The preparations for the upcoming excavation continued with about the same effort for Market Garden’s next offensive, and as the days wore on, the two would continue to interfere with one another to an irritating degree. Still, it kept me busy, and sorting out minor irritations like an archaeologist getting lost in the fortress and accidentally wandering into the General’s office where she kept her top secret documents gave me at least some excuse to get away from the more serious work, where my decisions could affect the outcomes of battles to come and the lives of everypony involved.
[As an unfortunate consequence of the war dragging on, particularly with Hardscrabble's new strategic doctrine in place, several ponies were arrested as Changeling sympathisers for committing acts ranging from vandalising government property to attempted espionage. The Commissariat's job was to clamp down on such dissent within the military, and though Blueblood's glossing over this incident may seem odd, it is likely a reflection of his disdain for the supposed overreaction of those around him, and the encounter was still documented in official records. Since an application of the Changeling reveal spell would not be sufficient, Blueblood conducted a brief interrogation, in which a bottle of brandy was involved, concluding with the suspect's prompt release.]
The incident with those strange glowing orbs continued to nag at me like an itch in a hard-to-reach place; far be it from me to think that my silly paranoia trumps the intelligence and experience of highly trained and well-educated academics, but said instinctive distrust has kept me alive these past few years of war and that it persisted in quietly poking me in the the back of my brain with a stick inclined me to think that there really was something more to them. However, they were gone now, having been rendered useless by Cannon Fodder, so it was something of a moot point. That said, the first rule of paranoia is that when somepony else goes to great lengths to conceal something from ordinary, routine scrutiny, then it is usually only the first time that they have been caught in the act and they are likely to be hiding a great many other things. I was determined to find out, but if I did the usual commissar routine of shouting at everypony and threatening firing squads until somepony cracked and told the truth, then they would have simply gone home and I’d be left wondering what that was all about, and so I would have to tread somewhat carefully. In practice, this meant going along with whatever it was they were doing, while keeping an eye out for the inevitable denouement.
As for A. K. Yearling, if I didn’t know any better I’d have said that she was avoiding me. That is not to say that she was outright rude or hostile to Yours Truly, but whatever bond we had formed over that dinner had clearly been broken prematurely by the peculiar incident right after. Each time that I saw her since now involved merely an exchange of pleasantries and a spot of chatter about the upcoming dig, and I made sure to resist the persistent urge to pester her with yet more questions about her Daring Do stories. Perhaps, I considered, it was better to maintain a level of professional distance, at least until the excavation was finally complete. I attended, and was thoroughly bored by, a number of meetings where they planned the excavation in as much detail as possible. Market Garden, I thought, would have been very impressed, and A. K. Yearling might have missed her opportunity to do her part for the war effort by serving on the General’s staff as the chief orderly in charge of counting staplers.
In one such meeting Southern Cross was in attendance, and was likewise bored to tears by the goings-on. As A. K. Yearling and Corded Ware went on and on about something or other to do with dating early and late Crystal Empire pottery, the two of us sat at our corner of the conference table quietly playing noughts-and-crosses on the meeting notes to try and pass the time. I lost three games in a row and Southern Cross grinned with insufferable smugness, but he could not gloat in his victory for long when it finally came to the part of this overly-long and tedious meeting that required his presence.
“Captain Southern Cross,” said Corded Ware, and said engineer looked up with a start from where he was doodling a constellation next to the site of my most ignominious defeat in our battle of wits.
“Yeah, mate?” he answered, suppressing a yawn at the same time so that he sounded like a drunk slurring his words.
“How long will it be until the blockage is cleared?”
“A couple more days,” said Southern Cross with a shrug. “Only because we did such a good job of blocking it in the first place; nopony here wants Changelings coming up through their basement again.”
Corded Ware frowned and shook his head. “Could you not speed it up?”
“We could.” A small smirk formed on Southern Cross’ mouth, as it tended to do before he had something he thought was clever to say. “We could do it in a day, and wreck all of the very old stuff in the basement that by rights probably ought to be preserved. What’s left of it, I mean. We’re engineers, mate, you can have us do things quickly or do things properly, but not both at the same time.”
