Eq Renaissance Part 22 (Ed)

   “Hurry!” Pinkie hissed through clenched teeth, gesturing wildly, trying to be heard only by Rarity on the other side of the corridor, and not by the guard down at the other end.  Rarity dared to peek around the corner, and when she saw that the guard had disappeared, she dashed across the corridor to Pinkie.  They both went racing together to catch up with the others.
   It was as if they were in another maze again, but this time it was far more frightful.  They had broken into the Palace once, on the other side, and had become lost among its hallways.  This time, though, they had Twilight with them, and Twilight knew where she was going.
   They weren’t going out the same way they had come in.  Almost as soon as they had left the room with the mirror, they could no longer recognize their surroundings.  Without Twilight it would have been impossible, but still their terrified hearts pounded in their chests.
   It was the guards.  The threat of capture by the guards had been very real on their way in, but at least those guards were human.  Criminal charges and time in jail felt insignificant in comparison to being caught by these weird... ponies, as sapient as they may appear to be.  Who knew what could happen if they were captured?  Who knew what the ponies would think of them, or do to them?
   Twilight was brilliant, and nobody, except perhaps Zecora, knew how she was doing it except by magic.  Without them seeing her, or even her seeing them, she seemed to know the guards’ exact whereabouts, and how to lead their group through.  At times she would gesture for everybody to hunker down, and they’d all crouch silently.  They would wait there for several minutes, then she’d urge everybody up and they’d be off again.  Other times, the scariest times, she’d have everybody sprint to the end of another hallway, as if a guard were at their heels, and have them duck all through a door.  Occasionally they even had to double back, as the guards made their rounds and their positions became vulnerable.
   Some moments they became strung out, with the last person in line not even able to see the front.  With Twilight in the lead, Big Mac tried to stay in the rear.  He hadn’t told anyone, but if they were going to get caught, he was going to put up a fight while the others got away.  He still had the guard’s gun, after all, now tucked away in the back of his pants, just under his lucky red shirt.
   Soon they came to an enormous hallway with a high gothic ceiling and arches.  Great stained-glass windows rose nearly as high.  The subjects were all weird multi-colored ponies that made the group slow down to try to understand where they really were.  They stopped at one in particular and froze.  It was a very familiar scene, albeit the forms looked so strange.
   “It can’t be,” AJ swore.  “It’s impossible.”
   “Is that...,” Pinkie began to ask, but couldn’t even finish.
   Twilight frowned.  “We have to find them,” she decided.  “We have to find ourselves.”
   “Are you serious?” Dash asked.  “Are those wings?”
   Twilight’s eyes fell from the Elements of Harmony, and the six ponies possessing them, and looked straight through the window, instead of at it.  She saw what was on the other size.  “The hedge maze,” she told them.  “We have to get to the maze.  Then we can get away.”
   “The maze?” Rarity complained.  “Not another maze.  We’ve been through so much.  Can’t you teleport us away?”
   “Not from here, no,” Twilight said.  “The princess will sense us if I try.  I can feel her now, she’s in the throne room.  I can’t say how long she’ll stay there.  I don’t dare use any more magic than I already am.  I wish I could trust her, but there’s no telling what she would think of us in these forms.”
   “These forms?  But the maze?”
   “If we can get far enough away from the palace, then I can teleport us away safely.  If we can get to the maze, we won’t have to worry about running into any more people.  Ponies.  Whatever.”
   Twilight led them through that hall, through the door at the end, and the palace beyond.  There were more guards here, and again they had to stop and wait, unseen, until the guards passed by.  They had some sense of relief, though, that they might soon make their escape.  They only needed to descend a couple more flights of stairs, then out the garden door, and make a mad dash to the hedge maze.
   They were getting strung out again.  Big Mac, once more, was at the rear.  The only person he could see, at the moment, was Rarity, waiting behind another corner for commands to come down the line from Twilight.  She turned to him.  “OK, now,” she whispered forcefully, then disappeared from view as she herself went forward.
   Big Mac hesitated just long enough to take a breath before pushing on.  He would have gone at the next second, if the door behind him, just a bit down the hall, hadn’t opened.  Big Mac’s heart jumped into his throat.  He turned to look, knowing that he would be seen regardless of what he did.
