To Make a Mess of Fine Machinery
The northern desert had always been shunned by the dragons. It lay to the east of their territories, an uncharted mass of sand and dunes that stretched into the horizon, forever unchanged and unaware of its neighbors. No one wanted the desert. If only we could have gone on that way, ignorant of the shifting mass to the north, and the secrets it held.
It was four years after my ascension that a star split from the heavens, crashing to earth in a great ball of fire. The princesses’ magic could not slow its descent, only aim it towards that wasteland. A team of royal guards was sent towards where it landed, and the stories they told were unbelievably fantastic. A great javelin of crystal and stone, skewered into the earth and radiating a soft, purple light. Inside was a being so odd that I scarcely understood their statements until I looked upon it myself. It seemed to walk on two legs, but was gangly and emaciated, lacerations covering its skin. It came as no surprise to them that it was not alive.
It was discovered that the crooked spire was some kind of vessel, larger than any we had ever constructed. Its outside was black and cold, like chitin, but inside it boasted immeasurable complexity; machines we had never even seen semblances of had operated this ship. All of them were dead, too, damaged by forces unknown.
As the princesses sent team after team to the spire to scavenge the technology to make our own, the thing inside was brought back to Canterlot to be examined. I saw it first there, and a chill broke my momentary professionalism. This being was alien, something I should not have seen, should not have known existed. The lacerations, its broken features, its hunched back… those things don’t happen naturally. Somehow I could make sense of it all, but it was like I barely understood the words I used to describe it.
Years passed as the world slowly came to terms with the discovery. Ponies were scared of the new technology, so we kept it for ourselves. Teams kept coming back, producing new wonders from the depths of the vessel time and time again, and we hoarded these discoveries like we starved for them. Eventually, the levels above the sand were all cleared out, and we descended beneath the dunes. Light was scarce in that place, and it became dangerous to travel there. The air itself seemed full of menace. We could not begin to understand what was unearthed, beyond that magic was absent in this place.
I am not sure what the final team to enter the spire uncovered. I am sure nopony does but them. Their last reports spoke of how the floors extended downwards and downwards, without end, and how they had found a great pit whose purpose was unknown. There were blades at the bottom of it, extending from one wall to the other and fitted such that they might spin, and the walls were coated with blood and disease. This was all that is known about their final journey.
I stood in the center of Ponyville as I watched the sky burn from so far off, a great column of smoke rising and snaking into the air from the desert. My vision became distorted as I looked on, and the space around me seemed to wave and shimmer like an illusion.
Canterlot was the first city to die. It was a quiet moment when I turned my head to see that the whole of the mountain was simply gone, a crater visible even where I stood. All those ponies… killed in an instant, simply erased… it wasn’t natural. It could not happen.
The path of destruction came slowly toward Ponyville, a slow-moving tidal wave of annihilation. The plants and the trees caught in its reach all became ash, any creature wiped out and turned to dust. With scrying spells we saw it was the beast from the vessel, shambling forward ever so slowly, bruised and bleeding, its eyes a dead and fearsome black.
We knew no way to stop it. A hundred unicorns fired spell after spell at it, and it did not react. It did not care. A thousand more joined and tore the ground from beneath its feet. They might as well have done nothing at all. It kept walking.
I evacuated Ponyville after I had not received word from Celestia or Luna in a day. The ponies there were told to leave as soon as possible, to be with their loved ones in other cities. There were no objections. I gathered my friends together one final time before I bade them farewell. I would not see them for a long time.
It feels so wrong to talk of that moment. I have tried many times to tell what happened, but every detail twists my heart in another direction. There were no words left unsaid in that room, and I cry because they feel so inadequate in my memory.
I left Ponyville and traveled for the Crystal Empire. Spike and I were alone on the roads. The world had suddenly become very silent. We rested in towns where the ponies hid indoors, and we walked the streets in the daylight, until we arrived at that beautiful city. My brother and Cadance met me there, and told me they had not heard from the other two princesses either. Worse yet, the thing from the vessel had been reported as approaching the Empire. Ponyville was no more. Of great interest, however, was their disposition as they told me this. They were sorrowful, yes; but hopeful.
I discovered why in my second week in the Empire. My brother approached me and described for me a great army of metal and crystal, spanning the horizons forever more. I asked of which army he spoke, and he gestured out a nearby window.
Before me stood a hundred sentries of unbreakable glass, animated by light and machinery. They stood and looked like ponies, immobile, waiting for a command. Each was twenty stories tall, and every one more fearsome than the last. It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen.
“Brother,” I said, “what beasts are these I see before me?”
“They are not beasts,” he replied, “but our salvation. A gift from the sky. Our own crystal, animated with the machinery found in that vessel in the desert. They are destroyers, capable of tearing down mountains. We will set them upon our enemy, and this thing will be done.”
I was there to watch as our saviors began their march south, towards the entity we had awoken. Their movements were swift and fluid, their actions single-mindedly murderous. The earth trembled beneath their steps, and I knew nothing could stand against such an army of Titans.
