Chapter 6: The Vaults
Minutes, hours, time becomes irrelevant to most restful minds. The passage of which could be swift or slow when within a dream: it might seem to be a decade trapped inside a moment or a few second spanning hours of real time before the dreamer wakes.
Luna stares at the bleak horizon, her thoughts fragmenting and shifting as she muses over what she'd seen. It was moments like this that made her glad that she had however long she needed to think.
She patently ignored the floating pillars of obsidian looming out of the grey mists, and even the distant crackle of lightning. They were little more than distractions as she set to ponder the sour feeling settling in her stomach. It took more effort for the Alicorn to bite her lip, hoping to keep it from trembling.
'By the stars, sun, and sacred elements, please let this be my dream and not theirs.'
Part of it felt unreal, a torture dredged up to wound her personally. Luna knew she could dismiss this, at least for the moment. The Tantabus was proof that she could torment herself, so perhaps this was just another of its forms? But a chilling thought kept creeping back regardless.
What if this was all real?
If this was a memory being replayed for her, just as they claimed, then she was in way over her head.
Equestria was a realm like any other, it had seen its share of war and disaster. Ponies had died for causes that seemed ludicrous in the light of the new age, and hordes of creatures had to be forced back to the borders at the cost of hundreds of lives. At its zenith, she'd personally led battalions into the heart of marauding hordes to slay warlords bent on enslaving ponykind.
But this was countless orders of magnitude worse.
And even in their troubles, Celestia had always been by her side. Her sister had been the one she could lean on, confide in. Well, most of the time anyway.
'Sister, I could use your help right now.'
Barely an imagined breath passes her lips before the veil of smoke swirls and churns in a slow convulsing vortex. The sound of distant mountains crashing together resounds in the deep, and tiny crackling lights illuminate the penumbral haze of shadows. Luna barely sees the floating obsidian columns, now ringed with golden runes winking in the dark. Those towering spires and unnatural geometries of the world subtly warp and shift around her. She glances up and spots the impossible curvature of an immense stairwell sweeping upwards as if upside down, ending in a colourfully complex mandala at its apex. Juddering sparks arc across a soft hue of light bending through the stained glass mosaic. The world shudders under her hooves again, pulsing in deep arrhythmic throbs. It grips her heart like it was her own.
It's from a searing lightning strike glimpsed out the corner of her eye that reveals the outline of her otherworldly petitioner. The princess of the night straightens herself, adopting the regal poise expected of one of the diarchs of Equestria.
But as she spots her petitioner, he notices her as well. With a raised hand, he approaches.
'Keep calm, Luna, keep calm.'
Reflexively, the Alicorn's horn alights. Her wards had slipped for just a moment, and she renewed them while also willing a gate back from the dreamscape into being. The gates were tiny and so faint that almost no being could possibly notice as it formed an emergency exit back to herself.
The temperature plummets immediately, and Luna stands agape as the tiny black spot next to her left forehoof bursts into a blossom of swirling pink smoke.
In response, the world violently shakes and spasms in an earthquake that hurls Luna flat. A shrieking wind arises from nowhere, flattening her plumage and raking through her fur. It takes less than an instant for her to find a far more recognizable quality in the gale: It burbled and choked in a screech of agony.
'Oh buck! This isn't a dream!'
Her breath hitches as her gaze shoots up to the mandala. She recognizes countless ingrained memories, stitched together, fragmented into a tapestry of colour and light. A memory vault, she was inside somecreature's mind. It had retreated, pulled itself into a coma and drawn her with it.
And she'd just ripped a physical hole in its head.
"What was that?!" Alpharius tosses his helmet off. The black pillars around them begin to crumble and shake themselves into rubble as they fall from the sky. The world trembles again, shifting meters at a time and tossing the warlord to his knees. His shifting eyes peer into the Princess as she fumbles for a response.
"W-we had thought that it would be better to prepare an avenue of egress."
The warlord's face contorts into a momentary snarl, pinching into a pursed-lipped scowl. His image flickers just as wildly and violently as smoke caught in a whirlwind.
An otherworldly mumble rises as Alpharius' figure gutters like a dying candle. His lips move, but his voice comes through a moment later as if muffled underwater.
'I've given you what you need to see to find him. Now, fulfill your destiny, Sabinus.'
Alpharius's eyes glitters back to intelligence as he peers into Luna's. Her mouth hangs open. Not only did he have a magic of his own cast over Sabinius, but also his own body. He was half awake and half asleep.
