Chapter 15: The Palace
Chapter 15: The Palace
“The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty, and bloody-mindedness." - Terry Pratchett.
Amelia
Fires burned. Drums beat. The chill of evening air hazed our heavy breaths.
Great fire pits filled with burning oil roared to either side of us, and in their glow loomed great statues of oxen with the noble heads of kings and folded wings. Upon the ziggurat, friezes depicting dancing forms flickered and swayed in the shifting light like unreal specters. We charged up the steps of the Cup Palace to the thrum of an alien heartbeat, listening to drums somewhere deep inside the ziggurat as they kept up a steady, rhythmic beat that seemed like it might never end. With one shoulder supporting Sweetie Belle and my bag both, each step up felt agonizingly slow, a torturous battle against the force of gravity. On her other side, Scootaloo did most of the work of carrying our friend, half-pushing the injured unicorn up the steps by main force.
Wire flew down from above, her eyes wide and terrified as she looked back down towards the gate, where even now Wand carriages gathered. “I don’t see any Cup guards. I don’t understand,” she said. “They should be swarming to defend the gate against an incursion.”
“Don’t care,” I grunted. Sweetie Belle’s sniffles and little cries of pain distracted me from the hypnotic lull of the drums. Each little sob cut deep into my heart. I might as well have broken her leg personally. “Will they come up after us?”
“N-no. Maybe?” Wire shivered. “I mean… this is still the Cu-Cup Palace. Th-they’d have to be cr-crazy to come after us! They’d be violatin’ Cup sovereignty.”
A woman’s shout from below caught our ears, and we turned our heads to see several carriages leaving. Two, however, stayed behind, and the crews pushed the door open just enough to charge in. One goblin, bearing wings, began to fly up towards us, while the others ran for the stairs.
“Crap,” I groaned.
“Looks like some of them don’t care none about the lack of an invitation,” Apple Bloom said grimly. She ran down to pick up Sweetie Belle’s front, then Scootaloo pushed her onto Apple Bloom’s back. “Sweetie? I’m sorry, but we gotta move.”
Sweetie Belle sniffled and wrapped her good hooves tightly about Apple Bloom’s back. She tucked her broken leg up and whimpered. “O-okay,” she said timidly. “Let’s go.” When her friend took off up the stairs, Sweetie yelped as her injured leg jounced against the other filly’s side, but did her best to keep her mouth shut as the race went on.
If only all of us could be so brave.
“We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die we’re gonna die…” Wire whimpered as we raced up the steps.
Our hooves clattered up the steps, and we reached the top before long. A great altar stood before us, its smooth sides stained with something dark. We passed from the shadows to meet the last rays of the sun as it kissed the blocks at the ziggurat’s pinnacle. The sun sat on the horizon as a brilliant arc, a valiant defender surrendering at last to the night as we crossed the threshold. Day into night, light into darkness, the outer world to the inner world.
The warm glow of oil lamps within revealed a chamber of golden stone and carefully inlaid gems that formed elaborate patterns on a floor worn smooth by generations. Upon each segment of wall and along the arched ceiling were scenes of men and women planting fields, feasting, and praying, each beneath the images of priests holding forth radiant chalices and a king enthroned. Great statues of seated figures towered far over our heads, holding burning jars of incense in one hand and a bowl of water in the other.
We ran heedless across the floor, our hooves tapping across the tile mosaic of a chalice. Smoke lay thin against the ground, but it still managed to fill my head with a sweet, strange fragrance. It reminded me of home in so many ways—the odor of fresh cut grass, the sweet smell of the trees in spring.
Above us, Wire wobbled in mid-air. Her nostrils flared and she swayed back and forth. “What’s wrong?” I called up at her.
“It’s…” Wire shook her head as she landed beside me and ran along at my side. Her eyes were staring around with a curiously flat expression. Then she turned bright red, ducked her head, and ran with us out of the room.
Behind us, the goblin pegasus raced into the room and charged at us, but she, too, lost her balance and tumbled out of the air. I watched as she inhaled the smoke and stared around, her mouth agape and her cheeks reddening. She rose up to her hooves unsteadily and began to squirm. Her eyes turned flat as she focused on the air in front of her. She started walking in a daze, following something only she could see. She swayed her hips in time to the drum beat as she wandered off down a side passage I hadn’t noticed in my headlong rush.
“What did you see back there?” Scootaloo asked. Apparently we’d all sensed something within the veil of that smoke.
Wire shook her head fiercely. “Nothing,” she lied and ran on through the hall. The blush didn’t leave her cheeks. Vases loomed over us, heavy ceramic vessels that lined the walls.
As we ran, we could hear the other Wand goblins shouting as they reached the room. I paused and tilted my ear back and indeed heard some of the armored footsteps slow. However, some picked up again and raced after us. I considered trying to slow our pursuit by tipping one or two of the vases, but they would have been far too heavy to move on my own. Hurrying, I raced after the others.
Wire, who hadn’t slowed in the slightest, shouted in surprise and caught herself in the air as her feet failed to find the floor. The Crusaders and I skidded to a halt just in time to avoid plummeting down an unexpected stairwell, and we stood gazing down at a long chamber that ran in two wings to the left and right, with too many halls and doors leading off it to count. It was a grand hall that must have led to every other part of the palace, and it, too, had been utterly deserted. Only the silent statues watched our progress, the ancient goblins of the Cup gazing down at us in judgment. Hieroglyphics, their style like and yet subtly different from the Egyptian, covered every wall, as if the room were some vast book.
“We have to be careful,” Wire said as we started down the stairs. Her eyes were wide as she stared back to see if the remaining Wand troops were catching up. “I dunno how things are under King Xerxes, but Cup at its worst has always been about… consumption. About lurin’ you in so that you can’t ever get out again.”
“How do you mean?” Apple Bloom asked. She reached back to steady Sweetie Belle as the two of them descended together.
“I mean this ain't the sorta place you wanna get lost in.” Wire shivered and ran a hoof through her mane, glancing across the hall. “Part of the power of the Cup—when used badly—is that it can turn you around, confuse you so that you don't know yourself anymore.”
“Can you find the way to the airship docks?” I asked her tightly. The drumbeat was getting on my nerves, and I could hear the clatter of armored goblins, still on our collective tails.
“I…” Wire wrung her hooves as if they were hands, staring at the symbols over each of the doors and the statues between them. “We-well, unless they’ve renovated, I know the Great Hall is near where the docks should be—there's a platform right behind the dining hall—and the Great Hall is beside the Spring, which should be that way.” She pointed to an archway that led between the statues of a kneeling man and woman who looked as if they could be twins. “The symbol of the fountain there is the key.”
Without much in the way of hesitation, I galloped towards it. “No time to waste! Come on!”
“Oi!” a heavy woman’s voice shouted from the top of the stairs. “There they are!”
“Stop, you lil’ blighters!” a man called, and I screamed as an arrow clanged off the stones beside me. The bladed shaft had come disturbingly close to skewering me right through my gut.
“Idiot!” the woman said and cracked the other goblin across the head. “We need her alive and unhurt!”
Not pausing to listen to their conversation, we hurried through the arch with the goblins hot on our tails. With our equine strides we should have been able to beat them in a straightaway, but, almost as soon as we entered the first hall, we had to turn down a fork. A frantic Wire led the way, and I couldn't tell if she was following the hieroglyphics in some fashion or just panicking and choosing at random. Probably the latter.
Just as it seemed that the goblin footsteps were right on top of us, though, we heard them race down another way.
Wire slowed to a stop to catch her breath in gratified relief. I grabbed her puffy tail in my teeth and hissed quietly. “No time! If they double back we’re hosed!”
