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Apple Bloom ran for the longest time. For half-a-mile high, she traversed intricate, dizzying cliffs and sharp precipices that held no simple procedure, all with eight mere feet of sight ahead of her. Her path quickly thinned and merged into the mountain, where she was forced to leap from a thin layer of ice that provided ample requital for her carelessness, her desperation, as she clasped around a small crag near the summit. There was certainly no time to be thinking anything more than of her escape; how fast she could carry herself was not a question nor concern, but how far . . . When would the mountain either collapse or her ascent end?
"This must be exactly what they felt before they . . . passed on. For the second time. Again . . .”
She knew exactly for whom she thought of, but while she knew not why the mountain paths were conspicuously paved by hoof, she suspected her lost family to be behind them. While she had definitely laid eyes on them through her quick ascent up the mountain, they did not notice her. Powerful magic was present around them, though; she recalled few memorable words, but notably those that insinuated resurrection . . .
Just like Sweetie Belle, her body began suffering under the weight of her own long-docile nerves with each lash of the winds' barbs. She started slowing down while the storm still screamed for her assimilation; its crippling cold clutches were all over her, making up for subtle tangibility just as such. She would suffer any number of deadly fates if she let go of the obtrusion, but the pain was so pervasive through her frail frame that her blood boiled even under freezing flesh, and so she clumsily managed to climb on the frigid apex.
She was now at the top of the world, but for reasons reluctant. Her body was stressed so stout and her resolve stretched so slim, and while thoughts were conceived, not a single one escaped her mouth. Instead, she moaned through every aggressive exhale, scared and unprepared for her fate. But one last thing would offer her a mere thought of respite: a tiny building no more than a story high laid unscathed in the far distance, somehow.
“Is that . . . my old house?” She would briefly ask the when and why, but there was just no time to ponder any questions nor stipulate the details. “How? It couldn't sustain even this! I’ve gotta be dreaming . . . !” Nothing else in the world she could do to ail her predicament, she sprinted and stumbled toward its wide-open door.
But before she could reminisce on livelier times past, before she could revel in young memories of home, she would indeed dream. The incessant storm had long posed as a doomsday clock for the present day, and thus it had finally brought an end to all life on Earth.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Inevitable Inception~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
---Zenith---
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A decade later . . .
A lonely valley surrounded by mountains witnessed the emergence of dawn from the far distance, the tallest of horizons, but dusk did neither falter nor fade. The sierras reached as high as the quilted clouds, and above it all, the sun allowed only them to relish in its languid glory. But what glory the sun once truly held had long since wavered past the lifespan of many generations, weeping for their souls as it watched them pass from its insurmountable height. Perhaps the sun lamented incredibly so as to give the clouds such dense forms, to retreat from the single sovereign who brought about the lands' destruction. There were no words grandiloquent enough to have described the sprawling city, the scene to the horror . . . the remains of a kingdom, the end of an era . . .
“Where is it? The light of the Empire?”
The disgraceful ruler stole the magic — the very light and lives — of the city’s inhabitants so that his own could reign so thoroughly and mellifluously. Then, alone and uninterrupted, his body converted his victims’ stolen magic into a power he used so selfishly to bring an end to the world. The storms that raped and ravaged the continents were created by none other than the self-proclaimed king of what was now a wasteland without hope.
“We’re running out of time. Where are you, come on now . . .”
There were but several handfuls of survivors he was unaware of, who resided within Equestria’s central mountainous spire since before the cataclysm. Though they were spared the world’s fate, the shelter became much too cold to ensure the delivery of their coming kin, thus they were forced to brave the open world once more. They were lonely nomads, wanderers who at first had no common goal except to escape a growing ferocity within the country, to peacefully subsist. But as the males forged a new path to the outside, the first having been off blocked by ice, they came to realize there would be nothing left to fear, but everything more to endure. The females followed suit behind them, in such a file as to surround the single most important member of their community — the group’s only current-born child:
The name ‘Sweetie Belle’ rolled off the tongue so perfectly. It was so similar to a swan song . . . a perfect coincidence for their knowledge unbeknownst. She provided nothing less than their collective morale, their hopes and dreams for the future. She was the only ration and reason left to gamble away their lives, some of the last members of pony-kind.
