The ancient crystal from which the palace had been built was not, as legend said, so hard as to be eternal. Ages ago it had been torn from the depths beneath the mountain and shaped, with forces now forgotten, to build the royal palace on its summit. The crystal, symbol of the Empire’s permanence, could not be bent, broken, or shattered. But the smooth, hoof-shaped depressions in the crystal staircase proved it could eventually be worn down.

To Sombra, 70th alicorn king of the Crystal Empire, they looked just as they had when the crystal heart had been passed to him nearly a thousand years before. Still they were a sign of decay, and he had tried to restore them to their original appearance by ordering workers to turn the heavy slabs over. They found, on the underside of each slab, hoofprints twice as deep.

The crystal staircase led ninety-seven steps up from the throne room to the Garret of the Books. Every morning, when the throne’s Onyx Gem swallowed the beam of ruby light from the Rose Window, Sombra followed the Keeper of the Books up the staircase. There the Keeper spread the three enormous tomes out on the crystal table to puzzle out that day’s duties. Sombra might be required to mount the palace’s western turret at seven minutes before noon and recite a poem to the ponies below, who would cover their ears lest they hear it. Or he might need to visit the Pool of Misremembering in its drip-drop cave beneath the mountain, and bring back one of its pale eyeless fishes to the evening feast.

In his youth, Sombra had spent hours reading the Books, to learn his future. Years later, he read them to recall his past, since they were the diary of his life, though written untold ages before. He found he could no longer remember whether passages described things he had done, or things he had read about and had yet to do. Still more years later, he realized it did not matter.

Sourdust, Sombra’s seventeenth Keeper of the Books, leaned close over the pages of the Third Book, squinting at the tiny letters which spread across its great pages like the tracks of uncounted insects.

“If Your Majesty were to imagine a shoe, how many nails would it have?” he asked, in a thin, rasping voice.

“Eight,” Sombra replied. This was easy enough; all his shoes, and the shoes of everypony in the palace, and in the city, had had eight nails at least since he had learned to count.

Sourdust muttered gutturally, or perhaps merely coughed. He consulted the previous night’s report from the Royal Astrologer, blue charts on a white scroll held unrolled on the table by two chunks of crystal. Then he turned several hundred pages forward and squinted again at the book.

“Hmm,” he said, and coughed or muttered again.

Sombra waited.

“Did Your majesty dream of ravens last night?”

“Yes,” Sombra replied. He had long since ceased to be surprised by the Books’ seeming foreknowledge, or even to regard it as such.

Sourdust turned to the first and oldest book and leafed through its brittle pages. Sombra could not tell whether the crackling sound and the musty odor came from the book’s pages, or from his Keeper’s rickety joints and dusty robes.

Sourdust read the page, then leaned in very close, squinted very hard, and read it again. He read it a third time before he looked up, his head still low over the page.

“Today,” he whispered in a voice even more weak and quavering than usual, “the Empire shall fall.”

It was a statement that called for a dramatic response. They looked at each other, Sombra in embarrassment, Sourdust perhaps in senility. Neither could summon the requisite enthusiasm to disturb the Garret of the Books, where no voice had risen above a whisper in thousands of years.

“Did you say, ‘the Empire shall fall’?”

“Yes,” Sourdust said, sounding surprised. He coughed.

Sombra stood and turned away from Sourdust to the wall behind him. There were no windows in the Garret of the Books, since its walls were clear as daylight. He looked down on the narrow streets below, where ponies plodded slowly along the same routes at the same tasks their great-granddams had, and their great-granddams before them, making, he knew, though he could neither hear nor smell them, the same tired sounds and the same stale odors.

“It’s about bloody time,” he said.