The Tome of Exalted Ponies

The violet bier of sorrow stylist knows exactly when the soup must die - and gobbles it up when the time is right

…

Another day dawned on the village with no name – the best word the villagers had for it was ‘home’, for their understanding of the world around them was quite limited, to the point that they didn’t even known where the other villages around the shadowland were. They had a vague idea that they existed, for when the Dowager would release a new crop of adolescents to rebuild a village, they would be composed of foals from many different villages, but they would never quite be sure.

This issue was resolved, in a way, as Speaker aimed the heavenly gardening tool that had arrived overnight. It looked like a strange device of green jade, a hefty hoof-sized emerald and golden filigree that floated in the air before him, as he poured his essence into it and saw it work.

The local god of that region of jungle, a being that appeared in the form of a tangle of branches and leaves, appeared before Speaker, somewhat confused of the strange summon that the device had enacted: “I am A Spread of Rampant Green – who calls upon me?”

The villagers had absolutely no clue what the thing was, so they ran off screaming, but the god didn’t seem to pay them any notice – it was wise enough to taste the air around it, and had sensed the presence of solar essence.

“I am Bright Machine Speaker, Solar of the twilight caste, chosen by Celestia the most high. By this writ and this tool, I would have you do your duty” Speaker proclaimed in old realm, the ancient language of the gods and primordials.

The god lumbered closer, as if the very jungle had come alive and was approaching Speaker: “My duty… do you realize what thing is telling me to do?”

“Yes – for I asked it to be made for that purpose: To clear all the jungle around the Noss Fens shadowlands and to keep it cleared” Speaker said, keeping his eyes fixed on the god.

The god groaned and rumbled, every log and root within miles trembling: “So be it… I cannot deny an order from on high”

It was then that A Spread of Rampant Green touched the strange heavenly device, rupturing the green emerald. From it poured thousands of wood aspected elementals in the swarm of glowing green hounds and moles, that instantly swarmed the target area, disintegrating all of the jungle into pure wood essence that just wafted away in the rushing wind of so many elementals flitting about.

It took a few hours – but the entire Noss Fens was cleared – leaving a vast area roughly two-hundred and fifty miles across bereft of vegetation. A lot of VERY confused animals were left behind in the wake, most of them fleeing towards the new treeline.

The process also exposed just how many legions of zombies the Dowager had hiding around the shadowland in the middle of it all, guarding her hideout – the place that the villagers had called ‘The Mound of Forsaken Seeds.

The clearing of the fens also revealed all of the surrounding villages – for the area cleared had been defined as a rough circle defined by how each village surrounded the fens: This finally gave them a clear and easy way to not only discover but also visit the other villages.

For the circle the clearing of the fens mainly meant that they could now clearly see where they were going. Sunrise conjured a small magical cloud and did some fly-bys of the shadowland, using her smiting charm to reduce many of the remaining zombies and undead things there to ash as grey as the withered shadowland itself. Once that was done in the late afternoon, getting to the mound itself was quite easy.

Well, it should have been.

As Cash guided Nah to take them to the mound, it began to resist his commands. He quickly found that not even his more potent riding charms could compel it: “Alright… looks like we’re walking”

Now, walking to the middle of a shadowland that was two and half or so hundred miles across was not a quick trek – even with the terrain cleared – but the circle quickly found a faster alternative: Loading up into Shimmer’s elsewhere den, she shifted into her warform and flew to the mound.

The inside the elsewhere den, which had been outfitted back in Sunhill to contain all kinds of supplies, emergency kit for anything from boat repair to medical emergencies, was perhaps not the most comfy place to camp in, especially not after a couple hundred villagers had been stuffed in there the day before, but there was also a table and enough seating for everyone.

“Speaker, how long do you think it’ll take her to fly in there?” Cash wondered, sounding as if he already longed to return to Sunhill.

Doing a bit of math, Speaker figured that Shimmer should arrive in a few hours.

