“You’re asking us to believe an awful lot,” Blueblood says, rubbing his jawline and shooting his associate a worried look. “Do you have any means to substantiate these claims?”

With a snort of laughter, the Silver Script beside him crosses his arms. “You have to admit that this is all pretty far-fetched, even with the pictures,” he adds in agreement. “I mean, you expect me to believe my alternate reality counterpart is a woman, and a horse from another world on top of it?”

You ever get a feeling of deja vu you just can’t shake? It’s like, you’re in a situation that is just so profoundly familiar that you could swear you’ve lived it before in another context? I kinda feel like that right now, like I am reading the newest Daring Do novel, and she’s in a situation very similar to one in the very first book. It really and truly makes me want to laugh out loud, but I’ve worked too hard to be mistaken for a madmare now.

Rather than risk making them feel like this is all some kind of hoax by adding my own laughter to the mix, I nod my head. “I felt the same way when I found out that a cartoon show for little girls was a reality in and of its own,” I answer in a soft voice, pulling all of my magic into my core. “I could give you a little demonstration, but truth be told, I need to conserve my energy; got a light?”

Neither of them answers verbally, but Silver Script reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket and returns with a fanciful lighter and a pack of menthols. Flicking the lighter open and igniting a small flame, he grins. “Pretty sure Abby will have a fit if she finds you smoking out here in the hallway,” he comments, his tone rich with the sort of sass I had a long time ago. “Thrilling, isn’t it?”

Rather than accept a cigarette as he might be expecting, I shrug and channel some magic out through my outstretched arm. In an instant, the flame turns green, leaping out from the lighter to sit on my outstretched palm. There’s no pain from the heat, though; in fact, it’s kinda cold. “Never really was good at creating a flame with magic,” I explain as I roll my palm to face the ceiling. “Water and air came naturally, and earth only put up a minor fight, but I could never get the feel for the way the spells worked in the flame creation part. I blew up Twilight’s training room enough times that she barred me from practicing fire magic while working out my phobia. Definitely easier to keep and maintain a flame, though.”

In one swift movement, my fist clenches around the flame, smothering it. Rather than ceasing my channeling, however, I probe outward, toward my counterpart, searching him with a gentle magical caress until I find what I seek. To be honest, I’m kind of surprised as I levitate two large caliber handguns from the twin shoulder-holster beneath his suit jacket. It’s not so much that he is armed in the first place—he is a bodyguard and/or enforcer for what is basically the Human Equestrian Yakuza—but that I was able to take them without any resistance at all, as if there were no catch on the holster to secure the weapon.

Both men tense as the pistols, though handcannon might be the better term, float between us. It’s an understandable response when you’re suddenly at the mercy of your own guns. That tension loosens a bit when I magically depress the magazine release button on each weapon, and said magazines drop into Silver Script’s waiting hands.

A bemused expression crosses his face as I eject the chambered rounds and then pluck the weapons from the air. “Christ, and you fire these akimbo?” I say aloud, wincing at the weight. I hold the weapons out slightly, angling the muzzles at the floor to examine them and frown as I read the inscriptions on the slide. Purity and Clarity? My eyes shoot up to him. “It’s fuckin’ creepy that you gave your guns similar names to my daughters.”

“They may as well be his kids with the way he babies them,” Blueblood jabs, slapping Silver Script on the back before policing the ejected rounds from the floor. A softness fills his eyes as he tosses them back to Silver. “Judging by the way he looks after my sister, though, he probably would be a good father.”

My stomach clenches at Blueblood’s words. Even after all these years, and even though I’ve come to terms with all of the hurt, what my world’s Aqua Regia did still pains me. The thought of my counterpart watching over Aqua dredges up the old doubts that led to my research for the Genesis Project. How would my world’s Aqua have fared if I’d become her friend? Would I have been enough to balance and heal her broken mind? For my Aqua Regia, Genesis was her redemption, but if this world’s Silver Script could have helped, then maybe I could have made an earlier difference, before I pushed her to her breaking.

