XVIII
The Mare Who Cried Wolf
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Twilight’s breath caught in her throat as sweat dripped down her brow. Her body shivered from the stress of the spell she never thought she’d need to use outside her studies. She felt Serp’s wing wrapped around her horn, and stared into the trailing feathers that blocked the center of her vision, containing the purple light of her magic, she could only see the vargr’s feet as it loped down the stony tunnel.
A spark of magic twinged in the mare’s horn; a small crack from holding a hard spell too long. Twilight was too experienced a mage to lose the spell, but the brief pain did send a little gasp of discomfort out from between her teeth.
The vargr stopped.
Somewhere behind Twilight, Going Solo adjusted the single bladed shoe on her right hoof. The unicorn reached a hoof of her own over slowly, forcing the weapon back.
The vargr stepped toward them. Its paws shifted the loose pebbles on the ground and left pawprints in the frost that seemed to cling to every stone surface. Twilight held her breath.
Two steps from discovering their hiding crag, the creature stopped again. A growl built in its throat, and the steamy clouds from its hot breath slipped around the stone walls and into Twilight’s view.
Gently, Solo gestured to her bladed hoof. Twilight shook her head twice, before biting down on her tongue to suppress the pain that the motion left in her horn. Her spell faded briefly, and it took a new surge of magic to keep the illusion alive.
In that moment of failure, the creature sniffed once. From that one simple breath, Going Solo decided she couldn’t wait any longer.
The creature’s claws were fast enough to draw blood from the pegasus’ side, but the shallow lines he drew came nowhere close to the speed he would have needed to stop her. The mare’s bladed shoe dug into his throat until it found spine on the other side. With a bloody gurgle and a painful wheeze, the creature’s pain overwhelmed its consciousness. And in those mere two seconds, Twilight Sparkle failed to suppress her gasp.
“Should have done that in the first place,” Solo muttered, wiping her hoof on the creature’s coat. “Twilight, are you okay?”
“You just… you killed it.”
“I didn’t hear you freak out when he did it,” Solo answered, gesturing in Serp’s direction. The three-legged pegasus gave Solo an encouraging, if sheepish smile. Unfortunately, given that his teeth had been filed to points, it came across as predatory.
Twilight gestured with a hoof down the hall. “Well, now they’re going to smell the blood.”
“Hide it with your spell,” Solo said, as if the solution were obvious. “Like we were doing here.”
“It isn’t an easy spell, and I’m not good enough of an illusionist to conceal something that smells that bad.” Twilight took two quick breaths. “Look, we’re running out of time. Let’s just get moving.”
Two of the three ponies set to wing in the narrow hallways, and Twilight’s out-of-shape sprinting struggled to keep up with them. She continued around dark corners and past sheer mined walls, hoping desperately that this new passage would hold the key to their safe escape. She rounded a corner, imagining the sight of snow on the other side.
A wing wrapped over Twilight’s chest, holding her a good three strides away from a crag in their path.
“Another dead end?” The unicorn’s tone of defeat echoed the emotions of her two companions. Her ears sagged, and her hind legs seemed to fall out from under her. “Okay, let me think… There’s the passage we gave up on earlier because it was Vargr-carved, and there’s the main mine-shaft.”
“Мы должны пробиться через завалы.” When Serp saw the two mares stare at him in confusion, he ripped a quill out of his wing and thrust the end into the stump of his shoulder. Its tip bloodied enough to write, he tossed it toward Twilight.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Twilight asked mere moments after finishing her spell.
“How about I bite one of your legs off? Then you can ask me if getting stabbed with a quill hurts,” the pegasus answered harshly. “We should go back to the rubble room, and just blast our way out.”
Twilight shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, except as a last resort. It would make too much noise, and since the hallway caved in already, it’s probably unstable. We might just bring the roof down on ourselves. Plus we don’t even know what’s on the other side.”
“So what do you propose?” Solo wondered aloud. “We go down in the mineshaft you found? You heard all those pickaxes, right?”
