//------------------------------// // Chapter 33 // Story: Celestia Goes West // by DungeonMiner //------------------------------// Marble and Sunny moved quickly. Even with her limited spellbook, Sunny had everything she needed to distract the various guards that blocked their way up. A stone dropping down the causeway, a tree shaking off to the side, or even one of their torches falling over provided more than enough distraction for the pair to make their way to the very top of the pyramid without anypony noticing them. As they approached the small covered structure at the top of the pyramid, Marble hooked his forelegs around Sunny. He dragged the unicorn to the top of the building, keeping her from the sight of the two guards watching the door. As they touched down, Sunny reached into her saddlebag and dropped another stone behind her and off the edge. It clattered loudly on edge opposite of the entrance to the sacrificial room. Both guards’ ears perked at the sound, and they glanced at each other before they slowly moved around to investigate the sound. The moment they turned the corner, Sunny and Marble slipped through the open archway and took the right-hand staircase down. Luckily, it seemed that enough ponies died in this temple that the black-vested ponies already marked many of the traps with pink neon flags that Sunny distinctly remembered seeing at a construction site. Avoiding the flags, they descended down before they turned the corner and found even more stairs. “This one looks deep,” Marble whispered. “I’ve seen this kind of temple a few times. They only have two or three livable levels, but they’re a maze once you get down there. We’ll have to stick close, and we need to avoid dead ends when we can. They’re almost always trapped.” Sunny nodded, and they continued to climb down flight after flight of stone steps, each carefully carved and many marked with more pink flags. They both descended for what felt like hours before they finally came to the bottom. The landing at the bottom revealed a hallway, five feet wide that turned left immediately, and a door just opposite the stairs. The wooden door sat snugly in its portal and didn’t even let light through the bottom if anything was on the other side. Marble sighed when he saw it. “We need to be careful. This kind of temple will swallow us if we’re not careful. There was one Vanilla, and I explored that had more than ninety rooms down there, and those were just the ones we could find.” Sunny nodded. “Good to know.” She slipped up next to the wall and moved down the hallway until she found a corner that she carefully peeked around. She didn’t see anything around the corner except for another wooden door in the distance, shadowed by darkness. Sunny briefly wished she had access to Transform magic to give herself some night vision but snuck back to Marble. “The ponies down here might have already explored a good chunk of this place. If we follow the flags, we might be able to navigate without running into anything.” “That’s the hope,” he replied. “Of course, that’s where all the ponies will be, so we’ll have to sneak around them.” “High risk, high reward, right?” Sunny asked. He glanced at her, unamused. “Better question,” she asked. “Which way do we go?” Marble glanced around before shrugging. “We might want to stick to the right. That’s the tradition, after all.” She nodded and looked to the door. Sunny slid over to it before she pressed softly against the wood. It didn’t budge the slightest bit. “Well,” she said, “you’re about to see a totally new side to unicorn magic, and I hope you’re ready.” “What more is there to throwing lightning bolts and making objects float?” he asked. Sunny’s horn lit up, and the door clicked before swinging open. “Incredibly easy breaking and entering,” she muttered. Marble blinked, obviously a little perturbed. “Celestia has had all locks magically enchanted to resist Control Matter spells to open them, but a lot of those enchantments can be forced open anyway.” “So basically, any unicorn can just open my front door?” “Most can’t,” she said. “The locks are stronger than that, but if somepony know what they’re doing, they can work around it, but no different than anywhere else. More importantly, these doors are old enough that they don’t have any enchantments on the doors. They’re basically open.” “Good news, I suppose,” he said as they began to move. The open door revealed a large room, tagged with flags all over the place, each with a matching bloodstain covering the floor. A lone torch on the far wall offered the only light, but it was evident that hundreds of ponies had been through the room several times already. “So this one isn’t so bad. We have a few options. Shadows to hide in and traps to exploit.” Marble stared at it for a second before he began moving toward the right wall. “You have a plan?” “No, I’m just looking for a secret door.” Sunny glanced over at it but didn’t see anything that would tip her off, no wear on the stones or smoothed ledges that a door might swing from. Celestia was fond of secret passages and did her best to stuff as many of them as she could into every castle she ever lived in. Still, she let him look, just in