The Last War
They say that in the battle for Datong, whole nations died. Songs often tell that sacred story—of the brave who gave their lives after Earth’s rightful protectors had been struck down. Many remembered that day in their songs, pouring drink or blood into the sand to pay their respects. Time was the end of pain, and for all that battle eventually became a distant memory, it’s wounds healed.
All but one.
In some ways, Jackie was the oldest pony now living. She had not spent long years dead, or grown in the soil of some other world. She had not cheated death by flight to the realm of dreams, or frozen herself in icy slumber. She had not spent long years slumbering in a forgotten lair amid her treasures.
Yet in all those years, Jackie had never seen such might assembled. Datong was a fortress as the word had never been used before, not even in the years of her ancient progenitors. It was everything they had built, and so much more beside. It was the last breath of chaos before the void consumed all, and order was established forever.
Or at least the second to last. Axis Mundi was the city this fort protected, directly behind it and further inland. Charybdis could not dig his river around the fort, for no crew could expand his watery highway without facing bombardment from its relativistic artillery cannons, the Iskender. These canons, likewise, could not keep firing forever—otherwise, they would just dig the enemy’s river for him. So it was that Datong itself became a target.
Even so, she could not help but feel pride as she strode down the halls atop its tallest tower, a spire of pure crystal a hundred stories tall. As she looked out the perfectly-transparent sides, she saw the combined might of all the Earth’s surviving military. Airships of surging magic hovered beside the Enduring Ones’ last Sky-Carrier, with the last human warriors that still lived. Innumerable automated defense installations glittered in the sun, each built by one of Athena’s automated crews, and occasionally manned by Purifiers. And in every lesser tower, behind every wall, were soldiers of so many nations and creeds that a universal translation spell built into the tower was required for them to communicate at all.
She stepped into the tactical center of the fortress, where the representatives of each faction would lead together. There were over a dozen ponies here—the Rightly Guided Caliph Abdul-Hafeedh, Isaac the Marshal, and Athena herself. So many others… though so many of the ones they needed most were gone. Every chair meant for an Alicorn was vacant now, as every Alicorn in all the world had been struck down. They were on their own now—the incorruptible tainted with a sickness that no mortal pony could contract. Jackie, it appeared, was just mortal enough to escape its curse, and instead be forced to watch the end of all life with her own eyes.
“You’re here,” Isaac said as she entered. Jackie could smell his grief on the air—almost all his people were gone now, first targets of darkness. Not one of the Enduring Ones had succumbed to Charybdis’s corruption, not one in three thousand years. What he could not take, he destroyed. “You don’t want to see the projections.”
“Show her anyway!” Demanded Abdul. The Dreamknife must know our despair.”
Even now, Jackie balked at that name. Yet she swallowed her frustration, and instead walked past Abdul to the massive holoscreen that took up the center of the room. She could see the fortress towards the back of the screen, and stretched out in front of it… an endless ocean of their enemy. Charybdis did not seem to care that they inflicted devastating losses every hour, when the Iskender’s capacitors were charged again and it could fire just once. There were so many monsters flowing from the sea that it made no difference. They could scramble just as well over the glass of their dead comrades as over the desert.
Athena’s powerful form stood even taller than Isaac, the largest figure here. Though the body she used looked organic, she was not alive and so could not be stricken by Charybdis’s curse. She was easily the most powerful being in the room. “My sensor readings detect approximately sixteen billion individual entities advancing towards this location. Approximately one point six have assembled outside the water. Charybdis continues to redirect my orbital strikes despite the laws governing motion and gravity. I only have the one cannon that can do appreciable damage to his army.”
“God willing, we will find a way to survive this day,” Abdul said. “But He has not revealed it to me. Perhaps His servants, the Illuminated would hear him, had they not all been cursed.”
Jackie covered a cough with her hoof. She had been with at least one of those Alicorns during much of the planning for this battle. In all that time, Archive hadn’t ever had a plan to win. Every strategy she employed had known the inevitability of their loss, and only been concerned with lengthening their time as much as possible.
But Jackie didn’t say that aloud. Instead she asked, “Any word from Mundi about them? An unexpected recovery, another army on the way?”
