Phase 1
Arrival
Venser was being rocked in all directions as his Ambulator sped through the Blind Eternities, trying to figure out how to stop before the sheer Ætheric energy ripped both him and his vessel apart. He had tried to steer it towards some of the planes he had passed, but he just bounced off their barriers at an ever increasing speed. As he panicked over how he was going to prevent his body from being ripped apart and spread across an infinite number of worlds, he hit upon an idea that might yet save him.
Concentrating all of his thoughts onto the energy surrounding his ship, he slowly tried to gather enough blue mana to teleport himself onto one of the planes he kept speeding past. When he had finally taken in as much energy he could, Venser channeled it into himself and out into the void, trying to pierce any plane he could. As soon as the tendril of blue energy latched onto something, he focused his thoughts, and then his body, down the tendril, trying to force himself in. Just as he thought he found a whole in the planes barrier, it closed, severing his line and rocketing him back into his ship, throwing him against the main console. Now severely injured and exhausted by his exertion he tried to get up, and as he grabbed a handle on the console to pull himself up, the attached drawer slid open, revealing fried circuitry, covered in shining black oil. But that wasn’t what caught Venser’s eyes, and filled them with renewed hope.
Quickly, he removed two stones from the board and focused what little energy he still had through them. He had no idea what kind of spell would even help, so he resorted to simply trying to will himself somewhere, anywhere that wouldn’t kill him in the next ten seconds. Within seconds, he was falling through a calm black void, seemingly far removed from chaos of the Abyss he had just left. Just as he saw a light coming towards him, Venser’s entire body was wracked with an unimaginable pain, and he slipped into the blissful embrace of sleep.
“See, what did I tell you Spring? I got those clouds cleared in 10 seconds, I think you owe me 4 bits!” Rainbow Dash gloated, heading over to her new colleague to collect on their bet.
“But how?! Those clouds were-but-how?!” Replied the other Pegasus, clearly flustered by this development.
“You know what, I’ll let you off easy, since your new to Ponyville’s weather crew, when we go on break next, why don’t you just buy me an apple?” Replied Rainbow, casually leaning against her nonplussed partner.
“Fine...” Sighed Spring Breeze. He went back to clearing out the rest of the clouds, wondering how he’d been suckered into a bet like that when he heard a strange sound. Turning around, Spring Breeze saw Rainbow looking at him with a confused stare.
“You hear that too?” The rainbow maned pegasus asked, getting a dumb nod in reply. “What in Celestia’s name is that noise?”
The noise sounded like nothing Spring Breeze had ever heard before, it was kind of like something was being ripped, but also like someone was coughing. Well, no, not exactly, it sounded like everything ever was being ripped, while the universe itself coughed in protest. Just as he was about to ask Dash if she thought they should go get someone who might know, the noise started growing in intensity, louder and louder, until Spring was sure he could feel his bones breaking with the intensity of the noise, and then, just as it reached a crescendo of furious hacks, rips and wheezes, the noise suddenly stopped.
Looking around both of the Pegasi could find no clue as to what had caused the noise when suddenly pale blue comet streaked past them, heading straight for Sugarcube Corner.
“Oh jeez, what the hay was that!” Spring exclaimed, looking over to see his partner had been replaced by a rainbow colored streak, heading for whatever had just streaked by. Just as he was getting ready to chase after his partner, he heard a faint whistling sound, and looking up, he saw what looked like two pebbles coming straight for him.
*KLONK*
The pebbles hit him at the same time, giving off a spark before bouncing off their now unconscious victim and continuing their descent. However, the sticky black goo that had covered them remained, invigorated by the spark seemed to move of it’s own accord, heading for the small cut on the unconscious pegasi’s head, and slipping into it. Spring Breeze began to fall, luckily landing on a cloud not too far underneath him. As he lay there, he began to have the strangest, most wonderful dream.
Rainbow Dash had almost worried that she wasn’t going to make it in time to stop that falling unicorn from crashing into Sugarcube Corner, not that she would ever admit it. As she made her way to the ground with the pony in her hooves, a group of ponies surrounded her, trying to see who this comet-like pony was. As she landed, she saw Nurse Redheart pushing her way through the crowd, finally breaking through and coming up beside Rainbow to check on this new pony to make sure he was okay.
