The Marks of War

by DungeonMiner


Chapter XXI

Sweetie Belle woke, mentally pulling away from the void she discovered.

She could feel the tears running down her face as she sniffed and choked back a sob.

Button chirped, walking down her face to stroke her cheek.

Sweetie Belle shook her head, petting the little Warp spider gently before standing. “Not even my memories are safe,” she muttered. “The warp cannot have my soul, so it wants my memories.”

Button chirped again, worriedly.

It was all wrong. The world of her memories had been turned and transformed into a parody of her past. Nothing was right. Her world had transformed into a place filled with shadows of an ancient race, stalking her from where she was now. Everything had been twisted and broken. Ponyville was merely a shade of what was. There was nothing really left.

Sweetie shook her head again, trying to compose herself as her wraithbone relay slowly retracted back into her body. “Nothing is safe…” she muttered. “Nothing is sacred.”

Button cooed sadly.

Gathering herself, she took a moment to clear her eyes, and with a long, shaky breath, she exited the small room.

If nothing else, it was good to see Scootaloo again.

Even if she was a shadow of her mind.

---=][=---

As morning dawned, Oraban finally returned.

Outwardly, he looked no different, his cloak and mask hiding whatever his impassive face did not. Even still, Sweetie Belle could feel a cloud of hopelessness surrounding him. He walked up to her, both standing outside of the Prince’s throne room. “Sweetie Belle,” he greeted, offering only that as he gripped his rifle.

Sweetie Belle tried to ignore the small stone that hung from the grip of the weapon. “Oraban,” she greeted back.

The ranger merely nodded, before he stood next to the unicorn, waiting for the doors to open. Oraban fidgeted, something that Sweetie Belle had not seen from him in a very long time, if at all. Something was certainly under his skin.

Sweetie spoke up. “I think we are getting our mission,” she said.

Oraban grunted.

“We might be assigned to scout the orks,” the unicorn pointed out.

Still, his face remained impassive, but the way his fingers tightened around the barrel of his rifle said that he enjoyed the idea. “There isn’t really anything else for us to do is there?”

Finally, the doors creaked open, revealing the throne room behind, and the Prince, sitting on the throne. “Enter,” he ordered, as ceremony was laboriously performed.

The two walked in, approaching the Prince, before bowing.

“Starstrider, Sweetie Belle, we now know when the forces of the Craftworld will arrive, and thus we know when to fight back and attack. However, until such a time arrives, we need to defend ourselves.”

Sweetie and Oraban said nothing.

“So we shall begin to retreat from this tree fortress. In the interim, I have a duty for you two.”

“You wish me to scout the ork?” Oraban asked, “I can do that. It would be a pleasure.”

“Actually, Starstrider, I have another duty for you.”

Sweetie Belle frowned, before shaking her apparent disappointment away.

Oraban remained impassive. “What duty would you have me perform? As long as I can shed ork blood I will not complain.”

The Prince shook his head. “No, Starstrider, the duty I have for you is greater still.”

The ranger’s grip tightened again, and Sweetie Belle could see his knuckles shining white through his pale skin.

“I need your skill of stealth and infiltration to guard something. An ancient treasure that has been guarded by us since the fall of our empire.”

“What is it?” Oraban asked, his curiosity causing his annoyance to subside.

“The Infinity Gate,” he answered, before standing. “A gate to the warp, the webway, and a thousand other worlds. It was the greatest work the minds of the Eldar could fashion, and is the last greatest monument of our glory. The power it contains would be terrifying in the hands of the ork. It needs to stay hidden, and I know no one better or more skilled at remaining hidden than the Starstriders.”

Oraban said nothing.

The Prince gave a nod towards an Eldar Warrior. “Kalleth will lead you there.”

Silence was the only reply.

---=][=---

He was furious, she could tell. She had never, ever seen him so angry before in her life. The Eldar warrior leading them had no clue that the ranger behind him was moments away from exploding in pure anger.