Except those few hours turned into several. For obvious reasons this worried the circle greatly, but they had absolutely no means of escaping – a lunar’s elsewhere den was hidden in the pocket dimension of elsewhere, so there was no physical way to breach the place.

Sunrise did her best to keep up everyone’s spirits – but even the messenger spell they tried sending just hovered at the closed exit portal – and as solars, they all had a magical sense of the time day via the position of the sun in creation.

When the portal finally opened, the circle quickly exited – finding themselves unmistakably in a shadowland… the Noss Fens – but that wasn’t all the found. They found Shimmer, in her warform, covered in gore and half-dried zombie remains. Around her were the remains of thousands upon thousands of zombies, many of the bits still wiggling on the ground if they were big enough to contract a muscle.

“So… rough trip getting here?” Cash quipped, giving Shimmer a respectful nod as to her combat proves.

Shimmer let out a tired bird-noise, combined with a long yawn: “They were hidden in the ground – just kept coming, sprouted like weeds… kept trying to grab me and pull me down”

“We could have helped – you saw how we fought the undead at Thorns” Speaker said, trying his best to not sound as if he was blaming Shimmer, but none the less wanting to communicate to her that the situation could have been handled better.

Freely admitting that she had been frightened too much to the swarm of zombies, Shimmer just focused on the here and now: “Look, I know – just patch me up so we can get this over with”

Sunrise chuckled as she stepped up to survey the land they were on: “Dearest Shimmer – you don’t have to stress yourself. It will take you time to mature your essence, to grow to a point where you’ll have caught up with us. We felt the same when we first met your past incarnation – don’t try to force yourself into something you can’t handle”

Shimmer could only frown while Sunrise looked around. They were on top of the mound in the middle of the shadowland – on top of the titular Mound of Forsaken seeds… but there really wasn’t much to see, for the recently cleared swampy terrain wasn’t terribly interesting to look at.

Of course, that was only what one could see with a naked eye. With essence sight, the truth of the matter was very different, and the whole circle quickly agreed that this was by absolutely no means a natural shadowland, not that shadowlands were all that natural to begin with.

“This is wrong in so many colorful new ways” Cash stated, for even with his limited insight into sorcery then he could tell that this was not normal.

Over the years, the circle had seen a lot of shadowlands. All of them had the same telltale marks: Enough death had lingered in the area to link it to the underworld, creating a bridge between Creation and its dark mirror, tied to the epicentre of the most death and suffering of the land. In Thorns, the spiritual epicentre of the shadowland was quite easy to find, for the god of the city was being slowly tortured and kept at the brink of death.

It was always a question of a source, from which necrotic essence would leak, poisoning the lands. This was not the case for the Noss Fens: Here it wasn’t necrotic essence pouring out, creating the shadowland… it was ordinary elemental essence of all kinds flowing into the mound, leaving the land void of living essence – and through that void, as essence of the underworld appeared to simply ‘seep’ out and poison the land, in an attempt to fill the gap.

It was so very strange to look at… to see a dead swamp in a place so rife with essence of life and growth. It did explain why the Noss Fens was a swamp, despite the thirst of the surrounding jungles having turned the terrain in hard root-riddled loam.

“Do you think you can actually close this shadowland Sunrise?” Speaker said, the uncertainty in his voice fully communicating his confusion and doubt.

Sunrise stomped the ground she stood on hard, a golden ring of essence pulsing out from where she had struck: “I’ll try – but based on what Shimmer said, then there’s no telling what might be hidden under the surface in the swampy ponds around us… things that might well come up while I cast the spell”

Everyone agreed that a swamp was a great place to hide undead: The undead didn’t need to breath, and the swamp would likely preserve the undead so they wouldn’t rot – and with the size of the Noss Fens swamps, then there was room for a lot of things to hide there… which was all the more reason to close the shadowland up.

