877 - The Dreaming Titan
Silhouette allowed himself only the tiniest smile as he watched Kryonex continue to pummel Lex Legis.
It was only because of the discipline that he’d learned during his time in the Royal Guard that he managed to hold himself back, not wanting to embarrass the Moon Princess – his savior and deliverer, who had not only healed his wounded body and broken spirit in her endless benevolence, but had raised him up in grace and elegance – by making a spectacle of himself.
Even so, it was all he could do not to moan aloud in rapture. It was poetic justice that Lex Legis had transformed himself into a monster, his body now as ugly as his heart had always been. But to be allowed to witness his downfall, wherein his hubris in thinking that he could challenge a god – a pathetic, sniveling demigod who had none of the Moon Princess’s transcendent resplendence, to be sure, but still a god – ultimately destroyed him was as blissful to Silhouette as when he’d embraced his true goddess and received salvation.
His only sorrow was that his beloved Luna wasn’t here to witness it.
Just the thought of her made Silhouette’s chest ache, the heady mixture of feelings no longer causing him anguish. Instead, it was a mixture of wry chagrin and wistful longing. I saw her through the eyes of one who was as but a foal, mistaking devotion for worship. And in so doing, I abandoned the mare in favor of her moonlight, letting it illuminate my nightmares even as she suffered. That is the sin for which I must yet atone.
In hindsight, it was so clear to him that his poor Luna had been suffering. Like a dreamer unable to wake, she had been lost in a mad delusion of godhood, seeking to escape her mortal troubles by ascending to the divine. His duty had been to relieve her troubled heart as she had relieved his, showing her the succor that a stallion was supposed to give his mare, joining their hearts together in blessed union.
But he had failed her, too caught up in his own needs to see to hers. It had taken the gentle touch of the Moon Princess – a true goddess, sacred and sublime, beyond all worldly needs or concerns – to open his eyes. And in her endless mercy, she had not only shown him the way, but had lifted him up.
The thought made the butterfly wings he now possessed – pure black, save for where they were adorned with white spots – to gently open and close. He was like Luna now, a creature of beauty and inspiration, a perfect companion for the mare of his heart. Even his foreleg was healed now, the imperfection which had always indicated his folly had he but the wisdom to see it now wiped away by the Moon Princess’s gentle hoof.
Now, he was at last a perfect companion for Luna, his future bride.
That was why Silhouette made sure not to take his eyes off of the screen which Luminace – one of the lesser gods, but who was wise enough to know her place – had conjured. He would record each moment of Lex Legis’ downfall in his mind, and make sure to replay it in his dreams when he slept. That way, when he returned to Equestria and was reunited with his beloved, she’d be able to share this moment with him.
Ideally, it would be what they watched after they fell asleep together on their wedding night, together as stallion and wife after taking their vows beneath the Moon Princess’s nocturnal sky. Then they’d be able to spend the rest of their lives together in bliss, spreading the goddess’s religion as they wiped out all traces of Lex Legis’ tainted teachings from Equestria.
I can only hope that Kryonex leaves a piece of that fiend’s body intact, Silhouette noted, another rush of joy pulsing through him as he saw the demigod knock Lex into a mountain. Once I’ve undone my beloved Luna’s curse, the horn of her despoiler will be perfect to gift her with when I propose.
It was a beautiful scene, one that he’d imagined many times since his rebirth at the Moon Princess’s hooves, and he had to resist the urge to imagine it again now, knowing that he had a duty to remember everything he was witnessing as vividly as he could. Making sure to stare raptly at the action, he solemnly observed as the clawed horror that Lex Legis had become was knocked into another stretch of the undead, his bedraggled form rising up again and throwing the monstrous corpses at the demigod, who arrested their movement and threw them back-
Only for Lex to destroy them all as golden armor appeared around him, its light obliterating the undead.
“That can’t be!”
It took Silhouette a moment to realize that the words hadn’t come from his own lips, one ear swiveling around toward another of the gods...the Sun Queen, it sounded like? But he couldn’t look away as Lex swung his oversized quill covered in bloody runes around and unleashed a spell-
And then the viewing screen began to flicker and jump, like a filmstrip that had become tangled in the projector.
