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Prologue1,872 words
Chapter 1: Homecoming6,304 words
Chapter 2: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick...9,002 words

Prologue

The cloaked figure moved quickly but silently, his horn giving off a dull yellow glow just bright enough to keep the overgrown path beneath his hooves visible. There was no need to hurry, of course, but all the same he kept his pace swift. Even after dreaming of this day for years, even after imagining his final plan so many times that the image of his triumph was all he saw when he closed his eyes each night, he still felt a shimmering bubble of excitement floating around in his chest. Tonight was the night he would finally do it. Tonight would be the beginning of everyone else's end.

The path narrowed, and he forced himself back down to a walk. Uncontrollable glee wasn't a good enough excuse to risk breaking his neck reaching the place. In any case, it couldn't be more than a quarter mile off by now, assuming the map he'd taken from that decrepit old pegasus with the wooden eye and the missing wing was accurate. To be honest, it had almost felt wrong to get so friendly with her, only to steal her prized possession when her back was turned and leave her broken and alone in that filthy cave. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have been hard to put her out of her misery right then and there: direct contact with the back of her skull, and a quick jolt from his horn sent straight to the center of her brain stem. Total annihilation of all electrical impulses in a single moment, and complete cerebral shutdown in the next. Like blowing out the flame in an oil lamp. She wouldn't have felt a thing. It would’ve been more than she deserved, considering the stories that had led him to her.

But that moral conundrum could be dealt with later, when time itself would have no meaning to him. He had arrived.

The Fortress of the Four. The bastion of all things unknown and unsavory to the common colt or filly. The Palace of Malice, as a few jokers supposedly called it in a fashion that hadn’t caught on with nearly enough ponies these days. Whatever you wanted to call it, the name itself didn't matter. Nothing outside those crumbling walls mattered. What was inside, what would be inside, that was what he had come for. That was where all his research and all his careful planning would finally come to fruition.

He had never felt so alive in his entire life.

The Fortress was deserted, as he had every reason to expect it would be, but despite that assurance he still entered slowly, mostly out of reverence for the colossal structure. The outer walls were thirty feet high and hewn out of what looked like obsidian, and the immense castle garrisoned behind it seemed to reach up to the sky and then melt into it. The tip of the impossibly tall tower in the center pierced straight through the clouds and into whatever wonders lay above. It'd be quite a climb to reach the top, but it wouldn't even be close to the hardest part of his journey here. Without another thought on the matter, he continued forward, and trotted through the colossal front entryway into the cavernous main hall.

Once he was safely within the confines of the pitch-black foyer, the unicorn allowed a bit more power to seep into the tip of his horn. The growing light threw twitching shadows all over the black and white-speckled marble, each one shifting shapes a thousand times in the blink of an eye. He paused to watch them for a bit, then kept moving onward, towards the back of the hall.

Twenty paces in, left at the pedestal, up onto the landing and through the first door on the right, he reminded himself. Don’t forget to wipe your hooves.

The rusty hinges shrieked with complaint, but the shrouded unicorn showed no signs of sympathy. Pausing only to kick the door tightly shut behind him again, he trotted briskly up the steep and spiraling steps, absentmindedly counting each one while his heartbeat raced inside his throat. A few minutes and roughly three hundred and fifty-eight steps later, he came to another door, this one very different from the first. It was a good deal thicker and braced with what had once been sturdy iron plates, and all across the dusty wood were carved ancient symbols and figures that the archaeological teams back home would've given their left hooves to get a gander at.

Chuckling and rolling his eyes at the thought, he pushed the door open unceremoniously with his hoof, making a mental note to get rid of it as soon as possible. The fewer reminders he had of those stuffy, erudite, infuriatingly close-minded scholars, the better. And the fewer reminders he had of the fact that he had spent too much of his life trying to work with them, the better.

He wasted no time in moving into the circular room, killing the light from his horn and strolling over the threshold as if he owned the place—which, for all intents and purposes, he basically did now. As he reached the center of the tower, he shrugged off his hood, revealing a stiff black mane buzzed down almost to his neck and a pair of fiery red eyes that twinkled with equal parts wonder and amusement. The rest of the cloak fell to the ground a moment later, and he flicked his tail in appreciation of being freed from the unwieldy garment, his cutie mark—an asterisk-like figure with a solid black circle over its vertex and arrows capping both ends of each intersecting line—shifting in tandem with the rest of his flank. The place was right. The time was perfect. Now all he had to do was cast the spell.

He had written down the incantation months ago amongst the hundreds of scribbles, sketches, and doodles in his dog-eared old research notebook, but he had read and reread the sixteen lines it consisted of so many times since then that the proper words were all but branded into his brain. No sense, then, wasting any more time when there was no one around to appreciate the dramatic effect. He turned to face the door, straightened up to his full height, and began.

O, ye devilish damn'd steeds

Of hateful blood and wicked creed,

Rise up from black eternity;

Come forward, gather unto me.

