Tales from Everfree City

by LoyalLiar

9-3

IX - III

Into the Valley of Death

In the end, the plan—despite Maelstrom's insistence on thought and deliberation—was no plan at all. There were no other ways out of the dungeons. At the colt's questioning, he learned that Tapfer was the best of the 'aeromancers' (as the griffons called those who could use weather magic) amongst the group; none of them were the equal of Cyclone's flames, to say nothing of Hurricane's magic—and it should be noted that it was Aela, not Maelstrom, who brought up the venerable pegasus as the point of comparison.

Aela was likewise the first, given in part her lack of injury, and in part the fact that she alone was equipped with a shield, to take a try at making it to the far end of the hall (it being wide enough for two griffons to walk side by side down it, but lacking the space for two griffons to fight in a pair). Before she left, she gave one of the shorter and yet more memorable pre-battle speeches I have ever had the amusement to hear (albeit secondhoof, much later): "We survived Magnus to get here. We will survive this. We are knights. We will advance."

The first few strides were simple enough, Quarrels from the arrow slits in the wall clattered off her shield and bounced or outright broke against the stone walls. Ahead, behind the portcullis, Legate Wrest called off further attacks with a raised wing, and in terrifying unison, her arbalists ceased their assault—though the quiet groaning of the winches as they reloaded continued..

"Spears, at ready," the pegasus ordered, and two dozen metal points were laid into the gaps between the lattice of the portcullis. She said nothing to Aela, but the brief glance the mare and the hen shared just past the lip of Aela's shield spoke volumes If Aela wanted to lift the portcullis by brute force—if she was even strong enough to—she still couldn't do so without exposing her flanks and back to the crossbows, nor without moving her shield aside far enough that the spears would pierce her chest.

Aela accepted the challenge without visible reaction; her aquiline eyes narrowed not in hatred, but in focus. Meaningfully, almost ominously, she took a single step forward.

One has to remember, on the telling of this story, that there was not a single pony amongst Legate Wrest's forces who had before ever faced—or even seen (save Artorius)—a living griffon. All they had were the stories of their parents and grandparents: stories that even a rank-and-file griffon was twice, if not thrice the strength of even a mighty pegasus (an exaggeration, but not a huge one) and could fly in a straight line twice as swiftly as well (likely an overstatement, though not by much). What they also did not know is that, unlike standard Legion technique for ground-bound, shield-carrying 'heavy' legionaries (who carried their spears in the crooks of their right wings and bound their shields to their left wings), griffons generally preferred to carry both spears and shields, like any other weapon, in a claw or strapped to a forearm—whether on the ground or whilst airborne.

Had one of them recognized this particular trait, perhaps they might have appreciated two further conclusions. The first was that Aela was, despite being a griffon, trained in combat in the Cirran style, and so they might have used that knowledge to their advantage.

The second, and much more immediately relevant fact, was that while her wings were occupied by her spear and shield, Aela's talons were completely free. So when she took a second carefully measured step forward, just reaching the very barest edge of thrusting range from the pegasus spears, a number of things happened in a very short amount of time.

First, several of the pegasi thrust through the holes in the portcullis, only to meet Aela's guard from her shield; standing as carefully positioned as she was, the spears from those pegasi at the fringes of the portcullis couldn't reach her, so none pierced her flesh. Second, Aela countered with a thrust of her own—catching one of the legionaries in the neck due to the advantage of her longer limbs and greater reach. The pony hadn't yet fallen before, in a third motion, Aela reached out and snatched the haft of one of the other thrusting spears, just below its head. And then fourth, she yanked with the fullness of her griffon strength on said spear. Its holder made the mistake of not letting go of the weapon, and he was slammed, face-first, into the opposite side of the portcullis. Only a breath later, Aela slammed her shield into her side of the portcullis, driving its hoof-width-long steel spike into the unfortunate stallion's eye—not deep enough to kill, though the gasp of agony that issued from the legionary might have made someone listening suspect otherwise.

