Perfection

by LeapingEquine

The Legend

Once upon a time, there was a race of immortal beings. And they were perfect.

They lived in a world that both existed and did not exist; a dream world.

No one knows quite what they were, but they were beautiful and powerful. Their eyes were full of divine light, their coats shimmered and shone like so many stars.

They knew nothing of evil, or the bloody battles that result from it.

They went where they would, and all of creation knew it. They ran across the whole universe; it was theirs. The stars sang to them, and the winds danced to them.

And they were one; strong and unified.

But all dreams, especially the perfect ones, are haunted by nightmares.

At first it was not a nightmare. No, nothing like a nightmare.

In the beginning, it was a great fog, a mist, a place where nothing had been made.

After more than an eternity of running, they found it.

They were disturbed by it; by that strange thing that had not been there before.

They tossed their astral manes and stomped their shining hooves, and felt uneasiness at it. For if they, who were perfect, could not name it, it could not be good.

And so they ran again, hoping to leave it behind, to abandon it to the rest of creation.

But it ran with them.

The nothingness, the misty gray bleakness, took form and began to run with them. It was their form it took, or what the nothingness could make of it.

For it was not beautiful; not perfect. It was faded and crooked and smudged. It was the grayness of a bleak wind; of fog. No, it was not perfection.

And they shuddered, and continued to run, faster now. They wished the nothingness would disappear, and they wished it with their whole godly being.

And so they ignored it; tried to pretend it did not exist. And they kept their eyes looking only forward while they ran; so they would not see the nothingness behind them.

But the nothingness would not be ignored.

It ran faster than them all, and it blocked their path.

And the beings reared in rage, and their powerful forelegs shattered the stars to pieces.

And still the nothingness did not move!

They demanded it to speak, to tell them why it had persecuted them across the whole world.

The nothingness did not speak.

No, it showed.

And the beings saw the first spirits, the first dreams, the first nightmares. All were the nothingness' children.

There were as many as there were grains of sand on a shore, all young and newly born.

And all imperfect.

They were only jumbled wisps; ideas; their ethereal bodies were a mismatch of every substance the beings had ever seen.

The nothingness' children were even stranger and more demented than the nothingness itself.

And the beings could no longer take it; could no longer stand this blatant, blasphemous insult to all things perfect and beautiful; to them.

And they took to battle for the first time, and the world trembled at their rage, at their power, at their sheer equine beauty, even when madness was in their bright eyes.

But the nothingness, it did not accept justice, could not follow even a divine will.

And it showed its true colors, the colors of a pitch-black night, the colors of hatred and evil.

It rushed upon the beings, and the same madness was in its eyes. It crashed down on them, a roaring tide, and for the first time, they knew death and pain.

But the beings were in the right, and they could not fail. They tried to tear the darkness apart, but it would not yield.

And so they extracted their vengeance on its children, on its nightmare-spirit-dreams, and tore their fragile bodies to pieces with their hoofs; their hard, hard hoofs.

And they were one, and glorious.

And once again, they ran from it, but now they ran victorious.

The darkness could only hiss evil words to them, for it could not run after them and leave its children; who were now like splinters of broken glass, now like drifting smoke.

But the darkness screamed and cursed all the louder for it; and without them knowing it; evil touched one in their midst, and began to flow in that one's blood.

And they ran, perfect and unified.

Until the contaminated one stumbled.

The were shocked, startled by this imperfection. And in a moment, something horrifying happened.

The being's body wasted away, melting like a candle, and his remains split into three.

Three little imperfections.

All three were small and stunted; ugly. One flopped about in mud; one clung to weak breezes; and one channeled weak, piddling little amounts of the magical energy that the beings were made of.

Once more, the beings were fated to destroy, and destroy they did. In moments, the things that were grotesque caricatures of foals were mere memories.

But it was far too late. Evil had run with them, had flowed in their veins, and they could not shake free of it.

Their foals were no longer perfect, but the same stunted weaklings as the contaminated one had become.

