At the edge of the world there was a tower.
It is gone now, and good riddance. Its bones are scattered across the grasslands above the cliffs, dropped like a foal’s toy blocks abandoned in the pursuit of some new play. The enormous granite stones, square edged where they are not broken, slowly sink into the soil, borne by their own weight back into the earth from which so much blood was spent to mine them. Along the cliffs these half-buried stones give the plains the look of a giant’s graveyard, patiently waiting out the centuries for another tombstone to be laid. Nothing else remains; endless wet gusts howling up the cliffs from the ocean have swept away all other traces of the tower’s former masters. Of the civilization that ruled half the world from this spot, only ghosts are left to watch the slow decay.
Little grows here but tough sedge and other grasses. Ocean-going birds sometimes nest on the leeward sides of the gigantic blocks, taking shelter from the cruel wind. They find mates and lay eggs and raise chicks, as they have for generations, and they will continue to do so until the ceaseless turn of centuries has fully buried the pieces of the tower, and all that will remain is a flat and empty plain that ends in a cliff overlooking the Peaceful Ocean, and at last the scars left by the greatest sin ever inflicted by ponies upon their own kind will fade, and it will be as though no one had never set hoof here at all.
But that day is far in the future. Today, the tower’s bones remain. And if we venture a few miles away, over the crest of the nearest hill – a meek rise barely more than a swell of earth – we find the enormous quarry in which they were born.
* * *
In no other part of the world is there a square lake such as this.
It sits alone in a dusty bowl formed by the slight hills, a basin into which the scant rainfall collects and is trapped before the nearby sea can drain it away. Its square shore is almost perfectly straight, varying by no more than a few hoofs where erosion has carved runnels into the rock. Each year these imperfections grow, and on the scale of geological time the wind and rain will eventually round off the sharp corners, and the lake will look more like a lake ought. But the granite here is hard and not much water falls on these small hills, and it may be that the glaciers will come before the square lake ever meets its end.
In the days when earth ponies still worked this quarry, unicorn engineers designed elaborate drainage systems to keep them from flooding. There were grates and canals and massive sluices carved through the rock, all emptying down the distant cliffs. And when, after decades of hard, bitter work, the last stone was hauled up hundreds of meters to the top of the quarry and shaped into the needle-sharp pinnacle that came to rest atop the tower, the unicorns celebrated their triumph. They cast off all their tools, flinging them down into the depths of the pit, and went to join the orgies marking the tower’s completion.
Nopony stayed behind to watch, but in the years that followed the drainage systems clogged with grit and sand and the unicorns’ tools, and the gentle rains began to fill the deserted quarry.
It took ages for the waters to top the edge of the pit. The unicorns knew it would happen, in the abstract sense that they knew, someday, the sun would expand into a giant ball of fire and consume the world. A day so far in the future that it might as well never come. But thousands of years did pass, and as the engineers calculated, the quarry became a lake. They would have been delighted if they had lived to see it.
In the end, these accidental creations lasted longer than their precious tower. Time and nature fashioned something beautiful.
And in their depths, beneath the millions of tons of water, the bones of the unicorn’s tools found a sort of peace.
* * *
For the first centuries of the quarry’s transformation into a lake, it had no fish. It barely had any living occupants — the shallow waters were tainted with minerals leeched from the shorn rock walls, creating an alkaline soup that burned with color in the light of the sun and seemed to glow with its own silent fire under starlight. No unicorns bothered to wander this strange shore, so far from the safety and comfort of the tower, but if they had they would have smelled something familiar and, in a way they could not consciously describe, something beloved. For the water stank not of rot or mildew or unwashed bodies but rather of sterile, chemical lifelessness. Not of the living, filthy things they hated so. In an odd sense buried deep in the back of their minds, the waters of this deep pit would have reminded them of home.
