Spear of the Windigos (Daring Do #2)

by BookeCypher

Chapter 10

Daring cast another glance back toward their camp, but kept pressing forward. As much as she didn't want to admit it, Zapapple was right. They didn't have time for her to fight her on the idea of splitting up – they had a country to save. Daring swallowed nervously at that idea. First real adventure and she had to save the world – she sure knew how to pick them, didn't she?

The camp was already out of sight, gone in the whiteout conditions of the snowstorm. With little to see behind her, Daring turned her attention to the looming shadow of the castle ahead of her. She was glad that the storm had seemed to have died down since the Windigo herd and ran through – the winds had dropped to almost nothing, and only the lightest of dusting's was falling from above. It did leave her wondering just what, exactly, was keeping enough snow airborne to whiteout everything.

Probably magic, Daring figured.

With no idea where those Raptorian guys might be, Daring warily made her way around the edge of the castle until she found herself once again looking up at the main entrance to the castle. “Tempting, but...no.” Yeah, Daring thought as she flew further along, walking in the front door seemed like a good idea... if she wanted to get caught again.

She kept making her way around the edge of the castle, on edge as she jumped at every little sound that her mind decided to interpret as 'griffon about to lunge on you'. It meant that by the time she reached a caved in section of roof she was already tired before she had even really started. “Well,” Daring muttered to herself as she eyed the hole. “here goes nothing.”

She dropped down through the hole, landing on the floor after a short fall. She took a quick look around. No waiting griffons. No monsters readying to pounce. No booby traps. “Huh,” Daring said after a moment. Part of her had been expecting...well, something.

Well, she'd take whatever good luck she could get at the moment. With little idea where she was going, Daring simply turned in the direction she thought was toward the rest of the castle and started walking. These tunnels were, barring the hole she had come in by, better preserved then the others she had seen – little snow had found its way in, and gems along the top of the walls cast the entire space in eerie blue light. The walls were covered in the same murals they had seen before – some were scenes she recognized from her own history lessons, while others were repeats of the earlier murals. A few were new, but she didn't pause long enough to give them more than a cursory look. Most of them seemed to be variations of the same theme – a cottage surrounded by a blizzard. She didn't want to dwell on what that might have meant for Equestria at the moment.

She stepped around the next turn in the tunnel and found herself blinking as she stepped out the the low blue glow of the gems into the harsh reflected white light of outside. It took her a second to recover from the blinding glare to figure out where it was coming from – a familiar set of towering windows, their glass long since gone – were arranged on either side. The room wasn't as tall as the main chamber she had passed through with that Ahuizotl creature, but the windows were definitely the same distinctively carved stone frames and just past them she could recognize a few of the stone crags from before even from a different angle. Somepony had gone through a lot of trouble to build a two-story grand hall – but, then, somepony had gone through a lot of trouble with this entire complex.

Still, if this was right under that booby trapped main floor, then that meant that whatever was at the other end was right under the main vault. Well, that had to be interesting, right?

The only problem was that the entire floor ahead of her was probably rigged to horribly kill her if she wasn't careful.
She shifted her wings a little as she grinned. Yeah, right. No rope, no angry Raptorian mercenaries, no raging torrent of snow. This would take ten seconds, tops.

Daring took wing and started across the intervening space at a slow, careful pace. She might not have to worry about ground-bound traps, but there were plenty of ways to make life difficult for a flier, especially when you know exactly were they will be.
Like in the middle of a big old secret grand hall.

So, she was only slightly surprised when she managed to trigger something as she crossed the room. How, she wasn't sure – maybe it was the overpressure from her wing flaps, or maybe she had blocked the wrong beam of light. All she knew was that she could suddenly hear the distinct sound of stone sliding against stone from somewhere overhead. She looked up to see a block as big as she was sliding free of the ceiling and plunging toward her. “Celestia, I hate being right all the time.” Daring muttered before she rolled out of the way of the stone.
She barely had enough time to catch her breath as the sound of another stone sliding free forced he back into motion. Heavy crashes thundered through the hall and out the paneless windows as the entire ceiling seemed intent on killing Daring. She dodged and weaved through the indoor rockfall, but the stones seemed to keep coming. “How...” She huffed as she quickly reversed direction to avoid becoming a pink smear. “...did they fit so many darn stones up there?”