She did not need to be psychic to tell that he felt like his vengeance had been stolen from him. The way he walked, the way he gripped his rifle, even the way he spoke aloud rather than using his psychic voice spoke volumes of his rage.

He was only moments away from shooting the warrior in the back, and running to throw himself on the orkish line.

She certainly needed to talk with him about it.

Before long, their guide led them to a large clearing in the middle of the woods, and in the clearing stood a massive structure of wood and wraithbone. A large ziggurat, with a wraithbone menhir at its peak.

“This is the Infinity Gate?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“This is the temple that holds it,” Kalleth answered. “The gate itself is inside.”

“So we need to disguise an entire temple?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“Surely a daunting task,” Kalleth replied as he held his spear and his laspistol, “but one I’m sure you and the Starstrider are capable of.”

Sweetie glanced over at Oraban, who simply stared at the massive structure, anger glinting in his eyes.

“We’ll be fine,” she told Kalleth. “You may return to the Prince. We shall perform our duty from here.”

Kalleth nodded, before retreating back to the tree palace.

Sweetie looked over at Oraban, who continued to stare at the temple, hate burning in his eyes.

“Let’s get to work,” she said, before she began walking to the ziggurat base.

Oraban continued to stare, as though the temple would unmake itself at his mental command.

Sweetie Belle noticed. “Are you coming, Oraban?”

He growled, but followed, walking up towards the massive building, angry, but silent.

---=][=---

The inside of the temple was a perfect mix of wood and wraithbone. It fascinated Sweetie Belle in its own way, being a mix herself. So she began her work,performing experiments that would blow Twilight Sparkle’s mind back on Equestria, trying to divine the purpose and point of mixing both these massive trees and the power of wraithbone.

Button, in the meantime, was simply teleporting all across the temple as he merged with the wraithbone veins that traveled through it.

And Oraban sulked.

After Sweetie Belle’s experiments, she took a moment to return outside. She went about, setting wraithbone markers to prepare her massive psychic labyrinth to keep the ground forces at bay, taking notes all the way.

Button went through, at Sweetie’s request, and mapped out the temple so that she could get a proper tour later.

And Oraban kept sulking.

She set up defenses. Barricades of wraithbone, spikes, digging pits and shutting off hallways.

And Oraban just sulked.

The sun was setting before Sweetie finally had enough of it.

“Alright,” she said, stepping out of the temple as she approached the ranger. “This isn’t you. You are normally so business focused, that you would have had this place covered in branches by now. What’s wrong?”

Oraban didn’t so much as give her a glance. “You know why I’m angry,” he said, staring at the setting sun.

“I asked what’s wrong, not why you’re angry,” Sweetie noted.

Oraban did glance at her this time, throwing the most angry glare he could manage.

Sweetie glared back, unamused.

Oraban growled, before turning back to the sunset.

The unicorn waited.

He sighed. “She was a friend,” he finally admitted. “We grew up together. She was the oldest friend I ever had...”

Sweetie nodded. That must’ve been millennia ago, probably back when the empire was in one piece.

“We grew up in the same city, on the same planet, and we both moved to the same Craftworld. We walked the same paths, we learned from the same teachers, and we both worked under the same yokes. I’ve...I’ve known her for a very long time…” he said, as he held up the spirit stone.

Sweetie Belle listened.

“She became a Ranger a few centuries before I did. She was a little less patient than I was, and she went to take to the stars long before I did. I was alright with it, at first. She would return every fifty years or so, and we would talk.

“And then...and then she lost herself. She became a pathfinder, and then she could not return so soon. She needed to be out there, free from anyone who would tell her otherwise. I...I missed her. I had not seen her in so long, and I was starting to feel the strain of the craftworld, and...and I thought perhaps if I became a ranger, I might find her.”

He looked back down at the spirit stone again. “But I was wrong…”

Sweetie’s face softened, and she walked up to him and sat at his side. “I know how you feel.”

“Do you?” he asked.

“Do you remember my friends?” she asked. “The ones who were supposed to come through the portal with me?”

