Chapter 14
Within Starswirl's tomb, a little pebble sitting on an unfolded length of tapestry rocked on its base, wobbling as it was pushed first one way and then another by the arcane energies humming in the air around it. Sassaflash stood nearby, forcing ancient, uncouth words out of her throat and weaving them into the burgeoning spell swirling around the pebble. Still chanting, she extended a wing and scooped a sprig of raskovnik up in her cupped primaries, lifted it above the pebble, and let it fall.
The raskovnik touched the pebble.
The pebble vanished.
Half a yard to the left, there was a sharp crack, and a small explosion filled the air with fine rock dust. Scowling, the Dark Lord raised a wing in front of her face against the drifting dust, and backed away from the chalky cloud with one or two muffled coughs. With two quick wingbeats, she shaped the cloud and forced it down through the stone lattice of the chamber's floor, to sink into the dark pool beneath.
The sound of hoofsteps filtered in from outside, and the Mule's coarse gray face appeared in the gap between the half-open door and the stone frame. "It done bust again?"
“What does it look like?" snapped the pegasus, shaking the dust from her feathers with short whip-snap motions of her wings. She glared at her minion. "Do you have anything useful to say, or did you just come here to waste my time with idiotic questions?" Then, seeing the hurt look on his face as he turned to leave, she sighed and gestured with a forehoof for him to come in. "No, don't go. I am sorry; I shouldn't take out my frustration on you. I just can't make this work, and it is...vexing to me."
The Mule shuffled inside. "Maybe you should leave it be for a spell? It ain't a-going to help nothing if you's too het up to think straight." Pale green stalks bent and rustled around him as he settled himself down in the crook of a twisting root-branch sprawling across and through the floor. Sassaflash drew a deep breath, and managed a strained smile.
"Perhaps you're right. I am a little overwrought. Zhro!" A shivering relaxation rippled through the air and the shadows softened, as though some hidden tension running through reality itself had been suddenly lifted. "I had kept that thaumic scaffold up longer than was prudent, in any case, and it was beginning to decay."
"O' course," said the Mule, with a sagacious nod. His attention drifted over to a decorated ceramic urn, sitting in a corner, and he turned to the Dark Lord, one eyebrow raised.
She gave a quick shake of her head. “Don’t worry. I was merely...inspecting it. I lack the necessary equipment and raw materials to attempt a resurrection, in any case.” The pegasus gave an awkward flutter of her wings, and with a touch of false bravado, added, “not that I would try to revive Starswirl. It would be foolhardy, as we discussed. Certainly not. I have more wit than that.” She bit her lip. “So! Your presence is not unwelcome, of course, but was there any subject you wished to broach?”
The Mule blinked. “Broach?”
“Did you want to talk about something?”
“Oh! Oh. Well, as a matter o’ fact, they was something.” The old creature shifted a bit, settling into a more comfortable position. “See, I been thinking. I still ain’t happy with this plan o’ yourn, and I still reckon they’s a good reason Celestia lets things go the way they goes. It just...it don’t make sense for her to be so good with everything else, and so bad with this one thing.”
Sassaflash frowned. “We have discussed this before, Mr. Mule, and I have made my views perfectly clear. Besides, I can hardly waltz up to Canterlot and ask her to explain herself. She clearly prefers not to make her reasons known to ponykind at large, and would no doubt fashion some soothing lie, and if I forced her hoof by revealing my knowledge of what she could do--what I could do--I would reveal myself to her, and that would be the ruin of all my hopes. I can hardly confront her.”
“No,” mused the Mule, “No, you can’t, at that.” He paused. “But I could.”
The Dark Lord blinked, one ear cocked as though she thought she had misheard him. “You...what?”
“What I said. Supposing I went up to Canterlot, and asked her for you? They ain’t nopony but Miss Sweetie Belle and my wife that knows I work for you, and they ain’t a-going to say nothing. If she ain’t as bad as you reckons, and she’s got good reasons for doing what she does, and not doing what she don’t do...You see? That might save you from making a real big mistake.” He gave her a sudden, keen glance. “And you could do it, couldn’t you? Whatever happened down there in Voomuth--you know, it didn’t wreck your plans. I seen how you looked when I said you’d left your saddlebag behind. They was something in it that you meant to bring down there, and you brung it down, even if it near killed you. Ain’t that right?”
