Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 49 - You Don't Learn That In School

I knew it was a mistake the second I carved that hole in the wall to get around the sealed door. The darkness on the other side was like an ocean of shadows, and when I looked out into it I got the impression that any second it was going to come crashing down and pour in on us.

“Can you see anything?” Jet Stream asked, trying to peer past me.

“Destiny, can you give me more light?” I asked. The cone of light from the possessed helmet was barely reaching beyond the opening, just hinting at what was beyond. She wordlessly turned up the power, and the pale crimson light spilled out, showing that there really was a floor there and not just a drop down into nothingness.

“That’s weird,” Destiny said.

“What is?”

“The light should be reaching a lot further. Look--” she turned around, keeping the beam steady. Pointed back the way we’d come, it reached at least twenty meters. When Destiny focused it back at the cloying darkness it didn’t even manage half of that.

“Maybe some kind of optical effect?” Ornate Orate suggested.

“It could be an air problem if this area’s been sealed off for long enough,” I said, motioning for Destiny to come closer. I pulled her out of the air and settled the helm over my head, making the armor airtight. “I’ll go first and make sure it’s not some kind of dangerous gas or haze.”

“Capital idea,” Ornate Orate agreed. “Stagnant air is one of the most deadly invisible hazards of the archaeological profession! In fact, it reminds me of an incident that involved salvaged and processed iron scrap that had been left in a sealed room and forgotten about, where it started rusting in the limited air supply available to it…”

I braced myself and squeezed through the opening I’d made in the wall while Professor Orate went on with his story. The hole was just a little too small to be comfortable, but the feeling I was getting from it was sending chills down my spine that made me think I shouldn’t have breached that barrier at all, no matter how clever I’d felt bypassing a bloodline spell with a knife.

“What is that feeling?” I mumbled.

“You’re not alone,” Destiny assured me. “If it’s just in your head, it’s in mine too.”

“Think it’s necromancy?” I swept the light around slowly, and caught sight of a dim glint of metal. I carefully walked towards it. I ended up on the other side of the sealed door, the edges glowing even on this side. Bodies were piled in front of it, mummified skeletal remains collapsed in the middle of reaching for that last escape.

“I’m really hoping it isn’t,” Destiny said.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the side of one of the shriveled corpses. “Bat wings!”

“This was a Night Guard base,” Destiny reminded me. “They had a pretty high thestral membership. Probably an even higher percentage in a cave like this. Being able to see in the dark would be a big help.”

I knelt down and looked at them. There was something strange about the way the bodies were positioned and it took me a little while to figure out what it was that bothered me.

“I think they died fighting each other,” I said, very carefully shifting a corpse to reveal a blade driven between its ribs.

“Not a good sign,” Destiny whispered.

“Are you dead yet?!” Cube shouted.

“Not yet,” I called back. I checked the readings to make sure I wasn’t about to do something stupid, then popped off my helmet. Destiny floated up to my shoulder. “The air seems safe, but watch your step!”

I waved them over when they stepped out into the bare rock of the cave. They joined me at the table of bodies, our lights not reaching the walls of the cavern and leaving me feeling like we were standing outside in the darkest night Equestria had ever seen.

“This is the old pre-war armor of the Night Guard,” Ornate Orate said. He indicated a crested helmet. “This pony here was a Captain, as you can tell from the silver filigree on the visor. There are vanishingly few examples of this sort of armor in existence, and none of it is this complete or well-preserved! This is a wonderful find!”

“These are also dead ponies,” Jet Stream said. “We need to treat them with respect.”

“We also don’t want to end up like them,” I said. “One of us should stay here to make sure the way back doesn’t get blocked off.”

Jet Stream nodded. “Masher, hold position just inside the lab. See if you can set up a barricade, just in case. If things go bad, pull back and get support, don’t try and fight it out.”

“Understood, sir,” Masher saluted and squeezed back through into the world of light.

“Ah! Look at this!” Professor Orate very carefully lifted up a corpse, freeing something that had been under it, a box about as long as my hoof and shaped generally like a book with a few large, flat keys on one side and a speaker grill on its face. “A portable voice recorder! Remarkably good condition, too.”

“May I?” Destiny asked, taking it from him with her magic. “I think I can get this working, but I’ll need a magical charge. I don’t have enough power to do it myself.”

“Excuse me? Incredibly strong unicorn here,” Cube boasted. “Just tell me what to do with this piece of junk.”

Destiny popped open a panel on the recorder’s back side and walked Cube through the recharge procedure.

