I saw the eyes, before anything else.
I thought they were more crystals, deep within the dark, but they were the wrong color. Red, instead of purple. Eerie. Baleful. Piercing.
And then they blinked.
“Wha—” The startled noise was all I had time for, before a cloud of…something…rolled over us. In an instant, the light from Dinky’s horn was quenched, and Red’s pyromancy withered to an ember. Were it not for the staff burning bright at my side, we would have been plunged into darkness in an instant.
“Pull back!” Red barked, whipping his axe over his back and into a hoof in an instant. Dinky yelped and scrambled backwards, deep into the pool of illumination, and the three of us scanned the darkness around our little puddle of safety. Already, Red had started to stomp his off-hoof as though he were shaking off mud, and his pyromancy flame sputtered back to life, notably weaker than before.
“I s-saw eyes in the d-dark. J-just for a m-moment.” Whether our own lights had blinded us to the shadows of the tunnel, or the darkness had grown deeper and obscured the tunnels around us more thoroughly in some way, I couldn’t tell. But I now realized that I couldn’t even see the walls of the tunnel any more, nor any glints of crystalline refraction around us. The stone under our hooves was the only proof that we weren’t floating in a bottomless abyss.
Dinky swallowed as she lit her horn again, and four more bolts of magic were readied overhead, waiting for a target. “We w-weren’t this deep in w-when we got attacked. D-did we miss G-Gilda on the w-way in?”
That seemed very unlikely; we’d definitely only seen the one gryphon. I had already opened my mouth to say as such to Dinky, when Red let out a warning nicker, and we all stiffened.
Those long few moments, in the endless dark, waiting for something to emerge and attack us—those were the longest moments of my undead life thus far. It hurt to wait for so long, even though it was seconds at most, because it was impossible to be proactive when so thoroughly blinded. At best, we would be striking at nothing, and at worst, it would be a fatal mistake quickly capitalized on by the creatures around us.
The silence was broken by a spitting sound, from the dark, and something liquid spattered against my side, missing the glowing head of the staff by a hair. I yelped and spun to face the attacker, but all I managed to do was smack Dinky in the rump with the butt of the staff. Then I yelped again—the liquid that hit me was cold, impossibly cold, and it felt gritty somehow.
“Clean that off!” Red barked as he reared back and tossed a fireball over my head, into the dark. There was a brief flash of light, and the dark was repelled for only a split second before it rushed back in to fill the void left by the light, but it was enough that I saw something, faintly. It wasn’t a creature exactly, but more akin to the shadow of a creature, like a living afterimage. I could see through it, but I saw bright red eyes in the head of the silhouette, as well as ghostly wings and the trailing tail of a snake.
That was enough. I poured my fire into the staff, and the light around us shrank, save for where I pointed the glowing end. Dinky and Red pulled close as I focused the light into a beam, and pierced the darkness where I’d seen the creature.
The cold spread across my side. Dinky shouted something about it, but I was too focused on the light to catch her words. The cave wall emerged from the dark as though it were rushing towards us, and across it whorled trailing wisps of smoke—it had just barely escaped the beam, but I could adjust. I swung the light to follow the trails, and swept it across the tunnel. As I swung the light over the darkened crystals of the tunnel, they brightened only for a moment, before disappearing, and I spotted a shadow against the cave wall.
As iI brought the light to bear, there was a muffled screech, and the shadow gained definition. There was still no physical body, but being in the light of the sun weakened it—burned it—and it couldn’t escape while I held the light steady. “There!”
Red was already moving, as the cold sensation crawled across my body and down my legs. He was on the creature in an instant, and brought his axe down onto what should have been the shadow’s throat. It was hacked in half in a brutal instant—one shadow split into two, and then the creature dissolved into nothingness.
“We g—” Something was wrong; the words froze in my throat, and I couldn’t move my jaw. I couldn’t move my head. DInky screamed one last time, and I turned my embered eye to look at her as Red turned towards us, then leapt for the small pool of light that surrounded us. His Pyromancy flame flared to life as the light of my little personal sun died, and then my vision all went dark.
