Chapter 1
Jian’s work station was filled with murders. The smooth white orb covered with inscriptions, shattered in a corner. Copper coils sparking with electricity, twisted and bent out of shape on the floor. Dense clouds enchanted with pure pegasus magic. All murders…
Except one. The old red pegasus lifted her newest contraption off the table with a smile. It was a small transparent gem, with thin, almost microscopic flakes of metal in the exact middle of every part of the invisible crystalline lattice. And around each bit of aluminum were tiny runes, so small it was the work of days to make the tiniest section visible, much less change them. She’d spent over twenty years on her current project to make one simple modification.
No murder had come from her use of it. Not yet.
Final Dawn hadn’t expected the end to come so fast. The near-certain possibility of death had been on his mind from the start, but he hadn’t considered that he’d die before even reaching the dungeon.
He tried to move, to make one last attempt to run or fight, but he only managed a slight twitch in one of his legs. His killer took the short knife and stabbed him again. The weapon seemed to drink his blood, leaving the ceramic surface the same brilliant white it had been when he’d first seen it.
“Stop moving. You might die too fast.” The pegasus said, taking something out of her saddlebags and examining it. Her rust-red feathers flicked against each other in a gesture of complete unconcern, as if she wasn’t even going to acknowledge the pony she’d just murdered.
He choked out a curse, choking on the blood in his throat. She’d stabbed him there first. He didn’t know why. There was nopony to call to for help. He tried to do something. Anything. There were earth ponies who could give themselves the properties of a stone, ones who could reform their bodies to instantly heal any wound that didn’t kill. He’d never been successful before, but maybe…
He writhed against the rough surface of the road in frustration. Nothing worked.
Then the pegasus stood up. “Alright, this should do it. Hold still.”
No. He was not going to hold still. He was going to make this as difficult as possible, to fight against every—
She slid the knife into a spot behind his neck, and everything below that point went numb. He couldn’t delude himself any longer. There would be no escape, no sudden saviour, no change of heart. He was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“W-Why?” he gasped. If he was going to die, then he wanted an answer for it. Pegasi could rarely stand the monotony of daily city life; almost every one of them went adventuring. Their rarity, along with this one’s striking coloration, made him sure he hadn’t seen this one before in his life.
She kept her silence as she pressed a crystal-clear stone against his forehead. The word shredded itself to painful pieces before his eyes. Every sense he had was painfully ripped apart and destroyed. Sight went first, non-shapes and anti-colors spiraling across his vision in sanity-destroying waves. Then his hearing left in scraps of shrieking sound. On and on it went until he was left in complete darkness.
He couldn’t even scream.
Eventually, he saw the spark. It was tiny, a point of light in an otherwise absolute darkness that he at first thought was a hallucination. But unlike the others, it never went away. After a long period of study, he determined that it was mostly blue, but sometimes shifted colors. It was close. He felt like he could touch it, if he wanted, but for a while stayed his hoof for fear of it going away.
Then he reached out to it. He didn’t use his mouth or hooves, because they didn’t exist, but he felt it all the same. As soon as he did, it rushed into him.
Final Dawn kept the spark inside of himself until it grew into a roiling ball of energy. Feeling experimental, he pinched off a tiny part and threw it at the darkness. It receded, and everything was outlined with a coating of blue.
He was in a hollow in the side of a mountain, in a small space that was barely a proper cave. Packed dirt and rocks made up an uneven floor. Stone crawled up the walls and made up the ceiling, surrounding all sides except one. From that direction came the sense of an empty void through which nothing existed. Dawn’s awareness recoiled back to the center of the hollow, where something small and round sat that he knew was him. It was as familiar as his old pony-self had been, a gem with delicate symbols of meaning inside.
But the energy that now coated the place felt wrong, like somepony else could just come in and take it. He quickly gathered up the tiny bits of energy, and the world returned to darkness. Maybe he just needed to keep his connection with them. After a moment of consideration, he put them back out again, but tried to keep his grip on them. They highlighted his surroundings the same way, but immediately felt better.
Then his mind caught up to what he was doing. He was dead, right? That crazy pegasus had stabbed him a lot with that knife. Then she’d put something to his forehead.
Something, now that he thought about it, that had looked a lot like the gem that was him.
So he was a piece of magic crystal now? Why? There was nopony around him. Just stone and dirt and an exit that felt like an empty, devouring void. What was he supposed to do?
