Paper rustled and lacquered wood clicked hollowly. A single taper flickered fitfully in the dimness of a cluttered store backroom, while nearby a grey shape wrapped in faded silks and brocades rifled through dusty heaps of books and artifacts, muttering absently to himself in a fidgeting language full of glottal stops and sudden shifts in tone. He snorted, and laid a copy of Whinny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia off to one side atop a stack of books: a Marechiavelli, an Ibn Khaylikan, and a pair of Sima Qilins. Those would all need to be reshelved in their proper places. Eventually, at least. He’d get around to it sooner or later.
A mounted cassowary skeleton, dusty and gnawed by boneworms, nearly collapsed on top of the shuffling creature, and his initial cry of surprise turned into a triumphant little exclamation. Draped atop the bird’s skull like some kind of surreal tiara was a blackened amulet, bearing a sharp-edged carving of an alicorn’s head in profile. The grey creature smiled, and scooped the amulet into a little satchel at his flank, already bulging with other pieces of jewelry and oddly-shaped objets d’art. There was nothing like having a few forbidden artifacts on display to boost one’s reputation as a vendor of strange and unspeakable things, and the Alicorn Amulet, its powers notwithstanding, was harmless enough compared to some of the other options. Anypony who recognized it would also know how monumentally stupid it would be to try to actually use it, making it about as safe as a forbidden artifact could possibly be. Definitely better than the Hinnysmouth gold he had been going to use; Tian knew he didn’t need any more attention from them.
The little bronze bell on the front door jingled, and the silk-clad stallion raised his head, his long queue swaying from the sudden movement. A customer! He turned and slid towards the front of his shop, snuffing the taper with a wave of his hoof as he passed by.
Two customers, amended the stallion, as he passed through the curtain hanging across the backroom door. One, a hooded and cloaked pony—probably a mare, to judge from her size—was already rummaging around through a stack of maps leaning against a dusty sarcophagus, while the other still stood in the doorway, shifting from side to side as though it wasn’t quite comfortable in its own hooves. The shopkeep wasn’t sure what kind of equine it was, although the outline was somehow familiar. Well, no matter. All types were welcome here, so long as their gold was good.
“Miss, I really ain’t sure this place is open,” drawled the awkward silhouette in a twanging, accented voice. It was a stallion, then. “It’s awful late. Shouldn’t we come back tomorrow?”
His cloaked companion looked up. “Nonsense. By the standards of the Hollow Shades, eleven at night is practically the start of the business day. The proprietor is no doubt watching us this very moment, and will shortly be making himself known to—Ah.”
A sharp one, this, thought the shopkeep, as he stepped forward, a newly lit lantern swinging from the crook of his left forehoof. In a polite tone tinged with just the right amount of mystery, he asked, “Can I help you, travelers?”
The mare doffed her hood and smiled a not-particularly-nice smile. “Good evening, Odsin-qiánbèi. It’s been a while. How is business?”
There was something strangely familiar about the mare’s voice, something the shopkeep couldn’t quite place. “It—it goes well. Do I know you, traveler?” There was decidedly less mystique in his voice this time around. His visitor tilted her head.
“You’ve forgotten? Hardly surprising, I suppose. But let me refresh your memory, Odsin Ends. Eight years ago it would be, now. A young pegasus, recently exiled, entered your shop inquiring after a certain ancient Saddle Arabian text.. You told her, regretfully, that you did not have it in stock.” She raised a hoof and gave her cloak an idle nudge, shifting it into a more comfortable position. “You lied. And she knew it.”
The puzzled look remained on Odsin’s face for a fraction of a second longer, and then melted into a mask of horror. “Sassaflash!?”
The Dark Lord gave a curt little nod. “The same. I imagine that you will not be particularly pleased to see me, so I won’t trouble you long; I merely wish to obtain—“
“What are you doing here?” Gesturing angrily towards the open door, the stallion spat, “Get out of my shop! Get out of this town! Whatever you’re looking for, I don’t have—you shouldn’t be here at all! You were banished!”
