There was a time, in ages long past, before the alicorns, before ponies, before magic, when great beings walked the land. Monsters to some, great and terrible, who left only madness in their wake. They cared not for the creatures of the world as it was; their purpose was greater than our miserable speck. As to what that purpose was—who’s to say?
What became of these great beings, you may wonder, if their power was so great? Some left, voyaging into the stars, or to other realms beyond our feeble understanding. Some were sealed away, their own powers turned against them. Some, impossible as it may be to believe, were even killed—though how or by what, I cannot say. Their corpses became mountains and oceans, and ponies live in them to this day.
And some… some chose to sleep. To bide their time. Prophecies exist in every culture that tell of their return, and the great and terrifying consequences that will ensue if they are allowed to awaken. If you know where to look.
Whatever happens.
Whatever the world may look like.
They must. Not. Wake. Up.
Or Celestia help us all.
As Eldr’chs’licht’mr (the Great Divinity of the Western Reaches, She Who Mauls Space, Queen of Rcht’leigh) opened her eyes for the first time in 10,000 years, the dim glow of the lichen that had grown over much of her temple was all that greeted her.
She blinked out of reflex, even though her many black eyes were mostly vestigial given her extra-dimensional perception. Opening her multitude of maws, she let out a yawn, which would have sounded more like the screaming of the damned than a yawn to most ponies, but you get the idea.
On the other side of the world, twenty-three birds treasured by the prince of Saddle Arabia suddenly dropped from their perches. The cause of death upon autopsy (they were very important birds) would soon be revealed: their hearts had been turned to sand.
Eldy (her friends called her Eldy, though it had of course been 10,000 years since she’d last seen any of them) stretched her tentacles and took in a deep breath of fresh air. Which turned out to be more of a musty breath, given she was in a temple in a cave hundreds of meters below the surface of the Earth (not a great thing to wake up to).
She looked around. “Followers?” she wondered aloud, though of course not in any tongue a mortal could have comprehended. “Where are you?”
She cast her gaze about some more, but there were no worshippers lining the obsidian floors of her temple waiting for her awakening. That was strange, she thought. They’d been there when she’d gone to sleep, singing their songs and doing the silly little dances they loved to do for her.
And the bleeding out the eyeballs thing. She’d always found that quite charming.
“How long was I out?” she muttered to herself. She expanded her awareness outwards, past the atmosphere and into the realm of planets and stars, and here she observed the positions of the celestial bodies.
“10,000 years?” Eldy remarked. “A reasonable nap. How irksome of my followers to not accommodate me over such a small span of time.”
She rolled over, the wet sounds of her limbs pushing against the smooth black floor echoing through the empty temple. In Farasi, three dozen village elders within a seven kilometer radius of one another were struck blind and given visions of the waters of the world turning to salt.
“What is going on around here anyway?” she wondered, and once more reached out with her awareness. This time not to the outer reaches of the cosmos, but simply to the surface of her current living space.
If a creature like her could feel surprise, that was what she felt, for it was not the stone-and-jungle setting of the dread city of Rcht’leigh that greeted her, but rather a small village of gaudily painted buildings with thatched roofs. And occupying those gaudily painted buildings were not the creatures that had been there when she’d fallen asleep, but something much stranger. She focused in on one.
It was a mammal, which was the first strange thing (the dwellers of her temple had been reptilian in nature). It had two large eyes, four limbs ending in solid bony protrusions, a soft coat, a tail and mane, and another bony protrusion coming out of its head. Very strange—and somewhat repulsive, Eldy thought. Too much hair. Gross!
As she thought this, all the kirin in Autumn Blaze’s village burst into flames. This was met with mild surprise more than anything.
Eldy noted that not all of the creatures possessed the protrusions coming out of their heads. Now that she looked closer some had wings instead. They weren’t leathery like hers, though.
“Shame,” she said. “That would have made them more tolerable.”
It was then that she noticed something else—but not in the physical world. The great Glsptu Gears, the golden mechanisms that drove the movements of the solar system, had been interfered with.