I shake my head, twirling the handguns by the trigger guards and presenting them to him grip-first. My eyes feel suddenly wetter, and I’m forced to look away as he reloads his weapons and stashes them away. I don’t have the heart to mention any of this to Blueblood or Silver, of course. There’s no way I can really say “Your family’s counterparts in my world were horrible people, and your little sister grew up to be a psychopath who raped me with my own research and murdered the one I loved,” with any form of kindness or tact.

Turning to make my way back into the auditorium, I shoot Blueblood a halfhearted smile. “If he’s anything like me, and I have no reason to doubt that he is,” I say, thumbing in my counterpart’s direction, “Silver Script is reckless as all get-out, and though he tries, he can and will find ways to fuck things up and come out better for it.”

Neither of them say a word, but I can practically feel them giving each other a look as they fall in step behind me. Then something occurs to me, rooting me to the spot. Reaching beneath my shoulder cape, I withdraw a pair of alchemy flasks and hand them to the boys. “In case someone is grievously wounded, drinking this should keep them alive and moving long enough to receive medical treatment.” Without waiting for a response or bothering to point out that they’re some of my last, I continue on back into the crowd. “The girls all have one, but it might be important that you guys do too.”

I don’t know why I’m so certain I should be trusting these two as much as I am. Maybe I’m hoping to mitigate the work the girls will have to do by themselves. Things are so much more complicated this time around. Yes, from everything that Sunset has told me the girls are progressing with their magic far faster with my interference this time around, and I’ve even gotten one of the Sirens... not quite on Sunset’s side, but mine. At the very least, Sonata’s willing to try to make peace, and I can’t quite remember how much she knows, but she can tell something big is going on.

At the very least, things will be in place if something happens to me.

~ 12 ~

When the screaming started, nobody was quite sure what was going on. The music came to a halt with a stereotypical record scratch, and then one of the girls from the CHS botany club pointed up toward the ceiling, yelling, “It’s the end-times! We’re all going to die!”

Though she didn’t need to look up to the blackness that had overtaken the auditorium’s ceiling to see what Rose was screaming about, Sunset still found her eyes drawn upward. The sheer number of times she’d seen this same event play out did nothing to diminish the revulsion upon seeing the spidery creatures emerging from the darkness. Truly these creatures could only have crawled out of the bowels of Tartarus for how wrong they looked and felt.

Although the creatures had eight legs, and some even seemed to descend from the middle of the ceiling on thin strands of spider silk, Sunset knew the similarities to spiders ended there. In place of the two-segmented body, the abominations simply bore heads that appeared to be some sort of deformed amalgamation of a pony and a human skull, with a bifurcated jaw that revealed a maw that wouldn’t be out of place on a lamprey. The worst part was the eyes, however. Rather than blank with soulless hunger, they were distinctly human, widened in perpetual terror, as though terrified by what it was being made to do.

It took Sunset a mere moment to put aside her disgust and call out to everybody in the auditorium. “Everybody listen up!” she bellowed with a quick amplification spell. “I need you all to stay calm and exit the auditorium in an orderly fashion. We’ll cover the evacuation, and then handle this once everyone is safe.”

She looked out to the crowd and managed to make eye-contact with the rest of her friends. “Fluttershy and Rarity, you two cover the evacuees making for that—” She pointed to the emergency exit nearest the pair. “—exit. Applejack and Pinkie Pie will cover the other emergency exit.”

As she watched her friends transform and begin moving out, she waved Rainbow Dash and Twilight over. “Rainbow, I need you to close off the hallway exit; they won’t bother with the closed door, but I’d rather this not turn into a bug hunt,” she said after taking a moment to dispel the voice amplification spell. “Once that’s done, link up with Rarity and Fluttershy. They’re alright with projectiles and barriers, but they’re not brawlers like you or AJ. Twilight and I will help out where needed.”

“You got it, Sunset,” Rainbow replied with a nod before taking to the air.

