Tales from Everfree City

by LoyalLiar

15.5-1 The Princess In Yellow

XVS

The Princess In Yellow

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

XVS - I

The Horror In the Margins

The best thing about the equine mind, I think, is that any arbitrary example can be relied upon to be small. In my tale hence, you have read some tiny clues as to the deeper nature of reality—its permeability, its tendency to fork and replicate and beget upon itself new truths incompatible with one another and yet coexistent, much as the ochre jelly does when split upon a blade—but these revelations have been as table scraps before a feast.

I have… seen… things, this night.

These now are my first written words; the first testament (and perhaps last will) of Mortal Coil, begrudgingly the Earl of House Dust, put to parchment by means of ink and quill despite the illness of my horn; for what is the mere mortality of a disease before the immensity of what I have seen tonight?

When I am done writing, Archmage Hourglass, who yet calls herself a friend to me despite being the source of my woes—or at least their unassuming gifter—assures me that intends to offer to me a respite from this… this madness that I would call deeper truth. But first, I must write. She assures me, further, that what I write I shall not have to read again until some day in the vast future—untold centuries and eons from now, when the sun dies and is reborn in the sky, and when chaos itself is tamed by the merest virtue of equine kindness. That prophecy would have scared me before. Now, I fear it sounds quaint. That is my condemnation upon you; the burden of the reader. So know this, reader, whether you be me, or a me who is not me as Hourglass suggests, or some yet further third party whose birth is not yet even a glimmer in the imagination of your forebears. I know not what tome it is to which Hourglass intends to bind these words, or who its author is, but nevertheless I will dare to warn you that if you continue this way you too will be burdened. Heed the wisdom I gained too late.

Fear not truths that are unknown to you, but fear that which lies between truths.

And do not try this at home.

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My knowledge of the world as it isn't began mundanely, over a cup of tea brought to me by my servant golem, whilst I pored over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. It was an activity I had set myself to in a fruitless attempt to calm the chafing of my soul at being restrained by magic—a state I find most intolerable, and against which I have recently found a temporary (and untested) reprieve in the form of an unrequested gift from an at least ostensibly untrustworthy spiritual beneficiary. Upon reflection, I came to the idea that another unexpected gift from some days earlier might well have been upon a related subject.

"Master Coil," said the Professor—a curious name, I must admit, for the golem was not educated academically, but his style of rejoinder was so oft academic and dry that the appellation seemed suitable—"I'm worried about your well being. You can't keep hiding from—"

I waylaid the ensuing conversation before the wooden automaton could press me into a distraction with a raised hoof, such was my obsession with the array of books scattered across the fine mahogany desk in my office. It was a singular thing; the office and the house in which it sat both. I had won them, if one can call their ownership a victory, for killing my mentor; a decrepit and wicked old stallion named Wintershimmer, and a fragment of whose soul lived on like a barnacle or a limpet latched onto mine. But here I digress. The house was once in the possession of a similarly cruel wizard, and it was from that stallion's secret shelves and records that I had pulled the books on the desk, and though they were due for purposes far less sinister, they portended a similar quality of the magical, the ethereal, the otherworldly.

"Have you heard of Eratrotsthenes?" I asked, flicking idly betwixt two pages, beside myself with curiosity. "The Great Librarian?" The aforementioned use of 'beside myself' was a pun most literal, you see, for though my horn blazed with literal flame as well as magic, sending rivulets and globules of thick wax rolling down upon my brow and my muzzle, my own body was standing beside me, still but attentive, as I worked. "He had a fascinating relationship with the act of writing and the written word. There's an argument to be made he was the first Father of Divination, before King Electrum took that title."

"Divination?" Asked the Professor, jaw unmoving, the voice coming magically from deep within, as he stepped forward to set down my tea. "You're hoping to see through the changeling's magic? Or is this more work on your mirrors?"

"Changelings and mirrors?" I scoffed, indignant at the thought of such a minor threat. "Nothing so base, Professor. I had an idea earlier about this book. The Princess In Yellow. Archmage Hourglass' gift; you recall, I assume?"

"I had not forgotten." I heard the golem inhale, though I knew he had neither nostrils nor lungs. But it was a trivial thing; the noise was the point. "What are you planning this time?"

"Are you, perhaps, familiar with Eratrotsthenes' Dive?"

"I'm not," the Professor replied. "This is a spell to help you read faster somehow?"

"A spell to learn to practice the craft faster," I answered idly, glancing between two pages, and then doubling back to re-read more slowly. Frustrating, maddening slowness. Leastwise some of it was magic; I suspect pure mundanity would have driven me to gibbering madness. "But not just that. Two birds with one stone. One must be efficient. After all, stones don't grow on trees."

"That might be literally true, Master Coil, but it's not really in the spirit of the expression. The second bird is Hourglass' book, I take it?"

"Indeed. Hard to read a book you can't even open by conventional means. But this way…" I grinned. "Well, it'll tell you all about it when I get back."

