the Pyramid. She knew the way she needed to go, and knew where she was going.
Daring reached the central tomb, and nearly stopped. She could not look at them, lying there, now that she knew. Their masks, the representations of their Lines, stood rusted and ancient beside their former owners, staring blankly. All Daring could think of was, as terrible as the scene was for her, what Seht must have felt upon witnessing it. What this sight must have meant to her. That because ponies like her had pillaged artifacts they did not understand, these ponies would never again wake to the world.
In the corner, she saw one mask that was not rusted. A mask in the shape of a sha’s head, lying to the side of a badly rotted one in the shape of a smiling crocodile’s face. Perhaps it had been jostled by the launch, or perhaps it had been placed there with purpose.
The air was growing thin. Daring Do, as a Pegasus, could withstand it, but she also knew that their altitude was getting dangerously high.
At the far end of the room, she saw a new door, and felt something arising from it. Magic and the smell of the air itself burning—and a strange force pulling her toward it.
Inside, Daring found an enormous room, probably a dome although the ceiling was too far for her to see clearly. What she saw was in its center. A tiny pyramid, made of a strange gray metal, surrounded in an incredibly complex sphere of white magic—magic that was now linked to Seht’s horn as she sequentially decoded and removed the seals containing the pyramid within.
Whatever it was, it was losing stability. The walls of the small object were beginning to separate, filling the room with flashes of brilliant light as magical lightning shot forth, breaking through the containment seal and precipitating into the same unknown metal that the object was made of. Or, as Daring Do somehow understood, the shell that kept the object inside contained.
Seht sat in the center of the magical storm, unwavering, linked to the object at the end of a path inlaid into the ground. Through the noise of the magical lightning and the roar of the engines below, she remained silent and firm, slowly crying as she tore away the seals.
Suddenly, Daring Do felt herself thrown to the side of the room. A deafening explosion shook the entire Pyramid. For a moment she thought she had been knocked across the room by magic, but as she grabbed the doorframe she realized that the Pyramid had tilted. Something was wrong.
Seht, grabbing one of the columns beside her, adjusted the projection before her and desperately attempted to divert power from the maneuvering thrusters to compensate for the failed engine.
“Seht!” cried Daring Do.
“Daring Do,” replied Seht, her voice sounding desperate—even if she did not turn from her controls. “You should not be here. Without the Cores I do not have enough force to reach the requisite altitude. You alone are fast enough to escape the blast radius. You need to go. NOW.”
Daring, feeling the Pyramid began to stabilize, smiled humorlessly. She gestured to her damaged wing. “That’s not going to happen.”
Seht looked over her shoulder, her red eyes focusing on Daring’s wing—and then on Daring's eyes. “Then you will be lost with the rest of them. I shall not stop the process.”
The noise of the room began to clear—or become distant. As if the sound of the dying Codex were being pulled back into itself.
“You can’t!” cried Daring Do. “You’re magic is linked to it, if you destroy it—”
“I will not have time to notice.” Seht looked up at the Codex, and Daring Do was sure she felt it staring back at her. “I am deactivating the spells that contain its Hawking radiation. You do not comprehend what that means. Suffice to say the result will be rapid.”
Daring Do did indeed not know what that meant. Nor did she care. “Seht, you don’t have to do this.”
“Yes. I do.” She looked up to the Codex. “I am the last of my kind, and it the last of its own. This world is cruel and strange. We were not meant to exist within it. This is my final duty. I am simply late to join the entirety of my race in oblivion.”
“It’s not the world! Wun—she tries, but she doesn’t know! She’s like a child—”
“And you are her mother, then? How ironic.”
“Seht, they aren’t all like her!”
“She took my beloved. And who took the rest of my friends? Who took my brothers and sisters? It was not her. It was the ponies of your era. Who pillaged and stole for the sake of greed. This is not my world. So I shall depart from it and be forgotten.”
Daring Do shivered. Something in the back of her mind understood what that meant, although the rush of adrenaline was keeping her from fully comprehending the dire position she found herself in.
“There are kind ponies out there,” she said. “There are others that could be your friends, you don’t have to be alone—”
“I know that, Daring. But the Codex must finally rest.”
“I don’t understand!”
Seht sighed, her magic continuing to break the seals and the Codex continuing to destabilize, now in total silence. “The knowledge contained within could tear your world apart.”
“Or you could change it, for the better!”
