Words of the Ancients

Life in the Crimson Shore carried on. The month of March sped swiftly by as rain washed away the last remnants of winter and with it the trimmings from the vineyards where countless mares now spent their days. Soon the vineries would be reborn, lightened, and the grapes may begin to grow in renewed vitality. So too did a force grip the unicorns of the city and its many colonies, as long-dormant strength awakened to work the sleepy fields. April was soon at hoof and the clearing of the weeds just around the bend.

Pearl looked out the window to the vast expanses of farmland just past the outer walls, where little dots busied themselves in the distance, checking on drainage ditches among the vineyards. Elsewhere in the fields, they cared for the oats they’d planted in February. The priestess sighed over the dusty tablets on her desk.

‘Were it as simple as that, to sow knowledge in the soil and harvest it come spring...’

Time had carried on and now their search was desperate.

“What are we looking for, Lord Saul?” she had asked him that day when he returned from the dead a second time and the world seemed to turn upside down yet again. The day he asked for their help.

“A volcano,” he had said. Like it was anything, a pebble by the riverbank. She’d looked him in the eyes for any sign of deceit or playfulness, but there was none. The human was serious. A volcano! What things existed that she wished she’d never seen, and what wonders lived only in the legends of old that she starved but for a glimpse!

“What do you know of them?” had been his question, asked with no little dread. But the knowledge was there, even if the actual thing hadn’t been seen since Old Equestria... Volcanoes, where fire flowed as water! Where the innards of the world broke free and spewed doom and fire! The land where dragons hatched their young, in ancient times long lost since the Exile.

Since that day they had hunted for the mighty mountain of ash and fire, to no avail.

Desperate indeed was their search, and now Pearl tore her eyes from the fields and grasped the tablet in her aura’s gentle glow. The letters were small, penned by the careful script of a fellow sister. Coral, perhaps, though Pearl couldn’t quite tell in the faintness of the morning light. She read down the lines with the trained eye of the clerk for the elusive character that may yet speak of fire and rock.

But her mind was elsewhere.

Saul sat behind her, on his makeshift bed—hastily assembled from a myriad beds to fit his size—now strewn with clay tablets he had scribbled upon. His ‘notes’ as he called them, written in that strange script of his, the extract squeezed from between the leaves of that odd scroll he called ‘book’. Sister Pearl fidgeted in her seat and stole a quick glance back at him. Back at the book.

How it weighed heavy in her thoughts... the script, the symbols! She’d checked once before and many times since, and even now as she looked again she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. It was the same as the ancient writings on the temple walls, and deeper still where the cellars stored grain and wine. Down in the depths where neither sun nor moonlight shone and candles alone lit the way to secrets untold since so very long ago...

“What’s on your mind, Pearl?” came the question. The priestess started and turned back to the tablet with a blush on her cheeks.

“Ah, nothing! I’ve just found another shipment log from the mining colonies, the furthest beyond the Bay of Mangoes where the jungles give way to the colder climes near barbarian Windland... And uhh, yes, this tablet clearly says... iron, wood... and...” Pearl squinted over the little markings and struggled to tear meaning from their delicate twists. Coral, definitely. Curse her ridiculous style!

She felt him smile behind her. “Mines and quarries have yielded nothing, and you know this. Dig as you unicorns may, there are no mountains and all your operations seem to be surface-level affairs... So tell me, what is on your mind?”

Pearl bit her lip but sighed in the end. There was no point evading the matter any longer.

“I... I suppose I’ve had a bit of a question in mind, Lord Saul. Ever since you showed that book to the princess... but I promised to help you and I didn’t wish to obstruct your mission for fear of endangering your life... again.”

She swiveled on her chair and twiddled her hooves.

“But yes, regarding the book... I uh...” The priestess racked her brain for a way to explain the unexplainable. “How do you know that script?”

Now the human looked at her oddly.

