The cold wind blows softly through a barren wasteland, underneath a grey cloudless sky which hasn’t witnessed neither rain nor shine for generations.
The sole movement here is the occasional shifting of the sands, which spread for miles and miles into the distance without an end in sight.
There are no signs of life in this vast expanse of nothing… plant, animal or otherwise. Just the overwhelming certitude that each colourless day will begin and end for perpetuity, with only a modest breeze carrying the bleached desert debris punctuating the eternally eerie silence…
But wait! What’s this? Almost half-buried in a shallow dune nearby is a bizarre figure, the likes of which this forsaken dust-bowl hasn’t witnessed in aeons. Upon closer inspection, it appears to be a trio of mismatched creatures, all frozen in time together in hardened stone.
What grotesque imagery! What a nightmarish concept! Whatever deranged mason was responsible for carving this indescribable monstrosity must’ve truly lost his/her mind. A defiant Changeling. A cringing Centaur. A petrified filly (in both senses of the word).
How did this abomination of a statue get all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere with no-one to carry it? How has it survived the unspeakably harsh conditions of its surroundings, with no signs of erosion or even a single chip bespoiling the ghoulish structure’s perfect whitish exterior? And, most importantly of all, who would even want to commission such a paragon of hideousness in the first place?
But now, dear reader, such pertinent and essential questions must wait. For right now, something even more incredible is happening before our very eyes. As if by magic, a slight crack has appeared on the formerly flawless sheen of the figure, and the expanding fissure is slowly getting bigger and bigger until…
Plop. The elderly Centaur is forcibly separated from his ‘friends’ and unceremoniously dumped into an adjacent sandbank.
Flop. As big as she is, the female Changeling makes no louder sound as she’s motionlessly submerged in a large bunker alongside him.
Puff. If the other two's respective falls warranted at least a gentle noise, the younger Pegasus barely made a whisper as she joined her pair of companions on the powdery desert floor.
Their unexpected detachment now complete, the stump of the statue simply crumbled into dust, and for a single solitary second peace reigned around the wasteland one more, as if the desolate landscape itself digested this startling series of developments…
“Oh dearie me, I’m so hungry! And thirsty! It feels like it’s been years since I’ve had a decent… u-um guys? Where are we? I-I don’t think I like this place…”
Well, that brief period of placidity didn’t last for very long. As the stone of the stump shattered and became one with the shifting sands, so did the hardened ‘skin’ of our three not-so gargoyle-like main protagonists. Now we see them for what they are: not remnants of a mad genius’s creative imagination, but genuine flesh-and-bone individuals cursed by arcane sorcery to remain locked together for countless ages…
Until now, that is. Of course.
“Hey, you two sleepyheads… wakey, wakey! Rise ‘n’ shine! I need you to get me out of here now! I don’t like it… it’s cold, boring and I forgot to pack my winter coat… plus, I’ve just tried flying a few feet into the air to see if I could spot a Hayburgers, and my wings don’t even work! I’m gonna starve to death flightless in the centre of nothing, and it’s all those darn ponies fault. I mean, I can’t remember exactly what happened to send us here, but it’s a sure bet it’s something to do with them…”
“Alright… I’m awake. But remember, just because we were cellmates for a brief period last summer, it does not give you the right to order me ab… Holy Celestia, where are we? I’ve been all over the world, from the distant shores of my homeland to that horrendous hub of Friendship known as Ponyville, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. What have you done now, Cozy Glow?”
“Oi! Didn’t you just hear me, Tirek? I told you: I had nothing whatsoever to do with this, honest! It was those blasted do-gooders… and their stupid… um, hmm… I tell you, this is the worst case of amnesia I’ve ever had. I bet those dumb ponies had something to do with that, too. That’s what I say to myself all the time: it’s always their fault, even when it appears it’s not. Kinda gives me the motivation to destroy them even more. Hey! Queenie! Are you up as well, or do you have sand in your ears too?”
“Of course I’m ‘up’, you intolerable little brat… and I told you never to call me that! Do you want me to singe off your eyebrows again? I’m just flexing my muscles after spending so long as a garden ornament. We’re not as young as you, you know… we can’t just get up and gallop about the place after spending who-knows-how-long encased in pure stone…”
“S-s-stone…? B-but I just thought… t-they’d put us to sleep for a… aarrgh!!”
