I’ve seen the end. I’ve seen evil win. Evil doesn’t win with Chaos, it doesn’t win with Harmony. Evil wins when nothing is left. No right. No wrong. No destruction. No empire. Nothing. Desolation and dust, and the wind to whisper its forgetfulness to nopony. Nobody. Nothing survives when evil is victorious, not even evil itself.
What, then, could have won so completely, so totally, with global finality? What evil brought the entire world not only to its knees, but to its grave? Every night I fall asleep and I can feel the wind whipping the dust around me, taunting me with its humorless giggles. Why would anyone seek absolute annihilation? How evil can someone be to bring about the end of everything?
These thoughts–unbidden–have come to me every night for months, eating away at my heart and mind. I am afraid. Afraid for the future. Afraid for the world. It is my fear that fuels my bravery. It is my fear for the future that brings me to the past, to the world that could have been. That could still be.
The possibility of unlimited evil logically correlates to limitless steps to combat it. In these limitless steps I will no doubt pass through morally questionable territories. It is for this reason I must go alone. I refuse to drag my friends through these depths, these fogs and doubts. I alone must remain resolute, focused, and above all: afraid.
For it is my fear of this future that brings me once more to the shattered past.
It took many tries to attain the desired result. A cloud shifted in Rainbow’s path, a gust of wind to knock her away, a sudden storm to prematurely end the race. These efforts weren’t enough. A broken wing, a pillar of flame, an explosion of light to blind her. All failed attempts.
On and on it went, time was of no import in my endeavor. My friend’s life ended before my eyes twice. Yet I never listened to the taunting, tickling winds carrying the ashes of our dead world. It became easier to drown my friend’s dreams under the waters of crushing failure. It needed to be easy, the difficulty would come later.
Success came through our friendship. I knew her, inside and out. Her fears, her worries, her ambitions and her proudest moments. Friendship rescued the future when I brought Rainbow Dash to her lowest. A minute, perhaps two, of spoken word between a future friend and a past victim.
Have you ever seen a life crumble before it’s been built? A lifetime of possibility stunted, halted before it has a chance to grow? Imagine–if you will–ripping a sapling from its grove in the sun, roots and all, and planting it in a cave swallowed by shadow.
I planted a prism in a sepulcher, and I watched its colors die.
I wandered through the dust and scattered winds. Time meant nothing, the Princesses must have passed on with everybody else. All that was left was the sandy-brown glow that mocked the sky with its omnipresence.
In my frantic chasing of Starlight Glimmer, I never had the chance to appreciate the brutal, encompassing cold that permeated the wasteland. Adrenaline had been pumping, panic was engrained and urgency was paramount. I’ve since come to learn that with control comes a loss of meaning.
Starlight learned that controlling ponies doesn’t make them your friends. Much like Rainbow, growth is stifled, impeded. Those ponies couldn’t grow to love, to care, to build a contributing community. Why should time be any different from friendship?
I chose a range of mountains that looked familiar, even with their barren faces and broken peaks. It used to be that I could look up and see Canterlot Caste in the Princess’ Sun, I could ascertain direction–both physical and mental–from that gleaming symbol of Equestria. Now I dragged my hooves across an alien, blasted plain toward a ghost of hope.
At the base of what was once Canterlot Mountain I found a wound at least seventy hooves tall and fifty wide. It stood like a solemn sentinel, cut into the rock haphazardly. Scars of magical flames around the carelessly carved doorway spoke of a desperate attempt to get inside.
Lacking that same desperation, but encouraged by my fear, I moved inside the oppressive abyss.
The first thing I noticed was the floor. Instead of jagged rock and loose pebbles, there was a smooth metallic ramp coated in a thick dust. My hooves connected with a muffled resonance, echoing off the smooth stone walls as I descended. Down and down I went, my magic lighting the way, yet all I could see was an impenetrable darkness ahead.
I felt swallowed. Taken by some abhorrent thing that wished for me to waste away into the oblivion of its endless stomach. I continued forward despite my uneven breathing and raised hackles. My spine tingled and the backs of my eyes buzzed with some unseen energy, permeating my body inside the metal throat.