case. He moved all the way down before sighing. “I don’t think there’s one over here.” “Then let’s go,” Sunny said before opening the next door. A large pegasus stallion stared back at her. Sunny moved in a second. She grabbed the stallion by the neck and pulled, rolling back into the room and carrying the pegasus with her. The stallion tried to scream, but he landed hard on the tile, knocking the air from his lungs, which gave Marble all the time he needed to react. He flew up and dived back down, slamming into the prone stallion and knocking him unconscious. Sunny rolled back onto her hooves and reached into her bag to grab a rope. She weaved it around the unconscious pony, tying him up and gagging him with the excess. Then, lifting the pony with her magic, she set him aside and turned back to the door. No one else came. “Well,” she said. “That’s not quite how I wanted that to work out, but that wasn’t too bad.” “Then I’d hate to see what terrible looks like,” Marble said. Sunny smirked and glanced at him. “You actually did a pretty good job there, Marble.” “Well, let’s not get carried away here.” Sunny smirked before she turned back to the door. “We should probably be quieter.” “That wouldn’t be a bad—” A familiar roar interrupted him, and both ponies looked to the stairs behind them where the sound originated. “Did that sound like the mandrill to you?” Marble asked. Her shoulders slumped. “I was really hoping he’d lose us. Come on, we can’t let that thing find us.” They moved into the next hallway, and they took the first right and came to another room. Luckily, this one wasn’t filled with flags marking traps. Unluckily, it was filled with ponies. Sunny glanced at Marble. He glanced back. Then the room exploded into a flurry of motion. Two ponies, an earth pony, and a pegasus, charged Sunny. She answered with magic. Tearing up the floor beneath her and revealing a room below, Sunny threw expertly cut boulders at the charging ponies before she grabbed Marble out of the air and yanked him down into the room she revealed. A handful of pegasi tried to follow, but Sunny stuffed the opening with more stone from the floor below her and then used another Control Matter spell to reshape the rocks into the proper shape to lock in place. “That works too,” Marble said, sliding his knife back into place. “We need to keep moving,” Sunny said. “We’ve poked the ant’s nest. It’s only a matter of time before they find us.” Marble opened his mouth to reply before they both heard grinding stone above them. Looking up, they saw powerful, spindly fingers grip into the rock that Sunny just put down before staring into two yellow, evil eyes. “I knew I’d find you,” the mandrill said, grinning. Sunny picked up another stone and threw it straight up into the opening. She didn’t bother watching if the rock hit. Instead, she grabbed Marble and pulled him toward the open door in front of them. The mandrill landed behind them and followed, grinning as he loped after them. Sunny took the first right, running down the pathways, with Marble flying behind her. Her hooves pounded on the stone beneath her as she ran, the clap of her hooves ringing on the flagstones and letting everypony nearby know where she was. She cursed before she saw the next intersection and frowned. “Marble, go right. I’ll catch up!” “What? Are you sure?” “I’ll find you, don’t worry!” Marble didn’t reply, but he went right when they hit the intersection, while Sunny went left. She glanced behind her for a moment and saw the mandrill chase after Marble. She skidded to a halt before rushing after the primate, tearing chunks of rock from the walls beside her. She picked one, magically smoothed it into a small cone, and fired it straight into the mandrill’s back. It yelped, leaping into the air, before spinning around and staring at Sunny with fierce eyes. Sunny smiled and fired another stone into the mandrill’s chest. He roared and began running toward her. Sunny smiled and ran back down her left-hand passage, firing a handful of rocks back into the mandrill as she ran. She found another intersection and dove left, specifically heading down the path that would most likely kill her following Marble’s theory. She found a door ahead of her, marked with a large, painted “x” over the door. Perfect. She ran up to it, magically ripping the paint off the door before she burst through the door and slammed it shut behind her. Doing everything she could to stay out of the middle of the room, she hugged the wall just long enough for the mandrill to burst into the room. He wandered it, and as he did, the traps snapped. Poisoned darts fired out of the wall, saw blades popped up out of the ground, and swinging pendulum blades swung out to slice him into pieces. Sunny smiled as she saw them before popping away, hoping that the traps would at least slow him down. She began retracing her steps, running as fast as she could before she made it back to the first intersection and taking a deep breath. As she panted, she cast another spell, a Perceive Body spell, to light up Marble’s path down through the hallways. Nothing happened. For a second, her heart leaped into her chest. Was he dead? Perceive spells typically fail