It would be some hours yet before the Sun dipped down into the boreal night, and some hours before the Mule and his wife, sheltering from a dreamstorm in their cabin in a green valley in the Dreamlands, would piece together the entirety of the Dark Lord’s scheme. For now that realization waited unrealized, and the Mule and the Dark Lord still stood exposed on an ancient Unicornian road, swift winds slicing through their fur and cutting cold against their skin. From this high perch, clinging like insects to the flanks of the mountain, the world opened in vastness around them. The sky was immense, the ice sheet was limitless, and the mountains and stones and winds spread wide and wild beyond their view.
The path stretched far out at one point, following an outflung buttress of stone that pushed out, stark and sharp, from the main bulk of the mountain like the prow of a ship. At its tip the road angled sharply and doubled back along the other side of the ridge, while at the sharp turning there rose a simple cairn, the rocks and pebbles making up the tower balancing one atop the other. As they reached the turning the Dark Lord, who had been talking to--or rather, at--the Mule, finished, “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. Now that the intervening stone ridge was no longer in the way, they could clearly see a tower--or the remnants of one, at least--in the distance. Shelter. Sassaflash hurried forward, and then gave an undignified squawk of surprise, flapping her wings and stumbling a bit before she regained her balance. The Mule’s eyes widened. “Miss Sassaflash! You alright?” He stepped forward--and then gave a sharp gasp of shock himself as he rounded the corner, his legs weakening beneath him and very nearly sending him flopping over in an undignified heap on the road.
Long ago, when he had been just a colt back in his old home in the Foal Mountains, a traveling caravan of merchants and salesponies had come trundling up the worn, weatherbeaten road to the Mule’s little mountain town, bringing brightly-patterned cloths, strange and enticing fruits, high-quality ironmongery from skilled artisans in the flatlands, and other such goods to trade with the mountain folk. While their parents browsed and bartered and haggled, the foals of the townsfolk and merchants played together, the travelers glad to be able to rest their legs and the mountain foals excited to see fresh faces. Among the travelers was a little unicorn filly, a thin, shy thing who hung back from the other foals and chewed nervously on her braids--and the first unicorn that the Mule had ever seen. As it happened, she had never seen a mule before, and their mutual curiosity soon overcame their timidity. She told him about magic, and showed him a few simple spells, amazing him with hovering pebbles and light shining out of thin air. One spell in particular had entranced him. Squinting in concentration, the unicorn had shone a thin beam from her horn, sending a perfect line of light shooting out across the clearing and into the dusk-darkened woods beyond. When she moved her head the distant spot of violet light had swung to and fro, shifting across the far-off tree trunks in impossibly fast sweeps as she tilted her horn through the slightest of angles. It was uncanny how quickly and effortlessly the tiny pinpoint of light shifted position, and the Mule had felt almost dizzy watching it, as though, in that moment, he was standing at a fulcrum around which the entire world was pivoting.
He felt that now, but stronger--so much stronger. One step forward, and the entire world had seemed to upend itself around him--but the rocks were the same. The sky was the same. Yet somehow, everything had changed. The Sun, which before had been a blazing star shining in futility in the void, was suddenly a reminder of Celestia’s love for ponykind again, glowing with warmth in the vault of heaven. In the rocks and crevices of the trail, which had hitherto seemed so bare and lifeless, the Mule noticed small lichens and mosses, spreading beautiful greens and greys across the rounded stones. The carved cobbles underhoof were not alien and disturbing, but elegant in their artistic strangeness--and even that strangeness was not so strange, for looking more closely the Mule saw that some of the stones had been carefully shaped into rounded but recognizable hearts. Ponies had lived here, and lived as ponies lived, in happiness and contentment. The blue, cloudless sky was beautiful, not barren. The wind was brisk, not cruel. Nothing was different. Everything was different.
The Mule rolled to a halt, eyes wide and mouth agape. “What was that?”
His employer stopped, and looked back at him, a light sparkling in her amber eyes. “A relief, is it not?”
“Yes, but--what was it?”
A smile. “Look at Voormithadreth.”
The Mule turned, then looked back at the pegasus. “I can’t. When we gone around that corner, them rocks done blocked it.”
“Precisely!” The Dark Lord gave a little flutter of her wings. “You can’t see it. The burden is lifted--or lightened, at any rate. Oh, it can still see us,” she added, in response to the Mule’s unasked question. “A few yards of stone are not sufficient to block the mind of the Thing beneath that mountain. But before we could have turned our heads at any moment and glimpsed it. We were always a fraction of a second away from perceiving it, and having a part of it enter into our minds. We might not have done so, but we could have done so, and the possibility was what mattered. Now, though, with every step we take along this road, we increase the time separating us and a glimpse of the mountain, and with that distance we decrease our awareness of the Thing beneath.”
After pondering this for a moment, the Mule said, hesitantly, “Does that mean we ought to go back somewheres where we can see it, so we ain’t--ain’t blinding ourselves, as you might say? Only I don’t much fancy--”
“No, no.” Sassaflash shook her head. “That would be very imprudent. We are mortal beings, Mr. Mule. We were not meant to be aware of the mind of a God. To expose ourselves to It indefinitely, even at this distance, would drive us mad, just as surely as I was driven mad in the depths of Voormithadreth. It is better that we know It can see us, without feeling that It can see us.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Only, knowing that It can still see us kinda ruined that cheerful feeling.”
“My apologies, Mr. Mule,” said the Dark Lord Sassaflash drily, “for not maintaining your state of blissful ignorance.” She hesitated, as if unsure what to say next, then shook her head irritably. “But this is foolish. That ruin may provide the shelter we need, and here we stand in the cold and wind, yammering senselessly at one another like the common ponies in the marketplace. Come. We must make haste.”
“Yes, Miss Sassaflash.”
