The robes sat heavily on my back, and fit poorly over the top of my quilted armor. While they did a fine job of keeping out the cold fog and the gentle rain that sometimes rolled off the cloudstone rooftops above, they were also uncomfortably warm. I think that if I still could, I would have been sweating underneath the heavy cloth. But I tried to ignore it as best I could, because as long as it kept me alive and disguised, it could have been as uncomfortable as sandpaper for all I cared.
“And you had these prepared, just in case?” Trixie asked, as she shifted uncomfortably under her own heavy robes.
Mistmane, at the head of our short little procession, responded quietly enough that I had to strain a bit to hear her. “Not quite ‘sitting around.’ In truth, I’ve actually been planning this—or something like this, involving mercenaries—for quite some time. I likely could have afforded to wait a bit longer, but I’m not one to pass up such a perfect opportunity.”
“Oh?” Trixie paused for half a step, before she continued onwards after Mistmane. “And how much were you going to pay these hypothetical hired swords?”
“S-so now we are m-mercenaries?” I muttered to myself, though neither of my companions seemed to hear me.
Mistmane shrugged. “A generous sum. It will go to you for doing the same work, of course, but I’d prefer to wait until you returned to Ponyville to discuss the exact details. Remember, you’re not to harm any more of the Gravewardens, if it can be at all avoided.”
“Right, right…” muttered Trixie. “And what kind of ‘distraction’ are you planning, then? One that won’t harm them either, but will take up their attention enough to let us slip by? Unless it’s okay if you harm them, of course.”
“It won’t,” Mistmane stated confidently. “There’s a few wandering demons that make their nests throughout the fallen city. It’ll be easy enough to lure one into the open where they can send a few waves of the dead at it, at no risk to themselves. There’s one in particular that’s been a minor annoyance to me; a sort of mutated beetle about the size of a wagon. Too big to get into a doorway, too weak to pull a building apart, but intimidating enough to have their attention for an hour. You’ll want to move quickly, all the same.”
“Right. And while that’s going on, you’ll be...?”
“Assisting them, of course,” Mistmane said with a pleasant smile. “After all, the demons are a problem for us all, and I am a friend, or at least an ally. It’d be strange if I didn’t.”
“Somehow, I think not much would be lost if some demon did wipe them all out. Mind control and skeletons…ugh.” Trixie grumbled. It was difficult not to agree with her, after what had happened to me.
Mistmane turned back to us and sighed, then waved me forward with a hoof. “Holly, you should be in the middle, and we should be a bit more bunched up so we don’t lose each other when moving amongst other ponies wearing cloaks. They might also be able to tell Holly’s condition from a distance, but it’ll be harder to discern if we’re close to her. If anypony does get close, just smile and nod; there’s enough members of the covenant that they don’t all know each other on sight, so it should be okay if they don’t recognize you, so long as you look like you belong.”
We nodded and rearranged positions, and—although we could still hear her complaining—that Trixie was now at the back of the party dissuaded her from asking Mistmane questions so incessantly. It also gave me a chance to observe the city around us as we walked, and I eagerly drank in the scenery.
The buildings around us were getting taller. The part of the city that we’d been traveling through before had been mostly houses and small, outlying buildings, like freestanding stores or small stalls. But as we got deeper and deeper, two-story buildings became three and four-story, and the upper floors degraded more and more. Once more, the buildings had all mostly been custom construction work by the residents or owners, and again, the more fanciful architecture had not handled the shock of impact well. The shorter, smaller buildings remained mostly intact, while the wider and taller buildings had crumbled under their own weight from the fall, or merely from time since then.
There were a lot more stores and shops, as opposed to houses. While I was still fairly sure that the upper floors were still apartments for the owners of said shops, it definitely didn’t seem as comfortable as the freestanding houses in the neighborhoods before. I also considered asking Mistmane to wait while we searched a few shops, but I noticed those strange symbols again on the doors listing their contents—and most had already been scratched out.
Still, I wondered if Mistmane would know what they meant exactly, and as we passed beside one, I stopped to point at it. “W-what do these symbols m-mean?”
Mistmane turned to look at it, then smiled. “Ah! That’s a sort of territory marking the covenant uses. The symbol represents the Gravewardens, the tallies mark how many usable skeletons are within the building, and the list of supplies are what can be recovered. They scratch out whatever’s been taken, so nopony goes searching for supplies that aren’t there.” She paused to think, then added, “I’m not terribly well-trained in music, whether modern or, ah, classical, but I believe the musical note represents one-eighth time? They also called it a ‘quaver’ when I asked about it, and did specify the flag. I think it may have been Sweetie Belle’s cutie mark, before she left, and that’s why they still use it.”