The rainbow-haired youth had no sooner cleared the crowd than did Silver Script and her two new acquaintances move to join them. “Where do you want me, Sunset?” she asked with a grave expression. “I might not be as spry as you kids, but I’m not going to sit by when I know someone or something is after Twilight.”

“You’ll be with us.” Sunset nodded. “Try to use those spell essences and alchemical bombs you brought before you use any of your own magic, though. I’d like to keep your mana potions in reserve for the future.”

It was Silver Script’s turn to nod, but to Sunset’s surprise, it was to the two men with her. “Blueblood, are you armed as well?” she asked the blond man. When he shook his head side to side, Silver frowned. “I want you and Silver to get Aqua Regia and her peers to safety, then. Silver Script, once they’re all safe, I want you to shoot anything that’s not human that comes through those doors.”

The tall bald man glanced at the creatures descending on spider silk strings and the teenage girls slinging spells before shuddering. “Better you than me,” he muttered, drawing a pair of pistols from beneath his jacket. “At least we’ll have some back-up. Surprised the pigs were able to respond so quickly.”

Sunset and Silver looked to the center of the room, where the crowd had cleared a circle around an armored figure. It was roughly the height of the silver-haired woman, but it was near impossible to gauge their sex. The flak jacket and body armor bearing the emblem of the Canterlot Police Department did a good job of obscuring most of the facial features and secondary sexual characteristics of the wearer. The only hint that it might be a woman was the wider hips and narrower waist.

The figure strode across the auditorium toward them, casually slinging their shotgun against their shoulder in such a way that gave Sunset pause. It was impossible to fathom, but that looked to be the very same weapon the Silver Script of the previous timeline had liberated from a police car mere minutes before her death; it even bore marks from where the tentacles had gouged into the metal of the barrel. But it couldn’t be that Silver! She’d seen the woman die.

But as the armored figure drew closer, she began to notice other things about it. They weren’t wearing gloves at all, but their hands had instead blackened and become chitinous claws. Warning bells started going off in her head as the figure’s gaze lingered on Twilight a bit too long. It seemed that Silver Script had noticed this as well, as her hand had darted up to her bandoleer of flasks.

“Hello again, Twilight.” The figure dropped their weapon into a ready stance, aimed straight at Twilight and yelled in a chillingly familiar voice, “It’s like you just don’t want to stay dead, but you can hardly face the punishment for your crimes if you just won’t fucking die!” The clawed finger on the trigger squeezed so agonizingly slowly, and the gun’s blast was a dragon’s roar to her ears.

What happened next occurred in the blink of an eye, but it played out as though in slow motion in Sunset’s mind. Silver Script surged forward, for just the briefest moment appearing with wings and pony ears, knocking Twilight Sparkle to the ground. The slug caught Silver clean through the side, tearing right through and ripping into the table behind them. The stricken woman dropped atop the fallen girl, bleeding from both sides of her abdomen.

“I’ll kill each and every one of you if you get in my way!” she bellowed, glaring down at the downed Silver Script. “Even you, if I have to!”

Silver’s male doppelganger turned, training his weapons on the armored attacker, but whatever it was that drove and altered the attacker must have made her faster as well. Before he could squeeze off more than a single round, which caught only the side of the attacker’s helmet before whizzing off into one of the arachnoid monsters behind her, she pumped her weapon and fired off her own retaliation into his belly. He too slumped to the ground.

The terrified screams of the students and chaperones began anew.

~ 12 ~

Somewhere in the back of Sonata Dusk’s mind, she instinctively knew that something terrible was going to happen if she did nothing. It wasn’t that niggling little thing called hindsight, which insisted that seeing Silver Script and the armed man gunned down in front of her was terrible enough if it meant Silver could no longer help Adagio and Aria. It also wasn’t the newfound desire to help people as the gray woman had helped her.

From atop the DJ’s stage, she could see the CHS and Crystal Prep students lose their composure. The first to fall victim to the shoving was a younger red-headed girl Sonata had seen at Canterlot High during the failed Battle of the Bands plot. Wasn’t she Applejack’s sister? The next to fall, landing directly atop the first girl was a pale foreign girl whose mismatched eyes stood out more than her ice-blue hair.