Oraban was silent for a moment, before speaking. “I am reminded.”

She gave a small smile. “We were foals. Dumb, stupid foals messing with a power we did not understand. Once we did, we were thrown through the warp, and if my friends survived that journey, then they probably died once they found the natives. They were my best friends. We would have grown up together, helped each other, faces trials together. Instead, that was stolen from us by our own foolishness.”

Oraban said nothing.

“I would give anything to see my friends again,” she said. “But I will never see them again, and I never had the chance to say goodbye.”

Both the Ranger and the unicorn stared off into the distance, watching as the sun finally dipped below the tree-line.

“I suppose you do understand,” Oraban admitted, “perhaps better than I realized.”

---=][=---

“What?” Vulek demanded, furious, “What do you mean that you haven’t found the Eldar yet?”

“We ran into orks, sir,” one of the Emperor’s Children answered.

“What do you mean, you ran into orks? There are no orks on this planet, and even if there were, we are supposed to fight the Eldar! Slaanesh can do nothing with ork souls! She thirsts for the Eldar! Why did you even engage the orks to begin with?”

“The noise marines could stand the silence no longer,” came the answer.

Vulek’s tentacle writhed angrily. “They can wait!”

“They have gone three months without their sound, m’lord. They needed to perform for their own pleasure.”

Vulek sighed. “So we have the orks. We came here for the Eldar, and we have orks, instead. You fools! All of you! We were given the location of an unspoiled, exodite world, and you are wasting your time with orks!”

The chaos marine before him took a hesitant step back.

“The Alpha Legion gave us a guarantee of any Eldar soul we come across, but right now they’re off on ‘their own business’ and they’re finding a better treasure than us!”

“But, but my Lord,” the chaos marine began.

“Silence!” Vulek roared. “They’re hiding something, I know they are! They’ve bribed us with the souls of Eldar and the favor of the dark gods, and instead they’re stealing power right under our noses!”

The chaos marine tried to back away further.

“They are playing us as fools, and you can’t even get the bait they set for us!”

Vulek’s tentacle snapped in the air, before whipping around and cracking against the chaos marine’s neck, ripping his throat to shreds.

As the chaos marine choked and gurgled, Vulek turned his back to the man, and stared out over his forces.

These fools below him did not even realize that the Alpha Legion had deceived them. And it was getting worse. Their need to revel in Slaanesh’s great debauchery, and their need for his touch drove them to thoughtless slaughter.

“What do they think we are? Khorne worshipers?”

He glared and growled, before Vulek shouted across his horde, pointing at a random marine. “You! Get up here!”

It took a while for the marine to make his way through the heavy smoke and ecstasy-ridden marines as they partook of various narcotics. Literal tons of Obscura, Sniff-musk, Grimweed, Kalma, and Onslaught, all powerful enough to affect the mind and body of a marine, stood between the marine and his commander, but once he got through, he stood before Vulek. The marine saluted, drugged out of his mind, but ready to serve.

“I have a task for you,” Vulek ordered.

---=][=---

“I have found it,” Festerus announced.

Kraagan muttered as he stood. “Finally. I was beginning to think that your abilities were perhaps exaggerated.”

The sorcerer scowled behind his helmet, but did not respond to the jab. “It is being psychically protected, I’m afraid. Either I break the field, and show our hand, or we need to use our...that monster.”

“We’ll see,” Kraagan grumbled. “For now, we do what we always do, we infiltrate, we observe, we locate their weaknesses. Gather the legion. We march tonight.”

Festerus nodded.

And Kraagan smiled.

Really, it wasn’t a bad effort on the worm’s part. Of course, he should know that you do not send an Obsucra-sot to trail an Alpha Legionnaire.

---=][=---

By the time morning dawned, Oraban, with Sweetie's help, had finally managed to disguise the clearing. Hiding the temple underneath some perfectly placed leaves and underbrush they made it completely disappear from view, at least from the sky.

The ranger and unicorn both nodded at their work, satisfied that they did well.

