//------------------------------// // Part One // Story: The Encore of Clover the Clever // by Ice Star //------------------------------// The light of a thousand prisms flew around me, swirling the multicolored hem of my skirt about softly. Not even the skies during the worst night-hours had created such a sight. Now, I was thrust about its very tangled heart, being thrown about and unable to see the outside. My whole form felt as light as a jump in mid-air and yet so undeniably present, more than I recall being in my life. I was dizzy with my trajectory and my sudden awareness that was all too keen. "Hello?!" I yelled as a chaotic wind threw me around and about this vast and yawning nowhere. My hooves touched no ground and could find no path in this strange void. Yet everywhere... was an overpouring of light. Were the voids of tales meant to frighten foals thought to be naught but darkness? How could this be? If the tales of the most learned of our kind were false, then what can be true? It is our traditions that guided us, as we had nothing true to measure by — as the blue godling would say. She was always one to dismiss the weight of the way of ancestors. "Am I not deceased?!" I called out with all the strength I could give my voice. At least that should be true if anything is anymore. The dark godling always would say that we conflated tradition with truth when she thought that no ponies heard her. I sometimes did, and her words never made sense to me. How could truth exist apart from tradition? Why would it even matter more? The vortex paused almost as if it were trying to get a rise out of me. I shuddered, wondering if the motion of the darkness knew my thoughts. As the bright pastel lights continued, I ran a hoof through my mane hoping to snag one of its short tangles to toy with in my uncertainty. There was nothing that brought me back to where I really was faster when fear gripped me. To my horror, the bobbed cut which I had died with was regenerated, grown out, and swept to one side in an even more matted mess bound only by a small brown tie. That was a look and leather thong that I would recognize anywhere. The mane of my youth, my dread, and my fear. I swept around finding myself no longer grounded by the ailments of age, only to watch helplessly as my lovely dress and apron had been shifted into a familiar rough cape with its itchy hood settled about my neck waiting to hide my gray eyes once more. I hated this old thing, with as much of that sensation that I could muster, and hated to see it returned to me now. That faint boil was all I could muster of true temper. This is all wrong! I wanted nothing, nothing at all, and instead, I get... whatever it is that this is! "No! Stop it! I'm a bloody atheist, this shouldn't be happening!" Will nothing listen anymore? At least the sound of my own voice is a comfort. Who could bear silence in a formless place like this? I screwed my eyes shut and stomped my hoof until the gusty tugs of this unearthly wind quieted into a nipping spring breeze that better suited my tastes. I may not be a pegasus but it was nice to see I could still do something even though I was still angry. Did I die for nothing? "I don't believe in a freaking afterlife! This shouldn't be happening, all this light and rainbow bursting should be nothing more than my mind falling apart! Nopony should get what is not real! Make it stop!" With an almost sorrowful silence, the wind lessened even further, down to an autumn whistle. I felt my hooves settle on solid ground somehow, even if I could see that I really was standing on nothing at all. Blackness was what I had seen, and that empty, cold, dead space was not as bad as the truth must be of where I was. "Mayhap you should start believing in us, Dear Little Miss Clever-was-I, for us gods and immortals, as sure as the misery of a thousand souls, do exist. We will be whether you like it or not, such is a staple of living beings. Belief in the life of another is completely unnecessary. We share your thrown state, though you will deny both. Nothing you believe has any prayer of changing that," growled a rough masculine voice, almost brimming with unspoken malice, "even if you believe in what magic prayer could do." "Of course, I knew god-immortals existed!" I proclaimed hurriedly, trying not to think about if I should believe my words. "I merely chose to ignore them, since they never meddled in the lives of anypony, or appeared at all. We only heard of them again when my friends and I started Equestria, and the southern stories piled up at our hooves. From them, we picked out that there was a chance of what others called 'gods' and that they were not unlike the godlings my master took in. Yet, to call them this label of 'gods' meant nothing to us when we had long ago struck them from magic, science, lore, and more. That was how I thought until the news was delivered otherwise. The other tribesponies, of course, were always sincere atheists, believing absolutely nothing I am seeing now, gods and others of the sort. In life, my five friends were not the only ones who proclaimed that gods could not be, and deemed the godlings freaks and tried to construct their own explanation for the stories we heard. Most important of all: Why do I need to meet anymore gods?" I received no comment from the speaker and I opened my eyes faster than this stunned being could come up with a reply. A gasp escaped my lips for I was no longer in the plain, flourish-deprived city of stone that was Canterlote but rather a magnificent pavilion with architectural styles even I did not know. Pillars with ivy patterns carved out of stone with the smooth likeness that shamed silk! A pond with water the color of starbursts was present, yet I knew not if it was water at all! And lo, the pavilion I was in was floating above a place half bathed in a moon's shine and a sun's rays. For