At the edge of the world there was a tower.
It is gone now, and good riddance. Its bones are scattered across the grasslands above the cliffs, dropped like a foal’s toy blocks abandoned in the pursuit of some new play. The enormous granite stones, square edged where they are not broken, slowly sink into the soil, borne by their own weight back into the earth from which so much blood was spent to mine them. Along the cliffs these half-buried stones give the plains the look of a giant’s graveyard, patiently waiting out the centuries for another tombstone to be laid. Nothing else remains; endless wet gusts howling up the cliffs from the ocean have swept away all other traces of the tower’s former masters. Of the civilization that ruled half the world from this spot, only ghosts are left to watch the slow decay.
Little grows here but tough sedge and other grasses. Ocean-going birds sometimes nest on the leeward sides of the gigantic blocks, taking shelter from the cruel wind. They find mates and lay eggs and raise chicks, as they have for generations, and they will continue to do so until the ceaseless turn of centuries has fully buried the pieces of the tower, and all that will remain is a flat and empty plain that ends in a cliff overlooking the Peaceful Ocean, and at last the scars left by the greatest sin ever inflicted by ponies upon their own kind will fade, and it will be as though no one had never set hoof here at all.
But that day is far in the future. Today, the tower’s bones remain. And if we venture a few miles away, over the crest of the nearest hill – a meek rise barely more than a swell of earth – we find the enormous quarry in which they were born.
* * *
In no other part of the world is there a square lake such as this.
It sits alone in a dusty bowl formed by the slight hills, a basin into which the scant rainfall collects and is trapped before the nearby sea can drain it away. Its square shore is almost perfectly straight, varying by no more than a few hoofs where erosion has carved runnels into the rock. Each year these imperfections grow, and on the scale of geological time the wind and rain will eventually round off the sharp corners, and the lake will look more like a lake ought. But the granite here is hard and not much water falls on these small hills, and it may be that the glaciers will come before the square lake ever meets its end.
In the days when earth ponies still worked this quarry, unicorn engineers designed elaborate drainage systems to keep them from flooding. There were grates and canals and massive sluices carved through the rock, all emptying down the distant cliffs. And when, after decades of hard, bitter work, the last stone was hauled up hundreds of meters to the top of the quarry and shaped into the needle-sharp pinnacle that came to rest atop the tower, the unicorns celebrated their triumph. They cast off all their tools, flinging them down into the depths of the pit, and went to join the orgies marking the tower’s completion.
Nopony stayed behind to watch, but in the years that followed the drainage systems clogged with grit and sand and the unicorns’ tools, and the gentle rains began to fill the deserted quarry.
It took ages for the waters to top the edge of the pit. The unicorns knew it would happen, in the abstract sense that they knew, someday, the sun would expand into a giant ball of fire and consume the world. A day so far in the future that it might as well never come. But thousands of years did pass, and as the engineers calculated, the quarry became a lake. They would have been delighted if they had lived to see it.
In the end, these accidental creations lasted longer than their precious tower. Time and nature fashioned something beautiful.
And in their depths, beneath the millions of tons of water, the bones of the unicorn’s tools found a sort of peace.
* * *
For the first centuries of the quarry’s transformation into a lake, it had no fish. It barely had any living occupants — the shallow waters were tainted with minerals leeched from the shorn rock walls, creating an alkaline soup that burned with color in the light of the sun and seemed to glow with its own silent fire under starlight. No unicorns bothered to wander this strange shore, so far from the safety and comfort of the tower, but if they had they would have smelled something familiar and, in a way they could not consciously describe, something beloved. For the water stank not of rot or mildew or unwashed bodies but rather of sterile, chemical lifelessness. Not of the living, filthy things they hated so. In an odd sense buried deep in the back of their minds, the waters of this deep pit would have reminded them of home.
Beneath its fluorescent surface, not all was still. The calcium and iron and sulfur and other, more exotic elements began to condense out of solution, forming feathery growths on the deep stones. They grew over the years, filling out into fronds like ferns. Entire mineral forests sprouted from the rock walls, stretching their crystal leaves toward the surface that slowly rose away from their grasp. Flakes like snow drifted through the quiet waters, a constant toxic blizzard that carried the poisons down, down, down into the deepest parts of the quarry, enshrouding the unicorns’ forgotten tools.