"We're out of time." Alpharius turns as the arrhythmic flutter of the world around them pulses beneath her hooves. It's a heartbeat, there's no question about it. And by the fluttering palpitations, it was anything but healthy. "I can help get you there, but don't you dare try that again."
The impossible obsidian spires fall from the sky like icicles as the miasma congeals, mist turning from airy purple wisps to sickly black clots.
"Sabinus," Luna shouts to the Warlord, panic raising her voice to a squeak, "we're hurting her!"
"No, we're killing her." Alpharius' gaze remains stone cold as he approaches to within a scant arms length, then gestures to the silent, spluttering Alicorn. "I didn't anticipate anyone putting a hole in her skull. Yet. No matter. Whatever you did started the cascade early. He'll be aware of us now, there's no helping that. There's still one last thing-"
"It can't be done. We're in her mind, not your dreams. I can't read-"
Luna's protest is cut short by a hand crudely clamping over her muzzle. The grasp had been made in a flash, nearly instantaneous. Nothing should have moved that fast, but the grip wasn't painful or even particularly tight.
"No time. Six-six-six, 'Hydra Dominatus'. Truth is a matter of perspectives so do not trust your eyes. Find it at all costs. Find Horus Lupercal! Go!"
Luna's muzzle is freed as he grips her mane in his other hand. Luna squeaks in indignant protest before he flings her bodily upward towards the mandala spiral. Unlike the hand clamped on her muzzle, that was painful.
Instead of finding herself muzzle first on the ground, gravity seemed to come unglued. She felt herself falling away from the ground as the wind rushed past.
Her stomach lurches as the wall of congealed smoke closes over Alpharius, crashing together in a murderous wave and obliterating him from sight.
Wind whips past Luna's deadened feathers and claws furrows through the fur on her back. All around the falling Alicorn the clouds swirl into ordered strata before roiling over one another. Lances of red lightning flicker through, smashing already collapsing blocks of perfect obsidian into jagged shards.
Luna twists in mid-air, trying to see the ground, trying to regain some measure of control as her wings flap but catch hold of nothing.
'Gate out, be done with this!'
She could, she could very well rip herself from this creature's mind, bypass any aegis, and she would be home. She would never have to deal with this, or even speak about this to anypony ever again.
'This isn't Equestria's business. This isn't my business.'
But a memory bubbles up as fresh and cloying as the sickly black droplets suspended in the air around her.
'This one hopes.'
Hope. It twists in her like a knife. Fleeing from Sabinus' mind and collapsing it would be the end of that.
A whirring flutter greets the image of a spiraling banister missing her wingtip by a few hooflengths. She still falls like a meteor, and a few wing beats and twists did little to halt her descent.
The Alicorn spins awkwardly, careening off course, and the stone stairwell rises to meet her. Any scream she could utter is cut fitfully short as she closes her eyes and awaits the inevitable impact.
Like plunging into ice water, Luna gasps. There was no bone crunching crash, just a halting push against her entire body and the bite of the cold. Her eyes flutter open, hoping to find a soft bed and knowing there would be none.
Luna finds herself floating, body suspended in thick viscous fluid. Hoses and prickling wires pump air straight into her maw, held in place by a riveted band around her muzzle. Her hooves flail in the thick sucking syrup. She kicks, feeling the smooth glass through the blurry yellow morass. Her wings spread, sweeping the inside of a rounded glass tube. Luna's mind recognizes the sensation, saying it's like a vat of honey, or jam, as disturbing as that thought might be after more than a few of her subjects less comfortable dreams.
She kicks down, hoof barely pressing the bottom, and pushes herself up. The wires bind and pull, but she twists and sees several tendril-like apparatuses slide free of her hooves. No, not from around, they'd buried themselves like thorns in her frogs.
Luna suppresses a shudder of disgust, flipping her hooves over, seeing the metal holes eaten through the bottoms of her fleshy pads. With growing uneasiness, she felt the little tugs all along her spine, limbs, pelvis, groin, and even at the dock of her tail.
Bubbles escape her in a cry of disgust, and she shivers, thrashing to throw the animated cabling free. She concentrates and with a twinkling chime of magic, the tube shatters spraying glass shards and amber gunk all around her. The sucking squelch pulls her free as the tide of viscous amnion slops out.
The mechadendrite tendrils withdraw, coaxing a wave of shivers down her spine as they release her. Luna flops to the ground, feeling all together too much like a fish flushed from a broken bowl. She grips the thick oxygen tube jammed down her throat in both hooves, and pulls it free. The viscous solution and metal washed up with a bitter mixture of bile and iron, causing her to gag.
