My name was Bradley Tenpenny.

I grew up in Ponyville, leading a life that was as simple as it was wonderful; a life that was positively brimming with the promise of great things to come. After a few years of hard work and dedication, I’d finally gotten promoted to second shift forestallion in the gem mines, becoming the youngest ever to hold the position. Though the position was demanding and carried a massive burden of responsibility, the pay was substantially better and I’d finally saved up enough money to buy an engagement ring. Eventually, I’d worked up the courage to go along with the ring, finally proposing to the love of my life, a beautiful mare named Carrot Top. I was so sure I was going to be snuffed that I’d continued to ramble on and on even after she’d said yes twice, before she finally silenced me with a kiss. Three months later we were married, and two months after that we were expecting. Yes, life was coming up spades for me.

At least, until the accident.

“Hey, Nails! Quit looking lost and get over here, I’ve got something you gotta see!”

At the mention of my nickname, I whipped my head around to lock onto the source; a grey mountain of a pony by the name of Spike. Spike was the foreman for the first shift, and he was far more anxious to get off shift than I was to go on. With a deep sigh, I set off from the rail platform that ferried the workers to and from the mines, stepping over the rocky ground with a dubious look on my face. ”Something you’ve gotta see” usually entailed a lewd magazine centerfold or a booger that could best be described as ‘big enough to be anatomically improbable’, at least when it came to Spike.

Even as I drew near, I could tell that this wasn’t going to be the same old triviality that it usually was… there was a crowd gathering ‘round Spike even as I approached.

Well… this looks promising.

Shouldering my way through the crowd was no issue for me; I stood half a head taller and was a bit stockier than just about everypony else, with the exception of spike. That joker is a friggin mutant, I swear it… there’s no way a normal pony grows so large. Breaking free of the throngs that had gathered, I came snout-to-snout (more like snout to neck… did I mention that Spike was a monster?) with Spike. The aforementioned pony-shaped-monstrosity had the single smuggest look on his face that I’d ever seen, quite a feat considering he always looked smug. What really caught my attention however was not his expression or even the gathering crowd, but that which he held in his hoof. Despite being draped with an oily rag to obscure it from view, whatever it was that he was holding was emitting a strange crimson light. I stared at the object for a moment, spellbound by the shifting lights and the promise of what lay underneath the rag.

Usually, Spike was given to comically overwrought theatrics when displaying one of his “treasures”, making outrageous claims and ridiculous boasts to any who would listen (and a few who didn’t want to). Today, he was doing none of these things; he merely panned his triumphant gaze silently across the crowd. As he cleared his throat to speak, every whisper of chatter was instantly quelled. His gaze once more returning to meet mine, he spoke up.

“I’m not going to waste your time, you know what this means as well as I do.”

Even as he said this, my heart leaped into my throat, seemingly in a desperate bid for freedom. With agonizingly slow movements, he raised his trunk-like limb and grasped the cloth with his teeth, pulling it off a centimeter at a time. For one brief instant, my thoughts were not with what was under the cloth; instead, the only thing in my head was the simple observation ’Man, I’ll bet that rag tastes terrible… ‘. All external thoughts ground to a halt as the improvised curtain was lifted, revealing the treasure within: a Fire Ruby.

The Fire Ruby is a legendary gem of incomprehensible value; the stories around the stone were nearly too fantastic to be believed. In fact, the entire existence of the stone was once thought to be mere myth, a remnant of the dark ages before the Unification. It wasn’t until Starswirl the Bearded came forward and announced the discovery of an actual tangible Fire Ruby that the stone had been accepted as actual entity instead of a legend. The tale of the Fire Ruby doesn’t stop there, though; Starswirl had heard the same legends as the rest of ponykind, and was all too eager to test their veracity. It was by this manner that the gem had moved from a mythical tale to a bona-fide legendary object. Starswirl’s experiments disproved the legends, but not in the way that most had foreseen; the legends didn’t come close to matching the sheer power of the stone.

It was said that a Fire Ruby held the same magical essence as a dragon’s flame; this was false. Compared to a Fire Ruby, Dragonfire was a mere candle. Using the Fire Ruby, Starswirl was able to send not just a piece of parchment, but an entire LIBRARY to the Princess, building and all. This is said to be the origin of the “Starswirl the Bearded” wing in the Canterlot Archives. The heart of a Fire Ruby is said to be fire incarnate, a piece of the sun frozen solid and sent plummeting to earth. While this was disproved and generally regarded as just plain silly, the core element was true: the heart of the ruby was possessed of a great amount of raw magical energy. Without a unicorn or other magical apparatus to shape the magic and form it into a useful spell, the Fire Ruby would discharge its entire magical essence in the form of an explosion, a massive ball of scarlet flame that would melt rock and ash everything else.

