Daring Do seemed to trust our new companion a little too readily for a pony who had been betrayed no less than four times over the course of her adventures as described in her books, but perhaps she had developed a system for accurately testing the loyalty of ponies who would be side characters in her next story. Dust Pan might have once been in league with the now-vapourised Corded Ware, but, assuming that his words were true, it was not by choice. I might have complained that he was not to be trusted, but given that the shards hunting us didn’t differentiate between their former masters and anypony else unfortunate enough to be in their way, his fate was inexorably entwined with mine. Still, that certainly did not mean that I was going to take my eye off him for a moment: the rational choice was for all of us was to all work together, but at the same time it would have been perfectly rational for him to come to me and raise his concerns that his boss was planning to unleash a horde of mindless killing machines upon the world, so I could not entirely put it past him to do something very stupid in the name of his long-gone king.
We trudged out of the room, leaving behind those scarab things as smashed and broken shards of crystal, and walked along another uninvitingly dark corridor. I had pocketed some of their remains, not as souvenirs but as evidence in case I’d managed to get out of there and, when questioned about where Corded Ware and the others were, nopony believed a tale that I myself was struggling to believe despite living through it. The sharp pain in my foreleg had dulled to an aching throb, which flared with each step, and a bright red spot had formed on the makeshift bandage Daring Do had tied around the wound and was spreading.
After stumbling about a bit in the almost pitch-blackness, Dust Pan pointed out that I might as well light my horn. “They can see us in the dark anyway,” he said.
“And how do they do that?” I asked.
“They don’t have eyes to ‘see’ in the same way we do,” Dust Pan explained. “They can detect the magic that exists in all living things.”
That Cannon Fodder had been consistently ignored by both the shards and their little scarab servants continued to nag at me, and I had developed a little theory that, if right, could give us a slightly better chance of getting out of this alive. Dust Pan had now all but confirmed it.
“Not through walls, I hope.”
“We did not make them with that feature,” he said, with a tone of voice that uncomfortably implied to me that he was storing that idea for later.
Carrying on a bit more in silence, the tense hush that was broken only by the sound of our hoofsteps and my own ragged breathing was becoming intolerable. Dust Pan seemed to know where he was going, and the thought that he was taking us directly back to the shards had occurred to me in a rather loud and persistent manner too, but the quiet assurance that he was unlikely to be that suicidal did much to help keep my paranoia in check. I was still slowly coming to terms with the news that not only did I have a long-lost half-sister but she was also a pony I believed to be little more than a beloved fictional character, which was starting to make me question my own existence as a flesh-and-blood pony living in the real world and I wasn’t quite ready to deal with that particular existential crisis just yet. Crystal killing machines and ancient plots were things that I could rationalise and understand, but Daring Do being real, related to me, and had nothing but fond memories of my utter bastard of a father was something that my mind still struggled to wrap itself around.
“So,” I said, to fill the silence. “What was it like? The old Crystal Empire under Sombra, I mean.”
Daring Do shot me a look over her shoulder, but otherwise said nothing, instead keeping her attention on the corridor ahead. However, Dust Pan didn’t seem particularly offended by my rather insensitive question. Few ponies had seemed to show much interest in how ponies lived under Sombra’s tyranny, being rather more interested in the bright future that awaited the Crystal Empire as a vassal state of the kingdom it tried and failed to conquer over a thousand years ago.
“Sombra was the dictionary definition of the word ‘tyrant’,” he said rather quietly. “He ruled through fear, not just in the sense of the threats of or use of force, but your real, innermost fears. Torture was a form of art back then, and the Inquisitors could do it without leaving a mark on your body. He demanded total obedience and conformity -- we weren’t individuals, but I suppose you could say we were treated like mere parts of a whole, to be used as needed and cast off when worn out, like cogs in a clockwork machine. If you couldn’t, then that’s what the masks were for, the ones like the one Corded Ware tried to force on you. They would bend your mind to his will, make you as subservient as those shards, while the real you is trapped inside your body. Every moment of my life was watched, observed, and scrutinised for the merest sign of treachery.”
