//------------------------------// // Chapter 19 // Story: The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash // by Dromicosuchus //------------------------------// With a quiet plip, nothing dropped from nowhere. It briefly flickered into existence as a droplet of water as it fell by a chunk of cracked stone that had once been part of somepony’s home, then vanished again, sliding smoothly away through a labyrinth of twisted space to some unknowable destination. Plunk. Presumably that was the sound of it landing in a puddle, or against the side of a cliff leagues away, or perhaps on the same damp surface from which it had fallen in the first place. Reality was broken, and it was hard to say for sure. A wad of dirty thatching fell with a wet thump to a cobbled floor, letting a dusty beam of light shine out of the hole that it had filled. It illuminated a vaulted stone chamber, thrown into disarray by the recent apocalypse. Books, herbs, heavy wooden furniture, and bent, twisted implements of iron and crystal lay scattered about the room, lying in heaps atop one another or hanging like surreal chandeliers from hooks embedded in the ceiling. A great black cauldron lay overturned in one corner of the room. The light grew brighter as another clump of thatching broke free, and an insistent scratching and whuffing became audible, coming from somewhere above. One of the stones of the ceiling grated inward, and after a few hollow thuds it fell free, bringing a rain of dirt and pebbles loose with it. Something like a pony's hoof that had cracked into a set of blunt claws grasped at the edge of the new cavity, scrabbling at the surrounding blocks of stone, and before long the hole had been widened enough for the digger, a rubbery-skinned, gaunt creature, to force his wrinkled body through and drop down to the floor of the dungeon. Looking up, he called, “The way is clear, necromancer, but—” He was interrupted by another shower of dirt, and he made an agile leap to one side as a begrimed pegasus tumbled down from overhead to land with a heavy thump on the uneven floor. Eyeing her as she lifted herself to her hooves, wincing in pain, he finished, “—’Tis quite a drop. Have a care.” “Thank you, Parchment, for that timely warning,” growled Sassaflash. Dusting herself off with one outstretched wing, she looked around, and drew a short, hissing breath at the sight of her ruined laboratory. “What a mess. Could have been worse, though, of course…” She stood silent for a moment longer, then shook her head and stepped forward, head held low as she peered through the wreckage around her. “Here, come help me look. We need the salts, of course, but also Angel’s corpses, a knife, bitumen, as much lye as possible, chalk, plenty of water or wood…” The ghoul and the necromancer labored in the shadows, overturning, seeking, collecting, and assembling. Before too long they had cleared a space in the center of the room and set the heavy iron cauldron there, squat and black, with the jar containing Starswirl’s salts—mercifully unbroken—beside it. Unsurprisingly, the shattering of space had likewise shattered all the plumbing lines, so water was not to be found, but there was plentiful wood in the form of the cracked and broken furniture littering the chamber. After mixing together two powders, one reddish and the other black, and pouring them both into the bottom of the cauldron, Sassaflash directed Crowded Parchment to fill it with kindling while she scribed a series of twisting sigils and interconnected circles on the stone slabs surrounding it. At times she hesitated, going back to erase some of her work or replace one glyph with another, similar one, and at one point she halted for nearly ten minutes to rummage through the books scattered through the laboratory, searching for some formula that, to judge from her muttered snorts of irritation, she was unable to find. The ghoul finished his labors first, and sat back on his haunches in a corner of the room, watching her with dark, glittering eyes. At length, seeing her continued struggles, he asked, “Thou’rt not forgetful of the Aklo? I can aid thee in it, if need be, though I wot not how thy memory could fail thee so soon.” The Dark Lord gave a short, humorless laugh and, talking around the bit of chalk held in her mouth, muttered, “Forgetful? Ya wgah’n shakloggog! No, it is the petty logistics, not the ability itself, that is the sticking point. To revive the dead I need water—but there is no water, or not enough to fill a cauldron. Thus this rigmarole. But I think…” She raised her head, eyeing the symbols on the floor, and then gave a short, worried whuff. Spitting the chalk out of her mouth, she said, “I have not attempted something quite like this before, and would not now, except—well. I can hardly make things worse. I would stand back, if I were you.” She stepped forward, muttering