//------------------------------// // Ticking Clock // Story: PaP: Bedtime Stories // by Starscribe //------------------------------// "You must describe it to me exactly, Alicorn," Winding Wheel said, his voice absolutely calm. Calmer than he thought he would've felt at his own execution. Calmer than he had any right to be, really. "Exactly what you want to see. The event in as much detail as you know it, with as much of the background as you can. I must construct a temporal sympathy as you might create a spatial sympathy for a teleport." He rested at the table he had used for the majority of his visions, constructed only a decade ago. Its surface was flat, but below the thin veneer many gears and intricate mechanisms turned, clicking to their own internal rhythm. They required no winding, no heating or any other form of input. The table kept ticking, its spells still working, until the moment he died. The artifact meant that all it really took was his presence to power the spell and his concentration to focus on a destination. All he had to do was muster the courage to cast a spell he knew would cost his life, and that would be it. The table itself was a perfect sphere, its surface painted with a traditional religious mural depicting Minerva's clockwork paradise in the sky. Minerva's creations demanded perfect accuracy, as she was a particularly jealous goddess. "Alright." Idyia took the seat directly across from him, setting down a little sliver of glowing crystal on the table beside her. Wheel recognized it at once as a memory spell, those rumored to have existed before the Fall. Ponies had once used magic like that to share knowledge and experiences with one another, but their creation had been lost along with so many other important things. "Tell me when you are ready. I warn you, the information I share will disturb and frighten you. Unfortunately, all of it is true." "I know." He rolled his eyes. "I already said I believed you. Let's get going, before I change my mind." Idyia took a deep breath, then began to speak. "I told you about Charybdis, the Piercer. He is not a native to this universe, but traveled here thousands of years ago, when Equestria was close. He is the spirit of the sea, of unbridled storms and lost ships and the horrible deep. A little of him swims in every drop of blood. He arrived on this planet long before the Event. When the old world ended, I mean. I'm not sure what you ponies call it here. If you even remember it. Anyway... he was not dependent on magic like ponies, nor did he care about the harm he caused. He found the most hateful, insecure nation in all the world, and made a convert of its dictator. He traded immortality and information about the coming doom in exchange for service. When the Event finally came, he had thousands of loyal servants. He made more, captured territory, enslaved ponies. He... He learned from humanity. Granted his subjects autonomy his older brother never had. Made himself less of a threat. He has taken large parts of the world since then. Conquered whole continents... and he caused the last war. He has always had a softer touch, letting us destroy ourselves instead of doing the killing himself. This strategy has worked so well, I'm afraid of where it ends. Like all beings from the void, Charybdis requires sustenance from truly living things to grow. It can't feed on its own, and every being it spawns must be fed too. I believe this pressure will drive Charybdis to eventually aim for the whole planet. Carefully enslaved, it might feed him indefinitely. It might also just consume the whole thing and burn out like a virus that has killed his host. Either way, I must know. Show me the moment when Charybdis finally rises from the depths for good. The time he aims for the whole world. Show me what happens. Show me his tactics, show me his strategies, his methods. Show me what the world does to resist him, and whether it succeeds. It might... Maybe I worry over nothing. If that's the case, this spell won't take much from you. I'll return your youth to you, and remove this entire building from Switzerland. I will find you a place you can finish your masterwork in peace and welcome you to the ranks of the awakened when you are ready." "My visions have never failed to come to pass, Alicorn," he warned. "Are you sure you want to see? It might not be better to see this Charybdis end the world if you can't do anything to stop it. When I peel back the veil, it will already account for actions you plan today. This vision has already happened, you will have already seen it. In the past, I have used this magic more often to predict specific, small-scale actions of specific parties. Looking at the outcome... it may not bring you what you're looking for." Idyia shook her head. "Humanity has already escaped an inevitable extinction once, Wheel. We will do so again, no matter what you show me. Cast your spell." Wheel reached out, his horn glowing as he flipped the final switch. The surface of the table split immediately into a thousand jointed sections, each of which was connected to the intricate mechanisms below. The mural rotated out of the way near his hoof, revealing something like the face of an interlocking pocketwatch. One that showed years and months instead of minutes and seconds. Winding Wheel set one hoof on that section and began to twist. He felt the power leaving his body then as he'd never felt it before. Not so much the faint trickle of life, as he remembered it. That painful realization that he was burning years instead of simple mana was still present, but now it seemed like he was spiraling down a drain, vanishing off a precipice. Even as he sat, his limbs began to stiffen. Joints weakened, constitution faltered. He would never be getting up from this table. "I see..." he began, horn still glowing with a constant, even