“He can’t have watched all of you all at the same time,” I said. “Or whatever secret police he had.”
“They didn’t need to. Everypony else would do it for him. If everypony was afraid of being arrested on the mere suspicion of committing treason then they were more than eager to inform on their neighbours, if only to keep the suspicion off our own backs.”
“How ghastly,” was all I could manage to say to that. It reminded me of what Odonata had said of how Queen Chrysalis ran things in the Hives, though she was able to better cement her power with a poisonous ideology that had, admittedly, worked quite well for her up until she decided that picking on the isolated pony tribes in the Badlands was insufficient and go after the biggest and strongest one in the world. One might accuse Sombra of making that same mistake, but from what little I can recall of reading about ancient history Equestria back then was more of a loose collection of squabbling unicorn kingdoms, earth pony fiefs, and pegasi city-states held tentatively together by oaths of fealty to the Princesses than the unified kingdom it is today. Chrysalis’ ideology at least offered a carrot in the form of the vain hope that the Changelings’ hunger might finally be sated in addition to the stick, whereas Sombra’s ideology seemed to be entirely made of sticks. One struggled to think of what Sombra might have offered his subjects in exchange for their servitude. That Chrysalis also controlled the supply of love for her starving subjects would also explain the longevity of her vile regime compared to Sombra’s.
“Why do you ask?” he said.
“Simple curiosity,” I answered with a shrug. “Ancient history is something of a little hobby of mine, as my family is positively steeped in it. I think an ancestor of mine was slain in battle against King Sombra himself. Until recently, all we had were scraps of parchment and Princess Celestia’s memories. It’s one thing to read about all of this in books, but quite another to hear it from a pony who lived through it all.”
[Pale Blood, the first Duchess of Canterlot and sister to Blueblood’s ancestors Princess Hotblood and Prince Coldblood, was killed in the Siege of Canterlot leading a sortie from the fortress to keep Sombra’s forces distracted from our assassination attempt on King Sombra. Blueblood appears to have misremembered the specific details of that battle.]
“It’s not ‘ancient history’ or a ‘hobby’ for me.” With that he trotted on ahead to walk next to Daring Do, who was more content to carry on the walk in respectful silence. Well, that seemed to have offended him, despite having been reasonably content to illuminate me on the finer details of life under Sombra’s rule. I suppose it must have been rather difficult for the Crystal Ponies to have awoken in a world that has changed beyond recognition, having missed the last thousand or so years of more ‘recent’ history, and everypony treating them as interesting antiques.
This meant that I was left alone with my thoughts again, which were not particularly friendly company even when I have the rare good day. Cannon Fodder was not one for idle small talk, and despite my best efforts to inquire about his thoughts on this latest mess he could only remark that it was ‘just another fight like any other, sir’, or some variation thereof.
“This is a long corridor,” I said, once the feeling that the quiet was getting to me popped up again. “Why did they build everything so far away? It’s like a bally maze down here.”
Daring Do was the one to answer my question: “Academic consensus is that it’s to confuse and exhaust invaders or saboteurs. It’s also why Sombra had a fondness for stairs.”
“Well, it’s working,” I said. Even my special talent struggled to keep track of where we were in these winding, labyrinthine corridors. I hoped that it meant that we were drawing closer to where we needed to be.
Dust Pan chuckled grimly. “Paranoia was the order of the day back then,” he said, shaking his head. “Spies were everywhere, even in these remote research installations. It just meant that I was always late for duties, which would mean extra beatings.”
