To whoever finds this:
You may not believe me, but my name is Black Amethyst. Not quite as foreboding as you would think? You probably thought it was Black Death or something. Of all the things I’ve heard, Black Plague seems to make the most sense without context. My cutie mark may surprise you as well, but that’s less likely now that you know my name. Gems. Digging gems, cutting gems, shaping gems, fitting gems, anything with gems. I once made this epic life size pony statue by melting a lot of rubies and lapis lazuli into a really big bolder and just shaved the rest away. Never could do that with marble though.
I know what you’re thinking by now. How could this monster of a pony sound so, dare you say, decent? I know, but if you were having any doubts, trust me, I’m not anything close to living anymore, so how can I possibly be as good and wholesome as a pony? If you’re thinking some weird idea along the lines of that one saying that if a pony knows they’re crazy, they can’t be crazy, but with evil-ness, just take my word for it. You’ll be convinced soon enough if you don’t.
If this thing ever comes into the hands of something that can read, know this, I wasn’t always how I am now, and how history likely portrays me. I use to be an honest working pony. I swear it’s true. Although, my word isn’t quite worth much by now is it?
Even if it isn’t believed or even seen by literally anypony, at least I can tell my story to myself. Or rather, write it.
I use to have a good life. I’ve looked at that life as snobby, ignorant, blissful, insignificant, lucky, naive, and most often as just plain awesome. I use to be a pony like how you probably are. I use to have a job. I use to have friends.
Back then, when ponies saw me as part of their species, I had a black mane and tail with silver streaked through them. It use to be all done up in curls and, on some particularly vain days, ribbons. I had dark, violet eyes, seen by some as off putting and by others as an enviable quality they’d pay tons of bits to have for themselves. I still have those eyes, at least. Well, most of them. I had pitch black fur that I’d give my right foreleg to have back again. I had actual hooves, harder than most from my work with those pretty looking rocks ponies gave me bits for. I had actual bits and spent them at actual stores. That’s worth a lot more to you when you wake up one day and realize you haven’t spent a bit in over a year. Jeez, I sound like I’m trying to earn your pity. I wouldn’t ask for something I’m hopelessly doomed to never have.
I wasn’t a particularly smart unicorn, but I had enough savoir faire to get me by. I wasn’t cruel or black hearted, or at least, I hadn’t killed anyone. I hadn’t stolen a thing in my time on Celestia’s sun covered world, let alone a life.
Don’t tell her I said that, she might come up with the idea she was right about there being hope for me. Now she’ll probably be the one to drop the metaphorical ax. By sending me to the sun’s center. That’s probably the most merciful way to kill me, if it works, otherwise it’ll be the worst of tortures. But come on, what’s the chance of me living after that?
…
So I had a life. An ordinary unicorn’s life as a gem jack of all trades. It was great, I enjoyed it. It wasn’t in Equestria, in case you were worried your nation was the home of the greatest cataclysm of the millenia. The first push that sent me down the hill was when I found out about necromancy. I discovered the magic in the very tundra I am writing this. Perhaps another will find this book the same way I found out about necromancy and become the new cancer of the world.
I didn’t find anything as cliche as a book, if that’s what you’re thinking, I didn’t have it that easy.
It wasn’t a tundra back in the day. It use to be a pine forest. It died out a long time ago thanks to the plague; zombie trees can’t reproduce, and regular trees can’t fight back, as I’m sure the people with the job that involved patrolling the border and killing any biological life what so ever that got across in either direction can verify. I found myself in the middle of this pine forest. How did this happen you ask? Well, the answer is one that embarrasses me by showing how utterly idiotic I once was.
One day, I woke up from a nightmare. Being one of the scarier types of nightmares, I can’t quite recall what was in it, but it was on the same level of scary-ness as the kind where zombie ponies are chasing after you and you get to a dead end then they kill you, but unfortunately for your scared shitless head, you stand up with half your innards dragging behind you without you telling your body to do so, and you start chasing your best friend as you play the role the zombies in the beginning of your dream played. Half of you understand the level of scared I was.
