Five minutes of rummaging, clattering, and accidental entanglement passed before Daring thought she was ready. She had the pith helmet perched upon her head, and one of the little head-lanterns had been strapped around it. Her saddlebags had been donned — the ones Dad had gotten her for her last birthday, the ones with her cutie mark embroidered on the sides — and a couple of multitools thrown inside them, including one with a blowtorch which she was probably allowed to use under the circumstances. A pouch of steel ball-bearings went in the bags as well, which Dad had once assured her were great for setting off traps connected to sensitive pressure plates, as well as for makeshift games of marbles if you got bored on a delve. A coil of rope had been wound around her middle and under her wings — one of the smaller coils, in reluctant deference to her size. She’d had to give up on the crowbars and ten-foot poles entirely.
That would probably be all she needed, and Daring tugged the oilskin back into place. No time to waste. Dad would still be moving towards the ruins. She glanced from side to side, and then made for the street, jangling as she went.
She emerged into the main street of Ponyville, which now had several ponies bustling around in it, setting up little stalls and watering flower beds. A trundling noise came from one side, and she turned with some confusion. It sounded like their own wagon, which she’d just left behind her —
No, it was another wagon, smaller and compact, pulled by a tall and wiry-looking earth pony mare, her copper-coloured hide covered by a rumpled cloak. She looked down at Daring with sharp green eyes, which slowly widened with puzzlement. “You—” the mare started, but Daring was already wheeling away and sprinting towards a likely-looking alleyway.
She didn’t mean to be rude, but she was on a schedule, and the strange mare would just hold her up. She could apologise later if she met her again. Daring clanked swiftly through the alleyway, ignoring the calls at her back, and sprinted through into the street parallel to the first. Two sleepy-looking ponies were out in front of their house, watering a bed of dragon-snapper flowers, and turned her way briefly. One tilted her head and the other looked as though he was about to comment, and Daring hurried on past them. No time to get delayed.
Before long, and after several short twists and turns in Ponyville’s streets, she arrived at the town’s outskirts past a final scattering of houses. Past them, a grassy meadow ran up to a fence, and past that fence, row after row of budding apple trees rose up a small hill. Daring grinned and broke into a canter across the meadow, leaping at the last moment to try and clear the fence with one graceful jump.
Saddlebags and coils of rope didn’t greatly assist grace, as it turned out, but luckily nopony was around to see her as Daring tried to disentangle her rope — and by extension, herself — from the top of the fence, repeating the one curse she knew all the while. She finally succeeded and tumbled down to the ground, prompting one last “Flying feathers!” on impact.
She picked herself up, thanking the stars that nopony had been around to see that, retrieved the helmet and the multitools from where they’d fallen out of her saddlebags, and scrambled up the hill before her. The grass underhoof was still damp with dew, and a cool breeze rustled through the leaves of the apple trees all around, fresh and sweet with the scent of apple blossom. As she dragged her way up to the hill’s summit, Daring paused to catch her breath and briefly turned around.
Past the trees, Ponyville was beginning to bustle as more and more ponies emerged out into the day. Their voices could be heard even across the distance Daring had made so far, and she thought she could hear some fillies and colts amongst them. Ivory had mentioned it was a school day today and, unheroic as it may be, Daring couldn’t help but mentally gloat. She was already missing her classes back in Canterlot, and besides, catch her going to school when old ruins were around.
Out of Ponyville proper, the road to Sweet Apple Acres ran, and Daring craned her head to see if Dad was on it yet. There — a fair distance out from the town, there was the distant shape of a stallion in a long coat and with a ten-foot pole slung over his back. He seemed to be tossing an apple in one forehoof as he ambled up the path, occasionally pausing to take a bite and admire a bit of scenery. Far behind him, just emerging from the town, another cloaked pony pulling a wagon seemed to be taking their sweet time as well.
One day, Daring wondered if she’d understand grown-up logic and whatever made them want to wake up early just in time to do nothing whatsoever. Understand, if not actually participate.