“Hey, it was just getting good!” The Unspoken’s voice – now an insectile buzzing – was matched by a disgusting blorping from his gelatinous companion. “This better not be a to-be-continued!”
Having nothing to look at now that the view of the fight had been interrupted, Silhouette had no compunctions about looking around, watching as the Sun Queen rose from the dais where she’d been seated and took a step toward where the Night Mare and Luminace were conversing. “Forgive my interruption,” she murmured, striving over to the pair, “but we require your attention. Luminace, would you please see what’s gone wrong with your spell?”
The monocled goddess blinked, a look of surprise crossing her face as she looked at the malfunctioning screen. But the Sun Queen didn’t wait for her to respond before turning to the other alicorn. “Night Mare, I apologize if I’m being presumptuous, but I must know why your champion was wielding armor consecrated to me...and why I don’t recognize anything else about it.”
The armored goddess’s lip curled, disdain crossing her features. “You think you can demand answers now, after you pressed me into standing idly by while another god assaulted my champion directly?”
“That’s it?” leered Blaze. “You’re not even going to comment on him using another god’s power right in front of you?”
“Aw, don’t be so uptight, hot stuff,” giggled Kara. “The Night Mare’s not an insecure girl. She knows that even if her stallion steps out every now and then, he’ll always come back to her.”
The quip made the Night Mare’s eyes flash – literally, turning red as she bared her teeth at Kara – as she spat a response. “Were I not bound to noninterference, I would censure him harshly for that! I allowed you to bless him only because it served my interests!”
“I understand that,” interrupted the Sun Queen, “and none of us doubt your commitment to your faithful, but-”
She stopped speaking abruptly, looking off to the side – at any empty portion of the pavilion where the gods were fathered – with an expression of surprise on her face.
A moment later, Silhouette saw why.
Appearing from out of nowhere, an old zebra mare appeared. Her hair was lusterless and stringy, the flesh seemed to sag from her bones, and even her stripes were slightly askew, as though half-formed. Nevertheless, she moved with alacrity, despite looking as though she was going to keel over at any moment; if anything, Silhouette felt tired just looking at her, lethargy seeping into his limbs simply from watching her move.
But before she had taken more than two steps, the Sun Queen was moving to greet her, a warm smile on her face. “Soft Whisper!” she exclaimed, sounding delighted. “I’m so glad you accepted my invitation! I can scarcely remember the last time-”
“Two hundred sixty-eight years ago,” cut in Soft Whisper tonelessly. “When Iliana finished extirpating my faith on Everglow.”
The Sun Queen’s features turned sorrowful at that, and she gave a mournful nod. “Two tragedies occurred that day. One was what happened to your faithful. The other was that you withdrew from our assemblies. Long have your wisdom and guidance been missed.”
Blaze gave a loud snort at that, while Kara rolled her eyes, but Soft Whisper ignored them, instead keeping her sunken eyes on the Sun Queen. “Then I hope you will heed my wisdom now, when I ask you to let me intervene in the travesty that is occurring now.”
Cocking her head, the Sun Queen blinked once. “You mean, between Lex Legis and Kryonex?”
Soft Whisper nodded once. “With my worship now kept only by a remaining few, I don’t have the power to bypass The Author’s interdiction. But you do, and so I ask you to send me there immediately.”
“I think that’s a great idea!” announced the Unspoken with a ribbit, his frog’s throat bulging. “The more players in the mix, the crazier things will get!”
But the Sun Queen was already shaking her head. “Forgive me, I cannot.”
“You must,” insisted Soft Whisper. “Thousands of souls have been defiled, forced to linger beyond death involuntarily. Without my guidance, they will not be able to find their way to their proper afterlives.”
“You’re behind the times, you old bag of bones,” scoffed Blaze. “The Night Mare’s newest mutant is making short work of all the undead. Besides, what do you care what plane they end up on? It’s not like any of them are ponies anyway.”
“Ponies or not, I cannot abide such a desecration on so large a scale.” She didn’t bother looking at the war goddess, instead keeping her gaze level with the Sun Queen. “Let me attend to it at the source, lest those multitudes suffer for crimes not their own.”