"Get back, sir? Please tell me you aren't planning on spending all night up at Canterlot again. I'm sure the zombies—"

"Flesh golems," I corrected tersely. "Artifical souls."

Another artificial breath, this time a sigh. "I'm sure the flesh golems won't be any more productive for your lack of another good night of sleep. Not to mention you have class to teach in the morning. And… I know you're tired of my concerns, but Metamorphosis has been leaving the house more boldly, and I can't follow where she's going. If she follows you with nopony else around…" Timidly, the Professor's words trailed off, fearing how I might reply. Perhaps he was right to. I had snapped at him before. And the memory of my breaking a stallion's back of his involvement was not so long in tooth yet.

I brushed off the thought; a magical idea had stolen my sour mood. "Au contraire, I don't even intend to leave the study. But all the same, I may be indisposed for a while. If there are any problems, with Metamorphosis or otherwise, send Angel or Graargh for Celestia. She already knows."

With that extended discourse out of the way, I lit my candle, turned to my flesh and blood body, beside myself more literally than most with excitement, and changed my perspective. Then, with a mouth not full of molten wax, I added in parting "This will cost me a year, no doubt, but I think the trade is worth it."

If only I knew when I lit my horn what strange aeons would be the toll for my spell. In a burst of blue magic, glimmering at arcane angles to itself, beyond the grasp of three-dimensional geometry, I cast my new spell, my body dissolved into as many glimmers of color, out of space or time in any true sense. And those sparkles wasted no time before, like weevils, worming their way between the clamped-shut pages of The Princess In Yellow.

Archmage Hourglass here with a bit of historical context. Eratrotsthenes' Dive has long since died out as a spell practiced in any kind of modern Equestria, supplanted by the work of Haycartes, who developed Haycartes' Method as a dramatic improvement on the usefulness of the spell. Both spells, when in normal function, render the caster a silhouette literally in ink upon the pages of the book that is targeted, allowing them to consume its contents more readily by 'suffusing the fullness of their mind'. Lego, ergo sum, to quote Haycartes himself. Readers familiar with Haycartes' will know that, while not without risk completely, the spell is generally considered safe because it avoids imparting loose magical energy on any spell diagrams which may be present within the pages of a book.

Eratrotsthenes' original version was less guarded.

I'm sure somepony would have cautioned Morty to use the safer spell, if Haycartes' had the decency to have been born twelve-hundred years earlier. And, only now that I'm writing this, do I wonder if perhaps Morty told some variant of this experience—at least, the part I let him remember fully—to Haycartes.

One final note to at least one specific future reader: there's a spell on these pages of the original copy of Tales which hides them from notice to most readers. I will encourage you to inspect that spell, and determine the exact conditions I've laid on it. They could be informative to you about who exactly knows what of these memories, and when. That fact could really matter in a pinch.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

I confess, I had expected to find myself rendered in ink upon the parchment of the pages; that was what Eratrotsthenes had described. But there is a funny thing about expectations; no one describes them aloud (nor, I assume, casts them in ink upon parchment) unless they are subverted.

So it was that I found myself in shock, gasping for air, when frigid salty waves dragged me upon a beach of rounded stones. When I found myself once more with breath in my lungs, unburdened by the briny rime, I took in my surroundings and found them utterly alien to any place living or dead I had ever set hoof before. And, lest you think that a casual comment, know that I have even at this young age traveled the better parts of the breadth of equinedom, into the lands of the dragons, and even into both the Summer Lands and the depths of Tartarus.

But never was there anything like this. I lay upon a mass of land—if one can call it land—whose name I lack the geography to describe. It was as if it was a shallow point in the ocean; a series of sandbars and rocky reefs built around thermal vents that rose up out of the dark. But despite being beneath sea level, these places were rich with life. Some species of un-tree with spongy, fleshy bark striped like a black and white tiger grew with roots like mangroves out of the water, though when I looked down into the brine, I saw they were not rooted in sand or submerged soil at all; instead, each root ended in a long, waving, leathery kelp like thing. Like an eel. Or the leg of a dead body, slowly drifting into the deeps after a shipwreck.

"Wintershimmer?" I asked the haunted air. The dead silence that answered my query, both within and beyond my mind, filled me with horror. For even in the presence of the Draconequus himself, though he swiftly silenced my old dead mentor, at least the stallion had been there for a moment. Here, it seemed, I was truly alone.

When I stepped over to look down into the deeper brine, something above me moved in the canopy of one of these trees, and though I was some good distance away from even the nearest, I nevertheless hesitated in place to look up. There I beheld two things of note. The first was the fruit growing beneath the wide, fern-like leaves of the trees. They hung in little bundles like grapes, but they looked more like transparent sacs, slightly wet and glistening in what little light came from the sky (but we'll get to that). The source of the motion, or so I concluded, were the eyes inside each sac. Dozens and dozens of eyes, red and green and purple and colors I lack the words to describe, for in all my studies I have never seen such shades produced by the refraction of any prism. And they glowed, like the watchstallion's lantern, casting me in a horrifying spotlight in the darkness.