   When he saw, then he became truly frightened.  He could recognize her the moment he saw her.  Even in this form - with four legs, hooves, wings, a horn.  She was unmistakable.  Big Mac had read something once, he couldn’t remember where, on the subject of the human body and proportions.  Beauty, it was claimed, was simply a closeness to human perfection.  The further away from the human form, the uglier a human representation would appear.  That wasn’t true at all.  This thing, this monster, could be beauty personified, and that made her all the more frightening.  The hair was the same, that weird, dark magical hair that seemed to flicker with starlight, even in the day.  That, and her eyes, were the only similarity to the human princess, but it was enough.
   They were doomed, he thought.  It was like some sort of cruel joke, the whole thing, from the very beginning.  She was a living nightmare.
   Big Mac started to edge away from her, backwards.  His hand started to raise, up towards the gun he was carrying, but he remembered the futility of it the last time he had encountered her, and his hand dropped again.  She could kill him with a thought, he knew.  She could lunge at him at any moment, and it would be over before he could blink.  She wasn’t killing him though, if anything it almost looked as if she were as surprised to see him as he was to see her.  Maybe they weren’t conspiring after all, this princess and the other.
   He thought of the others.  They had to get away, even if he didn’t.  Big Mac turned and ran.
   Princess Luna continued to stare at the space that he had just occupied.  She was shocked, of course, to see this creature standing there in front of her, in the palace.  She was confused by his appearance, but more she was confused by the look on his face.  The poor man had been terrified, that was obvious, and it seemed that if he was terrified of her, but he had no reason to be.  “Big Macintosh?” Luna asked, but he was already gone.
   Big Mac raced down the hall, in the direction he thought the others had gone.  Turning a corner, he saw a light at the end of another hall, an open door, leading out into the garden and the maze beyond.  Rarity was standing in the doorway, waiting for him, waving him forward.  When she saw him charging around that corner at full sprint, when she saw that look on his face, she knew something was wrong, and took off straight away after the others.
   AJ was sprinting across the garden, right on the heels of Dash.  The hedge maze was right there.  They were going to make it, all they had to do was get there.  Something was wrong though.  Zecora, who had been right behind Twilight, had stopped in her tracks.  She was stopped in front of some weird garden statue, and staring at it.  It was a strange thing, like some kind of Chinese dragon, with all sorts of different body parts.
   AJ grabbed her arm.  “C’mon, Zecora, we gotta go.”
   “Don’t you see?” Zecora gaped.  “He’s here.  He’s not loose.  This could be it.  This could be the break in the symmetry!”
   AJ tried to pull her, but Zecora wouldn’t budge.  She didn’t understand what the enchantress was talking about, but obviously it was important to her.  Then she heard her brother hollering.  AJ turned to yell back at him herself, him being foolish enough to make so much noise.  He could bring the guards down on them.
   Then AJ saw the expression on his face and knew it was probably already too late to be worth worrying about.  She pulled on Zecora’s arm again, but Big Mac’s appearance had shaken Zecora out of whatever was in her head, and she too knew it was time to leave.  They ran for it.
   Big Mac watched AJ, then Zecora, then finally Rarity disappear into the entrance of the maze.  They were clear.  They would get away free.  Big Mac felt a wave of relief, like one that he hadn’t felt since before all this started.  He might even make it himself.
   Then he heard that sound, that thundering, shuddering rumble that let him know that he wasn’t going to make it after all.  He didn’t need to turn and look to recognize the sound of shod hooves at full gallop on turf.  Big Mac made it as far as the entrance to the maze, slowing so he could catch his breath, then he turned to make his big stand.
   They were coming at him from all directions.  Out that open door, and around the sides of the palace.  All of them wore their odd versions of guard armor.  Apparently Luna wasn’t going to be doing the dirty work herself this time.  Big Mac reached behind his back for the gun.  His hands wrapped around the grip, feeling the texture of it on his skin.  He thumbed the safety off.  Then he thumbed it back on again and let go.
   These were animals.  They were even beautiful animals, despite the fear that he felt.  They weren’t sick.  They weren’t lame.  They didn’t need to be put down, so Big Mac wasn’t going to hurt them.