“I heard them. But I don’t know what other option we have; that’s the way they brought us in, and it doesn’t look like there’s another way out.” Twilight watched Solo swallow hard, but the pegasus mare had nothing to say in reply. She turned to Serp.
The Stalliongradian shrugged. “You’re the genius here. Blood Stroke would have my kids for letting you two down here.”
“Kids?” Twilight’s brow rose as she took the first steps back down the tunnel. “You’ve got kids, Serp?”
“Probably,” the guardspony replied in a hoarse whisper. Its lack of volume came across from the translated voice from Twilight’s spell. “Never met ‘em.”
“He didn’t mean kids, Twilight.” Solo waited to roll her eyes until she had Twilight’s attention. Then she rubbed her hind legs together in an unmistakable motion.
Serp let a quiet chuckle slip between his filed teeth, though his eyes remained focused, glaring into the darkness ahead and jumping from wall to wall with every step. “No, I did mean children, Canterlot pony. Do you not hear the rumors about Blood Stroke in Canterlot? Haven’t you heard about Resistant?”
“I don’t know that name… Should I?”
“He means Soldier On,” Twilight explained. “The mare we met in Ponyville.”
For just a moment, Serp’s shock broke through his focus. “You met Resistant, and you’re still alive? I guess I didn’t give you enough credit, Canterlot.” He nodded briefly in Solo’s direction. “Well, Resistant hired that hit-mare, Dress-Up Party or whatever her name is, to kill Blood Stroke’s brother. Blood Stroke lost it. He―”
“I don’t think this is the time for stories,” Twilight interrupted, her expression taking a turn for the worse. “Serp, keep a close eye ahead, and if we make it out of Onyx Ridge, you can tell us whatever it is you think we need to know.”
From there, the trio walked in silence, listening to the hisses of breath that seemed to lie in wait around every corner, and the distant echo of hundreds of pickaxes rising and falling into the onyx that gave the fortress its name. Their hooves edged around the corpse of the vargr who had nearly caught them, still lying unceremoniously in the center of the tunnel as his blood drew rivulets through the cracks in the rough stone floor. Either the other vargr hadn’t noticed his absence, or they simply didn’t care, it seemed.
As the sound of pickaxes grew louder, Twilight gestured a hoof toward the left wall of the tunnel. Solo and Serp each extended a wing to touch the stone, and then Twilight let the light on the tip of her horn go out. The darkness consumed them immediately. Only the chill of the stone and the rhythm of the picks guided her path.
Robbed of her light, and feeling the chill of Stalliongradi onyx running up her leg, Twilight felt helpless. With each step, the whispering sound of echoed breath seemed to be just ahead, and she struggled to remind herself that it was most likely her imagination.
The passages seemed to go on forever. Twilight’s right shoulder brushed against cold stone, and she sucked in a gasp, worrying that she’d walked into a dead end. Her hoof pushed forward, and found a solid wall. They hadn’t seen this path on the way in, the mare was sure. Where were they? Had she taken a wrong turn?
Solo’s muzzle bumped against her flank, and Twilight released the small gasp she’d been holding in. It was a subtle noise, but its pitch seemed tuned to echo perfectly the hallways. Little gasps fled down the tunnels, growing distant, but it seemed no less audible.
Solo, Twilight, and Serp waited with bated breath. Twilight felt Solo’s wing wrap over her back. Every thought was spent on waiting.
The strike of picks brought breath back into the ponies’ lungs. Twilight’s hooves moved along the flat surface of the wall, and found where the tunnel continued after a jagged elbow in the stone she hadn’t remembered. But as her hooves continued down the path, the fearful realization that she was only a single loud breath away from the deaths of herself and her companions seemed to tighten her chest and accentuate the icy feeling on her hoof.
After a mere few dozen strides, Twilight’s eyes saw a glimmer of light ahead. The orange glow of what could only be fire flickered on black stone walls, giving the entirely frigid passage a strangely infernal appearance. It reminded Twilight of her trip to Krennotets, though she quickly forced herself to cast the memory of her journey to imprison Discord aside. Her focus was on the path ahead, where the tunnels opened up into a spiraling, vaguely cylindrical pit. Stretching across the open space in the center, at various heights and with no particular ordering, were dozens of rope-and-plank bridges, boards rotting or threads growing worn and tired from the heavy steps of massive wolf-creatures.
