Prelude: From the Darkness
Prelude: From the Darkness
The sun had been summoned by its mistress from the gloom of the night, rising to chase away the graceful step of twilight. Shadows fled and spilled back to the shroud of evening waiting to be called out again by the cinder fire of the stars to dance in the cold moonlight. It was beyond memory since the stallion War had marauded across the realm destroying everything that he tread upon and filling the hearts of kings with blood lust. Forgotten was the withered hoof of Famine, his diseased touch had long been absent from the orchards and lurked only in the dusty tomes of books. Plague was a gaunt wraith, cast aside, his infested maggot-grin lurked only in the kingdom of nightmares. But as with the natural order of life, Death still moved among them beckoning those from their mortal bodies who had aged well into their years. Tempting them with a ruby hued apple drawing them away from the coil of the corporeal world to be ageless in an ethereal kingdom to reside at the side of the elders who had passed on before them.
But it had not always been this way. There had been a time when mustangs has frolicked with the Gods as equals. Trailing streaks of mercury fire across a fledgling sky, eating the ambrosia of Titans, ignorant of suffering. But this age of coexistence was a fragile one, a silver thread poised beneath the honed edge of war. The Four of the Apocalypse were dormant now, and existed only as myth. Much like the stallion gods that had reigned before them they slept on an astral plane beyond the reach of any pony. They were fury born from the blood of the ancient war between the elements of Caligo* and Lucerna* names that in the old tongue meant Darkness and Light. It had been a collision of creatures that had outranked even the gods each one monstrous and terrible in its power. Grappling for a throne in the new forged kingdom of Equos the stallions of the Apocalypse emerged from the slipped blood of Titans. The demi-god ponies fell from grace plunging from the heavens to become flesh and blood. Famine and Plague took the weak and very young, while War took the strong and healthy. Many perished and from their suffering, confusion and rage arose the Seven Vices, horses who were the very essence of sin.
Darkness and Light raged against the other and the shadow of their plight covered the realm. From their chaos came the first sparks of majick a powerful element that those who had been cast out of paradise harnessed for their own use. Alliances were formed and broken and the gods were forced to join the fray. Neither knowing that Darkness and Light cannot exist without the other.
Light prevailed.
Darkness was exiled.
The gods who had evolved to monsters by their malice and rage followed their loathsome master to the depths of the Earth. Order was restored and Lucerna created a new darkness, one not befouled by evil, graced with the essence of the stars, and called it Night. But always beyond the cusp of Night lay Darkness, residing in an abyss that hid the terror that spawned nightmares. It had never bowed to the fiery blade of the Sun, not fully. It had retreated back to its hovel to lay like a starving predator in the ruin of its citadel; waiting for the precise moment to emerge and take back what it rightfully had claim too.
In the far flung past when it had been in the throes of its death kneel it had buried its dusky claws deep within the heart of the Earth and had taken refuge there, hidden from the molten-keen gaze of Lucerna. Centuries had passed the empires of Kings had risen and had fallen to dust. The fickle gears of memory kept turning until what Darkness had been was something forgotten, a horror that coiled around the back of the brain stem, hazy and instinctively avoided.
But that did not mean that it had forgotten those who dwelt just out of its reach. Time meant nothing to it, a peripheral thing that only affecting the feeble little creatures that now called Equos their kingdom.
Pitiful vermin
It had been aware when those of the Apocalypse had gone to their celestial dimension. Equos had become too tame for them and they only came forth when a pony gifted with the rare sorcery of Summoning called upon them. But that had not happened in a long while, time spun on and Equos became Equestria. And it had aged. Becoming something that Caligo would not have recognized. The majick that had rained from the sky during the war its potency had faded, leaving being only a faint residue.
Even those ponies who had the flicker of a god’s blood running their veins possessed majickal skill that paled in the comparison of their most ancient ancestors. But every once in a while Caligo would sense something, a pony with potential. A king or a queen overcome by their sins, lured away from who they had been by one of the Seven. A stray soul, so consumed by deadly vice that it had forgotten its way and was stumbling through the broken shards of its own reflection.
Lost.
The last one it had snared it had relished and in its wanton hunger had almost devoured completely. She had been a sister to one borne from the loins of Lucerna and was of royal blood. A midnight Alicorn stitched together with the silver filaments of Night. She had been so easy to seduce, to transform into a creature of spite.
Hungry for blood.
It had twisted her into its marionette, a throw away toy, and when it had exhausted her life it was going to cut those strings. It had been so close to escaping its prison. The hatred that had roiled off its little plaything had fed its weakened essence and had brought it from the brink of being just a wraith. But something had happened, it had felt her slip away from its grasp just as it was about to enter the world that it had abandoned all those years ago. The thought caused rage to roil though it like a tide and it bared its teeth to the obsidian blackness, the stones of the Earth shook with it wrath. But it suddenly paused its attention captured. It stirred in its crypt shifting dust from elegant bones gouged from the edge of a weapon that had not been seen in Equestria for centuries.
A flicker of a soul had caught its attention.
Author's Note
*Lucerna Latin for Light
*Caligo Latin for Darkness