“A fact,” snapped the pegasus, “that I am not likely to forget. Banishment notwithstanding, I have returned. Moreover, I believe you do have what I am looking for—and I have no intention of leaving with an empty saddlebag.”
The two ponies stared daggers at one another across the dimly lit room, a pair of tense shadows amidst the high-heaped piles of charms, bric-a-brac, and oddments cluttering the shop. Finally, Odsin Ends gave an angry snort and turned from the counter, pushing aside the heavy cloth of the backroom curtain. “I am closed for business. Consider yourself lucky I don’t report you to the watch. Get out of my shop, witch.”
“Witch?” With an indignant whinny, Sassaflash trotted forward. “The Dark Lord Sassaflash is no mere witch! What did I ever do that could be called witchcraft?”
In spite of himself, the shopkeep looked over his shoulder at the petulant mare, letting the curtain fall back into place with a muted swish. “What did you—you can’t be serious. The Tindalos Hounds you nearly summoned? The grave robbing? Your meetings with those ghouls? The Yuggothoth that came to my shop looking for you after you—“ He paused, breathing heavily, and then continued, “Well, after you did whatever it was you did to annoy them? Then there was your invocation of the Gate and Key, not to mention the thing you created from the body of your own—“
“Yes, thank you, Odsin, that will do,” snapped Sassaflash. “That will do. Your point is made.” She glanced back. “You’re scaring my minion.”
Looking up from his perusal of a torn manuscript poking out from beneath a broken skull, the Mule said, “Oh, don’t you fret none, Miss Sassaflash. I ain’t skeert. I do got me some questions, though.”
Odsin Ends directed an uncertain stare at the Mule and gave a nervous, high-pitched laugh. “Your minion! And what is he, necromancer? He doesn’t look like any pony I’ve seen—he’s one of them, isn’t he? Wrapped in some poor pony’s skin, pretending to be normal, pretending to be under your control, just biding his time until—“
“I’m a mule, actually,” said the Mule, who had decided at this point that the manuscript held little interest and was now trying on a Zebrican spirit mask. “Might also be one o’ ‘them,’ but as I don’t know what kind o’ critters ‘them’ is I can’t say one way or t’other. Miss Sassaflash, look here. They ain’t no eye holes in this thing.”
“I—Oh.” The hyperventilating shopkeep paused. “My apologies.” Shaking his head and turning his attention back to the Dark Lord, he continued, “But that doesn’t change anything. You must get out of my shop, and get out of it now. I don’t know what twisted abomination of dark magic you’re looking for, but—
“A map of the Hippoborean glacial wastes and a bundle of dried worrywort,” said Sassaflash curtly. “Mr. Mule, don’t touch that, it’s delicate.”
“—no matter what it is, I will be dead before I let it pass into your perverted clutches, to be put to some nefandous—what?” Odsin’s impassioned speech ground to a screeching halt. “Wait. You just want…”
“A map, yes. And some herbs. I wish for them to pass into my perverted clutches so that I may brew some nefandous medicinal tea. On that subject, ‘nefandous?’ Really, Odsin?”
“I—you?—excuse me.” The stallion propped himself up on the worn wooden countertop with one hoof, massaging his forehead with the other as he muttered, “Map’s harmless enough, and the worrywort—Hah!” He looked up, triumph shining in his eyes, and slapped his hoof down on the countertop with a resounding thwack. “Worrywort! It’s an amnesiac! You’re going to drug somepony with it. You are up to no good.” A manic grin on his face, he repeated, “Get out of my shop!”
“It is, but I am not, I am, and I most certainly will not, in that order. Drug somepony with worrywort?” queried Sassaflash. “You are unhinged, Odsin. Such a thing is possible with very large doses, but hardly practical. There are simpler methods, without the associated gastrointestinal side effects.” She cast an indifferent eye around the dusky shop, taking in the long, snaking chains of dried herbs hanging down out of the darkness of the rafters overhead, the dusty jars sealed with wax and holding half-obscured objects of disturbing shape, and the occasional metallic charm or amulet, shining sharp-angled in the shadows and inscribed with weirdly looping characters. “At a glance, you have at least five such superior methods available for sale, although I would recommend throwing out the letheroot; it looks stale. Possibly decomposed. Difficult to tell with letheroot, sometimes.”