She frowned, with her thousand mouths, and turned her attention to them. Sure enough, someone else had taken control of them—they were supposed to turn independently, but they had been switched into manual. Someone had been manually adjusting them for who knew how long. Well, that was an easy enough fix. All she had to do was reach out and—
“Hiya!”
Eldy was ripped from her delicate work back to the physical plane by the sudden high-pitched noise in her temple, nearly breaking the fine watchmaker’s mechanism. In Canterlot, thirteen ponies and one griffon in a mental ward suddenly regained their sanity, only to begin crying.
Eldy looked down at the floor of her temple to find a small pink dot standing amongst the black. She moved her perception closer.
“Do you know what I’m saying?” it said. Elsy had no clue what this gibberish was supposed to mean, so she reached into the creature’s mind and rummaged around until she found its language centre.
“He he, that tickles!”
Having found it, she incorporated it back into her own mind. Summoning up strength that hadn’t been seen in 10,000 years, she opened her mouths and attempted a greeting.
“Wazzup?” she said.
The pink thing smiled. “Oh my gosh, you can speak Ponish! That’s super fantastamazing!”
“Super fantasta…?” That hadn’t been in the thing’s brain. Perhaps she hadn’t done the transfer right?
“Never mind that,” the pink thing said. “What’s your name? Mine’s Pinkie Pie!”
“…Eldy,” Eldy said, not quite sure what to make of this thing. She found herself oddly on guard—which was silly, she knew, given who she was. She puffed herself up a little. “Tell me, creature, for what reason do you come to my temple?”
“I need to ask you a teensy-eensy little favour, Miss Eldy!”
If Eldy had had eyebrows, as this creature did, she would have raised one.
“A favour?” she boomed. “Of me? Such insolence! I could drive you insane in a moment, you know. To demand something of me! Don’t make me laugh.”
“I promise it’s just a little one!”
Eldy scoffed. Above, a baby dragon spilled ink on an important book. The ink looked, to him, like a map to an unknown continent.
“I just need you to go back to sleep,” Pinky Pie said.
“Why?” Eldy said. “I only just woke up.”
“Yeah, you did! And that’s great and all, but it’s kiiiiiiind of having horrible and unpredictable effects on the world above. And that’s not fantastamazing at all! So we’d really all just appreciate it if you could take another nap, please?”
“Why should I care what happens to ants?” Eldy said. “And what will you do if I refuse?”
“I’ll get reeeaaaal angry,” Pinkie replied, smiling.
Eldy glared at her, coiled her body down so that her massive head was inches from Pinkie’s snout. In Trottingham, every clock and watch jumped forward six minutes.
Eldy stared at the mare, glared at her, prepared to drive her to madness so Eldy could get on to more important matters, like gathering new followers. But as she did, something new sparked in the back of her consciousness. A new emotion, brought forward by the look behind the mare’s eyes.
Fear.
Eldy had never been afraid before, but now the emotion bubbled up within her, clawing its way to the surface. For there was something behind those eyes, those shining blue orbs, that shook her to the very core. Eldy didn’t have the glands for it, but she could feel herself starting to sweat.
Still, she forced herself onwards, staring down this… thing, before her. She reached out with her mind, forced her consciousness back towards the pink one’s, but this time her psychic tendrils were brushed aside, as easy as if they had been a bit of lint on one’s shirt. She tried again, thinking this must have been some fluke, but no, it happened again!
“What—“ she croaked out, as her tentacles began to shiver. “W-what manner of being are you?!”
“I told you already, silly,” she said, goggling, the sound echoing off the walls and into forever. “I’m Pinkie Pie!”
That was it.
“I yield!” Eldy cried, recoiling. “I shall return to my slumber.”
“That’s great!” Pinkie said. “The world should be ready to accommodate you in about 5,000 more years, so try and aim for that, okay?”
“Okay!” Eldy laid down on the cool obsidian and closed her eyes, her hearts hammering in her chest.
“Now then, I’ve got to throw a party for Twilight,” was the last thing she heard. “See you in a few millennia!”
