I gathered the sailors in the mess and told them about Midnight’s current plan, not omitting to stress how dangerous it will be for everypony willing to participate. The whole crew volunteered on the spot. Even Sawbones – who was skeptical of Midnight’s alchemy – said it wouldn’t be right to quit now, when we’ve already come so far and paid for the journey with the blood of our comrades. I poured the potion into the remaining quarter of the last barrel of rum and raised a toast to the success of our mission and to those who didn’t live to be with us on this fateful night.
After the toast we stood up from the table and quickly trotted to our cabins in silence, ignoring the air of restlessness that permeated the ship. I made sure to warn the sailors beforehoof that the sleeping draft is very potent. I reached my room by the time I was starting to feel weak, then collapsed on the bed and drifted off to sleep.
I opened my eyes in the middle of the night. A glimpse through the porthole revealed that this night was so dark that even my bat eyes struggled to see the details on nearby objects. It was a full Moon and Mare in the Moon shone directly overhead, in the center of the sky. While I was looking at the reminder of our defeat, the dimmed runes in my eyes moved and changed shape on their own until they became different symbols. They started shining again, this time in the color matching the homecoming scar.
The restlessness sparked yesterday still hasn’t left me, prompting me to check if anypony’s dream journey went better than mine. I did not expect to find every cabin door in the officers’ wing open. Feeling budding unease, I continued going forward. Sawbones, Midnight, my former soldiers – none of them could be found on the ship. I trotted up the stairs and looked around, briefly noticing a pony’s tail disappear down the plank connecting us to the island.
I followed it and breathed a sigh of relief. Nopony went missing, the crew have just gathered outside, by the ship. I asked one of the soldiers to report on the current situation.
“We woke up around the same time, sir,” he said. “And we all felt this nagging feeling that we should explore around a bit.”
“Not all of the sailors are here. Did they not survive?” I asked in a steady tone.
“What?” The guard was surprised by the question. “Luna, no! Some just had the great idea to ignore everything weird and go back to sleep. We’ve already sent somepony to wake them back up and bring some weapons and lamps while he’s there.”
“Weapons? For what, fighting ants? This place is as empty as our ship’s hold!” I cynically laughed.
He ignored the mockery and said, “You should turn around, sir. Something’s changed.”
It was an understatement. Where previously grass grew on an empty plain, a winding cobblestone path now led to a lone stone structure in the center of the island. It reminded me of a crypt entrance.
“There’s a stairway leading down inside of it, but we couldn’t see how far it goes,” the guard explained, “or if it even has an end.”
“Are we still asleep?” I asked, surprising both of us.
The question wasn’t directed at anyone in particular but the former soldier said, “That’s what I thought, sir, even bit myself on the tongue to make sure. It hurt like it should but I’m still unconvinced. Maybe that witch of yours will know more.” He scratched his chin. “And sir, I’m not sure how to put it, but your eyes are glowing.”
“I know, I know. That’s actually alright.” I said, further confusing the guard.
A few minutes later everypony was ready to set out. The sailors drew straws to see who’d wear the helmets with lamps; some of the others – including all six lunar soldiers – took weapons with them. We carefully began the descent into the unknown. When a scout reported that the stone stairs stretched for at least a mile, we sped up. The walls and the low ceiling were covered in chiseled scenes and inscriptions written in thousands of languages. The reliefs varied wildly but almost all of the scenes were focused on fights between two characters. Remembering my dreams, I was almost sure that the characters shown were two of the Three whose conversation I saw.
It was impossible to judge the age of the structure; it gave the impression of being older than the oldest ruins in Equestria but every bit of it was preserved so well that it looked brand new. One of the sailors saw a bas-relief showing the defeat of the Great Deceiver, standing out because of the inclusion of the third character. Another found an even more surprising discovery – a depiction of Princess Luna’s defeat at the hooves of Celestia. The author included simplified silhouettes of two armies of ponies in the background; I wondered if that meant that I was technically forever immortalized here.
I don’t know how long we walked; any amount of time between ten minutes and ten hours would be believable. At last, the stairs ended in a stone arch leading into a narrow series of corridors branching out into even more corridors. Three symbols were etched into the topmost part of the arch. I recognized the language.
