Egress

by Grey Vicar

Chapter 9: Canyon

The wind blew ice-cold around Twilight. She thought that as she pressed further into the mountains, the stone would shield her from the fury of the elements, but all the treacherous cliffs of Featherless Canyon did was funnel the wind and turn it into an angry, howling gale intent on flaying Twilight to the bone.

She was starting to understand why nopony ever went into the mountains. Fortunately, magic was the panacea for most ailments, and conjured energies around her shielded her from nature's fury in the form of a bubble that cast an eerie purple glow on the bare rock around her. Unfortunately, being surrounded in a bubble didn't make her aerodynamic, and it was with a crawling pace that Twilight pushed into Featherless Canyon. Few places in the mountains of the North had a name, but this one managed to become infamous enough to earn one, after the story of a pegasus losing all her feathers after foolishly attempting to enter it. With the strength of the winds pushing against her, Twilight was inclined to consider that story more fact than fiction. Sheer stone cliffs rose either side of her, split by an uneven path that wound and snaked about the mountain's core. She didn't know what had happened to that particular peak to have been split in two, nor did she care about knowing. All she cared about at this particular moment was to keep her balance and not get swept away by the gale winds rushing around her, and reach the Place.

The mountains of the North were old. They were there when ponykind crossed from the Old World into Equestria. They were there before the first pony had even breathed its first breath. They would be there long after the last pony would breath its last. Their precipitous majesty had claimed the life of many, and as much as they were a bulwark against the ambiguously disquieting dangers lurking in the Greater North beyond their threshold, they were also the tomb of many a pony who perished looking for the Place. And thus the legacy of the mountains endured since the birth of that mad adventurous impulse that occasionally seized a young pony in the prime of their life and ran them aground in the frozen wastes, a legacy of jealous protectiveness and harsh judgement in exchange for a question.

In the North there were the mountains. In the mountains there was a Place. In that Place there was a Question. Nopony knew the Question, but everypony knew the Answer. Everypony held their Answer. The madness that had pushed the ponies whose frozen corpses were now littered about the mountains was invariably born from that Answer which everypony was bound to. Most received their Answer with open hooves and tucked it in a quiet part of their mind, where it melded with the rest of their lives, and was eventually as disturbing to them as their own tail or their own hooves. But for some, the Answer was a searing light in their brain, a vexing enigma that ate its way to the forefront of their mind and drove them to seek the Question hidden in the North.

Twilight grinned. She wasn't like them. She had never been like them. For most, the Answer was stamped right on their flank: the primordial purpose imbued into an individual by whatever force was driving the universe, in the form of a Cutie Mark. Some were clear. Some were nebulous. Some drove their wearers to near insanity as they desperately tried to figure out what they meant. No Cutie Mark bothered explaining why their bearer had been directed toward a certain path. Twilight was a master of magic, a spark in the life of others, a beacon guiding an entire realm, driving the flow of nations under her rule. Her Answer was power, unity, guidance. She had yearned for it all her life, been molded for it all her foalhood by

But that wasn't why she was here. As she shielded herself from the wind in a depression in one of the stone cliffs, she couldn't help but note the irony that the sole pony to ever reach the Place would be one who didn't seek the Question that so many others before her wanted asked. No, her Answer wasn't a typical one, and for most who came into the mountains looking for the metaphysical reason for their destiny, would sound very foolish indeed.

She waited a while for the wind to die down. There were lulls between gusts, moments when the wind abated enough to start crossing the canyon again without risking being blown away. While she waited, she could only think, and ball herself up against the wall to try and preserve whatever body heat she had left to sustain her. Every time she did, she shivered. There were so many bodies huddled against the walls, balled up in a desperate attempt to survive, only to succumb to the cold. But she wasn't like them. She wouldn't die. She wouldn't die. Not yet.

She shook her head as dark thoughts spiralled in her mind, and undid the clasp of her saddlebag. Heat rose in her cheeks as she held the dilapidated-yet-somehow-unburnt diary in front of her. The six gemstones inserted inside the cover had long become dull, but she could still picture their colours as vividly as the day she held it for the first time. She could still see the worn and dull cover before she had thrown it into cleansing flames. First had been portraits of some ponies she had known. Souvenirs and mementos. The flames had cleansed her mind of the pain, allowed her to put the past behind. Now this one had come back to haunt her. Centuries after she'd watched fire dance over that book, fully consuming it, it was back to haunt her.

That diary contained her Answer. And her Answer was: “Because I hate them.”

The wind blew ice-cold. So cold. She couldn't afford to drift to sleep. Couldn't afford to let the cold take her. She held on to that flame, that smoke-filled, warm memory where she had rid herself of the pain of betrayal and abandon, and let the wind abate. When she pressed on deeper into the canyon, she felt warm.

Comments

[Arceaion]

When the last embers die
what will the immortal have?

Power is pointless in the face of eternity,
Money is pointless for it holds worth to only mortal fools,
Life is meaningless when it is eternal.

In the end all they are left with are memories.
Memories of better times,
Memories of harsher times,
Memories of loved ones lost.

Loved ones who are gone,
Loved ones who are forgotten,
Loved ones who are hated.

They are gone
but the immortal is still there.

And that is why the Immortal hates them.