Apple Bloom groaned, panting under the stress of having been running almost since early morning and the weight of another filly on her back. “Hate to admit it, but Moonlight's right.”
“Sure, Ame—I mean, Moonlight.” Wire nodded and trotted ahead. At some point, though, it was clear we were indeed taking turns at random. Our path became confused, and it seemed as if our sense of direction had gotten spoiled along the way. We marched through nearly identical hallways of smooth sandstone. The same hieroglyphics and murals of farming villagers greeted us along every way. Even the torches seemed familiar. At least the clanging of the pursuing Wand goblins seemed just as lost, coming at times from the left, others from the right, but rarely directly behind us.
Soon we heard shouting, and the echoes of the racing goblins moved nearly in front of us. In a panicked rush, we ran backwards—only to come to a halt when we found the way behind us blocked by a wall that most certainly had not been there before.
“Dang it!” I seethed. “We’re being toyed with!”
“What’s going on?” Sweetie Belle said, her voice heavy. Her broken leg had swollen alarmingly, and I tried not to look too closely at it as I gesticulated to the wall.
“I’ve seen this before. Once when Fetter first picked me up and the trees in the forest moved, and again in the Wand Castle when a goblin was pretending to be a rock.” I glared at it. “There’s Cup goblins changing into walls to alter the shape of the labyrinth, or else they’re moving the walls by some other means.”
I could swear I saw the painted face of a priest on the wall’s mural quirk into a smug grin. Smashing my hooves into it angrily did nothing, however—illusion or no, the plaster and brick beneath certainly felt real enough, and my strikes only scratched the surface and chipped the paint.
Wire quivered in a corner, muttering a litany. Thankfully, though, the Wand goblins had not caught up with us. “Well,” Scootaloo said, “at least they seem to be equal opportunity jerks.” Indeed, the Wand goblins' frustrated shouts vanished in another direction entirely.
“They just want to divide us so they can swallow us up one at a time,” Wire moaned as she quivered in a little ball. “Keep us as slaves until we’re old and weak…”
Taking stock of Wire’s remaining supply of thunderstones, I wondered if we could actually hold off the Cup goblins if they decided to come after us. Probably not, but nobody needed to know that. “Well, let them try,” I said loudly. I poked Wire, then pulled sharply on her tail when she refused to get up. With a little shriek, she jumped back to all fours with her hair standing even more on end than usual. “We’ll thrash them if they come anywhere near us.”
“Yeah!” Scootaloo said, bucking her rear hooves threateningly. “I’ll pound them into dust!” I couldn’t tell if she was playing along or genuinely convinced she could fight off whatever guards this place had. No matter; if her enthusiasm kept our opposition guessing for a few minutes more, all the better.
“How are we going to find our way out, though?” Sweetie Belle asked. “I’m totally lost.”
I bit my lip, trying to think. There were techniques to get out of mazes, like always keeping to the left, but not many that I knew of for dealing with a maze that deliberately shifted itself to mess with you.
“Hey,” Scootaloo said, brushing her mane back from her eyes, “those drums always come from the same direction, right?”
“Now that you mention it…” I muttered and perked my ears. They most definitely came from a single direction, currently to our left. Their direction wasn’t immediately obvious because the actual sound of the drums came from seemingly everywhere at once, but the pulsing bass beat definitely had an origin, and that origin was to our left.
“And the sound isn't really muffled, meaning there's a clear path, so we haven’t been cut off,” Scootaloo added. “How are we going to—” She cut off when Apple Bloom shoved a hoof into her mouth.
“Wait. I think I have an idea.” For a moment we stood there as Apple Bloom cogitated.
I took stock of our little cadre. We all looked miserable and beaten up. My mane fell all across my face and sides. Apple Bloom’s looked particularly wild with the absence of her bow, and only Wire seemed reasonably intact—not that she wasn't about to have a heart attack, judging by how tautly she stood.
“Wire?” Apple Bloom asked at last, getting her attention. She gestured the older filly down to whisper into her ear.
Wire swallowed and nodded, like a puppet on strings. Apple Bloom slid Sweetie Belle to Scootaloo’s back, and then took a rope from her saddlebags, which she tied to each of us.
“Can goblins see in the dark?” Apple Bloom asked me quietly.
I shook my head. “No. Uh. Probably not.” I frowned as she cinched her rope tightly around my waist. “But, then, neither can we.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Scootaloo whispered with a grin. “We’ve got it all covered. We may not have gotten our cutie marks from spelunking, but we did pick up a trick or two.” She passed the sound sphere up to Sweetie Belle
“Do any of those tricks involve not dying in a dark corridor? Because—”
“Hush!” Apple Bloom stuffed a hoof in my mouth and nodded to Wire. The goblin grimaced and set her wings. Then she belted them forward and back, a rapidfire motion that kicked up a powerful wind that swept through the labyrinth. The lamps on the walls struggled, faltered, and died. A few survived the onslaught, but not enough to leave us in anything but near-total darkness.
The rope around my barrel nearly yanked me off my feet as the others ran and I struggled to keep up. Our hoofsteps made no sound at all, and even the sound of the blood pumping through my ears had been taken away. For all I knew, we could have been traveling through a void, were it not for the fact that my feet felt the floor and the occasional moments where I’d smack into a wall and then be dragged a different direction.
As we ran, though, I heard voices in other languages shouting across the halls. Even without being able to understand them, it seemed clear that they were trying to narrow us down again. Torches would flash only to suddenly be snuffed out by Wire’s wing beats.
Finally, light spilt open ahead of us as a man’s silhouette formed. Apple Bloom didn’t hesitate—she spun and delivered a powerful buck. I must have underestimated our strength greatly, or forgotten that Apple Bloom must weigh something on the order of eighty to a hundred pounds, because her blow struck the barely-seen fellow so hard he flew back into the stairs behind him. With spots filling our eyes, we charged past the stunned man up the flight of stairs into an antechamber. We darted through the open door and slammed it shut behind us.
I had to give it to those fillies; they were remarkably resourceful, particularly given our limited means. Chances are the Wand goblins wouldn't be able to catch up now. Somehow, I didn't think the labyrinth would risk losing more prey. With my heart lifting, I took in our new surroundings.
This room had a long arched ceiling with narrow ribbed windows to either side. They looked out into a moonlit garden with strange plants barely glimpsed. When we tried the door at the end of the hall, however, we found it locked. Apple Bloom, Wire, and I all tried to shake the door’s iron handle together, but all it did was wriggle the door in its frame and rattle a bar on the other side.
“Drat,” Apple Bloom said and gave the door a desultory kick. “Should we head back?”
Wire slumped against it, her sore wings hanging limply on her back. “They’ll catch us for sure if we do. It's just a matter of time until they find us here, if they aren't already coming.”
I went over to the window slats and peered out at the garden with a thoughtful scowl. “I… might be able to do something.”
“What’s that?” Scootaloo asked. She nudged her head against the stone windows and pulled back with a little pop. “Way, way too thin. You’d need to take my legs and wings off, and even then my head’s too big.”
“Not exactly.” I glanced back at the others. “Can you all turn around for a bit? It’s easier if no pony is watching me.”
Wire perked up. “Oh! I know what she’s doing.” She turned the curious Crusaders around. “Don’t worry, you lot. Am—err, Moonlight’s got this down.”
Well, at least one of us was confident in my abilities. I flexed my legs and stared at the stone bars. Setting my hooves against them, I applied a gentle pressure and fixed in my mind the idea of being on the other side. The fact that the garden beyond was visible made the task of Penetration far easier, but it was still the act of shoving myself through solid matter. The fact that I’d done it accidentally several times already didn’t lend me any particular confidence.