-----
Spurred on by the promise of shelter from the high Hippoborean winds, the two soon neared the ruin, clinging in craggy disrepair to the mountainside. Half of the structure was entirely missing, having been dragged down by an ancient landslide into a deep ravine, but the rest seemed sound enough, rising up in a crumbling, ice-glazed half-cylinder from the side of the road. Twin unicorn statues, weathered by whirling ice dust into shapeless golems, stood guard on either side of the small byway that led to the watchtower’s gate, while the heavy wooden door of the tower itself still stood in place, as solid and strong as if it had been carved and set in place only the day before. The same could not be said for the iron lock on the door, which cracked into sharp-edged fragments at a buck from the Mule’s hind hooves. With a sullen creak, the door swung inward into the darkness of the tower’s interior.
Stepping inside, the two travelers found a room that had been left surprisingly untouched by the passage of eons. Curiously carved wooden tables, low and long, stretched along the walls of the entryway, while deeper in the murk shadowed things like wine racks rose to the ceiling, rows of cubbyholes criss-crossing their faces, and the crumpled, fragmented remnants of tapestries lay on the floor, half-covered with a fine drift of powdery snow. The Dark Lord trotted over to investigate the racks, while the Mule inspected the tapestries. Although some of the fabric had apparently rotted before the most intense part of the freeze had finally set in, much of it was incredibly well-preserved, lying as it had in cold, dry darkness with nothing to disturb it. He nodded a nod of quiet satisfaction, and turning, called out, “Miss Sassaflash! They’s some cloth hangings here that we can use for blankets!” Receiving no response, he trotted over to the pegasus, standing at the back of the room and staring up in silence at the racks. “Miss Sassaflash?”
The Dark Lord did not turn. In a quiet, awed voice, her wings hanging slack at her sides, she murmured, “Look, Mr. Mule. Look.”
He looked. “I don’t see nothing. Just some wooden tube things stuck in them holes in the--”
“Scrolls.”
The Mule tilted his head. “Beg pardon?”
“They are scrolls, Mr. Mule, scrolls! Preserved, intact, Unicornian scrolls!” The pegasus whipped around, extending one quivering wing to point up at the wooden stand beside her, and gasped out, “This--this rack alone is priceless. Imagine the secrets hidden here! Look before you, and behold the mystic knowledge of an elder civilization, lost--and now found!” Turning back to the line of scrolls, she reached out a trembling hoof, and gingerly slid one of the long rolls of wood and paper out of its cubby. The paper did not crack, the wood did not crumble. “Imagine, Mr. Mule! We are the first to see these writings in nearly five thousand years! Oh, I should have come here years ago. I should have known looters would not dare venture so near to Voormithadreth. Only I--only we have so dared! And now we are rewarded!” Holding her breath, the pegasus carefully, slowly unrolled the paper, holding it up against the rack so that the fading light shining through the chamber’s open door fell on the aged glyphs. “I will translate.” Peering closely at the characters, the Dark Lord began to speak.
“And so...Sweet Wind, her head--no, her chest--heaving--with feeling, or perhaps emotion, threw herself into the--arms? Wings? of Iron Crest, the handsome--guard, and as she gazed into his coal black eyes, she whispered--she whispered…”
The Dark Lord stood staring at the scroll, an unreadable expression on her face. A dead silence fell, for which the Mule privately felt he deserved a great deal of credit, considering how hard he was finding it to hold back the braying peal of laughter swelling in his chest. Finally, he managed to squeak out, “Well miss, you know they wasn’t librarians here. They would’a been reading to wile away the hours, not to get them some book-learnin’, and--”
“I do not wish to discuss it, Mr. Mule.”
“Why, of a night when I don’t got nothing better to do, even I likes a good romance novel, and them guardponies here wasn’t too different from us, so I reckon--”
“I said I do not wish to discuss it!”
He considered pushing the point, but decided against it. There was a decidedly wild look in the Dark Lord’s eyes. “Yes, Miss Sassaflash.”
“Good. Let us continue to look for supplies, and put this...this travesty behind us. Glory of Unicornia, my left alula!” The Dark Lord stomped angrily off towards the stairs leading to the tower’s second story, and the Mule, after looking after her for a moment with a thoughtful expression on his homely face, turned and tucked a few scrolls into the crook of his hoof for a pile of supplies by the door. Might do them good to carry a little silliness with them, even if the only one who could read it would, almost certainly, refuse to do so.
The exploration of the rest of the tower took little time. There was little left to explore; much of the upper portion of the structure had collapsed in the distant past, possibly during the same upheaval that brought down the rear half of the watchtower, and the stairs leading upwards were either blocked with rubble or ended abruptly in thousand-foot drops. There were plenty of wooden furnishings and furniture remaining in the tower, though, preserved by the cold, and with them as kindling and the worn tapestries as bedding, the two travelers were able to make themselves reasonably comfortable for the night. They even had food, of a sort; some of the romance novellas in the scroll rack had been written on papyrus, and they proved edible enough, if not exactly palatable. As they sat by the crackling fire, smoke and steam rising from the flames, the Mule looked up from a particularly tasteless--in both senses of the word--novella detailing, the Dark Lord had told him with a contemptuous sniff, the adventures of a young mare and the vampire fairy weregriffon who loved her, and said, “Earlier, you said reality don’t like being forced. That it takes revenge. You’re talking about it like...like it can think, like they’s some mind out there that’s a-watching us. That ain’t so, though, right?” A pause. “...Right?”
The Dark Lord made no immediate response, dourly gnawing on the chronicles of a mare named Spring Blossom who had been so unfortunate as to have gained the affections of three different handsome, wealthy stallions, and couldn’t choose between them. To the Mule’s chagrin, Sassaflash had refused to tell him which one she ended up with. She swallowed, and looked back at the Mule. “Wrong.
“I have told you of the Great Old Ones, Mr. Mule--Tsathoggua, Cthulhu, and others, slumbering in the dark places of the world or stalking blasted wastes beyond Celestia and Luna’s guardianship. Now I will tell you of another order of beings, as far beyond the Great Old Ones as the Great Old Ones are beyond us. They are called, collectively, the Outer Gods, and while the Great Old Ones have immense power over reality, the Outer Gods, in a very real sense, are reality. It is by Their will that Tsathoggua and Its ilk wield such tremendous power, and They resent creatures like us, who use the power of magic without Their blessing. To Them, we are nothing more than crawling parasites, mindlessly feeding on a power that is not ours to possess. Lice.”
