At first glance, the temple was an enlarged and beautified version of an Al-Hoofuf house. Shaped similarly after a cube but devoid of windows, it had a silver dome which shined like the glass umbrella Celestia’s conjuration had left in the desert. Examining the facade revealed the walls were covered with tiny ceramic tiles which weaved geometrical motifs in blue, gray and silver. The shapes were arranged with unparalleled regularity, never once breaking the set pattern.

The ponies went around the temple in search of a potential entrance, but each side looked exactly the same: twelve horseshoe-shaped arches of white marble, grouped in threes along the edges. They gave the impression of paperclips digging into a folder, or sharks jumping out from the sand, and the outermost ones also interlocked with their vertical neighbors. That left Celestia and Sunset with the middle ones as likely ways in—provided of course the designer followed any kind of logic.

“Let’s try this one.” Celestia slid her hoof down the ornamented wall. “I can feel the wind here, all the way to the bottom. Interesting. I would expect those slabs to be two halves of a door, but I can’t see any handles or knobs. Maybe there’s a button somewhere, or a lever? I hope we won’t have to try pressing each and every one of those tiles to get in.”

“You say it’s a door, I say we blow it up,” Sunset proposed as her horn lightened up. “Stand back!”

“What did we say about solving our problems with magic?” Celestia asked calmly, but only resumed her search when the filly released the arcane energy without casting a spell. “Patience. We’ve been here for five minutes, and just compare it to the time archeologist are spending on researching old buildings like that. Sometimes they take weeks before entering.”

“Well, we don’t have weeks. Some of us have school on Monday. And homework.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll write you an excuse letter.”

Sunset shook her head. “I’m serious. You know they don’t work on Professor Inkwell. The last time I presented her with one, she gave me an extra extra essay to write.”

Celestia had been tapping the tiles on various heights for some time now, but it wasn’t until she found a weird bulge when she decided that writing a letter would not be necessary. The bulge was a tarnished, medallion-shaped plate hidden in the rich design.

“What’s this, I wonder? It looks like it can be pressed.” She pushed the medallion inwards, and it clicked, disappeared in the wall and returned a different medallion with a small hole in it. “A keyhole, perhaps? How peculiar. Saddle Arabians weren’t using such intricate mechanisms by the time this place was likely constructed.”

“Mayor Rashid said he doesn’t know who built it.”

“I don’t have the answer either,” Celestia said. “If those are the doors, I’d rather not have to force our way through, it’s a beautiful monument in itself, but I doubt anyone from the village has a matching key, which means—”

Celestia bit her tongue, remembering the circumstances under which she met her student. It was like a flashback, a series of frames which told a story: Canterlot, deep of the night. A filly sneaking in, borrowing a magical egg. The hatching of a phoenix and some extraordinary magic. A mysterious mare sporting the same scarlet mane, and mutual vows exchanged between the princess of a nation and the princess of thieves.

“Yes!” Sunset roared with the silliest expression, drawing the alicorn out of her reverie. “I’m on the job, Princess!”

She unrolled a bundle containing at least fifteen different picks and wrenches. The set was neat and nothing short of professional, and although Sunset wasn’t a certified locksmith, or any kind of locksmith to begin with, she knew very well how to put such tools to good use. Aside from magic and getting better, limited in number as they were, she had other hobbies—some would say a trained profession—which happened to deal with locked objects on a daily, or rather nightly, basis. She inspected the hole in the medallion, carefully selected two picks and grabbed them with a drop of magic.

“I know you don’t exactly approve my approach, Princess, but I think we can all agree it’s reliable and fast,” Sunset said while tinkering with the lock. “It won’t take long. A couple of minutes, tops. Unless, of course, this is one of those anti-magic locks which repositions its pins and tumblers whenever there’s arcane energy involved. Then it will take slightly longer… just a couple of hours.”

“You are, of course, aware we don’t have that much time, Sunset. Leaving Canterlot every once in a while is good vacation, but there are matters I still need to attend to.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll write you an excuse letter!”

“Oh!” Celestia giggled. “I’ve walked straight into that one, haven’t I?”

“You have, Princess,” Sunset replied, throwing her a grin. She had a pick clasped between her teeth, with another darting out from the bundle into the keyhole. “Anyway, this is an interesting case. It’s more complex than what you usually see in Equestria, but the basic principle is the same. Hold on. Come on, you little… I mean, I can’t unlearn what I have learned, right? And you always say we should be making the best of our skills and natural talents. So, I’m doing just that. Aha! I have you now!”