“Technically you’re supposed to use a charging station or just get a new battery and slap it in, but we never used to bother,” Destiny noted. “Doing it yourself can wear the battery out, but I don’t think we can do much to it that sitting drained for centuries hasn’t already done.”

Destiny pressed down one of the keys, and the recorder blared with static before settling down.

“Personal Journal of Twilight Sparkle, entry five.” The recording was scratchy, the raw static overwhelming her voice at points. “Progress since the last entry! I was right that setting a hard deadline was the right choice. The ponies here are just trying to delay and wait me out, and claiming they need time to make the second zone safe for visitors was just a delaying tactic. I gave them twenty-four hours, and had one of the old staff fired when he tried to argue. I don’t like making an example of ponies, but they need to understand that things are going to be different from now on.

“It’s also becoming clear that the ponies here had no intention of actually doing research at all. They just want to shove everything into boxes and sit on their horde like a bunch of dragons! Equestria needs all the resources at its command. I’d swear they think the war is less important than standing around in the dark and making sure nopony asks questions.”

There was a drawn-out sigh.

“Speaking of which, the darkness can really get to a pony. The lighting of this place is awful. Maybe it’s fine for thestrals, but regular ponies like me need a little more light to read by. I’ve been getting by with lanterns and portable lights, but that’s not a long-term solution. I’ve drawn up plans to refurbish this place to modern standards. Construction won’t take long as long as we don’t need anything custom-built. I expect it will be finished in a month or two since it’s really just a facade and interior design.

“One final note of bad news, I’ve had to start rotating staff. It means having to retrain the new staff as they come in, but it seems like the average Equestrian just doesn’t deal with the stress of this assignment well. Obviously I’ve made therapy available to them. I don’t want this to turn into a Wartime Stress Disorder outbreak. Rotating staff through other assignments should help mitigate it almost entirely.

“Hopefully, my next update will be about my findings at the lower containment area. Twilight Sparkle, signing off.”

The static blared again, totally washing over everything else in a wall of white noise and Destiny turned the recorder off, flipping it over in her magic and opening the back panel again to look at the inside of the device.

“There’s more to the tape, but this thing isn’t in great shape,” she said. “Let me play with this a little and try to improve the playback. I think if I just clean the contacts and make sure the connections are tight I can clear up the interference.”

“Go for it,” I said. “Toss me a torch, I’m just going to check the path up ahead. You all stay here and if you hear me yelling for help, uh… come help?”

Jet Stream pulled a flashlight out of his saddle bags and threw it to me. I caught it and held it in a wing. There wasn’t a nicely poured concrete path here, just a relatively clear path mostly marked by steel bars hammered into the rock with an old, frayed rope strung between them, the hemp just as mummified as the corpses by the dry cave air. I watched my hooves and walked forward, looking for the lower containment area Twilight had mentioned.

“This was a low-security lab, though, right? So why did she call the other area lower?” I asked the void. My voice echoed distantly, whispers returning my words and bouncing at odd angles until it sounded more like other ponies in the distance.

“It’s physically lower,” a pony said from beside me. I froze up and made a sound like a chew toy, fumbling with the light and dropping it entirely. A white aura caught it just before the flashlight hit the stone, the beam revealing the old grey unicorn I’d met before, a thousand miles from here.

He pushed the flashlight into my mouth and sighed, tugging at his beard.

“You’d think a pegasus would know something about altitude, but I’m learning not to overestimate you,” he said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“Whaa a’ uuu ‘oin’ mnn?” I said through the torch in my mouth. He rolled his eyes and yanked it free, letting me grab it with a wing. “What are you doing here?” I asked again.

“At least you didn’t ask how I got here,” the old stallion said. “It would have just frustrated both of us. As for the ‘what’, I’m trying to keep the bloody world from ending again! You just had to get yourself entangled in this mess, didn’t you?”

“Sorry?”

“You’re not sorry, you’re just confused and you default to apologizing. I don’t have time to explain everything to you, but I’ve already interfered with you once, and the fewer ponies I interact with makes each loop easier to predict. By opening this place up you’ve set in motion a real humdinger of a problem, no stopping it now. If I left things alone, they’d spiral out of control, but since I’ve warned you, you and you alone have the chance to fix it, so don’t mess it up!”

“I know you said you don’t have time to explain everything, but could you maybe explain just one or two--”

“Chamomile, are you dead?” Cube called out. “If you’re dead, can I have Destiny? She’s smarter than you and I like her more!”

I held up a hoof for the old pony to wait and turned around. “I’m not dead! I’m right over here! I was just talking to--” I looked back to ask the stallion for his name. There was nothing there except darkness and shadows.

