//------------------------------//
// Chapter 13 
// Story: Forbidden Deeper 
// by SaltyJustice 
//------------------------------//

	I let Inkie take the lead, she refused to let me pass her, though there weren't exactly any twists and turns in this mineshaft.  In fact, it looked pretty normal, but every few feet, there'd be a bone.  A ribcage, a skull, a femur, strewn about at random.  Grotesque, sure, but nothing terrifying.  It was more like wandering through a tomb than a massacre.
"Do you smell that?" Gabby asked from behind me.
"No, I don't," I said.  If she was going to make fun of me for the stench, we all smelled like salt now.  It wasn't going to stick.
"Hm," she muttered.
"Ohhhh, it's happening again," Inkie said, but she was blocking my view of the shaft past her.  This area had a lot of wooden boards on the walls and buttresses on the roof, it had been under construction when it was abandoned.  I noticed the boards were now damp, all the way up the ceiling, and certainly not due to the pools of water strewn about.  Though the place was flooding slowly, something else was causing the dampness.
Then I saw it:  Blood, all over the walls, floor, ceiling.  Bodies of ponies, some half rotten, some skeletal.  Pieces strewn everywhere, nothing was intact.  The skulls had been smashed in and scattered about, legs snapped in several places.  The blood was most certainly not related to the corpses, but I couldn't guess at what it was really due to.  Some sort of geological phenomenon?
"Princess Luna?" I heard Wedge ask from behind, and I turned to get a look at her.  She had stopped at the rear of the party and wasn't keeping up with us.
"What is it?" I asked.
"The stone here is bleeding," she murmered.  She looked up and around at it, then down at the water pooling on the floor.
"Something is trapped within it," she said.
"What, something stuck in the walls?" Wedge asked.  Inkie was staying silent, but what I could see of her face in the glow was paler than her usual blue.
"Yes, there is a magic in the rock that cannot escape.  We should hurry, so as not to disturb it," she said.  I couldn't feel anything myself, but the blood was unnerving.  I also hadn't known rocks could bleed.
Inkie had been walking before, but now she was trotting, then jogging.  Each step she took caused her to increase her pace more until she was nearly at a full run, and then rest of us were trying to keep pace.  She was breathing hard and kept looking at the walls, which ran and flowed, the blood shining back the light of her headlamp.
At last we reached a point where the rocks returned to normal, and there were no more bones.  We must have been near the edge of the passage, because the quartz veins here still hadn't been removed, and there was a distinct golden glow coming from deep within.  Inkie stopped and held her chest, trying to calm herself.  None of us spoke as she did.
"Heart.  My heart's going a mile a minute," she said, between breaths.
"It's okay, take your time," Gabby said.
"But it's not bleeding anymore," Inkie said.
"What, the rock?" Wedge asked.
"Couldn't any of you feel that?  Didn't you hear it?" Inkie asked.  I shook my head, Gabby did not.
"I could hear them crying, begging me for something.  Was it really just me?" Inkie said, and Luna pushed her way past me.
"That was merely an echo, child.  The victims have long since moved on.  We must continue forth," she said.
"Just give me a second," Inkie said.  I let Luna stay in front of me as we waited for Inkie to recover, her face written with concern, but she wasn't going to confide anything in me.  It was strange that I had not felt it, but perhaps the trauma of her earlier experience had imprinted something on Inkie's mind I could not grasp at.  Magic was indeed a strange thing, and not always in a good way.

Inkie took her time, but eventually she was able to stand and continue down through the mineshaft.  It was quickly becoming narrower and smaller, and I wondered just how much further it'd go, before it suddenly took a sharp right-turn and stopped following the quartz vein.  I got a last look at the vein, still bearing faint slivers of gold, before it pinched out and was gone.  Now the walls were dark stone and the path became mazelike.
We took a turn, then another turn, and another, and I wondered just what madpony had been digging this before it occurred to me that a Diamond Dog must have their own sort of work discipline.  We came across a concrete constructed door frame with a new wooden door, and Inkie fiddled with it for a minute before it opened into an enormous cave that glowed of its own accord, without our light sources.
"Whooaaaa," Gabby said, looking up and around at the suddenly open expanse.  Hey jaw hung open as she scanned the cave ahead of us.
I took the opportunity to stretch my legs, and I was plenty sick of tight cramped quarters.  It was an altogether different experience to not have to walk in single file, and this cavern was large enough to allow some air flow.  It felt like there was wind in my mane again.
"Amazing.  Did they dig all of this?" Luna asked Inkie.