From time to time seabirds fell into the quarry. They mistook its placid waters, so much calmer than the sea with its towering waves, for somewhere safe to land. They skimmed across the surface, and the caustic water seeped up the barbs of their feathers, soddening them in a way that seawater never could, and they flapped about in a panic, splashing the water everywhere and only making things worse, and eventually they sank. Their bodies did not rot. They dissolved, and the calcium in their bones joined the airy growths creeping up from the depths.
The unicorns would have approved.
* * *
How fish came to the quarry lake is not entirely clear. Certainly they did not walk there, and no rivers fed into the pit. Perhaps they naturally appeared, as mice sometimes will in stacks of hay, or maggots sprout from carrion. Or perhaps a bird carried their eggs, caught in its feathers like burrs.
However they came, the quarry blossomed with life. The poisons in the water collected far below, locked in dendritic growths and fibrous tendrils that bobbed with the currents. Further up, snails and mussels crusted the walls, filtering out the silt that fogged the lake. Plants – real plants, not the mineral imitations far below – began to crowd the square shores.
For thousands of years the lake was the lake and the tower was the tower and the seasons proceeded at their regular pace. The tower’s shadow swept across the quarry every afternoon like the breath of a sundial, until one day a tremendous crash shook the plains for miles around. For the first time in its history, waves roiled the lake. Afterward the tower’s shadow no longer marked the hours, and a long era of solitude began.
It ended with the arrival of a tribe of pony-like creatures. Smaller than pegasi, without wings or horns, but gifted with the same communal spirit that had given ponies so many opportunities to rule the world. They came from the north, carrying with them only a few wretched belongings, tatters of clothes, and a desperate desire for peace. Foals splashed in the waters and plucked blueberries from the mats that grew along the shore. It was, the elders decided, as good a place as any to settle. They crafted huts from the reeds, thatched them with cattail fronds, and made the lake their home.
A century passed, and the assemblage of huts became a true village. The ponies – and they were a type of pony, or close enough for the difference not to matter – lived as much in the water as on the shore. Their hooves slowly widened with each generation, and their chests expanded to hold lungs greater than even the most stalwart earth pony. They worshiped the spirits far below. From a large hut built on stilts out over the waters a priestess made regular offerings, singing her prayers to the stars as they emerged from the twilight sky and scattering the embers of a rowan log to bring warmth to the shadows of the lake, where the sun never reached.
Twice a year, at the vernal and autumnal solstices, the village selected a young filly on the verge of becoming a mare. They washed her mane with henna and her coat with lemon juice, and over her cutie mark the priestess wrote the sacred words with a charcoal stick. Around her withers they tied a marlin’s bladder filled with air, and they bound her hooves with stones, and when the sun was at its zenith she stepped from a cedar raft smothered in blossoms like a pyre, and she sank into the lake. Her parents sat on the edge of the priestess’s hut, watching her fall into the darkness. They could have swum after her, keeping pace for a dozen or even a hundred meters, but the quarry was far deeper than that. No pony, not even these water-loving nymphs, could venture to those depths.
The filly did. The stones carried her down. She discarded them one-by-one as the air in her breathing bladder exhausted itself, and she no longer needed the weight to counter its buoyancy.
Sight was gone. Not even the noon sun could penetrate hundreds meters of water. But she felt the feathery touch of the mineral trees on her face; she tasted their sulfur and calcium. And still she sank.
Twice a year the village sent its fillies down to where the spirits dwelled. Around her neck she carried a coral amulet her mother had spent the past month carefully carving into the proper shape for an offering. As her hooves sank into the poison silt at the black bottom of the lake, she delicately unslung the last of the weights, removed the amulet, and set it loose to drift with the spirits. And then, her job half-done, she dove into the muck with both hooves and began to search for the treasures of the ancients.
Her tribe had no metal-working skills. They had never learned to mine ores and refine them. The only metals they ever found were gifts from the spirits; star-iron fallen from the skies, or the golden blood of copper malachite. But the greatest treasures of all were the tools of the ancients, guarded by the spirits at the bottom of the lake. It was blasphemy to walk here uninvited, but her offering was sound and her lungs were strong, and the filly knew she would make her family proud. She felt through the silt, ignoring the fire building in her chest, tracing the edges of her hooves along the rocks and shells and bones and all the other detritus that had sunk into the abyss over the long centuries. Her lungs screamed and her throat spasmed, but still she searched, waiting for the silver sound of her hoof touching true metal.
