Celestia Goes West

by DungeonMiner

Chapter 28

Sunny ran.

Grabbing at the stones around her, she ripped the walls of the ancient temple apart. The unicorn tore them out and catapulted them behind her to try and smash the mandrill behind her. The boulders crashed into the hallways doing even more damage to the walls and structure of the pyramid.

If she kept this up, she’d bring the entire thing down on the three of them.

Inner Celestia commented about destroying another relic, but Sunny ignored her in favor of trying to stay alive.

She swerved toward a carved dragon head, sticking close to it as she ran past it, before leaping to the other side of the hall as she passed a snake. So far, the pattern had kept her safe, but she didn’t want to test it more than she had to. Sunny slid under the gaze of another jaguar before tossing a rock her size at the mandrill.

The giant monkey grabbed the stone from the air before tossing it to the side, closing the distance between them.

A part of Sunny loved it. This, in some way, was the very thing she was looking for. This was the adventure and danger that she loved from her days as an adventurer. Her heart pounded in her chest, her blood singing in her veins, and a smile growing on her face.

“Adrenaline junkie,” Inner Celestia muttered to herself, but even she had to admit there was something fun about the chase.

Sunny threw another rock, tearing a hole in the wall as the mandrill chased her, and the wall began to tremble. A little too unstable, but she could fix that. She cast a different Control Matter spell, and a stone wall slammed out into the hallway, blocking most of the hall. Sunny slipped through the open space before the mandrill followed, slowing only for a second or two, but the unicorn used those seconds well.

She dove forward under another jaguar before scrambling ahead, reinforcing the hallway again with another wall that left a tiny bit of crawlspace for her to slip under. Sunny slid under the bracing barrier and heard the Mandril roar as he reached out with his hand into the space.

Sunny smirked and blew a raspberry before running down and around the corner. The moment she turned the corner, the unicorn’s horn lit up, and she used her short-range teleportation to appear behind the first wall, on the opposite side to the mandrill. She heard it snarling before she peeked around the corner to watch the primate reach down with his massive hand and grab the opening in the wall.

She blinked and watched the mandrill rip the stone apart with nothing but its own strength before he chucked the broken wall aside and moved down the hall in the direction she just ran.

She waited for a second, trying to make sure that the monkey had been properly confused before she raised a new wall in place of the one the mandrill just took down. She wasn’t sure how long it’d last, but she needed to keep this thing distracted long enough for Marble to get whatever was down in the vault.

After that, well, bringing the temple down on the primate might just be the best idea she had.

Her hind leg was shaking with the adrenaline rushing through her, and she shook it to try and get her body to calm down a little.

Inner Celestia huffed a little before she finally spoke up. “How is it that we’ve basically become a teenager again?”

“Oh, hush,” Sunny replied. “You love it just as much as I do.”

“Of course I do. We’re the same pony.”

---☼---

Marble flew down the hall, ducking beneath the jaguars which had the traps against flyers before he found himself standing in front of the Coatl’s gaze once more. He glanced up at the massive gems before he glanced down at the jewels in the doorway. They still stunk of ozone and lightning, but Marble didn’t have the time to worry about it. Sunny was still running from that monster.

He slipped the headdress onto his head, but nothing happened. A part of him wasn’t surprised. Magic items as a whole could have any kind of command words to activate, including chants, mental triggers, or who-knew-what else. The question was, what did he need to do?

He thought back to all the traps in the pyramid that he saw so far and tried to think if there was some kind of clue that he could use from all of them. Stay close to the dragons, avoid the snakes, duck under the jaguar, and the coatl...was safe. Perhaps there was more to that? Did he need to bow to the coatl? They did revere the giant sky snake. Maybe that was it?

He bowed his head to the giant door, but still, nothing happened.

Was there a chant he didn’t know? If that was the case, then he’d have no chance of figuring out what to do.

Marble set the thought aside. He needed to work on something, anything that he could do. Worrying about stuff he couldn’t do wouldn’t matter.

He tried bowing lower, just to do something while he thought.

The good news was that magical items didn’t have the concept of language, so if there was some kind of magic code phrase, he wouldn’t need to know any ancient languages to get it. “Praise, Oh Great One!” he started, trying to come up with something that would—

Kraka-thoom!

Lightning shot from the giant crystals, and Marble leaped into the air by instinct. Without being grounded, he made for a heavily resistant connector for the lightning bolt, so it passed by him in the fraction of a second it took him to jump into the air before the bolt shot past him and slammed into the ground where he’d been standing a second ago.

“Okay,” Marble thought as he dropped back to the ground before glancing at the gems. “don’t get many chances, do I?”

“Oh great one” had been a long shot, he admitted to himself. It was simple, and if this were a book, cliche even. Instead, he needed the correct answer, or something would shoot him dead. More importantly, the fact that there was a reaction meant he might be on the right track.