Somepony had to do it, though. Damn me if I couldn’t at least do this right for my friends.
The key to the trick of Penetration is convincing yourself that the object isn’t really solid at all—to somehow slide the tiny bits of your matter between and around the tiny bits of theirs. Daphne probably could have explained the theory in a scientific way, and exactly why it was impossible—electron pressure or something like that. You have to believe absolutely that you can pass through a solid object, regardless of its technical impossibility. Perhaps it said something about my capacity for self-delusion, but there were few more suited to the task of believing the impossible was doable than me. Ever so slowly, my hooves sank into the stone and I passed through as if a solid wall were nothing more than insubstantial mist. Rock and flesh melded together, and I could feel it like a vague wave of pressure passing through my body.
In the span of two breaths, I was on the other side. Goblin magic rules.
“Okay,” I called back, “I’ll go open the door.”
They turned and stared. Scootaloo boldly shoved her head between the bars and winced as she banged her skull. “Ow! Moonlight, how’d you do that?”
“Don’t be a bald-headed loon,” Wire chided. “It’s magic, see? She was taught by a great magician and just clean walked through the windows.”
I rolled my eyes and picked my way across the garden towards the door on the other side. It was a roundabout path, dodging through vines and under briars. I moved carefully, owing to the poor lighting—the glass ceiling and a few fires on distant exits only dimly contributed to the illumination.
As I came out of sight, though, I bumped into something large and furry and backpedaled rapidly. As my eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight, I found myself staring at a huge backside, a bear, or perhaps something stranger still. Hopefully it was asleep, and I began to creep away, only to realize that it wasn’t moving at all. Not even to breathe.
As I stalked around, I discovered why quickly enough. It was a bear—very much in the past tense. Huge rents had been torn in its front, and black liquid pooled across the moonlit glade where it had died. A tiger sat across the way and stared blankly into space, with several marks across its face and side.
If I’d wandered into this garden as blithely as I had while they were still alive, I’d have been toast if they’d wanted me for a snack. Someone had cleared the area out for me already. Immediately, I began to search the darkness for blue eyes.
“Wee bairns should not stand so idly,” the Morgwyn said from behind me, “not while their enemies close in on them from all sides.”
Really, I should be proud of myself for not shrieking. I jumped and spun to face the cat-thing. My wide eyes flicked from it to the dead bear and back again. “Isn’t that, uhm… I mean…”
“Even now, the Wand King marshals his forces. He will risk the eternal ire of the Cup to gain what he seeks, if necessary.” The Morgwyn’s tail flicked, and I looked from its barbed tail to the marked tiger. “Should the Cup King know what he has in his grasp, he, too, shall rouse.”
It’s strange, really; after the initial hackle raising, the whole situation didn’t seem all that bad. Sure, the Morgwyn had slain two creatures on the off-chance that they might be a threat to me. Maybe a day or so ago that would have been horrifying, but after everything I’d just went through, it seemed only natural. “And just what does he have in his grasp, Morg? What am I?”
“Power and promise, bairn.” It cast its sharp gaze back at the others. “You may not have much time left to escape. The airships you seek lie past this garden, past a guardian.” It nodded towards a firelit ramp near the back that led into another chamber.
“We’ll just have to hurry, then,” I said, starting towards the door.
“‘We?’ The ones back there, will they continue to aid you once they know all? What will they do, once they realize you deceived them and led them to their deaths?” The Morgwyn flitted up into the trees and walked along a branch above me. “When the time comes, will they turn you in for a breath of mercy? When it comes between an uncertain and possibly lethal attempt at escape or clemency from your enemies, which will they choose?”
“They aren’t like that!” I snapped.
“Oh?” Its glowing teeth and eyes were the only thing visible now. “Because you have been so wise in placing your trust before.”
With that, its smile faded, and its eyes as well. I hurried along, trying not to think about my benefactor’s words. Daphne had betrayed me for some tramp unicorn. Everypony I had thought were my friends in Ponyville had deceived me and kept me prisoner and were now attempting to capture me again. Sweetie Belle, Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Wire weren’t like that, though; they were honest.
Except Wire only came with me because I’d made her think she was going to be punished and browbeat her into following me. The Crusaders didn’t even know my real name.
They’d just never have to find out until we were safe.
Reaching the other side of the door, I set my head under the bar and pushed until it popped free, then pulled the door open. The others flew past me into the garden, and I shut and barred the door behind them, just in case any Wand or Cup goblins tried to come after us.
“This way,” I told them and hurried down the garden path. We passed fountains, benches, and statues cluttering the night garden and came to the ramp. The drum beat was stronger than ever here, pounding like some ancient dragon’s heart. We ascended and walked into another dimly lit room. Ahead, obelisks reached for the tiled ceiling, and we faintly perceived two stairways curving around a massive statue in the center of the room. It seemed to be a sphinx, with a long body, two massive paws, and a woman’s head. Water flowed in channels on the floor.
As we passed a Cup emblem on the floor, however, fire leapt into being along the walls and revealed the sphinx as something very much alive. She opened her eyes and flexed her massive lion’s body with a cat-like yawn, and then stared down at us with dark eyes. Wire, rather than wibbling, simply turned as stiff as stone and fell over to play dead.
“Oh, crap,” I muttered.
“Wand-tongue? My, my,” she purred in a deep voice, “it’s been a very long time since anyone of that persuasion has penetrated the Palace this deeply. Few dare to disturb the sacred recesses so readily—I had not imagined anyone alive who was so foolish.”
I looked to the others and then back up to the sphinx. Perhaps, if it wasn’t terribly fast, Apple Bloom and I could run back into the forest and get ourselves lost—except for the fact that Apple Bloom would never leave her friends and Scootaloo was too slow with an injured Sweetie Belle on her back. So it would just be me. Then I could easily sneak back past the sphinx with the sound sphere after she had gone back into her nap.
Instead of running like they ought to, though, my feet stayed put. For now.
“Yeah,” I said. “Uh… sorry about that. We were running from some Wand soldiers and got chased here.”
“I do not particularly care,” the sphinx said cheerfully. “You might have preferred their ministrations to me, but what would we of the Cup be without our fabled mercy?”
My ears perked. “Mercy?” Apple Bloom asked uncertainly. She eyed the sphinx’s paws as it flexed and revealed huge meat hooks.
“Three riddles shall I ask, for ’tis mine ancient task. Should you answer true, freedom shall be your due. But should you answer false or lie, then I fear that you shall surely die.”
A sigh of relief escaped my lips. “Oh, phew. Riddles. It’s okay, girls, we’ve got this one in the bag.”
The sphinx’s lips quirked into a frown at my flippant response. The Crusaders gave me a puzzled look as well. Really, I’m surprised they weren’t feeling pretty confident. Everyone knew that there were a few things you had to work on in order to be prepared for eventualities like game shows, reality television, or adventures with strange monsters—memorizing werewolf moons was one, learning obscure trivia about mythology was another, but getting the hang of riddles was pretty much the top of the list, or near enough.
The sphinx cleared a throat and tossed her black hair, then intoned:
“Three lives have I.
Gentle enough to soothe the skin,
Light enough to caress the sky,
Hard enough to crack rocks.”
“Water,” I said, without even pausing to think about it.
The sphinx scowled down at me. “Are you sure it’s water?”
I rolled my eyes. “Three lives for the three states of liquid, solid and gas. It’s clean and cool to the touch when not dirty, it rises to the sky as clouds, and when it repeatedly freezes it can gradually crack rocks open. Yes, it’s water.”