Sunset turned the picks ninety degrees. The medallion flipped again, this time triggering a ringing cascade of clicks and ticks inside the wall. The two slabs moved to the sides while the third behind them sunk into the floor, creating a threshold tall enough to keep the sand from pouring in. The opening remained wide enough for visitors to cross, regardless if they were the height of a regular pony, an alicorn, or someone even taller.

On the other side—a dark corridor.

“Be on your guard. Whatever dwells in here may have the power over sand and wind, and is likely responsible for the recent sandstorm.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “Thanks for clearing it up for me, Princess. I’ve always thought that sand and wind make blizzards.”

Celestia conjured a glowstar, a magical sun of sorts, and pushed it forward to illuminate the path. The temple interior advertised itself with a plethora of smells varying from plain antiquity to dried oils and ointments. There was also a hint of grease in the cold air. The ponies shuddered at the sudden change in temperature, which felt low even for an isolated structure like this one, but they continued down the vestibule and soon found themselves in a much spacious place. The glowstar shot to the ceiling, lighting a chamber unlike any they had ever seen.

Thirteen columns shaped in the likeness of pendulums rose from the floor. They were slightly inclined towards the middle and served as support for the silver dome, in addition to holding a layer of triangular glass panels right underneath it. At the base of every column was a trench filled with cogs—the greasy smell was coming from those—which judging by the arrangement was a mechanism of straightening the columns up and moving them closer to the center.

There were more cogs lodged into the walls. Going up, even the columns were cut by similar platform-like gears on various heights which ascended around the chamber at regular intervals. Some of the platforms were horizontal, other vertical, but the majority were connected to the walls with hooked chains made of bronze or some such material, piecing together a grand, intricate arrangement. However, there was no movement to any of its supposed parts.

Dead silence ruled over the chamber.

“Now I know how a cuckoo from a cuckoo clock feels.” Sunset’s voice bounced off the walls. “What is this place? I know I’m hardly an expert on foreign architecture, but even I can tell this wasn’t built by the local ponies.”

“I don’t think it was built by ponies at all.”

Celestia had seen a lot of what the world had to offer, so her claim was that much easier to back up considering a bronze sculpture placed at the centermost point of the temple, as far from the columns as the columns stood from the walls. It didn’t match any of the artistic styles utilized by the ponies over the last millennium, and neither was it the work of dragons, griffons or Nephrite Jackals, to name those who had had a presence in those lands at some point. It was difficult to not mistake it for a bundle of useless salvage at first, but a closer look at the tangle of tubes and chains confirmed that they were not arranged in a random fashion. Like serpents slithering out from their lairs, the sculpture seemed to grow from the lower levels of the temple, if there were any.

Sunset knocked at one of the tubes. It replied with an empty echo of a long abandoned installation. “Huh. Looks like a fountain to me, or some kind of a wind instrument,” she said. “Either way, it’s pretty. I bet high society ponies of the Canterlot Elite would pay a high price for such a piece. Do you think this Dune Goddess will mind if we dismantle it and—”

“Shush! Can you feel it?”

“Opportunity to fix my dent in the treasury, yes,” she said, but her face became serious when the glowstar flickered, as if to warn them. “Uh-oh. You’re nervous. I’ll better go make some use of all that metal stuff laying around.”

“Nervous, why? What makes you think so?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sunset replied nonchalantly. “I suppose I’ve been studying under your wing for so long that I learned to pick up on such things,” she chuckled.

Celestia’s confusion was gone when she realized she’d extended her wing over the filly and had her locked in a tight grasp. A shade of red warmed her cheeks, and she folded her wing. She made a promise she’d keep Sunset safe no matter the cost, but it sometimes took effort to not end up looking overprotective.

“Ah, forgive me,” she said. “Suit yourself as you see fit, but let us try to reason with her first.”

“Yeah. Like that ever works.”

Streams of blackened sand spurted from the tubes, flooding the floor with rapidly growing dunes. Out of the largest, in a spot where the strongest streams intersected, a shape started to emerge, first shooting up its fingers, then a wrist, arm, and the rest that unearthed itself into a tall, feminine form.

The alien was not shaped after a pony. She had four skinny arms but no legs, with the lower half of her body wrapped in bursting, ethereal smoke. From the waist up she wore a tattered bodice that covered most of her ashen torso, and a scarf banded tightly around her neck and mouth, up to her eyes glowing with hatred. She had no hair, but on her head rested a wicked crown made of rusty chains, wheels and cogs. Finally, a scythe materialized in her hands. It was a work of art impressive in both size and appearance, but the inky miasma dripping from the tip of the blade suggested it was a dangerous weapon most of all.