He glanced back at the gems and thought. What did he know about the Coatl and the Lusitanpec ponies? He knew that the Lusitanpec ponies revered the coatl as a god, as an ancient being of the storm. He also had a theory that the Lusitanpec ponies used the coatl’s feathers to control the weather. If that was true, the feathers brought the crops and everything around it, which would be vital to a tribe of earth ponies.

Marble took to the sky for a moment, “Bringer of life, I come to honor you!”

The gems fired again, slamming into the ground, but Marble noticed with a growing sense of dread that it hadn’t struck in the same place and hit the wall instead. Somehow the lightning, which generally found the path of least resistance to the ground, was searching for him specifically.

He needed to be careful here. He might not have a chance to be wrong again. Marble slowly began to walk down a list of possibilities while trying to keep the thought that he didn’t have much time in the back of his mind.

The pegasus shook his head. “Come on,” he whispered to himself, “you’ve got to think of something.”

He started mentally running through every single ancient tome and book he read through. Every thesis and paper that he ever researched flashed through his mind, though most of the documents he remembered simply remained blank in his head. Not a single idea flowed through his head at all.

He stared back at the door with the gemstone eyes and the snaking body carved into the wall around the door. Serpent of storms? Bringer of Lightning? Heavenly Snake? Cloud Dangernoodle? “Come on, brain! There has to be something!”

He stared back at the gemstone eyes and tried not to think about the fact that Sunny was being chased by a maniac of a primate. There had to be something he knew somewhere in the back of his head that had the answer here. He just needed to find it somewhere in his memory.

He bit his lip before a thought entered his mind. For years, a pony on the very edge of academia commented about the possibility that the Lusitanpec ponies committed pony sacrifice monthly with a new pony dying on the altar, even full moon. The theory was absurd. Of course, there had been absolutely no evidence of any pony-based sacrifice of that level of frequency, but there had been evidence of the skeletons of smaller animals. Most archeologists thought the sacrifices were occasional religious rituals that were held maybe once or twice a year.

But maybe...maybe they were both right?

The question of how the Lusitanpec ponies came to possess these feathers had been bugging him. But what if they were given in exchange for sacrifice?

Marble looked back at the door and took a deep breath as he prepared for another bolt of lightning to fire toward him. “Herald of the Storms, I bring a sacrifice!”

The carved head stared at Marble for a long second before the rumbling of old stone sounded as the ancient door opened to reveal a dark room.

Marble reminded himself to write this whole thing down later before he stepped inside the darkened room. The space wasn’t ample. In fact, the vault was smaller than the room behind him, and most of its limited space was dominated by a table.

He approached the table, and he blinked at what he saw. A cloak decorated with sky-blue scales that were soft to the touch. They had the same color as the giant Coatl feathers and...and the scales were feathers.

It was a cloak of woven Coatl feathers.

There were dozens of them, maybe forty or fifty of the feathers held together into the cloak.

If just one of them could create a storm that tore the trees from the ground, then what could all of these do together? He couldn’t take this outside. The moment the sunlight hit this thing, the size of the storm that would blow through would destroy the entire jungle. Marble looked around for something that he could use to protect the cape and found the ratty skin of an animal hanging on the wall.

He tore it down and began wrapping the cloak into the skin, trying to be as careful as he could with the feathers. He rolled the skin up before he turned back to the corridor and hoped to Celestia that it wouldn’t explode once he got outside.

---☼---

Sunny turned the corner and found herself at the intersection. The four marked hallways and the one that led back up and out of the pyramid appeared empty. Marble hadn’t shown up yet, and she risked a glance down the hallway where she had just come from. The monkey hadn’t shown up yet and—

“Sunny!”

She turned her head down the hallway marked by the two coatl statues before she saw Marble running up with a rolled-up leopard skin in his wings.

“Marble! You’re alright. Did you get in?”

Marble tossed the headdress aside after it slipped over his eyes, and he nodded. “I found a—”

A thundering roar echoed down from the snake passage, and Marble interrupted himself. “Let’s go.”

Sunny nodded before her horn lit up, and magic tore the stones out of the wall. The temple began shaking as the walls started to bow inward, and Sunny turned to run. “Up the stairs and out before—”

“I shall get you traitors!” the mandrill roared as he turned a corner. “No one betrays Lady Dusk!”

Sunny and Marble booked it. Sunny used her magic to make short jumps across the more heavily trapped hallways, while Marble flew beside her, sticking close to the ground to fly under the jaguar traps. Sunny glanced over at him and nodded before a look of horror crossed his face. “Sunny, don’t!”

He didn’t have time to say anything else before a bolt of lightning shot across the hallway from one of the coatl statues and slammed into her horn. Sunny dropped to the ground, the world spinning around her before she felt a pair of solid legs pick her up.

