//------------------------------// // Chapter 25 // Story: Celestia Goes West // by DungeonMiner //------------------------------// “Get in, try and grab a feather, get out,” Sunny recited. “Seems easy enough.” The road led them to another pyramidal temple, though it stood twice as tall and four times as wide at the base. What’s more, a carved statue of the Coatl sat at the bottom of the stairs up the structure, marking it as a temple to the flying serpent. Between the sheer size and the statue, there was little doubt that a feather lay hidden inside. Of course, the bigger question is whether or not the black-vested pony and their murder monkey were already there. Luckily, they wouldn’t be there, and Sunny and Marble could deal with the traps themselves without worrying about anypony trying to get the jump on them. “Easy?” Marble asked. “Sure,” Sunny said. “Easy?” he asked again. “Of course! The worst we have to do is work through a few traps, maybe a small group of thugs, no big deal.” Marble blinked at her while giving her an unamused look that Sunny began to enjoy. “How much of this bravado is an act you’re putting on, and how much is just the fact that you’re just crazy?” “Who says that I’m putting on an act?” Sunny replied with a smirk. Marble frowned, and the unicorn bit back a laugh. “Well, are we going to stand here all day, or are we going to get up there and find the secrets of a long-dead people?” “You worry me, you know that?” Marble asked. “I should hope so,” Sunny said as she began to climb the stairs. “I’m a mad mare chasing an adrenaline high by leaping into the jungle. If that doesn’t inspire some concern, then much of what I understand about the world is incorrect.” Sunny continued to climb, leading the pair up without looking back, a habit she developed as Princess until they made it about halfway up. There, the pyramid flattened out, with a second-tier upon which the rest of the temple was built. “So do we want to try for a side entrance here, if there is one?” Marble asked. “I’m not sure,” Sunny said. “If there is a side entrance, it will let us get into the depths of the pyramid fairly quickly, but since we don’t know where the feather would be hiding, even if it’s in there, to begin with. It could be at the top for all we know, in the little altar building.” “Yes, that’s why I asked which way you want to go,” Marble asked, clearly unamused. Sunny shrugged. “Hey, if we’re on the same page, then at least we’re communicating well.” “You still haven’t answered the question, though,” Marble muttered. The disguised Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Let’s keep climbing, then. We know the temple has a way in, but we don’t know if the temple has any side entrances. I’d rather not waste time looking for a door only to wind up heading back up to the temple if we don’t find one.” Marble nodded, accepting that answer. With only a few more moments of rest to catch their breath, they continued the climb to the very top. Inside the small temple building, they once again found the image of the coatl covering the back wall and ceiling of the room, above the altar that dominated the room. Sunny glanced around at it before she found the two narrow stairways that began to descend into the pyramid below. “Well, Marble, do you—?” Marble already began hovering over the right-hand stairs as he began searching the walls and stairs, looking for traps. “Alright,” she replied. “On the same page, as I said.” Despite that, though, she decided she’d glance down the left-hand stair just to satisfy her curiosity. A pony lay charred at the base of the stairs. Sunny turned back to Marble as he began to make his way down the right-hand side, step-by-step. “Avoid this one,” he said, pointing to one of the treads, “there’s a pressure plate.” “Why would someone just put a trap on the stairs?” Sunny asked as she walked down. “It would be a pain to avoid all the time.” “That’s why I think there’s only, at most, two on this staircase,” Marble said. “It’s easier to remember a couple of steps at the start to stop most thieves. After that, we’ll need to discover the pattern.” Sunny furrowed her brow, and Inner Celestia blinked. This...this was actually something she hadn’t heard about. “Pattern?” Marble didn’t even look up from his work. “Typically, there are patterns to traps. If every denizen of a trapped temple had to remember every single trap, they’d kill themselves whenever they forgot the smallest detail. Instead, there’s typically a set of general rules to follow, which would help otherwise. Things like: walk on the right-hand path, avoid the third turn, or bow under the gaze of Celestia. That kind of thing. It’s easier to remember one or two general rules than every single spot that’s been trapped in the entire building.” Sunny blinked. That...that made far too much sense for her to be learning about this now. How had she not figured this out, between the adventures she’d taken and the years she spent alive? “If it’s a trial, though, then there’s typically a riddle or something that gives a clue, but that’s only if they’re trying to prove a point of some kind.” “I...and these are used a lot?” Sunny asked. “I mean, it’s a working theory my sister and I came up with,” Marble said. “We don’t have any real evidence to prove it, but Vanilla pushed it in the archeology field so hard that I think a bunch of ponies started believing it. It’s probably accepted for its logical working and the fact that it seems to work, but unless we get actual confirmation from a pony that used to live there back in the day, we can’t prove anything.” “But it works?” Sunny asked. “Most of the time, something like 80 to 90 percent,” he replied. “This step’s also trapped.” Sunny avoided the step before she continued down all the way down until they got to the landing. “So, how do we figure out what this ‘pattern’ is?” she asked. “Well, we need to find some traps, and from there, we’ll