He spoke of the tomb’s entrance chamber beneath the fortress’ keep, a few storeys down directly under our hooves, that had been the way inside the ‘temple-tomb complex’ that remained unexplored, except perhaps by a band of Diamond Dogs and the Changelings that had allegedly wiped them all out. It was ancient, yes, and had been repurposed as a dungeon and torture chamber by the Badlands pony tribe that had later occupied and then abandoned this fortress atop it, yet the desperately old carvings that predated Equestria’s founding by untold millennia had remained more or less intact. It had survived the many thousands of years since, until our sappers were forced to demolish a large section of it with explosives to stop the enemy from coming up through those same tunnels during the siege here. A great loss to the world of archaeology, of course, but given the rather desperate circumstances we found ourselves in during that awful battle, an acceptable one. Following that, subsequent teams of engineers had worked to seal off the tunnels as securely as possible, and now all of that needed to be undone so Corded Ware and company could go poking around below.
“I’d like to avoid further damage to the site,” said A. K. Yearling. “If it can be avoided.”
“We’re here for the old Crystal Empire outpost,” said Corded Ware, irritation starting to colour his face and expression. However, he then collected himself and sighed. “How quickly can you clear it?”
Southern Cross frowned, squinting at the old archaeologist, and took a sharp intake of breath, as labouring ponies do when somepony asks them to do something unwise but they can’t just say it. “I can always ‘speed up’. Send in the stallions with pick axes and hack through all the rubble and thousand-year-old masonry with fancy carvings. We can do it all in a day if we don’t care about damaging all of that irreplaceable stuff, if that’s what you really want?”
I could see the expression of dawning horror develop in slow-motion on A. K. Yearling’s face, and Corded Ware squirmed awkwardly in his seat. “The entire purpose of this excavation,” he began, “is to uncover the Crystal Empire outpost. Everything else is secondary.”
A. K. Yearling shot her colleague a sharp glare, and looked as though she was restraining herself from leaping over the table and slapping him. Southern Cross appeared not to know how to respond to that, and merely shrugged casually and muttered something quietly to himself about this entire meeting being pointless.
“That,” I said, and everypony snapped to look at me as I said my first words in the meeting that weren’t the usual opening pleasantries or an inquiry about whether or not we’ll be served biscuits soon, “is a very strange attitude for an archaeologist to have.”
My suspicions about the stallion sitting opposite me were only growing more aroused by his odd behaviour. Of course, he was an academic, and ponies who spend their entire lives immersed in books and fussing over others who are long dead are very odd by their nature anyway, like a certain purple Princess I could name. There was more to him and his little band of fellow geeks than their appearances, which were simply too stereotypical to be believable but I suppose such cliches have some grounding in reality, would otherwise have implied, but all that I had by way of evidence were a few odd things that would hardly stand up in any sort of tribunal except one where I had bribed the judge.
“What’s the rush?” I asked, while he continued to brood silently to try and come up with some sort of answer that, I assumed, would make me shut up. “Surely whatever’s down there is unlikely to walk away?”
He quickly realised that he had overstepped the mark, or that his cover had slipped, as the paranoid part of my brain hastened to correct. “Of course,” he said, looking and sounding very sheepish all of a sudden. “Forgive me, the ancient Crystal Empire has been my life’s work. I’m glad I have colleagues to ensure that my pursuits do not blind me from the principles of archaeological research.”
I remained unconvinced by that, but interrogating him on this point and thereby dragging out this meeting seemed like a waste of my valuable and limited time, and there was a seat at the bar in the mess with my name on it just waiting for me. All I could do, aside from drag him to one side and threaten him with a flogging if he didn’t give up all of his secrets, was go along with it. There was, I reassured myself, always the possibility, however remote, that it could all be very innocent. I’d learnt by now to trust my instincts, but I had made the fatal assumption that such things applied exclusively to matters of war and that the warning signs were merely them being misapplied to a group of socially-backward bookworms instead of the sort of socially-backward officers I was used to working with, and so, in the name of just getting on with it, I put it all to one side. This felt more and more like a Daring Do story by the second, and not one of the better ones too; I half-expected the door to burst open and Caballeron to storm in with his henchponies because the author had written herself into a corner and needed to move the plot along. I reminded myself that this sort of thing was fictional, as said author herself had explained, and that the reality of archaeology was much more tedious, sedate, and safe than otherwise implied. Besides, I didn’t fancy looking like a complete idiot again after that debacle at dinner a few nights ago.
