//------------------------------//
// Renewed Purpose 
// Story: Thirty Minute Ponies 
// by Arcainum 
//------------------------------//

---- -e deny, w- ---- im-----,
'ti- --- ---kest fears ---- risen

"I don't get it." Scootaloo frowned, peering closer at the faded scratchings covering the cave wall  as if daring them to make sense. The angular letters had faded to near-illegibility over the years, along with the unfamiliar symbols that covered almost every surface, barely visible in the light of her official Rainbow Dash Fanclub Rainbow Dash-endorsed Rainbow Dash torch. "Sweetie, help me out."

Her fellow Crusader's voice echoed from the deeper recesses of the cave, breathy and cracking with effort. "I'm a little busy!"

"We're both busy!" Apple Bloom's voice, muffled by the plastic shovel she was no doubt applying liberally to the cave floor even now, was accusing.

Scootaloo rolled her eyes. Sweetie and AB were both so obsessed with this "mysterious passageway" they'd found that they were missing out on the totally sweet cave they'd found themselves in after- She shook her head. What was important was that they were here, and not back there. If they wanted to scrabble around in some boring old tunnel, let them.

She looked around the cave again, flicking her torch about randomly in the hopes of finding something interesting. Shadows leapt across the walls as she chased them, revealing ancient whorls of colour and long-forgotten words even as they closed over them once more. She shivered. She had never been frightened of anything ever ever, of course, but there was something about the place that was…strange. The words she could make out all seemed to have been written in terrible haste, the scratches wild and haphazard, and the pictures seemed to twist under her eye, their crooked spirals drawing her gaze further and further into them...

"Scootaloo! You have to see this!"

Sweetie Belle's clear voice rang like a bell in Scootaloo's ears and she realised she had dropped her torch. Blinking and shaking herself, she picked it up and scurried back to her friends.

Whatever they had been tyring to do back here, it looked like they had succeeded. The entire back wall of the cave had fallen away, what had looked like solid rock sloughing to the floor around their hooves in a sea of fine grains. Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were beaming at her, eyeing her torch expectantly. Scootaloo repressed a grin of her own even as fear crept into the back of her mind. Their involuntary Crusade was about to get interesting.

~~~~~

Apple Bloom trotted ahead of the others, letting Scootaloo's torch light the floor ahead of her and peering at the walls around her. And they were walls now, sheer and tall, the ceiling above swallowed by ancient blackness. She had poked one experimentally when Scootaloo had challenged her bravery, but the firm black substance had done nothing but click beneath her hoof, the tic echoing into the darkness. At that moment, they - at least, she hoped ‘they’; she had no desire to be singled out as a wuss - had questioned the enterprise for the first time, but the thought of what lay outside the cave had sent them down the seemingly never-ending corridor without a second word.

"What was that?" Apple Bloom jumped at Sweetie Belle's voice, then coughed to cover her embarrassment.

"What was what? I didn't hear nothin'."

Scootaloo's ears pricked as she strained to hear. "Is that…laughing?"

Apple Bloom laughed herself. "You silly fillies, what're you talkin' about? There ain't nopony laughin' down here, we gotta be, I don't know, a million miles away from-" She stopped, and slowly her gaze met that of her friends, who nodded.

On the very edge of hearing, that she could barely agree with herself that it was real, came peals of laughter, of many ponies consumed with mirth. It was the laughter of parties, of afternoon tea, of days out in the park, of time alone with friends. And it was coming from further down the corridor.

Apple Bloom swallowed. "I ain't sure we should be goin' any further into this place, girls.  I'm gettin' the heebies and the jeebies, and I don't like it!"

"Oh, come on. What could it possibly be?" Scootaloo's scoff was unable to hide the tremor in her voice. "Eeevil zombie ponies from the dawn of time…having a party? It's just some dumb spell or something, right, Sweetie Belle?"

Sweetie's eyes widened at the sudden attention, and she stammered an answer. "I, uh, I guess magic can hang around sometimes, but…I don't think this is magic..."

"See? Magic hangs around sometimes. I bet this place had a unicorn like Pinkie Pie or something, and she cast a spell to make it party time forever." Scootaloo nodded sagely, and turned to move on. Apple Bloom bit her lip and once again weighed the unknown against the fear of returning to Ponyville.

The unknown won out. One thought of Applejack was all it took, and…She fought back a tear and frowned. She sure as hay wasn't gonna let Scootaloo take the lead in what looked like the most dangerous Crusade yet. Not when there was an Apple around.

She strode off purposefully, past Scootaloo and into the darkness, the bobbing of the torch's rainbow beam behind her the only light to be seen.

