Ezekiel sat on his throne, long over taken by vegetation. He could have moved, and left his steel tomb, left for the outside world which had long forgotten of him. He didn’t. The world had no place for him; they didn’t need his influence anymore. He thought to when he was human. He was a soldier in a crusade to take a holy city. He had forgotten its name. Something with a J. a priest promised him eternal life if he completed it. The irony made him sick. He wanted nothing more than to die. But that was impossible.

He did die once.

He remembered that he died halfway to their destination. It was horrible. He felt sick, and fell right as the sun reached its peak. He remembered as his fellows pulled him into a tomb, in the middle of the desert they were trekking though. They must have thought they were doing him a favor. They prayed over him and left, left him to his fate. He remembered blacking out for a spell and hearing the words for the first time. They were cold, and he felt compelled to follow them.

“You are mine, knight of flesh”

He awoke shortly afterwards. He saw his body lying, dead, on the ground in front of him. His body was now of steel, soul, and magic. He screamed. He screamed long after a normal human would have stopped. He screamed for what felt like days. He finally stopped when he realized it was fruitless. He was a creature of blasphemy, a dead man who was not. This was directly against the Holy Scriptures. He could not cry, could not eat, could not sleep, and could not be saved. It took a while, but he calmed down. He looked around. The walls were covered in arcane letters and symbols. Looking through the eyes of his armor, he realized he could read it, even though he never saw any of said symbols or letters in his lifetime. The roof of the tomb had a large bunch of symbols that were bunched together and the entire left side was unreadable, destroyed long ago. He could still read the rest of it. There was a large bunch of words, in perfect English, above the bunch of symbols. It said, ‘periodic table of elements’. He spent a good amount of time staring at the curious ‘table’, long enough to take it entirely to memory. The left side of his tomb had rather intricate carvings that appeared to be the history of the armor. It said that a spell caster that died in this very tomb made the armor. That made a lot of sense. The right side of the tomb had a list of things that were apparently in alphabetical order, albeit missing a few letters:

Air

Blood

Clockwork

Death

Earth

Electricity

Fire

Gravity

Hands

Ice

Life

Light

Monetary vices

Norse winds

Pestilence

Radioactivity

Rock

Souls

Sand

Space

Sound

Time

Uru

Water

War

He was openly confused about what he should do about this list but that was when the voice spoke up again.

“ Concentrate on one of the words on the list ” he was compelled to follow the voices commands. He focused and concentrated on the word, ‘electricity’ he felt nothing at first, but after a few seconds he was engulfed in blue light that wound around his body like a serpent. Normally Ezekiel would have been terrified. But he only felt more intrigued, and the voice urged him to experiment more.

Over the next few days? Years? It didn’t matter. No matter what Ezekiel did the door didn’t budge. He assumed it was similarly enchanted like the armor. On the other hand, the experiments went well. It was easy to figure out what a few of them meant, like fire and ice. Others, like sound and Norse winds, required more than a little experimentation. He purposefully chose to avoid the ones that seemed blasphemous, like life and death. Eventually, the boredom got to him. He sat down on the throne that the armor originally was on, and found it was surprisingly comfortable. Must be because he could no longer feel DIScomfort. He sighed and waited.

Nothing happened for a really long time. Ezekiel had no sense of time, but his biological clock was still working. He could tell that it had been at least 100 years. He sighed. And waited some more.

It was agonizing. It had been at least 1000 years by then. He was starting to lose his sanity, which he didn’t have much of in the first place. Waking up as a suit of armor was pretty traumatizing. He sighed again, and waited some MORE

He was no longer bothered by the fact that he would spend eternity sitting on a throne in a long forgotten desert. On the bad side, his sanity was wearing extremely thin. He could almost hear voices…wait a moment! Those were voices! There were people on the other side of the door. He concentrated on sound and he heard them clearly.

“This is a priceless artifact! The queen must know of this!”

But sir, the Persians believe that this is not yours to take. They believe that it is a part of their cultural heritage, and holds the bodies of their ancestors.”

“Bah, what do those savage desert dwellers know? They are members of the British Empire and if I say that it is transported to England, it will be transported to England!!!

There was a pause. “Yes sir.”

Ezekiel had heard enough. It was good that England was still around, but it sounded that these people were much more militaristic than he remembered. He still sat on his throne, because he knew that they would not be able to open his tomb. What felt like a few days passed, and he felt the tomb move. Huh, so what the person on the other side meant by, ‘take’, he actually meant take the entire tomb. He sat back and chuckled silently to himself. He was going to have a fun time watching them try to open the tomb. It was better than just sitting there, he supposed.

