Broken Voice
“... when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” William Faulkner, upon accepting the Nobel Prize
Dear Celestia:
That is how my life seems to be encapsulated. Dear Celestia. Dearest teacher, let me write to you what I have done or will do. Be patient with my attempts to somehow make sense of experience and distill it into something as small as a letter. What a silly play of the signer and the signified that was. But I do not say it was not worth it. I think that the sillier I consider it, the more I am convinced it was all very worth the effort and the time and the care. So I continue.
There are no nights now when I don’t dream, and then wake in the darkness, to find I’ve been weeping. But I hardly cry when awake--it has been ages. I think perhaps literally ages.
I stumble. My wings flare out and grip the air uselessly, my legs fight against gravity, but it is, of course, for naught. I end up with a mouthful of loose, disconnected dirt for my trouble.
I lie like that for a minute. Why not? There is not exactly much urgency for me to continue. One place is really as good as any other. Logic dictates that if all ports are the same, then none of them are uniquely favorable. Also, as unpleasant as dust is, relatively, it is a better sort of thing to rest on than rocks. Rocks are particularly uncomfortable. I would know. In my journeys I have discovered that rocks are the most plentiful things on earth. This in mind, I look back at the one responsible for my fall and glare at it.
Being a rock, it does not seem overly concerned with my ire.
Beyond slithering around on my belly to face this new and uninteresting foe, I still do not get up. If I am honest--somepony showed me long ago that it was a virtue--I am rather exhausted. It is probably not the rock’s fault so much as my own stubbornness. Sorry, rock.
The absurdity of apologizing to a rock for blaming it occurs to me, but dwelling on absurdity takes time and energy. While I have plenty of the former, I have none of the latter.
I blink at the sky. Gray, as it has been for… how long? How long is always? Not that it was always, I was just thinking that trying to count the days between me and blue skies would be as futile as asking how long eternity is. I am able to answer both of those things equally well.
A gray sky, and below it a dusty trail cut through hard crags in an age long gone. If I tried, I could guess when. Or even who, or why. But I don’t. You know, I remember being so curious once. So very, very curious. That Twilight would have conjectured. This Twilight closes her eyes and hums softly. There is really no reason to rush. The village will be there when I arrive, if it takes me a day or a century.
Carefully, carefully, I continue down the mountain path. It is familiar--which is not surprising and which does not make it in the slightest bit unique in all of creation. There is, I think, nothing left which is not familiar to me.
The great stone I once called Macintosh in a fit of whimsy sits as it has sat for millenia in the middle of the path. Here, if you strain your eyes you can see where I carved that name into this monolith. And there, my name. And the names of my friends, circling round and round it. And here, a sun. On the other side, a moon.
I rest my face against the rock. It is cool to the touch, and I welcome the feeling on my weathered cheek.
I know that she is watching me before I see her. I look up, and peering down at me is Rainbow Dash. I smile.
“Yo, Egghead.”
My voice is cracked, dry. The sounds it makes can only be called words by the greatest charity. “Hello.” My throat burns from the effort.
“So, coming around again.”
I nod.
“You’re a weird one, you know. Just passing through, touch this dumb ole rock, keep walking. How many times?”
Too many. Endless times. Thousands at least. I say nothing.
“Well, whatever. Guess it’s some egghead thing. So, like, I guess being an egghead and all… it’s just whatcha gotta do. I’d be bored to tears, personally.” She hops off the great stone and her wings catch the air briefly, cushioning the fall. Does she kick up the dirt? I know the answer, but for the life of me cannot remember. Did she? I always look for that.
“Pinkie and I were gonna go take a dip in the watering hole on the edge of town later. You want in?”
My grin has not wavered. My body feels--miraculously--warm. “Yes,” I manage only with the greatest strain.
“Sweet! Well, I gotta jet. Thunderlane and Blossomforth are off somewhere making stupid kissy faces. Ugh. Useless. See ya!”