“Stay close, Belle! Stay warm everyone, we’re almost there . . .!” The filly's father spoke heartily to the group behind him. He guided them through the blizzard with the brilliant light of his horn.
“Mmn, how much longer, mom?” The foal asked her father first, but assiduous in his precise task, he could not answer, in which she asked the same of her mother — any of the mares in the group acted as a mother. “Are we ever going to be warm again?” Poor, precious thing; she had yet to experience pleasant weather. And whether or not she would. . .
“Sweetie, I don’t know,” slurred a mare behind her, to her left. She was so cold, her mouth had almost sealed shut with frost twice. “He’s the only one who’s still strong enough to light the way.”
“I wish those stories you told me were real,” she whined. “The sun sounds like it could fix everything.”
“Oh, Sweetie, it could. It would . . .”
Any tatters that the group brought with them had blown away by the time Sweetie's father spoke of confident direction to take. They could tell that his confidence was truly faulted; every one of them was peering through the fog-like state of the world around them, scanning as best and as desperately as they could. Some felt hopeless and defeated, others valiantly battled the illusions that their weary minds were conjuring. They were lost, but they would not falter until they delivered Sweetie Belle to safety with undying hooves. Then the stallion called out once again:
“There’s something! Due northeast of here! Maybe . . . perhaps less than a mile!”
Sweetie called out with an energetic squeal. “Finally, the light balloon!! Over there, I see it!”
It was true: the group was suddenly witness to a moon-sized ball of light that beckoned them from a distance, from nothing and nowhere. The light punctured through rushing snow and shined upon their meek forms, with every ounce of physical and mental anguish seemingly soothing away, but only if they believed themselves to be healed, to believe in the light they saw. There was no reason to dispose of the opportunity.
“What say you, mister?” The group’s eldest member choked on the very breath she expelled. She approached the father, close enough to keep a low voice, but she was clearly the closest out of all of them to natural expiration. “This is how it ends, isn’t it? Acting on one more command from this child and we’ll be trudging our way toward a premature burial?!” Her demented delusions helped no one’s cause — she never seemed to be in as disheveled straits as the rest.
“Every one of us can see it thanks to her, Ma’am. You know how dire she is to our-”
“But this," she started, stuttering. "She is but a child! She is but only a few dozen moons old! She could not be the-”
“She is the catalyst for the queen’s divine intervention. The city, it speaks to her! The light speaks to her! We are much too close to douse the only semblance of sanctuary we’ve got, all on your whim.”
“She is accursed! Your queen is dead!"
“Superstitions! That is my daughter you speak of, how dare you, you wench! You've gone absolutely mad! With or without your seeds of doubt, it’s high time we drop your dead weight unless you fall silent and to the rear. You've just been lollygagging along expecting for a free ride . . ."
"Except that's exactly what I got, you buffoon."
Scorned and berated by the group of fellow nomads, she suddenly vanished, her ragged robes quickly blown away. But in an instant, though, each member became lost from one another as everything dampened to a monotone of gray. The clouds above grew colder trapping the cold below; the heartless wind kept blowing, becoming denser. And their sight, constantly flinching, narrowed to slivers of visibility with no peripheral.
“Dad!” Sweetie Belle leaped onto the body of the nearest mare and just climbed, hoping she could locate her father with higher ground. But in her urgency, she frantically shouted to the distance for an elongated moment; “The sun! It’s over there now!”