Before Sonata could act, however, a tall young woman with luxuriously long blond hair swooped in to help the foreigner and the redhead up. While Applejack’s sister was wary of the girl that had helped her—and quite reasonably terrified, all things considered—the pale girl was quick to wrap the red-skinned girl in a hug that brought her no shortage of apparent discomfort. Rather than lead the pair into the thick of the crowds fighting for the exits, the girl led them both to take shelter beneath the snack tables.

To her right, Vinyl was crouched behind her DJ equipment, staring up at the eldritch abominations creeping down the wall toward them. Rainbow Dash remedied that threat in a hurry, streaking by in a flash of prismatic glory, shooting forks of lightning from her fingertips at the creatures. The DJ shrieked as the bodies of the stricken terrors tumbled from the wall, but to both Sonata’s and Vinyl’s relief, the creatures dissipated into black smoke before they struck the delicate equipment.

“You guys should get out of here with everyone else!” Dash called out before flying over to the exit Fluttershy and Rarity were guarding. The blue athlete delivered several similar killing blows to a number of writhing foes pinned to the wall by needles of crystal. Even Rarity took no pleasure in this, it seemed.

Sonata frowned, even as she watched Fluttershy launching the spidery monsters back into the gaping abyss above. There was no comfort in seeing that the creatures didn’t come back down elsewhere; the panicked students in the crowd couldn’t make the same observation, and their renewed terror tainted the air with the acrid taste of terror. Her newly amplified sense of ambient emotions made it all so intense that it didn’t matter that she was wearing a helmet.

Sucking in a deep breath, she looked once more to Vinyl. “Someone’s going to get hurt, or worse, if everyone doesn’t calm down,” she said into the inbuilt microphone in the helmet, broadcasting her message to the entire auditorium. “Vinyl, pull up some music, please.”

Using the same sort of magic her sisters had used so many times before, she channeled her spell through her voice. Despite the terror around her, Sonata’s thoughts were of calm, and her intent was peace. A pale green aura flooded the auditorium. Unlike the previous times she used such a spell, however, the aura came not from the crowd, but radiated out from herself. “It’s no wonder, you’ve got demons...”

~ 12 ~

Twilight shrieked, staring down at the woman bleeding across her lap, breathing with the shallowest of breaths. It’d take forever to get the blood out of her dress, but her brain was quick to point out that she was in shock, and that the important thing was getting the woman medical treatment. For that to happen, however, she’d need to overcome the fear-induced paralysis that had overtaken her senses.

There was also the matter of the shotgun-toting foe that seemed intent on taking her life to consider. Despite all the practicing channeling magic and transforming, none of the girls—Twilight least of all—could transform and channel a spell in the instant it would take their attacker to take aim and execute them. She had all of them at her mercy.

So why wasn’t she firing? Was she taking a moment to gloat? To savor a surefire victory? Surely they weren’t expecting the girls to not attempt to redirect their focus in the face of this new foe... except Twilight knew that was exactly why. For all the speed and improved magical skill the girls now possessed, none of them could abandon those who couldn’t defend themselves to aid their friends, no matter how dire it might seem. Sans gloating, that’s how Twilight would do it.

Sunset had seemingly had enough and dared to move a muscle, but to Twilight’s surprise, she didn’t witness the pointless slaughter of a friend, despite the earlier warning. As Sunset manifested pony ears with accompanying aethereal wings and horn, the armored foe flipped her weapon around and clubbed Sunset about the side of her head. The transformation was interrupted, and the former pony dropped unconscious to the floor.

“You don’t even know how badly you fucked everything up, do you, Twi?” Her attacker laughed, arrogantly resting her firearm against her shoulder as she crouched down to Twilight’s level. The woman then reached up with her free hand and pushed up her visor. “I imagine seeing my face isn’t going to make any more fuckin’ clearer, is it?”