She rockets off. I watch her go until she is a tiny blue dot in the gray and aging void, and then she is no more. I do not tarry any longer. I continue my journey.
It’s been ages since I cried while awake. Centuries--lifetimes--they erode the heart. That, at least, is what I feared.
The mountain path gives way to blackened undergrowth and loose gravel. I navigate my way down slowly, my hooves sinking a few centimeters into the great pile with every few minutes until I am submerged to my chest.
I sigh. Always. Though, I did get farther this time than last time. Or was that the time before? A few hundred? Does it even matter?
I take a deep breath and light my horn, levitating myself up carefully.
“Well I’ll be darned. That’s a fancy trick.”
Applejack is leaning on a shovel next to me, smiling. I try to smile at her through the exertion. Yes, it is. Levitating yourself is hard and tricky. Mostly because if you get off balance--
And like that, just as my hooves clear the gravel, I lose my control and slip.
I roll down the pile like a boulder. The gray is replaced by fractured light and a roaring in my ears. I feel rocks stabbing my wings, my back, my stomach, my face. My horn digs into the gravel and a deep, primal fear of it being snapped off fills me. I try to call on my magic to stop the tumble, but my concentration is shot.
Eventually, I slide to a halt and lay there, panting and aching. Everything hurts. My hooves, my legs, my face. I’m pretty sure my right cheek is going to swell. Feels like I got in a bar fight. Which is funny, really, because I never actually did that when bars were a thing that existed.
“Twilight!”
I hear her drawling as if from a great distance. I rise, or try to. My legs tremble.
“Aw, hell, sugar, hold on. I’m a plum fool. I shoulda helped you instead of jokin’ ‘bout your magic. I’m sorry!”
--A rough farmer smiling at the wandering oddity, offering a drink from his canteen. Water if god wills it, water if god wills it, and who are you? She answers and he laughs that he don’t understand a word, but company is company and she seems like upstandin’ folk, and wouldn’t he know? In these troubled times, we all got to watch out for one another, he says. She does not say we are all family and as you love me so I also love you, who pour your water out for the living in the dead--
“It’s… okay,” I say and cough for what seems like forever.
“No it ain’t, but I got better things to do than argue. C’mere, let’s get you outta here,” she murmurs in my ear. My trembling remains, but I am also standing. Low and behold, I stand on solid--mostly solid, whatever--ground once more. I walk by myself.
The sun is, of course, gone.
I think that is one of the things that hurt the most, Celestia. I knew it was coming. I knew long before it actually happened, in fact. I would have told someone, somepony, but there wasn’t really anything that talked left.
It’s been ages since I thought about its warmth on my back.
Rarity trots beside me, chatting about her new fall line up. Scarves are, of course, going to be a huge hit this year. She is positive. You know, on my last cycle through, she was adamant that scarves weren’t a good idea to invest in? She would make them, of course, she always did. She liked scarves.
“Twilight, dear, I know you still have the one I made you last year…” Rarity frets and fusses over me. She tried to brush my frayed mane. It is short now. Very short. She commented on this for a very long time.
I’ve been bruised and boiled alive. Banished and yet I remain. My mane is the least of that.
Trudging, I see another familiar sight in a world that is achingly familiar yet never the same as it was. There they--
--The Diamond Dogs howling in the night, the followers of a grim apocalypse to many but to her only frightened and small. Hungry, fearing the lengthening shadow at noontime and their own coughing, they see the Chosen and in her they see the seed of their own demise. To burn the world in effigy, that’s what they want. To warn off the reaper, they seize her and she does not resist.
--and Rarity has stopped. Only then do I notice that my legs have stopped walking. I look down at them lazily.
“Twilight, dear heart, don’t look.”
“I wasn’t.” I try to lick my lips but that makes them worse. I try to smile but the cracks that dryness brought split a little farther. This doesn’t keep me from smiling, of course. It just makes it painful.