“What do you mean?” Then his features darkened, a flash of fright and sudden anger that sparkled just beneath the surface of his deep almond eyes. He rose to his feet, massive and dark in the early morning gloom. “You know these letters?”

The look in his eyes made her pause, but it was too late to back down now. The priestess bit her lips and took a deep breath...

“I have seen them before...”

The day grew ashen gray and cold when they left the palace. A few dozen droplets fell here and there, sporadic heralds of a storm that may or may not fall at any moment. The streets were deserted and the way to the temple was clear. It stood mightily against the backdrop of the city walls and the sea beyond it, black and angry under the lightless day. Pearl was a speck of dust before it. Minuscule, she approached with a knot in her throat born of anticipation and deep anxiety.

“None can understand it?” Saul asked. His face was grim, his strides great, and heavy the weight that tensed his shoulders. An unequine drive seemed to push him forward, and Pearl began to understand the fright that ponies spoke of who had seen him fight in the throne room.

“Nopony can. I was a filly the last time they tried to decipher the markings... Mothers from the four great cities gathered in the temple for weeks, but nothing came of it. Most thought they were decorative...”

“...until now.” His step brought him to the foot of the stairs under overcast skies and the stern glare of the Alicorn Sisters. His stride did not break as he walked, and soon he rose up the first few steps with confidence. Pearl could not boast likewise. She lingered under those stone eyes and felt doubt—perhaps for the first time—under their mighty stares.

“I doubt if anypony else has yet made the connection,” Pearl muttered. Slowly her hooves carried her after the human until together they stood at the very entrance to the sanctum. “Sometimes I feel I am the last sister to truly believe they mean anything...”

“Show me.”

The markings waited for them along the outline of the temple walls, where its western side was painted in moonlight silver, and its eastern face was solar gold. The lines of the script were carved into solid rock, wedged into the brick wall to support the upper tiers of the massive structure; they adorned the very edges of the upper, middle, and lower walls, interspersed with images and empty grooves that may have once been jewel inlays. Pearl lit up her horn to cast the light of her violet aura across the glyphs and the human followed with hard-set eyes.

“Can you understand it?” the priestess asked.

The human did not answer, but read the inscriptions in silent contemplation. Brow furrowed, eyes squinted against the distance and the faded outline of each symbol, he nodded at long last.

“I can.”

Saul began to read. The words were strange, with hard, rolling Rs and a fluidity that was nearly songlike, but for its harshness. It was an odd, foreign speech that had not been spoken on those shores for many, many centuries... Celestia alone could say by whom. Pearl listened, enraptured, as though she may through sheer will understand the words herself.

Once finished, the human translated:

‘Sorrow dwells where nothing truly lives,
Held captive in great malevolence,
Before the end, we hope the moon forgives,
For hers is our eternal reverence,

The envious Sun is ever distant,
Frigid and bitter are its loveless rays,
Thus always must weep this Night’s assistant,
For cruel sorrow, long and sunless days,

Castles of rugged rock may safeguard us,
From wrothful waves, raging tides and shores,
But behind your wings and spear so righteous,
Benevolent Moon we are ever yours,

Through ancient eons, our faith grows stronger,
In cavernous depths where nights are longer.

“It’s a poem... written in a language that is commonly spoken in my world,” he said. “But it’s very old, almost impossible to decipher at times.” A pregnant silence fell between them, fed by every second spent staring at those ancient markings on the rock. At long last, the question could no longer be held back.

“Why can I understand this?” Saul asked. “Who wrote these words?”

Who indeed? Thoughts trickled like water through the sutures in Pearl’s skull; a stream that quickly grew to roar with the intensity of a river. There was little that could avail her, but for the deepest unicorn lore, the stories that went back to the Exile itself and the ages of violence and darkness before the time of princesses... the priestess drew in a deep breath and pressed a hoof to the rock.