The meeting came to a gradual but greatly anticipated conclusion, for my backside had become numb after sitting still for so long and I was feeling rather restless. Southern Cross agreed that the blockage could be at least partially cleared within a few days, preserving what was left of the ancient carved walls and pillars for posterity while allowing sufficient space for a team of ponies to slip through with relative ease. This satisfied A. K. Yearling, and though Corded Ware sulked like a foal denied more ice cream, he glumly acknowledged defeat and nodded his agreement to the plan.
That evening, A. K. Yearling delivered on her promise to read a chapter from her greatly-anticipated next book, Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds, for the soldiers as part of an RASEA show, and I felt rather sorry for the comedy juggling act that was to follow immediately. Now, I’ve attended a great many of these shows before, as often on the frontline there’s not much else in the way of entertainment besides drowning one’s sorrows in liquor or seeking the comfort granted by hiring the services of another pony for the night, and both of which were, if accepted, at least somewhat frowned upon if done to excess. I had yet to see a show with such an attentive audience as her’s. They tended to be rather raucous affairs, you see, since the audience was made up of very bored young stallions and mares whose jobs entailed no small amount of personal risk to themselves, and as such all shows were audience-participation numbers regardless of the intentions of whichever unfortunate entertainer was hauled out in front of them for their amusement. The good ones knew this, anticipated it, and therefore built it into their routine, while the bad ones, which outnumbered those with talent, made up for the lack of entertainment value when heckled, booed, or otherwise driven off the stage. By contrast, the crowd that I saw that evening was the most well-behaved I’d seen thus far, and would have put the regulars at the Royal Opera House in Canterlot to shame for the atmosphere of hushed and attentive reverence they created.
They hung on her every word, as the saying goes, as A. K. Yearling described Daring Do’s obligatory descent into whichever ancient dungeon filled with traps that were somehow still working after so many thousands of years. Despite her desire to be a known and recognised as a serious academic, she remained a natural storyteller, and the way that she held the rapt attention of ponies who, were it any other author, would usually providing their own live commentary to the story or throwing things onto the stage, was a testament to that fact. Her voice filled the ancient hall, which once would have held banquets and entertainment for petty lordlings, and I too found myself taken in by what seemed like a spell cast over us all.
The chapter ended on a cliffhanger, with a particularly lethal and overly-complicated trap triggered and some manner of bloodthirsty mythical beast on our gallant heroine’s tail. We would all have to buy her book to find out how Daring Do escaped this one when it was finally published, and as the audience stomped their hooves and roared their approval I had a grim and unpleasant thought about how many of them, including Yours Truly, would survive General Market Garden’s next push to read it and find out what happens next. Her subsequent mobbing by her adoring fans prevented me from congratulating her and from providing a helpful critique that, now that I think of it, probably would not have been received well by her.
There was only one further minor hiccup along the way -- it didn’t actually inhibit the progression of the excavation, but it did, as these things often did, settle into my mind and continue to nag at me. Earthshaker, Chieftain of the Jerboa tribe (it was apparently no longer considered appropriate to call them the Rat Pony tribe, but I continued to do so in private if only because of what he in particular had done to me) was present in the fortress to attend to some important inter-tribe affair to do with their continued support in our war, and to avoid any particular tribe being seen as favoured it was decided to hold this on ‘neutral’ ground. They were organising, you see, and I’d already expressed my private concerns to Princess Celestia that they might prove a threat to Equestria if they ceased squabbling amongst themselves and started working together. She reminded me that we were fighting for friendship for all ponies and to worry about one threat at a time, before ordering another round of cake and diverting the conversation to something banal.
[Though relations had been strained by the massacre at Virion Hive, Earthshaker’s distrust of Equestria remained an anomaly amongst the Badlands tribes, who, on the whole, supported our war against the Changelings. The potential threat of a united Badlands hostile to Equestria had also been raised by a number of officers in the military and some politicians, whose fears would later prove to be completely unfounded in the years of cooperation that followed. As for the cake and the conversation, my nephew had chosen to raise this at a party, and for one evening I would have liked to avoid talking shop.]
