Blackacre

by Princess Woona

From The Ashes

5 July, Y.C. 970
Blackacre

From the outside, the castle had largely been spared destruction. It was covered with a two-inch-deep layer of ash from what had once been the forest around it; little paths led from one point on the ground to the other. The only tracks were pony tracks: there weren’t any woodland creatures left to make anything else. Under the layer of ash, though, the castle was largely undamaged. Sure, there were scorch marks where the walls had risen too close to the forest, and all of the wooden structures around the castle had burned down, but the castle itself was sound, as if shielded by some sort of intrinsic magic.

The rooms immediately within the castle, as well as the tunnels directly under it, were also in reasonably good shape. They were covered not in ash but in a fine layer of dislodged dirt and the occasional rock, but by and large they were also intact. Filled with hundreds of cowering ponies, but intact.

The vast majority of the countless miles of tunnels, on the other hoof, were damaged, destroyed, or worse. They had been designed to give easy access to any point on the surface, and the hundreds of access points had turned into jets of flame, bringing the raging inferno underground to burn out anypony that managed to get down from the surface. Some had burned to death, but most had either been crushed as tunnels collapsed, choked on the roiling clouds of smoke, or asphyxiated as the fire ate every last shred of oxygen in the air.

The lucky few who made it to the cistern rooms — those that hadn’t been destroyed — emerged to find themselves in rocky tombs deep below the surface, sealed in by tons and tons of rock and debris, with nothing but a slow and painful death from starvation to look forward to, if they even lasted that long. Perhaps their death would be made more interesting if they started digging: maybe they would puncture a cistern from the wrong end and be flooded out. Maybe they would dig into a coal storeroom still burning from the firestorm a week ago. Maybe something worse yet, one of the restricted rooms that he had never even been allowed near, much less in.

It wasn’t anything dangerous they were after this time, though, thank Celestia. No, it was something much more mundane: food. There had never been an abundance of it to go around, but now there was almost none. At least, none that wasn’t cut off by rockfalls or cave-ins.

“And that’s time!” called the shift leader from behind them. “All right, step down, hand off, take a few seconds to give your replacement the picture. You know the drill.”

Dag was only too happy to back away from the rock face, handing over the pickaxe to the grime-covered pony who stepped up to take his place.

“Anything?” asked the replacement.

“Straight shale, nothing special.” Dag shrugged. “Have fun.”

“Right,” said the other pony, hefting the pickaxe. “Fun.”

He joined the other equally grimy ponies in the short walk away from the face and back towards the three square yards designated as a cleaning area. There were only a half dozen of them working the rock face at any one time, but since none of them had much experience with excavation, they kept to three-hour shifts, which were grueling enough.

In theory, they were trying to dig out a lateral tunnel into one of the storerooms that had otherwise been blocked off by one of the collapses. In practice, they were accountants, sempsters, and other assorted craftsponies trying to do heavy labor. Progress, if it could be called that, was slow.

It was either that or starve to death starting in a little over two days, though, so nopony really complained.

Dag swatted the last of the larger clumps of dirt off his coat, stamped a few times for good measure, and was spun around by a hoof on his shoulder.

“There you are!”

Just behind him stood LeFleur, mane crackling slightly with energy, her expression tinged with mania, the face of a pony who had been skirting exhaustion for one too many hours. Most noticeably, though, she appeared… clean.

“C’mon,” she ordered, tugging him away. He didn’t need incentive to get away from the chaos of the rock face, though a part of him did wonder exactly where they would go away to. There weren’t many tunnels left, and he had the impression she didn’t exactly want a public conversation.

He stumbled over a pile of debris that nopony had bothered to clean up yet, either because there weren’t any free hooves or because it was too fresh. Unnerving, that, the thought that there were still bits falling from the ceiling.

“Why are you so, you know,” he asked, shaking off a hind hoof. “Clean.”

“They have me running scans,” she said, tapping her horn. “Believe me, I’d rather be boring a hole. I can dig too; only difference is my talents are a bit more obvious.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Dag. “That rock is pretty miserable.”

“At least it’s just rock,” she said darkly.

He frowned. “What —”

“In here,” she said, pulling him into what looked an awful lot like a prison cell.

As she closed the door with a slight sucking sound, he realized that it was.

“The hell?” he wondered absently.

“We can talk in here,” she said, holding up a hoof to forestall questions. “Sound-isolated.”

