//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3: Something is Wrong 
// Story: Desert Water 
// by Unwhole Hole 
//------------------------------//

	Diamond Tiara gently set the lantern down on the side of the wide marble sink. The pale, harsh light flickered and buzzed unpleasantly from the crystal held in the center of the assembly. The color of the light and the sound that the piece of equipment was far more unpleasant than the normal traditional lights filled with fireflies. It also  made Diamond Tiara’s headache start to return. 
The last night had been eventful, but Diamond Tiara could hardly remember any of it. She had indeed delivered on her promise to Silver Spoon and sought out the crate where her father had brought several bottles of cider. All the bottles were expensive vintages, perhaps even rare, but Filthy Rich would never notice that they were gone. He never had before.
Silver Spoon had been hesitant at first, but she was surprisingly easy to manipulate. Together, they had drank almost an entire bottle. The resulting rush of sweet, hoof-pressed appley goodness had turned the entire night into a blur. Diamond Tiara had awoken with a splitting headache and Silver Spoon- -smiling and disheveled- -splayed across her chest, lying in a pool of blurry polaroid photographs of the pair of them taking duckface selfies. 
Like many members of her family, Diamond Tiara had a natural intolerance to apple products. Even a small amount of applesauce, apple juice, or apple cider could make her ill, and she had drank a LOT of cider for a filly. She was also starting to worry if she was beginning to use cider as a coping mechanism, which would be bad. She did not want to end up like Rainbow Dash, who Diamond Tiara had literally seen eating dirt where cider had been spilled. 
The harsh light filled the large bathroom, and Diamond Tiara sighed. It was indeed grand, but also gaudy and dirty. The floor consisted of large marble tiles, and the walls were a checkerboard mosaic of white and pink ceramic pieces. Some of the wall tiles had started to fall out, and a few of the ones on the floor were cracked. All were covered in a thin film of dust. 
“Leaving me in a place that doesn’t even have clean bathrooms,” muttered Diamond Tiara to herself. “ ‘Oh, make us a grandson Diamond Tiara’. ‘He’s going to inherit the company Diamond Tiara’. If I ever do have a son, I’ll raise him better than you raised me…”
The servants that her parents had promised had never come. Over a day had passed, and Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon were still alone. As soon as the sugar rush from the cider had started to wear off and they had come to realize that there were no cars or even new tracks in the dirt driveway outside, Silver Spoon had started become more nervous, coming even to the verge of panic. Diamond Tiara might have been panicked too, if this were the first time this sort of thing had happened to her.  
Still, it was somewhat disturbing. Once again, the thoughts of their isolation were creeping into the back of her mind. There was no way to send a letter or a message out here, no way to find out if the servants were delayed, or never sent- -or if something terrible had happened to them on their way through the endless desert. 
Diamond Tiara shivered, and pushed away the moth-eaten shower curtain. She was surprised to see the size of the bathtub on the other side, but disappointed by its condition. It was enormous, the size of a small pool with multiple layers built into it for sitting or standing- -truly, for once, a proper bathtub for one of Equestria’s elite. Like the rest of the house, though, it seemed to have just been abandoned suddenly. From the thick layers of lime scale that covered its mosaic sides, Diamond Tiara could imagine that it that the former residents had not even bothered to drain it. They had just left it full and standing, ready for use, as if they had simply disappeared. 
Disgusted by the condition of what should have otherwise been a fine bathtub, Diamond Tiara walked around the edge toward the system of spigots attached to a system of pipes. With some effort, she twisted one of the handles and waited for the water to start running. 
The whole room seemed to shake as the pipes vibrated violently, thumping against the walls with enough force to knock loose some of the tiles. Diamond Tiara stepped back, frightened. The sound was too loud for such a small, dark place, and she wondered if the room would tear itself apart. Then she watched as the faucet coughed and produced a small puff of sand. 
The sound stopped, and Diamond Tiara stared at the small puddle of dust that now sat in the bottom of the bathtub.  
“Buck me like an apple tree,” she swore. “They left us here, and there’s not even water to take a bath! Do they expect me to be stinky and gross like a farm pony?”
Diamond Tiara turned in a huff to exit the useless bathtub, but as she turned, she saw a figure silhouetted against the translucent shower curtain. A pony was standing between the curtain and the light she had left on the sink, casting an enormous shadow. For a moment, she thought she saw the shadows of torn and tattered cloth and the shape of a mask. An excessively floral scent filled the room. 
Diamond Tiara squealed in fright and slipped, falling into the bathtub and joining the dust and broken tiles that had collected over decades at the bottom. 
The shower curtain was torn aside, and Silver Spoon’s face appeared over the edge of the tub. 
“Silver Spoon!” cried Diamond Tiara, looking up. “Don’t ever do that again! Do you even know how to knock? What if I had been on the pot!” 