“Everyone, to me!” the father called, testing even his own bravery. His posture trembled in paralysis as he watched more and more shadows emerge and besiege him in a flash, coming close enough to start sapping his life away and make him kneel. But one by one, his group spared him this fate by circling him closer than the dark winds, each member feeling even more weightless and emaciated the more they staved them off them long enough for the stallion to plod to the rear of the group. “Get Sweetie to the front, she’s still holding on!” Everyone fixed their gaze on him but only for a moment of distress, all they were allowed, unsure of how to feel about what he intended to do at the rear of the herd. He was assigned to be the hero of their story, but Sweetie Belle retained the strength required to inherit the title. She didn’t know it, but he very clearly did — his actions shocked but also convinced the other members as well. “I’ll do what I can to keep you safe, now run!” Then he simply became enveloped within the dark winds, where they heard him call out for battle, perhaps fruitlessly, as the winds were an enemy that just one Unicorn could not fight.
Sweetie Belle was not alone in her disdain. She was not so young as to be so ignorant, having been raised in a nestled, nurturing cloister; the uncertainty of the world they set hoof into had already challenged her blind, immature faith. Yet, the hope she held in his favor diminished with every second they lingered on without his further cries. Sadness welled up inside her, for she did not know what regret was, nor how to process it. An overwhelming question held a crutch to their bodies and spirits, much like the freezing winds that grazed the former, but it wasn’t for very long. If they let sorrow consume them, so would the winds of death.
“Alright, Sweetie, lead the way!” The whole group had to convince and ‘cheer’ the filly onward, to guide them as she held high ground from the back of the mare she rode atop. Their support was paramount, superior to the weather's cacophonic solo that sought to steal another's voice for another duet . . . such a demand that would not be fulfilled. She understood the simple instructions given to her: to direct them to the giant, conspicuous ball of light. “He’ll catch up to us! He could never leave!” they promised her, and it was with those exact sentiments that she courageously shook her tears away and directed the mares' way with definition, just as her father had hoped for. Unbeknownst to her, however, her father would never return . . .
~~~~~~~~~~~
Sweetie valiantly continued to act as the group’s guiding light, with their formation preventing the winds from suffocating all of their senses. The winds at their back, however, howled louder than the rest: The evil behind them was quickly racing toward in stunning contrast to the wind, snow, and the bright, nauseating filter the sick sky cast over it all. Only when the mares made the sharpest turns would they have a chance to be spared abduction, but still their numbers diminished with the quarters of the miles they ran. Soon, they were reduced to two pairs plus Sweetie at the helm of their disorganized echelon, but even then, the mares at the rear were rapidly slipping from view. She called out, praying for their safety before she too slipped behind the blizzard. But it was also then that their destination came into sight, for everyone. A Bright light started basking their faces with an ample, balmy warmth, where they hoped to any god left alive that it would repel the evil behind them. And that would be true, but not soon enough to save another life.
Sweetie thrust her most anxious of voices off her lips. “Everyone, just a bit longer!”
“Fine! Go! Seal your own fate!”
The final few from the group finally felt a firm, sturdy surface to assuredly clop their hooves unto, the first thing their destination promised to offer. But like the figurative air of respite it granted them, they would face one final, literal assault. The shrieks of the old mare from their ranks had transmogrified into a scowl, staring them down from a ghostly, gaseous form. The violent winds continued chasing them, splitting in two as they made way for the shroud and quickly gaining mass. Then, with or without volition, they buried themselves as large icicles under the stone at oblique angles.
“He will find you.” The elder’s last sentence was nearly indecipherable, save for the conclusion she emphasized so carefully. “He will tolerate no mercy for the weak . . . for the child!” She then dissipated into nothingness, few small particles of her form entering the new terrain before the icicles surrounding them grew into the tallest of spears, so much as to prevent their escape. Her laughter reverberated from wall to wall, and while some mourned and cried over the lives she stole, most simply stayed silent, fearful, and uncertain. But they were safe now.
"I can't believe she took so many of us," a single mare caught her breath, everyone was. "What was she? That was her, right . . . ?" The question would merely hover among them like the still, composed air; the beating of their hearts slowed as they simply relished in the silence, however dreary, however faint. Contempt could not consume them during elongated moments, but sorrow in its stead. "We trusted her . . . Why did we ever?"
