San Palomino Desert
“Yeah-ha-ha!” Rainbow Dash whooped as she executed a perfect barrel roll that ended with passing through a narrow gap between two rocks rising from the river below. She slowed to a stop, went back to the rocks, and took a picture of the spot with the camera she was carrying. The camera extruded a photo, and Dash shook it lightly to speed up the development as she looked around the desert canyon again. “This place is perfect,” she declared with satisfaction. She put the photo in her bag along with the half-dozen others she’d already taken, and then resumed flying upstream through the canyon.
Coming around a bend, Rainbow Dash came to sudden stop at an unexpected sight. Up ahead was a natural stone arch high above a small waterfall, and a round metal structure had been built into the top of the arch. Just beyond the arch, Rainbow could see a small lake and several other buildings built up against the canyon walls on both sides. The pegasus hovered in place for several seconds, puzzling at the little compound, and then let out a noise that was partly surprise and partly disappointment. “Well whaddya know,” she said, “I found Materan. Great.” She looked back the way she had come, biting her lip lightly. “I guess it won’t hurt to ask,” she decided, and flew toward the compound. She went up, intending to go over the arch and get a bird’s-eye view to look for where anypony might be, but as she crested the building at the top she heard a series of explosions from inside and saw thin smoke start to rise from an opening in the roof.
Diving through the opening, Rainbow alighted on a large telescope just inside and looked around. The floor of the room was more of a wide walkway that stepped up every so often as one moved counter-clockwise, ending at the chair for using the telescope. Shelves, drawers, and a couple of workbenches full of papers and random objects lined the wall for the first half of the walkway. At the north side of the room, there was a large window that granted a view of Materan and a set of stairs leading to something underneath the telescope. Twilight Sparkle and Star Swirl the Bearded were by the window, still reacting to the sounds, sparks, and smoke of fried electrical wires.
Near the window was the source of the commotion: a large round machine with various controls and consoles attached to it. Specifically, the attachment on the left side of the machine was what was emitting the smoke, until Twilight Sparkle cast a bubble of magic around it. “That went well,” Twilight deadpanned.
“What happened?” Rainbow Dash asked, startling the two unicorns.
“Rainbow Dash!” Star Swirl exclaimed. “Where did you come from?”
“I was in the area,” Rainbow explained, hopping off the telescope and hovering near the damaged device. “I was scouting for a good place for the Wonderbolts to do some low-altitude agility training and wound up here just when whatever this thing is broke. What is it, anyway?”
“I call it a crystal viewer,” Star Swirl said. “It’s supposed to allow us to get glimpses of other worlds, although right now I’ve only been able to look into a couple worlds I’ve Written Links to. And as you can see, it’s a major headache to try and expand its capabilities.” He stepped closer to examine the fried attachment. After a few moment, he stood back, shaking his head. “Well,” he declared, “the wiring’s all fused, but it looks like the damage is isolated here; the viewer itself is undamaged.”
Rainbow fluttered back from the machine with a confused look on her face. “Why would you need this?” she asked. “If you want to see a different world, why not just Write a book and link to it?”
“So we can see what’s going on in those other worlds without the ponies there being aware that they’re being watched,” Twilight answered.
“That’s… creepy,” Rainbow said, giving her friend a mildly disgusted look.
“Perhaps we should start from the beginning, Twilight,” Star Swirl said over Twilight’s sputtering reaction. “Rainbow Dash, you remember my apprentices, Cirrus and Archeon?”
“Yeah,” Rainbow deadpanned. “You sent them into book worlds with no way back after they pillaged and burned most of your linking books on Aitran.”
Star Swirl nodded. “Clover and I have been discussing whether or not it’s time to release them,” he said. “Clover believes that after almost fifteen years alone-”
“Fifteen years?!” Rainbow exclaimed. “It has not been fifteen years since Twilight and I first went to Aitran. It’s been like… almost but not quite two?”
“Time moves faster in the prison worlds, Rainbow,” Twilight explained.
Rainbow blinked, then nodded her acceptance of the explanation. “Why, though?”
“I made a few erroneous calculations when I originally wrote Monolith and Ka’utani,” Star Swirl said. “I corrected the text a few months ago to align their time flows with Equestria, but yes, roughly fifteen years have passed for Cirrus and Archeon. Clover thinks that’s enough time to leave them isolated from other ponies. I’m not so sure. I’ve Written a means for us to visit Monolith and Ka’utani without providing the boys a way out, and Clover, Nyx, and I have spoken with both Cirrus and Archeon several times. The time seems to have changed them but… I’ve been fooled before.”