“That might be excessive,” said Silver Spoon, disapprovingly. She looked around at the bathtub. “Wow. This is huge. It’s like a whole spa in here. Can we take a bath together?”  
“Only if you’re a chinchilla,” said Diamond Tiara, holding up a hoofful of sand. 
“I’m not,” said Silver Spoon. “But my coat is extra soft. I have some dry-bath powder if you want it.”
Diamond Tiara gowned. She hated dry cleaning products. They made her smell nice, but never left her feeling clean. That, and her skin was sensitive. Admittedly, though, they did make Silver Spoon’s fur extremely soft.  
“Fine,” said Diamond Tiara, letting Silver Spoon help her out of the deep and dusty basin. “But it had better be rose-scented. You know what happens if I use the lily kind!”
“You smell like lilies?”
“EXACTLY! And lilies smell like?”
Silver Spoon rolled her eyes. “Lilies smell like funerals.” 
“Yes, they do. If any colt ever tries to give me lilies, I will buck him in the face and DON’T YOU LAUGH Silver Spoon, you know what I meant! And no carnations either!” 
“I have rose, peach, and zinnia,” said Silver Spoon, suppressing a giggle. “Don’t worry.” Her eyes turned toward the door. “Hey, though. You’ll never guess what I found in one of these old rooms.”
“It is isn’t something dead, is it?”
Silver Spoon shook her head. “No. It’s even better!” 

Diamond Tiara shifted in her seat, and looked around the wide, dark room. It was a low stone amphitheater. They were just slightly underground, and the walls and rows were made of stone blocks that left the room feeling cool but not at all damp. The general structure itself seemed old, perhaps even ancient, but more recently a number of chairs had been bolted onto the stone. They looked like something out of a historical theater, except they were badly maintained. They were not torn or damaged, but the fine ornate brass that made them up was badly tarnished and covered in plaques of green corrosion. The whole of the room was dark, save for the powerful enchanted light that Silver Spoon was using. 
“Silver, where did you even learn how to use a projector?” asked Diamond Tiara, turning around in her seat to face Silver Spoon, who was mounting a roll of film onto the dusty old machine, focusing the light on a large yellowed and stained canvas placed over the ancient stone stage at the far end of the room. 
“I like to watch movies,” she said. “My parents have loads of films.” 
“You really shouldn’t watch your parent’s stuff,” said Diamond Tiara. 
“Yeah,” said Silver Spoon. “Learned that one the hard way. Several times.”
“One time, when I was looking for Daddy’s wallet, I found the magazines he keeps under his bed,” said Diamond Tiara. 
“What…what was in them?”
“The whole thing was pictures of Fluttershy. Like, every modeling shot that Photo Finish ever took of her. Just one after the other.” 
“That’s nothing,” said Silver Spoon, adjusting the focus. “One time, I walked in on my parents…” she shuddered violently “…eating in bed!”
Diamond Tiara raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s it? Silver Spoon, I’ve eaten in bed! You’ve eaten in bed!”
“Yeah, but you didn’t see what they were eating!” 
Before Diamond Tiara could ask what exactly Silver Spoon could have seen them eating that would be so distressing to her, the projector hummed to life. “Ooh, it works!” said Silver Spoon, adjusting the light behind the film and sitting in a seat near the device. Diamond Tiara turned around in her seat and started to watch what was playing on the screen.
The first thing that was apparent was the lack of sound. This was something she was familiar with. Unless the film was accompanies by a phonograph, the only sound was the clicking of the projector. This particular film also appeared extremely old. The images that came through were blurry with sharp contrast, and as they passed there was evidence of grain from decay and hairs and dust amplified to the size of a room by the lenses of the projector. 
The initial view was a slowly passing panorama of the desert outside, rendered without color. In all honesty, it looked exactly the same as it did in modern times: a rocky, wide area populated with sparse cacti and spiny shrubs. The pan held out for altogether too long, and Diamond Tiara sighed and sunk into her seat. This was going to be just as boring as Silver Spoon’s parents’ existentialist foreign films. 
On the screen, the scene changed rapidly. Now, instead of the desert, it showed the house. In the image, it was already large, but consisted mostly of a high stone wall. Scaffolds and building materials were strewn about the desert as hundreds of ponies worked silently on the construction of house.
Then the image changed to that of several ponies. One of them bore a thick mustache and fancier clothing than the ponies around him. He dusted away something on the ground, and the camera shifted to showing a close-up of something unrecognizable. It was half buried, and the resolution was bad, but to Diamond Tiara it looked like a disk of some kind, its surface partially open and revealing numerous gears. Then the mustachioed pony was holding it, and in his hoof the dirty artifact looked something like a badly damaged pocket watch. The next part of the film focused on that item for a long duration. Now it was cleaned and laid out on a table, with some pony putting a ruler and a plaque next to it to identify it. The year, Diamond Tiara saw, was listed as 883, over one hundred years ago. 
