//------------------------------// // Chapter 17 // Story: The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash // by Dromicosuchus //------------------------------// The morning was beautiful as only a fine summer’s morning in Canterlot could be. Sunlight glinted in the dewy grass, and a cool breeze ruffled Sweetie Belle’s mane as she trotted after her classmates and teacher through the Canterlot sculpture garden, her heart drumming in her chest as Miss Cheerilee described the statues around them. Normally she would have paid closer attention to what she was saying, but there were more important things ahoof than a Canterlot field trip. Important. She, Sweetie Belle, was important! “Critical,” even, Miss Sassaflash had said. Her little chest swelled with the thought of it as her friends, who were apparently arguing about something, bickered beside her, and flicker of irritation darted through her mind. Didn’t they know that she, Sweetie Belle, was critical? Applebloom said something something “victoryful” something, and the little unicorn, exasperated, snapped, “That’s not a word!” Her other friend, Scootaloo, looked over. “What are you, a dictionary?” Sweetie Belle was about to give a really cutting retort—”No, I’m critical!”—when Miss Cheerilee called “Girls!” in a tone that very clearly said that there would be trouble if there was any further squabbling. Truce, for now. The three fillies trotted after the rest of their class, who had gathered around a twisting, surreal sculpture. This was it. This was it! Sweetie Belle’s eyes widened as she gazed up at the kaleidoscopic monster rearing above their heads. It was just like Miss Sassaflash had described; mismatched horns, a writhing, serpentine body, hooves and claws and paws and wings, all jumbled together into one insane, chimerical beast...Her teacher asked what they noticed about it. Applebloom mentioned its eagle claw. Scootaloo pointed out the lion paw. Sweetie Belle jumped up, squeaking, “And a snake tail!” This was perfect! She reached up a hoof and surreptitiously felt at the thin, carved clay rod wound into her mane, brimming with a power that made her horn ache. All she had to do was snap it in half, close by to the statue. Her teacher, seeing that they were all gathered around, raised her voice so that they could all hear her. “This creature is called a draconequus. He has the head of a pony, and a body made up of all sorts of things. What do you suppose that represents?” Ooh! She knew the answer to this one! Miss Sassaflash had told her, back before she left, when she’d asked what the statue was like. The pegasus had paused, considering, and then said, “It has an evil look to it. Its head…” And then there had been that long description that Sweetie Belle had only half listened to, because come on, how many statues like that could there be in the sculpture gardens? It didn’t sound like it was exactly normal-looking. Drawing a breath, the unicorn filly said... ...Nothing, because Applebloom spoke up first. “Confusion!” That wasn’t right at all, though! Sweetie Belle pushed her friend aside, and just managed to squeak out “Evil!” before Scootaloo, in turn, shouldered her way forward and expressed her opinion that the statue represented chaos. For a moment Sweetie Belle considered just letting bygones be bygones—Miss Cheerilee had already scolded them once, and she didn’t want to cross any lines—but then a cunning plan sprang into her mind. A fight! That would be the perfect time to break the conduit without anypony noticing. With as much contempt as she could manage, the Dark Lord’s acolyte said, “It’s not chaos, you dodo!” “Don’t call me things I don’t know the meaning of—and it is too chaos!” “Is not!” Applebloom, not to be left out, jumped forward. “You’re both wrong!” The battle was joined! Sweetie Belle jumped at Applebloom and knocked her to the ground, Scootaloo bit the little unicorn’s tail, Applebloom gave Scootaloo’s ear a smarting blow with her hoof, Scootaloo kicked Applebloom’s shins, and in the midst of the confusion Sweetie Belle head-butted Scootaloo, angling her head just right so that the thin clay rod snapped in half with a sharp crack that was buried under the sounds of the fray. A spidery, trailing rune coiling its way along the two halves of the broken rod flared, burning with an indescribable color, and as it burned other runes, woven around and through space itself, burst into heatless flame. Magical buffers and barriers crumbled. Walls fell. Distances shuddered and collapsed. A link opened, connecting the Canterlot sculpture garden both with the abnormally real swamp surrounding the Canterhorn and with distant Tsathoggua, swollen and fatted on unreality. All around the petrified draconequus, space buckled and twisted invisibly, ripping open in a silent torment that the gathered ponies sensed as, at most, perhaps a stray wisp of wind or the faint, whining echo of a sound like hooves being drawn across a blackboard. Miss Cheerilee stepped forward. “Actually, in a way you’re all right.” The fighting ceased, and three slightly bruised fillies looked up in confusion. Continuing, their teacher said, “This statue represents discord, which means a lack of harmony between ponies.” She paused. “In fact, you three have demonstrated discord so well, you’re each going to write me an essay explaining it.” Sweetie Belle’s face fell. Darn. She just knew they weren’t going to get away with that