It had taken Winter nearly twenty minutes from reaching the peak to braving her way down the dark and gloomy cavern, trying her best to not let the thought that she’d just delved inside some giant monster’s gullet root itself too deep in her mind. She held her head a little higher up, letting the light spell she’d learn from Crystal illuminate the murky cavern depths that threatened to engulf her. Crys would have loved it in here, looking at the walls to tell the age of the rock and how the cave had formed...at least the natural parts of it. It had taken another twenty minutes of stumbling around the caverns to realize, like the carving outside suggested, this wasn't an entirely natural cavern. There were stone seats and benches carved into the walls, sconces for illuminating torches that had long since degraded or been emptied. As she delved deeper, Winter started to see drawings and etchings in the cave walls. It was familiar...the art, the carved furniture...she stumbled across a room with a large stone altar she knew she'd seen a reproduction of recently. Very recently. These were from the exhibit her parents had brought to Ponyville!
“What was all this?” she wondered aloud.
To her surprise, the voice began to explain. “Centuries before your birth, your kind developed a view of the world, that the world was the skin of a god itself, and all that lived upon it were inferior. They took it as their duty to appease this god, but in time believed that service would be rewarded, by elevation from being a mere parasite. Fragments of the religion that grew from those beliefs climbed this mountain, believing that the entire universe was the god, and hoping to come closer to its center by praying from the peak."
The voice’s words rapidly set Winter’s nerves back on edge, if they’d ever calmed down to begin with. There had been some writings like that in the text she’d read at the exhibit, but it hadn’t had nearly as much detail. It didn’t feel like something a fragment of herself would have just made up to fill a gap in the story as she understood it, so where was this information coming from? Somewhere besides herself? Her voice shaky, she asked “what happened to them?”
With a slight chuckle, the voice answered her. “A kind not unlike your own, but bearing stripes and greater superstition than yours, had come to understand that there were artifacts from the past that could pose a danger to the beings of the world in their present.”
“A kind like mine…Zebras?” Winter asked, looking around in confusion. She couldn’t tell if it was just an echo from the cavern, but Winter could swear that this voice seemed close to her, still hiding somewhere…but present, somewhere in this cave.
“This visiting kind confronted yours about their zealous beliefs, discovering the dangerous artifacts they had been keeping. When they tried to explain, your kind attacked them. But the visitors were prepared to fight, and destroyed the resistance. Those that surrendered were taken and treated with their potions and magic to cleanse their ‘corruption’.”
“They were…the zebras fought the ponies? For those beliefs?” Winter stammered. It was a horrifying thought, fighting with somepony that harshly just for differing beliefs…Winter knew deep down that she never would tolerate that. This wasn’t her mind talking after all…yet somehow, that was no comfort to her.
“Those survivors remained with the striped ones due to being too far removed from your kind for decades, and were kept from the corruptions that had reached them before.”
“And how do you know all this?” she asked, swallowing nervously as she did so. She had a feeling the answer was going to make all of this worse, but she was in deep already and didn’t see the harm in figuring out exactly what had gone so horrifically wrong.
“Because I was here, to witness it,” the voice hissed, a raspy sound to it. It was almost like somepony speaking through a wide grin without moving their teeth, a mental image that didn’t help Winter at all.
“You were...here? But that was centuries ago right? That's so long ago, who…who are you?”
“I am beyond your understanding,” the voice rasped, sounding almost bored and irritated as it continued to speak. “In an era before your concept of time can measure, I was one of many beings who bent the very powers of creation to our will. There was nothing, save what we chose to create or destroy, and for only how long we desired it. And all we wanted was our power. We fought for dominance, for a stronger link to those elements, to destroy those weaker intellects that fell before us.”
Winter gasped in shock and terror, as in a flash of white light, the cavern around her vanished. She started to see strange things, visions of places she’d never seen nor imagined, and things she couldn’t comprehend existing for mere moments before vanishing entirely. Entire mountains formed in a split second, and degraded almost as fast. Rivers became oceans to streams to gusts of wind all around her, all suspended in the blackest void she’d ever felt. It was terrifying and confusing, yet paradoxically it made it all too much sense at the same time.
“I swallowed countless lesser beings, always to strike back harder at those who threatened me. Millennia passed, and I grew strong enough to strike down thousands of my equals, and take their power for myself while snuffing out the potential threats from beneath me.”
“You…you destroyed your own kind?” Winter asked, shocked. “Without remorse?”
“There is no remorse for one such as I,” the voice chided her. “Those not strong enough to survive were destroyed.” The visions shifted again, showing Winter a vast, swirling light source somewhere in the void. The closer she looked at the sphere, she started to notice tiny little tendrils of energy bleeding off it, flowing outward into countless small vortices of dust. Some of the dust clouds had other threads stretching out to dozens of other spheres, each with a different color and substance. Winter could sense each of them for what they were: the cores of creation, the voice had called them, the power these creatures could use to make whatever they wanted. “For eons the battles raged, shattering others and drawing their strength in, fighting for the strongest connection to the cores. The one who commanded it all could do whatever they imagined with eternity.