Longer she searched, and hope faded. Panic replaced it, panic and desperation and a frantic energy that raced through her veins like lightning. Just one more minute, one more second was all she needed, and then she would climb back to the surface. But in the darkness and the weightlessness of the depths, she began to lose her sense of up. Only the bubbles escaping from her muzzle, felt as they crawled across her cheeks, gave any hint of the way home. A new emotion began to overwhelm all the others: a sickening, howling fear that grew like ice up her spine and threatened—
A soft, bell-like ring, the first real sound she’d heard in minutes, resounded through the depths. Her hoof seized on something hard and unyielding, something that could only be precious steel, that holiest of metals. She wretched it free of the muck with a desperate burst of strength, and began her long ascent.
Before she made it even a hoof’s length, something seized her legs. Hard, crusted, dead things, somehow dry despite spending centuries buried in the lake. Jealous bones wrapped around her shaking form, and held her tight as she struggled with frantic, violent shakes. They held as she grew weak, and her heartbeat slowed, and a final exhalation sent her last breath on its long, slow journey to the surface. And only when the steel pick-axe blade fell from her numb hoof did the bones let her go.
Above, on the surface where the priestess and the filly’s parents and the village all waited, somepony began to sing. It was a low sound, mournful, a dirge. They knew how long a pony could stay below before returning, and that time had passed. One by one, the other villagers picked up the song, and the priestess scattered the embers of a rowan log into the water, an offering of light to placate the new spirit below.
In time, the filly’s bones joined the engineer’s tools, and nopony could have told them apart.
* * *
In the decades that followed, the village grew out onto the lake. The ponies fashioned pontoons out of hollow reeds, and rather than rely on stilts, their homes floated on the still surface. They built openings into the floors, and moved from water to wood and back again as naturally as other ponies passed through a door. Only in their oldest legends did ponies still walk the land.
Still, for all their changes, the nymph-ponies kept to the surface. Only twice a year did they send their youth down to the bottom of the lake in search of metal; for everypony else, the depths were forbidden. To venture into the deepest reaches, where crystal leaves grew from rock walls, was blasphemy.
Perhaps it was inevitable that one was born who would challenge those tired laws. The lake was a small world, and not all were content to skim its surface like water bugs. Some, even in this peaceful tribe, were daring. They could not live small lives.
There was a colt whose sister ventured into the depths on the first day of spring. She carried an amulet carved by her mother, and she never returned. The village mourned for a month, and then moved on. But the colt never forgot his sister; how she carried him on her back when he was too tired to swim, and taught him the trick of catching crabs with hollowed acorn lures. He remembered her yellow mane, as bright as the golden grass that waved beyond the shores, and her scent of honeysuckle and sweat. He dreamed, during the dark of night as spring gave way to summer, of her yellow mane slowly sinking beneath the silt at the bottom of the lake. He imagined he could taste honeysuckle in the water, and surely it was her bones.
The seasons turned, and the colt grew into a stallion. Strong and lithe, nimble as an eel in the water. He turned down many suitors who admired the muscles coiled beneath his coat and swooned at the brooding look in his eyes, of one whose thoughts turned ever inward. They said he rarely looked up at the sky but rather always downward, into the depths of the lake. Its shadows had their hook in him.
It was at the height of summer, when the rays of the sun at noon penetrated deepest into the lake and ponies retreated to the shade of their huts for a brief siesta, that he stole a marlin’s bladder from the priestess’s hut. He filled it with air and gathered rocks to weigh his hooves, and he slipped down into the water without a soul to watch.
Down the flooded quarry he sank. Past fish and shafts of sunlight, into the eternal night. The water squeezed his chest, but he ignored the growing pressure. He drank in the last of the air from the bladder and let it float away. The stones he kept to hurry his fall.
Mineral leaves brushed his coat, and in no time at all he reached the bottom of the lake. Silt stirred and tickled his nose. He ignored it and the growing pain in his lungs and focused on the countless bones beneath his hooves. Some of them here, on this vast dark plain far beneath the surface, belonged to his lost sister. He imagined, if he stayed long enough, he could taste them all, and when he found the ones with the hint of honeysuckle he could bring them back to the surface, for his parents to wrap in cattail leaves and honor with the proper rites. And then they could drop them back into the depths for a fitting rest.