“If we’re quite done discussing musical theory…” Trixie grumbled, though Mistmane winked at me.
“Curiosity should always be rewarded; it’s a fleeting quality in this age, it seems.”
“Reckless curiosity will get your hoof stuck in a snare.” Trixie spat back.
Mistmane just shrugged, and we began to walk again. “I’d hardly call this reckless, but I can’t entirely disagree with you. The cautious seldom err.” She turned back to face me, and added, "If you'd like to leave some messages of your own, I can give you one of my spare soapstones—which is what leaves those marks—before we go our separate ways."
As we continued onwards, I noticed a glow that began to permeate the fog before us, visible in the sky over the rooftops. It was orange, like the sunset, but illuminated from below. Mistmane pointed at it a short while later, when it was even more obvious, and explained, “That light over there is what the covenant calls ‘New Cloudsdale.’ The fog will thin as we approach, so remember to keep your heads down and faces covered. Watch your hooves on this bridge, as well.”
We passed over a rickety bridge that crossed another bottomless crevasse, and then we were mere streets away from the main hub of the necromancers. I noticed that here, the streets seemed to have been cleaned up significantly; piles of bone dust had been swept to the side, most of the rubble had been cleared away, and several buildings seemed occupied. Various windows were boarded up, and we saw the flicker of small bonfires in doorways and through the boards.
While the skeletons of the dead had already begun to grow rare, they were completely absent here. Only the occasional pile of bones, capped with a glowing skull, was to be seen. Those likely served as sentries, or at least warnings to the pony who had enchanted them, like the ones we had now tripped over twice. Again, they had mostly been placed in doorways, or in alleyways—places where a pony would be forced to carefully step over them, in order to pass without disturbing the trap.
Finally, we came across a small guard outpost, with a pair of necromancers out in the open. One seemed engrossed in reading a book, while the other looked up as we approached. Mistmane pulled her hood back with a smile, and a wave. “Hello there, Raspberry! I’ve been looking through the ruins with a pair of curious acolytes; how have things been here?”
“Mistmane, hey. You see anything unusual out there?” The Necromancer put her hooves up on the barricade, and we could see her face under the hood, though something about the hood made it hard to make out any of her features—it was as though they created a veil of darkness to obscure the wearer. We could only hope the same could be said for us.
“Unusual?” Mistmane asked, with a tilt of her head. “What do you mean?”
The Necromancer shrugged, and her hooves dropped back down on her side of the barricade, as we walked around it. “We’re not sure. The Silverdust sisters found Ruffled Pages out there, dead and Hollowed. And they’ve been looking for Aural Charm, but she’s been missing entirely, when she was supposed to be watching the road into the city. It might be another demon, or maybe somepony finally got curious and we’re looking at a larger-scale invasion. We’re still good with Canterlot, right?”
Mistmane nodded, then paused. “Celestia won’t move against you, but I did recall overhearing that one of the nearby towns has been having some leadership issues. It’s possible they might send scouts? But I hope not, you aren’t bothering anypony here.”
“Hopefully, yeah…” The Necromancer looked back out into the fog, then sighed. “Still, keep your eyes open. If you see anypony not wearing a cloak, try and get back here, or back to Canterlot. Talk to Letter Opener, too; he’ll know more about the letter drops, and if we need to move them for you.”
“Regardless, It’ll be good to speak with him again,” Mistmane said, as we passed by. The necromancer turned her attention fully back to the road, and started quietly humming to herself as we continued into New Cloudsdale.
As soon as we turned a corner, Mistmane seemed to deflate slightly. I could tell she really didn’t like lying to these ponies; how close was she to them? I felt another pang of guilt at how we’d Hollowed two of them to get here, especially now that we knew their names. But then I remembered how the stallion—Ruffled Pages, apparently?—had forced his way into my head, and made himself my “Master,” and the guilt subsided a little. But only a little.
The fog above us grew dark as we moved deeper into New Cloudsdale, and soon the weathered concrete of the dam loomed above us as it came into focus. The cracks across its surface didn't seem so bad from this close up, but black water bled through the deepest ones, and ebbed downwards behind the buildings. Now that we were close, I could hear it creak and groan; the steel and concrete within the massive pony-made structure was strained and weakened from time. It threatened to crack again, and the rebar would split the smooth surface like broken bones through flesh, erupting in a great tide that would wash this valley away.