“Like only the best prisons are,” he deadpanned, taking a few steps to a boulder along the side of the small cell. Both the boulder and the floor, however, shared the same faint and unidentifiable splatter; it must be part of the original décor, rather than an addition caused by tremors.

What comfort.

“Funny the prisons should make it,” he commented absently.

“Most of them were directly under the castle,” shrugged LeFleur, collapsing into a seat. “The idea was to keep anyone from breaking out. Or in.”

“Or through. What about the prisoners?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

They were silent for a good few minutes, not because of any requiem for the former inhabitants of the cells but rather out of a shared and purely selfish interest: getting a few moments’ silence for the first time in a long while.

“What were you doing, anyway?”

The silence continued for a few seconds more. Dag glanced over at LeFleur, who was beating her forehead into a pulp. After a moment, he realized she was massaging it with an intensity usually reserved for some sort of drilling machine. Could’ve used one of those at the rock face….

“All right. Lay down,” he said, waving a hoof at the slab in the middle of the room. She did so without hesitation, though that was more likely due to lack of energy for objection than anything else. The slab itself was actually pretty clean, save for a sprinkling of dust. In fact, it looked as it it had been recently cleaned off, compared to the rest of the room… no matter. Clean enough was good enough, and neither of them was in any position to complain.

“—!”

LeFleur cut herself off with a pleasantly surprised sound as Dag’s hooves kneaded into her shoulders. A few more twists and she practically melted into the slab; the portion of her face still visible was about as placidly content as he had ever seen her.

The kneading continued for a solid five or six minutes. Horns might be the focal points for magical energy, but the stress it caused affected the whole body. Certainly it had with Jackie, thought she had never pushed herself quite this hard.

Jackie….

He only hesitated for a moment but it was enough; one of her ears twitched.

“Do you know what we saw today?” she asked, in a tone that expected no answer. “We were scrying into the near tunnels, trying to find ponies and supplies buried under the rubble.”

He had known that. He had also heard that it wasn’t a success. He suspected that there had been more to it at the time, but hadn’t exactly been in a position to go about satisfying idle curiosity.

“We have copies of the blueprints,” she continued quietly. “Have to know where we’re looking, what we’re looking for. But the ponies trapped out there… they don’t.”

A quiver of seafoam mane as she shook her head.

“And there are ponies out there, all right. Trapped in the rock. Lots of dead. Some alive. Most of those dying. And they’re all doing the same thing we’re doing, did you know that? They’re trying to dig their way out.”

Something that might have been a muffled laugh.

“There’s one pony, two hundred feet down. The very bottom shaft. Don’t know what he was doing down there. Can’t even tell if there were any others with him. But he’s down there, and from what we can tell he’s perfectly fine.”

“Lucky him,” Dag murmured.

“There’s two hundred feet of solid rock between us and him. There was just one shaft that went down, and it went. Completely filled in with rockfalls. Some of it’s shale, but most of it’s bedrock.”

She turned an eye up towards him.

“Even if we started now, right now, and put every pony on digging him out, it would take four or five days. Minimum. Round the clock work, double shifts for everypony.”

“Too much time,” he said with a slow nod.

“He doesn’t have enough air to last half that,” she said, turning her face back towards the slab. “He’s down there, and we can’t help him. Even if we wanted to. Even if we could spare the ponies from digging everypony else out, we couldn’t. And we can’t teleport, not even just a foot; there’s too much magical interference from something. He’s down there, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

She was silent for a moment.

“And then, we go on looking. Keep looking, they say. Scry the next tunnel over. Maybe there’s somepony we can save there. And all the while, we can feel him, feel him just at the edge, a little light in the darkness. His life, slowly slipping away, and we have to ignore him, to dig through all the other dead ponies to find a live one worth digging towards.”

Dag kept on rubbing her back. He felt a slight popping sound from one of her vertebrae; the muscle around it still needed work.

“That’s not the worst of it,” she said darkly. “Usually they’re either just dead, or they’re alive, if slowly suffocating. Once, though… once….”

She shuddered.

“One group was trying to dig its way out,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Fairly close by. They were digging, and they found a door. They were probably hoping for food storage, or a cistern.” Her voice was entirely devoid of emotion now. “They opened it. It was a coal storage room.”

Dag stopped.

“It was still burning. The moment they broke through, it came right back to life.”