The second thing of note, the real source of the motion once I looked beyond the eye-fruit to see it, was what I shall here describe for simplicity as a red-and-green macaw bat. I mistook it for a bird at first, for it did not hang from the branches, but instead stood upright. But in lieu of a beak, it had one of those monstrous noses—the scrunched up, bulging, wrinkled beyond a bulldog kind nopony ever seems to imagine when one describes a bat unless it is called out specifically—and when it spread its leathered wings, I saw there were not two of the limbs but four.

"Beware," said the bat, and I shall confess I let out a gasp on the very verge of a scream in surprise. "The last act begins too soon. Find your seat and lie in it. The stage of Lost Carhorsa waits for none."

"Um, alright," I replied—it is simply not done not to reply when you are spoken to by a beast of magic, unless it has asked you for your name. "Where's my seat… usher?"

The bat barked out a laugh, and then most troublingly it broke into song. "Follow the stars. The stars are right. Follow them into the long goodnight. The last act begins, so enter the fray. On the center stage of Forgotten Ry'neigh." (If you should wonder after its pronunciation, the bat spoke in rhyme. But don't say that word. Don't invite it into this world too.)

"Right…" I watched the bat for a moment longer, and it watched me, until I was confident it wouldn't pounce if I turned my back. But even then, I didn't turn fully. I just cast my eyes to the sky.

And it was then I realized the dark itself was wrong. The sky was full of lights, but only when I was looking at it. And when I moved my head, what I saw shifted, far faster than the angle by which my neck twisted—and not always even in the same direction. It was as if the whole of the sky was a great dome, mounted upon an apparatus of gears and ratchets beyond my comprehension in their design, which responded to any shift in perspective by amplifying the motion a dozenfold or more. In the sky, I saw countless miasmic strings of glowing color and gas, parting like great threads and growing thinner until each eventually either left what of the world fit into my angle of view, or ended in a grand and distracting nova, a fireball so bright, so violent, and so apparently close compared to even the sun you know, that I winced instinctively away to keep from blinding myself on first glance, only to realize in shock that there was no pain to look.

Between these threads, useless as glitter around a death warrant and notable only for how they detracted from the magnitude of the scene, were the stars. And so distracting from the beauty of these nebulae I beheld with my naked eyes were they that it took me a very long time indeed to realize that they were not my stars—not just not my stars in the sense that they were the sky as we would view it on the surface of the moon, say, or some other point of view, but rather a completely alien set of stars upon an unknown sky.

I knew not what the bat had meant that they were right, though; not until, in casting my head about to learn more about what there was to see in this ever shifting sky, I stepped forward. And when I did, the distant stars that ought to have been uncaring undulated. They beckoned. They bade me forward, all shuddering in a single direction.

Let me tell you of real fear, reader. So many ponies live in fear that they are insignificant, that their lives matter not in the great scheme of the world. In that moment, I experienced a different fear; one so foreign that though I often teased it in my pride, I had never dared to dream it to the fullness of its extent. I feared that I was right; that I was the protagonist, not just of my own little story, my own life in the world we share, but in the fullness of existence. There is terror in the realization of godhood, friend; of being cast in the leading role of some great tale and knowing not beyond a shred of a clue if it is fated to be a noble legend or a bitter tragedy, but being told with certainty that it will be of note.

Hurricane once regarded in me a saying I thought at the time was most curious, but now I see the depth of it with fresh eyes, as deep as those briny black waves that, when I extended my hoof, froze to create a passage in the way the stars had indicated for me, so that I could step off my lonely stone bar and into the shade of the mangrove eyes. He had said "It is a curse amongst Cirrans to wish someone to live in interesting times. And worse still to wish them fame in those times."

The wonders—and horrors—I passed on the walk from that stone bar to the stage were too numerous and too terrifying to be put into words. I cannot do them justice, so fresh am I in the art of learning to write at all, and I fear my mind might break if I indulged the most flagrant of them too directly, trying to wrap something not of this world into the understanding of a mind restrained by the words and thoughts of this world. So I shall not. Know this, though: not once in that walk along icy paths through tropical trees over brine that ought to have ended the life I saw, did I recognize even one familiar beast, a singular recognizable species of flora, one welcome face; not mane nor tail of a welcome pony, nor of a pony at all.

And then I came to it, and my wish was as ever granted in the cruelest way possible.

The 'stage' was not so much a theater as a place of public gathering, carved in grim yellowed marble out of the side of a cliff that must have once had a vein of the stuff. Seats were naught more than curved benches of the stuff separated by slender walkways, cut at an angle to give the tatter-robed, equine-at-first-glance audience full view of the semicircular stage. Only, it wasn't really semicircular. Not the way you or I would understand it. Even at a glance, I took note that it was wrong, though it took me a very very long thought to realize how. The answer, to spare you my ponderings, was that the ratio of the length of the radius of the semicircle to (double) its circumference was exactly two.

