Embers of the World

by kalash93

Rating: teen
Tags: Adventure, Twilight Sparkle, Sad, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe
Length: 4251

Once the world was bright and alive. Then the Gods left you all behind. The sun still shines, barely. But even now, there are only embers. But soon the flames will fade, and only dark will remain.

You are one of the undead, a cursed being leading a doomed existence in a downward spiral of decay, misery, and death. As the years go by and you die time and again, your mind slips more and more as you struggle to cope with things mortals were not meant to endure. How can you cope with this as you find yourself deteriorating but unable to stop yourself? Is it even worth trying in a world even the gods have left behind?

An experimental story born of sleep deprivation, Dark Souls, and vodka.

Published 2015-09-20 01:20:02 UTC
Last updated 2015-09-20 01:20:02 UTC

Your Wretched Immortality

Your Wretched Immortality

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You are immortal. That is great, no? After all, it is the way of mortals to seek to escape their fate, to never truly have to die. Little did you know it was the way of immortals to seek to escape their fate, too.

When did it all begin? You know not. All you remember is the monument hidden in some forsaken corner of a town long abandoned. It is not a place of honor. The monument is an ugly thing hewn most inelegantly from stone before being stabbed with a chisel to gradually carve the symbols into its body. The words on it cannot be read, if only because letters are but distant memories to you. If only the contents of your mind could be preserved in some medium less delicate than flesh and less fallible than thought. You swear that sometime long ago, flowers were laid at its foot. What need did it have of flowers; it did not have to eat, unlike a pony. You feel a vague resentment against the headstone as your muddled mind recognizes the physical pains of hunger and its own misfortune to be aware of the state it’s in.

The sun shines dimly upon you as you stand not far from the monument. You swear the sun gets dimmer with every passing day. What do you care? It is all dark, or is it merely a lack of light?

You try to think of a time before, when there was more sun. You think you can remember it, if it is not a mere fancy of your ailing mind. You think you can see it if you mentally squint really hard. It feels like looking at another lifetime so distant as to be a figment of your imagination. You remember that this big pony named Princess Celestia who used to have a sister named Luna. And then something happened. Something… Something… Something you just can’t grasp, flirting out of reach. Anger rises within you. You strike the ground with futility. You use no words; it was so much easier to seethe in irrational rage. Your heart feels hungry. Your brain feels stuck; it’s just not working.

Something shiny glints on the ground by you. It is a familiar and battered but still sharp falchion. You take it.

You stalk out of the courtyard with bared teeth. You’re angry and you’ll show it. That emptiness in your heart makes you keep moving. You don’t even want to; you just don’t want to slide further down into the abyss in your mind. You wander around. You see some markings over an archway. You go through and soon find yourself atop some white castle ramparts. Looking around, you see things, but too little color to catch your eye. A single tear stains your face. But why? It’s not as if you have enough light to really make out much. You go back inside. The archway ahead of you has some things carved into it.

What do the marks mean? The inscriptions demand your attention – you know that somewhere in your mind, you remember their meanings, but you just cannot drag them out. Your head is throbbing. You are in no fit state to tangle with mysteries. You have much more pressing needs. You feel yourself slipping away to hunger from more than just your stomach…

Then you see something.

It is another pony, but around it flitter alluring little black sprites. You salivate. Then you feel your heart clench in fear. You clench your falchion. This pony is clad around their forelegs and torso in plate armor and is carrying a shield and an ax. They walk around with steely confidence. You know what you must do; no other way appears in your mind. You charge the pony, weapon drawn, screaming like a psycho.

Your prey flinches for just a split second – just long enough for you to close the gap before they can wind up their ax. They reflexively try to shield themselves. You leap with all their might, crashing into them. You hear the high grunt of a mare as you shove her off balance. You hack at her lighly protected shield limb, aiming at a join. Crack! Something gives way, even though you don’t penetrate the armor.