“These stones were not quarried here, Saul,” she said. Mouth dry, a dreamy look in her eyes, she continued. “They were brought from across the Mournful Sea, from beyond the Bay of Mangoes where the jungles give way to... to nothingness... nothing but legend and myth.

“It’s a story etched into clay and memory, but often forgotten in favor of lighter tales. The story of Redhorn is the story of the Crimson Shore. She sailed the Mournful Sea before it was named, and sought blood and violence in retribution for her mother’s death. The first unicorn, the greatest of us all, was slain somewhere beneath the canopies of Verdant by heathen ponies and creatures of myth.

“But it was Redhorn who sailed the furthest of all of Ivory’s daughters, the one who spilled the most blood... and the one who brought these stones here, after a decade of war and the tearing down of pagan temples beyond the edge of the world.”

“So whoever wrote this...” the human said.

“...was not a unicorn,” the priestess shivered, “...perhaps not even a pony.”

There was more down in the depths. More secrets, more darkness thinly veiled by a barrier that could no longer stop her. Not with Saul by her side. Pearl knew this and the knot in her throat told her she knew something else...

‘I should not be doing this...’

There were ways, long, tiresome ways to earn non-unicorns access to the depths of the Temple. Ways that could take a lifetime to resolve. But the gnawing of knowledge so close to surfacing drove her onward with steady steps... and the human behind her followed with a fiery curiosity that gleamed in his otherwise unreadable eyes. Together they pushed through shocked acolytes and gawking sisters, past the sanctum, and through heavy wooden gates that barred the path to old and musty stairways. These snaked and twisted, one with the rock and bone of the hill where the temple was first raised and the city around it. Down they went until the air was hot and the stillness of the underworld became oppressive. In suffocating silence she led the human to the temple’s lower cellars.

There they found it; the very foundations of the Temple of the Sisters and the writing etched into its cold, dead stone.

“We’re here,” Pearl said. Thick beads of sweat pooled on her forehead.

They emerged into a chamber as large as it was claustrophobic, with narrow passageways filled with jars, grain, and bundled pelts. Bones of stone jutted from the ancestral foundations to hold the ceiling in place, and these were pillars as old as the world itself. Eroded markings lined their surfaces, nigh-impossible to see clearly in the faintness of the light born of Pearl’s horn. Saul stared long and hard into the rock...

“It’s a story,” he muttered and ran his fingers down the surface, wet with condensation. Under the hornlight his features shifted and turned with every new line he discovered.

“What does it say?” Pearl edged closer. The shadows grew long across the chamber.

“Listen...”

‘Exiled, we traveled on frigid currents over a world that wasn’t ours,’ he read to her. ‘Storm clouds gathered and the seas raged. We could not stop it. We could not fly as we once did. A weakness was upon us.’

“Pegasi?” he asked.

“None of the tribes know how to work stone like this,” Pearl answered. “Who would write down their history? They have no letters of their own. Read on, there’s more to this...”

He moved away from the pillar and beckoned for her to follow. Together they tread that darkness from rock to rock.

‘...but the Moon knew nothing of flaws and could not abide the Master’s failure... on the third day the winds blew kindly, Equestria was calm... the Sun’s pride would not allow this...’

“There is no order to these stories,” he said to her. “Each one speaks of different things. Nothing makes sense.”

“To me they do. It’s... I think this speaks of the Exile, Saul. The time before, when the tribes were together with the Sisters in Old Equestria, before Discord’s evil cast us away.

“Read on, please! This could mean so many things...” Pearl urged him, eyes fixed on the writing that begged to be understood.

‘...not long after our Master was lost to the waves, we came upon a land of greenery and plenty. Creatures waited in the trees. Strange beings inhabited the plains. It was no place for our kind, and soon we knew to leave...’

“Could it be earth ponies?” he asked, but Pearl was hesitant. The wise mares agreed most earth ponies lacked the capacity to create greater works, and to even imply that it was by their hooves that the Temple of the Sisters may have been made, even partly... No, but there was something else. It didn’t add up.