I didn’t want to go back to sleep, obviously. I woke up in a cold sweat and a freakishly fast heartbeat. Getting up from bed I thought that the best I could do would be to make myself useful by working.
So that’s how I got into the middle of a pine forest looking for gems.
Anyway, I’m out in the forest in the middle of the night. That by itself was creepy alone, I was scared timberwolves might show up, despite them being native to the opposite side of the world. Then it happened. The point that lead to my rise to power and ultimate defeat. I found a skeleton.
That’s all that happened. Blame the skeleton for half the world falling into a monster’s grasp. Blame the skeleton for the rise of the dark ages. Blame the skeleton for the extinction of countless species across the eastern continent. Blame the skeleton for the plague. Blame the skeleton for me.
Before I came around, there were other necromancers. There will be other necromancers after I’m around, and there were other necromancers while I was around. This particular skeleton that lead to your near downfall was one such necromancer’s construct. I didn’t know that at the time, all I knew was holy shit spawning tartarus a skeleton is right there! You can imagine how freaked out I was. Skeletons belong in the ground, and if they're in the middle of the forest, it's logical to assume something killed it. Under the state of being freaked out, I charged my horn, you know, in case the skeleton would jump up at me. If I had known what I know now, I might have been rightly concerned.
If you happen to be of magical descent, skip this paragraph. I’m only putting this here to cover the possibility that this isn’t found until hundreds of thousands of years from now. In case for some reason you’re a non-magical being with absolutely no knowledge of the arcane, let me give you the kindergarten basics of magic. In the world we live in, there are an unknown number of dimensions. What we do know is that there are at least five. Three spacial dimensions, one time dimension, and one magical dimension. To imagine the magical dimension is to imagine an alternative way of looking at our current version of the world, but an infinite number of those alternative ways of looking. Like, if you were a triangle on an infinite sheet of paper. You could see three d as an alternative way of looking at that piece of infinitely long piece of paper, but three d actually involves more than that one piece of paper, and you could fit infinite pieces of ridiculously huge pieces of paper in the universe, as long as they were still flat. Thats like magic, but just not in the sense of where places are. This is kindergarten basics, remember, so imagine the complexity of all this were increased by an order of magnitude, and you might be able to understand why blank faces are all unicorns get when we try to spread the ability to use magic. Technically, anything could use magic, but unicorns are inherently able to envision the magical dimension whenever we light our horns, so if we spend all our lives at the task, we can manipulate it somewhat.
Now, when a unicorn lights their horn, they’re envisioning the magical plane of reality. When I lit my horn, I could “see” the cocaine addled world of magic. That’s when I saw that the skeleton was different. It was covered in something I’d never seen before, it was threatening, it was promising, it was powerful. That, my friends, is black magic.
Black magic isn’t all bad, it can be used for good, it all depends on the wielder of the knife, right? Bull. Black magic is corrupting, it’s lying, it’s wrong. Black magic makes you use it. It makes you use it for everything. It makes you use it on everything you hold dear, promising to make the world a better place. It makes you use it on everything you hold dear, and everything you don’t, promising to rain hellfire on the unjust. It makes you use it, because it promises the power to do anything you want, from revenge to charity to forgiveness to greed to life to death. Then it corrupts you and it darkens your soul. It makes you use it the way it wants to be used. Don’t be deceived by the lies of the ignorant, black magic is evil.
I’m not making excuses here. I didn’t fall for the trap as I’ve seen others do. I’m just telling you, what I was doing was using evil for whatever I wanted. It just so happened that what I wanted was very detrimental to you.