THWACK! Something hard slams into your jaw and your knees give way. She’s strong! You taste blood and feel things fly loose. Pain. No time for it. You leap back onto your hooves. The mare’s winding her ax back to take a swing! You juke backwards at just the last second. She swings and misses with her deadly blade. She’s wide open! For an instant, you lock eyes. You see total horror. You strengthen your grip on your falchion and pounce before she can even begin to mount a defense.

Blood. Screams. Struggle. It is over in seconds. You maul the mare. Your blade penetrates her deeply time and time again. Her ichors spill out and she resists you no more. You plunge into her one last time as you claim what you want.

The black sprites around her flock to you. Concentrating, you crush one between your hooves. You immediately feel wonderful as every bit of damage and privation inflicted upon you vanishes. You feel your mind come unstuck like a great flood of consciousness, thoughts, and memories breaking through a dam. No more hunger. Your pain is gone. Finally, you can think!

You then look down and see the mare lying motionless in a pool of her own blood with the same crimson staining your falchion. On her helmed face is a shriek of absolute horror. You’ve penetrated through her face many times. Her body is similarly ruined, with a plague of more than a dozen stab wounds, mostly all the way through, and an array of gashes and deformations where you’d cut her and pummeled her. You kneel down by her side under the compulsion of your restored conscience. Her white fur is stained red almost everywhere by blood. You cannot even guess the color of her eyes on account of annihilating them in your frenzy. You had locked eyes with her, but it was all a blur – shapes and motions. You feel awakened yet remorseful. The fever dream was over for now with you having awoken into the living nightmare.

Tears pool in your eyes but you hold them back; you’re a stallion and you can control yourself. You gently reach out and touch your prey. She’s still warm. You wave a hoof in front of her face. You don’t know what you were expecting, but nothing happens, so you gently touch her shredded face. She’s soft. You close her agape jaw and remove her helmet. A tattered purple mane spills out. An unbidden smile twinges your lips; you might have even called her beautiful in better circumstances. You could have known her. You could have been her friend. You might have loved her. Instead, you had killed her. Her eyes still display her ghastly horror.

Your sense of mercy bids you to gently close her eyes. You liked to think you were somehow being kind to her, that she was at rest in a better place. You know better; any second now would come the damnation of your fancy.

Suddenly, an unsetting sound comes. It is like the ringing of a bell, only it seems to suck even the trace warmth out of the air. A dim light suffuses around your victim and her body fades away into nothingness, leaving only a pool of blood. She was undead and you can no longer tell yourself you haven’t inflicted a horrible fate upon her. She will be reduced to what you were when you woke in that graveyard, not even sure of which way is up. You look over your shoulder. You feel relief you don’t see anyone there.

The teasing threads reemerge in your mind, guiding you back to the archways. You see the inscription. You recognize the letters and words. “PALATIUM CELESTIAE, REGINA DIEI, DOMINA LUCIS, MATRONA MAXIMA SOLIS, PRIMA IMPERATRIX EQUESTRIAE. Sol vobis galeat.” Old knowledge bubbles up to the surface of your mind. “Palace of Celestia, queen of day, lady of light, greatest matron of the sun. May the sun shine upon you.” It dawns on you: you are standing in the royal palace of Canterlot, but something seems missing. You could swear there was some other name you were missing.

You journey out onto the battlements again and looked out towards the horizon. There had to be something missing, but what? You remember Celestia – things were good under her. She was the goddess of the sun; why were things so dark if she was in charge? The wind blows. You see something white flutter around you. Snow? You smile. You touch it. Not cold. No heat. Ash. You look out at the world. Everything is so grey and drained. All the great trees are dead, standing only as effigies. The few trees to still thrive are short, twisted, stunted things with hardly any green on them. You remember the old laws of the castle, how they were so lushly verdant. That’s all gone now; the little grass to remain is dessicated. It is like the world has burned out. Even now, there are only embers. But soon the flames will fade, and only dark will remain.