Twilight felt her jaw clench as she sucked an involuntary breath through her teeth. Her eyes darted from the face of the enemy to that of the woman bleeding all over her. Save for a chitinous growth over her right eye and a few wrinkles and scars, it was a perfect match. The same petite nose and blue eye, the same cocksure smile, even the worry-lines were the same. Somehow, she was looking at an older, corrupted version of the woman that had trained her friends in magic—the same woman that helped ease Twilight’s fears of the resurgence of her own inner darkness.

The Corrupted Silver’s eye lit up and her grin grew, baring sharklike teeth to the teenage girl. “Oh yeah, now your brain’s firing, isn’t it? Probably leaping straight to paradoxes, alternate reality, and maybe string theory, right?” She shook her head, even as Twilight tensed. “Don’t worry about that at all. Let’s just worry about how you fucked up and how, while it won’t fix anything, your death will make me feel better.”

Finally, Twilight found her voice. “I know what I did,” she said in as non-confrontational a tone as she could muster. “Drunk on the newfound power I gained from the stolen magic, I tore a hole in the space-time continuum, giving something outside our reality a taste of our world. You came as a favor to my pony counterpart, and now you cannot see your daughters again. It’s not just me that you blame, though. You blame Princess Twilight as well, and lacking the means to get at her, you’re channeling that rage and grief back into your loathing of me for creating this situation.”

The smile on the woman’s face faded slightly, but didn’t diminish entirely. Instead, it became the pitying smile of a teacher that knew something the student didn’t. “Gotta say, full marks for working that much out based on what she told you,” she said, pointing down at her wounded counterpart, not noticing as one bloodied hand reached up beneath her cape. “But this is so much more personal to me. See, your rape of space-time didn’t just invite something dark into this world... it took something pure and innocent, and created that darkness.” She gestured back at herself with her thumb. “We created it. All because your tampering ruined an experiment of mine so many years ago.”

Silver Script—the wounded one—jerked her hand out from the concealed bandoleer, brandishing a flask that roiled with blue intensity. Twilight didn’t even need the warning of “Eyes!” to know that things were about to get hectic. She slammed her eyes shut in preparation for a blinding flash... but it never came.

Over the din of the crowd and Sonata Dusk’s efforts to calm the remaining evacuees, Twilight could just make out the tinkle of shattering glass and the momentary ring of a spell discharge. Then came the pop of a rubber stopper, and the simultaneous clatter of gunmetal hitting the floor as the Silver on her lap shifted.

“Oh for fuck sake, are you seriously still willing to fight in that condition?” Twilight opened her eyes to find that the corrupted Silver had discarded her shotgun. The trigger, the trigger guard, and even the now-depressed safety button were all encased in ice. “I know I don’t give up, but could you just die with some fucking grace?”

~ 12 ~

In spite of the searing agony filling my belly, I sneer up at myself. The empty vial of combat stimulant slips from from my grasp as I wipe some blood from the corner of my mouth. “You know exactly why I can’t let you do this,” I respond. “This isn’t what she would have wanted.”

Twilight attempts to stop me from rising, wrapping a hand around my forearm, but I pull away. Pain is like an old, abusive relationship in that it’s left its scars; you never want to think about it, but at the same time, it’s the one thing that can give you strength in your times of need. Right now, it’s giving me the strength to fight through the very pain giving me strength.

The other me scoffs and looms over me, even as I roll off of Twilight struggle to my knees. “You think she honestly cares about me at this point?” she cackles madly before gesturing at a snack table surrounded by the spider abominations. Underneath the table cower three girls, all of whom I can recognize with heart-clenching ease. “You honestly think the spirit of that scared little girl’s counterpart gives a fuck about me? Even if any of this matters in that chronologically fucked up afterlife, you and I both know it won’t be me that Blossom meets at the gates of Elysium. So what the fuck do I care? I just wanna watch the world burn over and over for what she did.”