Regardless, though Dad might be taking his time, he was still on the road, and she had to hurry up if she wanted to be sure of getting to the ruins first. She stuck her tongue out as she tried to gauge the direction she’d have to go, and took off at a brisk trot. The hill sloped down into yet more orchards of apple trees, with neat dirt paths crisscrossing through them all. From further off in the orchard, she could hear voices and what sounded like a cut-off giggle. She’d have to give whoever was working there a wide berth if she wanted to avoid being seen.
Daring pressed on for what felt like ages, weaving around trees and trying to keep far away from where she guessed the farm buildings and the source of the voices were. The minutes ticked by in the back of her mind, and she crept onwards as quickly as she could. Her saddlebags and the rope grew heavier and heavier, and the lack of any landmarks amidst all the trees chipped away at her sense of direction all the while. Was she still on the right path? Getting there at the same time as Dad would be trouble, and if she somehow managed to lose the ruin altogether, she might just die out of sheer embarrassment.
But a ridge rose into view, past which the trees seemed to thin, and Daring made for it with a sudden burst of hope. She clambered over the ridge and past the treeline, and by some miracle, there was the field with the sinkhole. No other pony was in sight, and the world was quiet but for the wind rustling through the leaves and the distant trilling of birds.
Daring delightedly dove out of the trees, only arresting her momentum when she was about to tumble right into the sinkhole itself. Fluttering down with all the weight she was carrying struck her as more of a fankle than it was worth, and she reluctantly opted for just trotting down the walkway like a sensible and boring pony would. The roughly-hewn wooden steps creaked underhoof, and she could see the stone bottom loom closer and closer through gaps between them.
And eventually there were no more steps. Before her, a tunnel ran deep into the earth, twisting down and down into musty blackness, far away from the morning air and the smell of the apple blossoms.
Daring took a breath, all but tasting the sheer, palpable destiny in the air, and then she took the plunge. She trotted onwards, and as the darkness swallowed her, she tapped the side of her head-lantern, coaxing the magical mechanism to life. A thin ray of light skittered out ahead of her to illuminate the ground ahead, far less bright than she’d have liked. But that would have to be alright. Everypony knew great adventurers weren’t scared of the dark. And besides, there couldn’t be anything in the shadows that was scarier or more competent than she was.
The dark tunnel twisted on for much longer than she’d remembered, and Daring found herself stumbling over rocks and ridges in the stone floor as she left the daylight behind and only her feeble lantern lit the way. Her hoofsteps and her breathing were the only noise, with the shadows seeming to swallow everything else. But the dim, pale light of the cavern eventually came skittering round the last corner before her, and Daring eagerly picked up the pace to meet it. She stepped into the light, and there the cavern waited, just as she’d left it. The pale tower rose at one end, its antlers' tips eternally clawing at the cavern’s roof, and the ajar doorway at its base stood silent and still. Come delve, it whispered.
Daring was delighted to oblige it. She took off at a mad scramble across the cavern floor, weaving between the jagged patches of naturally-growing crystals until she reached the doorway itself. One moment to catch her breath and re-adjust her helmet. One more moment to savour the destiny before getting properly stuck into it.
And in that moment, from behind her, maybe as far back as the walkway, there came the tread of distant hoofsteps. She cursed and started towards the ajar door, leaning her full weight upon it with her forehooves and feeling it creak inwards at an agonisingly slow rate. Eventually, it swung inwards far enough for her to get back on all fours and poke her head inside.
Past the entrance, the tower’s innards seemed to consist of a single circular room, lit by the pale and luminous stone of its interior wall which rose up into the darkness of the tower’s hollow top. At its centre, past a floor whose curving indents and patterns were half-hidden by layers of dust, a recessed stairway spiralled down into the earth.
All was silent as Daring held her breath. Faint etchings and curving runes ran along the wall, glimmering with what looked like long-faded magic. She peered at them for a moment, and concluded that they were indecipherable and hence currently irrelevant. No matter, though, and she raised her hoof to cross the threshold —
—And then she paused, as a sudden suspicion came to mind. Her gaze flitted back down to the dust-covered indented carvings on the floor, rising and falling like the waves of a frozen ocean. If she was reading an adventure story or listening to Dad chat about his glory days, what would she expect to happen about now?
Her gaze flicked up towards the dark and unseen ceiling, and amidst its shadows, she imagined she could see the shapes of spikes.