“Their language is different. They could never control the elements; that was a gift only the pegasi held, given to them by the Sisters. As surely as the sun dissipates tempest and the moonlit seas conjure the storms... earth ponies have no grasp of stonework either.”

More rocks. More mysteries. The human found another pillar.

‘...he came to us from the depths, a prince! He called to us and to him we rallied, and he taught us much, and he led us through many evils and into unlit lands, glittering caverns where bats dwell and crystals bleed from the rock...’

Deeper into that darkness the human and priestess went.

‘...our barges were dashed against jagged rocks born of the water... it was alive, and we learned to dread it... our Master feared its immensity and in his fear we found our own...’

Too faded, too old. Most of the writing was useless, the rest offered no answers.

‘...that miserable thing hovered over us in pitiful skies. Heatless, loveless, we soon knew to despise its horrid glow... yet there was the other, and in that one we knew to have hope... It still lives. It watches, and so long as we keep faith, we know it won’t leave us... no matter how deep our caves and tunnels run... o beautiful silver pearl, you shine for us still...’

“What does it mean, Pearl?” tired, breathless from the oppressive heat and lack of air, the human asked. The known races—both living and long dead—swirled madly in Pearl’s mind, but nothing quite fit. What beast in this world knew of the Sisters and Old Equestria, and still held the knowledge to sculpt rock and master language if not the unicorns? Were there unicorns there, beyond the furthest reaches of the world?

“I do not know,” she said at last. “To find this in a unicorn temple... in the unicorn temple... I must speak to the Exalted Mother.”

“If I can help in any way, let me know,” the human said, eyes furrowed over a particular passage. “This has been a most interesting morning.”

“Squandered, I fear...” she added, a rueful grin on her face. “I promised not long ago to help you, yet here we are... I’m sorry we failed to find anything, Saul.”

The human merely chuckled. “Do not be so sure...” his fingers ran lightly over a new line he’d come upon, “...because I feel we may have just found our quarry...

‘...the city prospered for a while, but not for long. The mountain was alive, and it grew tired of our presence... its children let loose the fires of the earth...’

“Why are we digging a bloody pit in the ground?” Rainstorm asked around the grip of a shovel, never meant to be handled by a pegasus mare. “This leather grip is foul...”

The pit was in its very early infancy, to call it anything more than a hole would be wild exaggeration. Still, its ambitions were anything but small. The human had marked an extension of ground, about three by six pegasi in length, to be excavated with stakes driven into the earth at intervals and hammered deep into the soil.

“This,” Saul waved at the hole, “is where we make our nitre.”

The how of it wasn't quite clear to the pegasus, though it seemed wild and disgusting enough to be funny if nothing else. The hole itself was only the beginning, before the local slave colonies contributed to the project in garbage, rotten foodstuffs and urine. Rainstorm still wasn't sure she'd heard that last part right—and now it felt silly to ask—but if the human and his 'book' were to be believed, that is what it took to shatter walls and make cities crumble.

The pegasus scrunched. “I thought ye said ye’d found the stuff already! So why make it?”

The human stabbed his shovel into the soil. An awkward motion, it was far too small for him and forced him to bend low at the knees and back. A pike’s handle would have served him better. Barely.

“Insurance. We still need to hold that demonstration for the princess... and we did not find nitre. Not quite.”

Now Rainstorm was lost. She frowned and dropped the shovel.

“So what was all that fuss about? The priestess seemed pretty excited...” She arched her eyebrow. “...is it a prank?”

Saul laughed. Still an unsettling sound, even out in the open fields beyond the walls. He shook his head, no.

“We found something, alright,” he said. “It’s just no guarantee. Though it is our best bet so far. Still, it is distant and we need a more immediate solution.”

“So? What was it?”

Now he smirked.

“Fire,” he said, “and some holes in the ground.”

His cryptic nonsense!