“Perceptive as always, Mr. Mule,” said Sassaflash, but she said it absently, and a pensive look crept across her face. “You might be very wrong about her, you know. It is possible that she would go to great lengths to preserve her secret, and Discord might not be the only soul she has imprisoned in stone and set on display in her sculpture garden.” She shook her head. “No. No, I cannot allow you to risk yourself in this way. You are my minion, and your safety is my responsibility. No, I am not comfortable with this at all.”
“When it comes to that,” said the Mule, “I ain’t real comfortable with you fixing to take over the world, but ain’t I helped you? Ain’t I done like you asked, and gone where you wanted?" He paused and, seeing her hesitation, continued, "Ain't it my choice to make, and my risk to take?"
“That may be so, but I don’t--even if--” She stared helplessly at him, her tail lashing back and forth in nervous, twitchy sweeps. “What do you want of me? Shall I put my campaign on hold while you knock on Celestia’s door and politely ask her if she’s the greatest monster in history? What if she hurts you? You can’t expect me to agree to this.”
“That’s exactly what I do expect,” rejoined her minion. “And she ain’t a-going to turn me into no statue. I won’t be the first one to ask her why she don’t save more ponies, and I won’t be the last, neither. Don’t it make sense to make sure you ain’t making a mistake?”
“Mr. Mule, I have waited years for this!”
“Then what’s a few extry days going to hurt?” The old creature smiled, and laid a hoof gently on Sassaflash‘s shoulder. She tensed, then slowly relaxed. “Come on, Miss Sassaflash. Give me a chance.”
The Dark Lord considered this in silence for some moments, her head bowed and face shadowed. Overhead, the constellation of light stones set in the ceiling of Starswirl’s tomb glowed a soft amber-white, their smooth surfaces twined round with the tendrils of the rampant raskovnik. At length she looked up. “It’s--you may not be wrong, Mr. Mule. No. If this were simply a matter of schemes and plans and prudence, I might agree with you. But it is not such a matter, and the mortality of the ponies of Equestria is not all that is at stake. I have not labored heart, soul, and blood for more than ten years for them. I have to go through with this. I can’t abandon my mother.”
Meeting her gaze, the Mule asked, “Even if something real bad’d happen?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. It depends.” In a hushed, almost frightened murmur, she continued, “I don’t know how far I’m willing to go. How much I’m willing to sacrifice. I--I thought I knew.” A sigh. “I do not believe I can promise, even if Celestia has good reasons for all she does and does not do, that I will not still act. But I can grant you this, at least: I will wait for you to speak with her. I will wait, and listen, and consider, and if I have to--if I can bear it--I’ll hold back.”
The Mule smiled. “I reckon that’s good enough for me.” He spat on his hoof and held it out. “It’s a deal!”
Sassaflash eyed the proffered hoof uncomfortably. “I, er, would prefer not to…”
“Oh. Right, right.” The Mule wiped his hoof against his fur. “Still a deal, though, right?”
“Yes.” The Dark Lord nodded. “You have my word.”
-----
The brief boreal night passed swiftly, punctuated at odd intervals by the crack of detonating pebbles and the muttered imprecations of the Dark Lord Sassaflash against magic in general and raskovnik in particular. Despite the occasional explosions, the Mule managed to get some much-needed sleep curled up in a dim corner of Starswirl’s tomb. He walked with his wife in the fields above the winding river Skai and told her of what was happening in the waking world, and together they watched the moon rise above the distant mountains. For a thousand years it had been a dark, menacing thing, infested with flabby, eyeless moonbeasts and their cloven-hoofed slaves, but when Princess Luna had returned to the Dreamlands she had driven them all back to the plateau of Leng or to the Dreamlands of other worlds. Now lanterns were being lit in the ancient lunar cities, spangling the darkness between the crescent moon’s horns with webs of glittering light. Little by little, the clutching blackness that had consumed the Dreamlands was giving way to the soft, gentle shadows of a starlit summer’s night.
At length he awoke to the continuing sound of Sassaflash‘s teleportation experiments going explosively wrong. For some moments he sat there on the floor of the tomb, blinking bleary eyes and considering this pony who was doing her level best to cast down Celestia and Luna and forever rob the world of their light, and then he decided that he wanted a little fresh air and time by himself. Rising to his hooves, he ambled past the Dark Lord and out the tomb’s circular door, squinting in the harsh light of day. Around him rose the towers of silence raised by Unicornian kings thousands of years before, casting long, somber shadows across the pebbled plain. It was not, he thought, the most cheerful place in the world, but it was good for thinking. Very quiet, very peacef--
The Mule brayed in surprise as something exploded with a sharp crack right beside him, peltering his flank with a spray of stinging grit. He turned, looking back at the low dome of Starswirl’s tomb, and in a moment Sassaflash‘s head emerged from the darkness within, blinking in the light.