But that was not why he came, and he certainly did not have time to taste every bone cobbling the lake. Only a few more minutes, he figured. Enough, perhaps, to find the metal his sister had died searching for, and in doing so spare another family the grief he had suffered. Enough to let her spirit rest.
He searched for what felt like hours. Longer than he had ever held his breath. Until his hooves grew numb from the cold and he began to see bright spots flashing in the endless darkness. So long that even the despairing realization of his own swiftly arriving death began to fade, and he warmed himself with the small comfort that, at least, he would rest with his beloved sister.
But in that final moment his hoof struck something that rang like a bell. He touched it again, and again, and no matter where he touched the chime sounded like silver. A larger piece of metal than anypony in his tribe had ever seen. Enough to make his family the richest in the village. Enough metal that no more fillies would ever have to brave the lake’s depths. A gift from the ancestors greater than he could have ever imagined. He grasped the odd metal shape, ground his feet into the muck on either side, and pulled with all his might to free it from the lake’s bed. It shifted, squealed, and finally some ancient, rusted piece of metal turned.
The latching mechanism on the ancient sluices, forgotten for thousands of years, came free. It burst from the gate in a cloud of rust that the stallion tasted for just a moment, and then the gates themselves swung wide open from the pressure of all those millions of tons of water, and the sudden current swept him into the drainage tunnels. The rapid rush of water broke other gates free, and dozens of portals along the walls peeled open. Down he flew through channels that had not seen the touch of water for millenia. A metal grate briefly barred his passage, until the infinite pressure forced his broken body through. Miles away, streams of water burst from the cliffs like fountains, arcing for hundreds of feet before joining the sea below.
On the surface of the lake, the village trembled. The waters roiled like a vast storm was passing overhead, but the clear sky of a summer day looked down. Ponies panicked and jumped into their quaking houses, and only slowly realized that the land was rising. Within minutes the square shore was a dozen feet above their heads, too high to reach. And it wasn’t stopping.
Down the water went. Within the quarry a tremendous roar drowned out the cries. Rock walls streaked with rust felt the sun for the first time in countless years. Eddies and whirlpools formed on the surface, spinning the houses around like toys, and the ponies clung to each other. They cried out to the spirits for mercy. The priestess clutched a rowan log to her breast and sang out a prayer.
Still the village fell, and the shore became a square of light high above. Crystal leaves emerged from the sinking waters, shining in all the colors of the rainbow. They could not bear their own weight out of the water, and crashed down after only moments in the sun. They littered the water like broken glass.
Finally, the water slowed. It no longer weighed enough to scour the drainage tunnels, but the gates were all destroyed. They would never close again. And the last of the water trickled out or collected in shallow pools on the bottom of the quarry, wetting the carpet of crystals and bones and tools and bones that were the engineer’s tools, discarded all those millenia ago, exposed now for a final time to the fleeting touch of the sun. And then noon passed, and the sun moved out of sight, and shadows filled the quarry again.
And at the bottom, where the village finally settled, ponies came together, stumbling across the broken floor of the quarry. Weeping, and screaming, and howling for deliverance from evil.
In the heart of Equestria there is a haunted forest, and in it an enchanted glade.
The advancing trees have yet to claim this space, though every year they grow bolder. Saplings pry loose the cobblestones that winter has weakened with ice, and the questing roots of the great oaks push up the soil, wrapping the last broken pieces of this once great city in their jealous grasp. Soon only the cracked and dead fountain in the center of the clearing will remain, its basin filled with stagnant rainwater and a green skim of algae, reminding the animals and no one else that once this was the capital of an empire.
The fountain does not concern us. The age of ponies, in this part of the world at least, in this wild, haunted forest, has passed. The land has new masters.
It is a spring day when a salamander finds the glade. The trees are still bare, but beneath them the dense undergrowth has already begun to bloom with an explosion of new leaves. A parliament of swamp roses holds session over the old western path, where the sinking cobblestones create a shallow depression for the melting snow. The roses love the damp soil; from a single seed, dropped by some bird or insect years past, they have infested half the glade, turning it into a carpet of twisting stems. A riot of coral-pink blossoms covers the vines and hides their sharp thorns.
The salamander does not care for the flowers. Or the thorns, for that matter. Her thick scales, as hard as glass and scorched black around their saw-toothed edges, brush aside the roses like they are nothing. She tears her way through the thicket, cauterizing a path that smaller game animals will use for years. The ground smokes where her claws touch.
