//------------------------------// // Stainless // Story: Crystalforged // by SilverNotes //------------------------------// With another bypass, they were back in a lit portion of the facility. Their new umbrum companions would hiss a bit and draw back whenever a light-crystal flickered on, but they didn't react with the same signs of pain the shades had. Just displeasure and discomfort. Rutile certainly couldn't begrudge them that when the lights now felt a bit too bright for her eyes too. The three continued to converse, and while they'd spoken clearly enough to her--that was supposed to be a property of ageless entities like the umbrum, some form of inherent language-learning, able to move forward through ages of linguistic drift and somehow know how to speak, with any slip ups being due to habit rather than lack of knowledge--right now they were primarily talking in what she assumed was their native dialect. Some words almost sounded recognizable, and every once and a while they veered into modern speech for a sentence or two before returning. It was in those bursts of modernity that she picked up on their names. The bronze one was Bizra, and seemed to be the oldest. The aquamarine was Morga, who sounded like the middle child. The pink was Thana, clearly the youngest. Snatches of pronouns and modes of address allowed her to puzzle out that Bizra was a stallion and the other two were mares, if those terms were even the proper ones for umbrum. After all, they were vaguely equine in shape, but as shadowy magic arranged into a quasi-solid form, they hardly could be expected to have similar gendered language as ponies. What little she could understand of their speech sounded a lot like a family planning their vacation. Things they wanted to see, or do. Thana in particular repeated an ancient word enough times, in enough contexts, that Rutile was reasonably certain it meant a type of theatre. Excited to get out of this vault and do something as simple as see a performance. She almost felt bad about pointing her cannon at them. Almost. Enough things had tried to kill her in here that she felt she'd been pretty generous in not shooting first and asking questions later. Besides, they'd been enemies of ponykind when they'd been locked up in here, even if they seemed docile now. The story of Radiant Hope had warned that they could be deceptive... Well, if they tried to do anything to the empress, she'd blast them then. Simple as that. There was a locked door ahead, and Tundra headed for a computer. Rutile did a quick count of the layers they'd passed through, tried to gauge how deeply they'd gone and and how far it may be the core, and promptly gave herself a headache. Though the fear and dread that her companion was giving off certainly wasn't helping, either; something deep as instinct was telling her to soothe the doe, but she didn't know how, especially not while she looked like some kind of half-crystal magic cyborg. Still, she had to try. Rutile slowly approached, and saw ears flick in her direction. With one front leg encased in crystal and another in metal, her hoofsteps weren't anywhere close to light, so she wasn't surprised. "Tun...?" The flicking ears flattened and Rutile flinched. "Hey," she started again, voice soft, "You okay?" Tundra turned to stare at her in disbelief. "Am I okay?" She winced, looked over at the three umbrum, and only kept speaking when she was sure they were too busy chattering to pay attention to her. "You're fused with an ancient crystal with who-knows-what dark magic in it, that has three umbrum following you around like ducklings, and I'm the one you ask is okay?" "Yes." Rutile glanced at Bizra, Morga, and Thana as well, then back to Tundra. "Because I'm also the one who can sense emotion, and you feel like you're going to throw up or pass out at a moment's notice." She lightly stomped her crystal-coated hoof. "I feel fine." It wasn't bluster. Other than her new light sensitivity, she felt good as new, now that the pain of the initial transformation had faded. In fact, if she didn't look at either place where the dark crystal had grown, it would be easy to forget that it even existed. Even the stone in her chest felt... normal. Tundra looked at Rutile, and for a moment, the sadness overwhelmed fear. "That's why I'm worried, Root. All this happened, and you're not reacting to it. You're carrying on like you always do. Don't you think there's something wrong with that?" Don't I think--? "What a sickeningly sweet friend you have. It seems that even a battle-hardened crystal pony still has some of that weakness. What a pity." Rutile gritted her teeth. "Why do you care? I'm just the hired muscle, remember? And the job's almost done." She turned away, and walked toward the three umbrum. "You're the historian, and I'm just the history. The extinct species back from the dead. Worry about yourself." She could feel Tundra's eyes on her, at first. Then, slowly, the doe turned away and got back to work. Good. They'd barely set hoof through the newly-opened doors when they saw it. The chaospawn they'd fought before had had the rough size and shape of ponies. This one seemed to have instead taken the template of a hydra. There were four heads, four legs, and a tail, none of them were from the same sort of creature, and any one of those heads could have easily grabbed up Rutile and eaten her whole. It'd been laying on the floor, much like a marionette without strings, but their presence had it shuddering back into animation, getting onto the mismatched legs and looking at pony, reindeer, and three umbrum with far too many eyes. "I thought you said the first doors were keeping the spawn out!" Rutile burst out, looking to Tundra, who was looking at the pistol with the confidence of a bushwoolie who'd been given a slingshot to fight a dragon. "I said I was pretty sure they were intended to!" Tundra shot back as she put away the gun and lit her antlers with magic. "Chaospawn don't exactly play nice with three-dimensional space!" The hydraspawn roared, and Rutile looked at the three umbrum. "That spawn is between us and the empress." None of them looked impressed with the sight, but when she spoke, they all nodded. She nodded back, then raised her cannon at the beast. "Take it down!" Bizra, Morga, and Thana surged forward, and in that moment, Rutile understood why ponykind had once feared the umbrum. Rutile hadn't been around dark magic much, and the work that the Order of the Two Sisters had done to stomp out the practitioners of it was one of the few things of theirs that she could agree with. Her one close encounter had been a sorceress who'd started puppeting the dead around a settlement, and she'd never forget how the magic had felt. It'd been like somepony had found a way to make all of her senses feel oily at once, like she was drowning in a mixture of hate, sadism, and avarice that had been thrown into a blender. She'd later figure out that being a crystal pony made her especially susceptible, and had grimly noted at the time that she could have made a lot of coin as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If the crystal starts acting like she wants to crawl out of her own skin, you've got dark magic around. The umbrum had been fine to be around, just existing, but when they attacked the chaospawn, lashing out with shadows crafted into blades, whips, raw blasts, all of it hitting with force to effortlessly cleave through the unnatural flesh... "Yes, my children, prove that you are superior to chaospawn." Rutile's head rung, and she barely managed to fire off a single cannon shot before her legs nearly crumpled beneath her. Her stomach churned and she heaved, but nothing came up and the action only served to make her see stars. Pain lanced down her back, dark crystal bursting out from either side of her spine. They were thin sheets, running from her shoulders to her hips, and had jagged edges that made them look like a twisted mimicry of fairy wings as they spread out to the sides. Then her horn flared with magic, and this time there was none of her trademark blue, only inky black. "The umbrum will not be halted by an abomination such as this!" Rutile started to levitate, soaring up with greater ease than she'd ever been able to before. She lifted her leg, pointed the cannon, and the dark power rushed from horn to device, firing off a beam toward one tree-trunk-like neck. One of the spawn's heads hit the ground, shark-like jaws still snapping at air, and she saw Bizra, Morga, and Thana turn to stare. "Yes... you will do nicely. If I must inhabit a body of flesh, it's fitting that it be a crystal pony, after Hope poisoned my son against me." Rutile met their gazes, and she smiled.