“My apologies, Mr. Mule. Your departure appears to have disturbed the adaptive triangulation I was using to determine the destination of the teleported stones. You are unhurt?”
Her minion nodded. “Yep. Just startled by being hit with all that sand, is all.”
“Hrmph!” The Dark Lord gave a disgusted snort. “Sand! You mean dust. ‘Sand’ would be better than the powder I’ve been getting. At least the pieces would be marginally bigger. We might hope to arrive home as tiny chunks, rather than merely as a fine red mist. A vast improvement, certainly!”
“No, I mean sand.” The Mule knelt, and scooped up some of the grit from where it had fallen on ground. “See?”
Her brow furrowed, Sassaflash trotted over to where the Mule stood, and peered at the fine grains resting on his outstretched hooves. “But that’s...you’re right. That is sand. I can actually make out individual grains. But what--why--” She stopped abruptly, shot a quick glance at the Mule, and then made an abrupt about-face, calling as she trotted back to the tomb, “Stay there, and don’t move.”
The Mule stayed there. He didn’t move. Then, with another loud snap, another spray of sand hit him in the flank. Sassaflash poked her head back out of the shadows. “More sand?”
“Yep. Miss Sassaflash, what--”
“Silence! I am doing Science. Move ten paces to your left, if you please. Good. Stay still.”
Crack!
Emerging from the crypt like a groundhog lifting its head out of its burrow, the Dark Lord called, “Are the grains bigger or smaller now?”
The Mule squinted down at the particles littering the ground at his hooves. “I reckon they’s a mite bigger.”
“How much, precisely?”
He considered the question, and then hazarded, “...A mite?”
“Good. Very good!” The pegasus gave a delighted little flick of her wings, and allowed a small, triumphant smile to creep across her face. “Now, turn around, and face towards the crypt rather than away…”
The next thirty minutes were spent in a flurry of experimentation, with Sassaflash barking out orders from within the crypt while the Mule ambled to and fro across the waste, gathering fragments of pulverized rock from successive explosions. It wasn’t long before they realized that distance was the key factor; the farther the destination, the larger the fragments that the pebble arrived in. Following a few more trials at carefully-determined lengths away from the tomb, the Dark Lord called a halt to further experimentation and, after pacing out the distances that different pebbles had been teleported and squinting at the resulting grains, began scrawling out diagrams and equations on the ground and muttering about arc lengths and chords and the inverse-square law. The Mule plodded up alongside her and peered over her shoulder at the circles and numbers spreading out through the chill, dry dust before her. Giving a quiet cough, he said, “So, you reckon we might be able to get back?”
“...So, three hundred and sixty times further, squared, multiplied by about five thous, gives...Yes, yes. Our odds aren’t bad, at any rate.” She looked up from her calculations and trotted off in a random direction, occasionally glancing behind at her bemused minion. Before long she stopped and, peering over the distance between herself and the Mule, repeated, “Not bad at all. Eleven yards should be more than enough.”
The Mule walked over to her side. “More’n enough for what?”
“For us to arrive in one piece. The farther away from the point of teleportation, the more spread-out the shatterpoints are. If that pattern holds, then they should be very roughly eleven yards away from each other across the distance between here and Ponyville. Very roughly. We stand a decent chance of arriving without intersecting with any of the...discontinuities, at least.”
“And what happens if we do hit one o’ them disconti-whatsits?”
Sassaflash cast a quick glance at a nearby patch of dust smeared across the rough-edged gravel of the valley floor, long pale rays streaking out around it and the rocks at its center whitened and chipped by the force of the explosion that had created it. “Let us hope that we do not have occasion to find out.”
The Mule’s ears swung back against his head, and his eyes widened. “...Alrighty, then.” A pause. “They ain’t nothing we can do to make it a mite...safer?”