The Mule raised an eyebrow. “I ain’t no louse.”
“To Them you are.”
“But to me I ain’t!” The Mule propped himself up on his forehooves. “I don’t reckon it matters what They thinks. I reckon I’m worth something, and I don’t see as how Them thinking otherwise makes a particle o’ difference.”
The pegasus gave him an odd look, her head tilted and one ear bent to the side. “They wield great power, Mr. Mule. Infinite power, in fact. We only exist at all because They are patient and timeless, and the millennia that ponykind has existed are, to Them, just the fractions of a second between Their notice of us and Their annihilation of us.”
“That don’t signify.” With a shake of his head, the Mule continued, “Princess Celestia’s mighty powerful too, and she thinks ponyfolk is worth something--but that ain’t why I matter. I matter ‘cause I thinks I matters.”
For a time Sassaflash made no response, simply staring at him with her brow knitted and her tail twitching to and fro behind her. She seemed to be trying to parse some peculiarly complex puzzle, and not having much luck at it. Finally, she turned and looked into the fire. With a sigh, she said, “Well. You have a strange way of looking at worth, Mr. Mule, but not an unpleasant one. It is a shame the cosmos does not respect your views...But enough of this. The hour is late, and we have a long day ahead of us, if we are to stand a chance at finding some relic of Unicornian magic to help us before we succumb. Get some sleep; I will keep first watch. My dreams of late have been...troublesome, and I confess I do not relish the prospect of closing my eyes.”
With an enormous yawn, the Mule said, “Don’t mind if I do. But you’s welcome in our home in the Dreamlands any time you want, Miss Sassaflash. You knows the way now, and they ain’t a-going to be no nightmares there.”
The Dark Lord smiled, but said nothing, and after waiting a few moments longer, the Mule turned over, hunkered down under one of the salvaged wall hangings, and slowly drifted off to sleep.
And Dreamed.
-----
Ash stirred fitfully in the embers of the campfire, blown about by the draught whistling in through the broken door. The two sleeping figures on either side of the cinders were barely visible in the dim twilight of the northern night, cloth wrapped tightly around them against the cold. One of them stirred, and muttered something in her sleep--then, with a gasping intake of breath, she jerked upright, throwing the cover off her back with a violent sweep of her wing and rising to her hooves. She glared across the campfire at her companion, and snapped, “I fail to see how it makes any difference!”
The Mule’s eyes slid open, and he lifted himself up, meeting Sassaflash‘s glare with a cool, steady gaze. “I reckon not.”
“You knew my aspirations, my goals. Tell me, what part of ‘Take over the world’ was unclear to you? Did you interpret ‘Dark Lord’ as a little-known synonym for ‘pastry chef’ or ‘greengrocer?’ When have I ever been anything but open about my ambitions?”
“You ain’t never been real open about much o’ anything.” Clomping over to the pile of kindling they had heaped up the evening before, the Mule took a sharp-edged fragment of a broken chair up in his mouth. The Dark Lord tensed, then relaxed as the old creature tossed the wood on to the fire. He turned to look at her again. “T’ain’t that, though. It’s that you’s still fixing to go through with it, if we get outen this alive. I knowed you was planning something real bad, and this is real bad, but--”
“Enough.” Sassaflash held up a hoof. “There is no need for you to say anything further. The fact that you consider my hopes for Equestria’s future ‘bad’ communicates things quite well enough, thank you.” She stalked away from the fire, then turned, a shadow among shadows. Her eyes burned in the darkness. “I want to give immortality to Equestria, Mr. Mule. I want to banish death. I want to do what Celestia will not. Is that ‘bad?’”
The Mule shook his head. “I don’t like it. Like I said afore, ain’t you never stopped to think that maybe they’s a reason Celestia don’t do all them things you’re fixing to do? Ain’t you never--”
“Of course I have!” Tossing her mane angrily, the Dark Lord continued, “And the answer is quite obvious: cowardice and selfishness. Celestia knows that if she used her power, if she truly did all she could do, her life would be forfeit. The cosmos itself, angered by her use of such powerful magic, would bend itself to her destruction, and she would be crushed.”
“Can’t say as how I blame her for choosing not to, then,” said the Mule, and gave the dwindling fire a poke with a stick, sending sparks spiraling up into the chill air. Sassaflash snorted.
“Can you not? She was faced with a choice: die, and let us live, or live, and let us die. She chose to let us die. All of us, over and over again, countless times down through the millennia. The wails of every mother who lost her foal, the tears of children for their parents, the gaping hole left behind by the passing of dear friends--all of that falls on her head. She wears our misery as her crown, and her throne is made of bones.”
Dropping the stick from his mouth, the Dark Lord’s minion replied, “Even if you’s right, though, wouldn’t you be just the same? I still reckon Celestia’s a good pony, but even if she ain’t, I don’t see how it makes much difference whether we got an everliving ruler named Celestia or an everliving ruler named Sassaflash.”
“No?” The Dark Lord stepped forward, firelight gleaming in her flaxen mane. “The difference, Mr. Mule, is that I would not be everliving. I would choose differently than Celestia did, and be crushed by the wrath of the Outer Gods--the wrath of Yog-Sothoth, the Gate and Key, the Most Prolonged of Life, the One in All and the All in One--so that everypony else would never have to suffer the agony of losing somepony they love. Never again!” The last words came out in a snarl. “I would establish a dynasty of necromancer queens. Each of us would step forward in turn, maintaining the immortality of our subjects, and each of us in turn would be cut down so that they might live.”
The Mule started to speak, then stopped, his eyes widening and his ears flopping limply down as the full strength of what she had said hit him. Staring off into space, he murmured, “A sacrifice. You’s fixing to sacrifice yourself.”
Sassaflash nodded. “Rem acu tetigisti. Exactly,” she hurriedly translated, before the Mule could ask what the ancient words meant, and lowered herself back down beside the fire, now crackling and flickering again under the Mule’s ministrations. Reaching out a hoof, she drew one of the tattered tapestries back up over her shoulder, shivering in the cold of the Hippoborean night. “And for that sacrifice--for those sacrifices--nopony would ever need to know loss again.”
