The Land Of Glass And Stone
The southernmost reaches of the world are quartered off by a grand desert. Where the border sands ebb and flow with the needle grass on solid ground, there stands a tower of stone, cracked and embittered. Here the winds are gentle. But over tens of thousands years, even whispers will begin to sting, and the hidden cruelties behind their words become apparent.
The sandstone blocks of its construction have long since lost their seamless connections to time. The corners are rounded, the surfaces smoothed like fine silk, and the colors bleached white by the everpresent sun. Sand piles up at its base, pushing and climbing its way up the southern face in a sad attempt to knock the whole thing over. But twenty meters up, it’s the height of the tower that’s seen the worst damage. So high up the winds are less kind, revealing the truths of their intentions.
At one point there was an observation post here. The balconies have since broken apart and the roof caved in. Amongst the rubble sands collect, spilling into every crevice the sunlight exposes. It trickles down the stairs of the ancient structure, down into and burying the lower levels. Here the desert works to break the tower from the inside out, pushing apart the fatigued fragments of its construction that still hold the blocks in place. In another thousand years, and with another thousand pounds of sand, the walls might finally break and then the tower will surely topple.
Then, for a brief moment in this period of disintegration, the artifacts buried within its bowels may be exposed to the open air. Spearheads never used, their staffs having decayed into dust. Bits of pottery and broken glass. Golden crowns and bracelets—treasures of today, but mere accessories of old. And a bejeweled idol of a pharaoh who once ruled over the ponies of these lands.
In time, however, even they will be lost to the desert.
Further south the desert sands are everchanging with the restless winds. The dunes crawl across the land like a lazy sea, the waves rising and falling with the exhaustion of their travels. The winds usher them northward, deliberate and slow. The dunes drag at the ground beneath them, sometimes unearthing the skeletons of civilization in their wake.
The gold sands are a skin that once peeled back reveal the foundations of a forgotten village. The eroded carcasses are smooth, bleached white by the sun long ago when their structures stood whole. Now the desert struggles to chip away at them further, having withered them down so low. It can do nothing more than be dragged overtop them now.
Still, the winds work tirelessly to erase the evidence of its misdeeds. Here the sands are freckled with imperfections; white particulates shaved off the village stones have mixed with its golden sheen, and even fewer browns of miscellaneous detritus. From afar these colors are lost, melded by the golds of the desert sands. Even up close you'd be forgiven to believe the oneness of this saturation. But if you held the grains to your eyes and really looked, you'd find the dead amongst the sand. You'd find the life that once made this village a home, broken down and consumed over the ages, driven into the sands by the rough, ceaseless winds.
The dunes cover up these skeletons as lazily as they reveal them. With enough time, the sand here will be too deep and buried they will remain. Then the whites and browns will at last belong to the golden hues, when these remains lose the markers of their descent. Then, at long last, the desert here will be whole.
The dunes continue to shuffle northward, pushed along by the southern winds.
The further south you travel, the rougher and steeper the dunes become. Lazily they churn, gigantic in their heights and abysmal in their depths. The winds carve enormous canyons out of the white-gold sands, scraping away at the walls with their sharp claws until the cliffs collapse. The canyons fill with sand, the winds dig their channels, the cycle repeats, and the dunes march northward with all the might of a crashing tsunami, yet at the pace of mountains.
The steepest chasms are kilometers tall and whole horizons in length. Few reach down to the bedrock, where it sits cracked and petrified by the weight of so much sand. Here the winds are too voracious, blowing away the coarse sands too quickly to erode the hardened surfaces. The bedrock sits exposed, still dark and gray, covered by the shadows of the dunes from the intensity of the sun. Here, in the darkest recesses of the desert, color still remains, and the skeletons still bear skin.