I wouldn't want to be here when it did. Hopefully, the residents of New Cloudsdale could see that too, and had plans to prevent it happening. At the very least, I hoped they had plans to leave long before it happened. A morbid part of me wondered if, given their connection with the dead, they would have welcomed it.
The valley itself had noticeably narrowed the closer we came to the dam, and the great cloudstone slabs had less and less room to fall flat upon the valley floor. The slab on which we now walked had a noticeable tilt, sharp enough that a wheel would roll down the roads, but not so steep that a pony would slide off the end if they fell. What I thought was another valley wall turned out to be another slab, which had come to a nearly vertical rest. It was distinctly strange to look up and see ruined buildings above us, and the roads that led between them formed strange patterns, like a queer map of the fallen city.
Around us were dozens of robed necromancers now, and we blended in easily. I was constantly afraid that somepony would stop us and look under our hoods, but it never happened; the worst that did was a few Gravewardens paused in confusion, as if they smelled something strange, but couldn't find the source. Could they tell there was a Hollow nearby, like Mistmane had said? It certainly kept me on edge.
Even more unsettling were the skeletons of the dead. I'd frozen at the sight of the first one, but Trixie had jammed her head against my tump, and I'd not been still for more than a second. The dead pegasus had passed us without a second glance, with a dozen planks of wood on its back. The red embers in their bone sockets never looked any direction than forward, as it mindlessly carried its cargo to places unknown.
Just as Trixie and Mistmane had said, the skeletons were clearly being used as mindless manual labor, from pulling carts to hauling cargo, to standing guard, to brushing piles of bones away with push-brooms. We even passed by what seemed to be a small sparring circle, where two necromancers meditated on either side, while four skeletons fought between them as proxies, using salvaged weapons in brutal combat.
Through it all, I started to hear a quiet hum. At first I thought it was the wind whistling through the valley, or perhaps a machine running inside one of the buildings, but we passed by a pony who was humming loudly and clearly, and soon, it seemed as though every pony we passed was doing the same. It was a quiet undertone, never too loud, but always there, just below the quiet conversations throughout the quiet town. It rose high above through the fog, it rolled through the streets, and it washed over us, bathing us in the simple tune.
It had no words, at least none that we could hear being sung. It seemed to be carried only by the chorus of the Gravewardens, with no conductor, and no sheet music. If there were ponies humming out of tune, then they could not be heard over the weight of everypony else. And soon, I even found myself humming along to it, despite having never heard the song before myself, and despite it being a complex remedy that took a long time to properly repeat. I found my voice, though it was sore and tired, and joined in as we walked.
I don’t know if it was a sort of magic—perhaps it was a spell woven by the Gravewardens, or perhaps it had something to do with the ruins Cloudsdale, or the valley itself. Personally, I think it was simply a heartsong; but it was an old heartsong that had never ended when it was first sung, and scattered members of the covenant had continued the tune ever since. Or perhaps the heartsong had wanted to be sung, but nopony had ever actually started to sing the song, and so the melody persisted, ever waiting, lurking under the surface for lyrics that would never emerge.
It didn’t seem to impede anypony, least of all us; we simply continued to walk through the ruins, humming along, and perhaps the way we joined in helped keep any of the Gravewardens from looking at us too closely.
Whatever the cause, soon the base of the dam came into sight. While everything up until now had been ramshackle construction bolted onto the old, and hung from the crumbling buildings, this construction seemed as though the Gravewardens had settled, then found the ruined buildings wanting. They had torn them down, and used the materials to build real structures from the ground up. The closest we could get to that reconstructed area was a large square, where a large bulwark blocked the street between here and there.
After a moment, I realized what the building on one side of the bulwark was; a massive chunk of the weather factory—presumably the section that Mistmane had described—had fallen sideways there at the crack between two slabs. The entire cloudstone structure sat at a diagonal angle, while the bulwark was actually built into the roof of the building, not the side. A great crevasse hung underneath the factory, where the slabs had split, and once more I could only hear rushing water deep below. Mistmane gave us a subtle flick of her tail, and she ushered us into a darkened doorway nearby.