“So, you built that thing to spy on them,” Rainbow Dash concluded, pointing to the crystal viewer.
“A pony’s true nature shows through when they think nopony’s watching,” Twilight said.
“I guess that makes sense,” Rainbow said. “Well, I’ll just get out of your manes so you two can get back to work.” She flew up to exit through the opening in the roof, but stopped when Star Swirl spoke up.
“Actually, Rainbow,” he said, “if I could ask you for a quick favor?”
“What?” Rainbow asked, turning around with an intrigued look on her face.
“I should be able to fix this attachment with parts from the prototype viewer I built on Rime,” Star Swirl explained. “Collecting those parts will go faster if Twilight accompanies me, but Clover is busy on Tay right now and I don’t want to leave Nyx here alone.” He glanced out the window and frowned. “Also,” he added, “our little accident up here might have shorted out power to the entire estate. Would you help Nyx fix that? Twilight and I shouldn’t be more than an hour or so.”
“Hm,” Rainbow said, patting her camera as she thought. “Sure,” she said at length, “I can do that. The ‘Bolts aren’t expecting me back for a while anyway.”
“Thank you,” Star Swirl said. “Come along, Twilight.” The two unicorns walked down to the elevator underneath the telescope, while Rainbow flew out through the open roof and perched up there for a quick look around.
Counting the workshop Rainbow was on, Materan consisted of eight round rooms connected by walkways. On the east side was Clover and Starswirl’s bedrooom, two greenhouses, and a room that served as a laboratory of sorts for studying plants and small animals. A kitchen-slash-living area and Nyx’s room were on the west side, and Starswirl’s private study was located on the far side of the eastern cliff and accessible through a tunnel in the nature lab. There was only a single, movable bridge for providing access to Nyx’s room and between the two sides of the lake, and at the moment that bridge was connecting the kitchen and Nyx’s room. Movement in the kitchen area caught Rainbow’s attention, and she flew over to find a dark purple unicorn filly with teal eyes, a blue vest, and a necklace with a blue stone pendant in a silver setting poring over a pair of books on the table while an ink quill floated nearby in a magic aura.
Rainbow Dash’s arrival blew over some pages in one of Nyx’s books, causing her to look up. “Oh, Rainbow Dash!” Nyx exclaimed, “what are you doing here?”
“I happened to be in the area,” Rainbow said, giving a casual shrug. “What are you up to?”
“Experimenting,” Nyx replied simply, flipping the disturbed pages back to where she’d been reading.
“Uh huh,” Rainbow said, looking over Nyx’s shoulder at the books. One appeared to be a linking book, the pages covered almost completely in a nearly geometrical Old Equestrian script that Rainbow couldn’t make heads or tails of, while the other book seemed to be a copy of the first written in a more fluid style. “Are you making a copy of one of your dad’s linking books?” the pegasus asked.
Nyx shook her head. “I Wrote both of them,” she said. “I did this one last week while emulating Father’s writing style as closely as possible, but the Link doesn’t work, so I’m trying it again with a more relaxed script.” Rainbow Dash nodded politely as she felt her attention start to drift due to egghead talk. She forced herself to remain focused by trying to think of a way to tell Nyx about Star Swirl’s requests without making the filly feel talked down to.
Nyx wound up resolving the issue by setting the quill down and saying something about wanting to get something from her father’s workshop. She got up from her seat and walked out onto the veranda, grabbing a lever by the bridge in her magic and tried to pull it. The lever barely budged, and Nyx let out an annoyed grunt. “Father blew out the power again, didn’t he?” she asked Rainbow.
“Yeah,” Rainbow said. “Does that happen a lot?”
“It’s the third time this week,” Nyx replied. “Would you mind giving me a lift to the other side so I can give Father a piece of my mind? He has got to isolate the workshop from the rest of the power grid.”
“Uh,” Rainbow said, looking across the lake in time to see Twilight’s tail disappear into the nature lab. “Yeah,” she concluded, “I think we can catch up before he and Twilight go to Rime.” She scooped Nyx up and zipped across the lake to deposit her at the entrance to the lab. Nyx rushed inside, rounded the table in the center of the room, and barely stopped before colliding with the door on the far side. She turned the handle with her magic, but the door didn’t open.