Looking over the pale blue unicorn, Nurse Redheart noticed a few odd things about him, for one, he had no cutie mark, yet looked to be fully grown. While she had heard of ponies who had gone through life without one, she had never seen one before. But that wasn’t what she was here for she reminded herself, as she started to examine the stallion.
He was covered in bruised and cuts, and while none of them looked too deep, the sheer quantity was worrying in and of itself. He was unconscious, which was probably just as well, and he seemed to having some kind of nightmare, as he was whimpering and seemed to be trying to curl up in a ball.
“Okay” Nurse Redheart addressed the crowd after looking over her newest patient, “I need somepony to help me move this poor unicorn to the hospital so I can see to his wounds properly. Any volunteers?”
“Eeyup.” Came a reply from a large red earth pony as he walked through the crowd “Just put him’ on my back.”
“Thank you Big Macintosh” Nurse Redheart replied. Addressing the crowd once again, she said “Please can everpony move so we can carry this poor stallion to the hospital?” And with that, the crowd moved out of the way and she and Big Macintosh started for the hospital with the mysterious new pony in tow. As they walked, he dreamed a dream not unlike that of the pegasus whom his personal effects had rendered unconscious, and it was chilling him to his very core.
As he looked down on Equestria from above the clouds, Spring Breeze smiled “Oh yes, this is just perfect.” he cooed, as he headed down towards the Everfree Forest, eager to start his work.
As Spring Breeze touched down, a wave of distortion expanded from him changing everything in it’s path. The forest was warped, ripped, torn apart, and finally re-assembled into a new form. Tree’s were replaced with green metal monoliths the color of oxidized copper, bushes became groups of hollow spikes, weeping a black oil. Flowers exploded, leaving behind pustules of the same oil. The grass on the ground became flat and the dirt underneath was replaced by metal. Everything was re-arranged into an unnatural and unsettling amalgam of the organic and the mechanical.
A rabbit that had been in the path of this wave of the wave was ripped apart in layers, first hair, then skin, then guts and bones were all dissolved as if by some invisible acid. As the dust that remained swirled in the air, it came together, forming into some mechanical perversion of the previously docile creature, with metal fur sprouting from a body of white porcelain that left it’s bones and heart expose.
“This world will be perfect for us” came a booming voice from behind Spring Breeze. As he turned around, Spring saw an Alicorn rising from a puddle of oil. “You have done well to give us your strength and knowledge of this world,” proclaimed the Alicorn as it looked over the first of what would soon be countless subjects. “As the herald of a New Phyrexia, you shall be rewarded with the honor of being the first convert.”
“Thank you my lord.” Replied Spring, bowing as he did so. The glistening black Alicorn laid its horn upon its new subject, who was ripped apart just as the forest had been leaving only a puddle of oil and a skeleton behind.
As Rainbow Dash returned to her duties, she looked around for her new partner. “Hey Spring!” She yelled “did you see that? You probably didn’t I think I was going too fast to see!” The only response the blue pegasus got was the silence of a clear sky.
“Hey, where did you go? Are you trying to weasel out of- OH SWEET CELESTIA ABOVE!” She exclaimed as she saw a pony skeleton resting on a cloud. As she approached it, she could see that it had been a pegasus given the wing bones. She stopped a few feet from the small cloud the ghastly remains were resting on, trying to figure out what she should do. Rainbow had never seen anything like this before.
After floating above the skeleton for several minutes, Rainbow Dash started to feel ill. Not wanting to have to stare at the horrifying sight before her any longer, she dashed off to get Twilight Sparkle, hoping she could make sense of whatever this was.
As the pegasus dashed off, she failed to notice that a glistening black oil was oozing out of the skeletons eye sockets, and heading for the edge of the cloud. Crawling off of it’s perch, it hit the ground and immediately split into five parts, each heading off in a different direction. While it wasn’t capable of thought, the oil still knew what it had to do. It had to make some friends.
Twilight was in the middle of studying when she heard an urgent scream from outside getting louder and louder. As she got up to go see what kind of pony thought it was a good idea to e making such a racket. Just as Twilight was opened the door, she was bowled over by an uncharacteristically hysteric Rainbow Dash, who was desperately trying to tell her something through her choked sobs.
“Twi- *sniff* Twlight, you ha- *sniff* have to *sniff* come. Something *sniff* h *sniff* h- *sniff* horrible has *sniff* has” Twilight couldn’t make out the rest of what Rainbow Dash was trying to say as she once again fell into hysterics.