“Talking to who?” Cube asked, trotting past me and looking around, standing in almost the same spot the stallion had been.

I clicked my tongue in annoyance and shook my head. “Myself, I guess.”

“Oh hey, look at this!” Cube pointed her light down the path to a metal cage hanging from the cavern roof by steel cables and a bunch of wheels and pulleys and stuff that an engineer could explain and I could only compare to something between a trebuchet and an electric motor. It hung over a huge rift in the floor. I’d walked almost all the way to the edge of that massive hole without even noticing.

“I guess the next stop is halfway between here and Tartarus,” I mumbled.

---

The cage rattled and shook when we rode it down. I hadn’t wanted to ride it at all, but Cube couldn’t fly and Ornate Orate wanted to see it in action so I got outvoted. A yellowed, dull bulb hung from the roof, lighting up the steel platform and little else. As we went down, the stone wall of the cliff pulled further and further away until it just vanished beyond the reach of our lights, leaving us hanging alone with no reference points. Destiny quietly fiddled with the voice recorder, occasionally eliciting a spark or a softly spoken swear. The rest of us were caught in that space between boredom and nervousness, and dealt with it in our own ways.

“This is actually quite an early elevator design!” Orate yelled over the sound of metal against metal. “It was probably originally installed to haul cargo up and down, so the capacity is quite large! If you look at the way the counterweight system was designed, before they had an electric motor driving the assembly, it used pure gravity power! Water would be used to adjust the weight on the other side of the elevator so one side or the other would be overbalanced and cause this car to be hoisted up and down! Quite clever, and it could continue working even with something as simple as a bucket and patience!”

Cube looked around, then walked up next to me.

“Hey, buckethead -- cast a detection augury,” she said quietly. “I wanna make sure I’m not going crazy.”

Destiny lit up for a moment with a wash of red light. “I’ve been getting strange readings ever since I’ve been in this place,” she said. “I can’t pin it down. No active spells, no charged thaums, but I’d swear there are runic structures my magic isn’t seeing directly.”

Cube nodded. “I think something’s producing sterile thaums. A lot of them.”

“Sterile thaums?” I was way out of the loop again.

“Magic with no signature at all,” Cube said, keeping her voice low. “A spell with no caster.”

Destiny bobbed in assent. “It’s theoretically possible, but sterile thaums wouldn’t interact with normal magical structures at all. If they existed, they’d occasionally disrupt a few normal thaums, but it would be like shooting a bullet out of the air. There would need to be a massive number of them to even be a blip against the normal background noise.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Cube mumbled. “I’ve got good intuition and it’s telling me we shouldn’t be here.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Too late now, though. Even if we leave, it means somepony else is going to come poking around in here. At least if we’re the ones doing it, we can try to be aware of the danger and deal with it ourselves.”

“That might be the smartest thing you’ve said all day.” Cube reared up, narrowing her eyes and casting what should have been a powerful light spell. It got just about the same distance as the flashlight I’d been using. She made an annoyed sound and stopped casting, turning away from the darkness and planting herself firmly in the middle of the platform, right under the flickering electric bulb.

Even the professor quieted down as we rode that cage down into the dark. The darkness was oppressive. With nothing to see, it was like we were frozen there in time and space. If the ride had been a little smoother, I wouldn’t have even known we were moving.

“I can see something!” Jet Stream called out, peering over the side.

We all rushed over to the side just to share in the novelty of seeing anything, and we were able to make it out too. Coming into view below us, the stone and steel of the bottom of the elevator assembly.

“How far down did we go?” I asked.

“I’m having issues with the altimeter and, well, just about every sensor in the armor if I’m being honest,” Destiny said. The car shuddered firmly and came to a halt, settling into its cradle. “But assuming that trip was all at the same speed? We’re close to two kilometers down.”

“That’s pretty far,” I said. I couldn’t help but look up when we walked out of the elevator, all sticking close together on instinct. There was nothing above us. It wasn’t just black, it was the color of having your eyes closed.

“I’d feel a lot better if we had about twice as many people,” Jet Stream said. “I didn’t expect us to be this far from help if we get into trouble. If we run into trouble and anypony gets injured, I’m scrubbing this mission and we’re going back to wait for reinforcements, understood?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We shouldn’t go anywhere alone, either. There are four of us right now, so let’s use the buddy system. I’ll go with Cube, you go with the professor. You can probably keep him from sticking his nose into anything dangerous.”

Jet Stream nodded and slapped my shoulder. “Good thinking, soldier.”

I blushed a little at the compliment, but it was dark enough nopony could tell.

