The Scroll of Exalted Ponies

Speaker had seen fear many times.

He had witnessed it during his grueling special forces training while serving Lookshy and the seventh legion. There he had been trained to harness his fear and not let it control him. It had all been part of his albeit limited officer training – but that was then, and now he had centuries of memories of defending his kingdoms from hordes of demons or other primordial monstrosities. These memories hinted of more intelligent solutions to his current predicament: With essence sight he saw the mystic patterns that so clouded the mind with dread and terror in those around him – and having seen that he now knew how to block them.

“Stand fast – look at their weapons: They’re armed little better than yourself – only clubs for beating those who can’t fight back. You’re armed and you’re able. And now… they’re not” Speaker shouted, spinning around, pulling Gift from elsewhere and throwing it at the mercenaries in one smooth move.

The mercenaries were taken off guard by the sudden golden disc hurtling at them, it trailing golden light as it weaved in and out of their front ranks, cutting clubs and steel-banded battons in half by the dozen.

This demonstration of might shocked both the mercenaries – but also the neighborhood watch that stood beside Speaker, as their fears were suddenly if only momentarily abated. The mercenaries were not positive about how the situation was developing, but they weren’t stupid either.

The mare in charge had worked many times on crowd control, so she knew how a mob mentality worked quite well. She recognized that the situation needed firm action, less the ponies she was tasked with evicting were to become uncontrollable –especially with that damned anathema giving them ideas: “Draw blades! Charge!”

Around him Speaker saw with essence sight how the neighborhood watch’s courage faltered, as the mercenaries broke into a galloping charge. Honestly it was easy to understand – even without their battons and clubs the mercenaries had steel-shod hooves and apparently also hoof-mounted switch-blades, while the ponies of Firewander would be lucky if they could afford copper shoes, plus the mercenaries were in good armor.

While disheartening to see those around him flee, Speaker also learned something from the experience: He observed the essence pattern of a rout. Now, while in Lookshyan officer’s training had been basic, then Speaker understood that in a rout it wasn't always just a case of the individual soldier running away because it was afraid: It was a question of tactical analysis. If one didn't think you could win a battle, why not just run away to fight another day? In Lookshy it was taught to only ever commit to a fight if one was sure to win – and then always commit with a force guaranteed to win. It had been by this philosophy that Lookshy had kept the east out of the hooves of the Scarlet Empress for well over seven hundred years… and now Speaker knew how a rout looked essence-wise. With that knowledge it wasn’t difficult to use essence to counter and neutralize that pattern. At that point the only thing needed was to alert the fleeing crowd that it wasn’t scared yet, to push the realization that they weren’t afraid anymore into their consciousness.

A simple shout was enough. In the first age, the dawn caste solar who had first made this realization had been able to stem the routs of armies so vast that they stretched to the horizon in every direction with a mere gesture of the hoof. The neighborhood watch, and the other ponies in the crowd who had been close enough to the front to see what was happening to start running all stopped.

The mercenaries, surprised by this sudden turn of events, halted their advanced. This gave Speaker just enough time to call the neighbor watch ponies back to the front, where they bore witness to Speaker using the essence pattern of the rout once more, but this time offensively.

In the first age this had been called the Mob Dispersing Rebuke. A simple statement or utterance, assisted by essence, that put the same effect as before into the mercenaries, only here a rout wasn’t stopped: It was started. It was almost comical, as the mercenaries stumbled over each to run away. It was strange to see so many soldiers run away without there even having been sounded any kind of signal or call to retreat. Speaker made sure to remember that pattern of essence – it was bound to come in handy later.

The ponies of Brookside cheered as the mercenaries ran off, but Speaker quickly reminded them that even if this blatant attempt at plunder had been foiled, then it didn’’t change the fact that they had all been kicked out of their homes. The mist that suddenly began to spread around their hooves signaled to Speaker that Shimmer and Cash were done – and suddenly Sunrise’s voice boomed out across the roughly two or three thousand ponies that were now out in the main street of Brookside:

“Ponies, listen. The council has issued a civility that basically means that they now own everything we owed here – which means all of Brookside and most of Firewander. Your evictions and is only the first step: Only a small number of you stand a chance of keeping your jobs as is. Some of you have only worked for us and lived here briefly, and some of you have worked for us for months. You all know that we pay and treat you far better than anything you can get elsewhere in Nexus. Come with us and you can continue that life, or stay and accept whatever fate the council of entities and the immaculates have in store for you”

A few minutes later the circle and just over two and half thousand ponies rose into the air, just as reinforcements to the previously routed mercenaries arrived. Using his mob-dispersing charm once more, Speaker ensured that none of their archers were able to harm the circle’s followers as they rose above the rooftops of Nexus and floated east.