All of this power, and so much more… and it was resting in Spike’s hoof. Mouth agape, I lifted my gaze from the gently shimmering gem to the pony who held it, an expectant look upon his face; he was waiting for me to ask the question.

“Have you informed the Princesses yet?”

“Nope.”

“Good, we’ll want them—wait, what? No? Why the heck not?!”

“I wanted you to be here for this one. There’s more.”

“M… more? More what?”

With a triumphant smirk, Spike turned away from me and set off for the office, beckoning me to follow. The crowd had amassed in startling numbers to see this marvel for themselves, yet it parted like fog to make way for Spike’s passage. I quickly fell in behind him, not wanting to be swallowed up by the crowd as it closed in his wake. The entire journey to the office took less than a minute, but with the way my mind was running faster than a chicken in a twister, it felt like an hour. The entire time we walked, my mind kept stumbling upon the same word, over and over again.

More. More? More of what? There can’t possibly be more. There’s no way that there is any more of this stuff, can’t possibly be any more. But what if there is?

My train of thought was interrupted as soon as I reached the last question, my mind going blank as I walked into the office. Spike wasted no time with showmanship, striding straight through the office to a map tacked up on the far wall. With a thump that shook the very timbers of the building, he placed his hoof at the end of a dashed line, indicating the exploration shaft that had been under excavation for three months now, snaking its way in the very heart of the world and claiming the distinction of the deepest shaft ever dug. The day the shaft had begun to be sunk was the happiest day of my life. No, I wasn’t even at work that day, or the three days after; that was the day that Carrot Top and I had exchanged our vows. The three following days were for… recovery purposes.

The spot he was pointing to on the map corresponded to a segment just meters shy of the end of the tunnel, the point at which the excavation would simply cease and the tunnel would be re-purposed into a storage facility or some other similar purpose, so long as we didn’t hit a vein of gems. The air around us seemed to thicken, pregnant with dread purpose, as Spike tore his eyes from the map to lock onto mine.

“Nails, this isn’t the only Ruby. We struck a vein of Fire Rubies.”

So there it was. The first Fire Ruby discovered in over a millennium, and it wasn’t alone; it had brought friends. Swallowing became impossible as my throat parched and tightened, forcing me to fight to ask my next question.

“Ahem… how… how large are we talking?”

“According to Dirt… this is almost a quarter the size of the strike up in Flankorage.”

My Jaw hit the floor. Dirt was our senior geologist, and there was no mistaking that the guy knew his dirt… hence the name. Even so, his claim that this was a quarter the size of Flankorage… it was unbelievable, unfathomable. The gold strike up north had been discovered four years ago, and they were still pulling nuggets out of that mine. For this to be even close to that was… incredible. In the next two minutes, Spike laid out the basic details of the find.

They had just blown another segment of the shaft and were in the process of removing the debris to prep for the next blast, part of the never-ending cycle of life in the mines. Spike was at the blast face, chipping away at the loose rocks so they didn’t come down on some unlucky worker. He hit a strange, glossy black stone when he dislodged a particularly large boulder. Chipping away at the stone, he found that it shattered like glass. Recognizing it as obsidian from his highschool days, he chipped at it a bit more to see how deep it ran. The whole stone shattered suddenly, causing a small cave in and nearly crushing Spike in the downfall of rock. As the dust cleared, a single, shimmering crimson stone was visible from where it peeked out from behind a rock. He picked it up and took it to Dirt, who just about had a conniption when he saw it. Next thing you know, they were back at the face and Dirt was drooling on the floor as his horn glowed, probing the shape and composition of the vein.

A moment later, Dirt was finished with his “interrogation” of the rocks (that’s what he calls it, at any rate) and was busily drawing on the floor. At this point, Spike handed me a crude sketch on a piece of paper, telling me that they copied it from the floor-sketch. The image was a series of jagged edges and kinks, forking this way and that, growing thicker and thinner in a familiar looking pattern; it looked like a lightning bolt… at least in my opinion, anyways. He took a moment to enlighten me about a peculiarity if the sketch.

“Now, we don’t really have any way to pinpoint the location of the actual rubies themselves, but Dirt says that the obsidian is a carrier ore or something. I forget how he explained it exactly, but the basics are that the rubies are in the obsidian somewhere. He can’t penetrate the obsidian though… some technical mumbo-jumbo.”

My eye was drawn to a circle around one of the thinnest sections of the depiction, and as I squinted and brought the paper closer to my face, I could see that it was actually a small segment that was detached from the rest of the vein by a thin sheet of rock. I looked back to Spike, still wearing that smug look.

