Rumble now knew why Apple Bloom had been so silent during their journey. She was never that silent around her friends. As he led them back through the dome, he sniffed the air. He wasn’t thinking as clearly, but he still maintained control over his base instincts. He was happy about that.
I’m not going to go the way of my brother, he insisted. I’m going to endure this trial and come out a better pony for it.
They entered the tunnel together. Both filly and colt refused to look at each other for fear of stimulating themselves any further. The musky scent of heat, however, was working on them both. Thankfully, they got to the rocks.
“Let’s dig through and see what’s beyond here,” Apple Bloom suggested.
Rumble gulped. “Y-yeah.”
So they began to dig. They worked hard, determined to push through this period of time without soliciting titillating hallelujahs from each other. Small stones, large boulders, and a small deposit of particularly stubborn rubies holding a very long oval rock were all relocated to make room for the two small ponies. Eventually, they had a small round tunnel through the pile, supported by a well-stabilized dome of naturally tessellated stonework. They also had a stacked group of gems that would make fine additions to Rarity’s gowns should they get back. Apple Bloom in particular made a mental note to come back and clear the path for Rarity to excavate if they could find a way back to Ponyville.
Rumble and Apple Bloom skirted a small open pit where the creek they had followed earlier fell off the side and vaporized. A lazy stream flowed somewhere in the darkness beneath them, and the walls were covered in the same magic flower as before.
“Well, this is it.” Apple Bloom declared.
Rumble’s ear twitched as he looked up and down. His face contorted with a frown.
“No, it isn’t,” he said.
He hopped up on several steps of limestone and began following the upper path.
“What? There’s more?” Apple Bloom exclaimed. “Hey, wait up!”
She scrambled to catch up. They looped back around into the same tunnel they were at before, except up to what served as the second floor.
“Wow!” Apple Bloom said. “I’m going to have to bring Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo back here again. We obviously didn’t look close enough.”
They passed into the tunnel, but instead of descending into the dome where they were earlier, they made a sharp left-hoof turn just before the wall of the path and the wall of the cave met. A series of seemingly endless downward switchbacks led them to a path which took them back to the pit, this time at water level. They passed over the stream, wider than the room above by several hooves, atop a pony-built bridge of solid marble. A boxy dome of identical design leading to a carved-out secondary cave lined with thousands of tiny emeralds stretched forever into the mountainside. Another pair of switchbacks, as well as a couple gentle curving hallways, which now had the young ponies thoroughly disoriented in their positioning related to the tree room from before, saw them descend into a room filled with sapphires just as tiny as the emeralds.
Upon taking in the back wall, both ponies realized that these gems were not randomly placed. Each and every collection depicted scenes of a thriving civilization done in the pointillation art style on a scale that would be inconceivable to modern artists. Several of the gems had gone missing, leaving indents in the rock where they once were. Dividing these drawings into distinct images were the roots of a tree.
Which meant they were directly below the Dome.
Neither pony spoke for several minutes as their brains digested what, exactly, they were seeing. They proceeded to the middle of the room, taken completely in shock. They turned around, taking in every waking detail of these tapestries of jewelry.
There was no mention of the Princesses anywhere. There was only very briefly an image of what could even be relatable as modern history, on the third panel of nine from the left of the entryway. It was a clear depiction of ten alicorn-like creatures looking at ponies of all three persuasions, but also including the Breezies, the Gryphons, the Horses, and the Dragons, plus a number of creatures long lost to history.
Apple Bloom bit her lip and began to tear up. Rumble looked down at the floor.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
She turned until he saw the very back wall.
“Rumble!”
The mentioned pony turned his head. “Yeah?”
“I know who that is! That’s Star Swirl the Bearded!!”
Faster than lightning, Rumble whipped around and stared squarely at the back wall, the nineteenth panel in the room, the only one directly across from the entryway, and a panel nearly three times as large as the others. There, in inlaid-sapphire glory, was a glittering, full-body effigy of Twilight Sparkle’s idol, complete with hat, cape, and beard.
“Sweet Celestia!” he exclaimed.
“I know, right?” she said. “When we tell Twilight Sparkle of this, she is going to freak!”
“Twilight Sparkle?” he asked.
“You know. Ponyville town librarian?”
Rumble stared at her blankly.
Apple Bloom groaned. “Lives in the crystal tree in the middle of town? Has a dragon assistant named Spike? Any of this ringin’ a bell at all?”
Rumble slowly shook his head.
“You seriously don’t know Princess Twilight Sparkle?”