Sunrise began casting her spell, sunlight gathering into clouds of sunlight high above the mound. The rest of the circle girded themselves for battle, preparing for anything that might spring forth to stop the spellcasting. When Sunrise finally drew her head back and let out a piercing cry, the bolt of golden sunlight striking down into her, the circle held their breath – for now was the perfect time to strike…

…but nothing happened.

Sunrise maintained the spell for well over an hour, yet no undead attacks happened – but the shadowland also didn’t shrink. Sully, his eyes the keenest, leapt high into the sky more than once to survey the land… but every time he could only say that nothing had changed.

“This is impossible. There should be so much life in the ambient essence flows here – the instant the shadowland is banished from a spot new plants should start growing” Speaker said, utterly confounded.

Sunrise ultimately ended the spell, spiritually exhausted – and deeply disappointed that it hadn’t done a damn thing to seal up the Noss Fens shadowland.

“How can this be?” Fire Orchid said, with great confusion.

Everyone looked to Sunrise, for some clue, a hint, as to why the spell hadn’t worked. Had she felt anything different when casting the spell? Sunrise could only shake her head: “I don’t know – but I know that I cannot accept this… this spell was crafted by some of the brightest minds of the first age. No shadowland should be able to withstand it”

Speaker was about to ask Sunrise what she thought they should do, when she drew breath and shouted at the ground – blasting it with her sound and music-based martial arts. Having blown a hole into the Mound of Forsaken Seeds, Sunrise resolutely delved inside.

Cash groaned, loudly: “I thought this was just a scouting mission…”

“It still is – we’re scouting this place to find out why we can’t close the shadowland, so come along” Fire Orchid said cheerfully, sounding more than ready to take the fight to the Dowager.

Thus, it came to pass that the circle entered into the dark domain of the Dowager, entering the Mound of Forsaken Seeds.

The initial impression of the place was that of a rotting mineshaft dug into, of all things, a swamp. Not exactly something that exuded confidence in structural soundness. Indeed, the rotting timbers that held the tunnel aloft appeared poised to collapse at a moment’s notice. It was still big enough and wide enough that some very large wagons could pass through – but in the bug-riddled mud it wasn’t possible to tell if there were any prints or tracks.

Shimmer guided the circle, using her sensory charms to not just see in the darkness – she could not see the walls or the ceilings, but she could sense the insects and bugs that crawled everywhere, giving her a living map of the structure. At best, the rest of the circle could hear the drip of water from the moist ceilings.

“Is there a reason we don’t at least have lit caste marks, so we can see where we’re going?” Cash bemoaned.

Sunrise noted that she had her on – but the place appeared to eat light.

Sully, his own sensory enhancement charms needed at least the tiniest of hint of light to work, didn’t see the problem all the while he kept emptying out salt from his seemingly bottomless pockets: “At least your outfit cleans itself when you slip in the mud”

“Hold up – I see light up ahead… look” Shimmer whispered, gesturing towards what turned out to be a large wooden gate, one splattered in mud and covered in the kind gunk you would expect to see in a muddy underground tunnel frequented by the undead.

Speaker quickly pointed out that the lack of guards was not just a little suspicious. Shimmer noted that all the guards were up on the surface: “I spent hours carving up legions worth of zombies… this place had plenty of guards – and numbers like that wouldn’t work well in a narrow tunnel like this”

“Fair point. Considering how far this place is from any major piece of civilization, how impossible the terrain is at ground-level, and how it was for the Dowager to hide who knows how many thousands of zombies in the jungle… then that was probably her defence. Anyone entering the place with an army would be detected at the edge of the shadowland, and they would likely spend months carving their way to the mound – ample time for raids and diseases to overtake anyone trying their luck here" Fire Orchid noted, her strategic and tactical analysis being quite well thought out.

Everyone agreed that this was some very sound reasoning – and indeed, the gate opened fairly easily – though what they saw on the inside… it didn’t really surprise anyone, but honestly it wasn’t all that interesting either: Huge piles of shit.