“Spike, what are you smirking at?”

“You notice anything missing from the map? Something that you find on every map?”

I cast a sarcastic glance up from the paper.

“Coffee stains? Spelling errors? I don’t know. Why don’t you just tell me?”

“Heh, coffee… alright, quit your whining. A scale. It’s missing the scale.”

“So it is. Now, why do I care?”

We both knew damned well why I cared, but I figured I’d give him one last opportunity for theatrics. He gleefully obliged.

“How long do you think that segment on the end is, Nails?”

I looked back at the sketch, looking for anything that would give me a hint and finding none.

“I don’t know, mate… fifteen meters?”

“Try seventy.”

Once more, my jaw hit the floor. If that segment of the sketch was seventy meters… then that would mean that…

“The whole vein is over twelve clicks long?”

Spike just nodded smugly. Bastard.

“Sweet Luna… “

“Amen to that, Nails. We’ve got to get through about thirteen meters of stone before we hit the rest of it. Considering how quickly I was able to get through the obsidian earlier, we could be looking at nearly double the speed we’re producing gems now, and of Fire Rubies, no less. We now control the only source of Fire Rubies in the world.”

The world went white around me for a second as my brain tumbled across a nigh-forgotten fact. A few years ago, the owner of the company had hit a bit of financial difficulty, offering stock in the company equivalent to a tenth of their pay. I had known the owner of the company, and had actually spent some time one-on-one with him as I tried to learn the ropes. A gristled, gruff old coot by the name of Rocky, he was the meanest sonofagun you’d ever meet if you got caught doing the wrong thing. Once you got him away from work, he was simply Rocky Top; a caring father, a devoted husband… my father-in-law. I’d met Carrot Top briefly in school, but I’d never interacted with her in any great degree until I’d started working at the mines. We’d started dating before I knew who her father was, and by the time I found out I was too head-over-hooves to care.

It was because I knew Rocky so well that I’d offered to take my entire paycheck in stock that month, and half my pay in stock for the next three. At the time, I was just doing whatever I could to help ease the increasing debt until the next big strike. At the end of the third month, we hit the biggest lode of gems any of us had ever seen, and the stock that I’d collected was forgotten in the mad rush that followed. Since then, the company had increased its size tenfold, the value of the stock rising with it, a fact that I’d never considered up until this point.

Good thing I hadn’t remembered this sooner… I might’ve tried to sell the stock to buy Carrot’s ring…

I shuddered at the thought of how much I would have lost. A vague memory of a conversation I’d had with Rocky all those years ago came floating back through the mists of my mind.

“I appreciate what you’re doing, sonny. Your decision to take stock instead of pay has helped ease the pain around here, if only slightly. I want you to know that I’ve matched the stock that I paid to you with my own stock; by my estimates, you now own about ten percent of the company.”

Ten percent of the company in its current glory is worth more than the entire operation was at the time. And now, with the Fire Rubies… I saw golden bits floating across the ceiling. I’d be able to buy Carrot the house of her dreams and never have to work again in my life, freeing all of my time to spend at home with her. Wait, rewind a minute. Ceiling?

Blinking, I sat up from where I lay on the floor. Spike was looking at me like he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be concerned, cocking an eyebrow inquisitively.

“You alright? Didn’t know it was your nap time already, jeez. C’mon, get up.”

I climbed back to my hooves, still feeling a bit wobbly in the knees.

“Nails, I wish I could just take a nap wherever I wanted. What’s your secret?”

“Shaddup, before I sock you one.”

“You can try, if you’re feeling froggy.”

My head was still swimming a bit as I stood up.

“Yeah, maybe later. So, what now, Spike?”

“Well… we report it. Grab your gear, let’s go down there and talk to Dirt, draft up the report. Gotta make this one look good, it goes all the way to the top.”

“Alright, meet you at the shaft in ten.”

“See you there.”

I struck off for the lockers to get my gear for the day. Across the compound, there were scattered an assortment of buildings for various purposes, all constructed from the same thin metal sheeting. There was the Lab, where Dirt spent his days examining his namesake, there was the Barracks, a place that the workers could elect to live for a small deduction from their pay. Compared to off-site housing, the barracks were a steal, and most of the young workers chose to live there to get away from their parents until they’d saved enough to buy a house. There was the Mess Hall, where a portly but well-natured cook would serve us the best chow some of us had ever eaten, cracking jokes with us all the while. The large chocolate colored fellow endearingly called us all his “children” and asked that we simply called him “Chef”. While some of us found it a bit odd, Chef’s upbeat personality and incredible cooking far overrode any misgivings we might have had.

