Chapter one,
In which a species is annihilated.
“Your Royal Majesties, they are a cancer upon your lands. Even now, they plot on how to destroy you all. Believe me, they can and they will. All it would take, is for you to do nothing.”
“Who art thou, so that lips speak such blaspheme against Gods?”
“I am the head of your Chirurgeons’ Guild, Majesty. I heard you were accepting help from all ponies of any distinction. Allow me to help you; to treat your Country’s sickness”
Our Cloud Islands had always isolated us from the world below. We had tried, in my grandfather’s days, to maintain contact with those who lived in the Undercloud, but it was always too dark and too strange for us at the lower altitudes. And, over time, we drifted away from you and your ponies, retreated back up here, and lived our days in the constant light of Sol and Mun.
We spent our days in study, or took whatever work we enjoyed. Even across all twelve Islands, there were barely a thousand of us. With our magic, we had no risks of material shortage – we could easily grow our food, and our homes were carved from the ground itself. We wanted for nothing. But even in such a paradise, everyone had their place, and would spend their childhood searching for it – we weren’t acknowledged as adults until we found our calling.
I was magically weak, barely able to work a third level Transmute, or a second level Summon, and had thus been unable to learn new magic after my third half-century. For what little good it did, I spent days in practice, working to understand the path that Mun’s power took through me, so I could do the best with what little He had bestowed upon me. For a decade and a half I toiled ceaselessly. It worked, after a fashion. I could perform the lower magics flawlessly, repeatedly, and effortlessly; but I could not begin to handle the strain that came from channelling the greater spells. It seemed I would not be a Follower of the Way, like my parents and their parents before them.
Once I had reached my magical limit, I spent many years travelling across the Islands, doing my best to discover something that would grant me my Mark, but Sol seemed to have other plans for me. Even after spending months in the Bolas chapel, straining my voice at both dusk and dawn, my Mark had not come. I had thought if I could find my Mark anywhere, it would have been here, at the temple for the One Who Left. Like all previous attempts, I was wrong.
Oh yes, we once had Marks too – they were as I said, our calling. In fact, it was us who taught your kind what being Marked meant, and who taught your kind HOW to be marked. And because of that, you looked up to us. You caused our downfall – you had believed us to be Gods, and in your ignorance, you worshipped us. I cannot truly blame you for what your kind did, you were only Sol’s tool, used so She could scour us away. I cannot find it in myself to not hate you. Not even now.
I had poured my soul into the ancient chants, but had not even felt the faintest flicker of power, signifying my change to adulthood. The other Chanters were sad to see me go, of course, as less of us chanting increased the risk for all, not just us, but you too, in the Undercloud – Sol would not bless us with Her light if we failed to please the absent One, and would have burnt us to nothing had we not entreated Her to leave, to share Her consort with us each night.
It is different now; the Mad King Ayr destroyed Them, yanked Them down from the heavens and bound Their souls to his line. Your line. Even he wasn’t insane enough to try and kill the Gods That Stayed. Your kind are responsible for the sun and moon now. The lone princess guides both across the heavens. But you already knew that.
It was a week after I left the chapel that the massacre began. And we all knew the exact moment it did. You have to understand, we shared a gift, from Sol perhaps, amongst all of us. We could each feel when one of us passed. We could have called it a curse, but we took solace as it meant we were never alone when we died. For that instant, our entire species was as one, and would all help them across the boundary, to live with Her, forever.
We were such a long-lived species, it was rare to have two deaths within the same century, yet alone decade. So you can imagine how terrifying it was when the second came twenty seconds later. We hadn’t experienced combat for millennia, since carving out our own place in the world. Sol’s gift protected us from serious fighting amongst ourselves, and living in such isolation, with our needs met by our farms, we had no reason to hunt. We had deliberately withdrawn, to allow you time to grow to your full potential, once we noticed the spark of sentience in your kind.
A sobering thought, is it not? That your entire species was put on the planet for food. And then, when you evolved enough so that we could not, in good conscience, eat you, we left you to your devices. My parents spoke numberous times about it the end of our hunting, a single party left, and came back bearing a Pegasus colt. Wearing clothes. That was the last time our species saw conflict with yours.
Until the Mad King Ayr came.
That first day of the extermination, your species murdered four hundred of mine. I felt each one’s last breath, and the fear they knew as they were ripped from their homes and workplaces, before being buried alive, their souls bound to the Earth forever by the Desecrator, Terrara. But that was just the beginning, wasn’t it, little pony? Within a week, you’d killed near all of us. It was just my home left, just thirty of US left. We hadn’t fought back. We hadn’t learnt how to. Yet.
You did much worse than just killing us though. You tore apart our nests, were we hatched as young; and toppled our lofty mountains. You salted the remains, and left our fields and cities as dead ruins upon the earth. You destroyed everything that was dear to us, turning it all into a vast, lifeless plain; a mockery of our entire civilization. Perhaps that was why he left our Island alone for so long – he wanted us to see the complete death of everything that we were. Even left alone forever, we could never have recovered. There were too few of us to ever be able to repopulate, even if we had had anywhere else we could have spread to and called home.
He left us for months, the only place left that wasn’t Undercloud. Perhaps a plan, to cause despair amongst us, that we would surrender our lives to him. Whatever his plan was, it went wrong. And backfired.
We were in a corner. We had no reason to live – Sol and Mun had been stolen from us, our friends and families were long gone, and bound to the Earth, never to roam amongst their Heavens. And with his sentinels gone, Bolas would never know to look in on us. We could barely feed ourselves - none of us left alive had any sort of agricultural Mark. We’d have been dead within a year, one and a half at most. When you looked at us, all you could see were monsters.
So we became monstrous.
We knew we had lost, and that the endgame was coming. We had no chance of a draw, let alone victory; so we turned and destroyed the board. We blanketed your skies with clouds, hid the sun and the moon, now godless shells, from you; but you had never before worshipped them, so you were content in the dark. We tore apart our homes, hurled the last, shattered remains of our race on your heads; but your horde swallowed the casualties, a mere drop in the ocean. And so we pulled down our ancestors, the very stars themselves, and rained death down on your cities, burning them all to fire and ash. We killed half your nation that day, little pony. But it still wasn’t enough, because once we had emptied the sky of stars, Ayr retaliated, and came for us.
Our mountain shook under hundred upon hundred of armoured boots, breaking the bones of the Earth itself. In desperation, we split its skin, and tried to drown you in its searing blood. But your unicorns raised shields, and managed to divert the flow. We charged our clouds, to spit ice and lightning on your army, but your pegasi cleared them away. We gave it our all, but we were just too few.
I was still a child, and scared beyond anything I’d felt in my life. My mother hid me, binding me tightly in a weave of magic, and prayed to our dead Gods to preserve me. Their last remnants must have heard, because they answered our final prayer. I could feel them judge me; huge, beyond anything imaginable. They whispered, straight into my head, and I felt the burning that was supposed to be accompanied by being Marked, but I was still blank. The agony felt like it lasted for days, and even at the end, I was still blank, I still had no Mark to ever show my way.
But I had heard Their will.
SURVIVE.
