There was only ever one Twilight Sparkle. Of course, one could consider the filly of twelve to be a different pony than the young mare who saved the world from Nightmare Moon. However, they were just cross-sections of the Twilight Sparkle. Each individual was no more separate a mare than a single wafer of Twilight was a pony. She was a continuum, stretching out from birth to death in an unbroken line as Harmony dictated.
Except, of course, for the week when there were two Twilights.
Princess Twilight dragged her hooves as she made her way through the shattered streets of Ponyville. Her hair was dirty and streaked with gore, and her wings hung limp at her sides. In the sky above her head the sun was dying, fire bleeding out into the sky as it dimmed to a blood red. She tried not to look at the shattered bodies and broken homes, nor take note of the missing horns and wings from every corpse.
At the centre of Ponyville the Machine rose high above the broken roof of the town hall. An alien thing formed from spheres of metal and great whirls of magic. They spun around each other endlessly, never quite touching, the insane geometries of the Machine dragging the eye off into oblivion. Twilight fought to avoid looking too deep, and, as she approached, skirted a lump of meat that used to be a pegasus. An alicorn stood at the Machine’s base, urging the arcane energies faster and faster before Twilight’s eyes.
“You’re right on time,” Twilight the elder—Queen Sparkle—said. “And too late.” She turned to face her. “This marks the six million, four hundred and twenty-three thousand and third time we’ve failed to save the world.” A tome appeared in her magic. “I’ve prepared my instructions for when you’re ready to try again.”
Twilight the younger stared at the Queen, slack jawed. “What?” she demanded. “You said you had a plan, you said you knew how to save the world, you said that everypony would live!”
She nodded. “I know. The first instruction is to lie. Twilight, there is so very little time to explain, the world will end any minute. If you aren’t back in time by then, if you haven’t used the Machine, then everything we have done will be for nothing.”
“It has been!” Twilight roared, flaring her wings. “They’re dead, don’t you understand that? The princesses are dead, my friends are dead, Equestria is dying and all because of this!” She jabbed a hoof at the machine. “All that power, all that metal and time, what did it even do?”
“Nothing yet,” Sparkle said, softly. “It wasn’t built to save the world, this time. There’s a perfect answer, Twilight, there’s one where everypony lives and Equestria has a future, but it’s not this one. The Machine is here to give us another chance, to try again, to not settle for this dismal present.”
“This whole dismal present was because of you!” Twilight exclaimed. “You did nothing to save them. Even when Ponyville... you were right here and you did nothing.” She spat the final word.
Sparkle’s smile had no warmth. “I said that last time too. The machine takes so much to build, but we have to build it, otherwise the world ends with us. Take the book, Twilight, try again and do better than me.”
The book passed between two identical magical fields.
“I won't do it,” Twilight said, gazing down at the tattered, stained and singed cover. As thick as her hoof, but full to bursting with extra pages and even post-it notes, Twilight could feel the age of the work in her hoof.
“Six million times you have,” Sparkle assured her. “It's the only way. If you stay, Equestria will die and our friends will stay dead. Go.”
Twilight didn’t look up. The book couldn’t be the original; six million weeks was more than the whole history of Equus. How could she be the one to break that chain? Twilight began to walk, making her way across the blackened cobble towards the monstrous Machine. She fancied that the feverish writhing grew frantic as she approached.
“Why again?” she said, her voice a whisper. “What will be different this time?”
“It will be better,” Sparkle assured her. “Every time we fail we learn a little more. It will work, eventually. You just have to have faith, that’s your only option.”
Twilight paused on the threshold of the Machine and closed her eyes. She saw Celestia, bleeding out because she’d given too much to the Machine to win her fight. She saw Rainbow, sobbing over Fluttershy’s corpse, too late because of the Machine. She saw Shining and Cadance, locked together forever in a blood soaked, icy tomb. Before her eyes, Equestria fell and the Machine rose ever higher.
“No.” Twilight turned to face her elder self. Tears stung her eyes, but she matched the alicorn’s suddenly furious glare. “I don’t have faith. Not in this.”
“There’s no choice, Twilight,” Sparkle insisted, lowering her horn at Twilight. The Machine began to bellow as magic lashed around them. The town hall vanished in a titanic roar of broken stone and timber, struck by a bolt of lightning brighter than the sun. “You have to go. You have to keep the cycle going or everything we’ve done, everything every one of us has done, will be for nothing.”
A bitter chuckle escaped Twilight. “Rule one is to lie. You sacrificed my friends, my family, my home to this Machine. Yet you want to save Equestria by breaking one of the pillars of Harmony? I don’t believe you.”
“You have to!” Queen Sparkle roared. “There is no other way.”
“Of course there is.” Twilight took the book in her magic and hurled it into the churning workings of the Machine. The book seemed to stretch out to infinity as it flew through the web of machinery. After just a heartbeat, though, and with a sickening crunch it lodged itself between two great arcane cogs.
The world lurched and the machine began to scream. The insane order turned to chaos in an instant, destruction and fire racing out from the point of impact faster than thought. Unrestrained arcs of primal energies lashed out from the machine. They smashed through the ruins of Ponyville, tearing great holes in the firmament of the world which clawed at the edges of Twilight’s vision.
“What have you done?” Sparkle screamed, racing towards the dying Machine. She plunged her magic into the whirling mass of magic and fire, but she had no more effect than a mare trying to fend off a tsunami with a bucket. “Equestria will die without the machine.”
Twilight nodded, watching the Machine collapse in on itself. In the depths of the twisted space metal spheres and arcane machinery smashed into each other. Magnesium bright flares, that hung in space like luminescent soap bubbles, marked every deadly collision. “Maybe. But that doesn't mean the Machine is how to save it."
At the heart of the Machine a star ignited. Twilight closed her eyes as a wave of power raced towards them. Perhaps it was the coward's solution, dying, but she couldn’t bear to lose her friends yet another time.
The Machine exploded in silence and shattered the embers of Equestria.
Twilight Sparkle looked up from her book, frowning. She had the strangest feeling that something momentous just hadn’t happened. Chuckling to herself, she shook her head and continued her reading. Whatever the problem was she knew she and her friends could solve it, when the time came.
Author's Note
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