if the target stopped existing or… She used Perceive Matter to look for something on his body but again turned up nothing. Something was blocking her magic. She took a breath. He’s fine. I just need to try something else. She refocused her spell to look for the room he moved to, and this time, a misty line of glowing magic appeared to lead her to the room he was in. Gotta love loopholes. That and more complex spells that need a little brute-forcing to get through. She took one more breath before she began to chase after the magical light, deeper into the temple. She followed Marble’s path through the twisting hallways and crossed any rooms that she ran across. Sunny pushed through the doors ahead of her and then came to a sudden stop. Marble sat in a cage. The cage itself, she barely recognized as thronestone, the magic-blocking rock that made the changeling throne several years ago. He sat in the center of a large room, surrounded by ponies, including a burnt orange pegasus with a red mane and a single wing. On the other end of the room stood a massive door carved in the likeness of the Coatl. The vault. “So,” she said in a voice that sounded dead. “This is your partner, is it?” Sunny glanced around, the range of the stone would block most of her magic, but she might be able to fight them on this side of the room. As she looked around the others, she found one of the ponies laying by the wall, with the magical knife in his shoulder. Marble tried, at least. The orange pegasus flipped up her one wing to reveal a set of blades in her feathers. She brought them up to Marble’s neck and spoke in that same, emotionless voice. “Surrender, or I will kill him. I can assure you I have no qualms of killing him.” Sunny hesitated, and that was all it took for the mass of ponies to begin to surrounder her. She wasted her only opportunity to attack, and now she was on the defensive. “I can assure you that your magic won’t work,” the one-winged pegasus said, “and I doubt you’d be able to fight all of these ponies at once and keep your friend alive.” Sunny glanced around at the ponies around her. She could throw a stone at them, their momentum would remain even if the magic behind them disappeared, but that knife was very close to Marble’s throat. The sound of panting grew behind her, and wet breath hit the back of her neck. She glanced behind herself to see the mandrill standing over her, breathing heavily. “Zalxayl,” the pegasus said, staring up at the mandrill, “where have you been?” “This...traitor found the key,” the beast replied. “I was hunting them.” Stoping the mandrill would be very difficult, but combining that with all the ponies in the room, she wasn’t sure Sunny could take them all. “They’re not traitors, Zalxayl. I’m fairly certain I didn’t hire anypony that is actually competent enough to get the cloak, but I appreciate your efforts.” “Of course, Lady Dusk,” Zalxayl replied, bowing. “Then I deliver you the ponies that found the key.” The pegasus smiled. “Thank you.” Sunny didn’t have a lot of options. “No, she doesn’t,” Inner Celestia said. Sunny grimaced. She didn’t need her talking right now. She needed to think about how she was going to get them out of here. “You can’t. I have to.” Nope. No, Sunny could make this work. She just needed to think about this. “Now, as I said, surrender, or I will kill your friend,” Dusk repeated. Inner Celestia stepped forward and became Celestia. Sunny retreated and whimpered. “You will not need to do that. In fact, just let him go. I’ll have everything you need.” “Or really, and what’s that?” Dusk asked, amused. Marble glanced around, looking like he was trying to find something that he could work with somewhere. “Don’t do this to him,” Inner Sunny begged. “He’ll hate me for it.” Celestia reached into her bag and pulled out her changeling amulet. “He’ll wonder why I didn’t just teleport him to safety. He’ll wonder what I lied about this whole time.” Celestia took a deep breath and transformed into her true form. Sunny was gone. Instead, Celestia stood in her place, taking the responsibility she had to bear. “I am Lady Celestia the Firstborn, once called the millennial queen, the solar ruler, and she who has seen a thousand generations, and a thousand more will burn out before I am spent.” She smirked. “At least, that’s what they called me. I’m not sure anymore.” Celestia glanced around the room. The ponies in the black vests cowered in front of her with fear in their eyes. The mandrill behind her stepped backward, reassessing the threat, while Dusk stared with only a glint of satisfaction on her face. “Perhaps you do have what I want, Lady Celestia. Why don’t we start negotiating?” Celestia nodded before her eyes fell to Marble. The solar alicorn spent thousands of years reading ponies. She learned how to gather the most profound insights from the most guarded of ponies. Marble was an open book. His eyes were wide with confusion that shook him to his core as he tried to piece everything together. Mixed in the bewilderment hung betrayal and hurt. Celestia glanced at him and took a deep breath through her nose before saying one last thing to Sunny before the mare was absorbed into her mind. “I told you so.”