//------------------------------// // Chapter 5 // Story: The Blueblood Papers: Old Blood // by Raleigh //------------------------------// We galloped through a maze of twisting corridors and doors, empty rooms and ones filled with all manner of strange and arcane devices I had no hope in Tartarus of understanding even if I felt inclined to stop and examine them. I daren’t look over my shoulder, but the sight of those Crystal Pony things, ‘shards’ they were called, massacring the archaeologists was scorched into my mind like the burn marks on the floor that indicated where Corded Ware was reduced to ashes. It was dark, but I could not light my horn for fear of attracting those horrible, murderous creatures, not that the sounds of our panicked flight were any less of a clear indicator. Yet without the light of my horn my eyes adjusted to the darkness somewhat, and the faint glow from the crystal walls all around certainly helped. Yet we could not keep running forever. For all I knew we could be going around in circles, wearing ourselves out and thus leaving ourselves exhausted for when they would eventually catch up with us, and so, with my limbs starting to feel as though my horseshoes were filled with lead and my lungs were burning with the exertion, we stopped in a small, secluded room. We barricaded the door with a bench, and all sank into a corner to try and take stock of the grim situation that we now found ourselves trapped within. As for me, sitting there with the cold crystal against my flanks and my back, sucking in lungfuls of stale, ancient air to try and still the rapid beating of my heart, there was one confusing, albeit rather less urgent, conundrum that I needed answering immediately. “Daring Do?” I asked. Said fictional character was sitting next to me, ears alert and eyes on the door. She looked real enough, and certainly felt very real when she pony-handled me through the door earlier. “Yes?” she answered, looking up at me with expectant eyes. “Care to explain what in Equus is going on?” “Professor Corded Ware was a high-ranking officer and researcher in King Sombra’s regime, and posed as a harmless archaeologist to gain access to-” “Yes, yes, I’d managed to work all of that out myself,” I interrupted, waving my hoof dismissively. “And he’s right. Was right, I should say. I ought to have put it all together myself early, and I very nearly did. No, what I’m getting at now is why are you real?” “Ah.” She trailed off for a bit; I imagined that this might be a rather tricky conversation for her to have with ponies who saw through her very convincing disguise. “A. K. Yearling is a cover. I am Daring Do.” I snorted in response; I’d just seen a deluded servant of a recently-resurrected and now-gone tyrant awaken crystalline servants and then be disintegrated by them before my very eyes, but this revelation was still the most absurd thing I’d witnessed in what was proving to be a very eventful day for me. “It’s all real?” I asked, and she nodded in response. “Ahuizotl? The Griffon’s Goblet? Doctor Caballeron?” “There’s some artistic licence involved,” she said, with the air of a pony admitting some great sin, like eating kittens for sexual pleasure. “I skip over some of the boring parts of archaeology. My readers don’t want to hear about the amount of time I spend in the library or arguing over which dating methods are the best, they want exciting action.” “I think I’d rather have the boring bits back now.” While when I was much younger I’d dreamt of being in a Daring Do adventure, as with most things a foal imagines about adulthood the reality was far worse; nopony was ever disintegrated by crystalline killing machines in one of her stories, or she omitted the gorier elements from her ‘stories’ along with the tedious minutiae of her work. “If Doctor Caballeron is real, why hasn’t he sued you or ‘A. K. Yearling’ for libel?” “It’s only libel if it’s false,” she said, with a small smile on her lips. “He’ll risk having all of his crimes exposed in court.” “I see.” I didn’t, really, and was about to press her further on this before she preempted me. “Blueblood, we have more important things to worry about right now. I can tell you all about this later.” “Prince Blueblood, if you don’t mind.” We might be facing certain death, but that was no reason for her to forget her manners, thought I. “And I suppose you’re right on that account. We have to get out of here and warn everypony about those things. If they’ll believe me, that is.” I stood up and paced around the room in a circle. We had the great misfortune to have found a room without any other doors save for the one we just came in through. There, Cannon Fodder stood guard with his spear, as though that might do anything against the hard crystal bodies of the shards that were no doubt hunting us as we spoke. Despite muskets and bayonets being ubiquitous now, he still stuck with those trusty old weapons out of habit. I had a theory that his status as a Blank had