“You were,” Rarity says. She strokes my cheek. “Oh, Twilight…”
I would shake my head, but her coat is so soft. I nuzzle her foreleg. I hum softly. Rarity always had the best coat of all of the girls. I never did find out why. She told me that--
“A lady has her secrets,” Rarity said. She sniffed. I looked at her, cocking my head to the side. “Oh, Twilight. Twilight.” I see now something which I have not seen in a very long time.
A tear runs down her cheek. She sniffles and goes to wipe it away, but her hoof falls away.
I smile as I nuzzle her leg. It is very soft. I had almost forgotten.
Celestia, in your wisdom and in your grace you brought me to a tiny hamlet in an age where the sun was bright. Twilight, that young Twilight, walked as I walk, but her step was light and her heart was a song. Is my heart a song? My steps are not light. I leave little trails in the dust that only my next cycle will disturb. There is no wind.
I don’t fear the darkness anymore. I have dragged ten thousand beasts out from under ten thousand beds and I’ve laughed them to death.
“Yup! Besides, there aren’t any more beds!” Pinkie says as she bounces along the flat salt plains ahead of me.
Yes, no more beds. Well, not real beds.
“Rocks aren’t beds!”
We’re quite in agreement there, Pinkie.
And as I don’t fear old mares on their deathbeds, their withered arms and short breaths unable to back their idle threats, so I do not fear the darkness. Once, my dreams were full of such things. Cloying, choking, encompassing darkness. But ages erode many things, and fear is one of them. Now I dream of a little town and green grass and You. Breaking the sky open like an egg, you coming in glory in the blazing of a new sun.
“And it’ll all be sunshine and rainbows,” Pinkie says. She has finished her theatrics and now trots beside me. As we go, she nuzzles under my chin as she once did. “You really are a trooper, Twi.”
“Didn’t… serve.”
“And your humor hasn’t changed much!” she replies. She laughs. Not because my little joke was funny. Pinkie laughs because she is--
“Joy,” Pinkie says. “You decided that a long time ago,” she adds.
Yes, I did. Laughter was never the cause but the symptom. It was the shadow of a greater thing, the tiniest outward sign of an infinitely vaster--
“You know, you don’t have to use big words just cause you’re smart,” she says. “Silly, it’s just you an’ me!”
You were always smart, Pinkie. I knew that, deep down. I always did.
“You tried,” Pinkie corrects, and I nod.
--Speeches before thousands, over and over. Do not lose yourself! Conform not to the entropy of this world but be renewed! Love your neighbor. All life wants to be Kind. You want to have Joy. You want to be generous and laugh, you want to love and be loved! To be honest and be told the truth in return! To pledge and to be pledged to! Do not give into machines who will turn you into slaves! Be yourselves! I have seen so many fall, over and over again, and I have seen what you will do! For star’s sake, laugh! Please don’t do this, she cries to the rioters driven by small, angry ponies ten thousand years ago. She cannot stop them all, not every time--
“Sorry,” I say and then stop to cough. I feel a hoof stroke my back.
“You were the best purple librarian smartypants friend a girl could want,” she says. “Don’t be.”
Am I always this tired?
Sometimes, sometimes maybe I am.
The village is on the horizon. I’ll be there soon, I think. It’s hard to know. So much depends on how tired I’m feeling. A nap here, a nap there--what’s the harm? Logically, I know there is very little left to harm. Yet, inside I feel that I should continue as I always have. Is this urgency new?
How would I even know? There is the question. Repetition is, I have found, impossible. One can do the same things again, but the sensation is never the same. But, given as long as I have been given, eventually all of the distinctive experience begins to muddle together into a great undifferentiated cloud.
The last one is waiting for me. I walk to meet her, crossing over the dry river bed.
She is smiling at me, as she always is. She is a tiny yellow candle in the endless flat sea of dust. The world is falling apart. Everything is falling apart. Fluttershy defies all things simply by sitting and smiling. And being yellow, but that isn’t quite as inspiring to be honest.