There was an odd sensation of…un-being. It wasn’t like death; it wasn’t even akin to unconsciousness. It was just this momentary feeling of not feeling anything at all, only for a moment.
Then there was a flash, and I gasped, as flakes of stone crumbled away from my body. Red was holding the staff with his teeth now, and swept the beam of light through the darkness around us. Dinky was ready to catch me if I collapsed, but I caught myself, and managed to only drop to my knees. The darkness around us was receding, slowly, and I started to see the twinkling of the crystals around us once more.
Dinky suddenly wrapped me in a tight, warm hug, and pressed my head to her breast. “Holly! It hit y-you with some s-sort of goop, and you st-started to turn to stone, j-just like Gilda…”
I’d been petrified, then. So that was what that felt like. It was better than death in some ways, but…I could see just from a glance that I’d missed a few moments of time. Red didn’t have any training to use the staff; he must have taken it from me, fumbled with it for a few moments at least, and then managed to work out how to use it to unpetrify me in turn. But I’d only been gone for a single moment, alone and unliving, or so it felt.
I looked up at him, and smiled. “Th-thank you.”
Red tried to say something, but with the staff clenched in his teeth, it came out as a grunt. He jerked his head at me then, an indication to take the staff, and I stood to do so. I reached out for it with my fire first, to keep the light burning brightly, and it was only when Red stopped powering the miracle himself that he released it to my grasp.
Now that he could talk, he did so, while I started to fit the staff back into the straps at my side. “We’re both idiots. New marching order, we need to protect Holly. We got lucky this time; might not happen again.”
Dinky nodded, and she lit her horn once again to start weaving a spell. After a moment, a glowing magic buckler flickered into existence beside me, then another on the opposite side of my barrel. They began to slowly orbit my body at withers-height, as if waiting for an attack to come so that they could block it, and Dinky let out a breath. “Th-that should help. I th-think I can do a third, m-maybe…”
Red shook his head. “That should do. Just keep ‘em floatin,’ and be ready to defend her.” He started moving down the tunnel again, and we fell into step behind him. I kept scanning the darkness again, and the twinkling crystals within.
“O-okay,” After a moment, Dinky’s eyes brightened again. “Hey, we g-got it though, right?”
Red shrugged. “Prob’ly more. Don’t know much about cockatrices, jes’ what Fluttershy told me a while back.”
“O-oh.” Suddenly our brief victory didn’t seem as important. We’d probably have to repeat that trick a few more times before we escaped these tunnels.
* * *
Bizarrely, when we found GIlda, she wasn’t more than twenty paces from where the mine had crudely intersected with Canterlot’s sewers. And she was facing towards us, not towards Canterlot.
Dinky in particular seemed baffled by this; she kept glancing around the tunnel, as if concerned that the layout might shift suddenly. Which was maybe a valid concern, when it came to the Dark. Red’s attention was on the rough tunnels behind us, in case we were attacked from behind. I busied myself with focusing the staff—my staff, I supposed, though I didn’t feel right referring to it as such—onto Gilda.
It was a relief to see that her time as a statue within the dark didn’t seem to have weathered her features very much. There was some subtle damage, a few sharp edges that had been worn down, and her feathers seemed a little too smooth, but she was still recognizable. When I used the staff on her, when I entered that strange magical state where I felt more like a living avatar of miraculous magic, Gilda’s form looked unchanged.
Within that altered state, that magical dream, her eyes snapped open, and I was yanked back to my own body as surely as she was to her own. The stone that encased her crumbled into dust, and Gilda let out a battle screech that startled us all—before she dropped into a combat stance, flicked her head around as though searching for prey, and then raised an eyebrow at the three of us. “Where’d you two come from?”
Before any of us could respond, Gilda focused on me, her eyes lighting up with recognition, surprise, and something that I believed was relief. “Holly? You’re looking better. Finally caught up to us?”