The blow also caused a terrifying creaking in the portcullis separating Aela from the legion soldiers. The spearponies, seeing two of their number killed (or at least partially blinded), hesitated to thrust again, and Aela capitalized on their hesitance by bashing her shield against the portcullis once more. This time, wood could be heard to crack—even if there was no visible damage to the separator just yet.

Urgently, Legate Wrest drew a circle in the air with her wingtip. "Arbalists; take aim! Fire!"

Aela had just enough time to flare her arms to her sides and gather her magic before the bolts came—now aimed at her exposed flanks and back. While hardly a legendary display, the sudden gust of wind that rose in the hallway was enough to bat away most of the bolts, and to impress the pegasi watching from behind their arrow slits and portcullis.

"Can all griffons do that, ma'am?" One of the spearponies asked Wrest over her shoulder, not willing to take eyes off of Aela, lest she strike again through the porous portcullis.

Wrest scoffed and shook her head. "In your own time; stagger fire. We only need one shot through." And only once the order was barked out did she answer her spearpony, though she looked Aela in the eye as she did. "No; though it's not that hard of a trick. They say Hurricane can do it and deflect ballista bolts. Don't fear her; she's a caged animal."

In the heat of battle, Aela's squint at the tense Wrest chose to use in describing Hurricane was effortlessly passed off as disdain for the pegasus leader. As the arbalists reloaded, the griffoness slammed her shield into the wall again—again straining the wood, but failing to crack it meaningfully.

Then the first of the bolts came. Aela conjured another gust of wind to knock the bolt aside and scrambled away and turned her back on the spears and the portcullis so she could bring her shield to bear to her defense. A second quarrel clattered off its lacquered surface, and then a third; the fourth, from her undefended flank, she had to once again bat away with her magic, in a motion that left her off-balance and exposed.

But the biting wound that inevitably ended her defense was borne not by something as impersonal and unfeeling as the string of a crossbow. Rather, the knives that bit into her right flank and her right shoulder were thrown, much like the one that had wounded her son's palm, by the terribly dexterous feathers of Legate Wrest's right wing.

At the far end of the short hallway, where refuge was so close and yet so far away, a number of griffons could be heard to gasp as Aela toppled to her side. Artorius shouted "No!" and moved to rush to her aid, only to be stopped by another griffon's talon across his chest—though the limb lacked the strength to stop him, the delay seemed enough to give him pause.

"You have no shield, and your magic is not her equal," said the cold, reasoning voice of the apothecary. "You'll be cut down."

Even as those cautionary words were uttered, though, another griffon stepped forward. Tapfer, with his broken beak and blunted claws, stepped up to the very edge of the hallway, closed his eyes, and gritted the edges of his beak together. Those who could see his face watched as teardrops ran down his face, and all could see the thick mist that built around his wings and forelimbs. It was a frigid thing, whatever pain powered his magic, rooted in some sadness that had persisted and taken root too deep to be separated from the griffon who carried it. Maelstrom, for one, made a quiet note that the wounded knight, like his aunt Typhoon, surely had a wing memory that granted him such ice. Yet (not that Maelstrom had ever seen Typhoon use her magic in person) Tapfer's ice was unlike Typhoon's, for where the pegasus leader often favored hard, sharp icicles and defensive walls, the griffon's magic lent itself foremost to more ethereal forms.

When Tapfer cast his arms and wings forward, the mist that enveloped them moved like a nest of serpents, slithering with terrifying urgency, but refusing to follow straight lines along the walls, floor, and even ceiling of the short hallway. At their heads, they were almost invisible clouds, though the intricate patterns of frost they left on the stonework were unmistakable signs of their progression. But within moments—alas, moments too late to save Aela's right arm from being skewered by a legion quarrel—the mist had enveloped the hallway in full, thick and snowy enough that one could no more see through it than the contents of a dairy jug. For a moment, there was near silence—the only sounds were the tightening of crossbow strings and the gentle cracking of swiftly freezing stonework.

Wrest, as always, broke the silence. "They're trying to save her; keep firing. You'll catch her." When the firing resumed, however, it lasted only two volleys; the clattering of quarrels on stone made it clear the archers weren't hitting anything, and at last Wrest snapped out "Hold! Make ready, Second Legion; they've bought themselves another move. Spears, be ready."