Please, please, do not ask me to draw this. I fear the paper might yet burst into flame.

Upon the stage that I dared not look directly upon, there stood a mare. A very familiar mare, though I recognized her only by three factors. The first was her towering scale. The second was her colorful mane, hovering in the air from behind a saffron mask. And the third was her magical tail, from beneath a linen robe of the same fabric, tossed over her frame and bunched here and there lazily, as one might be seen to don drapes.

"Celestia?!" I called out from where I stood at the top of the stairs which divided the seats, making it possible for one to walk between the rows.

The figure on the stage reacted with an almost insectile jerk to her neck, though her other limbs stayed stiff, holding her up regally but coldly. "You are the one called Coil? His Excellence?"

I had no need of a second hint to realize this figure was not my Celestia. But beyond even the word choice, the fact that she spoke with a raspy, haunting, whistling voice that seemed to speak from over my shoulder and only echo from behind her yellow mask, removed any shadow of a doubt.

"I think the address is 'The Right Honorable'," I answered, in deference to the honorific of being 'Earl Dust'. "But I have been called Coil."

"Come forward. Let us… dialogue."

My best response, as a reasonable young stallion, was a raised brow. "I think that might be a bad idea." Yet I found myself saddled with a distinct sense of foreshortening, as if the space between us was being compressed. It was only in a moment of clarity that I glanced down and realized my hooves were carrying me forward—though it was also, as I counted my strides to a mere four, certain that I had not covered such a distance as the length of the formidable amphitheater in the span of so few strides.

From the stage, when my hooves touched it, I looked out at my audience. What I beheld sent a chill down my spine. For, though many of the tattered robes belonged to figures in masks not unlike this would-be-Celestia's, a respectable minority were likewise empty altogether. Just outlines of equine shoulders and hooded brows. The closest wizard's term for such a creature is a tatterdemalion—an accidental golem brought to life when ambient magic in items comes together to take a form. Only, these were each a single garment. And they seemed possessed with much more determined focus than a mere accidental un-being.

"The stage is set, Coil. The actors in their places." Over me washed the foreboding sense that beneath the mask, this not-Celestia was smiling in a way Celestia would never smile, and I was glad for the mask to hide her teeth from view. "Ask, while you yet have the lines."

I tried to move my hooves, and they did not heed me. I forced magic into my horn, and no light filled my brow. In desperation, hollow hope more to buy time than anything, I spoke "What do you want me to ask? I don't know the lines to this… play or melodrama or whatever."

"They are what you make of them," The saffron cloaked mare replied. "Ask and I shall answer. And when you are filled with understanding, you will know."

I legitimately forgot to struggle for a moment. "Yes, that is what understanding means. Where am I? What is this place? Who are you?"

"This place is a fiction. Carhorsa lies on the shore of never, on the threshold of the wasn't."

"Right. I'm in a book." A bit of worry faded from my mind.

The mask shook the head behind it. "You misunderstand. A book is not a book when it is a door ajar. Just because a place is a fiction does not mean it is not where you are. It only means you are unmade. Unreal. And now, un-derstanding."

I found I could cock my head in the process of utilizing that bit of control. "No, I don't think I do. Who are you, if you aren't Celestia?"

"Pay less heed to the host. I am called the Princess in Yellow," she said, and something in my spine, where I knew my soul to lie, screamed to run. My damnedest (a word I do not choose lightly) I gave in silencing the feeling; not because it was wrong, but because it is a wizard's lot to face things that promise fates worse than death as a matter of course, and in such encounters giving into fleeing by such a base tool as ones mere hooves is a sure way to meet said fate. With hilarious mercy, the willpower was mostly moot, given the stillness of my hooves, but the clarity of mind was the real point. It was in not perfect clarity, but more than mere panic, that I recalled the title of the book in which I found myself matched this creature's name.

So the protagonist? Bah, who was I humoring; no book shackled shut with enchanted steel put the hero's name on the cover.

"Alright, 'Your Majesty', what fate should I expect for having come up here? What horrible thing does a spirit like you want with a stallion like me?"

The mask swirled. Various shades of a color adjacent to yellow (perhaps on the z-axis) mixed and separated on its surface, and the voice behind it said with some irritation "A princess retains the honorific of 'her highness'. I'm not a queen, Morty."

"Celestia?" I asked, noting more emotion from the phrase than the mask(?) had thus given me.

The mask swept a uniform mustard color. "Do not concern yourself; the abandoned princess will not matter in a moment."

I found that I could cock my head when the motion occurred without intention. "But… Celestia isn't a princess. Is this supposed to mean something?"