The Mule blinked. “But I just--but why? I ain’t never heard you say a kind word for other ponies! ‘Rabble,’ you calls ‘em. ‘Fools.’ I’m jiggered if I can see why you’d do so much for them.”
The Dark Lord made a contemptuous snorting noise in the back of her throat. “For them? I have suffered no change of heart, believe me. I would do this thing not for them, but against the pain. Pain like that should never exist, even in their blank, fluffy-headed little minds. Nopony deserves that.”
The Mule said nothing, staring into the flames as he tried to wrap his head around all that the Dark Lord had said. Eventually he looked up. “It’s too big. I can’t think about it all at onct.”
“And yet it has the simplicity and elegance of a mathematical theorem: pare away the things whose loss would cause no pain, to save that which would. I am...disposable. Sweetie Belle is in awe of me, but nothing more. Crowded Parchment--you’ve not met him, and I am not at liberty to say what, precisely, he is--has seen many ponies before me die, and knows better by this point than to form attachments. The rabbit, Angel, is a business associate only. As for my sister and father--well. My father has never forgiven me, and my sister loves a Sassaflash who died long ago, though she doesn’t yet realize it. And then, of course, there’s you.” She hesitated, a shadow of doubt flickering across her face, and looked up at the Mule.
“And then there’s me,” agreed the Mule.
There was a long moment of silence, the two looking across the fire at one another. Finally, the Mule smiled. “You got one friend, Miss Sassaflash.”
“I see.” She considered this in silence for some moments. Then she drew the salvaged tapestry tightly about herself, her face turned away from the Mule, and said, her voice subdued, “Well. We should rest. Dawn is yet some hours off, and we will need all our strength on the morrow.” Almost as an afterthought, and so quietly that the Mule nearly didn’t hear it, she murmured, “I am sorry.”
-----
“She ain’t evil. She’s wrong, but she ain’t evil.” The Mule paced back and forth, dripping rainwater on the rug as his shadow danced across the far wall in the light of the room’s oil lamp. His wife sat at the table, watching him with a dubious eye.
“I don’t know, Ponyville. Setting an ancient demon of chaos free and siccing it on the Princesses seems real evil to me.”
“That’s just it, though!” He turned and stamped a hoof on the floor, and the Dodge Junction Mule raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t you go getting dramatic on my good rug, Ponyville. It wasn’t easy to stitch that up.” Raising a hoof, she gestured for him to come to the table. “You sit yourself down and dry yourself off; you’re getting all worked up. What’s just it?”
“That’s the problem. She ain’t evil, but the things she’s fixing to do is. It’s just...If she was evil and doing evil things, it’d be simple; do anything to stop her. If she was good and doing good things, they wouldn’t be no problem neither.” He trotted over to his wife, and at a sharp glance from her picked up the proffered towel and began to dry himself off. “But a real good pony fixing on doing something real bad...What do I do?”
The Dodge Junction Mule frowned. “Ponyville, you know durn well what you’ve got to do. Stop her anyhow. She may mean well, but that isn’t going to make a particle of difference to the ponies that get hurt when she sets this monster free.”
“I know.” A sigh. “She’s a-thinking about this like it’s a ‘rithmatic problem, that’s what’s wrong. She sees ponies living on, forever and ever and ever, and that’s such a good thing that she thinks it cancels out the bad things that’ll happen at first. But it don’t work that way. Ponies ain’t numbers.”
Rain pattered in the dark outside, a calm remnant of the storm that had torn through the valley earlier. The Mule’s wife tilted her head. “Thinking of ponies as numbers isn’t something that good ponies normally do. Are you sure you’re not wrong about her? I gave her a chance, like you asked--took her in, was real hospitable, and tried to see the good in her, even when she was talking about raising the dead and killing Gods and I don’t know what all. But this...how do you even know she’s telling the truth? She might just be spinning a story about what she plans to do after taking over the world, making herself out to be a great hero so you won’t stop helping her. She could just be in it for the power. She probably is.”
“She could be,” agreed the Mule. He absently poked at the tabletop, staring at the woodgrain with more intensity than the woodgrain probably deserved. “She surely could be.”
Neither mule said anything, the Ponyville Mule lost in thought and his wife watching him, waiting. A droplet of water splashed on the rough floor, falling from a crevice in the roof, and the rain murmured softly to itself outside.
Then the Mule looked up, and shook his head. “No. I seen good in her, Dodgy. I seen it. She’s almost ashamed o’ it, and she keeps it buried real deep, but it’s there and it’s behind everything she does. When she sees clear, when she ain’t blinded no more, she will do the right thing. No matter how hard it is, and no matter what’s standing in her way, she’ll make things right, and they ain’t no power on heaven or earth that’ll stop her.”
The Dodge Junction Mule met her husband’s gaze and held it. “You really believe in her?”
“I do.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer, and then with a sigh, she nodded. “Alright. I believe you. I don’t see it myself, but then I don’t always see things as clear as you. If you really trust her, then I’ll trust her too. For your sake.”
-----
“Hnnn…”
The Mule blinked, opening his eyes to the piercing white light of dawn. That wasn’t what had woken him, though. There had been a noise like a distressed insect, a kind of whine or moan.
“HHNNnnnnhnhnn… Nnno…”
He turned. The noise had come from Sassaflash, still lying curled up in her cloth hanging and hugging it to herself in her sleep. She whined again, and drew a ragged, whimpering breath, shivering beneath her ersatz coverlet. “Must be having night-terrors,” the Mule muttered to himself, and gently nudged the Dark Lord on the shoulder. “Miss Sassaflash? It’s morning, miss. Shouldn’t we ought to be on our way?”
The pegasus’ eyes snapped open, pupils dilated. She stared unseeing at the Mule for a fraction of a second, then snapped upright in one scrambling motion, casting the tapestry to one side. Her ears pinned to her head and her tail lashing, she demanded, “Worrywort! Where is the--tea. I need my tea. I need it.”