the same effect on technology as it did magic, which was all rather silly as I had seen him use an escalator before to no ill effect. It was those shards that had wiped out those poor Diamond Dogs, leaving zero trace of their massacre besides one frightened pup who was no doubt racking up quite the fee in bills with whatever equivalent their kind had for therapists specialising in trauma. Either they were on our tails or preparing to awaken more of their slumbering undead to do the same to the unsuspecting soldiers in the camp above us, and neither seemed particularly healthy for me. All that we could do, from where I was standing, was try to get out of here in one piece to warn everypony above and pray that my warning about the capabilities of the Guards Division to now-disintegrated Corded Ware was more than just a desperate bluff. I certainly wasn’t going to try and stop them, even with the Daring Do by my side. This room appeared to be a storeroom of sorts, and besides the layer of dust that covered everything like a fine dusting of grey snow it seemed to have been left in much the same condition as it had been when the Crystal Empire disappeared. There were a few heavy benches along the walls, a few of which we had repurposed as a flimsy barricade against the door, and some boxes piled up along one wall. These boxes were made of wood, and I surmised that there were some things that the ancient Crystal Ponies found to impractical to make out of their ubiquitous crystal, however, these had rotted somewhat over the centuries, and some had collapsed in on themselves and spilled their equally decayed contents on the floor. “What were those things?” I asked. “Truly?” “They are exactly what Corded Ware said.” Daring Do was pacing as she spoke, apparently to work off nerves or the same growing dread at our hopeless situation, or perhaps it was her way of thinking things through. “Sombra’s contingency plan, if his war with the Two Sisters, Celestia and Luna, turned against him, which it did. An army forged from unliving crystal, powered by extracted souls that failed his experiments in immortality, that was supposed to be activated when his curse on the Crystal Empire finally lifted.” “Only it hasn’t worked out for him.” He hadn’t counted on my aunties personally storming his castle and sending him back into the shadows where he belonged, as the story went. [I can still remember the look of shock on his face just before Luna and I attacked him in his bedchamber. The war between King Sombra and the newly-formed kingdom of Equestria had dragged on for seven years, and while his forces were engaged in a siege of Canterlot (then a fortress rather than a city) my sister and I assaulted his castle. When it became clear that he was outmatched, he turned to shadow and fled into the icy wastes, and in a fit of spite laid his curse upon the Crystal Empire.] I still struggled to understand why his devious plan had failed in such a spectacular fashion. It seemed as though the shards they’d summoned had failed to recognise Corded Ware as a suitably high-ranking officer in Sombra’s hierarchy, which to me implied that either he was not as important as he had attempted to imply or that the souls that powered the shards had been so degraded by their thousand year-long incarceration in these unnatural forms that they lashed out at the source of their torment. Both explanations seemed equally plausible to me, not that it mattered in the short term; it was something to ponder later if we ever made it out of here with our lives. “Did you know?” I asked. “Did you know who he really was? About all of this down here?” “No, I’d have stopped him,” she answered. “You said you were looking for inspiration for your next book.” “Yes, a serious work of archaeological research, not another ‘Daring Do’ adventure story. I knew about the shards, but I thought that whatever magic powered them had disappeared by now. I certainly didn’t think that a respected academic like Professor Corded Ware would turn out to be a Sombra loyalist.” “I think given your track record with Doctor Caballeron, you might have suspected something.” “Caballeron is far from a ‘respected academic’ these days,” she said sniffily. “Besides, I can’t go around suspecting everypony I work with of treason.” “I’d say you’ve found your next adventure regardless.” I could detect no hint of deception in her voice or demeanour, but she was a writer and clearly had experience in lying extensively to maintain her disguise so I couldn’t tell. Again, it was another purely academic question that was best saved for mulling over a nice glass of celebratory whisky in the mess later, should I survive. Still, I felt like an utter fool, more so than usual, as the only reason I didn’t act upon my now-justified paranoia was because I wanted to avoid embarrassing myself in front of her by being strange. I paced another lap around the room; things certainly looked grim, of course, but the fact that these shards