Closing her eyes, the Sun Queen lowered her head. “I’m sorry, but I cannot allow you to go down there. But if it helps” – she raised her head, giving Soft Whisper an earnest look before the old zebra could reply – “many of the undead are being cleansed with holy light even as we speak.”
Soft Whisper’s eyes narrowed by the slightest fraction. “No servant of the Night Mare could command such light.”
“I had thought the same.” Again, the Sun Queen turned her gaze to Lex Legis’s goddess. “Until a few moments ago, that is.”
The Night Mare gave a mirthless chuckle in reply. “And I told you, I owe you no answers-”
“It was dreambinding.”
Silhouette almost gasped aloud as the Moon Princess spoke, for the voice of his goddess was like music unto his ears.
Luminace looked over from where she was stabilizing the viewing screen that she’d made. “Isn’t that a sacred mystery of your religion?”
This time the Night Mare was the one who scoffed, earning a scowl from the Moon Princess. “No. Though dreambinding is a talent that my faith regards as holy, its development is something mortals do on their own, much like how you cannot claim to be the reason why some ponies are born as sorcerers, even if you are the goddess of magic.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Lex Legis was able to manifest a relic sacred to me, sister,” noted the Sun Queen pointedly. “Even if he can bring his dreams into reality, while awake no less, such a thing shouldn’t be possible; divine blessings cannot be dreamed into existence.”
“Kind of like how that titan just wiped out Luminace’s viewing spell,” hooted – literally, his head now that of an owl – the Unspoken. “Isn’t mortals overturning the powers of a god what the elves did?”
Luminace bristled at that. “He didn’t overturn my spell! This is a finely-tuned scrying effect, which means that the sensor is actually present there, and since I’m trying to make sure neither of them notice it, the majority of the spell structure is devoted to concealment rather than stability! So when spells with a theurgic index of over two hundred thousand are thrown around, it’s naturally going to have a hard time-”
“We understand, Luminace,” cut in the Sun Queen, her voice gentle. “No one thinks that what Lex Legis did just now now is comparable to what the elven pantheon’s mortal mages did to Thundering Gale.”
Despite looking like she wanted to keep going, Luminace nodded at that, going back to her spell, and the Sun Queen returned her gaze to the Moon Princess. “Please continue.”
With a curt nod, her sister goddess resumed her explanation. “You know where the Dream Realm is located, I trust?”
Despite his trying to remain nonchalant, Silhouette’s eyes widened slightly. To think, he was about to hear the secret truths of the realm that his beloved Luna oversaw!
Across from him, the Sun Queen’s smile returned. “I do, but please explain anyway. I believe your attendant is eager to know.”
Silhouette flushed, butterfly wings opening and closing in mortification as the Moon Princess looked at him. “Forgive me, Goddess, I-”
“There is nothing to forgive,” answered the Moon Princess, and Silhouette had to resist the urge to abase himself before her. “I wish you to learn this for when you bring my faith to your world.”
He bowed his head almost to the floor, overwhelmed. “I am your instrument in all things.”
Satisfied, the Moon Princess continued her explanation. “The Ethereal Plane is the insubstantial dimension that overlays the mortal world. Most who know of it think it to be little more than the realm of ghosts, where cunning spellcasters often venture when they need to bypass some physical barrier that they cannot otherwise breach. But there’s far more to it than that.”
“You’re downplaying the peeping aspect too much,” drawled Kara. “Seriously, most of those ‘cunning spellcasters’ are hanging out in the mares’ baths, since you can see the mortal realm from the Ethereal Plane, but not the other way around.”
“What few mortals know,” continued the Moon Princess doggedly, “is that unlike the mortal world, the Ethereal Plane doesn’t simply extend across three directions. Rather than forward and back, left and right, and up and down, you can also move ‘closer’ and ‘further’ from the mortal world. Most ether-walkers rarely realize that they – and the ghosts they often hunt – are as close to the mortal world as the Ethereal Plane allows for, not knowing that it’s possible for them to move further away from it.”
“And moving further away makes everything seem more muted and foggy, as though lost in a mist bank,” murmured Luminace, still fiddling with her spell.