Dinky swallowed nervously. “Y-you’ve been petrified, G-Gilda. There’s cockatrices in these t-tunnels, and they attacked us. Y-you’ve been here for a w-while, and I went back d-down to look for Holly again.”
Gilda relaxed, only slightly, but now her focus was on the dark tunnels and the bricks of the sewer tunnel a dozen paces away. She took notice of our lights, especially the staff at my side, and Red’s flickering pyromancy flame. “Huh. Alright. Cockatrices.” Then she flicked her gaze toward Red, suspicious. “And who’s he?”
Red snuffed his flame, so that he could hold out a hoof in greeting. “Call me Red. Friend a’ Holly, and headin’ to Canterlot too.”
“Red. Right. Pony names, I swear to Grover…” Gilda grumbled, but she balled her claw into a fist to bump Red’s hoof. “Well, thanks for unpetrifying me. Would’ve been a dumb way for my little adventure to end, before I even got there. What kind of predator doesn’t even kill their prey properly?”
Dinky explained, “C-cockatrices normally do, b-but these ones are…weird. They’ve b-been in the Dark.”
Gilda clicked her beak. “The Dark. Like that knife you found, Holly?”
I nodded, and tapped the glowing staff I had strapped to my side.
Gilda understood after a moment, and stepped closer to the light that I was projecting. This whole dark versus light thing might have been a new concept for her, but she adapted to it quickly. “Alright. Let’s get out of these tunnels then, now that we’re all caught up.”
* * *
“Ugh. I already wish I’d just flown there. These tunnels stink.”
I winced, but Gilda didn’t notice. Sure, we were walking uphill through fetlock-deep murk, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Gilda was smelling me and the toxic muck that had soaked into my armor. She’d missed my whole dip in the lake, after all.
“We’ll be out of here soon ‘nuff. Wish we had a map of these—” Red froze mid-sentence as we approached an intersection in the sewer tunnel, and one of his ears flicked towards the dark.
I jerked the staff down the tunnel, focusing the light into a burning beam of sunlight, but all I saw was a glimpse of a shadow darting around a corner. Too slow, and it was too far away for the beam to have any real effect.
After a moment, Red indicated we should keep moving. “Least the cave tunnels didn’t branch.”
Dinky paused just after the intersection, to draw a magical slash on the wall; she’d explained it earlier, and the theory mostly went over my head, but apparently drawing slashes and then crossing them was a way to navigate mazes. “I’ve been k-keeping a mental map as we ex-explore. As long as we don’t f-fall through into a lower level, we sh-should find—”
We all heard the splashing from the intersection behind us, and turned to face that direction. Dinky still had her four magical bolts hovering overhead, and they were just waiting for a target, but that target never came. The splashing stopped, close enough to the actual intersection to send ripples across the murky water, but no further.
Gilda clacked her beak in annoyance. “It’s baiting us. Taunting us with how close it is, so we chase after it. It’s an old trick.” She glanced at Red, but never looked away fully from the intersection. “How smart did you say these things were?”
“Should be wild animals. But for anythin’ the Dark touches, the rules change.”
Suddenly, Dinky’s bolts of magic twitched, and launched themselves—in the wrong direction. They turned to target something, but too widely, and they shattered with a sound like glass as they struck the brick walls on either side of us.
I spun around to see what they had been targeting, and that instinct was all that kept me safe, as a wet glob whipped past my face. Just behind it, a fresh cloud of gas rolled through the tunnel, past an already-petrified Dinky, and it snuffed out Red’s pyromancy flame once again. I could see eyes—assuming they didn’t have any extras, there were three cockatrice shadows slithering across the brick ceiling like snakes.
My staff turned with me, and I forced my flame through it, to flare as brightly as I could for only a moment. “Back!” I shrieked through my ragged throat, and I could hear both Red and Gilda as they swore behind me.
