//------------------------------// // VIII — A Spire Out of Time // Story: At the Mountains of Discord // by Glimmervoid //------------------------------// VIII — A Spire Out of Time We waited in that deathly room for almost an hour before venturing out. Of our pursuer there was no sign. With greater caution than before, we continued upwards. The corridor took us to a vaulted hall, held up by tall pillars which the mathematician in me noted conformed to the golden ratio. Natural philosophers have long pointed to the ratio within nature. This hall proved even the aberrant minds of alien beings saw its aesthetic appeal. Statues, strange sculptures and uncanny crystal windows decorated the walls. The windows looked out upon static alien vistas, displayed to onlookers through some trick of holographic light. The first showed an Elder Thing city. From the architecture I dated it to that peaceful interregnum between the defeat of Yeb-Ineat and the coming of the Mi-go. Towers of glass shot into the sky and around them twisted roads of foreign construction. Along those roads moved sleek, self-propelled vehicles, almost aerodynamic for all they did not fly. For the first time I saw colour too. However those ancient artisans had trapped this frozen image, it had survived undimmed even to the present day. By squinting I could just see the pinprick sized forms of Elder Things. Theirs skins range from medium to light brown — coffee on one end, milk coffee on the other. Their hair mirrored these dusky colours, blacks and dark browns. Breaking the trend, their clothes came in a hundred different hues, as if to make up for their otherwise dull appearance. Other windows showed different sights. One depicted a forest of gargantuan ferns, large fronded leaves which reached for the sun. The green was intensely vivid, and I almost felt able to lean forward and touch the nearest plants. Another displayed one of my purported demagogues, standing with a too-long shovel in hand before a cleared section of ground. Up close I could see wrinkles on his skin, around his small brown eyes especially. Apart from the hair on the very top of his head, he had no coat at all, just weathered skin covered by clothes. Said skin fell towards the dark end of the spectrum but lay well within the range I'd observed in the first picture. The sixth I examined showed a spread of the night's sky. The stars and constellations were those of the alien past. I looked at the moon and remarked at its strangeness. There were fewer craters on its surface, and it shone almost too bright. Had the Elder Things truly set it in the sky, and if so, why? In front of it all hung a celestial ribbon. A hundred thousand sparks shone against the black infinity, as numerous as grains of sand upon a beech. This, I realised, must be the Ring of Hue'min'I'tep, seen now in its heyday. The thirteenth showed a dozen shoggoths standing before a female Elder Thing. The shoggoths were less overtly monstrous than the current inhabitants of the spire, bodies smoother and more uniform in colour. The twelve in the window were almost transparent — slightly opaque raindrops arrayed in formation. The peculiar discolouration of their brains hung just visible at their cores. I knew the Elder Things controlled their shoggoth servitors through some invisible means, and this window appeared to show exactly that. Their order was perfect. Not a tentacle lay out of place, and not a gram of protoplasmic flesh extruded where it should not. If the Elder Things had this degree of control over their creations, I wondered, how did the shoggoths rebel? Why not just give an order and send every active shoggoth into a deep coma? The answer came back to fecundity, and the insidious creep of change. Of the statues and sculptures I have little to say. Most showed Elder Things, wearing a range of different clothing. Some had the regimented appearance of uniforms, formalised versions of what the silver egg Elder Things wore. Many of these also wore what looked like medals, shaped discs and stars hung on ribbons. The gender divide was slightly biased towards males but still mostly even. Looking at the women, I couldn't help but think their bulbous mammaries must get in the way. The men appeared queer, too. Hints of breast and nipple showed on their chests. Despite being no expert in biology, I knew the males of most mammalian species have rudimentary mammary glands, but ponies are an exception to this rule, as are most sophant species. Seeing it here struck me as eerily disturbing. I took pictures of typical samples of both genders, knowing such images could be useful for future study. One thing I will comment on is the prominence of clothes. The Elder Things wore them all the time, and I saw only a hooffull of naked artistic depictions during my entire time in the spire. Needless to say I found this very strange, though I imagine my friend Rarity would rub her hooves with glee at how much more everypony would spend on garments. Onwards we went, checking each window and examining each sculpture for significant details. Derpy seemed especially taken with the crystal windows. To me they were portals to alien wonder and primal terror both, but she saw only the former. We exited through a high, arched doorframe engraved with twisting vines and