“Ten-foot poles!” came Dad’s voice from drowsy memory, part of some old account told within stone walls next to a roaring fire. “Worthy things, cherish them. Amidst all their other uses, they can save your life as well. Tap them out ahead whenever you’re going down a strange corridor or entering a new room, and if there’s any pressure plate in cahoots with something both unpleasant and deleterious to life and limb, your pole can suffer so you don’t have to. Why, when your mom and I dived down to Sunken Dunwhick—”
She didn’t have a pole. But she did have a nearby rock, and she scooped it up with her hoof to lob it across the floor. It bounced several feet away, stirring up little puffs of dust, and skittered several more before coming to a rest at the top of the stairs.
Daring held her breath for a moment as the dust began to settle.
And then, just as disappointingly little seemed to be happening, there was a creak from up in the shadows, a sudden rush of descending darkness, and something hammered down on the floor with an almighty crash scant inches from Daring’s nose. Before she could so much as jump back, the ceiling-trap was already rising back to its starting position, dust flurrying on the floor where it had made contact. It was a dark circular slab wide enough to cover the whole floor, its base covered with long downwards-jagging spikes made of some pitted dark metal.
Daring watched it rise, transfixed and still even as her heart tried to hammer its way out her chest. And only when it distantly clicked back into place, did she finally release the only fitting exclamation. “Cool!”
A trap! An actual trap, like in all the stories, right before her eyes! She’d just triggered something that could have killed her, like a proper adventurer. Days couldn’t get cooler than this. They just couldn’t.
Other pieces of pragmatic adventuring knowledge slid into Daring’s mind on the heels of the initial excitement. Sleuthing out the trap had only been the first step, she reminded herself. You had to actually get past it afterwards. Happily, this one didn’t seem too tricky. If there were pressure plates in the ground that brought down the spikes, then you just had to never make contact with the ground as you made for the stairs.
Tricky for ponies who weren’t Daring, maybe, but she was a pegasus. And she might not be strong enough for prolonged free flight yet, but she was definitely the strongest flier among the pegasi in her year. She could glide for ages and that was practically the same thing as flying. One little jump should be manageable even with her weight of gear. She tensed the muscles in her legs and flexed her wings, preparing for the next great leap onwards …
But another suspicion came to mind, bringing her to a reluctant stop before she’d even started. Was it actually pressure plates in the floor? Did she know that for certain? The trap certainly had sprung after the rock had hit the ground, but there might be something else that caused it. Baron Munchorsen’s Adventure to the Moon had had a few lessons in it, in which long words like ‘correlation’ and ‘causation’ and ‘combustion’ had come up frequently, often at the expense of the silly Baron himself.
And besides that, Daring knew there were other things that could trigger traps.
“Tap ahead,” came the voice of Dad once more. “Sound out threats to life and limb on the floors and walls - and the ceiling if you can reach it, why not. But it might not be a pressure plate you have to watch out for. Some —” and in that part of the retelling, he had stopped for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had briefly lost its warmth and his eyes had lost their twinkle. “Sometimes, it seems the world goes out of its way to make our trade difficult. Some vicious old wretches who loved their secrets too much hooked detecting enchantments up to their traps. Cast them on the walls to watch for motion and let fly when they spot it. You can’t trust even thin air. So if your ten-foot pole isn't dead yet, hold it out ahead as well - and wait. Be patient. Hold back for star’s sake, and for your own.”
Daring supposed that Dad might know what he was talking about in some cases, and despite herself, firmly fettered the urge to fly straight on. Instead, she scooped up another rock, eyed the distant ceiling, and tossed the rock straight upwards to make it spend a moment or two more mid-air. She watched it like a hawk as it arced up, coming close to the impenetrable shadow, and then came down again.
As the rock fell, the runes upon the wall slowly shone with the faintest of shimmers. And then, just as the rock was about to hit the floor, the trap slammed down before Daring’s eyes. There was a little crunch that was all but drowned out before the spiked slab ground its way back up towards the ceiling once more, and only scattered shards were left of the little rock.