You remember the last time you were here before the curse. You could not say how long, but it must have been centuries given the extensive deterioration of the structure – stones weathered down like old teeth, ivy growing wild, moss growing rampant, a tree you remembered as a little sapling now morphed into a lifeless husk…

You find the other archway. You read the inscription. “”BASILICA LUNAE, REGINA NOCTIS, DOMINA TENEBRARUM, MATRONA MAXIMA LUNAE. Fiat ut astrae duceant te.” The court of Luna, queen of night, lady of shadows, greatest matron of the moon. May the stars guide you.”

There are no stars.

You consume another black sprite. Your mind expands.

You remember it like it was yesterday. The sun did not rise. The whole world was dark, save for the moon. When the sun finally returned, Luna disappeared and Celestia’s mane became an ethereal whisp of colors. Looking back, it felt like that first day when Luna was no more was somehow dimmer than all the days before, as if the sun had been bled of its warmth. It had been nothing to worry about, until it was.

Celestia slipped into seclusion. The sun continued to darken. And then you remember how some ponies got mysterious brands around their cutie marks – sinister circles like fingers of flames peeking from behind something, encircling their cutie marks. Nopony understood it. You were so confused until the news came: one such pony had been killed, but was back the next day alive and well. Rejoicing – immortality had been found! No more death.

Nopony had mentioned how that pony had never been quite the same again.

How could you forget the first time you died? It was like being asked if you could remember losing your virginity. You had been drunk that fateful night centuries ago under a too-pale full moon when you and your friends bet who could hold their breath underwater the longest. In your stupidity, you had decided to swim into a deeper part of the lake instead of just standing in the shallows. You remember it starting, but you don’t remember them coming for you, only that it hurt so horribly as the water forced its way into your lungs, the pain only ending with the frightful embrace of death’s shroud covering your eyes.

You woke up the next morning not fully remembering what had happened. You only remembered feeling hungry, hollow inside. A quick look at yourself showed all your limbs in order and your head on straight, but you looked a little ragged – eyes bloodshot, hooves uncomfortably grown out, your mane stringy and scattered. Your brain felt stuck as if you had been drunken. The other ponies had shone with a strange black light that ignited a craving in you. You brushed it off at the time, telling yourself to just get over it. Prior to that night you could recite classical poetry off the top of your head with relish for the beauty of the verse. Afterwards, you could just recite it. It took you about a week before you were close enough to alright again, although it was more like a refusal to admit your dysfunction. You had felt different on the inside. Before, you had loved life. Now, you felt somehow a veil between yourself and life, a new awkwardness and a sense of unsettling displacement.

You one day saw a black sprite hovering over a disused body. You approached it on instinct, your disgust being overpowered by an uncanny craving. When you touched the sprite, it broke like smoke and poured into you. You felt power and emotion fill you as the inner animal was silenced. You drew on this strength a little bit and felt your body change. Alarmed, you sprinted over to a nearby pond and looked yourself in the face. To your surprise and relief. You looked good as new, but felt the emptiness gnawing away at your heart again. Mustering that second reserve of that frightful black sprite, you felt your mind return to normal. You felt great and looked around. You realized that hunger for the black light from other ponies had stopped.

You cannot remember how long it was, but it could not have been too long before you began to hear of ponies who had brushed by the grim reaper one too many times and came back wrong. You told yourself they were just weak. Then you had your first encounter with a “hollow” pony, or at least one that was well along in the process. It was a wretched creature that looked like a walking corpse. Sure reeked like one. Less cheery than a bankrupt griffon. The worst were the eyes. Sure they had pupils and so on, but they were just dark like little voids trying to drink in every spot of light they could find. You had avoided eye contact and you were glad, for not even a minute later, you heard a fight break out between it and somepony who was vocal about their displeasure.