“Dang it!” Nyx snapped. “Of course, he’s put the lock on. I swear, he’s getting more paranoid by the day.” She whirled on Rainbow Dash as the pegasus approached. “He told you to look after me while he was gone, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, he did,” Rainbow said. “But what’s so strange about that? You’re his kid, and you’re not a grown-up yet, so...”
“I guess...” Nyx admitted sourly. “That’s not the worst of it, though. Father’s convinced that somepony keeps sneaking into Materan and rooting around for something. There’s nara locks on almost everything that can be opened around here, he’s trying to talk Mom into allowing him to set up surveillance spells...” Nyx shook her head in frustration.
“What’s a nara lock?” Rainbow asked.
“Nara is a substance that’s virtually indestructible,” Nyx answered. “It’s something the Kl’kai invented or discovered a long time ago; Aldro was able to point Father to a cavern with working nara fabricators a little while ago and-”
“Whoa, whoa, did you say Aldro?” Rainbow exclaimed. “The Diamond Dog that’s your family’s sworn enemy, the guy Star Swirl had Twilight and me trap in a book when we rescued you from Sohndar? Don’t tell me you let him out too!”
Nyx gave Rainbow a strange look. “First of all,” she said, “we haven’t let anypony – or kl’kai – out yet. Aldro’s still in that trap-book. Whether Father ever will release him… I personally think that’s more likely than freeing Cirrus or Archeon. Aldro’s actually been very helpful lately. Like I said, he’s shared his knowledge of ancient Kl’kai tech with Father, and he’s been teaching me a bit about the differences between the Kl’kai style of Writing links and Father’s to try and help me figure out why I can’t Write working links yet. I don’t how much of his ‘knowledge’ is useful, but it is a different perspective...” She shook her head and walked away from the door, slipping past Rainbow to go to a wooden box with a sliding cover mounted on the wall near the exit. “Anyway,” Nyx said, sliding the cover up to reveal what looked to Rainbow like a modified typewriter keyboard under a board covered in columns of lights of various heights, “let’s see what the power situation actually is.” Rainbow went over for a closer look as Nyx made a mildly miffed sound. Two columns of lights were each lit up to their second-highest – and distinctly green – bulb, while all the other bulbs were dark and the symbols below the middle two columns were blinking orange.
“That’s not good, I take it?” Rainbow asked, pointing to the blinking symbols.
“No,” Nyx said, “but it could be a lot worse. Those blinking symbols are for the back-up hydroelectric dam gates, and they need to be reset before I can direct power to them. Fortunately, between the workshop elevator and the kitchen, here’s just enough reserve power available to open the dam and get everything else working.”
“Cool,” Dash said. “What do you need me to do?”
Nyx gave the pegasus a grateful glance. “Just outside, the walkway forks,” she explained. “Go right and through the cleft and you’ll be at the controls for the dam. Push the button to reset the breakers, then pull the lever once the lights come back on white. I can move the power around in a jiffy.”
“Sounds good,” Rainbow said, moving past Nyx to reach the door and heading outside. She followed Nyx’s directions to the dam, and found a post with the button, lever, and lighted symbols on it just beyond the cleft. She pushed the button and the blinking orange lights went dark. Rainbow sat down and looked at the little hydroelectric dam while she waited for Nyx to do her part. It wasn’t a particularly complex construction, simply a pair of closed floodgates with paddle-wheels just below them. Just as Rainbow Dash was starting to get bored, the symbols lit up again. The pegasus pulled the lever and waited until the floodgates had opened and the water that poured out had spun the paddle-wheels up to an appreciable speed before turning around to rejoin Nyx.
As Rainbow Dash reached the fork in the walkway, a strange rumbling sound came from somewhere underhoof, followed by a larger crash as everything started to shake. Rainbow’s wings snapped open instinctively as the walkway buckled and collapsed, but before she could fly to the safety of the lab she was knocked to the ground by some rocks that had been dislodged from the cliff. As she landed among the wreckage of the walkway, a green mist billowed up around her. Combined with the shock of the crash, the mist made her vision swim and she quickly blacked out as she heard a terrified scream from the lab.
Materan, some time later.
“C’mon, Rainbow Dash!”