At last, the corridor opened up into a sort of antechamber, curiously devoid of any furniture or ornamentation save for a large, heavy door topped with a dark crystal in the lintel. Though the room was rather small, the light of my horn seemed unable to banish much of the darkness regardless of how much magic I’d poured into it. A heavy, malignant feeling settled over us; our hoofsteps seemed louder and heavier, our breathing more laboured, and the throbbing of my quickening pulse was deeper within my ears. The door itself was of a simple wooden construction and seemed like any other door I’d seen throughout my hitherto short life, but for some perfectly irrational reason the very sight of it filled me with an unnamed dread. It was not the fear of what new horrors might lie behind it, dreamt up by the sick mind of Sombra and his disturbed set of underlings, but of the door itself. The whole thing is impossible to describe without coming across as a bit mad and silly, but as I stood there in the shadow of this simple plane of wood reinforced with iron and set in a stone frame I felt the raw malice imbued within radiate like the warmth from a fire. It stood there, silent, unmoving, and implacable, but whatever presence within, real or imagined, peered down at me, through the layers of clothes and skin and organs to what truly lay within and hated it. Or, at least, that was what was going through my mind at the time.
“Here we are,” said Dust Pan, suppressing a shudder. “It’s through here.” I felt a little relieved that it wasn’t just me; only Cannon Fodder seemed unperturbed by this peculiar door, and even Daring Do seemed unable to even look at the damned thing.
Well, I was not about to be intimidated by a bloody door. “About time,” I said, striding towards it in defiance of the peculiar fear I felt.
“Wait, stop!”
It was too late. My hoof connected with its rough surface, and it felt like touching a dead fish, all cold and slimy. The numbing sensation of cold crept up my hoof to my leg, but, ignoring it, I pushed the door open. White, blinding light poured from beyond, overwhelming me, and faded to reveal…
Canterlot. Specifically, the throne room of the Two Sisters. Vast, airy, and ornate, it was a monument to the power and authority of the alicorn princesses and their enlightened rule. The walk to the twin thrones of the Sun and Moon, both situated on the high dais up which one must ascend a flight of stairs to reach, was a long one that each visitor must take, past grand stained glass windows that illustrated key moments in our kingdom’s long and glorious history. Yet, despite its grandeur, the throne room does not intimidate; it is an open, welcoming place where Celestia and Luna can meet with their subjects, hear their worries and concerns, and do what they could to assuage them.
I walked that same path along the polished marble floor, hoofsteps ringing out like the tolling of a great bell. The throne room was strangely empty for this time of day, where usually it was filled with courtiers, nobles, cabinet ministers, and civil servants engaged in the hushed conversations that kept the complex mechanism of the Equestrian state running. It was not unknown for there to be some quiet moments here, after all, the office of the Prime Minister and Parliament had taken over much of the minutiae of the day-to-day running of the kingdom and had thus relegated the royal court to something of more of a forum for discussion and debate than actual policy making. That said, on a ceremonial, traditional, and spiritual level, this great hall remained the very heart of our kingdom. But, wait, wasn’t I…
***
“Hey, Blueblood!” shouted Daring Do. “Hello? Anyone in there?”
***
The intrusive voice faded. Celestia was there halfway down the hall, staring up at an enormous stained glass window. I was certain that she was not there before, but there she stood, impassively gazing at the ornate design commemorating some ancient victory over a long-forgotten enemy of Equestria. She remained alone in the hall, at least as far as I could see, and so I trotted on over to her.
Something felt wrong. I was supposed to be elsewhere, somewhere dark and beneath the earth…
***
“What’s wrong with him?”
***
No, I was back home at last and with Auntie Celestia, and I wasn’t going to leave the city ever again. I trotted up to her side, a rather peppy spring to my step. “Hello, Auntie!” I said.
“Oh, you’re back,” she said, not even bothering to look at me. Instead, she stared at the stained glass window, but when I tried to follow her gaze its form and colours shifted and swirled, unable to remain solid enough for me to even begin to understand what event from our long and proud history as a nation it depicted.
“Well, yes,” I said. The ‘wrong’ feeling intensified, a hollowing in my gut and a crawling on my skin, as though I’d committed some terrible sin but didn’t know what. Wait, how did I even get here? “I thought I was-”
“You failed again, Blueblood.” She turned to face me, her expression twisted into an expression of utter contempt. That look and her words felt like a stab to the heart, and I recoiled as though I truly had been. Immediately, I felt like a foal again.
