//------------------------------// // Light on the Backdrop // Story: Of Treasures and Darkness // by Material Defender //------------------------------// The turns and corners of this damned city were absolutely insane to navigate. Beyond Blake's own torch, it was nearly impossible for him to tell the actual direction he was going, as he was surrounded by vaulting walls wherever he went. The most he had to go on was the sound of the screaming, which he was certain had come from a general direction. Another scream rang down to his left, yet another dark alley, but this one more narrow than the rest he'd been running through. He quickly ran down, going past various ancient doors and several darkened windows, waving his torch ahead of himself to try to shine light on the next turn so he didn't end up running into walls. "H-help!" the voice shouted. So whoever she was, she could speak English. With any due luck, it would be another human like himself, and maybe together they would be able to find some way out of this hellhole. "Hey!" he shouted back. "Where the hell are you?!" "H-hello?" the voice shouted back. "P-please, I'm... I don't know where I am! Y-you have to... agh! No!" There was the sound of growling, and the following sound of a scuffle could be heard. He flicked on his floodlight, turning down the alley, seeing several of those strange black smoke creatures run past his alley. One, however, stopped, and turned to bear its fangs towards him. Carefully aiming down his sights, he quickly found a bead on the sprinting creature, and planted a round straight between its eyes. "Son of a bitch..." he muttered to himself. "Hold on, lady, I'm coming!" There was no response as he continued down the path that the creatures had charged down. There was the presence of another light near the end of the same hall, so he assumed it was most likely the female's light source. The sound of yelps and more grunting meant that she was most likely trying to fend them off. He had to get to her, and quick. "Any... day... now! Agh!" she shouted. "Hold on!" he repeated, turning a corner. There were a number of the quadrupeds there, and he aimed and fired again, taking special care to dispatch of three of the creatures before aiming at a new one... but this one was different. It had a tannish-yellow fur, with black hair, and it slumped against the wall, heaving for breath. It also appeared to be wearing green clothing and had the mark of a compass on its butt. The new creature opened up its eyes as Blake walked over, revealing her dark pink eyes. "Th--" She was cut off as he planted the barrel of his Colt against her head. "W-wait! Please, wait!" she heaved. "I-I'm not here to hurt you...! I--agh..." She looked down, at her clothes, now barely beginning to wisp with tints of red. Blake drew his gun away, eyeing the creature slowly as she tried to pull out some gauze from her bag, fumbling with it. Quickly holstering his gun, he quickly grabbed the gauze from her hands and pulled up her garments, revealing a bite wound underneath. With adept work from his hands, he quickly bandaged the wound before it got worse. "Whew, I... thank you, uh... strange being..." she said. "Thank you for saving me, I'm not sure what I would have done if you hadn't shown up." "Just... what the hell are you?" he asked. "I... I'm a pony... and I'm an explorer. A treasure hunter, to be exact. My name's Daring. Daring Do. Who... or what... are you?" Daring asked. "I'm a human," Blake responded. "And I'm also a treasure hunter. Name's Blake Westerly, but I go by just Blake." "How fortunate to run into another treasure hunter here..." she laughed nervously. Blake pulled out the small white hat from his pack. "Is this yours? I found it in that... dome thingy up there." "Yeah! That's my hat!" She happily took it, and smiled when her keepsake was back on her head. "You're all right, Blake." "So... you know anything about this place? How you got here, or how to get out?" "Not that I can tell..." She walked over to examine the bodies of the creatures. "Their smoke... it's gone." "Yeah, I sort of learned that when I killed one of them just a while ago," Blake said. "Ugly things, aren't they?" "They're... they used to be ponies." "Like you?" He walked over and examined the bodies with them. "Mind if I get rid of these?" "Yeah... go ahead," she said, grimacing. "I don't think I can stand to look at them any longer..." Blake nodded, lowering his torch and setting the bodies on fire, then watching as their dust faded into the darkness beyond. "So... how'd you get here?" "I found an orb. A real shiny one with--" "With a crescent in it?" she finished for him. Blake raised an eyebrow at her deduction. "Oh, don't worry, I found one just like it, too. If only Ahuizotl wasn't there..." "An ahuizotl?" Blake said, having heard the name of the mythological Aztec creature before. "No, the Ahuizotl. He's my nemesis, and he's always trying to steal artifacts before me, but I usually get the drop on him." She looked around. "Doesn't look like that this time, though... I wonder if he's even here. We both grabbed the orb at the same time." "So the orb brought you here?" "Yeah. Didn't it do the same for you?" "No, I found a secret chamber, and then all the space turned to darkness, and then I fell, and then I ended up here." "Interesting... but it's kind of hard to say that it wasn't the influence of the orb." "Do you still have your orb with you?" he asked. Daring shook her head. "No... it must have gotten stuck with Ahuizotl. Great, now he's going to try to unlock the secret of the orb and try to attain ultimate power and all that..." "I doubt it." Blake looked up around the small courtyard they were standing in. The purple skies still swirled above them, as if it were some sort of living thing, watching over all in this damned city. "If he even lives long enough, all that power isn't going to save him from... this place." "So... I think we should start looking for clues, first," Daring suggested. "From the inscriptions that I saw, and from the beings living here, this is a pony city. We should look for their archives and see if there's anything related to the orbs that can help us get out of here." So Daring was one of the eggheaded types of treasure hunters. Not normally the kind that Blake stayed around, but extremely helpful to have when in a pinch, much like now. "Sure. You're going to have to fill me in on the details along the way... this place is really damn