were an unknown quantity, as opposed to the Changelings I’d spent the better part of two years fighting and running away from, made it worse. There was a horrid inscrutability about them; a drone fights out of a fanatical devotion to his Queen and his Hive and in the hope that victory will sate the ravening hunger within him, which, although monstrous, were still understandable motivations to fight. These shards killed with a dispassionate coldness that was far more unsettling, and based on what I’d seen married up with Rex’s story of his tribe’s extermination, put me in mind of a farmer eradicating pests in a barn. “There is one other thing,” said Daring Do, rising to her hooves. I stopped in my circuit of the room, and saw on her face the same odd expression that she had when she accompanied me to my quarters a few nights ago. Again, I assumed that she wanted to tell me something rather important, but for whatever reason this mare, who had no issues standing up in front of a group of terribly judgemental soldiers and delivering an excellent reading of a fictionalised version of what she did last month, seemed to struggle somewhat with speaking. “Well, out with it,” I snapped, pacing about in irritation. “If we linger any longer, those shards won’t grant us the time for you to tell me whatever it is.” “I’m your half-sister.” Well, that stopped me right in my tracks. It had been a day of striking revelations, but at least I could say that the business with Corded Ware was very obvious in hindsight. I suppose the one about A. K. Yearling being Daring Do as part of an elaborate double-bluff of sorts made some sort of sense, in a way. This, however, had come completely out of nowhere, and my addled mind could only arrive at one simple way to interpret the fact that I was related to a fictional character. “Very funny,” I said, and she pulled a queer look in response. “Luna!” I called out. “You’ve had your fun, but it’s time for me to wake up from this daft dream now! The part about the King Sombra loyalists was very convincing, but this is just a step too far. I’ll be sending a letter to Auntie Celestia about your choice of pranks first thing.” “Stop shouting!” hissed Daring Do. “They’ll hear you.” “Oh, forgive me for being a little upset at finding out I have a long-lost half-sister who happens to be fictional, but I have had something of a difficult morning, so I think I’ve earned that right.” I stopped in my tirade, realising that she was, of course, right, and sucked in a deep breath of that curiously cool air. When I exhaled I felt as though I’d purged much of that from my system. “Very well. Assuming that this isn’t a very elaborate prank played on me, I’ll humour you. Just how in blazes are we related?” “We have the same dad,” she said. “My mom was a waitress in a cocktail bar in Canterlot, working to put herself through college. Dad and her had a one night stand forty years ago.” “And you were the result?” Daring Do paused, frowning intensely as though she’d just thought of something bitterly sarcastic to say but thought better of it. “Yes, Blueblood.” It probably ought not to have come as too much of a shock in hindsight, marital vows being considered merely a polite suggestion was as much a tradition in my family as the Hearth's Warming games, but it was startling nonetheless. Maths was never my strongest subject, but I attempted to work out the sums in my head and came to the conclusion that dear Father must have been about seventeen or eighteen years old when that happened, and put Daring Do at almost twenty years my senior. It certainly would have been before the arranged marriage to Mother was even thought of, and so another bastard foal from an aristocratic family was hidden away to silence any awkward discussions about inheritance. “He never let me call him ‘dad’,” I said. “I would assume that meant you never had the misfortune to meet him.” She shook her head. “He visited Mom and me often, and always brought toys for me. We’d play and talk. We used to play a game about exploring dungeons and finding treasure. He would never stay for long but I always looked forward to his visits. I think he gave us some money too so we could get by, at least until he disappeared, but I was already working on my doctorate by then and the visits stopped. I remember him as being nice.” Now that got my dander up, but I like to think that I hid it well, as mortal peril tends to push such trivialities aside for rather more pressing matters. She had said a lot of words and all rather quickly, which to me implied that she had very much wanted to find her younger half-brother for quite a while and talk about everything. Yet still, the feeling stabbed at me; so the bastard foal here was granted the privilege of paternal affection and I, the real, legitimate heir, had only coldness and unreachable expectations thrust upon me instead. That vindictive old stallion was capable of ‘being nice’, as she’d put it, if he so chose to, and that