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// Part 2 Pebble encased 
// Story: The Book of Ages.    Volume 1.   Harmony and Immortality 
// by Rune Singer 
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Part 2
Pebble encased

Sounds of bells. Many bells and everything was cold and confusing.  An earth pony mare slid out of the unicorn keep through a narrow service door before dawn. Slipping through the shadows of the keep gardens she took the western path clutching the tight bundle to herself with one hoof. At the western gate she was halted and  ordered to state her business as well as what she was carrying.

With an annoyed gesture she pulled the hood of her cloak back displaying her priestess mark upon her forehead. Her eyes where haunted and she was fatigued to the bone and an unnerving metallic odour came off her.

“If you must” she replied wearily “I assisted in the delivery of the queen’s foal and as you can hear it has not made it to the world.”

One guard took it upon himself to challenge her claim and asked not unkindly.

“My lady…its a dark dawn indeed but unless you can vouch for your self I cannot let you pass…”

All around them the bells of mourning rung. The mare then propped the bundle she held accusingly, towards the guards.

“By all means, take it off me and see the sad creature. I have not dared to tend to my own sisters or myself, the queen’s blood is still on my hoofs and you dare desecrate the honour of the dead!”

The guards backed off at the miasma and bowed reverently, letting the mare to her duty. Earth ponies most often where midwifes due to the connection to growing and nurturing life they held. Yet even they could not perform miracles when a foal was simply not to be. The royal son expired not long after his birth, a feeble albinistic creature, whose mother held him to her for the few breaths he took. He was given no name and handed to one of the lesser priestesses to be taken south east and given the proper vigil and burial rights.

Unchallenged the mare crossed the bridge above Scala town and did not pay heed as one by one, a single candle was lit in each window, as the ponies woke to the bells. It almost eerily seemed that whenever she galloped past a house, a candle came on, as if she was a harbinger of death. Utterly exhausted she was met at Lake Lotus by a group of earth ponies who had set out to meet her. She handed the bundle over and collapsed to the wet grass. Stone Bark, then only a caste below the high priesthood, covered her with his cloak and nodded the group to go on, as he would tend to their sister. When everypony was out of sight, he drew a hardwood dagger from his belt satchel and slid it expertly between her ribs causing the least damage. Muffling her weak gapes for air with his cloak, he waited for her to fade. He then made a small fire, both for appearances sake and to burn the dagger. Saddened he would later claim she died of exhaustion and that he would tend to her funeral rites herself, as one who assisted in a birthing she had to be cleansed of all taint. Everypony was either way too occupied with the loss of the only rightfully earth pony heir that was born in the many generations.

Within the temple, Stone Bark’s twin, Viridian Sight insisted on handling the washing and shrouding of the infant himself as his duty and display of devotion to the rank of high priest he would achieve soon. In haste pre-planned with his brother, he covertly exchanged the foal’s corpse with that of a slain piglet. The twin brothers had concocted this scheme in shock and anger at the lost and long expected earth pony prince. The foal’s corpse was placed carefully in a pod formed out of the roots of the lodestone tree above. The Twins had long abandoned their mostly veterinary projects down there as one after another they failed and their victims expired.

Reverently Viridian Sight’s hummed a song that was more vibration than melody, prodding and leading the roots to spread tendrils that sought out the foal’s navel. Sealing the opening of the leather-like pod with a  poultice mixture of chlorophyll and haptoglobin, he closed his eyes visualising what the roots where already doing inside. While the pod filled with an amniotic liquid, the pony communed with the lodestone to send a pulse down in an attempt to revive the foal. Once, twice and thrice was the pulse sent and just when the pony was about to despair at the total loss and desecration of the princely foal, the response of a faintly beating heart came.

Viridian Sight knelt and wept at the foot of the pod, now serving as an extra-uterine system, exhausted, daunted and awed. This would work, it had to! They needed a strong king, but the twins dreamt of one with abilities beyond the simple tapping of earth-bound power, facilitating growth of flora and fauna. Why shouldn’t the earth ponies control the forces actually corresponding to them. 

“My prince” he whispered through silent sobs “We will guard you with our lives and grand you powers beyond imagination. Our saviour, the messiah of earth ponies, our King!”

———————
Pebble had connected the jumble of his first memories many years later, after he could make sense of what the feedback through the lodestones meant. Without having attended a school, he received a fine tutelage through the thoughts of ponies who conferred, used or simply lived near the magical stones.

Images of who he was and how he looked like came later as well, once he perceived that the pair of ponies spoke to him directly. Making the connection from their thoughts, through the lodestone to his mind he could picture himself simplistically at first and to great accuracy later. Hence at the age of three he could discern he lay suspended in a hard shell -crystal he found out- tendrils of plant roots connected to his forehead, back, navel and backside. Within the pod he was supported by, more like floating actually, a thin sap-like liquid. His needs where tended this way and to the day he would perish, it would be the only thing he was grateful for receiving from the lodestones.

By the time he was eight years old, he no longer needed the words of the two ponies who visited him, to understand the world around and above him. Either way they lied through their teeth. Stone Bark ever the leader of the two often acted the stern part, while Viridian Sight the friendly and confiding one. Pebble had to just cross check their teachings with what he could find out through the lodestone later and find out what was true. Almost every day the pair visited him, unknowing that Pebble did not need their tutoring. Listening with fervour at the promises and then with disgust at the lies.