What the legionaries couldn't hope to see through the fog was that a platform of ice, trapped in the very moment it would naturally sublimate, lifted Aela from the place she lay in the hall and carried her swiftly back to her kind. Barely a moment passed from her return to the griffons before Artorius was over her, and only a moment after that, the apothecary joined him.

"Is she alright?" Maelstrom asked.

"These will leave scars," the old griffon healer muttered. "But griffons have magic that pegasi don't. Her arm might not be as agile as it once was, but she won't lose it." Then, nodding to his patient, the old griffon adjusted his glasses and leaned forward. "But this will hurt."

Aela let out a dry chuckle. "...your bedside manner hasn't gotten any better."

"You have no idea," the griffon countered, with wry amusement, before dropping into deadly seriousness and adding. "You will likely pass out; I do not have anything to dull the pain. Anything you need to say?"

Aela shook her head. "Not much. I trust Artorius to lead. And the rest of you to counsel him." Extending the wing that carried her shield, she offered it to her son. "The wood wasn't built to withstand us. I have no doubt Artorius could break through with a few blows, but we don't have a few blows to stand and try. Tsume." The last name was spoken as a summons, and the most exotic looking of the griffons answered it swiftly.

"My lady," Tsume offered, dropping to one of her elbows and bowing her plumed head.

Aela wasted no time acknowledging the motion. "Look at the wooden grate."

"The portcullis," Maelstrom offered, though the word was obviously lost on the younger hen.

"You see the metal patches? I popped one off with Nimbus—" (That name was not commented on, but it did perk Maelstrom's ear) "—and I saw a nail head underneath. That's where the beams are nailed together. That's their weakness. If you get the plates off, you can dig out the screws. Remove as many as you can, and then Artorius can lead a charge straight through."

"How?" Maelstrom asked. When several griffons glared his way, he offered placative wings and winced. "I don't mean to doubt you, I just—those are hammered on. Unless that scimitar—" (here, he indicated to Tsume's katana) "—is enchanted, you're not going to be able to cut through those. You'd need to pry them off with a crowbar or something, and you're not going to have the time to do that while you're dealing with crossbows and spears."

Tsume scoffed. "Do not be ridiculous, pony. My sword will not cut through blocks of steel."

"You have some other plan?"

"Of course." Tsume nodded, stepping away from the group and toward the threshold of the short hallway. "I am going to use my bare hands."

Maelstrom stared in awe at the audacity—and, if I dare to let myself into his mind for a moment, I presume what he would have called the stupidity—of attempting to rip off with even a griffons talons sheet metal that had been heated, hammered into place, and allowed to contract as it cooled. But, given he didn't have a better plan, there wasn't much for the young stallion to do when Tsume walked forward into the short hallway.

By this point, some of Tapfer's mist and fog had dissipated, so the soldiers of Wrest's second legion could see the silhouette of the hen in the sunset kimono walking toward them on three legs, her right claw slung across her chest so that her talons rested on the hilt of her curved blade. They must have thought that she thought she was hidden—'why else would she walk so boldly out without a shield like the last griffon had used?' they asked themselves not with words, but quiet glances and grins, even as they aimed their crossbows through the arrow slits.

Everything—everything—was quiet, for the first time since Aela began the battle. The crossbows were already reloaded, so there was no creaking of winches and strings. Wrest herself offered no barked orders. Even the breathing of the soldiers had fallen out of hearing.

Forward, Tsume stepped, and her talons made not a sound on the icy stone. Forward, toward the portcullis. Forward, another step, toward freedom. Forward, into the valley of death.

When the inevitable happened, it outraced the thinking minds of its participants. Bowstrings snapped with musical twangs. Tsume's blade hissed from its sheathe, a serpent lunging for the throat. Steel cracked on steel with the sharp percussion of fireworks, echoing off of frigid stone. Sparks from a half-dozen collisions gave light through the mist, casting brief flashes of color onto what was otherwise still only the silhouette of a griffon. And then, horrifyingly, a wet gurgle issued from a pony behind one of the arrow slits.