revelation only made me despise him more. “Did he ever tell you about me?” I asked, trying my damnedest to keep from raising my voice in anger. “No, but he never told us who he really was either,” she said. “Mom only told me who he really was after he went missing. I think she wanted to make sure that me being a secret princess wouldn’t go to my head.” “You are not a princess,” I snapped, louder and more forcefully than I’d intended. “Relax, I’m not interested in claiming your title even if I could,” said Daring Do, rather too flippantly for my liking. That was something of a relief, however, as the thought of explaining all of this mess to envious members of my family was not a comforting one, should I survive, that is. It was ridiculous to believe, yet the ages matched up exactly now that I had time to work it out properly in my head. It was certainly possible that my dear old father had a youthful dalliance with a stranger and had neglected to take precautions, Faust knows I’ve had my fair share of one-night stands with all manner of mares, but the thought that the miserable old bastard and I shared something in common beyond mere blood was a deeply uncomfortable one. There could be any number of illegitimate half-siblings out there, and I wondered how many were likewise allegedly-fictional characters from story books. Still, now that I looked at Daring Do with this revelation fresh in mind, I could see some measure of a family resemblance: our cutie marks were similar, being compass roses, though that was rarely a firm indicator as my experience in a number of paternity scares can attest; but there was a certain patrician air about her, despite one half of her blood being from the common stock, that exuded a certain sense of entitlement, and where mine came from blood alone it was clear that hers originated with a supreme sense of personal confidence. She might have had the slim, slender build of a pegasus, and short in stature, but as with me she inherited our father’s sharp, patrician features. I could see some element of him, and frankly it sickened me. “I’m still not sure I believe you,” I said. “Blueblood, I’m not after any titles or recognition,” she said, reaching into the chest pocket of her safari jacket and removing a horn ring, which she presented to me. Examining it, I saw the family crest clearly on the signet ring and on the inside was the maker’s mark from the Canterlot armourers. There were only two possible ways she could have gotten her hooves on that—either, as she was trying to prove to me, my father had given it to her as proof of her bloodline; or she had stolen it. Considering that she essentially stole things for a living, though usually the owners were far too dead to complain, I couldn’t exactly dismiss the latter explanation. “Very well,” I said, “so what are you after?” Daring Do pulled an odd look, though it was brief. She looked as though I’d deeply insulted her, but she mustered some measure of self control and said, quite firmly, “We’re family. I’m not ‘after’ anything from you, except that.” I saw my father’s face before my eyes again - disapproving as always, sneering in contempt as I failed to live up to his impossible expectations. I remembered the pain of being beaten, the loneliness of being locked in a room alone for days over some small infraction, and my mother’s damning silence throughout all of this. Daring Do had said that father brought her presents, and he did the same for me. Every material possession I ever wanted was mine, but I know now it was little more than a way for him to make up for his cruelty or justify it to himself. I had always thought that it was merely all that he knew, being the way his father treated him, or that it was all simply in his nature, but to learn that he was capable of at least a pretended normal family relationship between father and child was a veritable kick to the face. It was a long time ago, even then, and I was never one to give the beastly old stallion the satisfaction of occupying my thoughts even after his disappearance, but the revelation brought everything that I had buried out in the stark, bright light of Celestia’s sun. He chose to behave in that manner to me. It was Cannon Fodder who reminded me of the peril we were all still in. He had ignored this very unexpected family reunion and was instead doing his job by standing by the door on guard while I was busy wrestling with this latest unpleasant revelation. “Sir!” he exclaimed, though keeping his monotone voice at the level of a stage-whisper. “I think they’re coming.” Fear pushed its way into my mind, forcing out all of the other emotions fighting with one another for attention and driving me to some sort of action. There was nothing like mortal terror to temporarily resolve lingering foalhood problems that I’d thought were long-suppressed. There was no obvious exit from this room, besides the one we just came through, and there was every chance we’d run into those