Not much of this crumbling building was accessible, and it was full of broken windows and empty doorways, meaning nopony wanted to bother clearing it out. It gave us privacy, unless a pony wanted to cross the square to look inside, in which case we would have plenty of prior warning. Mistmane still checked over the few hiding places that stood out, and when she was satisfied, she sat down near the doorway. “Very good; we remain undetected thus far. You two saw the weather factory?”
Trixie nodded, but I spoke up. “The s-section of it that f-fell down here. Th-that’s not the whole th-thing, j-just the exotic w-weather p-production wing.”
Mistmane nodded, hoof to her chin in thought. “That explains why it’s so dangerous. And you saw the condition of the building, as well; there’s likely to be sections within where the floor—or walls, I suppose—have fallen into the cracks below. Watch your step in there, because I don’t know where the river flows. Should you fall in, you may end up back at the bottom of the valley, relatively unharmed, or you may become trapped in the crevasse, perpetually drowning under piles of rubble and steel.”
Trixie blanched at the warning. “Right. Don’t fall in. Understood that, clear as crystal.”
“It’s also going to be dark in there,” Mistmane continued. “There will be gaps in the building, and windows, but you two will need lights. Trixie, I presume you have that covered. What about you, Holly?”
I shook my head—then paused, for an idea had occurred to me. While Applejack had confiscated the lightgem that Dinky had given me so long ago, and it was presumably sitting in the Ponyville armory, Zecora and Dinky had known each other for a long time. If she’d given me a lightgem before we really even knew each other, then surely she would have given one to my now-deceased teacher. I reached for my bottomless bag, and hoped I was correct, as I slid my hoof inside.
Mistmane’s eyebrows rose when she saw the bag. “Oh, you have one of those…interesting, those are an incredibly rare piece of equipment, outside of the Golden Guard. Wherever did you get it?”
“It b-belonged to my t-teacher, Zecora, b-before Apple Bloom H-Hollowed her.”
Mistmane looked down at the floor at my words. “Zecora has Hollowed? I’ve missed quite the chain of events, it would seem...I’ll need to ask Rockhoof for an explanation when I get to Ponyville, I should think.” After a moment, she looked back up at me. “Do you know how it works, and what it’s made out of?”
I blinked at her in confusion, while my hoof was still knee-deep inside the bag. “N-no?”
Mistmane smiled at me. “I think that might be for the better. Don’t leave anything living—or undead—inside the bag. It won’t survive.”
Unsettled, I nodded slowly, and started to imagine the lightgem necklace that Dinky had given me. When that didn’t work, I started to think about it in more abstract terms; the fine details of my own lightgem faded until I was imagining a generic glowing gem on a string. Suddenly, something moving, and covered in dust, pressed against my hoof, and I jerked my leg out of the bag in shock—but clasped in my pyromancer’s grasp was a lightgem, just as I’d hoped.
The lightgem seemed covered in some sort of chalky dust, presumably a remnant from whatever I’d touched inside the bag. I thought they might be fragments of the gem at first, but it seemed undamaged, even if the shape was unfamiliar. After a few moments of confusion, I shook the dust off, and looped the string around my neck, which satisfied Mistmane. “Good. Keep that around your neck, but hide it in your cloak when moving in the open, so it doesn’t attract attention. I’ll also give you one of these.”
Mistmane produced a bag of her own, and withdrew a length of orange soapstone with a smoothed end. I took it, and she pulled from her own bag one last item—her glowing mace. “You should take this too, I think. Like I said, the top of the dam has a great deal of skeletons left to guard it, and this should make short work of them. A tap, a swing, it shouldn’t matter—hit one of the dead with this, and it should disenchant their bones.”
I nodded as I took the proffered mace, and slid it into my bottomless bag, before I dropped my shoddy improvised club in a corner. Meanwhile, Trixie gave Mistmane a pout. “What’s Trixie, chopped celery? No gifts for me?”
Mistmane blinked at Trixie in confusion, and perhaps a touch of annoyance. “You do not strike me as a mare who would wield a club. Even if you were, I don’t have a second one to spare.”
Trixie let out a raspberry, before she moved to the door to look back out over the square.
Mistmane turned back to me, gentle again. “As I said, I’ll create a distraction that should keep them preoccupied. Move through the factory carefully, but quickly, and from there into the buildings at the base of the dam. There should be an elevator in there, that you can use to get up to the top. When you’re finished up there, take the mountain pass out, and I’ll be waiting in the Ponyville town square. Good luck.”
“Th-thank you,” I mumbled, and I smiled at Mistmane again, to which she bowed slightly in response.