Daring could feel her wings beginning to strain, and her lungs burned from the excursion. The only thing that kept her moving was the knowledge that stopping would be a really, really bad idea. She ducked low as another stone block came down on her, her feathers brushing across the underside of the stone before she shot clear of it and juked around a second stone. The other side of the chamber was almost in reach – she was three-quarters of the way there – when the room changed tactics.

A sudden change in the air pressure below her was the only warning she got as the floor suddenly shot up at her. She rolled to the side as the column suddenly burst from the floor, coming close enough to brush against her side. Another sudden rush of air sent her bolting nearly straight up as a second column came rushing up, with a matching stone falling down from above to catch her in the middle.

A pump of her wings sent her clear of the trap, save for a few tail hairs, as the stones exploded in a rain of shrapnel. She hissed in pain as a sharp chunk of dark rock grazed her side, blood welling up along the cut, but she didn't slow down. She was almost there.

The room, however, seemed intent on tearing itself apart before she could make it. Thundering hammer falls of columns meeting their falling counterparts made the chamber sound like the center of a lighting storm. She could feel more rock raining down on her, she could feel the traps trying to kill her, forcing her to dodge and weave as she crossed that last bit of distance.

A low rumbling that dwarfed anything she had heard before came a moment before all the columns shot back into the floor before they began to rise again, this time around the very door she was trying to reach.

And this time they weren't going back down.

Daring put everything she had left into one final burst of speed as she shot toward the door. To her left and right, columns shot up to the roof, closing in on her sides. The final hoof full of columns that would close off the center were already rising as she crossed the threshold.
For a brief instant, all Daring saw was the massive form of a stone column shooting up toward her.

And then she was clear, crashing into the far wall, bouncing off it and slamming into the solid mass of stone that was now behind her before she dropped to the floor.

The small landing was dark for a moment before a string of gem lights flickered to life somewhere overhead. Daring was too tired to actually look. She just laid slumped on the floor, trying to catch her breath and get herself back under control after yet another near-death experience in way-to-soon. After a moment, Daring finally managed to get her breathing back under control. “I really...” she muttered between heavy breathes, “...should have let Zap do this.” She wasn't sure how Zapapple would have gotten through that horribleness, but she was sure she would have managed somehow. Maybe just waited until the room smashed itself to bits – that fit with Zap's style. The methodical, think-then-act approach. Daring didn't have the patience for that – she much preferred to dive in and work it out as she went. Then again, if you ran into a brick-wall in your research, it didn't risk you getting squashed like a bug.

It took her another minute or three for her to get back onto her hooves and finally take a look at the door that she had just risked her flank to reach. Like the floor upstairs, the door had little to no sign of a locking mechanism, and no indication of how to open it at first glance. Unlike the one upstairs, this one at least had a seam down the middle from floor to ceiling, so at least she could tell where it would probably open. There were no convenient hoofprint indents this time. Daring started poking around the edge of the door and, when that didn't uncover anything, she started poking around the floor. Zapapple would probably have taken issue with her haphazard search pattern, but in the end the results were the same – no obvious levers or switches. Figures. Things were never like they were in the books. “Well,” Daring thought out loud, “If it isn't obvious it must be un-obvious.” She took another look around the dimly lit space, trying to think where you could hide a switch. The first one had been a pressure pad – a hoof only pressure pad, Daring remembered. Only a pony – or, perhaps a Zebra – could have triggered it. It was why Ahuizotl had kept her and Zap around when he had.

“So,” Daring said as she stepped toward the door, laying both her front hooves on it, “how would I make sure only a pony could open my door?” Not magic – they would have used a fancy scanning spell on the other door if they had one. Maybe a test? Not full-proof, sure, but neither was the hoof test.

She took another look at the door. The edge of it was covered with a collection of symbols. Hoofs, claws, suns, wings, paws, antlers and horns. They tiled the edge of the stone, which seemed odd. Most of the rest of the ruins had been covered in engravings. “I wonder...” She thought as she reached a hoof out to the nearest hoof tile. As soon as she tapped it, it receded into the door, followed by the next two up and down the row, and then the two after that. The tiles rippled around the door until they reached the other side and the chamber echoed with a low click as some sort of mechanism tripped.

“Okay then,” Daring murmured to herself as she looked for the next tile. “Lets go with horns next...” She reached for the nearest horn tile, but then the ground shifted. Maybe it was the ruin settling – she'd heard of that happening to some ponies. Maybe one of the stone traps outside had fallen over. Maybe the whole place was about to fall off the side of the mountain.

All Daring knew was that she had just pressed an antler tile by mistake.