Twilight crept up to the lip of the tunnel, where stone gave way to open air and the closest of the rope bridges began. There, she lied down on her belly and tilted her head slowly over the edge, looking down while showing as little of her body to the creatures below as possible.
What she saw nearly stopped her heart. Dozens upon dozens of vargr hacked at the walls with half-rusted picks and heavy hammers. Even more worked with yokes and buckets, hauling misshapen crystals and gems upward across the spiraling path of stairs and rickety bridges.
A hoof pulled back on Twilight’s shoulder, and she turned to find her muzzle mere inches from Serp’s filed teeth. Without saying a word, his wing traced 2 characters in the dust and gravel on the stone tunnel floor.
“Seventy―” The same feathers that had traced the numbers wrapped over Twilight’s face, muffling her continued display of shock. The determination in straining muscles on Serp’s brow seemed an odd contrast to the hopelessness in his eyes. Carefully, he shifted his weight away from the wing on her muzzle, and onto his remaining foreleg. With a nod of his head, he gestured toward the bridge, and then upward. His wing tapped Twilight on the shoulders, pushing her forward toward the bridge. When she hesitated, he flapped his wing once with a quiet forcefulness, dislodging a loose feather. Then his wing twisted, pointing at the offending quill.
Twilight turned back, not to Serp, but Going Solo. Unlike the brutal governor of Saraneighvo, the encouraging nod of the guardsmare offered some shred of confidence. “He’s right,” she whispered. “He’ll have to fly over, so he’ll need to go last.”
Swallowing once as a way to hold down her worries, Twilight placed her hoof onto the first slat of the bridge. The wood groaned, but in a room filled with the clatter of picks on stone, none of the Vargr noticed. Twilight was left to creep slowly forward on the bridge, feeling the old wood shift and groan with her every step. Four steps forward, the wood cracked under her hoof, and she pulled back. The sudden motion left the rope bridge swinging uncomfortably, and Twilight forced herself to look up toward the ceiling to keep her bobbing vision from making her sick.
As the swaying stopped, a glimmer on the ceiling caught her eye. At first, Twilight thought it was a gem or a crystal like the ones the vargr were mining below. A second glance made it clear she was seeing something far more inspiring of hope: ice. She turned back toward Serp and Solo, only to see four wings shuffling her forward. After offering one quick motion of her hoof to point upward with a smile, the unicorn turned her attention back to crossing the bridge.
Two steps later, a wooden slat cracked in half. Twilight eyes widened at the falling pieces of wood; they were aimed straight for a group of mining vargr. For the unicorn, a heartbeat could have been a lifetime. Biting down on her cheek, she forced her horn to light up. The weary appendage protested, but Twilight was too good a mage to fail a spell over a tired horn. Her arcane aura caught the planks a mere dozen feet over the heads of the vargr. With another surge of magic, the planks disappeared in a tiny pop of sparks, reappearing next to Twilight on the bridge.
She sighed in relief as her magic faded. Her hooves set forward on her journey again, and this time they tread with gentle determination. The wood groaned, but it did not crack. In twenty strides, Twilight found herself on the far side of the bridge, steady on solid onyx. She turned back to her companions, and beckoned for them to cross.
As Solo began her crossing, Twilight turned her eyes to the ledge she stood on. To her left, it spiraled down toward another tunnel that surely led to the mining levels. To her right, however, it carved straight upward into the wall. Somewhere, she was sure, it had to rejoin that upper path where she could still see ice clinging to the walls. Her eyes traced the path down into the stone, imagining the likely slope she would be expecting, and the journey back into darkness. Past the mines, however, it seemed likely that there would be fewer of the vargr to fill their paths. Like the diamond dogs of Ponyville, the creatures were notoriously greedy miners; in a busy day, most would be laboring in the pit below her hooves.