Daring stared, her heart hammering anew, and the excitement she felt this time sat more queasily in her. Visions of what could have happened spun out suddenly across her mind before she forced them away, but not entirely. One stuck with her, and in it, the pith helmet on her head became little more than tatters spread across the ground, lying amidst … other things.
The chilly urge to give it all up for another day and turn back now briefly rose in her, but a little voice that could have been her cutie mark itself whispered, The trap has to rise back up. Seize the moment.
Daring looked up, and sure enough, the spiked slab’s progress back to the ceiling was slow. Maybe whoever built it thought the first slam would be enough that they wouldn't need an immediate follow-up, or that most intruders - curious thieves or animals or whatnot - would be pulped or scared off by that first slam alone.
It’s still rising. Use the gap. Seize the moment.
And although the appeal of backing away couldn’t be denied, the sheer urge to press on, to prove herself the great adventurer, to make Dad and Mom proud - that burned brighter for Daring, and she seized the moment. She leapt out in a swift glide towards the spiral staircase, under the creaking weight of the spiked slab, and half-landed, half-crashed onto its first recessed step. Quickly, she tried to recover her balance as best she could under the weight of gear, and she all but leapt down to the next steps to keep her head well below the reach of the spikes. For a long, long moment, she huddled there on the stairs, trying to keep her breathing steady and failing, waiting for another crashing descent from the trap.
But the seconds ticked by and the descent didn’t come. Her heartbeat subsided. And terror turned to triumph.
She’d found her first trap. She’d outwitted her first trap. Her cutie mark all but sang. She wanted to find another trap and relive that thrill again and again, feel her heart jump into her mouth on another gamble in the face of deadly odds.
Ancient Antlertis built deep to protect its secrets, sealing them behind traps and wards and mighty magic, so Dad said. Well, Antlertis would have to come up with far better than that, because it was up against Daring Do now, and hell mend it for that dangerous life choice. Daring adjusted her helmet, grinned a cocky grin she’d spent hours practising in the mirror before, and set off down the spiral stairway.
It wound down and down, each step wide enough to let two big stallions trot down side-by-side and only slightly less tall than Daring herself at the withers. A dank and musty smell rose from the bottom, far worse than the cavern above, and Daring wrinkled her nose. Nothing could have lived down there for ages.
The height of the steps forced Daring to take the stairs at a semi-coordinated tumble, awkwardly swinging her forelegs and hindlegs down to each new step, one pair after the other. Her rope and saddlebags took every chance they could to get in the way, and though being inside the tower seemed to have muffled the distant hoofsteps beyond hearing, that was almost worse than hoofsteps she could hear. No end in sight loomed for the stairs, and on an impulse, she tried to take them at a faster rate.
That just made her stumble, flail for balance, and then proceed to take the stairs at a not-even-remotely-coordinated tumble. The whole world turned to a bruising kaleidoscope of whirling steps as she bounced from one to the other to the tune of, “Ow! Aagh! Ow! Flying — ow!” Only the cushioning the pith helmet gave her head prevented stars from being added to the blur. After a brief and confusing eternity, she mercifully ran out of steps, and she was planted face-first onto a stone floor.
For a moment, she chose to just lie there, emitting faint groans as the world stopped whirling. “Flying feathers, ow,” she managed as she finally staggered to her hooves and checked her teeth were still intact. She wasn’t exactly sure why the words made a curse, and whenever she’d heard Dad use them when he thought she wasn’t listening, they were something he apparently couldn’t give, but she couldn’t deny it was fun to say. It took some of the sting off the bruises as well, which always helped.
Thank the stars nopony had been around to see that as well. No wonder most adventurers she read about started off by themselves.
The helmet had fallen to the floor near her, past a thin haze of dust that had been stirred into life by her landing. She scrambled to pick it back up and collect a couple of multitools that had flown out of her saddlebags, coughing on some of the dust - there was a lot of it, with an even layer covering the entire floor. Once everything had been secured, she looked up along the corridor she found herself in, the beam of her lantern skittering ahead to light the way.
Her eyes widened.
The corridor ended at a distant stone door. Roots had broken through the stone further along, and had carved rifts into the wall just to the door’s side. A soft blue light glimmered past these rifts, as if being shone through water. The large door itself seemed to have no handle or hinges. Instead, a side-on picture of a long-legged and sleek quadruped had been carved into it, their long head crowned with antlers as they leapt through the air.
