"Careful.. I said careful!" Roughneck yelled at the machine operator, as he used the motor to lower Dust down on a harness via a rope. Dust herself said nothing, but her shaking legs and pale look said it all. She dropped down foot-by-foot, toward the cracked, slanted floor of the interior. It was a good thing that she had brought down a torch of her own, or the ruin would not be visible at all. And extra batteries for said torch had not gone unpacked in her saddlebags, so that helped things. "Can you see the bottom yet?" Roughneck's voice called from somewhere above. Dust looked down. There, coming up to meet her hooves in the pool of torch-light, was the dry, dusty old floor. She looked up at the square patch of sky.
"Yes! I'm just hitting ground level now!" She shouted up to him.
"Right.. We're sending some officers down with the floodlights, so the place will be lit up properly in a few minutes.. Don't worry!" He replied, and his silhouette disappeared from the lit-up patch above. Dust looked around, aiming her torch randomly in the hopes of locating something of worth other than the uneven flooring and bare stone brick walls. With a random swing of the torch, the beam illuminated the huge statue that her mother's journal had spoken of. Dust was awe-struck. "Oh, you are beautiful.." She whispered, trotting up and stroking a hoof across the rough surface of the statue's base. It was an intricately-carven masterpiece, stone hewn in the perfect representation of a stallion, minus a few eroded portions and some cracks in the rock. It wore odd armour, as her mother had also noted; The helmet and body plating was of some alien design, as-of-yet unseen in any of Dust's vast collections of historical texts back at the Institiute. The statue also stood in the not-oft used standing position, using only its hind legs to stand and its forelegs to hold a massive sword of some kind. The blade of the sword seemed to stab into an opening in the statue's base, imitating the image of a sword kept in the soft earth while its bearer uses it to lean on. Behind her, a troop of officers landed down on the stone floor, and began setting up the floodlights. Huge pools of light illuminated the odd statue, and one light was moved around, roaming across the dark walls to reveal the masses of smashed-open brickwork and the four doorways which led to the four compass-point towers on the outside edges of the structure. Dust, being the defacto commander of the officers in the ruin, sent a team of four off down a corridor each, to search the intact towers and try to search for ways into the collapsed ones. She kept a pair of the officers in the central structure to stand guard and keep contact with Roughneck while she worked.
An hour passed by as Dust began translating the carven passages which lined the base of the statue, using a translation table she had drawn up while back at the Institute. Apparently, the race that constructed Solum must have been an early deviation of Tan's central desert cultures. The carven inscriptions in the stone spoke thusly;
'The secret of the Casket of Undead-Bringing lies hid at Tali,
The Unholy Temple at the bottom of the Seas of Unrest,
Guarded by Morlyir Bae, the Many Limbed One,
He who may smite down unwary visitors with many a barbed arm,
The map to the Temple Tali rests here,
Only the Guardian may decide the worthy.'
Looking up at the stone statue, Dust took a wild guess that it represented the 'Guardian' that the inscription spoke of. After all, the statue certainly seemed to be standing guard over something. She noted down the inscription on the statue's base, scribbling it into her mother's journal. Taking a step back from the monument, Dust turned to the officers.
"Right, you two.. Search around that statue. Let me know if you find anything odd, I'm off to check up on the others." And with that, she took off down the West corridor. Upon reaching the end of the tunnel, she found that the officer had begun trying to burrow beneath the collapsed portion of the tower, and she had managed to dig into the lower portion. The tower had only collapsed at the uppermost level, and so the lower chambers remained intact and untouched since many hundreds of years prior. Climbing down into the excavated chamber, Dust waved her torch around, calling out to the officer.
"Hello? Um.. Hello?" Her voice echoed around. No reply. Dust travelled inward, entering the chamber and looking around. There were dusty old sarcophogi propped up in alcoves all around the chamber, and pulling open one, Dust found it to be occupied. Standing at full height on its hind hoooves within, forehooves crossed over its chest, was a semi-mummified pony. Well, it appeared to be a pony, in some respects. Its stomach area had been extended, as if the poor creature had been put on a rack and stretched to double its length. The legs were thin and bony, and grey flesh peeled off and hung from between the bandages in places. The head was the oddest though. The shape of the skull was different, as some ancient ritual head-binding of some kind had crushed the muzzle against the head, giving it a stunted, almost reptilian look, as the facial features were pressed into the skull. The eyes, no longer there, would have been recessed into the skull. However, now the eyes were nothing more than empty, misshapen sockets. Dust shuddered to think what kind of pain the binding rituals of the old culture must have brought, and she quickly closed over the sarcophagus again. As it thudded shut, she could have sworn she heard a rattling, crusty noise - like ancient bones moving almost imperceptably inside the decrepit tomb. She shook off her irrational fears, and pressed onward, down to the bottom level of the West tower. There, she found the officer she had sent. The poor mare lay dead, crushed by a sarcophagus which had toppled onto her. Dust theorised that she must have been trying to move it, and it had lost balance and crushed her. With a heavy heart, she returned to the central chamber.