Somewhere behind me, where I could neither crane my neck to look, nor shift my hooves to pivot, there came a bright flash of blue light, complementary against the dominance of the almost-yellow in the space. When it faded, a voice that I shall confess was the most pleasant I have ever had the joy of hearing spoke, firm and certain. And he spoke thus: "This isn't the Morty you're looking for…"

"There is only the one," said the mask, looking over my shoulder.

A blue light surrounded me, and I found mobility returned to my limbs. "Don't go far," the owner of the magic ordered me, and I trusted in the voice enough to step only to the edge of the stage, and then look back to see what sight met my eyes.

He was… perfect. A only just off-white blue coat and an icy mane—though an ethereal one possessed of a magic like Celestia or Luna's, as if gazing into the heart of a razing blizzard but without the noise. And the comparison to the sisters was, perhaps apt, for this curious variant upon yours truly (for if there was any doubt, a jacket of black with red trim dispelled it instantly) was an alicorn—and not merely an alicorn, but Celestia's better in height and her equal in posture. Setting aside immortality, his jawline suggested he was my elder, though beyond that I could not guess at his age any more than Celestia's. When he idly shifted his wings—apparently for comfort—the fabric at his flank stirred, and I noted that his talent mark was not quite perfectly my mirror; the backstrokes on the seven points of the star came to something like hooks, giving it an aesthetic less like a Coltic star-knot, and more like a sort of astrological glyph.

"You're a sad little example of Celestia," he observed dryly, simultaneously mocking the strange beast that Celestia wore.. "Did you put on the robes willingly, or was that a more recent detraction? Is that what ended your world?"

"You ought to fear me," said the mask. "My power extends beyond time and—"

"Your master's power extends beyond time and space," the ideal stallion corrected with less self-satisfaction than I confess I would have slid into such a comment. "You're just a unicorn from a dead reality wearing a magic jacket. And one, I might add, devoid of taste. Your reality is getting thin too; is that what you're getting from the real Princess in Yellow?" He did not yield long enough for an answer to really arrive before clicking his tongue. "Her standards are slipping."

The mask shifted, but the voice of Celestia (a Celestia?) did not leak from behind it. "You question my power? You mighty shard of Coil, you shall don the mask."

"Hmm… I'd be fascinated to see you make that happen. Please, by all means; if you're so confident in speaking fact or prophecy or whatever… hit me. But beware; when I stone false prophets, I throw mountains."

The mare behind the mask did not light her horn. There was no magical bolt, no blast of power. Nor was there the power of the elements upon her wings; no fire, no ice, no storm or stone. Which is, perhaps, too many words to describe that nothing happened at all. I yield them because to simply say nothing happened isn't quite right.

There was no moment where I saw space ripple, or my better self turn inside out in a shower of viscera I shan't suffer to describe. There was simply a moment where I had no concept of such an event, and then an adjacent moment in which I remembered it having already happened, with perfect clarity. That, at least, helped to explain the sudden wetness I felt on my brow and my forehooves, though I dared not look down to investigate them. My mind was similarly torn by a piercing headache as it tried to rationalize the one most important detail of the scene.

The alicorn still stood there, unharmed.

"Well?" he asked, frowning slightly. "Time is reality."

There was no moment where I saw it happen, but I suddenly remembered his immolation, in something like cold fire, lashing out in tongues of a color that most certainly was not blue, but was less unlike blue than any other shade I might describe. His flesh shriveled and tightened until it tore itself apart in rigid fragments and he dissolved not into sand or ash but broken rigid fragments like a shattered mirror or a mass of snowflakes.

But he was still there. Again, he seemed unamused

I remembered him suddenly shrink, becoming more like me; devoid of wings and with a horn shortened to a more believable mortal length, laying on his belly in a veritable sea of gray and white ashes, like a world wrapped in a liquid bark of birch. He screamed in agony at an empty, broken sky, as the sun slipped through a crack in its glass shell like an egg yolk and poured out fire on the land, in a wall sweeping toward him. The fire rushed to meet him—to meet us—and I even remembered the briefest moment of feeling singed myself.

"How dare you?" he asked, unharmed, and I could feel utter disdain in the tone of his voice. "You'd try to reduce me?" He stepped forward.

The so-called Princess in Yellow took a step back.

I recalled him falling into the space between two mirrors, frantically flailing his forelegs to catch himself as the reflections cast by the two surfaces stretched—and when his reflection touched his form, at least from my perspective, they joined. His body was pulled like taffy into the world of a kaleidoscope. The scream was… or had been… haunting.

His horn had been glowing for a moment, though there was never a moment when it lit. "Clever," he muttered. "Points for novelty. But disappointing. Are we done?"

I remembered a great sigil in the dark. A glowing yellow thing that meant The Satsifaction that Cannot Be, For the Unmade Duke to Laugh. A thing I—forgive me, I do not recall. I held that memory in my mind long enough to know that it was a sigil, but not its strokes, to know that it was in my mind, and it burned me, but that the scar it left behind was not a brand so much as a reflection, like the silhouette of layered shadowbox, or perhaps the tracing of a shaded spotlight cast through a broken prism.