“That… is an impressive collection of road apples” Cash said, holding a hoof up to shield his nose, not that it did much.

The circle agreed that it was probably part of some scheme to remove waste from the place. The piles of shit were crawling with insects and worms, and while Speaker, Shimmer and Sully all gleamed some knowledge about what the diets of whatever had produced such stool – they all agreed that the usefulness of such knowledge was somewhat limited.

Beyond the front hall full of shit, there were tunnels leading to other rooms: Some appeared to be storage areas where zombies just stood mindlessly, awaiting orders. They were racked and stacked like warehouse goods, often contorted into shapes that living ponies would have found extremely painful or impossible.

In some of the other rooms were large pony-sized ravenous maggots, which were quickly slain, and in another room the circle came across a strange scene of headless zombies stumbling around randomly – which never really made sense.

“Hey, look at the gate here – it’s the only doorway we’ve found so far that looks even remotely fortified” Fire Orchid pointed out, after the circle had cleared another room of strange over-sized maggots that barfed a corrosive mix of blood and digestive juices at anything they got near.

Indeed, this gate was wrought of dark stone and steel – clearly actually made to withstand a great deal of force. It was also locked with a soulsteel lock that simply ate the essence of Sully’s lockpicking charm – but Speaker just used his singing staff to move the compacted dirt of the walls aside, to open a new door to what was beyond the gate.

It turned out to be an absolute horror that was hidden beyond the gate: A single bloated ‘head’ of sorts, easily four or five yards across, stitched together of untold pieces of flesh and skin. Where the Dowager had acquired eyes the size of large watermelons was anybody’s guess – but what wasn’t a question was whether the thing was hostile or not… for the great head seemed able to use its jaw to launch itself into the air through the great hall, aimed straight for the circle as it came tumbling down.

The gargantuan head came down with a mighty crash, the wooden braces holding the walls and ceiling groaning – and from every stitch along the great head’s a great amount of blood spewed, which quickly revealed itself to be of the same corrosive sort, that the local giant maggots had a tendency to hurl around.

Springing into action, the circle leapt at the great head: Shimmer spun her essence webs to tie it down, Sunrise began to inhale sharply and bounce to a quick little rhythm only she could hear and Speaker struck the creature to slam it up against the wall with great force of essence, keeping it disoriented. Sully pummelled the creature with his cooking-based martial arts, tenderizing its thick flesh so that Fire Orchid could slash at the necro-surgical monstrosity along its seams, its thick flesh gaping open.

Sunrise then shouted into this gap, the great head briefly inflating – and then bursting, everyone trying to dodge the shower of blood. Well, everyone except Cash who just ignored it as his magical outfit shrugged off stains, and Shimmer briefly sought refuge in her elsewhere-den, coming out once it was safe.

The vocal onslaught that Sunrise had unleashed left very little of the monstrocity behind – everything had been torn, ruptured and rent asunder by the power of her voice. The single largest remaining piece was a great big tooth, half the size of a normal pony’s head. Upon closer examination, it was revealed by a strange mix of many teeth that had somehow been melted down and ‘recast’ as a big one – Speaker could only shudder at how many poor souls had been killed to make the parts for this beast. It was put into Shimmer’s lair as a grotesque trophy to be put up in Sunhill later.

“Well, that’s one way to guard the true entrance in your lair” Cash said, pointing towards the stairs heading down, which the monster appeared to have been keeping watch over.

Sunrise and Speaker both confirmed via essence sight, that the subtle essence-sucking effect that appeared to be creating the shadowland led down the stairs – and so the circle continued onwards, ever vigilant, searching for whatever prevented them from closing the shadowland.

The crude wooden stairs soon led to an underground stone structure that was markedly different from the muddy earth-hewn tunnels up above: This was an actual building… one buried underground.