The mustachioed pony, dressed in formal explorer gear like a nineteenth-century Daring Do, now stood amongst his team, a mixture of ponies and donkeys. The image focused on them, and there was a flash as a picture was taken over them with the rolling desert behind them. 
The film changed suddenly with a pop from the projector. The quality of the film deteriorated rapidly, and the screen was suddenly cast in yellowish sepia tones. The image was now much harder to make out, but Diamond Tiara saw a part of the inside of the house that looked like an open hospital ward. It was entirely empty, save for one hospital bed. An occupied hospital bed. 
The image shifted back to the outside, but the camera was shaking too much for much to be made out. Whoever was holding it was running from something. Then all the urgency vanished as it cut back to the image of the hospital. The projector clicked as the pony holding it stepped toward the bed. Above it, white curtains blew from an open window. Whatever was in the bed stirred slightly. 
“Silver Spoon,” said Diamond Tiara. She looked back to Silver Spoon, who was staring wide eyed at the screen. Then, turning back, she saw that the image had changed once again. Now it was a filming of the scaffolds that were around the house, except that they had changed. There were no workers, and the building materials were disorganized and rusted, the construction broken down and unfinished, surrounded by tall cholla trees. 
Then it was back to the hospital. The pony with the camera was now almost to the bed. Diamond Tiara knew what was coming, that something terrible was about to happen. She knew that she must not see what was beneath those pure white sheets. 
“Silver Spoon!” she cried. “Stop the projector!”
It was too late. A trembling hoof reached out toward the living, breathing lump on the bed. The curtains blew softly in the background, and for a moment nothing happened. Then it moved. The film was so badly decayed that Diamond Tiara could not see what truly was lying beneath those sheets, but for just a moment, she saw something: a mass of long, needle-like teeth and blind eyes staring up at the camera. 
Then it defaulted back to a pan of the empty desert, and the sound of the projector stopped. 
Diamond Tiara was breathing hard, but she did not know why. She looked up at Silver Spoon, who was ghostly pale, her shaking hoof still on the projector. 
“What…what was that thing?” whispered Silver Spoon. 
“Can you freeze a frame?”
Silver Spoon shook her head. “Please, Diamond Tiara. Please don’t make me go back to that frame…” 
“Not that one,” said Diamond Tiara. Thoughts were connecting in her head. The shock of seeing that almost amphibious, broken thing in the bed had triggered something inside her to accelerate, something driving her subconscious too see things that she had initially missed. “Before. The one where that explorer guy and all those others were taking a picture.” 
“Oh,” said Silver Spoon. “Yeah, I can do that.” 
The projector began to hum again, but this time in reverse. No images flashed on the screen for a moment, and then Silver Spoon reconnected the light source. For just a brief second, Diamond Tiara saw the hospital again, and she shook violently now that she knew what was lying in that bed, what was waiting. 
Within seconds, the image she had seen was back. The serious-faced ponies standing near a smiling, proud explorer dressed as though he were about to go on safari. Silver Spoon reversed the projector, and the image played through again. The ponies got togather, assembling, and there was a flash of light as their unseen photographer fired his camera.
“STOP!” said Diamond Tiara, standing. Silver Spoon obeyed, and the image froze. It quickly darkened as Silver Spoon reduced the light to avoid melting the celluloid, and Diamond Tiara trotted toward the stage. She paused at the base, and looked up at the image. Beneath her breath, she gasped, because she had been right. 
She pointed. “Can you focus on the upper right? Up on the horizon?”
“Yeah. Give me a second,” said Silver Spoon. The image on the screen shifted as Silver Spoon started to move the film, and became blurry as the focus changed. Then it came back into focus, magnified. From behind her, Diamond Tiara heard Silver Spoon gasp. 
“Sweet Celestia…” 
Up in the corner, standing on the horizon, was a figure dressed in black. Even with the low quality of the early film, it was possible to see him standing oddly close to the ponies taking the picture, and Diamond Tiara could see the rags he wore drifting in the dusty wind as he watched them. 
“That’s…that’s not possible!” said Silver Spoon. “This was recorded…”
“One hundred and twenty years ago.”
“Please don’t say that. Please don’t say that!”
“Silver Spoon?” asked Diamond Tiara. “Where did you get this film from?” 

As Diamond Tiara stepped off the edge of the cold stone steps, she found herself in an extensive hall. The house was labyrinthine and illogical, and it had taken nearly an hour to get to where they were. Diamond Tiara had no idea where she was, but imagined that she was somewhere below the central keep of the ancient fort. From the smell and from the depths of the various staircases she had passed over, she guessed that she was below ground. Perhaps by a lot. 
“What is this?” said Diamond Tiara, holding up her light. Even as bright as it was, it could not reach the high and ornate ceiling. 