“...oops.” Daring squeaked out before throwing herself backwards. An instant later her paranoia was rewarded as there was a heavy thunk from somewhere deep and the floor she had just been standing on slammed shut like a giant stone maw. These guys really didn't believe in second chances, it seemed.

Daring waited for the floor to return to its original position before tentatively toeing her way to it. She gave it a quick poke, but it seemed unresponsive. Taking a deep breath, Daring stepped back onto the stones and started again.

This time she managed to press the horn tile without incident. The same rippling pattern passed around the doors edge as the matching tiles sunk back. That left just the last tile.

Daring slowly reached out toward the wing tile, tapping it before she braced herself. For a moment, nothing happened. She wondered if something had gone wrong – she was sure she had the right tiles, but did she have the right order? Was there some clue in all of those murals she had passed that would have told her? Was she about to be killed by some horrible death trap?

The spiraling chain of negative thoughts came to an abrupt end when the door let out a thundering rumble. Daring could only watch as, slowly, the door that had nearly killed her twice finally swung open. The stone ground against the floor with a heavy screeching before coming to a lumbering stop.

Daring let go of a breath she didn't realize she was holding, and then almost immediately regretted it as she nearly choked on the stale air pouring out of the chamber in front of her. It smelled and tasted of must and decay, of things forgotten long enough that they probably should have stayed that way. Daring held a foreleg over her muzzle as she coughed at the foul air. The only upside was that, as foul as it was, it didn't smell...rotten. It didn't carry that sickening smell of decayed flesh.

Small mercies, she supposed.

The room beyond the door was almost pitch black, but after a moment more of those familiar looking gems started to light up the chamber in those same icy blue shades as the others. She carefully made her way into the waiting chamber, curious as to what could have been worth locking up underneath the single most dangerous thing she had ever seen.

The center of the room was an altar of some sort, a massive triangular stone piece polished to an almost mirror finish with a single pale sapphire set in the middle. The first thing that drew Daring's eye was the line of engravings around the tables age. “In the name of the three tribes...” Daring read out loud, “...May the cold embrace of darkness never plague us again...” For some reason, the words sent a strange chill down her spine. She quickly moved on.

The floor around the altar was covered in a giant engraving that, Daring thought, looked sort of like a giant snowflake. There seemed to be little else in the room, save for whatever decorated the walls.

At first glance, they looked like more of the same murals. In fact, some of the image was identical to things she had seen elsewhere. It was only when she reached a new part that she realized what she had found.

He quickly trotted around the room until she found what she was sure was the beginning before she started working her way down the wall, translating as she went an eyes slowly growing wider and wider.

It all finally fit.

It was, truth be told, a simple story – a stallion had simply wanted to protect his family. A stone carver by trade, he had walked out into the blizzard and begged it for reprieve. To his surprise, it granted his wish. With his newly gained power, he could keep the blizzard at bay, keep his family safe.

Of course, other ponies had heard of his little bubble of safety. And they came for it. They fought over it. They destroyed everything he had – first his home, then his wife. Then his child.

And in the background, the blizzard cackled.

Burdened by pain and grief, the carver attempted to rid himself of his cursed blessing. But it kept coming back. Again and again, it came back to torment him. He begged the blizzard, begged to know how to be rid of it. So it told him.

Build a temple, so that those who may want the blessing could claim it.

So he did. He built a temple, every bit a grand and as imposing as the blizzard desired. But he did more then that. He filled it with his secrets, his grief, his memories. He turned it into a memorial to what he'd lost.

But more then that, he turned it into a prison.

That carver, he was a clever pony. He knew others would come. And he knew the blizzard would tempt ponies to come. So he made sure they couldn't come. Made sure they couldn't get in – not without knowing just what they were after.

Because he couldn't destroy it, as much as he wanted to. It was too beautiful, to deadly – but above all, to important. It was the only thing that could stop the blizzard, could keep it from coming back.

So he hid it. Hid it deep, and hid it well. But he hid the real trick deeper. Until it was too late. He trapped the blizzard, but all it could do was rage and rage and rage against its own power, given of its own will.

The blizzard had created the key to its own prison.

Daring back petaled from the final mural, the final words of a broken pony before he walked into that white abyss to be with his family.
It all fit. It all finally fit.

There was a way to undo the damage. A way to save Equestria. A way to save her friend.

Daring gave the room one final look around before turning and rushing back out. The spear was more then just the cause of everything – it was the solution. And now she needed to find it.