need to start finding similarities to it and the other traps. From there, we could start trying to reverse engineer the rules.” “So, how are we going to look for traps?” Sunny asked. “To start with? No way of knowing for sure,” Marble said. “I’ll have to try and be thorough, and that’ll hopefully let me catch everything that’s coming our way. With any luck, we might not even trigger anything.” They turned the corner and found more bodies. A long corridor stretched ahead of them, with statues lining both sides of the hall. They bore the shapes of jaguars, dragons, coatls, and snakes. Sunny glanced over at Marble and watched him tense, but slowly, ever so slowly, he began to relax back into his previous stance. “Are you going to be okay?” Sunny asked. “I...yeah, just give me a second.” Sunny nodded and stayed put, not moving from her place as Marble recovered, but she did glance about, trying to read the bodies for any secret she could pry from them. “Lovely way of putting that, Sunny,” Inner Celestia muttered. “So glad to know you care.” Sunny ignored the jab. That one, in particular, was something she came to peace with a long time ago. Between ruling a country, commanding an army, and simply outliving everypony around, Celestia learned to deal with death a long time ago. The ex-Princess still cared, though. She refused to let herself stop caring for the ponies beneath her, but time still marched on, and every passing year made death a closer companion and a more efficient tool to use. The dead ponies on the ground showed a variety of wounds. Cuts and burns mainly, though Sunny did note that some of the ponies did have yellow-fletched darts poking out from their chests, a sign of poisoned darts if she ever saw one. And she did. They were right there. More importantly, she saw where the bodies lay. All of the ponies that died to darts seemed to lay in front of the snakes. There was a possible venom connection there, but that seemed a little shallow. Nonetheless, there was a possible pattern there. “Okay, okay…” Marble began. “I think I’m good. Uh...there might be a connection there with the snakes and—” “—and the darts. Yes, I saw that one,” she said. “Would it really be that blatant, though?” “Sometimes trapmakers aren’t the most creative bunch,” Marble said. “Either that or they spend all their creativity coming up with the trap themselves.” Sunny frowned. “If it’s that overt, then maybe the dragon spews fire.” Marble nodded and began moving forward. He walked up to one of the dragon statues and began glancing at its mouth. “There’s definitely soot around the thing’s mouth. The fire’s probably a good call.” “How’s it triggered, though?” Sunny asked. “It’s either a pressure plate, light through a lens that heats a mercury thermometer, simple hair triggers, or even a tripwire. The light one is complicated and was typically only used by the richer members of history, but then again, this is a temple.” Marble glanced around the room before he looked down the hallway. “Can you get that...what is that? That stick?” Sunny squinted as she looked down the hall but found it and used her magic to pull it toward them. Her magic helped her realize that the object was a wooden post of some description, left discarded presumably by one of the ponies that now lay dead in the hall. As it passed by the jaguar statues, something triggered, and a large disk of glass rose from the ground and sliced a section of the wooden post clean off. “Well, that answers the question about the jaguar,” Marble said, as Sunny kept pulling the wooden post toward them. It passed another pair of jaguar statues, and again a glass disk shot up from the floor. Sunny maneuvered the post out of the way this time, tried to watch where the giant spinning blade emerged from the floor, but saw nothing beyond a line between the flagstones that appeared no different from the other grout lines. The other statues didn’t react to the post, and Marble finally grabbed hold of it once it got within reach. Taking one end of the post in his hooves, he began to tap at the flat stones on the ground using the very end of the piece of wood as he glanced up at the dragon statues. As the pegasus tapped the cut stones, Marble began moving from one side of the hall to the other. As he got to the center of the hallway, the post suddenly hit a pressure plate, and the dragon statues spat flames from their open mouths, flames cooking the very end of the post. Marble nodded. “Alright, so the dragons have pressure plates in the middle of the hallway, so stick close to them, and it would probably be best to duck under the mouths anyway. How much do you want to be that the snakes hit at the edges?” “You sound very confident about that,” Sunny noted. “Oh, of course,” he replied. Every good set of traps makes you jump through hoops to stay safe. Just imagine if a thief came in and tried to stick to the walls, he’d totally miss the dragons, and considering that’s probably who they want to stop, to begin with. Meanwhile, they want to make sure that invaders, those who wouldn’t be sneaking and walking in the middle of the hallway.” Suny nodded. “Alright, and the jaguar?” “Probably for use against pegasi,” he replied. “The trigger is probably the light mechanism I described earlier, which means that it works incredibly well against flying ponies.” Sunny nodded. “In our defense,” Inner Celestia said. “The intricacies of trap design were never important for ruling a country.” Sunny wanted to take comfort in that, but she also remembered installing a thousand and one secret passages in their Everfree Castle, not to mention Canterlot Castle. She probably should have spent a few years studying the work that her architects did for her. Marble stood the post straight up and moved back to the edge of the room. Taking the piece of wood by the very bottom, he pressed it into the floor. The snakes responded immediately. Darts shot out from around