“I think it’s a library,” said Silver Spoon. She pointed to a cabinet near the entrance, one that was clearly far newer than the room it found itself in still almost fifty years old. “The film is in there. I…I didn’t go any deeper. It’s too dark.”
“Well, we’re going there now.” 
DSilver Spoon released a long, low squeak of displeasure, but followed Diamond Tiara dutifully as the latter led them into the hall. 
There were indeed bookshelves, and lots of them, but looking around Diamond Tiara doubted that this room had been intended as an archive. High on the walls, she saw several stained-glass windows. That alone was bizarre, considering that they were at least one hundred feet beneath the surface, but she guessed that they were meant to be lit from behind by the flickering glow of fire. 
They almost always pictured the same thing. Each one of them showed what appeared to be the same yellow pony, always rendered with blood-red eyes that had neither pupils nor sclera. She was shown in different scenes, all of them abstract and barely discernable: standing beside a pair of blue ponies, one in old fashioned clothing and the other spreading a pair of wings; standing atop a rock, hoof outstretched, as a number of impossibly tall and thin bat-winged ponies emerged from a cave and appeared to speak to a number of gray-coated ponies; standing beside a pale stallion, smiling as she held in her hoof a tiny, red-eyed yellow foal with a tiny pair of wings; standing at the side of a pony of black metal and bone with a violet crystal glowing in his chest. 
Diamond Tiara stopped in front of the final panel. It showed the yellow pony- -or rather, the foal that she had been holding before- -stretched out, her forelegs spread as if giving the world a hug and her face contorted into laughter as frozen glass fire burned behind her, consuming her stain-glass word. 
“What the hay is this?” she muttered. 
“I think it’s a church,” said Silver Spoon, looking up at a painting that showed the yellow pony standing with a pair of  perfectly white spheres floating just behind her body while tiny orange winged ponies played at her feet. 
“A church to who, though?” 
Silver Spoon could only shrug. 
There were several heavy, intricately carved tables set out in the center of the library. Diamond Tiara set her lantern down on one of them and turned the brightness up to maximum. The crystal bulb in the center hummed and buzzed as if in protest, but more light poured out- -even though at maximum, the edge of the room was still populated by flickering shadows. 
“What are we looking for?” said Silver Spoon, taking down a heavy tome. She tried to blow the dust off, and the entire book blew away as powder under the force of her breath. 
“Anything,” snapped Diamond Tiara. Then she paused. “No. Records. Old pictures, photographs. Journals. Anything that references the ponies from the past.”
“I really didn’t think research was your thing.”
“In case you weren’t there that day, I was once director of the Foal Free Press.” 
“Oh yeah. You were really bad at it though.”
“Yes, Silver Spoon. Thank you for that.” 
They started to search through the numerous stacks of books. There was almost no clear organization system, and the subject matter of the books was strange. Many of them were in languages that Diamond Tiara could not read, but some were in normal Equestrian. The topics were variable but almost invariably boring. Some were philosophy or stories that she had never heard of, some seemed to be religions texts, and many concerned topics about mining or tunneling or myth. 
Eventually, the pair of them accumulated a pile of various materials on one of the reading tables in the center of the room. Silver Spoon stumbled upon to a cache of photographs- -or rather, old glass photography plates, as well as a number of books. Diamond Tiara had less luck, retrieving a few dusty journals and some torn blueprints and mining records. 
Then, as she pulled back a large and heavy book, she found something hard placed next to it. 
“What is this?” said Diamond Tiara, pulling out the device that had been crammed between the books. It was roughly book sized, but made of plastic with a pair of transparent wheels mounted beneath a clear cover. 
“Oo!” cried Silver Spoon, suddenly excited. “I know what that is! It’s a magnetic tape recorder!”
“What’s magnetic tape?”
“It’s in the name. But back in the forties they used to use it to record stuff. It’s like a record you can carry with you.” 
Diamond Tiara passed the device to Silver Spoon. “How do you use it?”
“Like this.” Silver Spoon turned a crank in the rear, charging the mechanical systems of the recorder, and then set it on the table. She pressed a small triangle-shaped button and with a click the wheels began to turn, running the thin black tape through the machine. 
At first, nothing happened. Then, to Diamond Tiara’s surprise, a sound came out of the machine’s internal speaker. It was difficult to tell what it was, but it sounded like heavy, labored breathing. Then hoofsteps, slow at first but then rising. Those were followed by a more distant sound of something grinding, like distant equipment being moved. Then the sound stopped for a moment.
“Hello,” said an awkward, winded voice suddenly, causing Diamond Tiara to jump. “I’m…oh sweet Celestia. This is probably the last recording I will ever make, and I pray to all the gods that nopony ever hears it. If you do…it’s already too late. You don’t even know, but they’ve surrounded you. They’ll never let you leave.”
Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara looked at each other, and then at the recorder. Another sound drifted against it, like something thumping in the background, and the creak of a wooden floor. 
The pony in the recording cleared his voice. “My…my name is Pickle Dillinger. I…I’m the last. We…we robbed a bank, and came here to hide. This big, abandoned house…this cursed place. How could we have known?”
The pounding accelerated, and for a moment Diamond Tiara thought she heard a different sound. Something like distant, whispering voices that were just quiet enough to avoid being recorded onto the tape clearly.  
“I don’t have much time,” said the recorded voice of Pickle Dillinger. “The things…the things in those suits, they’re not ponies! Oh Celestia, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! Why didn’t we listen? Look, this is important, more important than anything: when they come, and they WILL come, you have too- -”
The voice suddenly stopped. The tape continued to run, but nothing came out except static. There was no sound, no notice; it was as if the speaker had simply disappeared without even a whimper. The tape continued to turn for a moment, and then, with a click, it went totally silent. 
Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon looked at each other, and then at the tape player. 
“It…it had to be a prank,” said Diamond Tiara, desperately trying to rationalize what she had just heard. 
“Yeah,” agreed Silver Spoon. “Yeah, it had to be. Or else who…who would have put it on the shelf?”
A sudden sound caused both of them to jump, and to turn toward the bookcase. 
“What was that?” cried Silver Spoon, shaking under the table. 
“I…I don’t know.” Diamond Tiara approached the shelf slowly, and looked through the empty places where the books had been moments before. The shelf should have been pressed against the wall, with nothing behind it except stone. Air seemed to be coming through, though. Cold air. 
Diamond Tiara picked up the lantern from the table in her teeth and held it close to the shelf. Behind it was a small recessed space that was completely covered by the shelf. Through the cobwebs and dust, Diamond Tiara saw a door. 
“There’s something back here,” she said. 
“Like a good something?” squeaked Silver Spoon. “Like a group of royal guards? With candy and cashmere sweaters and shiny new accessories?”
“Like a door.”
“Noooo,” whined Silver Spoon. “I would take a musty skeleton over a  DOOR.” She paused. “Actually, I’d take a musty skeleton over the sweaters too.” 
“Pack up the stuff,” ordered Diamond Tiara. Silver Spoon hesitated, but unable to resist an order from Diamond Tiara poked her head out of the table and began to load the journals and photographic plates into her saddlebags. 
Once the bags were loaded, Diamond Tiara stood next to the shelf. She leaned against the wall and, with a sinister smile, inserted her hoof between the dry, old wood and the wall.
“Woops,” she said, pushing just slightly. The entire shelf and all the remaining books came tumbling down, nearly crushing Silver Spoon and opening the way to the door. 
Silver Spoon gasped. “Diamond Tiara! If Princess Twilight learns what you just did, you’re future in the royal court will be sunk!”
“She doesn’t have to know, does she?”
Silver Spoon looked down at all the spilled books. “I think she just sort of will. Like, a disturbance in the library force or something.” 
Diamond Tiara ignored Silver Spoon and focused on the door. It was tremendously old, made from darkened wood and set two steps down from the rest of the room. Slowly, she descended and pulled on the wrought iron handle bolted into the dark wooden surface. For a long moment, nothing happened- -and then the door slid on its rusted hinges, filling the room with a sharp shriek of protest. 
A gust of cold air rushed in from the other side, and Diamond Tiara held up the light. The stairs that led to the door did not continue beyond it; rather, the land sloped away into a dark tunnel beyond. 
“Well, it goes somewhere,” said Silver Spoon, turning around. “Time to go back upstairs.”
“No,” said Diamond Tiara. “We’ve got to see where this goes.”
“I can see where it goes,” said Silver Spoon, wide-eyed. “And we don’t want to go there!”
“Don’t be a coward, Silver Spoon. Nopony likes a coward.”
Diamond Tiara jumped down onto the dirt, trying to conceal how badly her legs were shaking. She was even more terrified than Silver Spoon, by far. They were already in a deep underground library, and now there was a door that went deeper, cutting into the earth and going onward for a distance so long that Diamond Tiara’s lantern could not penetrate all the way to the end. 
Silver Spoon whined in protest, but followed her friend into the blackness. 
“Why do you think there’s a tunnel?” asked Diamond Tiara. She felt a need to talk; the silence paired with the almost palpable darkness was just too much for her. 
“Well,” said Silver Spoon, looking upward and all around at the shadows dancing in the harsh light, “this place used to be a…a sanitarium. Maybe it’s for…disposal…”
“Disposal of what?” 
“I’d…I’d rather not think about that…”
“It’s probably just a service tunnel that some idiot wasted his time digging. I mean, come on. This is totally something Snails would do in his basement.”