“You can’t have them, either,” said Odsin.
Striking the countertop with her forehoof, the Dark Lord said, “I don’t want them, I want worrywort and a Hippoborean map. And you will provide them, willingly or otherwise.”
There was a pause, broken only by the popping, hissing sounds of the Mule’s discovery that the jarful of Princess Rupert’s Drops he had been investigating was more fragile than he had initially thought. Sassaflash and Odsin Ends both flinched at the sound, and Odsin briefly made the whimpering noise of a shopkeep who has just heard forty bits’ worth of merchandise explode into worthless glass fragments, but neither looked away from the other. Seconds passed in silence.
Odsin scowled.
Sassaflash narrowed her eyes.
And then, quite suddenly, Odsin Ends looked aside and muttered, “Hippoborean maps’re next to the pile of stuffed swordfish. Worrywort’s in the backroom, I’ll get it. That’ll be fifteen bits, plus forty for the Princess Rupe—“
Sassaflash glared.
“Like I was saying, that’ll be fifteen bits.”
“Acceptable,” nodded the Dark Lord. “Mr. Mule, kindly look through the indicated stack and find a map showing northern Hippoborea. Two ‘P’s, yes. No ‘Y.’ There should be a large mountain, four-peaked, drawn somewhere in the center. That,” she continued, turning to the shopkeep as he came shuffling out from behind his curtain holding a sheaf of dried leaves wrapped in paper, “is poison oak, not worrywort.”
“My mistake,” growled Odsin. “I’ll just go correct that, shall I?”
“See that you d—that is wolfsbane.”
“Oops.”
The resentful merchant trudged back off to the shop’s storage vault, and at length there came a series of emphatic and somehow angry rustlings and clatterings as he searched for the right herb. Evidently, thought Sassaflash, he kept irritatants and deadly poisons closer to hoof than medicinal herbs. Not that she judged him for it; it was his business. And this was the Hollow Shades. A merchant had to know his customers, after all.
Hoofsteps sounded behind her, and turning she saw the Mule approaching with several yellowed maps, some rolled and some folded, clutched gingerly in his mouth. With a curt nod of thanks she extended one of her wings and cupped the proffered maps against her primaries, sorting through them with her forehoof. No, no, out of date by a few centuries in some places and a few millennia in others, covered in pink hearts and dominated by a garish depiction of Rudolph’s workshop, peculiar and unsettling odor, big blank space labeled “Here there be wendigos”—hardly any use, as she knew that already—Ah. Odsin’s background muttering grew suddenly louder, signaling his imminent return, and the lemon-maned pegasus smiled and laid one of the maps down on the counter, while the Mule shuffled off to put the others back where he’d found them.
A sheaf of dried leaves landed with a soft thump next to the map, and Sassaflash smiled, showing just a few more teeth than was strictly necessary. “Thank you, Odsin. This map, if you please, along with the worrywort. Fifteen bits, I believe.”
“Yes,” growled the stallion. He slid the small pile of coins across the countertop, glancing at the half-unrolled map as he did so. “I know I will regret asking this, but what is your business with Hippoborea?”
“That is my concern.”
“Perhaps,” scowled the shopkeep. “But unless you’ve changed a great deal, ‘your concerns’ are prone to becoming everypony’s concerns.” He nudged the heavy roll of paper further open with his hoof. “There’s nothing there but a few ruins, and they’ve been picked clean these thousand years, at least.”
Raising an eyebrow, the Dark Lord said, “Perhaps I go there for the aesthetic beauties of the place. Perhaps I have become an outdoorsmare, and wish to try my hoof at mountain climbing.” She bit her lip and hurriedly added, “Or perhaps I have taken up glaciology, that too might well be the explanation for—“
“Mountain climbing…” murmured Odsin Ends. He stared at the map for a few moments longer, and then raised his eyes, looking across at the Dark Lord in growing incredulity. “Mountain climbing. You can’t possibly be thinking—even you wouldn’t—you will die.”