I glance at Twilight and the unconscious Sunset Shimmer and then incline my head at the table and the girls beneath. “Twi, get Sunset and those girls out of here,” I groan through a mouthful of blood. She looks like she’s about to object, but I cut her off. “She’s my responsibility; you worry about everyone else.” Raising my voice to a bellow, I call out. “Rainbow! Table, far side of the auditorium, three stragglers are cornered! Help Twilight escort them out!”

There’s no response, but as the rainbow blur zips by, there’s a pat on my back as I find myself back on my feet. Instead, I move to place myself between my duplicate and my allies. “I’ll face myself,” I whisper to myself, even as retrieve a lightning spell essence from the bandoleer, before making the sign of the cross. “The almighty God is no longer with me, but damned if I’m not going to purge your sin from this world.”

The Judas of a Silver Script in front of me flexes her chitinous fingers, clearly balking at me. “You’re going to fight me with your guts torn up like they are? You’ll bleed out.” she says with a laugh. “And what’s with the religious shit? We haven’t worshiped anyone in years, least of all the God we were forced to worship as a child.”

Part of me wants to continue the banter and keep her distracted for as long as possible. Biding time would give the girls the opportunity to finish off the spiderlings and regroup. After all, I’m no match for the seven of them even with all my spell essences, bombs, and dirty tricks, and Judas Silver doesn’t have the benefit of half of what I have available.

That said, she also has however many shells are still left in her shotgun; the ice bomb I used to disable the firearm won’t last forever, and my counterpart knows that. In fact, I can count on her trying to bide her time as well. She knows the limitations and dangers of the spell essences and bombs, and she knows me. In itself, that makes her my most dangerous foe.

Unfortunately for her, there’s one thing she didn’t count on: me using magic. I still don’t know why she never figured out how to pony up in her world iteration, or if she was even able to at all. She has been keeping tabs on me, but there’s no way she could have seen it all, least of all the training. Besides, I’m already critically wounded and the combat stim won’t keep me functional forever; there’s no reason to not go all-out.

“Hey, Silver! What did the five fingers say to the face?” I ask, knocking back the lightning essence. When she merely raises an eyebrow, I frown. “Humor a dying mare, would you?”

“What?”

The syllable is barely out of her mouth before I tear off my bandoleer and thrust it into her hands. In that same instant, I manifest my wings and kick off from her belly to soar backward toward Twilight. “Surprise, motherfucker!” I glibly reply, discharging the lightning spell from my fingertips into the bandoleer.

The stunned Judas Silver doesn’t even have time to drop the collection of vials or hit the floor; magical lightning shatters the containers, detonating them all indiscriminately. One not versed in Equestrian magic would call the ensuing explosion a ball of fire, but the light given off is mostly attributable to spell-backlash mixing with the few alchemical explosives I brought with me.

As the spell vapor clears, I can see the damage done. Most of her body armor has been burned or melted away, while chunks of ice adhere to the underclothes in places. The exposed parts of her body not covered in chitinous growths are showing signs of extreme spellburn. Other than that, though, she’s mostly unharmed. No big surprise there.

“Are you fucking kidding me? That doesn’t even make sense!” she screams. By the pain in her voice, it definitely hurt like a bitch, even if it didn’t do any serious damage. “Did you seriously think that’d work?”

I shrug. Looking back to Twilight, it looks like she’s trying to snap Sunset out of it, which would definitely be a major help, but it’s not what I asked her to do. What happened to getting her and the three students out of here? You’re a certifiable fucking genius, so why can’t you follow simple instructions?

To my displeasure, Judas Silver has retrieved her shotgun in my moment of distraction and rid the trigger and safety of the ice. The blast probably even helped in that regard. It’s a mere trifle for her to release the safety and level the weapon with my chest. So why am I not worried? Oh, yeah.

“You should have gone with some sort of Naruto bullshit,” says my doppelganger. “Just ‘Chidori’ your hand through my chest. But no, you gotta stick to your pony morals and avoid the bloodlust, right?”

Again, I shrug and use a levitation spell to wrench the weapon from her hands. I fully expect her to start running her mouth off or find some other way to fight—hell, she’s right next to the man with the same name as us, so Purity and Clarity are well within her reach—but she doesn’t budge.

