"So that's how we's situated," said the Mule, looking out across the shifting stalks of grass bending to and fro in the wind. There was a fiery glow on the grain, cast by the Sun setting behind the weird, warped mountains of the Dreamlands, and a warm breeze ruffled the Mule's uneven fur. He looked back to his wife, sitting beside him on their gnarled wooden stoop with a shawl wrapped around her knobbly shoulders. "I allow as how it looks mighty grim, but like I tole Miss Sassaflash, we ain't dead yet."
The Dodge Junction Mule frowned, her long ears lying flat against her head like a rabbit’s, and gave an irritable little swish of her tail. "That's as may be, but I'm not real happy that 'Not dead yet' is the best that can be said about how y'all are. I'd like you to be a little better off than 'Not dead yet.'"
"I know, Dodgy, I know." The Mule leaned over and nuzzled his wife, and after a moment's hesitation she leaned against him, resting her weight against his side. Neither mule said anything for some minutes, sitting in peaceful silence and watching the fiery Sun sink slowly behind the strange mountains. At length, the Dodge Junction Mule spoke up again.
"What are y'all going to do, though? You don't have much food, you don't have much shelter, you've got precious little hope..."
"Now, Dodgy, it ain't that bad."
The Mule's wife gave him a peremptory little swat with her tail. "Don't you 'Now, Dodgy' me, Ponyville. It's exactly that bad, and you know it. I just..." She bit her lip. A sudden quaver crept into her voice. "I can't see how you can get out of this alive. I don't want to lose you."
At first the Mule made no response. Then, in a slow, thoughtful tone, he said, "I don't reckon you're a-going to. I really don't, Dodgy, and that's a fact. It don't seem like this is how Miss Sassaflash'll die.
"She's a quare one, that mare--mighty quare. I can't say as how I understand her half the time, and the other half she seems like she ain't nothing but airs, all puffed up and strutting around like an 'ol rooster chicken a-lording it over the barnyard. She reckons she's got a destiny, that's for sure, and mostly I don't hold no truck with ponies who thinks they's got destinies. When the world don't give 'em what they reckon they deserves, they get desperate and start stepping on other ponies to try and get what they want.
"But Miss Sassaflash...When the world don't give her what she reckons she deserves, she don't take it out on the ponies around her. She takes it out on the world itself. She grabs it by the neck, and she twists and twists until she makes it give her what she wants."
There was a chill to the breeze rustling through the grass, now, and the oak leaves overhead whispered and muttered in the wind. The Mule’s wife reached up and pulled her shawl over to wrap it around her husband's shoulders as well, saying as she did so, "She doesn't sound like a very nice pony." The Mule shrugged.
"Sometimes she ain't. Other times, though...I don't reckon she's a bad pony. I wouldn't a' kept on traveling with her if I did. But something's done digged itself deep down in her mind, something bad, and she ain't figgered out that the thing that's hurting her so much is inside her, not out in the world. I wish I knowed what it was, but she don't talk about it, even when I ask her direct-like. And now she's up and made this plan o' hern, to get back at the world for what she thinks it done to her.” He gave his wife a sly, sideways glance, and casually added, “She been telling me a whole lot more about it this past day, by the by.”
“Has she now!” The Dodge Junction Mule gave a short whistle of surprise. “And she being so coy about it for so long, too! How’d you finally get her to come clean?”
The Mule shrugged. “I didn’t do nothing. I reckon she’s just got tired o’ carrying such a powerful heavy burden for so long all by herselfs. Mind, she ain’t told me everything, and I still don’t know exactly what she’s planning on doing, but they’s a lot o’ bits she let slip.”
“Then by all means, ‘Mr. Mule,’ you tell me those bits. And shorten it up a bit, if’n you please. I don’t mean to be sitting here halfway into the night.”
So the Mule told her.
-----
The mule and pegasus (said the Mule) stood on a vast plain of ice, small and alone. To their north rose the Eiglophian mountains, bare and black beneath a twilit sky glittering with faint stars. Among the peaks strange winds whistled and howled, lunging to and fro in the high mountain valleys like caged wolves chafing in captivity, and at times one of the winds would break free, rushing down the slopes of the mountains to the ice below in a raging katabatic gale that threw great clouds of ice dust and snow into the sky. Then, by degrees, the air would still and the ice would settle, and silence would return to the wastes.
The Mule was the first to break that silence. He had been eyeing the scene of desolation before them with a critical eye, his scraggly tail swishing to and fro, and at length he turned to his employer and demanded, "Why's it allus have to be so grim?
Sassaflash shrugged. "This is what the world is like, beyond Celestia and Luna's care. Elder powers rule these wastes, and they do not appreciate beauty or life--at least, not beauty or life as we understand them."