The first problem she had to deal with was the stone wall surrounding the door. A few quick bucks and all she got were some sore hooves. She quickly started looking around for something else – anything else. “What sort of room leaves the pony who used it trapped?” Then again, she supposed it might be a design feature. Since she got the hall trap wrong, maybe it just assumed she shouldn't be there door-puzzle or not.

No, she couldn't think like that. It would mean she was trapped and everypony was doomed.

She quickly started poking around the edges of the chamber as she tried to remember the stories her father used to tell her. There was always a release hidden somewhere – in case the builder needed to reset the trap or got caught themselves. For a lot of traps, that little fact didn't matter since by the time you realized it was a trap it had already killed you. Here, however, it might have been her only chance.
She found something that seemed promising when she found a loose floor panel next to the ones that had tried to flatten her. It wasn't much, but the slab shifted just a little when she put all of her weight down on one corner. Some prodding around the edges with a wing was eventually rewarded and after some pulling and shoving she had the stone out of the way. That, unfortunately, wasn't nearly as helpful as she had hoped.

She was looking at some sort of cramp crawlspace, a series of long metal rods along one side. There was four separate rods, each one connected at either end to yet more rods. What kept the strange chains in tension, Daring had no idea. With little other recourse, Daring tugged on the top-most one.

There was a heavy snap and an instant later the familiar pair of slabs again slammed together with a thundering crash that left Daring's ears ringing. “Oh, sonofa...” Daring groaned as she reeled from the sound, rubbing at her now aching ears – which joined her aching wings, her aching legs and her aching sides. All she needed to do now was bite her tongue and she was fairly sure literally everything would hurt. Even her eyes hurt from the snow glare and straining to see through that constant whiteout.

Daring took another minute to let the ringing in her ears fade away before returning to her work on the little compartment. She gently nudged the top one out of the way before trying to tug on the second one. Nothing. It didn't so much as budge. “What the hay?” Daring muttered as she gave it another tug. It shifted a hair, but it might as well have been anchored in stone. She knew it moved – she'd watched it shift when she first popped the panel off. As if on cue, the rods shifted again as Daring quickly pulled her hoof back lest something got pulled in by the mechanism. The rod shifted to one side nearly its entire length, before shifting back about two-thirds of the way. Daring now had a much better view of the rods end, a small elbow joint linking it to the next rod in the chain. What sort of system would need to cycle like that? Too small to be a power linkage – maybe a timing mechanism? Something that kept the whole system in sync?

She wondered what would happen if she broke the timing.

With no other idea, she brought a hoof down on the small elbow joint. The aged metal, as well as it had survived centuries of cold and use, stood no chance under the sharp blow of a equine hoof and popped apart with a little snap. It was actually kind of anticlimactic.

Daring looked around the enclosed space for a minute, holding her breath as she waited. For a while, nothing happened and the chamber fell into an unnerving silence. Then, echoing through the stone, came a low grinding sound. It was not a pleasant sound, bringing to mind a train crash in slow motion or a piano being crushed by an anvil. Or a mixture of both.

The gem lights flickered for a moment as the grinding dragged on, and Daring started to worry that she might have made a terrible mistake. Then, finally, the grinding stopped. Daring let out a relieved breath as she glanced back at the stone columns blocking her way. None of them had moved. “Well,” She sighed, “so much for-”

There was another echoing, bone-rattling groan as something deep within the aging mechanism of the castle something gave. Something big.
A low, eerie groan filled the chamber as the ground shook beneath Daring's hooves. Ahead of her, there was the cracking of stone as, slowly, the stones blocking her way finally began to shift. The first began to tilt forward like a felled tree, and Daring let out a cheer of triumph.
Then the second one started falling inward.

Daring's cheer turned into a cry as she quickly bolted up and around the column. With two gone, she had ample room to escape back into the hall. What she found, however, made her jaw drop.

The sound of collapsing columns faded into the background as she stared around the room. She didn't know if it was a side-effect of the room trying to kill her, or a result of something she did with that panel, but the hall was utterly devastated. Once grand stoneworks had been reduced to rubble, and the entire floor was a cratered mess of stone shards and pony-sized chunks of rock that made the room look less like a castle hall and more like a lunar landscape. “Sweet Celestia...” Daring whispered to herself. The pony that built this place had not been messing around. She gave the altar chamber she had come here for one last look before she started picking her way through the destroyed hall.