I was cautious of course, I knew about black magic. Most others aren’t as lucky. Like a disease, the place where I had lived was prone to it, but earned immunity. Other places are lucky to not have experienced the worst of the magic, but they were vulnerable... Those places have grown immune now. Being the wary mare I was, I ran. I was already creeped out by the actual skeleton, but a skeleton imbued with black magic isn’t something you stick around to see. Others see black magic as enticing, and those are the ones who have lost themselves in it.
I went back to my day to day life. I talked to my friends, I cut and fashioned gemstones, I lived life, but I had a growing tick in my head. Everyday I grew more curious and less cautious. One day, in the middle of the street, I threw my head in the air, and said out loud “Screw it,” and ran back through the forest. I didn’t actually get to the skeleton that day. It took many a trek to find it again. Once I did, I didn’t touch it with my magic, but I did carry about three bones back to my house.
I still saw the danger, however. I didn’t touch the stuff as far as magic went. I looked at it from every angle I could think of. One time, I just threw it at a wall. Not because I was angry or anything, just to see if it would do anything. I tried everything that didn’t involve me touching any magic.
That didn’t work out.
So, being the type of pony who loves herself some good old fashioned grit work, I went for it. I levitated the bone first. Nothing really. Well, shit, as they say. I wasn’t really sure where to go from there. I could touch the stuff with my horn, but I wasn’t on a suicide mission. I thought about it for days before finally figuring it out.
…
What, you thought I was going to tell you how to use black magic? No way in tartarus, boyo. I wish someone had smacked some sense into me when I first started trying to figure it out, I’m not going to just ruin someone’s life for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I may be evil, but I had reasons for doing what I did.
Well, with that breakthrough, I opened the floodgates. Then I hurriedly shut them again. Then I slowly creaked it open till only a creek’s worth could get through. That’s the best I can really describe how I started learning black magic without telling you any details.
So I did that. I kept up the facade of my previous life, but in truth I was obsessed. I didn’t act desperately, but I did act every action in purpose of learning. I became a regular closet nerd. A regular closet black magic nerd, but a closet nerd none the less.
I started to specialize in necromancy. It was the only real material I had to go on, so it makes sense. Eventually, I got fairly, moderately okay as far as the necromantic community is concerned. Yes, the black necromancer was at one point mediocre at her job, I know, laugh it up, but it’s true. We all were beginners at our jobs at one point or another, weren’t we?
That was about the time were I really started delving in. I could hold together about four skeletons at the same time by then, and I started to get the idea to use them. I mean, why not? There are so many things all around me, and if I really wanted to, I could just take them. I had the power, I had the courage, I had the know-how, I could do it. I did do it. Temptation is a cruel cruel mistress, sister, believe it. First I just swiped something from someone when they weren’t looking. It didn’t even involve magic, I just grabbed it and walked away. Then I started to lie about anything I didn’t want people to know about, which was a lot more than I first thought it was. I started becoming a recluse. I found other ponies troublesome and annoying. They were fickle and gullible, easy to manipulate and naive. I started to actually mug people with disguised skeletons. Those who fought back couldn’t even hurt my new minions. I was amazed at how much I started to accumulate. I became the wealthiest pony on my block, then my street, then the district, settling at the city. I don’t even remember the first time I ordered one of my skeletons to kill a pony. All the while I grew in terms of ability. I could easily keep up twenty skeletons at a time.
One of the few things I ever really enjoyed by then was my apprentice. Just this little orphan I found on the street. When I saw him, I realized the potential he had. I mean, his name was Gruesome Death, no joke. I brought him with me everywhere I went. I found it amazing how fast he learned, it took me years to do what he found out in a month with my help. I set restrictions of course. Betrayal, corruption, and disharmony is how an empire falls. I learned quite a bit from teaching him too. He started acting like a little mini me, it was adorable. He wore a black robe all the time and spoke in a low whisper. You may think that would be creepy, but he pulled it off.
He died in his sleep. Witch hunters found him. I have had several apprentices throughout my existence, at times multiple ones at the same time, but none of them had the lost potential he did.