After a few seconds, he remembered himself and continued kneading.

“We saw it — felt it — burn right through the door, burn down the shaft and through all of them. Felt them die, burning to death, trapped underground, with only a dozen feet of solid bedrock between them and one of the cisterns.”

She shuddered once, twice, and he realized she was laughing.

“If they had dug the other way, they’d have drowned to death instead.”

Again Dag said nothing. What could he do? He had had no idea… none of them had.

That was the point, he realized. Get the unicorns to scry out the tunnels, figure out which direction would save the most ponies and get them the supplies they needed to stay alive. All while avoiding those who were already dead, avoiding the coal fires just waiting for a whiff of oxygen to spark them to life.

Sorting between the living and the dead, figuring out who was worth saving and who wasn’t — the unicorns did the real dirty work. They just did the heavy lifting.

“We have to go,” said LeFleur.

“Mm. Go where?”

“Out.” She lifted herself up a bit, enough to get an eyebrow out and arch it at him. “I’m being serious. Maybe I don’t look like it, but I am.”

“What do you mean, ‘out’?” he asked, pressing her back down to continue his ministrations.

“I mean, out of this,” she said, waving a forehoof vaguely towards the main tunnels and up at the ceiling. “Out of here. Out of Blackacre itself.”

Dag licked his lips; she sensed his hesitation.

“There’s a reason we’re in here,” she said, thumping the slab. “Soundproof. Say what you want; I don’t care. I haven’t told them anything you’ve ever told me.”

“What, you’re not a plant? Not reporting everything I say?”

With remarkable agility she flipped to a side and caught his hoof mid-knead.

“Never,” she said, staring deep into his eyes.

After a moment she broke contact, released the hoof, and settled back on her stomach.

“Though Celestia knows they tried.” She laughed. “Look, we’re — we; hah — we’re even still using the Princess in our figures of speech.”

“I did notice that,” said Dag, glad to latch onto something he could comment on without much hesitation.

“Anyway — we have to go. To get out of here.”

“I…” he started. “I don’t know.”

“What else would we do?” she asked. “Blackacre’s burned out. I don’t know what’s happening on the surface, but I can’t possibly imagine it will be good for any of us in general.”

“And in particular?”

“In particular?” she said, the smile plain in her echo. “I, for one, am the lead negotiator of what’s looking an awful lot like the losing side in a war. They’re not going to need me for anything. If there are even any terms, which I wouldn’t bet on, they’d be negotiated straight with Beatrix the Great herself, probably in chains, probably in the council chamber of the Castle Tower.”

“And that’s the good scenario,” she said absently. “Worst case, then I’m a traitor, rogue, something of the sort. The rank and file will get off, but if they’re pushing the traitor angle, then there’ll need to be some sort of punishment on leadership. Probably not executions, probably, but I would not at all be surprised to be facing down double-digit terms in the Canterlot dungeons.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Dag, but it was halfhearted and they both knew it. He would have said that about firebombing Blackacre, two weeks ago. Now, though… who knew. It couldn’t be good.

“Not that you’re getting off any better, of course,” she added with a shrug. “Unless you forgot, papers pegged you as the turncoat who scuttled the talks and blew up the Mane.”

“How,” he said in a tone that begged the absurd, “did they connect me to the bombing of an airship.”

“No clue,” she said, “but they did it. Somehow. Anyway, you’re involved. Remember, most witnesses are dead, the only ones who are alive saw the Blackacre delegation save your life, and pretty much everypony short of Celestia herself pegged you as the turncoat.”

“They blame me —”

“No,” she said. “It was going to happen anyway. Everyone agreed on that with the wonderful green-tinted glasses of hindsight. You just happened to be the pony at the center of it all. A tool, maybe. But you still did it.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Of course it is.”

“You’ll back my story.” he said. “Everypony here will!”

“And what stock will they put in that?” she asked gently. “Great; the ponies in the dungeons say Dag Hammer is a-okay. That won’t get you anywhere.”

“But the others.”

“If you really were a super-deep-cover double agent, then maybe nopony knew about you except Beatrix herself. And her word won’t be worth the paper it’ll be printed on, if they bother to.”

She shook her head gently. “You’ve been thoroughly burned, Dag. Even if you managed to get out of here and rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of the government, what do you have to go back to?”