The Mule blinked. “We ain’t got none, remember? Them things from down up under that mountain done ate all our things. They ain’t none left.”
“But I need it! I have to have it! If I don’t, I’ll--she’ll--” The pegasus stopped, and with a visible effort of will wrenched herself back under control. She shut her eyes and drew a deep, measured breath, her limbs still slightly trembling beneath her. When she opened her eyes again, the earlier frenzy was gone. “My apologies, Mr. Mule. I--You are quite right. The worrywort is gone, as you say. I will just have to make do without.” Another deep breath. “It is only tea, after all.”
Staring at her as though he had just seen Tsathoggua Itself, the Mule asked, “You sure it’s only tea? Only you don’t seem--”
“I will be fine. That is, I am fine. Am and will be. Perfectly fine.”
“But--”
“I do not wish to discuss it any further. Packing! We have packing to do. Kindly gather as much papyrus as you can for provisions--strip the scrolls from their wooden spindles, we should travel as lightly as may be--and see if it is possible to bundle these tapestries in a compact fashion. Wood should be brought also, for the purposes of warming ourselves and melting snow for water, and if possible see if you can find…”
Despite the Mule’s best efforts, Sassaflash managed to successfully steer the conversation away from worrywort for the rest of the morning. Before long they had managed to arrange the various supplies they had found in the old guard tower into reasonably portable bundles, and loaded down with their burdens the Dark Lord and her minion set out once more, picking their way down the crumbling stone steps leading up to the tower door and turning back on to the Unicornian road that had led them to their shelter.
It was a long day. Their goal, Sassaflash explained, should be to seek out and investigate any structure that might still hold arcane knowledge or functioning magical devices, and this they attempted to do. The first tower, reached after four grueling hours of scrambling across a glacier to reach the neighboring peak upon which it had been spotted, was a disappointment; although the inhabitants had clearly been wealthy, they seemed to have had little interest in reading--or had loved it too much, and had taken their scrolls with them when they fled their home before the oncoming ice.
The second tower they reached--likely a summer home, Sassaflash explained, built by Unicornian nobility as a refuge from the valleys and the commoners who lived there--was similarly barren. It did, however, offer up one treasure: an ancient telescope of curious design, built with the lenses themselves embedded in some dark stone and connected to each other by an open latticework of bronze wires, bent into various shapes--coiled serpents, salmon and deer, twining vines, and--of course, for ancient and alien though they were, the Unicornians had still been ponies--carefully crafted hearts. Sassaflash immediately took her prize to the top of the desolate tower, and after peering through it at the surrounding mountain slopes for some minutes, gave a sharp “Hah!” of satisfaction. Turning, she said to her minion, “We are in good fortune. There are the remnants of some substantial settlement or construction there, to the right of that nunatak. Our chances of finding suitable arcana there should be much better, and if nothing else, there should be supplies aplenty there. It is some leagues from our current position, but I believe we can reach it before sunset. Here, Mr. Mule. Take my spyglass.”
“Aye aye, Miss Sassaflash.“
“Thank you. I--” The Dark Lord paused, then directed a sharp glare at the Mule, who looked innocently back at her. She raised an eyebrow. “I realize, Mr. Mule, that our customary forms of address do have a certain nautical ring to them, and that the term ‘spyglass’ carries a similar flavor. I would appreciate it, however, if you would not emphasize this. It lacks dignity. Is that clear?”
“Aye--yes, Miss Sassaflash.”
“Good. Now, kindly take my telescope, and let us be off.”
-----
Snow glare dazzled their eyes and wind chilled their bodies as they made their way along ancient paths towards the distant structure Sassaflash had spotted. The Unicornians had been industrious; as they pressed onward, they began to see signs of other habitation surrounding them. Remnants of side roads angled their way down the slope, bridging crevasses and pits in slender arches of interlocking stone and passing through tunnels carved into the living rock of the mountain to vanish beneath the crushing mass of the ice flowing between the peaks. Tapering towers rose from the peaks of far off mountains like pointed crowns, bound together by elevated walkways and linked to the lower reaches by covered stone passageways. At one point they even glimpsed, through the gap between two summits hazed blue by distance, the still-standing ruins of a gigantic aqueduct or road that had been built between two peaks, stretching through the air from the flanks of one mountain to meet with another. Its central supports had long since been toppled by the river of ice slowly but inexorably flowing through the valley beneath, tearing down most of the structure, but enough remained clinging to the slopes of both mountains for the travelers to grasp some sense of what its scale had been when intact. Sassaflash muttered quick calculations to herself, her eyes growing ever wider as she worked out the colossal mass of rock needed to build the bridge and the tremendous stresses it had withstood for so many thousands of years, while the Mule just stared, lost in awe.
For all the power and glory they had possessed, though, the Unicornians were gone, and little by little their works were being beaten apart by time. The Dark Lord and the Mule soon found themselves forced to leave the old carved road, and venture out on to the glacier’s treacherous surface yet again. The ruin that was their goal was visible through the naked eye, now, not just through the telescope they had found, but they still had a long way yet to go, and as they trudged on, tied together by the length of rope that the Mule had brought down with him into the depths of Voormithadreth, the old creature decided that the silence and stillness and immensity of the place was becoming a bit too oppressive. Hurrying forward to the Dark Lord’s side, his hooves crunching in the glacial firn, he said, “So, about this plan o’ yourn.”
Sassaflash‘s ear twitched, and in a guarded tone she said, “Yes?”
Well, it was a big improvement from ‘That is none of your concern.’ Encouraged, the Mule went on, “I know you reckon you’re doing a good thing, but ain’t this chaos critter you’re fixing on setting loose dangerous? They’s a reason it was sealed away in the first place, arter all. Couldn’t an awful lot o’ ponies get hurt?" He waited for a response, but received none. “Miss Sassaflash?”
The Dark Lord bit her lip. “Celestia and Luna will act quickly. They know what Discord is capable of better than anypony else, and they will not let the beast roam free. Then, once they’ve expended their power against that threat, I will step forward, and--”
“What if Discord wins?”