“Thank you, for doing this for me. Take good notes, and bring back whatever you can. I’ll be able to reward you both handsomely; personally and professionally, from the Princesses’ coffers.” Even Trixie grinned at that, as Mistmane stood up straight, and passed through the door beside her.
We both watched her leave as she crossed the square, and disappeared from sight. Trixie then started to inspect her hooves, while my own gaze shifted to the looming doorway that led into the weather factory. It hadn’t been accessible from the ground originally, but the Gravewardens had built a ramp, supported by scaffolding, up to the doorway. I could see several piles of bones left to guard it from where we sat, but we could probably step around them. That would be our way inside, then.
After she grew bored of inspecting her hooves, Trixie’s attention became focused on the barricade. The wall itself seemed very sturdy, to the point that they had actually scavenged a rusted metal gate from somewhere in Cloudsdale and brought it here, and managed to install what looked like a fully-functional—if rusty—portcullis to separate this square from the one that had been rebuilt. Eventually, Trixie made a “hm” noise, and started to rub her chin in thought.
I looked up at her in curiosity, because while she seemed content to stay put for the moment, I still couldn’t guess at what she was thinking. “T-Trixie?”
“Hm? What is it, Assistant?” She glanced at me, before she started to sit against the wall in a relaxed pose.
“W-well...you’ve b-been staring at that gate for a w-while…”
Trixie chuckled, and nodded. “Indeed I have! I still say we could get to the dam without having to go through that deathtrap that decrepit mare suggested. Cutting our way through the necromancers would still be easier, I bet.”
She still wanted to…? I rubbed my forehead at her words, though all it did was remind me that I’d had what amounted to a minor headache ever since I woke up originally. Trixie was making it flare up somewhat, although water would maybe help too. If I could trust the water in this valley, considering the condition of the dam. “T-Trixie, we can’t. There’s t-too many, even before they started to use m-magic.”
“Are you suggesting that the Great and Powerful Trixie can’t out-magic a few Necromancers?” The eponymous mare shot me a sour look as she spoke.
“N-not when they have s-so many skeletons...And they c-can get into our m-minds, too.” I shuddered as the voice of my “Master” echoed in my head once more.
“They can get into your head, Assistant.” Trixie grinned as she waved a hoof across her body. “Trixie is positive they attempted to ensorcell her as well, and it failed so miserably that she didn’t even feel it!”
I shook my head again in disbelief. “D-do you ever hear the w-words you’re actually s-saying? What if y-you’re wrong?”
Her face curled into a cocky smirk, and she tipped her witches’ hat in a showy manner. “Trixie is never wrong, Assistant. Honestly, I thought you would have noticed that, by now.”
“I’m n-noticing something, that’s f-for sure…” I mumbled tiredly. I was in the middle of considering if there was anything else I could say to convince Trixie not to attack the bulwark, when the decision was taken from my hooves.
All of a sudden, there was a whistle from down the street, and the pitch of the Gravewarden’s song shifted as a whole towards curiosity, and then a low sort of alarm. A moment later, a thin Necromancer who nearly tripped over his robes with every step galloped up the street, and shouted to the guards at the gate, “Hey! There’s a demon attacking Malleus street! Some sort of big beetle!”
“That’s our distraction,” muttered Trixie, and I nodded in agreement.
The guards scampered from the wall, and only two remained to watch the gate, which opened. The other guards all ran out, and the thin Necromancer led them down the street in a gallop. With most of them gone and distracted, we crept out from the building, and I started to make my way towards the scaffolding, only to notice, a moment later, that I was alone.
Trixie had changed course towards the gate, and it was only good luck that she hadn’t been spotted by the remaining guards in the meantime. “T-Trixie!” I hissed to her. “Come on, th-this way!”
She glanced at me, then back at the gate. She seemed to be weighing her options, and I was about to hiss at her again, when she changed course back towards me. “Fine,” she growled, as she started to follow me up the ramp. “But you're taking the lead. If this crumbling ruin starts to fall apart, then it will not fall out from under Trixie’s hooves!”
We gingerly stepped past the glowing skulls on the scaffolding, and I tried not to cringe whenever the wind or our weight caused the platform to shift. The bright red embers in their sockets burned steadily, unmoving, but I had no doubt that they would awaken if one of us was foolish enough to trip over one of the piles of bones. Soon, we were past them, and we found ourselves looking at the boarded-up door.
