The Ruby of Balance

by OtterFeelings

Chapter 3

The Ruby of Balance
by Gabriele Hall “OtterFeelings”
Chapter 3

The Ruby was in the center of the statue, right where I had been told it should be. But before relief could wash over me, I heard a mare scream. A lone gunshot echoed for what seemed like days off the walls of the magnificent Canterlot homes. Silence, a very eerie one, ran cold over the shocked onlookers. The faint clopping noise of the royal Canterlot guard could be heard in the distance. At the same time, cries from a wailing filly made the spines of all the ponies near the court where the Ruby was quiver. All the adult ponies knew what had happened. Some did want to believe it, others simply could not, and some young enough colts were startled and bewildered by the whole situation.

A pony I did not know was dead. The family of this mare would be beyond emotionally tormented, as their lives would be changed forever. I never did see the one who murdered her, or his exact motives, but I know what his actions were. His decision to take another’s life was pure evil. And although the mare’s family would never be the same, with many of them having their lives ruined, none of them could possibly have been more devastated than me.

For I wasn’t distraught by the death of the mare herself, I was in shambles because if she was murdered, then that meant that the Ruby of Balance wasn’t rescued. This meant that ten thousand years since it had been cast into the volcano had passed and evil had permanently taken hold of Equestria forever. Yet, I was fascinated and intrigued at the same time. Because although a pure act of evil had been committed by murdering this mare, there was the Ruby of Balance, in its statue in the center of Canterlot. So I was left pondering the situation that I saw in front of me. Was the Ruby of Balance not actually in its statue, and instead the evil had placed an imposter there as to mask its actual victory on the volcano? Or was the Ruby really there, and this murder was justifiable? Neither answer made much sense to me, nor to this day I am left pondering here at my desk which reality is true.
-----

The young alicorn rolled her eyes across the page of the ancient text. Words in weird patterns were spilled out on the page. It all seemed so boring; there was nothing special about it. She saw it as just an old useless diary that some pony had written long ago. Yet as bored as she became, she realized that no matter how many times she thought about putting the diary down, she never quite could disregard it, and toss it onto the shoddy old desk. It was boring, she literally felt as though death of boredom was possible, and it was happening to her right then. Alas, she flipped yet another page, and had more dust fly into her eyes. Maybe, she pondered, the book was so boring and seemingly useless, that it was interesting because of it.

So for hours upon hours, in a centuries-old rundown shack, a young and promising alicorn turned page after page in the interestingly boring diary. The account was one of remorse and sorrow. The writer had obviously been in a great deal of pain when he was writing the diary. The pain itself though, the young alicorn noticed, was not that of a physical pain, but one of mental pain. Tales of what could have happened, what he should have done, all down to the most finite detail, made up the composition. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, such that had obviously had greatly affected the alicorn.

So on and on the diary told of what the alicorn should have done, and what he wished he hadn’t. The whole diary carried out in this fashion, all except for the last page. The entire diary had been the alicorn talking about the past, and regretting it. But on the last page, the young alicorn observed, was a hopefulness shown by the writer towards the future. Although he had spent the rest of his life distraught after what he had previously mentioned as “The Mistake,” he had ended it with a slim period of optimism. He believed that one day; a pony would come and would correct his mistake. Despite all of his errors and wrongdoings, the writer had hope that one day things would be right, even when he knew he could never see that happen.

The young alicorn sighed when she read the last words on the page. The last dusty and rotting page. She slowly shut the back of the hard bound diary and began to turn away. As she did so, a slight black mark standing out against the dark green cover caught her attention. She was confused because she hadn’t remembered seeing it when she first closed the book. She spun her hooves around to get a better look. The black mark looked like it was part of a word, as there was cobwebs and dirt covering most of the cover. She gently blew the debris off and took a close look at the letters. In a very hard to read cursive, she made out what she believed to be as “volcano.” This word had nothing to do, as far as she could tell, to do with the diary, yet she had the strange feeling that the two were connected.

The letters were faded and hard to make out. She tried to read the words again, but before she could readjust her eyes to the beginning of the word. But before she could do so, the letters, like invisible ink, vanished from the cover. There was no trace that black letters were ever there. Stunned and confused, the young alicorn tried to read the letters again. But no matter how much she strained, and how many times she tried to see the letters, they simply were not there. Frustrated more than ever, she flung the diary across the shack, smashing it into a pile of decaying jars.
-----

I wandered through the streets of Canterlot. I possessed no sense of direction or destination. I was extremely upset, and the rays of sunlight, practicing choir and any of the other things that should have cheered me up, or made me smile, simply made my mood worsen. I had a dilemma on my hands, and no idea how to solve it. The air was fresh, yet my mind was stale. Should I go back to the volcano, and try to determine definitively for myself the real identity of the Ruby? Or was it best just to stay in Canterlot, and continue to aimlessly trot around with questions swirling in my head.