“No,” Athena said. “Their condition is unchanged. My servants keep them alive, but no treatment has made any difference. I cannot repair what I cannot perceive. There is immeasurable missing and cannot be replaced.” She stepped forward, taking a breath. “Know this, defenders of life. I will not permit Charybdis to claim this world. Should our efforts fail, I will dismantle the planet from under his feet. I will poison his oceans with a billion diverse toxins. He will not have a victory here, even if you are also destroyed.”
“That is no comfort to us, wise one,” said an Emperor. “But it would be better if you would take vengeance for us now and assure this battle is won.”
“I am already doing all I can,” Athena said. “But I have not recovered from the opening engagements. My manufactories are not yet rebuilt. It is entirely my responsibility for thinking the vacuum protected me… but the time is far spent for regrets. The one who could alter causality is comatose with our other Alicorns. Unless one of you here wishes to ascend.” She turned to face Jackie again. “I believe Archive named you as the next likely candidate. Perhaps I should begin reciting ancient wisdom for you?”
Jackie grunted something quite impolite. “Even if that wasn’t bullshit, a new Alicorn would probably just get sick too.” She turned away. “I don’t think there’s really any strategy here. You all can decide what you want, you know we’ll obey. I’m going to the front.”
Jackie was certain of very little anymore. But of one fact she did know: if Charybdis wanted Datong, she would make him pay dearly for it.
The longer Jackie lived, the more names she gained. Since the incapacitation of the Alicorns, and the end of any promise of help in the last battle to come, she had gained one more. Ponies dropped to kneeling bows as she passed through the Citadel of the Purifiers, or what was left of them.
“Lord Omega,” each said, as flesh and crystal alike saluted with right hoof or hand to chest. There had been no debate over her name, as there had been with the last Lord to preside over the Purifiers. They all knew Jackie was the last.
“What is your command?” asked her scribe, a blueish-colored earth pony named Rosetta. At least, Jackie thought that was her name. She hadn’t been serving when Jackie first took the office, but then she didn’t really care about the petty administration of the order. Ponies all knew she was only here for the fighting.
“They’re coming,” she said. She stretched the dream around her, expanding her voice so that it filled the Citadel. “Everyone left alive, assemble. He will be here with nightfall.”
A shout went up at her command—utterly fearless. They all knew the odds, far better than the other militaries here. The Purifiers had been fighting Charybdis for well over a thousand years. They knew what these numbers meant.
“You will want the armory then?” her scribe asked, as soon as the shouting had died down. “And your wife summoned?”
“She’ll already know to meet me,” Jackie said, though one eyebrow went up as she looked the scribe over. Her last one hadn’t been that perceptive with her priorities. “Yes, the armory. And no, I don’t have any brilliant strategies. Do you?”
She laughed. “Of course not, Lord Omega.”
They went to the armory. Jackie stood still as a dozen of the Purifiers’ best armorers fussed over her, adjusting the many layers of the ancient Runeplate. It was the single oldest artifact in the order—so old that none knew its creator, or the means of its creation.
“Archive should be wearing this,” Jackie muttered to herself, feeling the strangely cool metal shift as she moved her body. “Or Sunset Shimmer. Not me.”
“I imagine she would if she could, Lord Omega,” her scribe said. “Will you address the troops before we make our way to the front?”
“Our way?” Jackie asked, tapping one of her hooves impatiently. Where was Ezri, anyway? “Aren’t you going to be evacuating with the other civilians?”
Rosetta looked indignant. “You really are new to the order,” she huffed. “We don’t have civilians, Lord Omega. And even if we did… why run? Die fighting beside my friends, or die afraid and alone in Mundi a month from now. No contest.”
That was when Ezri appeared, and Jackie stopped caring about anything else.
She hadn’t come alone—a pair of brightly colored Redeemed flanked her, dressed in the powered armor the Enduring Ones had made for them. Yet there was sign of wear in the suits—there were no more factories, no more replacement parts. There were far fewer sets of armor than Redeemed to wear them.
They embraced—a pair of ancient creatures in ancient armor, at the end of the world. It didn’t last nearly long enough. “We will join you at the front,” Ezri whispered into her ear. “I don’t want my children to see the end of this battle.”
