It Sleeps Beneath Foal Mountain

by the7Saviors

I gazed upon the god which existed at the beginning and the end of time...

I was fairly certain that by now my features had become all but unrecognizable. Without looking I could tell that the majority of my original visage had broken away, revealing whatever hideous creature I'd become underneath. I no longer felt like myself, but that wasn't to say the change was uncomfortable. On the contrary, I felt oddly liberated, as if my original body had always been some kind of outer shell holding my true self within and it was only now that I could sense that disparity between that outer and inner self. That such a horrific change should end up feeling so natural in the end, it made me question whether or not I'd had any real equinity at all to begin with or if this eldritch monstrosity was hiding just below the surface all this time. I would have dismissed the notion as ridiculous mere moments ago, but that had been before Stygian informed me that I was to undergo a 'second ascension'.

Monstrous as my appearance may have been, my bewilderment at the stallion's statement must've still been quite evident, because he gave a slight chuckle when he turned to meet my response. All I'd wanted was to finish what I'd started and satiate my undying curiosity, but it seemed Stygian... no, it wasn't Stygian but those higher powers he answered to that had other plans for me. Stygian, like myself, had only been a pawn dutifully carrying out his role. I understood that now, but I'd come too far to turn back now. There was no stopping what was to come, so ultimately I could only press forward, and if Stygian was to be believed, the answers I'd given up everything I'd ever loved or otherwise cared for were finally within my reach.

All that said, I still required an explanation regarding this 'second ascension' but unfortunately, Stygian's reply as he made his way towards the others silently waiting deeper within the chamber was a cryptic one.

"I don't, nor can I, claim to know the motives of those outer gods who reside beyond our own reality, but what I can tell you, Princess, is that you've caught their attention, and that is an honor if ever there was one..."

With those ominous words, the stallion ushered me further into the damp chamber and toward the blood circle where the other three robed ponies stood watching with a silence that seemed almost reverent from my perspective. I returned their stares, attempting to see the hidden features beneath each of their hoods, but even with my warped vision, I could see nothing of their faces. It was as if they had none within that swirling black void and I began to wonder if maybe it were for the best that I not see. I thought to ask Stygian of where he'd obtained these 'followers', but decided against it for the moment. There were more important matters at hoof, such as discerning the contents of the small black box that lay upon the pedestal at the center of the blood circle. As I moved closer, Stygian began to explain, his tone hushed, but the excitement no less clear in his voice.

"For years, a select few members of the Hidden Ones—my father among them—had tried and failed time and again to accomplish what only Starswirl was able to. For years they sought to find the forbidden realm of the Demiurge—the Unbegotten Source itself, Ubbo-Sathla, hidden somewhere in this world. Ultimately they despaired of ever finding that sacred place, that is until the Wandering Prophet Nyar provided from sources unknown a solution in the form of the object that sits within the very box you see before you..."

Stygian paused as he laid his eyes on the box in question. A spark of something I couldn't quite place entered his strangely dull gaze and looking at him, I got the sense that he was lost in thought or perhaps trapped within a memory of times long since past. Whatever the case may have been, he regained his senses quickly and motioned for me to stand before the pedestal. I comply without complaint and, satisfied, he continued speaking, all the while moving into position to complete the circle of ponies surrounding me.

"Shortly before Starswirl and his wretched 'army' attacked the final temple, Nyar entrusted that box to my father and instructed him—among other vital tasks—to keep it safe until such time as it was meant to be opened. It was the Wandering Prophet's foresight that ultimately allowed my father to escape Starswirl's slaughter and with one of the Hidden One's greatest treasures in hoof, he fled the temple. Neither he nor the other members were ever told what the box actually contained, only that the object inside would grant another means by which one could obtain the limitless wisdom of the Unbegotten Source..."

He turned his attention from me to one of the other robed figures standing opposite him and nodded. I followed his gaze just in time to see the cloaked pony give a slow nod of affirmation in return. A moment later there came the tell-tale sound of magic being channeled through a horn and a large black tome appeared in a flash of bright blue-grey light to float before the pony who'd summoned it. The tome was large, thick with the thousands of pages that no doubt filled it. Unlike the faded images and title upon the cover of the Nameless Tome that I possessed, the cover of this book had no title or image. Needless to say, the tome had piqued my interest, but there was something else I'd noticed that was far more distracting. Though I heard the sound of magic, no magical aura lit the horn of the caster, leaving their identity yet unknown to me. Before I could read too deeply into that, Stygian's voice pulled my attention back to him.