She is not a smart creature. Mature female salamanders do not have to be. They have no natural predators. They eat almost anything – rotting leaves, carrion, tender shoots, eggs, even animals that are too sick, wounded or stupid to move out of their path. It is all the same to them. All fuel.
Some ancient instinct measures the glade and finds it agreeable. She approaches the fountain in the center, with its stones warmed by sunlight shining through the broken canopy, and crawls up into the basin. The water inside breaks into a feverish boil, filling the glade with steam.
Up each layer of the fountain she climbs. The stone resists her heat, but the little vines sprouting from the cracks shrivel and blacken. They fall away, leaving slender smears of ash like shadows.
The highest level of the fountain is a large marble bowl that once flowed with water. A few leaves and twigs resting there vanish into cinders. The salamander curls her body in the hollow, letting it grow warm, until the stone glows a dim, angry red. It pops like pond ice, and new cracks appear; marble was never meant for such heat. It begins to burn.
That is hot enough, instinct says. She lays her egg in the bowl. And then, all her maternal instincts exhausted, she climbs down from the fountain and tears her way back into the forest again. She has already forgotten why the glade mattered to her at all.
Slowly, the fountain cools. The marble is black now, riven with chips and branching fractures. The egg inside, a charcoal diamond about the size of a pony’s hoof, rests patiently. The tiny life stirring within, more fatty liquids than meat at this point, does not understand time any more than its mother does.
It will wait, unchanging, for years. Around it, around the fountain, the seasons resume their endless turn.
* * *
It is winter when the cockatrices arrive.
Cockatrices are not social monsters, as a rule, but in the colder months they sometimes band together like other junglefowl, sharing warmth and protection from predators. For while a hungry manticore might decide to take a chance on a lone cockatrice, even a starving one would think twice before attacking an entire covey of them. The forest is littered with statues of those who tried.
The dominant hen scouts around the clearing, hopping clumsily on the snow, flapping through it as though trying to swim toward the fountain, which radiates an unusual warmth. No snow touches it. The cobblestones around it are dry and bare. The basin’s rim is just a bit too high for her to peer into, but cockatrices have a keen sense of smell, and she detects no animal scents from within, only rotting leaves and fallen bark and an odd, acrid taste she has never encountered before. A mixture of ash and stone that has no precedent in the enchanted forest. She has no experience with lava.
But all seems safe. The myriad stones, in the fountain and the cobbled ground beneath the snow, appeal to her. They sing to something primal in her nature. Cockatrices adore shaped stone, whether they find it or create it themselves.
She calls to her brothers with a rumbling, querulous trill, and they emerge from the bare trees to gather by her side. She hops up onto the rim, poses with her wings outspread to demonstrate that this is her domain, then flops awkwardly into the fountain and pushes the mess of leaves and sticks that have fallen there into a rough pile that will become her nest. The others do the same, and soon the basin echoes with chirps and trills and the dry, papery rush of scales twining like centipedes amidst dead leaves and feathers.
One cock does not join his siblings. He perches on the rim of the basin and hisses at them, at the fountain, at the unnatural warmth that, though it drives away the dreadful winter chill, strikes a chord of fear in his tiny brain. The scent of burned stone alarms him. He flaps and dances, warning the others of the danger they have found.
This defiance angers the hen. She jumps up beside him, fluffs up the rill of feathers around her head, and hisses a challenge. The cock, quite a bit smaller than the hen, refuses to back down, and they engage in a frank exchange of opinions and razor-sharp claws.
That settles the matter. The bleeding male gathers what dignity he can still find and departs the covey, leaving a trail of shed feathers and ruby drops, like little flowers that melt into the snow. He vanishes into the empty forest, and a few minutes later the other cockatrices hear a loud crash, breaking branches, and a bird’s cry that cuts off abruptly. The silence that follows seems to last forever as the forest holds its breath.
In time, the covey resumes its gentle chatter. They have already forgotten their departed brother.
Cockatrices are not social monsters, as a rule.
* * *
The enchanted forest is the site of a battle. It has been raging for centuries and will not be settled for decades more, but already the winners and losers are clear. The age of the beech-maple is coming to an end, replaced by an alliance of oak and ash.