“You mean—so we can stop Charybdis ourselves, because we’re the only ones who have a chance,” Jackie whispered back, forcing her old tone to come back. Ezri didn’t feed on her emotions anymore, but she could still feel them. She’d know just how hollow they were.
“Yes,” Ezri straightened, and didn’t whisper anymore. “Exactly that.”
“Gandalf isn’t coming on the third day,” Jackie said. “The Alicorns are gone. The Enduring Ones are just about extinct. We will be soon.”
One of her battle-lords stepped forward from the armory, his own armor only a pale imitation of what she was wearing. Half his face had transformed to crystal, one of his eyes a glittering gemstone instead of flesh. All the Purifiers’ gear had that effect on ponies, slowly rendering them ageless crystal so that they might fight forever, until the day Charybdis was destroyed.
It had no effect on Jackie, just as it hadn’t affected Archive or any of the other immortals who used it. Only mortals could be so changed.
This lord was named Mathis, and he saluted her as she approached. “Please, Lord Omega. You’ve seen the dreams of all ponies, isn’t that true?”
“Only the interesting ones,” she said, without thinking. “Why?”
“Then you saw Oracle’s vision of this day. Will we be victorious?”
Jackie had seen that vision in Oracle’s nightmares, it was true.She had seen civilization destroyed, life conquered by Charybdis, turned into a shadow of itself that festered and rotted away. He would rule over an empty planet forever.
“I have,” Jackie began. And we all fucking die. But she didn’t say that. “Do you know what’s out there?” She pointed out towards the sky with one wing, out the nearest window. She didn’t wait for a response. “I’ll tell you. Every planet in the whole galaxy with smart things on it—people—every one of them is empty and dead. I’ve seen some of the cities.”
She advanced towards her battle-lord. “We’re the last, Mathis. Datong, and Mundi, and every soul here. We can’t know the dead, or their stories. But we must survive.”
There was a long silence, as all the watching ponies in this particular armory stared at her. Eventually Rosetta set down a piece of paper beside her. “That was a great speech,” she said. “I wrote it down, so you don’t forget when you address the troops.”
“I can give you sixteen days,” Sydney said, leaning over the map. “That’s assuming Charybdis himself doesn’t arrive. Those are our only win conditions, and the chances are slim. He’s been too clever to subject himself to danger like that in the past.”
Isaac sat along with the other strategic minds at the highest tower, watching Sydney’s latest tactical plans. She was a brilliant strategic mind, one of the greatest surviving of the Enduring Ones. It did not seem even her skill would be enough, however.
“Death waits for you, Isaac. But not necessarily defeat.” Isaac sat up suddenly, searching the room for the speaker—there were few left in this upper chamber, not with the battle so close. Most of the assorted commanders and generals had separated to be with their own, planning for the inevitable conclusion. Only those committed to strategic supervision from above were present now.
Yet that wasn’t quite right. Isaac could see no newcomer to the room, exactly. But he could see a towering figure in the glass of the polished window—a reflection of a massive dark-skinned woman standing beside him. His eyes didn’t want to fix on her, and if he tried to look directly at the reflection, he couldn’t see anything but out at the battle to come.
Without explanation, Isaac rose from his seat, making his way over to the window. No one stopped him—no one even said anything. “I’ve heard of you,” he muttered, quietly enough that those in the room behind him wouldn’t be able to hear. It would still sound like he was whispering to himself. “Archive spoke of you. A few others. Aren’t you supposed to be God?”
“You created the Enduring Ones. Were you their god?”
Isaac had no answer to that. He couldn’t even pinpoint how he was hearing the voice—with the Compiler gone, all his precision spellcasting was gone too. “We could’ve used your help earlier,” he eventually said. “How long has this war been going on, but you only involve yourself now?”
He couldn’t make out features clearly, yet there was something of annoyance in the voice when it answered him. “You are mistaken. My resources have been invested in opposing this power since the first days of war. But so few heard my voice—they ignored my warnings. I have done all I could to protect you.”
Isaac was dimly aware of eyes on his back. At least Sydney had noticed the strange way he seemed to be talking to himself, and was just staring at him. He ignored them all. “That’s it then, Keeper of Earth? We failed in the past, and now we’re all dead? You’d rather have him ruling the planet instead of us?”