Well...he could try to get his body back. If he made enough magic, he could spread it everywhere and find the pegasus. Maybe she’d stored his body, kept it safe with charms and shields, and he could go back the moment he found it. It was probably a futile hope, but what else was he supposed to do?
So Final Dawn threw magic out into the void. It settled onto dewy grass, and he felt cold hard moonlight. He quickly withdrew the magic, leaving the outside unable to shake the feeling that he needed walls and tunnels and rooms and caves to protect himself from the nothingness.
It must be the stone he was in. Something about it didn’t like the outside, and the fear only intensified when he tried to fight it. Still, didn’t mean he was going to just give up.
It had turned from night to day to night again before he gave up. Each time he flung his magic out into the open, even while maintaining his connection to it, the utter emptiness he sensed caused him to withdraw and flee back inside the cave.
Then a pony found him.
Disembodied hooves trotted through his hollow. Final Dawn tried to make sense of it. Was somepony standing outside throwing in horseshoes? No. He knew with certainty that he could tell with difference, though he didn’t know how. These were the real thing. Was the mysterious pony using a spell that hid everything but their hooves? Maybe, but that didn’t make much sense. Without any reasonable explanation, he decided to try throwing some magic out into the...void. It would be quick. Just a few seconds, to make sure nopony was out there.
He took hold of some of the magic with his connection. It flowed toward the exit, toward the endless nothing. Along the way, it flew through the area above the phantom hooves.
The rest of the pony was revealed. She had a thin plating of green armor covering her, made of a material Dawn instinctively knew was orichalzine. Leather saddlebags sat between two outstretched wings, lightning arcing between the feathers and ionizing the air around the pegasus, and an amulet bursting with energy hung from her neck.
He was an idiot. He could only feel things inside the magic. Just coating every surface with it left anything above or below invisible to him. The magic needed to be everywhere for him to see anything.
Dawn drew all the magic back into himself, then flung it out again. This time, instead of letting it fall where it may, he pushed it again and again, making it all fly around the small cave like a miniature snowstorm. The pegasus flinched back, seemingly able to sense the magic as it moved, and looked around warily. He ignored her for now, trying to concentrate on keeping the magic from clumping up. Eventually, it all resolved into a single massive tornado-like pattern, spinning around and catching everything that went on.
Then the pegasus took another step toward the middle of the room. Suddenly, he had an instinctive urge to make her go away. She was too close, and he didn’t have the resources or ability to challenge her. She didn’t belong. He piled magic into a dense structure within his crystal, building with the same instinct that told him she needed to leave. Once he finished, it wavered and resolved into something different, something that he took without consciously knowing how and activated. A superheated beam of energy flashed out of his crystal and zoomed toward her, a jagged arrow made of lightning.
She must have been ready for it. She stretched a wing toward the lightning with unreal speed. The bolt curled inward and joined the electricity already sparking around her.
Final Dawn’s panic grew. He formed another portion of his magic into a shape that turned out to be ice, which cracked against her armor, shot a fireball which splashed onto the wall behind where she had been standing, and flung a bolt of pure darkness at her. She batted it aside with a wing, which immediately began to darken. She frowned and took a leather pouch full of a liquid that was almost as full of magic as her armor and took a sip. Her wing returned to normal.
There wasn’t enough magic left inside his crystal to form into another attack, unless he took the bits that were whirling around him, and he would rather die than go back to the darkness. It was too much like the void outside.
The pegasus put the pouch away and started speaking. Dawn couldn’t hear, but he could see the movements her mouth was making through the magic in the air. Unfortunately, he couldn’t read lips. She reached back into her bags and threw something to the ground. It was a seed, full to bursting with magic. She nodded toward it, then left.
And Dawn was once again alone, with most of his magic spent, able to see only the inside of his prison. He examined the seed. Something about the pony hadn’t let him draw on any of the magic inside of her, or the things she carried. Now that she was gone, though, he felt he could easily reach inside the seed and take the magic for himself. He extended his mental grasp toward it, then hesitated. The pegasus could have done anything. She could have smashed his crystal without a thought, and after his attacks she might have even been justified. But she hadn’t. She’d given him the seed. The magic could be tainted or something, but that just seemed like a more roundabout way of smashing his crystal. The more likely explanation was that she wanted him to have it. He mulled it over, then withdrew. It would grow, and he would watch it. If it did anything suspicious, he would drain it.
