Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

Harmony: The Rise and Fall of Classical and Modern Equestria

Chapter III

In Memoriam

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Celestia stood alone on the great balcony of the citadel’s throne room, as she had always stood alone, gazing out across her shattered demesne. Where once there had stood an ancient forest, vast beyond all mortal reckoning, there now was little more than bitter ash.

She could taste it in her mouth.

Celestia—despite her earlier conviction in having done only what was necessary—felt a crushing sense of loss. It was to her a special kind of agony, to look out across that blasted landscape, and know that all that the forest was and all that it contained—its species, its memories, its history—were irrevocably lost, swept away as if they’d never existed by the hoof of a uncaring God.

And there was lain upon the great Alicorn’s heart a scar as on the solid earth.

She had wandered the paths of the Lost Eriatum; she had journeyed beyond the Sea of Dreams to traverse the enchanted Plains of Aed; she had flown the length of the Crystallarium with the Sky Serpents of the Far East, beyond even ancient eremic Narzus. She had seen entire empires rise and fall, stars born into the ceaseless aether, and throughout all these ages had she stayed her hoof: permitting herself only to observe, never to interfere, lest she disturb the very Balance that, her latter abhorrence of which, would ultimately lead her to take her Chosen under her maternal wing.

Given enough time, the forest would return. She’d seen it before. The process of renewal was as eternal as she was. She would live to see life return to these lands, and so would the descendants of her Chosen. The sun everlasting would rise upon the morrow, and the stars would wheel forever overhead.  In the grand design of all things, this infinitesimal act of destruction would change nothing.

Still. She couldn’t help but wonder. Couldn’t help but question the validity, the proportionality of her response. Because of her singular, peremptory action—an action she would never have considered prior to the advent of the Ponies of the Earth, whom she had sworn to preserve at any cost—the enigmatic Nemoricolae were no more. All their knowledge, all their secrets—their art, their culture, their very way of life—were lost forever. She had single hoofedly wiped out an entire civilisation, struggling only to survive, as her Chosen had once struggled. How could she have let the traitorous actions of a few compel her to commit mass genocide? Could it not be that there had been another way, a less catastrophic way, to purge the Shadow and spare the Nemoricolae from the flame?

It was a question that she knew was not only on her mind.

For their part, the surviving members of her company had said nothing. They were the only other firsthoof witnesses, after all. The intimate knowledge of exactly what she had done would pass from them, in death, unrecorded and undocumented: a history to be written in the manner of her choosing. In time, should she so wish it, ponykind would forget the ultimate fate of the Nemoricolae, and perhaps even their very existence. She need only wait until the last of her Chosen from this era had breathed their last, and so in their inevitable deaths find absolution.

That only one pony might know her sorrow.

Such was her fate. To forever remember, outlasting all others. To eternally mourn the loss of the Fallen Nemoricolae. The knowledge she had extracted from the hapless mare was now precious to her, for so long as she remembered, a part of them lived on in her.

She, alone as in all things, would remember them.

So it was that Princess Celestia, God-Princess of the Ponies of the Earth, became Steward of the Memory of the Fallen Nemoricolae.

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With a stuttering shimmer, the cloaked mare cast off her spell of concealment, unveiling her image to the eyes of the world. Her stance, while weary and age-worn, remained interminably defiant. Her eyes blazed under the heavy folds of her hood, radiating a power not unlike Celestia’s own.

“I’ve lived many years and thought many things, Princess. I now know many of them to be lies and deceptions, implanted in me by you. That I might one day escape your gaze, live my own life apart from your dream, well… that was never one of them.”

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Celestia walked alone, as she had always walked alone, her solitary hoofsteps echoing throughout the cavernous vaults and underground halls of Cadytum. The monolithic stone structure was deep and vast and old, extending many fathoms down into the very heart of the mountain. The Ponies of the Earth occupied but a scant fraction of its upper levels, and here at least, Celestia could be assured of her solitude.

She’d spent an arduous afternoon holding court with her generals and the Elder Council, First among her Chosen. They were not so brazen as to openly question her methods, but they could no more hide their discontent from her than she could feign enthusiasm for the same transgressions. She could see it in their eyes, feel it in the veiled earth they trod, taste it upon the very air they breathed. With each passing day, her kinship with them grew stronger, and ever their mortal blood flowed deeper down into her eternal veins.

