Chapters Author's Note
This is going to be my first actual serious attempt at creating a fan fiction piece for MLP. With that said, there will be some disclaimers. This work is not an attempt to theorize about the origins of Equestria in the canonical version. This is set in an alternative universe which takes a look at what happens if you crossed the universes of Dark Souls and My Little Pony: FIM together. So please do not criticize this piece for being incorrect about the source material as certain creative liberties will be taken. That being said, feel free to criticize everything about this. I would like to improve as a writer and sadly the only way is through the bitter way XD.
Prelude
Listen my child, listen to the tale of how our world was formed…
In the beginning, when the world was young, there existed a primeval mist that slumbered on all of existence.
Heat…Warmth…Light…
All was smothered by the unrelenting stillness of this primeval mist. A stillness that dreamt of eternal Winter…
Of Eternal peace…
And deep within this stillness, there existed the immortal Wendigos, spirits of frost that ruled the width and breadth of the World’s domain.
They rested on thrones of tranquility, on the overlooking precipice that dreamt of tomorrow and today as one, and ensured that the World continued to slumber.
But then, from the empty blanket of the primeval mist, there came Fire.
With Fire came Chaos.
They arose in the midst of the Fire, each gazing out into the frozen World and determined to claim it as theirs.
From the burning Destruction of the Fire, came the mighty Dragons, whose thirst for war knew no bounds.
From the boundary drawn by the Light of Fire and the Flickering Shadows, came the Draconequus who gazed into the brink of Chaos, never truly belonging to the Light or the Shadows.
And finally from the Heat of the Fire, came the youthful Alicorn and her faithful Equestrian servants, whose unwavering loyalty was only matched by the Alicorn’s compassion and grace.
They marched forth into the winter and with the strength of Lords, challenged the everlasting Wendigos for the dominion of the World.
The Draconequus, with the power of Chaos, stripped the Wendigos of their immortality and cursed them to be forever bound to the fabric of the World.
The Dragons, with their breath of hatred, scorched the world with great firestorms and burned the true bodies of the Wendigos until nothing but ash remained.
And the Alicorn and her servants, with the warmth from the strength and perseverance forged from their bonds, banished the spirits of the Wendigos and with that, the Wendigos were no more. With their passing, the primeval mist parted and the World was claimed by the new Lords.
Thus, the Age of Ice passed and the Age of Fire was ushered into the new land.
But although the Wendigos passed on from this World, their echoes still resonate through the veils of their exile and they whisper of the terrible fate they shall bring with their return
For time shall pass and the fires will fade
Even now, there are only embers of the mighty kingdom that once ruled the land
Ponies know not the light and warmth of friendship, but the never-ending howl of the bitter cold.
Among the living ponies, there are those who bear the Accursed Icebite,
These are the Accursed and the Afflicted
But in this land, the Accursed are corralled into the South, to be imprisoned in an asylum until the end of days. For this…this is the fate of the Accursed Icebitten.
The winter shall pass but as the ice settles on the fading embers, a young Afflicted stirs in his prison...
In a forgotten prison, a lone stallion huddled to himself in his cell as the cries of the imprisoned rang out in an infinite cacophony of misery and despair.
Sometimes, he wanted to join them in their lament.
Sometimes, he did.
In those rare moments where he did, a soothing calm overtook him as he felt himself disintegrate into the sea of lost souls, to become nothing more than a forgotten note in a hurricane of screams. But those words of lore always seeped its way into his conscious and jolted him back into the real world.
The real world...
The stallion shifted his gaze upward.
Nothing but rough hewed stone...
The stallion shifted his gaze through the barred door to this cell.
Nothing to see there as well. The torches had gone out a long time ago, and all he could see was a dark corridor that seemed to him like a gaping hole that swallowed all that entered. In fact, the prison guards seemed to have disappeared as well as the stallion could not remember the last time he ever saw them. The only thing that ever came out was the constant shrieking of his fellow prisoners and it seemed to him that they would never tire of it.
The stallion shifted his gaze behind him, and tried to peer through the only window in his cell. Try as he might, the window was too small and too high up to see anything useful out there, but when Celestia raised the sun, a slim beam of sunlight shined down into his cell. Sometimes, he would stare at that spot where the sun shone for countless hours until the sun set and the moon rose.
And then another day would have passed on by...