“Wait,” commanded Midnight, gesturing for us to stop, “unless you want to walk into a trap.”
“Can you translate it without your references?” I asked.
The smug smile returned to her face. “I already did. It won’t win any poetry competitions though. Let’s see… ‘True passage leading — Promised Traveler’s Reward — Others–Oblivion’. It’s simple, really. We have to find the way that leads to the ‘Reward’ or face oblivion,” concluded Midnight.
“But they look identical!” protested one of the sailors. “How are we supposed to know which one is correct?”
“Following the right wall is guaranteed to lead us somewhere,” enthusiastically suggested another. “It’s called the right-wing rule and it always works!”
“You’re stupid,” one of the soldiers chided her, “the rule breaks if there are any walls not connected to the edges. Instead we should pull out a thread from one of the saddlebags and use it to mark the paths we’re taking.”
“Ahem.” Sawbones cleared his throat. “I doubt that any of these methods will work here. We have to–“
Among the chattering, a revelation struck me. I said, “We got it wrong. This isn’t ‘Promised Traveler’s Reward’. It’s ‘Homecoming’s Reward’. So how about ‘Homecoming’s reward leads through the true passage’?”
The rune on my flank blinked and one of the paths in the maze began glowing. I stepped forward.
“Where are you going, captain?” asked the sailor who proposed following the right wall a moment ago.
“Forward,” I answered. “The glowing path must be the right one.”
“Um, sir,” began the guard standing next to her. “Nothing is glowing aside from our torches and the mark on your flank.”
“No, he’s right,” said Midnight, trotting behind me. “I can feel something changed. We just can’t see it.”
After some grumbling from the less courageous sailors, we resumed our expedition into the unknown.
“How did you know?” whispered Midnight. “I don’t suppose you’ve learned unicornish overnight, did you?”
“It looked similar to the rune the Night gave me during our last meeting. Then I remembered that Sawbones mistakenly called the mark a Traveler’s Promise. Remembering your lecture about the use of root symbols in this language, I put the two and two together.”
“Not bad,” she said, “for a soldier, that is.”
“Did I hear admiration or mockery?”
Instead of answering, Midnight smiled revealing her fangs.
Getting through the maze took as long as the stairs before it. We quickly discovered that the narrow corridors weren’t identical – although most of the labyrinth was carved in dark gray stone, occasionally we’d see a splotch of a lighter shade. The navigator identified those spots as markers reflecting the placement of the stars on the night sky.
“We’ve traveled very far from home, captain,” she said, “but I didn’t expect us to have to cross the sky.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Some have theorized that our Princess has been banished to the Moon. If we need to travel among the stars to reach her, we’ll do that, too.”
Eventually the corridor opened to a large ballroom. The walls were covered by silk draperies finished in gold. Near the ceiling they smoothly transitioned to impeccably painted murals decorating the marble ceiling. From it hung three great chandeliers chiseled out of the purest crystal I’ve ever seen. Below them stretched a checkered white and black floor; the white tiles were made out of ivory, the black ones – impossibly large black opals.
The tables were placed next to the walls, leaving the center of the room empty. They were no less extravagant than the rest of the room. The table cloth resembled golden silk but it was something even more rare – byssus, the sea-silk, woven only by the legendary sea ponies of Maretlantis before their hubris brought their kingdom to ruin at the hooves of kelpies. The silverware was no less ornate, decorated with flawless diamonds and black pears, forged out of the incredibly rare and highly sought-after starsteel – a metal that could only be found in the meteorites and even then only rarely.
And yet, it was not the splendor of the room or the absurdly extravagant furniture that immediately grabbed our attention, nor were it the tables or the silverware. It was the contents of the latter, food piling up high wherever we could see. One long table was almost bending below the weight of bowls of exotic-smelling soups in every color of the rainbow and twice more, the next had plates of masterfully prepared sandwiches and salads. The bread gleamed like gold, fresh lettuce sparkled like silver. I turned my gaze to the third table; this one hosted the most elaborate confectioneries, small pieces of candy prepared in fanciful shapes. I slowly started walking to the tables alongside all of my crew. The aroma of freshly-baked pies resting on the next table beside meter-high cakes was impossible to resist. I sped up. The fifth–
“Something’s not right,” said Sawbones in an alarmed tone.