~~~~~

Sweetie Belle gasped. This place was amazing.

The corridor had continued for what felt like almost an hour, and had opened into what could only be described as a vast cathedral, fit for the grandest halls of Canterlot. Thick columns of the same black material as the walls supported an enormous dome, simple yet elegant arches stretching from wall to pillar to wall across every possible angle. The strange designs that had been scratched into the cave were here too, but here they were part of the very walls themselves, suffusing every inch. They pulsed with a faint but strangely illuminating light, shifting through colours slowly and regularly. The whole place looked like nothing her sister would approve of, but it was…beautiful. If eerie.

"Look at that!"

Sweetie followed Scootaloo's voice to the far end of the room, where her friends had run ahead while she was transfixed by the vision of the hall itself. She hurried after them before slowing to a halt where they stood, a gasp forming once again. How could she not have seen this already?

The entire back wall was taken up by an enormous mirror, tens of feet across. Sitting on a wide dais and supported in a thick frame of the black stuff, the huge pane of what couldn't be glass gave off a dim light of its own, a light that made Sweetie Belle's eyes feel strange. Not painful, just... strange. She peered up at the mirror's seemingly-impossible height, before reaching out to touch Apple Bloom's shoulder.

"Hey, look at the frame."

Her friends' eyes followed her hoof to the bottom left corner of the mirror.

"I don't get it."

Sweetie Belle rolled her eyes at Scootaloo's inattention. Scootaloo never got anything. "Look, the patterns are different. They're like…pictures."

Scootaloo's eyes widened and she grinned as realisation dawned. "Hey, you're right! What do you think it's a picture of?"

Apple Bloom squinted at the precise, angular green lines. "I think it's…a pony?"

Sweetie joined her, and began to follow the pictures upwards, tracing the images in her mind. As the pictures followed one another, it seemed almost like a story. What looked like a pony. The same pony, with its head down. Was it…sad? Another pony. Both ponies facing each other.

"Come one SB, this is boring. They're just pictures."

Sweetie ignored Scootaloo's plaintive pokes and kept craning her neck. The ponies fighting, hooves locked in a way that almost felt aggressive. A sun and moon above them. A stylised starbust. The two ponies locked in an embrace, and above them...

"Hey, I know that one!" Sweetie jumped as Apple Bloom cried out in delight.

"The ponies…hugging?"

Apple Bloom's looked at her flatly. "No, not the hugging! The thingy on top!" Above the two ponies was a five pointed star, each point connected by a circle, smaller circles at each point, and a final point in the centre. "That's the, uh, what d'you call 'em. The Elements of Harmony!" She paused. "It's kinda different though. I ain't ever seen that circle around it in a textbook."

Sweetie peered closer. There was indeed a circle around the Elements, encapsulating them, a circle that differed from the rest of the pictograms. It glowed with the same unnerving light as the mirror. "Huh. Weird. I'm gonna keep reading." But the pictures were too high now, their light fading before it reached her. She frowned and walked to the other side of the mirror, squinting up as she did so.

The first symbol she could see was the Elements of Harmony again, but with the black circle displaced to one side, separate. The sun and moon, then the two ponies again. The two ponies bowing to the sun and moon. Another starburst, and then the black circle, over and over again, growing smaller and smaller until…

"Uh, Sweetie?!"