“No. It would only be a matter of time before ponies like HER take it from me. Daring, you will not convince me. All of the other Interfaces have already completed the task. I am the last, and I am alone. I will not disgrace their sacrifice. I will make it complete. I will perform my final duty. I will not hide from the truth any longer.”
Several more of the seals on the spell cracked, and the room suddenly filled with blinding white light—light that was quickly consumed by darkness.
Daring Do felt herself suddenly being pulled toward the Codex. She looked up to see the walls of the tiny pyramid had opened—and revealed the eye within.
It was not an eye, though. That was how Daring perceived it, but not what it was. The Codex was instead a small black sphere. But not ordinary black. It was impossibly dark. The darkest thing she had ever seen.
Every hair on her body bristled, and not from the magic permeating the room. She suddenly understood why she felt so afraid around it. The sense of being watched was an instinctive reaction, a relic of an era of pony evolution when predators with sharp-pointed horns had pursued her ancestors through the plains in times long before history. That ancient fear had instinctively been applied to this as well, although not for the same reason. It was not watching her, because it could not see. And yet her mind treated it as though it were on the verge of devouring her.
“The entirety of all dark unicorn knowledge,” said Seht, coldly. “Imprinted on the event horizon of a quantum singularity. These words mean nothing to you. But it is my greatest shame that I must end a thing of such great beauty.”
The air around them distorted as something flowed outward from the singularity, passing through its broken neutronium shell and into the room at all. A kind of colored mist that resolved into shapes and forms.
“What is it doing?”
“Memories are leaking,” said Seht. “Dreams of the god we created.”
The images formed around Daring Do. They were not light, but shadow. In them, she saw the forms of ponies. Of other dark unicorns, like Seht, standing around the Codex. It was a flash of memory, like a ghostly photograph. In it, they wore strange clothing, its form derived from the distant memories of a world ruled not by magic but by technology instead.
There were children and adults alike, all smiling and congradulating each other, laughing and proud of the success of their scientists. All of them were strong and dark, save for one. A small unicorn whose body was a most disturbing shade of violet.
The memory shifted across countless ages. Now, instead, Daring Do beheld dark unicorns clad in masks that had not yet developed the headdress of animals, devices instead intended to protect their faces from radiation and damage. One among them stood tall, drawing a thin trail of runes from the ancient Codex while his comrades looked on. Among them were thestrals, some of whom were too young to have attained the mark of rank and stared in wide-eyed awe at their masters.
It changed again, and Seht took a step back. She no longer needed to interact with the seal for the final sequence. The process could no longer be stopped.
Where she had stood, three dark unicorns appeared. Two were clad in strange robes, wearing masks almost like hers, although more primitive and abstract in an artistic style that was forgotten millennia before Seht’s birth.
One of them had the head of an ibis. The other, a sha. And between them stood a filly, her body already almost as large as an adult of any other pony race but her eyes wide and innocent and her flank unmarked.
The two beside her stepped apart, and the filly steeled herself and raised her horn. Then came the screaming.
Daring Do tried to look away, but she found she could not. She watched as the magic of the Codex poured into that filly, forging the connection for which she had been born. To bear witness to the god they had forged in their own image. And she saw the memory progress. Another filly. A colt. Another colt, a filly, a colt and a colt again—countless hundreds of ponies across time and space, each of them etched with the memories of the last. A transfer of Seht itself.
Until, finally, it stopped at one. At the last—and Daring Do watched as the current Seht writhed on the ground, a filly in agony as her mark was installed on her side. As she became many, and endless. As she lost her name and became Seht.
“That...that was you.”
“And is me,” said Seht. “No more could ever be born. No more of me. I am the last.”
As she watched, the younger version of Seht stopped screaming. She breathed hard on the ground for a moment, and then stood. As she did, the sha-faced stallion beside her nodded. Then, without ever showing his face, collapsed to dust.
A new memory came. Of ponies in strange masks standing around the Codex, engaged in a discussion. There was no sound this time, but Daring could see the energy among them. Some lashed out in anger, but most were calm. At their head sat the most ancient, the youngest among them, clad in the mask of a sha—and at her side, one who wore the head of a crocodile. And when Sobek spoke, the others listened.
A different memory. Of two ponies sitting before the Codex, weeping. One with the mask of a cat, the other of an eagle. They were alone in a darkness that had suddenly become so hostile. So empty. So much time had passed from when their world was new, and Daring Do sensed that it was growing dim. That Seht had not awoken in an inhospitable world, but one that the modern age had been encroaching upon long before she went to sleep, even then begining to erase everything she hold dear.