Sitting in the same exact spot, looking at the same exact spot, sleeping in the same damned spot time after time after time...
Sometimes, to break the boredom, he would try to imagine what he used to look like. He had a faint image of what he was like, but he was never quite sure if those visions he had were real or merely illusions.
So much time had passed by...
He would examine every inch of his shriveled, decaying body, trying to decipher what secrets of his past life they held from him. The secrets eluded him every time. He would place a hoof on his forehead and feel a horn from it. A small victory for him: he was a unicorn. A small, but hollow victory.
In each of his examinations, his eyes would always trace to the place where his Cutie mark used to be. Instead of his beloved Cutie Mark, a black, shifting hole sat in its place. He tried to remember what his Cutie Mark was but in the end, he never did. All he remembered was that the day that dark mark appeared on him, he was cast into this prison. He felt a certain coldness seep into his heart. At first, it was a tolerable cold, but there came a day when he touched himself only to find that he was cold throughout. And then the decay began to set in...
His name, his name...
What was his name?
It always seemed at the tip of his tongue, ready to take flight, but always slipping out and slithering its way back into the depths of amnesia. He tried recalling his mother, father or anyone that he used to know, but like his name, they slithered their way into the recesses of his memory. The words of lore, however, kept working its way into his memory and sometimes he could swear that the voice that spoke them was his mother. But the words would disappear like into the wind and once again, he was left with nothing.
This was usually the point where he started to feel hopeless and that damned chorus of the damned would pick up and he would feel chiming in and once again the words of lore would intrude again and once again the cycle would begin and it would never end...
Another day has passed. And another has passed.
On one particular day however, something special happened. The stallion was staring into the spot where the sun shone as usual, when he felt a great tremor shudder through the walls of his prison. The ceiling caved in unexpectedly on the spot where the sun shone, and a decaying pony fell through with the stones of the ceiling. The pony seemed lifeless. The stallion looked up to the hole in his ceiling, and was astonished to see the pale blue sky for the first time in what seemed like forever. An armored unicorn glanced down at him from the ceiling and with a short curt glance, rode off.
The stallion turned to the body illuminated by the sunlight pouring in from the hole.
There was a key on the body.
For the first time, the stallion thought he could feel the cold blood in his heart begin to move. He held his breathe. With his magic, he lifted the key from the corpse and inserted it into the keyhole of his prison door.
The door clicked and swung open.
The stallion took a step forward through the prison door, and looked into the dark corridor. He looked back at the spot where the sun shone. He turned his back and stepped into the darkness.
Because for the first time, he was free.
Chapter 2- Yesterday's Walk
The stallion stumbled into the corridor. The weakness in his legs seemed to betray him at every single possible moment. After all, it had been a long time he had trotted along. He could still hear the rattling and depraved howls that shook the bars of the imprisoned and thought about letting them out, but he decided to push on. Though he could not see their faces, the darkness framed the bloodlust that drowned their hearts.
In the midst of the darkness, he fell.
He tried to see what he tripped over and in that moment, the darkness allowed him a dim silhouette. It was huddled to itself on the cold ground making short sporadic spasms. It seemed like a pony. He tried speaking to it. It only sobbed in response. He tried petting it, but it flinched at his touch and shambled away. He tried to see where the pony stumbled of to, but the darkness was too thick.
He walked on forward.
He walked into a wall, made a right turn, and saw a light at the end of the corridor. His slow walk turned into a brisk trot, and the brisk trot gradually turned into a full gallop. Oddly enough, as he galloped forward, he began to hum a little melody that he once heard when he was a foal. He felt the years slowly melt from him and in that moment, he was young again. He remembered the smiles, the songs, the sweet, sweet apple cider...
He heard the shrill cry of the gulls above him and with a rattling laugh, he cried, "Aaaaaahhh! Aaaaaaahhhh! Aaaaaah!" with tears streaming down his face. Confetti exploded in his face. He was eighteen again and was back at home with his friends and family. He was at his birthday party and a pretty pink mare hopped around singing to him some archaic birthday song while cartwheeling around. Her name, her name, what was her name? He tried to look around and ask his friends and family, but their faces, their faces...
What happened to their faces? He tried to reach out to them, but they melted away into the sand. Only the pink mare was left and she was still belting out that song. He tried to reach out for her too, but he suddenly felt a sharp hit to his face and he opened his eyes.