Daring had seen pictures of deer before, showing the old Antlerteans before their Fall in adventure stories or her foal’s history books, and usually showing them off wearing elaborate robes and doing improbably cool things with magic at the same time. But she realised that this must have been a picture the deer had carved themselves, of themselves. She looked up at it, and a blank stone eye looked back at her.
Daring prided herself on being as tough and emotionally-hardy and proud as any proper adventurer should be, but under the ancient carving’s high and solemn gaze, it was hard not to feel overwhelmed and somewhat small. Someone must have made it once. Someone else must have cared about it enough to order it built. Even here under the earth, it must have seen things Daring couldn’t even imagine. And here it had lain for thousands of years, quietly co-existing alongside all the legends and great ponies of history without anypony suspecting it lay here at all.
It must have been a lonely carving, forever waiting to be seen again.
A little plaque ran below the carving, and as it caught Daring’s eye, magic suddenly flickered in the air around it. The sparkle of the magic was unexpectedly bright, much brighter than the old etchings she’d seen above, and the words on the plaque uncoiled and shifted in her vision to form understandable Equish letters. She squinted to make them out from across the length of the corridor, shining her lantern-light directly upon them.
PADHOOF, A THIEF REFORGED.
NOW I SERVE LORD FALLOW TILL TIME’S ENDING.
Daring just blinked. The words made no sense — maybe the Antlertean grown-ups had been no different at all from grown-ups nowadays in the stuff they came out with — but she hadn’t been expecting them to translate for her. She stepped closer to investigate the door.
The carving’s eye shut. And then it snapped open, burning yellow.
A golden line of magic slashed out from the eye, arcing far over Daring’s head as she yelped and threw herself to the ground to avoid it, and landed on the last step. Flames roared to life across the step, blazing all the way up to the ceiling and blocking off any escape. As Daring scrabbled forwards away from the sheer furious heat, the carving turned to regard her, as if it were a three-dimensional object somehow stuck inside the wall. Two flaming pinpricks of purest gold blazed in place of eyes, high up past a gaunt muzzle and above a too-tall and too-thin body and legs.
“You intrude upon the freehold of Lord Fallow, Councillor to King Loceros and Lord High Necromancer of Antlertis,” growled a voice from the carving, as cold and deep and pitiless as the night ocean. A faint crackling snarl lurked just below its surface, as if the throat producing it had rusted over. Magic floated thick in the air, seeming to translate the words as they hit Daring’s ears. “If you are capable of speaking and desire to live, make yourself known. If you are merely a wandering animal or some local primitive, just keep gurgling vacantly where you stand and powers beyond your comprehension will reduce you to a carbonised smear in short order.”
Daring Do swallowed, even as sweat trickled down her brow and her legs trembled. This was something more than just a trap. This was it, this was the moment, you couldn’t back down from the first actually scary thing if you wanted to be the great adventurer you knew you were. She reached for the same inextinguishable fire in her heart she’d felt earlier, coaxed it to life, and let it fill her. “I’m Daring Do!” she said, with scarcely the hint of fear in her voice. “Who are you? And who’s Lord Fallow?”
The carving’s golden eyes simmered before the cold voice spoke again. “You are doing this entirely wrong.”
Daring blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I am the sentry. You do not quiz me. I ascertain your identity, compare it to the list of those with appointments, and either grant you entry or reduce you to fine charcoal. I generously assumed this was not hard to fathom. Owing to my excess of optimism, we shall try again. Make yourse—”
“Let’s not,” said Daring, who found her fear of the sentry-carving lessening with each moment, now that she could talk back to it and look it in its eyes. Or flames. Whichever. “I just want inside to look at all your cool old stuff. Nobody’s using it anymore anyway, so why not?”
“Look here, you primitive speck,” said the cold deep voice, which had acquired a certain peevish quality. “I guarantee you that only one of us has this procedure forged into the very essence of their being. We shall follow my lead on this. And in any case, no, you are not getting inside to look at the ‘cool old stuff’. Not unless you have an appointment. Which you certainly don’t.”