When ponies still trod this land, when it was not a forest but their greatest city, they filled the avenues and gardens with tame trees, harmless as kittens. They admired the ostentatious and unusual – greater silktrees and crimson kings and fragrant dogwoods. But more than any of these they loved maples, which grew slowly and in the autumn months underwent a brilliant metamorphosis, their canopies erupting with brilliant yellows and oranges, reds as dark as blood, and even stranger colors. The sugar maples bedecked themselves in incandescent pink, like a watermelon’s flesh, and for weeks until the first frost the entire city took on the aspect of a dream, a riot of colors like an artist’s palette smeared across the land. Another wonder to remind ponies that they were the chosen of the gods, gifted with beauty, destined to rule the world.
Since the city’s fall and abandonment, the trees have run wild. The more delicate, ornamental breeds died quickly, made hollowed nests by insects or freezing in the new winter chill. But the maples survived, and their allies the beech trees joined them in reclaiming the city, tearing up the streets with their roots and overturning the stubborn walls. It was the work of centuries, of generations, but slowly the forest reclaimed the city, and only recalcitrant holdouts like our fountain survived amidst the verdant ruin.
The maples and beeches thrived in the cool weather that followed the city’s fall. Their strong roots found easy purchase in the poor, rocky soil that defied so many other trees. They built a new empire, wildy beautiful and crawling with life. In other lands, it might have lasted forever. But ponies were a magical species, and their city dripped with enchantments, cantrips, charms and great sorcery. Spells not as weak as their masters; spells that outlasted them, that seeped into the land like acid through skin.
The maples resisted the magic. They had no need for it. The beeches noticed the spells, but they were too few in number to make a difference, in the end.
It was the oaks who felt the magic most keenly. From their isolated, pitiful little groves, the oaks saw the magic, and they drank it into their roots. The loose spells twisted them, bent them, and made them into something new. Something the world had never seen.
In the space of a season, the enchanted oaks exploded from their tiny redoubts. Acorns filled the forest, sprouting with unnatural speed into seedlings that grew like grass. Their leaves rattled and their branches bent in the calm, windless air. The new trees sent down deep roots, questing for the buried remains of the city, and what they found they consumed. All the magic that was hidden in the ruins became theirs, and the wild forest changed. Shadows deepened into pools. Animals dreamed red nightmares and woke as monsters. The heart of nature beat faster and faster, a thing alive with fury and aimless intent, pursuing itself, being pursued, flying, fleeing and everything eating, eating, eating, and over generations of this madness the forest stopped being any forest that ponies would recognize. It became the haunted forest.
A few lone maples remain in the fountain glade. The roses crawl up their trunks, but the trees do not mind. Every year the forest grows warmer, and the oaks and ash thrive. They release more seeds, and more of their saplings survive. Within a generation, only a few maples will remain, locked away in stony grottos or bent beneath the cliffs, huddled refugees of a battle so slow that the stars will change shapes in the night sky before the oaks declare victory.
The cockatrices know none of this. But they relish the acorns that cover the forest floor when autumn comes round again.
* * *
It is summer, and the cockatrices have new neighbors.
A pack of timberwolves is moving in. A towering sycamore that grew on the banks of a nearby stream fell during a storm some weeks past, flattening dozens of lesser trees and laying its massive crown flat upon the earth. Leaves the size of dinner plates are scattered across the forest, and the timberwolves gather them with industry, carrying them to a dense thicket where several fallen trees rest in a jumbled pile, a mess of sticks and splintered branches and thick trunks snapped like bones when the sycamore fell. The timberwolves bring the fallen leaves here and skewer them on the twigs, creating a rough thatched roof for their den.
The timberwolves are wary of the cockatrices. The cockatrices are wary as well. Neither species sees the other as food, and the timberwolf den is far enough from the unnaturally warm fountain that outright conflict can be avoided. But the fountain now sports an addition, a surprised, petrified timberwolf peering into the basin. Its calcium leaves are delicate, and many have already broken, falling as flakes onto the cobblestones. Soon all the stone leaves will fall, as they would from a tree in autumn, and only the timberwolf’s skeleton will remain, locked in stone for all time.
The seasons turn, and when spring arrives a litter of timberwolf cubs joins the Fountain Pack and cries inside the den. Fern and honeysuckle paws scratch blindly at their littermates; their bones are the soft greenwood of briars. The adults pile up thistles and poison ivy around the den.