the snakes, hitting the post five different times from five individual points. Marble nodded as though expecting this before he moved back to the center and tapping again. Nothing happened. He began moving back toward the edge and finally found the edge of the trapped area. “Alright, so stick close to the dragons, avoid the snakes, duck under the jaguars. That just leaves the coatls.” Sunny nodded before she began to follow the pegasus, using the rules he came up with as he began to examine the space in front of them. “I...I think the coatls are safe. Which has a religious theme to them as well.” “Are you sure?” Sunny asked. “There aren’t any pressure plates. The light method’s a little too expensive to use consistently, and I didn’t find any tripwires at that.” “So, we have to stick close to the dragons, avoid the snakes, coatls are safe, but duck under jaguars?” Sunny asked. Marble nodded. “Sounds right. Of course, we can only trust that for this hallway. Assuming the pattern is about the position you need to be in may turn out very bad for us. It could just as easily be something like ‘dragons breathe fire,’ or something equally simple.” Sunny sighed. “Okay, I was hoping for an easy answer,” she replied. “Too easy an answer can be infiltrated,” Marble pointed out. “We want to avoid that.” Sunny nodded, conceding, and began to follow after Marble as they navigated the hallway, moving past the statues that clung to the sides of the walls. As they turned the corner, though, they found the following problem ahead of them. The passage split into four different stairways, each descending deeper into the temple. From the lack of dead ponies, both could tell that none of the entrances were trapped, though Sunny suspected that’s because the traps were further in than she could see. At the front of each passage, another pair of statues flanked the stairs. One had the coatls, one had the jaguars, another had the dragons, and the last had the snakes. “We...we want the coatl passage, don’t we?” Sunny asked. “Not necessarily,” he replied. “If the assumption that it’s safe holds out, then that’s where we want to go, but if we misunderstood the coatl statue, it might wind up being more dangerous.” “So, how do we go from here?” Sunny asked. Inner Celestia provided an answer, but Marble beat her to it. “We have to check the wear on the stone,” he replied. The pegasus dropped to the ground and glanced at the rock beneath it. He looked at each set of stairs carefully, comparing the stairs with a discerning eye. “The coatl stair was definitely the most popular set of stairs, though the dragon does have a lot of traffic going down there as well.” “So...if the coatl is safe, that makes sense, but why the dragon passage?” Sunny asked. “That’s the big question,” Marble replied, “but first, which one do we go down?” Sunny debated for a moment. “Let’s head down the coatl passage,” she said. “Alright, whatever you say,” he replied. They continued down, moving through the corridors and refining the pattern with every trap they ran into. The bodies they found warned them of more surprises, and Marble worked quickly. As they predicted, the dragon statues continued to breathe fire at a more extended range, the snake at close range, and the jaguars all hit any floating targets. What’s more, despite their initial worries, it seemed that the coatls were, in fact, safe. In fact, as they ran into more intersections, they found more coatl statues, and they took the coatl path each time. Then they found the door. Sunny was tempted to name it a gate, as the monolithic stone reminded her of the doors to the first walls of Canterlot Castle. They towered over the pair of ponies and the bodies that lay in front of it. They bore minimal decorations, only a twisting coatl that danced in across the doors, with two large gemstones in the eyes that thrummed with magic. The arcane aura radiating off the gems was strong enough that Sunny could feel it vibrating against her horn. The bodies lying in front of the door appeared burned and lay in tight balls as though trying to curl up into the fetal position. Some had muscles that were still tensed, and the faint scent of ozone made it clear that lightning of some description was to blame. “I...uh...I don’t think they got through,” Sunny said. Marble nodded as he stared at the destruction around him before taking a deep breath. “I concur,” he muttered. “I can feel the lightning magic coming off those eyes, so I have to assume that there’s a key to open the door, and without it, the door won’t open. One of the few traps that pure numbers won’t beat.” “Do you think it was down that first dragon passage?” Marble nodded. “That makes sense to me.” “Alright, let’s head back up and check that out. If these ponies couldn’t get through, then the vault here has probably been untouched. If anything has a feather in it, this does.” Marble nodded again. “And the sooner we get that, the sooner we can get out of here.” ---☼--- Zalxayl moved through the jungle as quickly as he could. Lady Dusk’s patience was wearing thinner by the day, and she would not suffer these delays for much longer. He needed to get her some results, and quickly. He moved quickly to the last ruin the Sons of the Storm infiltrated, the one that had not reported in for the past three days. The mandrill heard of this blatant act of defiance and moved to dole out punishment if any of Lady Dusk’s ponies still lived. If the temple’s traps took care of them all, then he’d merely send a new team to see if there were any more secrets to find. Zalxayl broke the tree line and landed in front of the temple. Its massive size was impressive but unimportant, though it did have a statue of the Great Storm Snake at the base of the stairs. He frowned as he saw it. The sprawling size of the temple would make it challenging to explore efficiently, but he would have to if only to please Lady Dusk. And he lived to serve.