Three seconds it took for anypony to make out what had happened, much less to react. From the strange transformation in Tsume's silhouette, it was obvious she had drawn her sword, and given that she was balancing her upper body on a wing, with her free left talon outstretched in the direction of the gurgling, it seemed as if she had thrown something; a knife? But then why was she not collapsing, not bleeding from her wounds. Where had the bolts gone?

The answer was as impossible as it was stubbornly the only possible solution. But… nopony could parry even one crossbow bolt at such close range, let alone a half-dozen…

No, there had been seven fired, hadn't there? But there were only six slashes…

And then, suddenly, a glance was given toward the fallen archer—with a bolt sticking out of his throat, doomed beyond medicine already, though he still had yet to drown in the wellspring of blood—and the griffon's outstretched hand likewise made a grim kind of sense.

But how? She hadn't used magic; there were stories that the griffon emperor could turn the wind to stop arrows in flight, but… no, this was different.

In their awe, Tsume continued forward—walking, so utterly unafraid that it seemed she might not have ever heard of the concept.

"Archers, hold," ordered Wrest, given their inefficacy. Then, to the surprise of her own soldiers, she continued "Spears back."

"Legate?"

"Seventh century, stand ready on my mark." Then the mare lifted her wing, and a spark appeared between her two leading feathers. "Your move, hen."

If Tsume understood the words (and she certainly did, given her Equiish amongst the other griffons) she gave no indication to Wrest; she only continued her methodical, borderline ominous approach to the portcullis. There, Wrest waited for her to launch some kind of attack, either on herself or the structure. And she was not disappointed, but she was surprised; rather than wielding her sword, Tsume slowly (and somewhat dramatically) sheathed the blade. Then she pinched her fingers together and held them up at the level of her eye, even as her piercing eyes locked onto the first of the joints in the portcullis grate.

At this point, some readers who are familiar with what a 'secretary bird' is will be quietly chuckling, understanding in some sense what was about to happen. For those who have not encountered this (entirely mundane) avian species in their favorite bestiary, though, I will highlight the following excerpt:

When hunting in the tall grass savannas of east-central Dioda, the secretary bird preys primarily on snakes and other small reptiles. Rather than swooping down and carrying off prey or tearing it apart with razor-like talons, the secretary bird is unique among its near natural neighbors for its habit of hunting on foot. Once the sleek-legged birds have sighted prey with their sharp, pinpoint eyesight, the secretary bird brings down its quarry by pinching together its talons in the air into a collected point, and then stomping down, spreading talons as they go, so that their stomping force is concentrated onto the very pointed edges of those talons. The force of such a bird's legs are terrifying, exerting as much as tenfold their body weight, and the blows arrive with astounding swiftness, making contact for as little a moment as one per-cent of a second. Combine this with their natural pinpoint accuracy and instincts to aim for the head, and the result is that prey and even sometimes would-be predators are defeated with cracked—if not completely collapsed—skulls before they even have time to launch a first attack of their own.

To this, I will only note that Tsume was a full grown griffon who, having trained as a warrior, had considerable muscle density; rather than a true bird weighing something in the vicinity of nine pounds, I would guess she weighed in at two-hundred and eight pounds. Multiply that by a factor of five or so (as a creature gets larger, strength does not scale linearly with growth, for reasons that are more geometric and less magical than I care to elaborate on in this tome), and apply it over the surface area of just the tips of her talons, and you can appreciate: Tsume did not rip the nail out of the portcullis; she drove it out the other end.

This time, Wrest had learned not to let the griffons strike twice. She had also learned, at the cost of the lives of two of her soldiers, not to reach into the griffons 'cage', whether with spears or bolts. But she had a particular advantage in that regard: fire is much harder to grab and throw back.

I don't want to give the impression that wrest had the power of a wing memory like one of the Stormblade siblings; her fire wasn't even really the equal of Tapfer's show of frosty fog moments earlier. But then, it didn't need to be. A small cone, maybe a yard wide at its very edge, cast through a gap in the portcullis, was functionally unavoidable. There was no cover in the short hallway.