“But, I can’t have!” I pleaded. “I don’t even know what I’ve done.”
“It’s what you haven’t done.” Celestia sneered down at me. She seemed to use her full, unnatural height to its fullest intimidatory effect, and all I could do was cower beneath her like a scolded puppy. “Once again your failure to act has led to disaster, and worse than the last time. An entire camp, a whole division, thousands of ponies dead because you did not stop Corded Ware before he could act. You knew he was planning something nefarious, and still you did nothing.”
“No, that can’t be right. I was just there…”
***
“Snap out of it!”
***
“I had no proof!” I spluttered out desperately. “Look, I-I can’t just accuse ponies without any proof.”
“Don’t give me those excuses. You took no action to investigate Corded Ware and you didn’t even tell anypony who might have helped you. It’s just like Second Fiddle all over again, and Scarlet Letter, and Crimson Arrow.”
I shook my head. “No, no, I stopped them, remember?”
“After they acted. Your unwillingness to lift a hoof to do your job killed those ponies, just like Gliding Moth. You knew that their incompetence would lead to avoidable deaths, and again, you did nothing to stop them. You alone could have prevented those deaths, but you were too much of a coward!” Her voice had grown angry and hate-filled in a way that I had never seen from the Princess before. “I questioned my sister’s decision to make you her commissar because I didn’t think you were ready, but she convinced me that the responsibility of that office might make you finally grow up. I see that we were both naive. You remain a selfish, spoilt little foal incapable of taking responsibility for all of the power and privilege that you have had the great fortune to be been born into”
Shaking my hooves, all I could do was stammer uselessly. I couldn’t even form coherent words. She was right; all of it was my own fault for doing nothing, all because I merely assumed that things would invariably work out for the better in the end somehow on their own.
Celestia closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh. “I bear some of the blame,” she said, somewhat absently. “When you were a foal you always had ponies to solve your problems for you, me especially. Your father tried to teach you how to be a good prince, as devoted to public service as he was, but, well, look at what he had to work with.”
“But I did my best,” was all I could think to say.
“I know,” said Celestia, nodding gently. “But it still wasn’t good enough. I see that there is only one thing that will make you learn, or at least keep you where you can no longer do harm: I now divest you of all titles royal and noble, all rank, land, and privileges thereof, and from this moment on you are a common subject of Equestria. A ‘peasant’, as you would have put it.”
With that, Celestia turned away from me and walked with her usual unearthly grace and elegance up towards her throne. The light seemed to recede from me, as though a cloud had moved before the sun shining through the stained glass windows. Stunned, horrified, my legs shivered and finally gave way until I was forced to sit on my haunches, shaking with what had just happened. I had lost everything that had given my life meaning, for without those ancient titles I was little nothing more than a useless drunk with nothing to contribute to society. It had been a long-held suspicion shared unknowingly between myself and a number of gossipy tabloid newspapers that had I the misfortune to be born a common pony I’d have died from some self-inflicted misfortune already, and it seemed that I was about to put that theory to the test. I would assume that she also included my various homes in her list of things she had just confiscated from me, so freezing to death on the streets of Canterlot seemed a likely outcome.
“What…”
She stopped and waited.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“I don’t care,” she said, peering over my shoulder as though I was dirt she’d accidentally stepped on along the way. “Do what you want. I hear Barnyard Bargains is recruiting shelf-stackers.”
***
‘Canterlot’ melted away before my eyes, and I was back in that dingy little dungeon under Fort Nowhere. I felt the reassuring solidity of rough stone under my flanks, not the cold and smooth marble of the throne room. Rather shaken, as one can imagine, I gasped for air as though I’d run a race, and when I touched my face I found that it was wet with tears.
“What?” I said, and I was surprised to find that my voice quivered and my throat was raspy. “What was that?”
I looked around to see Cannon Fodder, Daring Do, and Dust Pan all gathered around me, all bearing looks of concern on their faces. Well, Dust Pan’s looked a little too put-on to me, but being in a rather fragile state of mind, I didn’t think to comment on it.
