Ruby glanced nervously over her shoulder, preparing whatever string of excuses she would need. Deep Silver didn’t appear in the hallway with the rest of the excavation team, though—it was only her imagination. It must be dawn by now. Do they think I went up to the city for coffee? Maybe Deep Silver thought she’d abandoned the project completely. It wouldn’t be beyond him to give up on something.
The wall shuddered with each tap of her pick. She moved it delicately, conscious every minute of the spells that might crumble with too much force. Who knew what secrets might hide in a relic like this, older than Equestria’s immortal rulers? Is that why you didn’t care about this expedition? This wasn’t your world.
Her worry over discovery proved in vain, though. One last tap, and a sheet of deposited minerals slid away from the doorway, crumbling onto the floor. The door seemed to be waiting for that exact moment, because it sung to her, a simple melody that echoed through the rock all around her. An ancient message of welcome, perhaps?
Then it opened, many sections sliding past and around each other until they vanished into the wall.
Ruby was immediately struck with an unplaceable smell, one strong enough that she covered her mouth with one hoof. Like a perfect bouquet accidentally left in the sun too long. Her vision blurred, and she dropped to one knee, waiting for the vertigo to pass.
After all these years, it’s intact. How is that possible?
Ruby River rose to her hooves, lighting her horn. Yet somehow, impossibly, that didn’t seem necessary. Purple and red light glowed from beyond the doorway, beckoning her.
As she’d suspected, the building within was twisted to one side, though its metal corridors were still relatively intact. The ancients had built large, so that even an Alicorn could’ve marched through in comfort.
She tested the path with one hoof, placing only a little of her weight at a time. Despite seeming as thin as paper, the metal held without bending. “How?” she asked, her horn dimming slightly as she took another few steps in. She stowed her chisel, removing a tightly wrapped case from beside it and opening the thaumic voice recorder. With a little focus the crystal began to glow, and the wax cylinder started spinning. She would have two hours of recording time with both her blank disks—hopefully it would be enough.
“Ruby River of the Canterlot Archeological Society. I stand in the threshold of a pre-Equestrian ruin. The building appears entirely intact, through some… ancient preservation spell. I will proceed as far as structural stability permits.”
There was one last thing to do before she could proceed. Ruby lifted a dense spool of white wire from inside her satchel, and stepped back out of the doorway. She wrapped the end tightly around a large rock, then retreated.
“I have secured necessary safety equipment and am proceeding deeper into the structure.”
She continued to the end of the hallway, which fell away after a short distance into a remarkably steep stairwell. The glow of her horn illuminated as far as the railing on either side, then empty air. How high up was she? A little further the blue of her magic caught a bronze colored… sphere, attached to the ceiling?
“Past the doorway is an entry passage of unknown size,” she told the recorder, bracing her forelegs on the railing and lighting up her horn as bright as she could.
This wasn’t some impossible ruin Daring Do might’ve explored—there was a floor three stories down. “I believe the ancients must have valued nature as much as ponies do. There is landscaping below this bridge, and…” It couldn’t be. Nothing could possibly grow in conditions like these. Even strange fungus needed something to decompose, right? Yet something was growing down there, reflecting black and blue and pulsing strangely as she watched.
What kind of plant is that? “I think it was abandoned, there are dead plants down there. Petrified, maybe.” That was the only sensible explanation—petrified plants.
She continued onward, describing her path as the passage widened and took her down into another hallway, this one surrounded by tubes larger than a pony. There was no mistaking the motion from all around her, even if she couldn’t quite catch it in the glow of her horn. She could hear mechanical grinding as metal slid against metal, along with the occasional distant crack of lightning.
“I thought this might’ve been a purely unicorn structure, but I’m seeing some signs of electricity. It must be weather magic, though I don’t know how it could be contained before the invention of the first weather factory.”
Unless it wasn’t. Maybe we were wrong about that too. She wanted to follow that light, and see what magical discoveries might wait if she approached the distant flashing—but something else caught her eye. A doorway up ahead as wide as a castle gate lay half-open, with one side perpetually sliding forward, then back as it tried and failed to close. And in the opening, she saw… a spell?
Ancient and modern accounts both sometimes mentioned spells cut loose from their casters, and this is what she imagined one might look like. A ball, pulsing brighter as she looked in its direction. “There’s something moving down here. A spell fragment… maybe what called ponies here in the first place?”
Ruby wanted to run for the spell, but she resisted the temptation. This was no tomb, so far as she knew, filled with traps and guardians to keep its treasures safe. To her knowledge, Unicornia and the other ancient kingdoms had brought nothing like that to Equestrian soil.
She peeked through the doorway, and recoiled at what she saw. A smaller room than any of the vast spaces she’d yet explored, with walls snaking with rubbery sludge. Little pulses of red glowed from within, and strange feelers wriggled towards her.
I was wrong. There is a strange fungus here, feeding on this old place. Not the terrible cold of the Windigos, either. The sickly-sweet smell was much stronger here, a perfume strong enough it no longer seemed rotten.
“I don’t think I’m qualified to catalogue any of this,” she muttered to the recorder, retreating from the doorway. “Something is still alive down here, maybe… feeding on the magic directly. I’ll come back the way I came, search for tools or art to bring back with m—” She stopped abruptly.