"Princess, I know without a doubt that you are the one meant to open that box but know that once the box is opened, whatever experiences you've had up until now will pale in comparison to what you will experience once you gaze upon the object inside. Our role is to act as lifelines keeping you—or rather your mind—tethered to this place. If you were to open that box and peer inside without this ritual, you would lose yourself entirely, never to return. We are here to help you, but even so, there is still some risk involved if you are unprepared, so I will ask: Have you steeled your mind, Princess? Are you ready to lay eyes upon the Beginning? To potentially sacrifice your very existence to obtain knowledge not even Starswirl himself was able to glean from the Unbegotten Source?"

For a moment—just for a brief moment—I hesitated to answer. Given everything I'd already abandoned and what I stood to gain, the answer should have been a simple one. It should have been easy to say I was prepared to continue no matter the cost, but I was surprised to find it wasn't quite that easy. Something, some lingering doubt suddenly made itself known and silenced the answered I would've otherwise given without hesitation. Perhaps it was my last remaining shred of reason telling me that I may not have been ready to face what lay inside that box. The unexpected anxiety made something as simple as opening a box seem like a daunting and borderline insurmountable task.

Feeling somewhat pensive, I turned away from Stygian's expectant gaze and slowly made my way to the edge of the wide platform. I cast one last glance back at the stallion now eyeing me with a curious frown before turning my eyes downward toward the murky water surrounding the large stone platform. It was barely visible in the dim light, but on the surface of that fetid water, I could see the reflection of a creature that no longer resembled the mare known as Twilight Sparkle staring back at me. I could see a hint of what I once was in the scowling dark violet muzzle upon my face, but everything above that was a horrid sight to behold. The thing that returned my stare was no longer equine.

Eyes were missing where they ought to have been, only to be replaced with others in places they ought not to be. A pulsating, writhing, living mass of shadow that had once been my mane sat atop my head. Dark fur and skin cracked and split and broken away in large pieces, revealing more of that hideously squirming darkness beneath. I was a monster, an unsightly marriage of shadow and flesh. Putting a blackened hoof to what was once my chest, I could still feel the muscle and bone beneath, but it was soft and pliable like clay. I smiled and pushed just a bit further until I could feel it, the soft and irregular beat of my own heart. To anypony watching, it would've been a strange and unsettling sort of smile, but I could do nothing else but smile that eerie smile as I dropped my hoof back to the ground.

Yes, I'd known all along, but I wanted to confirm it for myself; with changes this drastic there really was no going back now. Even if the world hadn't already been doomed to fall to the sleeping god beneath Foal Mountain, there was no happy ending for me. I had no reason to hesitate anymore and with a renewed sense of what I couldn't decide was determination or resignation at what was to come, I returned to my place before the pedestal and the box that sat atop it. This time my answer came readily and without fear or anxiety. Stygian's face lit up at my willingness to cooperate and his smile widened into the excited grin of a colt being given exactly what he wanted on Hearth's Warming.

"Excellent! I suppose you had your doubts, but in the end, I expected nothing less, Princess... Very well, then we have no time to waste. You've almost reached the end of your trials, Twilight Sparkle, but while this may be the most difficult hurdle you've faced up until now, I have no doubt you will push through it and move ever higher. Now, if you've cast aside your misgivings, we shall begin..."

As he finished speaking the smile slid from his face and I could feel a drastic shift in the atmosphere. It was such that it made what remaining skin I had left crawl in what could have been unease or anticipation, or perhaps both. Stygian once more turned to the pony in possession of the large tome and gave one last nod, this one carrying the weight of finality. We were all about to cross the threshold, past which no return would be permitted. I watched as that tome opened before the pony, watched them magically flipped through several pages until they found the right one. Then, after a short but heavy beat of silence, the pony began to speak in a slow, monotonous, almost hypnotic drone.

The words she spoke—for it was clearly a mare that spoke them—were familiar to me, as alien and unsettling as they were to any sane pony. Unexpectedly, the voice too was familiar to me, though I couldn't quite put a name to the voice. Who was this mare who so diligently and unhesitatingly spoke such blasphemous and vile words? Before I could think too hard on the matter, the voice of the other two mysterious ponies joined their droning voices to the chant, one more of which also sounded vaguely familiar to me. As they continued their incantation, the blood sigil beneath our hooves began to shimmer and glow a deep crimson.

There was a sound like a deep slow hiss that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. The sound reached my ears and tore through my mind, its reverberations leaving me oddly weak in the knees. I felt rather than saw Stygian's eyes on me and as I turned to the stallion he bade me open the box in a tone that echoed queerly off the walls of the surrounding chamber. I obeyed without question, using my monstrous black hooves to pry open the box. I felt strangely disconnected from the act—as if I was watching somepony else open the box. Though that box should have been sealed, it opened at my touch as easily as if it had never been locked in the first place, and inside was the object that would grant me the knowledge I so desperately pined for. A brief moment of confusion crossed my mind as I stared at the contents within.