strange." "I'm not entirely sure what this place is myself, actually..." she said. "It's definitely pony related, but I can't seem to recall reading any sort of text about... about a place with a purple sky." Blake pulled out his gun again. "So let's get started..." "Where the hell are we fuckin' going?" Blake whined. "I don't know already, we're just searching! Celestia take me, you're so annoying!" Daring griped. "That's because I don't exactly have a penchant for getting nowhere. And what's this Celestia thing you keep talking about?" "Celestia's a Royal Princess of Equestria, and she's the one who raises the sun! She's an alicorn, a mix of a pegasus and a unicorn, and holds immense power." Blake stopped, as did Daring when she noticed the light of his torch no longer mingling with her lightstone. "Wait... a pegasus and a unicorn?" he asked. "Yeah. Something wrong about that?" "I saw something like that on the mural back in the temple I was in before I got... thrown here. It featured one, wearing armor that had a crescent on it..." "That's Nightmare Moon..." "Excuse me?" "Nightmare Moon... she was originally Princess Luna, Celestia's sister, before her disdain for the ponies' love for her sister's sun and rule overpowered her desires to be recognized, and she sort of went on a whole rampage and war against Celestia before she was banished to the moon." Blake shook his head, trying to comprehend everything she had just said. He understood it, he just didn't really comprehend all of it, it seemed. "Right..." He nodded slowly. "Let's just... keep going... maybe it'll sink in with time. Seriously, you ponies do some crazy shit... powerful alicorns... going to war... and building all of this." "Yeah, it's strange. Usually all of that old-time stuff ends up totally smashed, but this place is perfectly intact. It's definitely not anywhere in Equestria, from what I can tell so far. This place is an anomaly." To Blake, everything, including Daring, was an anomaly. "Yeah, well... the sooner we get out, the better..." There was the sound of another roar... or at least it sounded like one, until it devolved into something akin to a scream. It was vaguely male, and stopped shortly after a few moments. "What the hell was that?" Blake asked, turning his head to view the darkness surrounding them. "Maybe that was Ahuizotl..." Daring whispered. "...he probably has that crystal orb with him... but if he's dealing with those creatures, best of luck to him. Come on, let's keep moving." "I think this is the place." Daring and Blake stood before a large ornate building, sitting in the center of a larger courtyard and surrounded with what seemed to be residences on all sides. They had luckily not run into any more of the shadow creatures on their way here, though the lack of ambient noises unnerved Daring, causing her to jump at shadows on more than one occasion. "What makes you so sure?" Blake waved his torch around the stone arch over the door, trying to see if there was anything that could tell them what the building was used for. "Well, it looks important." She gave a shrug before fidgeting with her wings some more. Her decision to avoid flying was obvious when Blake had told her about the winged shadow creatures lurking in the nearby spires in the distance. "Yeah, and in our line of work, 'important' also means 'dangerous'. Best let me take this one." He leaned against the side of the door, with his Colt ready, as Daring quickly huddled behind him. "Ready?" He received a nod as Daring nervously darted her eyes around the courtyard. Pushing the door back with the butt of his torch, Blake slowly peered inside. The torchlight didn't reveal much aside from more ornate carved tiling with moon iconography, so he pointed the torch further inside, slowly bringing himself in and checking the premises with his gun. The area seemed to indicate that the square building was a single room, and the air hung with a damp premonition of death. "Stay back," Blake said. "I don't like this." "Yeah, I... what's that smell?" "That's why I'm telling you to stay back. Watch the courtyard." "...okay..." Daring shrunk back outside, her lightstone providing a bright yellow glow outside the contours of the doorway. Blake continued forward, unsure of what exactly lay before him within the shrouded darkness. The stench of death grew stronger as he proceeded in, until his foot bumped into something that his eyesight hadn't caught, making a small thump in the permeating silence. "...Blake? Is everything okay in there?" Daring called. He peered down at the floor, and noticed a small piece of... something, on the ground. It was pale white, small, but almost as if it should have been part of something greater, and the stump at the end looked like-- Blake quickly looked around, now intensely aware of every single factor in the environment around him. The clue was there, but he wasn't entirely sure; he was, however, entirely sure that this place was most certainly not a library nor a public service location of any kind. "Yeah, Daring... I'm pretty sure this isn't a library..." "I... I thought so... oh, goodness, that smell..." "Stay out there, I'll be out in a moment." He bounded forward, waving his torch in front of him for the sight that would soon come before his eyes. The presence of blood on the floor became quickly known, as he walked to the end of the room, holding his breath and bearing a hardened gaze on his eyes. It could have been that because he'd been in the treasure business for so long, the smell of ancient death had dulled the part of him that would had his body running for the hills, but the sight he held before him only produced the slight feeling of angry butterflies in his stomach. Strewn before him was a pair of horribly mutilated white ponies, their golden armor still mostly untarnished in the unknown amount of time they'd spent here since their deaths. Their torsos were torn out, savagely so, leaving their entrails and body parts strewn about the room. Small traces of dark smoke lapped at their open wounds, which Blake burned away with his torch, igniting the wisps with a loud hiss. "Daring... I think you should come see this..." "Is... is it bad? Can you just describe it to me?" Though her upbeat attitude had held for most of the trek, none of it was present here. "It's... bad. I'm looking at the corpses of two white ponies decked out in golden armor. Who are they?" "Th--those are... those are... Celestia's royal guards..."