At some point, I started seeing things as a bigger picture and I think that point was when he died. At first it was control of the underworld of the city, then it was corrupting the government, then I started going nation wide. Being the local power, I had managed to get a few actual books on necromancy. Then I realized how small time I was thinking. I should be the leader of the nation, not the city. I knew I couldn’t manage the politics of the game, but if I wanted to, I could overpower the players. I needed a way to amass an army for that, though.
It took me awhile, but I managed a way to start a zombie outbreak in every town and city of my nation at the exact same time. The problem with zombies is usually that they’ve got too little stamina to spread out quickly, and without food, they die quickly. That’s what history and the endless hours of research told me. I managed to be different. I took over the nation, and filled it with zombies. You might have heard the story, but it happened far before you were born. What I found out was that zombies scare most everything, so everything tried to kill them. All of the surrounding nations rallied together to stop the scourge.
That was plan and fail number one. My cover was blown, I became a known necromancer, or at least my face did. So I ran. I took what few zombies survived the slaughter and the fifty skeletons I had up and running and ran to the arctic. Pretty far up into the frozen wastelands, I created my own little black gem castle. Personally, I thought it looked cool. I had a lot of magical ability, what with decades of growing power, so I managed it. I don’t know what’s happened to it now, I think Celestia’s made her own little colony. She couldn’t have kept it black. Oh my God, she made it pink didn’t she? That little bitch! She made my freaking castle of epicness pink! That … just … GAH! Okay, deep breath, and forward.
I stayed there for a good long while. All the zombies froze over, but my skeleton army grew and grew. I had a huge draw back when I died though. I came back as a lich, freaked the heck out of me, that did. Most of my magical power left me, but I got a huge boost with my skeletons. I got about a hundred more, and all of them were better fighters. A bunch of adventurers thought that they could come up and just end my existence, so I had a bit of entertainment here and there. I once did this thing where I pretended they didn’t exist. I got all of my skeletons to just avoid them, and they just walked up to me monologuing while I looked sleepily past them. Eventually they realized that I was ignoring them and started yelling at me. At some point, they just walked up to me and stabbed me. Repeatedly. I got a good chuckle after that, I didn’t even kill them. I just sent them out of my castle without their clothes and locked them out. That was even funnier while they writhed in the sub zero temperatures.
I may be repentant, but I can still chuckle a bit at other’s pain.
All in all, it was boring. I studied necromancy, finding ways to grow my army, and planned for trial two. I speak from experience when I say that immortality doesn’t suck, it isn’t sad or depressing, it is simply boring. Boring may suck to you, but it’s not as bad as people try to make it out to be once you get use to it. Anything you could do you’ve already done, if you keep yourself within your own boundaries. If you leave them, you go crazy. I stayed in my epic castle because outside the castle was wasteland, and outside the wasteland, ponies would seriously annoy me, so I stayed where I was. Again, mind-numbingly boring.
So, after a decade or two, I came up with a fail-safe plan. Start with an island. Go small, then transport the army from island to island so nopony could fight against us but the island inhabitants. Once I had a fairly decent sized army, I’d spread it out across the coast, using hit and run to further the size of the horde. I’d keep that up until I had enough to take over the continent, and by then I’d be set.
It had actually worked pretty well. The plan went smoothly up until the continent invasion part. The reason my first plan worked up to the death of a nation was because I had infected literally every city. I can’t do that with a continent, that’d be ridicules. I transport my army by marching and me teleporting mass amounts of the horde. I can’t make that many small teleports across such a vast area. I can’t now, and I couldn’t then.
Despite being the biggest threat the continent had seen for a good while, I still managed to disappear back into my castle. Nothing much to say about my renewed vacation. Same process as before, planning, growing, getting better.