As it turned out, watching plants grow was boring. Oh, at first he spent a lot of time looking at the magic swirling around inside, but the magic-sight was becoming more normal to him every day. He could even tell different colors apart with it. Without being able to understand what the magic was actually doing in the plant, he quickly lost interest. Dawn spent his time trying to figure out a way to spread magic outside in a way that wouldn’t trigger the instinctive fear of the void. Eventually, he found one.
It was slow and expensive, but it worked. Forcing magic through anything non-living or that didn’t already have some magic inside of it was a difficult endeavor, but eventually he was able to stuff a bunch of the blue energy into the floor beneath his gemstone. It filled a circle of dirt and stone about a meter wide that was deepest at the center, and became shallower near the edges. The effort took a few days, measured by the times the light he could now sense streaming into his tiny cavern rotated between the soft silver of the moon and a bright glare from the sun. When he was done, he was almost out of magic and felt a curious state of semi-exhaustion where only his mind felt weary. Since he didn’t have a body.
He really needed to get that back, if he could. And if he couldn’t, maybe he would make a one. You could just stuff something full of magic and make it live, right?
But that was a last resort. He could put magic into solid matter. It would be a lot slower than just flinging magic all over the world, but he had time.
Dawn extended his reach downward and got to work.
He hadn’t kept track of the time. All he knew was it took a lot of it, but eventually he had the entirety of the small mountain he was in suffused with his magic, and a good portion of the land surrounding it as well. The problem was that it was way too slow, and just like he hadn’t been able to sense the pegasus walking around inside his cave when his magic had been coating the walls and floor, he couldn’t sense anything above the soil.
For a while he was stymied, until he really considered what he was. He hadn’t thought too hard about it until now (he tried attributing all his moments of stupidity to shock, but couldn’t get past the fact that he couldn’t really feel emotions too strongly in his current state), but he was a dungeon. Everypony knew what dungeons were. They allowed the large portion of the population that wasn’t born into a family or guild to get a measure of power. Dawn himself had been on his way to one to pay off an artifact he’d bought, an artifact that was probably being seized along with the tiny room he’d been renting after he hadn’t returned to pay his debts. But he was getting off track. He was a dungeon. Somehow, the pegasus who’d killed him had put him in a gemheart. And if she’d done that, she must have had a reason. He just needed to give her whatever reason she needed to come back. Did she want a dungeon she alone controlled? The visit of the pegasus from earlier made that possibility a lot more distinct. Everyone knew what those kinds of ponies did, of course; they were Surveyors, adventurers powerful enough to exist without anypony else backing them up, and daring enough to investigate reports of new dungeons even with the likely chance that the report had the location of an ambush meant to kill ponies and take their artifacts. All she needed to do was give an adventuring guild his location and a small percentage of everything taken from his dungeon would go to her.
And to get her to come back, he’d have to start making stuff that would give adventurers a profit.
The only problem with that was that he had no idea how. Everypony took for granted that you would find coins, powerful artifacts, herbs, and higher metals in dungeons if you could defeat the challenges they set up, but nopony said how. Could Dawn just spin the magic he had into physical objects like he had with those spells?
It was worth a shot.
As it turned out, trying to build spells or objects out of magic without that instinct he’d had guiding him before was a fruitless undertaking. He could recreate the bolts of flame, ice, lightning, and darkness from before, but they always went in the exact same direction with the exact same effects and used the exact same amounts of magic. He tried picking apart the magic that made them, but the compact swirls of magic that built them up were too entangled and shifted even while he was looking at it. There needed to be another way.
Dawn eventually turned his attention to the rocks and dirt he had infused with his magic. He had an intimate understanding of everything his magic touched, from the tiny bits of metals within the stone to the nutrients and tiny creatures living within the earth. It wasn’t possible to just study the structure of the stone and recreate it by putting his magic in the same pattern like he had with the spells, since magic was made entirely different from anything physical. He found out how to shift the soil around, making towers of dirt outside in the void, but it wasn’t until he broke apart a section of dirt in frustration that he stumbled upon the answer.
When he split the ground into a soupy mess, he noticed something. The soup was full of tiny particles, smaller even than that first spark of magic. These particles weren’t like magic. Where all of magic was built from the same exact essence, the pieces that made up the ground were not. They were made from dozens and dozens of different pieces. And when he tried to put them back together, they made something new, huge particles that flew apart when he mashed them into each other. When he tried to keep them together, they exploded. He barely kept it contained with a field of magic around it, and everything within the area was charred. By carefully picking apart the tiny pieces of matter that made up the rock in his cave, he was finally able to slide the pieces together in the exact same arrangement and recreate anything within his magic. He was even able to recreate what he somehow knew was pure aluminum, traces of which he found inside the rock. Gold, silver, copper, iron, and other ores were just as easy, though the higher metals eluded him. He even recreated an earthworm after a few dozen attempts that ended rather...messily.