“You just opened the door,” said Daring Do, clearly rather shaken by watching whatever it was that just happened to me, “then you sat down and just started sobbing uncontrollably. We tried to snap you out of it, but it was like you couldn’t hear us.”
“It’s a Metus Door,” said Dust Pan, drawing away from me to inspect it with great interest. He traced his hoof over the aged wood of the lintel, apparently unaffected by whatever magic had ensnared me just now. “It traps the mind of anypony who opens it without the right key in a nightmare of their own making. They guarded the most top secret chambers in the Crystal Empire.”
“Who the bloody hell makes a door like that?” I blurted out.
“King Sombra, that’s who,” said Dust Pan. His tone was flippant and it annoyed me, but I quickly realised the implication that he was the one who had to live in a world where such horrors were merely a fact of daily life. “I wonder, what nightmare did it make for you?”
“That’s none of your damned business,” I snapped, drying my face and eyes with a hoofkerchief that I ought to have replaced a while ago. I was hardly about to admit out loud to them that my greatest fear was Celestia finding out what an utter waste of flesh I have been all of these years, though I felt to some extent that the metaphysical dressing-down I’d received was not entirely without merit. Throughout my life I always had ponies who would fix problems for me, whether they were servants whose entire jobs were to make my life as easy as possible or even Princess Celestia pulling a few strings here and there, and any real setbacks that could not have been smoothed over by those ponies were still those where I could be shielded from the consequences. It was not unreasonable to expect that I did not act in those circumstances because I’d been too used to such obstacles being removed for me, and thus carried on under the assumption that everything would work out eventually if I just left everything alone for other ponies to fix for me. After all, I had been too slow in stopping those ponies, and had I acted early then a whole heap of trouble could have been avoided for everypony involved and certain ponies would now be alive.
It was a queer thing, for I knew it now to be a cheap parlour trick to unnerve ponies stupid enough to go poking around in places that King Sombra would have preferred to remain private, but the words put in Auntie Celestia’s mouth stuck with me. All of it would have had to have come from somewhere within the dark recesses of my murky psyche, and amidst all of the various neuroses and anxieties that occupy the soup of my brain it sifted through the petty things like forgetting my lines at a school play or my mild phobia of cellophane it had zeroed in on the very thing that was bound to cause me to finally snap. ‘Your father tried to teach you how to be a good prince, as devoted to public service as he was, but, well, look at what he had to work with’ the apparition had said, and well, one could never accuse my father of slacking in trying to mould me into something, but whether or not it was a ‘good prince’ depended upon one’s definition of the term and whether or not it was worth the misery I had gone through.
“Looks like the magic’s worn off now,” said Dust Pan, and I cast a glance at Cannon Fodder who had situated himself between the door and me.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“Not long,” said Cannon Fodder. “Less than a minute, sir.”
“It felt much longer than less than a minute.”
I felt Daring Do’s hoof touch me on the shoulder, stroking rather gently in a comforting manner that reminded me of when Celestia used to look after me as a foal. Though I knew that it was not truly her in that illusion crafted by that hideous door, I could not help but feel some irrational feeling of disgust at the thought of her, which only made me feel more ashamed.
“What’s a ‘shelf-stacker’?” I asked.
Daring Do stopped stroking my shoulder and frowned at me. “They’re supermarket employees who stack shelves,” she said. “Is that your greatest fear?”
It came across as silly when expressed like that, which rather helped me focus my mind better.
“Dammit all,” I snarled, pushing Daring Do’s hoof away and dragging myself up to my hooves to stand. “I’m fine. We still have work to do, and those crystal bastards aren’t going to stop just because I’m throwing a wobbly.”
Dust Pan smiled and waved in the direction of this open door. “After you,” he said.
“No, you first.”
He hesitated, apparently trying to work out if I was joking or not. The expression on my face must have conveyed that I was most certainly not as he swiftly looked away, muttered an apology, and stumbled through the doorway. When I saw that nothing happened to him and that the magic of the door had indeed been dispelled, I tentatively crept through the door and was relieved to make it through to the other side without suffering any further distressing hallucinations.