Sweetie Belle was anxious as ever, trotting around the wide empty plaza with naivety in her steps, avenues with boundless views in every direction she looked. The towering structures combined with her fearless, prevalent sense of wonder prodded the most possibilities at her imagination. She focused her gifted ‘sixth sense’ through the haze in the air, clearing her head and allowing her to peer through the same fog that proved to quickly ail the adults. They called for her, and she would guide them, once again, through the interconnected streets that even she would get lost in.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Every broken boulevard and every scarred street left the three mares to dream with disdain, as the architecture smothered them with listless, motionless air from all sides, as above and so below. Likewise, their tos-and-fros were comprised of moments that were quite literally frozen in time — not a single flake of snow fell from the sky while they cautiously studied their surroundings. Collections of images drawn on the ground in colorful chalk felt like ominous outlines where the dead once sprawled, and every couple of steps they took sent a small shock through their heads. The static air weighed on their focus so heavily that they swore the lingering fairy lights above were swaying in an evident absence of wind; the uncanny calm shook them possibly more than they had known. They deduced that they had been granted a particular kind of insight, for better or for worse, and even Sweetie witnessed various other happenings alongside the three mares. However, they suddenly felt nameless to her, so much more so than before . . .
“Belle?” asked the mare she rode aloft. “How do . . . you feel?” The filly quietly whimpered and whined, an effect that caused clear concern among the threesome. She quickly turned her head to face the adult, but she no longer recognized her face: she may as well have been staring into the abyss, the nothing that she saw . . . all until the shape of the head featured the face of a mare she did not know. Her displeased whines wore themselves thin quicker than she was prepared for, as she still recalled not a single thing from the face that was crafted for her study. She couldn’t look away.
With fur the color of bananas, a discernible face slowly emerged from exactly where she expected it to, detail by detail, orifices in their exact positions that greatly disturbed her. She looked away and down the street, her gaze remained stoic and unflinching, but she made the face out again, attached to a head upon the shoulders of a filly. She started to hear things, little whispers and murmurs incoherent all the same, but they remained only briefly — only until she saw another, smaller filly emerge from one of the alleyways would the whispers return as a choir, bombinating her awareness, belligerent enough to make her balance tire and throw her to the ground. Her plush mane cushioned her cranium, but her head felt so weightless and cloudy as if protection didn’t matter. She scrambled to her hooves, panting and stressed: the voices of her three guardian mares were still present, but those of malice had taken them over, beckoning her by name now. She couldn’t see the mares anywhere she looked, near or far, but the two fillies in the distance possessed the only eyes that her own frantic gaze would meet. They seemed closer, more imposing than before.
“What if they catch us?” one of them asked. Sweetie suspected the fillies to be talking with each other, but they both looked in her direction just before their mutual sentence ended, which came to reverberate within her ears. Her chest felt so compressed ever since her guardian’s final query, and when her surroundings started to cloud and turn to gloom, she held an answer deep within her heart.
“I feel fine . . ." Her focus was only an ounce. "I . . .”
“Where did you go, Sweetie? Did you escape?” The same voice, now incredibly hazy, continued to echo in her ears. Goodness, she wished she could escape the agony that slowly crept up her spine. Her legs suddenly felt gelatinous, pliant to her weight which held no direction. And so she stumbled carelessly, so easy to fall to the rough cobblestone pavement. She could have deciphered each meticulously drawn image on the ground, but alas a rush of ravaging, raving, angry voices prevented such composure. They also addressed Sweetie by her name, but they described her so crudely . . .
“There you are, Unicorn scum!”
Sweetie felt malice from this individual in the purest form she knew, the only one . . . but she stared ahead, dumb in consternation as she could not plunge herself into the darkness that came to blanket her forward path. She believed to be helpless, and when a bulky figure materialized behind her, plaguing her with even more slurs, her fate would surely be sealed if it weren’t for another . . .
“There you are, come on!”