In the short term, I’d already had my worries about General Market Garden ruining our vital alliance with these tribes by opening her mouth and offending one of the natives, particularly the contentious Earthshaker who, though he saw the evident necessity of it all, remained decidedly unhappy on the necessity of cooperating with the ‘servants of the Tyrants of the Sun and Moon’ as he continued to call us, but our illustrious General was easily distracted with the job micromanaging the army’s supply lines and mercifully left dealing with the locals to more socially capable officers. If the delegates were offended by her infrequent appearances they did not care to voice it.
For reasons that ought to be obvious, I avoided Earthshaker as much as possible beyond the bare minimum required by basic courtesy. However, it was impossible to avoid him completely, and eventually we were forced into a mutually unpleasant situation where we had to make polite and civil small talk while we both waited for Major General Garnet to arrive so this meeting could start. I don’t exactly recall how the topic of the upcoming excavation had come up in the conversation, besides desperately trying to find something to chat aimlessly about once talk of the weather had finally run dry. Nevertheless, when the news was quite casually brought up, he frowned disapprovingly at me.
“The tombs below this fortress are cursed,” he said.
“How so?” I asked. “Is it anything I should be worried about?”
“That depends if you’re stupid enough to disturb the ancient dead,” he said solemnly. At first I thought that he was joking or trying to unnerve me, but either he was extremely dedicated or being honest, and it was the insult that nudged me into believing the latter.
“I’ll make sure the grave-robbing is kept to an appropriate minimum, then.”
His expression did not change, and I knew then that he was being deadly serious. “Our stories tell us of the king who once lived in this castle, knowing that ponies of an empire long fallen had delved deep beneath his throne and buried their dead and their treasure below, and despite the warnings from his priest, his curiosity overcame his good sense and ordered an expedition below. The dead there rose from their tombs and slaughtered the entire castle, and the kingdom fell.”
Major General Garnet had by then finally arrived (it turned out he was delayed because he was giving an impromptu lecture on postage stamps to a hapless clerk) and the meeting began at last, so I hadn’t the time to question the Chieftain further about this particular story. In what I could only assume was a measure calculated to spite me, he left before I could prod him for further details, and, well, given that my back would still ache from time to time with the flogging he’d personally given me even after those years had passed, I could be forgiven for not wanting to speak to him any more than I truly had to.
I did, however, ask Corded Ware and A. K. Yearling, our experts, about this particular story when I next met them in the officers mess for dinner.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” snapped Corded Ware, and he must have seen the arching of my eyebrow at that remark and thus added a quick ‘sir’ to the end of that. “It’s merely a legend, a myth, from a superstitious tribe of backwards savages.”
Ordinarily, I would have agreed with him, but the fact that this sort of thing might have happened again with the Diamond Dogs much more recently had led me to believe that there was a chance, however slim, that there really was something to these old ‘legends’. Nightmare Moon, after all, was merely an old ponies’ tale right up until the moment the sun failed to rise.
“Local stories can help us in uncovering what really happened,” said A. K. Yearling. “Tales become twisted, distorted, exaggerated, and so on with each telling, but there’s often some truth behind it. Perhaps the king opening the tomb happened to coincide with a disastrous event that ended his kingdom, like a war or a plague, and over the years the stories spread and ponies believed the two events were directly linked.”
I suppose I was in no real position to argue; decades of research and study versus my strange hunch that something was wrong was hardly a fair comparison, and so I quietly accepted A. K. Yearling’s sensible explanation for it all and simply carried on with things. Curses aren’t real, as Corded Ware had said, and the dead don’t rise from their graves until such a time Faust grows bored with her creation and decides to start it all again from scratch.
The engineers cleared the blockage by hoof on the following day, having been bribed with extra beer rations, extended leave, and tickets to an exclusive burlesque show to pull an all-nighter, and the archaeologists, each giddy with excitement, immediately descended into the dungeons to begin their excavation. This basement area was the only part of the entire fortress that had not been ‘renovated’ at all by the military, and remained more or less in the same state as it was after the engineers had collapsed a large section of it to keep the Changelings out. I felt a strange and foreboding sense of deja vu as I descended with the team down the spiral stairs to the dungeons, and the way that the spirals would reverse direction for no reason that seemed obviously logical took me by surprise once more. The stairs also went down considerably further from the ground floor than one would otherwise expect from what was effectively a basement, and I had the rather unpleasant feeling that the native ponies who had built this in the first place did so to make entrance and exit to what lay below as difficult as possible.
