The Academy: fashionably late.

[insert some neat title here]
By: Lore the Dre

Where does it come from?, they asked, but why should they know? How does one explain the ascension of magic? Of gravity? Perhaps the Stone is like those things and yet, it isn’t. Perhaps it has been there, as old as the earth or perhaps older, as impermanent as the rivers and the fire dancing in summertime; perhaps it is as old as the crack of lightning and the rush of the wind; always there, when the elements come together.

Perhaps it is as avirus is, as birds are, as horses are. It is because change had it be, that it would exist, and exist it did, and it was content and dreaming and it owned the lands it rested upon, the way a tiger does, or a plague.

Where does it come from?, they asked, but that might be the wrong question; the real one would be, what is it? A parasite; a semi-sentient thing, that feeds on its victim’s willingness to carry it and shelter it. A Stone, yes, feeding on the minds and souls of other living creatures and giving power in return – power over the elements, power over nature, power over itself.

Perhaps it would be best to say that the Stone is power. And power is a tremendously fickle thing.

Thus once upon a time, if we might say such a thing, they came – the horses that traveled from afar, from everywhere and nowhere. Some had seen wars, some had seen pestilence and darkness and beautiful things, but they had never seen those lands, and the land lured them as a trap does.

Some escaped. Some didn’t.

But that isn’t to say their life was horrible, or that the power – the leavings of the Stone – was so strong that it ruined their hearts and souls. No; power grew into them, wove itself in their bodies and the genes, and power did strange things – it was great, to see the earth rise and welcome those who chose it, to see the rivers and rains dance to the voice of its masters, the winds spin their webs around those who spoke to it, the fire writhe in their skin – it was a beautiful time and it was a terrible time, and there was order as the elements divided, seeking their kindred, and order was established, and balance.

The elements canceled each other out, and power tasted sweet. They remained, and they thrived.

Until, that is, the Stone found its victim.

He wasn’t a particularly terrible creature, at first. Why would he be? He was there, and he was ambitious, perhaps, or more aggressive, or just had the right traits – the potential, the genetic makeup, if you will, that the Stone desired. And desire it did, passionately, in its nonexistent heart; desired that stallion that was strong and proud and ambitious and that thirsted for power and a reckoning whose price he would never know.

He wasn’t terrible, no more than average; he had a mind and a will, as many do, and this did not mean – entirely – that he was evil, or cruel. But power, especially the likes of the Stone, can be quite irresistible.

And irresistible it was.

Imagine having the power – he did; it changed him, it transformed his mind and unearthed those things he wouldn’t have thought otherwise, as he had no power, not in the degree he had it then. Perhaps the bloodshed, the want of it, wasn’t so much the Stone’s as its bearer’s, that core of violence that remains when you rid one of all his inhibitions; perhaps it was just a consequence – the consequence of an immense power harnessed by an indestructible, amoral thing with no concern for the fragile, fleshy beings it depended on to survive.

But the Stone had a secret, one that it knew, and did not reveal. It wasn’t the only one of its kind – though there are those who might claim otherwise. And power over air, earth, fire and water wasn’t all it was capable of.

When Necromancer died, under the hooves of the mare who named herself the Quintessence, the Stone revealed itself, too, to have a hidden face – a fifth aspect.

Lightning – or, as some would say, electricity – had always existed, deep within the Stone’s core. It wasn’t entirely unknown; nobody could live their lives without seeing a crack of lightning cleaving from sky to earth, in the heart of a storm, to light trees on fire, to destroy flesh, to fall harmlessly into the dead earth.

Lightning, to their naļve eyes, was a quintessence in itself. It came unexpectedly from the sky, the realm of the winds; it brought fire in its wake; it was often in company of rainwater; and its enemy was always the earth.

It made sense, in their hearts, that lightning was a powerful thing. And so it was.

It made even more sense, to them, to want that power and to harness it. soon enough, the fifth element had risen between them – not only the fire, the earth, the wind, the water, but the lightning that was a subtle combination of all and yet none of them.

But the Stone wasn’t the only of its kind, and when it shattered, other things appeared.

First were the relics, trinkets reminiscent of past times, from different eras and periods of the elemental horses’ existences. They were the opposition to the Stone’s – by then broken into the five Shards – power, made of the wills and the minds of those who fought them and loved the land they chose to live in, even beyond the Stone’s tyrannical reign.

And, among them, was the Seed.

The Seed, seemingly borne of the elements themselves, small and unassuming enough that one might think it harmless – it is the other face of power, the gentleness and the goodwill it brings rather than the bloodlust and ambition and darker feelings of the Stone.

Thus, in balance they were born, Seed and Stone, to cancel and end each other’s reign; as the Innocence broke it, and the Rainbringer remembered it, as the Diadem sealed it and the mysterious Glaļsenre made it, as the Shards remained; so the Seed and Stone would eventually meet each other, sometime in the future, as was their due, and perhaps –

Ah, perhaps, but who knows what the future brings?