“I … what? You can’t be taking appointments now anyway! Antlertis Fell off the face of the world, like, ages ago!”
“Blackness Beyond, they’ll try anything these days,” sneered the sentry-carving. “‘Oops, I forgot my own name, please just read out your entire list of appointments until I recognise my own, honest.’ ‘Ooh, I’m a great and powerful rival to your master, let me in and I shall restore you to your true self after I vanquish him while he sleeps.’ ‘Ooh, you have to let me in, your entire civilisation’s gone.’ Do I look like I was soulforged yesterday? Do not answer that.’”
“Maybe you were! How should I know?” snapped Daring, who couldn’t escape the feeling that this wasn’t how bold entries into ancient ruins were normally meant to go. What was ‘soulforging’ anyway? “You know what, fine. I’m Daring Do! Can you schedule an appointment and let me in now?”
“That is a name not even slightly on the list of appointments,” purred the sentry. “There are, in fact, no appointments scheduled at all. There have been no appointments scheduled for over three thousand years. And I am not in the business of scheduling appointments, especially not for you.”
“Then why did you even ask?”
“Because this is what I do, because I was made to do this. What part of ‘procedure forged into the very essence of my being’ eluded you exactly? Was it all the long words? Should I reduce my present linguistic ability to better accommodate? How would monosyllabic grunts and inarticulate gurgles suit?”
She could have dealt with the sorts of monsters everypony else got on underground adventures, like troglodyte dragons or skaven or Diamond Dog slavers. Instead, every sort of sneering grown-up seemed to be in front of Daring in the form of one stone carving, and she itched to be able to bop its nose as her wing-feathers fluffed with anger. “You’re an inarticulate gurgle!”
“Oh, you little bastard.” And in spite of the multitude of other distractions, Daring still internally exhulted as she recognised what had to be a second curse and added it to her repertoire. “Why are you down here at all? Shouldn’t you be at school, assuming you primitives have those?”
“I —Yes! No! Shut up! Let me through!” Daring stamped her hoof, and instantly cursed herself for it. Adventurers didn’t do that.
“Enough of this,” rasped the sentry. “You’re distracting me. I ought to be incinerating you, both on dutiful grounds and on general principle.”
“Wha—”
And whatever Daring would have said next was cut off by fire. The sentry’s eyes flashed, and a ribbon of pure golden flame swept into existence in the air before it, weaving in quick little circles and flowing patterns like it was a living thing. A tongue of the flame split off and lashed right down at Daring before she could blink. Thoughtless instinct kicked her back across the floor, flapping frantically backwards to avoid the fire that blasted into where she’d been standing. Dust ignited, and a smoking black scar marred the floor.
She alighted awkwardly, all but stumbling as her limbs seemingly refused to work with sheer panic. Heat buffeted at her back from the unabated wall of fire there. She whipped her head from side to side, hunting for a way out, any way out, and there came another flash from far above. Another lash of golden fire came down in a sideways sweep, coiling in the air as if trying to form a noose. She fell to her belly, sending the helmet tumbling off her head, and felt her mane crisp as the lash swept inches overhead, slamming into the wall and leaving a long dent across it.
All the air seemed to have left Daring, and it was too hot to breathe. The room had become a furnace, breaking out beads of sweat across her whole form, and somehow a cold rigidity had seized her trembling limbs and collected in her gut. She tried to think, think, look for some clever way out, but nothing came to her frozen mind.
How do I escape?! How do I get out?!, some part of her screamed in her mind.
Flying feathers! Bastard!, wailed the distinctly-unhelpful bulk of her mind in response. Flying bastards! Bastarding feathers!
Another high golden flash caught her attention, and Daring looked up just in time to see the sentry’s twisting ribbon of flame stab down once more. She rolled to her right, tumbling as best she could with the bulk around her midriff and colliding with the fallen helmet. Heat singed her side just as she flopped onto her belly again. A growl sounded from far above, mixing with the roar of the fire, and she looked up to see the sentry’s cruel yellow eyes.
“I can keep this up longer than you, speck,” the sentry growled. “You’ll choke soon even if the flames don’t get you, but I’d prefer the direct approach if it’s all the same to you. ‘Incineration’ is probably too long a word for your kind, so I’ll just ask you to burn.”