"Some of it, some of it is natural.  As you get away from the porphyry complex we'll be getting into more limestone.  I believe your goal is in the D section, but we'll have to detour through these natural caves in order to get there without digging our own mines," Inkie said.
I wasn't listening all the way, now I was concerned with trying to wring some of the moisture out of my tail.  I was never going to get the smell out.
Inkie walked behind us and shut the door, and I heard her slam something, presumably locking it.
"So now we've saved about two days of walking by taking that shortcut," she said.
"More ponies than you realize are in your debt, Miss Pie," I said.  For the first time, she smiled, then sat down and pulled out her map and busied herself with it.
Gabby had wandered a bit into the cave, though I was not worried as there was some sort of natural light source here and she'd not trip and hurt herself in the gloom.  I decided to follow after her while Luna and Wedge were merely stretching themselves, and I found her looking intently at some sort of fungus. 
"You ever seen a mushroom glow like this?" Gabby asked.  There was a bluish fungus growing all over a rock she was looking at, and a periodic drip of water would splash down from above, right on top of it, nourishing it.  A big fat mushroom was growing off to one side, with spores practically visibly falling off of it.  It was like looking at a fog as the spores floated across air currents and coated the rock, all under a phosphorescent blue light.
"The natural world is full of wonders," I said.
"Five bits says you throw up if you eat it," she said.
I was about to take a bite when my brain got the best of me.
"Shame on you," I scolded, and she walked off, back towards Luna, without saying anything.  I turned back to the mushroom, and as soon as I did I heard her stop and look back at me.
"Eat it.  Eat it!  Eat it, filly!" she chanted.
I swallowed hard.  The mushroom was mocking me.  It sat there, uneaten, possibly being centuries old, undisturbed at the bottom of a cave.  I had to eat it.  It was made to be eaten.
"What if it's poisonous?" I asked.
"Then you'll die a courageous taster of exotic fungi," she said.
I stepped gingerly closer and held my head in front of it.  It didn't smell like anything edible or inedible, it gave no smell at all.  I've eaten mushrooms before and they don't smell like anything until you cook them, so that was no surprise.
I had skipped breakfast for the good of the group, damn it.  My mouth was watering.  It was right there, inches away.  So delicious, so tempting.  Just one bite, and I'd shut Gabby up for good.  Or until the next time she found a reason to dare me to do something stupid, then I'd do it again.  So, I'd shut her up for a day.  Just one bite...
"What are you doing?" Luna's voice snapped me out of my trance.  I backed up suddenly while Gabby made a sucking sound.
"Just checking out this cool mushroom," I said.
"Oh, very exotic.  Are you perhaps a connoisseur of rare fungi, Amoria?  This is something new," she said, standing beside me.
"You know what this is?" I asked.
"Certainly.  Photophorm, I hear it's quite delicious," she said.
I shot a smirk at Gabby, who was whistling.  Maybe I could take a bite...
"And a potent laxative.  These were considered an expensive medicinal ingredient, as I recall.  Everypony takes pills these days, hmm," she said.  She muttered something else about sterility as Inkie and Wedge ambled towards us.
"Were you going to eat that mushroom?" Inkie asked me as we started our march through the caves.  I couldn't tell direction anymore, we'd taken so many twists that I had no idea which way was north, but Inkie said she knew and I had no choice but to follow.  There was a subtle hatred in the air, my senses were alert, but it was ambient, all around us.
"Absolutely not," I said.  Gabby wasn't making eye contact.
There was more than one species of Photoform in the caves, the first had been blue, but as we walked I saw gold, green, orange, purple, and all the other colors, rainbow or not.  The stuff grew everywhere there was a source of moisture, and cast faint lights through the cavern, though it was a gloom to be sure.  We'd still need our lamps to see properly.
The dogs had been carving paths between the openings, and leaving crude doorways between each one.  Inkie made sure to carve a sign on each wall as we went through the doors, and as she did I noticed someone else had left markings already.  I had no idea what they said though.
"Hey, good news," she said, after we had walked through about a dozen different rooms.
We all waited patiently.
"Somepony prompt me," she said drily.
"Uh, what's the good news?" I asked.
"Well I'm glad you asked!" she shouted, and whirled in place to point to the sign on the door we had plodded up to.  It looked like the head of a Diamond Dog, in a scowl, and there were some scribbles underneath it.
"This sign says there's a trading post not too far from here," she said.  She raised her rock hammer to point at the scowling dog.