The next plan I came up with is the one you likely are most familiar with. I found a way to keep my zombies from needing to eat. They still could, and they still had the drive, they just didn't starve. Brilliant, I know. It was insanely difficult, but I managed it. I basically had the same plan as before, but to amass a bigger army and invade the mainland from several directions at once, instead of just one coast. I was the northern scourge and my two apprentices had command over the southern and eastern coast.
Before invading a certain area, I gave every inhabitant a choice. Either they would join me and my army willingly, or they could die and join it anyway. Most fought against me, but those who fell to their fear were given domination and loyalty spells before being taught how to control the plague. They were my lieutenants and captains, my apprentices were the generals. The dragons were especially effective, but especially few. They are a very prideful species, after all.
The only thing they could do was run to the west. I amassed so many in such a small amount of time from the western naval battles. They didn’t fight back, they ran. They didn’t help each other, they ran. If I had any pride left for how I use to be a pony, it left me as they ran.
This is where things started falling apart. I couldn’t break any new ground. I did manage to get a few miles past the coast of the western continent, but I hit a wall. Like, a literal wall. One of the biggest advantages to the plague was that it destroyed everything. The only thing left of the eastern continent is the empty landscape, no life exists here. Even the water is contaminated with the plague, I was thorough in my work. What your nations had managed to do was unite and build a huge hundred hoof tall wall along the border. How did you even get the stone for the thing? I could have easily broken it down in places and flood the area, but zombies can be put down with the right defences. That’s where the dead environment comes into play, your food sources were suppose to disappear. That thing did it’s job well. Even still, if I really tried, I could have gotten past it if not for the fact that I had to go on the defensive.
I found out that you have multiple superpowers against my one. I had my zombies, which you managed to keep out with your guards. I had my lieutenants and commanders, which you countered with your own leaders. I had my apprentices, which you countered with the ridiculously overpowered and seriously massive number of heroes looking for a righteous cause to fight for. I had myself, which you managed to counter with Celestia and Luna. My lieutenants and commanders couldn’t beat your army with a horde of zombies, you all have tactics and actual thinking soldiers. My apprentices couldn’t beat your various heroes, they didn’t have the trump cards you ponies seem to constantly find yourselves with. I can’t beat Celestia and Luna. Sure, Luna I could whoop any day. Celestia, I could kill her under the right circumstances, as long as I played dirty, and she knew it. The two together? They’re a force of nature. They literally control the sun and moon. What is a lich suppose to do against that? Whenever they struck at me, there were crippling losses. Somewhere down the line, they developed a “cure” for the plague. It was only a matter of time until I was defeated.
As far as math goes, if you leave one mistake unfixed, everything after that mistake is wrong. I tried to solve the necromancers’ biggest equation, world conquest, three times. I’d found so many mistakes I made and I fixed them, but somewhere down the line, you get to the point of no return. You aren’t allowed to go back and fix your mistakes anymore. You can’t go back, if you stop and reassess at that point, the world will find you. I passed that point, and my final draft had a lot more mistakes than one.
I can’t make another attempt at conquest. I’ve gone too far, you have learned your lesson. Black magic is heard about everywhere now. There are chilling tales of the horrors of necromancy in any library, alley, or campfire you find yourself at. I’m back in this wasteland that use to be a forest. I want you to know that I’m sorry. I was wrong. But at least I know I can’t do any more damage. I’m turning myself in. I’ve had a century to think about this, and I’m giving up. My king has fallen over and can’t seem to get himself back up. Firm handshake, then I walk away to whatever is beyond that chess board. For a while there, I went crazy. I wanted the rest of the world to be the wasteland I was surrounded by. I’m sorry. I’m not asking for forgiveness, but I am going to walk up to your princesses on my knees and beg for an end to this torture I’m unable to get away from. I’m going to beg for an ending, or at least, for the rest of my eternity to be nothing but the void. I’m going to beg for an ending to your nightmares, for my sake. I’m going to beg for an ending to the black master of the plague.
Author's Note
So how good am I at writing?
