• Published 24th Jun 2012
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Of Things Amiss - Nightwatcher



History is not what's important, not who's important, it's only what we remember.... What could we have forgotten?

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Chapter 2 : Arrival At Corinth

“Hey… Hey Lyra, wake up. We’re almost at Corinth.” She heard and felt Tone shake her awake.

“I’m... awake.” Lyra said in between yawns.

Lyra shook her head to clear her from the dreamless sleep that had overtaken her in the intervening time since she had talked to ‘Ash’. Lyra had attempted to put her overly secretive employer out of her mind, opting to focus on the work to come, but a haze of questions still swarmed in her mind concerning the mare. Her main concern was the sheer amount of unknowns that surrounded her employer, but, those questions would have to wait.

“How long was I asleep?” Lyra asked.

“Not too long, two… three hours tops. We’re about another hour from Corinth so I thought we could use the time to review our past findings.” Tone said.

Lyra nodded in agreement, “That’s a good idea. It has been a while since I’ve reviewed the information surrounding Corinth, and I’d expect you’ve made some new discoveries since then.”

“Indeed we have! The last team, which Duster was a part off and whose report you’ve read, was chiefly focused on dating the city and identifying what little was left. Our team on the other hoof has been studying the culture of the city, mainly history, religion, and scripture. Despite our progress we’ve run into a bit of a… snag in the operation as of late.” Tone sounded a bit annoyed near the end.

“What happened? Duster did not say anything about any ‘snags’.” Lyra said.

Tone sighed before beginning, “A member of our team, Gilded Script, left the expedition, he was a specialist in religion and he was studying the deities of the inhabitants of Corinth. As you know Lyra, the religion we practice today evolved from the older faiths; the older faiths worshiped a large pantheon of many anthropomorphic and faceless deities that, over time, became more refined until it became the monotheistic faith that most follow today. Anyway, there was a rumor that he still held to the old faith, and one day, he simply left. It was a heavy loss to the project. Though now that you’re here that should take up some of his slack, so to speak.”

“Hmm… I wonder what made him just up and leave.” Lyra wondered openly.

“I think it was something personal. Script was a good friend and he was dedicated; he wouldn’t just leave for something small. He didn’t even say anything to me about what was going on. One day he just kind of… changed, like somepony flipped a switch. Suddenly he had no interest in what we were doing, called it heresy, then he left. I haven’t seen him since.” Tone said.

“That is… strange.” Lyra said.

Tone nodded in agreement before taking out a large stack of books, “I’ll tell you the rest another time perhaps. For now, let’s review. What do you know about Corinth?”

Lyra shrugged, “Not as much as I would like. It’s the oldest city we’ve found to date at around ten thousand years old, it’s rather small, about the size of Ponyville, I believe. It had an multiracial population, an odd thing for that time. It was eventually destroyed in an event that is, as of yet, unknown to us. More than that, I cannot say.”

“That’s about right.” Tone began, “The most interesting thing about Corinth is its rather… abrupt beginnings. As far as we can tell it just appeared, now as… improbable as that sounds, our evidence supports that the city had an accelerated development when compared with other nearby cities. The normal signs of gradual development, such as simple buildings and large plots of cleared land that would have formed the base of such a city are not there, only the end state. From the ruins we can conclude that the city had multiple large structures, most of them religious in nature, along with what looked to be small aqueducts. All staples of cities hundreds or thousands of years younger than Corinth, but the city and all of its structures have been dated to be among the oldest pony made things on the planet. Like the city had simply appeared fully formed in it’s current state. The surrounding cities appear to be… crude imitations of Corinth, like they forgot how they built everything.”

Lyra wracked her brain trying to think of some way to explain all this, “I just don’t get it.” She began, “If what Duster said is correct then why would we just devolve in intelligence after Corinth, surely the inhabitants of the city would have kept records of events and knowledge. It just does not connect the way he says it does, we were once an advanced race and we destroyed ourselves, caused extreme damage to the ecosystem that can not be explained, then after generations of basically living in caves we build Corinth, then that city gets abandoned and we go back hundreds of years on the technological scale. I’m sorry but am I the only one who is thinking we’re missing something?”

