Rainbow Dash's eyes flew open with a whimper.
She lay. Stretched out. Legs and hooves and wings pinned to the dew-laden strands of a giant spider's web. Suspended in darkness.
She gasped and hyperventilated.
Ears twitched. Eyes darted. Wings buzzed like a trapped fly.
A shriek escaped her lips. A yelp. She shook and thrashed and fought with her restraints.
Tiny vibrations rippled along the silken strands, trailing into darkness.
Then...
...heavier vibrations rippled back towards her. Heavy. Thunderous. Carried by a million hooked legs.
It was coming for her.
It was coming for her and she was going to die.
She screamed for help. She shrieked for mercy. She howled and sobbed into the abyss.
Nothing but darkness greeted her. Hungering.
The vibrations came closer. They shook her skull. They resonated in her ears, forming a pattern beneath the primal terror of the moment.
That pattern soon became a voice. It throttled Rainbow and soothed her all at once.
From darkness we come and one day return.
Eclipsed by shadow, there is room for Song.
Rainbow Dash breathed and panted and breathed and panted...
The vibrations surrounded her.
The legs and hairs encroached, carrying with it the darkness from all edges of the web.
Soon, she was suspended by nothing but her own breaths, forming a melodic squeak in the center of the everlasting emptiness.
Affording a semblance of the sound... the Song...
The Song defines us, its strings sustaining
Until there is no more life remaining.
Perfect harmony encapsulated
Briefly between onyx parentheses.
Rainbow Dash's eyelids thinned... lowered... and fell.
There was a hint of color... a final spark from her inner being.
A lasting exhale, and it was gone.
The barest trailing molecules scattered outward into the ether.
Like stardust.
Building up speed and momentum as it pierced the everlasting blackness.
And the hint of substance blurred by.
Nebulaic bands of glittery gaseous detritus.
Constellatory miasma, furiously soundless.
A hazy shade of stars—billions in number yet null in heat.
And from the void in between... the hint of something solid, poignant, and purposeful...
Lingering. Trailing. Spinning. Weighting.
And from this briefest of orchestrations
A ballad is formed: a symphonic dance
Befitting accidents and miracles,
A duet performed in the darkest void.
At first, it looked like a narrow string of lifeless metal.
Then—as it zoomed closer—it possessed curves. Texture. A surface that reflected, projected, differentiated.
Finally, pivoting, it exposed a complex glass onion cross-section of circles within circles.
Cylinders within cylinders.
Forever rotating.
Forever animating.
Brimming from the inside out with artificial light. Atmospheres. Ecosystems and oceans and arcologies.
The Song of Circles, conjured in secret.
We know not the authors nor the artists.
Their legacy is their work: an ode to
Life in all its shapes to be and not be.
To dwell and to die in numbers great, small,
And to pass on their slice of the Circle
To the next generation to arrive
As all who have been blessed to hear the Song
Have been summoned from Darkness into Light.
Zooming even closer, levitating swarms of structures materialized, patrolling the horizons within horizons that reflected one another and rotated constantly.
Heat brimmed and crackled between the opposing continents and curved shelves, allowing life to thrive and migrate and bloom and decay and revitalize the landscape.
And then, countless movements into the Song,
An uninvited break, cocophonous
And unyielding in its grotesque volume,
Shattered the rhythm—forced a new cadence.
From within the innermost circle...
Hovering over a slice of verdant landscape...
...two spheres formed.
One of golden, steady and sparkling brilliance.
The other of flickering, ever-changing madness.
There was a ruby splash of color, a violent hemorrhage.
Two swarms of structure flew to the rescue, but it was too late.
The slice broke free, shattering mountains and spilling oceans and—FLAAASH!
The ruby light flooded the circles, spilling out of the cylinders until the lonesome slice was expelled fully and completely...
Jetted out into the chaotic dark, twirling helplessly in a death spin until it was a mere silhouette against the nothingness.
The timeless Symphony of Life and Death,
Forever tainted by its own chorus,
And yet it was the birth of a new song.
Forged in dichotomy, tempered by a
New soundscape and seeking new audience.
This Song beckons the strings to form a new
Partnership with the Spectrum, a duet
Of chaos and harmony, and this slice
Is the new destined auditorium.
So as it turns out, not even the spiders know who made urohringr?
Interesting
Ok, a lot to take in here. That's for sure.
When you realise that you're just a speck of life on a piece of broken ring-world that is part of the actual halo which is part of an even bigger scope of cylinder which is a part of a group of countless other cylinders of even greater potential.
Phew, that's a lot.