“When you are ready, you will emerge to Marelantis above strong and unique!” Viridian Sight would whisper in awe.
“You are the hopes and dreams of all of ponykind! The first and only!” Stone Bark would intone. And so it went on.
“Your sisters wait for you, they ask about you every day…”
“You parents cry every night, your people await their saviour…”

He was disappointed in the beginning, especially upon finding out that nopony knew he was alive. His parents would not wait for his triumphant return, nor his sisters play with their strong and handsome brother. No! In the minds of the ruthless twin brothers, he was an unexpected prize to be moulded and honed for their purposes. When the real experiments started, he hated them. If he would ever survive what was planned for him, and if he would emerge, the first thing he wished to do was strangle them.

The massive tree conglomerate around the lodestone, whose roots supported and fed Pebble’s pod, was coaxed to send more tendrils his way. Painfully and slowly the ones at his forehead and shoulders exited and the new snaked in. For endless hours the colt knew only the different forms of pain in all its colours and accents. His growth accelerated exponentially in the next years and all the while Pebble learnt of the world, stretching his abilities beyond attunement to the earth pony lodestone. He could confer with all three and soon with the very one the former where hewn from. He thus had eyes and ears to wherever the lodestones had reach.

One might fear that he was bound to become a villain, yet in his anger and hate towards the two earth ponies experimenting on him he wanted everything they did not. If they coaxed the roots to strengthen him, he coaxed them to do the opposite. Whenever Stone Bark tried to grow a horn from Pebble’s forehead, the colt made it revert back. Viridian Sight, always envious of pegasi, set his mind to grow wings on the pony’s back. Pebble gleefully thwarted that plan in its not so hypothetical roots.

Completely beyond what Pebble could learn from the vast repository of information the minds of ponies offered, was the fact that his two elder sisters befriended a creature he had no clue of. To his luck the three of them visited the temple above his pod on a midsummer’s celebration. Within the heart of his existence, he could trace the shape of the Draconequus perfectly and enter his mind briefly before being ousted. No other chance to communicate presented in the next years until any news of the draconequus named Discord seized. Pebble’s last hope was his sister Concordia, to whom when she advanced to the fourth degree, he would reveal himself and be free. Or at least be known to exist and thus reunited with his family.

What he mostly hoped to have gained from Discord was any knowledge of whether it was possible for him to be freed and not perish the instant he was released from his pod. Would he be released if he continued to fight what was being done to him? He began doubting it himself and in consequence let the vile experimentation take root anew into his body. If asked Pebble would not be able to pinpoint which supplied the most pain. In category, the horn was the coldest pain, especially after the tree embedded the osteophytes into Pebbles forehead, and  was allowed to dig deep into his nervous system. Within a year it had grown to a perfect size.

The wings where another matter. Following the success of the horn implantation and it not being rejected or causing any further demyelinating disorder than Pebble was already born with, the twin earth ponies fervently undertook the same procedure. Whether from Pebble’s own actions to reject them for so long or due to there being no way in the beginning, his body rejected the osteophytes. If the ponies did not care for the inflicted pain of so many years, the had no mercy now when they removed Pebble from where he spent his entire life, submerging his head in a vat of the liquid from the pod, and proceeded to strap his quickly drying body down in order to graft wings on the stubs behind his shoulders. Afterwards he was moved in a bigger pod and was reattached to the tree’s roots anew.The fever following this invasive procedure almost took his life and lasted for days. It was at that time when Discord was trapped in his prison and Pebble spent his waking moments listening to his thoughts and threats.

Stone bark and Viridian Sight revelled in their accomplishments. Their King would soon be transformed completely and if their experiments with various flying creatures could be trusted, all that Pebble’s stunted wings needed, was a greater demand of power from the lodestone. Only a Unicorn could achieve that and that is how the twins came to plan the trap for the royal pair. The king was sure to want to use the nearest lodestone to support his queen and he would thus supply the push needed. The magic would revert the flow of energy from the stone to the land that existed for centuries and it would not only flow down to Pebble, but also take what was needed from the lands itself.

Pebble feared though what the latter would mean. From decimation and  miasma on crops and pestilence on livestock to a weakening of the ponie’s resistance to sickness. If he was ever to emerge to the outside and if in all unlikelihood he succeeded to revert the damage, he would play right into the twin brothers hopes and dreams of a messiah King.
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“Enough with the sappy story!” Discord replied in a mental shout, but received no reply. 
“I care not the least in when, where and in what manner your world will perish, all I want is to get out of here and take my revenge!”

The reply that came eventually showed no sign of its owner having recuperated and Discord worried he might lose his only means of escape, even as feeble as it sounded.

“There is a third…lodestone…Pegasi…she plans…terrible…promise me and …you free”

Discord exploded in mad roars, his care to control his temper long lost.

“You knew how to set me free and you lied? Bastard! Useless thing in a jar! Let me tell you what I know then! If you where ever let out of your flower vase, you will die in moments. No king, no unipegasus dreams, nothing! The greatest earthquake of this world will not be stopped and your famine will descend. All Dead!”

Pebbles voice, even in his state was tinged with a drop of gratification.

“You knew…something, I… knew… something. You…swear…help me…save…my…the…the…ponies, I…tell…way…be…free.”

“I swear all right? Tell me! Do it now!” Discord demanded.
“Pebble?” he asked of the void.
“Pebble!Answer me!” his anger rising again “If I find out you’re playing with me, I swear to do much worse things than what you’ve thought torture is… Answer me!”

Yet no answer came, only another surge of memories. It seemed that Discord would not get his reply despite how much he tried and would be subjected to the expected third lodestone calamity for which he cared the least.