The stones looked old, really old, and so did what we could see of the passage beyond the entryway.
Cadance cast a magic light down into it, moving it around a little to check for the hallway's integrity. "It looks safe enough; those are some thick stones."
"Not unlike the walls of one of those temples from the Daring Do stories, I suppose," I muttered, noting the intricate engravings on the sandstone.
I could just feel Rainbow's growing excitement at being part of this. This was a story she could share with her friend A.K. Yearling, also known as Daring Do, once we got through it all.
With the right spin on it, Daring Do could have been the one venturing forth into what depths this hallway led to, find the treasure at the inevitable end, and save the world from Ahuizotl's many schemes. It would certainly be a book her fans would love to read.
"Who's ready to go first?" I wondered, looking back at the others.
"Obviously you're going to need light down there," Spritelight grumbled. "So let me do right by my name and suggest to take point. Turkey, you're with me."
"Fair enough, now I'd like Rhon... Patty Cannon to join me since we're making teams," I suggested quickly before I lost my chance. "How about Rainbow sticks with April, and Cadance with Pinkie Pie? Then we have a magical pony with a non-magical one just in case something goes wrong."
"And what about me?" Discord wondered in a sad tone of voice, definitely pouting. "I'll be all on my own."
"Why don't you stick in the middle between us then so you've got ponies all around you?" I suggested. "Then it'll be Spritelight and Turkey ahead, me and Patty Cake... Cannon second, Discord in the middle, April and Rainbow, and then Cadance and Pinkie pulling the rear?"
"Okey-dokey-lokey," Pinkie Pie agreed merrily.
"Sounds good to me," Rainbow agreed.
"It does make sense to pair up like that," Cadance considered. "If anything goes wrong I have enough experience and magical power to do something about it."
"How do you make a light?" April wondered, addressing Spritelight.
"You focus on the tip of your horn and just hold a ball of magic there," Spritelight returned, showing by example. "Don't overcharge it."
I watched as April carefully did as Spritelight showed her, and then gave her a warm smile as she succeeded in her effort. "There you go April, you're doing marvellous. Don't let your insecurities get the better of you."
"I'll try," April agreed.
"I'll be with you down there," Rainbow offered the unicorn with a grin. "I can fly you out of dangerous situations if they happen, so don't you worry."
"Discord," Cadance started, drawing the Draconequus' attention. "Remind me to have you and Fluttershy come babysit Flurry Heart. You owe me that much for the effort."
Discord visibly swallowed. "Why, I'm sure I can babysit those two without Fluttershy's help. Don't you trust me?"
"No," Cadance stated flatly. "I know you value your friendship with Fluttershy, but the Crystal Empire has had one too many close calls to let you run free in it without supervision. You might give my foal bad ideas I won't be able to turn her away from."
"She's got you there," I chuckled at Discord. "You know you'll fall for the temptation of making a joke here or there and then forget about yourself."
Discord looked shocked at the admonishment. "Why won't anybody accept I'm a reformed man?"
"It will take time," Spritelight answered. "Just like it will take time for ponies back home to forgive me for this mess I caused... and I might not have your lifespan to see them do that."
"Hopefully," I started, motioning Spritelight to take the lead, "we can fix this thing and restore what was lost. If there's anything in my power which will allow me to change the events which happened so far, I will try to do so."
Spritelight hummed in thought at my words, but then nudged Turkey to follow her into the passageway.
I watched as the pair of them wandered in, Turkey on the left, Spritelight on the right, and looked over at Patty Cannon.
"Care to join me, Patty? I'm going to have to get used to your name. I'm still plain old Josey myself," I suggested, sticking to the left wall as I dipped into the passageway, so Rhonda/Patty Cannon would join on my right side.
With Spritelight on the right and me on the left, the light we both emitted from our horns cast over and past our partners to spread out more evenly than if I had followed directly after Spritelight.
Discord groaned as he had to lean down to fit in the passage, following behind us with some effort.
"Well, this is just entirely too uncomfortable," he complained.
I looked back past Rhonda's flank. "You can shrink and grow at will."
