//------------------------------// // The Prophet // Story: Children of the Sun // by Silent Whisper //------------------------------// The Solarium was exactly as it should be: a quiet, bustling hub of busy ponies. It was a fairly well-lit room, with pinpricks of light dotting the ceiling. Stars, the unicorn artists had called them, pouring mana into each and every tiny speck of light. They did little to illuminate the deep grey cavern walls, slick and shined with the breath of thousands of ponies. Years of carving and chipping away had made it awe-inspiringly large; so tall and wide that six or seven pegasi could fly over each other without touching anypony. It was a testament to the Sun’s might, the work of past generations to herald a new future. A Prophet long ago had foretold that this was to be where we’d gather when we finally beheld our Goddess’s light. The Solarium was built, the literal height of ponykind’s accomplishments, far above the depths where most ponies lived out their lives. Only the most important were allowed up here, closest to the surface and to the Sun, and I was honored to trot among them, no matter what they thought of me when my back was turned. I sat, as I often did, at the base of the great staircase. It was polished and worn smooth by the dull thundering hooves of the Acolytes, who forever paced up and down their steps, carrying their burdens of dust and stone. Their packages - mostly borne upon earth pony strength - held the debris of the tunnels that spiraled up towards salvation. The value of their endurance could not be overstated, and though some grew sick with a cough that never fully went away, still they tunneled up, up, up towards the heavens. Not even Dustlung could stop the Acolytes from their work. My hooves brushed dust off the tattered blankets I sat upon. It was a place of honor, steeped in tradition, being up here, but the problem with being so near the Acolytes and their rocks was that dust got everywhere. It never seemed to brush out of clothes or fur, either, and I’d spend a good long while tonight, just as I did every night, trying to get the feeling of dust and stone and impurity out of my fur and out of my head. At least I had a filtration spell worked into my outfit to keep my lungs from feeling the effects the Acolytes so often did, but the spells did nothing for the actual cloth they were cast upon. My robes were extremely delicate, which made the dust even more of a hassle to scrub out than if they were some Acolyte’s rags. I did my best to push the thoughts of cleaning from my mind, and instead focused on my connection with my Goddess. I pushed the gentle rumble of hoofsteps and stone out of my mind and relaxed on my blanket. Breathe. In, then out. Focus. Maybe today I’d hear something. My Goddess wouldn’t leave me without insight yet again, surely. Nothing. There was nothing to answer my internal peace. No calm, regal voice, no flicker of warmth or light, no comforting, pale blue eyes, no anything. Granted, that was the usual result of my meditation, but it still irked me every time it happened. Having a deep mental connection with the Goddess herself wasn’t easy, and my predecessor had even less success than I’d had so far, but it was still frustrating. Any bit of news from the surface was always met with rejoicing. The churches would be crowded the evening it was announced, filled to the brim with devoted worshippers, each proclaiming the glories of the Sun, the Goddess, and the Elements that brought them hope. Everypony around me would be buzzing about the snippets of information I’d brought to them, and they would talk of little else for weeks. Goddess knows they could use something else to talk about. There were rumors of food shortages, of stale air and disease. Such rumors only brought dissent, which brewed trouble. I’d heard of it before, though it’d grown more and more frequent. There would be louder and more aggressive disagreements in bars that would spill into other ponies’ jobs and recreational time. A few ponies may even hold up signs in protest of the unfairness of the world before being brought to prison and encouraged to reconsider their actions. It would be chaos, and chaos caused inefficiency, which in turn brought only more trouble for everypony. Personally, I wished everypony would just pick a sacred Element to follow and aspire to, and be done with it. The world was far simpler with such purity in mind. A flurry of uneven wingbeats was my warning before a pony skidded to a graceless stop in front of my blanket. A gust of dust-choked air battered at my hooves, and I fought against the urge to cough. Coughing would be undignified. I slowly opened my eyes and gazed serenely into the messenger pegasus’. “May the Sun be with you,” I said, with a bit more of a croak than I’d intended. Ah, yes, what’s-her-face. A what’s-her-face I vaguely recognized. “The High Priestess wants to see you,” chirped the pegasus, shaking her wings off. She straightened her slightly-askew satchel and stared at me with slightly-askew eyes. I managed a mysterious smile