A voice resounded in Celestia’s head. It was a chorus of whispers in the middle of taking a breath, delivering in a hundred different timbres and tonalities.

You have made a grave mistake by coming here on your own, equine.

“It has been quite some time since I had a pleasure of speaking to a jinn,” the alicorn replied calmly. “I am Celestia of Canterlot. I come here on behalf of the ponies of Al-Hoofuf and its sister villages of Al-Moonram and Al-Mubazzar. Are you the one they call the Dune Goddess?”

She is no more. She has already succumbed to my will, and soon, so shall you.

The jinn shrieked a bloodcurdling wail to solidify the threat. The ensuing echo was yet to subside when she threw herself at Celestia, making full use of her arms to alter the angles at which the scythe was cutting. An overhead slash, twist behind her back, then an undercut. She was quickly gaining more and more ground as she pressed on, but her assault driven by blind rage kept scarring the floor rather than the alicorn, black sparks shooting from the blade.

Celestia had to agree with Sunset. There would be no reasoning with this one, only brute force in the face of which she could only pull back.

Through graceful skips and dodges she led the jinn away from the fountain, up to the ring of columns where she would bring her own magic into the fight. Perhaps she didn’t know every single spell in existence—and many unique branches of magic had been forgotten over the centuries—but her favored domains of light and fire had always been more than adequate response to any danger. Over one thousand years of experience in spellcasting would not go in vain.

With a powerful blast of her wings Celestia pushed the jinn back, creating the distance she needed, then reached out into the streams of magic. Her horn shimmered and the arcane energy willfully gathered around her widespread wings, shielding them with a golden, armor-like field. She charged straight at her adversary, who responded alike and rushed towards her, twirling the scythe as they were about to clash. The blade fell upon the alicorn, but bounced off her wing as Celestia ran forth unharmed. She took a sharp turn and galloped again. The jinn went for a horizontal slash and stroke, but was yet again deflected. Just before they would joust for the third time, with the jinn sacrificing the steadiness of her grip in favor of reach, Celestia’s horn glowed.

Spellcasting was like any other skill. With enough training, imposing certain patterns on the arcane field was becoming a second nature, which allowed to create multiple magical outcomes within a single window of opportunity. As Celestia was drawing near, the air around her crackled, and she disappeared in a cloud of white smoke. The smoke condensed itself into a ball which rolled towards the jinn and exploded with a blinding flash. At the same time, Celestia reappeared behind the jinn as if she had been galloping from the opposite direction all along. She employed her momentum to slide, seize the scythe and tear it out of its confused owner’s hands.

Celestia crushed the shaft in her wing and scattered the pieces around. The blade she tossed into one of the dark trenches where it got jammed between the cogs.

“We do not need to fight any longer, spirit,” she declared. “Release the Dune Goddess, and you will be free to go in peace.”

The jinn wailed again.

There can be no peace between the two of us. You, and everything you hold dear shall wither!

Celestia shook her head in silence. Her saddened face gave way to a stern gaze.

“If hatred is the only language you speak, then so be it. Know that I feel truly sorry for you.” She took an almost imperceptible glance to the side. “Now!”

Sunset emerged from the shadows and jerked the jinn by the scarf. The creature could not be brought to her knees, but the sudden loss of balance sufficed to bring in the armory. What followed was an overwhelming flurry of cogs, hooks and chains shooting out from behind the columns. They were guided by a cyan grip, but with so many pieces of metal flying around, Sunset had once again bitten more than she could chew, and was forced to improvise. Her magic couldn’t nail the position for some of the chains—instead, she grabbed them herself and danced around the stupefied entity, binding her in an inescapable net.

Celestia took care of the remaining few hooks and cogs, and weighted the jinn even more while Sunset was giving some finishing touches. She had to admit, the filly was a nimble one, especially for someone who had never played hopscotch or jumpsies or any other kindergarten game in her life.

“Not bad!” Sunset said with a triumphant smirk. “Now talk! What have you done with the Dune Goddess?”

Deprived of her weapon of choice, chained to the floor and overburdened with a pile of spare parts for a giant clock, the jinn posed no threat.

Celestia looked down at her. “My patience is wearing thin. I command you to leave her alone and never come back!”

Softly at first but then with more confidence, the jinn cackled and the ground trembled. By the time she burst into maniacal laughter, the sculpture exploded sending bits of bronze in all directions. Celestia shielded herself with her wing while Sunset took advantage of her small form and ducked. Like a geyser, the crack in the floor erupted with an unending stream of sand, which instead of littering the floor gathered over the jinn and enveloped her with a gradually amassing cloud of swirling dust.

Foals! Did you really think that these would stop me?

Just then, the chains broke.