The sphere of light reappeared from the end of the room, beside some kind of… relic. A machine taller than she was, formed of many metal arms and bits of glowing gemstone. It too was overgrown, yet the failing spell could move freely around it.
Did it respond to what I said? Curious, Ruby leaned through the doorway, raising her voice. “Can you hear me?”
It seemed to glow brighter, but otherwise just kept bobbing up and down in place. Maybe it couldn’t understand her? Ruby hesitated for a moment, running over a translation in her head. The trouble with Old Ponish was that nopony was quite sure how it was meant to be pronounced.
But at least Ruby knew enough to try. “Hello? Are you a guardian enchantment?”
The sphere switched from white to deep blue, and several smaller circles separated from the center, orbiting around it like a star. “Guardian,” echoed a voice, strangely fragmented and shifting in pitch. Like the one time she’d met a changeling, only more mechanical somehow.
It flew towards her, fast enough that she retreated from the doorway. There was no reason to bother—it moved only as far as the doorway, as though striking against an invisible barrier. “You are… intelligent? The terraforming paradigm contained no intelligent quadrupeds.”
Ruby held the recorder towards it, though the voice seemed to come from the room itself. It echoed from the walls nearby, occasionally muffled by the sickly growths covering everything.
Its words made no sense, but if this was the voice of the ancients preserved in their magic… even religious conversation would be precious. She held her magic extra still, so the wax disk would get the clearest possible impression.
“I am… intelligent,” she repeated, doing her best to match the pronunciation. “I am Ruby River. Here… investigating this… building. To learn about the ones who built it.”
The ground shook under her hooves, and as it did the walls beyond seemed to glow bright red. Was that responding to her too? Or maybe that was the excavation team, barging in destructively and making the guardian angry.
But no, the little sphere of light seemed unchanged. It bobbed up and down just out of reach, as though examining her with invisible eyes. “Has the infestation cleansed the Sentients from Tau Gamma?” asked the voice. “My crew would have answered that question on my behalf, but they have been dead for… a great many years.”
Ruby had to fight the instinct to dig out her quill and ink and write everything this spell repeated to her. But she was recording everything—every sound she made on this recording would probably be in a museum one day. She spoke with that in mind, as dignified and confident as she could be.
“I do not know the word… Sentient,” she said. “What are they?”
“Horrifying monsters, completely out of control,” the guardian answered. “You are organic, and apparently free-thinking. Deduction leaves only one possible conclusion: that our mission was successful. Thank you for sharing this information with me, Ruby River. I will now self-terminate.”
The glow retreated, zipping back towards the arcane machine at the far end of the room. Ruby found herself following, her hooves stepping onto ground that was soft and warm when it should be neither. “Wait! There’s so much more you could tell us! Don’t… whatever you’re going to do. Please tell me about Unicornia! Tell me about our home! Where did we come from?”
She reached the machine, though didn’t dare get close enough to touch it. The sphere of light did not return, but a broken voice seemed to speak from within, as though the spell were unraveling right in front of her. “Perhaps a Sentient gene-mold? Or maybe the war is long over, and you were placed here by an Archimedian. Inquire with your masters for information, or await extermination when they arrive to repossess Tau Gamma. Whichever is applicable.”
Something clicked, and the voice abruptly fell silent, leaving Ruby alone in the gloom.
Celestia, no! This was exactly why she hadn’t wanted the crude excavation team on this project—now through a few callus words she’d just done the same thing.
Part of her wanted to turn in despair, and return to the surface for whatever punishment she deserved. But she could still feel the faint pulse of magic from all around her. Maybe she misunderstood what self-termination meant—maybe it was only sleeping, waiting for a new purpose.
Ruby leaned forward, and selected a few of the overgrown levers. They were tiny and delicate, far too close together for an earth pony to operate. They responded sluggishly to her magic, mechanisms jammed with dirt and grease and tendrils of strange fungus.
Yet as she worked, the machine moved. A deep blue glow erupted from within, bright enough to overpower the pulsing red fungus. She shielded her eyes with a leg for a moment, letting them adjust to the light.
The machine hummed, and its multi-jointed arms began to swivel and spin. They unfurled like an insect waking from a long sleep, as complex as any modern textile-mill and far better assembled.
It moved towards her so quickly she hardly knew what was happening. She squealed in pain as something sharp jammed into her, spreading an agonizing burn from its touch.
Ruby made it three steps away from the machine before both of her back legs had gone completely numb. She flopped to the ground, clawing a little further towards the doorway with her forelegs. Her breath came in rattling gasps, like she was fighting with something else in her lungs.
She managed to settle the recorder down on the deck in front of her, though it was all the magical focus she could manage. “I am… might be… poisoned…” she croaked, voice raspy. “Hopefully… not fatally.” Her legs twitched and spasmed of their own accord, and felt terribly like something had begun growing along the surface of her skin. “L-love you, Mom. I’m…”
But she would say nothing else.
The recorder kept spinning, long enough for something to stalk past the open door—a stretched and elongated form, dragging tentacles from its oversized arms. A dense crowd of stranger things followed in the gloom, moving listlessly towards the distant touch of fresh air.