The Mule’s long ears twitched to attention. Sassaflash scowled. “Kindly lift that hoof and let me have that map.”
The hoof stayed in place. “I am serious. Go home, Sassaflash. You may think that because you’ve tricked some of the lesser beings that a greater one is within your scope, but you are wrong.” He made a broad, low, slicing gesture for emphasis. “You will simply die. There is no other way it can end.”
“Your concern,” retorted the pegasus, in a voice drier than the sands of the Rub al Khayli desert, “has been noted—baffling as it may be, given that you just tried to poison me with aconite. I would have thought you’d be pleased.”
Odsin waved a hoof irritably. “As if you wouldn’t have known it as soon as you saw it. Look, witch—yes, fine, necromancer, whatever pleases you. It’s true I would be overjoyed if I knew I would never see you again. But I don’t want you to die. And if you do this thing—if you enter Mount Voormithadreth, which you must plan to, as there’s nothing else there for you—you will not survive. Perhaps it will be quick, perhaps slow, but there—there is nothing else there. There is no other way it can end.”
Sassaflash regarded the shopkeep in silence, eyes narrowed and ears flattened. Then, quite suddenly, she scooped the map and worrywort into her saddlebag and made an abrupt about-face. “Come, Mr. Mule.” She trotted across the room and out the front door without another word to Odsin Ends. At the threshold she said, “It is time we found lodgings for the night,” and then swished out of sight, her cloak billowing around her.
“Wait,” called the shopkeep, as the Dark Lord’s minion began to plod after her. “She may be a mule-headed idiot—no offense—“
Mild, dark eyes blinked a long, slow, deliberate blink. The Mule smiled. “None taken.”
“—but you don’t have to be mixed up in this. She is plunging towards a cliff. Get out of this now before she drags you off the edge.”
The Mule considered this, slowly chewing his lower lip as Odsin Ends stared nervously at him. Then, raising his head, he said, “I’m mighty sorry about them glass things o’ yourn. I’ll pay for all on ‘em when I got some cash again.” He trudged out the door and, turning, gave one last little nod of his head. “Evening, Mr. Ends.”
-----
It had taken a while to find an inn. The Hollow Shades, sunk deep in the shadows of the surrounding mountains and hemmed in by thick, dark pines, were a disorganized maze of ancient buildings that had been patched into existence out of the decaying fragments of even more ancient structures. Early Exilium lath-and-plaster sprouted up from antediscordian foundations, themselves fused with Unicornian stonework built on rammed earth berms from some long-forgotten paleopony culture. Winding in and around and through these hodgepodge structures were meandering alleyways and paths, paved with cobblestones worn smooth by millennia of use and overshadowed by thick, mildewed eaves sagging outward over the walls and alleys like gigantic toadstool caps. Perhaps in some distant past the streets had been laid out in a neat grid pattern, sensible and practical, but if so that order had long since been erased as buildings had been built and burned, expanded and demolished.
Curiously, it seemed to the Mule as though something other than the city’s byzantine streets was foiling his employer’s efforts to find shelter. No matter how many branching side streets led off their path and no matter how narrow and twisting the alleyway, she seemed to always know precisely the path she wanted to take—and those paths, each in their turn, had in fact led to no less than five inns and taverns. But Sassaflash had turned, scowling, away from each and every one, and slunk back off into the labyrinth, shouldering her way past the bemused Mule.
It took nearly an hour, but after maneuvering their way through a particularly crowded little side street, its cobbles choked with abandoned carts and refuse, Sassaflash finally gave a short, sharp smile of satisfaction instead of her customary snarl. They stood before a queer, lopsided inn, fronting a cobbled plaza and half-slumping into a sunken street to its right, as though it had been sculpted of moist clay and then slapped down, hard, on an uneven surface. Warm light shone out of its unbroken windows, though, and its thatching was dry and golden in the yellow lamplight of the plaza. The Dark Lord trotted forward, beckoning for her minion to follow.
As the pegasus peered suspiciously through the open top of the inn’s half door, the Mule ventured, “Miss Sassaflash? Seems like you know this town real good; why go to all them other places first?”