"Right." The Mule shuffled his hooves in the glacial firn, trying to ignore the hunger that had begun to gnaw at his stomach. "And...you're fixin' to overthrow 'em?"
"I believe we have established that by this point, yes," responded the Dark Lord, with a little flick of her tail. "I do not intend to leave a power vacuum behind or let the wastes creep in on Equestria. My intention is to outdo the Princesses, not to destroy all they have created." The pegasus paused, and for a moment a shadow crept across her face. "Although, of course, some destruction may be--will be--inevitable. Chaos will not bow to Order without a fight. Which is the point, of course, but still..." The pegasus eyed her companion for a moment as though waiting for something, her ears folded back against her head. When she received no response, she gave a short, barking laugh.
"Ha! I speak of plans and schemes--and here we are, adrift and alone, surrounded by hundreds of leagues of ice and rock." She shook her head. "Enough. Come; we must press onward, Mr. Mule."
"Yes, Miss Sassaflash."
-----
“That was the first bit,” said the Mule, “not that I knowed it then. I figgered she was just being mysterious.”
“She was being mysterious, Ponyville, and if you think she wasn’t, you’ve been spending too much time around her,” said the Dodge Junction Mule. The wind was colder, now, and wilder, tugging at the shawl wrapped around the two mules and sending uneasy ripples through the grass. The mare shivered, and then rose to her hooves, the wooden planks of the stoop creaking as she moved, and gestured for her husband to follow her. Looking back at the waving grass, the stalks still glimmering with the light of fireflies and glowsnails, she said, “Come on, we’d best be getting indoors. There’s a storm coming up the valley--a regular howler, too, or I’m a zoog. What was the first bit?”
“Why, ‘Chaos,’” said the Mule, mild surprise on his homely face. He reached up to take the hoof his wife had extended, and pulled himself up on to his own hooves. “Thankee kindly. It weren’t clear?”
“Clear as mud, and that’s a fact. What about ‘Chaos bowing to Order?’ What’d she mean by that?”
Her husband hesitated a bit before answering. “Y’see, I ain’t quite clear on that myself, even now. I asked her about it, and the most I could figger from what she said was that when she said ‘Chaos,’ she meant some manner o’ olden devil, that the Princesses had fought in the before times, and that they’d fight it again if it came back, sooner’n blink at you. Not that it can come back, mind you. The Princesses done sealed it away, Miss Sassaflash said, and it’d take more magic now than the two on ‘em have together to break it free again. She said it had other names, too, that I might know. ‘Tarakhe.’ ‘Discord.’ ‘Demens Deitas.’” He shook his head. “Can’t say as how I ever heard tell o’ any on ‘em, though. You?”
“No.” A pause. “Wait, maybe I have. There’s a flower that grows in the swamps near the Canterhorn--a little yellow one. It’s called Mage Starswirl’s Wort, but my ma had a different name for it. ‘Chase-Discord,’ she called it. She told me that wicked things, things made by Discord, didn’t like it, and when I asked her who Discord was, she told me she didn’t know--that it was just what her own ma had told her, and her ma’s ma before.” The Dodge Junction Mule’s ears swiveled back, and her brow knitted. “Discord. Isn’t a nice name, is it?”
“Nope,” agreed the Mule. “But anyhow, that was just the beginning. Later on, she tole me more. Lots more…”
-----
The night waned swiftly, dawning to another of the long, cold days of the Hippoborean summer. Difficult as distances were to judge in this featureless wasteland, Sassaflash had feared that the mountains--and any ruins therein--might prove to be much farther away than they appeared, but fortunately the reverse proved to be the case, and by midday the two equines were picking their slow, careful way across one of the glaciers grinding ponderously along through the rifts between the peaks. After traversing a particularly difficult stretch of ice, heaved up into a crumbling, rubble-flecked ridge by the immense pressures grinding and pushing within the glacier’s heart, the Dark Lord paused to catch her breath, looking out over the barren vista around them. She started, and raised a hoof, shading narrowed eyes. Turning and gesturing to her minion, a little ways behind her, she pointed wordlessly up at the nearest peak, rearing high into the sky and flecked with remote patches of blue-white ice.
At first the Mule saw nothing--just the bleak, forbidding sight of another exhausting climb ahead of them. Then he noticed a narrow, wavering discontinuity along the mountain’s flanks, as though a thin slice of the mountain had been pared away from its middle. And there--yes. Strange, distant little towers, off-kilter and stunted, rising up at regular intervals along the winding cut.
“A Unicornian road,” smiled Sassaflash. “Our way has just become significantly easier, Mr. Mule. The glacier will have ground away the old roads and settlements in the valley, of course, along with the valley itself, ” here she gave a short, sharp stamp on the ice underhoof, “but the mountain ways, and any dwellings there, may well be intact.”