horrible, murderous crystal things hunting for us in the halls beyond. Perhaps we could fight our way out, but I didn’t know how well swords and my limited magic would fare against their solid crystal forms. It appeared that we had no choice but to risk it, that is, until I noticed something that I ought to have picked up on earlier. “It’s cold in here,” I said. “What?” blurted out Daring Do. “There’s a draft,” I explained. “Can’t you feel it? There must be air circulating around in here through a duct or we’d have all suffocated by now. Corded Ware said that the shards were maintaining this place in anticipation of Sombra’s glorious return.” Daring Do, my apparent elder half-sibling, seemed patronisingly impressed that I was not the total idiot that I often appeared to be, and paced around the room to help me find its source. The chances of it being big enough to fit even the slim pegasus here, let alone Cannon Fodder or me, was remote, but one must hold onto hope, no matter how slim. She found the source of the draft, probably using some manner of pegasus sensitivity to shifting air currents or some such, in the corner of the room, obscured by a large wooden desk that fell apart with a tremendous clatter and a shower of rotten splinters when I shoved it out of the way. The air duct was a rectangular hole in the wall, close to the bottom, and covered with a metal grate that my magic ripped from the wall with relative ease and causing only a minor flare-up of the persistent headache occupying my skull. It seemed wide enough to admit a stallion of a sufficiently healthy frame such as myself, though it would be a tight and unpleasant squeeze to get through. “Sir!” shouted Cannon Fodder. He’d stepped back from the barricaded door, spear in hoof and ready to thrust as though that might somehow break their hardened crystal bodies. The door shuddered on its hinges as something quite heavy had hurled itself against it, but the sturdy bench we’d dragged across it held firm. [Why the Shards did not simply disintegrate the door as they did the 'archaeologists' seems odd, considering they had ample power to do so, but it is likely they had standing orders to avoid causing permanent damage to the structure they were assigned to protect if possible.] That was more than enough to spur me into action. ‘Ladies first’ didn’t apply when murderous killing machines were at the door, so I darted past Daring Do before she had a chance to act and threw myself into the vent. It did hurt when my shoulders struck the sharp edges, and more so as I squeezed through, but the shaft beyond the grate flared out a little, and once I’d negotiated my flanks through the opening without any assistance from Daring Do I found I could crawl through, albeit with significant discomfort and at a slow pace. I lit my horn, banishing only a small iota of the gloom all around us. The air duct stretched onwards into darkness. It was much too narrow for me to turn my head comfortably, but I could tell from the noises behind me that both Daring Do and Cannon Fodder had followed me inside, with one or the other receiving an unenviable view ahead. I could feel the cold metal surrounding my body like a coffin, and as I crawled forth on my belly like a snake it occurred to me that the Crystal Ponies must have brought metal from the north to build these. It was strange that my mind wandered to such things, but I suppose that it was better than fretting about what was creeping up behind us. However uncomfortable and tight this narrow metal tube was, I could at least be grateful that it was clean after all of these many, many years, and at that thought my forehooves began to itch. I stopped dead in my tracks. Somepony or some thing had to keep these air ducts in working order, and, not being an expert in such things, I doubted that the machinery here would keep going on its own for so long even if it was based on ancient, long-lost Crystal Empire magic, which would only entail the shards sending something to crawl inside the ducts just as we were. I felt a poke on my right hindleg, and the jump reflex caused me to bash my skull against the ceiling of the tunnel. “Why have you stopped?” Daring Do hissed. Something moved in the darkness beyond, a tiny flicker of something reflected by the dim light of my horn. Whatever it was advanced quickly upon us, and I saw that there was not merely one single thing bearing down but a multitude of crawling things. Their crystal carapaces glittered in the pale glow, being made of the same stuff that those shards were. They resembled scarabs, but each was the size of a large rat, and they skittered towards us on spindly legs. Each lacked eyes or any other facial features besides a pair of razor-sharp mandibles that looked as they would have no problems ripping through flesh. I didn’t answer Daring Do, but I think my wordless yelp of raw terror conveyed the turn of events quite well. We were trapped, and in a blind panic I fired a single blast of