Rainbow Dash’s eyes slowly opened, but all she could see was a purple-green blur that wavered like a disturbed pool of liquid rainbow. “Ugh,” she said, rubbing a hoof across her eyes, “who’s there?”
“It’s me,” the blur said as Dash’s swimming vision began to settle, letting her discern that it was a small purple dragon, “Spike! Are you ok, Dash?”
“I’m good,” Dash said flippantly, getting to her hooves. She tried to spread her wings, but stopped when pain lanced through her right wing. “Agh,” she groaned. “Ok, maybe not so good. I think I sprained something when I fell.” She looked around, noting that she was still among the wreckage of the walkway down in the gap between the nature lab and Star Swirl’s bedroom, and then glanced upward and saw stars in the sky. “Hold on, it’s night?” she exclaimed. “How long was I out?!”
Spike shrugged. “I have no idea; I just got here,” he said. “Twilight hasn’t come back home yet, so I came to see what was keeping her. You’re the only pony I’ve found so far and...” He gestured to the wreckage around them. “What happened here?”
“I don’t know,” Dash admitted, rubbing her head to try and clear the last bit of blurriness from her vision, “some kind of earthquake, I guess. Wait,” she froze and looked Spike square in the eye, “You really haven’t seen anypony else? Not even Nyx? I was helping her fix the power just before the quake.” Spike shook his head and Rainbow’s ears laid flat. “Crap,” the pegasus said, “Star Swirl was counting on me to look after her!” Using part of the collapsed walkway as a ladder, she hauled herself up out of the gap and staggered to the walkway in front of the nature lab. “Nyx!” Rainbow called out, “Where are you?”
“Don’t forget about Twilight,” Spike said, climbing up after the pegasus. “What was she doing when the quake hit?”
“She and Star Swirl went to Rime to get parts for some machine he was working on up there,” Dash said, waving dismissively at the workshop. “They did say they’d only be gone about an hour though...”
“Ok,” Spike said, determined, “and Star Swirl keeps that Linking Book in his study. I’ll check that out while you patch yourself up.”
“Good idea,” Rainbow Dash said as Spike walked past her and into the lab. After a moment of thought and looking around, she added, “but I don’t know where-”
“The door’s locked!” Spike exclaimed.
Dash peeked inside the lab and saw Spike tugging at the handle of the door in back. “Oh, right,” Dash said, “they locked that door behind them. Probably should’ve mentioned that.”
“No, I just came through here!” Spike said, releasing the handle and turning toward Rainbow with an expression of worried confusion. “Twilight’s copy of the Materan Linking Book puts you on the patio outside Star Swirl’s study. I unlocked this door just a minute ago, but now it’s locked again! Somepony else is here.”
Rainbow grimaced. “If my wing wasn’t hurt, I could fly us around to the other side,” she grumbled, “and with that bridge out, we’re stuck on this side of Materan with no way out.”
Spike came out of the lab and looked toward the workshop. “We might not be,” he said, “unless the elevator was damaged. Come on.” He started walking toward the workshop.
“How is that going to help?” Rainbow Dash asked, following the little dragon. “I didn’t see any other way in or out of that room besides the elevator and flyi- ow.” She flinched in pain as she had reflexively tried to gesture with her sprained wing.
Spike winced in sympathy. “I’m pretty sure there’s a first aid kit in the workshop,” he said. “I’ll show you what I’m talking about after we wrap your wing.”
“Sounds good,” Rainbow Dash said.
The pair left the nature lab and walked through the two greenhouses to reach the elevator below the workshop. As Rainbow Dash stepped into the cylindrical elevator car, she noticed that the control mechanism was a sliding lever which was currently sitting on the middle of three positions. That made her curious about where “down” could take them besides into the water below, but she held the curiosity in check in favor of riding the elevator up and addressing her sprained wing and other little bumps. She suddenly remembered her camera as the elevator slid up into the workshop, and she checked it over as she followed Spike to the landing with the crystal viewer machine. Aside from a barely-noticeable scratch on the top, the camera didn’t appear damaged, so Rainbow took a picture of the view out the window to double-check its functionality. The photo paper popped out and developed into a nice clear image, allowing the pegasus to breathe a sigh of relief. Spitfire would’ve benched her for a week if she brought the camera back in less than working order.