at the pegasus, who beamed back at me. At least she wasn’t an unkind common pony. She seemed happy to be up in the Solarium, and I could imagine part of the reason why. Pegasi didn’t seem to enjoy being cooped up in tunnels, where flying down them meant risking clocking a pony on the back of the head with a hoof or wing. Still, I’d take a happy pegasus over a sore earth pony or an overworked unicorn any day. Perhaps, I thought, that’s why the High Priestess usually sends this one. She always seemed to understand which ponies annoyed me the most. I stood up and shook myself off, as subtly as I could manage. I resisted the urge to frown at the thin cloud that rose from my robes. It couldn’t be helped. Dust was just meant to be, and for now, it was meant to be away from me, and I from it. I followed behind the pegasus at a brisk walk, not stopping to acknowledge the Acolyte who almost bumped into me. He made a face, but continued on his path towards the steps leading skyward. I mentally braced myself as I stepped out of the door of the Solarium and through the gently sloped hallway. I tried to make it look effortless, as though I was gliding across the floor. Every once in a while, though, I snuck a glance at the rough floor of the hall. It wouldn’t do for a Prophet to trip and fall flat on her face. The pegasus in front of me hummed blissfully to herself, unaware of the stares directed at me. Part of me pitied the messenger for being so ignorant of the importance of my presence, but another quieter part of me wished I could be that carefree still. Then I could sit with other ponies at the dining hall, laugh about things the communication broadcast said, gossip and relax between working shifts and sleeping shifts. What must it be like to have those I could rely on, and be relied upon in turn? As quickly as the thought came, I pushed it from my mind. I was, after all, too unwavering in my faith to worry about such things. The Sun came first, always. Praise the Sun. Get to the surface. Meet my Goddess. Those were the only things that mattered. We passed the newer halls and chambers and began spiraling deeper downward through the hallway, to the older parts of the tunnels. I followed the messenger down to the Control Hub. It used to be the highest room in our civilization, but the ponies before me had gotten tired of continuously moving the furniture from room to room as their ancestors burrowed higher and higher, so here it sat, around the higher levels of where most ponies lived their lives. The door opened with a whine as we entered. It was empty of ponies, save for the High Priestess herself. The walls were lined with blinking lights, signaling various purposes that I couldn’t fathom. Cords wound their way to nowhere. Some, I suspected, formed a powerless loop around the room, though each time I tried to follow one with my eyes, I quickly got mixed up. Charts and maps were taped and glued to the wall haphazardly, some sagging down and rotting from the weight of time and decay. A folding chair was set up behind a table in the center of the room. If somepony in the past hadn’t taped a sign that said “High Priestess’s Desk” on it, nopony would have been able to discern it from any other table and chair. It wasn’t fancy, and it wasn’t particularly neat, but that was okay with the High Priestess. She wasn’t the sort of pony to fuss about appearing all-knowing and religious, much to my annoyance. She also preferred the title “Big Boss” to High Priestess, and that annoyed me even more. If I was being honest, she didn’t exactly look like High Priestess material, anyway. Her mane was frizzy and kept in an unkempt halo around her head. She had forgone the more traditional ornate robes for a bright magenta trench coat and a pale cream shirt underneath. The only thing that truly marked her as the High Priestess at all was the heavy necklace she wore. The silver and black woven cords hung with the weight of a spherical stone bauble, the traditional sign of the leader of the Church of Daylight. “Good Day, High Priestess,” I began, steeling myself as best as I could for the peculiar sort of conversation we traditionally had. “I’ve been called to speak with y-” “Oh, Twilight,” giggled High Priestess Pinkie Pie, waving a hoof between us. “You don’t need to be quite so formal. It’s just us. And, well, Ditzy. Thank you, Ditzy. You can go ahead and send the other message I told you to, and then take your lunch break, okay?” The pegasus messenger saluted her and trotted off up the hall. After the door whooshed shut behind the mare, Pinkie Pie continued. “Any new revelations from our Goddess and the world above, Twilight? You know I love hearing good news.” I shook my head, mentally kicking myself for not being able to somehow do more. Pinkie Pie’s mane deflated a bit, and her smile looked a little more forced. I swore I could hear a tinge of exhaustion in Pinkie Pie’s voice as she replied. “Well, it never really hurts to ask, does it? Ponies aren’t exactly happy these days, and every little bit of goodness can help with that! My friends