The room beyond was a large office, and one clearly designed to intimidate visitors. The ceiling was far higher than was truly necessary and the walk to the desk at the far end was an uncomfortably long one. I imagined Corded Ware, or whoever else might have run things here, a thousand years ago, glaring with practised menace as said visitor spent far too long crossing the intricately-woven rug depicting angular, fractal designs reminiscent of crystals, now faded into a muddy grey, to reach him. The desk itself was a large, imposing thing about the size of a billiards table and carved or grown out of solid white crystal, upon which were a collection of neatly piled sheets of parchment and books all arranged with the sort of precision that only a fastidious sort of pony with very little actual work to do can muster (I always made sure that my desk and my office looked as messy as possible, to give one the impression that I was much too busy with more important work to even begin to tidy up). At the far wall just behind the desk and chair was a large, full-length portrait of King Sombra himself, looking equal parts regal and terrifying; he appeared to regard the artist painting his portrait and, by extension, the viewer as one would an irritating beggar. However, all along the walls, much like in the vast entrance hall earlier, were crystal tubes lined up in rows, and each occupied by a faceless, motionless shard.
“Relax, they’re inert,” said Dust Pan, as he strode up to the closest one to inspect it. He peered through the translucent crystal at the shard trapped within with something almost approaching a sense of reverence, and though he was ostensibly on our side thanks to our mutual desire to survive this nightmare, I could not entirely discount the thought that, deep down, his motivations were still aligned with the sort of bizarre Sombra-ist revanchism that Corded Ware was wrapped up in. “Without an implanted soul, they’re completely harmless.”
Call me paranoid, and I’ve been called far worse before and since, but I did not entirely trust him when he said that. I’m all but certain now, looking back, but in that moment I felt as though those things were truly alive in a metaphysical sense, rather than strictly biological, and that whatever corrupted intelligence occupied the pony-shaped shell of crystal watched me through its blank face and just hated my mere existence for living where it could not. Still, I reassured myself that Dust Pan would not have brazenly waltzed right into this office if it was not safe to do so, and so I followed, head bowed and terribly afraid to meet the eyeless gaze of those ‘inert’ shards.
I felt a faint breeze and found that it came from a vent in the wall, very close to the high ceiling. Much like the air ducts we had just crawled and fallen through, it looked about large enough to admit a pony one at a time. The aching wound on my leg flared in response to the thought that had just wormed its way into my mind.
“Will any of those scarab-things come through that?” I asked, indicating at the grilled vent with my nose.
“Unlikely,” said Dust Pan. “Shards have some measure of intelligence, enough to adapt to changing circumstances, but the scarabs will always stick to their programmed tasks. Unless they’ve been re-programmed, they’ll stick to the air circulation system.”
“We’ll stay out of the vents, then,” said Daring Do. She looked around at the expansive office. “What is this place?”
“This was Corded Ware’s office,” Dust Pan explained as he led us towards the imposing desk at the far end. “Past here are the restricted areas, the alchemical laboratories and the workshops where the researchers carried out the ‘Great Project’ to uncover the secrets of alicorn immortality.”
“I thought it was all ‘restricted’,” I said. “It’s hard to have a secret research centre that anypony can just waltz into.”
“The even-more-restricted areas.”
“And the portal?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, and the portal. It’s further down, in the lowest level of the facility and past the laboratories.”
I breathed an irritated sigh. “Naturally.”
Cannon Fodder shut the door behind us and barricaded it, as he did with the last one, by dragging a rather large but decaying sofa behind it. While he was doing that, I decided to explore a little here. Though my mind was still reeling from the unpleasant nightmare the now-inert door had inflicted upon me, the knowledge that it was merely a cheap psychological trick created by a power-hungry tyrant with apparently nothing better to do with his time than create needlessly cruel doors of all things had lessened the blow somewhat. It was madness, thought I, that even the doors were evil back then.