An enormous roar of hatred or pain echoed from overhead, startling Twilight into cowering against the solid onyx wall ahead. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Solo lay flat against the bridge slats, just as the echoing of the single noise gave way to the incomprehensible grumblings of the seventy-some vargr miners, who surely had to be looking straight up in that moment. Unable to see them from her hiding place, Twilight turned her focus overhead. Another tunnel leading out of the tall chamber above, devoid of ice or signs of happiness, was instead lit with a vibrant and flickering light. Against the wall, she could see the outline of one of the vargr. It roared again, as its silhouette overlapped with another of the creatures, far larger than the first. Another howl filled the chamber, and the light disappeared.
Everything was quiet for a minute, or perhaps more. The first sound was the clicking of a pickaxe against stone. The next was another. The third was the wood of the bridge groaning as Solo rose to her hooves. With subdued motion, she wiped a wing across her sky blue brow.
Twilight’s heart skipped yet another beat when a burst of flame erupted from the same tunnel, lighting the cavern far more brightly than any of its flickering torches, and unmistakably illuminating the Canterlot guardsmare standing halfway across the rope bridge. Howls and countless words escaped the fang maws of the mining vargr below, but Twilight only needed to hear one. “Пони!”
Pony
“The ice tunnel!” Twilight shouted to Solo. “That’s the way out!” As the roars of the vargr turned to the slap of their paws against stone as they began to climb and run, swarming up like a hive of insects, the unicorn focused her attention and her meager desperate grasp of Stalliongradi toward her other companion. “Serp! Lyod!” Her hoof gestured toward the literal glimmer of icy hope, and her horn gathered its energy. The pegasi spread their wings, and with a groan of protest at the continual strain on her magic, Twilight popped away.
She rarely got sick from teleportation, but the suddenness and the desperation of the spell left Twilight’s gut churning. Below her, what looked more like a thousand giant diamond dogs than the seventy Serp had counted were running up the tunnels and outright climbing the sheer stone of the cavern walls to move toward the ponies. Not three dozen feet to Twilight’s left, the tunnel that had played host to the fireball that began the mess echoed out another roar, and then a voice that Twilight was sure she wouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon.
“Не дайте им сбежать!”
“Was that―?” Solo began, as she landed beside Twilight.
“Fenrir,” Twilight nodded, even as she turned toward the icy tunnel. “We need to go!”
Solo and Twilight were already running by the time Serp landed. Twilight spared him only one glance to ensure he was following before turning her attention back to the path. Roaring and the growing stench of their hunters filled the chilled air of the tunnel, though her eyes paid more attention to the strange clumps of sharp, jagged ice clutching to the walls. At places, the icicles jutted out into the path. At one corner, Twilight felt her shoulder scrape on the ice. The chill seemed unnatural; too cold to be mere ice. Simply from the touch, ice gathered on her coat around the wound.
One of the wolves howled, too close behind. Twilight turned back over her shoulder, just in time to watch Going Solo stab the vargr in the brow with her single bladed shoe. As it howled in pain, Serp spared a motion to stomp on its knee, sending spurs of bone flying free out the back with the crack of a bolt of thunder. Anger turned to agony in the creature’s voice. It kept howling, up until the moment that a burst of flame turned it to ash, ending its suffering.
In the ensuing smoke, the silhouette of a gigantic vargr loomed strong, snarling as its left hand glowed with crimson magic, and tongues of fire licked up its arm. Fenrir didn’t bother taunting the escaped ponies as he had before. Extending his gem-covered hand, the alpha vargr unleashed a burst of flame, intent on consuming all three in a single ‘spell’. Gritting her teeth, Twilight tilted her head forward and focused her horn.
“The most important part of the shield is balance, Twily. It’s only as strong as its weakest point.” Twilight could hear her brother’s lecture in her ear, drowning out the sounds of the pursuing creatures, and even the fiery explosion that extended from Fenrir’s hand. Her magic stuttered once, and she felt a long crack open on her horn. Surreally, she caught her mind wondering how many weeks it would take to heal, instead of worrying about whether or not she would survive the day. Her mind never questioned the strength of the wall of rose mana that stretched to fill the hallway.