The sphinx bit her lip. “All right.” She narrowed her gaze.
“This old one runs forever, but never moves at all.
He has not lungs nor throat, but still a mighty roaring call.
What is it?”
My hooves clipped a little pattern as I circled the others, thinking through different options. “Hum. Not that… no…” I listened to the distant beat of the drums, letting their rhythm clear my head. The Crusaders watched me circle, hardly daring to breathe. “Something that roars and yet isn’t an animal, and stays in one place… Generators don’t run forever, but something that… Ah! A waterfall!” I said and clapped my hooves triumphantly.
“Damn!” the sphinx swore. She lowered her head down to my level and looked me in the eyes with a sour expression. “All right, pretty miss unicorn. You like riddles, do you?”
“Is that your riddle? If so, I answer—”
“No!” She snarled. “It’s not!” She lifted her head and stamped a foot. “I’m thinking; shut up!”
It was hard not to look smug as the sphinx sat back on her haunches and puffed her cheeks out. Goading her could be the wrong approach, but someone who was off balance wasn’t liable to think very hard.
“I’ve got it,” she said at last, and curled her lips into a smile.
“Thought will ever trail behind,
as this one colors in the mind.”
I opened my mouth to respond, then paused. It certainly wasn’t one of the classic riddles, so perhaps she’d come up with it by herself. It was extremely simple, which indicated either that the answer was deceptively complicated, or else deviously straightforward in order to throw off people who over think things.
My eyes met the Crusaders, but each of them shook her head in turn. Wire was and remained catatonic. I started to pace again, going around and working the puzzle out in my head. “Can I ask clarifying questions?”
“No,” the sphinx said smugly.
“Come on. You should at least tell me if it’s something from Midgard or some faraway land.”
“I would think it obvious that it is not, especially to a clever riddle-solver such as yourself.” She settled back on her belly and watched me gleefully. “Go on. Take your time.”
Growling, I paced faster. My tail twitched. Twice I stopped to answer, thinking it might be something as specific as a type of bird, or as simple as the brain itself, but both times I stopped. Neither fit. If it wasn’t the brain, it wouldn’t be synapses, either, and the blood in the brain certainly didn’t color beyond red.
“Tick, tock,” the sphinx said. She flexed her claws again and let them scrape across the tile.
“How much time do I have?” I asked. The tremor of uncertainty I kept firmly out of my voice.
She spread her teeth in a grin. “Long enough to answer, but shorter than you might like.”
The damned drums continued to pound, and my heart outraced them. Possibilities flew into my mind and were discarded just as rapidly. This feline witch wouldn’t beat me.
Except she was beating me.
I circled closer to the Crusaders. Sweetie Belle still held the sound sphere loosely in one hoof—if I grabbed it and ran, I could get away.
I paused, staring at the sphere. It was my ticket out.
At the cost of everyone else.
All I had to do was reach out and take it.
“Ahem,” the sphinx said, but she paused as Sweetie Belle abruptly spoke up.
“Wh-why are you doing this?” Sweetie Belle asked. Her eyes looked up to meet the sphinx’s, and they were huge and liquid. “D-do you enjoy hu-hurting little kids?”
The sphinx glared down at her. “Now, you hold on, unless you have an answer—”
Sweetie Belle wouldn’t be deterred, though. She started to cry. Her eyes streamed tears and she began to wail at the top of her lungs. Her bitter, broken sobs filled the arena. There was such heartbreak in those mournful cries that I felt my guts shrivel up in shame at the thoughts I myself had been having. Just moments ago I’d seriously considered abandoning these people to save my own skin.
Just what sort of creature does that?
“Look, it’s just my job,” the sphinx said apathetically. “I’m bound by ancient laws.” Sweetie Belle’s cries grew louder, if anything, lamenting her short life and how she’d never get to say farewell to her parents or her sister. It could have been my imagination, but it seemed as if the figures depicted on the walls had turned their heads to frown at the sphinx. She rolled her shoulders uncomfortably.
“I’m not that bad; I’m not!” she protested. Her eyes flicked from side to side and she hunched down, as if to block the gazes. “I… I probably wouldn’t kill you, anyway! I mean, that whole line about dying is more eventual. I like kids, really! I have a cousin on Svartalfheim and I play with her cubs a lot.”
“I’ll never get to taste chocolate ice cream ever aga-ain!” Sweetie wailed. “N-no pony wi-will ever be my special somepony! I-I’ll never have foals of my own!” She banged her hooves on her head. “I'll ne-never see my sister and tell her how much I'll miss her-r!” Great watery tears fell on Scootaloo in profusion.
“It’s ‘eyes!’” the sphinx shouted over the shrieking. She waved her paws in front of the four of us desperately. “It’s ‘eyes!’ Because, you know, cones in the eyes register color so our thoughts can—Agh, please, just say it so you can go!”
“The answer to the riddle is eyes?” Apple Bloom asked.
“Good enough! Go, go!” she said, waving us up the stairs. I grabbed Wire’s tail in my teeth and hauled the catatonic goblin up after us, with Apple Bloom’s help to keep her from banging her head on the steps. Scootaloo carried the still-sobbing Sweetie Belle, whose cries were still loud enough to leave our ears ringing. The sphinx, for her part, covered her own ears and sang loudly in what sounded like an Indian language—a Cup dialect, no doubt.
We passed through the portal at the top and into a circular room dominated chiefly by a great fountain, fed by four different statues of goblins all pouring their chalices in. Once we passed through, Sweetie Belle turned her head to look behind, and her keening slackened off. It was almost as if somepony had gone and tightened a valve, because the waterworks stopped as well. “Wow, I can’t believe that worked,” she said wonderingly.
Wire jerked up. “Huh? …We’re alive?” She patted herself down. “Well. I certainly wasn't expectin’ that.”
Scootaloo snorted. “Yeah, so far.”
Apple Bloom covered her mouth to keep from laughing too loudly. “We showed her. I think Moonlight was pretty close to—Moonlight? Are you okay?”
“Ye-yeah,” I lied, turning away. No tears, but the pit in my stomach hadn’t gone anywhere. Shame was a feeling that I was neither comfortable nor familiar to me. I couldn’t look at their faces now, any of their faces. They didn’t deserve what I had been putting them through, and here I was playing them false. “Girls?”
“Yeah?” Apple Bloom asked as she, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle turned towards me. “What’s up?”
“There’s so-something I ne-need to tell you girls,” I said, and swallowed at a lump in my throat. “I—”
“Oh, hey!” Wire said, oblivious to my revelation, “it’s the Spring! I can’t believe it, I thought I’d never see it with my own eyes!”
Before we could ask what she was talking about, she flew back, lifted Sweetie Belle up, and dipped her into the bubbling water. Sweetie gave a little squeal and kicked her heels, but was soon up to her neck regardless of her struggles.
Even as we watched, the bubbling increased, and the water around her skin started to glow. It shined brightest about her broken ankle, and the three of us stared in awe as Sweetie Belle’s leg slowly straightened, letting off a thin trail of milky white that filmed on the surface of the pool before itself fading. The swelling shrank. When Wire pulled her out, she looked as good as new, and when Sweetie Belle gingerly put her weight on her rear hoof, she didn’t so much as wince.
It was incredible, miraculous even—not merely the healing, but what it meant for me. I practically fell into Sweetie Belle’s forelegs with a happy sob. I buried my face in her mane and wet it with tears. It meant that I hadn't screwed her over.
Sweetie rocked back as I leaned into her. “It’s okay.” She patted my mane awkwardly. “I’m okay now, see?” She rubbed her own leg with a wondering expression, feeling at the soft hair and smooth, unblemished skin. “That is really incredible, Wire. How does it work? I mean, not even Princess Celestia could do that!”