It was about ten minutes later when Shimmer had Sunrise announce that the cloud they were all on was now outside of the borders of Nexus, as the cloud had just passed over the thirty-mile markers that encircled the territory around Nexus which the council of entities claimed dominion over. Speaker could tell that many of the ponies were scared, but Sunrise did a stellar job of keeping all the pones calm… and there were so many! It raised the question of what to do with them all.

Shimmer had the obvious solution in mind: “I’m planning on flying us all to Chung Do – all these ponies should be just what that place needs to fill in for those who died from the plague”

“Not an option – Since we arrived in Nexus I’ve heard about at least six prams and cargo ships full of immigrants leaving for Chung Do. That should about four thousand immigrants” Sullen Hoof quickly noted, looking very much as if he was scouting down at the ground for somewhere else to settle all the ponies.

Speaker nodded: “The housing capacity I built up was for a total of eight thousand, and I think Cash said that the post-plague census had the city down to three thousand from eight – we would need to expand the city walls to make room for that many ponies…”

“Moot point – the farmlands around Chung Do can’t support that many extra ponies on this short notice, not three months before the growing season” Shimmer argued, shooting down the idea of resettling the Brookside ponies in Chung Do definitively.

The list of possible places to go instead was a short one. Precariously landing Nah on the cloud, having not come along on the cloud but left for the yeddim stable Nah had been at when the rest of the circle had left Nexus, Cash pointed out their limited options: “Great Forks doesn’t have capacity for this many ponies, but we can probably buy sail cloth and supplies to set up a tent town somewhere. The city with that bragard unicorn mare isn’t big enough either. Honestly, I think our best bet is to simply build a whole new settlement somewhere”

The circle found Cash’s logic difficult to argue against. Shimmer said that she could summon up elementals to bring forth stone from deep underground, and Speaker could make some basic homes fairly quickly with his singing staff. The question was where to put that settlement… because very few places in the hundred kingdoms wasn’t under control of some pony warlord or city state, and few would likely want to just give up territory. Sure, fighting for some territory wouldn’t be that difficult, with Speaker’s new army-routing charm, and Shimmer using her shapeshifting charms to grow into a giant monster – but with several thousand ponies to keep safe, then… what about Denansdor?

“Not possible. The bracelets that kept us safe are still drained of power. They’ll need another high power solar aspected manse to recharge at. We don’t give off enough ambient solar essence for them to do that – and we’ll need them working, plus access to solar circle sorcery to disable the miasma generator” Speaker reminded the circle. They all agreed that going back to Denansdor should be put off until both of those resources were available to them.

Time passed and the sun was setting when Sullen Hoof gazed to the north-west while the cloud flew in the same direction, following the curvature of the yellow river: “Why not just build a manse for the bracelets?”

“Sully, you don’t just build a manse that powerful. Rerouting and shoring up the natural essence flows of hundreds, if not thousands of miles of land to flow into a single point takes a lot of time, even with my singing staff. Just the measurements and surveying alone would probably take a year at least” Speaker in a disappointed tone. He knew that Sullen Hoof’s suggested was honest and well-meant, and it would solve so many problems – but it just wasn’t possible without a potent demesne to build such a manse on.
The rest of the circle all suddenly gave Speaker a funny look.
“What?” Speaker said, looking around at his friends in mild confusion.

Sullen Hoof, the eye-holes in his mask glowing brightly from his vision-enhancing charms, explained: “You were knocked unconscious when we pulled you out of the demesne we left Red and PSV in – you didn’t see what that did to the place”

“Gods… I almost forgot about that. What happened? Did the proto-shinmaic vortex rupture? Is it a wyld zone?” Speaker asked, his voice tinted with a sudden onset of great worry.