I doubt Tsume could have dodged fully out of range even if she had intended to, though she might have only been licked by flame. Instead, she chose to endure, if only for a moment. Wrapping her face in a wing to endure the worst of the direct fire, letting the feathers scorch in an absolutely sickening smell that pervaded the short hallway, she used her other wing on the ground to balance her body yet again so that both her forelegs were free to strike. And with two more blows, she both knocked free two more nails, and hurled herself backwards from the flame by arm strength.

The net effect was that the hen was left to stagger backward, face contorted in agony but stubbornly refusing to even let out a hiss of acknowledgement at the pain of her burns. But with her arms still largely unharmed save a few singe marks, none of the legion sharpshooters were willing to chance another volley, and so she walked back unharmed to her company.

"It is ready, Artorius," she said as she collapsed beside where the apothecary was tending to a now quite unconscious Aela. To him, she said "Do not rush."

"I wasn't going to; I don't have any balm for that. The best you'll get is me wrapping it," the old griffon muttered. "And it won't do us much good if all four of you die. So Artorius, for once in your life: let discretion be the good part of valor, hmm?"

"I make no promises," Artorius answered, hefting the shield that Aela had called Nimbus and making sure it was braced well on his wing. "Well, no; I promise that if I do not come back, I will at least bring some of them with me." Then, draping a three-headed flail over his neck like a scarf, the bulk of the young griffon strode up to the end of the short hallway.

I could give great drama to describing this charge, pacing out Artorius' movements stride by stride. But I think that really does injustice to the sheer momentum of the griffon's movement. Artorius wasn't clever or deliberate like his mother. He wasn't magical like Tapfer. He certainly wasn't graceful, nor preternaturally swift, like Tsume. And he absolutely wasn't educated and calculating like Maelstrom. No, Artorius was, in a word, inevitable. In that regard, the best simile would be not one of the other knights at all, but instead a natural disaster; perhaps an avalanche.

Artorius held Nimbus in front of his torso, and broke into a sprint, and about four strides into the hallway, it was already obvious he was going through the portcullis, inches of solid wood be damned; I would have given him even odds of with that much momentum of bursting through a wall of solid stone bricks.

The real question to ask was not whether he would get through, but whether he would survive the moments after, alone on the far side of the hallway with Wrest's soldiers surrounding him. Wrest, to her continued modicum of credit, saw the inevitable as well and called out in the three words she could fit into that moment "Spears to flanks!"

And then the world erupted into splinters and broken beams. Artorius reached up to his neck, grabbed the handle of his flail, and brought its three spiked heads down on the helm and pauldrons of the first pony who tried to thrust a spear into his side. The momentum of this, perhaps the iconic griffon, cannot be understated; the blow killed the stallion despite his armor, and it also carried his corpse into the next pony over, toppling his attack, and unbalancing (if not completely canceling) a third pony in the legion formation. On his other side, the great shield's mere existence and sheer bulk were enough to protect Artorius' torso and head, even if a few spears landed shallow cuts and pokes into his leg; none were deep enough to impede his movement before he had time reorient his upper body and bring the flail to bear. The act of turning and the force of his arm were so great that, with an almost deafening twang, the resistance on the head of the flail still embedded in the partially collapsed helmet and skull of the knight's first victim proved stronger than the chain holding the flail together, so that by the time Artorius struck another killing blow, he had only two heads left attached to the handle of his weapon.

Hoping to save her forces, Wrest flicked out two more throwing knives in hopes of catching the griffon's more exposed hind limbs and limiting his mobility; alas, though something of a lumbering brute, Artorius' lack of grace was made up for by just how large his shield was, and he managed to knock away the two knives with ease. The same fate met her next burst of flame, shed off the red lacquered surface of the metal shield, and she only barely managed to avoid being impaled by the spike at its center when he thrust it her direction as a counterattack.

It seemed inconceivable; the stories from the Red Cloud War were that a griffon was worth just two pegasi for their advantages in strength and size. But here, Artorius was besting twelve (or, as he had so aptly put it, "even more; ten!" given in the moments that Wrest was dealing with the shield, Artorius' flail felled two more).

