This is not required reading for the story, but if you don't mind some mildly spoilery material to start with, have a read.

Each chapter will have a song that reflects events, provides clues, and/or foreshadows future events. Some songs' meaning or significance might change or expand if listened to after later chapters. Any suggestions are welcome (even if the chapter already has a song), but the criteria for genre and lyrical content is quite specific. If I receive an exceptional suggestion, the provider can choose any scene in the story and I will illustrate it or commission an artist if the scene is beyond the scope of my talents.

Matt Maeson - Put It On Me

The year is a modern one and Spring is not the only thing on the near horizon. The place: quiet outskirts of an active and thriving settlement known as Canterlot. A mansion, atop a long and grand slope, overlooks a collection of beautiful homes like a feudal lord’s estate, rising over gilded peasantry. This is not a place known for suffering, though it’s not immune to tragedy or despair, and horror has stalked the dark of these lands before. Within the warm, decadent recesses of the mansion, a man occupies a wheelchair in a room full of terrible secrets. He pays neither these nor the ache in his crumbling bones any mind as he cogitates over the dust swirling in the slanted moonbeam coming through a grand, circular skylight. Once, long ago, he had developed a melancholy sense of kinship with the motes of that dust, moved by chaotic forces incomprehensible and unassailable to them. But Man is not mere dust, he thinks. Man is a seed and Man is his own chaos. The winds can blow and the tides can rise, but Man adapts, he overcomes, then ascends, bursting into the form of a new seed that will evolve yet again some day. What new and frightening forms might Man assume, in time?

The one and only door to the room of terrible secrets gently creaks open. The sound pleases the man as much as it causes him anxiety. Neither he, nor the youthful, gorgeous woman that enters, speak as she approaches him. She leans over him from behind, placing a paper folder on his lap, a hand on his shoulder, and a kiss on his hairless, liver-spotted scalp.

“Is it what I was afraid of?” He murmurs, his strong and steady tenor reverberating richly off the skillfully carved wooden walls.

“Yes.” The woman responds. Her smooth, cold response doesn’t seem to touch the boundaries of the room.

The man looks away from the dust, turning over the cover of the folder to reveal yet another set of terrible secrets. The contents would mean little or nothing to the layman, but to an open-minded collection of highly educated physicists, chemists, psychologists, philosophers, and various other men of science, the significance of the information on this small collection of paper would be enough to deny them sleep.

“How long has it been active?”

“Unknown. A high probability of years. Waveform analysis and Rushe radiation indicates approximately half a decade, at most.”

“PNE detections?”

“Negative, although you’ll see a partial read on page three, sometime after activity is suspected to have resumed. Without hunters, it can’t be confirmed or eliminated, if necessary.”

The man leafs through the folder’s contents and props his head on one shaky hand, rubbing at his brow.

“Likely a failed transmogrification. I assume the Discidant Ritual is going well for tomorrow’s eclipse?”

“Yes.” The woman responds, displaying none of the emotion exuded by her companion. The man closes the folder and rubs at his suddenly heavy eyelids.

“And were we able to procure supplies for next year?”

“Unless additional funds are acquired, they will remain unavailable. Our enemies continue to make this unlikely.”

“Then gods save us all. Take me to bed, please, I’ve heard enough for one night.”

“There’s one more thing you should see. Page seven.” Like only the elderly can, the man sighs with the age of constellations and impatiently flips the folder open again. He grasps the last page between two brittle fingers and slides it over the others. His eyes widen after only a glance and his knuckles pop with the tightening of a fist.

“What are these waveforms?” He demands.

“Inconclusive. As you’re aware, a range of responses loosely analogous to human behavior have been determined, but this one has no precedent. However, there is a theory.”

“Out with it, woman!” The man rasps, leaning forward and craning his neck as much as his ancient joints and atrophied muscles will allow. The woman’s hand patiently pushes him back down without resistance. When her answer comes, a hint of the word she uses creeps into the edges of her tone.

“Fear.”