A flash of light from Shimmer pulled Speaker’s attention in her direction. She was pointing into the horizon: “Look for yourself”
It was majestic.

In the distance, emerging from the evening mists, a lance of bright light pierced shot up into the heavens. Around it was about three miles of blasted forest, all the trees knocked down and reduced to tooth-pick sized splinters – and in the center was a perfectly conical grass mound. From the tip, amidst grass bleached white from the intense light, shined forth the light that the circle was seeing miles away up in the air.

In essence sight is was even more beautiful. Speaker wept as he beheld the demesne, its essence flows shooting up into the sky along the column of light to form an ethereal after-image of Red, defiant and stoic as ever, her hoof raised towards the heavens.
“I think she did part of the work for you… I have never seen a demesne this powerful and yet so calm and stabile in over a hundred years” Shimmer said slowly, marveling at the sight through her third eye moments later after having shifted into her beast-pony form.

Setting the cloud down in the blasted forest around the newly formed demesne, the circle quickly confirmed that this was no ordinary demesne. Normally a natural conflux of dragon lines pooling together to form a demesne this potent would render everything within miles of the place a mess of saturated essence, mutating all life in the area, like the wood-hoof’d ponies who had lived near the old demesne… but this manse had no such ambient energies. Speaker figured that

Recalling the presence of the wood-hoof’d mutants nearby, Cash said that he would like to take Nah out and scout the area – get some information from the locals on who actually controlled the territory and then fly to Great Forks for supplies: “We’ve got a lot of mouths to feed. Shimmer, I need you to come along to help with elsewhere-storage. Not even Nah can haul enough feed for three thousand ponies”

Shimmer declined, noting that she needed to get to summoning elementals post haste so Speaker could build a permanent settlement.

As Nah disappeared to the south, Sunrise began organizing the ponies into groups of ten. Some were charged with clearing ground around the conical mound to make shelters, other were to gather up piles of shattered wood so fires could be built.

Speaker recalled his old medical bag from elsewhere and rummaged through it, floating out a small notebook. Its last entries were from battlefield triage at Mishaka. It was tempting to rip out those pages, but he kept them in and started taking notes on the essence flows of the demesne. He could remember hundreds of demesnes from the first age, many of which he had later constructed miraculous temples, palaces and factory cathedrals upon – but this kind of demesne… one wrought of sacrifice and a touch of madness? This was new.

The night grew dark and the thousands of ponies were hungry and cold when the low rumble of Nah’s mindless grumbling in the distance signaled Cash’s return. Speaker could only smile and shake his head as Cash unloaded what must have been enough sail-cloth to cover all of Great Forks in a giant circus tent, along with barrels of nails and other construction materials.

“We had hoped that you would be able to get some food – the ponies are getting hungry. Many of them haven’t eaten at all today” Sunrise said to Cash in a disappointed tone. It was clear that she was trying to maintain her usual calm and sanctimonious tone – but having ministered to these ponies for months on end, seeing them rise from the gutters to become productive and happy members of society, had endeared them to her in ways that the ponies of Chung Do had never been able to do, and there were limits to what even one such as Sullen Hoof could cook up with but dirt and broken twigs.

Cash tilted his head to the right and shot the beautiful holy mare a wide grin: “Oh they’re not here yet? Hold on?”

Cash leapt back up on Nah and flared his anima banner: “Forest king Hadar the thrice pine-scented, we had a deal! Deliver!”

From the edge of the blasted clearing, where the trees had finally been able to withstand the explosive rebirth of the demesne, a small tide of lesser spirits and elementals flooded out bearing mushrooms, fresh flowers, fresh shoots, nuts, berries and other produce of the surrounding woodlands. Standing at the forest edge stood a majestic figure wrought of leaves and roots, crowned in a green light and jade: the forest king, the god of the forest.

“Sullen Hoof, I think this is your cue” Speaker spoke out loud, unsure of where the culinarian was, but certain that he was within earshot. Walking up to Cash Speaker congratulated the eclipse caste Solar, and asked exactly what kind of deal Cash had struck with the god to make this happen, since the forest king didn’t exactly look that happy as it glared at them from the edge of the forest.

