The price for immortality is not a pretty one.
At the mere age of 25,000 - the equivalent of being twenty-five in mortal years - my world crumbled. I was a monarch, and a good one at that, as I ruled for thousands of years with my younger sister and the Elements of Harmony, rising up against the evil of the lands.
I should have been prepared, as I knew that it wouldn't last forever, yet there I sat, thinking that life would be that way forever. Then I saw the darkness through the light, and I realised that I couldn't have been more wrong.
A niece of mine had outlived her husband, and her unicorn children were elderly, with grey manes and shaking hooves, while her alicorn children stayed young, barely toddlers.
The bearer of the element of magic, became depressed, as her friends had long since withered. Their children had, too, and their grandchildren. All that remained was a small picture in a frame on her fireplace, some charm necklaces, and tiny scraps of their personalities and appearances in what remained of their bloodline.
My sister became once again unhappy with what she had. She became lonely and deprived, and spent all of her time in her bedroom, hunched over a notebook, sketching the faces of ponies that she remembered from thousands of years ago; ponies that had dissipated in the dust of time, and were now just bones in the dirt.
The economy crumbled. Cities were deserted as ponies fled to any nearby civilisations that they could drown their worries in - Griffonia, Zebrica, The Dragonian Isle. Equestria became a husk, a shell, a dead thing.
I knew it would happen, but not so soon.
Those of us that remained stayed huddled in the small village of Ponyville, where we resided in a shack. It seemed pointless to live in a castle when you ruled over nothing, or to remember the friendship that you once had when your friends were all gone, or to return to your saved empire when all of the saved citizens had fled. We simply sat and waited for our doom.
It was 1,000 years before we faced the world again.
The few ponies that remained had long since died, their bodies lay across the gravel path, dirty and rotten. There remained one inhabitant of the land - a small-framed stallion named Sindile Storm. He didn't speak, he didn't move, he simply sat beside the corpse of his beloved, silent and unmoving.
That was until he saw us. He screamed and screamed, exclaiming that it was all our fault. "If you hadn't left us, then we wouldn't be here!" he screeched. "I wouldn't be mourning my wife! I wouldn't be mourning everything that was beloved in my life!"
And, as anger-induced as his words were, they were all true.
So there we lay, watching the ruins of what once was a beloved town crumble because of us, and watching the wreckage for thousands of years later, until our bodies decayed and we too left the earth.
My name is Celestia, and I am a fallen ruler.
