//------------------------------//
// Chapter 12: The room 
// Story: Knights of Night - Chosen of the Moon 
// by vadram 
//------------------------------//



Chapter 12: The room





After hours of attempting to enter the building, Starry, Petal and Foggy were underwhelmed when they first saw what was on the inside, nothing.

The door opened to reveal a small room, barely big enough to fit a single bed and a few extra small pieces of furniture. But there were none. The ceiling was so low that a tall stallion would have hit his head just by walking inside, the walls were crooked and the wallpaper was crumbling. three of the walls were bare only the front one had any windows, and even those were boarded. While the stone floor was covered by inches of dust. The room looked and felt like nopony entered in ages.

“What?!” they all asked, surprised by what they saw.

Starry lit up his horn so they would have more light and the ponies walked all over the room, feeling the walls, looking for a secret door, a hidden passage or anything that could have explained where the two guards disappeared, but found nothing. The walls were solid, and the only thing they saw on the floor were their hoofprints.

“Oh, come on!” Foggy yelled out of frustration stumping his hoof. “We waited for hours and this is what we got?!” he stumped his hoof again.

“Foggy why don’t you check the ceiling,” Petal asked of him.

“Why would there anything be up there?” Starry asked looking up. “They are not pegasi.”

“Do you have any other ideas?”

“No,” he admitted.

Foggy stretched out his wings and started flapping them. Starry and Petal felt the air moving as the pegasi took off. 

Foggy searched all over the ceiling, tapping it, listening for a hollowed out spot, and looking for a hidden switch, but again, found nothing.

“Nothing,” he said as he flapped his wings more slowly before landing next to his friends. “It’s like they vanished into thin air.”

“Maybe they teleported away,” Petal tried to explain why there was no sign of them anyway.

Starry sat down on the stone floor and took a moment to think about it, the other two did the same. He looked at the ceiling, nothing. He looked at the walls, nothing, just crumbling plaster. He looked at the floor, noting, just dust and their hoofprints.

“Wait a minute, dust?” Starry asked himself.

“Dust?!” he asked again, this time outloud grabbing the attention of his friends. “Dust!”

“Dust?” Foggy  was surprised by what Starry said. “What about the dust?”

“It’s here,” Starry replied.

“Yeah, so what?”

“It shouldn’t be here...” he tried to explain. “Not anymore.”

Foggy and Petal were not following Starry’s thinking.

“Foggy, wave your wings and clear the dust!”

“I don’t see how that...”

“Just do it!” Starry interrupted him.

“Uh,” Foggy grunted as he stretched out his wings and began flapping moving the air in order to blow away the dust, but no matter how much he tried the dust would not move.

“That’s enough,” Starry told him as he lit up his horn. A bright flash of light filled the room, blinding all inside.

“Why did you do that!?” Petal and Foggy yelled at Starry, while they were rubbing their eyes, trying to recover from the blast.

“Look!”

“We can’t!” they both yelled at him.

“Oh, right.”

A little later when their vision returned to them, Foggy and Petal were able to see why Starry did what he did. The dust was gone and in the middle of the floor a wooden door was visible.

“How did we miss that?” they asked Starry.

“It was hidden by the dust,” he explained as his horn lit up once more and the door swung open revealing a stone stairway heading down beneath the building.

“But why couldn’t I blow it away?”

“It was never there. It was an illusion, now come on, let’s go,” Starry told them as he let his horn light up the passageway, as they descended down the stairs.