You remember the second time you died, split in two by a minotaur’s giant cleaver. The pain, the horror. That hellish blackness. When you woke up, you made yourself get drunk just to prove you were alive. Perhaps that was a mistake, given your downright beastly mood, and worse, that gnawing hunger for something to fill your heart. You remembered that black sprite. More importantly, that you had pillaged it from a body. In spite of your insistence that you would never rob another for their vitality, you had been affected much more strongly than before, and restoring yourself would finally end that horrible, hungry, hollow feeling in your soul. Before long, you had swung at somepony who didn’t really deserve it. Days later, while you were fully sober, you swung again at somepony who called you rotten.

You had never done anything violent in your life until that moment.

Then the hunts began.

A new faith called the Path of True Life emerged. They swore to protect the living from the undead. They first came for the hollows who had lost their minds. You remember the day they caught you as you were sitting at your monument with a book of your favorite poems in hoof, willing yourself back into appreciating them. They came with swords and spells and spears and then seized you, hurt you. Too bad for them you still had a knife on you. Without thinking, you ripped open your own throat. You wish you had just expired painlessly, but no, they couldn’t let you do that. Instead, you spent the better part of an hour hovering between life and death until your kindly medic made the decision to snuff you out by a horrible, crushing blow to your throat as you thrashed and gasped.

You found yourself without a life. You had to travel from place to place, always alone, always wary, always suspicious. You hit rock bottom from the thirst that never stopped, the hunger than never sated, the weariness no rest could ease, and the emptiness nothing could fill. You looked less and less like a pony with every passing day. With nothing left but want, you found it easy to pick up a sword. Those other ponies had things in them you wanted. You had enough of life; you wanted to live, and if that meant cleaving a few skulls and claiming their souls for yourself, it was their fault if they couldn’t fight off a starved walking corpse.

You became a beast. You found yourself in a vicious cycle of feast and famine, looting and losing, dying and returning. You bore the invisible scars of a thousand deaths. The animal within you drove you to do whatever needed to get what you wanted and to avoid the hunts. You had at first tried to live with dignity, but those selfish others couldn’t abide it. Nopony would grant you lodging, fearful of predation if undead and fearful for their privilege of experiencing a merely mortal life if not, as if your darksign would spread to them like a foul odor.

It was not only you who suffered this fate. Untold thousands, then millions, then billions of others did. Centuries-old aristocrats rotted in their manors just like the traders did in their caravans. One by one, everyone either died or fell to the undead curse. Even the believers in True Life, who claimed that the absent Celestia’s affection for them made them immune fell victim, although many of those who claimed exemption lived unnaturally long lives while others had funerals with suspiciously unburdened coffins. One by one, each new victim was forced out to wander a world choking on entropy. And looks to the future showed no days, but only endless nights.

The refugees all started like you, convinced they could dwell happily at just the next town over, until every town had denied them. Then they became convinced they could live the country life, aloof from others to resist the void inside. Then they discovered their hunger had to be sated. At first they tried to just pick it from less fortunate ones, and then only take from those who were less deserving, and then from strangers, and then from whoever they dared attack, and then from everyone. The harder they tried to struggle against their deterioration, the worse it got. Try as they might, nothing could halt the breakdown forever; even with eternal life, there is one so much you can do before the sheer weight of years erodes away a consciousness never designed to cope with the burden of endless time.

At least going hollow made it all so much easier to take. They all found that out eventually.

Being an animal was so much easier. No rules, just freedom. You could do whatever you pleased whenever you wished. You could eat whatever you could lay your hooves on. You could drink whatever you could get. All you had to do was go out and get it and not get killed. You were not always successful. The more you failed, the less you cared for anything but your body’s cravings. The more your cravings took over, the less you wanted to stop decaying. What would the point of stopping, anyway? It wasn’t like playing nice and settling down would end your wretched immortality or stop the Path’s hunts. Besides, the more you had to care about surviving, the less time you had to worry to lament what you had become. You couldn’t do that; you just had to keep going – it was the only thing you had left.