The cockatrices didn’t turn back, but the light filled the tunnel enough to make them halt in their tracks. They became more real, somehow, as the light enveloped them, and they fell from the ceiling with a chorus of three twisted squawks. Two landed in the fetlock-deep water and disappeared from sight; the last landed on the narrow brick walkway on either side of the sewer channel, and barely had time to right itself before one of Gilda’s bone-tipped arrows speared through it. It fell backwards and exploded into wisps of smoke, as the arrow bounced and rattled down the tunnel, as though there had never been anything there at all to strike.
Meanwhile, Red had chosen to focus on the one that had been playing bait. I could feel the heat of his own fire as it flared, and he summoned a fireball powered by anger, and just a little fear. Then it was flying towards the intersection, and there was an echoing thump as it exploded, super-heating the murky water into steam in an instant. The heat turned the brickwork under the surface red-hot, until the water flooded back in to replace the liquid that had been flash-boiled away. I had no idea if he hit his target, or if he was even aiming for anything specific in the first place.
A moment later, the water between my hooves erupted, and I felt a stabbing pain in my left hind as one of the cockatrices dug into it with its claws. I let out a yelp, and kicked backwards on instinct, but all I managed to do was buck Gilda in the side. Her bow went flying as she swore at me, but her focus was stolen by a second eruption of water as the second cockatrice leapt out towards her face.
It never reached her; Gilda had already drawn her hunting knife from its sheath, and she caught the shadowy creature with a wicked slash in mid-leap. It exploded into wisps of shadow, and Gilda was back on her paws and claws in a moment.
That still left me with a cockatrice clawing apart my hindleg, exactly where I couldn’t reach. I was panicking as I tried to kick it away, with no other defensive option.
“Damn it, Holly!” Red shouted, as he tackled me, and we tumbled together into the water. There was one last stabbing pain, and then the pressure around my hind released as Gilda leapt into the tussle with her knife drawn, then retreated.
I kept kicking for a moment out of panic, but Red tightened his grip, and I was forced to relax as he and Gilda scanned the tunnel for more cockatrices. After a long few moments, where I mostly focused on the dark blood seeping out of my wound and into the sewer water, they seemed satisfied that the fight was finished. Red rolled off of me, and held out a hoof to help me up.
“S-sorry,” I murmured.
Red sighed. “Happens. Start workin’ on Dinky, then patch y’self up.”
As I started to work on her, Gilda checked her bow, then glanced back at us. “A baited ambush. That’s not animal intelligence.”
“Nope,” Red agreed, glumly.
“And they’re avoiding you.” She pointed at the stallion. “They were on the ceiling—you can’t fireball them there.”
Red grunted in annoyance. “Like ah said. The rules change.”
Stone gave way to flesh once more, and Dinky gasped in alarm, even as she realized she’d missed the fight. “There’s—! Oh.” Her horn lit with magic once more while she looked around, and then she focused on my ragged hindleg with another gasp. “Holly! C-come here, you should keep that wound out of the w-water…”
Gilda chuckled. “I think we’re a little beyond rot and infections these days, sister.”
* * *
We continued forward, stumbling through the dark tunnels of the sewers, and climbing upwards wherever we could find stairs or ladders. These tunnels had been designed for maintenance ponies and construction workers at best—the sort of civic worker that would have brought a map and a headlamp into the tunnels with them. We could barely make do with Dinky’s system of glowing marks and slashes, but I would’ve given a foreleg for a proper map.
We emerged into what seemed to be an artificial waterfall. The room was wide, and the hoofpaths converged into a bridge that passed over a great concrete crevasse. On our left, a torrent of raging water rushed down a nearly-vertical channel cut into the wall, which ran far below the bridge. On the right, the water continued pouring down into the dark, far further than any of us could see, even with the assistance of a faint coating of crystals that had grown up the wall like faintly-glowing lichen from far below.