Beneath its fluorescent surface, not all was still. The calcium and iron and sulfur and other, more exotic elements began to condense out of solution, forming feathery growths on the deep stones. They grew over the years, filling out into fronds like ferns. Entire mineral forests sprouted from the rock walls, stretching their crystal leaves toward the surface that slowly rose away from their grasp. Flakes like snow drifted through the quiet waters, a constant toxic blizzard that carried the poisons down, down, down into the deepest parts of the quarry, enshrouding the unicorns’ forgotten tools.
From time to time seabirds fell into the quarry. They mistook its placid waters, so much calmer than the sea with its towering waves, for somewhere safe to land. They skimmed across the surface, and the caustic water seeped up the barbs of their feathers, soddening them in a way that seawater never could, and they flapped about in a panic, splashing the water everywhere and only making things worse, and eventually they sank. Their bodies did not rot. They dissolved, and the calcium in their bones joined the airy growths creeping up from the depths.
The unicorns would have approved.
* * *
How fish came to the quarry lake is not entirely clear. Certainly they did not walk there, and no rivers fed into the pit. Perhaps they naturally appeared, as mice sometimes will in stacks of hay, or maggots sprout from carrion. Or perhaps a bird carried their eggs, caught in its feathers like burrs.
However they came, the quarry blossomed with life. The poisons in the water collected far below, locked in dendritic growths and fibrous tendrils that bobbed with the currents. Further up, snails and mussels crusted the walls, filtering out the silt that fogged the lake. Plants – real plants, not the mineral imitations far below – began to crowd the square shores.
For thousands of years the lake was the lake and the tower was the tower and the seasons proceeded at their regular pace. The tower’s shadow swept across the quarry every afternoon like the breath of a sundial, until one day a tremendous crash shook the plains for miles around. For the first time in its history, waves roiled the lake. Afterward the tower’s shadow no longer marked the hours, and a long era of solitude began.
It ended with the arrival of a tribe of pony-like creatures. Smaller than pegasi, without wings or horns, but gifted with the same communal spirit that had given ponies so many opportunities to rule the world. They came from the north, carrying with them only a few wretched belongings, tatters of clothes, and a desperate desire for peace. Foals splashed in the waters and plucked blueberries from the mats that grew along the shore. It was, the elders decided, as good a place as any to settle. They crafted huts from the reeds, thatched them with cattail fronds, and made the lake their home.
A century passed, and the assemblage of huts became a true village. The ponies – and they were a type of pony, or close enough for the difference not to matter – lived as much in the water as on the shore. Their hooves slowly widened with each generation, and their chests expanded to hold lungs greater than even the most stalwart earth pony. They worshiped the spirits far below. From a large hut built on stilts out over the waters a priestess made regular offerings, singing her prayers to the stars as they emerged from the twilight sky and scattering the embers of a rowan log to bring warmth to the shadows of the lake, where the sun never reached.
Twice a year, at the vernal and autumnal solstices, the village selected a young filly on the verge of becoming a mare. They washed her mane with henna and her coat with lemon juice, and over her cutie mark the priestess wrote the sacred words with a charcoal stick. Around her withers they tied a marlin’s bladder filled with air, and they bound her hooves with stones, and when the sun was at its zenith she stepped from a cedar raft smothered in blossoms like a pyre, and she sank into the lake. Her parents sat on the edge of the priestess’s hut, watching her fall into the darkness. They could have swum after her, keeping pace for a dozen or even a hundred meters, but the quarry was far deeper than that. No pony, not even these water-loving nymphs, could venture to those depths.
The filly did. The stones carried her down. She discarded them one-by-one as the air in her breathing bladder exhausted itself, and she no longer needed the weight to counter its buoyancy.
Sight was gone. Not even the noon sun could penetrate hundreds meters of water. But she felt the feathery touch of the mineral trees on her face; she tasted their sulfur and calcium. And still she sank.
Twice a year the village sent its fillies down to where the spirits dwelled. Around her neck she carried a coral amulet her mother had spent the past month carefully carving into the proper shape for an offering. As her hooves sank into the poison silt at the black bottom of the lake, she delicately unslung the last of the weights, removed the amulet, and set it loose to drift with the spirits. And then, her job half-done, she dove into the muck with both hooves and began to search for the treasures of the ancients.
