//------------------------------// // The Last City of Ruins // Story: Lost Cities // by Cold in Gardez //------------------------------// "At least that is what Theodora's inhabitants believe, far from imagining that a forgotten fauna was stirring from its lethargy. Relegated for long eras to remote hiding places, ever since it had been deposed by the system of nonextinct species, the other fauna was coming back into the light from the library's basements where the incunabula were kept; it was leaping from the capitals and the drainpipes, perching at the sleepers' bedside. Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, hircocervi, harpies, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of their city." - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities The Everfree Forest is close to Ponyville. So close that, even after stepping hoof into its verdant shadows, a pony can still hear the creak of windmills, the bang of doors, the shouts of foals. It is wild, untamed, and dangerous. It is filled with monsters. Few ponies venture into its depths. Fewer return. Even at its margins, where moss-laden oaks brood over the grass and flowers of the meadow, the forest exudes a sense of otherness. The line of trees demarks not just the boundary of the forest, but an end to the order ponies have struggled for centuries to impose upon the land. The plants within grow wild and free. The animals and monsters – two categories that blur the deeper one intrudes into the Everfree – obey only nature’s laws. The clouds above are shapeless and huge, a hundred or a thousand times the size of normal clouds. All this, just past the first line of trees at the edge of the meadow outside Ponyville. There are paths throughout the Everfree, though who created them is something of a mystery. They are far too large to be game trails, and they seem to require no maintenance. No grasses intrude upon them. No fallen trees lie across them. Ponies who stay upon the paths are generally safe from whatever lurks in the mists around them. Sometimes the paths change. Nopony has ever seen it happen, but every few years a path will simply vanish. Gone; a memory. Centuries-old trees stand in their place. Once, decades after the Banishment, a unicorn scholar spent a full year studying the paths. She placed scrying spells, wards, and charm circles on every path she could find, and she lived in a small hut in a large grove and did her best to hide from the slouching beasts that knocked on her walls at night. Against all expectation, she lived long enough to record several twists in the paths, and the conclusions she shared after escaping from the forest convinced her fellow scholars to find other subjects for their study. The paths had not shifted. They never existed at all. * * * Poison joke is the best known example of the Everfree’s diverse, enchanting, exotic, and often downright lethal assortment of plants. It is not, despite the name, related to poison ivy or poison oak; it is more closely related to the tropical hibiscus, though strongly (and, apparently, magically) modified to survive in the dim gloom that fills the forest. On clear autumn nights, when the moon is full, the blossoms take on a faint silver glow that persists even when the flowers are moved into shadows or indoors. Nopony has ever died from poison joke intoxication. Several ponies have died from the indirect effects of intoxication: pegasi whose wings fail mid-flight, or ponies unable to escape from the Everfree’s many predators because the bones in their legs have suddenly turned soft as moss. A full catalogue of the Everfree’s flora has never been completed. Some of the more unusual known plants include spiderbrambles, whose thousands of blossoms are living, fully functioning spiders, capable of spinning webs and capturing insects. They are generally shy and do not bite ponies except in self defense. They are not edible and make poor gifts, according to florists. In the swampy areas of the forest, what appear to be blueberries grow in thick clusters near fallen logs. Animal corpses, or simply bones, are often found around them, sometimes with the remains of berries still in their mouths. Roots have grown all through them, piercing them, drinking them. They are not blueberries. None of these plants are considered particularly dangerous by scholars of the Everfree. Those lie further in. * * * A variety of predators call the Everfree home. Deep gouges scour the trunks of most of the larger trees in the forest. The wounds lie in rows, usually of three or four, and cut deep enough into the bark to draw out weeping flows of sap. They form shining amber runnels that buzz with flies and ants, drawn by their sweet scent and taste. The slashes are one way manticores mark their territory. The acrid stench of their urine is another, used by males to warn each other away from potential conflicts. Female manticores are more sociable and their territories often overlap, except when game becomes scarce. Once a year, a few weeks before the Spring equinox, manticores will swarm. The territorial animosity they display the rest of the year fades, and for a single night they gather by the thousands, crowding the air with their flight and bending the trees with their weight. They appear like a million monstrous bats, wheeling among the stars in some ancient dance that defies meaning or reason. They gather not to mate, or to fight, or for any purpose, it seems. By the time the sun rises, they are gone. Not far from one of the paths, a pair of trees have fallen together into a spindly copse, their branches grasping at the canopy above as though to climb back up, or perhaps pull their still-standing neighbors down. The space between their trunks is crowded with twigs and leaves and vines, far more than could ever have belonged to these two trees alone. The mound of vegetation swells out, a cancerous mass, pregnant with secrets. When building their dens, timberwolves