without some kind of punishment. Oh, well. It’s not like anything really bad had happened. ----- Beneath the icy pinnacles of Voormithadreth, buried in the endless wastes of Hippoborea, the God Tsathoggua dozed in divine languor. Its ancient dreams continued undisturbed, and Its eternal hunger gnawed It as it ever had. Some day—some year—some eon—the stars would again be right, and then It would grasp hold of the mountain’s roots and blast them to shivered fragments, wrenching the millions of tons of rock above Its head aside and opening a gate to the surface world. It would erupt out of the depths, ravening and terrible, and none save, perhaps, Dead Cthulhu Itself would be able to stay Its hunger, or waylay the flood of liquid death that would pour forth from the depths to gather stone, air, trees, fish, mountains, ponies, and all else to sate the appetite of great Tsathoggua. Black things splashed and slithered in the choking darkness around the God’s reclining bulk, whispering poison to one another. Occasionally a shivering ripple would slide across their tarry surfaces, as though they had been struck by a chilling breeze or had felt a hint of some presence other than their Master and Parent. They were disturbed. A pony had come to the depths, bearing witness to Cthulhu’s Eye—and then, somehow, it had shielded its mind, so that while it still knew the piercing sigil, they were no longer able to perceive its thoughts through that window. It had escaped. It had threatened them with the Eye of Cthulhu, and in their bafflement it had escaped. They were small, and it had been small, and so their thoughts dwelled on the tiny intruder, while the latent apocalypse that was Tsathoggua slumbered far, far above, indifferently awaiting the rightness of stars. Some day. But the stars were not right, and so Tsathoggua still waited, wrapped safely in Its web of unreality and confident in Its might. Let the cosmos—Yog-Sothoth, the All in One and the One in All, the Most Prolonged of Life—rage in the wastes beyond; that Power could never touch Tsathoggua in the artificial universe It had crafted for Itself. Nothing could ever touch it. It was in no hurry. It had all of eternity, after all. Then, quite abruptly, all unreality vanished from under Voormithadreth. A hunger vaster and older than even Tsathoggua’s howled up out of the gaping rift in the cosmos, fanged and fierce. Tsathoggua’s black, liquescent spawn flashed into nothingness like rain in the heart of a volcano, boiling out of existence as a hundred million years of accumulated unluck—the wrath of Yog-Sothoth—slammed into them. Ancient perversions of unreality running through the bulk of Voormithadreth were torn loose, and the mountain shrieked as all its massive weight fell upon it, no longer supported by Tsathoggua’s spells. The walls of the Toad God’s chamber imploded. Rock materialized, then vanished, then erupted out as a molten spray that hissed into incandescent vapor, leaping through the burning air in hundred-yard plumes. Great cracks arced up the flanks of the mountain, and in a slow, grinding plunge it began to capsize, its four peaks shifting and sliding into the cavernous depths. Tsathoggua screamed. Voormithadreth exploded. At the center of a maelstrom of white-hot plasma and whirling vortices of Being and Unbeing, Tsathoggua struggled, fighting to regain its balance. It was and had always been a Thing that should not be, and for an instant It had been afraid—afraid!—that It would fall. But that danger was past. It was not a Great Old One for nothing, and it would take more than this to destroy it. Tendrils of magic lashed out, binding Its unholy self back into existence. It would weather this storm, as It had all others, and whatever had done this to It would be destroyed, never to threaten It again. And then the second attack came. A thousand leagues and more away, Discord had felt the flood of magic, more powerful than anything he had ever sensed in his life, pouring over and through and around him in his stony tomb. He didn’t know what it was or where it came from—but after a moment of absolute shock, he decided that now wasn’t the time to ask questions. Reaching out with his mind, Discord, for all intents and purposes a Great Old One in his own right, grappled on to the already-slackening stream of power, and pulled. Hard. Something else was trying to choke the stream of magic off, but he was Discord, Lord of Chaos, and he would not be denied. He drank deeply, filling himself with the unbeing he needed to break free of his prison—with the unbeing draining away from Tsathoggua, and that the God needed to exist. In the fiery caldera that was all that remained of Voormithadreth, Tsathoggua, already unbalanced, swayed in midair as It desperately clutched at Its hemmorhaging magic. It wasn’t enough. Withdrawing the remaining webs of power that kept it aloft, Tsathoggua focused them all on the deific tug-of-war, letting Itself collapse in majestic ruin to the boiling floor of the crater. It wasn’t enough. Matter flowed away from the God’s body, exploding in the intense heat as Tsathoggua abandoned Its form, Its mind, Its being, everything but Its frantic struggle for existence. It wasn’t enough. The God gave one last, wailing howl of anger, fear, and despair, and the remaining threads of magic protecting the Great Old One from the will of the cosmos were shredded. The hammer of Yog-Sothoth descended. A God perished. A