With a quick shake of her head, Sassaflash turned and began to trot back towards the low dome of Starswirl’s tomb, steam rising in little swirling eddies from its slightly-ajar door. “Not that I can think of. Truth be told, we are fortunate to be able to avail ourselves of even these odds. I would offer to make the journey alone and attempt to arrange for your retrieval by more conventional means, but I do not know that any rescue could hope to arrive in time.”
“No, you’re right at that.” The Mule gave a little shrug, and followed her into the green, overgrown chamber of the crypt, dangling mats of raskovnik trailing past his head as he entered. “Ain’t no sense in putting it off, then, I reckon.”
“Indeed not. Together, then.” The Dark Lord fanned her wings forward, splaying her feathers wide to catch the slightest shifts in the air, and took a slow step forward. “ftaghu naflthrod ng’nnnehye, ilyaalw’nafh… I must ask for your patience; local space must be stabilized before we can proceed.”
“Alrighty.” The Mule settled himself down on the carved stone lattice of the tomb’s floor. “It’s safer for us to go at the same time than one by one, then?”
“Not precisely, no.” The pegasus shifted to one side in an unsteady, arrhythmic sort of half-stumble, flickering her wingtips to and fro in tight, controlled motions as she shaped the magic around her. “In fact, our odds are slightly worse traveling together than apart. But were we to travel separately, I would have to send you first in order to maintain the connection from this end, and I have no intention of using you as thale cress in an experiment.”
“Now, that don’t make no sense.” Rising to his hooves, the Mule shook his head. “It’s a risk both ways, ain’t it? If it’s safer to go separate, then shouldn’t we ought to go separate? I don’t got no problem with going first.”
Sassaflash slowed her uneven dance, and turned to look at her minion. “Are you certain? I do not quite like the idea of sending you off alone, while I wait here safe and secure.”
“It’s alright, Miss Sassaflash, it’s alright,” said the Mule, raising a hoof. “I ain’t skeert.” Drawing a deep breath, he said, “I’m ready whenever you is.”
She eyed him for a moment longer, then turned and gave an odd flopping half-twist of her right wing, muttering grotesque, awkwardly-shaped words as she placed the finishing touches on her spell. “So be it. Come, stand you here, and give me the saddlebag. I would like to take several cuttings of raskovnik with me when I make the leap, to see if I can manage to cultivate them back in Ponyville. Thank you. Now, be still…”
The Dark Lord stepped back, a solemn look on her face, and began to chant--sotto voce at first, but with each passing moment her voice grew louder, and the irregular, ugly words gouged their way deeper into the air within the crypt. A shiver slid up the Mule’s spine, the muscles beneath his skin twitching like frightened insects trying to crawl free. Space was folding around him, molding itself to his body--and to something else, very, very far away.
”Fm’latgh ftaghunglui, geb sgn’wahl cgwai…”
The image of Sassaflash wavered, faint flickers of pale blue and red dancing in opposition around her outline as the gnarled raskovnik behind her twisted. The entire room seemed to be everting itself around the Mule, everything rotating forward as though he were sliding back across the floor while somehow remaining standing firmly in the center of the chamber. He winced as a sharp ache juddered up his left foreleg. A similar pain bit at his tail, then faded away. “M--miss Sassaflash?”
”K’yarnak ‘bthnk, ag ch’sgnnak yahl.” There was a strangely anechoic quality to her voice now, the words stabbing through a fog of echoes and murmurs. She paused, concern on her flickering face. “...Stop, Mr. Mu--Shall I sto--Are you alright? Shall I stop, Mr. Mule?--alright? Shall I--Are you--are you--Mr. Mule?” Her image lurched unsteadily, drifting back and forth through time. The Mule hesitated, then shook his head.
“No, I reckon I’m okay. Go on.” He probably sounded as distorted to her as she did to him, but she seemed to get the gist of what he was saying, for she resumed her chant. The Aklo words plunged down through the billowing space around the Mule like stones through mist, heavy and solid in a world of shadows. Colors and shapes flickered around him--books? Was that a table, or just a branch of the raskovnik? Were those rafters, or the carved stone vault of the tomb? Sassaflash‘s voice thundered on, rising to a crescendo--and then stilled, falling into deafening silence.
Reality hung in abeyance.
“--You ready, Mr.--Is done. It is done. Are you rea--Mr. Mule? Are you--it is--Mule?”
The Mule swallowed. “Yes.”
For a moment there was stillness. Then a single word smashed through the haze, long and howling and powerful.
Uaaah!
The world unmade itself.
