At first glance, the ceiling seemed to be made of tinted glass. Grey with the overcast sky outside, it ran smoothly from wall to pristine wall, and only the hard edge of its cut betrayed its true nature; it was a gigantic stretch of crystal slab. Even under its weight, and safe inside the chamber, Lapis Lazuli could hear the wind drone as it passed like a mournful, never-ending choir.
Lazuli was the name she had given herself. None of the crystal ponies had been given names by their king. A role and a number was all they needed.
Around her, the chamber was bare of decorations. It could have been carved out of a black glacier for all the finery it bore. Along the sides were ponies like her, arranged beside their tables with their backs to each other whenever possible. They didn’t talk. They just sat on their gemstone stools and stared listlessly at their own hooves, which seemed to move all by themselves as they worked.
Some ponies were ambling back and forth from table to table. Axles squeaked as a row of harnessed ponies walked along the aisles in single file, the planks of their carts groaning whenever they dared.
One such pony stopped beside her. It wasn’t marked with any kind of greeting; just the listlessness of a pony with only one job to do and no care for it. For a moment, Lazuli felt a brief spark of fellow-feeling.
“Hello.” Lazuli’s whisper of a voice struggled with the sounds. “Jade.”
Does my voice really sound like that, like the croak of a plague victim? I used to sing the solo for the anthem, every fair. What happened to my voice?
Lazuli’s spine shivered, and she swamped the treasonous thoughts out of her head.
The eyes of the standing corpse beside her barely flickered. Lazuli examined the block of crystal in the cart, and with an inevitable creak let herself off her seat. Rearing up, she stretched for the top, a midge reaching for the peak of some insurmountable ice cube, and slowly eased the top over onto the table.
The thud was imperious.
She winced at the chill running along her foreleg, and there was a slight stickiness when she pulled her hooves away. The rest of the crystal slid out and gave another, more imperious thud as it nearly buckled the table legs. The sound, she thought, was what things were around here. Grand. Deep.
And empty.
Gently, Lazuli massaged her hooves and rubbed her snout. Under such grim times, she felt herself coming down with something – her nose felt swollen, even sore – but still she breathed in the rancid odours of acid and sulphur from the adjoining room. They’d taken this crystal straight from the depths.
Lazuli’s dextrous hooves plucked a bolster and a mallet from the stool next to her, hastily putting themselves in the way when the other tools made a bid for the floor.
“No,” she whispered. “You stay there. Don't you leave my side.”
The creak of axles told her that Jade had moved on. Lazuli sniffed and shuffled her forelimbs, guiding the helve of the mallet upright for her weary and stinging jaws to grip. The free hooves then held the bolster steady.
Lazuli felt the pain in her strained neck already. It was horribly close to the muscle-wrenching agony she feared was coming, and she closed her eyes. Just a few dozen more, Lazuli. For your fellow crystal ponies.
She began to strike. Chips flecked off the crystal where she struck, and the headache and the pain began to rear up again. Every strike rattled in her head with the beats of a weary anthem. She could taste the roll of wood in her mouth. The helve must have slipped on the first blow. She wished they had sanded it off, but there was never time.
While Lazuli worked, she paced herself along with the others. The blocks on all the other tables – bankers, in sculptor's terms – began to crumple and deform, as paper crumples and shrivels within a pitiless flame. She worked around her own, gently grinding the millstone-like turntable around for the other side. Beneath her hooves, the crystal fluctuated, disturbed ponds of water waving and rolling and ebbing and distorting as hour after hour oozed by. It tightened, closing around a body encased inside the shining cocoon.
Cocoon. Lazuli shivered.
Then the cocoon tightened. Hooves curled up and were free at last. Hindquarters and torsos emerged from the receding shell. Mallets and bolsters were swapped for chisels, and the harsh strikes became the merest flicks of a painter’s brush. Tiny mites of crystalline were flecked off the body with a doctor’s care. Finally, the face: two wide, staring eyes, knowing even in their deadness what was to come. A tiny snout, just enough to allow the dainty nostrils and slit of a mouth. Lastly, the frozen waterfalls of the mane.
Overhead, a voice boomed out from the distance.
“My crystal slaves.”
The thunder clouds themselves might have spoken it. Every corner of the chamber rattled with each rumble of the vowels. Ponies all around cowered under the looming weight of each word, hiding themselves in their chipping and chiselling while it threatened and soothed at once.