“Or it’s a…”
They stopped at an intersection, and the question as to the identity of the tunnel was at least partially answered. The corridor that they were on had stopped and diverged into two much larger ones. The new perpendicular tunnel had larger wooden supports, and the bottom was coated a set of narrow and extremely rusty rails. They were in a mine. 
“Celestia’s butt,” said Diamond Tiara, holding up her lantern toward the place where the mine continued to slope downward. “How deep do you think this goes?” 
“It could be miles,” gulped Silver Spoon. “And I really don’t want to get lost in here.”
“We won’t get lost,” said Diamond tiara, walking down the slope. “We’ll just follow the tracks.”
“Do we have to?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Diamond Tiara. “This place was a silver mine, right? What if we found some silver? Daddy would be so happy.” She turned and muttered to herself. “Maybe so happy he wouldn’t miss my birthday again…” 
So they continued deeper into the abandoned mine, following the rusted rails. The mine shaft was cold and almost completely silent, save for the occasional whispering of the drafts that pulled their way through the tunnels on a convoluted and long-forgotten path to the surface- -or to some place far deeper.
Along the sides of the path were what remained of the mining industry that had once sprung up around this ancient house. There were shovels and picks, all rusted to the point of being unrecognizable, as well as pieces of mining equipment that Diamond Tiara could not identify.
“Hey!” said Diamond Tiara, suddenly.
“What?!” screamed Silver Spoon, her voice echoing off the walls endlessly as it trailed through the tunnels. 
“Not so loud!” cried Diamond Tiara. She reached down into the dirt below and picked up what her light had glinted off of. “Check this out,” she said, pulling up a hoof-sized lump of shiny metal. It was heavy and cold, and Diamond Tiara knew what it was. “Look. At. THIS!”
“What is it?”
“SILVER!”
“Yeah, you don’t need to yell, I’m right- -”
“No! I just found a piece of silver!” Diamond Tiara lifted her light to the cavern, and saw that large chunks of the glimmering metal were all over the walls and ceiling. “Ha! Maybe this place isn’t so bad after all. Not that we need money, but  hey, it’s always good when the rich get richer.”
“Let me see that,” said Silver Spoon, pulling the rock from Diamond Tiara’s hoof.
“Hey! That one’s mine!” A thought occurred to her. “Actually, they’re all mine! All of this is!”
Silver Spoon ignored Diamond Tiara’s protests and examined the  metal closely, lifting her glasses and tapping on it with her hoof. She shook her head. “It’s not silver,” she said.
“It’s not- -WHAT?”
“It isn’t,” said Silver Spoon, dropping the rock on the ground. 
“How would you know?”
Silver Spoon raised one eyebrow. “Because I know silver. And that’s not silver.” She grimaced slightly. “Actually…I don’t even know what it is. It’s not any metal that I’ve ever seen, and it feels…Diamond Tiara, I think we should go. Please.”
“If it isn’t silver, what is it?” asked Diamond Tiara, mostly to herself. 
“Please, Diamond- -”
A sound on the periphery of the tunnel suddenly drew both of their attention. Something had moved, and moved quickly, but neither of them had seen it. The silence returned once again, seeming to come from the walls themselves, dropping from the encrusting metal that the miners had mysteriously stopped mining over one hundred years earlier. 
“We have to see what it is,” said Diamond Tiara, following the tracks deeper.
“No,” said Silver Spoon. 
Diamond Tiara stopped. “What did you just say?”
“No,” said Silver Spoon, shaking her head. “I’m not going. Diamond Tiara, this is stupid! Look around you! We’re in a hole! That by its self is bad, but…but you just heard it too! We’re- -we’re not alone down here!”
“Which is why we need to go forward.”
“That makes no sense!”
“Yes, it does! This mine is Rich family property! A pony was spying on me, ME! I’m not going to let him get away with this, Silver Spoon!”
“Then you can go ahead without me.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Wh…why not?”
“Can’t you tell? I’m scared out of my mind right now.”
“You don’t look scared…”
“Of course not. If you had Spoiled Rich as a mother, you wouldn’t look scared either. Appearance is everything, remember? Never let them know when you’re afraid, or angry, or happy, or…or sad. It is a sign of weakness. But I am afraid Silver Spoon. I can’t do this without you.” 
“You…you need me?”
“I’ve always needed you.” She paused. “But if you tell anypony I said that, I will never speak to you again!”
Silver Spoon produced a shaky smile. She took a breath. “Okay. We are going to go two hundred more feet. Then we are going to turn around and go back home, and we are going to lock ourselves in your room and hide under the bed and cry. Got that?”
Diamond Tiara smiled. “Got it.” 
So they continued into the mine. As they moved, though, the scenery began to change. The slope grew deeper, and the walls wider. Soon, Diamond Tiara had no idea if they had gone two hundred feet or two thousand. At some point, the tracks vanished from beneath them, replaced by a bare stone floor. 
