//------------------------------// // 556 - Down and Out // Story: Lateral Movement // by Alzrius //------------------------------// Every step had become a challenge. The ground was rough and uneven, and more than once a slight dip or bump in the terrain had sent him sprawling, unable to see even such minor obstacles in the pitch blackness. Other times he had walked face-first into a wall, and although he’d been moving at a pace slower than a walk, the impact had still been painful. More than once, he’d tasted blood as a result, though that might have been because he’d re-opened some of the injuries he’d acquired in that last fight. Even so, he knew it could have been worse. As much as each impact hurt, colliding with a wall or loosing his hoofing were mild consequences compared to what could happen if he wasn’t careful. It was why he now took each step with utmost caution, reaching forward from a stationary position and tapping the ground ahead of him before moving forward. It had reduced his progress to a snail’s crawl, but it would prevent him from accidentally plunging off a ledge and falling to his death. And Silhouette refused to die before he’d had his revenge on Lex Legis. That was why he was down here now, crawling like a worm through the caves beneath Canterlot. This had been the way out of the city that Silhouette had least wanted to take, knowing how dangerous the route would be. While sneaking onto a train would have been far more preferable, it simply wasn’t possible. Even if his appearance hadn’t been so distinctive, with his stark coloration and withered hind leg, most of the guards knew him personally. While he considered none of them to be his peers, let alone his friends, he had still worked with them enough to develop at least casual familiarity with the majority of them, something that would work both ways should they catch even a glimpse of him now. The next alternative had been to sneak onto an airship. Canterlot had plenty of those, ranging from mail delivery liners to private pleasure barges owned by the city’s richest residents. But those had risks all their own, the major one being that – unlike how a train would continue toward its destination in all but the most dire of circumstances – an airship could easily turn around and return to Canterlot if a stowaway were discovered. And the risk of discovery was not something to be dismissed lightly; while most airships were bigger than a train car, they weren’t bigger than the dozen or so cars that most of the trains to and from Canterlot pulled. That meant fewer places to hide, especially since airships tended to make optimal use of every square inch of space they had; finding someplace that didn’t see at least moderate use during anything longer than a brief voyage to sequester himself in would likely have proven to be difficult at best. And just to make things more difficult, the Royal Guard had apparently let a group of scofflaws slip out of the city right under their noses recently. While Silhouette wasn’t certain what the details of that incident were, he’d overheard snatches of conversation during his time hiding out in that gossipmonger’s apartment – the voices of passersby floating in through the windows or in the hallway outside her front door – talking about how the guards had briefly grounded all air traffic and searched the train yard. The implication had been that they’d been looking for someone, and from what he’d been able to piece together, they’d apparently failed to catch them. Silhouette held his fellow guards in contempt on general principle; they more or less revered the princesses, but their feelings fell well short of true faith. Beyond that, there was a pervasive view among their ranks that becoming part of the Royal Guard was an accomplishment that didn’t need to be further built upon. While there were some stallions who worked hard in hope of advancement – mostly ones with cutie marks related to guard duty, and so planned on staying enrolled for life – the majority of the Royal Guard treated their time there as a temporary digression from their true calling, setting aside a few years of service out of a sense of patriotism or because it looked good on a résumé, and then moving on…which they could do as they pleased, since the princesses didn’t believe in compulsory service. That attitude, combined with how tedious many found their duties to be (guarding empty hallways for hours at a stretch was a common source of exasperated jokes among the ranks) meant that most members of the Royal Guard were little more than showpieces in uniforms, at least in Silhouette’s view. But for all of their laxity, they had their pride. Having just let some other ponies slip by them, they wouldn’t be eager to let it happen again, which meant that if they were watching the train station and airshipyards for him – which seemed likely now, given how violent his altercation with those hack journalists had been – they would almost certainly make an actual effort to catch him. And if they spotted him in his current state, they’d likely succeed. Silhouette had always taken his guard duties with the utmost seriousness, knowing that his actions reflected upon the one whom he worshiped with all of his heart. For her sake, he had filled his off-duty hours with training and prayer, eager to mold himself into the perfect symbol of devotion. And if his rigor – along with his pronounced lack of tolerance for even the slightest hint of disrespect toward the alicorn who was the object of his devotion – had won him little camaraderie among his fellow guards, it hadn’t kept him from being promoted to the rank of commander, in part due to his fighting prowess. Even with his bad leg, and without his armor, two reporters without any combat training shouldn’t have given him a hard time. But they had. For all his training, a pair of civilian unicorns – a stallion who was clearly past his prime and a mare whose will should have been broken – had very nearly overpowered him. Even those brats who’d gotten in his way back in Vanhoover hadn’t managed such a thing, since their strategy had been merely to stall him while one of their number ran for help, otherwise he’d have defeated those foals in short order. But this time he’d won only because he’d managed to knock Nosey Newsy’s editor out a window, sending the mare herself rushing after him in a panic and giving him a chance to escape…though not before several bystanders had gotten a good look at him, he was sure. As it was, he was still feeling the injuries he’d taken in that fight. His split lip – courtesy of that old stallion – still ached every time he ran his tongue over it, and one of his back teeth was suspiciously loose. Of more concern was the shot he’d taken to his ribs; the ache was refusing to fade, and even lightly brushing his hoof against it made him bite back a groan of pain. To think that four-eyed nag