At the bottom of this winding, labyrinthine set of stairwells was a modern addition in the form of a large wooden door, which had been reinforced with sturdy metal bars and iron studs in case any Changelings somehow made it through the rubble. The light from my horn danced upon its surface, and standing before it I was stricken by an unexplained sense of foreboding. I knew exactly what was behind it, though I had not visited the dungeons since the night of the battle here, but the irrational fear that some manner of grotesque monster, dragged up from the darkest depths beneath the keep, lay in ambush behind it had wormed its way deep into my mind. The weight of my heavy sabre strapped to my back was a reassuring one, as I swallowed my trepidation, gently pushed the door open, and shone the light of my horn through the widening gap.
The broad, underground chamber with the low ceiling supported by squat pillars was much as I remembered it, aside from the fact that over half of it was buried in a large pile of rubble. There was a gap cleared, about the height of a large pony and just as wide, reinforced with sturdy wooden beams. Despite the bright light emanating from my horn, much of it was still shrouded in an opaque, murky darkness, resembling a black fog that had somehow coalesced from the depths below and seeped into this chamber. The rusted old chains and manacles were still attached to those pillars, as though the engineers who worked down here feared what ghosts they might anger if they removed them, and I shuddered to think what it must have been like to be chained up down here and forgotten. As before, the truly maddening array of pictograms carved into the walls made one dizzy just looking at them; I recognised some Haygyptian there, not that I could ever figure out hieroglyphics or have much cause to add that dead tongue to my repertoire, but much of the other peculiar chicken-scratch designs seemed impossible to be considered a true language. Whether or not they were truly conveying information, had mystical or arcane purposes, or were the product of a deranged mind remained to be answered, but, I thought to myself, perhaps with this little archaeological expedition I might finally receive some answers.
I ducked my head to enter a dungeon apparently built for ponies about a head shorter than me, though A. K. Yearling seemed to have no such trouble as she followed me inside. She gasped audibly in amazement, and when I looked over my shoulder at her I saw an expression of wonder on her face, in stark contrast to the sensation of dread that simmered within me. The evidence of the engineers’ work was plainly evident to see all around, ‘contaminating’ the site as the esteemed author put it; hoofmarks in the thick layer of stone dust were everywhere, as were great areas where whatever equipment they used had cleared much of it, but true to Southern Cross’ word, the rubble his sappers had cleared from the blockage there remained intact, piled up neatly in the corner for the archaeologists to tinker about with as they pleased. However, they appeared, at least to my untrained eyes, to have cleaned up after themselves, and nothing of the modern world that I could see had been left behind, leaving only those old things, predating Equestria, if in a slightly disassembled state.
The archaeologists followed, but this was rather old hat to them, I imagined, as their responses were a little more subdued. Besides, they were really after the ancient Crystal Empire stuff below, so for them I would assume this was merely window-dressing. A few of them carried bags of equipment, which they had insisted on carrying themselves despite spindly backs of some of these nerds, having rejected my offer of inflicting that onerous duty on whichever soldiers had misbehaved this week and required a boring punishment. Cannon Fodder was last, remaining a respectable distance to avoid snuffing out the light of my horn if he wandered too close. The team busied themselves at the gap cleared by the engineers, where Corded Ware had discovered that the unintended side effect of trying to make Southern Cross’ ponies rush their work meant that the gap was a little too tight to allow them to push their laden bags through. I left them to it, for I’d be damned if I was going to help him overcome the consequences of his own decisions, and instead accompanied A. K. Yearling as she examined the carvings on the walls.
She seemed to have a better idea of what they were about, and indeed this was the most animated that I’d ever seen her in these few short days. I could barely keep up as she went from wall to wall, pillar to pillar, pointing out some of the more interesting carvings. One depicted an ancient pegasus myth about how they received their wings from their old heathen gods so they can chase the sun and moon, and another simply read ‘Gertrude was here’ in Old High Griffonic. A particular carving caught my immediate attention: it depicted a large alicorn rearing on her hind legs, with a flowing mane and tail, wielding an enormous sword in her mouth earth-pony style, and the sun emblazoned on her cutie mark. Above, in Ancient Ponish, a language I could read, was the word ‘Cimmareian’.