A pony in a sha mask appeared by their side. The two others looked to her, and then lifted to her their failure. Something small and wrapped in cloth.
A new memory, of a pony all alone, her mask retracted. Sitting alone as the world collapsed around her. Then, from the darkness, another. A pony in a crocodile mask, the metal of it retracting as he approached, revealing an eternally young and kind face with just the barest hint of derpishness. He sat beside Seht, putting his head on her shoulder. In her pocket, Daring Do suddenly felt Wun’s necklace move, if only slightly. As if it, too, could see.
Then the memories went dark. That was the last one it had recorded.
“Then the time has come,” said Seht, stepping back to her place before the now bare Codex, it’s singularity now hovering silently in the center of the room, the its formal shell a system of triangles in orbit. “There are no more, and never will be.”
Suddenly, the room flashed. A new memory appeared around them.
“What?” Seht looked around, confused. “This is not possible. It has caught up to me in real time. There are no new memories.”
“There’s more?”
“There can’t be. I have every memory already, there could not be more...”
The shadows resolved, and Daring Do saw the formations of the mummified abominations now wandering the room, ghostly shades of their true and hideous selves, standing in defense of the Codex.
Then something moved, a shadow nearly too swift to see. One of the creatures roared and charged, and Daring Do saw the loop of a sword swiveling on a gray hoof—and the creature was sliced cleanly in half.
Another charged, surrounding its body with a carapace of unbreakable dark iron several feet thick. The pony with the blade took a flying leap and brought the sword down on the shell, effortlessly cleaving it in twain.
The pony moved with terrible swiftness, with every blow performed with both impossible strength and procession—and terrifying wrath. Not the blows of a swordspony, but of something far more primitive. Not strikes meant to win, but motions meant to maximize destruction with utter disregard for the safety of the pony connected to the hilt of the blade.
In seconds, the monsters that had seemed so unstoppable lay on the floor, their bodies broken and the black sludge that made up their tissue hauling away what fragments of bone they had. One managed to stand, to offer one last blow, and brought down a great hoof covered with toothy mouthes on the dark pony. The pony swiveled, and the monster raised its iron shield.
The pony struck it with his hoof, imparting so much force that the iron deformed and every bone within the creatures body was reduced to crumbs. The flesh departed the bones and left, leaving the pony alone.
He stood still, not even winded. In fact, not even breathing. Daring Do saw that he was an earth-pony, one of a grayish color and dressed in simple doublet. Wun had several like it, and Daring Do knew that this pony had last stood in this spot just under two thousand years ago. The only other thing he wore was a simple necklace that held a small, gray stone.
His mane was pure white, and he held a sword—although, for some reason, the Codex could not render it properly. Instead of metal, it showed only a space of pure blackness.
The pony froze, and then suddenly turned toward Daring Do. She jumped back, as did Seht, Daring Do from incomprehension but Seht from a distant instinctive memory of predators that had no name.
His eyes were distorted and red. Not the eyes of a pony at all—and slowly he smiled, continuing to stare at Daring Do.
He spoke, but not with the voice of a pony. With two voices. One, a terrified young stallion, and the other a female.
“Such fluffy little wings...”
One of the creatures suddenly rose behind him, its remaining limbs forming a pair of great scythes. As it lunged, though, its body was consumed in red fire. Metal was rended and bone splintered as the pressure of the fire increased around it, drawing it inward in a slow implosion. It screamed horribly as everything inside it was broken, reduced by magic until all that remained was a tiny ornate cube that dropped to the floor, dripping as a tiny worm of bubbling black liquid escaped and fled from what remained of its body.
A different pony appeared at the edge of the memory. This one was larger than the earth pony, who was of a surprisingly light build. His body was covered in armor. Some of it was Equestrian, or fragments drawn from an Equestrian source, but other plates were assembled from elswhere. Assyrian, Abyssian, griffon, and several others that Daring Do could not recognize—all assembled into a skin of machinery and mechanical muscle. All linked to a respirator apparatus built into his strange dark helmet. The armor was apparently magical, with runes in strange languages having been assembled into it. What purpose it served, Daring Do was not sure.
“Holder,” said the voice, distorted by the mask. “Do not get distracted.”
Holder, the earth pony, turned sharply toward the unicorn. “These creatures, they bear no souls. Nothing to claim of worth. I require the flesh of ponies, not of these pointless shells.”
“Strange that you claim to ‘require’ anything. I had understood that you were inviolable and devoid of needs.”