“It’s part of the Arcana’s purview. The Cup swallows desires and overflows with gifts,” Wire said. “Which is to say, uhm… it kind of grants wishes, and—do not drink it, Scootaloo!” She grabbed the younger filly and shook her.
Scootaloo coughed up the bubbling water and watched the froth dissolve into nothingness. “I thought you said it was magic healing water!” she protested, giving Wire a sour look. “Also, wish-granting.”
“Yeah, sure, but you don’t want to let strange magic inside you. Do you know how to control it?” She shuddered. “That’d be a right tidy mess. I took a big risk just dunking Sweetie Belle in, but my sister Flash told me it was pretty safe for brief exposure like that.”
“What could happen?” Apple Bloom asked, looking at her murky reflection.
“I dunno.” Wire shook her head. “You could end up on another world entirely, or maybe changed somehow. Maybe you’d become an empath and never be able to shut off others’ feelings from infectin’ yours.”
“Could we get our cutie marks that way?” Apple Bloom asked with a gleam in her eyes.
Wire shook her head harder. “I ain't a Cup goblin, I don't know all the lore; we also aren’t Cup Bearers, so we couldn't control it even if I were. Maybe it could give you your cutie marks, but it ain’t worth the risk no matter how tidy you might think the rewards are.” She frowned towards the open doorway in the back, from whence the pounding drums came. “Their rewards always come with a price, and usually that price is servin’ the Cup King in whatever he wants. That’s why I was so afraid of comin' here—Xerxes is the worst kind of King. He’ll hook you, addict you, and never let you go. You’ll never want to leave ever again, because he'll just suck you in with something else you need whenever you think you're free.”
“Shoot,” Apple Bloom said. “Well, I guess. Say, Moonlight—” she turned towards me “—didn’t you have somethin’ you wanted to say?”
I slid back from Sweetie Belle and rubbed my face. Each of their faces looked to mine, open and innocent. Their eyes shone with happiness, and Sweetie Belle looked so proud to have her leg working again. All I had to do was open my mouth and tell them that I was a liar who had abused their selfless friendship and all of their heroism.
The words stuck in my throat.
After a pause, I finally said, “If this is the Spring, then the Great Hall and the airships are just past this area. We should hurry and get out of here, after we take care of our injuries.”
Wire turned to look at me, washing her bruised sides with the healing water. Her pale eyes wavered and turned away, and she returned to cleansing herself without saying a word.
The pool glimmered as I stepped up to it and splashed myself. Wherever the liquid touched, cuts and abrasions bubbled and washed away as if they were merely dirt being soaped up. The thought of soap reminded me, and I dug around in my bag until I came out with a pair of tiny soapstone statues of birds, the ones I had picked up in the forest before the basilisk attack. Somehow, they’d survived all the bouncing around, and looked reasonably pristine but for a few chips.
“Will it heal petrification?” I asked.
Wire gave a shrug, and watched as I held the two rocks in under the surface in the cloth I’d wrapped them in. They soaked for a bit, and bubbles rose off them fiercely. The five of us watched in amazement as their surfaces lit up with a pearly luminescence. Then, shaking themselves free of the water, a pair of blue jays flew up to dance overhead. I beamed and felt for the first time in a while that perhaps there was hope for us after all. The two birds swooped down to perch in my hair and I laughed. Then they hopped down to the lip of the Spring, and their eyes were oddly intelligent as they met my gaze.
On impulse, I told them, “You two should go. There will be ships outside—wait for us there.”
They pecked at the stone, and for a moment I wondered if I was foolish for talking to a pair of dumb birds, but then they leapt back into the air, spun around twice, and flitted through the open door.
Wire coughed. “Right. We’re near the throne room, though, so we should be extra careful. If one of the Cup Bearers sees us… I’m not sure we’ll ever get out.”
Sweetie Belle took the hint and wound the sound sphere up. With our hooves muffled once more, we snuck up to the door and peered through. We watched from behind a columned cloister, with the shadows of mad dancers cast up against us. Down below, goblins of every shape and size blended together, red-faced with heat and exhaustion as they beat drums, played pipes, strummed, and cavorted between lit fires. They gorged themselves with wine and excess. In one corner, the winged goblin who had been lured away before danced in the air with another of her kind, the two close and covered in sweat. Overlooking it all sat a young goblin man with golden metallic hair, bearing a shepherd’s crook in one hand and a simple wooden chalice in the other. The chalice bubbled and poured red wine down endlessly to be collected and distributed by maddened shapes. His face was split wide in a smile that danced cruelly in the shifting shadows.
At Wire’s touch, we went around the terrace, coming to a vaulted banquet hall over the throne room that could have played host to a decent game of football. The windows on the far side had an excellent view of the distant statues. Enormous tables ran from one end of the hall to the other, haphazardly placed and topped high with plates, platters, and even whole troughs of the ripest, freshest food I had ever seen in my entire life. Grapes as big as a man’s fist practically glowed in the flickering light, while whole mountains of roasted bird and slabs of steak glistened in their own juices.
It was also a complete mess.
The goblins there, some as big as elephants and others as small as mice, must have had a field day earlier in the evening. Entire rivers of wine, milk, and honey poured across the floor, pooling around snoring figures, for they were all quite asleep. Engorged with what was only a fraction of the feast laid before them, they snoozed with their heads face down in pies or across benches. Some of them had been flung one atop the other, probably so others could get to the food that they had fallen asleep on earlier.
“Just… don’t eat anything,” Wire murmured as we started towards the hall. The sound sphere had worn off, but we didn’t see much need for it again yet. “We just need to get through here.”
“Why not?” Sweetie Belle asked.
“The whole place has been blessed, and the food, too,” Wire said as she trembled. “This is one of the Cup’s most sacred festivals.”
Sweetie picked the sound sphere up again. “Should we…?”
“I dunno.” Wire poked the arm of a hairy, troll-like figure. “They’re pretty wanged out.”
“Can you keep it wound up until we need it?” I asked.
Sweetie Belle nodded and twisted the key. Then Apple Bloom tied a rubber band around the ball and stowed it. “We’ll cut it if things get hairy.”
In a line, we started across the banquet hall. We picked our way over snoring bodies and avoided pools of liquid or grease, the piles of broken glass and pottery, and the heaped tables.
My mind drifted. It was like some weird haunted house, and Halloween was right around the corner. Naomi would probably make my costume again this year—
Just in time, I caught myself from pitching over the side of a table and into a bowl of spaghetti. I shook my head and scowled. Nothing had really changed, but it was as if a fog had risen up around the room. When I shook my head and cleared it, the haze went with it, and so, too, did I realize that I’d fallen behind. Hurrying, I caught up with the others and poked Wire, who was leading the way.
Wire stared down at me blankly. “Flash…?” she asked dimly, then her eyes sharpened. “Amy? What’re you—whoa!” She stepped back, and her hoof squished into a roll. The warm, heavy odor of sugar and cinnamon wafted up and filled my nostrils. All the colts and fillies at school would come to my party. They’d never laugh at me again.
My stomach growled.
“Could anypony else go for some hayfries right now?” Scootaloo asked.
Apple Bloom glanced around at the room. “I sure could.”
“Uh.” Wire shook her head again. “That’s probably a bad idea. We should go.”
“Yeah,” I said, reluctantly tearing my eyes from the succulent pastry rolls. We picked up the pace and found a clear path through the debris, trotting along.
