Chapter 1: Intro
It has been little more than two weeks since I arrived in Equestria, and I fear that my presence can only mean bedlam and destruction for the pony civilization. Apart from being the only human in this world, I arrived under unusual and rather deadly circumstances; circumstances that threaten to tear the very fabric of reality and existence as we know it. For when I came to this vibrant earth via the wormhole that I had been testing, something of another race… or another dimension came with me.
Before I was transported to Equestria, Ponyville to be exact, my colleagues and I had been working on developing a wormhole to explore the possibilities of other universes. It seems that humankind has come a long way in arts of science and technology. We have a better understanding, and greater fear, of the universe now than we ever had before. And as we begin to scour the galaxy for new minerals, sources of fuel, and life, we now have a larger sense of the utter insignificance of our race, expendable more now than ever before. The new age of intelligence has, in a way, crippled our morale as an intelligent species, but it has not made us race of complete pessimists, either. If anything, our newfound interest in the ways of science and reasoning has given us a chance to move forward as a civilization to a utopian future, much like the one here in Ponyville. However, my new equine companions have little understanding of the universe and physics and such, but what they lack in knowledge, they make for in what the human race could never grasp or come to understand: honor.
The ponies seem to have it all right. This world they call Equestria seems to be the paradise that my home can only wish for; a fleeting dream that, due to the human condition, we may never achieve. There is no disease or poverty, and war seems to be nonexistent in this universe. These facts stem from the study of their history through the books read to me by the pony named Twilight Sparkle. The ponies seem to speak English, but they have a completely different system of writing from us. It appears to be a combination of the Russian alphabet and Japanese characters, so I am unable to read it myself. Twilight has been helping me to figure out why I am here and how to return me to my world; but to no avail. “There’s a way, I’m sure,” Twilight says,” but we just haven’t found it.” She has even informed of my presence to their monarch, Princess Celestia. She is a god-like mare who is said to have unbelievable magical powers. It is also said that she is the one who raises the sun in the mornings. I challenged these facts with speculation and demanded proof. If this were true, it would defile the very laws of physics themselves. This would also give me a chance to study the cosmic workings of another universe as well. It is, with great, dumb luck, that I was able to witness the Princess raising the sun during the Summer Sun Celebration in Canterlot a few days after my initial arrival. Needless to say I was stunned and left in a haze of disbelief and… wonder. In this universe, magic exists. There are gods among them. That is the reason… that is what made it possible for the abomination to follow me here.
There are things that the ponies here do not, and should not, understand. What they have here is beautiful and pure, and I’m afraid what I have done could spell doom for their species, for when I came through the wormhole… something came with me.
As I said before, my colleagues and I had been experimenting with the possibilities of inter-dimensional travel via wormholes. At first we believed it to be exciting… but we soon discovered that some things, or beings, are better left undiscovered. On our first trip through the wormhole, we discovered something that should not exist. We breached through the fabric of time and reality and arrived in what appeared to be a desolate, nightmarish wasteland. The ground beneath us was a viscous yet solid mass that reeked of the putrid stench of death and sulfur. Above us the sky appeared to be a solid stone mass with cracks and crevices from which a blood-red liquid leaked. In front of our group laid an endless stretch of nothingness, polluted by a black fog that was rising up from various vents in the ground. The very notion of any chance of life occurring here was absurd; for there was not even a sun… but by some strange force, there was somehow light for us to see where we were going. We walked on for what seemed like an eternity never passing by as much as a pebble. We walked for some time, until we came to the first solid thing we had seen since leaving our dimension.
It appeared to be a mountain of some kind, black, rocky and jagged. It was not steep, though. In fact, it was sloped enough to ascend semi-comfortably. As we began to climb the fortitude, we encountered some odd spectacles. The vents in the ground no longer spewed forth the noxious mist that had given the landscape its bleak atmosphere. Instead, they became geysers that erupted with the blood-like substance that had trickled from the “sky”. As horrified and appalled as my partners and I were, we decided to continue climbing out of sheer morbid curiosity. It wasn’t until we had reached near the top that the hellish land began to take on an even more sinister theme. Bones of strange and alien creature lie strewn about the ground, rotting and decaying in the blood and the smog. There was a new stench in the air, too. A fouler smell has not crossed my nostrils since… and hopefully never will again. The stink of burning corpses and blood laced the air and even the mist changed its color: it was now red like the rain. Many of us gagged with smell and the sights around us, but we could not turn away. Even though we wanted to turn and run, we could not.