This was another frequent victim of graffiti, it seemed; there were several scribblings to the sentiment of “Do not enter,” with one particularly detailed one depicting a stick-pony getting electrocuted. A sloppy, glowing orange skull covered the entirety of one of the doors, while one of the boards across it had “DANGER” simply inscribed upon it. The symbol of the Gravewardens, that simple musical note again, adorned the wall directly beside the door, but it looked incomplete without the tally marks and list of the building’s contents. Presumably, they’d drawn the symbol before they’d attempted entry, and had never finished their exploration of the interior to actually write out the list.
“Well, this looks promising,” Trixie muttered sarcastically. “What about climbing over the building? Is that an option?”
I shook my head. “C-can’t fly, and n-neither can you. C-come on, help me p-pull this board off.”
Removing the wood blocking the door was easy, although doing it quietly was a bit trickier. While we were safely out of sight of the gate, any loud splintering noises would surely attract attention, and so we quietly wiggled the soft wood board free of the nails that had held it in place over the course of a few minutes. When it finally came loose, we both jumped at the loud squeak it made, but none of the Gravewardens seemed to notice, so we set it down beside the door.
When we actually tried to open the door, we found it opened outwards, and it was a good thing it did; as soon as we got it open, it sprang wide open, and we caught it just before it slammed back against the building. A rolling mass of fog poured out of the doorway like a wave, and I think if I’d been standing directly before the doors, I would have been swept off the scaffolding.
Strangely, when the thick fog finished pouring out of the doorway, we found there was still a layer that blocked our path in. It wasn’t solid cloudstone, but it wasn’t normal fog either—even Trixie had trouble pressing forward through it, and it took a concentrated effort to push through the fog wall and into the building. When we both had made it inside, we took a moment to look around, and take in the Exotic Weather Wing.
The room was dimly lit by a long set of windows on the side wall, which was now practically the ceiling. Another set had been present on the opposite wall, but the building had landed on them, and so they were effectively opaque. On both sides, most of the glass in the frames had shattered on impact, and the panes that had somehow survived were dull and grimy from decades of neglect and rainwater.
The calcified factory was subtly disconcerting, because of how sharply vertical the building had come to a rest. My mind kept trying to reorient itself, to turn my hooves so that I stood flat on the floor, only for it to instantly conflict with my personal sense of balance. If it had been completely upside-down, or had at least fallen flat on its side, then I could have handled it much better. No matter what the structure looked like, I would have had a flat surface to stand on. But my hooves were forced to scrape against the slope of the catwalk just to keep my balance, and eventually I clung to the railing and simply shut my eyes to clear my head.
Trixie seemed to be having slightly less issue with it, but only slightly. I heard her scrabble against the metal catwalk, and curse quietly to herself that she was going to be sick.
Once I had stabilized my balance slightly, I opened my eyes again, though I clung to the rusted railing like a drowning pony clung to driftwood. The room we had entered seemed to be dedicated to condensing and packing clouds, heavy with magic, that kept their contents tightly packed within. Most had turned to cloudstone, and lay around the room like great white bricks that leaked melted rainwater, but a few had survived until now. One rattled wildly under a pile of cables, like there was a wild animal trapped inside, while others were still stuck against the ceiling. Their contents had resisted whatever magic had calcified the city, and now the floating bricks were a massive danger waiting to disenchant themselves and plummet through whatever was below, be it floor or catwalk or pony, like the massive hollow brick that they were. One of the packed clouds glowed hotly, as though there was a fire raging within that yearned to escape.
I clenched my eyes shut again. Okay, this room was a massive danger. Disrupting any of those cloud-bricks could be potentially disastrous, and would likely set off a chain reaction that would rupture the rest. We might survive that, but I had my doubts that the building would. Thankfully, the catwalk had looked intact, and crossed the room without requiring any travel across the room. There was a door on the other end, and hopefully that would lead back outside, though the building was much too large for that hope to be realistic.
“C-come on,” I groaned, as I began to blindly clamber across the catwalk. “W-watch your hooves, we j-just need to cross this r-room.”
“Right...lead the way, Assistant.” The irony of the statement did not elude me.
Our hooves shook and rattled as the catwalk wobbled under us, and the metal bars that comprised the railing were woefully inconsistent. Some were rusted, some were missing, and some were so loose that grabbing them for support pulled them from their mounts. I swore as one pulled free, and I was so surprised that I let it fall from my hoof into the room below. I clung to the railing and waited for an explosion, but it never came—only the sharp report as the metal bar clanged off of a packing machine, and then rattled across the floor into a corner, where it came safely to a rest.