Does this mean that Urohringr was a secret project when it was built?
Does this perhaps mean that those who caused the sundering were possibly an outside force, intent on destroying all the rings?
What if the ring makers were in some kind of war, on a scale beyond imagining?
Woah.
Iirc, the giant spooder was in that lone piece of floaty metal for a meeting of some sort? I don't remember if there were other such "leaders" who went there for that 'meeting', but if they were, then wouldn't this look like an inside-job of some sort? A plan to remove all of the species' leaders?
Chaos and Harmony.
Two sides of the same coin.
Or are they? I'd argue that Order is the opposite of Chaos, and Harmony is the balance of the two... but it seems like it's been shown to us repeatedly that Harmony is the opposite of Chaos, not Order.
Hm, is the circle some kind of Ark, providing a habitat for many species/civilisations from different places of the cosmos?
So not even the inhabitants of the cylinders know who built them? Wow, how deep does the Urohringr rabbithole go?
Shard dudes tried tapping into a chaotic sentinel, or their experimentation lead to the Smooze contamination?
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/171718/66/urohringr/the-pegasus-behind-the-curtain
Circleception!
So, the chaos came from within Uroringr? The plane didn't just drift into a cloud of chaos? Man, those alicorns knew nothing.
I fail to see how this shard of the ring can ever be re-attached.
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But if Harmony was the opposite of chaos, Discord would not need to distinguish himself as the antithesis of both.
That aside, seems like no one still alive knows who made the rings, but they at least seem to know enough to restore them to what they once were.
Note that this vision differs strongly from Rainbow's original one of the Sundering. Now it's just the one, single ring being expelled. Also note that Verlax may have been right: Chaos may be an integral element of the Spark.
Ogres have layers. Urohringr has layers.
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Not necessarily, the original vision had the cylinders break into rings in sequence. Abaddon's memory of events may only include this ring as the first one in that sequence she was ignorant of, or perhaps she is conflating together Sundering 1.0 and Sundering 2.0 for sake of brevity or incomplete information.
Visions from the machine world come from Ilrifa, an AI of the rings, who liklier has a better memory then BIG SPODER
It seems that the trio of rings was ejected first - hence the references to the "Slice", implying that it is not yet shattered into fragments.
Harmony and Chaos?
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Or just Order and Chaos.
Could this be in reference to the heat death of the universe? Maybe in the fic's universe this is already underway and Uhroringr needed to be made to provide life with a place to, er, live while everywhere else in the universe became uninhabitable? It would be a suitable goal for such a huge and complex structure, since the problem - like in Asimov's The Last Question - is the hardest and last one an advanced civilization needs to solve, after (presumbly) having solved all the others. It would also provide an explanation for why "chaotic space" exists, since when the universe gets very old it'll become "more chaotic", i.e. increase in total entropy.
I vaguely remember thinking something like this while reading one of the past books, so maybe this has already been implied somewhere.
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Now, that's an interesting theory, an Austreaoh theory!
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I hope we get more flashbacks to the sneaky last days of ring world.
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Space duct tape
So, the Pegasi didn't create urohringr. Interesting
Hmm so the Ancient Pegasi were not the ones that built the cylinder...and apparently Harmony and Chaos originated from within Urohringr?
8611871 wait, when was it explained that ilrifa was an AI?
Alrighty then. So, I left for like 4 months. Time to play catch-up once again.
I'm finding myself reading each passage twice, like a poem... and even then, I only mostly follow their meaning.
Shit's deep, yo.
Think this is where Skystone really comes from?
The leftover crystallized debris of the great Sundering from this Ruby Dirge?
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This is intriguing.
So it seems like there are a crap ton of these rings, and this one piece is the only one that broke off. I’ve always predicted the final goal was to reconnect this piece with the rest of the ring. We still don’t know who built Urohringr, but it appears to be it was built because the rest of the universe became uninhabitable. What if somehow there are humans in this before the end?
For some reason, I've been reading the last 2 chapters again & again to get all the info through my brain. I still feel I need to read this one for the 3rd time to process. Oh well, maybe tomorrow with a rested mind!
So this plane is the only one that broke off? Interesting
Wait, wait, wait, wait. The Angels weren't the ones who built Urohringer? Nor any of the other denizens of the megastructure? Then... who? When?
Seems like a nice long chat with Discord is in order.
I'll be honest, I kinda just stop paying attention whenever I see lyrics. Every time a character has decided to "sing" in text form, I've just skipped over the lyrics. The fact that such an incredibly important moment is being described with lyrics is frustrating.
Hoo boy, we're getting really philosophical now.