"Doesn't make it any more comfortable, I'll assure you," the draconequus grumbled, but shrunk to a height which allowed him to walk upright behind us without his horns scraping against the ceiling nonetheless.
Patty Cannon giggled lightly as she followed beside me, and I smiled down at her.
"I've missed you, you know? I had to send you to Ponyville for your own protection but I'm glad you found a friend in Pinkie Pie," I told her.
"Oh yes," Patty returned with a bright smile. "You know how we used to watch the episodes and wondered how Pinkie did what she did in the show? I get that now."
"You do?" I asked curiously.
"Oh yes, you know how illusionists do these fantastical tricks on stage which people marvel at but they're all able to do it with some training and we're just all like 'ooh' and 'aah' because we don't get how they do it because we haven't learned it ourselves but it's really an easy trick when you learn it and it's not so special but they keep that to themselves so we go and watch their shows?" Patty Cannon rattled off.
I missed a step trying to follow her train of thought, then just nodded slowly to her. "I... I think I do, yes. It's a little like how I'm using my magic now I'm an alicorn but I would have never considered how that worked as a human?"
My earthpony girlfriend gave an eager nod to that. "Yes, I think it's like that. Although Pinkie and I don't use magic."
"Because you're earthponies," I stated.
"Because we're earthponies, yes. We don't have magic, but we have gimmicks which look like it," Patty Cannon agreed. "Anything beyond that is just sleight of ha... hoof. Which is how we can do this."
She turned her head to her flank facing away from me for a brief moment, then faced me again. Within that brief second she had put on a Groucho Marx-style pair of glasses and mustache and I could not help but snort in withheld laughter.
"Okay, that's honestly amazing," I told her. "I didn't expect that."
"Expect what?" she asked, doing the same thing again but now turning back to me with just a red clown's nose on her muzzle, her face painted in full clown makeup.
I stumbled again, needing to find my footing anew. "No, but that was too short a time for you to put all that makeup on!"
"Not if you know the trick, silly," Patty Cannon told me with a bright grin. "That's how Pinkie does it. It's all party tricks."
"Sometimes I wonder at that," Discord threw up his own two cents from behind us. "I know interdimensional magic when I see it."
"But we can't use magic," Patty Cannon returned, her clown makeup and nose gone again. "We're earthponies."
"Still," I suggested. "There's something supernatural about the way you and your friend are able to do things, and I'm happy that you figured it out for yourself."
"Oh yes, Pinkie loves making everypony smile, and so do I," my Rhonda agreed. "I'm very happy that Pinkie trusted me with her secrets."
"Well, don't tell me," I chuckled, looking around as the patterns on the wall looked familiar. "I've got enough of a headache dealing with my own magic. Hey Spritelight, do these figures on the walls mean anything to you?"
The unicorn diagonally ahead of me looked up and around herself, then stopped walking. "This looks like ancient Equestrian..."
"It looks like Egyptian hieroglyphs to me. Not that I know how to read them, but it's like... pictographs, I think they're called?" I revealed.
Spritelight studied the wall to her right while I turned to my left to look at the figures on the wall.
Humans and horses, no; ponies, were depicted side-by-side in a scene I could only describe as a party surrounding a bonfire.
The images were like that found on ancient grotto walls, heavily stylized but recognizable.
Similar patterns were set in blocks beside it, obviously a type of writing using images like the hieroglyphs I had mentioned to Spritelight.
The patterns appeared top-to-bottom rather than left-to-right, each 'word' with a border with round corners drawn around it.
"Can you make any sense of these, Spritelight?" I wondered out loud.
Spritelight was looking at the scene on the wall next to her, this one looking more like a meeting than a party. She studied the 'words' next to the scene with great interest.
"The meeting of... great minds," she spoke with some difficulty. "This predates even the magic scrolls I've read. I can only make it out because of the familiarity I have with this kind of ancient writing."
"Hey, what's the holdup?" Rainbow called out from behind Discord.
"Have you looked at the wall, Rainbow? Daring Do would love to know about these stories," I called back, using my knowledge of the show to tempt her into being more patient.