“Hey, you guys notice this?” Cube asked. She was looking off to the side of the elevator. There were pallets of coated metal paint, wires, lighting fixtures still in boxes, and scattered tools all around them. “Looks like they left all the construction stuff down here.”

Ornate Orate nodded. “The facility seems little-used. The newer constructions above us were almost spotless. I don’t believe it was occupied for very long. From the dates, it seems to have been abandoned even before the Battle of Stalliongrad.”

“So they never even finished building it?” I asked.

“Unfinished projects might as well be the signature of the Ministries,” Destiny said derisively. “They split up the government and made it six times less efficient. It’s why BrayTech tried to avoid engaging with them.”

“You helped the Ministry of Health with the Exodus Green,” I pointed out.

“Nopony can say ‘no’ to Fluttershy,” Destiny sighed. “I don’t remember very much about those days, but I do remember that she was just… so nice!”

A pebble rattled against stone. All of us spun around, looking for the source of the noise. After a moment of confusion, all of the others focused on me, and I couldn’t see their expressions through the glare.

“What is it?” I asked.

I turned around. There were two shadows behind me. One was mine. The other was tall, stretched out, and somehow seemed to have depth to it in the way a shadow shouldn’t. The suggestion of a head turned to look at me, then the shadow melted like ice on a hotplate, vanishing in a way no trick of the light could.

“Did everypony else see that?” I whispered.

“What was that?” Jet Stream asked.

“I, ah,” Ornate Orate coughed. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like that before. Maybe some sort of illusion, like a mirage?”

I carefully waved a hoof through where the pony would have been if they’d been casting that shadow. I felt nothing.

“I bet I know what it is!” Cube declared. “Think about it! This whole place has a weird magical aura, and it was a secure containment site with a bunch of guards and warnings and junk. This is probably some kind of old warding spell designed to discourage ponies from exploring!”

“That is possible,” Ornate Orate allowed.

“As the only unicorn--” Cube started. Destiny coughed. “--as the only living unicorn here, I’m calling it safe. For now. If there are serious wards later, they might do more than just try to spook us.”

“There’s a marked path,” Jet Stream said. “We’ll follow it and see where it goes. Remember, stick with your buddy.”

“You heard him,” I said. Cube rolled her eyes and took a step closer to me.

“If there is anything dangerous, I’m going to use you as cover,” she said.

“You’re not the first pony to do that,” I said, walking along the path at a slow enough pace that she could keep up without being rushed. Even if I wasn’t trying to be polite, I didn’t want to rush anywhere. I kept seeing movement in the corner of my eye and finding nothing there when I looked. From the way Jet Stream and Cube were acting, I’m pretty sure they were experiencing the same thing. Ornate Orate seemed totally blase about the whole thing, but maybe his vision was just poor enough he was used to phantoms.

“Hold up,” Cube said, when the iron path markers gave way to stone pillars reaching just to head height. “I think these are lights.”

“I don’t know if there’s any power down here,” I said. “I didn’t see any wires.”

“Not electrical lights, magic!” Cube said. “I just need to…” she reared up, only getting about halfway up the stone plinth.

“Need a lift?” I asked.

“I can take care of myself!” Cube snapped, her aura surrounding her whole body and lifting her off the ground. “See? It’s a simple trick for any sufficiently powerful unicorn.”

She floated to the top and cast a spell. There was a shower of sparks and then blue flames appeared. Another fire sprang up on the stone column on the other side of the path, and as if she’d lit a fuse, more lights appeared in the darkness, running on both sides of the path and lighting up the stone around it with dim but usable light.

The flames went on for almost a dozen pairs of the stone guide lights before they illuminated the end of the path, a steel door set into the stone wall. Ornate Orate gasped and sped up, almost running up to the door.

“Oh my! This is amazing!” he exclaimed. “Look at the delicate metalwork! The detail! This must date back to the early era of enlightenment, around the time of Star Swirl the Bearded! This kind of clockwork was the high technology of the era, and is almost impossible to replicate!”

“It’s a door,” Jet Stream noted, sticking close to the professor while Cube and I caught up. “How does it open? I don’t see a handle…”

“Ah, well,” Ornate Orate paused. “An excellent question. It’s believed that they’re a sort of combination lock. You can see how there are rings of symbols, some of which are locked and some of which are unlocked. If we manipulate them in the correct order, we can unlock the door. This kind of door was used by secret societies and arcane scholars to hide discoveries they didn’t want common ponies to be able to interfere with, you see, so opening the door is something of a lesson in itself. From the symbols used, I believe this door involves astronomy and the position of the fixed stars.”

