“What are you thinking about?” Plasma asked to break the silence.
We were seated back to back in the castle's main hall, unable to decide whether to think by ourselves or talk with each other. I ignored him for a few seconds and tried to gather my thoughts into something that wouldn’t worry him.
“Where do you suppose… they bury the bodies of the bad guys?” I finally replied. He let out an exhausted chuckle and reached over his shoulder to pet me.
"C'mon, Neon,” he soothed, “you know we aren't allowed to think about that stuff."
An uncomfortable surge of energy shocked my heart, and I jolted just slightly. From my seat on the black floors I shifted to rub my back against his, feeling the lights across our skin line up and glow together. We both tilted our heads back till they met each other and we sighed.
"How's the view?" He asked as we both looked to our respective images on the black castle walls. He had a painting of his parents for himself, while I had the window. I saw the Bolts' family house had gone dark. There was another shock, and we lost the Chalks. The rest of the buildings flashed and brightened with every loss as they prepared to be next.
"Oh, it's stunning," I cooed. "You should really see it, Plas'."
"Nah," He laughed. "Can't be as good as I've dreamt."
His voice was deep and raspy, but it hid an innocent stallion.
No, actually, innocent is the wrong word. I can’t think of the right word, but I know that innocent did not describe either of us. Maybe some parts of us, but not all of us.
The two of us gradually closed our eyes and listened to the familiar, calming buzz that filled the hall. Again, my thoughts threatened to wander back to the future, but I knew he was right. The future wasn't our concern anymore.
Instead, I reacquainted myself with my oldest memory. It began with the castle’s old floor, so dead beneath our hooves. The sandy corpse of what the city used to be. It chilled my bones and echoed between my ears with every hoofstep.
I was standing in a room I didn't belong in, having sneaked into the row of mares on a shelf for the prince to peruse and eventually select. His parents sat on their seats in front of The Great Tree, both gazing proudly at the dolls they had assembled, and assuming their partner had selected the frail looking one at the far end. Maybe I was a schoolteacher. I was ready to be scoffed at and thrown away, but as the other mares raised their heads and wore their best fake smiles, he approached my relaxed form, picked up my chin and said to me:
"I want the one who will change this empire forever."
That was when I knew who he really was: Not just a figure of power or authority, just somepony who had heard of me, my work, and my goals; and with only my body and mind in front of him, knew with full confidence that I could be something. Whether my goals were his as well or he just wanted to be part of the ride, I didn't care. My eyes traced that drab floor supporting his aging parents on their bland, tired chairs, and a response came to me that was unsettling to everyone but him and I.
"I know just where I'll start."
That was the starting point of our lives. Sure, I had already started to work on my plans, but he was the key I needed to set them in motion. And in truth, the feeling was mutual. He knew how easily he could wrap me around his desires, even if he could only do it from the comfortable cloud that contained mine. I earned that right by toiling for years over my impossible design: The thing that would change the empire forever. Every time I faltered as an engineer he encouraged me with no more than a condescending smirk, and every time he faltered as a leader I did the same.
We kept it a secret from the rest of the ponies because there was no room for a test run. I was either bringing everypony with me the first time or I was never doing it at all. That thought would have stopped anypony in a kinder world from ever pulling the switch, but I had something extra to push me forward. Even after The Lantern was designed and installed, after the buildings were rigged as magical conduits, and after the members of the city gave the two of us their full respect for our time spent together, it was only a few words that really set me on fire.
"Maybe we should sleep on it" were my words, and he replied to them as perfectly as he always did.
"I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being asleep."
I channeled all of my magic into that moment. Because magic was emotion, there was no more powerful emotion than love, and I knew that I could never love him like I did in that moment. I breathed life into The Lantern and felt the wave of power react and crash over the city from my perch at the source. It almost stopped my heart, but I stayed above the divide and watched him stare happily and unfazed at the struggle I was going through. When it stopped, the lights exploded from The Lantern and convinced me that I had died and come back to life in an instant.
It didn't take long to find proof that it had worked. There was life embedded into the walls in the form of lighted trails, pulsing and bending between different colours. The bags under our eyes had completely vanished. Our bodies themselves had begun glowing through our manes and mouths, as well as the patterned lines across our bodies that started at our eyes. But the hardest evidence of all came when he sprinted towards me and embraced my fully sprung form, because that was when he gave me an incredibly fond memory: The tingling sensation running behind my back that neither of us had even considered. All he had to do was reach his hooves behind me and pull in my wings for the very first time.
When we exited the castle doors our ponies were all there waiting. They looked like monsters. They looked like they felt like monsters. They all stared at us without blinking, unsure of what to say, yet unable to find any reason to object. From the outside it was definitely a curse, but from the inside it was a gift. We had all been released from the cycle of energy that normal ponies slaved under. We were as alert and focused as any group of neon lights could be, and we never needed to sleep again. Even those who weren't convinced understood when the sun sent its last ray of light over the gnarled teeth of the southern mountains and left us swallowed in the dark.
We truly shone in that first night. The starry sky suffocated against our polluting bodies, but we simply didn’t need to see it anymore. Our city was as beautiful in birth, that night, as it was in death.