He blushed. “The only time I ever remember even hearing her name was when we were preparing for tornado duty, and even then I didn’t pay much attention to exactly who she was.”
Apple Bloom rolled her eyes. “The pony who ran the… tha-that wing power measuring thingy.”
Rumble’s eyes went wide. “Oh! That’s Twilight Sparkle!”
A big smile dominated her face.
A flat look fell over his. “Yeah, I don’t know her.”
The smile popped.
Apple Bloom couldn’t fathom someone not knowing about one of Equestria’s princesses, much less another resident of his own town. Then again, she realized she might be privy to information unavailable to others, like exactly what, or who, Twilight’s Night Mare Night costume was that first year she was in Ponyville. She grumped a bit at the gaffe, but the small smile soon returned.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Me an’ the Crusaders’ve been learnin’ some skills from her.”
“Ah!” Rumble said.
“Yeah, we’re friends.”
“Okay.”
Silence fell awkwardly in that rather humbling room. The smell of Apple Bloom’s heat had dissipated somewhat, or maybe they just got used to it. He didn’t know. All he knew was he could think a little clearer now. Rumble looked around and found nothing more of note. He began walking back to the switchback to return to the tree dome, but stopped and turned to look for his partner. He found her closely examining a rather uninteresting panel, the fifth from the right.
“Come on, Apple Bloom,” he insisted. “There’s nothing there.”
“Wait. Gimme a second. I’ve never come this far down before. We always assumed that the big pit was the end of it. This is excitin’!”
Rumble rolled his eyes and trotted back by her side. He noted she was running her hooves along the wall.
“What are you doing?”
She glared at the wall and shivered. “There’s a draft comin’ from this side of the wall. Why is there a draft here?”
Rumble’s hair responded with some slight movement. A brief double-check confirmed that yes, it was moving. He voiced his confirmation, then began searching the panel work with Apple Bloom for breaks. Up, down, around, and over the stone and artwork they went, a frantic and excited search for a way out. Every minute and stone that passed by without yield, however, weakened their resolve. Even employing Rumble’s wings to check atop the panel had proven fruitless. Apple Bloom stepped back as he landed, and both sighed, defeated.
“Well, it was a good thought,” Rumble said. “But where’s that draft coming from?”
Apple Bloom looked around at each of the other panels. “Should we try them all?”
Rumble took a step back and looked again. The panels that weren’t Star Swirl and were not already observed in detail didn’t seem to say or show anything regarding the breeze. One was a pony bucking a tree. Another was two ponies locked in mortal combat, one made of blue gems, while the other was bedecked in green. A third was a rather explicit kissing scene that both foals quickly moved on from (just what we need right now – thanks, you fan-pony-tastic cave). One mural spread over three panels told of a town ablaze, using fire red rubies as the flames. Another was a simple brown book with yellow topaz gems forming a pony head. Still another was a simple blue door with a weird polygon atop it and a tall bipede in a long, brown coat standing next to it.
Nothing about the breeze at all.
A growl echoed through the chamber. Rumble and Apple Bloom looked at each other, wide-eyed and startled. The colt blushed. Apple Bloom snorted.
“Sorry. I guess it’s time to eat.”
Apple Bloom affirmed the suggestion. She too had developed a hunger since their escapade began. As if to emphasize the point, her stomach decided it was time to voice its own concern. They shared a brief chuckle as they trotted back up the walkway. They ascended into the tunnel with one last forlorn look at the cavern, determined to solve this puzzle later.
Minutes later, they were eating their fill of grass and flowers in the crux of the roots of the tree. The smell of the heat had gone away, but Rumble knew it was still there. So did Apple Bloom. Whenever they made eye contact, both ponies would cave just a little bit more. They knew they wouldn’t resist for much longer.
“I-I’ll get in th’water…” Apple Bloom mechanically said.
Rumble nodded. “I need to… um… use the bathroom.”
Apple Bloom nodded. She watched the colt, tail between his legs, hobble off into the cavern. She knew what he was going to do to prolong his endurance. She suddenly felt really guilty about not at least offering to help him with his issue, but she knew there would be no stopping them once that first contact was made. She had heard enough when Applejack and Big Macintosh got randy with their partners that once they started there was no stopping until the mare was satiated, no matter how used the stallion was by the end.
"Better to not start at all and ride it out," she said, biting her lip.
