Chapter One

The first conscious, ragged breath hit his lungs like a splash of ice cold water in the face. The light was all but blinding, an array of vivid colors dizzying. The movement of air on his skin set prickles and goosebumps all across its surface.

That was, more or less, to be expected. In many ways... In essentially all the ways that mattered, this body was new. Not young, the way an infant's body was young and fragile, but similarly sensitive to anything and everything in the environment. It experienced things for the first time, with no physical baseline for comparison, despite the fact that his mind was older.

Older, and filled with memories. Memories of things he had lived. Things he hadn't lived through. Things nobody had lived through yet as well, fading and mingling into a slurry and stew in his brain, mixing together and blending until the important things fit into place, highlights, while the tedious minutiae faded into background mist. His eyes shut as he blocked out the current brightness of the world for a time, clearing his mind as he focused.

Disaster was on the horizon for this beautiful world. So great and terrible that...

... The details were slipping away from his mind. Whether they had been dulled by a kind act from the original owner of the memories that had been neatly weaved into his own, or whether it was his mind blocking them out from the sudden trauma of seeing and knowing everything that had happened all at once, in a single grisly and visceral stroke... the details, it seemed, would only be likely to surface in disjointed and unclear nightmares.

What was important was that this world was not defenseless. It had guardians. Champions. Radiant goddesses in flesh that shone as brightly as the sun and moon hanging in the sky. A band of heroic defenders, motivated and empowered by the strength of their bonds with one another and powerful magical elements that resonated with their very souls. Others yet, though they were less prominent.

It had simply not been enough, in the end. In the final hour, the world had been swallowed whole by wickedness, and there were none left that were able to meaningfully oppose it, or prevent it from happening in any way.

Save one. Save him. Hope, not shining brightly to illuminate the dark, but flickering dully like a near-expended candle light in a chill and threatening breeze. There simply wasn't enough left of the world's goodness to shine brightly, then.

The only real solution, he had been told, was to gather up what could be gathered and use it as a catalyst. Send it back, like a stone cast over the shoulder into the river of time far behind, to make what ripples it could and hope that it would be enough.

Things were more plentiful, in the here and now. Light and laughter and love... all things good and vibrant and wholesome, where even violence was typically enacted for a cause and an ideal, or at least simply because a creature fed on flesh and not fruits, rather than for the sake of seeing another suffer for amusement. The world was dripping, drowning in plenty, with more going to waste fruitlessly like a grape vine clinging to a barren mountainside than anyone truly understood.

That was plenty to, with the proper triggers and the correct stimulus, prompt the formation of a new god. Plenty to sheathe that essence in strong and sturdy flesh. With the last traces of dying gods and a crumbling world to spur it on, it had to be able to manage at least that much. Even a great being of chaos, technically neither truly good nor evil, had lent assistance to this endeavor... a realm of endless darkness and suffering just had no humor in it, after all. No punchline that could prompt a chuckle at the miserable situation. It wasn't even a little bit funny. There was no helping it, then. He'd simply had to throw his weight onto the scales... or so he had said. It was debatable how much of the argument was true... just as it was if it being true or not really mattered. The fact of the matter was that he had helped, force of chaos and disruption or no. Even if he had only cast out that magical crown into the aether, like a baited hook ready to pull in a big fat fish from the sea, he would have still helped, and in the end he had done much more than that.

The scales had been tipped. Everything they had had gone into throwing the dice on this last, desperate gambit. Hoping that it would be enough, when the forces of opposition that were already here were joined by forces that invaded from outside.

They had been happy to join together. That was an arrangement that had lasted as long as they were useful. Once that use had run out, however? They became targets just the same as all the rest of the world, betrayed without a blink or a moment of hesitation.

By the end of it, it was those outsiders who were making war across a burned out and dulled wreckage of what remained of the world, while the original inhabitants could only do what they had to in order to keep out of the way and survive, for just a few days more. Ancient and long-forgotten monsters, lain dormant for untold generations, were the only native powers that posed any threat towards the invading forces of the hells and other, more... otherworldly foes. The Great Old Ones seldom acted directly against the demons that walked the land, but once they had taken root in the world they could no longer be pushed out of it again, and only the most powerful and malevolent could turn them aside when they walked like the tides.