“Face your end!”
Though lithe, the grip of a small hoof pulled her forward, shunning her from peril proposed. She then felt the force of another, heavier hoof swipe at her from behind, only striking at the curls in her mane. She quickly swung around to glance over the presence of an indignant stallion who would curse at her once more, but study the face of the filly who saved her, who praised her, who shared the same physical semblance that introduced itself before.
“Get ready to run, Sweetie,” she warned her by name, aware of the fact or not.
“Fugitive, you will not escape this place” the stallion asserted in a strained, but gentle voice. He didn’t appear to gasp for air at any point in his rage, though. “The rest of your kind is fallen, and we have no more use for you as it stands.” Another stallion emerged from a near alleyway, where a faithful smirk eased its way onto his face. He assessed the scene.
“You found her. Great. Now let me have at her.”
“Belle, come on!”
"Sweetie Belle, is it?"
With little left for her to try to make sense out of, she was coerced to follow the filly down the road, quickly pursued by the stallions. The stallions seemed to know of her by name as well, and whether she was a new arrival or an escaped ‘convict’ as they claimed, both realities would tie her to the city regardless. While they took a sharp left at the three-way road ahead, the stallions would divide and hope to conquer, and where there were angry promises of snuffing them out, the filly would provide a rebuttal, proving those words wrong as she led Sweetie away from their bounds, slowly and methodically.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Soon enough, the absence of cordiality once reciprocated many moons ago started taking a heavy toll on the Empire. The city’s glorious grandeur faded, colors blemishing and structures deteriorating. The air turned stale and unmoving, essentially becoming poisonous to the organic hearts of those who occupied our world. And hence, no others would visit the premises for years to come, with no discrimination between those who would pillage and those who only wished to see the sights of what they felt was foreign. The miasma spread from the city to consume the rest of Equestria’s northern region and all else that fell victim to its path.
Unfortunately, the rest of the land was no exception, and the remnants of the past quickly trampled over the foundations of the present. Stress and sorrow overwhelmed the young and the old, as all were susceptible — and all would succumb — to the unrelenting decay. The Pegasi could not speak of it to their friends and family soon enough before it invaded their cities and towns, and they could not save them before it did the same for their homes and their hearts. All were doomed to die; all was to be erased; everything that the past had sought to be would be relinquished by force.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“. . . Lest we stay here, the malaise will claim you just as it did them,” the young mare explained, her own lungs suspiciously heaving not one bit. “Sweetie,” she had more to add, “You still possess your magical abilities, but they’ll fade faster than we’ll be found out. You cannot be here.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Sweetie was confused but invested. However, she was also aghast. “Does my magic have to do with why I’m not already dead? Are you. . . ?" Another small silence without an answer drove Sweetie's mind to derive hypotheses. "You’re not choking or anything, are you . . .a ghost? My mothers told me ghosts can only live when the sun is away.”
“You’re a brash one. I’m the one who’s dead, so yes, I am indeed a ghost, and this is indeed no place for the living.” The filly peeked out from their simple cover of the abandoned chariot they hid in. She shook her head lightly, with the swishing of her mane giving Sweetie an intoxicating feeling, with the way it glided along her neck as she descended from her perch. “But Sweetie, we need to get out of here. I’ll join you in the outside world unless I must sacrifice my existence for yours.”
“Your life? But you're dead, though." At the filly’s stoic, uncompromising composure, Sweetie quickly came to regret the choice word. “Sorry, if you don’t have time to explain, I understand. It's just that . . .”