There’d been no state or sense of enmity between the Ponies of the Earth and the Nemoricolae as a whole, taking into account the fact that many of the latter had doubted the mere existence of the former. If anything, the Nemoricolae were the closest thing to family that they had had. And now they were gone.

The Ponies of the Earth, like her, walked alone.

Celestia strode purposefully past massive columns in the darkness, hewn out of the very mountain itself, architraves graven with intricate designs of blood and war. Grotesque stone faces leered down at her from lofty capitals, glowering in and out of existence by the aureate light of her horn.  The air down below was unnaturally cold, and even Celestia—ordinarily immune to any such variations in temperature—began to feel its bite. The Ponies of the Earth, while not beholden to the same consumptive superstitions as the Nemoricolae—hallowed be the Memory of the Fallen Nemoricolae—they yet refused to venture down into the depths of the citadel. What it was that they feared, aside from the preternatural cold, Celestia did not know. There was indeed a presence here; of that much she was certain. An oppressive sense of weight that bespoke an ancient malevolence; a brooding malice manifesting itself as the warping of the echoes of her hoofsteps into a loathsome clangour. If she listened hard enough, Celestia could almost make out whispered voices: minatory susurrations lingering on the very edges of her perception.

She and her Chosen were not welcome here.

Princess Celestia, dauntless as the rising run, forged onward. She would not be so easily deterred. The ten thousand year old Demi-Goddess heeded neither threat nor warning and respected no borders. She came and went as she pleased, and while once she would have stayed her hoof in the face of provocation, woe betide any who would think to stand in the path of the newly coronated God-Protector of the Ponies of the Earth.

There was a presence here, yes, but there was also something else.

Power.

She’d felt it the very first time she’d descended upon the citadel, coming to the aid of the Ponies of the Earth in the hour of their direst need. She could almost smell it now, such was the potency of its allure. And as the Lepidopteron is drawn ineluctably to the light, so too was Celestia drawn to the flame. Her heightened—if not entirely particular—senses when it came to matters of the Arcane told her that this was a power worthy of possession; and if it could not be possessed, then it must be destroyed. In all her ceaseless, aimless wanderings in ages past, she had seen many wondrous things, encountered a multitude of strange and powerful beings—ever to wander among them as the solivagant hoof of God—but few if any of them could rival the sheer emanation of power coming to her from within the blackened heart of the mountain.

Could rival her.

Celestia stopped in front of a great wall, upon and from which alien and familiar figures both were graven and sculpted in stone. Channelling her power through the length of her form, she slowly illumined the whole extent of the voluminous hall—larger than its contemporary on the upper levels by an order of magnitude—its impossibly high ceiling barely visible by the cast of her horn.

What drew her eye, however, was the grisly scene wrought in marble high relief before her.

It was a depiction of a battle. Or, perhaps more properly, a slaughter. Creatures both known and foreign to Celestia were strewn violently about the field of war: dismembered, decapitated, disembowelled. Gryphons, Minotaurim, ancient Canidae—a host of beings that defied even her expansive faculty for description and even a few mighty Hydrae—none were spared from the storm of Death that whirled victoriously all about them.

Perhaps most disturbingly of all, however, was the sight of what looked to be the broken bodies of a form not dissimilar to her Chosen, lain dead amidst the wreckage of flesh and bone.

What great force, then, what grand army of antiquity could be responsible for such extensive devastation?

There was no army. No great host that assailed them. There stood, towering ignominiously above the carnage, rising up as one exalted from the bloody ordure of the Fall, but a single creature, in whose form Celestia fancied to be distilled the very essence of ruination and war. The bipedal serpentine bicorn stood alone, and from its gaping maw there rained down upon its victims a cataract of woe. Its physiognomy was of so hideous an aspect, so appalling a form, that Celestia could scarcely bear to look upon it, lest she flee in mortal terror and never again return. The stone eyes of the creature, while necessarily dead and cold, radiated a sanguinary madness: an insatiable, eternal bloodlust that was without beginning or end, that would endure forever after the mere form that it animated’s fall.