Holder’s face distorted. “Do not toy with Her. You understood what She meant.”
“And you must understand who gave you that particular pony body.”
“Which is why I tolerate you.” Holder looked up at the Codex, pointing his blade at it. “This pointless trifle. Is this what you came all this way for?”
The armored pony looked up at it. “Yes, Holder. This is the one.”
He reached for his helmet, disengaging the mechanism that held it to his head. It hissed as he removed it and threw it away.
Seht took a step back. “That—that is not possible!”
The pony that stood before them in the memory was a dark unicorn, a stallion of disturbing beauty. His mane was long and black, and his horn curved and bladed, as Seht’s was. A thin dark iron crown rested on his forehead.
Holder sighed, lowering his sword and cutting a deep gouge in the iron floor—a gouge that still remained there over fourteen centuries later.
“And what do you intend to do with it?”
The dark unicorn only smiled and raised his horn to the Codex.
Energy suddenly flowed outward from it. Even if it was only represented in the form of a memory, Daring Do shielded her eyes. She could feel the sudden heat arising from it.
“No!” cried Seht, suddenly panicked, as if she could change the past and protect this newfound member of her own extinct race. “Only an Interface can survive contact! Only one with the Mark!”
The stallion in the memory, of course, ignored her. Instead, strange spells formed around his bodies. Spells formed in every school of magic from every race of unicorns. The fragments of dark unicorn spells, as well as those of the Classic and Eastern unicorns—and even some in a truly horrifying form that deeply unsettled Daring Do. Something from long before all three.
The beam expanded into a devastating blast. A beam of pure, raw information. The entirety of the Codex’s contents flowing into his mind at once. It was like the spell Seht had used to gain information from the books in Twilight Felt’s library, but orders of magnitude more powerful.
Even Daring Do understood as she stared into the blinding stream of letters and mathematical equations. “It’s too much.”
“Yes,” sighed Seht, on the verge of tears. “Yes, it is.”
Then, in a flash, the beam stopped and the stallion fell to the floor, his body smoking and parts of his flesh collapsing to dust.
Holder stared at him and groaned. “This is not what She is intended for,” he chastised, lifting his blade. “So I will let the organic deal with this moronic task.”
He sheathed his blade in a scabbard on his back and suddenly dropped to the ground. When he sat up, his mane was no longer white. It was a dull, rock-like gray and his eyes were strikingly blue. He would have looked almost appealing had he not seemed so terrified.
“Who what where when why?” he said, confused. “Where am I? How did I get—SOMBRA!”
He jumped up, rushing to the side of his fallen friend. “Sombra, no! What did you—Boulder, help me pick him up!”
The earth pony carefully picked up the stallion, supporting him. Sombra groaned, wincing as he opened his eyes. Seht gasped audibly.
“He...he survived?”
“Sombra, are you okay?! Darn it all to heck, why did I let you do this? Wake up, please wake up!”
Sombra put his shaking hoof on Holder’s shoulder, and then stood weakly, the earth pony still supporting him. “Holder, my friend, I am still here.” The wounds on his body were already starting to regenerate and within seconds had healed.
Holder let out a long sigh of relief, then he looked up at the Codex. “I don’t like that thing. Boulder says it’s a bad thing.” He looked back to Sombra. “Did you get it?”
Sombra nodded, and his horn ignited.
Information suddenly swirled around him. Daring Do understood absolutely none of it. It was not in what had been in Seht’s time modern dark unicornic, but in a different language. A language that she quickly realized was, inf act, mathematics--but for which the equations did not quite make sense. They lacked the fundamental sanity of modern, lesser disciplines of the subject and were built upon an entirely different array of concepts.
“No...” said Seht, softly.
“What is it?”
“This...this is a piece of the Deepest Core. Memories that even the greatest of us could not reach. That only the Ancient Kings could even begin to fathom. It cannot possibly be recovered. It would drive the owner insane to even attempt it...” She turned to Daring Do sharply. “This stallion, who is he? What does your history record of him? None of the knowledge I aquired holds any relevent context.”
Daring Do looked at him, then back at Seht. “I don’t know. There isn’t anything recorded about a pony named ‘Sombra’, especially not a wizard like that. Not that I’ve ever seen. And I've seen pretty much all of it.”
The math swirling around their feet began to change, segmenting itself and being rearranged—and merged with new math. New spells and new systems, rendered in green. They connected and assembled into something new. Seht stared intently—then gasped. In fear, perhaps, or in awe.
“What is it?” asked Daring Do.