“Silence is a virtue, Mr. Mule.”
A puzzled blink. “What’s that got to do with anything?“
With a petulant huff, Sassaflash abandoned her attempts at stealth and snapped, “This is the town’s mundane inn, and its location changes, Mr. Mule. I knew where the inns were. I did not know where this inn was. Now kindly be silent. The Dark Lord Sassaflash is…” She paused, evidently at a loss for a verb, and then muttered, “…irritated.”
“Hold up a minute. When you say ‘changes,’ you ain’t—“
“Irritated, I say!” Pushing the lower half of the door open with her hoof, the mare trotted into the inn. The innkeeper, a weary-looking pegasus playing a game of darts using a board across the room, her own primary quills, and dexterous flicks of her wings, gave a little ear twitch as the two entered but didn’t bother turning.
“Innkeep,” bellowed Sassaflash, “I require one room, two beds, clean, spare furnishings, poor sound insulation, ground floor, and non-eldritch. For the night. Can you meet these criteria?”
The old pegasus looked over with bleary eyes and started, drawing a sharp breath. “You! You’re—“
“A paying customer,” concluded Sassaflash smoothly. “A well-paying customer. My previous question stands.”
The proprietor hesitated for a moment, and then shrugged. “Fine. It’s no mud on my quills.” She turned to a rack of keys hanging on the wall behind her. “They’ve all got bad insulation; I hate getting stuck with this place. 5A’s ground floor, two beds. Beats me how eldritch it is. Will that do?”
“Yes,” said the Dark Lord.
“No,” said her minion.
“Yes,” she repeated, giving him a death glare.
“But miss, it ain’t proper. We shouldn’t ought to be staying in just one room. I’m a mmm—“ He hummed in hesitation, stuck with a syllable that, for some reason, he didn’t seem to want to use for anything, and then his face brightened and he concluded, “—mmmule. A mule. Ponies’d talk.”
One long, expressionless stare later, the Dark Lord said, “This is the year 1002, not the 800s. We will be spending the next few months alone, in the wilderness, together. If this offends your oh-so-delicate sensibilities, I suggest you get over it. Is this clear, Mr. ‘Mmmule?’”
The Mule considered this, crinkled his face up in what was, possibly, an effort to rewire his propriety, and then gave a small uncertain nod. “Yes, Miss Sassaflash.”
“Yes. Well.” She eyed him askance, and then turned her attention back to the pony at the front desk. “Good. 5A will be satisfactory, innkeep.” Glancing back at the Mule, she added, “Do try to make sure that it’s proper enough.”
-----
An hour or so later, in a room graced with enhanced propriety in the form of a sheet draped from a clothesline that the bleary-eyed innkeeper had stretched across the room at the Mule’s behest (“We don’t wear clothes! What are you so afraid of seeing? The bed? I fail to understand the source of scandal, here.” “I just don’t feel right about it, Miss Sassaflash. Yes ma’am, that’ll do. Just droop it up on over, just like that. Thankee kindly”), the Mule lay back in his bed, his pillow over his eyes as he tried to ignore the sound of the Dark Lord scribbling away in her half of the room, working by candlelight on…something. The sound of quill scratching against paper grew no less insistent, though, and eventually he gave it up as a lost cause. Propping himself up, he looked across at the black silhouette of the pegasus cast against the sheet, and said, “What might you be a-working on, Miss?”
The silhouette paused. Speaking around the quill, it said, “’At is ‘ardly your ‘on’ern.”
Scratching one of his long ears with an extended forehoof, the Mule rejoined, “I reckon it is, though. I’m on this quest too, ain’t I? And you been carrying ‘round a whole heap o’ secrets, and they keeps on piling up, one arter t’other. Pretty soon, they gon’ get too heavy for you to carry at all. You don’t got Miss Sweetie Belle around no more to talk to, and lighten the load.”
Spitting the quill out on her bed, Sassaflash said, “My secrets are not a burden. I choose to carry them.”