Painted in red, Twilight’s eyes closed as she took a moment to catch her breath. Her horn was beyond sore, and it screamed with pain at the force it took to hold back the inferno. She knew she was nearly spent for fast, strong magic. Two more spells, at most, and she would be done. She didn’t have the strength to play with shields.
“Sometimes, the best shield isn’t made of magic.”
“Twilight, what are you doing? Let’s go!” Solo’s hoof grabbed Twilight’s shoulder. The younger mare shrugged off the motion.
“I’ve got a plan,” Twilight answered. “Both of you stand back.”
“You aren’t going to do something dumb, are you?” Solo asked, even as she guided Serp away from the mage.
Twilight didn’t answer. Her focus was on holding the shield up, even as she built up a greater supply of mana in her horn. The pain made her vision blur, and left her hooves feeling unsure and dizzy. When dark spots began to overtake the inferno in her vision, she gritted her teeth and let the spell go.
A blinding burst of rose light shot up into the stone of the ceiling, striking with a piercing noise somewhere between a crunch and a crack. The cave shuddered for only a moment, and then the stones began to fall. Twilight’s shield faltered, but through it, she saw Fenrir give up on his fire as he brought up a blue shield of his own to protect himself from the collapsing tunnel. With a few quick steps backward, Twilight got herself out from beneath the impending cave in, and collapsed onto her side from exhaustion.
“Разъебать его в тартарарам!” Serp growled, his jaw slack.
Going Solo had nearly nothing to say, and so instead rushed over to Twilight’s side. When the unicorn looked her in the eyes and smiled back, Solo placed a wing over her face. “That was insane, Twilight. You saved our lives.”
“Thanks…” Twilight groaned, then stretched out a hoof to try and stand. Solo helped her up with a wing, and soon, the unicorn found herself resting against the guardsmare’s padded vest. “But we still need to get out of here. Let’s get moving.”
The wall of rubble cracked, ever so slightly, and Twilight turned toward it in silent shock. They couldn’t be through that fast; even she couldn’t lift that much stone. What she saw was much more comfortable: in the cracks between the rocks, smoke and an orange glow had begun to show themselves.
“Is he burning his way through?” Solo asked. “Twilight, tell me that isn’t going to work.”
“As long as we don’t sit around here, we’ll be gone by the time they get through.” Twilight turned back to the ice-studded tunnel. She rubbed a hoof across her brow, embracing the way that the passage had stopped shifting. “I think I can walk now, Solo. Thanks.”
As the trio of ponies ventured toward the precious surface, the clumps of spiked and bladed ice seemed to grow more frequent, until at one final corner, Solo had to actually smash a path through a literal wall of jagged blue and white with her bladed shoe. Behind it, the rough onyx gave way to smooth blocks of worked stone. Much of the room was dark, lacking any torches or lights, and the air was crisp with the truly unnatural chill. Twilight’s eyes could only pick out a single glimmer of something in the room.
Lacking her hesitance, Serp limped forward and extended his wing. The flames that covered it weren’t large enough to even bring warmth to the room, but they cast it in some semblance of light. What that light revealed left Twilight staggering backward, her voice suddenly missing from her throat.
The glimmer at the far side of the room came from a massive block of ice, long and rectangular, in the shape of a coffin. Rather than jagged edges, its sides were smooth, too round at the corners and too flat on the sides to have been worked by tools. Inside the coffin, Twilight saw a pony.
Easily sixty years old, the mare had a tan coat, and her mane and tail were striped in the colors of autumn leaves. The wrinkles on her face were tough and rigid, seeming to perfectly match with the long, thin scar down her brow and skipping just barely over her right eye before continuing on her cheek. Plates of skysteel covered her body, and in her hooves, she clutched tightly to a rather thin book, and a sheathed saber.
“What is that?”
“Тут нет выхода,” Serp observed behind her, sounding disappointed and angry.