Yet the smell coming off the tables was incredible. It must have been hours since they were left out, but it all looked fresh out of the kitchen. The drum beat sank itself into my bones and my feet struck the ground in time with its rhythm. The statues of goblins on the walls swayed. They shook sheafs of wheat and jugs of red liquid.
“You know, we could use something for the road,” I said. “Or the sky, whatever.”
Wire folded her wings tightly against her side, frowning. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“It does seem like a bit of a waste,” Apple Bloom said, bumping into Wire when the latter slowed.
“Wait, girls…” Wire stammered, “I-I think something’s wrong.”
“What could be wrong, Live Wire?” Scootaloo asked. She tracked her head past Wire to a pile of gooey-looking desserts that had gone untouched. They practically glowed in the moonlight. “Oh, wow, look at that.”
“One snack won’t hurt, right?” Sweetie Belle asked. She hopped up onto the bench, and I hopped up with her.
“Well… I mean… I don’t know for sure,” Wire said. She squirmed and danced below uncertainly.
I waved a hoof down at her. “Oh, relax, Wire. We’re just going to have a bite.”
“Th-that’s what I’m afraid of!” she said and fluttered up. She stared at the pastries and tore her face away with obvious effort. “I-I mean, that’s the trick. You start sm-small.” Her wings fluttered as she darted around behind us. “Girls? We really shouldn’t. It’s a bad idea.”
Apple Bloom gave her a reflexive kick as Wire tried to grab her around the middle and carry her off. After that, Wire shied away.
The fog crept up, stealing over me as I hopped on Scootaloo’s back to get up onto the table. As I hauled her up, I saw myself walking home. It was a hot summer, with all the windows opened. Mom and Dad sat at the table. Mom carved an apple with the knife in her teeth as her tail flicked with concentration. Father’s wings ruffled and his neatly kept black mane bobbed over behind his newspaper. I heard footsteps from upstairs and Daphne came down the stairs in her newest dress. I ran to meet her, leaping into her forelegs, and she laughed and picked me up, and—
Wait. Daphne and me hugging? That was just all sorts of wrong.
I stared down at the pastry sitting on my hoof, sticky with caramelized sugar and with a ripe cherry on top. It had seemed so innocent, so delectable.
“Girls, stop!” I said sharply.
Apple Bloom took one look at me. Then she bit into her cake. In turn, each of the Crusaders dug into their pastries. Then, their eyes alight with hunger, they tore into the pile, stuffing their faces.
My eyes widened in shock as I watched them. “No!” I shouted and tried to pull Scootaloo off, only for a sudden burst of strength to surge through her as she tossed me off. I windmilled my forelegs and kept from toppling off the table, readying myself to leap at them and stop them by force, when something strange caught my eye.
They were changing.
Sweetie Belle’s horn sharpened and grew, the tip catching the moonlight with a sharp point. Apple Bloom’s limbs had thickened, but only to match their increased length. Scootaloo’s tiny wings fluffed up and folded across her back—she seemed sleek, powerful.
Would that have been the end of it, I might have been able to stop them and walk away. We could have laughed about it.
Even as I watched, Apple Bloom licked at her hooves and looked at me. Her eyes were red-on-red, pupils and sclera both. Wood sprouted in her long red mane, popping little white blossoms out. “This is great stuff, Moonlight. You should try some—I feel amazing.”
“Yeah,” Sweetie Belle agreed, her voice oddly resonant and clear, “these are way, way better than anything back home.” Her hairs became translucent, then solidified along the length of her, forming a brilliant crystalline sheen of fine diamond scales. Her tail flicked, shaking off hair as it grew, leaving a long tuft at the end. She lowered her hoof as it split into a cloven one and picked up more dessert with a glow of pale green magic.
“Awesome more like,” Scootaloo said, spreading her now-impressive wingspan to let the feathers there catch the light and scintillate like a kingfisher’s iridescent plumage.
“No,” I breathed. “No, no. Guys! You have to stop!” I turned towards Wire. “What’s going on?” I begged.
“They’re… they’re becoming goblins,” she said slowly.
“Hey, Sweetie, hovah someof dose grapes over here, wouldja?” Apple Bloom asked through a mouthful.
Sweetie nodded enthusiastically. “Sure thing.”
I pounced at her. “Sweetie, stop!”
She picked me up in midair in a green aura and gave me a distant look; I could see the light refracting oddly in her smooth eyes. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”
“Yeah,” Apple Bloom said, shifting and kicking plates away to give her increased scale room on the table. Her teeth were even more broad and flat than normal, strong enough to grind bone to powder. “She’s… uhm… Moonlight Shimmer? From Manehattan?”
I landed with a thud as Sweetie Belle discarded me. “Oh, right. Come join in, we can talk after the party,” she said.
The drum beat jarred thoroughly now as my heart raced. I gaped at them, watching as they ate and changed. All around us, the snores slowed, and the goblins began to stir.
It was so unfair.
After everything we’d been through, after all the scrapes we’d pulled ourselves from, after all the dangers we’d faced and overcome, this is what it came to. When Sweetie’s leg had been broken, I had thought that I’d screwed up for good, only for hope to be given by the Spring.
Now, mere minutes later, that hope had been viciously torn away.
Wire landed next to me, reaching out to Scootaloo, but I grabbed her and yanked her around. “No. Leave them.”
“But—”
“I said, leave them!” I snapped at her. Wire’s head jerked around, and she stared in terror at my bared teeth and wild eyes. “Let’s go. Now!”
Wire whimpered, but lowered herself so I could climb on her back. Then, with effort, she beat her wings and carried me away from the doomed Crusaders. We didn’t get far before a groggy voice shouted. A plate buzzed up out of the mass of goblins below, but the thrower had yet to really wake up. I could hear them shouting in their own tongue, trying to get the attention of the mad party below.
Wire shook below me. For a moment, I’d wondered if she’d been hit, but found her choking back sobs instead. “Come on!” I shouted. “We can’t be far now, Wire! Don’t give up on me now!”
“Like you gave up on them?” she called back, tears flying past as we dived through a tunnel. Feet stomped and goblins crowded at the entrance. We soared out into the night air, where the stars were bright. A storm approached from the horizon, ripe with the promise of thunder and rain as we flew towards a series of craft moored to the side of the palace. They swayed in the rising wind, their envelopes turning like great sails.
“We didn’t have a choice!” I glanced around for the bluejays, but neither sight nor sound of the birds presented themselves. Perhaps they'd been smart and flown away entirely.
“Just like you… you didn’t have a choice but to lie to them?” Wire took me over the lip of one airship that was about the size of a rowboat, with an engine in the back on a tiller. Rather than let me down, though, she reached back and threw me onto the deck with a loud thud.
“Wire!” I gasped, wincing at the pain in my shoulder as I stood. Nothing had been broken or dislocated, but it had been a rough landing. “What are you doing? Get down—”
“No!” she screamed, and I shrank back from her as she snarled at me. “I’m done with you, Moonlight Glimmer.”
I stared at her, momentarily dumbfounded. “Bu-but… Wire, I’m your—”
“Friend?” she spat. “You were never my friend. All you’ve ever done is treat me like dirt since the moment we met! You foalnapped me and told me everything I knew was over! You… you… serpent-tongued cythraul!” She hammered the ropes holding the airboat in place and tore at them with her teeth until it came loose from the moorings and drifted on the wind. “You want to run and hide? Fine! I don’t need you! Those girls showed more care and compassion to me than anygob I’ve ever known, and I’m not gonna let them become Cup slaves! All you ever did was lie to them and use them!” She grabbed the engine’s cord and pulled once, twice, and thrice until it coughed and roared.