Daring’s breathlessly witty heroic response just came out breathless, and she choked as she looked up at the tall, thin deer, up at its flaring ribbon of flame, and up towards its blazing yellow eyes.
And past those, a glimmer of blue, catching her attention. A glimmer of blue past the rifts in the wall, carved out by snaking roots.
Desperate hope seized Daring then, and an idea raced through her mind like chain-lightning, etching itself onto the forefront of her thoughts, onto her nigh-unconscious motions, onto what seemed like her very self. She clutched hold of the helmet by her side with one forelimb to hold it tight against her form and wriggled free of the constricting coil of rope - it might be a handy adventuring tool, but it wasn’t worth her life, and she needed to move like she’d never moved before. She sprung free just as a fiery coil flew down from the ribbon, already leaping up into a straight flight up through the air towards the blue light. Blazing golden fire looped in the air around her, singeing her hide with its closeness, but she flew free of it all and corrected her flight just in time to impact with the wall by the door with her hooves rather than her face. She scrabbled for a proper grip on the roots and gaps in the wall, her wings flapping as fires raged at her back.
But before her, a mercifully cool breeze wafted across her face. There was a broad rent running right through the half-foot-thick stone of the wall, and through it she could glimpse another corridor lit by some unseen blue light. It was an escape, it was a way away from the fire and the cruel yellow eyes of the sentry …
… and there was a large, sharp, inconvenient jag protruding right up through the middle. And the gaps on either side just weren’t quite wide enough to squeeze through, even for Daring.
Dad was right, the world did like to go out of its way to make adventuring difficult.
“Stop trying to avoid your death, you rude little bastard!” raged the sentry to her side, and the roar of its fire redoubled. Daring bit down on returning the curse with interest — she had little enough time and air to use on her survival as it was — and pressed herself closer to the wall, pressing the helmet between it and her body whilst her rear limbs and wings scrabbled and flapped to keep her precarious position. Her left forehoof punched out at the jag of rock, and all she got was a stinging pain in her hoof and a unmarred jag for her trouble. She frantically swung out again, and again, and again and once more before she gasped with pain and shook her hoof, the jag as untouched as ever. Stone had no business being that hard.
What did she have? What could she do? She couldn’t kick her way through it, not without a grown-up’s strength, and not unless she had a lot more time in which she wasn’t likely to be set on fire. She couldn’t wriggle through the gap, certainly not quickly enough to get away from the sentry. Could she take out the ball-bearings and throw them behind her as a distraction? Not likely — the sentry didn’t seem quite stupid enough to just blast anything moving, it had its target. Maybe one of the little multitools with a blowtorch would be able to sear through the stone? Could it do so in time, though?
Time. Time was the issue, and Daring knew more and more of it was ticking away as she rummaged through her options. The heat at her back intensified, and the golden light that spilled across the walls all but blazed with brightness. Daring twisted around to see the source, screwing up her eyes as much as she could to protect them from the drying force of the heat. From her side-on position, the sentry’s eyes seemed to radiate vicious satisfaction, and in the air before it, the flame-ribbon twisted and twisted through ever-faster loops, gathering speed and power.
Daring’s eyes flicked down to the impressions left in the floor and wall by the sentry’s last strikes, and a manic plan came to her then. It didn’t seem like it could work in any sensibly-run universe, but she didn’t have many other options, and damnit, everypony knew the great adventurers sometimes just had to blow raspberries at the odds and always came out in the end.
“Just hang where you are and this’ll all be over shortly,” said the sentry then as its fire wound up, its voice a self-satisfied purr. “And in your next life, speck, consider coming back as something with more forethought. Or at least less flammability.”
Daring eyed its fire, estimating as best she could. Would what it had be enough? A little taunting couldn’t hurt. “You’ll have to get me first!” she managed, in something between a gasp and a desperate trill of laughter. “Were you made to miss things as well? Come on, hit me with your best shot, slowpoke!”