“Rainbow” Twilight said, trying to calm the distraught pegasus to no avail. “Rainbow!” she tried again, with similarly unhelpful results. “RAINBOW!” she screamed while casting a spell to silence the sobbing pegasus for a moment by gluing her mouth shut.
“I’m sorry for that, but I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s happened. Now, I’m going to let you talk, but you have to try and be coherent, I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong, okay?” The Lavender unicorn asked, getting a nod in return. “Okay, now what exactly happened, start from the very beginning.”
Twilight sat there as Rainbow Dash slowly and tearfully told her about what she had seen: “It was the worst thing ever, I was coming back up to where I was working after saving that falling unicorn, and when I got there, I couldn’t find Spring Breeze, and as I looked around, I found somepony’s bones lying on a cloud, and I’m not sure if they’re Spring’s bones or if they’re somepony else s, but it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.” Rainbow dash began to shake and cry again. Twilight came up to her and tried to calm her friend down.
She didn’t want to admit it, but seeing the normally confident and brave Rainbow Dash reduced to tears was worrying her. What could have done something like that to a pony? She’d never heard about anything like this in any of her books.
“Listen Rainbow, I think I should go check out what you found, and you don’t have to come if you don’t want to, just tell me where it is.” Twilight said to her friend. She didn’t want to admit it, but she actually kind of wanted to see what had happened, just a little bit, if only to satisfy her curiosity as to what could have caused such a thing.
“No! somepony is dead, this isn’t the time to be thinking about your studies!” Twilight mentally scolded herself. Turning to Dash, she saw that she was starting to stand up from her previously collapsed state.
“I-I don’t want to go back there, b-but I can tell you where it is.” Said Rainbow Dash hesitantly.
“Okay, that’s fine, so where is it?”
“I-it’s on the cloud over Sugarcube C-Corner.”
“Okay, thank you, now why don’t you go upstairs and lie down, you seem like you could really use some rest.” Offered Twilight
“Y-yeah, I th-think I will.” Rainbow Dash replied with a weak smile as she walked up the library stairs.
Meanwhile, Twilight was stuffing a saddlebag with various books and spells to help her find out what had happened to the poor pony on the cloud, not noticing that a small bit of black goo was crawling towards her. The goo crawled up her leg, and into a small cut Twilight had gotten as a result of Rainbow Dash’s terrified tackle.
Going over what she had prepared, Twilight thought for a second, and grabbed one last book from her shelf, one that she had just seconds ago put aside. The cover read “How to Learn Spells Through Their effects”
“It can’t hurt, and I should find out how this happened, if only to defend against it.” she rationalized, as she slipped the book into her saddlebag, a small smile on her face, she was so very curious to learn what could have caused such a horrific thing.
Big Mac and Nurse Redheart had gotten the fallen unicorn to the hospital, and now he was in a bed, tossing and turning while Nurse Redheart tried to get him to lie still and let her bandage his wounds. As she tried to hold him down, the pale blue unicorn shot up, looking around with a look of relief on his face.
“Oh sweet Urza’s ghost, I’m alive!” He exclaimed jumping out of the bed and landing on his hind hooves, at which point he fell face first on the floor. “hmm, I swear I wasn’t this clumsy before, let me just-” he stopped staring at his hooves as if he couldn’t believe they were his. As he turned around to look at his body, the relief drained from his face, replaced with a combination of terror and confusion. As he lay their silently, staring at his body, Nurse Redheart cleared her throat trying to get his attention.
“OH DEAR LORD I’M A HORSE!” He yelled, trying to get back on his hooves and failing spectacularly. After a couple tries, he simply decided to lie down, figuring if anything hostile from this plane was going to attack him, it probably already would have. Looking around, he saw that he was in a white room with a bed. As he continued scanning, his eyes fell upon two other horses, one a pale white, and another, much larger one a deep red, both looking quite confused.
Venser chuckled nervously while trying to find any source of mana he could, just in case these two . “Um, hello, sorry about that” He said as he found a small amount of blue mana nearby, not much, but enough to power a short teleport if it came to that.