“Ok,” Rainbow Dash said, “where’s the first aid kit?”
“In one of the cupboards between those two workbenches,” Spike said, waving distractedly as he stepped closer to the crystal viewer.
Despite the vagueness of the directions, Rainbow Dash found the kit with ease and had her sprained wing wrapped up in no time. When she returned to Spike, she found the dragon perched on a stool he’d dragged over to the viewer and fiddling with the controls while consulting a book. “What are you doing?” Rainbow asked.
Spike pointed to the book, which had an illustration of a row of colored crystals on the page. “That’s the pattern for tuning the viewer to show Rime,” Spike explained. “Hopefully I can at least catch a glimpse of Twilight or Star Swirl, or some hint of why they haven’t returned yet.” He pressed a button below the viewer’s main screen and it lit up with an image of Star Swirl and Twilight in a room, staring out a window at a blinding snowstorm. Twilight shifted a little and seemed to say something to Star Swirl, but the crystal viewer didn’t convey the sound.
Spike relaxed a little. “Ok, they’re safe,” he said. “I guess that blizzard’s keeping them from reaching the exit book, though.” He switched the viewer off and turned to face Rainbow Dash. “Let’s go look for Nyx now,” he said.
“Right,” Rainbow Dash said, following the dragon into the elevator. As Spike slid the lever to the lowest position, Dash asked, “Say, how do you know so much about how everything around here works, anyway?”
“Star Swirl has had Twilight helping him with that crystal viewer for at least a month now,” Spike answered, “and as Twilight’s Number One Assistant, I’ve been asked to lend a claw often enough that I know my way around.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Rainbow said.
The elevator reached the walkway below the workshop, paused for a second, and then continued moving down until it met a single track that snaked through the lake just below the surface to the far end of Materan. The elevator car shot along that track at a high speed, came to a stop below the platform between Star Swirl’s bedroom and the kitchen, and rotated slightly as it rose up through a hole that opened in the middle of the platform. “That was pretty cool,” Rainbow said as she stepped out of the elevator. She looked around and frowned slightly as she noticed that the moving bridge was currently parked between the platform and the kitchen. “That’s not where the bridge was the last time I saw it,” she said, pointing.
Spike scratched his head in thought. “If I were Nyx,” he said, “and I couldn’t get to a linking book for some reason, my room would be the next place I’d try and hide in.” He and Rainbow crossed the bridge at a brisk jog. While Spike operated the lever to move the bridge toward Nyx’s room, Rainbow took a quick look in the kitchen. The nonfunctional linking books Nyx had been working on were still on the table, and nothing else stood out to Rainbow aside from a chess set that looked like it had been left in the middle of a game. She called out Nyx’s name, just in case she was hiding in a cupboard or some secret bolt-hole, but got no answer. “This isn’t good,” Rainbow said as she rejoined Spike and started across the bridge to Nyx’s room. “Materan’s really not that big of a place, and it’s so open you’d think she’d hear me calling from anywhere.”
“Do you think maybe she was foalnapped?” Spike asked.
“I hate to admit it,” Dash said, “but I’m starting to think that, yeah. I can’t imagine who could be responsible, though; the obvious suspects are all trapped in other worlds or inside a faulty linking book.”
Nyx’s room, like every other one in Materan, was a round stand-alone hut with a deck outside. There wasn’t much stuff inside compared to the available space, just a filly-height desk in the back left with some writing tools and a small glowing crystal sculpture on it, a pillow-strewn bed built into a nook in the back right wall, a boxy end-table with an aquarium just to the right of the door, some kind of tilting-table and ball game to the left of the door, and a red dress on a wooden ponyquin near the head of the bed. At the very back of the room was a porthole window in what looked like a wooden door without a handle. Rainbow dashed across the room and looked through the window. The curvature of the glass made it a little hard to see through, but the pegasus thought she could make out some folded clothes stacked on some shelves, so she guessed it was a closet. “Are you in there Nyx?” she asked, knocking on the wood. “It’s Rainbow Dash.”
There was no response.