The shattered remnants of a large stone building lay in a heap at the bottom of one such canyon. Upon collapse the structure it once was may have still been recognizable from the rubble. But repeatedly being excavated and reburied by a mountain of sand have crushed it to smaller and smaller pieces. In time those pieces will be small enough to be picked up by the winds, carried to the tops of the dunes, and exposed to the sun.
This structure is not alone. Similar piles dot the length of the canyon floor. Others still stand, if not entirely together, poking through the canyon walls, waiting for the weight of the next collapse to finally pull them down. These fossils are all that remain of a long lost kingdom, drowning beneath an ocean of sand.
In time, they too, will be claimed by the desert.
An arm protrudes out of a canyon wall. Its stones are a brilliant yellow, with hints of blues and greens still clinging to its worn façade, hidden from the sun. The domed roof is cracked, yet still together. A window sits looking out over the canyon, its glass long since blown out. The winds pour into the opening, turning everything inside to a fine dust with their violent billows and shrieks. The winds break through the exposed room, cascading down the dark interior of this forgotten place. But the winds can only reach so far before they fade, and the halls are too long and numerous. They cry defiantly, rampaging around all they can with all the force they can muster. But the deeper into this place you go, the quieter the howls become. Before long the winds themselves die out, and only silence remains.
Darkness now resides over this quiet place beneath a mountain of sand, hollowed by the hooves that built it long ago, when the winds weren’t so feral and there was still light to be had. The chambers are too practically large for any one pony, the doorways and arches fit more for a creature more than ten times their stature. Rainbows paint the enormous halls, flowing into the seemingly endless rooms. At one end, a great set of doors rest ajar. Inside are tables full of curiosities, filled with trinkets and valuables that paid homage to the ruler of this kingdom. The tables flank a great red carpet which leads all the way to a large, illustrious throne of glass and stone.
Behind the throne there is a mural, chiseled and painted by hooves even time has forgotten. It's clearly been misplaced, cut out of its original place and deposited here. It depicts a pharaoh surrounded by their subjects, and basking in their adoration and the light of the sun. Together, the ponies sit atop heaping mounds of crops and wealth. A river flows in from the south, painting buildings numerous and tall along the riverbanks. Green seeds dot the scene beneath it all. Berobed pegasi fly above the scene on gusts of wind carrying those same seeds, smiling down on the benevolent ruler.
The pharaoh has since been scratched out of the mural. Now the throne sits empty, without a pharaoh to oversee this fallen kingdom. It sits black, without a light to show the glamor of this castle frozen in time. It sits alone, without ponies to be neither commanded nor led. It sits without a purpose, patiently waiting for the winds to fill and excavate their canyons so it may at long last die and turn to sand.
Sometimes, the castle creaks. Not from the winds outside nor the sands above, but from the depths below.
The bowels of this castle extend further into the bedrock. A twisted set of tunnels lead downward, rough and jagged from when they were dug, and large enough to fit whole barns. Pickaxes and hammers litter the path, their handles petrified by time and turned to stone. The occasional set of broken shackles are strewn amongst them.
The tunnels lead deep, several hundred meters underground. But at last they open up to a large and cavernous amphitheater. A trickle of water runs through it. Fungus grows along the walls, basking the room with their luminescence. The gentle light is just enough to reveal the dimly lit scene.
On the smooth walls are paintings of berobed pegasi, each one carrying a green seed and flying around on gusts of wind. They fly up to the center of the doomed room, where the sun is shining and contains a bounty full of crops and wealth. All along the room’s circumference rest a variety of shrines and altars, all of varying craftsmanship and quality. All of them bare.
In the center of the room is the mummified corpse of a sphinx. Its body sits hunched, covered in jewelry and regalia, its front paws brought tight against its chest. It holds an empty casing—a broken shell turned brown and petrified by age. The sphinx’s face is twisted, frozen with a greedy smile and empty eyes. A small pile of sand rests at its feet beside an overturned pedestal. More sand sits inside the remnants of the shell.
Far above, the uncaring sun observes the winds’ angry howls.