She blinked wildly before Marble’s face swam into focus. He carried her through the halls, flying low over the floor before she glanced back.

The mandrill was closing in, teeth bared and moving fast through the hallway. The creature’s gait let him leap over the pressure plates, and he smashed through any blade that swung down. Sunny blanched at the terrible strength before the unicorn glanced at the walls. So far, the pyramid hadn’t collapsed, and a part of Sunny knew that having the stones slam down on the mandrill was going to be the only that slowed the monster down.

Her horn throbbed from the attack, and though concentrating on the wall sent a spike of pain through her skull, she could still cast some magic.

Besides, she’d felt worse.

Pushing through the headache that threatened to split her head, she grabbed another stone in the wall and tore it free. She tossed the boulder down the hall toward the mandrill, who leaped out of the way of the attack.

But the wall began to buckle.

“Finally.”

Sunny tore another rock from the wall, and part of the wall came with it. The floor beneath them began to crumble as the entire structure finally could take no more. Everything began to fall around them as the straight lines and corners of the pyramid gave way. All of her work to destabilize the temple finally came to a head, and everything around them fell apart.

Marble pumped his wings to rush through the corridor, moving as fast as he could to carry her out of the temple. The mandrill screamed behind them, roaring with a voice so deep that it vibrated in Sunny’s chest.

A stone dropped ahead of them, and Sunny grabbed it with her magic before moving it out of their way and tossing it directly at the monkey’s chest. This one caught the primate in a solid blow, and he fell backward into the mess of stones and wreckage that formed a wave of destruction that moved closer and closer to them.

Marble took a sharp corner and found the original four statues they passed by when they entered the temple.

“We’re almost out!” Sunny said.

Marble didn’t answer.

“We’re going to make it!”

Marble still didn’t answer.

The wave of the collapsing building got closer behind them, and as they turned the last corner, they saw the stairs collapse ahead of them. Marble pulled up short, halting just short of the wall.

The collapsing wall of debris was getting closer.

Marble looked left and right, but Sunny had already done the math. They were close to the top, it’d be rough on her, but she could do it.

“Fly up.”

“What?”

“Just fly straight up,” she said before her horn lit up.

Marble didn’t argue. He flew upward, and Sunny pulled the ceiling apart ahead of them, leaving them in a bubble of empty space before finally, finally, they reached cool, clear air. The sun shined with afternoon light, and the clouds appeared soft and wispy.

Sunny let her magic drop and felt her head spin. That magic trap might have taken more out of her than she initially thought.

“Sweet Celestia,” Marble said. “We made it out of there. We actually made it.”

Sunny smiled as her vision started going dark, and before her brain could tell her stop, she kissed Marble’s strong, heroic-looking jaw.

Marble blinked and looked down at her, and the last thing she saw before passing out was his eyes.

His incredible, pale blue eyes.

---☼---

Zalxayl held the stones above him with his legs as he slowly moved the rocks out from above him to the side.

Whoever this unicorn traitor was, they certainly knew how to get the job done. By tearing down the temple, he couldn’t in good conscious leave without first checking to see if the vault had been spared. Lady Dusk believed that traitors were secondary to her goal, so if he wanted to chase after these little traitors, he needed to be sure that the key survived first. If he didn’t secure them, he would disappoint the Lady, and he couldn’t allow that.

He broke through the rubble and saw darkness beyond. It took him more than a few hours to dig his way through the mess of stones and debris, so he assumed that night must have fallen a while ago.

Zalxayl casually tossed a bolder aside before he glanced around, looking for any sign of—

He found the vault. The only standing square structure left in the rubble around. The ancient ponies must have protected it with whatever primitive enchantments of protection. This also made his duty far easier. He crossed the collapsed stones over to the still in-tact box and pushed more rocks aside to find the large open doors of the vault.

Zalxayl frowned.

The vault was open. That could only mean that the traitors found whatever was inside.

He turned to the jungle where, no doubt, the two ponies ran and hid into it. They had Lady Dusk’s key, and between that and their treachery, he needed to chase them down.

He barred his teeth in a wicked, terrible grin. It seemed his duty to the Lady and his desire to kill traitors lined up perfectly today.

Comments

[Nadus]

Another great chapter.
Took me way too long to notice that dusk vs. sunny bit.

[A Predatorial Horse]

How is it that I never notice your stories are being written until you're well into them? On the bright side that's 30 unexpected chapters to keep me busy.

[MoonlightRift]

Hmm.

[djthomp]

She blinked and watched the mandrill rip the stone apart with nothing but its own strength before he chucked the broken wall aside and moved down the hall in the direction she just ran.

Yikes.

This monkey is OP, definitely needs some nerfing.