Biting her lip, she lets out a shrill whistle, and the remaining dozens of spiderlings freeze where they stand. All at once they disengage from whatever they were doing and march backup the walls or strands of webbing they’d descended from. “You win this time,” Judas Silver says spreading her arms placatingly. Looping her arm into one of the silken strands, she quickly adds, “This isn’t the last you’ve seen of me, though,” as she begins to rise.

To her right, a voice responds, “Yes, it is, bitch.”

The crack of gunfire echoes through the auditorium, and blood blossoms from the left side of Silver Judas’s head even as her face—my face—disintegrates. Somewhere, in the back of my head, I can recognize someone screaming near one of the exits... Fluttershy, probably. I kinda share that sentiment.

In the near eternity between the gunshot and her body dropping to the floor, my eyes dart to the source of the gunfire. Sitting there on the floor, still clutching his own unbleeding belly with one hand, is Silver Script—no, the male one from this world, not my evil duplicate. The nearly psychotic smile on his face says nearly as much as the smoking gun in his hand.

“Holy fuck,” I whisper, walking over to my evil doppelganger’s body. Common sense tells me that I’m in shock, and that I’ve dawdled for too long without medical attention. “He actually fucking killed me.”

Even as I come to stand over the failed timeline’s Silver Script, I can hear a commotion to my left. The red-skinned form of Aqua Regia rushes over to Male Silver’s side and begins fussing over him and the hole in his suit. He pulls up his shirt to reveal a flak jacket, from which he removes a large plate that’s nearly cracked in half. Seeing that her bodyguard is unharmed, she wraps him in a hug.

I barely notice the exchange, if I’m being honest. There’s just something incredibly... fucked up about standing over your own dead body, even as you yourself are bleeding out of a hole in your gut. “There’s nothing I could have done,” I say aloud, to nobody in particular. “I don’t know what sort of hell you went through in the previous world, but we were always one giant ball of fucked up. At least it was quick.”

A mournful sound, like the cry of wounded animal fills the auditorium. At first, I am sure that I’m crying, but the gasps all around me alert me to the fact that I’m not even breathing. In fact, I haven’t been for several moments; heart’s stopped, too, so the sound definitely isn’t coming from me.

No, the sound is coming from above us.

I look up, and in that moment, I sincerely wish that I hadn’t. A large, bloodshot eye hangs out of the darkness that encompasses the ceiling, and it’s staring. Not at Twilight and the girls, or this world’s Silver and his charge. It’s staring down at both of me, dead and dying.

A smoky tendril descends from the darkness, and as my legs give out and I fall across my dead counterpart, I feel its touch. It... doesn’t take me? No, there’s something more to that touch. In it, I experience the terror of another, familiarity, and a great sadness. In the back of my mind, I hear the crying of a foal.

“Mo... mmy... no...”

As blackness takes me, it all slides into place: what the other me said, what Twilight did, everything.

~ You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you? ~

I stir where I lie, surrounded by a warmth I’ve felt only once before. With ground as soft as a downy blanket and the smell of flowers all around me, there’s no doubting that I’ve returned to the Nexus of Souls: where all souls go to find their afterlife, and later depart from for rebirth. This is an absolute fact that I can feel without even opening my eyes.

Unlike my previous visit, however, the Nexus island is a lot more noisy. The din of a million voices muttering overpowers the river and waterfall.

I open my eyes and look about, and a frown creases my equine muzzle.

To my right, a sea of miniature humans waits before the figure of a skeletal man in a cloak. He frequently gestures, and a person will depart from the crowd to cross the river at either side to enter one of the many wrought-iron gates dotting the far shores. Occasionally, though, he merely walks into the crowd, plucks up one of the small people, and they are engulfed in flame, scattering their essence to the depths of the Hell at the bottom of the waterfall. As I watch the spectacle, I realize that a number of the people there are duplicates of themselves. There are even a few of Sunset’s friends there.