As soon as the first words left his lips, all motion in the surrounding forest seemed to cease. The air inside the room grew warm, and the crackling scent of ozone began to fill his nose. Corny as the rhyme was, it was working. Something was stirring.

Sinful arrogance, unkempt fire,

bloody wrath and mad desire,

idleness and cravings dire:

'Neath thy hooves this world expires.

The stones in the walls hummed with energy, and the ceiling quivered with barely restrained power. Beneath his hooves, the floor of the lofty chamber began to glow, thin lines of light snaking out from the circle he was standing in towards the far edges of the room.

Seven names in whispers told,

Seven fearsome fiends of old,

Let thy broken wings unfold

So mortal eyes, thy strength behold.

A distant rumble set the tower shaking, ancient dust showering down from the girders and beams that had been keeping the roof of the tower aloft for thousands of years. In the back of his mind, he wondered whether the prehistoric spire could even handle the treatment he was putting it through, but the raw, nearly uncontrollable power coursing through his body was enough to whisk that concern away as quickly as it had come. He couldn’t bear to stop now. Not when the ceremony was almost complete. Not when he was this close to success.

He hunched his shoulders and locked his legs, his head and horn throbbing with light. He finished the spell through gritted teeth.

Now come, O creatures fierce and fain,

Your vengeance o'er this land shall rain,

For command ye I, in tooth and mane:

To glory ye shall rise again!

Abruptly, the rumbling stopped. For a long, terrifying moment, all was still.

And then, a deafening explosion rocked the tower and sent its lone occupant careening off into the far wall. When he got his hooves untangled and cracked one grimy eyelid open, he saw that he was still alive, and that the room around him was still intact. And what he also saw, in perfect accordance with the legends and myths he’d heard a thousand times over, was an ethereal golden ring of light in the sky, centered right overtop the tower and spreading rapidly away from it in all directions.

He let his head clunk back against the wall, and an almost foalish giggle spilled out of his throat. The spell had worked. It had really, truly, one-hundred-percent-seriously worked. The first phase of his plan was complete. And after Phase One would come Phase Two, then Phase Three, then a few other Phases and Steps and stuff which would segue into each other and tie up all the Loose Ends, as Phases in Plans were wont to do. And then, when it was all said and done...

Victory. No, wait, even better: Revolution. Yeah, that sounded just perfect. He repeated the word aloud, the syllables rolling off his tongue in the most delicious, momentous way. Revolution. The end of the beginning. The return to the status quo. The leveling of the playing field. The single greatest achievement of any mortal pony in the history of the universe.

He hugged his hooves around himself and brushed the dust from his forelegs, his smile still growing even after the golden ring faded off into the distance. So the peasants and the invalids back home were ready for the world to change, were they? Well, ask and ye shall receive. There went change now, rocketing away from the Fortress of the Four at an incalculable speed. Equinekind’s new era was about to begin. His era. His world. His moment of ultimate and everlasting glory.

Far off in the distance, the animals of the so-called Everfree Forest were being rudely yanked from their slumber, poking their heads out of dens, nests, and treetop canopies to blearily blink up at the blinding, glimmering light that had just passed overhead. If they had known what it signified, they might’ve felt a deep, instinctive dread of the unearthly horrors that would soon be revived. If they had realized the extent the ring would travel in that single night, they might’ve run for the hills instead of lazily yawning and shuffling back into their homes. If they had known the identity of the cloaked figure responsible for it all, they might’ve known better than to try to escape.

And if they had looked towards a crumbling, deserted tower in the middle of an uninhabited, unexplored, and virtually unknown part of the forest, they might’ve heard that mysterious cloaked figure throw back his head and laugh.

Author's Note:

The very select few of you who may have followed my writing way back in my FFN/pre-FIMFiction days may recognize portions of this opening chapter, as well as the title itself, from an identically-named story that was published on Equestria Daily approximately forever ago. This story, to put it as bluntly as I can, is not that one. While it will reuse several antagonists and a couple heavily reworded and edited old chapters, the plot and main characters of this fic are entirely different, and the main villain is a more canon-related entity with vastly divergent motives and, if I'm being honest, a much better writer behind him.

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Icarus Crimsonhoof

Icarus Crimsonhoof #1 · Jan 14th, 2013 · · ·

Interesting. I'm curious how the zodiac are going to hold themselves.

JJN Whitley

JJN Whitley #2 · Jan 14th, 2013 · · ·

Dude! That was awesome! I really like the villain already. The personality put into the narration was, in my personal opinion, absolutely hilarious. I really hope I'm right and that it ends up being Sombra.

Alondro

Alondro #3 · Jan 14th, 2013 · 2 · 1 ·

>>>He hugged his hooves around himself and brushed the dust from his forelegs, his smile still growing even after the golden ring faded off into the distance. So the peasants and the invalids back home were ready for the world to change, were they? >>>

I'll bring them hope and change! ALL THE HOPE AND CHANGE THEY CAN BEAR!!! HA HA HA HA HA!!" rang the maniacal laughter of the pony named Baroque Noblamer, who is a completely original character and not based on any political figure at all..