“That don’t mean they ain’t burdensome,” observed her minion. “Anyhow, I’m gonna need some questions answered afore I go much further on this quest o’ yourn. I want to know what I’m getting myself into.”
The silhouette of the slender pegasus sat still, its edges shivering and dancing in the light of her bedside candles. Then she shrugged. “Very well. But I cannot guarantee all your questions will be answered. And I must pose some questions of you, as well. You have shown signs of unexpected complexity, and unless understood, such complexity is a liability in a minion.”
“Fair enough,” nodded the Mule. “I’ll ask you something, then you ask me, alright?” He bit his lip, thinking. “Lessee, now…What did you do to get the folks hereabouts so het up? Don’t you got no kin to stand up for you?”
Sassaflash stiffened. “Ask a different question.”
Mulish eyebrows rose, but the old creature didn’t pursue the point. “Alrighty. What’s the point behind this whatchamacallit—this deicide? What you got agin’ the ‘very great, very old one’ you was talking about? And don’t it got no particular name, what for to call it by?”
After some consideration, the Dark Lord answered, “Your first question has quite a simple answer: global domination. And No, I will not elaborate on that point. With regard to your second, this Thing—this Great Old One—is an abomination and a blasphemy. It should not be. Any resident of this universe who truly understood what It was, and still retained their sanity, would not hesitate to blot It out forever. You can call that my reason for wanting to destroy It, if you will. Certainly that is part of the motivation behind this journey.”
“What about its name, though? Don’t it got none?”
“Yes, It—that is, no, It—hm.” The mare trailed off, evidently unsure how to deal with the double negative. The shadow of her head bent down as, in contemplative silence, she considered the book spread before her. Her silence lasted for so long, indeed, that the Mule was almost beginning to think that that was all, and she was simply not going to tell him—but then, quite abruptly, she raised her head and looked towards him, the shadows of her ears flattened to either side of her head. “It has a number of names. ‘St. Toad,’ if you wish to be fanciful. ‘The Sleeper of N’kai,’ if you wish to be informative. ‘Zhothaqquah,’ if you wish to be antiquated.”
She paused, and then finished, “And Tsathoggua if you wish to be both accurate, and reckless.”
“Sath…?” hazarded the Mule.
“Don’t try to say it,” said the mare, hurriedly. “Don’t say it at all, in fact. I probably shouldn’t have. Now, I have a question for you. Earlier, during your little bout of prudishness, you started to object to our sharing a room because you were, and I quote, “a mmmmm.” You finished the consonant with “mule,” but that was clearly not what you had originally intended to say. Elucidate.”
“Oh, ‘t’weren’t nothing,” muttered the Mule, suddenly quiet. He traced an awkward little circle in his bed sheets with a forehoof. “Only I was a-going to say ‘married,’ but, well, Missus Mule, she done passed away this summer last. But I ain’t quite used to it yet, so…” He shrugged.
“Ah.” On her side of the dividing sheet, Sassaflash bit her lip. “I am, ah, sorry. For your loss, and…and so on and so forth.” She paused, and then, with more of her usual fire, continued, “But if you were hoping for me to bring her back, regrettably I am not able to do so, and I will not have you badgering me on that point. Necromancy is a delicate art, with certain…limitations. Barring very special circumstances, resurrection is usually impossible for any pony that has not been dead for at least two hundred years, as a general rule. I am sorry, but this must be understood, Mr. Mule.”
The Mule nodded. “Understood, Miss Sassaflash.“
“Good.” The Dark Lord blinked. “But why the prudishness if you’re unmarried, then?”
“Oh, miss, no!” exclaimed the Mule, shocked. “That don’t make no difference! Once wed, always wed, you know.”
“I don’t actually, no. I mean, I don’t know. I mean…” She shook her head. “What happened to ’Til death do us part?’ A sweet sentiment, but it does imply an eventual parting.”
“Maybe that’s how ponies does things, and maybe that suits ‘em,” said the Mule. “But mules does things different. We don’t think that dying parts two folks who’s really in love with each other.”