As I pottered about the room, peering up at the frightfully-still statues in their crystal cages, I came to the slow realisation that there was nothing that the apparition of Celestia had said that I had not inflicted upon myself while in my blackest moods, and the shock of hearing it from a beloved Auntie would gradually wear off. Survival was the order of the day in this horrible war, and, if I might say so myself, I was doing something of a sterling job so far. I suppose the advantage of already having a low opinion of oneself is that when another attempts to break one down with a few ‘home truths’, one is already in agreement and that pessimism forms a perfect shield to deflect such barbs.
Still, I was letting myself become distracted from the task at hoof: survival. Dust Pan, however, seemed to be in no rush, and had drifted over to another, smaller desk in the corner of the room, close to another door at the far end that I could not help but feel a tad suspicious of now. He had described himself as being Corded Ware’s slave, and I could safely assume that this little writing desk in this dingy corner was where he was forced to work. Indeed, as I wandered closer, I could see that a rusted chain was affixed by one end to the wall behind the rotting wooden chair. I watched for a moment as he traced his hoof over the length of chain, but I felt as though I was intruding upon a private moment and so turned my attention to Corded Ware’s desk.
I wasn't sure what I really expected. Perhaps a brandy snifter with an accompanying cabinet of well-preserved libations, and a magically-powered humidor full of expensive Zebrican cigars, or whatever the millennia-old equivalent would've been. Perhaps Sombra forbade his underlings from such vices, or Corded Ware was a teetotaller, but either way, I'd allowed myself a smidgen of hope that there might be something to distract me from my plight; yet all it did was remind me of the cold, utilitarian efficiency that more accurately characterised the army than a supposed higher official.
As a rule, I don’t trust ponies who are too neat with their things. Now, there is a difference between being healthily fastidious with one’s grooming and clothing as I am, and being overly persnickety about the arrangements of one’s workplace; it is a symptom of a certain underlying malignancy in one’s own psyche, I feel, and my theory was proved correct again with this latest evidence. The parchment was piled up in a neat little stack in one corner, and there was a single sheet just in front of the chair, which had been pushed back from the desk a little. The opposite corner of the desk was occupied by a bound ledger, and despite its age it looked remarkably well-preserved. There was only one thing that was out of its proper place on the desk, and that was a quill, which had been left atop the parchment next to a rather large squiggle of spilled ink; if I had to guess, Corded Ware was in the middle of writing something when King Sombra inflicted his curse upon the Empire and whisked it away into shadow. I found the mental image rather amusing.
[The nature and the mechanism of the ‘curse’ has been subject to much speculation over the years and there is scant evidence in the Crystal Empire’s archives. It is generally accepted that King Sombra had dedicated much time and effort to prepare a number of contingencies in the case of his overthrow and that the curse that took the entire Empire out of time itself was a key part of it, with Corded Ware’s shards having been a part of the plan that was still in development when Sombra was forced to deploy it. How the curse affected the Crystal Ponies who were outside the borders of the Empire like Corded Ware remains unknown to this day.]
Daring Do likewise found the parchment on the desk interesting, albeit for more academic reasons than my mere curiosity. Well, I suppose I was interested to see if these documents provided any insight into Corded Ware’s thinking, but as I peered down at what he was working on before his King petulantly plucked him out of existence for more than a thousand years I saw that it was all gobbledygook. That is to say, though his script was fastidiously neat and tidy, the letters were all jumbled up so as to make no sense to me at all.
“A code?” I posited. The portrait of King Sombra seemed to be staring directly at me, so I turned and positioned myself so that my flanks were to him, and even then I could feel his eyes on me.
“It looks more like a cipher,” said Daring Do.
“Ponies love being corrected, you should keep doing that,” I snapped at her.
Daring Do looked as though she was about to snap back with a barbed comment, but considering that I’ve had rather an emotional day and it wasn’t even ten in the morning according to my watch she thought better of it. “Alright,” she said flatly, and then started picking up sheets of parchment to tuck away inside her satchel.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Come on, you read my books,” she said. “My job. I’m collecting evidence. Who knows what sort of secrets from the ancient world these might hold?”