“Starting to come back to you now is it, Cozy? The final battle which ended in yet another humiliating defeat? Those damn windigos who couldn’t even do their job right? And all those despicable creatures of Equestria watching us in their thousands brought together by the wretched power of ‘Friendship’… including Starlight Glimmer and Thorax and how I hate and loathe them so much watching as that treacherous draconequus and the royal sisters took aim at us with their magic and…”
“T-Turned us into a statue! Yes, I remember now! Chrysalis, you were underneath me, and the irritating pipsqueak was just above my right shoulder. A few other memories are beginning to return… teachers with groups of school-colts and fillies telling them ‘cautionary tales’ of why they shouldn’t be bad… being climbed all over by careless tourists anxious for ‘that perfect snap’... spat on, ridiculed, never even cleaned by the local gardener after the local avian life started using us for target practice…”
“S-So what happened, Tirek? How come we’ve just been released, why have we ended up here, a-and how long has it…?” The junior pegasus known as Cozy Glow almost didn’t want to know the answer to those all-important questions, but the uncharacteristically subdued child blurted them out anyway. “D-don’t tell me… t-this is all that’s left of… please, don’t tell me…”
“My working theory is as follows: the final vestige of magic has left the land… and with it, whatever mystical force held us together as an unholy trinity. Now that that’s all disappeared, we’ve finally got our freedom back… although, to what effect, I can’t say.” A light breeze whistled through Chrysalis's dozen or so leg holes, as the muted Changeling silently pondered what their uncertain future might bring.
“Y-You mean… everything has gone? No power for me to feast upon? No love for you to syphon? No creche we can shove that annoying little hellion in for an hour to give us both a break? And this is everything that’s remaining? I can’t believe it. I-I simply can’t believe it…” It was difficult to answer which one Tirek would miss more: transforming into his musclebound alter-ego, or the absence of innocent lifeforms to imprison and torture relentlessly. Sometimes, it’s the small things that count.
In the meantime, another ‘small thing’ had just finished weighing up the ramifications of what’d happened to them, and now was ready to deliver her final verdict. “Y-You're telling me… we’re hundreds, thousands… possibly millions of years in the future… and everything we knew from back then… simply doesn’t exist anymore?”
“It certainly looks that way…” Chrysalis shook her head in despondency, unsure how better to put it.
“So what you’re saying is… all of our main enemies… the ones we hated, abhorred and despised for so long… they’ve all been… vanquished forever? And we didn’t even have to put up a fight in the end?”
Tirek cast an curious glance at his old cellmate. “Well, yes… the rigours of time took care of that. Even alicorns have an expiry date, apparently. But, you’re missing the point, which is…”
“Woo hoo! Eat that, Twilight Sparkle! Suck on those eggs, everypony else! We did it! Equestria is mine at last! And, a bit yours too, I suppose. Like 1-5%, tops. This is the happiest day of my life! I’m gonna build the biggest sandcastle ever to celebrate! No, scratch that… I’ll make myself the biggest sand-wich! Get it? Sand-wich? Mmm, tasty!!”
The two other bemused Legion Of Doom members could only watch in stunned silence as the euphoric Cozy Glow performed cartwheels in the desert, made sand angels and basically exploded into a fit of absolute manaical diabolical joy.
“I’ve heard of deliriously happy, but this is just… delirious.” Chrysalis whispered to her Centaur ally, less concerned for Cozy’s unhinged state of mind than highly disturbed by the implications. “Was she always like this, even at Tartarus?”
“Yes, and judging by the content of her letters, long before then too.” Tirek didn’t really want to dwell on the past of his clearly insane former penpal, for he had much bigger worries right now. “Let’s just… leave her to it, and start walking for a while. Surely we have to discover something else eventually. I mean, it can’t all be like this… right?”
“I-Indeed. Good idea. Let us depart at once. Before she depresses me even more.” Chrysalis simply replied, more out of blind optimism than any real hope. The pair left Cozy Glow to celebrate her ‘glorious victory’ alone, in a desperate attempt to locate a town, a village, a single habitation… even a tiny scorpion crossing their path or a prickly cactus jutting out of the endless desert sands would be welcomed with open hooves round about now.
As legend has it, they’re still searching.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition
Author's Note
Whether it was my love of the poem, or a certain Breaking Bad episode which inspired me to write this fic, who knows. But here you go.
Till next time, then...