“There’s no way…” Twilight walked forward, stepping past Serp to approach the mare’s final resting place. “Countess Star must have known… but how could she possibly have…”
Going Solo stepped up past Twilight, placing a hoof on the ice. Almost immediately, she pulled it away with a gasp. “What is this? Who is this, Twilight?”
“It’s Typhoon,” Twilight explained. “Commander Hurricane’s daughter. Countess Star wanted us to bring her body back. I assumed she meant some bones or something, but it would be incredibly unlikely any survived for eight-thousand years. Countess Star must have known Typhoon was here like this. The question is: how?”
“Вы ваще слушаете? Мы, блять, замурованы!” Serp’s growls grew more irritated. Twilight spared him a glance, and found him glaring her way. Between his teeth was a feather, its quill stained with his own blood.
Sighing, Twilight released a quick burst of spells. The crack in the coat of her horn ached like a sore muscle, but she forced through it. Her new translation spell didn’t take a large volume of magic; it merely possessed a complex formula.
Serp wasted no time in voicing his opinion. “Are you two having fun with soldier-mare? There isn’t a way out of this room!”
At first, Twilight didn’t believe him. It didn’t make sense; there had to be a way out. Otherwise, the room wouldn’t have worked stone. It was clearly pony-made, rather than the rough tunnels the vargr preferred. But as her eyes swept the walls, the reality sunk in alongside the chill. The only way out was back the way they had come, toward a cave-in and a small army of monsters.
Solo’s head began to move more and more frenetically with each passing moment. “No… no, that doesn’t make sense. There’s all this ice here. She’s still frozen. It has to be getting down here somehow, right?”
A gentle hoof settled on Solo’s shoulder. Twilight found her words much harder when she saw the desperation in the other mare’s eyes. “Solo… it’s from her. It’s Typhoon’s Empatha.”
“That can’t be right,” Solo countered, almost too quickly. “You said she died thousands of years ago, right? It would have melted―”
“Solo, please…” Twilight forced herself to swallow. “Magic can last a long time. In Canterlot, there are books Starswirl the Bearded enchanted that still have his Arcana in them.”
A shudder from Solo’s shoulder traveled up Twilight’s leg. The pegasus brushed her companion aside with a wing, and half-stumbled forward. Her eyes flicked toward Serp, and then around the room. Finally, she settled on the frozen form of the long dead pegasus within her coffin of ice. With a cry of desperate rage, Solo lifted her shod hoof, and brought her weapon down on the ice. It cracked slightly from the first blow, but its assailant wasn’t done. Again and again, the pegasus brought her hoof down on the ice. Twilight stepped forward to stop the mare, only to find Serp’s wing blocking her path.
“Don’t waste your breath, Sparkle.”
“But she’s going to hurt herself!”
Serp scoffed, shaking his head as he revealed his fangs. “On a block of ice? It’ll be a sunny day in Novigrad. Give her space and she’ll get her head on straight. I have a question.”
Intrigued, Twilight followed the stallion to the center of the room, where he sat down and looked her squarely in the eye. There was a glint there, even beyond the reflection of the fire on his wing, that left Twilight feeling more than a bit uncomfortable.
“What time is it,” Serp asked.
Twilight cocked her head. “How should I know? We’ve been underground for who-knows how long.”
“Do you have a spell?” Serp pressed. “Or some way? I need to know who I’d be talking to.” As Twilight wondered what he meant, Serp reached into his mouth with his non-flaming wing. A sickening crack ensued, and he produced a blackened withered tooth.
Twilight held a hoof over her mouth, and she was sure her cheeks flushed a momentary green. “Wh-what was that?”
“It’s how I am going to save you and your friend. This tooth is from Blood Stroke’s mentor. He called it ‘Hole Gem’.” The wing holding the fake tooth shuddered with a slight gust of wind, and the tooth began to hum with an unmistakable pitch as it ate the stallion’s magic. For just a moment, Twilight’s memory brought back the image of slitted green eyes.
“Void crystal?” Twilight gasped. “You’ve had that in your mouth?”
