Sunny sighed.
The past three days had been rough, but they made it. They pushed their way through the thick foliage and weathered another, a much smaller zorbo attack. Only two of the koala-like carnivores managed to cross their paths, and they scared them off without much difficulty.
Though it did worry her that they crossed a pack of only two creatures, she didn’t complain about the far-more manageable fight with only two zorbos. Now, with the fourth day of their journey nearly ending, they were finally approaching the windtower.
The giant Lusitanpec structure towered over them and the canopy of the trees around it. Marble and Sunny were close enough to make it to the base if they pushed for another hour or so, but Sunny already figured they might need to move through an afternoon to get there. With that in mind, she spent even more of her time foraging the night before and found enough food to feed them tonight as well.
Assuming they could use the tower to camp in, they could make up the resting time while only needing to reinforce a spot or two in the building. The work from the day before would pay off tonight, and they could rest in something more sturdy than a lean-to of wood and leaves.
“Well, Marble, here we are,” she finally said as they walked onto the landing of cut stone that the jungle tried to reclaim with vines and roots.
The pegasus stared up at it with barely restrained glee. “I can’t believe we found one!” he said. “I wish I knew where we were so I could properly mark this place down in our map of Lusitanpec borders.”
Sunny resisted the urge to correct him. Form her guess, they were already deep into the Lusitanpec territory. Still, Marble already made it clear that he didn’t want her help in history lessons, so she kept her knowledge to herself.
She led him into the tower’s antechamber, which yawned above them into a domed ceiling marked with winged, snake-like creatures that Celestia recognized as simple depictions of couatls.
She glanced over at Marble, who appeared giddy for all intents and purposes. The pegasus flew up to the dome and nearly cooed as he traced over the carvings with his hooves. “Look at this!” he whispered in awe. “Their condition is exquisite! They look practically untouched! We must have found a completely unspoiled tower! Just imagine what we can find here!”
Sunny smiled despite herself and shook her head at his surprisingly contagious enthusiasm. “I imagine we might find a lot,” she said before turning his attention back to the area around her. The antechamber didn’t offer her a good place to rest, but its excellent condition meant something should have been living here at least. It would have made a lovely den for a panther, jaguar, or thessalhydras. Something should be living there, but Sunny saw no sign of spoor or other marks of territory. Nothing was living here, but there should have been.
The disguised alicorn glanced around the large chamber and found two doors, one on each side of the room. “Keep an eye out for anything suspicious,” she said. “I’m going to look around for a good place to set up camp.”
“You’re going exploring?” he asked.
“I’m looking for a place to camp,” she replied. “I’m trying to make sure the place is safe so we can camp properly.”
“I’m going with you!” Marble said.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m going with you! If you’re going to explore an untouched Windtower, I want to go with you.”
Sunny sighed. “Fine, come on.”
They took the right-handed door first and began climbing the stairs. Sunny took deep breaths as they went up, trying to keep her muscles relaxed if something attacked. She could grab the stone around her to use as a weapon, but that might weaken the wall’s integrity around her. The plant life wasn’t as thick up here, either, so using vine whips or something similar wouldn’t be a good idea either, the higher magic cost notwithstanding.
She might have to use her drinking water as a weapon. Unfortunately, that meant she might wind up spending hours trying to clean her water, and she still needed to actually rest tonight. Then again, she did have her machete, which would not be quite as effective, but it might just hit the middle spot of not being a pain no matter what she did.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, she supposed.
She halfway opened the lid to her canteen and continued their climb.
“There’s a room up ahead,” Marble said.
“I see it,” she replied.
Sunny continued up the stairs before she finally made her way up to the double doors. She raised a hoof to open the door, almost without thinking and—
“Wait!”
Marble’s sudden cry rang in her ear as she slowly turned to him. “Yes?” she asked calmly, even though she knew that Celestia’s furious glare was peeking through.
“The door’s trapped,” he replied.
Sunny glanced at him. “What?”
“The door’s trapped, the left one,” he replied simply.
“The door’s trapped?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“That symbol right there,” he said, pointing to his wing at a pony skull with eyes surrounding it. Less than half the size of Sunny’s hoof, the little carving sat underneath a primitive doorknob, nearly impossible to see. “That is Milchetcli, Lusitanpec goddess of death.”
“That one is the goddess of death?” Sunny asked. “What about that one?”
“That one’s just a skull. You can tell because the skull’s wearing a necklace of eyeballs.”
Sunny glanced at him when he said that. Sure, Celestia was vaguely familiar with dozens of pantheons she outlasted, but to represent a goddess with a skull, when that was already a massive cultural throughline in basically every piece of art they ever produced.
That’s hyperbole, inner Celestia noted.
“More than half of their art,” she corrected herself.
Fair enough.
The point was, it seemed strange that they represent such an important figure as a deity with a symbol that wound up being so common that they needed to specify it with something else.
“Okay,” Sunny said. “Why does that make it a mark of a trap?”