Coming to a halt, Sassaflash turned to face her minion, her mane and tail billowing in the wind. “Discord cannot win. None of them can. The powers all of them will be bringing to bear will be too great, and the universe simply will not allow any of them to retain any measure of good luck after the engagement. Oh, I have no doubt that the Princesses will attempt to dodge that arrow; if they are particularly foolish, they may even send out the six ponies who recently wielded the Elements of Harmony against Luna--as if they have any chance against Discord, Lord of Chaos! Ultimately, though, the only power that will have any chance of matching that demon’s is their own, and once all three have exhausted themselves against one another, I will step forward.”
“Them ponies took on Nightmare Moon, though, and they done beat her.”
The Dark Lord turned, a stern look on her face. “Kindly do not compare me to that...that blithering incompetent. ‘Nightmare Moon’ was little more than Princess Luna playing at villainy, and not doing a particularly good job of it. You’ve heard the stories of the terrible obstacles the Bearers faced, I presume? The only truly dangerous things they faced were an avalanche and a manticore--and trust me when I say that I am significantly more threatening than either of those things. As for the rest, I understand that Nightmare Moon’s other dastardly deeds involved snipping half of a sea serpent’s mustache off, attempting to frighten the Bearers away with some scary-looking trees, and--this I have trouble believing, but I am assured it is true--trying to get one of them to join her sports team. A fell and perilous foe, indeed!”
With a short laugh, Sassaflash resumed her march across the ice, the Mule plodding after her. “No, the Bearers will fail, and Celestia and Luna will be forced to battle Discord themselves. I will have no trouble overpowering the victor and claiming dominion over Equestria, particularly with Celestia and Luna out of the way. There are old, great magics--things forbidden by Celestia and Luna, that they have placed powerful wards against--that I have some knowledge of. With them defeated, their wards will collapse, and many of the old powers--the powers that the Unicornians had access to--will become available to me. Spells for shifting the positions of the stars, Sun, and Moon, for example. Incantations capable of transmuting matter into magic, and magic into matter. Even time travel. True, unfettered time travel, mind you. Limited time travel is, of course, available to particularly gifted mages even today, but it is of no practical value; the range of time one can travel is quite short, the location at which one emerges in the past is uncontrollable, and the spell itself is carefully designed to prevent any alterations to the timeline being made. It is nothing more than a parlor trick, really, useless for the seeker into hidden truths. Without Celestia’s spells, though, the gates of time would open, and one would have unlimited access to past and future. Which is why, of course, the Princesses saw fit to forbid it.” The pegasus came to a halt before a telltale depression in the snow in front of her that marked, possibly, a crevasse, and turned to one side, skirting the hidden pit.
With a sage nod, the Mule said, “On account of ponies’d go back and change things to mess up the future, right?”
She shook her head. “Time does not work that way. The traveler in time who alters the past does not erase their original future, but simply creates two futures, diverging like twigs off a branch.”
The Mule tilted his head in puzzlement, one long ear standing upright and the other flopped over to one side. “Then why’d they forbid traveling through time? Oh, and I reckon we can cross here, Miss Sassaflash. That don’t look like it’s got a pit hole up under it.”
“Ah? Very well.” Moving gingerly, the Dark Lord inched forward, then relaxed as the ice beneath her hooves gave no sign of giving way. “To answer your question, there are…beings that dwell in the angles of time. Hunters, implacable and deadly as a hound chasing after its prey. They resent any and all intrusion into their realm, and will follow and destroy any who dare venture too deep into the past, chasing them back to their own time and slaughtering them and anypony else who dares stand in their way. They always find their prey, no matter where she may hide and no matter what spells she may put up in her defense.” Shading her eyes, the pegasus peered up at the craggy peak rearing up out of the ice far beyond them. “We make good time. ‘The Hounds of Tindalos,’ they are called--somewhat fancifully, for they bear no resemblance to hounds. At least, not that anypony knows. I do not know of any records of anypony who has actually seen them and survived the experience. One victim did scream something about ‘tongues’ before being meticulously disassembled, so perhaps they have those. Or perhaps not.”
“Ain’t there never going to be a question I ask you that don’t end up being answered with a story about some awful pony-eating monster?”
One of the Dark Lord’s rare smiles flickered across her face. “I consider it unlikely.”
Sassaflash‘s estimate of the time it would take them to reach the ruins proved accurate, if only just. By the time they had finally climbed down off the ridge of debris-flecked ice at the edge of the glacier and set their hooves on solid rock once again, the Sun had sunk behind one of the western peaks, cast in stark silhouette against the twilit sky. In this high, dry land the bitter cold of night set in swift and hard, and by the time the two had found the remnants of the road that led to the ruined complex they were already aching with cold. Fortunately their destination was not far up the road, and before long they stood before a tall, peaked stone arch, still intact despite all that wind, ice and time could do to it. Beyond the arch stood a number of tall stone buildings and towers, clustering around a rubble-strewn courtyard and in varying states of disrepair, while in the courtyard itself, rough, snow-dusted boulders of ice stood here and there clustered in groups of twos and threes. They were oddly shaped, and all about the same size, being somewhat taller than the Dark Lord and her minion.
Without a word the two hurried in, making for the nearest of the dark doorways yawning in the face of the crumbling stone buildings. As they entered the darkness within, Sassaflash muttered something under her breath, and a spurt of flame flared into existence upon her outstretched hoof. For a moment they glimpsed a great hall, tall stone columns, heavy ceramic urns, more of the odd icy boulders, perhaps a hint of broken furniture off in the shadows--and then the flame flickered and died, and darkness descended once again.
Turning to where he was reasonably sure the Dark Lord was standing, the Mule said, “It don’t look like they’s any scrolls in here.”
“Yes,” came the reply. “Still, this is but one room. There will be other rooms in this place, and other towers and buildings to explore in the rest of the compound. That, though, is all for tomorrow. For now, we should focus on finding furniture to break up for firewood. It is, I think you will agree with me, too blasted cold.”