The cold water helped, but she was still aching. She felt like if she didn’t do something she would explode. Again, she was brought back to her brother and sister, and again she stopped. She clenched her body into itself and moaned as she rode out her heat, alone in the pool. It was very uncomfortable, with the pinching sensations and the overwhelming desire to just cram something into her.
No, she thought. I’m not going to tempt Rumble. If he’s holdin’ out, then I have to. For him.
She gritted her teeth and rolled over, crossing her hind legs and squeezing. A tear trickled down her cheek.
Dammit, this is hard…
Rumble moaned as he pulled himself away from the floor. Never before had an opportunity for him to experience what his brother and girlfriends had with such a willing participant been as available as now. He couldn’t lie to himself. He wanted to do it now. He wanted to take Apple Bloom’s body and do the unspeakable to her. However, he had a morality to keep, as hard as it was.
Curse pony society for being so open, he thought.
He fought his hooves, so eager to drift southward that he nearly let them just to release his hormones. He didn’t want to. He wanted to control the beast. He wanted to know consensual submission rather than hormonal enslavement. He wanted to decide when he would have his first time. Everything in him was screaming against this decision.
Equestrian culture frowned on sexual control, saying it was better to experience it all and just let go than try the discipline route. Education on the subject was limited to contraceptives, anatomy, and the ‘should you decide to’ theory. Nothing was encouraged in the way of abstinence or saving oneself for just one other pony. Such was the culture that Equestria had no word for abstinence. These were preposterous notions, discouraged based on the idea that sexual morality was expired and outmoded. To hold off was also terrifically painful for ponies, so not having sex when your heat came was outright feared.
The only reason it got so painful to keep it, though, was because we started just doing it willy-nilly, Rumble insisted, unsure if this was indeed scientific fact or whether he just told it to himself to sleep well at night. Ponies’ biology became used to sleeping around and began rejecting control. I know we have the capability, though. I want to show ponies it’s still possible to control yourself, to wait for the right one.
In thinking this, he turned his thoughts from the erotic to the academic angle. Slowly his desires began to ebb. This brought him great encouragement, and he called out to his compatriot.
“Apple Bloom! Think about something else other than your heat! It might not make it go away, but it’ll weaken it!”
All he heard was a grunt from the other room.
Heat was always more difficult for the females of Equestria as a whole. Stallions could escape the smell and in an hour or so clear their heads. Mares, however, had to live with it for a while. Rumble truly felt sorry that he couldn’t even touch Apple Bloom during this time. He knew that some mares reacted quite strongly to even being brushed up against, while others you could hug and get little reaction from unless you stimulated their proper spots, which sometimes didn’t even include their lady bits at all. He wasn’t willing to risk anything that would send Apple Bloom down that path.
Apple Bloom, I wish there was something I could do for you.
A sudden piercing thought tore apart all his work.
Anything but that!!
Apple Bloom barely heard Rumble’s cry. She wanted to just roll over and die, wanted this to be over, him inside her, to be filled. She was getting sick of this pain in her gut, a pain that could only be cured one way, a way he didn’t want to, and a way she was determined to help him avoid. It hurt far more than she ever considered possible.
But she did hear him.
“Apple Bloom! Think about something else other than your heat! It might not make it go away, but it’ll weaken it!”
She found it nearly impossible to tear her mind off her aching body, but she managed to partition a piece of her brain and place it on the mystery downstairs.
Wrong word! Wrong word!
After fighting that thought off with handcuffs, a whip, leather boots, and a whole swarm of rather well-endowed ponyquins, though they could have just as easily been a passing desire – thought!! passing thought as much as her own weaponry, she recalled Star Swirl’s face and the draft. She brought her mind around the room once again, focussing on each individual panel as needed, including the two rather obscene panels.
It took all her will not to race out of the pool and jump Rumble at the thought.
As she considered the Star Swirl wall and the two obscene walls, she soon realized that they were placed at a precise triangle from each other, their places specifically chosen to create a perfect equilateral. She then moved on to the details of the pointillation art itself, analyzing what she could remember of the gem dot shapes. Immediately, she felt Rumble’s suggestion begin to backfire as her body reacted to her thoughts.
Sweet Celestia, why was this pervert allowed to make this puzzle!? And darn you too, Rumble! This isn’t helping at all!
She separated herself from her task for several seconds, simply breathing and thinking of apples, before forcing herself to think of the pictures with little discernible anatomy whatsoever. She soon noted that one pony in each pic could be identified as Star Swirl. The gems of the beards trailed off from the figure, identifying the triangular pattern and the lines that the eyes were to follow. However, Apple Bloom soon remembered one particular detail about the gem art that made her heart flutter in non-erotic excitement, which was a relief. Her face blew open in a radiant smile of epiphany and her heat faded. She leapt out of the water and bolted down the tunnel back to the Star Swirl exhibit.