“You can't possibly remember, Sweetie, so you're forgiven. Now let’s make haste. This fool has his back turned.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
“The filly I met back then was one named Apple Bloom, and she did insist on explaining to me the importance — the utmost, absolute critical information — of a short, brutal era erased from history. She claimed to live during this lost period, inside the capitol of Equestria’s Frozen North, and also that not a soul happily occupied the thousands of ponies that trudged through promenades of snow in shackles and chains. Their bodies were mere fodder for a king that attacked the pregnable city and dethroned an absent ruler, but enforced strict order with blitzkrieg of a foreign, dark magic that had physical influence like no other. He could easily murder without devotion, as his unstable power often tantalized him so, but that power was the very reason that drove him to crush his very being. It was the perfect opportunity to end his brief reign, as the guilt of the lives he took weighed on him just as quickly, but ultimately to relinquish his own life. After all, his presence was thrust unto the world not by choice but by circumstance. Perhaps to reincarnate a greater evil, perhaps to fail, just as he always did.
His name was Sombra, and he was born from deepest shadows and the most brilliant of highlights, but for every wrong reason that plagued both him and the time he lived in. His years occupied with incessant desolation and despair, he sought after any means to an end that he felt couldn’t be any more necessary.
He devised many a theory over many months of starving our kind and forcing slave labor upon the city’s denizens. He ordered them to destroy anything and everything in order to unearth an ancient, umbral evil that dominated tall tales of the time, that laid in slumber just underneath their hooves. However, there was a much faster and effective practice that shaped the circumstances into that what he most desired. The children were the weakest bodies he could command, but although they shared the same fate as their parents, their misery would come to an end sooner, as so would their lives.
He whisked all the youngest Unicorns away and violently severed their connection to the well of magic that surrounded them, that surrounds us all: Their untapped, untainted potential would ignite his coal-black heart the fastest with every body inebriated, stripped of their birthright. Although he generally ‘feasted’ on those most magically adept, the power he quickly obtained would grant him his mortal desire for self-destruction, and so he would no longer discriminate against the ages and races of those he brought down with him. He prayed to his uncertain, agnostic conscience that any gods would be kind enough — blind enough — to absolve him of sin, to understand that he was serving for the good of pony-kind, but the thought quickly grew hopeless as his morals suddenly conflicted with his grand goal. His rationale long abandoned, he desecrated the children’s corpses by encasing them inside coffins of pure crystal, sapping their very souls in the process. It could have been an attempt to appease heavens above, but with fewer lives to devour, his infidelity in the divine and lust for gratification consumed him.
He attempted to remove the city from Equestria’s soil by sealing off all entry with hundreds of crystal caskets, with additional numbers including the very first souls that fell. Then, with enough power siphoned from the living, and the city surrounded by the dead, he unleashed a mass of magical might that was quickly absorbed by the crystals. An unexpected effect for true, but all success was guaranteed with his ability to lift the capitol with ease. He observed the casualties immediately wrought on the land, a great shroud of darkness racing to envelop every inch in its path. The city became surrounded in a fine mist, a byproduct of the over-saturated crystals, that essentially made it invisible and allowed exceptions for the laws of space. He held the city in stasis for nearly a year, suspended not only in space but apart from the outward influence of time as he watched the nation devolve to dark, windswept wastes, distracted only by his newfound narcissism and magnificence. Few survivors were silent, but most would cry; they would only have mere moments to profess their love to any family before Sombra would snap out of his daze and murder them. Their blood would finally sate his appetite, but their energy would only add to an ethereal flame that was already fading fast . . .
-----
Equestria’s Frozen North was always remembered for being governed by a strong, courageous leader who would never intend to rule, but when the capitol fell into certain disarray, he showed a certain weakness. He didn’t abandon his citizens, he would never . . . but when he suddenly vanished, so did the magical tales of the wonderful Crystal Empire: The lustrous buildings that emanated their own sheen. The worn yet pleasant streets paved with promise for all walks of life. Everything fell to decay even before Sombra’s rule — the wicked stallion had just acquired much more than the North. Though, the silence throughout would be comparable to the murmurs of very real ghosts, who undoubtedly had a place among the wastelands, for it was all they would ever have, ever again.
But now, where Apple Bloom’s tale ends is supposedly where my real mission begins. She could not accompany me to the outer worlds, as much as I wanted her to.
She was one of two very best friends, from that very trying time . . .
~~~~~~~~~~~