“Yes, Miss Sassaflash.”
-----
Embers drifted through the night air, rising up from the glowing remnants of the campfire as the Mule and Sassaflash slumbered beside it. The light gleamed faintly off one of the urns, half as tall as a pony, that stood nearby, filled halfway to its brim with the crumbling remnants of what might once have been a tree or shrub. All was still, silent, dead.
“Nn.”
Sassaflash shifted beneath her covering, one of her ears twitching. One of her hooves began to move, sliding back and forth in an odd, complicated pattern, and she murmured again, this time a bit more loudly.
“N’gha…uln n’gha wgah’n...Yog...Yog-Sothoth…”
The fire flared, and a flame leaped up from one of the embers before subsiding again.
Uln orr’e, uln’bthnk, ebumna ch’geb...
The fire flared again, and this time the flames took hold, dancing and crackling in a sudden burst of light and heat. A scraping, creaking noise came from the urn standing nearby, and a rich, living scent filled the air. The Mule stirred, roused by the sudden revival of the fire, and opened his eyes just in time to see a slender stalk rise up from the ancient urn, its branches twitching and clawing at the air and vivid green leaflets springing into being at the tips of its twigs. The Mule blinked at this once or twice, and then shut his eyes again. A dream. It was a dream of some sort.
”Noggeb shugg...Goka Y’gotha, Yog-Sothoth...Tharanak, Y’vulgtlagln Yog-Sothoth…Uaaah!
The Mule’s eyes snapped open again. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream. He propped himself upright, glancing from the shrub, now grown to a respectable size and sending out new leaves every second, to the Dark Lord. “Sleep-spelling?” he murmured. Sassaflash had fallen silent now, although her limbs were still twitching, and after staring at her for a moment the Mule slowly eased himself back to the floor, eyes still fixed on the pegasus. It was lucky, he supposed, that she had just used a plant-growth spell, or whatever that was; from what he had seen her do before, casting spells in her sleep could have ended very badly. His eyes drifted shut again…
“Nnn...Hrrnnn...”
It was a whining sound, thin and frail and frightened. The Mule raised his head, looking across the flames at the pegasus, curled up against herself beneath the thin tapestry wrapped around her. Sassaflash shuddered and clenched her teeth, ears lying flat against her head, before giving a long, low, miserable moan, her voice wavering and full of pain. Casting his covering off, the Mule started to rise to his hooves--
“Mama!”
Sassaflash woke with a scream, her eyes wide and frantic. Her breath coming in harsh gulps, she stared unseeing into the fire, her mouth open and her face contorted in a rictus of pain. She looked up, saw the Mule, tried to say something...and then a heavy, broken sob forced its way out of her throat, and she turned her head away from the light, her back shaking as she sobbed into the thin cloth of the tapestry.
At first all the Mule could do was stare at her, frozen in shock and uncertainty. Her eyes had been so full of pain, pride, frustration, loss...He didn’t know what to do. Comfort her? Pretend nothing had happened? Could she be comforted? She was always so proud, so angry, so determined in her invulnerability--but now she lay hunched on the ground, the fur on her face dark with tears as she howled out her misery to the dark. He couldn’t stand by. He couldn’t. Rising to his hooves, the Mule moved over to Sassaflash and set himself beside her, fur against fur and warmth against warmth. The pegasus started to draw away, but stopped--and then another sob wracked her body, and she leaned back against him, crying and crying.
They sat there for a long time. By degrees, Sassaflash‘s sobbing fell away into dry gulps and messy sniffles, and the quaking of her body gradually stilled. The Mule said nothing, simply sitting beside her in the dark, a warm, solid presence at her side. It seemed best that way.
Finally, her voice numbed and broken, Sassaflash spoke. She made no thanks to the Mule, made no excuses for herself, made no attempt to salvage her dignity or restore her pride. She only stared ahead, gazing with reddened, puffy eyes into the darkness of the ancient Unicornian hall.
“I’ve never spoken of my mother to you. I should have; she was the best mare who ever walked this Earth, so kind, so clever, so wise. She was Saddle Arabian by birth, and she had some of the old blood, the air of the Horse about her. She had wandered the wastes when she was young, like Abd al-Hisan, and she followed in his hoofsteps--but where al-Hisan was broken and warped by his wanderings, she came out of the Rub al-Khayl pure and whole, like...like a stone, tumbled in a stream until it’s smooth and perfect. She knew dark secrets--but she also knew the darkest and most hidden secret of all, that dark is not the same thing as evil.
“Unlike my father, unlike all the other wise fools of the Hollow Shades, who were so scared of the knowledge that it was their task to guard, she understood that truth, that secret, and she taught it to me as well--and tried to teach it to my sister, although I don’t think Starshade ever learned that lesson. If she did, she’s forgotten it by now.
“I learned so many things from my mother. When I was still a foal, she taught me in secret--it was forbidden knowledge, you understand--the art of necromancy, or at least its beginnings. She opened doors for me, and showed me how to think carefully, quickly, never lingering, always watching--the safety of motion. I learned Aklo from her--learned the language that no books teach, not even the Equunomicon, that can only be learned from somepony or something who speaks it. And I loved her. I loved her more than anything else in the world.
“Then, when I was still a foal, before I even had my cutie mark, there was...a sickness. Nothing unusual about it, I suppose; just one of those things that happen. The doctors tried what they could, but it wasn’t enough, and she dwindled and faded and died, and all I could do was watch and cry, helpless to save her. And my father and sister cried with me, and wished that they could have saved her.
“But they could have saved her, or could have tried; I knew that. They might have been scared of the knowledge, scared of the powers and responsibilities it gave them, but the elders and my father knew of the old, dark secrets too. It’s difficult or impossible to bring back somepony who has recently died, yes, but they could have tried! They didn’t even try! They were too afraid, too weak, too cowardly. That’s what I felt.
“But I wasn’t afraid. My mother had taught me to be strong, and to face the world as it is, not cower in fear of it and whimper after a fantasy, and even then I knew more of necromancy than most other ponies in the world. I decided that if they were too cowardly to bring her back, then I would do it.