I had to open my eyes to more carefully pick across the broken catwalk, and I glanced behind myself to check on Trixie. Her eyes were still open, albeit focused on the metal path, and our treacherous climb across the hall.
Eventually, we made it to the doorway, and I pushed at the door. With a screech of metal as the rusted hinges gave way, the double doors that blocked our way fell into the corridor behind, and rust showered from the broken frame. I climbed through and stood atop them, though I turned to watch Trixie as she followed behind me. She gave me a glare as she crawled over the rusted doorway. “Subtle. Real subtle, Assistant. I’m sure they have no idea that anypony’s trespassing here.”
“If th-they can f-follow us through that…” I mumbled.
Trixie scoffed. “Oh, I doubt it. They’ll probably just be waiting at the exit, and then we’ll have to fight them anyways.”
I winced. Trixie had a point; we’d have to try and be a bit more quiet as we passed through the ruined building, if we didn’t want a welcoming party to greet us on the other side.
The corridor we’d entered had run along the spine of the building, and was lined with doors on either side that led to smaller rooms that isolated different weather machines from each other. Unfortunately, the doors had all long fallen out, so while the ones on the right wall provided dim light for us to see by, the doorways on the left wall were effectively a series of hazardous pits that we would need to cross over. At the very least, they were only single doors, and did not require that they be crossed by jumping; a pony could simply step over the doorway, though they were just wide enough to be off-balance and terrifying.
As we started to cross over them, we leaned against the floor as though it were a wall, and I peeked inside the rooms that we passed by. In one, I recognized an antique cloudwinder for spinning up cyclones; in another, I saw a sparking lightning coil, still powered and dangerous. That one I did jump over, because I didn’t want to be exposed around the live current for any longer than necessary. In fact, the whole building still seemed to have power, though the lights had all burned out; another door looked down into a room with a massive, whirring hail grinder. Though I was willing to bet that the blades had all long grown dull, the fact that it was still gnashing for ice to this day was terrifying, and I was sure that I wouldn’t survive falling in, Hollow or not. I was almost relieved when the next room over was completely empty—the floor within, and whatever machinery it contained, had long fallen out of the building, into a black crevasse below.
The end of the hallway was wreathed in shadow, and as we got close, I could see why. The door on the ceiling had remained closed and intact, and I had a certain ominous feeling as we passed underneath. It wasn’t helped by the fact that we could hear something rattling around and moving inside the room above, and the door groaned worryingly as whatever was inside banged its full weight against the metal.
Trixie in particular seemed annoyed by it. “Can’t those idiots outside hear that racket? It’s making more noise than we ever did-”
I think it heard Trixie, because the rattling suddenly grew frenzied, and the door rattled repeatedly as whatever it was bounced against it. The metal shrieked and groaned, and we both scampered past as quick as we could. But we’d barely made it a few steps further down the hallway before the door latch gave way, and the door slammed open with a squeal and a flash of light.
We were blinded by even the dim light filtering through the fog and the broken window within the room, but I saw something fall through the doorway, bounce off the open doorway below it, and rebound straight towards us. I shoved Trixie out of the way, and she sprawled across the wall with a yelp, while I had moved myself directly in the path of whatever it was.
The thin edge of a carriage wheel slammed against my breast and threw me back, and I was bounced down the hallway, where I managed to scrape against the floor for purchase. My hind legs still fell over the edge, and I found myself hanging by my fores from an open doorway, winded from the impact. The creature finally skidded to a stop next to me, and I got a decent look at it.
A pony must have been tangled in the wheel of a carriage before they died, because they were still tangled around it in death, with their body jammed amongst the spokes. The skeleton chattered wildly at me as it staggered to its hooves, the wheel bouncing on the floor as it found its balance. A twin pair of glowing gold embers within its sockets flicked between me, and Trixie, before it decided that I was apparently no threat. It turned to Trixie, and dove forward, as if they were attempting to roll. Instead, the carriage wheel began to roll, and they kicked their hooves as they bounced down the corridor to pick up speed. The wheel skeleton catapulted itself suicidally towards Trixie, and she let out a screech of horror before launching a firework directly at it.
The blast knocked it to the side and made it miss her, and so she started running down the hallway, horn aglow to light her way. It slid to a stop behind her, and the wooden wheel ground against the cloudstone wall as it turned, and then dove into a roll once more. Trixie leapt over me, and the wheel skeleton followed a moment later, to her horror. I focused on trying to climb up to safety, but I could hear blasts of magic and Trixie swearing behind me.