She heard the sound of clopping behind her. She turned and looked at Rumble, who had joined her run. She clearly saw confusion on his face.
“Did you figure something out?” he asked.
She nodded with a huge smile on her face. “We were so focussed on the pictures we didn’t even think about what we were standing on!”
“What?”
“Three of the panels have a pony that resembles Star Swirl on it. All three look toward the viewer, rather than at the pony they’re with, including the solo Star Swirl head. However, they also look at something else – the middle of the room! I think the key to figuring out the breeze is to figure out what we were standing on.”
“That way, we’d be able to figure out what to do!”
“Yeah!”
With new eyes, the pair of young ponies descended back into the buried Star Swirl museum. When they passed over the marble bridge, their experience with the large room brought the gems along the entry wall into focus. They depicted three Star Swirls looking at each other, their beards knotted as one in the middle of the room.
Both ponies blushed.
They continued to the large room. Apple Bloom began proceeding down the stairs, but an astonished Rumble stopped her with a hoof. He silently swept a hoof across the whole room.
Apple Bloom gasped. “How in Tartarus did we miss this!?”
A very elaborate series of cobblestone bricks drew out a massive, sweeping, and round Celtic knot on the floor. At the centre of the giant design was a very shallow impression in the stonework easily three adult pony lengths across with room for at least a head and a half to spare. It was patterned with a waterfall, simply an extension of the larger knot in the raised platform. In the middle of that was a small, corroded, ancient bit made of copper, covered in glass and set in a depression padded in black velvet. This was surrounded by another knot of such fine stonework that it looked impossible to do, even with magic. It was an exact duplicate in scaled miniature of the larger stone knot.
After Rumble and Apple Bloom recovered from their shock, they spent several minutes just walking around atop this masterpiece, examining and appreciating it as fully as they could.
Finally, Rumble managed to squeak out, “We really need to get someone who knows what they’re looking at down here.”
Apple Bloom wordlessly nodded before swallowing. She tore herself out of her reverie, though not without some internal complaining, and brought her mind back to Earth.
“Y-yeah… so, the center of the room.”
Rumble snapped to attention. “Yeah. The bit.”
They returned to the scene identified by the Star Swirl glances. A feeling of trepidation settled over the ponies.
“Soooooo…” Apple Bloom uttered.
“What do we do?” Rumble asked.
Apple Bloom thought for a second. What are we missing?
Rumble extended a shaking hoof. He looked at his partner, who nodded.
“Go for it.”
Rumble stepped on the coin case. He waited a few seconds with his hoof on the coin. When it became clear nothing was happening, he groaned and stomped his hoof in the same place. Still nothing happened.
“Well, that was a dud,” he said.
He removed his hoof and set it down. As soon as hoof met earth, the world began to tremble.
“Whoa!” Apple Bloom shrieked.
The coin in the middle of the room began lifting up out of the earth. It illuminated with a pale gray sheen, transcending material presence as it passed through the glass. It ascended a couple more feet until it was eye-level with an adult pony.
I don’t think Star Swirl expected foals to find this, Apple Bloom thought.
A high sound like a sword being unsheathed echoed through the room. The coin shattered, setting the room ablaze with green luminescence. The sources were multiple, to the point that there were no shadows when the fragments were spread out, even among the cobblestones on the floor. For a period totalling five seconds, the gems held their positions, allowing Apple Bloom and Rumble a brief period of awe at the tiny glowing fragments. Some fragments began moving in a slow circle. Others began moving faster. A few moved one way. A few moved another. Soon, they were encased in a giant magical bubble, created out of swirling gems. As they looked around, they saw the walls begin to rise. The bubble and the platform sunk below the earth, then shifted left and shot forward.
Apple Bloom and Rumble quickly forgot about their problem as the platform seemed to move the universe around them, rather than moving them directly. Soon, they found themselves slowing down as they approached the moon.
“Whoa!” Rumble exclaimed.
Apple Bloom could do little more than glance around, a shocked expression on her face.
The platform then accelerated.
Apple Bloom grimaced. “Is it…”
The ground grew closer.
Rumble swallowed. “Yup.”
The platform rocketed straight for the surface.
“It is!” Apple Bloom shrieked.
Both foals screamed.