Midnight pulled herself out of the trance. “You’re right, I’ll run a magic scan. Do not touch anything until I’m done.”
The sailors ignored her, moving ever closer to the delicacies. I shouted, “Don’t move an inch closer to the tables! This is an order!”
My words reached only the six former soldiers. They looked at each other with perplexed looks on their faces and promptly returned to the entrance where I, Midnight and Sawbones stood.
The rest of the sailors ignored my order. Chief among them my navigator, who said in a desperate voice, “Captain, this is our prize! We earned it! Gorge yourself, everypony!”
As she finished her command, the sailors broke into a mad dash to the tables and began devouring the food at an incredible pace. The soldiers looked at me, waiting for the next order. But before I could open my mouth, Midnight finished charging her spell and a wave of dispelling magic surged through the ballroom.
The illusion broke with the sound of shattered glass. What had been a ballroom a moment ago was now a derelict cave haphazardly dug in stone and mud. The banners on the walls rotted away into green scraps of seaweed and the chandelier fell to the floor and disappeared. The tables and the ‘silverware’ were made of rotten, jagged wood. And the food…
It was not food. Before I averted my eyes in horror, I saw soups of blood and bile, sandwiches made from flesh and a dish full of bloodshot pony eyeballs. Thousands of hair thin strings hung from the ceiling above the table, each ending with a tiny rusted iron hook.
The eyes and manes of sailors who partook in the rancid feast were lifeless and gray, the ponies themselves connected to the ceiling by the countless threads. With their meal interrupted, they turned towards us and began to shamble more than walk in our direction.
Midnight probed one of them with a weak spell. “They’re gone! Whatever they are now, they are no longer your crew, or ponies at all for that matter.”
The guards instinctively held their weapons at the danger.
“There!” cried out Sawbones, “Another way!” He pointed at a smaller door on the other side of the nightmarish room.
He was right, running away wasn’t an option. Even if the turned sailors couldn’t follow us out of the crypt – which I doubted – back on the ship we’d just starve to death.
I gestured for everypony to run to the next door. The pony-shaped monsters noticed it and shambled faster, exceeding our galloping speed. We reached the door first but the situation looked hopeless. Along the way one of the guards ran his wide spear through one creature’s neck. At first the sailor collapsed to the floor but a second later a hard, lizard-like scale grew on the wound and the sailor continued his damned march, now with his head sticking out at an unnatural angle.
The former soldiers assumed a defensive stance in the entrance to the corridor. “Go, sir,” said one of them, “we’ll hold them off here.”
“There’s thirty two of those things and six of you.” I firmly shook my head. “I’m staying with you.”
Sawbones picked up a dagger dropped by one of the sailors. “I wasn’t always a surgeon, you know, –“ he threw the weapon into the air with his left wing and skillfully caught it with the right one “– and I only swore to never harm ponies, which they are not.”
“So they’re resilient, big deal,” said Midnight nonchalantly conjuring bright sparks from her horn, “we’ll see how they handle third degree magic burns.”
One of the creatures in the ballroom stumbled headfirst into a cave wall, causing a boulder to fall from the ceiling straight onto its hindlegs. The monster squealed and continued to drag itself across the floor with its two remaining hooves.
“Go!” the guard drawled out through his gritted teeth and drew his wide-bladed partisan. “We’ve faced worse odds in Fillydelphia, sir. We’ll stop them and catch up with you in a minute.”
It was then that I remembered him. Sergeant Straight Pike, one of the brave souls who led a frontal charge on the solar encampment that cut our escape path. He was an excellent fighter but, as it turned out a moment ago, a terrible liar. A part of me wanted to stay with him and the other guards to fight to the bitter end.
But we all have our duties. “Midnight, Sawbones, come with me! And you, brave soldiers, thank you. We’ll come back… as soon as we can.”
“I’m sure you will, Long Vigil,” said Pike with a sad smile.
We ran further into the darkness. Seconds later, the sound of slashing and poking filled the corridor. Before we got far enough for our hoofsteps to drown out the fight, a pained scream echoed behind us. My scar flashed with a blue light and stung me with a spike of a fleeting cold sensation. Somehow I understood. There were only five soldiers left standing between us and the mindless horde.