down in the mechanics division said that some ponies are so sad, they don’t even want to do their work! Maybe - and this is just a rumor, but it’s what my friends are telling me - they’ll all stop working at the same time, to try to get something better to happen! Isn’t that awful?” Pinkie Pie paused, as if waiting for me to answer, but when I didn’t supply anything immediately, she went on. “But there’s always something good, isn’t there? We’re working towards the surface, and working to see the sun again. And my High Priestess Sense told me something absolutely wonderful today! You wanna know what it told me?” Pinkie Pie leaned forward, almost knocking the paper sign off her desk. “It said that we’re going to break through to the surface. Today.” I couldn’t help it. Despite my years of practice at keeping my composure, my jaw dropped. Quickly, I closed it again, but I couldn’t keep a smile from growing on my face as the news sank in. “Really? That’s incredible! I wish the Goddess had said something about that, but maybe she didn’t notice! This is great news, and, and…” I trailed off. Pinkie Pie wasn’t bouncing around quite as much as she should have been. “What’s wrong? This is the best news any of us have ever heard!” “Well,” began Pinkie Pie, tracing a circle on her desk with a hoof. “The thing is… we aren’t going to tell anypony about this. Not yet.” “But why?” I sputtered. “This is important! Wouldn’t everypony be really excited about all of this? You wouldn’t need to worry about ponies striking, or protesting, or any other crimes against the Church!” “Honestly, Twilight, why would they want to strike somepony?” scoffed Pinkie Pie. Before I could elaborate, she held up a hoof and gave me the sort of no-nonsense look that only a caffeine-deprived mare in charge could give somepony. “It is exciting, but I was thinking about the logistics of it all. If everypony knew that we were about to breach the surface and be able to go home, wouldn’t they all rush up to go see it? Would they hurt somepony as they raced to be the first to see the sunlight? What if somepony got trampled, or left behind? That wouldn’t be very nice at all. “Besides, and I know this will sound a little like heresy, but what if the surface isn’t as pretty as we all hope? I don’t want everypony to be disappointed. And we’ve all got to get ready before we go up there anyways, because we don’t know what we’ll find. Then we can be Honest! We just have to wait until we have the whole story first.” Pinkie Pie beamed at me, and I could’ve sworn her mane inflated a little bit. “So, that’s why I’ve decided you get to be the first one up there!” “What? Me?” I started pacing, trying to keep the nervous edge out of my voice. “That doesn’t make any sense! Shouldn’t it be you? Then you could give a better report to everypony. Besides, you’re in charge! And I’m not as important as you, or anything like that! I don’t know what to do or say up there. Do I just peek, or do I walk around up there and then come back down and-” Pinkie Pie’s lighthearted laugh broke me out of my panicked rambling. “Twilight. You’ll be fine. I may be our Big Boss and High Priestess, but you’re our Prophet pony! Our All-Seer! You have a connection with the Goddess that nopony else has! If she’s up there waiting, you should be the one to see her. Besides,” Pinkie Pie shrank back at her desk and fidgeted awkwardly. “I think they’ll believe it more if it comes from you. Ponies wouldn’t believe it if it came from me, but from you? We’ll believe anything.” I coughed and slowed my pacing before I wore hoofprints into the floor. “I guess that makes sense, but you said we’d break through to the surface today, right? When am I supposed to go up there and take a look around?” Oh, please be later tonight or something, give me a moment to wrap my head around this, I mentally pleaded. “You can go right now, okay?” Pinkie Pie said, kicking her hooves under her desk. “I told Ditzy to tell the Acolytes to stop working and take a break, and they didn’t seem to mind that as much as when I tell them to work harder, for some reason, so you should be alone when you’re up there. And, if my High Priestess Sense is correct, you should be only a few hits from the surface. You can use your unicorn magic to do that, right? So go on!” Pinkie Pie sagged a little and propped her head up with her hooves. I wondered when she’d last slept. Did her High Priestess Sense keep her up at night? Should I get her some coffee or something? Was it obvious that I was mentally stalling? Pinkie Pie smiled gently, and for a moment I felt that she understood me a bit more than even I understood me, but then waved her hoof towards the hallway. “We’re so close, Twilight. Please. For all of us. I’ll be waiting here for your report, okay?” I got the distinct sense that I was being dismissed, and turned to leave. Before I made it out the door, I could’ve sworn I heard the High Priestess whisper. “Please, Celestia, please let Equestria still be up there.” Then the door hissed shut behind me, and I was lost again in a haze of my own thoughts.