“The root is covered in steel,” Serp explained, rolling it over to reveal the metal, “so that it does not take my magic. Blood Stroke has a knife made of this, which he uses to take away the magic of criminals. He gave Hammer and I a tooth this size each.”
Twilight stared at the little black crystal with a respectful fear. “I know it eats magic. Do you know what happens if it eats too much?”
Serp nodded. “It starts growing. And if it cannot grow, it explodes with raw magic. I have seen how large. We used a piece the size of a shoe during the Revolution, and it нахрен leveled half a city block in Coltpenhagen. This should be more than enough to kill those vargr. Do you understand now? I need to know if the sun is out, or if it is the moon.”
Twilight’s jaw dropped in understanding. “No, Serp…”
“Do you have a better plan? Make friends with the vargr?” the stallion taunted. “I’m not blind. You almost passed out when you caused that cave in. Canterlot over there is having a panic attack. I’m missing a leg. We’re never going to sneak past them or trick them now. This way, at least you two make it out.”
Twilight shook her head in protest. “But you can’t just kill yourself!”
Serp rolled his eyes. “Sparkle, your friend was right. If I die here, the Princesses will damn me to Tartarus. Maybe they don’t get what it was like to fight rebels, maybe they don’t care… maybe I really am a bad pony. It doesn’t matter. If I go to Celestia and I tell her that I died to save Twilight Sparkle, I know what I will get. It is a much better life than this one.”
“That doesn’t mean you should just kill yourself.” Twilight took a deep breath. “Look, I’ll think of something, okay? We’ll think of something. Just give me some time.”
Serp shrugged. “I’ll wait as long as it takes them to burn through the wall either way. Here’s hoping you come up with something.”
“Okay… wow, no pressure.” Twilight turned back to where Solo was assaulting Typhoon’s frozen coffin. The continued blows against the ice were still far from posing any threat to the ancient preserved corpse, but the cracks had nearly reached Typhoon’s book, and the sheath of her sword.
The corners of Twilight’s mouth twitched up, just a bit. “Solo! Stop!”
Going Solo reacted as if she had been slapped. First she paused, and then she turned slowly toward her ward, though her attention was momentarily consumed by the frost and ice coating her hoof.
“I know this is stressful, Solo, but I think we should all try to relax. Princess Celestia always liked to tell me that the worst thing you could do in a dangerous situation is get emotional. Okay?”
Swallowing once, Solo nodded. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Twilight answered. “I understand. I need your help, though.”
Solo nodded again. “You’ve got a plan.”
“I’ve got something at least. I need you to get that book out of the ice.”
The request earned a confused look. “But I thought you just said to stop…”
“Well, I didn’t want you to just lose your temper and hurt the book. I need to be able to read it. Once you’ve got that, I might need Heims Osculum too.”
As Twilight pronounced the ancient Cirran words, the voice coming from Serp’s quill as it scrawled on the ground translated them. “Winter’s Kiss.”
“She named her sword?” Solo shook her head, as her hoof went back to work on the ice. “Real classy there, Typhoon.”
“Actually, it was traditional for ponies to name swords in those days. There are still more than a few old Cirran swords that are still around today. Infernus, Ensis, Procellarum. Honestly, I can’t believe we just found Heims Osculum. It’s the last one of the stormblades, and it’s been thought lost for generations.”
Solo brought her hoof down with another forceful blow. “Since we’re waiting on me to break the ice anyway…” She gritted her teeth and smashed her hoof down again. “...what’s a ‘stormblade’?”
“It’s Commander Hurricane’s last name.” At Solo’s confused expression, Twilight chuckled. “I didn’t quite mean that literally. In those days, a pony’s extended family was called their gens. Each gens had a name; Hurricane and Typhoon’s was ‘Stormblade’. I don’t know exactly why; most of the history of Cirra prior to the migration is lost. Hurricane name his sword, the Gladius Procellarum, in honor of his gens. Each of his children also hoof-forged a sword, so collectively, they’re known as the stormblades: Procellarum, Infernus for his son Cyclone, Heims Osculum for Typhoon, and Aestas Melos for his youngest, Gale.”
“Summer Song,” translated Serp’s enchanted feather.