a few quick invocations of protection, and raising a hoof above the cauldron intoned, “’Bthnk sgn’wahl, ch’orr’eah ftaghunglui. Throd ehyehai uaaah!” A brief pause, and then, averting her face and cringing in anticipation, she said, “Fm’latgh.” A burst of flame shot forth, sliding across the broken wood like oil over water. A thin veneer of sickly, blue-green fire clung to the surface of the wooden fragments for several moments before slowly fading away—but as it did so, the wood itself began to glisten wetly, little bubbles of gas hissing and sputtering as water dripped from its surface. Sassaflash‘s shoulders lost their tension, and she allowed her wings to settle back against her sides. Turning to Crowded Parchment, she said, “Add small but equal proportions of these two powders if you feel excess heat coming from the wood, but do not touch anything in that cauldron. If you do come in contact with anything within, let me know immediately; otherwise, you will probably die horribly. And possibly explode. I haven’t actually done the math.” She paused to gather her thoughts and then made a careful sidestep, disappearing smoothly from the perturbed ghoul’s view as she slipped away through one of the cracks running through space. Gradually, spell by spell and ingredient by ingredient, the elements of Starswirl’s resurrection came together. Sassaflash spoke little, going about her task in a grim, strained silence very different from her normal melodramatic self-assuredness. When the flameless fire in the cauldron had died down and she was satisfied that all the wood had been consumed, she instructed Crowded Parchment to stir in several dozen pounds of lye while she rolled a thick oaken barrel, nearly as tall as she was, over to his side. She levered the top off, and the ghoul, leaning over to look within, exclaimed, “So that is why I could not scent them.” The mare nodded as she hoisted a heavy slug of wax with a suspiciously groundhog-like shape out of the barrel and dropped it into the nearby vat. “Yes. Boiled, then sealed in wax to preserve them from putrescence—and from snacking ghouls. I know your proclivities. Here, help me with this fox.” When the last of the bodies had been loaded into the cauldron, the ghoul kindled a fire beneath it while Sassaflash busied herself about the small urn containing Starswirl’s salts, a kerchief tied around her nose in an attempt to block the acrid stench of the slowly disintegrating corpses nearby. Crowded Parchment, she noticed, seemed completely unaffected; in fact, every so often when he thought she wasn’t looking, he would lean over the bubbling, greenish-black stew and inhale deeply, apparently savoring the aroma. Sassaflash rolled her eyes. “Are there any bodies left in the barrel, Parchment?” The ghoul paused, confused. “Aye.” “Then take a break and have something to eat. You’ve been working hard.” Crowded Parchment raised an eyebrow, but to Sassaflash‘s relief made no comments about unexpected thoughtfulness or consideration, and after groping with his long foreclaws around the bottom of the barrel managed to retrieve what might in happier days have been a duck. While he cracked it out of its wax shell, the pegasus returned to her own task. Pouring a small quantity of water into Starswirl’s urn, she set it above a spirit lamp and heated it to a boil, stirring it the while to dissolve the salts within. Then, bringing forth a small lump of bitumen, she held it above the urn on an upturned hoof while muttering a short incantation of harsh, stinging words in Aklo. After waiting a moment, as if to be sure that the spell had taken, she turned her hoof and allowed the bitumen to fall into the boiling water, where it immediately began to melt away, disappearing in cloudy black eddies into the water around it. Sassaflash nodded. “Acceptable. Parchment, would you bring that knife here? You’ll have to do the cutting, I’m afraid; I can’t pronounce the words while holding it in my mouth.” The ghoul laid his half-gnawed duck aside, and loped over to the pegasus’ side. “Aye. What dost thou need cut?” “My foreleg, of course. At the fetlock. Try to avoid the tendons, I don’t want to be lamed. I just need a little fresh blood.” A pause, and then, seeing his hesitation, “What? Surely you aren’t squeamish?” “Nay, nay. Only I am ill used to cutting living flesh. A carcass, yes, but a warm, living thing, moving and breathing, with blood flowing through it…” The ghoul shivered in revulsion. Sassaflash rolled her eyes. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’m not asking you to saw a leg off; it just needs to be a little cut. Kindly do not dither.” Raising her hoof above the boiling water, she repeated her earlier incantation, changing a few words and adding a few new ones. When she had finished, she turned to her assistant and said, “Now.” Not without some reluctance, Crowded Parchment raised the knife and nicked Sassaflash‘s outstretched foreleg, letting a few red droplets fall with a hissing splash into the urn. Withdrawing her hoof, the pegasus nodded thanks and trotted over to the bubbling cauldron to inspect its contents. As she had hoped, the lye had already completed its work, helped along by the lingering remnants of the spell that she had cast to disintegrate the wood, and the cauldron was filled with a glutinous soup, greenish-brown and smelling strongly of ammonia. The necromancer nodded. “All is in readiness, then. Parchment, I ought to warn you that this particular resurrection may be unusually dangerous; Starswirl the Bearded was an immensely powerful mage, and not overly fond of necromancers. I will be reviving him without bindings as a sign of good will—and because I highly doubt that anything I could cast on him would be sufficient to hold him. As such, you may wish to...Parchment?” She turned. The ghoul was conspicuous by his absence, and a newly-dug hole yawned at the far end of the room. Trotting over, she could hear the fading sound of claws scraping on clay as Crowded Parchment put as much space as possible between himself and the impending resurrection. Well. No need to worry about him, then. Drawing a deep breath, Sassaflash gingerly lifted the mage’s urn from above the spirit lamp, and carried it over to the cauldron. She paused before it, and then, her voice ringing hollow in the vaulted dark of the chamber, she poured the contents of the urn into the cauldron while intoning: Y'ai 'ng'ngah Yog-Sothoth H'ee-l’geb F'ai throdog Uaaah! The last droplet of water struck the roiling surface. For a moment nothing happened, and Sassaflash was terribly afraid that the entire resurrection had failed. Then, like a pool of chilled water freezing into ice, the bubbling liquid stilled. Sassaflash‘s eyes widened, and she reared up and around, darting away from the vat even as the brew within began to mold itself into a form, a shape, a body… She made it nearly halfway across the room before the cauldron exploded. At the same instant, a choking wave of force swept through the air, flinging her helplessly up against the opposite wall and pinning her there like a butterfly to a board, every muscle in her body slack and helpless. A shadow rose up amidst the swirling fumes billowing from the shattered cauldron, gaunt and long-limbed, and as the clouds of steam fell away Sassaflash beheld a tall gray pony, white-maned and white-bearded, with eyes yellow as amber and a long, trailing tail. He had no horn. The stallion paused a moment, looking around to take stock of his surroundings, and then turned his gaze on Sassaflash. His ears flattened against his head, and his eyes narrowed as he said, “Erravisti.” He raised a hoof, stepped forward—and then froze in shock as the shattered world around him warped and twisted. After a moment’s hesitation he took a tentative step forward, back, then rotated experimentally to the left and right before glaring up at the pinned necromancer overhead. “Quid fecisti!?” Fm’latgh ehyehai, uaaah, thought Sassaflash, and the spells binding her in place and silencing her momentarily weakened. “Please! I need to save them! I need your help to—” A quick gesture and a muttered phrase from Starswirl, and her tongue went numb again—but the anger on the mage’s face was fading away now, replaced by confusion. In halting accents, he said, “‘You need to save them?’ What trickery is this, necromancer? Do you think to fool me?” After a moment’s further thought, he raised a hoof and uttered a quick, growling phrase in Aklo, and Sassaflash felt life return to her limbs and the numbness drain away from her mouth and tongue, though she remained pinned to the wall. The mage stepped carefully forward, eyes focused on her as he tried to ignore the kaleidoscopic eddy of worlds rushing by his peripheral vision. “Speak!” “Please,” repeated Sassaflash, “Everypony’s dead. I killed them. I can’t let this be the way the world is, and you’re the only pony I know of with the power to undo what I’ve done. They didn’t deserve to die.” “Few do,” observed Starswirl, coldly. “Yet I am no necromancer, to rouse the dead from their slumber, nor have I the time to erase every tragedy from the annals of history. If you’ve killed your few friends, or more likely, your family—I’ve rarely known a necromancer to have friends—that is your crime and your punishment. Live with it. It was your family, I suppose?