Bone-weary and cold as they were, the mule and pegasus soon made their way to the base of the road, or what was left of it. The glacier had evidently run higher up along the mountain’s flanks in the past, for the lowest twenty yards of road had been sheared completely away, with only a few scattered stones here and there to attest to its presence. The way was not very difficult, though, and before long they had clambered their way up to a reasonably intact portion of the ancient course.
-----
“And by the by," the Mule added, his ears flicking upright as he turned to face his wife, "them Unicornians knew how to build things right. Mountain stonework ain't easy; the stones gots to cling, sort o' like, not just lie up atop each other, and if you is building in a place that gets warm come summer, well...You'd best think real careful about how the blocks is supported, and what they's supporting, 'cause some o' that mortar's a-going to crack in spring and fall with the freezing and the thawing and all. But the Unicornians, they didn't use no mortar! Them stones on that old road was carved neat as neat, so that they all fit together like one o' them jigsaw puzzles and didn't need nothing but their own selves to stay in place. ‘Sickle-oppian,’ Miss Sassaflash called it. I reckon--"
“Get on with it, you old coot,” smiled the Dodge Junction Mule.
“Alright, alright. So anyhow, we was on this old road the likes o’ which I ain’t never seen afore…”
-----
Though exposed, the road along the mountainside was still sound--surprisingly so, considering its immense age. There were patches that had been wiped away by ancient avalanches or were just missing, with no hint as to what had become of them, but on the whole the way was clear enough. Here and there on the mountainside, sometimes just beside the road but sometimes far above or below it, tucked away on distant ledges overlooking hundred yard drops, stood rough towers of stacked stones covered with odd glyphs that the Dark Lord refused to translate, while at more regular intervals along the path little alcoves had been carved into the mountain’s face. Some were vacant, while others still held the weathered remnants of statues and icons backed by detailed bas reliefs. As Sassaflash and the Mule traveled further up the mountain, they passed stony unicorn warlords, dressed in strange regalia and standing against a backdrop of ponies attacking one another in a forest on the flanks of what was unmistakably Voormithadreth itself--a unicorn with a broken horn, bowing her head in sadness in front of a scene of four priests and four warriors standing in two opposing lines before Voormithadreth--a pegasus, lying on a bed of carved reeds and clutching a flail with Voormithadreth rising above the horizon in the distance--another broken-horned unicorn, this time rearing in triumph beneath the watchful bulk of Voormithadreth.
The great four-peaked volcano was in every carving, every scene, a constant and oppressive presence looming over the history of the northlands. The Mule would have liked to ask Sassaflash about the recurring motif, but it seemed unsafe, somehow, to discuss the mountain, and the Thing still sprawled beneath it. Not when such things were so near. Not when they might be listening.
-----
Rain pattered on the windows of the mules’ cabin, darkened by the fading of the day and by the thick, churning storm clouds plunging and rising in the sky in slow, tattered sweeps like waves breaking on a rocky shore. Warm candlelight filled the little living room within, shining off the rough floorboards, the spiral rug, and the colorful crazy quilt hung on the wall for decoration. At the table, the Mule raised his head from his bowl of oats and grass, and said, “Sh’ nnshtd, ‘ ‘shked R--”
“Swallow, Ponyville. Goodness, the way you’re eating, you’d think that was real food. It’s not going to help you out there, you know.”
“Shrry.” The Mule swallowed. “I know, I know. But like I was saying, instead o’ asking about them pictures o’ Voormi’s Addre--Voormithadreth, I asked her about the unicorn with the broke horn, who they done made so many statue carvings of. And what do you think she tole me?”
The Dodge Junction Mule smiled a patient smile, and pushed back her own empty bowl. “I couldn’t imagine.”
“She tole me that it weren’t no single unicorn at all. The broke horn, she said, was a metaphor--a metaphor for something real important to her plan.” He paused. “She also tole me she was surprised I knew the word ‘metaphor,’ but that ain’t here nor there.”
-----
Frigid winds bit and howled at the stones of the mountain, and bit even more fiercely at the two travelers, shivering as the ancient Unicornian road led them ever higher. The Dark Lord Sassaflash turned to her minion, and in answer to his question, said, “A curse, Mr. Mule. It is a metaphor for a curse--one of the oldest in the world, older than Celestia and Luna, older than ponykind itself. Magic carries a price, and Unicornia was steeped in magic. They knew that price, and paid it every second of their lives.” She winced at a particularly fierce blast of wind, cold and cruel as a cockatrice’s stare. “Hurry. If I read the waystones right, there was an old watchtower not too much further along this road. There may be some remnants left of it that we could use for shelter.”