“The gate should be safe for now,” Sweetie Belle said. “I doubt the orks could get through the field, and they can’t attack what they can’t find.”

Oraban nodded. “More’s the pity. An ork or two could certainly lift my mood.”

Sweetie Belle sighed as Button climbed up her back. She couldn’t really blame the ranger. She understood his need for revenge. She really did. Another art of her was more than acutely aware that if his mood did not improve, then he would complain for the rest of his time here.

“You know,” she began, “you could probably go out there.”

The ranger glanced at her.

“You could probably sneak away without me ever knowing,” she continued, a smile growing on her face. “Why, you could be out there, killing orks, and I wouldn’t even realize.”

And Oraban smiled. “Are you sure?”

She shrugged. “I have experiments to run on the Gate anyway. My curiosity getting the better of me, and all that.”

Oraban shook his head. “I’ll be back soon.”

“I know you will,” she said.

And with that, the ranger shouldered his rifle, and ran for the forest.

Missing the three sets of eyes that watched him from the forest.

---=][=---

Sweetie Belle walked deeper and deeper into the temple, following massive, cable-like bundles of wraithbone and wood that ran through the corridors.

It fascinated it her utterly.

It was as though the wraithbone had tapped into the psychic atmosphere of the planet itself, drawing power from the living wood and the forest beyond. With that kind of powersource, there was no telling what this thing could do.

The various runes and script of the Eldar lexicon along the wall spoke of how to activate the gate, as well as the best environment to activate it in.

From what she could translate from the dizzying script was that every three cycles or so, there was a psychic surge of the planet, and here, when the surge occurred, is when the Infinity Gate reached its maximum potential, lasting for three days before it had to shut down.

She kept following the “cables” further and further in, reading the walls as she tried to find the true power of the Gate.

She was practically overjoyed when she found a wraithbone console, complete with a calendar to find the next surge, and noted with growing interest that it was only a few days away.

This was an amazing invention. This was the closest they had to design their own webway gate. When the designs for the gates were taken from the Old Ones millennia ago, the Eldar quickly began to build the common webway design everywhere they could, but this…

This was their first attempt to try and surpass their betters, the true hubris of the Eldar falling flat when they could not even count on the gate to open.

She smiled at the thought.

Perhaps the greatest saving grace in this design was how it could be used to view its destinations with only a touch of psychic energy.

And then, before she knew it, she was there.

The Infinity Gate, a wall of wraithbone surrounded by a containment matrix not unlike the cables that spread from it like a spider’s web, stood in the center of the room, the heart of the temple.

She smiled at the sight of it.

More consoles, not unlike the one she came across earlier stood along the room’s walls, humming softly as power slowly poured into it. They looked like they were slowly coming to life, and Sweetie Belle was sure that was almost assuredly the case. With the surge coming, she was sure that psychic energy was once more starting to flow through the machines.

She gazed up at the massive gate, awe filling her body, before something else began to tug at her.

She was sure that...if she gave the gate just a little bit, she could see the worlds beyond it.

Curious, she took a step forward, before setting her hoof against the surface of the gate.

It was just such a tantalizing thought.

She poured just a little, just the tiniest amount of power into the gate, opening it to her sight.

She was not ready for what she saw.

A quadruped figure, sitting on a cold, stone floor. Her orange fur and piercing, sad green eyes stared back at her.

She froze at the sight of those eyes.

And then came a voice, a voice with a pronounced Southern drawl she had not heard in over thirty years.

“Ah’m sorry, sis. Ah’ve tried so hard, fer so long…”

Sweetie stared, mouth agape, as the very-obviously-pony figure stared back at her.

“Ah’m so sorry, Applebloom.”

---=][=---

“Fear not the creatures of the jungle but those that lurk within your mind.”—Imperial Thought of the Day


“What?”

Yup.

“What?”

Yup.

“No.”

Yeah.

“No.”

And guess who arrives next chapter?

“What?”

We’ll see you next time, guys!

“What? Also bye!”