The Alicorn wobbles and pulls herself upright as curtains of slick film drip from every inch of her body. Luna shivers and extends her wings to wipe her eyes. A flick of her pinions spatters the thick goop across steel grating, and she blinks her vision clear.
The howl of the onrushing wind never ceased, even coated in slime. But all around her was a sea of cold torment in the midst of an immense cavern. Layers upon layers of latticed steel walkways were suspended by immense chains and rods. In the middle of the chamber, propped up by thick metal pillars, is a great round tower with walkways stretching out from its lower reaches like the central hub of a wheel. Spotlights sweep out from it like a dozen luminescent eyes, while shifting shadows stride the gantries hanging high up over the floor.
The floor.
All around her were the same yellow tanks. And lining the walls, as far as the eye could see in the cavernous expanse shrouded in darkness, were sarcophagi. There were thousand, latched to walls, tiny windows glittering when the spotlights swept across them before disappearing into darkness. And in the pits at the very bottom were hundreds of yellow viscous tanks, filled with denuded, hairless forms like Alpharius, like the girl.
Cold choking similarities came back, it was almost identical to an iron and steel version of a changeling hive. Worse yet, it was just as oppressive... no, it was more so.
The roiling static ambiance wells up around her as cloying as the amnion still clinging to her feathers.
Luna felt it as much as heard it; a sorrowful song of suffering shared between the thousands of beings trapped inside the sarcophagi. It was a melody that couldn't be wholly suppressed by the tanks. She could hear the chime of their combined arcane gifts, and as she gazes across from her she sees the naked form of an older female. She was stripped completely, entombed in the amniotic tank and lit by a single weak orb in the base. She was curled up, atrophied limbs suspended by tangles of mechadendrite wires. A single black strap and steel plate covers her eyes with a burnished number 111, while a single thick corrugated cable snakes down her throat.
"Sacred Elements, they're all mages."
The shadows on the gantries never become clear beyond sketchy motions in the distance. The mage's nameless, unnatural guardians prowl quietly in the dark, and even from a distance, Luna can smell the unmistakable pong of something else. Dogs.
'111' Luna reads the metal plaque across the woman's forehead again, her eyes widen in recognition.
"Six-six-six." her eyes scan the monolithic expanse. "Simple."
If they were organized into anything resembling a system, she could find it quickly enough. A few flaps of her wing flicks the last of the offending fluid from her, and she takes to the air. The first row at ground level reads 211. A promising start.
Luna avoids a wandering light, ducking around it and streaking up past rows of narrow gantries. Four more rows, and she finds row 6. Following it along, she glimpses more figures, more forms, each splayed out in rictus moribund poses. The oppressive sensations mesh with the growing roar of winds.
Hot droplets spatter across her coat like rain. Slowing her movement, Luna flicks the offending liquid from her face, but found it congealed red and reeked of bodily fluid. She takes a breath, looking up at the towering bulwarks high above.
And the rain began to fall. Luna narrows her eyes against the new assault, but she didn't give it the thought she might have. It was blood, it slicked the gantries and dripped down them like eaves. Luna shivers but presses on, reading the numbers printed on the tanks. 624, 635, 648, 659...
Rows and rows of sarcophagi rear up, but there's a sudden and obvious gap. 665, 667. Nothing. She stops, suspended above a narrow access walkway. Touching down, her hooves squelch over the thick offal pooling and dripping down below. She can see one of the sketchy forms in the distance as it approaches.
It doesn't matter, the princess's breathing deepens as she gazes at the smooth patch of wall between two metal coffins.
"It should be here." She reaches up, pressing her hooves above it, then taking to wing to get a better look. seeing 766.
A lump forms in her throat. There was no 666.
Ringing metal-on-metal footsteps echo as the warning klaxons blare a hideous alarm. The strobing yellow lamps meld with a sickly red from hundreds of flickering red lumin orbs sunk into the bare metal walls.
The mechanical bleat of the klaxon physically wrings the breath from the Alicorn, and she nearly missed the beat as a shrouded form sprints across the suspended footbridge towards her narrow shelf.
Luna wheels in time to see the figure. It was slender, tiny compared to Alpharius, but big compared to Sabinius. Its glittering silver cuirass reflects crimson as the warning lights bath it in a sanguine glow. Rivulets of crimson dribble down its polished armour and starts to seep into a billowing white fur cloak. It was lithe, and while shaven headed, the form was similar to Sabinius in other ways. A female.
'A guard.'