I was half-heartedly considering whether I should shout to ask Red to toss a glowing flare of pyromancy down the waterfall to see how deep it went, but our attention was seized by another cockatrice first. It had been nesting on the other end of the bridge, and as soon as we emerged into the dim light of the room, it let out a squawk that was drowned out by the sound of the rushing water, then darted into the doorway beyond.
We exchanged glances—we couldn’t do much else with all that noise, and then slowly began to follow after the half-shadow creature. Perhaps it was a trap, but Dinky probed the bridge with her magic and said that it was still sturdy, so a trap seemed less and less likely. Still, we pushed forward, since our only other option was to double back, and we might as well follow this path to its conclusion first.
Through the door, the tunnel continued, taking a sharp left before it became a steady incline. Once we reached the top, it leveled out once more and curved a bit left—surely we had to be getting closer to the surface, at the very least.
Then the floor suddenly crumbled under Red’s hooves, and none of us had the time to even yell before the rest of the floor fell out from under us. We tumbled, lost amongst an avalanche of stones and rotten timbers, and it all fell with a series of splashes into a pool of water. That water only barely broke our fall, especially with the rubble underneath us, and we all scrambled to our hooves—or paws, in Gilda’s case—as we looked around the room, still standing in the knee-high pool.
This must have been atop the waterfall we’d seen before; the far end of the room was cloaked in water vapor, and the flowing water ran between our legs, towards that edge, accompanied by a distant roaring. More water fed the pool from the sides, at a more leisurely pace through pipes and small channels. I was worried that one of us had been killed in the fall, but we’d only been dropped a dozen or so body-lengths, and we all seemed relatively uninjured. However, that pile of rubble had blocked off what seemed to be the only exit: a steel gate set into the wall.
“Movement!” Gilda barked, as she brought her bow to bear. “Near the edge!”
I twisted back to face that direction, and watched to see just what was emerging from the pool to greet us. At first, I thought it was something made entirely out of sludge, or mud; then shiny scales emerged, tarnished from lying under the muck’s surface for so long, and I wondered if perhaps it was a small dragon of some sort. It certainly moved like one; it held its head high and proud, and let out an alarmed squawk as I finally realized what it was.
The other cockatrices we’d seen must have been juveniles—or this one was some kind of mutant. It was nearly the size and mass of Red, and as the water drained away, the feathers around its head began to smolder, then ignited, becoming a burning corona that illuminated the room in dim, flickering light that danced across the surface of the water—water which suddenly took on a strange, oily quality, recoiling from the light in tremors and waves. It had huge scaly wings, akin to those of a wyvern, which it used like claws to drag itself forwards us, through the water. As it sloshed forward, crowing angrily, the water erupted as a half-dozen more normal-sized cockatrices made of shadow leapt out, and began to glide towards us.
“Tartarus.” Gilda snarled, clacking her own beak. “That’s one big mother.”
“Split up! Target the little ones first!” Red barked, as he leapt forward into the fight, axe in hoof.
Gilda took to the air on shaky wings, and started to fire her arrows, which flew through two of the cockatrices, to no effect. They all dove back into the water, and Red was left swinging at nothing—which left him free to dodge a vicious peck from the mother cockatrice. Dinky had resummoned her floating bolts to hover around her head, and the two bucklers that orbited my own body shifted into defensive positions in case one of the cockatrices spat in my direction.
But I noticed something on the roof, in the glimmering light of the fight. More crystals, growing in uneven patterns, fed by the moisture of the large room, and glowing faintly. I pointed the staff of miracles upwards, at the largest crystal I could see.
Around me, the battle took a nasty turn. One of my floating bucklers caught a glob of poison, and deflected the impact, but shattered from the force into whispers of magic. Red had to dodge again as another glob whipped past his side, which left him exposed to a slash from the mother cockatrice that spattered blood across the surface of the water. GIlda swore as her wingtip was struck and began to calcify, but her knife was back out in a flash, and she sliced off the cursed feathers before it could spread to the rest of her body. Still, the disruption to her flight feathers grounded her, and she landed with an awkward splash back in the water, knife bared for the first cockatrice that approached. Only Dinky seemed to have avoided becoming a target, but that may only have been because she was retreating back up the pile of rubble, while the water around us writhed with movement that she couldn’t seem to target.