“Hello, Auntie,” I said. I didn’t expect that an image of Princess Celestia would turn up here of all places. [I travelled a lot in my youth, before I was crowned princess.]
Miss Yearling, however, was fascinated by a rather more striking thing on the wall, one that I recognised from my previous visit here. It was not a carving like the others but a painted fresco, and depicted a stylised pony’s skull within a halo from which three lines emerged from below to give the impression of an ascending comet.
“The triumph over death,” she said breathlessly. “King Sombra was obsessed with alicorn immortality. His followers must have painted this on the wall.”
“I’ve seen it elsewhere,” I said. “In an old city, now inhabited by a tribe of Badlands natives. They weren’t terribly hospitable last time I visited there, so you’ll have to forgive me if I wouldn’t want to accompany you on a trip there.”
“The Crystal Empire must have spread its influence farther than we thought.” She tapped her chin, and peered at the curious symbol through her thick-rimmed glasses. “They were the dominant power in Northern Equestria, and we knew they established colonies far to the south, but all of this implies they had a much greater presence in the Badlands than historians first realised.”
“But why?” I asked, and A. K. Yearling turned and looked up at me with a peculiar smile on her lips. “I’m sure the ponies who live here won’t forgive me for saying this, but I’ve been in the Badlands for a few years now and there’s not a lot of anything interesting or valuable here.”
“Now you’re thinking like an archaeologist,” she said, her tone suddenly friendly and warm, which took me by surprise. “The evidence we find often reveals more questions than it answers. Just what were the Crystal Ponies doing down here?”
“I think we’re about to find out,” I said.
The Crystal Ponies had managed to squeeze through the gap with their equipment, and now it was our turn. The sappers had been very thorough in collapsing that portion of the chamber, for which I was immensely thankful for years ago when Changelings poured through this basement, and so the blockage itself was no mere wall of broken stone and paving, which had necessitated clearing a deep tunnel to allow us egress to the other side. I let A. K. Yearling through first and the slim pegasus slipped through the gap effortlessly, as though she had squeezed through such tight, partially collapsed structures before. However, when it came to my turn, I found that I had considerably greater difficulty, and the rough stone chafed painfully against my flanks until I wormed my way through to the other side, popping out like a champagne cork and falling in a heap on the ancient stone paving. I certainly would not have put it past the likes of Southern Cross to have instructed his sappers to clear a gap just small enough to inflict the maximum amount of indignity on me. Cannon Fodder fared little better than I, as he still wore his old suit of bulky Royal Guard armour to this little expedition and had gotten stuck. This necessitated a great deal of tugging on his forelegs, while the burlier members of the archaeological team tried to dislodge a few of the blocks of rubble around my aide’s armoured backside.
When my aide was finally freed and everypony on the other side of the blockage, we carried on. On the other side of the cleared tunnel the chamber itself looked much the same as it did before: the same pillars, the same rusted iron chains, and the same maddening scrawl carved onto the stone. However, at the far end, which I had not seen before in my brief time here years ago, as my attention was directed elsewhere, was a large wooden door set into a great and ornately carved stone frame. The heavy planks of aged wood were reinforced with metal bars, which seemed out of place here.
“It looks like a recent addition,” said A. K. Yearling. “The Badlands ponies?”
“Metal ore is a rarity here,” I said. “We use it to barter with the local tribes, and they tend to use it to make weapons and armour. I don’t know why they’d use it on a door here, unless they wanted to keep somepony out, or in.”
[My nephew can be forgiven for not mentioning so, but some Badlands tribes used the metal—particularly steel—to fashion farming tools. The rocky soil in the region was too rough and thick to be easily worked by bronze or stone, but high-quality steel allowed reclamation of land once thought impossible, improving the tribes' ability to conserve precious water.]