God awoke. ----- The morning was still just as beautiful as might be wished. At least, so Princess Celestia was informed. She’d done her part to make it so, of course—the Sun was up, right on schedule, and to her mind she had done a rather nice job with that particular dawn—but the pegasi sometimes made mistakes, and sometimes schedules got mixed up, and one got rain instead of shine, or snow instead of mist. Or tornadoes instead of clouds; ponies were still occasionally finding little pieces of the old castle from that incident in 393, buried in the soil miles away from the Canterhorn. But evidently no miscommunication had happened today, and everything was as it should be. A slight smile crossed the tall alicorn’s face, and she returned her attention to the letter hovering in the air in front of her, raising one hoof to push a drifting wisp of her mane out of her eyes. Then, without any warning of any kind, something broke or snapped in the fabric of reality, far, far away. The princess gasped as the shockwave swept by, jarring her bones and sending a stabbing bolt of pain up her horn. A moment later it was gone, vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared. The letter fluttered to the floor. Celestia glanced around. Her secretary, a unicorn, was still quietly transcribing her shortform notes from the morning meeting into long script for the archives. She’d evidently felt nothing. Whatever it had been was too subtle for ordinary unicorns to sense; too far away, perhaps. Or maybe just something they couldn’t pick up. Lifting the letter and placing it back on the neat stack of the morning’s correspondence, she closed her eyes and sent her senses spreading out, seeking for any change, any difference. She didn’t have to seek far. Almost at once, she became aware of a strange alteration, as though some fundamental part of the world had shifted. What in Equestria? She cast her mind further, and found part of the change, at least, almost immediately. A tremendous wash of magic lay in billowing pools in the swamp surrounding the Canterhorn, almost bringing the normally magic-less place to typical background levels of magic. It wasn’t the Shepherd’s doing; she could feel the ancient entity now, a locus of power striding through the swamp and erasing the unreality around him. Besides, there was more; this was just the backwash from some greater, more distant event. She cast her mind further, searching the Everfree, the Hollow Shades, the Sintered Lands...Nothing. Everything seemed placid, clean, and pure, as right as it could possibly be. Pure. Yes, that was the word. It was too pure; there was something missing, a foulness that had dissolved into light. Part of an ancient evil, something so old that she scarcely noticed its shadow anymore, though she thought of it often, had disappeared. A wild thought crossed her mind, and she sent her thoughts further afield, across the Western Ocean to the site of an unfathomably old city, lying sunken beneath the waves—No. No, Cthulhu wgah’n R’lyeh. Her thoughts darted elsewhere. Nug and Yeb yet labored beneath a forgotten ruin in Saddle Arabia. Yig still crept through the wild places of the world, capricious and feral. Tsathoggua— —Was gone. Just...gone. The alicorn’s eyes drifted open in numb shock. How was that possible? It must be a mistake. Great Old Ones didn’t just disappear. But if it was a mistake, what had happened? Had Tsathoggua shielded Its presence for some reason? One of the throne room’s grand double doors slid partly open, and one of the castle pages entered and approached the throne. He said something; she didn’t quite catch what. Celestia raised her head automatically, her mind still a thousand leagues away, and saw the page looking expectantly at her. She blinked. “I’m terribly sorry. Could you repeat that?” “Of course, your highness,” said the page, with a quick bow. “There is a strange pony who wishes to speak with you. He did not give a name, but said that you would want to see him.” Seeing her confused expression, he added, sheepishly, “I would have sent him away, of course, to make a proper appointment, but—well, the fact of the matter is, he just appeared in the reception chamber. I don’t know how he got in, or got past the guards. I just glanced away for a moment, and when I looked back he was sitting on one of the couches as if he had been there for hours. The door didn’t open, I’m sure of it.” “I see.” The princess’ thoughts were already drifting back to the disappearance of Tsathoggua. Somewhat vaguely, she asked, “And he gave no name?” “Not precisely. I told him, of course, that I could not announce him without a name, and he responded by asking me which of his names I would like. He said he had thousands.” The page paused. “Princess? Are you all right?” No, thought Celestia, I am not all right at all. Hoping desperately that the mad suspicion that had leapt into her mind was false, she asked, “Thousands? He said he had thousands of names?” “Yes. Is anything—” “What color was his coat? What was his cutie mark?” “Black,” answered the page, taken aback by the urgency in the princess’ voice. “He had a black coat. And I think he had painted over his cutie mark or covered it with soot; it looked like he didn’t have one at all. Your highness? Your highness!” Celestia leapt from her throne, moving faster than she had in years. “Get out. Show Him in, and then get as far away as possible. Dismiss the guards. I