The Mess Hall was one of a cluster of three buildings, being situated on the right side of them group. The barracks were on the left of the group, and my destination was smack dab between the two: the Showers. Though it had been built primarily for the barracks personnel to use, it was not uncommon for the other workers to shower on site before heading home. Mostly, this was due to Chef’s no-nonsense, no-excuses rule that you WILL NOT come into the Mess Hall unless you are clean. Every so often, a new worker would disregard the brightly colored warning sign just outside the door and find himself being chased out of the Mess Hall with a spatula. The showers served another function though, and that was as the Locker Room. While there were only about two-dozen shower stalls, there were dozens of lockers arranged in rows, providing space to store your gear when not on shift.

I made my way to my locker (number sixty-nine, of course… the most highly coveted locker of them all) and withdrew my safety gear. I swapped the batteries in my headlamp with ones fresh off the charger, donned my cargo vest and emergency air tank, followed by my Forestallion’s vest with its distinctive reflective piping. I conducted a radio check with the operations center, and as soon as I got back a positive reply, I set off for the elevator shaft to meet Spike.

I was damned near floating; it was as if all of my dreams were coming true. Carrot and I could move into the country and build the house she’d always dreamed of, and neither one of us would ever have to work a day in our lives to cover the bills. Carrot’s farm could become a hobby rather than a necessity, not that it had ever really been one. Without having to work to support the family, I could spend all day with my beautiful wife and our baby, helping to raise him or her into a responsible and well mannered adult. Yes indeed, life was coming up in spades. Considering the smile on Spike’s face, it was pretty easy to see that he was having the same thoughts. I took my place beside him in the cart, flicking on my headlamp as the doors slid shut with a clang.

Through the grate of the door, I could just barely make out the shape of the sun as it dipped down behind the mountains, signaling the end of another day; the end of this chapter of my life. By the time the sun rose again, word of our discovery would spread like wild fire, and life would never be the same.

As the elevator lurched and began its hasty descent, the ground rose up to swallow us, the last rays of the sun vanishing overhead as we plunged into the abyss. Life would never be the same, alright; however, it would not be the paradise I’d imagined. The residual illumination from the sun slowly faded, only the beams of our headlamps staving off the darkness. Suddenly, everything went black.

I turned to look at Spike, seeing if his light had gone out as well. I looked in his direction, seeing him perfectly clearly against the blackness, as if the light on my helmet had come back on. This couldn’t be the case though, because there was nothing else in the blackness but him. It looked like he was saying something to me, his face contorting into a mask of terror as he screamed silently in slow motion. I began to notice a faint ringing sound in my ears, ever so slowly increasing in volume and pitch.

Okay, this is getting creepy. What’s going on? I tried to ask this question, but my mouth refused to cooperate, remaining slack-jawed despite my efforts. I tried to close my mouth, tried to move my tongue, turn my head, blink, do anything, to no avail. I was frozen; I was a statue. Spike’s pupils narrowed to pinpricks, so incredibly small it was scary to look at… almost like he had no pupils at all. Staring at him despite my will, his mute screams finally registered as a recognizable word to my mind:

“RUN!”

And then the world exploded into flames, emanating from within Spike and spreading outward, burning everything into ash.

I could feel my flesh sizzle and pop from the flames; though I was unable to move, I was able to feel. I felt the flames wash across my face, unable to close my eyes, and was forced to watch as everything went red, then white, and finally black. The flames raced down my throat, burning me alive from the inside out. This pain was transcendent; purifying me from within. The ringing in my ears had grown to a terrible, piercing roar, a drill boring its way into my skull and driving a pick of ice and fire into the space behind my eyes. Faintly, a part of me recognized the sound as that of myself screaming. In this moment, I had become the embodiment of agony. I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of my own pain. I felt nothing but the screams of my nerve endings as they begged for death in the wrath of the fire. I saw nothing but flashes of scarlet and white as each wave of pain rocked through my nervous system. I tasted my own burning tongue, and I smelled the stench of my coat being vaporized, and of my flesh blistering and popping in the conflagration.

Celestia, how long could this last before I finally died? How long would I be tormented by the flames before given the sweet release of death?

Dear Luna, end my pain. Take from me this suffering, give me peace!

Please, let it all end, let me die.

Please… kill me.

Kill me.

KILL ME!

My pleas for death fell upon deaf or uncaring ears as I was swept along the sea of madness, carried by the waves of pain as they crashed over me. In this sea of eternal agony, I thought I knew despair; I thought I knew pain. I was no longer Bradley Tenpenny, husband of Carrot Tenpenny-Top, soon-to-be father of one; I was pain, and pain was me.

We are me.

I am One.