Her rant was stopped when the train came to a halt.

Tone nodded in agreement, “No, you’re not the only one. Everypony here has different ideas on what happened, we’re all just trying to figure out who’s right. With you here that should go just a bit faster. Come on, I’ll show you where you’ll be working from now on.”

~=~

Lyra looked around at the half destroyed and decrepit buildings as they walked to what Tone had said was the main base of operations, the city’s main church. From what she knew and from what Script’s notes had told her the city had seven churches, one at each of the hexagonal shaped city’s six corners with the main at the center. Each of the structures was dedicated to the worship of one of city’s seven gods; the six each had a road leading to the main place of worship at the center. The road that they traveled on now was named ‘The Path of Vigilance’, dedicated to their god of protection. The road was bordered by what she assumed had once been one of the city’s aqueducts, though the structure had long since fallen to the ages. Tone told her that the city had six aqueducts, one per road, all six would have been fed by one main one that circled the city. She wished she could have seen Corinth when it was in its prime, what a sight that would have been to see.

“Hey Lyra! Come over here for a second would you? You’ll love this!” She heard Tone called from the head of the group.

She moved around the other ponies in their group before letting out a gasp at what Tone showed her.

It was what she understood was once one of the supports for the aqueduct, but it was what was carved into it that took her breath away.

“What… what is that?” She said.

“Lyra, I’d like you to meet ‘Vigil’.” Tone said with a smirk.

The pillar was about twenty feet tall, and taking up most of that was a huge stone relief of what Tone called ‘Vigil’. It certainly not a pony, that much was easy to see. In fact most early gods weren’t anthropomorphic, most took the form of monsters or creatures of legend. Only… this, this was unlike anything she had ever seen. It was bipedal, standing on two thick tree trunk like legs with what looked to be a pony hiding behind one of them. It had a broad chest and shoulders giving its top half the look of an downward pointing triangle. It had a single pair of arms, one raised and the other at its side, both holding something different in its claw like hands. In its raised hand, what would have been its left; it held what looked to be a plant that was unknown to her, and in the other looked to be a small ball of fire that flowed up its arm to the elbow. Its featureless head was looking at the unknown plant in its hand as if it was curious about it. Its body looked… unnatural, made entirely up of hard angles with no curves at all. Its head was shaped like an upside-down right triangle with a flat featureless ‘face’, the flat top gradually narrowing to a point at the back. Its fingers holding the same triangular shape, yet somehow being able to bend, tapering down to vicious looking points. The thing was just… imposing, yet at the same time somehow comforting. If she were to guess its height, based on the size of the pony hiding behind its legs, it would be about eight or nine feet tall. She saw a short inscription at the bottom.The familiar Corinth script popping out at her, beside it sat a piece of paper with the transcribed reading.

‘To He who defends us.
Shields us from the dark.
We pay our tribute.
As he gave his.
We give ours.
Blood for blood.’

“Strange, don’t you think?” Tone said.

Lyra nodded in agreement, “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s… breathtaking, to say the least. Though the inscription at the bottom is a bit disconcerting. It speaks of some kind of blood tribute, pony sacrifice maybe, something about a debt for its protection.”

“Many of the statues and holy structures have similar undertones. Bunch of fire and brimstone stuff mostly. Their religion is very interesting.” Tone said.

“Oh?” Lyra said.

“Not much in the way of creation mythos, nothing like the more modern religions. They did not think these beings were responsible for their creation; they weren’t even really ‘gods’ to them. More like… lords or kings; they saw them as beings of great power over certain things like life, death, love, and war. They were also more… impersonal, they did not see them as something tangible…ugh this is hard to explain. We’re missing most of the holy scriptures you see, and sadly, Script’s notes are a little… jumbled.” Tone said.

“I’ll have to take another look; I only got to read a little bit of his notes.” Lyra said.

“Sounds like a plan, come on, lets get to the HQ.” Tone said.

“Actually I’d like to stay for a bit and look around if it’s all the same to you.” Lyra said, looking back at the pillar.