must see Him alone. Raven,” she said, looking over her shoulder at her bewildered secretary, “You’re dismissed as well. Go home. I’ll tell you when it’s safe to return.” They hesitated, confused, and Celestia slammed her hoof against the floor. “Hurry!” “Your highness, if this stranger is dangerous, it would be wise to keep at least several guards present, in case—” “Do as I say.” They did as she said. For a moment the alicorn considered stepping down from the dais to meet Him at the door, but she thought better of it. It wasn’t as though the Outer Gods cared one way or another, and she would not abase herself before their soul and messenger any more than she had to. Stepping back, she seated herself on her throne, and waited, heart beating wildly and a cold chill clinging to her flesh. The doors swung wide. He was tall, just as she remembered, and His body was lean, muscular, and black as a starless night. Dark, appraising eyes, half-lidded and callous, passed slowly over the room as He strolled towards her. His gaze lingered on the stained glass windows, slid lazily past Celestia herself to the tapestries hanging above her throne, and then drifted over to the remnants of Raven’s morning work, lying abandoned beside the throne. He came to a halt directly in front of the princess, glanced briefly at her, and then looked to his left at the stained glass on the other side of the hall. Fighting to keep the fear out of her voice, Celestia spoke. “I swear we don’t know what happened to Tsathoggua. Luna and I had nothing to do with it.” She flinched. She could feel His attention focusing on her, cold and distant as the depths of space. He considered her in silence for a moment, staring into her soul with fathomless black eyes, and then spoke in a slow, languid drawl. “You don’t know what happened. Your sister knows—or knew.” “What do you mean?” She wasn’t going to notice the past tense. She wasn’t going to allow herself to notice the past tense. She was letting her fears get the best of her. Of course he didn’t mean— “She knew.” The black stallion tilted his head. “So I killed her.” The world shattered around Celestia. It couldn’t be true. She had to find her sister. The princess scrambled down from her throne, her breath catching painfully in her throat. “Luna!” Luna had been fine just this morning, she had been sleeping in her chambers, she—”Luna!” And then suddenly the black stallion was standing in front of the doorway that led up the towers, a tired expression on His face. “Go back to your throne. I didn’t kill her.” He sounded like he was explaining something to a particularly stupid foal. Celestia froze. “You said—” The stallion stepped forward, walking back towards the throne, and Celestia automatically stepped out of His way. Without looking at her, He continued, “I was lying.” He stopped. “Or perhaps I wasn’t. Perhaps even now your sister is lying sprawled on her bed, blood dripping from her neck to the floor below. Soaking into the rug. Her eyes open but lifeless, staring at nothing. Body cooling. Stiffening. Perhaps.” He turned, looking back at Celestia, and His eyes narrowed slightly—the first hint of an expression he had shown throughout their meeting. “You don’t know whether to believe me. You’re afraid. Angry.” A pause, and He slowly shook his head. “I thought you might have changed since we last spoke. Become more bold. Stronger. You haven’t.” Celestia stepped forward. “Why are you doing this? We’ve done nothing! We never broke the rules!” The visitor made no reply at first, merely staring idly off at one of the stained-glass windows, showing the victory of Celestia and Luna over Discord. At length, He muttered, “The alicorn would have ended Tsathoggua if she could have gotten away with it—but never at this price. Not then, and not now.” Forcing herself forward, forcing her voice down from a furious, terrified shriek to a controlled monotone, Celestia asked, “What price? What are you talking about?” No answer. The black stallion stepped up to the window, peering down through it at something below, then turned and began to stroll back the way He had come, towards the doors leading out of the throne room. Without following Him, Celestia asked again, “What price? Answer me!” The stallion showed no sign that He had even heard her. With a tremendous effort of will, Celestia strode forward, setting herself between the visitor and the door. “Answer me, Nyarlathotep!” He stopped and looked up at her. His expression was completely unreadable—but Celestia knew what was going through His mind, as surely as if He had told her Himself. He was trying to decide which would be the easiest way to get her to stop bothering Him: to tell her what she wanted to know, or to just kill her. There was a long, long moment of silence. Then the being called Nyarlathotep spoke. “Something has defied Us and destroyed Tsathoggua. It did this by using the Night Shepherd's domain to unbalance It, and Discord to drain It. Discord is free.” Nyarlathotep’s eyes narrowed. “Naflhai Y’sgn’wahl, grah’n.” Celestia stood aside. The doors swung shut. For a moment she made no further movement, staring tensely at the twin doors as though afraid that the messenger would come back through them, and then she reared up and around, and galloped for the stairs that led to Luna’s chambers. It took Luna at least ten minutes before she could get Celestia to stop sobbing and hugging her and tell her what had happened.