Some quick sounding checks by Speaker, using his singing staff to get a sense of the structure’s shape and size, revealed it to be some kind of ziggurat – a stepped pyramid. It was within the top levels of this ziggurat that the circle found the last crop of foals that the Dowager had been indoctrinating… or… something…

The foals weren’t exactly talkative – already traumatized from having witnessed or been made to commit the brutal murders of their parents. Shimmer saw the empty looks in the eyes of the foals, and was about to quietly ask not if – but how – the circle should put these poor souls out of their misery.

Shimmer painfully recalled the stories of her childhood, of fisherponies that would venture too far west, who would get caught by aquatic changelings… who would end up drifting back to their islands as dream-eaten husks, often heavily mutated to boot. The worst of these would ‘return’ to their fishing villages mutated into fish or seals… unable to speak to their kin, but ultimately gutted and eaten by them. It was a mercy to end their suffering, right?

Speaker wasn’t quite sure why Shimmer was zoning out, while he went around and used his medical charms to give the foals a combined check-up and to cure them of any physical ailments. Cash then huddled the foals together and quickly ferreted out what magical lies and chains the Dowager had put into the minds of foals, purging them and giving them a new lease on life, with a desire to honor their dead parents by doing well in life.

“Hey Shimmer, open up your elsewhere den – we need to stash the foals there until we’re out of here” Fire Orchid said, poking the lunar.

It came to Shimmer as a shock, that the circle had already solved the issue of the foals. Such soul-crushing trauma, turned into happy smiles and eager hopes for the future. For some reason this was so much more difficult to comprehend, compared to the battles she had seen fought at Thorns – but there it had been so much more… straight forward: An evil villain was killing everyone and taking their stuff, and planning on conquering everything else. Here the Dowager was just needlessly traumatizing foals for shits and giggles?

“You ready to move on?” Cash inquired, as Shimmer helped herd the last of the foals into her elsewhere den.

Steeling herself once more, Shimmer shook off her doubts and nodded, following the circle deeper into the deathlord’s lair.

Exploring the rest of the level they were on, the circle found kitchens ‘staffed’ by magical soulsteel cooking utensils and equipment that cooked food on its own. It wasn’t difficult to identify the ghosts bound to these things as the source of their animation. In examining these things, mainly to see if they were a threat, but also because Sully basically had a giggle-fit when he saw the magical kitchen cooked stuff on its own, Speaker did make the worrying discovery that the worn and tattered ghosts bound to the objects were all looking at Shimmmer… regardless of where she went – even through walls and whatnot.

Destroying a few pots, pans and knives freed these ghosts of their bondage – to which they quickly rushed Shimmer, not to attack her… but ask to see their children.

These were the ghosts of the parents of the captured foals. The dowager had bound them to serve her forever – and indeed, to the great sorrow of the ghosts, then it turned out that the foals that Shimmer had stashed contained none of theirs. The ghosts admitted that they had sensed no passage of time while bound, indeed they had barely been able to think on their own, so the grim truth was likely that their foals had died long ago… likely also taken to the Mound of Forsaken Seeds as subsequent generations of adolescent parents to be slaughtered and made to serve the next generation.

“Good grief… how long has the Dowager been doing this?” Shimmer said, her mind already feeling worn and tired from the previous shock – now she was finding herself unable to get upset over this revelation, since it was simply too grotesque.

Sunrise did some quick thinking: “For millennia likely – if not longer. If Sully’s intelligence on the Dowager is correct and she somehow developed the great contagion here first, then she’s been working from here for quite a while”

“Well not anymore – once we figure out how to close up this shadowland these villages will be free!” Shimmer said, now more determined than ever.

The stairs to the next level down into the buried ziggurat were guarded by a pair of foals… though honestly, saying that they were ponies anymore was a misnomer: Surgical abominations, carved up and stitched back together in ways most hideous.