arrived at a crossroads. Three arrow straight hallways shot off at right angles to each other, with no ancient markings or oddities of architecture to let me choose between. Before I could put the question to my companions, I caught a flash of movement. A cleaner dashed across the corridor straight ahead. It moved faster than any I'd seen, which just wasn't energy efficient. The only other time I'd seen a shoggoth gallop was to chase us. Since it wasn't headed toward us, I could imagine only one other thing to produce such a reaction: the Elder Things. "Come on," I shouted as I set off straight ahead. When I reached the needed cross corridor, I veered to the side, my hooves skittering on the slate metal floor. My haste was such that I didn't even mark the turn with magical paint, but that scarcely seemed to matter at that point. The green-brown blur jinked around the next corner. I teleport-jumped so as not to be left behind, and my pegasus companions put on speed to keep up. The precise details of the chase are lost to memory, but after many twists and turns through that metallic maze of otherworldly construction we arrived at a large circular room, beneath a geodesic dome. Seven cleaners gathered in the centre of the chamber, around the slowly dissolving body of one of their kin. Of what breed or strain this shoggoth belonged, I cannot say, for the forces of putrefaction worked with great haste on the alien protoplasm of its body. Only the discoloured remains of its neural core remained semi-intact, and even it was not uninjured. Two cauterised holes bore through it, a mirror of the slaughtered ponies at the sub-expedition's camp. "Medulla Thaumus Major," I muttered under my breath. "Medulla Thaumus Minor." I had no proof, then or now, but I'd lay money on being correct. The Elder Things targeted those to places for a reason. What better way, after all, to kill a creature with the power of a shoggoth than to remove the very control mechanism for that power? It made cold, logical sense. The geodesic dome was made from interlocked silver metal plates, carved with stars and constellations. They matched what I'd seen through the crystal window. The sheer age of those markings bore down on me, as did the wealth of meaning they held. Elder hands had fashioned them in aeons past, shaping the plates much as they shaped all life on the planet. The Elder Things were utterly alien beings of fiendish eldritch myth but contained a spark of pony all the same. That slight connection, that glimmer of light within the dark, dark void, terrified me all the more. They gazed at the stars much as a pony might and noted what they saw. They saw patterns. They projected their culture. They painted pictures with thought, metaphor and an eye for form. Of course, they had a more intimate connection to the stars than we ponies. They came from those distant orbs. Was their home system up there, with its nine planets around a sun? Had they still cared or did they come to see my world as their home? The chamber had only two entrances: the one Derpy, Mountain Flower and I used, and a small portal on the far wall. With a glance at my companions, I teleported us passed the assembled shoggoths and on with the chase. Stairs lay beyond the portal, cold metal things arranged in an ascending square around the ruined remains of what might have once been an elevator. They led up as far as I could see and down just as far. On instinct I chose up. Before long my legs ached. If the Elder Things had built the stairs to reach the roof of the world, they were fiendishly proficient in their task. As before, they were ill sized for pony legs, and I couldn't imagine shoggoths finding them easy, either. Finally I took to teleporting, leaping in violet flashes from landing to landing. It left my horn numb, but a numb horn was better than liquid legs. In the pauses between jumps, I considered what I knew. The Elder Things from the silver egg came from five hundred million years ago, the same time as the Mi-go attack. The spire dated to slightly after that, when the survivors rebuilt. That meant they couldn't know its layout; they couldn't even have known it existed. They'd headed north, towards where their capital had stood, and found only one surviving structure. What would they look for? What could they look for? Their civilisation was millions of years dead. After an hour we reached the top. A slate metal door guarded the exit. It swung open under the push of my magic, and the sounds of combat both fierce and repugnant washed out. Steeling myself, I stuck my head through the perfidious opening, looked left, looked right and jerked back. It took me a few seconds of blinking to process everything I'd seen, but it painted a grim picture. I'll explain it here just as I explained it to Derpy and Mountain Flower. The corridor spilled out for a long way, left and right. High pillars lined each side, in the style of the old Pegasus Tribe. The Elder Things battled towards the right-hoof end. Opposing them was a degenerate war shoggoth, its obscene body more nightmarish than even the abominable monsters depicted in the crystal mural. In writing this and delving so deeply into hellish memory, an additional detail has come to me. It concerns the walls. In places, slate metal doors had been