The stallion frowned, and lit his horn more fully, so that it glowed less like a mere mortal unicorn's and more like Celestia's at the height of her magic. "So you can wound me. But if you know the name Mortal Coil, you must know it won't take." And, with a sickening crack, the hood around the mask bulged to one side, which then shifted to a lump on the back.

It was only when blood dripped down from the neck that I realized whatever would-be-Celestia was behind the mask had suffered a fatal neck fracture, as her head was turned fully around to face her back.

Yet the mask hadn't moved.

"Did you think the death of the host would inhibit me?" it asked.

"Hardly," answered the alicorn. "That was merely a courtesy. Wouldn't want that poor Celestia to share this fate with you." As he spoke, the alicorn's horn withdrew from his jacket a glass bottle full of glimmering reality, much as I had seen in the care of Archmage Hourglass. The liquid reality inside the vessel emerged and began to swirl in a helical orbit about the glow of his magical aura.

Then, with a noise not unlike the clapping of two hooves, Celestia's body collapsed, and the robe and mask fell to the ground with it. There, with a crack like a dropped teapot, the mask shattered.

"These so-called 'gods'" the alicorn noted, mostly to himself. "So sure of looking down on us, but they don't understand us any better than we understand them. How embarrassing, to call someone an ant and then lose anyway." It was only after that dry remark that he glanced upon me with a raised brow. "What is one of us doing here, Archmage Coil? Or are you one of the sort to go by 'Morty'?" He looked me up and down, and found something wanting, though I cannot say what. "You look the type." Then his eyes wandered back about the stage and its seats, and he noted ere I could reply "I don't think I've heard of a dying world dropping anypony in the amphitheatre of Lost Carhorsa before. We're awfully far from the middle of Nowhere.."

My confusion and sense of disorientation in this strange place won out over my sourness at his inexplicable disapproval; perhaps I had gotten disheveled in my trip to the amphitheatre in some regard. "I don't fully understand what happened… or even what is happening. I used a spell to go into a book Archmage Hourglass gave me; I expected it to let me wander in the margins, not take me to some…" I struggled with the words, and at last settled upon "...alien shore."

The alicorn sighed. "You have my sympathies, then, Morty. Yours isn't the first world Hourglass ended. Still… to lose it over something as lowly as reading a book?" He clicked his tongue, once, and adjusted the shoulders attached to his wings forward. "I will spare you suffering from the consequences of her actions, and your own. No point delaying the inevitable." Then, somewhat worryingly, he took two solid steps toward me.

At that, I reacted with confusion and worry. "Ended my world? What? No! Everypony else is fine. I just used Eratrotsthenes' Method on the book. Why would that destroy… my world? Whatever that means?"

The stallion cocked his head, and then frowned, and I watched his pristine brow furrow for a moment as he closed his eyes in thought. I (not being remotely blind to the implication from his prior sentence, that he intended to kill me) considered briefly flinging the Razor his way. My memory of the events that had not happened halted that idea; if I didn't even understand his duel with the so-called Princess in Yellow, how could I hope to fight him? My mind then turned to escape… and when my horn painfully ignited to ready myself to teleport away, I felt his magic quench it like the stub of a candle dropped into the roiling ocean. When I looked back to him and away from the horizon, he hadn't even opened his eyes to look at me as he shut down my magic.

"Calm yourself. I'm not going to kill you; not if your world still lives. Save me the inconvenience of rescuing you from a worse fate, please. I am only the scariest thing you are likely to encounter in Lost Carhorsa so long as I have reality to spare, and it is a precious thing in this place. I would prefer not to waste it."

I nodded hesitantly. "Then… may I ask where here is? You keep talking about worlds; is this another plane? Or some kind of mirror dimension? Another timeline?"

He sighed. "There is a short version to that answer and a much, much longer one. I shall give the shorter now, and we can discuss the longer over a meal. This immediate place is Carhorsa; it is one of several… abandoned realities created by the creatures that dwell outside our understanding of reality." With that comment, he gestured up to the stars. "The things Luna's ill-advised Night Guard and Hourglass' self-righteous self-proclaimed vigil ostensibly protect us from. You deduce correctly that I am you from another 'timeline', but this place is not my home. We are nowhere. Or, if you will suffer the inexcuseable coinage, more accurately no-when. There is no single course of action, no event that leads to this place, save irreparable paradox. In short, this is where the dregs of worlds are left to wash ashore when existence itself dies." And then, as if he had not given the single most ominous answer to any question I had ever asked in my life, the alicorn who would be me extended a wing toward one of the carved stairways out of the amphitheatre in a seemingly arbitrary direction, and calmly asked "Shall we walk? I'm not partial to the humidity."