The sentry’s inarticulate yell might have contained a new curse; it was hard for Daring to tell past the noise of the flame. Its fire briefly blazed brighter than the sun in the tight confines of the corridor, forcing Daring to avert her gaze to avoid being dazzled. There came the sudden roaring rush of moving fire, and it was now or never. Daring grabbed her helmet with her teeth and threw herself backwards from the wall with all the strength her limbs and wings could afford. The jet of flame rushed in just overhead as she fell, scorching the very tip of her muzzle and making Daring yelp with the pain of it. She hit the ground with her back just as the flames crashed into where she’d been perched, and though the fire’s roar muffled all else, it was possible to make out the splintering and crashing of falling stone.
“Got y— starfire take it!” blazed the sentry, and went unheeded. Daring rolled over onto her belly, bracing her limbs against the ground and whirring her wings as hard as she’d ever done, ignoring her growing collection of aches and small burns. With one more great lunge, she flew straight up again at the rent in the wall. And as she swept on up to it, she saw the jag had been blasted clean away, leaving only a jagged faintly smoking stump behind it.
Fire blazed at her side. With one last heroic flurry of effort from her wings, Daring plunged right through the rent, twisting mid-air to just avoid clipping the stone sides and to skirt the last lash of fire. And then she was free, leaving the smoky, golden furnace that was the entry corridor far behind and falling down into a new mercifully-cool and blue-lit corridor. A last cry from the sentry of, “Oh, COME ON!” pealed at her back, but she was already beyond its reach.
She landed hooves first on the stone, tottered for a moment, spat out the helmet, and then let herself slump. The taste of smoke was thick on her tongue, and she was seized by a sudden, breathless coughing fit, taking big, greedy gulps of cool air in between each hacking cough. Eventually, the coughing subsided, and the urge to laugh bubbled up inside Daring like water from a spring. She gave into it, and giggled where she lay upon the cool stone floor.
Munchorsen and Tumbleweed and the Superb Six didn’t have anything on her. Dad would forget to be angry and admit he’d been wrong the whole time. Mom would approve so very, very hard. And that sentry, and every other grown-up who’d been saying she couldn’t do this, that she wasn’t old enough to be a great adventuring hero … they could kiss the dust she left in her wake.
The laughter, coughing, and heavy breathing currently vying for control over her windpipes finally all settled, and the aches and small burns she’d picked up began to register as her adrenaline faded. Daring glanced around the corridor she found herself in, wrought of the same pale and seamless stone as everything else and carpeted with the same layer of fine dust. The plain front door sat at her back, on the other side of the sentry beyond. A strange light fixture dangled from the ceiling from thin white chains, a hemisphere seemingly made of thin crystal and filled with guttering blue flames to cast a sapphire hue all across the entry corridor. On either side, the corridor continued on for a short way before vanishing into darkness past two sharp bends.
Daring reached for the helmet on the ground before her — which was only a little scorched around the rim, thank goodness — and perched it back into place. Several multitools and several ball bearings also rested on the floor around her, presumably spilled from her saddlebags as she’d come flying in. With a wince as several of her burns protested, she staggered to her hooves and began scooping the multitools up. She was nowhere near done yet, after all, and she’d want all the tools she’d brought. Shame about the rope. She’d have to find some way to make its loss up to Dad.
She scurried from multitool to multitool, and the blue light in the corridor intensified slightly. Daring paid it little heed. Once done, she advanced on the scattered ball bearings. And just as she reached for the first of many, there was a polite cough to her right. “Good day and welcome to you, Miss. May I lend assistance?”
Daring froze, and her head slowly craned around to the source of the voice. Beside her, a spectral blue figure had emerged, about twice as tall as Daring herself at the withers. They were deer-shaped, with their outer form merely a translucent blue shell over a luminous deer skeleton. A plaque dangled around its neck, with script running across it in unknown Antlertean lettering. Short and erect antlers jutted up from its skull, crackling with pale blue magic as if they were electrified, and in the hollow pits of its eye sockets, blue lights flickered and stared right down at Daring.
Daring stood stock-still and wide-eyed, too bolted to the ground to even tremble. After a moment, the deer-skeleton-ghost-spectre-whatever once again ventured, “May I le —?”
And as swinging her saddlebags right off her back and smacking the deer-skeleton-ghost-spectre-whatever right in the face with them seemed like the only sensible course of action in that moment, that was exactly what Daring did.