light. The vision resolved itself into a distant beach, somewhere with strange trees and solid green as far as he could see. Wheel did not recognize this part of the world, yet he didn't doubt it was his own world he saw. Shapes dragged themselves from the dark water of night. Wheel couldn't get a good look at them, there were so many. Not only that, but each one seemed hideous in a different way. Disgusting, disturbing, rotting two-legged creatures with fins along their backs, bubus eyes, and woven armor on their bodies. They carried weapons too. Bulky constructions of metal and tubes, with fungus growing from them at various points. "I see... an army. So many... I can't see the beach anymore. They just keep going. And behind them..." How could he describe the gelatinous creatures rolling up the sand behind the walking fish? As large as a small shack, but made from a semi-transparent flesh with insides that seemed to be constantly shifting, changing, melting and reforming. "Monsters. They're so big... bigger than a minotaur, transparent..." "Shoggoth," the Alicorn supplied. "That's called a Shoggoth. He'll grow more of them, then." "Many more..." He let his mind drift again, slowly turning the wheel with his gradually stiffening hoof. The Alicorn was right about the clarity of this vision. Nothing was vague here—he could see every single creature distinctly, even focus on them if he wanted to. He could practically hear the waves, and smell the festering corruption these monsters dragged onto the beach behind them. "There's an army waiting for them," he continued. "They look... strange. No metal armor. Helmets, masks, cloth... and their weapons look like muskets, but different. Smaller, more elegant. They have canons too... metal carts follow them around, with huge cannons mounted to them." They fought. Wheel tried to watch, but the battle was so chaotic, so terrible, that he couldn't stand to look directly into it. At first, the strange ponies with their entrenched positions and powerful weapons tore through the walking creatures with ease, and they held their ground. But as it wore on, he discovered something terrible. "The big slimy creatures... the muskets don't hurt them. Not even the big ones. They're stunned, but they recover. They keep coming. The ponies don't stand a chance..." It had taken only one night. Eventually all the pony positions had been overwhelmed. Tens of thousands were dead, the rest dragged back to the beach to be... eaten. He wretched in his seat, his whole body shaking from the effort. At least he didn't actually vomit. At this point, he wasn't confident that he wouldn't choke and die on it. "There isn't much resistance..." he continued. "Past that first beach, it's just... death. Nothing can stop them. These armies are... worse than the first one. Much worse." He watched the rotting monstrosities sweep away crudely prepared troops, soldiers with weapons just as primitive as those he knew from his own lands. Wheel watched as creatures like ponies, but far taller joined the fight, along with others with strangely shaped lumps on their backs. The terrible army swept over them all, covering all the land in a sickly white fungus that sucked the life from everything it touched. Plants lost their green, animals shriveled, and everything that did not flee was sucked dry. "I don't understand... there should be more here. These fish-creatures... they're rolling over every city they come across. Some put up a little fight, but most are already empty. Word is spreading. The further they cross the coast, the fewer they catch unprepared. They're crossing up into... familiar territory now. My own homeland is already empty. Down into the south, into a land covered with sand. Not much lives here. The army continues. Westward into the rest of Europe... so many empty cities." Eventually the army reached the edge of the coast. The whole continent had been covered and strangled, with huge sections shriveling and dying but few ponies captured for such a tremendous area. After the initial landfall, Charybdis had lost his huge influx of food. His troops were consuming each other's essence to stay alive. His numbers dwindled. Eventually the army had nowhere else to stretch, from the edge of Europe to the extreme edge of Asia, and the enemy sent them elsewhere. "They're... moving, somewhere else. Across the sea... Another continent, not so large as this one. Almost nobody there... the army gets weaker and weaker the further it goes. Where did everyone go?" The Alicorn didn't get the chance to answer him. No sooner had he thought the question than his mind searched the future for an answer, and found it. The warm south of Africa, where the invading army hadn't dared to go at first thanks to the sweltering heat and the parched dryness to the land... "I found them. In the very center of the driest, deadest land, surrounded by sand... it's some kind of city." City was too shallow a word. It was a fortress that boggled conception. Buildings were made of strange dark materials that were soft to the touch but stronger than stone. Massive buildings with glass walls and whole gardens inside, rotating around to share the sun. Ponies with their magic in the millions. More ponies than he'd ever imagined in one place. And in the very center, a building so high its peak had to have sealed windows. And in its top floor... Alicorns. Not just Idyia, though she was one of the oldest and wisest among them. Others. One with a mane like fire, and more. One Wheel couldn't even look at without hearing a terrible ringing in his ears and having his eyes burned by the light. "They knew this was coming," he continued, explaining everything he saw. "They gathered everyone together. Some refused to come... all those are dead now. Only the fortress remains. I do not understand... what you've done. The