magic. The ensuing headache felt as though I’d been punched square in the horn. The light briefly illuminated the air duct in its entirety, and revealed that there were far more of them streaming straight towards us. The blast struck the first rank, whereupon those creatures shattered into glittering pieces that were rapidly crawled over by the ensuing wave. “What’s going on up there?” shouted Daring Do. I could feel her moving about behind me to try and peer around my flanks. In my state of panic, the only words I could muster were: “Creepy-crawlies!”, which were insufficient to describe the danger we were in. I tried to scramble back, but two ponies were directly behind me, not that I would have been able to crawl backwards fast enough to escape the oncoming horde without them in the way. However, as my flailing hooves struck the metal I heard hollow ringing, not the dull thuds that would indicate we were encased in stone. Without thinking to consider that there might be a frightfully long drop down, I aimed my horn directly down between my hooves and directed as much magical energy into the metal as I possibly could. I must have fainted with the exertion, because the next thing I knew I was on the floor in a large room and in considerable pain. My head pounded with the most appalling headache I’d felt since waking up from a three-day bar crawl in Canterlot, and my vision swam and lurched as though I was on a ship in a turbulent storm. I heard the sounds of shouting dimly, and when I tried to stand up foul-tasting bile rose up the back of my throat. Blinking away the stars, I saw Daring Do, Cannon Fodder, and one of the archaeologists fighting back against the swarm. Looking up, there was the jagged hole in the ceiling that we must have fallen through, and those scarabs poured through it and fell upon us. Attempting to summon more magic to blast the little bastards only made that headache even worse, and my horn sputtered and sparked uselessly, leaving me no recourse but to either join in the fight or run away. Daring Do fought viciously, darting out of the way of lunging of snapping jaws only to hurl herself back in to deliver a knock-out punch that shattered their crystal bodies. It would appear that ‘artistic licence’ did not apply to her fighting capabilities. Cannon Fodder, missing his armour as he must have disrobed to squeeze into the air duct, had to resort to frantically stomping on the scarabs, and despite them skittering all around him he appeared to have suffered no injuries. As for the surviving Crystal Pony, he’d grabbed a broken chair and swung it clumsily at the chittering creatures. Running away was not an option with so many witnesses, so despite my brain feeling as though it was two sizes too big for my skull and with every muscle aching I charged into the fight. Even attempting to draw my sword with magic was too much for me, so I resorted to hooves. Their bodies were hard but brittle, and a forceful stomp shattered them into gleaming shards. The savage things gnashed and bit at me, one sank its mandibles into my foreleg and blood guttered from the stinging wound when Cannon Fodder tore the scarab free from me and dashed it against the wall. Another leapt up from the ground, but I spun on my hooves and bucked it into pieces. My aching forehooves slipped, the pain from the gash on my leg blinding out all other sensations, and I fell on my face once more. I tried to stand once more, but I felt those creatures swarm over me, sensing that I was vulnerable. Cannon Fodder shouted something, but I couldn’t make it out over the fog of exhaustion that now clouded my mind. In contrast to the silent shards, these scarab-creatures chittered and buzzed like the oversized insects they resembled, or indeed Changeling drones. I felt their legs, pointed and sharp, digging into me as they swarmed my fallen body. On instinct I rolled as though my clothes were ablaze, and swung my hooves wildly in an effort to free myself of these things before they could bite somewhere vital. “Get them off me!” I screamed. One scarab crawled its way up my chest, clinging onto me by sinking its jagged limbs into my tunic, and I looked up into its blank, empty face and those mandibles spread wide to plunge into my eyes. I grabbed the horrible little thing with my forehooves and wrenched it from my face, feeling the scratches against my cheeks and scalp only dimly through the panic, and threw it away blindly against a wall. I managed to stand again, though I nearly slipped again when I put weight on my wounded leg. The horde had thinned. Cannon Fodder, still miraculously unharmed by the creatures, was methodical in dispatching the remainder, while Daring Do tended to the surviving archaeologist’s wounds. Upon seeing this strangely un-vaporised Crystal Pony my relief at surviving quickly turned into anger. It was his fault that all of this was happening, and with Corded Ware dead I was going to make damned sure that this lone survivor knew