The tunnels started to change as well. They became more convoluted, with twists and turns and intersections, some of which did not make any sort of physical sense. By far the strangest aspect, though, was the number or roots that seemed to come down from the ceiling. They pierced the rock and clung to the walls like inverted vines, driving every deeper through the gravel of the floor and between the cracks of rocks. Some were the size of tree trunks, and all were gnarled and dry. 
The roots were not the only unearthly thing in the tunnels, either. The mine shaft gave way to a more organic system, with wide curving tunnels. Many of them branched off from the main artery with holes that were barely small enough for a pony to fit through, and some of them traveled straight up or straight down, like strange, smooth-walled chimneys. 
“How deep do roots normally go?” asked Diamond Tiara, putting her hoof on one of the larger of the trunks. The bark was hard, but had the feel of living wood, as if it was vibrating from within. 
“Some cacti can burrow hundreds of feet into the ground looking for water,” explained Silver Spoon. Then, to herself, “Thank you, Spiny V.”
“I wonder how deep we are.” Diamond Tiara edged around one of the deep circular holes in the floor. In the light of her lantern, it seemed to go on forever. “I wonder what dug these?”
“Animals?”
“Animals don’t chew through solid rock.”
Diamond Tiara looked around at the roots and the holes, and then raised her lantern to look down the main tunnel. The darkness was still thick and frigid, and the light did not reach far. In fact, the presence of the crystalline glow only seemed to make the shadows deeper. 
As she raised the light, though, she felt her eyes widen. Staring back at her from just beyond the edge of her lantern’s glow were a pair of luminescent, reflective eyes. 
“Silver…Silver Spoon…” She already knew that Silver Spoon saw them too. Silver Spoon’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates, but, like Diamond Tiara, she was frozen. Neither of them knew what to do. They were standing twenty feet away from something, but neither of them knew what. Neither of them could see it. 
More than anything, Diamond Tiara wanted to turn around, to run and scream all the way back to the house above, but she found that she could not move. Something inside her was waiting, desperately hoping that the owner of those eyes would turn away and that she would not have to turn her back on whatever it was. 
The pair of silvery eyes did not move, though. Instead, the cavern was filled with a deafening, echoing sound like that of an enormous cicada. Near the eyes, red lights suddenly glowed dimly, illuminating the edges of a pony-shaped body dressed in black and rags. 
“RUN, NOW!” cried Silver Spoon. She grabbed Diamond Tiara, and as Diamond Tiara turned, she saw the thing lurch forward, its legs scampering silently forward as it started to pursue. 
The pair of them were running and screaming in a panic, their hooves slipping and clicking against the hard ground. While she had been descending, Diamond Tiara had realized that had been going downhill. Going back up, though, she might as well have been climbing a mountain. 
A system of red lights passed overhead, and Diamond Tiara was sure that she could feel a wisp of dirty cloth drag across her back. She burst out crying as the creature dropped from the ceiling, blocking their path.
“This way!” cried Silver Spoon, turning down a side path. 
Diamond Tiara followed her friend, but knew as soon as she had that they had lost the initial path back to the door. 
“Where’s the way out?” she cried, matching Silver Spoon’s speed. 
Silver Spoon was breathing heavily, her pupils little more than dots. Her glasses had fallen off in the commotion, but she kept running forward blindly, breathing heavily. “I don’t know!” she cried. 
Diamond Tiara looked forward toward the edge of the light that her lantern cast, watching as the tunnels changed size and shape and as mining equipment overgrown with roots passed by. She knew that if one of those tunnels were to narrow suddenly, or if they were to hit a dead end…
“Next…left…”  whispered a voice, suddenly. Diamond Tiara felt her ears prick, and her eyes flicked to Silver Spoon. Silver Spoon was not in any condition to talk, though; she was breathing too hard and to wildly panicked. The voice had almost seemed to have come in on the wind, but Diamond Tiara knew that she had heard it.
“Left, here!” she cried, suddenly, pushing Silver Spoon into the next tunnel on the left. As she did, she saw the pair of silver eyes following them closely, and thought she might have seen the glint of teeth reaching out toward her soft filly flesh. 
“It’s a dead end!” cried Silver Spoon as the light from the lantern illuminated a collapsed tunnel.
“Right….then…stay left…” whispered the female voice again. 
“No, there’s a path to the right!” cried Diamond Tiara. “Take it, and then stay to the left!” 
Silver Spoon nodded, and indeed, the voice was right. Although the forward tunnel had been completely blocked, a tunnel to the right had been left partially open. It was too small for an adult pony to fit through, but Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara were able to squeeze into the branch tunnel with little difficulty. 
On the other side was a narrow mining tunnel, and indeed, it split into two directions. One went up, and the other one- -the one on the right- -went downward. 
“No! We have to go left!” cried Silver Spoon.