“I wouldn’t mind a bit o’ shelter right about now, and that’s the truth,” said the Mule. Food, too, he thought, but said nothing. No point in bringing up what they couldn’t have, even if the hunger was beginning to get difficult to bear. “But what kind o’ price? I ain’t never heard no unicorn talk about having to pay some price for their magic spells.”
The Dark Lord gave a derisive snort. “Of course not. The unicorns of today deal in nothing but petty cantrips and lackluster charms--none of the old magic. None of the deep magic. Their ancestors, though, wielded power to rival Celestia and Luna themselves. Even the Hearth’s Warming Eve story, distorted by the passage of time as it is, preserves the memory of that might: ‘The unicorns demanded tribute likewise, in return for magically bringing forth day and night.'
"But with that power came a cost. Magic is the imposition of unreality on reality, Mr. Mule; it is the act of forcing reality to assume a state other than the one it would naturally take. But reality does not like to be forced. It pushes back. The greater the magic, the greater the misfortune of the one who cast it. Small spells, the kinds used by unicorns today, yield small bits of bad luck or mischance--a beloved possession may break, or a minor plan may fall through--while the greater spells, the kinds that the ancient Unicornians brought to bear on the world around them...Those bring greater evils. The deaths of loved ones. The collapse of dynasties. The destruction of all one could hold dear. The cosmos inevitably takes its revenge. That is the ‘broken horn’ of the Unicornians. That is magic’s curse.” She sighed. “And that is--or was--how I would have overthrown Celestia and Luna, and claimed Equestria for my own.”
The Mule pondered this, tail swishing to and fro behind him and brow furrowed in thought as he plodded onward. He raised his head, about to speak, when suddenly his eyes widened and he lifted a hoof, pointing ahead of them. “Miss Sassaflash, look!”
The Dark Lord’s gaze followed the Mule’s pointing hoof, and then her mouth curved into a small, fierce little smile of satisfaction. They had made their way around one of the mountain’s outflung stone buttresses, and now, on the other side, they could clearly see a tower--or the remnants of one, at least--in the distance.
-----
“And do you believe her?” asked the Dodge Junction Mule.
The Mule, who had been peering out through the storm-rattled windowpane into the thundering darkness beyond, turned to face his wife. “I can’t say as how I ever heard tell o’ reality fighting back or taking revenge. But on the other hoof, she’s been right about an awful lot o’ things already. Maybe this is one on ‘em. Anyhow, you know the rest; arter that we was able to find some old cloth hangings in the tower for warmth, and they was a heap o’ scrolls written on reed paper which was sort o’ edible, kind of like. ‘Tweren’t pizen, anyhow. Then she took first watch--said her dreams had been bothering her recent, and she didn’t fancy a-going to sleep right off. I tole her she could come here when she did go to sleep, if’n she wanted to. She knows the way, now, and they ain’t a-going to be no nightmares here.” He paused. “You don’t mind, do you, Dodgy?”
“Hrmph. No, I reckon not. And y’all won’t starve, leastwise,” muttered the mare. “But did she ever say what she meant about using this whole business with the cosmos and magic to overthrow the Princesses? I don’t see it.”
The Mule shook his head. “She did say as how it had something to do with what she did back in the Hollow Shades to her sister, draining her magic and all, but other’n that, nothing.” He trotted back over to their table, and eased himself back into his seat. Folding his forehooves on the tabletop, he looked across at his wife and chuckled. “Even when she says a lot, she don’t say much at all, do she? She’s planning to kill Tsathoggy, she’s planning something with this sealed-off Discord monster, she’s planning something with magic-draining, she’s planning something with reality not liking magic--and somehow all them plans go together into one big plan.”
Rain hissed and washed against the wind-whipped grass outside, and droplets drummed against the cottage’s windows. The Dodge Junction Mule’s ears snapped upright as a particularly loud thundercrack burst somewhere not too far away, and she frowned. “Kill a God, steal some magic, get reality mad, and mess with a demon. Steal some magic, kill a God, mess with a demon, get reality…”
Another crack of thunder. The Mule’s wife started, but not from the sound of thunder. As the rolling echoes of the blast faded away, the Dodge Junction Mule repeated, “Steal some magic, kill a God, mess with a demon, get reality mad...” Her ears drooped and her eyes widened. A look of dawning comprehension--and horror--slowly crept across her face. “Steal all of Its magic from a God, killing it. Feed that magic to an imprisoned demon, freeing it. Force Celestia and Luna to fight that demon, draining every last bit of magic and good luck they have. And then...and then…”
Thunder rolled. Lightning flashed. The door to the mules’ cottage burst wide, wind and rain swirling in, and there in the entrance, her cloak billowing wildly around her and her face obscured in shadow, stood the Dark Lord. She raised her head, a grim sadness in her eyes, and said,
“And then would have come the rise of the Dark Lord Sassaflash.”