“Likely just another local superstition,” said Corded Ware dismissively, as he brushed past us and casually pulled the door open. The ancient hinges squealed in protest at being disturbed from their thousand year-long rest, and rust flaked off to collect in a small pile on the floor. Beyond that, a set of yet more stairs in a tight corridor receded into a pitch black darkness below. “Come along, we’re here for our legacy, not theirs.”
I exchanged glances with A. K. Yearling, who, apparently acknowledging and sharing my assessment that Corded Ware was acting strangely even by his usual standards, shrugged in response and followed the lead archaeologist into the dark depths. Well, I thought, I could have turned back, made an excuse about some important work to do with the ongoing war effort, and left them to it, but a certain unpleasant adage about the death of cats applied here. My hooves might have been itching, but I ignored the usual warning sign from my subconscious that something was wrong and followed along anyway; I had to know what happened, and that desire for answers had overridden my paranoia, and besides, there was nothing immediately threatening to life, limb, and sanity yet.
As we descended down those steps, the light from our horns forming a bubble of illumination around our small group, it occurred to me that once we’d finished for the day I’d have to climb all of them back up again. I made a mental note to ask Twilight Sparkle to teach me how to teleport, as not only would it be simply more convenient to teleport straight to my favourite seat at the bar in the Imperial Club, it would also help get me out of further messes. At any rate, the descent dragged on interminably, but when we finally reached the bottom and spread out into another underground chamber, I checked my watch and saw that only a few minutes had passed.
Mercifully, the ceiling was much higher in this room, so I could finally stand straight without having to tilt my head down. The light from our horns could only banish a small portion of the gloom, but within our island of light I could see that it was in much the same style as the previous room: tall pillars, covered in those same maddening carvings, supported the tall ceiling, and all around on the ground we saw that the ancient layer of dust had been disturbed, but not recently. Hoofprints, heavy boots by the looks of them, had scuffed the stone, and I could make out claw marks too. Here the air was stuffy and warm, and presumably ancient. I noticed that there were no chains attached to the pillars, as in the room before, which implied to me that the Badlands ponies hadn’t appropriated this room for the use of imprisonment and torture.
We spread out somewhat, and thus the unicorns were better able to illuminate more of this chamber. This revealed a row of sarcophagi along the length of both of the side walls, each arranged to stick out towards the middle of the room. Each sarcophagus had an ornately-carved lid, depicting a pony, presumably the one whose mortal remains lay within the stone box, in solemn repose. Though these representations were unique, they were all carved in exactly the same pose: resting on their backs, with their forelegs folded over their chests, and their blank faces staring up at the ceiling.
Ms Yearling didn’t exactly make a ‘squee’ noise when she saw them, but it was a close enough approximation. She darted over with a speed that seemed at odds with her age, crouched down, and peered closely at the array of Ancient Haygyptian hieroglyphs carved into the side of the sarcophagus.
While she did that, however, Corded Ware ignored the no-doubt fascinating artefacts and strode confidently to the door on the far end. I turned to Cannon Fodder, who, as ever, remained unfazed by the very old things dating back to the days when the word ‘Equestria’ was merely a geographical expression, and nodded in the head archaeologist’s direction. “Keep an eye on our friend over there,” I said. “Make sure he doesn’t get himself in trouble.”
“Yes, sir.” With that, my aide trotted on over to where Corded Ware and his team crowded around the door.
I approached A. K. Yearling at the sarcophagus, and peered over at the blank expression on the effigy on the top. It was painted, though the paint itself had faded over the course of the many thousands of years, and depicted pale grey pony clad in what might have once been vibrant robes. She wore a headband of some description, painted yellow presumably to approximate gold.
“It’s very rare to find Haygyptian tombs this intact,” she said, not looking up from the hieroglyphs. “Most tombs we find have already been looted by grave-robbers long ago. This one holds the mummy of a priestess. Judging by the style of the engraving, this was from the early kingdom, centuries before Princess Celestia was even born and when the unicorns moved the sun and moon with magic. It says she burned out her magic doing this, and spent the rest of her life serving as a priestess.”