I focused on that crystal in the roof, and I thought of the few happy memories I had. Dinky leapt to mind first; I remembered her teaching me how to breathe in Baton Verte, and meeting her back in the jail, when Celestia freed her, and most recently when she pulled me out of the lake and bore me back to shore. Red, I remembered first meeting Red, and that cozy moment in the abandoned store, then waiting with him out on the balcony. Gilda had been supportive throughout, and though I didn’t have many happy moments, I treasured that support, and kept it in mind. I’d even had a scant few moments of enjoyment adventuring with Trixie; it hadn’t been all bad.
I heard my second buckler shatter as it deflected another glob of spit, but I was too focused on the fire in my hooves, and the fire in my soul, to stop now. I pushed that fire out through the staff, and I could feel it boiling the water around me as it became a glowing beam of sunlight that hurt to look upon directly. I pointed the beam upwards, towards the largest crystal above us, in a field of glittering crystals that were already reflecting the flickering fire of the cockatrice only a few body-lengths away, above a pool of water that was just as reflective.
The room filled with sunlight, warm and loving and unyielding, and I heard the beasts howl as they were blinded and burned all around us. Even my friends yelped in surprise as they too were blinded, but they recovered faster—the cockatrices were nearly consumed by the dark, and this burning sunlight killed them, in a way that mere magical light, or blade, or shot, could not match. They exploded into ethereal wisps of darkness, which dissipated like smoke, leaving only ourselves—and the mother cockatrice, which screeched in pain, and no doubt anger, given that we had slain her children.
As the sunlight faded, I suddenly felt all my aches and pains return in a rushing wave. I felt every crack in my bones, where they had broken and healed, or hadn’t healed at all. I was acutely aware of every bruise and blow I’d sustained throughout my journey, and I felt like a battered practice dummy made of rotten flesh. I collapsed into the water, and I would have gone under, if Dinky hadn’t dragged me back to the pile of rubble under her hooves. From there, I watched the rest of the battle, which seemed to be no less intense for my lack of direct involvement.
The mother cockatrice and Red were locked in a deadly dance amidst the knee-high water, but she had recovered quickly from her sudden blindness, which meant the battle continued. Dinky and GIlda fired magic and arrows into the melee whenever Red didn’t block their aim, and this seemed to exhaust the creature—right up until Red swung his axe directly into the joint where one of its wings connected to its body, and it reared back, hissing, which yanked the axe out of his hooves.
We hadn’t seen the underside of the creature before now; it had kept its belly underwater as it dragged itself forward to attack us. But we hadn’t considered why that might be, until we saw the state of its body, which was uniquely disgusting in our journeys so far. Below the throat, the beast had been split open, as if it had been disemboweled without dying. Black ichorous blood gushed out from between exposed ribs and decrepit organs, and even the creature’s pelvic bone seemed to have been shattered, which left its legs dangling, useless and withered. It had been able to move using only its wyvern-like wings, because if it didn’t have those, then it likely would not have been able to move at all.
And yet, it seemed to have adapted to this horrific state of half-evisceration. It flexed muscles that shouldn’t have been able to flex, and let out a hiss as two sets of broken ribs were snapped shut on Red’s torso like a pair of jaws. Then it fell atop him, pulling him deep inside its innards as it dropped back into the water, and tried to crawl away with one wing half-broken.
“Dinky! Grab it, before it gets away!” Gilda shouted, as she swooped in front of the creature’s beak to try and distract it. I started to shift, to try and get up and help. If the cockatrice leapt down the waterfall, with Red still captured within, would we see either of them ever again?