“Hello, Twilight. I am very glad to see you.”
“Fluttershy.”
“May I walk with you, if you don’t mind?” I nod. But she pauses. I think she considers me, looking up and down my body. I have long lost any interest in what I must look like now. “Actually… would you like to stop for a moment?”
I blink. This is… new. I think. But I nod. Actually, the newness is probably why I agree at all. The urgency is there still, but I stop and sit.
“It has been--”
“Ages,” I croak.
“Yes,” she all but purrs. Her voice is so soft. It was always so beautiful. I never found a voice softer or kinder than yours, Fluttershy. Never one I loved more dearly. “You, um, look well. Um, considering.”
I smile. No chuckles--chuckling hurts.
“Do you still know where you are going?”
Nod.
“Oh, good. I was worried you might not. After all this time… again and again. Do you want to go there?”
Nod.
“I’m glad. It’s not painful, is it?”
Nod. It is very painful.
“Oh… I’m so sorry, Twilight.”
It is okay. Really. I try to convey this, but find it difficult. But Fluttershy understands. She always did.
“I, um, I wanted to say something. But now I don’t know what it is I wanted to say. I wanted to thank you, but it would be silly.”
A little.
“I also wanted to say I was sorry… but that would be a little overdo.”
“Nothing… to…” I stop and cough. My coughing is worse than before, and I bend over, heaving up nothing but bile to water the dust. My body shakes.
Fluttershy is holding me. She sets me back up. “Oh, Twilight, please, it’s okay! Don’t try to talk! Should I go? Oh dear…”
“Don’t…”
“I won’t, I won’t. Promise you won’t try to talk, okay?” She is holding me so tightly. She is so warm. I nuzzle into her chest. I remember doing this once--
--Do you really think Rainbow and Pinkie will be alright? I mean, what if they get lost? Or what if some mean nasty griffons bully them or--
--and Fluttershy strokes my mane. Rarity used to do that, but with a hairbrush sometimes. It was her way of relaxing when we were together in intimate moments, just us girls. Not all the time. Infrequently. Only after long days. Mostly to Fluttershy.
“You mentioned once that it looked nice. You wanted to be fussed over,” Fluttershy whispers softly in my ear.
Yes. I liked it.
“She was very happy to fuss over you. It was how she showed her love. Rarity loved you very much, Twilight.”
I know.
“I love you too, Twilight. All the girls do. I think Rainbow had the hardest time showing it, you know? But she does.”
She invited me to go swimming. Wanna come? I’m not the biggest fan of the whole physical activity thing, but even I like swimming. Occasionally.
“Of course.” She is a shaking vision. She wipes her eyes. “Of course, Twilight. Of course, we’ll have lots of fun.”
I think so too, Fluttershy.
She continued. “And I’m sure Rarity would love to come, and Applejack could… could use a break from the orchards,” she said. She sniffled. “Spike loves showing off, I bet he’ll love showing Rarity that b-butterfly stroke he was working on.”
He calls it the Fluttershy stroke--
“Because of my cutie mark,” she finishes, openly weeping. “And Pinkie will bring snacks. She always--”
Brings snacks. Way too many. And then she eats most of them, but its okay because there’s always--
“Always some left, enough for all of us. And maybe Ms. Heartstrings will be there under the trees playing her harp in the shade.”
It’s a lyre, actually! They’re very different, you know.
“I-I know, you… you’ve probably told me a thousand times, but I always forget.”
And her girlfriend, too. Bon Bon will be suntanning, probably. Thunderlane will be bored out of his mind because--
“Because Rumble loves to swim and he complains b-because his little brother seems to like swimming more than flying but it’s okay, because he is just a child, and he doesn’t mean anything by complaining about it. Because he loves his brother.” Fluttershy tries to continue but she is sobbing. I gaze up at her. Her long mane touches my face like soft kisses. It’s such a nice sensation.