“Princess Celestia has Aestas Melos in a case in the Royal Library, Infernus is kept in the throne room of Burning Hearth Castle in Stalliongrad, and Procellarum was still in use by the Commander of the Honor Guard until Masquerade killed him. I guess it’s the lost sword now.”
“Well,” Solo chuckled to herself. “Maybe I’ll have to invest in a pith helmet when we get back to Canterlot, since I’m a famous archaeologist now.” Turning with her wings outstretched, she proffered a book. “Wow, the ice did a number on this thing. The cover feels weird. Is that what ice does to paper?”
Twilight smiled. “The book is fine, Solo. It’s bound in leather.”
Solo’s eyes widened, but she at least maintained enough control not to drop the ancient book. “Okay, uh, what are we looking for in this thing?”
“Well,” Twilight began as she flipped the cover open, “That tunnel we came in through is vargr-made. But in Typhoon’s time, there probably weren’t any vargr in Onyx Ridge; the fortress was occupied by bandits and crystal barbarians. So she must have gotten in somehow.”
“You think there’s some sort of secret passage?”
Twilight shrugged. “I won’t know until I start reading. Give me a minute…”
The first few pages were a familiar description of Typhoon’s departure from Everfree City at the end of the Shadow War. Knowing that the record predated her death by some two decades, Twilight flipped to the end of the volume, only to stumble upon a mass of blank pages. Her horn moved them carefully, the spell so easy and so practiced that she barely even felt it at work, despite her fatigue. Ultimately, she came upon a page scrawled in a shaky, yet familiar Cirran script.
Cy-,
I have no doubt you’ll be the one to find me. Don’t be sad; fifty-three years is a long, healthy life. I got to see my son grow up, and meet my grandfoals. I guess my only regret is that I let that stupid bandit get me between the ribs. I’ve frozen the wound so I won’t bleed out, but I’m living on borrowed time; I know I won’t ever make it out of this fortress alive.
Give this journal and Heims to Tempest; I know Father helped him make his own sword, but maybe it’ll be a good fit for Maelstrom or Blizzard when they grow up.
I just realized, I do have another regret. While you’re in Everfree, tell Gale I’m sorry. She and Celeste were still wrong about Father, but I shouldn’t have let that be the last thing I ever said to her.
And don’t be such a stranger to her yourself. She is your little sister, after all, even if your foals are older than her. It wouldn’t hurt for you to be a real uncle to Tempest.
What I’m trying to say, Cyclone, is to tell the whole family I love them. And to tell them all goodbye.
Ante Legionem nihil erat, et nihil erit post Legionem.
-Ty
“Twilight, I got it,” Solo proclaimed, stealing the unicorn’s attention. The guardsmare pulled the weapon free of the ice, clutching its sheath between her teeth. “Wow, this thing is light.”
“It’s pure skysteel,” Twilight explained. “Most modern guard weapons are part ‘ground iron’, which is a lot heavier, but much more resistant to Arcana. If you pull it out, you’ll see―”
A distinct hissing noise echoed down the hallway behind the unicorn, and a burst of orange flame lit the walls. As the sound settled, Serp rose from his resting place, clutching his void-crystal tooth between his teeth and spreading his wings. “Both of you,” he growled around the tooth. “Once I’ve cleared the way, don’t waste your нахуй time. You’ll only get a bit.”
As Serp readied himself, Twilight took careful notice of the smell of fire, and the hiss of the flames meeting Typhoon’s ancient ice. Instead of roars and the slap of paws on stone, however, all the unicorn heard was a single steady rhythm of something like steel clicking in time against the tunnel floor.
As the source of the wound grew closer to the final turn, where it would be visible to the room, a bulky shadow, low to the ground, was cast against the tunnel wall. And as the source of the flames rounded the corner, a familiar voice spoke up in Equiish, though tinged by a heavy Stalliongradi accent.
“Welcome to Stol’nograd, Twilight. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
Twilight’s jaw dropped at the face that rounded the corner. It took her a small eternity to unleash even a single word.
“Ink!?”