A heart.
A few simple words. It wasn't much to ask, but it seemed so unbearably much to give. A few words was all he had to write and yet they were too few and too many at the same time. How could he compress every year into a few words? A goodbye that should be a grand prose, written in the course of centuries and delivered by heavenly herolds. Yet what he was given were a few simple words. How do you put an entire life into a few words?
Every word would have to be chosen at utmost care as to not waste a single precious one. Exactly that was what made it so hard to find the words he was desperately searching for. If a word should only be of purest essence, then how would he find so many of them? There were so many little words that could be circumvented only by means of greatest difficulties. Fitting words would have been those of ancient cultures, not spewing around with their little "and"s and "or"s or "have"s. He owed her a proper goodbye, not just a few filler words. Yet he wanted his last words for her to be something she would have not only understood, but also liked.
In a tiny little century, she had lived and died, and yet in that century he had experienced a transformation as huge as only in aeons of long forgotten. A simple pony had not only changed how he lived, but she had changed the very being he represented, a power he had only thought the old creators to have. Now it was time to say goodbye to what could be the strongest force since time, all hidden inside a pony of her size.
Tiny things, these ponies. They believe their beliefs to be absolute, their knowledge to be vast and their time to be neverending and yet finite. They spend their lives living blindly, only in a few short moments noticing their immediate devise, scaring them to the bones. With their next day it is all gone, forgotten.
They all seemed to be so blind to the world around them, except for her. She knew of her end, having seen it in her friends from the forest often enough. She didn't waste time trying to achieve something great and yet forgotten in a mere century. No, she lived her life caring for those around her, making an unprecedented difference.
"Light and love, kindness and a heart greater than the world she lived on, "
He quickly erased what he had written. Was it really what was the essence of her being? Simply knowing of the death ahead? No, many ponies knew of the death ahead and hadn't moved mountains like she had. There was something greater than banal knowledge she had possessed.
He wasn't writing something for just a friend. He was writing something for his very best friend, a memory that would survive the annals of time, the great void after, and the very end of being. A tiny lifespan and yet she had struck against the aeons. Fitting words? What a ridiculous idea. How could words be fitting, when she really had deserved more time, not just words after she was gone.
She had declined his wish to extend her life. He had thought about it for long, fighting his heart wishing not to let her go. Though he fought valiantly, it seemed his heart had won. Within an instant he was beside her bed, seeing his little pony friend sleeping quietly. In that moment of weakness he had almost condemned her to aeons of loss she had never been prepared for. Maybe the most precious things had to go sometimes.
In the end, he had to turn his very own heart to stone to be able to let her go. Now that the graphite had broken apart, so had his heart. He didn't know if he would be able to bear seeing her one last time, to bear one last time opening his heart to her.
Slowly he put the feather back onto the table of the little cottage she had urged him to build right next to hers so they would always have a place where they could meet. He didn't have the strength to get up, so instead he floated cups of tea over, setting them neatly next to each other, before drinking the air around him.
He had thought it lost for the longest time, his heart. Of course a heart was always there, but the concept of a heart never had struck him as anything but a thing ponies tell their children so the children would forget of the pain awaiting them. She had shown him that ponies had a heart, had something that kept them loving each other, a force greater than just biological attraction, a force greater than what evolution could bring forth, a force greater than anything chaos could have created. The limitless capacity to die for each other, to help a stranger, to love their enemy. Fluttershy loved the terror he had been to them. For him, it had never been but a play, a long collection of scripts, each one acted out by a different generation of ponies, a princess banishing him to stone, another to tatarus, maybe the next to the corners of the universe. He had come back from banishment at times more or less fortunate, he had ruled kingdoms and worlds. He had lost his powers, what a laughable concept. A being of chaos could only lose its power as well as it had the ability to create order. A play, staged and forgotten. Yet with every of his plays the next one was harder to perform, ever since he met her. How could he keep playing a fool when it could have hurt her?
She had a heart radiating so bright it had always blinded him. Ponies were blind to most of their surroundings, but she was not. He saw what was inside of her, only so little of it leaking out as something visible or audible or sensible. 'Maybe' it struck the draconequus. 'Maybe' he thought, having stopped in his steps. 'Maybe'.
In all of time, he had learned of the world, of every good deed and every worst failure. He had fought the most dangerous villains and the greatest heroes. He had forged worlds, he had seen the very beginning and he had seen every smallest piece fall into its predetermined place until the very moment he was in right now. Not just blindly walking through it, seeing a couple of hundred of billionths of a meter of the visible light, but instead everything. He knew of the way atoms played together in smallest detail and greatest composition. There was nothing he hadn't learned since the very beginning. And yet...
Maybe. Maybe he had not stopped learning because there was nothing more to learn but because he had reached the limits of simplicity. The things he would learn from now on were less a matter of knowledge and more a matter of what it meant to have a heart. What he had discovered through her were all the fine details that were beyond comprehension, because they were beyond knowledge itself.
Maybe he had found a divinity beyond his expectations, not just something that had built and formed the world from the very beginning, not just a being with power beyond any imagination, something with more than just immortality and limitless power. Maybe he had been as blind as the ponies he had looked down upon for so long. Until this day not seeing more than a glimpse of what was beyond mortality or immortality or time.
Maybe he would never be able to see more than what he was designed to see and even with infinity at his disposal, not a step closer to something that lay beyond infinity, beyond what he understood about everything and beyond everything there was to know. Somehow the ponies had better eyes for a heart than he had ever had.
A heart seemed to be less of a simplicity now. Not an organ. Not even an object. Beyond a metaphor describing what their biological and neurochemical predisposal was. Beyond all matter and thought, in a realm of divinity. The beyond was where their hearts came from. The beyond was where their conception of love came from. The beyond was what made the true wonders they had grown so blind towards. With all of their magic, how would they keep seeing the beyond if not through the works of their hearts?
Maybe he had much to learn from these ponies.
Two words he wrote down, contempt with his writing. He closed the small letter no one but he would ever know the content of. One last time he looked over to her cottage before disappearing into the void between worlds. She had been to him more than any living being before her, she had been a messenger from beyond. She had been...
"A heart."