Her dark ebony skin was marred by a single white glyph over her forehead, and with that almost faceless presence, some degree of similarity drew across Luna. This felt relatively normal. She drops to the metal grating and holds out a forehoof.
"Cease. We merely wish to-"
Luna's plea evidently fell on deaf ears. The creature never slowed, rather, it wordlessly and expressionlessly drew a silvered greatsword from behind the cloak.
"-know where..."
She skids around the metal corner, throwing her body into the massive sweeping blow. It was done in fractions of a second without battle cry, taunt, or even demand.
Luna's eyes widen and another word springs to her lips.
"Ceifador!"
In a flash of eldretch blue, the silvered blade halted a hairsbredth from the Alicorn's throat. A cerulean metal haft congeals into existence behind a roiling latticework of abject darkness. The harsh outlines of a polearm cast pale blue light in the darkness, transmuting baroque silver leaves stretching up to a broad crescent blade tipped in a tapered icicle point.
The halberd that saved her pushes back against the great blade, luna's arcane grip throwing the female guardian off balance. Her opponent forces the blade over, locking the crossguard with the polearm's haft and scraping it across the fluted metal.
Luna yelps and ducks the shearing edge until it caught the leafed fluting and lodged fast in the guard. The female warrior barely drew a breath before dragging the blade back in a shower of sparks.
But the Alicorn throws herself at the haft, leveraging her weight and arcane might to toss the guardian off balance. She skids across the grating, wordlessly taking the shock of the Alicorn's shove. Luna draws her halberd back before thrusting the point forward, goading the warrior back who neatly bats it aside and hops backward.
She snorts like any other warrior mare and hunches forward, bracing the keen greatsword against her bracer and circling towards the wall.
For the first time in her life, Luna locked eyes with the creature and saw nothing. They couldn't be read, no fear of death, no fire of ambition. Absolutely nothing. The guardian darts forward jabbing the blade towards the Alicorn, then feinting left while sweeping a leg out beneath her. Luna skips back another few paces. Blood beating in her ears, twin heartbeats thrumming through her hooves through the mesh grating.
Only distantly could she recognize the sound of more feet pounding in over metal, drawing closer. There was no pattern, no reason, this creature fought 'wrong' as it wedged itself between her and the wall.
The first whip-crack and undulating whine of a ricochet drew Luna's gaze to the left where impacted off a hanging sarcophogi.
She realized her mistake far too late.
The guardian woman darts forward, quillions locking with Ceifador's crossguard as she throws her armoured bulk into the princess. Luna's rump hit the thin excuse for a railing, and with a vicious headbutt, she's tossed into the void, barely avoiding a sweeping chop of the freed blade.
The empty woman seemingly fell away from her as stale wind rushed past her ears. Luna's mouth opens and the rows of coffins flit by her at a blinding rate with her vision still swimming from the hit. A moment before she crashed to the metal decking she glanced over and caught a glimpse of a plaque. 991.
'991'
Perspective.
Summoning up her reserves of will, the Alicorn disappears in a swarm of sparkling energy. Through the screaming whirlpool of energy she plunges, momentarily as mesmerized and shocked at the roiling torrent around her. It lasts only a moment before Luna is spat out into the copper tinged air. She falls a few more meters before quickly flipping over to right herself. A swift glance around let her reorient herself, finding she was well up above the blaze of the searing spotlights.
She glances at a nearby tank. A-185. Not quite right. She descended a few rows past an unoccupied shelf and counts the nine banks of tiny yellow lights running up from the depths. 985. Luna browsed, ears back and attentive of every nearby sound.
She quickly finds it: 999.
With a breath, the Alicorn chances a glimmer of magic, grasping the whole sarcophagi. A soft electronic chirp startles her as she blinks, seeing a little red flicker on the side near a thick hoof-width metal restraining band.
She cranes her neck to see, spotting a monochrome red display with a flashing white question mark. There was no words, no characters, no buttons, just the display. Her hoof and magic both scour the surface. With growing unease, she notices the spotlights sweeping over the metal prisons, searching ever higher as the roar of the klaxons blot out any other noise in the enormous prison.
Nothing, there wasn't a single button there at all. Luna closes her eyes and whispers a single phrase through clenched teeth, "Hydra Dominatus."
With a click and a flat bleep of binaric, it spits back a harsh metal cadence, "Dies irae dies venit, rex imperator. Inductat noctum aurora saluto."
The casket swings open, blotting out the world in a swirling hiss of sucking air emptying into a howling void. Even light itself disappears down the endless drain, and the princess barely manages to let out a squawk of protest as she's swallowed.
