Canary never came back from his work. After a few days, I was selected as the new primary Canary of the compound and I learned on the existence of several other compounds. Mine was compound 23. If I was to be referred to in a way that distinguished me from other Canaries, I would be discussed as the Canary from 23, or just Canary 23.

I feared that at this point I was starting to lose my individualism. I was slowly starting to lose track of the days after the first week. There were no windows. I could not see the sun. There were no calenders. There was only the next cave for me to crawl into and the sopping mess that they called stew.

And after a while I realized the reason that the carnivores and I were being served the stew instead of the mash the ponies were getting. The stew was drugged with something that kept us docile and it made it harder to think about the self.

A few days after the realization and at least 20 more caves crawled, I discovered a break through.

"Fml." I had taken to using Text speak as a way to distinguish myself from the others. I heard them whispering that I was going mad. It was rather entertaining. "Stfu." I would only reply. I never talked to any one who had more authority than me that way.

More days passed by.

My bed had a long crack in it.

After a long time of sleeping in that bed the crack grew wider and it collapsed. I inspected the wreckage and stared dully at it for a long time before finally noticing a small piece of paper in the midst of it. Rather, I didn't recognize it as paper at first.

They didn't let anyone have paper. Or anything to write with. There wasn't any trees to burn to make charcoal tools and the torches were cleaned by literally the scariest abomination I had ever laid eyes on. It took just one gaze from it to send me scurrying away. It was the predator.

I guess the right term is minotaur. It was big. That's what I remember.

At any rate, the piece of paper was glossy and had a bit of a shine to it. It was vaguely familiar and after I searched my memory I recognized it as laminated.

I had gotten better at using magic. I was popular amongst the beings in charge of the digging. for being able to accurately tell how big a cavern was.

I placed the ruby in my mouth and looked at the paper. After a few seconds of staring at it, the paper went blank. I snapped out of the spell and looked at the paper.

It had changed. It was a simple equation.

Fireball = Bat and Sulfur.

I blinked and the paper went blank. The high gloss that I now realized I had imagined disappeared and I felt incredibly dumb.

My name was Canary. It's hard to think.

There was something in the food. I learned a new spell. I reached into my satchel and pulled out a piece of coal I had found and very gently wrote a word down. "Ivan." I said out loud. I almost mechanically placed the lump of coal and the paper into my satchel.

I didn't understand the meaning of the word. I had a distant memory of something before the caves but it hurt to think about it.

I didn't like pain.

There was no funeral for Canary. If they died they were knocked into a pit. It was believed that eating them would be bad because of how much gas they had taken in before they died.

It was time for me to explore another shaft. I was going to the first compound today. They needed a Canary and there was no Canary duty scheduled for compound 23.

I walked over to the compound leader. He was a Zebra just like me. I was proud that my compound leader had told me to go to another compound. That meant he liked me.

"Hello Canary. You are going to compound one." I was happy.

"Yes sir." I said. I distantly remembered something about trying to subvert authority but that would be silly.

"Do you know the way?" He looked almost sad that I was happy. Why should he be sad? I'm happy. He should be happy.

"No Sir." I said again. Walking was getting easier and easier. Though why would that be? I've been a Zebra as long as I can remember. Why would walking get easier?

He nodded. "I will escort you there." I was happy. I got to spend more time with him. That meant he liked me. He stood up and walked out the door. I followed behind him because that's what he wanted me to do and why shouldn't I do that?

We walked by all of the happy workers as they dug their mine tunnels. I tried to think of why it seemed wrong for them to be happy. We were doing our jobs and happy work is happy work.

He turned to me. "Do you remember your name, Canary?" I smiled at him.

"My name is Canary." I held back my laugh. They didn't like it when you laughed.

"Your name before you got here, I mean." He looked worried.

I shook my head. "I've always been Canary." There was dried guano in my satchel.

He sighed. "I hear you are an excellent Canary. Do you sing?"

I looked at him blankly. "No sir. Why do you ask?"

"It's called a joke, Canary." There was sulfur in my satchel.

I nodded at him. "Oh. Heh..." I giggled.

"You seem a little flighty." That was a bad pun.

"Are you trying to be funny, sir?" I asked, curious.

"I wish our brainwashing methods weren't half so effective." He muttered, then turn to me. "This compound is the closet to the surface. Several times a Canary has discovered bits of building in his tunnel."

I listened, my eyes vacant. "Sir?"

"Are you following me?" Submit to authority.

"No sir."

He nodded. "Good. Compound 1 is the main coal mining operation. It is likely that this tunnel you will be working on will have coal."

I continued listening, excited about going into the tunnel. I was always excited about work.