A moment later, I managed to pull myself up out of the doorway and onto the wall, but as soon as I stood up, something thin yet heavy slammed me in the back, and hammered me flat against the wall under my hooves. The world spun as I looked up, dazed, and saw the wheel skeleton bouncing back down the hallway, all the way through the door and onto the catwalk. One last bolt of magic from Trixie slammed into it there, and knocked it off-balance.
When it landed, it had too much force, and the metal catwalk that we had crawled over sheared off entirely. The entire construction, skeleton and all, fell into the room below with a deafening clang. A moment later, something in the room exploded, and a massive burst of ice crystals expanded upwards, filling the room, the doorway, and they began to expand down the hallway. It was like an explosion made entirely out of magical ice, and I swore as I scrambled to my hooves.
My head was still spinning as I jumped over the last two doorways, and Trixie had barely gotten the door at the end open as I galloped to the end of the hallway. Together, we leapt through into the sunlight, and Trixie slammed the door shut with a crack, as it smashed against an ice crystal that had been following us out. We backed away from the door a moment later, as the metal surface fogged and froze, and ice crystals began to form in the doorframe and on the surface. But the door held strong, at least for the moment, and that was good enough for us to look around.
We’d emerged from the fallen wing of the weather factory into a cramped back alley formed by the sheared slabs of the city, and another set of scaffolding built up to the door. SOmehow, no cultists had come to investigate the racket we’d made, though I could see smoke curling up over the building.
Trixie glared at the door for a long moment, then spat on it. The spit froze the second it touched the door, and formed a smear of ice. “Luna-damned wheels are going to hound me for the rest of my life!”
“W-what?”
“What?” Trixie turned her glare on me when I spoke.
“Y-you said something about w-wheels-”
“That is a story that Trixie is not going to tell you,” she growled, in a tone that left no room for negotiation. I nodded uneasily, and together, we started down the scaffolding on this side of the building.
When we reached the corner, I peered out, and Trixie leaned over me to look as well. While we could see several Gravewardens from where we were, they all seemed preoccupied with running down the street towards the burning end of the weather factory. We had made our own distraction, this time. I pointed at a small building at the base of the dam, labeled “Upper Dam Access Elevator” and decorated, as though it were a shrine, with hundreds of wax candles.
When nopony was looking, we bolted across the open space and ran inside, where Trixie jammed a chair under the door handle. While she did that, I looked around at what seemed like a long maintenance office; shelves lined the walls, and those shelves had been lined with skulls. Spare parts were scattered everywhere, as well as a couple of toolboxes, with the open ones being filled with more candles. Every single one of the skulls on the shelves had two glowing red embers in their eye sockets.
“O-okay,” I mumbled in terror. “L-let’s just move s-slowly through here.” Trixie nodded beside me, a look of revulsion across her face, and we slowly paced down the center of the hallway, as far away from both the walls as we could be.
Thankfully, we reached the end of the hallway without disturbing any of them, and found a gated elevator inside. The shaft was dark, but I experimentally hit the button for the elevator, and a groaning, rattling mechanical noise echoed down from above.
“Just how old is all of this machinery?” Trixie hissed under her breath. “This elevator has to be centuries old, this can’t be right…can it even hold our weight?”
I shrugged, as I glanced nervously back at all of the glowing skulls behind us. I swore I saw one shudder, but I think it was just my imagination. “It b-better, or else we’re st-stuck down here...”
To Trixie’s surprise, and my relief, the elevator did actually come to a rest before us. The metal gates groaned and shrieked like the rest of the rusted metal down here, and they locked up when they were only halfway open, but me and Trixie were able to pull them open enough to get inside. The elevator itself swayed and shook as we climbed in, but it hadn’t collapsed yet, at least.
We pulled the elevator gates closed once more, and I suddenly felt very trapped inside the tiny lift with Trixie. If it did fall, we would be stuck at the bottom of an elevator shaft, and we’d never see the sunlight again. But Trixie seemed impatient, and she had already hit the button before I could say anything about my fears.
The elevator rattled and shook again, before it slowly began to drag upwards towards the top floor of the dam. Trixie sighed, and closed her eyes as she tilted her head back in what seemed like relief, before she muttered sarcastically, “But I don’t want to ride the elevator!”