“Then, out of nowhere, the cataclysm began. Two spirits emerged.” As the voice continued to describe events, Winter saw what it said play out in front of her…a memory of history, before Equestria had even formed! Right on cue, two bright, shining vortices appeared, each gleaming white with a unique halo of colored light around the edge; one of red, and one of gold. “For ages nothing changed, the war went on as ever, but eventually it became clear these demons had begun to work together, defeating that which they could not do alone. They borrowed each other’s power, and lent it in return, as the two grew stronger and stronger.” The ages flashed by Winter’s eyes too fast to determine any individual battle, and all she could tell was that the two spirals…the two entities, were growing larger, stronger, their energy streams growing brighter even as they passed the threads back and forth between each other. “They destroyed countless of us, fragmented our forms and scattered us to the vastness of the void. Then, with the power they stole, they began to create, together.”
Sure enough, the spirit of gold began to weave matter, create a raw mass of material, letting the red spirit shape and mold the matter into shapes, some seeming strikingly familiar to Winter. “But the two did not destroy their work when they completed, instead allowing it to persist, and expand to fill all of creation."
"The birth of Equestria..." Winter gasped. She felt herself shaking, awestruck at witnessing an event that nopony could have imagined before or since...or at least, a memory of it.
"In the end, the pieces that were left of us were forced to take on a form or be lost to oblivion. But fractured as I was, my meager connections to the cores each became a separate material being, and were scattered across the land. For centuries I could still feel my other shards, each with a fragment of my essence along with it. But the ages past, and I lost contact with my other shards, until I could only sense one. Trapped in the physical plane I could not move, could not reach out to find my fragments, could not shape anything. I was trapped, here, on this mountain for centuries. I had lost it all to those demonic spirits.”
Winter's jaw hit the floor as the visions faded, returning her to the cavern all alone. She had just a moment to sift through the sheer amount of information that had been dumped on her, enough to keep Canterlot’s best historians busy for decades. But in her current state she just could not process anything that had just happened, only just able to process how she was somehow speaking to an elemental creature from beyond the beginning of her world! Questions flitted to the front of her mind, only to be bogged down and swallowed alive by the avalanche of other questions that followed, all drowning in a tide of mind-breaking awe and fear. Her words stopped working, and any slight noise she tried to make was muddled and meaningless before it even made it to her lips.
“But now, it is time for the chosen to fulfill their destiny, and free me from this torment,” the ancient elemental cackled at the tiny little ice pony.
Suddenly, the flood in her mind cleared, all of it stamped out by one massive question that filled every part of her brain. “It’s me, isn’t it? I’m your chosen, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” the elemental said bluntly. “This miserable world finally gifted me the chance to escape my eternal suffering. After millennia of waiting, you were delivered in close enough proximity for me to accept such a gift.”
“Proximity…” Winter latched onto the word, as her mind began to race. Her first thought was obvious enough: these whole two days had been this elemental’s fault. It had been doing this to her, with her, but that still left the question of why? Why had it chosen her, and when had it done so? “The stone at the exhibit,” she muttered. That was when this had all happened: the pain and the voices, the loss of her control, it had all happened because of that stone.
“Indeed,” came the reply. “That was my physical embodiment of my connection to the ice element of creation. The only one I have access to in this…disgusting fragmented state.”
“But why? Why would you pick me?” she asked. “You chose me over everypony else there, I felt you from so far away! Is it because of my ice powers?”
A loud, booming laugh echoed off the cave walls, causing Winter to cover her ears in pain. The elemental was laughing at her, but why? “You foolish creature,” it said, “your timescale is off. I chose you twenty years ago.”
Realization hit her like a cold ocean wave, so cold she actually shivered again, finally understanding. The first time she'd recognized seeing the rock was only two days ago, but the elemental inside it had encountered her long before then. Her mother had been curating the exhibit, the search for artifacts that had found the elemental's body here on this very mountain. The exhibit was as old as her...while it was being set up, Winter's mother must have been pregnant with her. That lined up with the elemental's story, especially as it continued.
"As your body developed, I was able to influence your growth, your rapid change and your frequent proximity made it simple to mold your form. I opened your mind, your very being, to the forces of creation. Your powers came from me, to make you a suitable one to be my chosen.”
Winter began to shake with fear, realizing she knew deep down what this thing had in mind for her. She still felt compelled to ask. “And…what was I chosen for, exactly? Why did you do all this to me?”
“You shall be my new vessel on this plane,” the elemental explained. “You shall be the physical form I require, the chance to regain my power and reclaim the world I desire."