In this figure, and in this figure alone, there was found a maniacal savagery beyond even Celestia’s near infinite comprehension. It was the veritable definition of incorrigible evil, so far beyond the pale as to eliminate it from consideration, and so was it an anathema to her very soul.

She could not allow such a corruptive abomination to remain extant in this world.

Her world.

Calling upon the might and the righteous fury that was her birthright, Celestia smote the fell Mad-work, blasting it with Goddess-wrought incinerative fire: hot enough to render even diamonds before her as withering ash.

And yet, against this unstoppable, all-consuming onslaught, the hateful tableau endured.

The relief, as a whole—but the baleful figure that occasioned so much loathing in Celestia’s breast in particular—began to glow. At first, Celestia, assured in the inevitability of its destruction, in the nature of her insuperable power, saw before her eyes an end to the madness: a final close upon that marmoreal chapter of woe. What she failed to perceive, however, beneath the igneous glare of her own making, was that the glow was a malevolent blood-red, not the white-hot brilliance befitting all rational expectation. Too late she foresaw—as she could be said to foresee all things, if only a fraction of a second before their occurrence—the arcing discharge that reached, with sanguine claws, for her heart.

The stone beneath her shattered as Celestia’s immortal hooves tore great furrows through the unyielding Earth, the light from her horn instantly extinguished as her body was blasted backwards with enough force to make the very mountain itself tremble before the unholy might of the discharge.

On the upper levels of the citadel, The Ponies of the Earth stumbled and fell, clinging to walls and sheltering under tables as dust and loose stones rained down around them, riding out the ostensible earthquake together. Little did they know the true significance of the assumed to be geological disturbance.

It was a disturbance far graver than any mere tectonic activity, barring the Equid Apocalypse, could ever hope to be.

Far graver and more consequential than even Celestia realised.

Rising up from the swirling dust and shattered stone, her grievous wounds healing with the celerity befitting only an Immortal, Celestia beheld, with captive horror, the malefic red gleaming of the high relief, now set glaringly against the deepening shadow, unmarked and as hideous as ever.  Wholly wreathed in the malevolent blood-light, the ghastly work took on an ever more disturbing aspect, almost seeming to move before her very eyes: mutilated figures acting out, as but one writhing mass of flesh and limbs—made brothers in the mortal  commonality of death—their harrowing death throes. Again, on the very edges of her perception, Celestia could faintly make out the blasphemous utterances of a whispering malice, and now intermingled with these dark intonations were the distant screams of the dying and the maimed, shrieking and screeching and wailing voices.

The fell effulgence waxed and waned, as if taunting her with the tantalising prospect of its ultimate dissolution, pulsing evilly before finally fading away. From the mad eyes of its Master was it last seen to depart, and from these malignant orbs it bore down on Celestia as if the Beast itself beheld her in the flesh. To her great shame, Celestia wilted under that most withering of gazes, shrinking away as if in fear: an emotion hitherto all but unknown to her.

The Mad-light in the stone effigy’s eyes at length flickered and went out, leaving Celestia alone in the darkness, with only the distant strains of an inequine roar echoing in her ears. Hunkering down low on the ground, hanging her head so that her nose was almost pressed against the shattered stone, the immortal Princess did something that she had not done for many centuries.

She wept.

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Celestia drew up short, freezing in place in the manner of one transfixed by an arrow or crossbow bolt, her unwaveringly steady breath catching in her throat as her practised speech died on her lips. Having felt the particular signature of the magical emanations as the cloaked mare revealed herself, the realisation of exactly how she had concealed herself from all eyes apart from her own dawned on her last. This was a power endemic to but one people; a secret cognizance kept only by their own. Turning to face her at last, her eyes brimming with pain and betrayal, she spoke but a single tremulous word, one that echoed across the ages.

“How?”

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The journey back to the upper levels was not a long one. Any other pony, deprived of her infallible sense of direction, could very well have gotten lost within the labyrinthine turnings of the underhalls. But not Celestia.

She had seen enough of the Darkness for one day.