By that time, the mysterious plant had grown. The magic inside of it looked to have been a way to control its growth, because all of it was gone. Its roots stretched through the soil, and a thick green stem poked above the ground. On top of it a cluster of three small tentacles thrashed, tipped with thirsty thorns. Dawn felt at it for a while, confused. Why would the adventurer have given this to him? If every dungeon could turn dirt into gold, why not just give him a bunch of coins? It was a mystery he didn’t have enough information to puzzle out, so he reached out with a mental shrug and picked the plant apart in his mind. Then he dissolved another part of his cave, hollowing out more of the mountain, and formed the pieces into a duplicate of the plant, this one at the entrance, as if to guard him from the light that streamed in from the void. Its tentacles writhed and it stretched toward the entrance. Dawn fed it some magic, then retreated back to his thoughts.
The pegasus and adventurers both seemed content to wait for him to do something, but he didn’t know what that something was supposed to be. Make gold and let them take it? As soon as he had that thought, another part of him spoke up, the part of him that had the fear of the void outside and the part of him that had taken control when he’d made those spells that he’d shot off at the adventurer.
That wouldn’t be fair, it insisted. Letting them just stroll in and take whatever they want without being challenged is wrong.
Final Dawn hit a wall. Just like his attempts to spread magic outside into the void, the feeling that just creating valuable metals and leaving them out wouldn’t be fair wouldn’t leave him. He could fight it for a time and leave out a few blocks of gold and aluminum in his cave, but then the feeling that it just wasn’t right would overwhelm him and he’d dissolve them back into their discrete parts.
So something about being a dungeon wouldn’t let him do that. Then it hit him: He was trying to figure out ways to get ponies to come to him without actually being a dungeon. All he needed to do was be more dungeon-like. Unfortunately, he had no firsthoof experience as to what dungeons were like. He was a city pony through and through. Still, he could use stories as his base. Dungeons were said to be big, with multiple separate rooms and levels, each with distinct themes. They were supposed to reward adventurers for defeating difficult obstacles, and punish those who tried to cheat. It all made a lot of sense. There were no stories of dungeons that were aboveground, unless they’d taken the shape of a castle of inhabited a flying island, and even then they didn’t show themselves at the parts that were in direct sun or moonlight. They gave out valuables after their challenges were defeated, and didn’t just give out stuff for free, an aversion he’d directly experienced.
Maybe he could put a bit of coin next to those tentacle plants?
A few seconds of concentration and three round copper pieces popped out of the ground next to each plant, fully formed. He’d have difficulty with them if he were still a pony, but not so much that it would make three whole coppers just laying there an unattractive prospect. It felt...fair, and he didn’t have the need to reabsorb them. He’d need something more threatening for anything more.
He had his first traps. What to do next? Making the place roomier seemed like a good option. He already had the entire mountain infused with magic, so it was the work of a few days to make a winding path through the entire thing, eventually ending at a small room at the bottom. Dawn had a ton of leftover matter, so he took over some more land below the mountain and hollowed it out as well, then compacted the spare material and left it there for later use.
Now that was done...could he move his gemheart? Dawn sunk the ground under his heart, pulling it under until it was out of sight and reach of anypony who might come in. It didn’t last long. It needed to be accessible for anypony who got past all of his defenses. If it wasn’t, then he wasn’t being fair.
And then his crystal was once again on the floor of the cave, right next to the entrance, where the void was. Okay. He couldn’t simply hide his gemheart, but maybe he could move it to the end of the tunnels. He took hold of the ground underneath it and shifted the crystal to the very last room he’d made.
It was ugly and minimalistic, but there wasn’t much else he could do aside from shifting the walls and creating more of those tentacle plant things, and he was planning to change it up as soon as he found more things to flesh everything out with. In time meantime, he was settled on fiddling with the spells. It was difficult work and required intense concentration. He had to expand the structure the magic made to see what each individual part did, and the lapse of a single moment of concentration would cause the entire thing to implode.
He’d figured out how to change the direction they would fly in when another group of ponies came.
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Missing tags.
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Which ones?
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Thats’s not my job. If you can’t figure out what tags to give your story, plot it out, step back, and think about what tags it needs.
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I'd rather not. Thanks for the opinion, though.
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First thing in general rules.
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Thank you for your concern.
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