At my left is a full-sized human, lying nude on her back—the spitting image of what I looked like in the human world. She doesn’t move beyond covering her eyes with one arm, sobbing like a child. I don’t even need to see her eyes to feel the guilt radiating from her. She knows what she’s done and now that she’s here, she’s clearly resigned herself to her fate.

“Greetings, little pony, and welco—Oh no, please tell me it’s not happening to Equestria too, now.” A pony, bay coloring and robed in black, coalesces before me. Epona, the guide into the afterlife for ponies, has arrived, and she doesn’t look the least bit happy. “This isn’t supposed to be happening!”

“Tell me about it, Epona,” I reply, stretching and pushing myself up into a sitting position as I take relish in being a pony once more. “I get the impression that I wasn’t supposed to be here for another decade or so.”

She looks from me to my still-sobbing counterpart before covering her face with a hoof. “You have no idea how unprepared for this we all are,” she says, taking a seat next to the human me. A shudder racks her body as she stares up at the starry expanse above us. “This only ever happens when the Great Old Ones get loose in a reality or somepony plays with time, but I’ve never seen it this bad before, and never without warning!”

With a sweeping of her hoof, she points out the sea of humans the skeletal guide is dealing with, and then at me and myself. “The worst part of all of this is that so many splinter-realities have been created and destroyed in recent times that the Nexus of Souls is in a state of flux as it tries to accommodate all of these simultaneously living and dead souls.” She looks back to me. “To say nothing of the reality the two of you came from, which is both the prime existence of that world, and a splinter reality at once.”

I look down to my human self and sigh. “This is, in part, our fault, I believe.” It has to be. “I mean, yeah, this is mostly the result of one of the hugest coincidences in the multiverse, but both Twilight Sparkle of the human Equestria and I have a hand in this mess as well.

“Twilight gained power she couldn’t control, and though she and Sunset are yet to realize it, I’m pretty sure they’ve both achieved their world’s equivalent of alicornhood.” I stare up at the sky, and in it I see my dead body, surrounded by friends. Sonata Dusk is crouched over me, and I think she’s pouring magic into me. “That’s beside the point, though. Twilight tore reality asunder and created unstable rifts between her world and Equestria. At that same point in time, Equestria was in a state of temporal flux as Princess Twilight and Starlight Glimmer waged war in the past. I think that in those moments of flux, something dark slipped into one of the rifts.”

A frown crosses Epona’s muzzle as she seems to puzzle over what I’ve said. “How does this link to you, then? By your own statement, this seems to be on the Twilights and Starlight Glimmer, not you.”

“I created that darkness,” I reply with a hollow laugh. “Or rather, I helped. I was in the process of creating an artificial lifeform, a homunculus, to help me both with my experiments, and raising my daughters during all of this. All I needed to do was give it some pony DNA to give it shape and it would have been done. I thought the experiment merely failed, which was why the bottle it was living in exploded, but I think one of those rifts formed inside, sucking it out into the void between worlds, where it met something dark and took on its properties.”

Yep. I can actually say it with utmost certainty; I, Silver Script, created a world-eating monster in an attempt to make a babysitter and lab assistant. Go me, right? Unfortunately, this is still my mess, and since Sunset and the girls aren’t having any luck, I’ve got to clean it up.

As a warmth fills my chest, I look back to Epona. “I know that you lot in the afterlife tend to keep in contact with the guardians of all the worlds under the Nexus coverage—it’d be stupid if you didn’t—so I need for you to get into contact with Celestia.” My hooves begin to tingle as I start to lose cohesion in this realm. “Tell her that I need everything from my homunculus project locker and a dose of Genesis sent to Twilight’s castle. I’ve got a mess to clean up.”

You know, it’s kinda funny seeing a guide to the afterlife look indignant about being treated as an email server. “And her?” Epona pokes the Silver lying beside her. “She can’t go to the Elysian Fields after what she’s done.”

I shrug before I disappear entirely. “Give her to Charon, for all I care. He looks like he could use a stress reliever.”

Author's Note

I hate the new lack of google documents import. That is all.