When we finally reached the top, we discovered that it was no mountain we had climbed; it was a crater. Deep and wide, the crater stretched farther than any of us could see. There was no solid sky above us anymore, only a night sky; a black and empty vastness that appeared to be the eye of the universe, looking down on us as if we were gladiators in the cosmic coliseum. Inside the abyss, however, resided a creature beyond anything the human mind could comprehend. I began the descent down the slopes into the canyon below and the rest followed behind me. The amount of bones and carcasses began increasing as we descended further, and so did our terror. But as we got closer to the bottom the bones soon turned into freshly killed corpses that looked to have been half-devoured by something of enormous size and stature. All of these mysterious bodies had one thing in common: the eyes had been gouged out and the throat had been slashed; and judging by the size of the lacerations, no ordinary animal had committed these atrocities. The smell was getting stronger and our stomachs grew weaker.
We arrived at the bottom only to encounter a diabolical and scarring surprise. In front of us sat a lake of blood. Upon the sight, a few of my associates vomited; their stomachs and limits strained by the journey through this nightmarish land. “We need to leave at once,” one of them spoke as they wiped the bile from their mouth. “I agree. I’ll ready the return device,” I replied, my voice shaking from the terror before us. Our return device resembled a remote control used for televisions with some minor adjustment. As I began to type in the coordinates that I had designated for our universe, I heard something in the distance. It sounded like the roar of a lion, except deeper and more guttural. “What was that,” one of my colleagues enquired. The voice sounded very close; almost too close. And then it spoke…
"Nyat’chigurl kotgn’agual… gtolhulu shlyar’skreth… b’fagl… xiar… xiar…"
I have no idea what was said or what had said it, but following the unintelligible sounds a great and ungodly cacophony of a roar erupted behind us; and it belonged to a creature borne of the darkest realms of the human imagination. It resembled, from what I can recall, a towering, 12-foot tall grub standing upright with the aid of a mass of tentacles. The beast’s eyes were replaced by a mass of wrinkled skin, and its large, carnivorous teeth grimaced in a wicked smile that trickled with the blood of past slaughters. The creature’s arms were of another world themselves. They were long and wretched with the atrocious beings hide only covering the latter part of the appendage. Its hands, if they can even be called that, were the tools of which it used to slaughter and eviscerate its prey. Both appeared to be carved out of the fiends own bone; the right resembled a simple spear, while the other had been somehow crafted into a scythe-shaped blade.
The attack came swift and occurred within a matter of seconds of the monster’s utterance. Without a moment’s notice, the being impaled one of my associates with the spear and beheaded him with the scythe. Reveling in the success of a fresh kill, the abomination bathed in the fountain of blood it had made of out of the prey, draining my poor friend of every drop of his precious fluids and devouring the cadaver he left in a single bite. And then it spoke again, only somehow we could understand what was being said…
"I am By’hagn’gyl, the Messiah of Pain, and I demand my tribute... "
The rest… is a blank space... The only thing I remember are the horrible screams and a symphony of carnage; the splashing of blood, the cracking of limbs and the ripping of flesh. All I remember of that moment are the horrendous cries of pain and unimaginable suffering as my colleagues were torn asunder by the Blind Horror… By’hagn’gyl.
I recall, however, reaching for the return device and finishing the coordinates for my universe and jumping through the portal that would eventually land me here in Equestria. But somehow, the passage stayed open long enough for By’hagn’gyl to follow after me. It was not my intention to bring any harm to the world in which I found safety, nor was it to bring the god to my world either, but by some small chance… it happened. I brought this hell-fiend to a place far less deserving than that of the realm of humans. If left unchecked, By’hagn’gyl’s reign of terror will spread from his nuclear blood-world of pain and suffering to the utopian land of Equestria, ensnaring the pony-race within his grasp and wiping out their kind in a gluttonous holocaust of bedlam and utter destruction. Celestia help me, I must not let this happen.