here, both hung in the unearthly lavender sky, bound in what looked like an eternal twilight that the whole world below basked in. Two smooth and clear crystal thrones sat at the far end. There was an hourglass betwixt them, one made from a skill that could not belong to any creatures I ever walked among. Its sands were flying about within like a demon-mad pony instead of falling into place. On this hourglass was a thick and mangled gray talon that had seen many battles I wished desperately to remain ignorant of. Those talons were connected to a garish red-feathered limb which was in turn attached to a vicious-looking griffon... But not just any griffon, for it was a hideous being with the same garish red feathers all about its body — with primary feathers composed entirely out of what appeared to be actual flame. The same was true of the tail's tip and the goat-beard adorning his crooked black maw of a beak. The deep black lines underscoring his eyes made the bags under my own eyes appear faint in comparison to his, for he was a creature that looked as if they had never known the mere notion of sleep. These orange eyes were framed by thick inferno eyebrows that lit up his face in such a way that my bones and heart sang with every ache and pulse of fear they knew — and all from the tracing of light itself! Nothing dark about him was atypically fearsome, only what shone with light was. Large red wings were spread wide, a behavior I knew from pegasi that meant he was ready to take flight. Atop his head was a tarnished silver crown shaped like its parts were constructed out of bones, with blood rubies wedged at the very top. A large blue onyx was pinned to a blue cape that was torn and bloodied with pale blue fur trim did nothing to conceal the fact that just like a pony... he had a marking... why? Griffons get no markings. There is not a spell among all the ponies alive, dead, or those yet to be that could give griffons the markings we ponies get, just as no magic exists to make meat-eating good for us. Upon his haunches, I saw the skull of an indeterminable species coupled with a sprig of black holly berries present right on his hindquarters as if he were a pony. Or like one of them. After all, Starswirl had more than one Arcane Student, and the godlings could change their shape well. Both of them had marks too, and on each shape they took, those marks managed to find a way to stay. "You?" he bellowed. "You know gods? What lie are you going to spout next, my fountain? That they walk amongst you on Midgard? Do you perhaps have tea with them? Cream or sugar, dearie?" He laughed loudly before he wiped a phony tear away from his eye. "Liars go to Tartarus, you know. You know of no gods that I do not, and perhaps in the time we have together, I can tell you how far I searched for survivors of the Collapse. Now let me see here... how have you sinned, Mistress Clove Verre 'Clover' Felicia Magnus Laurelsdaughter-Tanglemane? That name is quite a mouthful for a peasant such as yourself." He fluttered up onto the headrest of one of the splendid twin thrones on either side of the hourglass. He summoned the skeletons of seven pegasi with eyes like leaden coffins washed to a gray nothingness. Each appeared bearing a number of fiery orbs depicting something in my life. They began to juggle. The griffin laughed heartily and snapped his digits, causing a ghostly guise of flesh to encircle them. All were identical and glassy-eyed, implying that these were powerful conjurations rather than damned souls. "Oh what have we here?" cackled this strange fellow. "Assisting the wicked? Turning a blind eye to the plight of others? Sinful, sinful, Mistress Clover. Tartarus could be your future. Now, would like to be broiled or scorched by the flames there? That might be the only thing that I let you pick among the eternity of punishments I set up for you across its rich, hellish, and oh-so-varied plane." He stopped snickering all of a sudden and focused on an orb depicting an event from my so-called apprenticeship. Instantaneously, all but that orb vanished as his eyes caught fire and with a flash, his griffon form grew and melted, sculpting itself into a matching guise of the 'Alicorn' variety, one I knew to be his towering true form. A long red horn produced the very aura that now held my memory. I looked around quickly out of the corner of my eyes for a path of egress but all possibilities led to the unexplored edge, and the world I could barely make out below that. The only advantage I have would be in how quick I could move. Alas, I had not been well versed in physical combat in life and despite the fact that the ailments of age no longer plagued my body, I still had the gritty pacifist soul of myself and not the violent attitudes of the god-immortal. Trying for subtle movements, I inched closer to the strange pond for perhaps it could be a vortex or conceal something else of use. This movement was noted and quickly and I was pinned to one of the columns by this being's fiercely un-pony-like magic. What was it about the magic of these creatures that could seem just like us ponyfolk, until you blinked? "Who are they?!" he bellowed once again, only the anger was frighteningly clear to me. He brought the lighted sphere to my face as if I needed to nit-pick my own knowledge. "Where are these goddesses? How much do you know?!" I gulped and struggled harder against his telekinetic grip, for all I knew this stallion had the intent of harm, and after all that happened, I could die again. Who was there to say I couldn't after all of this? I closed my eyes and tried to ignite some kind of flare only to wrench them closed even further as another powerful light presence made itself known and an authoritative female voice bellowed: "STOLAS, END YOUR TORMENT OF THIS SOUL AND RETURN TO YOUR REALM OF TARTARUS TO CONTINUE PUNISHING THE DAMNED AND EVIL!"