She carried on, delicately taking a fragile sheet of parchment one at a time, each on the verge of crumbling into dust at her touch, and placing it delicately in a pocket inside her satchel. After taking a few of these, and I was becoming increasingly anxious at her careful slowness as I remembered the horde of shards hunting us down, Daring Do stopped as she came across a map. It was, of course, primitive by our standards, but the landmass it represented was still identifiable as that of Equestria; the west coast hadn’t been explored yet, so the cartographer had elected to leave that blank, and the eastern coastline with the Griffish Isles bore little resemblance to how it appears on modern maps. The city of Manehattan was absent as it wouldn’t be founded for another few centuries and Trottingham apparently was neither large nor important enough to warrant inclusion. The lands claimed by the Crystal Empire were shaded in a deep purple colour that had faded with age, and it filled up a much larger portion of land than the few square miles surrounding a single city it does now, extending beyond the Crystal Mountains and reaching as far south as Neighagra Falls and rather unsettlingly close to Canterlot. That one or two of the more obscure of my titled lands fell within the borders of the old empire brought me some small feeling of triumph.
I saw a few crosses marked out in red ink here and there beyond the borders of the old empire, one where Manehattan was founded some time after this map was drawn, another close to Ponyville, and another far to the south in the Badlands, among others scattered all over the place. “Dust Pan, what do these represent?”
“Hm?” Dust Pan pottered on over, having finished reminiscing about the time he was a slave. I still found it baffling that he, a former slave, would willingly fall back into service with his old master even after Princess Cadance abolished that horrid practice in the Crystal Empire, but either Corded Ware still had some leverage over his old serf or, perhaps more worryingly, if all one knows are chains then it must be harder to let those bindings go. The cage that traps the mind can be a more secure prison than the one that only holds the body.
“These markings,” I said. I’d worked it out already, but the thought was too unsettling for me to fully accept on my own reasoning alone. “There are quite a lot of them outside the old empire.”
“Oh, right,” he said, looking rather apologetic too. He tapped his hoof on the cross in the Badlands. “This one here, where we are, is the main facility for producing shards.” Then, sweeping his hoof at the other crosses dotted around on the map all over Equestria. “These were our additional sites for King Sombra’s contingency plan. This map is old - well, older - and it’s missing the newer sites.”
Well, that confirmed the uncomfortable conclusion that I’d already come to, but, still in some sense of denial about it, I grasped for straws. “‘Were’, you said. After all of these years they must be inactive? Or maybe they were only planned and hadn’t been finished before the curse came?”
Dust Pan pulled a face and then shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. “I mean, these are all the completed ones filled with deactivated shards, and assuming nothing’s happened then they’re all just dormant, waiting to be activated.”
The feeling of dread pushed out all of the other thoughts and emotional turmoil quite nicely, for there was nothing quite like the prospect of more of these tombs filled with shards scattered all over Equestria to put one’s true priorities sharply into focus. I looked over those small crosses with this new perspective, trying to connect them to cities and strategic locations in Equestria. One was in the middle of the Everfree Forest, which I could assume was trying to be close to the Castle of the Two Sisters and the former seat of the royal court before it moved to Canterlot, and I wagered that even the shards would struggle to emerge from that wild, monster-infested blight to terrorise unsuspecting ponies. However, I’d already identified Manehattan and Ponyville as prominent areas close to a dormant tomb (Ponyville only being considered as ‘prominent’ here due to the proximity of Princess Twilight Sparkle and the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony, and perhaps the important rail connection from Canterlot to the South. On second thought, I grudgingly accept that former rural backwater as a village of strategic and political importance only), and with fresher eyes opened by this disturbing news I could identify other large settlements on the Equestrian mainland nearby to them.
“I think I’ll take this one,” I said, carefully taking the map in my magic, rolling it up neatly, and tucking it inside my jacket’s inner pocket, where Slab could watch over this valuable bit of what certain officers would call ‘intelligence’. “Whatever happens, this map must get to Princess Celestia. She needs to know this.”