The sky became a wall of fire as I observed the fight from the highest tower in the Empire. Again and again, the Titans threw themselves against the entity, and it did not care. The gears in their crystalline bodies squealed as they broke themselves upon the emaciated beast. And in the end… all it had to do was look in their direction. A single glance, and they were all gone. Our greatest hope had been an illusion.
Spike came to me that night and asked me why I had not used my magic against it. I began to tell him of how futile mere spells would be against such a monstrosity, but he stopped me and told me of the arcane knowledge I had collected over the years. He showed me many books I had saved in the Empire’s library. These books speak of wards and summonings and things I have no remembrance of, and yet as I read I feel as though I remember more and more. I do not remember these books. I do not remember writing these things.
As I studied the library of these books, my brother proposed more and more ideas to take down the entity. More mechanical monstrosities were created, and sent against this foe as it came slowly north, but each one failed. The prisoners of Celestia’s dungeons, great and terrible in form and in origin, were unleashed upon the earth, and they were broken like dry twigs. Discord reached forward, across time and space, across logicality, and brought down upon it the fires of heavens long destroyed. He was undone just the same. Ponies, imbued with powers of ancient gods, marched in loyalty to the Empire towards the entity, and none returned.
This thing was beyond strength. Through scrying portals in the library I sat and watched each and every attempt fail, again and again. These things we created to combat it became chaff in the wind under its gaze, and its spread of destruction only increased as we fought. It had already destroyed several towns on its path northward. In its wake it left an arid desert, a wasteland that stunk and felt of death.
I busied myself with my readings as my brother continued to fight. I do not know how he created what he did. I had never known that Celestia possessed such prisoners beneath the mountain of Canterlot, and likewise I did not know many of the horrors that came forth from Tartarus to fight in exchange for freedom. I saw one more massive than the greatest mountain in Equestria, fire streaming from its mouth and eyes. It was a beast of carnage that knew no master. I saw another, a lone biped much like our enemy, and the very air around him sparked with power as he strode forward, his eyes leaking energy and resolve. The ground beneath him boiled in anguish. There was another, a bright and magnificent spirit, with wings of pure white and a sword lined with the hottest of flames, crowned by the elder gods above. All of them closed in on that thing, and they were no match for it.
The death toll, by now, had reached the millions. Nearly half of our world was gone, covered in that arid desert it left behind. In the end, it reached the Empire no differently than if we had waited in silence. I left my brother there in his room as he whimpered, knowing there must be some way to stop it.
It continued to walk, its path unobstructed by mountains, weather, barricades or ambush. It killed, and it killed, and I ran with Spike and these unfamiliar books for as long as I could. I did not know if I were the last pony alive. Occasionally, I would see something impossible streak across the sky, and I would know it was still following me. These things I saw must have been gods, summoned from another world by the dragons, the gryphons, or some other race. I did not know these gods existed. They are as foreign to me as that vessel was to us, and yet Spike seemed so sure of their nature.
As I ran, I could see now that its influence was only growing. I came to the mountainous homes of the dragons to find nothing but another desert. The fate of the gryphons was just the same; the zebras as well, and every other race.
The final god I saw thrown at this beast was a serpent, three thousand miles in length, curling up and up into the air, its jaws unhinged as an inky blackness poured from its scales, and it lunged for the entity. Its very being died, I see now, and the world was truly silent.
For the entity I had prepared magic incantations unseen by ponykind, feats so destructive that I feared the world itself might crumble as I unleashed them. This task I never accomplished. I fell asleep on the side of the road, as I always did, and awoke to find the road was gone, and in its stead, a desert, stretching on and on as far as the eye could see. Spike was gone.
That monster stood with its back to me, still and silent. It was as I remembered: several times taller than me, with skin bleached black and bleeding cuts along its arms and back, hunched over, deformed, and almost dead. I shuddered, and it turned its head my way. It said nothing as it gazed upon the last living thing on the planet.
“Why must you be here?” I whispered, scarcely expecting an answer. Its mouth opened, and a deep, resolute voice replied, but its eyes were coated in shadowy tears. Crying and speaking to this thing were the same.
“I came because I must. Because I am. I have lived among many worlds, but yours has been the first I have desolated.”
“Why must it have been ours?” It was a selfish wish. I do not regret asking it.
“You are the main character in your own story,” it replied. “For that, I have come. Your world was too good for a creature such as I.”
I knew, and I understood, and I left. It remains, standing as a lone figure, its hair stained red and its eyes forever black, observing the world it has created, a world no longer my own.
In this place, a hundred gods and dark spells were created.
In this place, humans lived, and were wiped out.
In this place, a thousand stories were told.
But none of them were mine.
Author's Note
This story is a crossover in the loosest sense with two SCPs, SCP-3999 and The Absence, both of those names being links to their files.
There is no motive behind this story.
Thank you for reading.