Blinking, Sweetie Belle looked up irritably. She had been just about to finish! What she saw, however, flushed all thoughts of annoyance from her mind and replaced them with abject terror.

The mirror was black - a deep, inky well of nothingness that seethed as though alive. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo were back away slowly, transfixed by the rippling pool of darkness. Wisps of blackness began to writhe, tendtril-like, into the space surrounding the mirror. Sweetie Belle backed away herself, mouth working in horror as she tried to scream.

And then the voice came. It oozed into her brain, bypassing her ears and writing itself straight into her consciousness, a slow and slithering sound, a drawn-out hiss like a snake's death rattle.

"At laaaaaaaaassssssssst..."

As the voice entered her mind, she found hers. She screamed, and her friends screamed with her. As one they turned and galloped toward the entrance, but grasping vines of shadow coiled around them and pulled them back to the foot of the dais, holding in the place as they struggled desperately the free themselves. The shadows felt like ice and smelt like blood. The voice dripped into her mind again, opening with a deep and satisfied sigh. It sounded almost like a pony now.

"Aaaaaah, much better. It's been…too long."

Sweetie Belle's struggles turned her over, and he found herself staring straight into the mirror. What she saw cut her screams short all over again.

The black film was coalescing, solidifying, coming together at the foot of the mirror's centre. The roiling ball of emptiness extruded itself from the reflection's surface, spilling to the floor before it began to rise, and reform… Within moments, it was over. Above them stood a solid black pony, a living hole in space. The light slid off it like oil off metal, and only the shifting of the darkness itself gave the impression of shape. The featureless head turned slowly to face Sweetie Belle, to match her gaze with the eyes it didn't have.

And then it grinned. Impossibly white teeth, as white as its body was black and perfectly formed, cut a slash of white across its face as its mouth widened farther than any mouth should.

"Boo."

The Crusaders screamed. The figure gave the impression of a wince.

"Oh, please. From all the difficulty you gave Diamond Tiara, I thought you'd be better than this." Its voice was smooth now, insinutating itself into Sweetie's mind with slick grace, with not a trace of the alienness that had tainted it before. The Crusaders continued to scream, and with a shrug the creature extended the tendrils that held them to cover their mouths. At first they cried out in muffled shouts, but then their breath became ragged and their eyes pleaded mercy. The tendrils withdrew, letting the fillies fall to their knees as the spindles of shadow re-entered the figure's body. "Good. Perhaps now we can talk."

Sweetie Belle gasped a response through starved lungs. "You're…you're not going to hurt us?"

The figure's head tilted to one side questioningly. "Not going to… Oh, no. I am going to hurt you. Quite significantly so, in fact. But not yet. We have things to do, my little ponies. Very important things."

Scootaloo stared up at it with as much defiance as she could muster, and croaked, "What are you?!"

The creature grinned again, laughing in their heads. "That is precisely the question I was hoping you'd ask!" It began to strut back and forth across the dais, teeth still twisted in that triumphant smile. Its voice exulted, filling their minds with its presence so strongly that Sweetie nearly fainted.

"I am that which the Princesses brought into being then sought to destroy. I am the solution, and the problem. I am the forgotten, the ignored, the cast away!" Its voice rose in intensity, and Sweetie's mind screamed. "I am that which is denied, and that which defines! I am binder and breaker, bound and broken!" The figure threw its head back, shadowy tendrils lifting into the air as if raising a monarch to the Stars. Its voice was almost unintelligible now, such was its power and sheer reality. It stared down at them with infinite contempt, its smile a white scar across a black sea.

"I am the Seventh. I am Purpose."

Sweetie's mind shut down as glorious agony washed over her. The last thing she saw before she blacked out was the final pictures in the sequence, the pictures she had had no time to see before her nightmare had begun. The last vestiges of her saw, and understood.

A black circle shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, splitting into two before it reached the two ponies where, at last, it touched their flanks.

And left a mark.