The manticores that sometime soar overhead are meat eaters, and they do not savor timberwolves. Rather, they hate timberwolves; the mere sight of them drives manticores into a frenzy of claws and fangs and stingers that only ends when one or the other is dead. The hatred is unreasoning and guileless – it drives even young manticores to attack entire packs of timberwolves, with no chance of survival. They seem to delight in the carnage, even as the forest floor grows muddy with their blood. Their poison has no effect on the timberwolves, but with row upon row of shark’s teeth they can shred the delicate wolves down to bare branches, and their claws rip out the delicate vines that are the wolves’ guts.
Twice now manticores have found the Fountain Pack. Their corpses, picked at by scavengers, litter the forest around the den. A single bat wing lies lodged between two branches, tattered and rent and dangling in strips. The timberwolf alpha is ferocious in defense of her den.
But time is not on her side. The carrion attracts scavengers, which every day attract more attention. Above the glade, turkey vultures ride the thermals in wide loops, waiting for their chance to dive down and grab a scrap of flesh. All this commotion calls out to darker appetites within the forest. And one day the trees sway as something rough and huge slouches between them. Beyond the trees, the lush undergrowth blocks sight beyond more than a few feet, but the timberwolves can smell the new arrival. It stinks of rot and bones and the sharp, sour tang of magic, loose and wild and hungry.
The pack assembles at the edge of the glade. Behind them, a few curious cockatrices poke their heads out of the fountain’s basin, and just as quickly retreat. The wolves growl and snarl and puff themselves up, but the ones at the back begin to edge away. The ground trembles beneath their dandelion paws as the intruder nears.
It stops just out of sight. The bushes rattle and the trees bend, and a huge shadow drinks the light out from the forest. A sickening, cloying scent stuffs their muzzles.
The standoff lasts for only a minute. Too many wolves, or perhaps the unseen beast catches sight of the cockatrices. Or perhaps it simply isn’t hungry. Regardless, the trees sway again as it turns and lumbers away. The air slowly clears of the stench of death.
The Fountain Pack retreats to the den. In a few months, the cubs will be old enough to travel with their parents, and they can find a more hospitable part of the forest.
But then, that is how they came to be here.
* * *
The magic loose in the forest works in great ways, and in small.
Off the path leading to the fountain, in the damp soil where the roses grow, there lies an ancient rowan log, all that remains of a tree that was old when ponies first laid the stones of their city here. The peaty, acidic soil kept it from rotting for an age, but the churn of centuries has eroded the shield of dirt that preserved it so faithfully, and now, exposed to the sun and the wind and the rain and worms and spiders and burrowing centipedes tracing whorls beneath its bark, the log begins to decay.
Rowan has a particular affinity for magic. It is a witch’s wood, beloved of shamans, carved into precious, elegant wands by sorcerers. And, soaking in the magic of the enchanted forest for most of a thousand years, this rowan log has become quite magical indeed.
The insects, in their gnawing, felt the magic’s bite first. The tunneling millipedes died and curled into spiral coils that grew crystal chrysalises, and out from these cocoons emerged shadowy motes, little more than specks of darkness that caught the wind and sailed away into the forest, burning passages through whatever leaves and branches and animals they encountered. A colony of ants sampled the log, withdrew, and retired to a life of peaceful meditation in their nest beneath the earth.
But the greatest transformation came to the most humble of beings. Under the bark, in the wet spaces, grew a particular species of slime mold. In a normal forest it amounted to nothing more than a yellow smear, like the yolk of an egg misplaced and dripping from something dead. But, infused with the magic of the forest, the slime mold changed. It grew stronger. Hardier. More ambitious.
The mold burst out from the log and swallowed the flinders. Within days it swelled from a barely visible speck of a lemon’s rind into a messy, wet mass the size of a blanket. It pulsed with thoughtless hunger, stretching out, extending fibrous tendrils out into the roses. And it found them nutritious.
It is autumn now, in the glade. The slime mold is a cancer. The roses are all gone, and in their place a yellow trellis remains, dripping ichor as bright as the sun. The mold digests the stems and reaches out hair-thin feelers toward its next prey.
It is winter, and the mold is not dead. The fountain’s unnatural warmth keeps it alive even as the rest of the forest sleeps. It crawls up the maples, an inch a day, and decides it likes the height.
It is spring, and the mold has overrun a quarter of the glade. It creeps up on the bare rock around the fountain. The cockatrices stare murder at it, but the slime has no eyes and refuses to turn to stone, despite their best efforts. A vague notion of danger begins to build in the elder hen’s mind, an uneasy hollowness in her gizzard. Soon the decision to abandon the fountain will fall on her wings.