{======}

This was worse than just sitting there. The people who took the tomb, obviously not knowing what was in it, decided to take it back to Brittan by boat. Ezekiel could not get sick, but he could still feel like he was getting sick. His tomb, and, to an extent, Ezekiel, were sliding every which way and he could feel a few dents in his armor forming.

{======}

He survived the initial trip, which he assumed took a few weeks. He wasn’t broken (thankfully) and sat back down in his throne. He had nothing else to do. There was a lot of shouting and he could feel his tomb moving. If the royalty hadn’t moved the castle, then that’s where he would be going. He knew the British. They tried to bring anything they found in some obscure country to the royals so to curry favor. He knew that he was once one of them, but he wasn’t now, and he hated thinking about what he should do if they did open the tomb. Play dead? Try to convince them that he wasn’t some Satan spawn that was imprisoned there for a reason? Destroy them? He couldn’t figure out what to do.

He wasn’t in the castle. From the voices he heard he assumed that he was in some sort of university or museum. There was a lot of clapping and praise being given to someone, presumably the one who stole the tomb. He concentrated.

“Congratulations are in order, Elrond. I did not expect you to come back with such a prize.”

“Thank you, director joseph, it is good to be back at the university. Anyway, I am assuming that you all want to know what this is inside of this… this thing, from the desert. Well. Horace!”

Another voice picked up. “Yeah boss?”

“Get the dynamite, we will blast this infernal door to oblivion, and plunder the riches inside!”

Dynamite? Ezekiel assumed that that was some sort of explosive, and was somewhat surprised that they were using such measures to open it. Oh well, when (if) they open the door, it will be nice to see the sun again.

‘ When they open the door, destroy them .’ Ezekiel shook his head to get those horrible thoughts out of his head. He would not hurt his countrymen.

‘ You will pay for your treachery, knight. ’ The voice was obviously quite angry that he had disobeyed him. While he was having a mental debate with himself, he had forgotten that dynamite was being placed all around the door. The boom was big enough to get him out of the trance though.

The dynamite did nothing. There were a few more angry shouts and another boom, but the door didn’t budge. He was honestly surprised when the third boom was so big it tipped the tomb over. But the door didn’t move an inch. He decided to just wait.

{=====}

It had been a really, really, really long time. He had spent so much time in that tomb that he had forgotten how to speak. He hated it. He hated his unholy life, he hated this infernal tomb, and he especially hated the horrible people who couldn’t open the door. It festered over the decades into a burning hatred of all living things. He wanted to destroy every living thing he came across, brit or whatever else might walk across his path. But he was still rational. He knew that it would still take a while before humans could open the door. His time in the tomb, however, gave him good amount of time to experiment with the powers, as he started to call them (cliché, I know, but what would you call them?). He had mastered most of them, but there were still a few that he had yet to understand.

{=====}

It had roughly been 5000 years since he died. He had learned how to speed up time, but he chose not to do anything with it. It seemed a blasphemous. He heard a large rumbling and an explosion that would have destroyed his eardrums if he had any. This explosion was much louder than anything he had heard before. And the explosion was certainly large. It ripped the door right off the tomb, and Ezekiel saw sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. And it was instantly consumed by fire. He left the tomb and saw what appeared to be a gargantuan, black skinned, floating leviathan, tearing in to the earth with beams of light from its mouth. There were what appeared to be metal birds attacking it, but the creature shrugged the attacks off and kept blasting at what appeared to be large stone structures. Ezekiel was impressed. He had never seen such destruction. He was in what appeared to be a building, or what was left of it. Everywhere was dead and charred bodies. He grimaced (or whatever) and went back in his tomb. There was nothing for him up there anymore, and he was a sure as the sky was blue not facing down one of those things.

It had been another 4000 years. The earth had recovered, and plants had taken over the tomb. The carvings on the walls were completely obscured by roots and trees reached high over the hole that was once the door to his prison. He STILL sat on his throne, waiting for something. The voice had all but fizzled out, and he had nothing to think about or talk about. But, as stated before, he could not sleep, and was forced to just watch the sun move over the sky. It was somewhat maddening.

(Finally, I get to pony!)

Luna was troubled. You see, she has a power to see into the dreams of any living thing in equestria. She could not enter the mind of someone awake, and what troubled her was that way to the far right of the dreamscape, was a mind that never slept. It had been there for as long as she could remember, and it was starting to scare her. She decided to talk to Celestia about it. She waited until morning court was over, long after she usually went to sleep, and walked out to see Celly, who was sitting on her throne going over documents. Celestia looked up and instantly saw the look of discomfort on her face.

“Luna, what troubles you?”

“Tia, I must speak with you about something…”