it. So I hobbled on over with all the grace of Yours Truly attempting to navigate to the bathroom seven drinks in on a night out on the town, wincing with each stab of pain that a step with my wounded foreleg. “What in Tartarus was that?!” I shouted, my throat hoarse. The Crystal Pony looked up at me with the most pathetic, apologetic expression imaginable. He was amongst the youngest of them, I remembered, barely out of adolescence perhaps, with a pale blue, shimmering coat and navy blue mane and tail. His cutie mark was of a brush that at first I thought was one used for shaving, but I eventually identified as one others of his profession used for brushing away dust from ancient artefacts. “Scarabs,” he said, his voice trembling with adrenaline and fear. “Haygyptians used them to maintain their tombs. We repurposed them to maintain our research institutions.” “Nasty little blighters, aren’t they?” I remarked. From what I’d seen, Sombra and his underlings had a penchant for taking things that were perfectly harmless and making them perfectly harmful - they could have weaponised butterflies for all I knew. The entire floor here was littered in their smashed remains, broken shards of crystal that, taken all together, might be worth something on the gem market perhaps. “How in Equus did you survive?” “Same as you. I ran.” “I made a tactical retreat,” I insisted. “However, the end result is much the same. I’ll be blunt, I’m not happy at this turn of events, and by and large it’s all your fault, seeing as how you’re the only Crystal Pony left alive. I am going to ask some questions and you are going to give me plain, simple answers, and then you’re going to help us get out of here.” “You’re bleeding.” The stallion stared at my leg, and I followed his gaze down to see where blood flowed freely from two gashes there, and blood pooled at my hooves. I’m no stranger to seeing blood, as a number of the more archaic family rituals used to involve splashing about in the stuff until I put a stop to those ghastly and messy practices, but seeing it pumping out of me was enough to make me feel quite faint. Daring Do was at my side in an instant, and, starting to feel a little weak on my limbs, guided me to sit down. She produced a long, rolled-up strip of cloth from her satchel and wrapped it around the wound, where the off-white cloth was almost immediately stained bright crimson, and guided my hoof up in the air to try to stem the bleeding. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said, her tone curiously soft, and I realised that she was slipping into the role of a big sister looking after a younger sibling. Well, that swiftly ruined my attempt to threaten and intimidate this Crystal Pony into confessing everything, but there was also another way around this. As the pain in my leg dulled to a low throb, I finally calmed down enough to look at my surroundings. We were in a room with quite a high ceiling, and the long drop down from the jagged hole in the ceiling explained why I was in considerable pain and covered in bruises. This room looked to have been an office of sorts, perhaps the kind of administrative centre where the likes of the Crystal Pony sitting before me might have worked more than a thousand years ago. The wooden tables and chairs had long since rotted away into useless piles of broken planks, and the bookcases filled with ancient books looked as though they might collapse into piles of dust if I so much as looked at them. “I take it things haven’t exactly gone to plan for you,” I said, while Daring Do continued to fuss about my wound. “Your King’s little contingency plan has not proved to be as easily controllable as that Corded Ware chap had first thought. Now they’re hunting you down, and if you want to live long enough for me to consider arranging a pardon for the treason you’ve just committed then we’re going to have to work together on getting out of here. Do you understand?” The stallion mulled this very basic conundrum over for a bit longer than I thought was strictly necessary, until he finally arrived at the only course of action available to him. “Yes,” he said. “Look, I didn’t want to go ahead with this crazy plan, but he made me do it!” “Don’t give me that,” I snapped. “You had every opportunity to tell me the truth before it came to this, and now those shards are loose in a vital military facility in the middle of a war. You’re lucky that I need you alive to get out of here.” Daring Do, apparently finished tending to my wound, sneered and said, “This isn’t helping and you’re wasting time.” She then turned to this hapless stallion, sat next to him, and rather patiently started asking him the sorts of questions I ought to have been asking him in a voice that was just too low for my hearing, still rather damaged from exposure to nearby artillery fire and Princess Luna’s voice, to pick up clearly. Well, that was me told off, and I certainly felt admonished by it. Ordinarily, I’d have stood my ground