Dinky was already working before I found my balance, and I felt her horn flaring brightly—maybe too brightly. I could feel the heat emanating from her corona of magic, even from where I lay. She seized the whole creature in a field of levitation, and began to drag it back towards us, away from the waterfall. It writhed in her fading grasp, but it was enough to slow it down. Gilda used the opportunity to fire an arrow tipped with metal right into one of its eyes, and it cawed in pain, then began pecking wildly in her direction.
Suddenly it let out a sucking gasp, and a cloud of smoke, as the creature's whole body flexed involuntarily. After a moment, it rolled over in the water, onto its back, and seemed to disgorge Red from within its guts. He was spat out into the water a few body-lengths away, his whole body seared and smoking, and the room quickly filled with the scent of boiling flesh. Red must have started casting pyromancies while still trapped within the cockatrice’s chest cavity; the tight spaces meant the fire burned them both, but the beast had borne the worst of it. Even then, it wasn’t enough to kill it; after Red had been ejected, it rolled over again, and started trying to drag itself towards me and Dinky.
I groaned with pain, and forced myself to stand one more time, atop the loose rubble. The staff was still strapped to my side, and I began to channel through it once more, but something was wrong. The tip began to smoke, and the magic it produced was sluggish. I managed a beam, but I couldn’t get it to stay as bright as I needed, and the light flickered erratically as my muscles screamed at me to stop fighting. But if I did, then the cockatrice would kill Dinky, or me.
“B-back off…” I rasped, as the beam danced across the creature’s eyes. I forced it to squint in the bright light, but it didn’t even slow down. Even without being able to see, it kept crawling forward, towards us. I pushed the staff harder, just to get a flash, a ray of light to force the beast back, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. And the harder I tried, the more the tip of the staff smoked, and it started to vibrate against my side…
Dinky let out a grunt behind me as her horn burned with magic. I saw blue light dance around the room, and she swept her head upwards as magic crawled over the rubble, under the water, causing it to glow brightly. Then there was a sound like the blades of a dozen swords being dragged across stone, and glowing spears erupted from the water under our foe. They didn’t stop when they struck the split underbelly of the monster; they just continued up—and through.
The cockatrice was impaled by a dozen magical spears in an instant, and it made a final gagging noise as it was pinned in place, unable to move. But it lived yet; it squirmed on the spears, as though trying to escape, but with only one barely-working wing remaining, it just couldn’t manage the effort. The beast’s struggles slowed as the water turned dark with demon blood, and I knew it was finished.
I relaxed the beam of light, and the staff completely stopped vibrating, though I could see trails of smoke still winding off the metal of Celestia’s mark at the tip. Dinky grunted and strained behind me, and I turned back to look at her.
She had clenched her teeth, and she stood still as a statue as her horn burned with magic. I saw her corona doubling in on itself, writhing against her head like a storm around a volcano. She had been casting almost non-stop since we had entered these tunnels, I suddenly realized. And Dinky was strong, but everypony had their limits—this fight must have reached hers.
“D-Dinky…?”
“M-make sure it’s d-dead!” She grunted, through her clenched teeth. She didn’t want to release it until she was sure the fight was over, no matter how much it hurt her. How much longer could she keep that up? I’d heard unicorns could burn out their magic by overtaxing it, but I didn’t know what that looked like—Dinky’s horn looked like it was going to explode, and take her whole head with it.
Thankfully, Dinky didn’t have to hold it for much longer. Gilda sloshed forward through the water towards the cockatrice’s head, with her knife at the ready. Without even a moment of hesitation, she jammed it into the beat’s sole remaining eye, fully blinding it and piercing through into the creature’s skull. Her other claw, she slashed across the beast’s throat, to make sure it was dead.
Dinky gasped, and her magic winked out in an instant. She and the dead beast fell as one, now that her magic was no longer propping them both up. I stumbled up the rubble to check on her, and found she was still breathing, even if I could see waves of heat rolling off her horn. However, she seemed to have fallen unconscious, and I couldn’t really blame her. I tried my best to ignore the uncomfortable warmth, and flopped onto my side next to her, so that we could both catch our breath.