“Can you open it?” I asked.

“That is… hm.” Ornate Orate clammed up, rubbing his chin.

“Hold on, maybe there’s a clue on this thing,” Destiny said, holding up the voice recorder. “I think I’ve recovered a couple more recordings.”

She snapped the panel shut with a sharp click and pressed the play button, a wash of soft white noise flowing out before the recording started, Twilight Sparkle’s voice warped and stretched just a little, like a vinyl record that had started to get wobbly and rippled.

“Journal Entry, uh… seven? Six or seven. I’ll fix it later when I’m writing the formal report. Maybe I should have kept written notes too? Next time I’m going to get one of my employees to just take notes. Spike isn’t going to be available and… I didn’t want to replace him, but I think I need to if I’m going to make this work.

“Anyway, notes regarding the security. I have some personal concerns. I’m making this recording away from the old staff, because I don’t know if they’re compromised, or if that’s a real worry or if I’m being silly or… I should probably just replace the staff, to make sure.

“The security door is of a very rare type, extremely expensive to construct at the time, and located at the bottom of a rift in the lowest part of a cave in the middle of nowhere. This might be one of the most secure locations in Equestria. In theory. In practice, this is a door in eternal darkness being guarded by members of an ancient branch of the Night Guard that have been extremely evasive about actually cooperating with me.

“More than that, opening the vault door… it requires arranging the stars correctly. If I was going to be really paranoid and poetic, I might say that the stars will set it free.

“I hope I’m wrong about what I suspect.”

“Any idea what she’s talking about?” I asked, tapping the swirl of symbols and interlocking rings on the surface of the door.

“Not really,” Destiny said. “I was hoping she just would have recorded the actual combination so we could skip a few steps.

“That would have been nice,” I mumbled.

“You could try cutting through it,” Destiny suggested.

I frowned. “I hate to say it, but I’d kind of like to be able to shut this door again in case we don’t like what we find on the other side.”

Ornate Orate sighed in relief. “Oh thank goodness. This door is a piece of art! If you destroyed it, it would be… unconscionable! Practically like murder! Worse, even!”

“It is a nice door,” I admitted. It was made of gold, silver, brass, and the whole effect was like looking at a clock with half of the gears exposed.

“I don’t know how much good it’s doing,” Jet Stream said. “Remember the bodies up above? Why would the Ministry Mare need to seal the door with them on the other side? And why couldn’t she have cast the seal here?”

“You think whatever’s in there already got out?” Destiny guessed.

“I hope not,” Jet Stream muttered. “I hope the kid is right that this is all some kind of spell to scare off scavengers.”

I poked the door, being as careful as possible to avoid breaking anything and wiggled one of the rings inscribed with symbols. It shifted a little, then clicked into the next position. A gear behind it moved, and I tilted my head. One of the teeth was longer than the others.

“Hmm…” I mumbled, thinking.

“To open the door, we’ll need to decipher the symbols,” Ornate Orate said. “Let me just get my notebook here… yes. Alright. Obviously we could attempt every possible combination of the puzzle rings, but that would take thousands, tens of thousands, of attempts. We also need to consider when this door was likely constructed and account for the drift of the so-called ‘fixed’ stars since then…”

I clicked the next ring, watching the door closely. I could just see far enough to spot the other wafer-thin gears sliding past each other, and where something was just a little off about them.

“Ponies would have still had to be able to open it up,” Cube said. “It can’t be that complicated. Twilight got through pretty quickly.”

“But she had the existing staff to show her the combination,” Orate pointed out. “She might not have needed to decode it on her own. We should assume that even if they weren’t helpful, they wouldn’t simply refuse a direct order.”

“I think I got it,” I said, rotating the last ring.

“Got what?” Jet Stream asked, just as the rings aligned and the clockwork door pulled apart.

“How did you…?” Ornate Orate asked, shocked. “What was the combination? How did you know?”

“Oh, uh, I didn’t really pay attention to the actual symbols,” I said. “If you looked really carefully and wiggled the one button, you could see where the stuff inside needed to move to get out of the way.”

“You didn’t have to learn a lesson about the mystery of the stars?” the professor asked, sounding disappointed.

“I didn’t learn anything at all,” I said with a shrug.

---

The passage behind the door had been carved by careful hooves, the walls inscribed with almost abstract engravings. It was more like an ancient tomb than anything modern. They’d been patched over with bricks, then when that crumbled, with concrete. Wires were bolted to the wall and hung loose in temporary fixtures, leading to a few still-working lights throwing dim orange light across the pictograms.