A single cloudy white crystal sat snugly in the box, its size roughly that of an orange and its shape a clear oblate spheroid. Just the sight of it was enough to push everything else out of my vision and though it looked benign enough, I felt the crystal sucking me in. The longer I looked into its cloudy surface, the harder it became to look away. After a time I could see a faint light in the crystal's center, one the seemed to grow brighter with every passing second. That strange sense of disconnect intensified drastically and my world became hazy and dreamlike. Where there was once only Twilight Sparkle, there was now a feeling—a certainty, that I was also a different creature in a different place in a different time staring into this same oblate crystal.

Slowly, over time the presence of Twilight Sparkle began to fade. The dank chamber and chanting ponies around me fell away to be replaced by an entirely different scene. Here there was no Well of Shade and there was no Twilight Sparkle. I was no longer the twisted mare who'd trotted a path of ruin but Nec Divinos, a Hidden Ones cultist and accomplished unicorn mage whose leader had tasked me with the unsealing of a mysterious chest containing a treasure said to contain the wisdom of a god. I acquiesced, happy to be of use to the speaker for the Dark Silent One, and after no small amount of effort, the seal was undone and the crystal was released from its ornate prison.

As I inspected the crystal, I found I couldn't look away, a sudden desire for the knowledge it contained overwhelming me. I watched, mesmerized as the crystal began to glow with an eerie light and once again I felt myself sinking into that light, falling into the crystals cloudy depths as if I was falling into a dream within a dream. Before I knew it, I was elsewhere, no longer the Hidden Ones cultist Nec Divinos but rather an old griffin antiquarian of some renown. I saw the world as he saw it long ago; I lived my life as he must have, and eventually, I moved on, my consciousness wildly and violently thrust across time and space before sinking ever deeper into the past.

I was a proud thestral warrior fighting for my life and my queen against the wretched forces of the Solar Tyrant. I was one of the thousands of changelings newly spawned from the carnivorous plant that had grown from a fetid pond teeming with foul magic. I was an imprisoned unicorn, stolen away from my home in Equestria to a distant kingdom by a vile magician. I was a slave, laboring deep within the icy mines of Sombra's frozen empire to the far north. I was a reputable mage of the royal court serving under the newly throned Princesses of the Kingdom of Equestria. I fought bravely as a rank and file earth pony soldier protecting my family and country from Pegasopolitan invaders.

I was a terrified villager fleeing from the ineffable horrors dwelling in the endless and absolute darkness swallowing the world. I moved past the nightmare, living innumerable lives and dying innumerable deaths along the way, be they sapient, sentient, or otherwise; there was no living creature whose existence my consciousness did not encroach upon. As I passed into a prehistoric era in which no intelligent beast could or would ever dare to thrive, my consciousness finally began to fade into the everflowing river of eternity. I had long ago forgotten the being known as Twilight Sparkle and could only move against time's flow, helplessly dragged along by some unseen and unknowable force leading me closer and closer to the source and the end.

I watched as the beast that would be known as Zushakon sank down into the depths of the earth for the first time. This went far beyond any mere dream or nightmare; no meager vision could compare to the reality of events playing out before me. From my metaphysical state somewhere in-between time and space, I saw that towering pillar of shadow bursting forth from unknown depths and shrouding the sky in a cold and empty blackness. I saw the massive winged monstrosity that flapped and slithered and dragged itself down beneath the newly formed earth to begin its deathlike slumber and had I still been flesh and blood, I might've lost my mind. As it stood, however, I could only move onto my final destination.

In the planet's infancy—in a time before life could have existed in any form, when much of the molten rock that would form the earth's crust had yet to fully cool, I knew without knowing that I had reached the end of my journey through countless aeons. It was here, amidst the bubbling, boiling, steaming primordial marsh that had once been a shallow impact crater half a kilometer wide, that I finally found Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source and the ultimate End. With neither visage nor appendages nor internal or external organs to speak of, the titanic shapeless mass sat as an absolute ruler among its kingdom of putrid vapors and primeval ooze. From its slimy undulating body, it birthed its children in an endless stream, the amoebic forms—the blueprints of all life as I would know it millions of years from now—spilling into the protomorphic soup.

This was Ubbo-Sathla... and yet...

For all its inconceivably horrifying and disgusting glory, Ubbo-Sathla itself was not the source of all unearthly wisdom, but rather its guardian. The forbidden and unfathomable knowledge of the gods—the very cosmic secrets that would later be held by Yog-Sothoth, the Opener of the Way—was first inscribed upon the many monumental tablets embedded and strewn haphazardly about Ubbo-Sathla's grotesque bulk. Though I hadn't the means to make use of the knowledge as I was now, I'd obtained all of what my world's history had to offer me. It was from these mighty, transcendental tablets, however, that I could learn the ultimate truth of what lay beyond that history and perhaps all of what the future would hold. I could see past the limited scope of my own reality and gain not just mere glimpses, but complete insight into hidden realms I'd, up until now, only touched upon.