“Precisely,” agreed the Moon Princess. “And once one ventures ‘away’ from the mortal world, they come upon the plane’s natural boundary: the Color Curtain.”
The Sun Queen’s mortal attendant cocked his head at that, a confused look on his face. “Color Curtain?”
“That’s what the few sages who know of its existence have termed it,” nodded the Moon Princess. “An endless wall of multicolored light, always shifting and changing, spreading in every direction for eternity.”
“Psychedelic,” cawed the Unspoken, who sounded as though he were smiling, though his macaw’s beak made it hard to tell.
The Moon Princess shook her head. “They’re wrong. What they’re seeing isn’t colors; it’s dreams.”
Despite himself, Silhouette raised his head. “The wall is made up of dreams?”
“More accurately, dreams appear within it. While they can be viewed from the outside, anyone touching it simply passes through the curtain, unless using oneiromancy or some other power to affect the dreams therein directly. And on the other side of it...”
Silhouette held his breath, sensing the gravity of what she was about to say.
“...likes the Deep Ethereal.”
The Moon Princess gave her sister a solemn look. “That’s where dreambinders such as Lex Legis pull things from.”
For a moment, Luminace’s attention faltered, looking away from her viewing screen. “Wait, the Deep Ethereal? But there’s nothing there except for a few crumbling demiplanes and strange monsters. There aren’t even any gods who live there, or at least none that I know of. What could the dreambinders possibly-”
“You’re a wise goddess, Luminace, but still quite young,” cut in the Moon Princess with a small smile. “The Deep Ethereal is far more than you think.”
Raising a hoof, she pointed at the malfunctioning screen. “The reason Lex Legis wore armor consecrated to you, sister, is because he pulled it from one of the aborted universes within the Deep Ethereal. Specifically, one where he turned away from the Night Mare, and found redemption in your religion.”
A chorus of shocked gasps and confused grunts came from the other gods then, though Silhouette noted that the Night Mare wasn’t one of them, instead simply sneering. But it was Luminace who recovered first, her eyes wide behind her monocle. “You mean he’s pulling in stuff from other timelines?! Because the Monitors of Infinity won’t let that stand! At the very least, they’ll send an aevarut-”
“No, not another timeline,” cut in the Moon Princess. “An aborted universe. A timeline that failed.”
Luminace paused at that, pursing her lips for a moment. “I...don’t understand.”
“The Deep Ethereal is, quite simply, the realm of possibilities that were unable to manifest. It contains planes of existence that can no longer sustain themselves, or which never grew enough to take their place within the cosmos. Histories which were never able to come to pass, no matter what circumstances occurred, are there as well. As are numerous other modes of existence which were incompatible with the whole of Creation.”
Silence fell then, and Silhouette struggled to make sense of what he’d been told, but didn’t have a chance to ponder for very long before the Unspoken burst out laughing. “You’re telling me that these ‘dreambinders’ are really just rooting around in the multiverse’s wastebasket?!” he cackled.
The question made the Moon Princess scowl. “You would do well not to mock the dangers that the Deeps hold. There are creatures there who are aware that they dwell within realms that are less than real, and try mightily to get out. It is the Dream Realm, the Color Curtain, which serves as the first line of defense against them. The collective tapestry of dreams acts as a barrier between them and the closer, Border Ethereal that covers most worlds.”
“And the dreambinders?” prompted the Sun Queen.
“They have, somehow, the power to push their piece of the curtain into the Deeps, snatching something from those failed universes and temporarily giving it substance in the mortal world,” answered the Moon Princess.
“A skill my champion taught himself without even realizing it,” sneered the Night Mare. “Even I never expected that the tulpa I gave him would learn such a valuable ability.”
That was enough to earn her a dark look from the Moon Princess. “Your champion,” she spat, “is the single least-talented dreambinder I’ve ever seen. Most binders can sustain what they take for at least a full day, if not longer, while your champion can manage a few minutes at best. His only notable quality is that he can do so while awake, since that portion of his mind you shaved off governs his dreams, leaving it perpetually active.”