Emerging from a winding stair into the dying rays of the setting sun, Celestia breathed a great sigh of relief. Trotting out onto a nearby open balcony, she lifted one golden-shod hoof up to drape it over the ancient balustrade, admiring the way it sparkled and glimmering in the evening light. Her eoan pink mane was blown back by a gentle breeze, silken strands caressing her neck and pooling lightly on her withers. The scent of a breathless life eternal, brought to her as on a distant wind from beyond the alien waste of her own making, moved her trembling spirit to rapture.

This was where she belonged.

Not in some underground vault or tomb. Out here, in the open air, at work amongst the greater world. The inner workings of the earth could take care of themselves, bereft of her intervention.

Her kingdom was not of that realm.

Standing alone on that lesser balcony, content, as she had once been content, to merely watch as the sun slowly descended upon the horizon, Celestia became aware, by slow degrees of awareness, of a distant sound that brushed faintly against her ears. At first, a not yet supressed terror engulfed her, its cold jaws closing in upon her heart. Had the whispering malice that had plagued her earthly waking dream seen fit to follow her even here?

But this was a fear that was quickly dispelled. It was not a sound born of the same inimical unbreath that had tormented her beneath the earth that reached her now. It was a sound that she had seldom heard the like of before.

It was the distant sound of somepony singing.

Celestia, intrigued, abandoned her watch over the setting sun, heading towards the source of the inexplicable vocalisation. The Ponies of the Earth were not a particularly musical people. They played few instruments, and to her knowledge at least, sang few songs. And yet, the closer she got to the echoing strains of the musical emanation, the more certain she became as to her supposition of its source.

It was, in fact, not the sound of any one pony singing. It was the sound of a multitude of ponies, voices lifted up in unaccompanied song.

Rounding the corner to her war room—the room from which the strange music originated—Celestia was struck by what she saw. Drawing back before she could be spotted, she observed, as one from the shadows, the Song of the Ponies of the Earth. The entirety of the Elder Council, First among her Chosen, along with her generals were gathered around the massive table in the centre of the room, upon which all their maps and plans were laid. All eyes in the room were closed, and a single solitary shaft of ailing golden sunlight fell upon the table top, adding a further sense of funereal gravitas to the already foreboding scene.

It was no cheery anthem or drunken sea shanty that reached her ears. This was a song of unparalleled solemnity; a song of sorrow and of loss, wrought only as an a capella commendation to the grave.

The Ponies of the Earth, as she did, mourned the loss of the Fallen Nemoricolae.

Chief amongst the mourners was Icarus, youngest among both her generals and her Chosen as a whole. He was the son of a great line of descendance, from which many noble heroes and venerable leaders of the past had come. From birth, by right of lineage, he had been destined for greatness, and so many of his people believed in him. He held great sway with the Elder Council and all but commanded the loyalty of her generals, and thus far, to both Celestia’s great pleasure and credit, he had proven extremely amenable when it came to questions pertaining to the cause. Celestia, while appreciative of his utility as a determining force, did not envy him his heritage. The weight of her own expectations had been enough for her to bear alone.

The young Icarus was handsome and august, possessed of both a lordly bearing and a great sagacity beyond his age. He was tall and broad, as unmatched in personal combat as he was in his letters and, apparently, in song. His coat was the colour of the newly risen dawn, and his lustrous mane was an unusual vermillion, cut through with a streak of white smoke. He had been the first to swear fealty to her, to offer up both his own blood and the blood of others in exchange for her own, and so had he cemented himself in the forefront of her considerations.

When the others fell silent, Icarus, standing tall above all ponies before the light of the sun, sang alone.

This was an air of a different provenance, and Celestia, despite never having heard it before, recognised it immediately. Still sorrowful, yes, but hopeful as well, which made it all the more heartbreaking to her. His voice had a beautiful, almost aethereal quality to it—lent further grace by the fragility of the composition—and through it swept the wind through the trees and the waters over stone. It was the Song of the World itself, beautifully played as if through the finely tuned vocal chords of one of its favoured children, they who would walk the Earth no more.

It was the lost Song of the Fallen Nemoricolae.

For the second time that day, Celestia, overcome with the beauty and the musicality of mortal sorrow, wept alone.