And so, the neon empire was born. Plasma and I tore apart that painful stone city together, and replaced it with the blackest material the outside world could offer: Obsidian, carbon fibre, whatever would help highlight us and help us feel beautiful. Because the prettier we thought we were, the happier our community became.
And when he and I found our kisses to be growing as old as we did, we searched for an end to that process. We wanted a kind of ‘forever’, but we hadn't planned on how long forever could take to be found. Being an alicorn had no such gift for immortality as everypony assumed, and even so, he would never want to become one himself for fear of being compared to my beauty and having it tarnished.
Those were his words, though. I thought them foolish, and he knew that.
But then the rest of the world interrupted our search by taking notice. They watched the city in the desert wasteland glowing like a beacon that affected their emotions. They questioned the ponies who had forgotten hunger and thirst and become impossible to distract. That wasn't playing by the rules, they said.
And so the outside was split into those who wanted to join us, and those who wanted us to disappear. It never once crossed their minds that we could have been just left alone, or even allowed into the conversation. As our bodies changed we became more of a topic than a member of their species.
But The Lantern's birth was a singular event. Our power couldn’t be selectively given to outsiders as we pleased, because It was not sentient. To toy with the circuit would be to toy with our lives, and I would never experiment on our ponies for anypony else. And when the first of their kind journeyed into our walls and found that they could not have what we had, there was only one side of the argument left.
It is a shame his parents did not last. Two more years, and they would have had a thousand. However, their deaths were more sweet than bitter. If they ever learned the fates of the few neon ponies that took time away from their transformed home and tried to seek companionship in the old land, they would have implored us to change course.
It just so happens that a slaughtered neon pony made for a tremendous sight. It painted the leaves, rock and dirt of the outside world with a mosaic of colour. Or at least, that was what we heard from the stories and rumours. I envied the beauty our sacrifice could give: A final piece of artwork to stain the world with our memory. But I would never wish for that sacrifice to be made. And if it was ever made in our empire, we knew we would be lost.
But we, he, and I never lost each other; and when the other ponies came and they tried to rip our gift away from us all the while claiming to be ripping us away from it, we invented forever. It was fake, but it was a starting point. With our new power and the love we shared, we gave our entire culture the blessing to vanish from their world for as long as we could stay awake. We found ourselves in a place unlike any other: A place where we could live forever. How do I explain it...?
The only evidence we had that time was moving was our own movements and conversations. The black sun never moved from its peak. The endless nighttime never rotated or shone. Everything not alive never withered nor wore away, and in a way, we were the least alive of anything. It was a world as energized yet as lifeless as we were. I'm afraid that's the best I can explain. You simply had to be there.
But there we stayed, the two of us and our neon ponies, and we built ourselves in the lights of our bodies and buildings. It didn’t take one thousand years to perfect my magic. It didn’t take one thousand years to use up our resources and build as high as we could. So what did we do for the rest of the time? We built tools of destruction that would protect us when we returned. I built mine, I built King Plasma's, and even a few other engineers among us rose out of the crowd and helped me build more. We invented a way to know the exact state of the world when we returned, and we invented a system to fight it should it come after us again.
The most surreal moment I've ever experienced was when I and my fellow neon ponies stood in wonder at the destructive capabilities we had achieved, turned to each other and without words agreed on one thing:
We could no longer be stopped, but we desperately needed to be.
Another shock pulled me out of my memories and back to the castle hall. Its timing gave me a horrible thought.
"Did I make a mistake?" I whispered to my reflection behind me.
"Try again," he scolded. I frowned and stiffened against him.
"Did we make a mistake?"
"Don't think so. Mistakes usually have lessons, right? I haven't really learned anything recently."
"So," I muttered as my head tilted away from his, "maybe we’re just a failure?"
He laughed absently for a few seconds before responding, and I narrowed my eyes as I felt another set of lives burn out.
"Have I ever told you you're dramatic?" He teased.
"There's nothing you've never told me," I replied, and I matched his smile.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, forever. We never wanted to return, but life had other plans for us.
All it took was one little hint that our bodies couldn’t take the strain anymore. The sickness came from me and The Lantern, and it hit the one closest to us first. I still remember the first time he seemed ill. His lights flickered for just a moment, and then he coughed up a thunderstorm. All the while, he held that gorgeous smile in his face and waved me away. And after a few minutes of hacking he raised his head as high as it could go and never looked ill again. It was like he struck a deal with death itself, telling it that it could wait just a few more years if it was so keen to take him away.
Because it was time to return, and he knew that situation had no winners.
We tried to make the outside world understand, of course. After all, you always have to try. We even spoke the same language as them, having ironically evolved in similar directions over that millennium. But perhaps that was a curse in disguise, because whenever we spoke our words just made us look scarier, more threatening, and more different. After the sad attempts at negotiating were over, we all knew what was coming.
"They think we're too strong," the king announced to the hundreds before him, plus me standing solemnly beside him. "They think our connection to our magic is a threat to them, and they haven't even seen our weapons yet."
"And are they right, King Plasma?" called one of us.
"Honestly? I think it'd be rude to let them be wrong."
And the hundreds smiled in unison.
He was wrong about one thing. They had seen our weapons. The magical machines we had built were just tools for the real weapons. Truly, there was no such thing to me as a weapon that did not breathe and bleed.