“Work hard. Strike hard. Every crystal given to you, make an army from it. Carve our victory deep into the bedrock itself.”
Lazuli groaned, and stepped away from her own created sister. Around her, her brothers and sisters worked on, rounding off the skins of their siblings. She barely noticed the new cart standing beside her table, but she knew it would be there already. The king made sure things came and went only when they were needed.
“The vermin wish to destroy you. The vermin will strike again, and soon.”
Lazuli barely listened. The voice didn’t want them to listen. It simply pressed its will into their hearts, every day, everywhere in the Empire.
Her new kinsmare, frozen in a rictus of horror, was still crushing her hooves as she tried to lever it up, and a shot of ice slid down her pasterns, nearly killing them. If only she could stop, just for a moment, just before the skies turned dark and starless. Carefully, she guided the statue over to the cart.
“You are my creations. Obey me, and no harm shall befall you.”
The thump was dampened with straw. Without any kind of signal, the harnessed crystal pony beside her ambled onwards, down the aisle, and towards the portal to the next chamber. Sickly green and purple light flashed from within, and Lazuli knew her work would now find itself before the king’s throne, targeted by that red scimitar of a horn, pinned down by those eyes –
“Loyal slaves.”
The room fell silent. There was a new timbre to the voice now.
“Your king commands you. Flee to your homes. The vermin come to test us. Prepare for a difficult battle. For the good of the Empire, bring down the vermin.”
Lazuli sat back and fought against the desire to throw herself back, to rest for a moment. In that moment, she suppressed a scream. Her mind shouted it anyway, but she pretended she couldn’t hear herself.
Liar!
It was too cold for sweat, but the fur along her neck began to tingle. They could almost feel the rope.
“Not much longer,” she muttered.
"For the good of the Empire," droned a hundred voices.
“For the good…” Lazuli mouthed.
She swallowed the words, but then the vision came back.
A flash of an emerald glare, flaring at the edge with a fire that never burnt out, but which grew brighter and hotter each time she turned her face to it. And in the middle of each poisoned pool, the glint of a fiery drop of blood, seeking her soul, slicing deep into her for the merest flicker of treason –
Could he? she wondered. Could he really hear me?
There was no answer. Wearily, the room began to empty of ponies, and she only just saw that she was being left alone. She cantered after them for the door, and hid herself among the listless crowd.
"For the good of the Empire," they droned as one.
“F-For the good,” she whispered, “of the Empire.”
The streets were in chaos when Lazuli fled down the avenue, away from the towering black palace. Behind her, the purple flares rose furiously from around the central spire. Row after row of white cottages flashed past her, and she hastily checked each one for torn rooftops, smashed walls, any sign of a breach. Around her, ponies galloped and shouted for their friends.
Only a day since the last one, too! They must be getting desperate.
“Lazuli!” called out a face from one of the doorways. “You gotta pick up your gallop! They’ll be onto anyone hanging around the streets like flies on a carcass!”
“Don’t worry. I know a shortcut!” she called back as she galloped past. “Get back inside!”
“Be safe, Lazuli!” After two other ponies rushed past him, he slammed the door. There was the click of a bolt being drawn across.
Straight up Amethyst Avenue, she commanded herself, and her hooves listened. Left into Graphite Grange, and cut across the plaza towards Cobalt Cross. Never done it before, but it should work.
Overhead, the clouds turned a sickly green. The voice of the king growled over the city.
“The Empire is now on primary alert. Bauxite Regiment, report to the Quartz District. The vermin wish to send us a message; be ready to receive it. All shields on maximum power. No subject is permitted outside their district. The Empire is now on primary alert.”
Lazuli felt a stab of shock. There had been rumours outside of her workplace that the Quartz District was festering with traitors, but she hadn’t believed it. Pyrrhite lived there.
Pyrrhite used to live there, corrected her thoughts.
Her white cottage was coming up. Without slowing for anything, Lazuli galloped straight through the front door and almost took its hinges off. She nearly swept around and slammed it shut again when a thought occurred to her.
“Dolomite?” she called out to the house.
Quickly, she went over the straw-covered floor and past the burlap overhang that shielded the stove from view. The dining table and drinking trough were set out for a meal, the table lined with three plates and the trough filled with a foul-smelling cider.