“Wire, wait. I… I…” I reached out to her. “Please, I… I’m sorry, I… we…” I prepared to leap after her. Maybe she was right—the goblins were disoriented, we could hide and wait until they were gone. The boat would prove an excellent distraction, too, drawing their attention and making them think we’d left until it was too late.
Wire paused on the side of the deck, looking back at me with her eyes soft and wide.
Past her, the other goblins were finding their footing as they stumbled out into the night. A few had makeshift weapons, pieces of broken chairs and benches, the iron rods of oil lamps, and other random bric a brac that looked blunt or sharp. A few of them had taken to the air with mixed success, as well.
“We can’t do it,” I said at last. “Look, you… you can’t save them. We have to leave, now. Please, Wire. I’m—”
She struck my hoof with her own, turned, and dived down into the shadows of the palace.
“Wire!” I called, shrieking her name at the top of my lungs. “Don’t… don’t leave me, please…”
My mane and tail whipped raggedly across my face as the little craft picked up speed. I sobbed bitterly, but already the Cup goblins were recovering. They climbed into the other crafts or leapt into the air, all of them shrieking with rage. Some were even frothing, driven to a frenzy. On the dock, I saw one winged woman stride powerfully into the confused mass and lift an object into the air. Powerful light poured from it. Where the Wand had been a magnesium flare, this one was like a pool of shimmering incandescence that flowed out from her to the others. When she barked an order, they snapped into action, gaining clarity and discipline where they had none before.
I pushed my body into the tiller and turned the boat out away from the palace. It didn’t matter where I was going, so long as it was away. With tears blurring my vision, I could only vaguely see the forest that lay outside the city walls—crashing there would be really my only hope.
The wind up here was powerful and bitterly cold, rolling off the frozen realm of Mag Mell in an icy breath. Shuddering with the cold in my thin coat and lacking time to retrieve anything protective from my bag, I watched as the shapes of the goblin fliers raced after me. The first was foolish enough to come up from below, so I took one of the boat’s sandbags, aimed, and kicked it down to him. The birdman squawked and plummeted as the ballast struck him clean in the face. The others hung back more cautiously, but I knew it would be only a matter of time until they grew bold.
Good. The more time it took them, the longer Wire would have. I could at least serve as her distraction.
The next to approach had the head of a bearded man and the wings of a great eagle. He carried a heavy pick, and, rather than go for me, he tore at the rigging of my blimp. The craft shuddered and yawed as it tilted a few inches, and I had to push on the tiller to keep on course. I whimpered, watching as more dark shapes rose around the boat.
Just as I was about to squeeze my eyes shut, though, a bar of nearly solid white fire swept through the sky. It left a fan of spots across my vision, but then it was gone. The stalkers on the right side of my craft were, too. Instead, I saw a trio of chickens desperately flapping their wings before falling out of the sky. The others screamed, and the fire flashed again, scything through their ranks and turning the ones on my left into puffs of feathers that drifted away in the breeze. Looking ahead, another craft, a massive steel-bound airship with an enormous envelope and dozens of propellers holding it aloft, filled the sky. Spotlights rotated above and beneath it, cutting through the clouds. From a balcony on its side, a huge shape loomed, and it held in its hands a searing staff of white.
I didn’t need to see him clearly to know who this was.
Shoving against the tiller, I tried to execute a quick turn, only for the sudden change in velocity to cause the already weakened craft to shudder. The boat handled like a beached whale, and when I turned it so suddenly the gondola swung violently. I managed to hold onto the tiller by sheer effort, but it didn’t matter. Already weakened by several lost ropes, the jouncing of the craft compromised the rest. With a loud snap, the rear of the gondola swung free and hung from the front-most hawsers alone. Shaken and held dangling over the city of lights, I whimpered in terror.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” I whispered. Sorry was never enough, though. It was never enough.
The polished wood of the tiller slipped through my hoof tips.
Down, down I fell. My hair whipped past my face and the freezing night air chilled my limbs so fast they became numb within moments. With my back to the city, I watched the stars and tried to pick out familiar constellations—something to occupy my mind in the long drop, to let the tension ebb out until I felt nearly weightless. Empty.
“Gotcha!”
A flash of rainbow light shot down from the heavens and snapped me from the sky. Hooves held me tight against her chest as we arced through the air. Mag Mell’s lights tilted insanely in my vision as we pulled a tight turn, accelerating against her own inertia and battling back the force of gravity as if it barely existed. From above, a searchlight’s pillar of illumination shone down on us. With steady beats of her wings, Rainbow Dash bore me up to the castle in the sky.
By the time she rolled me out onto the balcony, I was shivering and half-frozen. With bleary eyes, I looked up. Against the golden light pouring forth from the door frame, I saw him. The Wand King.
He stood twice as tall as any man, with shoulders to match. At first, I thought him a man indeed, for his bare torso, though thick with hair, was free of fur, and his head was definitely that of a man. Below the waist, though, he had the body of a great black stallion, complete with a long tail that whipped in the wind. His vast arms bore an ash staff which he held with unquestionable authority.
There was more to him than a mere vastness, though. Even in my nearly delirious state, there was a presence that rolled off him in waves to brush up against me. It was as if the centaur occupied more space than he actually filled, like some sort of optical illusion. His eyes seemed unhindered by the dark of night as he scanned the skies, and, when they fell on me, I felt as though his attention had a weight of its own.
Dwarfed by his great size, a strange, graceful creature came from his side. She had a doe’s build, soft blue fur, a violet mane and tail that were like stiff and wiry brambles, and a pair of antlers that sprouted back from her delicate head. “Thank the stars,” she said in Twilight’s voice, “Rainbow Dash, I can’t believe you saved her. That was incredible.”
“Hey, nothing to it,” Rainbow Dash said brightly, striking a pose. “See? I told you—action star in the making.”
Twig laid a hoof against me, and I weakly tried to shove it off to little avail. “Oh! The poor wean’s frozen to the bone.”
“Get her inside,” the Wand King rumbled. His voice, as it had in the Equestrian Wand Castle, reverberated like a drum. “I shall deal with our pursuers.”
Like a sack of meal, I found myself slung across Rainbow Dash’s back. “Sure thing,” she said as she started forward the open door. “Sheesh. This acting business is rough. Do all the major production studios have standing armies?”
“Aye,” Twig said as she joined her, “competition’s pretty stiff.” A reddish glow kept me steady. “Let’s get her into a nice warm bath. Poor thing.”
“Maybe we should send a message to her folks,” Rainbow said thoughtfully. “I’ve just about finished another letter for Twilight and the girls, too.”
Twig smiled. “I’ll pen something up and send them together. It’s a shame you ain’t heard back from them, yet. I’m sure they’re really excited to hear about all of your adventures.”
“We go on adventures all the time,” Rainbow Dash shrugged, though it seemed to me that she was trying to play it cool. “Like, just a few weeks ago, we…”
I tried to stay alert to listen, but the shivering cold and exhaustion wormed its way into my vision with threads of icy black. It seemed that I had been moved, but I could not remember how or when. Though I did not sleep, time slipped away, and in my half-daze I found some relief at last.
Not being conscious meant not having to relive the memory of losing my friends.
* * * * * * *
Poor Amelia. She had the potential to be so many things, but fate intervened and closed off the many doors she had open to her. She's a bright girl, passionate, driven – she could have been a great scientist, a politician, an activist, a lawyer, or devoted herself to some obscure passion.
Instead, she was taken to another world, and the universe applied screws to her until she cracked.
A friend of mine actually compared her to the main character of Breaking Bad. Interesting.
This chapter, fundamentally, is about Amelia having a moral failing.
The Cup Palace was a great deal of fun to write, as any "pure" adventure chapter often ends up being. Don't believe for a second that this is the last we've seen of them.