fused together and used as patches, as if to seal ancient structural wounds. These seals were old, very old. A battle had been fought there, millions of years ago. When the shoggoths betrayed the Elder Things, those two powers had clashed in the nearby corridor. And during my expedition to the spire they did so again. It can't be a coincidence. There has to be some nearby prize worth fighting over. Taking a deep breath, I extended my head as if under the guillotine and took another look. There were four Elder Things, three male and one female. Their skin remained mummified and fallow, but they moved all the same. It was jilted, unnatural movement, sudden bursts of speed separated by split second pauses. They didn't carry weapons but instead attacked using miniature armaments built into their longest fingers. Those fingers ended in glittering ruby eyes — the flesh, skin and horn plates discarded or burnt away. The eyes spat invisible beams, which invoked fire wherever they hit. Even in the midst of life and death struggle, my mind marvelled at the stupendous engineering. How advanced must Elder Thing technology have been that their weapons still functioned after so much time? The Elder Things used the pillars for cover, only leaning out far enough to aim and fire their weapons. Their style and coordination bore the marks of military training, almost robotic in precision and character. Indeed, something within their movements reminded me strongly of Wolf Troupe's Automaton Chess Player. When one pair advanced, the other would lay down covering fire. Invisible beams slammed into the war shoggoth, but it wasn't as weak as the others. The war shoggoth's gargantuan bulk filled the corridor with seething, protoplasmic flesh. A hundred thrashing limbs issued from its teeming body, and proto-eyes bubbled out from some debased internal store. Its skin was rubbery, opaque and membranous. Fractal, crystalline patterns hung just beneath the surface, interspaced with strange signs and glyphs of ancient and elder power. From a dozen gash-like slits issued jabbering sounds, almost painful notes that shifted from above to below hearing range according to some diabolical pattern beyond my ability to decrypt. When the Elder Things' invisible beams struck its main body or the primary tentacles, the attacks fizzled in puffs of smoke. Comprehending this, they aimed primarily for secondary targets: small sensor stalks, eyes which boiled up only to disappear and thinner, weaker limbs. With an unnatural call the shoggoth struck forward. Two tentacles uncurled like striking elapid whips and shattered an eon old pillar. The Elder Thing behind it vaulted back as razor-sharp shards of masonry showered the corridor. He hit the ground, rolled and started to rise, but his left leg bent at a strange angle for all its supposed ceramic reinforcements. He never made a sound. The three remaining Elder Things ducked out and laid down heavy fire. Burn marks bit into the shoggoth's slimy flesh, and an eye exploded as the optical liquid flash boiled. Using the opportunity, the injured Elder Thing rolled into cover. He never once so much as grimaced at the pain. The moment he was behind cover, the other Elder Things returned to their sheltered firing positions. And then I saw Rock Watcher. They Elder Things had bound him to a crude sledge, set well back from the battle lines. Ropes bit into his flesh, and canvas scraps covered most of his body. The tattered remains of cold weather clothes hung like forlorn rags — a dilapidated woollen scarf around his neck, a red sock on one hoof. His eyes were closed, and if his chest rose, it was by too small a degree for me to see. So cocooned, he might have been anypony or anything, but his cutie mark was just visible: a geologist's hammer. With a gasped breath, I jerked my head back. "Rock Watcher." The name repeated in my head even as I spoke it aloud. His foalnap drove us to this spire out of forgotten time. So close to my goal, I again faced the initiating question: why had the Elder Things done so? Why take him alone? Was he a hostage? A biological curiosity? Or did they have a darker purpose? Was he naught but feeder stock for their dread experiments? Would they use their secret genetic keys and special chemicals to awaken the genomic potential locked within his cells? Would they transform him into a shoggoth to fight shoggoths? A raw primal force boiled up through me as I contemplated the Elder Things. They'd murdered and abducted. They'd killed ponies I liked and knew. Despite that, it wasn't a desire for justice which drove me. It was all the horrors I'd seen. It was the windigos, shoggoths and aeonian constructions. It was the never ending cold, the constant death, and the forbidden secret histories. It was the blasphemous law contained in the October Codex, the crystal mural, the Eohippus Fragments and a dozen more obscure sources. It was the Princesses' warning and my failure. The Elder Things' actions condensed all that down and gave it form: vengeance. "Give him back!" I screamed as I leapt into the corridor and whipped out with my telekinesis. In a single great spell, I seized the Elder Things and locked them in place. They glowed the magenta of my magic, and the resulting light twisted through strange angles as it reflected