"Ah, Miss Dust. We've found something you might be interested in." One of the officers in the central room called to Dust as she re-entered the octagonal chamber. "See, here.." He led her to one of the wider cracks in the statue's torso. Within, illuminated by torchlight, Dust could see gears, chains and other intricate, ancient machinery. It did not move, but Dust had enough sense to know that, with such an amount of machinery inside it, a statue of this size must be the key to finding the map to Tali. Looking over her options, she took a chance.
"Pass me a rope." She ordered. One of the officers handed over a coiled length of rope. Tying a lasso and throwing it up as far as possible, Dust managed to coil the loop around one of the stone barbs on the statue's helmet. Taking a deep breath, she leapt upward and began climbing. The statue, being at least thirty feet tall, took a while to scale by rope, but soon, she was clambering up the topmost portion of the chestplate and onto the statue's face. She reached the top of the helmet, and immediately came across the soloution she had been looking for. An opening in the back of the statue's helmet opened into the inside of its head. Clambering down inside, she shone her torch around. Inside, there was only one object. A rotting wooden lever, mounted on a dusty, rust-eaten iron mounting. Grabbing hold of it, she yanked the wooden pole back. Quickly, a grinding noise erupted from within the statue itself, and Dust leapt out onto the head to see what was going on. The collossal sword that the statue held was slowly raised up by its stone arms, and the tip of the sword's blade slid out of the rectangular opening in the statue's base. Soon, Dust lowered herself down on the rope, dropping down into the hole opened by the lifting sword.
"Well.. This is it.." She uttered. Now standing inside the base of the statue, she had located the map room.
It was a small enough chamber, circular and ornately covered with inscriptions and grand sarcophogi which surrounded the centre - but the centrepiece made it an incredible sight. A huge globe, set halfway into the stone floor, made of rusty, but still recognisably shimmering, gold. Prodding at the globe with a hoof, Dust realised that it lay in a moving pit, capable of rolling around freely to offer a view of any part of the globe. A mechanism of some sort hung from the ceiling, a needle hanging down further toward the globe on a chain. The cogs and gears of the machine also appeared to link in to the floor-mounted globe. Dust quickly realised that the machine on the ceiling operated the globe, pointing the exact location of the ruin Tali. But the machine lay dormant, unmoving at this moment in time.
"How am I gonna make this thing work?.. I'm not a mechanic, by any means.." She murmured to herself, looking over what appeared to be the control panel for the machine which stood on a stone pedestal in front of the globe. An age-worn stone podium, with a golden panel at its summit. The panel bore only a small, dark opening. A hole, not unlike a keyhole, though wide enough for a pony's hoof. Inspecting the inscription around the hole, her heart sank.
'Tei'Solu, Guardian of Solum, demands a sacrifice of flesh and blood to reveal the location of the forsaken Tali. Put forth your hoof, if you are sure of heart and steely of resolve, and take the location of Tali for your own.'
Now she noticed the black residue which lined the hole's rim. Dry, cracked blood. "No.. No, I can't do this, I.. Wait a minute." She suddenly thought hard, staring around the room. The sarcophogi.. She could use the bodies. Peeling one open, she held back from retching at the smell of age-long decay as the air was polluted with rot. Grabbing at the bandage-wrapped body inside, she yanked at its hoof. "I'm so sorry about this, Sir. Or Miss. I can't really tell." She apologised profusely, as the rotten old body tumbled out of the sarcophogus, almost on top of her. She dragged it over to the stone podium with its golden panel, and tried jamming the mummified cadaver's hoof into the keyhole. There was an altogether disturbing noise, the popping, crunching and tearing of bone and flesh as a stone block inside the keyhole slowly crushed the hoof to dust and flakes of dead skin. Had that been her own hoof, it would have been horrifyingly crushed to a bloody pulp. However, as it was, the cruel mechanism accepted the gift of long-dead flesh and bone, and the machine began to grind into action. Slowly, the golden globe in the floor began to swirl around on its axis, and as it came to a resting-place, the needle of the machine on the ceiling lowered down to touch it gently, revealing the location of Tali; The Olenian Ocean, a few kilometres from the Crystal Empire. Dust's face lit up with joy as she scribbled down the exact location in her mother's journal, giddy with excitement.