“Monoceron,” replied Seht, softly. “He has...he completed it...”
“I don’t know what this means,” admitted Holder.
“It means,” said Sombra, “that my theories are mathematically valid. This provides the last components of the model necessary for my work to be completed. Or, rather, the foundation that indicates that it is possible.”
“So you can do the...the door thing?”
“No. The foundation is real, but the work required would take me several lifetimes.” He produced a second file, this one a combination of double-helices and a combination of five repeating letters in numerous sequences. “There are ways to compensate, though.”
“How?”
“You would not understand. Come, Holder.”
Holder began to follow him. “To where?”
“There is work to be done. The record suggests an extensive power source to the north, one that I will require to complete my work. We must go there.”
Holder gulped, and then looked back at the broken fragments of the monsters as they slowly started to crawl away—and then up at the Codex. He shivered, and then started walking, following his best friend toward whatever unknown piece played the next role in creating something he would never understand.
The memory faded. For a moment there was nothing, and then several white lines traced themselves into the air, forming letters. They were strange and geometric, rendered in three dimensions. They were in an ancient form that predated the dark unicorns and history itself. Seht, for some reason, associated them with the sound of ticking and desperate fear. She had only ever seen them once before, long before she herself was born—and Daring Do would only see them one other time, decades later at the twilight of her life.
A thin smile crossed Seht’s face as she read them. “I see. So it is a leap of faith.” She turned to Daring Do. “For both of us.”
“Seht?”
Seht returned to her position before the Codex and cast a spell. The Monoceron code surrounded her, replicated from what Sombra had shown her—and she arranged it around the geometric runes, incorporating them into forms she provided from her own mind. Seeing it, Daring Do almost imagined that those runes were meant to be part of the code—or the code was meant to accept them.
Above her, the neutronium fragments in orbit around the Codex formed a new confirmation, their surfaces aligning around it in a kind of sphere. New spells began to surround them, linking them, and the sphere began to revolve.
“My body will be able to withstand the void radiation for several seconds,” she said. “But yours, I do not know. Nor will that world be meant for you, Daring Do.” She looked over her shoulder and no longer looked sad. “I cannot take the Pyramid with me. It is too heavy. So I will entrust it to you.”
“Where are you going?”
“I think you already know, Daring. Thank you for being kind to me. But this world is still not meant for me.” She looked up to the Codex. “I simply now know that I am not alone. And that he is waiting, in the darkness.”
Daring Do understood and nodded. She ran toward the door as the sphere of triangles around the Codex began to move, entering the code that had been provided by the strange runes, being assembled from the spells that a forgotten pony named Sombra had managed to construct.
The air began to vibrate, and new lightning began to escape the Codex. New magic, a brilliant white corona as its blackness was converted to light and it truly came to life.
Daring stopped, reaching into her pocket. “Seht!” she called over the noise. Seht turned, and Daring threw the necklace to her. Seht caught it. “Take him! Don’t give up hope!”
Seht looked at the gem, and then up at Daring Do. She smiled and put the chain of the necklace around her own neck. “And you,” she said. “Do not forget.”
As soon as Daring Do felt the wind on her face and saw the horizon stretching out before her, she heard the sound of the explosion behind her. Explosive bolts had fired along the upper edge of the Pyramid, spells severing the top of it. With a roar of magical flame, the top of the pyramid broke free, a bipyramidal hexahedron of dark iron departing under the power of its own engines, rising away from the rest of the Pyramid and up into the dark sky. Seconds later, Daring Do heard the sound of it being crushed. Of metal rending and crumpling under immense force as it distorted and imploded, ripped from space itself until it ignited in an explosion of brilliant light—and as the light retreated to nothingness. As Seht left behind reality itself.
Then, below her, she heard the engines of the Pyramid slowing—until she only heard the sound of rushing wind. There was no magic left within them.
That was when she felt a peculiar sensation. As if she had suddenly grown lighter.
She looked out in panic, realizing that she was so high she could see the space where the blue of the sky transitioned to the blackness beyond. She was now fully aware that the Pyramid, without its engines, was falling.
Her mind raced and she instinctively spread her wings—finding one completely incapable of flight, its pain making her wince.
“Buck me in the teeth!” she swore, looking around, desperately trying to find a solution. All she could see was snakes pouring from the door and, finding that they were so very high, huddling around themselves and quivering.
“Please no!” they wept, holding their little snake families tightly. “Please NO!”
Daring Do looked at them, and then at the desert growing ever closer.