But, alas for our hero, even with her forces humiliated against odds they should have taken freely, Legate Wrest still had a plan.

"Seventh Century! Forward and ready!" she bellowed.

There was a very literal rumble in the guardroom at the pegasus end of the short hallway, and it was not the rumble of drums, nor of taut griffon bellies. It stemmed from thick, black, roiling cotton, occasionally illuminated by flashes of light. And it smelled of a sharp, clean death, promising to thrust deeper than any spear, and to fell a griffon with equal ease to a pony, with no regard for the thickness of a chest that needed to be pierced.

"First cloud, fire!"

The bolt of lightning that followed left sparks in the eyes of everypony remotely looking in Artorius direction, and the force of his own limbs flying out violently threw him backwards into the short hallway, where he lay twitching and smoking until all motion stopped.

The crack echoed on the stone walls for what seemed like minutes, overriding any thought in any mind in the dungeons. The stone walls, brittle from the chill of Tapfer's magic, cracked at not the lightning, but the thunder,and little shards of stone fell

"Artorius!" Maelstrom shouted.

Tsume let out no exclamation; she just started to move into the hallway after her fallen comrade, and was only stopped when Tapfer grabbed onto the collar of her kimono and yanked her back from the threshold of the short hallway. Barely a half-second later, a bolt of lightning flew through the place her vibrantly feathered face had occupied. Again, all thought stopped for the crack, and then the ringing in the ears of the survivors in the hall.

"Scheiße!" muttered the apothecary, pushing himself up from where he was attending to Aela on weary limbs. "Is he dead?"

"Nopony walks off an artillery thunderhead bolt," Maelstrom mournfully observed, his voice trailing for a moment. "We did better than we had any right to, getting past the portcullis. But Wrest outplayed us."

Tapfer closed his eyes, and his chest rose and fell with a single breath.

The apothecary sagely stroked his beard, and then looked over to the pile of weapons Artorius had left behind for his charge, the results of their haul from the castle's armory when they had all the hope in the world. Slowly, the aged griffon lifted a shaking talon to his eyeglasses and removed them to highlight the beady, weary, wrinkled eyes they normally magnified. "If you are saying truth… As a healer, I am often the cause of pain. But I detest pain that has no purpose."

Maelstrom glanced over at the same pile of weapons, and his eyes swept across his the strange grindstone Artorius had brought, Maelstrom's grandmother's spear, and a pickaxe, before finally falling on a griffon-sized Cirran-style gladius.

"If I had medicines, I might make us all a poison. But… This will have to do." With a decidedly dry chuckle, he added "Da kannst du Gift drauf nehmen."

"Hmm?" asked Maelstrom.

"A griffon saying. It means 'you can rely on it'. But the words say 'you can take poison on it,' so…" With its explanation, the humor in the gallows comedy of the old tercel was suddenly found wanting, and the three conscious griffons and their one equine companion drifted into silence.

Finally, Maelstrom took a step toward the blade. "I feel like this is my fault, and—"

"You disgust me!" Tsume declared abruptly, cutting the pegasus off mid-confession. "Both of you," she added, snapping at the apothecary. "Give a blade to the helpless ones if it soothes your consciences, but we haven't lost yet! Not while we can still hold blades. Not while we still stand."

In the hall, the griffons and the pegasus heard Wrest call "Vanguard, advance. Artillery, behind. March."

Maelstrom sighed, and tiredly extended a wing toward the threshold of death. "If you want to die in the hallway, be my guest. Assuming Wrest is using the battery I told her to ready against the fenrir that Artorius killed, her weather century has ten bolts left. That's three for each of us—and nopony survives one. The best you can do—"

The timing was like fate, if you believe in that sort of thing (and for the sake of explaining, if you do, but you didn't set it up yourself, you're an idiot.) Even as Maelstrom gave his tired rant in the face of death, his mind shutting out the inevitability of his doom by reverting to treating Tsume's militant dreams of glory and death the way he would have addressed his sister Sirocco, there came from the hallway a piercing avian gasp. The three 'knights' and the apothecary huddled over to the doorframe at the edge of the short hallway, careful to angle their view so they could see into the hall without taking a bolt of lightning to the eye.