And the foals that were not completely contaminated were still imperfect. They were tall and thin, pale. The rich colors of their parents were only faint shimmering hues in them. They were hybrids, half-breeds.

And the beings saw their foals, and they felt cold, fearful. And so they battled for a righteous cause; to destroy all of contaminated, mare, stallion, or foal.

They were killed and quarantined and the beings were all panicked, and they were no longer one.

No, they were a jumbled, confused mass; all fighting each other for the noble cause of keeping their perfection intact.

And the darkness found them, and suckled its new children with the blood of their cosmic battlefields. And they grew up dark and twisted, and when old enough; hunted the beings.

The nightmares rushed to the kill, dark apparitions that they were. The spirits bounded behind them, claws glittering, baring their fangs and screeching. And dreams ran cautiously behind them, sweet illusions, but for their anger and hatred.

And when the darknesses' children all mingled, hybrids burst onto the battlefields too; things that shifted their shape, and sang alluring songs, and lived in shadows.

They only hunted imperfects, for they could not catch the perfects. And they grew stronger and stronger; taking the imperfects' weak magicks for their own.

The beings who were still perfect were now few. But they realized that they would disappear entirely if the darkness' children continued to gain strength from feeding off imperfects.

If they grew too strong, they would destroy the beings.

But what could they do? They had tried to stamp out the imperfects, and had not succeeded.

They despaired at their fate, and at the inevitable death of all perfection that would follow.

But a wise stallion among them had a plan.

They did not necessarily have to destroy the imperfects; he declared. If they were only led to some remote corner of the universe, the darkness and it's children would follow.

But the imperfects were like rocks, the beings cried, they needed others to move them. Left to their own devices, they would stumble all over the universe.

They needed one of the perfect beings to lead them. But none would go.

If they went, they would go as sacrifices. They might last long enough to take the imperfects away, but the imperfects' evil would eventually find them too, and they would become imperfects.

The stallion snorted with contempt. The imperfects did not a true being to lead them. They only needed some pony more powerful than them.

And he led his half-breed foals before the other perfects. They were young, very young.

They verged just on the edge of perfection; lithe and glowing. But they were not made of star-stuff and magic, like the stallion, like the perfects.

Evil was in their blood too.

It might not contaminate them. Or it might.

Did it really matter?

They were well suited for the task of leading a numberless amount of dangerous half-wits across the cosmos, and that was that.

No time was to be lost, agreed the beings. They drove the foals on to a battlefield, and with a stomp of their hooves and a curl of their lips, urged them to run.

And they rose upon their thin legs and ran, ran desperately, with the occasional stumble.

None looked back.

But they all heard a loud snort; the stallion's only farewell to his children.

And they continued running, until they could no longer see the beings and their perfection.

They saw only the cosmos, a great, bloody battlefield. The bodies of the fallen lay draped on the ground, and they nimbly leaped over them.

The dull-eyed imperfects saw them,and blindly began to follow them, moving in one great herd.

And the darkness saw them too.

It felt no pity or compassion. It was bitter; twisted. It was not enough for it to stunt foals, turn them imperfect.

No; it had to kill them as well. Divine justice worked that way.

It set its children upon them, and they rushed forward, a wave of acid.

The darkness' children grazed the foals' flanks, barely bloodying them, only catching the weakest.The foals were just too fast, only a smidgen too powerful to escape obliviation.

The imperfects, though, were the ideal prey. They could do almost nothing to the darkness' children; they were powerless.

And the darkness' children tore them from limb to limb, their insides becoming their outsides.

The foals would run for thousands of years; the imperfects with them, and the darkness' children following behind.

They ran for so long that the purest foals became imperfects; until there were only two left, and only a few hundred imperfects.

The two foals realized they could not run forever. The elder barely knew her own name, the younger even less. And they were both exhausted.

The two sisters summoned every ounce of magic within them, and cast their first spell; hoping desperately that it would work.

And it did.

It was a blast of pure, undiluted magical energy. It lit up the skies for a brief moment, then disappeared.

The foals and the darkness, along with its children, were nowhere to be seen."