“No!” yelled Diamond Tiara, slamming her friend down the right tunnel. Unable to turn around, the ran down the steep hole, and then turned- -and found themselves rising upward.
Silver Spoon started to fall behind. “I can’t do it, Diamond,” she said, out of breath. “It’s too steep…just leave me, save yourself…”
“Oh, for Luna’s sake!” cried Diamond Tiara. She pulled off her tiara and put it in her teeth with the ring of the lantern, and then got behind Silver Spoon. Lowering her head, Diamond Tiara pushed against Silver Spoon’s rump, driving her forward. 
The scenery immediately began to change. Diamond Tiara felt warm air against her body, and realized that she could smell the desert. There was no light ahead, but they were approaching the surface. 
Then they burst through a hole torn in a concrete floor, and found themselves inside of a concrete structure. The space in the center was narrow, and in the lantern light, Diamond Tiara could see that there were several stone sarcophagi lining the walls. 
“Over there!” she cried through the metal in her mouth, pointing at a narrow set of crumbling stairs ahead. She and Silver Spoon raced toward them and found themselves faced with a large stone door. 
“It’s locked!” shrieked Silver Spoon.
“No, it isn’t!” screamed Diamond Tiara. Actually, she had no idea- -but she refused to give up. She pushed her hooves against it. “PUSH!”
The two fillies put all their weight against the stone door, but it did not move. Behind them, they heard the sound of something creeping toward them from the hole in the floor, preceded by the oddly alluring sound of buzz or system of chirps. 
Diamond Tiara turned back toward the door, not knowing if the beast was about to crawl out of the hole or if it already had. With a sudden surge of adrenaline, she put everything she had into the door, and, in response, it pushed outward just slightly. A thin beam of orange sunlight poured through the gap, filling the room. 
“HARDER!” she cried, and her and Silver Spoon slammed themselves against it with their full weight. The door moved more, and opened. Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara burst out into the sunlight. All around them was tall grass and spiny plants growing up amongst tombstones; the tunnel they had taken had led into a mausoleum.
Silver Spoon collapsed onto the ground, breathing heavily, but Diamond Tiara was still running on adrenaline, knowing that this was no time to rest. She spat out the lantern and her tiara and pushed her back against the door. 
“Come on, Silver!” she yelled, angrily. “We have to close it!”
“R…right,” gasped Silver Spoon, barely managing to stand and put her weight against the heavy stone door. 
Almost as soon as they had pushed it closed, something immensely heavy slammed against the back of it. Diamond Tiara cried out as she dug her rear hooves into the dry soil, trying to keep the door from opening. There was a pause, and then another slam as the monstrosity threw itself against the door. It pushed again and again, each time knocking the two fillies back slightly.
Once a gap had formed, a black-clad hoof extended out of the gap, reaching toward them. Silver Spoon screamed. At the sound of her best friend in distress, Diamond Tiara managed to summon the last of her strength and slam the door closed. The hoof retracted into the darkness just as crypt closed.
There were no more impacts against the door, and Diamond Tiara slid to the ground. 
“I think we got it,” she sighed, smiling. 
“Yeah,” said Silver Spoon. They suddenly both broke into relieved laughter- -until a high pitched whine filled the air, like the photoflash of a camera warming up. 
“Um…do you hear that?” asked Silver Spoon. 
Before Diamond Tiara had a chance to answer, the heavy stone door detonated behind them. The energetic explosion threw both her and Silver Spoon forward, slamming them into the ground and scraping them across the harsh scrub that grew there. Silver Spoon was slammed into a cross-shaped tomb stone, but Diamond Tiara landed on the ground and was covered by a spray of newly formed gravel. 
Shaken and disoriented, she stood and looked at the now open door of the crypt. She watched as the thing inside lurched forward toward her. For just a brief moment, she thought she saw the horror of what it might actually look like. 
As quickly as it dove forward, though, it scrambled back into the mausoleum, releasing a warbling and distressed call. 
Diamond Tiara was confused, but then the thought clicked in her mind. 
“The light!” she cried to Silver Spoon, who was just barely starting to rise. “It can’t stand the sunlight without its mask on!” 
Diamond Tiara’s eyes flicked across the ground, looking over the rubble that surrounded her. Then she saw it: the lantern, still flickering even in the light of the setting sun. With a single motion, Diamond Tiara scooped it up in her hoof. 
“EAT LIGHT, MOTHERBUCKER!” she cried as she slammed the light against the edge of the mausoleum floor. The impact was enough to crack the housing, and the crystal within broke free of the limiting rings that kept it stable. It shattered with a deafening boom and a flash of blinding white light. 
The creature inside the tomb screamed horribly, and released a complex array of vowel sounds that almost seemed like words. Diamond Tiara had been forced to turn away from the flash of light to avoid being blinded, but when it subsided, she looked back and saw that the creature had retreated back underground to where it had come. 
For the time being, they were safe.