At that he stopped entirely. Sitting back up, LeFleur tugged on his forehoof; it yielded without resistance, pulling him to a seated position on the slab next to her.

“They all died in that explosion,” she said, softly and with infinite sorrow. “The same one they pin on you.” She gently rested a hoof on his cheek. “It doesn’t make sense, but they don’t care. The Equestrian public already tried and convicted you.”

Dag slumped, and for a minute he said nothing.

“Then that’s it,” he said, voice devoid of emotion not by attempt but by default. “That’s it,” he repeated.

“It doesn’t have to be,” she said.

Slowly, he turned to face her, blinking in confusion at the light in her eyes.

“We found a tunnel to the surface,” she said. “There are still fires up there, and there’s nopony alive, and the scout saw Air Patrol flyers, so they can’t use it for anything, but we can get up there. We’ll just say we’re up to scry for surface-level tunnels from a different point of view, triangulation.”

“And?” he asked. “Where does that get us? To the surface?” He barked a laugh.

“The moment we get out of here, we run,” she said with a quiet intensity. “I hear tonight’s a full moon, so there should be enough light; we can get bearings by the stars. We go east, always into the east.”

“That’s… the river.”

“And down the river, through the river, that’ll get us to Hayseed.”

“The Swamps —”

“Will give us cover,” she finished for him, eyes alight. “And we can follow the river to Horseshoe Bay. I still have some contacts in Baltimare; I can get us passage.”

“Passage?” he asked. “On what?”

“On a ship,” she said with a broad smile.

“To where?”

She spread her hooves wide. “Anywhere.”

“Anywhere… that’s not Equestria,” he realized.

“My contact does freight runs to Brandenbuck,” she said. “You know, with the gate?”

“With the gate,” he echoed.

“Right,” she said with a quick nod. “Favors will only get me so far, and we can probably pick up piecework to make ends meet. Stevedoring isn’t the easiest, but I’d rather that than scry, and you’ll like it better than mining.” She shrugged. “At least there’ll be fresh air. After we pick up a few bits, we can get train tickets farther inland.”

“Inland.”

“Towards Strasbuck,” she affirmed. “Honestly I don’t like the sea much, and I’d rather not hang around communities closer to where the news comes in. I don’t think either of us would be recognized, but I don’t want to chance it if I can avoid it. Besides, I have some family there. Not close, but family’s family, and they can probably spare a bite or two to eat, a warm shower.”

“Maybe put us up for a few days,” LeFleur nodded absently to herself. “At least until we can pick up a few more bits, take care of ourselves. Neither of us will be able to draw down on official accounts, so we’ll have to live hoof to mouth for a while, but we can do it.”

“Do… it.”

“There’s a lot going on in Strasbuck,” she shrugged. “Food, fashion, lots of craftsponies and the like. Big university, too. Teaching doesn’t pay much, but between you and me I think we could work up a decent curriculum for something. Maybe Equestrian literature. Get some adjunct courses, maybe angle for a tenure-track position in a few years —”

“LeFleur,” said Dag.

She blinked.

“You want us to run away to Strasbuck.”

She licked her lips.

“By breaking out of this compound,” he continued, “escaping Blackacre, making it through Canterlot’s lines to Baltimare, hopping a smuggler’s ship and praying nopony pulls us aside in Brandenbuck, and scrape together enough bits to make it to a little city on another continent where nopony knows us, where we then have to build a life from scratch.”

“When you put it that way,” she said with a thin smile. “Look, I’ve worked out the numbers. I’m pretty sure that we can make it out of here; I’ve got enough pull with the crews so that we shouldn’t be missed until we make it far enough out. I had a look at the local tactical maps,” she continued, gesturing as if to invisible notes, “and I figure we can ballpark it to the river, and from there work out to the swamps. With a full moon, if we’re covered in mud, I think we’ve got a good shot —”

Dag held up a hoof, and she stopped short.

“You’re forgetting one important thing,” he said slowly.

She frowned at that, and quickly too. “What —”

“I trust you.”

The retort died on her lips as she saw his mouth quirk upwards.

“I only need to know one thing,” said Dag. “Do you think we can do it?”

“I think we’ve got a good chance at —”

He cut her off with a raised hoof.

“Do you believe we can do it.”

She regarded him for a moment, eyes deep in thought. Then —

“Yes.”

And in eyes of pure seafoam he knew that they would.

Dag gave a single nod.

“Then let’s go.”