While Dash poked around searching for a hidden latch or other means of opening the closet, Spike examined a small bookcase built into the wall between the desk and the tilting table game. There were two shelves filled completely with eight brown books each and below them were two glass door cabinets displaying a white book with metal reinforced corners and a piece of paper bearing a hoofprint with a glowing blue line in the middle of it and writing rendered illegible by the angle of the paper and the glare of reflected lamplight on the glass. Spike turned his attention to the books on the shelves and frowned as something about the perfect uniformity of their sizes and how well they fit into the shelves struck him as odd. He tried to pull out the leftmost book from the lower shelf and was only mildly surprised when it refused to come out. Spike pushed on the book instead and it slid back smoothly a few inches before stopping with a click. “Hey, Rainbow Dash,” Spike said, looking toward the pegasus, “I think this bookcase is actually...” He trailed off as a glint of light caught his eye from under the desk.
“What about the bookcase?” Rainbow asked, turning in time to see Spike kneel down, reach under the desk, and bring out a necklace with a blue stone pendant set in silver. “Huh,” Rainbow said, “I think I recognize that.” Spike didn’t respond, staring blankly at the stone as it sat on his open palm. “Spike!” Dash snapped, giving him a little shake.
Spike returned to the present with a small jolt, wrapped his claws around the necklace, and looked grimly at Rainbow Dash. “Nyx was definitely foalnapped,” he said.
“H-how do you know?” Rainbow asked.
“There’s some kind of memory spell on this,” Spike said, holding the necklace out to the pegasus. “Take a look for yourself.” Rainbow took the necklace onto her hoof and stared at the stone. Before she could ask how to activate it, the world around her seemed to rush away to make space for a slightly unfocused vision of the room at an earlier point in time.
Nyx muttered to herself as she frantically moved her hoof across the spines of the books on the upper shelf, “No, no… C’mon Nyx, you’ve only used this code a dozen times in the last week!” She looked over her shoulder at the sound of hooves on the floor and gasped. She backed up as the intruder got closer, bumping into the desk. “No!” she cried. “Stay back!” She ducked under the desk as a pair of hooves lunged out to grab her. Nyx tried to fight them off, but cornered as she was it didn’t take much effort for her assailant to seize her by the vest. As she was dragged out, Nyx managed to shake off her necklace and kick it back under the desk.
“Dang it,” Dash said as the vision faded, “of all the things to be right about...” She gave the necklace back to Spike with the instruction, “Hold onto that and let me know if it does anything else,” before heading back outside.
“Sure,” Spike said, putting the necklace on as he followed Dash toward the door, “but where are we going now?”
“We need to retrace the foalnapper’s hoofsteps somehow,” the pegasus replied. She crossed the bridge to the kitchen and stepped inside, intent on giving the room a more thorough search for hidden doors.
“Rainbow,” Spike called from outside, “the necklace is glowing again!” Rainbow hurried over to where the dragon was standing by the bridge controls and they both focused intently on the blue stone.
Nyx’s back hooves slid out from under her as she tried to simultaneously stop and turn around after galloping off the bridge. Panting, she stood back up and gripped the controls in her magic as she looked back across the bridge. A dusky blue pegasus with a blonde mane was stepping out of her parent’s room with a dastardly expression as he locked eyes with her again. It was a look that told Nyx that she would not enjoy what would happen if he caught her.
“How did you get out?” Nyx asked under her breath as she yanked the lever to the right. As the bridge started moving, she leaped onto it and dashed toward the end. It was a dangerous thing to do, sure, but it would let her get to her room faster, and she needed as much time as she could buy.
“Cirrus?!” Rainbow exclaimed as the vision faded. “He’s the foalnapper?”
Spike gave Rainbow a slightly confused look. “That was Cirrus?” he asked, “One of the apprentices Star Swirl locked away?” Rainbow nodded. “How’d he get out of his prison book?” Spike asked.
“I don’t know,” Rainbow said grimly, pulling the bridge-control lever to the left, “but I’m going to find out.” As soon as the bridge finished moving, Rainbow galloped across it, rounded the elevator, and went up onto the deck outside Star Swirl and Clover’s room, leaving Spike in her dust.
While the little dragon hustled to catch up, Rainbow opened the doors to Star Swirl and Clover’s room and went inside to look around. It was a typical room by Materan standards, including the writing desk that every major room in the estate seemed to require at least one of. There was a fireplace at the back of the room large enough for a pony to crawl into, a fact that reminded Rainbow strongly of the fireplace in the library of Aitran Island. The fireplace was also spotless and notably lacking things that a functional fireplace typically came with, like a poker or a pile of logs nearby.