“Are you quite done now?” Asked the pale one. Venser jumped a little at this, he hadn’t expected the horses to talk, though given his current form, it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. “I still need dress your wounds, and giving yourself new ones isn’t going to make that any easier for either of us.” Continued the short pale horse as she approached him.
Venser tried to back up as best he could, but he didn’t really have much experience walking on four legs, so he settled for scooting backwards trying to cast a spell to get him out of this room. He wasn’t sure he was comfortable with whatever was going on here. But no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t seem to get the spell to work. As he wondered what was going on, the pail white horse had come up to him and started lifting him up to the bed.
“Whoa, what are you trying to do?” Venser asked accusingly as she put him down on the bed.
“I’m trying to dress your wounds, like I said before!” Replied the mare as she started applying some kind of stinging gel to his skin.
“That’s certainly not what it feels like!” He replied.
“Listen,” she sighed “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but nopony in this town wants to hurt you. Hay, you’d be dead if Rainbow Dash hadn’t stopped you from crashing straight into the ground.”
Venser started to relax, at this point, with his spells not working and his difficulty walking in this form, he decided he might as well just relax. If these creatures were going to hurt him, they probably already would have. As long as he was lying here he might as well ask some questions...
Twilight Sparkle got off her balloon, making sure to cast a spell so she could walk on it, and dropped onto the cloud, instantly spotting the pegasus remains Rainbow Dash had told her about. They were quite frightening, and Twilight tried to back away, but something drew her to them, a hunger in the back of her head, one she had known all her life, but which was now stronger than ever. Curiosity. As she approached the skeleton, Twilight Sparkle grabbed her supplies out of her saddlebag and started to examine the bones.
“Okay, so let me get this straight, I’m in the land of Equestria, which is inhabited by talking ponies, a group to which I now belong, and I arrived by falling from the sky at high speeds.” He questioned the two ponies in his room, both of whom seemed very much “and the only reason I’m alive is because a pegasus grabbed me from the air before I hit the ground at a lethal velocity?”
“For the last time, YES!” Shouted Nurse Redheart. She’d been answering this pony’s questions for over an hour, and she was getting tired of explaining such basic things over and over. She wouldn’t have admitted it, but she was starting to believe that maybe he was from another world.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to ask you some questions.” She said, taking pen in her mouth and walking over to a clipboard with some paper on it.
“Okay I guess.” Venser replied. He was starting to feel a bit more at ease. While he still very much disliked being a horse, er, unicorn, the people here seemed friendly enough.
“What is your name?”
“Venser”
“Hmm, age?”
“20 years.”
“Okay, birthplace?”
“Urborg”
“Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but okay. Now then, one more, occupation.”
“Artificer”
“Again, never heard the term, but okay.” Nurse Redheart said, putting the clipboard at the foot of the bed. “Now that I’ve gotten the necessary questions out of the way, I’d like to ask you some others for the sake of my own curiosity.”
“Um, fine, I’ll answer as best I can, I do owe you.” Venser responded
“USELESS!” Twilight Sparkle shouted at the night sky. She’d been here four hours, and had run through every spell she had 3 times, and the only thing she could find out about these bones was that they were clear of any organic matter outside of the calcium they were made of.
“How the hay does a pony’s skin and guts just melt away without leaving anything behind?” Just as she was packing up, she saw the one book she hadn’t used, not through any kind of mistake, but because she was afraid, afraid of what using the book might tell her.
As she stared at it, she thought to herself “It’s not like I’m going to use this spell for evil, I just want to know what it is, and how to defend against it.” And again, she felt that hunger, more than anything, she couldn’t stand the thought of not knowing what had done this. She just knew it would eat away at her forever if she didn’t find out what kind of spell could have caused this.
Opening the book, she flipped to the page where the spell she needed was described, and started to focus her magic. As she did, a cloud of dim purple light started to travel from her horn to the bones at her hooves. As it contacted them, a word came into her head, and with it, instructions. Slowly, Twilight Sparkle whispered this new word, taking her time to enunciate every beautiful syllable of this powerful word.
“Phthisis” She purred, “what a beautiful name for such a beautiful spell.” With that, Twilight packed her things into her balloon. As she herself was getting in, she stopped and turned to the skeleton still laying on the cloud. “I don’t think it would do if someone found you, now would it?” She asked, as she used her magic to to grind the bones into a fine powder and spread it on the wind. “At least, not yet.”
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I claim no right to anything regarding those properties.