"Ooh, there's humans and ponies on this one," April called out in wonder.
"All of the scenes depict people from our worlds in unison," Spritelight realised as she walked a little further ahead. "I knew our worlds were united in the past."
"Yes, it does seem that way," I agreed, following behind while studying the walls around us in more detail.
"Do we really have the time to be studying these pictures what with certain death looming over us?" Discord asked in uncharacteristic concern.
"We're passing them by as it is," I threw back. "There's no crime in trying to translate what we can while we continue on. But yes, let's keep walking."
Spritelight gave a nod in agreement, the light on the tip of her horn dancing and sending shadows changing through the hallway ahead.
We spent the next minutes walking at a slightly slower pace than before, with both Spritelight and me turning our heads left or right depending on what wall drawing we were looking at.
The script didn't mean much to me, but the graphic depictions beside them said enough.
The scenes started off jolly enough; humans and ponies put together having meetings and parties and sitting in schoolbenches in mixed classes.
Everything showed that this was a happy time where both races enjoyed the peace together.
But then the drawings started to change. Humans and ponies started to be grouped together more, spaced apart from one another, set opposite one another.
Were they mixed before, now they were steadily drifting apart and taking up more hostile stances where each group clearly tried to keep the other out.
An uneasy feeling crept over me. "Spritelight, is this saying what I think it is?"
The unicorn gave a nod and translated it; "The humans grew weary of not having magic, not having the ability to fly, and drew up impossible demands of the ponies."
"Are you sure it's saying that the humans started this?" I had to ask, not putting it past my former species given we were happily murdering our way through entire countries just because their people had access to resources not available in other regions.
"Not just the humans; the pegasi were unhappy with the unicorns' magic. The earthponies were as bothered by both, just like the humans were," Spritelight pointed out as we walked by another scene.
"The humans then tried to recruit the earthponies to their cause, if I'm reading this right. Some followed them, others resisted," the unicorn continued to translate.
"This ties in with the stories we know about the period from before Equestria's forming, doesn't it?" I wondered, to which Patty Cannon nodded.
"Yes, it sounds like that. Unicorns, pegasi, and earthponies going to war with one another, forgetting that they were essentially the same and stronger together," my girlfriend stated eagerly. "That's why they have Hearth's Warming Eve now."
"No, this is older," Spritelight decided from up ahead. "There were no humans in that time. No depictions of them in any book or scroll that I've read."
I studied the scenes we were walking past. "Are these humans riding on the backs of earthponies?"
"And pegasi," Turkey pointed out.
"Unicorns as well," Spritelight added. "These humans and ponies were standing opposite the other ponies, but note that there are a few humans remaining on the other side of the scenes as well."
I did notice; they were not riding on the backs of any ponies but standing among them as equals. The ponies themselves also grouped together again after having previously stood apart from one another depending on their features.
"Don't tell me this is going where I think it's going?" I grumbled. "This looks like an all-out war between humans and their pony friends against ponies and their human friends."
"A splitting of worlds," Spritelight gasped up ahead and I looked over her shoulders at the image on the wall to her right.
A rift was clearly drawn between the two warring groups, some of each of them depicted falling into it as it formed.
This was what Spritelight had expected to find; Earth and Equestria having been one, a long long time in the past. And now we were witnessing an account of the two worlds coming apart.
Every image we walked past made this point clearer than the previous, the rift growing larger and keeping the groups of humans with their few pony companions on one side and ponies with their few human companions on the other.
And then the group of ponies disappeared from the next scene and Spritelight stopped in front of it.
"That's it. There's no contact between Earth and Equestria anymore," she pointed out. "This is just Earth."
I looked at the picture; the humans were standing tall over the remaining few ponies. Some of the ponies had their legs tied together or had tack put upon them.
The beginning of the domestication of the ponies we now had on Earth...
I shuddered at the thought of these animals having once been as intelligent as us, and where had the unicorns and pegasi gone since?
Had they gone extinct because of something humans had done to them?
Too many unknowns for a history which went back so far in the past nobody would be around to answer the questions that arose.