“Alright, then.” She stuck the spade into the soil with a grunt. “Keep yer secrets...”

They dug until the shadow of the city stretched over them, cold and black against a gray sky, and all songbirds had long been drowned out by the crashing of icy waves against the shore. A frigid wind blew in from the north to remind Rainstorm of home. She shivered.

The bloody pit could wait. From beyond the horizon a pallid glimmer of white light shone just under the cloudline, and Rainstorm dreaded the look of the coming weather. It was much too familiar, like a feeling in the gut, a bad dream. A memory.

“We ought to head in,” she muttered. “It looks like rain. Lots of it.”

“Help me cover the pit,” Saul said through gritted teeth. He wore a heavy woolen cloak over his tunic, and fur-lined wrappings over his hose that were thicker still, and through all these the cold seemed to seep through. A gnawing, biting force that nothing could stop, not even a northern pegasus’ coat and feathers.

Together they raised a tarp on wooden poles over the hole they’d dug, and built a small wall around its edge with brick and rocks.

“There is something to the cold...” Saul muttered, arms crossed to wrap the cloak tight about his torso. “Something nearly-”

“-unnatural? Aye.” Rainstorm said, wings wound tight about her barrel. “Ye’ve noticed. Others have, too. It bites clean through most wrappings, some nights, wherever ye are. Bonfires may as well be candles, and the sun does not help.”

“Not always?”

“No,” she shook her head and cast a bitter glance at the gates, where the guards kept a great brazier burning. It's flame flickered fiercely under the gusts that raged upriver and over dusty plains, and the guardsmares huddled close to that feeble light. The pegasus cursed her luck, but it did feel like one of those nights.

“Why?”

Did anypony really know? She'd heard stories, of course. The Matriarch of Longwing often preached Luna's bitter hatred of moral and bodily weakness, and the icy bite of her vengeful breath born of the sea. Others, southrons, who had long lived among the horned ones took to their teachings and the things that were spoken of in the temples of the Gilded Bay beyond Fluttering Pass. They said it was no deed of the Alicorns, but their absence. That the mudponies’ worship of evil beings had wrought to life some dreadful magic deep in the jungles of Verdant...

The pegasus shrugged.

“Dunno,” and she tried not to be bothered by the whistling howls that soared far, far above them, where she knew the skies grew dangerous and impossible to navigate. Up there where once her kin had ruled, Rainstorm knew the currents to be malicious. Many a friend she’d lost in her youth to those wrathful winds...

“We’d best move on.” She picked up the pace and hoped to drown out the chill with exertion.

A barrage of frigid water fell on the Crimson Shore not a minute after Rainstorm and Saul had reached the gates. It fell at an angle, mixed in with salt water torn from the surface of the sea by distant waterspouts, like writhing tendrils of tempest over roiling waves. Lightning and thunder followed, and soon it was impossible to go on.

The two of them took refuge in an abandoned smelter. Its roof was mostly whole, its brick walls were strong, and the floor was not fully turned to mud by the flowing water that seeped through the cracks in the structure. It was as good as they might get, Rainstorm reasoned. At least with her in tow.

“We should try one of the nearby homes for shelter,” the human said through gritted teeth. Aye, it was one of those nights. “They'll have a fire, maybe something warm to drink.”

“Nay,” she muttered and fought down her teeth from chattering. A shiver ran down her spine. “Least not I, but they might let ye through. Being a lord and all.”

“Us both, surely!” he hissed through a trembling jaw. “If you come with me they must let you in, too.”

“If it’s us both they will put out their fires,” she laughed, “to shiver and huddle in darkness rather than bear my presence. Trust me, Saul. This is not my first storm.”

“A discouraging thought,” he said and grew quiet while the sky thundered over their hideout. Flashes of lightning illuminated a curtain of water outside the shutterless windows, thick enough to block all sight beyond a few paces. The wind howled too, and the strain against the rotten beams that held the ceiling made the wood groan and quiver. All through that they trembled, drenched, and caked in soil.