Although the murder of the pony had not physically affected me, it left an imprint in my head. I had not emotional ties to the murdered pony, yet her death was important to me because it was evil, the exact thing the rescuing and returning of the Ruby was said to vanquish from Equestria. I needed an answer, and I knew that doing something yourself is sometimes the only way to prove something to yourselves. Well I sure as hell felt this was one of those times.
I had nothing with me in terms of possessions with me other than a saddle bag with a few measly bits in it. I scraped together my money, and bought all the necessities I could afford, which was a small amount of bread, some carrots, and a canteen. I felt ready to go, at least as much as I could ever, still feeling extremely down at that point.
-----

The young alicorn walked away from the shack. Ringing in her ears was the word “volcano.” her entire brain was concentrated on that word. It made no sense at all to her but she understood, in some weird way, that it was of the utmost importance. It was so deeply engraved into her conscience that getting back to Canterlot became secondary to her, nothing more than an afterthought. She had traveled into the Everfree forest to spend some time in deep meditation, in order to think about her role in the universe. But the constant sounding off in her head of “volcano” was a bit more “deep thought” than she could handle.

Walking slowly through the Everfree forest, she lost her sense of direction. It would be expected, sense she couldn’t concentrate, either voluntary or involuntary, on anything but the “volcano.” Feeling no end in sight, and at the point of madness, the young alicorn screamed out in frustration, and collapsed to the ground. She was utterly lost. As she blinked in and out of consciousness, she felt a slight tug on her mane, one that appeared to originate from inside her. She breathed heavy and tensed up. Before a final blink of her eyes, an energy she couldn’t describe boiled up inside her, and her ears were filled to the max with a final uttering of the word “volcano.” Unconsciousness for the young alicorn then ensued.

Oh how she had come to hate that word. She was quite certain it was going to be the death of her, right in that instant. “Volcano.” it was terrible and the very nature of it now seemed evil to her. Anything she would give to get it out of her head. It had become pure torture for the young alicorn.

And so, deep in a crazed-induced sleep, she gave herself into the word. Yet as soon as she committed herself, everything became clear to her. The word did not want her; it wanted to simple relay a message. She did not understand it fully, as that was not the intent, or the purpose of the word. It was so simple; she could have driven herself insane just by being angered at herself that she did not realize the simple task that was right in front of her the whole time. She realized that the “volcano” was a clue, better yet an instruction.

Hours, or maybe minutes passed before the young alicorn regained her conscience. Without and second thoughts, not even to ponder the strange occurrences in her dream, she started off. Relentlessly and without any chance of being stopped, the young alicorn headed off for the volcano. She didn’t know why she had to go there; she just knew that it was something she was required to do. The diary, she figured, had something to do with this mission that had been given to her. She just did not know how it had anything to do with the volcano. Yet along she went.
-----

Back in the shack, the liquids, both ancient and beyond spoiled, oozed and dripped out of the jars. The diary absorbed them all. A rotten fish smell engulfed the entire rundown old shack. The pages of the diary were already extremely frail. More than once the young alicorn had torn a corner of a page, despite great delicacy, in the process of flipping them. So the liquids were death for the diary. Page by page, section by section, pages disintegrated into nothing more than a fine powder, which were blown away through holes in the shacks poorly constructed walls. The binding gave away, and the whole diary collapsed in on its self.

The greatest and most important diary in the history of Equestria had been reduced to mere nothingness by oozing liquids in a rundown shack in the middle of the Everfree forest. Yet one page remained. Or rather, a single cover remained. Tumbling down to the dirt floor, the back cover of the diary landed face down in the muck.

The wind howled outside, and a strange eeriness filled the shack, even though there was nopony there to experience it. As this happened, the young alicorn made her way to the volcano, hell-bent on getting there. Back in Canterlot, the long lived and beloved queen took her last breaths. And in the middle of the dirty floor of the long abandoned shack of Shade Heart, on the back cover of his diary, the word “volcano” appeared in a black cursive font, waiting for some pony to read it.

Comments

[Valiant_Daybreak]

Very intriguing... Every chapter gets me more and more into the story, along with providing more and more questions... In short... Very excellent. .

[OtterFeelings]

thank you 1729582

[Slender Dash]

It's official! The diary is Celestia, and since it was destroyed, so is she!