After the thundering crashes of falling stones and the heavy darkness of the chamber, the silence and brightness of the now still hall was almost disorienting. Only the whistling of the wind outside and her hooves occasionally kicking a piece of rubble aside as she passed. “And it was such a nice castle too...” A small part of cried at the wanton destruction before her – it was an almost perfectly preserved example of pre-unification architecture, and she had leveled part of it! Actually, she realized belatedly, she had leveled several parts of the place. She had to fight the urge to just curl up right there, and even then she couldn't help but slump as she made her way across the room. “...I can't believe I ruined this place...” She wasn't sure how it could get worse.

And then, of course, it did.

She was about a half-dozen paces from the door when it slowly creaked open and a rather annoyed griffon snuck its head in, looking around with a glare that quickly settled on Daring.

Daring and the griffon stared at each other for a moment. Daring's ears flattened against her head. “Oh, horseapples.” The griffon shot forward in a blur of black feathers and gray fur, and Daring dodged upward just fast enough to let the Raptorian mook sail just under the her rear hooves. “Hey,” Daring shouted down at him as he pulled himself from a pile of rubble. “You haven't seen a big glowy spear-thing, have you?”

The griffon replied by snapping his wings open and snarling something at her in what sounded like Lyonese. Daring didn't speak it, but whatever he said didn't sound nice.

Daring sighed. “Didn't think so.”

Daring darted for the door as the griffon gave chase, but she had to pull back as the griffon swung around and tried to cut her off. Instead of heading for the door, she found herself shooting out one of the windows and swinging upward in an arc that took her straight into the hall above.

Her hooves clattered across the stone floor as she came to a stuttering halt. A quick look behind her showed the griffon shooting past and arcing over the roof. “Hah!” Daring said with a grin. “Probably thinks I headed for...the cloud layer...”

Around her, Daring found at least six griffons in various colors, sizes and levels of kit standing around, a few working with crates while others were seated at a folding table, cards in-claw. All of them were staring at her in dead silence. Daring gulped nervously as she slowly back-stepped. “So...any of you seen a spear?”

A cacophony of pry bars hitting the ground and chairs toppling over as the flock of griffons all charged Daring. Daring didn't bother hanging around and quickly threw herself back out the window, flaring her wings out as she rolled over into a steep dive.

The bleak gray stone of the cliff on which the ruined castle was perched sped by under her in a blur, mere inches away. Behind her, she could here the flaps of wings and squawks from her pursuers. “Buck me, buck me, buck me...” Daring cursed under her breath as she pumped her wings and drove herself faster. Below her, the ground was fast approaching, but couldn't slow down and risk the raptorians catching up with her. Time to do something Zapapple would call rash then. She took one final glance behind her to see how many were still following her. A quick count put it at... A lot. Well, she could work with that.

She flared her wings again, the combined force of the gee's and air resistance made her wing joints scream as she pulled out of her dive just above the valley floor. Behind her, she heard a flurry of squawks and wingbeats as the griffon's tried the same trick. Most of them failed. Daring let herself chuckle a little as she banked around. “That worked even better then I-”

The wind was knocked out her lungs as a griffon crashed into her from above. She guessed one of them must have made it after all.

Daring cursed as the two plunged toward the ground in a flurry of fur, feathers and claws. “Where the buck did you come from?” Daring growled as the ground quickly approached. All she got in reply was a hiss and some snapping beak. “Fine then!” Daring shouted as she twisted around mid-air.

The pair crashed into the snow-bank griffon-first, a plume of powder flying skyward before raining down on them. The snow showered back down onto the white-coated ground before the world fell calm again, quiet save for the gentle howling of the all-pervasive wind.
Then, popping of the ground like a daisy, a hoof and tan-furred leg burst forth followed closely by the body that owned it. Daring slowly pulled herself free of the snow, powder spilling off her as she finally freed herself and collapsed onto her back. One hoof idly brushed some lingering frost from her hat as she laid bonelessly on the white-coated ground.

She had nearly died. Again. That was at least three times in as many hours. She was sore, tired, and very, very cold.

But she was alive.

It was small, at first – just a little snort of laughter. Then it was followed by another. And then another. Soon she was cackling to herself as she laid on the side of that goddess-forsaken mountain. Her entire life had gone pear-shaped, all of Equestria was on the brink of ruin, and the bad guy had the upper-hoof.

But she was alive.

As her bout of surprised-to-be-alive hysteria finally passed, she rolled herself over and got back on her hooves. “Get ready, Ahuizotl,” Daring said with a grin. “I'm coming for you.”