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6083363
I was a little uncertain about how much to reveal and how much to keep obscure, but decided in the end, as the point is more atmospheric than plot-critical, to leave it obscure. I'm glad to see, though, that I seem to have made it clear enough at least for you to figure out what it was she saw...
"zhro![/]"
You appear to have a broken italics tag there.
6088254
Conflabbit. Many thanks for catching that!
6088258
You're welcome.
And so, one lives to rememeber, and to wait.
And to watch the darkness.
I now have this barmy scene in my mind where bigoted communities of Mi-go draft a strongly worded protest letter to the King in Yellow complaining how all the moon refugees of Ib were taking their jobs, sullying their communities, and otherwise "sapping and impurifying their precious bodily fluids".
I got the gist of it but it did seem a bit awkward.
Otherwise, I quite enjoyed the chapter. Mr. Mule is just so reasonable. He's basically the antithesis of the average Lovecraftian protagonist, who is learned but not wise.
It remains hilarious that she's going through all this mind-bending outer-god brain-destroying hoo-ha in order to bring about... the Season 2 opener.
Ah. I was wondering about the cress, actually.
In any case, occult science occurs! Of course, Sassaflash doesn't seem to have considered how carrying cuttings of the space-warping plant might throw off the teleportation ritual. This may not be pretty...
I just love your writing style. Thats what.
So... Is Sweetie Belle going to appear a little more? I ask because she appear as a main character but she only appeared a couple of scenes in a couple of the first chapters, but then she stay in Ponyville. and for 10 chapters is at last mentioned in a couple of them, but that is all.
Oh boy! The thing is, I can never discount the possibility of someone dying given that Sassaflash is a necromaner, reluctant as she may be to attempt resurrecting someone. So we'll just have to see where this goes!
6088562
Meanwhile, the Saturn cats have their own complaints, having lost their favorite vacation spot, and all of a sudden Hziulquoigmnzhowonearthareyousupposedtopronouncethis is up to his eyes(?) in iridescent cat-things.
6090409
Prerequisites for survival in a Lovecraftian universe: years of study, a mastery of dark and occult powers, a good physique (with particular emphasis on strong legs, suited for rapid dashes to safety), an understanding of forgotten, unholy tongues, carefully crafted alliances with quasi-friendly races (so...ghouls? Maybe?), and a gigantic heaping of luck.
Or, y'know, good solid common sense. That works too. Glad you enjoyed the chapter!
6092748
My next story: A grand epic following Berry Punch's quest for a legendary wine rumored to lie buried in the depths of Tartarus, aided in her journey by the bewildered, amnesiac wraith that is all that's left of King Sombra, which incidentally results in the removal of Cerberus from his post and the escape of both Tirek and the bugbear, thus bringing about the events of the season 4 finale and Slice of Life. But it was really good wine, so it was totally worth it.
6093426
Well, the raskovnik in its natural form tends to only open physical locks, not metaphorical ones, so she's probably more or less safe, given that the space-warping properties rely on some heavy magical modification of the raskovnik's natural properties. There are definitely some shades of "TARDIS materializing within itself," though.
6094514
Glad to hear it! I shall endeavor to keep it up.
6099843
Eeehh...She's not going to have quite as large a role as I originally imagined, I'll admit. The overall arch of the storyunderwent some very significant changes while I was writing it, and when I started I had intended for Sweetie Belle to accompany the Mule and Sassaflash into Hippoborea, which obviously changed. She will still have an important role to play, mind, just not quite as central as I had thought she would at first. I'll be able to elaborate on that more fully by...well the next chapter, actually.
6106938
Wait and see, is all I'll say.
6113180
This is probably a joke, but I would read the hell out of it.
6115476
...Same here.
Hey, at least the rock isn't exploding in place. Silver lining!
I can't help but wonder if summoning Starswirl with intentionally zero wards and protections up might be enough to catch him off guard long enough to have a conversation.
The Mule managed to talk Sassaflash into letting him go interview Celestia first, with an admitted possibility of stopping depending on the answer? This plan is getting better step by incremental step.
Neat.
Science!
Interesting that the Mule was just teleported away leaving Sassaflash unsupervised in the frozen north immediately next to Starswirl's tomb. Now, I'm not saying I expect her to make poor life decisions on every opportunity to do so when nobody is available to oversee and critique her actions, but she does have a bit of a history of it.
6113180
Yes, please.