Author's Note
You may want to listen to this track at some point. Probably starting from where Twilight first shows up. Enjoy.
Nothing Ever Ends
Pipsqueak and his mother were having a late afternoon walk in the park, as was their habit. The sunlight was gentle, brushing on things rather than settling upon them; the autumn landscape was saturated with golds and oranges and ambers, the light broken into perfect, intangible solid beams of dusty brightness between the leaves. Pipsqueak was very excited about the latest Sampo comic-book issue. He ran around his mother, excitedly miming the highlights of the story.
“A-and then the Spaghetti Master, that’s the pony with six extra magical limbs, whacked the Magpie against the walls of the Tytus’ nest. Wham and smack she went. And Sampo, broken, on the floor…” Pipsqueak made an unnervingly good impression of an unconscious, beaten hero on the sandbox. One of the fillies there, with a worried look, prodded him with a stick, and he jumped up like a jack-in-the-box! “With one remaining noodly appendage, the despicable Spaghetti attempts to set the final piece to the megaspell that will obliterate Manehatten,” he makes a wide gesture to a flowerbed on the path, like it was a sky-scraping megapolis, “and plunge Equestria and Zebraland into a world consuming war!” At that point, Pipsqueak’s wild expressive gestures looked like he was attempting to milk an immense celestial cow. “But what’s this? The piece is not set? The appendage does not reach? What’s stopping Spaghetti? It’s Sampo! He’s grabbed him by his other appendages, and pulling him towards him, with a prodigious force we never knew he had!” Pipsqueak walked around the corner backwards while mimicking a pulling that seemed prodigious indeed. “‘You trashed my body! You slammed my girlfriend! And now…’ and Spaghetti seems more and more terrified as Sampo draws him towards himself” and Pipsqueak did a comically abject ‘cowering’ pose “‘YOU WILL NOT! DESTROY! MY HOME!’ And he RRRIPPED—” Pipsqueak fell silent.
They had walked around the bend, and there, in a quiet corner of the park, was Princess Twilight Sparkle — real-life hero, emeritus scholar — vacantly gazing upon a rock. A sense of focus and contemplation arose from her, that drew silence around it like a lover draws a blanket. Pipsqueak, despite the silent protests of his mother, quietly sat by the mighty, humble hero, and followed her gaze to the rock and into the void beyond and beneath and within, attempting to see what she saw.
Twilight is now aware of an inquisitive presence beside her. At first, she paid it no mind, absorbed as it was in the infinite order of things, and, at that moment, focused on that single rock. The world had grown wider and deeper since she’d acquired her wings, a vast and infinite mesh that is, that once were, that may become. She could see things that there were no words in her language for. New colors, new fragrances, new sounds, new senses altogether. The rock before her had lived through a million existences before this moment. The rock was a cliff, and it was twice the bottom of an ocean, and it was the shelter of two lovers, and it was the repose of the weary. The rock resonated with a music of lingering tensions and crushing pressures and a conflict of crystalline perfections.
Seeing as Pipsqueak wasn’t going to be moving anytime soon, the mother sat by Twilight as well, and quietly contemplated the Sun settling beyond and behind the faraway blue, misty mountains. Her mind was heavy with calculations of schedules and groceries and mortgages, and yet somehow she found herself growing more peaceful. The red disk gently kissed the horizon, and slow, tender, it went deeper and deeper into it.
Pipsqueak, despite some initially enthusiastic attempts at instant enlightenment through rock-gazing, had given up on extracting the meaning of life from the shapeless boulder everyone called Tom, and instead shifted his focus on a much more interesting spectacle. As the twilight grew darker, Twilight herself appeared, more and more, to subtly, gently glow. A dim, purple glower came and went like a slow breath, deep and heavy and inner like an iron-gem’s light. A subtle, rippling glimmer ran on the surface of her skin like a moonlit brook, highlighting the iridescent, rich nuances of her hairs and feathers. The atmosphere flowed upwards around her, tinged with a purple tint, like the sort of flame you’d get from setting fire to hard liquor, whose light didn’t pierce the darkness so much as highlight it, but grown-up and matured and settled; a hunger-less flame, unconsuming, all-preserving. And on the tip of her horn, a star twinkled and shivered and sparkled, on and off; despite being in hoof’s reach, it seemed so very far away.
Twilight turned her focus inwards, to that new body of hers, to its structures and circuits, its beats and rhythms, its stirrings and its flows. She took deeper, more conscious breaths, and became aware of her limbs, and her joints, one by one. Piece by piece, from the end of her hind legs, to the tips of her feathers, to the point of her horn, she ran a checklist of every piece of her physical self, paying special attention to the intricate richness of her new wings, and the barely explored realms of magical complexity opened by her new Earth Pony and Pegasus magical circuits and channels and senses.
You could see that shimmering glow receding; drawn in, but not extinguished. Neatly, safely sealed.
She tasted her own mouth, took a sniff off the air, and listened to the sounds of the night. The crickets, the owls, the snoring ponies… wait, what?
Twilight opened her eyes. The lamp-posts, surrounded by clouds of little moths, and the occasional hurtling little bat, illuminated the bench where she and two other ponies were sitting; an old wife and a young child, both deep in slumber. When had they sat next to her?!
She hesitated, shy of disturbing them, but aware that she couldn’t in good conscience leave them alone, asleep in the night, no matter how warm and comfortable a night it was. She resolved to gently nudge them.
“H-hello? Are you okay?”
They stirred, seemingly struggling with themselves. Their dreams were pleasant, it would seem. She briefly considered floating them to their house, but thought it would be undignified—and, more importantly, she knew not where they lived!
She nudged them a bit more decisively.
“Ma’m, little one, you shouldn’t sleep here, you might catch a cold or something!”
They opened their eyes, first with resentful reluctance, and then with astonished embarrassment.
“Princess Twilight! What’s—How...?” said the mother, blushing.
“I don’t know, I was meditating and when I finished I found the two of you asleep beside me.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Princess, my son, he saw you sitting there and just decided on his own that he’d follow your example, I think.”
Pipsqueak looked at Twilight with unabashed admiration.
“Whooooa, Princess~! That was waaay out!”
“Er, thanks, I suppose?”
“You’re so pretty when you’re on fire!”
“I was on fire?” she said in an ascending note of panic.
“Don’t worry, Princess. It was cold fire. Or rather, cool fire,” he laughed.
It was a contagious, bright laugh, and soon Twilight and the mother joined him, laughing under the moonlight.
In the shadows, Tom remained, waiting. He remembered the cosmic furnace of the Earth and he remembered the wresting of the gods. It could have been worse. He remembered the sea urchins, the sea cucumbers, an anchor, once. Of such things the world is made. He could dimly remember someone loving him fiercely, once, not long ago. All things pass. Nothing ever ends.
With thanks to Meta Four for his delightful prereadership. Dear readers, please leave a comment, let me know how you feel about the story; those make me very happy. Even stuff as simple as "Nice." or "LOL." is good.