* * *
We’d all needed a break, after that fight. Dinky was completely out from overstraining her magic, and I was exhausted from…what I guessed to be something similar, even if I didn’t understand how it worked. Red had been protected from the worst inside the cockatrice’s guts by his hide armor, but he’d burned his fur and face badly by casting a fireball at point-blank range. Gilda had gotten off the easiest, it seemed, though she’d definitely damaged her flying abilities for the moment by slicing off that wingtip.
Needless to say, I was generous with my little flask of sunlight, and passed it around to the other two. It didn’t do much to help me, since my exhaustion seemed to be more spiritual in nature, but for Red and Gilda, it clearly helped a lot. Hopefully it would get Dinky on her hooves too, when she came around, but I was content to wait until then. In the meantime, I kept it clutched against my breast to feel the warmth within, and I watched as Red and Gilda began the long process of digging out the rubble that blocked the gate. Once that was out of the way, we could continue onward through the sewers, and hopefully upwards to Canterlot.
Once again, I was reminded about where that flask of sunlight had come from, originally. And it still disgusted me, but…it was just too useful for me to want to get rid of the thing. I tried my best to stop thinking about it, to stop agonizing over it, since it was far, far too late to do anything for Snips, but in moments like these where I had nothing else to do but wait…the thought crept back and reminded me, and I wished that it wouldn’t.
What must have been a few hours passed in relative silence, with little conversation, and the sounds of splashes as bricks were picked up and tossed aside, or timbers were dragged out of the pile. We briefly entertained the idea of climbing back up to the corridor that had fallen out from under us, but we decided that we didn’t know if it would just keep collapsing like that, and there wasn’t much point in making more work for ourselves unless we had to do so. We would investigate this gate first, at the very least.
We delayed a little bit longer, after Red and Gilda had cleared the gate enough to open it, just so they could move a little more rubble and open the door comfortably, just in case we ever needed to come back this way. We were also hoping that Dinky would rouse herself while we waited, but eventually it seemed that wasn’t the case, and so we picked her up and placed her on Red’s back, so that he could carry her forwards. Hopefully, somepony in Canterlot would be able to wake her.
Soon, we were back to exploring the sewer tunnels, though they seemed much more peaceful now. Perhaps we had slain all the cockatrices, or perhaps they were afraid of us, now that we had killed their broodmother. The reason why didn’t matter to us as much as the peace, for which we were thankful.
* * *
We had reached a corridor that was so close to the street that we could see sunlight, and hear the murmurs of a city, through a set of bars high above. Too far to reach, but it gave us hope, and assured us that we were headed in the right direction. And in that sunlight, we saw something metal and broken, glittering in the darkness.
“What’s that?” Gilda asked, and I moved forwards to pick it up, so we could all look at it clearly.
What I found was strange; a birdcage made of brass. As I picked it up, a dusty layer of down fluttered out of the bottom lining. I shook it a bit to see if there was anything more substantial inside, but that seemed to be all that was inside the cage.
I held it up so Gilda could look at it, and she tapped the bars with a talon. “These bars have been forced open, but they’re bent wrong…it’s like they were pulled apart from the inside. Something was trying to get out, not get in.” She glanced around at the down, then back down the tunnel, from where we’d emerged. “You don’t think…?”
“M-maybe,” I mumbled. “If…if it was p-pregnant when it was caged…”
“Somepony tryin’ to smuggle a demon into Canterlot, maybe?” Red asked, looking up at the bars. “An’ they had to get rid of it, real sudden-like.”
“All this trouble, over an escaped pest,” Gilda groaned.
I nodded, then set the cage down again. “At…at l-least it’s dead now. These t-tunnels still aren’t s-safe, but…”
Red nodded. “Safer than when we entered. Let’s keep moving; can’t be far from the streets o’ Canterlot now.”