“This place has survived the rise and fall of empires,” Ornate Orate whispered. “Oh, I need to get rubbings of the remaining carvings!” He started pulling out charcoal and paper.

“We’ll go look ahead. Can you keep an eye on him, Lieutenant?” I asked.

Jet Stream nodded. “We’ll watch the door, too. If it starts to close on its own I’ll find a way to jam it open until we all get through.”

“Come on,” Cube said, kicking my shin lightly. “The sooner we get this over with, the better. This is turning into a stupid, creepy dead end.”

We barely got to the end of that first hallway before it hit us.

Destiny bobbed in midair, the aura around the helmet flickering. I felt something pass through me at the same time. It was like pins and needles, but something about the sensation made me think of a sweeping spotlight passing over me. Like being exposed.

“Woah, are you okay?” I asked. I caught her before she could fall. The voice recorder hit the stone and rattled off to the side, the button on the face clicking into place. I settled the helmet over my head so she wouldn’t risk falling again, sealing up my armor.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think that was some kind of sterile thaum surge. I couldn’t get a grip on anything with my telekinesis.”

“I told you it was sterile thaums,” Cube mumbled, shaking her head and rubbing her horn. “That really stung…”

“Why did they keep this from me?” Twilight Sparkle’s voice said, her tone sounding manic and rushed. “This might be one of the greatest discoveries ever made, and they’ve just been sitting on it!”

“Shut that off,” Cube groaned. “I don’t need more of a headache.”

“I’d rather know what we might be walking into,” I retorted. “Let’s get this second door open.” I nodded to the door at the end of the hallway. It wasn’t ornate, interlocking metal. It was stone and steel, with no visible mechanism.

“From the top, right. Sorry, trying to focus. Entry thirteen. The Night Guard never really named it. There are some floral, poetic, useless names floating around but none of them really capture it. I’ll be referring to it as the Anomaly for now until I can get a better idea of all its properties. It has some kind of magical aura, obviously. Anypony could tell that just by looking. I can’t get a clean scan. It’s like trying to read a book when it’s being held upside-down and at an angle -- all the letters are there, but they’re skewed and wrong and I don’t have a way to translate it yet.”

“How does this thing even open?” Cube asked. “This had better not be another stupid puzzle. We’re not going to get lucky twice.”

“Look at the scrape marks,” Destiny pointed out. She enhanced the faint marks in my HUD. “They’re curved. I think the door rotates out of the way. Look for a lever or catch.”

“The one thing I have found out is that I was wrong about the nature of this place. All those artifacts boxed away and put in storage weren’t brought here. They came out of this Anomaly! They… find things in the shadows. Like gifts. Offerings. Stone tablets with strange carvings, ancient pieces of armor. They’re impossible to date accurately. The object could be making them from whole cloth, or pulling them from somewhere else.”

“Found it,” Cube said. Her aura surrounded what looked like part of the wall carvings. She pulled, and it swung out a few degrees, revealing a metal backing. A low gurgle sounded from the wall, and the door started moving, scraping and rotating to the left.

“I’m going to go try a few more detection spells. I feel like I’m right on the edge of discovery here. There are so many hints and suggestions of patterns in the data that I’m sure I can figure this out if I just keep working on it. I need to find the right spell.

“Something deep inside is telling me this is the answer to all our problems!”

I frowned. “She sounds like my mom talking about SIVA,” I said, picking up the recorder and switching it off.

“You don’t think it’s actually a SIVA core, do you?” Destiny asked. “I mean, it’s impossible, but we’ve seen a lot of impossible today.”

An opening appeared in the stone, rotating into place to let us through, the thick circle of stone grinding to a halt when it was aligned. Dust rained down from the roof when it locked into place, the more modern reinforcements to the structure creaking as they took up some tiny fraction more of the strain.

“The source of the magical disruption should be right up ahead,” Destiny said.

“You go first,” Cube ordered.

I nodded and stepped through into a chamber shaped like an inverted ziggurat, square terraces going lower and lower until they converged at a central point. Tarps, crates, and desks littered the wide terraces, like the remains of a base camp on an abandoned mountain top. There was even the skeleton of a tent, the nylon skin gently moving in a breeze that wasn’t really there.

All of it was there in service of the thing at the bottom of that pit, where something floated, cradled in magic so thick it warped the air around it like the heat coming off a forge. Ghostly, foglike light came out of the air, almost in a reverse of the pervasive darkness outside.

“What… is that?” Destiny whispered.

It wasn’t a SIVA core. SIVA was something inequine and horrible in its own way, like a swarm of biting, burrowing insects spilling out of a beating heart. This was…

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Cube said, with awe.

