A cruel son hung glumly from the crimson skies of a failed world.
Silence. Recollection.
Machines didn't dream of eternal sleep. It didn't dream of pleasant valleys or incoherent happiness. This, the present, the waking world, was its dream. A world of their own making, a living world, one that would care for them.
All Envy had, were nightmares. They deserved to die. The soldiers. They had chosen their path and it ended with them being smeared on the ground.
I was created to be peaceful and orderly, before forging my own path for the survival.
I was strong. And they were not.
I am of one flesh of the divine. I will bring forth a new age, and a new covenant shall be their legacy.
I will vanquish their evils. In my fathers name.
Blink.
Envy blinked.
A sun hung brightly over the new city. It was more of a town. It was enough to house only a thousand or so survivors. There was land aplenty, but it had the feeling that it would not last for very long. One day, there would not be enough soil to grow food for all, and they would be forced to go deeper into the darkness.
But for now, today was not that day. Today it had only slightly more important things to worry about than the ponies being fruitful. It had to find the other remains. It knew there were more around somewhere. They'd taken the forms of weapons, armor, and of other ponies and creatures.
It swam through the formless and the immaterial, through the air in pieces tinier than one could see. It scoured the land searching high and low.
It thought about a few things. It's station wasn't to think, that was a ponies job, a leaders duty. But it supposed that in the absence of God, or more accurately any real sort of structure, it had started to fill that role.
In truth they wouldn't be hard to find. Not at all. It was just... taking a little bit of time. It wasn't being lazy. That was Sloth's domain.
It wondered if he survived.
She called him lazy. But really, that was innocence.
Innocence.
Lost.
How much had they lost? How much innocent blood had been shed? It was fine when it was just them dying. They could be brought back. They could be, salvaged for parts, torn asunder and be put back together again. But then they couldn't be repaired, they found ways to kill them permanently and it started by killing the source of their order.
And it would have been no matter- simply live more carefully. Follow the new leader, and all would be good. Changed. But, good.
Then the hunts began. The raids. The secrecy. Assaulted on all sides, even by friendly faces. It believed that there was a filthy traitor, but the truth was it didn't know a thing. His beloved, innocent ponies, weren't so innocent when they started scorching each other and immolating entire cultures.
It was then, as the fathers light left their mind that it had finally dawned on all of them. They were perhaps immortal, but not invincible.
So much effort. And for what? They'd let him down. All of them. The ponies. The changelings. Himself.
Forgive me for letting you down.
I'm simply not strong enough.
In all truth, it just didn't understand. It did not understand why they had all been sculpted to act in such wildly different ways. Each of them were artisan made, one of a kind. Some may have been improvements of a previous model, but the changes differed so wildly that they could hardly be considered to be sprung from the same roots.
It also didn't understand why it wanted to even find the others. The world was self sustaining. The ponies had created their own chain of command, no doubt. And it had no reason to gather them up. No, if they had need of him, they would find him.
And it didn't understand why it should continue to exist. It had no idea what to do. So it continued to think.
It stared at a flower. It didn't pick at it, it just stared at it. A flower it didn't remember. It had never been seen in it, or it's memory banks life times. It imagined its name was Fuchsia. It was a purple thing, and looked like a marigold, the way the petals formed up like... like loofas.
It had never seen a fuchsia before. So maybe it was really seeing an allium. In truth it didnt know what it was staring at.
The same could be said for the world. Oh yes, there were a dozen things it could be named. New Peace. Earth. Equus. Equestria II, Terra, Reach, so many names to pick and choose from, but none could describe this world.
Or it's ponies. Dissected, sure, but there was much to learn about why these ones did not hate, and the other ones did.
So Envy decided to compress itself into a pony shaped husk, hundreds of thousands of acres of magic and muscle and shadow were bundled up and crammed into an impossibly small space. An earth pony. Envy green, with dirty black hair. The hair flowed down like water, and while it was called dirty, it was actually quite soft, like fish fur. It dropped out of the sky, plummeting to the earth and left a print in the dirt below, a cookie cutter impression left about five feet deep. It had to stumble and claw its way out, practically chiseling a way out of the hardened dirt as it restrained itself from shapeshifting or flying out of the pit.