   At the last moment, Big Mac raised his empty hands high into the air, hoping that it might make him look bigger, and hollered as loud as he could.  The guards, suddenly wary, skidded to a halt, and stood up on their hind legs, neighing loudly.
   Applejack, already deep into the maze, turned at the sound of her brother’s voice.
   “Go on!” Big Mac bellowed, knowing that AJ could likely hear him, and was even more likely to do something stupid.  “Keep running!  Git!”
   “Big Macintosh?” AJ cried down the twisting maze.
   Zecora grabbed her arm in a reversal of the earlier moment.  “We must go.  You heard him.”
   “I ain’t leaving my brother,” AJ yelled, “not again.”  Zecora’s grip was strong, but AJ put up a fight.  “Let me go!” AJ’s feet dragged across the grassy ground.  “No!  I need to help him!”  Zecora picked Applejack up off the ground completely, and ran after the others.
   Big Mac stood his ground.  It wasn’t easy.  The ponies were putting on their show of being intimidating.  They were stomping on the ground.  The horned ones were swinging their horns back and forth, obviously very deadly.  Others were turning around and kicking at the air.  Big Mac had dealt with horses enough to know how dangerous a frightened horse could be.  These guards weren’t frightened, they meant business.
   One of them was getting close.  Too close - it was going to kick.  Big Mac leapt backwards for all he was worth, and barely missed that awful, shod hoof that shot through the space where his head had just been.  That would have crushed his skull easily.
   Big Mac didn’t know what to do.  He had to run.  He couldn’t fight these things.  They’d kill him easily.  He made a lunge at one of them anyway, taking a swing with his fist.  It jumped back itself and the punch didn’t even come close to connecting.  He had to get away, he thought.
   Too late.  He saw the kick coming, almost perfectly in his blind spot, but it was far too late to avoid it.  The hoof connected square in his ribs.  The force of the blow lifted him several feet off of the ground, and he landed more than a dozen feet away, spinning and rolling as he slammed into the ground again.
   Big Mac wished he could have lost consciousness, but he didn’t.  Shock didn’t even settle in yet, and the pain was sharp and intense, just a pure hell.  He tried to breathe, his face down in the dirt, but his burning lungs wouldn’t work.  He was as helpless as a newborn babe while he watched the hooves encircling him.
   “What is it?” one of them asked in perfect English.
   “I don’t know,” said another, “never seen anything like it.”
   “It can talk,” said a third.  “I heard it talk.  It was shouting to others.  They must be in the maze.”
   Big Mac didn’t hear the rest, not because he blacked out, but because the pain was too much to register anything else.
   Pinkie was watching Twilight up ahead of her as they ran.  She kept disappearing around corners, never hesitating to look for a different route.  Pinkie kept worrying that Twilight would go too fast, leaving them behind, and they would become lost.
   Then Twilight began to slow down a little, and Pinkie managed to catch up.  Twilight started stretching her one arm back towards Pinkie, extending her hand.  “What’s going on?” Pinkie asked, taking Twilight’s hand.
   “This is going to be far,” Twilight said.  “I need a line-of-sight.  There’s one in the clearing up ahead.”
   “Oh god,” Pinkie cried, and looked back.  Dash was right behind her.  Pinkie gave Dash her own hand, and soon Rarity was catching up.  Zecora, quick on their heels despite her load, set Applejack back down on her own two feet.  AJ, now seeing her friends and what they were doing, did what she was supposed to and took Rarity’s hand.  Zecora took the rear.  They would have to come back for Big Mac, somehow.
   The walls of the maze spread out, revealing a big picturesque clearing with fountains and topiary and ripe fruit on trees.  It was on a side of a hill, and when Pinkie looked out, it seemed she could see all of Equestria, down in that valley.  Miles and miles and miles.  She had an amazing view.  So did Twilight.  “Oh god,” Pinkie repeated.
   “Hold tight and don’t let go!” Twilight screamed.
   “Ohgodohgodohgod!” Pinkie screamed.  There was a blinding flash of purple light, and a terrible lurching in her stomach.
   The maze, though, was empty.