Shaman of the Zaharren by Beware The Carpenter
Respite of Wisdom

In the beginning The Logos, Great Father of Light,

From Its essence formed Wisdom and created all life.

By Its will the foundations of the universe were laid

Then, as an expression of glory, the cosmos It made;

Sun, moon and stars; earth, sky and sea,

It made by Its power, whatever it pleased.

It then formed races to rule on Its behalf:

Pony and camel, griffon and giraffe

Llama, elephant, and many more it unfurled

To live by Its rulings, and rule over the world.

But to steward the stewards, came those even greater

To be dispensers of justice, and of truth be curators;

The last and the greatest, to shepherd all races

Came draconequus with powers, to govern all peoples and places.

Such was the way of the universe fair

That life carried on with hardly a care.

Until hunger and malice, deception and strife

Found place in the elders, and took over their lives.

Discontented with stewards, they sought to be masters,

In their pride and their folly, they invited disaster.

Chances were given, to repent and submit

But the draquoni were obdurate that their crimes they'd not forfeit.

They propelled the young races they were meant to lead,

Down death-holes of violence, hatred and greed;

Each trying to claim the earth for their own

Their cruelty endless, their kindness unknown.

For an age of the earth there was nothing but war

As the blood of their armies, the draquoni outpoured.

Till at last one of their number proclaimed himself king,

Emerging victorious over the bones of his kin;

Subduing all rivals, he enforced endless strife

Denying the Logos, and blaspheming life.

Using his powers that were meant to bring joy

To deceive and to torture, to cause fear and destroy.

Till six alicorns of the days long ago

Remembered this state was not always how it was so.

They remembered the Logos and cried out for aid

Repenting of wickedness and confessing they'd strayed.

Given to them was the power of amity

And with this gift of heaven they ended calamity.

Sealed in stone, the mad king was banished,

His empire fallen, his army was vanquished.

The powers of Discord were broken; divided

Among his subduers, who were by harmony guided.

A new age dawned on the earth that fair day

The earth, under the alicorns, returned to the way.

The Logos appointed them, the new stewards of earth

They became great and mighty, in wisdom and mirth

But like the draquoni, their glory would end

When upon their own power they chose to depend.

They honored the Logos, but their love for It failed

As the joy in their worship became sickly and frail.

Legalistic and crude, they became masters of bigotry

As though adoration of commoners would sap heaven's dignity;

Claiming the joy of the Logos was not for the masses,

They discouraged Its rites in all lower classes.

They forbade Its worship to all but a few

Then fewer and fewer these vested ones grew,

Till scarcely a hundred so-called priests did remain

And these were corrupt, haughty and vain.

The effect on rectitude was as apples from locusts

Without spiritual guidance, the people lost focus

Falling away, they began worshiping demons

Without sight of their master, they lost their rhyme and their reason.

A plague was unleashed against the esteemed

And Discord unleashed to punish those fiends

To remind them they followed the path of the lost

And if they continued, what would be the cost.

Offers were made to be stewards renewed

But they were rejected; and chaos continued;

Till two pony sisters, princesses of old,

Restored relics of harmony and returned Discord to stone.

They tried to rebuild the lands of their youth;

And recapture times of virtue and truth.

But too many years had gone by between,

The releasing of Discord and of his defeat.

No one remembered the true way of the Logos,

Fragments and whispers were all that were posed,

The law of the Logos was so tainted and blurred,

That even the sisters, could not remember the word.

Any attempt to re-worship the God of their past

Was shattered when younger struck elder, in murderous craft.

What emerged from the ashes of that Solar War

Knew little, if anything, of what came before.

No stories or proverbs could one rightly account

While rumors and falsehoods and lies did abound.

Nations they fractured, one from the other,

And migrated out; son separate from mother.

No longer united under the alicorns' rule,

Each species left, and alone became fools.

Who is the Logos, and what is Its name?

What are Its laws for whom my heart should flame?

Who is the God to whom my allegiance is owed?

I will tell you plainly; I do not know.

But all is not lost, and hope is not gone.

There yet comes the day, of a new truthful dawn.

And for that day's coming, we watch and we pray

And prepare for its splendor, however we may.

For though the full truth is quite out of our grasp

All nature sings of Its glory, and to this we may clasp.

For this crucial task, the shamans were formed,

To study creation, that we might be informed

Of the author who breathed life into all this

Thus, somewhat rekindle, what has gone amiss.

We took to this quest with great skill and fierce passion

Studying all that we saw; in all manner of fashions.

Yet as the bodies of sentients are the jewels of creation

We chose these as the pinnacle focus of our fascinations.