... Even now, they blighted the world's hope with regret. Not every ripple was, or could, be a good result. He had been called upon, and he had been sent back in the hope of fixing things before they were beyond repair. But that simple act meant that there was a trail left to follow... Not to directly invade the past, but enough for the rulers of the future to nudge and stimulate the minds there, adjusting things into their favor in their own ways.

It would begin earlier. A slow and insidious creeping into the world, drip by inky ocean-scented drip, a few probing and testing actions, rather than an introduction with the force of a full and overwhelming invasion crashing into the world like the breaking of a dam, only to be met by desperate actions making things all the worse for everyone.

He would have to hope that they had prepared well enough to counteract that as well.

Seven powerful magical affinities, stacked upon more and ever-more magical potential. They had gone all in on focusing on the magic side of things, in the hope of burying enough raw power to be awakened later that it would make a serious difference for things.

War. Above all else, war. More than any other of the affinities, war had been important for him to have, because war was coming for them all, like it or not. It was paired with Order, an affinity for discipline and keeping things running properly, and joined with the sheer force of Destruction... because sometimes, no amount of friendship or understanding was going to solve a problem, and the only way there was to salvage what you could was to get rid of it.

It built up into a violent, worrying picture of the god figure that would result, but those portions couldn't be done without or just sealed away until they were needed. Bad things would happen from such an attempt... at best it would result in an evil clone ripping its way free at some point. The best result, because with the memories of what was to come, it would at least be possible to work together with the clone for a time... but that didn't mean it wasn't still going to be a severe problem down the line. Better to avoid it.

The solution had instead been to cut into other possible areas and add yet more magic. Diluting it proportionally, counterbalancing the force of repressive tyranny that he could easily have become.

Empathy was the first and foremost, the most important of those additional affinities. The first step of making war was to strip away any human qualities in your enemy, to see them as nothing but the enemy... demons would make that very easy indeed, but with enough power it was a very short step between dehumanizing the enemy and treating everyone as things to be moved about at one's own direction. Empathy, it was hoped, would be enough to temper such impulses... even if it couldn't entirely counterbalance them on its own.

The freedom of Air, to weight itself against the rigid structure of Order. While it would be just shy of impossible to force an affinity for creation to coexist with Destruction, Biomancy offered an alternative... changing and guiding life to better purposes, rather than creating it wholesale or eradicating it.

The capstone of it all, binding them all together, was the affinity for Crystal. A rigid structure, but one which grew, which could be shaped into a weapon or a tool, and which could prompt any number of emotional responses

The mass of affinities shouldn't, he had been assured, drive him insane from competing and conflicting instinct and stimulus with them all tied together this way. He wasn't sure that he liked 'shouldn't' as a qualifier for that, but it was long past any time for second guesses and half-measures. They were supposedly as balanced and healthy as had been possible while still maximizing the number of affinities present and he hadn't really felt the need to debate the point.

Overall, it didn't matter much when they were all sealed anyway. Less of a beacon, minimizing the effect their opposition could have in turn by as much as possible... or so he was told.

He stretched, moving his body slowly.

Hooves on the ground. Neck craned out. Wings...

... Wings, huh. Well, he'd resigned himself to not having the horn right away. The magic would come when it came. There was at least a little bit of power devoted to flight and mobility, after all.

If he'd wound up not having the wings, then he would have been incarnated as a skittish and comparatively weak Earth Pony, built for advanced magic and not having any particular way to use the talent. It would have been an uncomfortable period of time, and he might have... No, speaking fairly, he would very likely have made mistakes as he pushed to awaken his dormant and sealed abilities as quickly as possible. Mistakes that couldn't be afforded, just for that.

As a Pegasus, he could be patient about his growth. Focus on the important things, rather than grasp at the power he would need to be taken seriously...

His eyes opened once more, more or less adjusted to the bright light and bright life of a happy and vibrantly healthy world, instead of a ball of burning corpses floating between the stars.

There was a pink pony there, standing in the middle of the road with a curly mane fluttering slightly in the breeze as she stared him dead in the eye. Then smiled.

"Hi! Welcome to Ponyville." she said, quickly and with a bubbly form of mirth that couldn't be faked. "You look like you could really use a party, mister!"

"Huh?" He said aloud.

And then there was pie.