“Milchetcli typically marks domains of the dead,” he said, motioning Sunny to step back.
She relented.
Marble glanced down at the door and the grinning skull of the death goddess. “They’re her domain, after all, but according to current findings, we believe that she metaphorically stood at the gates of the underworld. In fact, we’ve typically found images of her in front of graveyards and such. The working theory then is that she’s always posted at doorways that lead to death.”
“So you’re assuming that this door leads to death?” she asked.
He nodded before he stepped to the side before pushing the door open. It swung a whole foot open before he stopped. “There’s some resistance there,” he said. “Can you push the door the rest of the way with magic?”
She raised an eyebrow but nonetheless took the door in her magic. The door swung an inch further, and something clicked. A dart flew through the air, snapping against the stone of the other door.
Marble was on it in a second and picked up the tiny needle. He held up his hoof to it and frowned. “Poison. Freshly applied.”
He glanced at the door. “Can you close the door and open it again?” he asked.
Sunny, still raising an eyebrow, did what he asked. She closed the left-hand door before opening it again, and again the door opened a foot wide before it clicked and fired another dart.
Marble picked that up and examined it as well. “Also wet. Fascinating. It not only has a reloading mechanism, but I can only assume that they have a mechanism to actively poison the darts.”
While he continued on, Sunny’s inner Celestia spoke up. “You would have totally had to cheat if he hadn’t stopped you just then.”
What?
“You would have walked right into the dart, and you would have been poisoned. Then you would have had to cheat to stop the poison in time, and then you’d have to explain that Marble.”
That was unfair. Sunny could probably counteract poison with a control body spell. It certainly fell under the purview of that branch of magic.
“It just takes more time,” her inner Celestia smugly noted. “The poisons on traps, though, tend to act very fast. You know that.”
Sunny mentally glanced at her inner Celestia. “Whose side are you even on?”
“Go ahead and close the door,” Marble said.
Sunny did so, and the pegasus glanced at the right door. “This one isn’t marked with anything. It might be safe, but we should try to be more careful. We don’t know what else could be trapped.”
Sunny opened the right-handed door, and nothing clicked or shot out to kill them. She glanced over to Marble, who made another check at the door before Sunny decided to retake the lead.
The room appeared empty, much like the antechamber, though stone benches marked this room as a place to rest. An old firepit spoke of meals cooked here by whoever operated this tower.
“I think we can rest here,” Sunny said.
“Great, can we start setting up?”
“Not yet,” Sunny said. “We need to make sure that there’s nothing else living in the tower. I don’t want to go to sleep if there’s something still behind us.”
“That’s fair enough,” Marble said.
Avoiding the trapped door, they continued up the stairs before they found themselves reaching another door, with a set of stairs heading back down just opposite them. “That probably leads back down to the antechamber,” she said.
“So what’s in there?” Marble asked, pointing to the stone doors.
“Don’t know yet. Why don’t you check it for traps?”
Marble nodded and began checking the entire door for any esoteric signs that might reveal that it’s trapped. Meanwhile, Sunny glanced down the other set of stairs. If the tower’s architecture wound up being symmetrical, then there had to be another door down there on the other side of the building, midway down these stairs.
Then again, if the tower was built symmetrically, then they should have already crossed the stairs once before. Did the stairs strangely double-back in the stone? Did the stairs on the other side of the tower bend around weirdly?
“The door doesn’t look trapped,” Marble finally said.
“Good,” she replied before she turned to face the doors. “I’ll open them,” she said, before adding as an afterthought, “with my magic, just in case.”
Marble nodded, smiling from ear to ear.
“What are you smiling about?” Sunny asked, glancing at him.
“Oh, it’s just that the tower is in great condition. If we manage to get a team of archeologists here from the university, we might be able to actually learn—”
Sunny pushed the doors open, and they quickly realized that their initial assumption that the tower had been untouched was wrong. Someone had been here, and they had sacked the room.
---☼---
Marble felt his mouth drop open.
Who did this? Why would anyone do this?
Lusitanpec books, complex characters carefully painted on pressed wood bark had been scattered and stepped on. Ancient stone chests had been shattered open, and their contents were stolen. A strange podium, attached to a machine whose purpose might have been speculated, lay in pieces.
Everything had been torn to shreds.
“Wh-who…? Why?”
Sunny wandered in from behind him. The unicorn stepped inside and glanced at the room before picking up one of the books.
Thin wooden pages slipped out of the broken spine as she glanced at the cover. “Somepony’s been here.”
Marble turned to her as though she said the most obvious thing in the world.
She didn’t turn to face him, and his glare went unnoticed. “This book is burned, so it couldn’t have been an animal or anything.”
Marble blinked. An animal hadn’t even crossed his mind. He dropped the look on his face when he realized that it could have been a possibility before Sunny’s following words caught his full attention.
“What’s more, they didn’t care about money.”
“What?” Marble asked. “How do you know that?”