"And nine tenths of all supplies from the surface come the entrance to Compound 1. If something bad were to happen, say, the cave collapsed or some other horrendous event, most of the other compounds would be starved off."

I had an odd feeling that I was forgetting something. "I will do my job sir."

He nodded. "Good. I would hate to see you do anything else."

The cave we were in looked pretty. The tunnels were all smooth and it made it easy to transport stuff.

After a long time of walking I was led into a room that was smallish. There was a door behind me that had opened to let me and my compound leader in and then there was another door that opened and we walked through.

It was another compound like my other one except there were more guards there and it looked cleaner. I was led through and then there was another tunnel and there was a hole in the wall. Rope was placed around me like I knew it was going to and then I did my job and walked into the hole in the wall.

I reached into my pouch and pulled out my ruby and put it in my mouth and looked around. It was all coal. Every bit of the walls were coal. If I looked up further there were ruins and stuff but I thought I saw ponies and griffons in the buildings but they were ruins because that's what I was told they were.

I was seeing things and if I told them I was seeing things maybe they wouldn't let me do my job.

I liked doing my job.

I tugged on the rope to let them know I was there. Something was wrong. There was no resistance when I tugged it. The rope came towards me a few feet and I could just barely make out that the rope had split from long use.

There was a long moment where my brain cycled over what to do. I had no instructions. I wasn't being controlled.

"What do I do?" My voice echoed through the chamber.

"Fuck yes." I muttered, intelligence streaming back to me. I closed my eyes and forced the magic to stop. I was free.

I noted that there was a building very near to me that was empty. From what I could tell, it was mostly intact but deserted. The bottom part of the basement had collapsed due to water damage and there was a nice hole in the stone that had been hollowed out by means unknown to me. It was behind about 5 inches of coal.

Coal burns.

I froze before reaching my muzzle to my satchel. The compound leader...

If I escaped by catching the coal on fire, I was dooming him and all of compound one. And by proxy, most of the other compounds.

My head was rapidly clearing up. Sweet freedom of thought began to leak through. "I'm going to kill them all." I tried to care that thousands would die. I really did. The rocky platform I was on was less secure in its rigidity than I was in the idea that death would be more merciful than living like cows.

I reached into my pouch and gently worked the sulfur and the guano together. I ignored the fact that I had probably just got a horrible disease from it.

Memory surged through me. "It's..." It was so clear. Everything made sense. "FIREBALL!" A bare of fire appeared before me, and like the other spell, I felt a draining sensation. This one was a far greater drain. I summoned up strength I didn't know I had and aimed it at where I knew the collapsed structure to be.

It exploded in a ball of fire.

Within seconds the coal caught on fire. Smoke billowed out from it and suddenly the chamber was fully lit. It was coal. All of it was the flammable rock. It was beautiful; the pyre jumped from the single spot that I had hit to every surface. I could feel the heat on my back as the chamber was engulfed in the cleansing flames. Parts of the ground were on fire.

It made me fell alive. Coal began to crumble off the walls as its centuries old grip was burnt away. I steeled my nerve. and waited it out, dodging bits of falling rock.

I was going to see the sun again. There was a massive smashing noise noise and suddenly all around me, as far as I could see, there were cracks. And then they fell.

There was liquid below and it slowly bubbled. I saw it in the flame.

Tar. It was tar. It was a lake of tar. The building I was trying to get into was exposed and I threw myself at it in a desperate attempt to get free.

The tar lake caught a lit. The building I was in was starting to smolder. The building floor was quite a bit different from the cave floor. It felt good.

I raced through the building while it started to turn to ask around me. I was in the basement and I could ust barely see a set of stairs going up.

The first few stairs caught a lit and I jumped through the fire. It was so dim in the caves... and the fire was so bright.

My eyes were burning.

Everything was burning.

Everything was carpeted in an orange light from the fire. The door to the upstairs was made of wood and I kicked it open and threw myself up yet another flight of stairs.

It was a dead end.

But that didn't make sense. Why would there be stairs leading to a dead end below the surface?

A beam of light shone through a hole in the wall. The wall had been boarded up and painted over. I looked down for the first time in a long time and found a skeleton of the idiot behind it. There was a paintbrush beside the bones.

I bucked the wall. It collapsed and I spilled out. As far as I could see there were Zebras in a mass attacking everything I could see. The guards were going down, torn to bits beneath them.

Canary was there. He was on a podium above all of it shouting orders. A large bubble shield surrounded him and arrows bounced off of it.

They were all Canaries. Every single one of them. There was at least a hundred of them. And things were on fire and it was all chaos and disarray.

And then the building erupted in a massive fire cloud behind me and I knew no more.