and told Daring Do to let me, the allegedly professional commissar, manage this. However, this time I was truly out of my depth, and far more so than usual. If I was any more out of it I’d be on an entirely separate continent to my depth. It was certainly not, as one might assume, simply because she was my older sister that I felt compelled to acquiesce to her in this regard, but I supposed given what I’d just been through I was hardly in a fit state of mind to interrogate a survivor who had just seen his friends and colleagues massacred and likely felt about as miserable about this situation as I did. Somewhat embarrassed, I trotted away to see what Cannon Fodder was up to. My aide was pottering about the room, kicking away at the shattered remains of the scarabs. I couldn’t quite understand how he’d escaped that fight with not even a minor scratch on him, even though he had shed his armour and wore nothing but the set of protective underwear that stops the plates of mithril from chafing uncomfortably against one’s skin. Perhaps he was merely lucky, or the scarabs had a sense of smell. However, this, coupled with the fact that he stood directly in front of the shard that killed Corded Ware before my eyes and it ignored him entirely, reminded me of how his presence had dimmed the lights in those glowing orbs earlier, and the start of a theory began to form in my mind. [The newer patterns of Equestrian armour included a set of linen underclothes worn under the plate armour for added comfort. When away from the front, soldiers would just wear the underclothes in camp unless on a specific duty. Cannon Fodder likely expected trouble and assumed Prince Blueblood was aware as always or continued to wear his armour out of habit.] “Cannon Fodder,” I said, “did those things attack you at all?” My aide looked around at the shattered remains at his hooves, then over his sweat-stained clothes and grimy coat. “No, sir.” “Even when you were destroying them?” My view of the fight was limited, as it usually was in such scraps, to what was necessary to merely keep myself alive, but from what little that I could see the scarabs seemed to have completely ignored him even as he smashed their crystalline bodies to pieces. Daring Do appeared to have suffered only minor, superficial cuts, compared to the rather nasty bleeder I’d taken, He shook his head, dislodging a shower of dandruff from his closely-cropped scalp. “No, sir,” he repeated. Now, I knew enough about his condition to remember that magic within a certain radius of Cannon Fodder’s horn simply did not work, aside from certain spells that required the barest amount of magic such as basic telekinesis and the sort of innate magic that allows pegasi to fly and earth ponies to grow crops, and that radius was approximately five feet or so, give or take a few inches. I wondered, perhaps, if that condition rendered him invisible to those creatures, and if by sticking close enough to him we all might be likewise shielded from their sight. That optimistic and encouraging thought lasted until I remembered that the ponies restraining him were likewise turned to dust. “Alright, he’ll help us,” said Daring Do, interrupting my thoughts. She trotted on over, leaving the stallion sipping water from a canteen in the corner. “His name’s Dust Pan, and he was Corded Ware’s slave, doing admin jobs for him. Corded Ware was Sombra’s expert on Haygyptian studies and developed the shards based on ancient experiments in mummification.” “But why did they vaporise him?” I asked. Not out of any concern for him, of course, that was the only reason why I was still alive. “The soul is not supposed to survive outside the body or wherever it’s meant to go after death.” She suppressed a shudder. “They’re filled with so much hate for what’s been done to them. One thousand years of isolation would do that to anypony. That’s what he thinks happened, anyway.” “Just ask my Auntie Luna,” I said dryly. “Does he know anything that can help us now?” Daring Do nodded. “Yes. There is a source of magical energy deep within the complex that powers everything here, and if we destroy that then that should cause a chain reaction big enough to demolish much of the tomb here, hopefully without damaging the camp above.” “And burying us alive in the process.” “I was coming to that. These complexes were connected by a network of portals. They’re on a backup source of power for emergencies, so when we blow the main source it should still be active.” “I don’t like betting my life on ‘should’,” I remarked with a sigh. The portal, too, could spit us out somewhere else filled with these things, or perhaps just somewhere far from civilisation like Appleloosa, but I knew that she was already aware of that and didn’t need me to point out the obvious. Anywhere else was an improvement on here. “And I’d trust that fellow as much as I would a Changeling, but we don’t have much of a choice here. Fine, let’s just get this misery over with, shall we?”