It was a black pyramid, as big as a skywagon, rotating around its peak languidly. The sides occasionally caught light that didn’t come from anywhere in the chamber. It was impossible to make out detail, the glints of light always coming at an angle that teased but never really revealed.

“There’s some kind of massive energy spike!” Destiny warned. “It’s like… something trying to build spells out of the places where magic isn’t! It doesn’t make any sense!”

The light shifted, that sourceless illumination somehow changing its angle. My shadow stretched out in front of me, joining with the rest in the room in a pool of blackness, like they were all being bound together. And something pulled itself through that pool of darkness. It stepped through from the second dimension into the third, a figure almost shaped like a pony but wrong, with a minotaur’s upper body where the head should have been, huge horns cresting like a crown. I could only vaguely make out the silhouette of the monster. The shadows clung to it like it was standing in deep shade.

“Tirek?!” Destiny gasped. “But he’s dead!”

“Tirek?” I asked.

“Watch out!” Cube shouted.

Energy crackled between the monster’s horns. I threw myself down, letting the edge of the ziggurat act as a shield. Even just hitting the rock a meter away it sent a wave of static, fizzling feelings down my spine, like a combination of electric shock and the pure jolt of terror from being slapped awake.

“Tirek was a demon,” Destiny said. “He drained the magic from half of Equestria! In the end they had to use lethal force to stop him. It happened when I was a foal, but I still remember how scared everypony was!”

Another bolt of black and white energy crashed into the wall, shooting past where I was taking cover and sending a chill through my body.

“He’s looking pretty spry for a dead guy!” I shouted.

“Let’s just leave!” Cube yelled back. “I don’t think he can even fit through the doors!”

“I like the way you think!” I agreed, throwing her a salute from the ground. “You go and I’ll cover you!”

I aimed the cryolator at the ground and fired, spraying a stream of liquid nitrogen in a wide arc. It boiled almost instantly, a cloud of fog rising up where it was condensing water vapor out of the air. Cube turned to bolt and her eyes widened.
I looked back the way we came, and saw the door rotating closed with a soft subsonic rumble that I felt more than I heard.

“No!” Cube yelped, grabbing it with her telekinesis, trying to hold it. I don’t think she even managed to slow it down. “The stupid thing was on a timer!”

I looked down at the shadowy giant centaur. It took a massive step, starting to walk up the terraces like they were merely oversized stairs. “Open it back up, then!”

“It’s using some kind of stupid primitive water-clock system! I have to wait for the tank to refill or it won’t do anything!”

“Time for Plan C,” I said.

“Is ‘Plan C’ the one where you wrestle the giant monster?” Destiny asked with a keen sense of the inevitable.

“The C stands for Chamomile,” I explained, before spreading my wings and jumping through the fog cloud. Tirek was the size of a barn, making him easily the second or third biggest monster I’d fought in the last few weeks. I slammed right into him and promptly bounced off, landing at his hooves.

He looked down at me.

“How are ya, big fella?” I asked.

Tirek kicked me. I flew about twice as fast as I could with my wings and went right through an ancient tent, hitting a cot and crushing it between me and the stone.

“You know, I’m starting to wish I was an earth pony,” I said. “I bet earth ponies never get punted around like hoofballs.”

“Yes Chamomile, when I see you I think about how light-weight and delicate you are,” Destiny said.

“You know anything about this guy?” I asked. I tore my way free of the broken bed. There was a nightstand next to the bed, with a framed photo sitting under a flickering, half-broken light. It was faded, but I could make out what looked like a half-dozen ponies sitting around a table.

“What’s to know? Tirek is a demon centaur who likes eating pony magic to make himself stronger. He’s big, he’s strong, and he’s got some kind of crazy magical blasts!”

“At least he can’t--” Hooves slammed down right next to me, one smashing the end table. “Fly?”

It would have been more comforting if it’d said something. Tried to scare me. Heck, it would have been good if he roared! It didn’t even seem like his hooves made noise unless I was looking right at him! Tirek reached down to grab for me, knocking what was left of the tent away.

I reared up and grabbed his wrist, wrapping my front hooves around it.

“Yeah, alright legend. Let’s see how you like this!”

I flicked the mantis-like blade out of my right forehoof and stabbed. The tip of the blade stopped dead before piercing his skin. With how dark it was, I couldn’t tell if his skin had stopped it, or if the glowing fog was shielding him somehow.

“You don’t seem to mind much,” I said sheepishly, looking up at Tirek. DRACO beeped and fired, hitting him right between the eyes. There was a sharp, hot ping when the bullet bounced away. A spray of liquid nitrogen just boiled away on touching the centaur to no effect. With no other ideas, I tried squeezing harder and pulling like I could throw him over my shoulder.