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “No.” Sassaflash shook her head. “It was almost everypony within—” She made a quick mental calculation, based on the disfigured and missing mountains she had seen on the horizon. “—a radius of approximately thirty leagues. At the very least.” Starswirl, who had been experimentally moving his hoof back and forward in front of his face in an effort to pin down exactly what had happened to the space around him, made a sort of surprised choking sound and stared up at the necromancer. “What? What year is this?” “I don’t know what it would be in your reckoning; Unicornia fell a long, long time ago.” “Immaterial,” said Starswirl, stamping his hoof on the floor, and for a moment Sassaflash had the strangest impression that she was looking at her own reflection. She recognized that impatient irritation with the slowness of others, though she had never had it directed at herself. “Just tell me the date as you know it.” “Well...1002. That is, a thousand and two years after—” “—After Princess Luna was banished to the moon, yes,” finished Starswirl. “Oh yes, I know about that. How do you think I know your tongue? I’ve visited many times, and lived the history of Equestria—and written it, too, under different aliases.” He paused. “Which is why this particular deception, necromancer, was doomed before it began. I know the history of this era, and I know that this year suffered no such catastrophe.” Sassaflash gave a hopeless shrug of her shoulders. “Just look for yourself. The hole in the ceiling there is the way out.” After glaring at her for a moment longer with a look of deep suspicion, Starswirl muttered a few words under his breath and made a brief gesture with his hoof, and then promptly disappeared from view. Sassaflash thought she might have glimpsed a hint of a blur striking up through the air, but she couldn’t have sworn to it. For perhaps a minute she hung there in silence, still pinned to the wall by the ancient mage’s spell, and then with a crack of displaced air Starswirl rematerialized, his composure gone and his eyes wide. He seemed to be having some difficulty getting air into his lungs. The mage stared wildly up at the necromancer, at a loss for words, and she raised an eyebrow. “You see?” Starswirl swallowed once or twice. “What did you do? I couldn’t have done this! Nopony could do this! What are you?” “Magister, with all due respect, don’t be a fool. I didn’t do that myself; I had to release the demon Discord, and in its battle with the royal sisters, it—” “No. Stop.” Starswirl held up a hoof. “You don’t understand. This never happened. I have been back and forward through ten thousand years of history, and I know every catastrophe and every triumph of Equestria, all locked within the pattern of time. And this—this apocalypse is not part of that pattern. Discord was freed in 1002, yes, but he was quickly contained by the bearers of the Elements of Harmony, with no loss of life. You have not just broken a world, necromancer, you’ve somehow broken time.” He sank back on his haunches, a look of shocked bafflement on his wrinkled face. “And you did so without drawing the Hounds of Tindalos down on your head, as well. I cannot fathom it. Yhoundeh’s pack cannot be drawn off from their quarry; any divergence of the river of time, and they descend to tear apart whatever was responsible. They cannot be waylaid. They cannot be distracted. They cannot be stopped. The only way to evade them when traveling through time is to maintain stable time loops—but this you manifestly have not done.” Looking back up at Sassaflash, he repeated, “What did you do?” “I don’t know!” Her hopes of a masterful Starswirl ready to take control and mend what had been broken were rapidly crumbling around her. That left time travel as the only option, then—not that there was any way it could help, but what else could she do? “I mean, I did kill Tsathoggua before bringing about Discord’s death, but that shouldn’t have done anything like this.” A pause. “Should it?” “How should I know?” The old pony gave an exasperated whinny. “I’ve never met anypony who has committed serial deicide before! Did you say you killed Tsathoggua?” He paused, massaging his greying forehead. At length, he looked up and asked, “What did you say your name was again?” “Sassaflash.“ “Never heard of you,” muttered Starswirl. “I wonder why.” He bent his head in thought. The silence which followed lasted some time. At length the pinned necromancer said, with some hesitation, “I wasn’t expecting you to be an Earth pony. You are Starswirl the Bearded, correct?” A disgruntled snort. “Of course I’m Starswirl. I imagine I am commonly depicted with a horn, yes? That was a prosthetic; the Unicornians among whom I lived had little respect for the hornless. And why should I not be an Earth pony? You are a pegasus.” The only good mages are unicorns, but the only great mages are Earth ponies and pegasi, she thought. “Ah. Could you perhaps let me down now?” “Absolutely not. Be grateful I’m allowing you to speak at all.” Well, it had been worth a try. Sassaflash resigned herself to waiting in silence for the mage to speak—which, after a period of time that was much too long for the necromancer’s liking, he eventually