Tone gave her a look but nodded after a moment, “… OK, just come along when you’re done, we start tomorrow.”

“Yeah… sure thing.” Lyra said disingenuously, staring at the figure.

She was trying to understand just how the ponies of this city had conceived such a strange creature as this. She knew the imagination was a powerful thing but these beings were just so… alien. She saw neither analogues nor similarities to any other deities or ponies for that matter. The form was strange and imposing, communicating power and superiority just by being there. Yet also she could somehow feel that this being would have moved with a grace unlike anything, like water around a rock or the air around her. Something subconscious within her was telling her that this creature was dangerous, was to be feared.

She managed to tear herself away from the statue, the thought of Script’s notes at the forefront of her mind.

She spared a parting glance back at the imposing figure, a lone thought passing through her mind.

‘That thing was not birthed from the mind of a pony.’

~=~
Lyra huffed as she stopped the flow of her magical energy to the levitation spell, allowing the spell to fall along with the many objects floating about the room drift into their respective places around her new room. It was a rather small space within the church, just a simple room with a bedroll and a small desk. Most of the group stayed in another nearby building, but Duster wanted her nearby as new finds needing translation and documentation were always coming in. The structure itself was huge, all of it centered on a large rotunda, with two main parts branching out giving the building a rectangular shape. She found that whoever built this city had an affinity for angular construction, unlike the more shapely construction of most other cities from this time period. Tone had told her that that was odd because constructing something on such a scale as this city with such perfection would have required a very good grasp on mathematics and building techniques that are more reminiscent of the age of expansion, when we began to branch out and colonize most of the world, and not the late stone or early bronze age of when this city was constructed.

She had to admit, it felt rather odd here. The air was… heavy with something she could not describe, and she was not the only one. The other unicorns could feel it, it was like a ward had been placed on this building, and those sensitive to magic could feel the variable storm that the magical waveform was churning about inside this building. Yet whatever was causing it was not like any spell or ward she had ever seen, it was like simultaneous slap in the face and buck in the gut the moment she had entered the building. It felt like a ward spell that was crafted to make spells impossible to cast, yet in that respect it failed as she could still cast, yet with difficulty. It was almost like a crude imitation, a false, of the true thing. She could feel it in the air, moving across her body like a thousand biting ants, and her horn felt as though it was being hammered. Though the feeling went away as her body adjusted, but she still found using magic difficult. Strangely it was centered on a statue in the center of the rotunda, a visage of what Script’s notes called ‘Marxon’.

It was another ‘god’ of the inhabitants of Corinth. It looked to be a small amount shorter than Vigil. This statue would be what she’d of called ‘life sized’, at about seven feet tall, unlike that monolith of a statue on the road. It’s form was stranger than Vigil’s. True it still held a vague semblance to Vigil, two arms and legs, chest and a head, all with the same angular shape that Vigil had. But in addition to that it had many… parts, which Vigil did not. Like from its midsection flowed what looked to be a dozen angular tentacles, which were holding it up in place of its legs. Sprouting from its back, a pair of bat like wings curved forward, following its outstretched arms. Lastly, around its neck was a snake which was raised up to where she would place the biped’s eyes. The statue was made out of the same material that the others were, aside from its wings which were a bronze color and the tentacles that held it up were carved out of obsidian, and the snake around its neck was carved from quartz.

From what Script’s notes told her ‘Marxon’ was the ‘Keeper of knowledge’, an all-knowing, omnipotent, figure that lorded over the other six gods of Corinth. Script’s notes panted Marxon with an elusive light, an individual whom did not concern himself with the goings on of ones he lorded over. Alas Script’s notes quickly descended into mad ramblings and side notes about his dreams.

No matter how she tried, she could not see what Script saw in these figures, or why he supposedly worshiped them. Where he saw comfort and protection, she saw things that would be better placed in her nightmares.

‘One’s faith is a strange conviction to those who don’t hold to the same, it would seem.’ She mused.

Breaking away from her thoughts and attempting to ignore the discomfort that permeated the room and her body, she laid down on her meager bedroll and attempted to sleep.