Merry Dies Natalis Solis Invicti to all! I hope everyone has a fine day of feasting and bathing in the blood of the sacred sacrificial bull. 
Stay tuned next week, where we come at last to the Well of Pirene and discover what it is that everyone has been searching for.
Remember to comment below! Yes, I know that there was an error with the posting earlier. Like, fav, and subscribe~! And Merry Christmas and stuff!
Image courtesy of Cold in Gardez!Stats
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Don't you fight that.
I love this story, just not the little sister
[youtube=oyAP6PpAzK8]
At :08
NOOO!!!
...
... Breath.... Breath...
How dramatic can you get?
I mean, this has got to be a pinnacle point where everything's going down and climbing back up is a rough ride. Daphne has to get to the goblin city quick.
It is good to see you again, Dashie but What are you doing?!
And right when I was starting to warm up to Amelia, she goes and pulls that dick move. Poor CMC.
I really hope Wire pulls through and salvages what she can of that disaster - after all they went through at Amelia's expense, they don't deserve that.
3681036
Her family being unicorns? Pft.
Daphne and her hugging? NO! NOOO! NOOOOOO!
3681065
Whaaat, how can't you like Amelia?
3681114
Num num. Moral failings.
3681121
(Still recovering from meltdown)
What do you mean no?
Daphne is getting her sister because they are sisters. But there is no denying, even with the excuse of her parents getting worried, there always the same thing within them.
And yes I'm feeling better.
3681143
I'm not sure I understood that!
Ha, I like Riddles too! Last I met a Sphinx in a DnD game with some friends, I answered most of her riddles on my own.
...Then it got to some complicated play on words that spelled out "Inkstand" or something stupid like that without enunciating the key parts. I'm good at riddles about things, not words! Well, my fault for accepting her challenge for rare loot instead of just stopping at three riddles so I could pass.
Too bad I didn't have a Sweetie Belle.
Dang Mogwin's corrupting our little "Moonlight". Equestria is all about friendship. If he keeps this up she won't have any of it. ...What am I saying? She already lost it all.
This story is overflowing with imagination. This story is so much more than just FiM. FiM is just a backdrop to all the facets that have been brought to the fore. This is a story that can't just be compartmentalized with a few tags. And still the ending is shrouded in mystery. What will happen to them? Will some stay, will some go? Whatever the decisions made, all are already changed by them. For the happiness of some, misery for the others.
So many questions.
Would Daphne stay?
Would Amelia stay?
What about their parents?
Is Marcus trying to angle a way to stay himself?
Will the CMC be saved, or just stay another incarnation of goblins?
How will the Elements react to all this?
Will Wire and Flash reunite?
Will Amelia forgive herself?
Will Lyra hook up with Hector?
What, exactly, does the Wand King need inspiration for?
3681281
I had to reject several riddles that were based on written language, because Wand, while it shares a lot with the English spoken language, it uses an entirely different alphabet.
3681153
The point is obvious, it's love. Family love.
3681362
One thing missing, what is the purpose of the wells of Pirene?
3681459
Wait and see.
3681473
I cause myself to have a melodramatic reaction.
I'll shall.
This a dark and difficult time for them, even...
The newly goblin-ized Sweetie sounds rather akin to a kirin.
I'm hoping the Crusaders aren't all being left in the lurch forevers
3681362
Maybe
You'll see
Stay in Equestria, or what happens to them in general?
Good question!
I can certainly promise they'll be back.
Ferociously.
There will certainly be a reunion.
Wait and find out~
A STORY FOR THE AGES
Figure it out, maybe you'll get lucky.
3681364
I had actually thought the answer to the last one was 'doubt.'
3681511
Kirin was indeed part of the inspiration there.
3681572
And Applebloom sounds a little like....I want to say...I don't know what I want to say. Yet, seems familiar.
3681545
I was sure it was "anger", since we can refer to it as "seeing red" which fits the bit about "colouring in the mind", and thought could certainly be said to "trail behind" when you're angry, since you're not thinking as rationally as you might normally.
Anger.
Actually, what would happen in a riddle contest if an alternate answer to the one the asker has in mind is presented that fits just as well, assuming the asker agrees it also fits? Is the goal to guess what the asker is thinking of or to suggest something that fits all the criteria of the riddle?
3681665
It would have to fit aye.
3681520
Oh, I love to see how.
Oh the CMC
Well great chapter as always
I can't wait to see how they'll be saved 
3681036
Totally agree. I mean cmon, rejecting family, on CHRISTMAS!?
Great now we have a whole new rescue mission to plan/wait to read about.
3682302
It's ironic that her rejecting family saved her.
Yay! Sphinxies! I love sphinxes. They're super interesting monsters of mythology. And seeing one crack under Sweetie Belle's crying is hilarious. Looks like she picked up some skills from her sister Rarity.
3682422
She learns well!
She actually cried tears of joy when I hugged her a few months ago, saying she would never forget it
Anyway, Great chapter , can't wait to read more
3682502
Hug her more! You monster!
Hug her more or she'll become a monster.
3681364 I like your riddles!
3682696
Sagebrush came up with the third one. I wanted to make sure no one could just google the solution.
So, finally Amelia's lying and manipulation has come back to bite her in the flank. Karma's a harsh mistress.
If only Rarity could see Sweetie Belle now.
Wait a minute
Dropping more hints, are we? I think I know where this is going, especially with what Daphne said last chapter.
When you think about it, the goblins are gonna be really pissed when they find out they have the wrong girl. I mean not only for the obvious reason, but because she's exactly the sort of fast-talking scamp they'd undoubtedly have as a folk hero.
3682897
Buwahahahaa! BUWAHAHAHA!
3683710
Actually, she didn't. That's why I wouldn't call it cheap - because it was a false hope.
Sweetie being healed meant that Amelia didn't fail. And then she failed so hard there was no going back. That, more than anything, shattered Amelia's soul. To have hope returned to her, only to see it snatched away shortly thereafter.
I didn't need to heal Sweetie's leg. Indeed, to have not done so would have been kinder by far.
It would be cheap if I'd healed her leg so easily and then let them escape.
Wait and see next chapter - which I have written, yes~
And yet again our young protagonist makes a hard, grown up decision to save her own skin. Cause really, she was probably right... there was no way for her to get away without ditching her friends.
Douche move? Maybe. So might leaving your best friend behind in your hometown to go to school or join the military. Or getting a real job 4 states away. In the end our grown up culture is all about self advancement and less about friendship and harmony.
I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying it is.
Welcome to adulthood, Amelia. You climbed over the faces of your friends to get here just like us. And I suspect, just like us, you're going to find out what real manipulation is.
We'll keep the door to Equestria open for you for a bit. I bet you'll be banging on it to get back in like the rest of us soon.
Oh: and I wouldn't let Dash out of your sight if you know what's good for you.
3682510 But good things are better when they're a rarity
3683791 please don't take that seriously i really was delrious i'd copy my skype conversatoins but i can't even read them at the moment...
Well just continue on lol forget that even exists
Okay, after re-reading the last part of the chapter, the wand king is a centaur?
Half-man, half-horse. What is this guy's plan?
3684122
We don't often do it after our friends have been shot in the face, but yeah.
3685047
He is!
The cup or Crusaders + Wire?
OR BOTH!?
3685508
ALL OF THE ABOVE
3685704 images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130911004637/dragonball/images/9/94/Aww_yeah.png
3686581
What made you think that this myth is connected to this story?
Fun chapter... though now I am hungry but don't want to make anything
See you again next update.
3686966
Yes! Fear food!