At the height of summer, the slime is triumphant. Half the glade has fallen to it. The trees are yellow spires, dripping with yolk. Several have collapsed already, and others creak ominously in the wind. The mold loves the sound. It loves the promise of broken trees and exposed heartwood, delicious like the marrow of bones. It wonders what the cockatrices will taste like.
But then the spiders arrive. A troop of them, swollen by the same magic as the mold. They are bristly and stout, with powerful legs for climbing and leaping. As big as foxes, they scuttle out of the woods into the glade, find the mold, and give it a taste.
It is, apparently, delicious. The spiders go mad, scooping ichorous yellow lumps into their mouthparts. Their stomachs seem endless. For hours they feed, chasing down every yellow drop they can find. They tear up the logs and scour the trees, their bodies a black, living carpet of twitching legs. A few venture too close to the fountain and stay there forever. When the rest are done, a faint tracery of delicate silk shrouds the glade, veil thin, whispering like fog.
Only a few specks of mold remain. They hide under the rim of the fountain, little yellow beads in dark cracks, and conclude that the old ways were better.
* * *
It is winter again, the season when manticores die.
Manticores must eat meat to survive, but in winter all their prey sleeps in dens burrowed into the snow, or flies south, or swims beneath the ice-crusted lakes. They catch a few deer here and there, but they grow weak with hunger. By the time spring returns to melt the snow and spread her green mantle over the trees, the manticores are only half in number. The ones who still live are starving.
They leap from the trees into the fountain. Surprise is the only way to attack cockatrices, and they would not dare to ambush the entire covey had hunger not hollowed them out, left them desperate, willing to take foolish risks for a little meat.
They are lucky. Only one cockatrice sees them coming, and only one manticore lands like a meteor, shattering into countless pieces in a deafening crash that startles birds into flight for miles around. His brothers reach the fountain a moment later, and the bloodbath begins. At this range, the cockatrice’s magic gaze is useless – they need to fix their target, impossible to do in the scrum of claws and scorpion tails and shark’s teeth. The dominant hen realizes the nest is lost and sounds a warbling retreat. They abandon the fountain, dodging around statues of timberwolves and spiders and into the trees. The undergrowth swallows them after only a few paces.
The manticores let the survivors go. They have what they want. Three twitching bodies stain the fountain, filling it with a puddle of their blood. The manticores scream in delight and begin to feed on the fallen cockatrices. They lather themselves in gore. Feathers, flesh, beaks and bones all vanish into their gullets. It is the closest feeling to joy that monsters can know.
They are still euphoric when one of them, a scrawny male who barely survived the winter, spots the timberwolf cub at the glade’s edge.
It should not have strayed from its den. But timberwolf cubs are like foals in many ways – playful, careless and curious. The pack does not realize this one is missing until they hear the manticores howl again, followed by the cub’s brief cry.
When the timberwolf alpha arrives, the cub is gone. Only a scattering of fern and honeysuckle leaves remains. Leaves, and the manticores, who turn to face their new enemy.
In the battle that follows there is too much death. Or, from another perspective, just enough. So much blood is spilled from the cockatrices and the manticores and the timberwolves that it paints the glade red. The scent of it clogs the air. And above them all, forgotten, overlooked, a tiny bit of monstrous magic that has waited for decades drinks in all the bloodshed and begins to wake.
During the battle, the fountain grows hot. In the marble cup at its zenith, the salamander’s egg begins to tremble. Cracks appear in the black carbon shell, and out from them spills an evil red light. The stone begins to smoke. The survivors of the battle – still locked together, teeth in flesh and claws digging through guts that are vines – have just enough time to smell an acrid odor, stronger even than the scent of all the blood, and wonder at the sudden heat. It is pleasant, like a revelation of sunshine on a cloudy day.
The egg splits fully open, and the salamander is born. A wave of fire erupts from the shell, consuming the fountain and the stones and the trees and the manticores and the timberwolves and the statues and everything else in the glade. The blood in the basin flashes into pink steam before the flames obliterate even that. A thunderous blast digs a crater several feet into the earth.
Where the fountain stood, a holocaust rages. Before it burns out a tower of smoke will rise for miles into the still air, covering half the haunted forest with an ashen pall. And out from the flames crawls a tiny, lizard-like creature, no larger than a pinecone, glowing like a star and oblivious to all the stories that ended with its birth.