Upstairs, then? If only they would answer, say something, make a noise –
“Dolomite? Beryl?”
Each timber step buckled under her weight. One snapped, and she wrestled to free her leg before rushing to the top. On the landing, she wasted no time in pushing aside the first saloon door and peering past the bales of hay.
Dolomite’s room was bare. Damp stains could be seen in the corners, looking somehow grimier in the light. Lazuli went straight for the other side of the hay bales and searched under the folds.
“You took it with you?” she said aloud. “No! You didn’t! Please say you didn’t!”
They were at the jousting match. He only ever took it out for that.
Outside, she could hear distant crashes and screams. Barely visible against the darkening sky, between the falling white flecks of an incoming blizzard, shooting stars could be seen. All of them were the colour of gangrene, and glowed like slimy beasts at the bottom of the sea. All of them showered down over the Ruby district.
The streets below her were empty. However much she pried until her eyes met the windows, there were no galloping figures coming up either end of their road.
Lazuli nearly tripped over a loose bale on her way out. Beryl’s door crashed into the exposed floorboards before she could control her speed. They’d be meaning to fix that, she remembered suddenly.
The pony mannequin in the corner wore no armour. Straw figurines and half-finished flags were strewn over the floor in one corner, and the pile of hay was half-hidden beneath a layer of patches and wool. The knitting needles lay on top, still entangled in a second rag Beryl had promised to finish.
A few bits had been scattered over the top. She remembered Dolomite couldn’t pay for things himself.
“The arena’s on the other side of town.” Lazuli’s voice went on, despite her own mounting fear. It was as if she could get rid of the realization if she passed it as quickly as possible.
Her heart and mind were already outside the house when her body struggled down the staircase on four legs that suddenly seemed far too feeble. Now she could hear, on the threshold of her hearing, the air screeching with each shooting star, and the crashes of breaking rooftops.
“Please let there be time, please let there be time, please let there be time –”
The front door burst open, and she was greeted to the blast of green.
It threw her back indoors, and her lower back finally cracked and exploded with pain. Noise simply scrambled all around her ears, and the last thing she heard was the front door land like a stunned body onto the floor. When she could see again, her eyes were smothered with burlap.
Gingerly, Lazuli shifted her weight onto her elbows and knees and heaved herself up, letting the sack slide off her face. Bits of broken china ground themselves under her body. Her hooves and head were sore. She staggered to her hooves. For a moment, she didn’t remember what had happened. Had she hit something?
The table was upturned. Senses returning, Lazuli glanced around, but most of the hall was obscured by a cloud of grim dust. She couldn't see outside the front door.
“My neck…” she began.
A snickering met her ears, and the pinnae stood upright on her skull. Her legs screamed at her to gallop, to pump her cannons and flee, but she fought the urge. The windows had blown out – she could make the frames out vaguely through the encroaching mist – and the staircase was blocked by the dust cloud.
It began to settle. Shapes were moving in the mist. Lazuli hurried around it and went for the back door.
The rear of the stable was littered with chipped crystal shards. On the other side of the straw-strewn floor, a workbench was set up, but this was lower than the table at the palace, and the wooden stool beside it had a cushion. Along the one wall was a sideboard bearing far more tools than she was allowed at work. Carefully, she guided herself around the crystalline statues of ponies waving, ponies dancing, and ponies holding each other’s hooves while smiling at each other, and ducked under the table.
From the next room came the groan of floorboards, some snickering, and a new sound: a droning, buzzing noise. Lazuli braced her limbs and prised the floorboard up, but only slightly. She didn’t want to knock the table, and the hoofsteps were spreading out, one set drawing closer to the back door.
“Guards save us,” she whispered.
The guards aren’t coming to save us, said her traitorous thoughts. They’re never coming because they don’t exist. No one’s ever seen them, have they?
Shut up!
As she held the object in her teeth and pulled it up, Lazuli pushed the table back, and its feet groaned along the wooden floor.
Shrieks of glee came from the hall. Lazuli slipped as carefully as her shaking legs could manage through the maze of statues, wishing she could be like them. There was no time to put the floorboard back into place.
Just as she reached for it, the handle was blasted off and a smoking black horn pierced through the door. It ripped the hinges right out and the door, impaled, seemed to look at her.
Lazuli raised the weapon in her hooves. Still… she had to be sure.
