//------------------------------//
// Journey Through the Dark - Part 2 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
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Was she really going to enter through the front door?
Yeah, she was. She had to reassure herself multiple times that it was the most reasonable thing to do, but she did manage to convince herself of what she knew was true in the end. Because for all the attention guards were obviously putting on ponies walking in through the front gates, someone walking in through the walls or back entrance would have been far more out of the ordinary.
And she wasn't just walking in by herself, no. She waited, just outside the castle, for the next pony to arrive. They'd been keeping an eye on things, before her mission there, and though regular ponies visiting were infrequent they had found that there was a rather steady and regular set of reports being brought in by guards. And while the bat-winged ponies at the gates were busy checking in on the newest arrivals, she silently made her way past them, then into the castle itself once the doors opened for them.
It almost felt anticlimactic. Hours of careful preparation and delicate study to make up the perfect set of spells, and the result of it all was nothing happening. The intended result, sure, but simply stepping into the castle unseen under the guards' noses felt a little at odds with the tension of the whole situation.
And so did still walking past guards inside the castle's hallways, all blissfully unaware of her presence. Those were the perks of being a skilled magic user, she supposed. It did make her wonder if Celestia or Luna themselves had ever done something similar within their own castles or towns, to see how things were normally. Maybe Celestia had used it to sneak into the kitchens. Maybe Luna had used it to learn what ponies thought of her night, a millennium and some years before.
She did have to ask about the exact date of Sombra's banishment relative to Nightmare Moon's at some point. She always forgot to for some reason.
Twilight shook herself. She needed to focus, even if she didn't like what she had to focus on, which she supposed was the reason ber brain was wandering so much. She still remembered where she'd found the passage the previous time, and how close she'd gone to being found out then for that matter, but she wasn't planning to go down that way. Too risky, and she'd already seen everything she could easily access there.
But there was more to the corridors and rooms underneath the castle. The place she'd ended up in with Chrysalis, she'd realised, was another such place. And though she'd only gotten a passing, hurried glance at it, there was a laboratory there. A laboratory she'd learned the purposes of on her last full visit. She was even fairly sure the room they'd been inside of was the room those experiments had been conducted in, though she couldn't be completely sure of it, of course.
The point was that she'd only found the records of the failed experiments. And everything she'd found in Equestria pointed to there being more than just failures coming out of that place. She needed to know what they were to face, at least, if they could not avoid a confrontation.