off the walls, ceiling and floor. "Give him back!" The war shoggoth let loose a rumbling roar like a reverse susurration and slashed out with a striking tentacle. It smashed into the nearest Elder Thing and ripped that alien other from my grip. Such was that shoggoth's primeval power that the Elder Thing cracked apart, body going one way and head another. They thudded and clunked to the ground respectively. In numb horror I realised I'd ignored the greatest threat. A pustule opened on the shoggoth's oozing plastic front, and a disintegrator beam of abominable power blasted forth. My ears rang at its passing, a discordant cacophony of energy unheard since the days of primal myth. Two Elder Things vaporised in my grip. The slate metal of the walls bubbled and warped at the close contact. The bulk of the blast missed Rock Watcher, but its outer edges caught his rear left leg. The impacted section simply vanished, leaving a bizarrely warped stump behind. "No!" I shouted and threw the last Elder Thing. She hit the wall, bounced and rolled along the ground. "No!" Light blasted from my horn as I lashed out with my magic. A raw telekinetic shove slammed into the war shoggoth, and it staggered back a pace. "No!" I did it again. Pain shot through my horn, but I didn't care. "No!" Again; more pain. "No!" Again. More. Four of its tentacles shot into the nearby walls to anchor it against my next assault. I struck anyway, and a truculent but futile wave passed through its protoplasmic body. The slate metal ran in red-hot rivulets around its tentacles, and crystal geometries flexed under its skin. The patterns held mesmeric influence, as if they possessed the power to render the rigid rules of mathematics amorphous. Its many mouths warbled, and its proto-eyes swum to the surface, phosphorus orbs of many colours. Without thinking, I gathered up everything I'd learned about heat magic since arriving in the Uncharted North and struck out with a focused beam of near solar intensity. One of the shoggoth's eyes exploded in gory violence, and the beast released a queer cry of verminous insistence. I did it again, and a second vanished. The light from my horn flickered and wavered; I was doing too much, too quickly. "Twilight!" screamed Mountain Flower, and I turned. One of the Elder Things stood and staggered towards me, killing finger trying to rise. It wasn't the female I'd thrown aside. It was the male without a head. Part of his spine gleamed purple in the light of my horn, and the exposed flesh was black. Over the course of five hundred million years it had reached some plateau of stability beyond mere necrosis. My options limited and magic dwindling, I used telekinesis to wrench his finger to one side. It fired its murderous beam at the same moment, and the wall erupted in an explosion of out-of-place colours — cerulean, indigo and azure tinted silver. Whatever the finger weapons were, they projected more than just heat. No mundane force could harm the walls. He tried to raise his other hand, but I wrenched his arm about, so the finger pointed right at his centre of mass. He fought me, some unseen force animating his aeonian body with unholy power, but I fought back with even more strength. Pain stabbed through my horn and into my brain, but I just gritted my teeth. The war shoggoth let loose a warbling cry, and I glanced back. A pustule opened on its abominable face, a festering wound leading directly to a cosmic cauldron of primal chaos. Immeasurable energy boiled with, enough to vaporise me and all my friends. Pieces fell into place within my mind, like a complex jigsaw of menacing character. The disintegrator beam was a powerful ability. If deployed earlier it could have wiped the Elder Things from the corridor, but the shoggoth had held back. It had only used the attack when I'd locked its opponents down and again now, when nopony stood ready to oppose it. That only made sense if there was a flaw, and looking into that great pustule of grotesque, hateful energy I knew what it was. In a single swift movement I stepped to one side and forced both of the Elder Thing's killing fingers into position. He fired at once, and invisible beams of singular power struck the disintegrator pustule. It exploded like a pressurized steam tank. Energy backlashed into the shoggoth, doing unbelievable damage to its protoplasmic flesh. Most of its voluminous body simply vanished, and the remainder dissolved into organic slop. The energy wasn't done. It rolled out in an expanding ring of screaming fire. I frantically threw up a protective barrier, but the fire howled with unspeakable power. It shattered my magic into a field of falling fractal shards, but I'd absorbed enough that it merely threw me off my hooves and into a wall. The impact was hard and fast. The slate metal had no give at all. A sharp pain stabbed through my side and renewed with each gasping breath. My ribs hurt, possibly broken. I tried to reach out with my magic but my power fizzled and gave out. The slate metal of the floor and walls cracked at the screaming fires passing. Flakes formed. A piece fell away. Under the fire's infernal influence the once inviolate material became as brittle as rotten bone. The floor under me groaned. Before I could do anything it gave way, and I fell into the long dark.