“The ground from whence I came blesses me,” she said.
A second blast from its horn shattered the door into ripped planks. Statues were scratched and tipped over into each other, a falling army of crystalline figures, smiling to their doom.
The blue, empty eyes pierced hers. The black body behind it quivered with excitement, and it hissed through its fangs.
Lazuli brought the crystal flugelhorn around and blew with every last bit of breath until her lungs were almost permanently scrunched.
The changeling reared back, flailing its half-rotten forelegs. Three squeals of pain tried to drown out the long wailing note.
With a gasp for lost air, Lazuli swung the horn. It struck the beast on its black snout and the face vanished into the next room. Two sets of hoofsteps rushed over, but Lazuli didn’t care about numbers.
“The ground from whence I came blesses me!” she yelled, and galloped in.
The second changeling’s wings droned as it tried to lift its comrade off the ground. Lazuli aimed for the third, throwing the flugelhorn hard at its snarling face, and then tried to turn around for the others before they both fell upon her. Their slimy skins pressed down on hers, but they were surprisingly light like children.
Something cold slid over Lazuli’s back. Flecks of green goo met the floor.
“No, you don’t!” she shrieked.
Viciously, she lashed out with her rear hooves, and almost fell over with the shock of impact. A screech of pain was cut off by the thud of a body hitting wood. The other beast stumbled, but kept itself pressing down on her shoulders, and the crash of wood met her ears as she bucked again.
“You took Beryl!” Each word was met with a violent spasm as she bucked, leaped, and reared in a frenzy. “And you took Dolomite! You monsters! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”
The changeling snickered into her ear.
And then she felt… drained. Lighter. She could see the door frame, the walls, and the window and the street outside begin to blur. Every part of her skin was cold. The headache ate away at her mind.
“Don’t… you dare…” she said. The snickering intensified. “Don’t… you… DARE!”
Lazuli leaped back and threw herself at the wall with a sickening crunch. Its wretched screaming stung her ear, but she braced her hooves against the floorboards and pushed. Crush it! Kill it! Squish it just like a fly!
The wriggling along her shoulders began to cease, and the headache vanished.
Then something slammed into her side, and she was struck on the head and hit the floor before she even realized it. Cider washed around her. The droning wings flared up, and gusts swept past her back. Fainter and fainter became the sounds until nothing more could be heard, and all was still. The house was silent.
Amid the shattered glass, the broken door, the china fragments, and the upturned trough, Lazuli lay in a pool of cider and despair and welcomed her one moment of relief. She didn't want to get up. Not yet.
She didn't know how long she spent lying there, while her bruises throbbed and her stomach ebbed and flowed over the hard floorboards with each weary breath. She didn't even mind giving in when her eyelids slid down, so long as they kept the world at bay.
The skies were now black and starless. Plumes of smoke rose from one slice of the giant circle that was the Empire, but in all other places, the candlelight could be seen through the windows, and were snuffed out one by one. Even the dark tower at the centre of the city lost its lustre, despite the flickering of its purple flames.
All the streets were silent, and nearly all of them were empty, save for the occasional straggler hurrying through the thoroughfares for home. Grass verges – those that were not reduced to smoking craters or white wastes – trembled in a slight breeze, and a light covering of snow smothered everything that was not protected by an overhang or a parasol.
The banner along the main thoroughfare fluttered idly. Tomorrow, this would be a rainbow shining over a parade, and ponies would flock the streets either side and sing until the world came to life once more. Now, however, the banner simply looked muted, like a butterfly drowning in a murky pool.
Lazuli peered out from the gaping blackness that was her front doorway. She glanced left, and then right, and then ducked back inside her shell.
“Dolomite,” she moaned, wishing they could reply. “Beryl.”
Slumped against the doorway, she sighed at the ruins she had woken up to. They should have been home by now. Curfew was three hours ago.
Idly, she rolled the hourglass across the floorboards, and watched its sands stop and freeze time. She wished she could turn the whole world the other way, take things back to when the fair was brighter and the streets were all grass, and there had been a white tower overlooking her friends, instead of the black spire.
At a canter, Lazuli cleared the snow-covered steps. Carefully, she sidestepped the mass of craters in the middle of the street. Many other houses had been broken by the blast, and now lay rotting with gaping holes in them. They had no light. She wondered if anypony was left inside.