Cash shrugged and yawned: “I told him the truth. We are settling here. This means we’ll have to clear a lot of the surrounding land for farming and orchards. In fact, tomorrow I want to take you down to the yellow river and then I want you to use your singing staff to dig two wide canals up to this place, so we can connect to the river trade routes. My deal was that we would replant every acre of forest we cut down on the far side of the forest, and I’ve already brokered a deal with the cattle ranchers that used those plains and meadows, buying up that land on the condition that they plant it up with trees before they leave”

“You’ve been busy” Speaker said as he nodded approvingly.

Cash yawned again, but looked quite pleased: “I’ve had enough time to shag three mares, a sexy young colt and two exceedingly randy wood elementals – I had time to spare”

In addition to his sexcapades and forest dealings, Cash also noted that in four of the barrels still lashed to Nah’s sides were seeds for sowing rice, rye and barley. The forest king’s minions were also to supply the settlement with seeds and nuts for planting.

It was then that the ground quaked slightly, and Sunrise acted quickly to calm the thousands of ponies huddled around their campfires. Great pillars of dirty marble and other kinds of stone burst from the ground, though they did so slowly – more like a mole pushing up a mole hill, than a geyser shooting up into the air. Shimmer’s task was done.

Together with his Lunar mate, Speaker and Shimmer quickly worked the sail cloth and made crude tent coverings out of them. They were distributed as quickly as they could be fashioned. Between that, the campfires, and Sullen Hoof making delicious things out of the morsels brought by the forest spirits, the thousands of ponies of Nexus settled in for their first night under new stars, away from the whimsical tyranny of Nexus.

The next morning the circle held a council with the community leaders of the former Brookside ponies. There were many questions the circle had to answer, luckily there also answers ready for most of them, but not all:

For example there an old mare, wrinkly and gaunt, with a face that told of a one probably shouldn’t ask questions about and a mane looked as if it had given up long ago, who asked: “Now that we’re not in Brookside anymore – what do we call ourselves?”

Shimmer suggested that the ponies themselves figured that out. They could come up with suggestions and then narrow them down to a list, with the ‘council’ – meaning the circle and the community leaders currently present – then choosing from that list. The old mare seemed apprehensive, wishing for the circle to take charge more, but Cash argued against that: “Look, I am well aware that many of you are still frightened. You’re in unfamiliar surroundings, you’re uncertain of the future, so you look to us for decisive action to guide you. Trust me, we’ll be doing plenty of that, but at the same time we want you to be able to manage and govern yourselves as much as possible. We won’t be here all the time, for a lot of other places in Creation will need our guidance and help – and one of the best ways to ensure that you all feel responsible and proud of your new home, is having everyone get a say in naming it”
All the mortal ponies present agreed that this sounded quite reasonable. Speaker wasn’t sure what Cash’s deal was – but his lie detection charm hadn’t gone off, so it had all apparently been legit sentiments.

Of other topics the council covered was the issue of future food production, which Cash’s deal with the forest god cleared up fairly quickly, both for short and long term. Being this far to the east the growth rate of almost any plant was so fast that from planting a grain of rice to having a harvestable rice plant you didn’t need much more than a single month. The eastern growing season was one of near constant planting and harvesting – on the blessed isle this was almost a constant affair.

Another topic was what the circle planned to do with the manse. To this Speaker introduced the council to his preliminary ideas on what kind of manse he wanted to build: A hospital worthy of the first age – with office space for the city’s administration.
“That… sounds expensive” Cash noted.

Speaker agreed, noting that when Lookshy would mobilize workers and resources for manse construction it often involved large amounts of costly jade, four to five hundred highly trained laborerers, and sorcerer engineers who could take decades to educate: “….but we have all that already, plus with my singing staff the basic structure can be done in days instead of years, so this will be done in a few weeks”

With Speaker’s ambitious plans, the council seemed certain that this new community would do well. Only Cash was worried since Speaker insisted that the hospital remain free for ponies to receive services from… but Sullen Hoof noted that they could still charge outrageous sums for ‘housecalls’, only instead of Nexus merchant princes it’d be warlords and actual princes. Speaker agreed to this, adding that they could impose taxes on merchants who’d want to sell medicines to the hospital. Cash found this idea somewhat amusing, correcting Speaker: “I think the word you’re looking for is import tariffs and medicine vendor licenses – but ya, though I doubt they’ll cover for the actual prices of the medicine they’ll want to sell…”