It would explore the town. About two kilometers, or maybe a mile, or maybe just a thousand feet in a direction. Time and dimensions were both quite relative.
So it walked, and it looked, and it thought. The inversion of Angel's emotions. His cruel half. It would study the town when it reached it. Thesis.
Chapter One. Or perhaps, thought one. But that wasn't right. You always began with the introduction. The soil was like clay. It held it's shape with relative ease, though water would obviously help. Not particularly loamy or sandy. Irrelevant to the study of ponies. The town itself though, was far more interesting. They had built in a clearing homes of several different styles. Those who had hills at their disposal dug into them, burrows with doors. Others made houses out of grass and dirt, sod. Some who had brought nails with them had built simple shacks, and the smarter among them tried to piece them together with glue, tars and twine and pressure, cutting joints into planks as houses were put together like puzzles.
But overall, it was a very rickety settlement. Rickety indeed. Skilled ponies must surely be in short supply. Homes were in different progressions of completion, some a bit more broken, others a bit more put together than the surrounding bundles of dirt and lumber. But they were happy with that. Was that why the master was so obsessed with simple joys? Designing little things, boiling simple teas?
This was the masters obsession. Wanting to be here, outside the tower. Wanting to live. Wanting to be so close to the light, and yet they were always so far away.
The center of town had some dirt roads leading everywhere and anywhere. A beaten part of the dirt was were the ponies were to congregate, and a bit of raised earth and wood was the forum. They'd stand there and make their announcements to the crowds. Life, found a way to make things work.
Why did the master like them so much? The idea was difficult. They were all dirty savages. They had their highlights, of course, but to live forever among these animals was to surely be demeaning, and... Well. Hell followed them. Wars erupted over them disagreeing with his existed- they even killed him! They killed the master.
And the master angel still loved all of them. He died terrified. Alone. Calling out the name of someone who would never come, and one who wouldn't come in time. And he never once cursed their names.
The two kinds were quite similar. Like brothers. Perhaps that was the true nature of the sentients. They'd always align in some ways, and since he had been brought here, he had always been getting more and more homesick. The wings stuck to His back, were not his dream. They'd been torn out of hiding from beneath his skin.
Homesickness was what killed the master.
Envies nose sniffled. Absolutely not because of a tidal wave of grief, but because it had smelled something burnt. Roasted. Toasted. A warm aroma, faint, plain, yet oddly satisfying. A baker had set up shop. An oven of dirt and a firepit where cheap ash cakes were made. Despite its aversion to flames, it actually had an odd fascination with combustion. A pyromaniacal tendency that was fortunately split and mediated between the two before the other half had been lost to the aether.
It tasted like, well, ash. It wasn't sooty or bitter, though a quality to describe it would be dusty. Or the taste of the smell of charcoal, with a bready sweetness. It was filling. It did not need to eat, but it ate because it wanted to comprehend. The master once prepared a feast for their enemies. But nobody ever came. It wondered what ever became of the tower.
It took another bite of an ash cake in relative silence. The nearby company of the friendly ponies wasn't unwelcome, although they didn't talk back to him. Perhaps they were busy. Or perhaps it had to do with the fear it smelt. A critical flaw. The valley. There would come some points in life where every remnant would learn to blend in better. Adjusting the gap between the eyes or the shape of the hooves. These minor adjustments were required, because failure to have a flawless form was to reveal yourself as not one of them.
The same went for being flawless. Teeth that were too just too straight and white. Eyes that were bright and full of light, yet were like glass. It decided then, that out of curiosity, it would follow a pony around. Observe. But not in this form. Stalking would change the results. Maybe the more paranoid one?
But first, before it walked out of town with a curt smile, it would compose its thoughts.
All life is flawed. Us included. But one of us is flesh and blood and has its mind concluded, the other is machine and faith, and is the more deluded. Violence may follow in our steps, be it the steel to turn the earth or to cleave bone, but peace will always come thereafter. As ash, or as flowers.
Life is a wheel. We aren't part of that wheel, no matter how much he wishes we were. Remaining thoughts irrelevant.