To my surprise I found myself rather interested in all of this; all the talk about the technical aspects of archaeology had thoroughly bored me, of course, but to find the summation of an entire pony’s life contained within a carved stone box and preserved through the endless aeons was strangely fascinating. It made me wonder what sort of legacy I would leave, interred within a similar stone box in the family mausoleum, assuming that there was enough of me left to bury after the Changelings had finished with me. This, perhaps, is what archaeology was really about; not just the made-up adventures or the faffing about with digging and dating old things, but the lives and stories of the ponies long dead who came before us.
“So why wasn’t it?” I asked. A. K. Yearling shot me a blank look. “Looted, I mean. It’s seen Crystal Ponies, Badlands tribes, and even Diamond Dogs living in the fort above us. If your friend over there at the door is correct, the Crystal Ponies even went poking around inside this crypt for Discord knows what reasons. And that story about the king who lost his kingdom after looking around down here, would he also not have ransacked the place too, or is the alleged curse that quick? Either nopony’s made it this far, or everypony who descended down here was unusually conscientious about maintaining the sanctity of this tomb, or somepony’s been tidying up after them.”
“You know,” she said, smiling, “you might have made a decent archaeologist.”
“I suppose I would have to find something to do after this war is over,” I said, sotto voce. “But doesn’t this all seem a little odd to you?”
“Yes. Exciting, isn’t it? Come along, sir, we won’t find those answers just standing here.”
With that, she trotted off to join Corded Ware and his team, who appeared to be having a little bit of trouble with the door. I wandered closer, taking my time and affecting to show that I wasn’t really all that impressed by the very old and rather pretty things all around me. There, the door was of a Crystal Empire design, and thus crafted from the very material that they revered so much, and set into a frame likewise made out of that same crystal. In the stark light of my horn it shimmered brightly, and inside its semi-transparent structure I could see shifting shapes of greens and purples gently swirl like smoke from a freshly-extinguished candle. I could feel the magic radiating from it, much like those peculiar spheres that they had tried to smuggle in earlier, but muted somewhat.
Corded Ware himself stood before the door, his horn glowing with a deep green aura and his eyes were screwed up in concentration. His fellows had gathered in a semi-circle around it, and as I joined them with A. K. Yearling I saw Cannon Fodder leaning casually against the wall, staring boredly at the proceedings.
“I don’t understand it. It should just open,” muttered Corded Ware under his breath.
“Having trouble there?” I asked, doing my best not to sound amused at his evident struggling. “Can’t we just knock it down?”
“It’s sealed with magic,” he explained, the aura from his horn dimming into nothing. “I know the spell, it’s the same as the ones we used in the Crystal Empire, but it just doesn’t seem to work.”
“Perhaps it’s a different spell?” I posited; I knew precisely why his magic just wasn’t working, and the reason was standing there next to the door happily and very messily munching on a chocolate ration bar, but, well, given that he’d made me feel rather stupid on several occasions, I didn’t feel particularly inclined to be helpful to him that day.
“I know the spell, sir,” he snapped, clearly growing more irritated.
“I thought you said you weren’t here,” I said, remembering that conversation we’d had in the mess earlier. “How would you know the spell, then, if you were just another one of Sombra’s slaves?”
Corded Ware rounded on me abruptly, eyes narrowed in disgust, and I’d wondered if I stepped a bit too far over the line. “I read books, sir,” he hissed, with the unsaid implication that I don’t. “And I’d thank you not to bring up that tyrant’s name so casually again.”
I mumbled a half-hearted apology and instructed Cannon Fodder to go and help the other archaeologists with their luggage. With my aide out of the way again, Corded Ware attempted the spell once more. His horn lit once more, radiating a sickly green light that flowed forth into the crystal door before him. This light sank into the shimmering surface, melded with the strange luminescence within, and with an ominous rumble of crystal grinding on crystal the door opened before us. A sharp but brief blast of cold, copper-tasting air struck us, picking at the folds of my sweat-soaked and dusty uniform, and swiftly faded. Beyond, through this yawning portal, amidst the ancient gloom that the light of my horn seemed too feeble to banish, I could see things glowing in the distance with peculiar green and purple tones that put me in mind of an infected wound. My horn tingled in response to the old and malignant magic radiating from whatever those glowing things were, and I felt the desire to turn and run seize me by the throat.
Corded Ware, however, breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and he smiled broadly at the sight beyond the crystal door. “Well, then,” he said, “destiny awaits.”