Alicorns... but somehow, it seems to sustain itself. You do not seem worried about food. There are weapons here I don't understand... beams of light that turn solid matter to dust. Strange swarms of... insects... but smaller... that eat everything... flying ships that move faster than a sonic rainboom. Magic like this... you may've come here in vain, Idyia. There's no way it could be a threat to a city like this. So well positioned, so safe..." The army came, and as he predicted many of them died trying to cross the desert. Thousands of corpses were left, dried and withered husks. Flights of pegasi around the city drew in every drop of moisture for thousands of miles around, leaving dry lakes and parched rivers to sustain the monster's march. Yet it came. Millions were left dead in the desert, and with their deaths the shape of the continent was forever changed. "The... it digs a channel... all the way in... it takes years." He could see them—Shoggoths by the thousands, carving out the earth, pressing it aside as the sea rushed in behind. Piling up mountains of soil and sediment to keep the water flowing the right way. A living, fleshy tool. The city fought back, but each army that struck out was destroyed. At one point, an army of thousands struck out from the city, led by an Alicorn in brilliant white armor. He died, along with most of his soldiers, their corpses swallowed by the desert. That was when Winding Wheel noticed something else. As he looked up from the table, peeking for just a second past the vision and into the familiar world. Idyia watched him with her horn faintly glowing, expression intent. Like a unicorn casting an incredibly difficult spell, though Wheel couldn't have said what. And on either side of her... there were creatures. The first one was vaguely pony in shape, though it was more than twice Idyia's own size. Its body was concealed in a wispy gray cloak. Only a pair of gray eyes emerged from the cloak, as piercing as the flesh of a corpse left to rot in a lake for many years. Her mane emerged from her cowl like strands of sentient fog, shifting and blowing about in the air as though there were a wind. Yet for all that, its eyes were only curious. She seemed amused with Wheel, though it was hard to see when so much of her was concealed. The other figure, on the other hand, looked nothing like the species Wheel knew. It was thin, had only two legs, and dressed in a form-fitting set of formalwear like a military uniform. He had bright red hair, and matching eyes that seemed to stare through Wheel. It had no hooves, no wings, no horn. Only pale paws that seemed to tighten with anger when he realized Wheel could see him. Idyia gestured with one hoof. "Please continue. We must see how it ends. Ending your spell prematurely will not prevent what's coming." "What's that?" he asked, voice quavering. Wheel could let his mind wander from the vision for a few moments without difficulty. So long as he didn't try to cast another spell, nothing would interrupt it. If his concentration ever failed, the spell would have to be cast again. Not really an option at this point. "Your death." It wasn't Idyia who answered him, but the pony on her right. The kindly gray eyes watched him just as intently as the biped, but without any of his malice. "Your magic echoes through the Supernal like Beethoven's First Symphony." "We're here for your soul, equine. But please, don't let us rush you. Tell Archive how your vision ends." He leered down at Wheel, his teeth too sharp, glittering with the hunger of a predator who could never be filled. "Be silent, Charybdis," Idyia barked, glaring sidelong at him. "You agreed not to interfere with the aspirant until his work was finished. So let him work." That's him? Wheel felt a stab of panic in his chest, strong enough that he nearly lost control of his spell. He didn't, though it was a very near thing. He had to return to the spell, or else he would surely lose it. So he turned away, feeling more and more overwhelmed by the second. I should've said no. Getting involved with an Alicorn was a mistake. He could feel his heart struggling in his chest. Aside from the vision, the colors of the world started to fade. He could only hope he would survive until the end of this vision. His death would count for something. "The... The army is mostly gone now. It seems like the fortress is secure. The ponies within are starting to celebrate..." Then he saw it, the reason that Charybdis had been willing to sacrifice so many of its spawn to connect that land to the sea. Another force rose up from the depths, more terrible than the first. There were no more of the small bipeds, only swollen, bloated monstrosities several times their size. Most of them could fly, soaring through the air from the lake and flowing over the fortress. "There's a second army. Much bigger than the first. There are... it's like they ate every living thing in the ocean. Millions and millions of them, and they're all so powerful. The fortress holds... at first." Towers came down. Shields failed, ponies died by the thousands. Once the inner wall was breached, the rest went very quickly. Water flooded the lower levels, drowning many. The creatures rounded up the rest, enslaving them, putting collars around their neck and spreading the sickly fungus to this last of clean places. In the end, the Alicorns were some of the last ponies standing. They had powerful friends, other deathless ponies, ponies from other realms, they all fought together... and they all died. The last survivors were massacred. And because I have seen it, it is true. Wheel hung his head. "It is..." His voice came in a faint rasp. "Idyia, the city fell. There were millions too many of them. None of the inventions or weapons will be enough. They'll destroy everything and everyone. Not a single pony will survive who hasn't