Huffing and puffing, Spike arrived and leaned against the door frame for a second to catch his breath. “Geez, Rainbow,” he whined, “would it kill you to move just a little slower sometimes?”
“We don’t have time for slow,” Rainbow countered. “Who knows what Cirrus plans to do with Nyx! Is the necklace reacting to anything in here?”
Spike sighed and worked his way around the room, holding the necklace out as he went. While he did that, Rainbow ducked into the fireplace to look for anything unusual. There was a metal plate on the wall above the opening and a button just below it. On the walls to both sides were unlit lamps of some kind pointing toward the plate, and thick cables ran up the two front corners from below the floor to the top of the chimney. “Heh,” Rainbow smirked, “he actually made it a functional fireplace this time. Well, let’s see what this does.” She reached a hoof toward the button.
“What are you doing in here?” Spike asked, poking his head into the fireplace to give Rainbow a strange look.
The pegasus yelped and her hoof froze just shy of pressing the button. “I might’ve almost taken your head off Spike!” Rainbow exclaimed. She took a calming breath and explained, “I’m checking the fireplace for secrets. The fireplace on Aitran hid a secret nook, and there’s a button here.”
Spike twisted his head to look up. “Huh,” he said. “That makes sense then; this is the only spot in the room where the necklace starts glowing.”
Dash motioned for Spike to move back and then crawled out of the fireplace herself. “Let’s see it, then,” she said.
Cirrus stood up after crawling out of the fireplace and looked back at it with a sneer. “An elevator in a fireplace? Hmph, why am I not surprised, Master?”
“Informative,” Dash deadpanned. “As if I wasn’t just about to find that out for myself.” She turned around to re-enter the fireplace, but then paused in thought. “What’s down there, though? The linking books to the prison worlds?”
“Probably,” Spike answered. “When I asked Star Swirl where they were, he said he put in them as secure a location as he could make, to stop anypony who managed to get out of the prisons from getting any farther. Obviously, it wasn’t enough.”
“Ya think?” Dash said, crawling into the fireplace. She pushed the button and the metal plate dropped down to cover the opening and revealed a grid of square buttons on the wall. “Deja vu all right,” Dash said. “Sorry Star Swirl, but I agree with Cirrus on this. Reusing a puzzle from Aitran isn’t very clever.” She pressed one of the squares, which made the all the squares around it light up red. “Oh, he changed it up more than I thought.” Rainbow pressed the round button to raise the plate and crawled out of the fireplace. “Any idea where Star Swirl might hide his puzzle codes, Spike?” she asked. Spike shook his head, and Dash sighed.
Deciding the bedroom was as good a place to start searching as any, the dragon and pegasus quickly set to it. After checking an armoire full of bell-hemmed robes for hidden compartments and nearly driving herself nuts with all the jingling, Rainbow turned her attention to the desk. The two drawers merely held random junk and some blank paper and spare pencils, respectively, and Rainbow decided to appropriate some things from the latter drawer. She knew from experience that the ability to take notes was essential to dealing with Star Swirl’s world-hopping magic books and all the brainteasers they always contained. There was also a little compartment with a door among the pigeonholes on the desk, but it didn’t have anything in it.
“Do you really think Cirrus would’ve taken Nyx back into his prison world?” Spike asked from across the room, where he was searching one of the nightstands.
“Maybe,” Rainbow said, somewhat unsure. “I mean,” she continued, thinking out loud, “he’s spent fifteen years there by his perspective so he has to know its layout by heart. I feel reasonably certain he’s not familiar with this part of the San Palomino Desert and he certainly hasn’t seen Materan before; Star Swirl only set this place up after Twilight and I recused him on Aitran and he sent Cirrus and Archeon into the prison worlds properly. A foalnapper needs a secure, familiar place to hold their hostage, so...” She trailed off as she reached the end of her train of thought and spotted a crumpled-up paper under the desk.
Unfolding the paper revealed that it contained a drawing of two spherical table lamps with wires leading from them to the fireplace and the button grid. In the space between the lamp were written instructions: Turn on both lamps to power pointer lasers. Turn one of the lamps off to reset the code read out. After having achieved the correct combination. “Heh,” Rainbow said, “that’s nice and straightforward for once.” A quick look around told her that one of the lamps was on the corner of the desk while the other was on the nightstand to the left of the bed. “Yo, Spike,” Rainbow said, waving the paper as the dragon turned to look at her, “found it. Turn that lamp on, would you?” Spike gave her a thumbs-up and went to do as instructed. Rainbow switched the desk lamp on, and then the pair went back to the fireplace and crawled inside.