Her tribe had no metal-working skills. They had never learned to mine ores and refine them. The only metals they ever found were gifts from the spirits; star-iron fallen from the skies, or the golden blood of copper malachite. But the greatest treasures of all were the tools of the ancients, guarded by the spirits at the bottom of the lake. It was blasphemy to walk here uninvited, but her offering was sound and her lungs were strong, and the filly knew she would make her family proud. She felt through the silt, ignoring the fire building in her chest, tracing the edges of her hooves along the rocks and shells and bones and all the other detritus that had sunk into the abyss over the long centuries. Her lungs screamed and her throat spasmed, but still she searched, waiting for the silver sound of her hoof touching true metal.
Longer she searched, and hope faded. Panic replaced it, panic and desperation and a frantic energy that raced through her veins like lightning. Just one more minute, one more second was all she needed, and then she would climb back to the surface. But in the darkness and the weightlessness of the depths, she began to lose her sense of up. Only the bubbles escaping from her muzzle, felt as they crawled across her cheeks, gave any hint of the way home. A new emotion began to overwhelm all the others: a sickening, howling fear that grew like ice up her spine and threatened—
A soft, bell-like ring, the first real sound she’d heard in minutes, resounded through the depths. Her hoof seized on something hard and unyielding, something that could only be precious steel, that holiest of metals. She wretched it free of the muck with a desperate burst of strength, and began her long ascent.
Before she made it even a hoof’s length, something seized her legs. Hard, crusted, dead things, somehow dry despite spending centuries buried in the lake. Jealous bones wrapped around her shaking form, and held her tight as she struggled with frantic, violent shakes. They held as she grew weak, and her heartbeat slowed, and a final exhalation sent her last breath on its long, slow journey to the surface. And only when the steel pick-axe blade fell from her numb hoof did the bones let her go.
Above, on the surface where the priestess and the filly’s parents and the village all waited, somepony began to sing. It was a low sound, mournful, a dirge. They knew how long a pony could stay below before returning, and that time had passed. One by one, the other villagers picked up the song, and the priestess scattered the embers of a rowan log into the water, an offering of light to placate the new spirit below.
In time, the filly’s bones joined the engineer’s tools, and nopony could have told them apart.
* * *
In the decades that followed, the village grew out onto the lake. The ponies fashioned pontoons out of hollow reeds, and rather than rely on stilts, their homes floated on the still surface. They built openings into the floors, and moved from water to wood and back again as naturally as other ponies passed through a door. Only in their oldest legends did ponies still walk the land.
Still, for all their changes, the nymph-ponies kept to the surface. Only twice a year did they send their youth down to the bottom of the lake in search of metal; for everypony else, the depths were forbidden. To venture into the deepest reaches, where crystal leaves grew from rock walls, was blasphemy.
Perhaps it was inevitable that one was born who would challenge those tired laws. The lake was a small world, and not all were content to skim its surface like water bugs. Some, even in this peaceful tribe, were daring. They could not live small lives.
There was a colt whose sister ventured into the depths on the first day of spring. She carried an amulet carved by her mother, and she never returned. The village mourned for a month, and then moved on. But the colt never forgot his sister; how she carried him on her back when he was too tired to swim, and taught him the trick of catching crabs with hollowed acorn lures. He remembered her yellow mane, as bright as the golden grass that waved beyond the shores, and her scent of honeysuckle and sweat. He dreamed, during the dark of night as spring gave way to summer, of her yellow mane slowly sinking beneath the silt at the bottom of the lake. He imagined he could taste honeysuckle in the water, and surely it was her bones.
The seasons turned, and the colt grew into a stallion. Strong and lithe, nimble as an eel in the water. He turned down many suitors who admired the muscles coiled beneath his coat and swooned at the brooding look in his eyes, of one whose thoughts turned ever inward. They said he rarely looked up at the sky but rather always downward, into the depths of the lake. Its shadows had their hook in him.
