//------------------------------// // Misery // Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot // by Equimorto //------------------------------// Twilight studied the door in front of her for a moment. She looked left and right, making sure no one else was nearby, then opened it and stepped through. She closed it behind her, magically locking it again and hoping no one would notice any differences. She'd checked as best as she could that the spells would match up with the previous ones, and she was fairly certain she'd done a good job there, she just wasn't sure if she'd missed something. No alarms had seemed to go off, at least. She walked farther inside, carefully taking one step after the other as her eyes got used to the low light of the room she was in. She didn't plan to cast any light spells. Masking her own shadows was hard enough, properly making the light she'd cast and its results invisible would have been an extremely complicated task. Blinking as she got used to the darkness, she realised she was inside some sort of small storage room. Very narrow and short, made even more cramped by the shelves on every wall except the one with the door. The space she could walk on wasn't much larger than the door itself had been, and only about three times as long as it was wide. But Twilight knew it had to be more than just storage. They wouldn't have gone through the trouble of boarding up the door with so many spells if all it was protecting had been a bunch of bottles and jars and boxes. It was another layer of security, in case someone managed to get in there by accident. She just needed to keep looking. And keep looking she did. It didn't take too long, not with her magic scanning over the shelves' contents and the walls. There was no magical switch, interestingly, but she still detected the empty space behind the wall opposite from her. A few seconds of fidgeting around later, she found the mechanism holding the fake wall and the shelf attached to it in place, and pushed it open. The space beyond was even darker, though the hints of light she could see if she looked down made it clear that she was standing at the top of a narrow spiral staircase that plunged into the ground. Stepping forward and down the first few steps, Twilight closed the fake wall behind her, and began her descent.