It was all there before me, so close that I need only let the unknown forces that be pull me just a bit further... but it was not meant to be, not entirely.

I had barely cast my mindless yet wholly omnipresent gaze over the sacred words etched into those tablets when something—some strange sensation tugged at the consciousness I'd no longer even been aware of. Shock and bewilderment were the first sentiments that assailed my slowly reawakening mind as it was yanked from Ubbo-Sathla's eldritch mire at the beginning of time and sent wildly careening forward into the future. Disorientation made billions of years and countless lives pass by in an instant, but I still felt each and every second as keenly as if I was being reincarnated over and over—experiencing endless births, living an endless number of lives, and dying again and again only to be reborn in a seemingly endless cycle until...

My world suddenly went white, and somewhere in that blinding abyss, I could hear a voice—several voices shouting, screaming in pain and fury. I could hear, as if from beneath a bed of water, the familiar sounds of spells being cast in the midst of some great commotion or vicious struggle I couldn't see. Somewhere, somepony—a mare by the sound of it—was chanting unintelligible words in a strained and desperate voice, but I hadn't the wherewithal to discern exactly who it was. I was still lost, my consciousness now hopelessly and helplessly wrapped in a white haze, a heavy, snowy blanket of nothingness. How long it took I couldn't say, but eventually, gradually, the haze began to clear and I began to regain a sense of self, though my own identity still escaped me.

Then the chanting stopped and everything came back to me all at once as the desperate mare called out my name in an agonized cry. The dreamlike sensation enveloping me vanished and for the first time in what truly felt like an eternity, I was Twilight Sparkle. The modern world came back into focus and above the confusion and disorientation that had yet to fully abate, I could feel a growing migraine from the overwhelming thoughts and memories whirling in my head along with a sense that something had gone terribly wrong. In a sudden panic and with an effort that went beyond grueling, I pushed the pain caused by the flood of knowledge I'd acquired aside and looked around me, my bewilderment reaching new heights at the sight that greeted me.

At a brief glance, I could see two of the four cloaked ponies that had initiated the ritual crumpled and unmoving upon the mossy stone floor. The blood circle had been broken and the hoods of both ponies had been thrown back to reveal the faces of those who'd conspired with Stygian. The sallow-faced, brown coated unicorn stallion I didn't immediately recognize, but the other pony I knew all too well. Across from the stallion lying unconscious was Moon Dancer, my long time friend and rival in the pursuit of thaumatological study. The mare's mane, usually tied up in a knot, had come undone and spilled across her yellow-grey features and her thickly rimmed glasses lay broken a short distance away. Even further away I could see the large black book that had been used in the ritual lying in tatters, many of its ancient yellowed pages scattered about the chamber.

Wondering what to make of the situation, I turned to take in the rest of my predicament when the sound of another spell being cast caught my attention. Still dazed, confused and in pain from my pounding migraine, I was slow to react to whatever spell had been released and an impact that shook my brain was the last thing I felt before I was swallowed in a dreamless black void.

Comments

[Venerable Ro]

It never fails, you're at the tail end of the final ritual, at the eleventh hour, after centuries of dedicated preparation, and some idiot adventurer comes swinging in to ruin everything. I tell you, courtesy is a dead concept.

[Brony of the Revolution]

Aww, poor Moondancer. She just wanted to help her friend.

[Yosh-E-O]

Ooh! Now this certainly is a fantastic addition to the story. We're nearing the end but still there is so much more to gleam.

Moondancer being a part of Stigin's efforts does make sense. Perhaps, once twilight bllew her off, she decided to only do research towards a spirit, Sound Mind?, suggestion.

"You want her to notice," he would say plainly. "Then you must find the truth through the study only a scholar, such as yourself, can accomplish."

Time passed and, by the time twilight came back to apologize, Moondancer was already in too deep. She knew what was to come and was ready to see it through.

What will come next shall certainly be most interesting.

[Aether Spark]

The rescue wagon is here, hopefully they have a chance to avert the end of the world.

[Blood Rarity]

[Mix-up]

nice chapter, Stygian was a lot of fun and was interesting to see how many generations his family was into that cult. I am better that Luna was following Twilight the whole time.

[FanficReader920]

Looks like Luna finally caught up to her.

[Coretz]

I must be in too deep—I did not realize that the Forces of Good interrupted the ritual. And yet, deeper to go I desire.