Prologue. The Northern Wastes
PROLOGUE
The Northern Wastes
2147 Year After Great Frost, the Cliff Mountains
One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.
The citadel of Iron Hall succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But no army of diamond dogs had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted dragon had pulled down its mighty gates. Iron Hall was the secret refuge of the Equinian High Kings, and no one, not even the Mother Darkness, could besiege a secret.
Months earlier, Marthell Emeraldblood II, High King of Equinia, had fled to Iron Hall with the remnants of his household. From the walls, his sentries stared pensively across the dark forests below, their thoughts stricken by memories of burning cities and wailing multitudes. When the wind moaned, they gripped Iron Hall's uncaring stone, reminded of diamond dogs' horns. They traded breathless reassurances. Had they not eluded their pursuers? Were not the walls of Iron Hall strong? Where else might a pony survive the end of the world?
The plague claimed the High King first, as was perhaps fitting: Emeraldblood had only wept at Iron Hall, raged the way only an King of nothing could rage. The following night the members of his household carried his bier down into the forests. They glimpsed the eyes of forest predators reflected in the light of his pyre. They sang no dirges, intoned only a few numb prayers.
Before the morning winds could sweep his ashes skyward, the plague had struck two others: Marthell’s concubine and her daughter. As though pursuing his bloodline to its thinnest tincture, it assailed more and more members of his household. The sentries upon the walls became fewer, and though they still watched the mountainous horizon, they saw little. The cries of the dying crowded their thoughts with too much horror.
Soon even the sentries were no more. The five Uniat Knights who’d rescued King after the catastrophe on fields of the capital lay motionless in their beds. The Grand Vizier, his golden robes stained bloody by his bowel, lay sprawled across his sorcerous texts. Marthell’s uncle, who’d led the heartbreaking assault on Scotos’ gates in the early days of the Apocalypse, hung from a rope in his chambers, slowly twisting in a draft. The Queen stared endlessly across festering sheets.
Of all those who had fled to Irol Hall, only Emeraldblood’s bastard son and the bard survived.
Terrified by the bard’s strange manner and one white eye, the young colt hid, venturing out only when his hunger became unbearable. The old bard continually searched for him, singing ancient songs of love and battle, but slurring the words in blasphemous ways.
“Why won’t you show yourself, child?” he would cry as he reeled through the galleries. “Let me sing to you. Woo you with secret songs. Let me share the glory of what once was!”
One night the Bard caught the boy. He caressed first his cheek and then his thigh.
“Forgive me,” he muttered over and over, but tears fell only from his blind eye. “There are no crimes,” he mumbled afterward, “when no one is left alive.”
But the boy lived. Five nights later, he lured the bard onto Iron Hall’s towering walls. When the stallion shambled by in a drunken stupor, he pushed him from the heights. He crouched for a long while at the fall’s edge, staring down through the gloom at the bard’s broken corpse. It differed from the others, he decided, only in that it was still wet. Was it murder when no one was left alive?
Winter added its cold to the emptiness of Iron Hall. Propped on the battlements, the colt would listen to the wolves sing and feud through the dark forests. He would hug his body against the chill, murmuring his dead mother’s songs and savoring the wind’s bite on his cheek. He would fly through the courtyards, answering the wolves with Equinian war cries and brandishing weapons that staggered him with their weight. And once in a while, his eyes wide with hope and superstitious dread, he would poke the dead with his father’s sword.
When the snows broke, shouts brought him to Iron Hall's forward gate. Peering through dark loophole, he saw a group of cadaverous stallions and mares — refugees of the Apocalypse. Glimpsing his shadow, they cried out for food, shelter, anything, but the colt was too terrified to reply. Hardship had made them look fearsome — feral, like wolves.
When they began scaling the walls, he fled to the galleries. Like the bard, they searched for him, calling out guarantees of his safety. Eventually, one of them found him cringing behind a barrel of wine.
“We are Gnosians, child. What reason could you have to fear us?” with a voice neither tender nor harsh, he said.
But the colt clutched his father’s sword, crying:
“So long as ponies live, there are crimes!”
“No, child,” the stallion said, his eyes filled with wonder. “Only so long as ponies are deceived.”
For a moment, the young Marthell could only stare at him. Then solemnly, he set aside his father’s sword and took the stranger’s hoof.
“I was a prince,” he mumbled.
The stranger brought him to the others, and together they celebrated their strange fortune. They cried out — not to the Gods they had repudiated but to one another — that here was evident a great correspondence of cause. Here awareness most holy could be tended. In Iron Hall, they had found shelter against the end of the world.
Still emaciated but wearing the furs of kings, the Gnosians chiseled the sorcerous runes from the walls and burned the Grand Vizier’s books. The jewels, the gems, the silk and cloth-of-gold, they buried with the corpses of a dynasty.
And the world forgot them for two thousand years.
* * *
Late Autumn, 4109 Year After Great Frost, the Cliff Mountains
Again the dreams had come.
Vast landscapes, histories, contests of faith and culture, all glimpsed in cataracts of detail. Ponies skidding to earth. Hooves scrathing mud. Dead strewn on the shore of a warm sea. And as always, an ancient city, chalk-dry in the sun, rising against dun hills. A holy city... Thessalem.
And then the voice, thin as though spoken through the reed throat of a serpent, saying, “Send to me my son.”
The dreamers awoke as one, gasping, struggling to wrest sense from impossibility. Following the protocol established after the first dreams, they found each other in the unlit depths of the Hundreds' Hundred Halls.
Such desecration, they determined, could no longer be tolerated.