“Go on then,” Rainstorm said. “I’ll run on ahead and we can meet up at the castle once it’s stopped pouring...”

“Will you fly there?”

“Oh sure. I’ll grab us a bite while I’m at it, too!” The roll of her eyes was almost good-natured, but the day had been long and it threatened to be longer still. “Just go, ye dolt. I’ve taken my share of showers before and this one’s hardly gonna do me in.”

Saul wiped rainwater from his brow and fastened the clasp of his cloak tight around his neck. A close-lipped smile adorned his lips as he rose to his feet and strode to the ruined door—it rattled something fierce on its hinges—and the pegasus knew he would leave. Rainstorm stretched out stiff and aching joints, ready to brave the storm.

“Can I ask you something, Rainstorm?”

The question caught her unawares. She glanced at him, but the look in his unequine eyes was as unreadable as always.

“These people don’t want you here, yet you remain. They scorn you, they mock you. Still, you bled for them.

“Why?”

There were lies she had practiced and had many half-answers with enough truth in them to deceive most mares, most everypony. But in the cold darkness of that evening, the pegasus found herself full of doubt. Perhaps it was the chill in her bones or the exhaustion in her muscles that dampened her spirit long enough, or maybe it was the way those small, piercing eyes gleamed terribly in the blackness of the smelter every time lightning flashed... but all deceit felt pointless.

“I’ve... nowhere else to go.” The pegasus shuffled her wings and looked away. “Burned too many bridges. A few were burned for me... Here, the Sapphire Tower, any other horned city... It's all the same to me.

“What’s it matter, anyway? It’s a bloody deluge out there and we’re not getting any warmer here. Let’s get a move on!” She set her jaw and bore the cold with a resigned shrug. If the human expected anything more, tough luck. She pushed past him and through the door into the icy winds outside. Winds that bit hard into her, though the smelter had been a poor shelter, the outside was far, far worse. She envied him then, more than ever she’d envied anypony. Or almost anypony...

“Go on and get yerself somewhere warm,” she half-growled. “I’ll see ye at the– what are ye doing?”

The human stood beside her, face contorted into a vicious scowl against the frigid gusts that tore through his cloak like it was nothing. Still, the ghost of a gentle grin tugged at the edges of his lips.

“I’m coming with you,” he said.

"What? In this bloody rain?" She struggled to keep pace with his strides, weighed down by the water in her mane, in her tail, all over.

"Why?"

He faced her, braced against the howling gusts, water freely streamed down his face.

"We are stuck, Rainstorm!" He had to shout to be heard over the roaring tempest. "But we are not alone. Good thing, too! You and I, we can take the hits! We can weather the blows, survive the night with ease. But not forever. Never alone. In the end, it's the solitude that gets you.

"So come! The storm bellows and all winds race against us, and still the path ahead is long and uphill. Let's move!

"We are not getting any warmer, after all." His smile shone against the grim backdrop of tortured skies, and Rainstorm grinned despite herself. What could such a strange, mighty creature know of sorrow or loss? And yet, in a world of giants, might sadness not be giant too?

"Aye!" Her wings unfurled, her mind cleared of clouds and thunder, and she looked on at the looming castle as a challenge and not a task. The path ahead was hers to conquer!

Or not! A mighty splash marked the human's departure, and then another, impossibly distant to the first, separated by an oddly long silence. There it came, the third! And soon Rainstorm knew that Saul had broken into a run.

Her mind went blank for a second or two while memories of their fight flooded her mind. The speed! Soon the human was lost in the downpour, and she shook her head clear.

'No ye don't!' and she was after him.

Author's Note

Just a quick heads up! Friday's chapter may be delayed until Monday! I've run into a few real life difficulties and the chapter needs a few minor edits I may not be able to finish before Friday night.

That's all! Have a good one!