When I nodded, he took off walking, and I very nearly had to sprint to catch up. He was taller than Celestia, if only a bit, but the real difference was that he clearly lacked a respect in his pace for being around ponies of the natural size. As he strode, his magic reached into his jacket breast and retrieved a thrumming silver sphere inlaid with intricate arcane engravings beyond my ability to comprehend at a casual glance. Into it, he spoke a simple command. "Raziel, bring the Dutchmare down to the beach near the old theater." As he stowed the thing away, he explained "One of my golems, in keeping with the old naming convention."

"The old naming convention?"

"You did make an 'Angel', didn't you? With Wintershimmer… presumably before you killed him." Then the alicorn paused. "You must be one of the ones who killed Wintershimmer, surely."

"I did…" I raised a brow. "Didn't you?"

He chuckled. "Small is the gate, and narrow the way, that leads to my wings. The difference between you and I is not one of our choices. Or, at least, not solely."

"That doesn't really explain…" I paused not out of distraction, but in trying to keep up with alicorn strides. "What do I call you? Archmage?"

"Apologies. My given name is Mortal Coil, unsurprisingly. But for distinction's sake, most creatures here call me 'His Excellence', as the honorific befits the Prince on the throne of Canterlot."

I scoffed. "Good to know I picked the right name. Now I just need to finish building mine."

"Canterlot isn't real for you yet?" His Excellence asked with a raised brow, and then frowned. Then the expression faded, lasting only the passing moment, and his eyes turned once more forward through the wet forests of alien plants and even stranger creatures—creatures that, I could not help but notice, avoided my guide's presence. "Curious. How old are you, Morty?"

I shrugged. "Eighteen? Nineteen? Something like that."

I hadn't expected the comment to produce any humor, but His Excellence broke into a small chuckle that I would probably have taken offense at, had the stallion laughing not been so disarming. "You're serious?"

"I take it you're old enough you've forgotten what a young stallion looks like?" I asked. "So you must be a few thousand, like Celestia?"

Humor fell from the stallion, but not harshly. "Most of us I meet look like you. But they're all much older. Liches, vampyr… and stranger things. It's rare for one of us to make it here while actually looking their age. You presume correctly about me once again, though putting an exact number on my age is a complicated affair. When my world ended, I was nearly two thousand years old. I've been here longer, if that even makes sense when one is trapped in a timeless, fictitious world."

Abruptly, a wing the color of my coat blocked my path, and His Excellence lowered himself into a combat ready posture. In following his gaze, I saw not some horror, either monstrous or in equine guise, but rather a crude geometric carving on the trunk of one the nearest trees, leaking green sap in pulses as if driven by a beating heart. I cannot recall the sigil; it has been burnt from my mind already, though I know not when. Perhaps that was some mercy on His Excellence's part.

"We need to hurry," he said, and then spread his wings with dramatic flair. I—thinking back to times when Celestia was generous enough to carry me—stepped toward him, only to receive a harsh glare. "Do you expect me to carry you?"

"I… yes? I was already almost running trying to keep up with you. And… no wings."

I felt telekinesis wrap about my shoulders and my barrel, and then I was hoisted bodily up from the ground of that unnatural jungle and dragged alongside his panting wings, lateral to the direction I had actually oriented my body. The experience was equal parts disorienting and sickening, and I did not feel much better about it when, in the course of emptying my stomach, His Excellence shifted his grip on me to assure none of what I… divulged… would sully his attire or his coat.

Not more than a minute or two of unspeaking flight later, he dropped me down in fetlock-deep water on a beach that I did not question long enough to perceive as alien, beyond the obvious wrongness of the sky overhead. It had sand and saltwater and tide, and that all was sufficient for me.

"Here we are," he said. "The Flying Dutchmare." Before us, in the place where the shallows dropped off into the dark, a sailing ship bobbed in the water. It was trim and taught, and braced with a great deal of steel along its beams—a warship, no doubt. Most notable of its features, though, were the six alabaster wings, in three pairs, folded against its sides the very same way the ship's master carried his beside me.

"What's a 'Dutchmare'?"

"'Dutch' is the adjective form of the Netherlands, a country on the other side of that insufferable mirror where the Draconequus exiled humanity…" I had not thought I reflected confusion on my face, for I knew the story of which His Excellence spoke, but he let the thought trail to naught, nevertheless, and then started again. "The name comes from a legend of a ghost ship that flies above the surface of the sea, and never makes port, sometimes said to ferry the souls of those who have not yet realized they are dead. In the interest of nautical tradition, or in case you are somehow already a vampyr, or part-fae even at your young age, I give you permission to come aboard."

From the shore, I had a strange feeling of what I shall term lateral vertigo, and with a tap on the back from His Excellence' wing and a single timid stride forward, I was on the deck of the ship—as if the space between us had been folded down to naught, but in some far different way than I had achieved with Wintershimmer working on his ritual to open the Summer Lands.