Artorius had been stepped over and lay behind the front line of the Cirran vanguard, who had (like Maelstrom) assumed that no living creature could walk off an artillery lightning bolt and so elected not to finish him off as they progressed. When the griffon brute sat bolt upright, the cramped quarters of the short hallway meant that those elite armored soldiers, carrying Cirran gladii and shields, struggled to turn in place, bumping into one another at the shoulders as they struggled not to cut one another with the weapons they held in their mouths and the bladed scales they wore on their un-shielded wings.

The chaos gave Artorius time to come to his senses, throw himself to his paws, and kill one of the soldiers with a bare talon—crushing the poor bastard's windpipe and piercing his throat in several places on his talon tips in the same violent motion. He then used the same horrifying grip to throw the now quite dead stallion by his spine into the thunderclouds being pushed down the hall behind him by the slowly advancing second wave of Cirran forces, in the form of the weather century. There, the corpse's armor caused another deafening and violent flash and crack, which Artorius—unfamiliar with the art of weather cultivation—assumed meant that he was safe.

As Tapfer watched this from the safety of the edge of the hall and Tsume rushed forward to help her companion, Maelstrom retreated to the pile of abandoned weapons, and there snatched up his grandmother's spear. Like almost all weapons beyond a standard-issue gladius, it was weighty and unwieldy in his grip, but it would have to do if he wanted to save Artorius—and possibly all their lives.

As Artorius and Tsume took up their advantage of flanking the surviving (now organized) members of the Cirran vanguard, the weather century artillery line were readying to deliver a battery of quite fatal bucks into their thick black cumulonimbus clouds. Just as the first of the soldiers raised her hind legs from the ground to end the battle of the short hallway, Maelstrom came rushing into the back of the hallway, holding Swift Spear's nimbus spear in his wing like legionaries were taught to hold a pilum. The comparatively solid and massively heavier weapon left his grip, and Maelstrom instantly knew the throw would have earned him a scolding from a legion armsmaster. It flew past Tsume, easily missed the surviving members of the vanguard (even if its distraction let Tsume strike one in the eye with her frighteningly powerful talons), narrowly missed impaling Artorius, and struck the cracked and broken floor of the short hallway—two strides short of the battery of thunderheads. There, it jutted up awkwardly like the arm of a sundial, a final testament to his military failure.

"Pathetic," Legate Wrest observed, revealing herself to be in line with her artillery. "Fire."

Four lightning bolts flew from the clouds. And, to the amazement of every griffon and every pony in the room save Malestrom, all four bolts forked from their initial paths and struck the haft of Swift Spear's spear.

When the wincing and dazed confusion of the thunder faded, Maelstrom watched as Artorius rounded on the artillery and reached for the abandoned spear.

"No!" Maelstrom shouted, giving the griffon pause. "Thunderclouds! Nothing else matters!"

Artorius and Tsume made it back to the inner guard post not only with two thunderclouds (both in Artorius' grip), but with two of Legate Wrest's throwing knives as well—both lodged rather deeply into Artorius' hindquarters.

"How did you do that?" Artorius asked, ignoring the pain of his own limp. "That was incredible! Do you have lightning magic like Emperor Hurricane?"

"Nopony can buck lightning like grandfather; that's why everypony is afraid of him. That wasn't magic, that was just weather knowledge. My grandmother's spear is made of thunder-capable clouds, but it has no internal charge of its own. She could drag it through a thunderhead and use it to store a charge, but most of the time, it's… it's like a pit for lightning. The lightning wants to go to it, even more than anything else."

"Well, now we have two clouds," Tsume agreed. "And it seems you know how to use them. We can beat them."

"No," Maelstrom answered, earning shocked looks from most of the griffons, and outright spite from Tsume.

"Then why did you not let Artorius and I—"

"We can't out-fight her numbers. But now, I think, we can escape. I just need… Um, it's Tapper, right?"