Several points of red light were now scattered across the metal plate, and when Rainbow pushed the button to lower the plate she and Spike saw that each dot sat in the middle of one of the squares. “So, do we have to press all those, or…?” Spike asked.
“Probably just make them all light up,” Rainbow replied. “Pressing a square lights up the four around it, so we need to figure out which ones to actually press.”
After a minute or so of discussion and trying out ideas (and learning that pressing a square next to an already lit one caused it to turn off), Rainbow Dash and Spike managed to get all the indicated squares lit up, and the floor fell out from under them. At least, that’s what it felt like due to the speed of the elevator’s descent. They found themselves in a small cavern with a small, shallow pool of gently steaming water. A metal walkway had been built over the water leading up to larger chamber that had been carved out of the rock. On the opening to the chamber was half of a metal frame for a circular vault door. The other half of the frame was leaning up against the opposite wall along with the door itself, and it appeared that a chunk of the wall had been knocked out, letting in moonlight to enhance the illumination coming from the elevator shaft and from the chamber.
Rainbow went to take a closer look at the vault door. It was made of an almost black material that wasn’t quite stone or metal, had some small openings carved into one section to presumably permit a pony to look inside the chamber without opening the door, and had decorative carvings with a theme of circles and curves. Aside from obviously having been violently removed from its place, the door was surprisingly free of damage; it wasn’t even slightly bent or scratched in any way Rainbow could see. “What is this made of?” Rainbow wondered aloud.
“Probably nara,” Spike said from Rainbow’s side. “It’s a substance-”
“That’s practically indestructible,” Rainbow interrupted. “Nyx told me about it.” She looked over her shoulder at the chamber and frowned. “I’d bet that ‘earthquake’ that knocked me out was caused by the nara door being flung out its place and hitting the wall. How on Equestria could Cirrus have managed to do that, though?”
“I dunno,” Spike said, shrugging. He started to walk toward the chamber, but then looked down at the necklace and stopped. “Necklace is glowing again,” he reported. “Maybe that’ll answer our question.” He came back to the door and held the blue stone up.
“Patience, my love,” Star Swirl said to Clover as he coaxed her away from the unfinished chamber, “the fabricator is almost done with the door, and I’ve already done the calculations to Link it into place. We’ll be able to visit the colts soon.”
“Ah, never mind then,” Spike grumbled as the vision faded.
“It was worth a shot,” Rainbow said. “Let’s go to Cirrus’s world; there’s bound to be answers there.” Spike nodded and followed Rainbow up the short ramp into the chamber.
Inside the carved chamber was another, smaller spherical chamber just big enough for a pony to comfortably stand inside, held up in the center of the outer chamber by a U-shaped support. A wire mesh window provided a glimpse inside the sphere and the two open books sitting inside. On the walkway, just inside the threshold of the vault, was a lever. Rainbow pulled it and was rewarded by the sphere rotating vertically a hundred and eighty degrees, revealing a larger metal grate on the other side which dropped slowly down to the walkway, granting access to the interior.
Spike climbed up on Rainbow’s back so they could both fit inside, and the pegasus walked into the inner chamber. Looking out the little window, Rainbow noticed that it lined up with a window in the outer chamber and provided a decent view of the exterior of Nyx’s bedroom. The two books had been closed by their holders and moved along a rail to either side of the chamber when it rotated, but there was helpful-looking handle on one end of the rail that Spike wasted no time in twisting. The grate closed behind the pair and the chamber rotated back to its original position. The books slid along the rail and fell open to about a foot apart from each other in front of Rainbow, their linking panels on display, waiting for somepony to lay a hoof on them and be transported to another world.
“Which one is Cirrus’s world?” Spike asked, leaning forward to get a better look at the linking panels. “I know Star Swirl called it Monolith, and Archeon’s prison is Ka’utani, but-”
“It’s the red book,” Rainbow said shortly, reaching for the book on her right. Spike tried to spit out a plea for her to wait a moment, but Rainbow ignored him and laid her hoof on the moving image of a tall, dark, pointed rock rising ominously from green-tinted storm clouds.