“And now that he’s a titan, it can find so much more than the garbage most other binders pull in,” countered the Night Mare. “How many could have grabbed a relic from a universe that could never have been, rather than some simple tool or lower lifeform?”
“And in doing so, he raises the chance of revealing himself to the creatures that dwell in the Deeps,” shot back the Moon Princess. “He-”
“I think I’ve got it!” announced Luminace, the viewscreen stabilizing in front of her.
All of the gods fell silent then, turning back to the sight of the battle, as did Silhouette, waiting to see Kryonex continue to crush Lex Legis.
But when the picture came back a moment later, what he saw made his jaw drop.
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Welcome, to the Pinkie.
A good guide to the types of mathematics that need to be considered in these situations, would include Surreal Numbers, P-Adic Numbers, N Dimentional Quantised Hyperbolic Geometry, and a term I saw which I have no idea what it means so Im assuming it might have some relavence is Fibre Bundles on Orbifolds?
Thats the stuff Ive glanced at that uses mostly English language. Once they start getting into Set Theory as taught to 11 years old, I give up.
Finally saw the mathematical function that leads to calculating the circumference of an ellipse, like how long along a ballistic flightpath taken with a planetary center of gravity instead of an infinitely flat plane. It horrible. Yet the aea of an ellipse is very simple.
Lex has cracked open the Character Generator books, and is using ALL of them.
Wonder what he might do with Adagios Dragon blood Taint, given its Equestrian Dragons?
11723337 I'm going to assume that most of what you said has to do with trying to chart planar spaces, and just smile and nod knowingly.
As for Lex using all the books, he's actually just using one (well, two: Eclipse and its sister publication, The Practical Enchanter), but it's designed to give the freedom and flexibility where you can essentially replicate virtually any other character-building options in any other book. Sure, you'll still want to look for new spells and monsters and such (similar to what he did with his aurumvorax exploit), but when you can essentially make whatever you want under a singular rules set, you don't need much in the way of alternatives...those are for other characters.
Yeah, sums up how I feel about most cliffhangers from other stories I've read. Especially those that never continued...
Also, the Unspoken is pretty much us readers as a whole now.
It is safe to say that Silhouette is still unhinged though more stable than he had been but that's likely due to him being in the presence of his patron deity. After all, anyone will always put on their best face for their boss. Though given the way his thoughts are working, it appears that he will be a major obstacle to Lex and his allies once he is sent back to Equestria.
As for Lex's tulpa's ability...damn that's incredibly powerful but it obviously has its limits but an aborted reality where Lex sought out the Sun Queen instead of the Night Mare...a bit trippy to imagine given his current self but I suppose the opposite is true if the Lex of that reality had seen a Lex that follows the Night Mare.
Though now I wonder if his tulpa could pull Severance from an aborted universe where he had kept it instead. Or one where he received one of Severance's 'siblings' instead. Granted, all that power undoubtedly comes with a caveat as the pony pantheon concluded.
11724195 Audience reactions are universal, it seems, even when the audience in question is a pantheon of gods.
That said, Silhouette's unhinged state does seem to be somewhat mitigated here, though I suspect it's more because he has something new to dedicate himself to than anything else. It was fairly clear from what we knew of him before that he was using religion as a way of coping with what happened during the Elemental Bleeds, and when Lex inadvertently took that from him, it hurt worse than dying. Now that he has another goddess-figure (this time an actual goddess), he's less prone to outbursts, though the fact that he's changed his idolization of Luna to infatuation makes it clear that he's still a long way from what anypony could call healthy.
Of course, that might change if Lex actually wins his fight with Kryonex, which just might happen at this point thanks to his tulpa. While it's ability to bring him whatever he needs is an incredibly powerful ability, the Moon Princess's words here make it clear that there's a risk to it...worse, it seems likely Lex doesn't know that, which may spell trouble ahead. There's also the restriction (established before, but which I maybe should have mentioned in this chapter) that his tulpa can only bring out so much in a given period of time. That armor that he's using to turn things around might very well be the last time he can use that power in this fight.
Review of the first 20'sh chapters here.
11724565 Thanks for that! Hopefully the most recent chapters score a little higher.
EDIT: And thanks for the review of the most recent chapters too!