Sunrise cleared her throat, having remained largely silent throughout the meeting: “We will need a revenue stream to fund the hospital. Taxation won’t cover this alone, at least not to begin with. We need something to export. What about making room in the hospital for training new doctors? We could charge for doctoral degrees”

“Still won’t be enough” Cash said, doing some quick number-crunching on the fly: “The amount of money I was spending weekly funding the hospital we…. Wait – what are we even talking about? Why not just send Speaker down to that tomb manse of his and have him shape up a fortune in silver and gold?”

That was an option nobody had considered.

“Won’t doing that eventually devalue the wealth Speaker could conjure up?” Sunrise asked.

Cash waggled a hoof at Sunrise: “No it will not. Hell, in Nexus there’s usually a new scavenger lord turning up two or three times a month after having cracked open some first age resource cache with a fortune in magical materials or other things. All we need is to have a guild assayer swing by and verify the metal purity of our coin, then we’re golden. We can just say we have some first age stash of the stuff”

Thus it came to be that Speaker spent the next week using his singing staff to first raise several stone apartment buildings for all the ponies to live in, as well as most of the manse. The layout of the apartment buildings, with the manse in the middle, made for a giant three-mile in diameter sunburst, for Speaker built the whole deal using a geomantic pattern in the same way he had rebuilt Chung Do, only this time it was a different geomantic pattern: It ensured that it was impossible to fatally screw up a medical procedure within the city. From putting on a simple bandage, to performing any kind of surgery, it would be impossible to botch the action – though making non-critical errors was still an option. During this time Speaker also learned to do a proper jumping charm from Sullen Hoof, a handy ability as Speaker had to scale the increasing tall manse structure often.

With most of the manse done in absolute record time, the only parts that were missing required materials that simply were not present. Speaker needed a lot of gemstones and amber for the control center of the manse, along with a large amount of gold and other precious metals to make the proper essence-conducting inlays and relays that would effectuate most of the manse’s powers. Most of these things Speaker could shape into existence at the Soulforge, though Cash was also itching for some on-hoof money so he could do some shopping in Great Forks for medicine and general advertising for the hospital. It also turned out that Cash needed money to officially purchase the land that the by now half-finished manse was on from that strange changeling that had originally sent them to the old demesne – though Cash was able to close that deal surprisingly easily.

As Speaker and Cash returned to Sunhill, as the ponies there had finally agreed upon calling the place, with Nah laden with freshly shaped gold ingots, silver by the talents and raw and uncut gemstones the size of melons a few days after setting out, they were greeted with a very different place than what they had left.

The ponies of Sunhill, under Sunrise, Sullen Hoof and Shimmer’s guidance, had begun clearing the forests around the place, the massive bitemarks on some of the logs and uprooted stumps hinting that some lunar shapeshifting might have been involved, as a first step towards establishing farmland. This led Speaker and Cash to make that canal Cash had talked about, since they would need irrigation for the farmland no matter what – and Cash was eerily deft at getting permission for Speaker to make the two parallel canals in every territory they passed through, mostly because Cash assured everyone concerned that Speaker could build a bridge over the canals wherever needed. This amounted to about eighteen stone bridges total.

Finally back on manse-construction, Speaker and Shimmer were helped by the roughly sixty ponies that Speaker had trained back in Nexus to craft and maintain delicate surgical tools and instruments, in making the gold inlays and finely cut gems needed to finish the manse. This final leg of the manse construction process took well over a month, as it involved lot of finicky fiddling around with very complicated and sensitive essence arrays made of sapphires and red jade. When finally finished the first crop from the surrounding fields was almost ready to be harvested, which made for a wonderful backdrop when the emissaries from Great Forks and Nexus arrived participate in the official opening of the grand Sunhill Hospital, with its magnificent white marble, gold and red jade state of Red standing at its top – its hoof raised to the heavens with a beam of white light emitting from it so bright that it was visible in the daylight.

The emissaries from Great Forks looked very impressed, the multi-tiered circular ziggurat shape of the hospital making the whole thing look like a giant temple, especially with the statue on top. They assured the circle that there would be medicine merchants arriving shortly to help stock and supply the facility, for it seemed that the circle’s hospital in Nexus had been known to them – so they seemed to know what kind of services their new neighbor was going to offer.