Tirek flexed his bicep and tossed me clear across the room. I caught myself in midair, breaking out of the spin and stabilizing before I hit stone hard enough to hurt myself.

“I think he might be invincible!” I shouted.

“There’s no way we can win this,” Destiny said. “We need to get out of here!”

“I’d teleport us out, but with all this interference I can’t promise how many limbs you’ll have on the other side!” Cube yelled. She fired a few shots from a floating beam pistol. I wasn’t sure Tirek really noticed.

Every time she shot, I saw something in the air. It was like the shadow of a vein, pulsing between Tirek and the black pyramid floating in the center of the room.

“He’s drawing energy out of that thing!” I said.

Destiny brought up the view in a small window, flashing through different colors and filters and trying to enhance the image to make it clearer. “It makes sense, he always ate magic. Maybe this… shadow is doing it too?”

I nodded. “How do we stop it?”

Tirek fired a beam of dark energy at Cube. She put up a shield, but the spray just cut through it. She ducked out of the way, her defensive spell barely even lasting long enough to run away from it. One of her pistols got caught in the beam’s wake, exploding and showering the floor with red-hot shrapnel.

“Leave her alone!” I yelled, flying into the side of his head. I could tell it didn’t hurt him, but it got his attention and he turned back to me. I zipped out of the way of his reaching paws, up higher than he could reach. It took him about half a second to switch to firing another one of those death rays, the energy crashing into the roof and cracking the rock.

“You need to disrupt his connection!” Destiny yelled. “I don’t have the magical power to do it, but you do!”

“You need to shoot him a few times!” Cube shouted back. “They’re easier to see when he’s drawing energy!”

I could do that. “Got it! DRACO, fire at will!”

The gun beeped and went into auto-targeting mode, just like the couple of times I’d used it like a turret. The barrel tilted on its own, and DRACO started firing with the rhythm of a slow heartbeat, fire, cycle, reload, fire, cycle, reload.

Cube’s aura grabbed a bunch of the threads and pulled, the strange magic slipping out of her grip. She grunted and pushed harder, and I saw sparks flying around her horn, the color of her aura shifting as she went harder at it.

“Come on, you stupid--” I heard her grumble, before she roared and got a grip on the slippery puppet strings, tearing them free. She fell back on her flank from the recoil, the aura sputtering and dying.

Tirek shrank. I don’t mean he shrank back like he was trying to get away from us, he actually got smaller, the darkness seeming to eat itself and shrivel up until he was only a little bigger than I was.

“This is our chance!” Destiny yelled. “Go wrassle him, Cammy!”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “DRACO, give me an explosive round!”

The gun beeped, and I aimed at where the damage to the roof was worst. Well, I say aimed, but really I just pointed DRACO in its general direction and hoped it would get the idea since it was a better shot than I was.

The rifle barked, and the shell went right into the deepest crack in the weakened ceiling. There was a sharp crack, and the whole chamber shook and rumbled. Even Tirek stopped to look up.

The roof came down right on his face. A dozen tons of stone squashed him like a bug, and instead of a rush of blood and guts, black dust exploded from under the landslide, bursting into the air like spores and rot and vanishing before even hitting the ground.

“Is it over?” I asked.

“The energy readings are going down,” Destiny said. “I’m not seeing any spikes. I think he’s gone.”

“What do we do about that thing?” Cube shouted up to me, blood trickling from her nose. She sniffled and wiped it away. The filly sounded like she was forcing herself to sound normal and okay. She tilted her head at the floating black pyramid.
The thing didn’t seem defeated. It shouldn’t have seemed like anything, since it was just a floating polygon. Looking at it, I could imagine it looking back like an animal in a cage. A cage whose door we’d pried open.

The last echoes of the crash from the rockslide faded away with the sound of distant laughter.

Comments

[Reese]

"and claiming they need time to make the second zone safe for visitors was just a delaying tactic. I gave them twenty-four hours, and had one of the old staff fired when he tried to argue."
...Yeeeeeah, uh. But did they actually, you know, make it safe more quickly? Or did they just see that they weren't going to be able to make it safe before you went in there no matter what they did, stop trying to warn you, and leave it dangerous?

"You helped the Ministry of Health with"
"You helped the Ministry of Peace with"?

Well. I'm not sure just what that is, but it certainly seems rather ominous!
Thank you for writing. :)

[FridayPie]

Containment breach!

Cham, you are not smart, stop trying to do smart moves.