Flitting about to-and-fro on the deck of the ship were two categories of being. One set, of whom I observed about six, were golems in the styling of my own Guardian Angel, albeit writ large and grand and the slightest bit unsettling. Where my Angel had only a couple of halos around a stone core, each of these angel-golems had a half-dozen or more halos of gold studded with gems and 'eyes' that very well appeared to be made of flesh, hovering around cores of radiant light of various colors. A green-eyed one flitted past me as I approached, stopped and stared for a moment (I did not like the sight of so many eyes pivoting in different directions in their sockets to keep watching me, even as the halos rotated) before looking up to its apparent master in His Excellence and then flitting off again.

The other category of creatures were other alicorns, of a vein akin to Celestia and Luna rather than say Queen Jade, though writ even larger. They were clearly monsters, if one judged by their obviously carnivorous fangs, and they were towering, even over Celestia and Luna and His Excellence's heights. A pair by the door into the captain's quarters of the ship were white, like Celestia, but instead of majestic manes of pleasing peaceful colors, they wore literal fire on their heads (even from a distance I could feel the heat), sprouting from golden helmets heated such that they glowed almost orange, and carrying halberds of the same material. Another, standing watch on the prow, was black but had a mane very similar to Luna's, and wore blued steel for armor—I would describe her perhaps as an evil Luna, were I not inclined to label such a description redundant.

"Gabriel," ordered his excellence, and I noted a golden-'sunned' golem swoop from its odd duties toward us. "Take the ship home. And have Cadance prepare a meal for myself and my guest. Tell her to consider it a meal of some importance."

"Of course, Master," said the golem. "I… Sir, may I ask? This is a lesser of you, is it not? Why not simply…" Its words trailed off, seemingly realizing fully that I was in earshot.

His Excellence shook his head. "His world isn't dead. I intend to send him home. I believe his future is, in a coincidental way, the key to our own journey home."

The golem, Gabriel, seemed surprised, and perhaps troubled by that revelation, but he said only "As you wish, Master."

When I got His Excellence' attention back, I asked "Your journey home? Isn't your world… gone? Or your timeline, or whatever? Like you assumed of me?"

"I've been waiting a very long time for a particular one of us, Morty" said His Excellence, ushering me past the flaming alicorns and into the ship. My hoofing slipped a bit as the vessel shifted when its six wings extended, and pumped us up into the dark sky full of time. "And before you get worried, it isn't you. Yet, at least. But I cannot afford to miss him. Come. We'll talk more over dinner. You'll like it; you share my palate, I dare say."

Unwellness settled over me, as I could not shake the feeling I was destined to make an uncomfortable discovery about myself.

Comments

[Star_Shade]

Ok, I am a bit confused, but I think I will try to summarize what happened. Morty went to a book, thinking he could use a spell to sort of dump it into his mind? But the book is one of Hourglass, which transported him to a strange quasi-chaotic world which sort of collects dying members of other timelines. Here, he finds a creature mimicking Celestia to try and get information from him? But an Alicorn version of him shows up and destroys it. The Alicorn is stuck here, looking for a version of Morty that he can hop into a living universe?

[Farenth Vega]

Well that was probably one of the single biggest lore dumps yet. The King in Yellow reference is of course obvious, so many things to dissect though. An Alicorn Morty, Hourglass causing tons of multiversal damage, a future version of OUR Morty being some key to all the multiverse's struggles. Very glad to see this wasn't just a short one off chapter to wet the appetite then never be referenced again for age and it looks to continue in the next one.

Did anyone else hear the ominous Signalis soundtrack the whole time?

VERY interested to see more and at the current pace I bet it'll be soon. Hyped!

[RoboRed]

I LOVE stuff like this. The kind of stuff that explores the very edges of conceptualization, dissecting spacetime and the mutliverse until it becomes but the barest of suggestions, trying to piece it together in a way that can make sense, crossing between worlds upon worlds. Ohhhh I have a feeling I am going to really enjoy this part of the act.

Hooo-wheee, Morty has certainly seen some stuff, though. Seen things that no mortal eyes should see. Been on the shores of lands in a sinkhole among worlds where none are normally supposed to end up. Been exposed to the full gaze of the cosmos and feeling as if watched and placed into something greater. He's just witnessed a battle between gods (or godlike beings), exposed to eldritch concepts, and lived to tell the tale with his sanity intact(?). And he's still not at the end of the road yet.

Also, ch 15.5? Weren't we just on 15.3? What happened to 15.4?
Well...if it's not an honest mistake, my speculate is given the involvement of Archmage Hourglass and the concept going on exploring different spaces, my money is on wibbley-wobbly-spacetimey-wimey shenanigans that'll probably resolve somehow into a 15.4.

[LoyalLiar]

12162786
15-4 is still-to-come. This isn't 15-5. It's 15 1/2 - 1; note the S in the XVS (meaning 'Semi')

[RoboRed]

12162963
i r goodest readr

[Alchemik]

Well. I went from merely enjoying the style of the writing to glued to my seat there. Talk about laying down plot threads.