The guard room in front of the stairs even featured magical doors that slammed shut behind the circle after they had entered, locking them inside with the two necro-surgically conjoined foals: One of them was a fair bit larger than the other – its muscles unnaturally bulky, and on its brow was tattooed the old realm pictoglyphs for “Contusion”. From its gut trailed a long and leathery-looking cord to the other foal – though calling it an umbilical was probably as far from the truth as it was possible, considering that both of them looked to have been conjoined after death and reanimation.

The other one – the smaller of the two – appeared to hover in the air, its head the largest part of its body, the rest appearing shrunken and vestigial at best. It featured a tattoo in old realm spelling out the word “Suture” on its forehead.

The two instantly attacked the circle, contusion charging at them, while suture appeared to heave and then barf out a stream of corrosive blood every now and then.

The circle sprang into action just the same, Fire Orchid charging at Contusion, to meet the necro-surgical creation head on. The two wrestled, while Sully and Speaker came around on the side to double-team the thing while it was busy tussling with Fire Orchid. This simple deception worked splendidly, Contusion ending up cut into pieces.

This left Suture hanging… literally… with the torn umbilical cord hanging from it, and with the loss of its ‘sibling’ the thing appeared to redden, its face contorting into a permanent rage-filled scowl as it began to fly towards the circle quickly, shrieking like a screaming child.

Shimmer caught it in her essence-webbing, the little thing quickly revealing itself too physically weak to break free. With all threats thusly neutralized, Speaker helped Fire Orchid clean up while Sunrise sang Suture a requiem – her quiet prayer smiting the abomination with holy fire.

“So…a guardian at the stairs to the next level? I wonder how many more we’ll have to face before we get to the bottom of this” Cash mused, sounding not as much intimidated, and more… managerial. It was clear that he was simply trying to figure out how long this little venture would take, trying to calculate when they would run out of essence to fight with.

Speaker poked the remains of the two monsters: “No clue – but if the top level was mainly storage and logistics for things being moved further down into this place, and the second level was living quarters for the captives… then I would expect the deeper levels to be laboratories and production facilities for the diseases that the Dowager researches. She has to have made the great contagion somewhere here”

The circle agreed that there was definitely something they had not found yet.

Delving deeper, slaying stranger necro-surgical creations – from headless zombies that would try to pry your head off, to horrors too grotesque for polite description, the circle found no laboratories. Instead, they came across a great chamber lit with glowing amber where they found a single foal surrounded and beset upon by undead monsters. The child was being beaten and tossed about, barely clinging to life as claws raked its hide and corrosive bile and blood seared its wounds and flesh.

The circle instantly sprang into action, slaying the monsters quickly and efficiently. Cash held back during the fighting, saving his essence for untangling the mind of the foal, expecting the Dowager to have messed with the foal’s mind a lot more than the others.

It turned out that Cash wasn’t wrong… but he was also very much off the mark:

Approaching the foal, amidst the sliced and diced bits of undead monsters, Cash used charms to first calm and sooth the mind of the foal. It was curled up on the floor, covered in dirt, blood and gore to the point that you couldn’t really see the natural coat colors of the poor little thing.

“There, it’s safe now – we’ve slain the monsters” Cash said, speaking softly and kindly in the local tribal tongue.

Of course, while Cash was focused on the foal, he paid little attention to the piles of undead remains around him – including the skeletal snakes that seemed to slide out of the piles towards him, suddenly snatching Cash and coiling around him.

In a blur of motion Cash was caught, the skeletal snakes poised to strike, their venom-dripping fangs grotesquely enlarged through necromantic surgery. It was in that instant that the foal roused, crying out and from its tear-filled eyes, black fire shot forth, consuming the snakes in dark flame.

Fireballs of black flame was not something normal foals could do… but it was something that the circle had seen a few abyssals do.

“What is your name… or title?” Sunrise said, approaching the foal carefully, keeping an eye out for more fireballs.

The foal staggered to her hooves, shivering as necrotic essence washed over her and reduced any dirt or blood-caked mud on her to ash and blew it away: “Mother calls me Shoat. Shoat of the Mire”