The whole tower shook gently, as though a distant earthquake had just begun to rattle. He could feel the weight of the massive structure as it fought against the perturbation, and held. Crystal was strong stuff.
“If that were true, I would not have come to you. You are my firstborn, Isaac. My oldest son. You hear my voice, but will you obey it?”
He hesitated. “I will… do anything to protect my people.” There was precious little left to protect. After the destruction of Midgard, so few of his kind remained. As far as he knew, everyone who still endured was here in Datong. “Tell me what to do, Keeper.”
“My enemy has sent his greatest servant in his stead. Camazotz is a powerful Deathlord, and his power grants him arrogance the enemy lacks. The enemy’s soldiers fight together only by his will—kill him, and they will descend into chaos. Our enemy must arrive himself, or allow his army to be destroyed. He has been preparing for this day for centuries, firstborn. He has invested all his strength in this assault, just as you have invested everything in your defense. If he fails here, he’ll be as weak as the day he arrived from Outside. Our enemy will arrive, and another will destroy him.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, voice faltering. “You want me to…”
“Ride out with all your strength, oldest and firstborn. Meet the Deathlord when he appears with the courage of my favored son. Your strength will fail, and you will die. Fight anyway.”
“That… isn’t a compelling case,” Isaac said, voice low. “You want me to go out and… die?”
“So that my creation has a chance,” the Keeper responded. “Your contributions will guarantee that possibility. All you have to do is act. You have always been a profitable servant, firstborn. Serve me now.”
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This story cannot wrap up!
You have yet ten thousand years of stories to tell.
What of Equis?
Surely they deserve a story as well.
So are the alicorns dead or just incapacitated?
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We'll see tomorrow when I post the second half of this.
8512397
Maybe... Just MAYBE this IS 10k years later. We know that multiple thousands of years have passed but Im not sure we know just HOW many. Maybe Equestria will show up to help save the day? I hope.
We have our differences, Starscribe, but I will admit you have hooked me here. Awaiting the rest of this tale with great anticipation. Thank you for what you have done.
This is some real World-of-Warcraft-ass stuff here. I love it.
Holy shit this is SERIOUSLY intense and insane! O.O
Great work! I hope to read more of this story soon <3
Because noone cared about the warnings, noone cared to solve the problem thousands of years earlier.
Project Titan AE.
Evacuate and scan all entities off the planet using Athenas resources, created by grey goo asteroids.
Use solar plasma to rip the planet apart to the nucleonic plasma level.
Rebuild the planet.
If Charybdis survives that, I say call it quits and just chuck the thing into a black hole by temporally pulse focusing that solar beam down to a singularity.
If Charybdis survives that, theres the ZPR Vacuumm Level wave.
If Charybdis survives that. Reach through L space and burn the story.
Sigh. 16 billion corrupted offense beings?.. Where that armory of 50 thousand thermonuclear warheads or unrestricted light spells when you need to vapourise a million cubic miles of attackers.
How did Compiler fail? I thought it was created from scratch, which means Charybdis would have to badly alter the overall rules of reality to prevent Compiler from just being reinitialised from sources?
Sounds like an awesome fight is coming up. Hope it lives up to the rest of this story (and its prequels).
I'll have to reread the stories to figure out Isaac, the Compiler, the Enduring ones to name a few..
...I feel like we've skipped over a lot.
Nice and chilling, though.
I've been dreading this chapter for a while since i've seen it referenced here and there. I feared it would be the beginning of the end and it seems that it indeed is. Decided to grab the most ominous music i could think of for this chapter.
Still after reading this i cant help but be a little bit annoyed at how much has been skipped. Im trying to hold back ranting about it since i know it was gonna be like that with this being an anthology and all but it mostly leaves me a bit saddened. I guess that's the danger of binge reading a series as long as this one and getting too invested in it.
I still hope to see some of these gaps filled a bit more over time but at the same time i can imagine wanting to write things besides the PaP universe stuff. With that venting out of the way, you did a great job setting things up here. I find it a bit harder to stay invested in it because we kinda get thrown right into the middle of things but the setup here is good enough to keep me hooked. Knowing you the last couple of chapters will be very interesting.
Was there an interstellar war or something among the last of the humans? Dang.
Hmm...