been enslaved." "Marvelous," said Charybdis, folding his arms and grinning across the table at his companions. "Exactly what I told you, isn't it? There was never any other choice. Your willing service now would save you a great deal of pain. Why wait?" The magic was fading from him. Winding Wheel could feel his limbs going numb. The warmth in his chest faded, the steady ticking of his heart struggling and coming irregularly now. "I will start with you, soothsayer pony. Your powers are valuable." He put out a hand. "Swear yourself to me, and I will keep you in this world, immortal. I will give you kingdoms to rule, wealth to continue your study. The oceans have universities greater than anything on the surface. Choose quickly... you are still mortal until you agree." Wheel turned to the other two, watching as the table began to close. For all the terrible things he had just seen, the ponies didn't seem surprised or discouraged. Idyia only seemed more resolved. He opened his mouth to say something, to warn her that his visions were inevitable and always came true, but the words came only as a croak. He had lost the ability to speak. A little longer, and his body would be dust. "You have done enough," said the pony with her cloak, rising from the chair. She walked slowly around the table, and Wheel could feel her as she got closer. Each step took a little of the pain away, and made his body feel more distant. "Come with me, pony. Death is not so terrible. In the night there can be no labor, only peace. The time of your peace has come." She didn't extend her hoof, only stood beside him, watchful and waiting. "You're almost out of time," Idyia said, smiling sadly at him. "I will not blame you if you leave with her," she nodded faintly to the pony on the other side of the table. "If you don't, it may be a very long time before you ride with her." Wheel could no longer hear his clocks ticking. He couldn't hear the traffic of hooves on the road outside, constant even through the night. Couldn't hear his own breathing, or even feel the chair he was sitting on. He was grateful he couldn't see his body now—it must be a truly horrific sight, shriveled and pockmarked and sunken. Most of his fur was gone, he could feel bare skin touching the air. Death was so close, and so easy. "But there's a third option," Archive said, setting something on the table across from Wheel. It was his unfinished pocketwatch—his masterwork. The tool that, when he finished, would let him travel through time, not just see it. A spell so mighty even the gods had noticed him. "Come with me, Winding Wheel. You have seen a terrible future... if you stay behind, you might have to suffer through it. But if you stay... maybe we can stop it." "Impossible," the bipedal hissed at her, leaning further across the table, more urgent. "Decide, animal. This is not a chance I give to many. The power to create you is enormous. I don't offer it lightly. And if you refuse... you have either oblivion or torture waiting for you. The gray promises you only the end, a termination of your existence and the final darkness that swallowed everything you were. If you accept Archive's offer... I won't kill you like the others. As your particular gift for defiance, I will keep you alive, to live in agony until I tire of hearing you scream." The robed pony only shrugged. "If you wait, you choose the rest I'll grant you. After all that you have done, you've earned your peace." Winding Wheel glanced between them, considering. The Final Death, as he had known... immortality in service to this monster, helping it do the terrible things he had seen. If he worked for it, ponies might suffer even more. Yet... he wouldn't. In loyalty there would be life for himself. Life forever, as a servant to the world's new ruler. It wasn't as though the Alicorn had any chance of beating him. His visions always came true. There's a first time for everything. With the very last of his strength, Winding Wheel reached out and took the clock, tugging it towards him. He vanished. The gears inside the table finally stopped spinning. All was quiet in the clock shop. * * * Wheel had left his shop so shriveled and corpselike that he might've been mistaken for one. By the time he returned, he'd lost most of his height and every vestige of his maturity. His coat was still the same color, his mane no longer graying, and he'd gained something new on his back, a pair of feathered wings that seemed sometimes to obey him and other times to get confused and generally obstruct his path however they could. "I still don't understand," he said, and his voice came out in a squeak. "Why am I so... so..." Idyia stood over him like a parent, protective and suspicious. "Young? Because you age differently than ponies, Oracle. You're only forty-two, remember?" He could feel her warmth always close to him, one wing partially extended as though she were ready to grab him and sweep him up into her grip at a moment's notice. She hadn't actually done so, not yet. "Just be glad you will age. One of these days I'll tell you the story of how I spent four centuries as a sixteen-year-old." The Alicorn tossed a pair of saddlebags to the ground in front of him, pawing open one side. The ground opened sideways within, into a storage space that extended forward as large as a warehouse. "Any of your research you want to keep goes in here. I will destroy anything you leave, to prevent it from falling into the hooves of those who would misuse it." There was no use arguing with her. Idyia, or... Archive, more properly, had thousands of years experience on him. He'd seen incredible things, been changed by them, and been given the opportunity to keep studying. He would keep growing, keep learning... perfect his masterwork at last. Maybe he'd find some time to enjoy the youth his first inventions had stolen from him.