Innumerable years passed. They found you again. This time, you could not escape as you were just reeling from reemerging into life. They took you to the asylum to await the end of the world, when they claim Celestia will return according to the prophecy; and the Path of True Life, a clever deceit to make everyone believe the gods hadn’t left them behind. And there you would have waited through eternity had not an earthquake struck, tearing down the hated stones of your prison. From there, you had drifted aimlessly, just barely keeping yourself sustained and lucid.

You come down from your high. Your mind contracts as the flood of consciousness finally stems. Exhausted, you stare out into space. You muse, “If the gods haven’t left us behind, nice of them to stay out of sight.”

The sun is setting.

The sun is already set.

You go inside to get ready for nightfall. With a bit of luck, you may even find a usable bed where you might not get murdered in your sleep for your Spirit. You are about to ascent a spiral staircase when you hear a dreaded sound.

Clop clop.

Hoofsteps.

You ready your falchion. Wait, something’s not right. The rhythm’s off.

There’s more than one and they’re getting closer. Fear clenches your heart. Your breathing accelerates. You try to stealthily climb the staircase to get out of sight before they find you, but the sound is rapidly catching up. You back yourself against the wall to stop them from surrounding you.

Clomp!

A figure tramps through the doorway. Your heart races. You see the glint of cruel, nasty steel. Before you stands a zebra with an arming sword. Right behind him is a pegasus with a spear and shield. You could take the swordspony, but your blood runs cold at the sight of your second foe; he not only can touch you from a distance, but he can block you as well. You see it, the hungry glint in their eyes, the corpselike condition of their bodies, their ungraceful movements – they’re full hollows on the prowl. They advance on you. No way out. You still your tremors, knowing what is about to happen. They’re going to kill you. Then you’ll wake up again with your mind gone.

You challenge them to attack. If you must die, you’ll do it well. Violence. Confusion. Fury. You run the swordsman through in the chaos. You turn on the second one.

Suddenly, agony explodes through your chest as something strikes through, skewering ribs to impale you. No. You drop your falchion in shock. No. You meet your enemy’s eyes. Black pits stare at you. It almost seems to smile as it yanks back the spear and rams it forwards into your body again, impacting you a second time. You fall to your knees. No. Everything sears into your memory. You feel the wet, hot blood pool around your legs. You’re slipping. It’s all falling away from you as the darkness swarms over your eyes. You collapse. Even the pain stops as your nervous system gives out.

You awake to an endless void, an abyss. It strips you, flays you, rips away every precious thought and feeling in your heart, as if your very soul shrank from the hell.

An unknown time passes.

It as to end.

Eventually.

It must.

You are lying down somewhere. You remember nothing. You are crying. You stare dazed at the mournful glow of the moon framed by the skeletons of long dead trees. You pine. You mourn for what you can’t even remember. You weep for the sun. You beg for your mind. You lament your unending life. You don’t want to feel the agony of a thousand deaths anymore. If only you could move, you would walk through the fog, but your mind does not work anymore, but an ancient sword is within reach. One quick thrust, and a return to that momentary oblivion, apart from all this. You pick it up only to realize it is blunt. You jab at your belly in vain.

You weep for the final embers of the word. And you plead to the gods that life might end so none will have to bear what lies ahead when the sun has failed and the moon is dead.

You weep in despair as your soul’s embers crumble to ashes. Your inner void has opened into an abyss. Endless waking blackness yawns from the pit within. Your body is a shambles sustained by nothing more than inability to die. This all that remains of you in this life that is not.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading. I hope you liked it. I may touch this subject again one day. Thanks to Nahmala for giving me feedback on my initial draft of this fic. You helped me turn this into a real work.

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Kalash93

P.S.: My friend's friend desperately needs money for rent ($600 by THIS monday). All she asks for is just $10. She promises to pay back in three months when her big check comes through. Please be kind and lend a helping hand. You'd be doubly awesome for helping someone avoid going homeless. To help, click here.

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