Yes, I have heard of the Farisi, the gentle people. I have heard their females were graceful in flight, their males crested with golden feathers. I have heard we must learn from the Farisi.
The Blackbeaks say the Farisi made the best music, and that once every Blackbeak fledgling had a Farisi flute. But if you ask them to sing a Farisi song, they will smile and say they have all been forgotten.
These tales are foolish. I have seen that peak whose name is forgotten, midway between Brokebeak and the Claws. Its sulfurous stink reaches through thick clouds.
Its western edge is steep and rocky. This is the land one flies over on the updrafts. Here lookouts watched for Blackbeaks or Silvertails, here they cried out Dull Claws' name when he returned from across the western sea.
Woods wrap its eastern edge. A traveler drifting above sees a gray line below the ridge, where a yellow haze clings on cloudless days.
The gray line is granite. The haze is smoke, foul like rotten eggs, rising from narrow cracks a claw's breadth across. The cracks stretch a hundred spans and more through stone and earth. I could not see to their bottoms.
The riven stone is dry and hot. An egg broken upon it would soon turn hard and white.
The road curves uphill and ends in a field of limestone covered with moss. Here the tribe sat while Dull Claws told them of the ponies, who lived across the sea in peace and harmony, neither killing nor being killed. He said the earth gave them more fruit and berries than they could gather, and the stones of the earth shaped themselves into great cities for their comfort. Here he told them of their leader, the great white Sun Mare.
In the center of the plaza stands a stone statue with no head, still twice as tall as a gryphon. Chisel cuts on its flanks mark an eight-pointed sun. The statue looks like a bear with wings. Its carver never saw a pony.
Little else remains. The Farisi built with wood.
In the brush below the road, queer vines cling to strange gnarled trees. Dull Claws brought their seeds from across the sea. In the fall the vines bear the sweet purple berries and the trees bear the hard, round, red fruit he told his tribe to eat instead of meat. The Blackbeaks say there were other fruit besides, and ground grains, and cooked roots, at the feast the Farisi threw for the Blackbeak to teach them the ways of the white mare of peace. But the Farisi were thin from eating them.
The Blackbeaks still feast on that day every year, to remember.
North of where the village was, a hole in the ground spews thick yellow-and-green smoke night and day. Here the Farisi dug for the black burning rock which Dull Claws said gave the ponies great power. This is the hole the Blackbeak warriors threw Dull Claws into after they broke his wings. They filled it with wood and fire, the same fire that still burns in the mountain's belly.
None know if the Farisi had beautiful voices or golden crests. The chief of the Blackbeaks feared their weakness would infect his people. He ordered their carvings burned, their pottery smashed, their males gelded and used as beasts of burden, and their females sold or kept to serve his soldiers and household. Their eggs fed his brood.
Every year on the feast of the Farisi, the holy one of the Blackbeaks brings out a basket of bone flutes, and the flute-players play, and the people dance and sing late into the night. I have seen these flutes with these two eyes. This is what remains of the Farisi.
So if someone bends your ear with stories saying the Farisi had golden crests, and voices like honey or like flutes, he is a fool and does not know the world. He would do well to learn from the Farisi.
very intriguing, also, it's good to see a update and good job
That picture isn't from The Lost Treasure of Griffonstone? Wow he's good! Does he do requests?
7208007 Oops. Original cover art was by ModeratelyDeviant. Current cover is a scene from Griffonstone which I edited the gryphons out of and added a greenish-yellow sky to, plus a statue from S2E18 which SirCxyrtyx edited to make it look old and I took the head off of.
And this is why we must blow up our enemies before they blow up us first! *nukes North Korea and blames this story for it!*
7208482 Alondro, how do you keep beating the geniuses of the future to all of the best answers without using time travel?
I hadn't realized this was based on a true story. That makes it all the darker. Still, good to see it on Fimfiction.
7208737 I exist in all times simultaneously...
7207832 It helps that Pound Cake isn't smart enough to realize he's being trolled and turn it about on Discord in some clever fashion.
Ah well, few children were as devious as I was at that age.
After all, my first words came at the age of a little beyond 1 year of age when my grandmother stumbled over an uneven sidewalk and I immediately spat out, "Did you have a nice trip?"
It was inborn, you see.
Blackrobe is an amazing film, by the way.
I have no doubt that history is full of failed experiments, and littered with the bones of naive idealists. Every failure is a lesson, and every corpse a warning. They day we, as a people, stop trying and failing is the day we confirm our own destruction.
This story is dark as hell and I love it.
The music of the Farisi indeed.