“So I studied her books, and gathered the herbs she had picked, and searched the woods for small dead things and preserved them in wax, so that I could use their flesh and bones to knit together a new body for her. I went out one night alone with a spade and a sled--Starshade wouldn’t come with me, she was too frightened of what I was planning to do, although I did get her to promise not to tell our father--and I took my mother out of her grave where my father had left her to rot, and brought her back to our home, and down into the basement.
“I could barely look at her, but I knew what to do--knew what I had to do. I rendered her down to her essential salts in her own cauldron, that she had used so often for her own potions and brews, and while her salts were drying I dissolved the carcasses I had collected, using the formula she taught me, so that their flesh and bones could be molded into her flesh and bones. I spoke the words. I drew the circles. I called upon the Outer Gods, and at my bidding They reached back into the past, plucking her mind and form from her deathbed and bringing them forward to me.
“I remember it so well, now. The candles on the walls, flickering and guttering in the winds swirling around the cauldron--the spattering of liquid on the stone floor--my voice, the voice of a foal, squeaking out words never meant to be spoken by ponykind. The air burned violet around the cauldron’s iron rim, and I could hear things moving within, matter being drawn together into a new body. In my mind I could already see her raising her head out, confused but alive, and I could see myself running up to her and holding her and never, ever letting go...
“But for all my strength and all my courage, I was still a foal, and what I was trying to do was beyond me--beyond anypony, maybe. The winds died down, the fires stilled. The splashing and hissing stopped. I waited, but she didn’t lift her head up over the rim--even though I could hear something moving inside, shifting wet against the metal. Maybe she was stuck, I thought. Maybe she needed help. So I went up to the cauldron, and I hooked my hooves around the handle and pulled. It tilted on its legs, tipped up--I jumped back, out of the way--and it fell forward onto the stones, and the thing that was inside spilled out in front of me.
“At first, I thought I had succeeded. There was something off about her, but I knew that mane, that face, those eyes...And then she turned, her head weaving and bobbing like she was saltdrunk. Her other eye was white and half gone, leaking down her face, and her face itself was rotting, her skin hanging loose and pale against the bone. That was when the smell hit me, and I stumbled back, just as she stumbled forward and on to her hooves--or what was left of them.
“Necromancy needs time. It works by drawing an image of somepony’s mind and body back from before they died, but it can only pick a specific time to draw them back from if they’ve been dead decades, at the very least. Centuries is better. When they haven’t been dead long enough, bringing them back brings back...bits and pieces from different times. Half of their mind may be thinking one thing, and the other half thinking something else. Half of their heart may be pumping blood out, and the other half may be drawing it in. Half of them may be alive, and half may be dead…
“Her tail fell off as she stood up, and one of her legs buckled under the weight, the rotting tendons too weak to hold it together. Her brain must have been decayed in places, her nerves would have been half whole and half eaten, her heart pumping putrid blood through rotting veins... She slipped forward, towards me, and made this...this sound. I don’t know if she recognized me when she saw me. I think she was in too much pain to notice anything. She tried to scream...
“It was over soon, fortunately. She couldn’t stay alive for more than a minute or two like that. Then the door to the cellar slammed open, and there was my father, at the top of the stairs...I don’t know whether Starshade told him what I was doing, or whether he had heard the cauldron tip over and had come to investigate. It doesn’t really matter. He came down the stairs, staring at what was left of his wife with these wide, dead eyes. He stumbled up to her. Looked down. Then he looked at me. I’ve never seen so much terror in anypony’s eyes before or since. He backed away, then turned and galloped up the stairs and out the door. I could hear him shouting for help, but I wasn’t really paying attention. All I could do was stare at my mother’s body, remember the agony in her face as she died a second time, and think to myself, I did this.
Sassaflash drew a long, shuddering breath, and turned to look to the Mule’s horrified face. “I’ve been drugging myself with worrywort ever since. In large doses, as you know, it’s a potent amnesiac that erases short term memories completely--but in small doses, when taken over long periods of time, it suppresses long term memories. It doesn’t erase them; a pony taking the herb still knows what happened to them in the past. But the emotional content is muted. It is, in a way, a shortcut through the grieving process; it carries one straight past the pain, leaving only a dull sense of loss and sadness that never quite disappears. One remembers the pain, but doesn’t feel it. But if one stops taking it, soon enough the colors return to the old memories, and the old flames are kindled. The grief comes back, as fierce and agonizing as it was on the very first day. Since we lost all our worrywort to Tsathoggua’s spawn, the nightmares have been getting stronger and more vivid, and I suppose tonight they finally came to a head, and all the intensity of my memories broke through, all at once.
“There’s not too much left to tell. Some of the laws of the Hollow Shades are forgiving. Possession of forbidden grimoires, for example, is usually either ignored or dealt with with a small fine. Divination is frowned on, but as long as no particularly dangerous beings are invoked, it’s accepted. But necromancy--there is no forgiveness for that, for no one, under any circumstances. They found me still down there in the basement when they came back, and brought me out into the dawn. The council of elders convened a few days later, and they--my father included, he was one of the newest members--voted to banish me from the Hollow Shades, never to return, for the horrific thing I had done. I was only a foal, but it made no difference. They gave me some supplies, and a map to the nearest village--there was no train then, not yet--and took me to the town gates and barred them behind me.
“It was then, as I was sitting there under the gates, staring up the long, winding road that led up out of the valley and shivering in the wind blowing through the dark fir trees around me, that I felt a strange tingling on my flank. I turned, looking back, and I saw a pattern form on my haunches: a double lightning bolt. You’ve heard the saying ‘lightning never strikes the same place twice?’ Well, that’s not true of me. Lightning struck me twice, once with my mother's death and again when my attempt to bring her back failed, and I swore, that day beneath the trees and the clouded, swirling sky, that I would become lightning myself, and I too would strike twice. I would do the impossible, become the thing that never happens. I would find a way to break down the barriers against time travel, even if it meant overthrowing Celestia herself. I would bring back my mother. And together, we would make certain that nopony ever had to go through pain like mine again.”