“That’s not been my experience,” muttered the mare, a twinge of bitterness staining her voice. She scowled, suddenly peevish. “Are you quite finished, Mr. Mule? No more questions for me? I have work to do.”
“Not quite, Miss Sassaflash, not quite. I got a whole heap o’ questions yet, actually.”
“Most unfortunately, I do not possess a ‘whole heap o’ time.’” She gestured at the book in front of her. “I have much reading to do. You will have to satisfy yourself with only one further query.”
“Well, if’n that’s the way it is.” The Mule thought for a moment. “What are you reading, anyhow? You’ve had your nose buried in that book like a hound dog with its head down a rabbit hole. What’re you reading up on? What kind o’ book is it?”
The pegasus’ silhouette shivered, but it was only the dancing of the candlelight. She closed her book and scooped up one of the bedside candles, setting it atop the cover in front of her so that the flame, twisting in the draught of her breath, cast faint phantoms against the sheet, the walls, and the ceiling. Without taking her eyes off of the candle flame, she asked, “Do you know what horses were, Mr. Mule?”
“I reckon. Caveponies, right? From back afore the paleopony period? Only I heard tell they’s still some living off down in the Orient.”
“’The Orient?’” Sassaflash raised an eyebrow. “If by that you mean Saddle Arabia, then yes, there is some of the old blood still there, and the ponies of that land are sometimes mistakenly referred to as such. But horses, true horses, are long gone, leaving only their descendants, the ponies, in their place.”
Leaning forward, she blew out the candle in front of her, and a thin wisp of smoke swirled up into the air, backlit against the screening sheet by the remaining candles. Reaching out a hoof, the pegasus caught and shaped the smoke, sculpting it like a weather pony would sculpt a cloud to form it into a shape both like and unlike that of a pony. A twitch of her fetlock and its legs lengthened, while a delicate beat of her wings shaped its back and its neck into long, thick, arching forms. Its legs were long and slender, far more graceful even than those of an alicorn, but its body had a strange, thick solidity to it, and its head was long and disturbingly proportioned. Sassaflash lowered her hoof, allowing the construct to drift gently down through the air, and then spoke again.
“They knew the cosmos as we do not. They were wise in the secret ways, and they knew and worshipped the true Gods of the cosmos, not the petty little pretenders that rule from Canterlot. Magic they knew, strange magic, forbidden magic, and the least of their dwimmer-crafters would have been the equal of the greatest pony mage who has ever lived, in power if not necessarily in learning.”
She sighed. “And that was their downfall. It’s an old trap, a very old trap, and it always works, once a civilization has allowed itself to be lured into it. Let one race escape the pitfalls set for ‘lesser’ beings, let them grow fat and proud, and convince them that they, and they alone, truly have the ear and the favor of the Great Old Ones. Then, use them. Let them be your tools among mortals, tormenting and destroying rising cultures, and when there is no more use for them—” Sassaflash swept her hoof through the drifting figure, tearing it into fading ribbons of smoke. “—let the Chaos crawl up and through them, rotting them from within and bringing down all their glory and splendor. The starfish things, the horses, and now, I suppose, the Yuggothoth. Only the Great Race that came from Yith has escaped that fate, and they spend their entire existence on the run, fleeing eternally from enemies they cannot hope to face in open battle. Fleeing from the three-lobed fiery eye, from the tongue that bleeds out of the sky…”
She drifted into silence, watching as the last swirling whorls of smoke dissipated. Then, lifting her head, she said, “This book is the same book that I purchased from Odsin Ends eight years ago, and the book that he has regretted selling to me every day since. This book has been passed from hoof, to claw, to paw, to tentacle for hundreds upon thousands of years, and will continue to do so long after I myself am dust within a jar on some necromancer’s shelf. This book has cost lives, driven ponies to insanity, raised horrors, destroyed civilizations.”
Drawing a breath, she finished, “This is the Equunomicon. This is ‘The Book of the Ways of Horses,’ bound in leather and written by a mad Saddle Arabian stallion who had caught glimpses of deep time that no pony should ever witness, and heard the whining and howling of ghosts on the desert wind. I am its keeper—and it, for now, is mine.”