often seek such fallen trees. It is not clear why they do so – certainly not protection, as timberwolves have no natural predators aside from fire. They pile their dens high with any green thing they can find, and spend the night time hours inside. It is hard for the few ponies who venture this deep into the Everfree, who see timberwolf dens and manticore swarms, to remember that this was once the heart of a kingdom. That the very steps they now walk were trod by the Sisters at the height of their power, when all the world bowed to the Celestial Thrones. It was the golden age of ponies, and Everfree City was their jewel. But gold is also the color of autumn and sunsets. It is the color of ending. * * * At its widest point, the Everfree forest is nearly fifty kilometers across. It is the largest free-standing forest in Equestria, and every year it grows. The new growth is generally harmless, more like a normal woods than the unnatural darkness that inhabits the Everfree’s heart. Where it grows near towns such as Ponyville it is chopped back with little difficulty. The forest and the ponies around it have, after nearly a thousand years, reached homeostasis. They live as wary neighbors, and sleep with daggers beneath their pillows. They have made peace with the forest, like villagers living beneath a volcano, confident it will erupt some other day. There is a river that runs the length of the forest. Ruins dot its banks; isolated at first, then growing in size the nearer one travels to its source. Marble and granite columns lie half-sunk in the boggy woods, overrun with vines until they appear like trees themselves. They are picturesque and unthreatening, and aside from the occasional serpent, the river is a relatively safe path into the forest depths. Were it not for a series of waterfalls and rapids, one could venture almost to the old palace itself on a boat. The city’s bones rest closer to surface here in the heart of the forest. Wide stone walkways, now crumbling, lead straight up to the river’s edge. Broken walls, their empty windows like the eyes of a skull, stand alone and forlorn amidst the ruins. It was a beautiful city, once; a dream of marble and towers and gods. Vast squares filled with fountains and sculptures that existed for no reason but the joy they brought to ponies who passed them by. The largest fountain was more than fifty feet high, layered like a wedding cake, and decorated with free-standing statues of pegasi, unicorns and earth ponies all dancing in unison. High above, atop the fountain’s highest level, a pair of winged unicorns gyred around a common center, each touching a wingtip to the other. Little remains of the fountain today. The noble statues are heaps of rubble. Only a few pieces – a leg, a head, a wing – are even vaguely recognizable. The flat flagstones all around are buckled and torn. More trees stand here than statues, now. Up ahead, barely visible through the perpetual mists, a few high towers still live. They are broken, toothless and hollow, but they have not fallen yet. Some other fate awaits them. * * * The ruins open into a broad plaza, seemingly untouched by time or the forest all around. Dark stones, cut into pristine squares, create a vast plane upon which not even grass or mold has dared to grow. By day the obsidian shines like black glass in the sun; at night, the moonlight penetrates deep into the rock, far deeper than the stones are thick, and transforms the dim emptiness beneath ponies’ hooves into a gaping space filled with stars and nebulae and galaxies. A simple metal sculpture stands in the center of the square: a silver crescent rises from a stone pedestal carved with a thousand pinpoint stars. It has not dulled or tarnished with time, and glimmers as bright as the day it was forged. On humid days, which are common here in the forest, a layer of frost sometimes grows along the metal, regardless of how warm the sun shines. The Plaza of the Moon was one of the wonders of the ancient world, though few ponies at the time would have said so. They saw it only during the day, when it was plain, and simple, and featurelessly black. They rarely visited at night, when its full majesty was on display. * * * Less than a mile away from the Plaza of the Moon, another vast square still stands within the jungle’s growth. Blocks of brilliant marble, enough marble to build a mountain, are laid out side by side like soldiers standing in a row. The level stones once shone bright as the noon sky. Once, a great sundial held court in the Plaza of the Sun. Crafted from gold and platinum, its style stood higher than ten ponies, and the sweep of its dial was nearly as large as Luna’s entire court. The gold inlay was polished smooth by countless ponies who brushed their hooves against it, reverently whispering prayers to the god it honored. On any given day, a half-a-million souls crossed the plaza and admired, if only in passing, the unveiled beauty reflected on its face. The great sundial is shattered, now. The fluted golden beam whose shadow marked the hours lies in fragments all around. Some great heat has rendered them to slag, and they slump on the broken marble like runnels of wax from a candle. The graceful dial has been uprooted and twisted into a mockery of the order it once spoke. The level stones are ruined, now. Wrecks of marble, pieces weighing hundreds of tons each, are scattered like toys in every direction. The square is sunken and warped. Countless bones lie in its cracks and crevices, a once-living mortar that binds the fragments together in death. The teeming millions are fled, now. They have left the city to its shadows. The sisters are gone, now. Only the forest remains. * * * Far in the distance, just barely visible from the heart of the Everfree, proud Canterlot juts from the edge of a mountain. It is filled with flowing water, families, and life. It is a dream made real. The ponies who live there believe it will last forever.