"Says they might have some Rock Nuts for sale, anypony interested?" she asked.
I think I heard Wedge cough, but none of us knew what she was talking about.  I had other questions.
"Trading posts?  Down here?" I asked.
"Sure, gotta put em somewhere.  I've never been to this one, it's a ways, but there's always something good on offer.  If you know the right dogs," she said.
"And what would you trade, Miss Pie," Luna asked, examining the sign intently.  I didn't think she'd have any better luck than I would reading it, but making a show of doing so might make her look sophisticated.
"We do everything on credit with these guys, and they owe me a few.  Rock Nuts!  Come on!" she said, smiling.
This time I decided to cough, to break up the silence.
"Fine, no nuts for you," she said, pushing on the doorway and leading us into the black beyond it.  Each doorway had another on the far side of a narrow, twisting passage.  The doors must have served to stop water from getting in if there was a flood, for I could see no other reason for placing them at every opening.  Perhaps the Dogs had used them to mark natural openings from carved ones, I really had no idea.
We went through another open, natural cave, this one almost exclusively with dark red photoform illuminating it.  It reminded me of high school, when I had to go into a dark room to develop some photos for my art classes, the deep red made everything look like rose petals except for Inkie's headlamp.  If the Pie family ever ran into financial troubles, I was considering telling them to sell guided tours.  I'd have certainly paid a mint to see these caves.
This time, when we reached the next doorway, Inkie made a mark on it, then didn't open the door.  She instead trotted off to another door nearby, which had the same picture of the scowling Diamond Dog as before.
"Is this the way to the trading post?" I asked, looking at the picture.
"Yep!  Just a few more minutes and we'll have Rock Nuts for everypony!" she said excitedly.
Silence.
"They're a candy!  They're really good!" she shouted.
"Ohhhh," Gabby said.  I admit, that didn't sound like the name of a candy until she had said so, and suddenly it made sense.
We went through this new door and followed the darkened passage until it led us to a room that was not natural, and had been carved out.  There was no Photophorm here, either, perhaps it took a long time to grow and thus would not be present in a hewn room.  Instead, there was an unlit torch in the center.
Luna made to light it, but stopped and gave out a grunt of disapproval.
"This torch has burnt all its fuel," she said.
"Hello?  Trader Dogs?" Inkie called out.
I got that strange feeling again.  It was nearby, and then began to recede as soon as I had noticed it.  My stomach twisted.  This was not a good sign.
Nobody answered Inkie's call.
We stood in the gloom of Luna's horn for a moment as I decided to look around this small room.  There didn't seem to be any Diamond Dogs present, or sleeping, and there were two cots in the back of the room.  The entire place was full of assorted junk, crudely made clothes, metal replacement parts, picks, hammers, gems.  Everything you could expect to find at a trading post, I suppose, but I'd never been to one.  If there were any Rock Nuts to be had, I'd never be able to identify them.
"Well, I guess nobody's home," Inkie said, dejectedly.
Luna pushed a pile of shirts aside and revealed a torch which had been partially covered by them, and she levitated it up to replace the old one, and lit it.  The bright orange glow looked much more natural in this sort of setting, and made the place seem almost homey.  It also brought attention to a note, printed on a scroll, that was in the middle of the room.  It had been unremarkable in her pale horn-light, but was easy to spot in the orange.
Wedge got to it first and picked it up to read.  He scanned it over quickly, then turned to me and decided to read it out loud.
"Muttin, left to go meet up with Firewatch's team.  Get out now.  Don't take anything, just go.  Meet us at the main camp.  Not kidding -Q".
That didn't make my stomach feel any better.
"Well that's cryptic.  Should we be worried, Inkie?" Gabby asked.  Inkie shrugged.
"I don't know, I didn't even know they could write.  Somepony's been giving them literacy lessons," she said.
"Any idea when it was written?" Gabby asked Wedge.
"Mmm, fairly recently, the parchment isn't faded or torn.  Within a week at most," he said.
I looked up, then around.  I tensed.  They were all around us.
"Luna.  Luna!?  Do you feel that?" I hissed.
"Feel what?" she asked me, stepping close to my side.
"Everywhere, thousands, millions.  We're surrounded," I said.
Luna drew her bow as I drew my sword.  Wedge waited not a second before likewise drawing his own spear.  Even Inkie brandished her pick, and Gabby was ready to fight with her bare hooves.
"Where are they Amoria?" Luna asked, her eyes darting everywhere, searching for our enemies.
Then we heard it.  A billion skittering little feet.
Bugs.