did. With a sighing whuff, the old stallion shook his head and said, “I still do not understand what exactly happened—what you did. Tell me everything, and perhaps I shall find some way to undo this. I doubt it, though." So she did. Starswirl proved to be a good listener, sitting in gruff silence as she related her plans, her adventures, and her mistakes. He interrupted her only once, when she was reluctantly explaining her motivations, asking “And how, necromancer, did you expect to save your mother without calling down the Hounds of Tindalos when you split the timeline by interfering with what has been?” “I don’t know. My plan was to cross that bridge when I came to it; I had already done so much that evading the Hounds seemed like a simple task. I’ve even done it before; when I was a filly I sent a stone back in time as an experiment, and when I brought it back to the present they followed. I wasn’t able to see much of what happened; I just remember an incredible, pressing pain, and a cracking sound. Maybe a hint of blue light, before I lost consciousness. When I came to, there were jagged cracks in the floorboards—not along the grain of the wood, but at random angles—and the stone itself had been reduced to a few sharp-edged fragments of rock. They’d left me alive, though. They hadn’t realized, I suppose, that I had been responsible for the sending, and only attacked what had been directly responsible for disturbing the flow of time. I thought I might be able to take advantage of that to distract them in some way, although I haven’t yet been able to think how.” “Nor will you. The Hounds are not to be trifled with; it’s a miracle, indeed, that you’ve already survived one encounter with them—and incomprehensible that they haven’t pursued you now, given that you’ve somehow split history itself in half. I’d say you were lying to me about what happened, were it not for the evidence of the apocalypse above us.” He frowned. “Proceed with your tale.” The rest of the story took little time to tell. When Sassaflash had finished, she concluded, her voice low, “And now nothing’s left.” Her ears limp, she raised her head and pleaded, “Can’t you do something? Can’t you save them from me?” Starswirl fixed her with a keen glance. “Is that what you hoped for? Summon the great mage Starswirl the Bearded so that he might recite some arcane incantation and undo the damage it took you years of planning and effort to achieve? I am a wizard, not a God—and even were I a God, it might avail nought. By your own account, you’ve already slain two of them.” He shook his head. “No, I’ve neither heard, read, nor experienced anything that leads me to believe that erasing an entire timeline is possible. I see no way of undoing the destruction you have wrought on Equestria.” The pegasus’ wings hung slack in her bonds. She had hoped, she had dared to hope, that Starswirl might have been able to do something—that he would know some secret, or wield some forgotten magic, that would undo all she had done. But he didn’t. He didn’t, and the burden of Equestria’s fate rested firmly on her own shoulders. She would have to bear that burden as best she could, and find a solution herself. Looking up at the mage, she said, “Then I’m on my own.” “Did I say that?” With a wave of his hoof, Starswirl dispelled the bindings holding Sassaflash in place, lowering her to the flagstones of the floor. “I am a methodical thinker, Sassaflash, who must put one hoof in front of the other. But from what you have told me, I very much suspect that you are not. The sheer ambition of your original plan is such as I have never encountered before. You contemplated acts and deeds that I would have dismissed out of hoof as being impossible. It may well be that you possess the bold madness needed to wake Equestria from the nightmare that has consumed it.” He gave her a keen glance. “What do you need in order to do so?” Sassaflash blinked in surprise. “What do I—are you offering to help me? Half a minute ago you had me pinned to a wall!” “For good reason, I think! You are a necromancer, you are a Dark Lord, and you frighten me, Sassaflash! Do you imagine that strength in magic is to be found in lore and formulae? No! It is a way of thinking, an algorithm by which one encounters and manipulates the cosmos. Your destruction of Tsathoggua and Discord used no magic that I was not familiar with—and yet I could never have accomplished what you did, because I could not have imagined accomplishing it. You could. You will. I must aid you as I can, for that is all I can do.” He drew a deep breath, and then, speaking with some distaste, he continued, “I cannot and must not limit you, much as it pains me to say it. What, then, would you have me do? What impossibility will you face?” She thought, and at length, she spoke. “Take me back in time.” The archmage bowed his hoary head. “So be it.”