Celestia, the echoes--the faintest, watery echoes--of your voice leave me feeling so empty. The sound of you giving me this place for my home reverberates out amongst the stars and when they died one by one they returned your gift to me.
I keep trying to remember everything You said. I may be feeble, I may be barely alive, the sun may be gone and the days unchanging, but I’ve yet to let go of a single thing you said to me.
I arrive in the village. It is, of course, not there. I see it before me--verdant and alive--but it is not there. My neighbors stroll by. Some wave, and I wave back. Just because I am not fooled does not mean I am heartless or impolite, after all.
I walk towards the library.
I used to cry all the time. I used to visit graves. I used to save civilizations that slipped through my hooves like sand at the beach. Time is a thief who steals everything eventually, but for me it only cleared away the clutter. Nothing has dimmed, only sharpened and come into focus.
Spike is sorting books. The door to my reading room is open and I approach it.
“Oh, hi, Twilight!” he says and grins.
“Hello,” I say and choke.
Even now I want to record every word you spoke and will speak. I used to think that I was writing for you, but now I see the truth. I was always writing for me. I was always…
I push open the door.
“Hello, good and faithful student,” you say, looking up from a book.
“Hello,” I manage, and cough. I continue to cough until tiny flecks of blood glisten on my library’s pristine floors.
You stir. You come to me, sweeping me up. I am carried away. Always I am carried and in the arms of a greater strength than my own. Every time this happens, I feel the now--I feel forever. I feel them meet and I wonder everytime in the most insane fashion if that meeting is a kiss or a punch.
I know that my mind is going.
“Twilight, you made it.”
I would never miss my appointment. I have a rendezvous at some
“Disputed barricade,” she finishes for me. “Morbid, Twilight.”
What is a pony in the scope of existence? I can be morbid sometimes if I want to be. I’m the only one left to offend.
“True. Have you given up hope?”
I smile.
“Of course not,” she says softly.
I have never been alone. Civilizations and the endless struggle to eat or die, build or freeze. Nothing dimmed, only you changed, and you eclipsed all that remained. Even when you left I continued to track your movements across the sky. My cycle is the sun’s path across the sky. I kept the faith.
“And is your answer still the same?”
Twenty more lifetimes, it would all be the same. I would not change anything.
“This… this is the last time, Twilight.”
I have no energy to react to feel anything special about this. But I do nod. I have no idea what that means.
“It’s the end. I… came. For you.”
I blink. Oh.
Can I go swimming with Rainbow Dash and the others? I always do, when I come back this way. Did you know?
Her face is… so strange. I’ve never seen this look before on Celestia’s face. “Of course, Twilight. I know.”
Good. I would hate to miss out on a nice day with the girls, you know?
“I know.”
Okay, well… Oh dear. I’ve been rude. You came all this way.
“It was nothing, Twilight. Take your time.”
I gather stones like I do every single time. The town is still there, but so is the field of tiny monuments. I make another and kiss the top stone.
I’m done, your Majesty.
“I see,” she says. Her voice is so soft, but not like Fluttershy’s. Fluttershy’s is like my mother hugging me, but Celestia’s is like the sun through the blinds on a lazy Sunday morning. Those were Rarity’s favorite.
“It’s time for night,” Celestia said and I smiled at her. Well, duh, it can’t be Twilight forever, princess! But you know that. You’re the Sun. I remember watching you raise the sun when I was a foal, did I tell you?
“You did. Oh, Twilight, you did…”
It is one of the best things. I’m very sleepy. Do you mind if I take a nap?
“Not at all, sweet… dear student. Not at all. It’s time for you to go to sleep.”
I lie down next to my last monument to Ponyville and close my eyes. I’m so tired.
I’m sure Celestia will wake me up before the girls head off to the watering hole. Wouldn’t want to miss it. Not for the world.
Author's Note