Lazuli stuck close to the row of houses on the eastern side, silently apologizing to their owners for trespassing. As she moved further away from her house, she passed a cottage with its windows still lit, and caught a snatch of talk through the empty frame.
“… becoming more frequent. You don’t think they could be winning, do you?”
“And they’ve taken fifteen, from what I’ve heard. Well, I think so. Nopony’s heard from the Ruby District.”
“At least we have King Sombra on our side. Imagine how bad it would be without him? There’d be no city left…”
She crept further along the avenues, the blood rushing through her veins. Who are we kidding? It’s either the changelings or the king.
She was leaving prints in the snow, but she couldn’t do much about that. Nevertheless, she ventured across the plaza and hoped they would blend in with the mass of slush already there, where dozens of ponies had pulped the snow beneath them.
Lazuli tried not to look up at the void that was the night sky. It was so completely and utterly empty, so vast and endless. It seemed the whole world was being slowly drawn towards it, and would one day vanish, screaming, into that void. If she even glanced at it, she’d never look away.
She wondered if the green eyes were in there, looking back.
They’d always been watching her, even before the war began. Nopony else seemed to remember that far back, not even Dolomite, who could remember their first day out of the mines.
The mines…
She’d just woken from nowhere, the slight shock of feeling for the first time spreading through her – everything lighting up as if a room had been illuminated with a sudden fire – and there, when she felt her body slide into focus enough to move her neck and look up, there had been the eyes.
Cantering through the snow, Lazuli shuddered and was suddenly back in the black cave, twisted spikes of stalactites and stalagmites poised to snap like jaws, to slice her, and the yawning, chilling wind of the cavern’s breath rushing over and under her, leaving no pore untouched. She’d had pores. Her fur had been slick with sweat.
“My crystal slave…”
The first words she ever heard. A poisonous glee surrounded her, and the king’s glowing eyes enveloped her in their flames. The sheer heat of his stare could have washed over her, so near and so wide were the glowing eyes. One of the first things she realized, looking into those eyes, with the venom of some alien consciousness seeping into her mind, was how grotesque and grand his delusions were. He saw the world through them all the time.
The red horn flickered with black sparks. “Today, one. Tomorrow, more. I need an army fit for a king. I need slaves.”
From under a robe, an iron-clad hoof gestured around the chamber. The walls sparkled. Every last facet and cut glittered in the dark of the cavern. It seemed to glow sky blue around her, and for a moment, Lazuli felt something wonderful for the first time.
Warmth. She was safe here. She didn’t know why, but she was safe.
“Now,” said the king, his eyes flaring brighter. A bolt arced along his curved, red horn. “Make me that army. Carve others into the likeness of yourself, and I shall give them what I have given you.”
The crystals flickered. Sparks of anger leapt into her mind, and she felt her legs tense. How dare he?
"No," she said.
Something flickered in his eyes. "You dare defy me? I am your king. I am your master. You are nothing."
“NO!” roared the new voice.
And then the bolt shot into her heart. Everything began to stutter, and fade. She wanted to scream at the shadows as they closed around her, and she remembered what it had been before the memories, before she knew fear like this and could dread going back to the darkness. Pain! Pain leapt into her from all directions…
“You forget yourself," said the king's voice all around her. "What I can give, I can take away.”
She saw the green eyes –
Lazuli tumbled and a chill of snow smothered her face. The world seemed to flip, and she started as one from a sudden splash out of a dream. She braced her teeth and let things swim into focus, before realising she was lying on her back against the grass.
“No,” said the echoes in her memory. “You are my creation. You shall obey me.”
She picked herself up, steadying her legs, and looked around at the city of the Empire.
“Obey me…”
Lazuli glanced around. She shook her head vigorously, shaking away the last flecks of snow. Nothing else moved.
“Obey…”
Breathing heavily, Lazuli hurried into the shadows and down a side street before pressing her back against the wall of the city. There was a hollow tapping around her hooves.
He’s here. I know he is.
With a last glance at the distant spire, which flamed into the void overhead – she hastily looked away – Lazuli prised open the hatch and clambered in.
Her hoof shook as it held up the lid. She tried to keep it steady.
“We did it once,” she whispered to herself. “We can do it again.”
I just wish I knew how.
Lazuli slid into the darkness, with her hoof guiding the lid shut behind her until it blended in with the rest of the path.