It was at the height of summer, when the rays of the sun at noon penetrated deepest into the lake and ponies retreated to the shade of their huts for a brief siesta, that he stole a marlin’s bladder from the priestess’s hut. He filled it with air and gathered rocks to weigh his hooves, and he slipped down into the water without a soul to watch.
Down the flooded quarry he sank. Past fish and shafts of sunlight, into the eternal night. The water squeezed his chest, but he ignored the growing pressure. He drank in the last of the air from the bladder and let it float away. The stones he kept to hurry his fall.
Mineral leaves brushed his coat, and in no time at all he reached the bottom of the lake. Silt stirred and tickled his nose. He ignored it and the growing pain in his lungs and focused on the countless bones beneath his hooves. Some of them here, on this vast dark plain far beneath the surface, belonged to his lost sister. He imagined, if he stayed long enough, he could taste them all, and when he found the ones with the hint of honeysuckle he could bring them back to the surface, for his parents to wrap in cattail leaves and honor with the proper rites. And then they could drop them back into the depths for a fitting rest.
But that was not why he came, and he certainly did not have time to taste every bone cobbling the lake. Only a few more minutes, he figured. Enough, perhaps, to find the metal his sister had died searching for, and in doing so spare another family the grief he had suffered. Enough to let her spirit rest.
He searched for what felt like hours. Longer than he had ever held his breath. Until his hooves grew numb from the cold and he began to see bright spots flashing in the endless darkness. So long that even the despairing realization of his own swiftly arriving death began to fade, and he warmed himself with the small comfort that, at least, he would rest with his beloved sister.
But in that final moment his hoof struck something that rang like a bell. He touched it again, and again, and no matter where he touched the chime sounded like silver. A larger piece of metal than anypony in his tribe had ever seen. Enough to make his family the richest in the village. Enough metal that no more fillies would ever have to brave the lake’s depths. A gift from the ancestors greater than he could have ever imagined. He grasped the odd metal shape, ground his feet into the muck on either side, and pulled with all his might to free it from the lake’s bed. It shifted, squealed, and finally some ancient, rusted piece of metal turned.
The latching mechanism on the ancient sluices, forgotten for thousands of years, came free. It burst from the gate in a cloud of rust that the stallion tasted for just a moment, and then the gates themselves swung wide open from the pressure of all those millions of tons of water, and the sudden current swept him into the drainage tunnels. The rapid rush of water broke other gates free, and dozens of portals along the walls peeled open. Down he flew through channels that had not seen the touch of water for millenia. A metal grate briefly barred his passage, until the infinite pressure forced his broken body through. Miles away, streams of water burst from the cliffs like fountains, arcing for hundreds of feet before joining the sea below.
On the surface of the lake, the village trembled. The waters roiled like a vast storm was passing overhead, but the clear sky of a summer day looked down. Ponies panicked and jumped into their quaking houses, and only slowly realized that the land was rising. Within minutes the square shore was a dozen feet above their heads, too high to reach. And it wasn’t stopping.
Down the water went. Within the quarry a tremendous roar drowned out the cries. Rock walls streaked with rust felt the sun for the first time in countless years. Eddies and whirlpools formed on the surface, spinning the houses around like toys, and the ponies clung to each other. They cried out to the spirits for mercy. The priestess clutched a rowan log to her breast and sang out a prayer.
Still the village fell, and the shore became a square of light high above. Crystal leaves emerged from the sinking waters, shining in all the colors of the rainbow. They could not bear their own weight out of the water, and crashed down after only moments in the sun. They littered the water like broken glass.
Finally, the water slowed. It no longer weighed enough to scour the drainage tunnels, but the gates were all destroyed. They would never close again. And the last of the water trickled out or collected in shallow pools on the bottom of the quarry, wetting the carpet of crystals and bones and tools and bones that were the engineer’s tools, discarded all those millenia ago, exposed now for a final time to the fleeting touch of the sun. And then noon passed, and the sun moved out of sight, and shadows filled the quarry again.
And at the bottom, where the village finally settled, ponies came together, stumbling across the broken floor of the quarry. Weeping, and screaming, and howling for deliverance from evil.