“Between private collectors, universities, and researchers, anyone trying to make money could just sell these artifacts to any number of ponies. These were just trampled underhoof.”
Marble blinked.
“So the question is, what did they actually want?” Sunny muttered before his eyes turned to the chest.
Marble followed her gaze to the shattered container.
The unicorn approached the open chest and glanced down into it, where nothing remained. “I don’t know what I expected to find.”
“That’s why we won’t find it in the chest,” Sunny’s voice called, and Marble turned to see her picking through the stone and wooden machinery that lay scattered around the podium. “What I want to know is what was so important about this machinery that whoever came here had to destroy it. Or, possibly, what they took from it?”
Marble glanced up at it.
Sunny looked over at him for a moment. “Anything in your books that might explain this?”
“No,” he replied. “At least I have no way of knowing without seeing it in one piece, and even then, we don’t have a lot on Lusitanpec machinery.”
A comment about how she would surely know bubbled up to his lips before he shoved it back down. He didn’t need to keep bringing up her little “theory” about the totem here. In fact, he should probably let this slide. She just proved that she could figure out more about this room than he could with her...educated guesses.
Just like the totem was an educational guess, huh?
Maybe...maybe her hypotheses here were also wildly inaccurate here. Perhaps they did just want money, and they had just been careless.
“Maybe that was a spell gem?” Marble asked. “That might be why they were here, to steal the gem?”
Sunny frowned. “That could have been it. There would be fewer buyers for a pre-matrixed gem,” despite that, she shook her head. “This doesn’t seem right, though. It doesn’t…make sense…” she whispered the last words before she circled the podium.
“Of course, because I can’t ever be right, can I?” Marble thought with a bitter frown.
Marble turned back to the chest and began searching in earnest. If he found something, some kind of sign that the chest held something valuable enough to sell, then that might work, but he wasn’t sure—
“Well, well,” Sunny said behind him. “This might be something we need to hold onto.”
Marble turned to her. “That’s thievery.”
“Sure,” Sunny replied, as she held up something in her magic, “but we’re trying to survive.”
“What is it?” Marble asked.
“A dagger,” she replied. “Which you’ll probably need if you’re going to make it across the jungle.”
“What?”
“We’re in the middle of the jungle, and we’ve already been attacked several times. I can use magic, and while I can hand you my machete, I’ll normally be using it, and if an emergency happens, we might not have the time.”
“So you’ll hand me a knife?”
“A magic one,” she told him.
“How do you know?”
“The giant gemstone is a bit of a giveaway,” Sunny replied.
He glanced at the dagger, which looked like it had been built with a long handle to accommodate hooves instead of wings or horns. The cut onyx gemstone glimmered with light that seemed to originate in its depths. The blade itself seemed to be… “Is...is that a tooth?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Sunny said. “Vampiric Flying Fox fang, if I were to guess.”
“Pardon?”
“You know vampire fruit bats?” Sunny asked.
“Yes,” Marble answered, concerned.
“Imagine one of those, but they drink blood, and, well…” she motioned to the dagger blade made from a tooth, “they’re big enough to make daggers out of their fangs.”
“Vampiric flying fox?” Marble asked, trying the words on his tongue.
“Calling them bats made them sound too small,” she replied.
“Foxes aren’t that big either!”
“It was a close approximation,” she replied. “The other option was calling them actual vampires and causing a country-wide panic. Not that it helped. They’re nearly extinct today anyway.”
Marble blinked.
“So I’ve read at least,” Sunny said quickly. “The Conservation Committee has some comprehensive records.”
“Okay…” Marble said before turning back to the dagger. “So, do you know what it does?”
“Not a clue,” Sunny admitted. “I don’t know the magic identification spells.”
“But you’re sure it’s magic?” he asked.
“I can’t confirm it with a spell, but I’m fairly certain. Gemstones don’t normally glow like that when they’re unenchanted.”
“No idea what it does, though?”
“Nope. You’ll have to figure that out.”
Marble stared down at it.
“When you get back to civilization, you can turn it into the Canterlot University. The chances of you breaking it are minimal, and you might as well use it to stay alive while you’re trying.”
Marble sighed and took the dagger. “Here’s to hoping.”
“You’ll be fine. Come on, we need to make sure the rest of the tower is secure.”
Sunny continued on, leading Marble down the other set of stairs, which moved down the tower in an unbroken line without doubling back. They did find another room, on the opposite side of the structure, and it, too, proved empty except for some long-rotted away spears, though Marble did note that they had metal spearheads.
That wasn’t too surprising. Iron goods were traded late in the life of the various kingdoms. The fact that they were left behind seemed stranger than anything else.
Sunny picked through them for anything she could use but left empty-handed despite her effort.
Finally, they returned to the resting room, and Sunny began setting up her hammock in the room before she checked the light outside. “I’m going to get some firewood before it gets too dark to see. Go ahead and eat, drink, and get ready to stand watch. I’ll be back soon.”
Marble let her go and shook his head.
There went the mare that was always right, and he had to be stuck with her.