The lone representative from Nexus was less enthusiastic. Indeed, the old stallion in his fine green robes seemed more interested in having his assistant take notes that he dictated in guild cant – and looked positively offended when Cash revealed that he spoke the secret trade language, when Cash openly informed the circle that the Nexus rep was appraising the manse and its component’s resale value.

“Good sir, I’m certain that if you’re that interested in buying our services we can quickly come to an agreement – no need that kind of behavior” Sunrise said calmly.

The old stallion merely sneered at Sunrise and went about having his assistant jot down more notes.

“I see… should have foreseen that the council would be angry with our escape, but this is a bit much…” Cash mused as he observed the old stallion.

With music and fanfare all around them, the Sunhill ponies celebrating their new home and work place, Speaker found it difficult to get away Shimmer’s insistant attempts at getting him to join her in dance – but right now he was more worried about what Nexus was up to and what Cash meant.

At the massive buffet table, where Sullen Hoof had truly outdone himself in making absolutely sinful morsels using berry juice, nut-pastes and plant starches, Speaker finally caught up with Cash who seemed somewhat amused: “What is that Nexus rep up to? He’s been going around looking like he owns the place all day?”

“Don’t worry. It’s the council of entities trying to send us a message, and failing. They’re pissed that we ran off with the hospital staff you trained. They had expected to be able to auction off the Sun and Moon hospital, with employees and all, to new owners for a hefty profit. We left them with nothing and then some. This joker is meant to present us with a bill for all the damages the remaining rampaging changelings did after we ‘fixed’ Firewander” Cash mused, looking strangely pleased and not at all worried.

Speaker knew well of stories of how pissing off the guild or Nexus could mean armies of mercenaries bearing down on ornery warlords or bandit kings who got too greedy. This only made Cash’s behavior even more confusing: “But even if we refuse to pay – what’s to stop them from sending mercenaries to raid us, to recoup their losses?”

“Sullen Hoof snuck in and took a copy of the bill and we had a look at it hours ago… they’re basically demanding that we enter into indentured servitude for an eternity to work off our ‘debt’ – this has nothing to do with the damage the changelings did. It’s a ploy to force us to work for them for free, because they’ve finally recognized the kind of miracles we can work. They know well enough from Chung Do and our fighting with the changelings in Firewander that no mercenary force they can send to Sunhill will ever do anything more than never come back and likely join us as a security force after me and Sunrise throw the right charms at them” Cash said with no small amount of confidence.

“It’s good to hear that you’ve all recovered from Red’s untimely demise and moved on like this” a familiar voice suddenly spoke out from across the buffet table. It was that dark-brown coated chosen of secrets sidereal, Heath Rose.

Speaker drew a deep breath and was about to say something when Shimmer appeared next to Heath Rose: “Oh you again – long time no see. I’d been so worried that we weren’t useful to you anymore and that you’d just discarded us…” she said, her tone unmistakably hostile and a reasonable amount of drunk at the same time.

Cash quickly seized the moment of speak before Shimmer could finish drawing breath: “I think what our lunar friend means is that we haven’t heard from you in a while. What brings you here?”

“Aside from admiring your record breaking manse construction time?” Heath Rose mused, beholding the grand arches covered in white marble. Speaker had gone to great lengths to have the load-bearing structure be made of sturdy and solid granite, while almost every wall and ceiling surface was covered in various colors of mirror-polished marble. The floors were covered in locally sourced hardwoods, and the manse itself provided essence lighting that automatically turned on when a pony would enter a room.
Speaker and Cash remained silent, waiting for the sidereal to get to her point.

Seeing that she expected to talk, Heath Rose quickly ate two of Sullen Hoof’s delicious berry and nut creations, then bluntly stated: “The largest wyld hunt in over seven hundred years just left the Pinnacle of the Eye of the Hunt. They’re going down the river of tears to the Avarice river, then they’ll go over land towards Chung Do. Their plan is to cleanse it of all anathema influence and taint”

All in earshot fell silent for a moment before Shimmer spoke: “They’re going to kill everyone…”