"Tapfer," Artorius corrected, even as the older griffon indicated his apathy by nodding.

"One of the banks of cells has long window shafts; can you freeze the stone in one of them with your mist?"

Tapfer shrugged. "Solid stone is hard. But… I will try."

"Good," Maelstrom pointed the way to the westernmost cell block. "Go, pick a window, and get it as cold as you can. If you can get the mist into any cracks, do it. I'll be there shortly." As Tapfer left, the young stallion turned to Artorius. "I'll take the thunderheads; I need you and Tsume to hold the line as long as you can. Even if this works, it won't be a big opening, and there are a lot of you."

"We will hold," Tsume agreed, showing a slight grin instead of outright hatred of the colt.

Artorius nodded, and then turned to wander over to the pile of weapons.

"And, uh, apothecary, I'll need a hoof… or a claw, I guess, with—"

The old griffon showed a bit more strength than Maelstrom had expected from him when—albeit with considerable pain and stiffness—he pulled Aela up so that the unconscious hen was draped across his back. Then, with long and narrow claws, he grabbed hold of one of the thunderheads Artorius had rescued. "I will bring it. Do, if you please, elaborate on this plan of yours."

Maelstrom indulged the venerable griffon if only for the chance to sound out the plan beyond his own mind. "Well, years and years ago, when we first came to the Compact Lands and met the earth ponies and the pegasi, they wanted to know a lot about our weather magic. Grandfather lent a couple of junior weather centuries to the earth ponies to see if they could help with various work in exchange for food; one poor architectus named Echo Echo got asked to shoot lightning in a mine to see if they could break up some dense stone for easier mining. The only earth pony survivor they managed to dig out said the lightning didn't do anything to the wall, but the thunder collapsed a bunch of weak points in the mineshafts."

"Hmm? But then why did the hallway behind us not collapse? Or this room we are in now?"

Maelstrom gestured around the windowed dungeon with a wing. "Because this is worked stone. A mine is full of lots of strata—layers, you might say—and veins of different types of stone and dirt and ores and whatever. The different, broken up pieces come apart easier than the put-together, balanced stuff we have here. But we saw in the hallway that between the cold from Tapfer's magic and the thunder, parts of the walls did crack, and expose the raw stone behind them."

"But I think not enough to break through the wall, no?" asked the apothecary.

"Not with lots of open air around it," Maelstrom agreed. "But the window shafts here aren't much bigger than my head, so if we stretch out the artillery cloud and stuff it into the hole so there's no gap for it to echo out and lose any of its sound…"

The apothecary chuckled. "Emperor Magnus would have killed for an enemy like you."

That comment made Maelstrom cock his head, even as he stepped into an empty cell with a windowshaft, where Tapfer had already begun his magic. "Why? Because I'm good at weather and bad at actually fighting?"

"Hm? Oh, no, no; I do not insult you. Magnus was happy when Cirra was led by cunning leaders; he thought a pony's short life gave you better minds in shorter time."

"You knew him personally?"

Tapfer didn't exactly speak, but he made a kind of clicking noise deep in his beak, and the apothecary winced behind his spectacles. "Yes, once. But I have said too much. Now, we shall test if your genius will live on, hmm?"

After stuffing the cloud fully into the now frozen shaft (its chill aided by the eternal winter outside—how Maelstrom longed to be out in the windigo's deathly cold now), the colt urged the two older griffons out of the cell. They watched around the open door as Maelstrom plugged his ears with his lead feathers and folded them down against his scalp, before raising a single forehoof.

And with a blinding flash and the crack of ten thousand whips, his forces outnumbered a hundred to one, Maelstrom Stormblade achieved the impossible, fighting his way out of the dungeons of Burning Hearth Castle and surviving the short hallway for the first time in equine history.

If only that had been the end of it.

Comments

[Raugos]

Absolutely fantastic chapter! I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.

[Fireeaters]

Here comes the flash, here comes the thunder.
On a side note, I don't remember where I heard that line, and Google gives me nothing.

[Web of Hope]

With exactly zero sarcasm, I cannot wait to see how all of this is relevant