We studied primarily; all of hurt and disease,

And how we could cure them with roots, vines, herbs, and trees.

We studied all flora and the effects they possessed

When brewed into potions and used to ingest.

Sleep, diet and exercise were then mastered and tamed.

To cure near all ailments we came to be trained.

Centuries passed, and our knowledge grew

Seeking not only healing, but enhancements too;

Stronger muscles, denser bones, and longevity

Heightened senses, immune systems and fertility.

Till in all manner of creature there was scarcely a limit

and not one bodily function we could not enhance or inhibit.

Then came a shaman who noticed by chance

Her patients healed faster in hypnotic trance.

So we explored not only the body, but also the mind

With redoubled passion to see what we could find.

We learned close observation, and the art of deduction;

And to remove from our learning, all harmful obstructions.

Language not just of speech, but of body and face

Then how suspicion and memory, to discreetly efface.

We learned how to hypnotize, and how to cause fear,

How to persuade, and how to bring cheer;

And truly what's mentioned is not half the list

In short, we mastered the arts of the mentalist.

Last of our crafts; we learned about war

To fight and to kill, to maim and to gore.

Not for great conquest or the creation of strife,

(Though in defense on the innocent, we would take a life),

But to cement our knowledge of body and mind

For what is combat; but biology, fitness, and cunning combined?

For six hundred years we wandered the earth

No home and no country; we had not a berth

Till four centuries ago, a temple we raised

Whose size, strength and glory, was far and wide praised

The place of our choosing, was the vast Timbucktoo,

Jewel of the Zaharren, which from the desert is hewn.

Great lord of the trade routes, north, south, east and west

Ruled by the alicorn Ferric, who by the Logos was blessed

Stewardship over the earth's magnetic fields

That to his wishes, all metals must yield.

From the trade of his city, we mustered great plunder

And the number of species it was a great wonder.

To the north was the ocean, and the lamas dwelt west,

Camels to south, who were most often our guests;

Save for the Equestrians who from across the vast desert did come,

To be welcomed by zebras as their most distant cousins.

For Ferric's fine metals, it was worth the great test,

Of braving the wasteland of sunshine and death.

We hoped that by choosing such a central location,

Our teachings would spread and enlighten all nations;

We thought we would influence the world by our actions;

Alas, to our shame, quite the opposite happened.

We sought to gain wealth and prestige for our quests

These things came to us easily, through various tests.

But our tools became masters and our means became ends

We gained wealth so quickly, that with greed we grew friends.

After this folly began, many worse things did follow

For with but wealth to stand for, our hearts became hollow.

To make our teachings pleasing to everyone's eyes

We forfeited conviction and gave way to compromise.

A little bit here; a little bit there, our temple was defiled

As we accepted false teachings which we should have reviled.

I shall not recount all that was done on our floors,

Just know that slowly but surely we opened our doors,

To the superstitions of lamas and their pantheon of delusion,

And then could not close them to the camel's bigot seclusions.

Then, counting from the end of the great solar war,

Came the departure of Ferric in nine-ten-and-four.

He called his officials to a royal convention

Saying trouble in the mountains, required attention.

He would go alone, and not return till he'd negated his fears

But that he knew not if this would be weeks, months or years.

So he anointed a steward, a wise servant named Appraen,

Flew into the mountains, and was not seen again.

Did he simply grow tired of the life of a king

And seek to move on to try other things?

Did secret guilt make him feel unfit to lead;

And so in heeding his conscience take lonely leave?

Did the ground open up and swallow him whole?

You should not ask me, for how should I know?

After ten years, the searches began,

to find our lord Ferric and bring him back to his lands.

Slowly at first and then quite in earnest,

As many young stallions did make this their purpose.

By thirty years; the searches had extensively grown

As, step by step, the world was combed.

Youths searching for signs of their missing master

Goading each other to search for him faster.

But at length they grew tired and returned to their homes

Their master unfound, they ended their roams.

The remaining stewards have ceaselessly pled

That they would have known if Ferric was dead.

For the death of one steward is felt by the others

By the links they all share; one to another.

They swear he's alive but do not know where

Nor can they tell, if he's free or ensnared.

But although much wealth was lost without Ferric's alloys

We kept more than enough through our banks and trade convoys.

And in government his vanishing was not such a great loss

As aside from defense; Ferric issued few laws

And his good steward Appraen did carry on these

or at least at the start, this was how it did seem.

For although rich trade continued to pour through our gates

And war hardly touched us, or put us in straits,

Our culture, it rotted from the inside out

As we shaman gained power, and allowed greed to sprout.

The shaman forsook the destiny for which they'd been borne

And 'twas in this time, and this place; that I was born.

A Troublesome Filly