He was back at the prison. He looked behind him. The rotten splinters of the barrels that he so unceremoniously crashed through seemed to be making a rude gesture at him. He looked forward. He could not longer hear the gulls or remember whatever he was doing previously. What was he thinking of before? It seemed really important... He felt his cheeks. Tears? Was he crying?
He stopped to think, but all he felt was weight of the dark mark on his rump. It felt so alien and intrusive, and for some reason, he felt that it took something from him. He just wasn't sure what.
He looked outside. He was on a balcony that overlooked a garden that had died long ago. In front of him, there was a giant door that loomed in front of him. At that door's steps, were some ponies that seemed to be dressed in guard's armor. Or rather what was left of it. He counted three of them as they shambled about aimlessly.
He looked around, the giant door seemed like the only path available. All the other doorways on the balcony he was on seemed to lead on to nothing more than cesspools of despair. He trotted is way down the stairs and into the garden, and cautiously approached the guards.
They stopped and stared at him. He stared back.
He saw rotting faces whose putrid flesh just seemed to barely hang on to the skull. Accompanied by the putrid flesh, were milky, white orbs that the stallion supposed were once eyes. Whatever color their fur coats had faded away with time. None of them had horns or wings, but all of them had that same damned mark on the places where their Cutie marks used to be. That same mark that he had...
They stared at him eerily.
He stared back. He slowly began to shy away from them until he stepped on a dried out husk of a flower. The flower crumpled, and as the flower disintegrated, the guards violently twisted their heads, making a sickening snapping sound, and charged at the stallion with nothing but glazed stares and open jaws.
Chapter 3 - Violent Hearts
The stallion stood in his place as the Afflicted guards lunged their way towards him. All he could think of was the eerie way the jawbone just seemed to hang on to that few minuscule strands of decayed flesh...
He tried to warn his body to move; he tried to rile it up to react to the violence. But somewhere in that nebulous connection between mind and flesh, the thought fizzled and died. His eyes dilated with fear as the first guard was upon him...
"Flesh is so delicate," his mind thought absentmindedly as the Afflicted guard sank its teeth through the tendons and sinews of the stallion's throat and ripping loose.
In a split second of the mind, his lethargic thoughts were serrated with savage bursts of red, and somewhere in the far distance, he heard a bestial roar that sounded, oddly enough, quite a lot like him.
He felt like he was being torn apart, based on the sudden jerks that felt on all about, and his mind kept on going in circles about that happy spot of sun that he used to look at constantly in his prison cell which always got punctured by that fucking burst of red and he felt mad because they were tearing him apart or was he mad because the red punctured the sun or it just didn't matter at all he was angry, mad, enraged, savaged, saddened, scared, feared, and thoughts thoughts thoughts just trying to overwhelm him and he thought he was going crazy and and and and
Then he found a crack.
In the chaotic maelstrom that formed his mind, he felt a slight bulge in his consciousness. He saw a strange, archaic rune blocking his path and tried to push through it. It offered more resistance than he thought. He took his horn and stabbed the rune a little bit harder. A little crack tinkled in the abyss. He pushed and pushed and pushed through with a desperation that surprised even him and finally he broke through!
He looked around in the receding haze of red that dotted his vision. The garden...he was back at the garden. His horn felt like it was burning and when he tried to find the Afflicted guards, he only saw charred piles of flesh that didn't resemble anything pony-like.
He looked down at the ground. It was scorched beyond belief. He placed a hoof over the bite mark on his neck. The blood languishingly flowed with a dark, thick, viscous texture and he supposed that there was a time, before the accursed mark replaced his Cutie Mark, where it might have spurted out with bright, intense passion. It might have killed him once. But his blood was cold to the touch, and though he winced as he rubbed his wound, he began to feel the bleeding stop already.
He looked above. The sky seemed to spin around in circles, but he was certain that it was becoming dark. He felt dizzy and wanted to rest, but he had a strange feeling in the pits of his stomach that he had to move forward. That he couldn't let the darkness overtake him.
He looked at the giant door in front of him. The door seemed to loom over him with the rotten timbers that formed its skeleton and was trepidatious to its sight. But the darkness was more ominous.
So the stallion walked to the giant door that was once guarded by the three Afflicted and tried to shove through it. To his surprise, the door relented easily to his push and he walked past the door.