had done that to him! Taken together, his wounds painted a grim picture. Not so much of his physical state (though that was certainly poor as well), but of his competence in the wake of being brought back to life. And that worried him. Hadn’t Princess Twilight mentioned something about that, in the moments after he’d come back to life? He couldn’t remember it clearly, since that moment was obscured by the soul-searing pain of seeing what Lex Legis had done to his Goddess, but there was a vague sense that the youngest alicorn had said something to that effect. If she had, then she hadn’t been wrong. Ever since then, Silhouette had felt a persistent lethargy dogging him, as though he was walking around with invisible weights affixed to his body. While not truly debilitating, it nevertheless dulled his reflexes, depleted his stamina, and took the edge off of his strength. Worse, it seemed to cut into his situational awareness, making him slightly slower to recognize and react to his surroundings than he knew he was otherwise capable of. Even basic things such as memory and simple computations now required a moment or two of additional thought. And while none of those were major problems in isolation, together they served to reduce him to the point where, well…where two untrained unicorns had nearly bested him. Actual guards, no matter how incompetent they were, would likely subdue him easily if he encountered them. And if coming back to life had debilitated him to the point where he couldn’t even handle two ordinary ponies, then his chances of defeating Lex Legis – a sorcerer of such power that he had triumphed over multiple alicorns on his own – in battle were nil. But that didn’t mean he was incapable of avenging his Goddess. Ah, Luna… Just thinking her name – her holy, sacred name – sent a ripple of ecstasy down his spine, and Silhouette came to a halt as he enjoyed the sensation. But the feeling was a pale shadow of what it had once been, tainted now by the memory of seeing her wretched and wingless, wailing as he beheld the blasphemy that Lex Legis had worked upon her once-flawless self. A whine rose in his throat as the unwanted memory ruined what should have been a moment of rapture, denying him the peace he missed so desperately. It was enough to make him consider lying down and letting himself drift off to sleep. The promise of the sacred communion with the one who ruled his heart was tantalizing, letting him recall when she came to him in his dreams and comforted his troubled mind. The memories of how the demons had ravaged his poor brother while Manehattan had burned, once the bane of his unconscious hours, had miraculously faded away under her gentle ministrations. It had been a life-changing experience. Helpless within her sacred magic, a force as gentle as it was overwhelming, the serenity he’d felt as she’d manipulated his dream – touching his very soul – had been an experience far more intimate than anything mere lovers could have shared. Under Luna’s power, he was naked and exposed, all of his flaws and imperfections made manifest to her eyes, and she in her grace and mercy had not turned away from the ugliness within him, but instead seen fit to wipe it away, cleansing him and leaving him renewed. That he might experience such a thing again had been part of his nightly prayers, ashamed of his own selfishness and yet unable to keep from hoping that his Goddess would deign to visit him again, bringing him to bliss once more. It was something that would never happen again, now. Even if she was still capable of reigning over dreams, the mark of Lex Legis’s power over her was indelibly stamped on his mind now, as was the way she’d bleated – broken and whimpering – as the other princesses had proven powerless to restore her. It had broken him to witness, making it impossible for him to pray to her with faith in his heart anymore, and where he’d once hoped for nothing more than to have the Goddess enter his dreams again, he now feared the prospect, not wanting to experience the lack of rapture that he knew would result. Normally, avoiding any chance of her finding his dreams was easily done, since all he needed to do was match his sleep schedule to hers. But that was impossible to do in a cave. Now all he could do was stay awake as best he could as he stumbled forward, inch by wary inch, and curse himself for never having thought to inquire if there was a map of these tunnels. As it was, he’d already expended what knowledge he had of them, gained when he’d been freshly enlisted and given a grunt job cleaning out some of the upper mines so that they could be converted in archives for old records. That was the only reason he’d known about these caves at all, since they’d long since been abandoned (despite the gems they contained being far from depleted) due to fears that digging too far down would lead to somepony accidentally breaching Tartarus, the underworld beneath Mount Canterlot where the most dangerous monsters in all of Equestria were imprisoned. Fortunately, nopony had expected him to head back to those archives now, slipping inside during a shift change, and from there to deeper caverns. It was far from a perfect escape plan, though. He hadn’t had a chance to bring any food, his only sources of water were where condensation had dripped down from the ceiling and collected into puddles, and it was unpleasantly cold. And while a unicorn would have been able to light up the darkness with even a minor spell, since their horn glowed whenever they used magic, he was trapped in darkness that had not even the faintest light to break it. But he kept going anyway. Somewhere there was a way out. Twilight Sparkle had gotten Princess Cadance out of these same caverns once, and while Silhouette had no idea where he’d emerge, the fact that most ponies still didn’t know that there were tunnels beneath Canterlot suggested that wherever the exit was, it was far from prying eyes. Far enough that he’d almost certainly be past the guards, letting him make his way down the mountain without them realizing he’d already slipped by them. That was a gamble, of course. But it was the sort of gamble that he knew he’d need to take if he ever wanted to be able to make Lex Legis pay for what he’d done. The first of many. The information that he’d gotten out of Nosey Newsy hadn’t been very helpful. A great deal of it had been things that he’d already known, or had been able to guess. But there had been nuggets of useful knowledge here and there, enough for Silhouette to realize what he needed to do to make his revenge more than a flight of fancy. And while he might fall into Tartarus in the attempt – literally, with how deep these caves seemed – it was worth making. Besides, the hard parts would come later. Right now, all he needed to focus on was getting to the next step of what would likely be a long and dangerous journey: Ponyville.