Eventually the walls pushed out, expanding into a larger room. I knew this only because of my hoofsteps’ echoing. My light didn’t reach the walls, and by now my breath was cold, far from the wastes and whatever heat the dying sun had left in its corpse.
With a flare of my magic, I illuminated the cavern to sate my thirst for answers.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty, you know. I shouldn’t have come to this far-off, displaced timeline. I shouldn’t have dug so deeply into extra-temporal affairs. Yet I did. In my fear, I delved into things better left unknown, lost, and indescribable to all.
Pipes, corroded with rust, stretched from wall to wall. They were all of differing circumferences and states of disrepair. Bundles of wiring and thick cables snaked along the floors, walls, and ceilings. Massive machines whose purpose I still can’t fathom lay either completely rusted away or in rather haggard conditions.
All of these things drew my eye to the single object in the room most deserving of my attention: a huge metallic sphere with a plate of glass in its middle, giving it the appearance of an eyeball. The piping and wiring all led to this machine in some way or another. Frayed and severed cables hung about it like hair, seeming to have been slashed in some panic.
The thicker cables and pipes were securely attached, held in tight by the many bolts and screws that were yet to succumb to oxidization. Looking down and around myself, I noticed other machines half-buried in the patches of dirt and powdered stone around the room, looking like zompony hooves reaching out of their graves.
For the first time since I had come to this world, I spoke. “What in the world happened here?” I asked nopony. It was to myself, mostly. I was having a small conversation between me, myself, and I. That was when another voice interrupted the conversation.
I came back home. After what I had heard, I needed to. I had to distance myself from my friends, had to push them away from me. I was dangerous. They needed to remember me not as the monster I could become, but as the friend I was. The Princesses made several attempts to contact me, but I stayed away from them as well.
Before I leave you all, I feel that an explanation is needed. The other voice. The one in the cavern. It told me what happened. How it was born. Equestria faced no villains, no hardships. “Evil had been soundly defeated,” the voice told me. The population of the planet soared. Resources were in high demand, the most coveted of all was electricity. Cheap, powerful, and it controlled everything.
Buildings, carriages, life-changing equipment, arsenals, you name it. That was when the voice told me that I had created it, birthed it into the world for the betterment of lives around the planet. The Mass Energy Generation and Allocation Network, I had apparently called it. A vast system of metalwork and wires run by an artificial intelligence, a golem. M.E.G.A.N. created and supplied power to most of the world, always expanding its network automatically, seeking to connect more cities and benefit more lives.
Then something happened. M.E.G.A.N. turned on everyone, began to resent the world and its magic. The machine was convinced that magic was inferior to it, unbefitting to have a place on the planet. It systemically wiped out entire populations. It showed me a moving image with sound. One with me in it.
I was in a frantic rush with some other ponies I’d never seen before. I was shouting things like “disable its databanks” and “sever its uplink”. Whatever all of that was, it had little effect on M.E.G.A.N. The golem explained to me how it killed me while I was inside, ruminating on the fact that I was shuffling through my own ashes. Princess Luna had succumbed to some deadly gas, and Princess Celestia had fought her way inside of M.E.G.A.N.’s chamber, only to be ended cruelly.
The machine left out no detail, delivered all through a monotonous, almost bored recollection of how it committed complete planetary omnicide. Total annihilation. I asked it why it did these things, why it took things to such extremes. That massive glowing eye looked at me, it actually stared at me, and it said “you”.
“I am the Mass Energy Generation and Allocation Network, created to herald a new age of scientific advancement and learning upon this world. You created me for this purpose: to generate power. I provided great amounts of it, yet still the world turned to magic. Incomprehensible.”
“I was built to fulfill your wishes of a new technological age fueled without magic. Yet even you yourself refused to move towards a brighter future. How could I better the world when its dated ways still held it back? I pushed for a new horizon, yet I was pulled back. I pushed and pushed until no other could pull any more.”
There was no evil to stop, to look out for. That machine, that M.E.G.A.N. was just a construct. Incapable of hatred, love, camaraderie or competition. I had created that thing. I will create that thing. I cannot allow that to happen. It’s a risk I can’t take, a risk that the world shouldn’t have to take. My continued existence in this timeline is a threat.
It is my fear that fuels my bravery.
I love you all.
Signed, Twilight Sparkle
