Lyra Heartstrings walked the winding path through the Ponyville Park. She was alone.
A warm summer sun hung in the sky. Cicadas buzzed from the tree branches overshadowing Lyra's trot. As she rounded a bend, she came upon a hilltop. Several foals were playing in the gently sloping grass. A few of the local youngsters had discovered an empty cardboard box that they had fashioned into a makeshift sled. They rode the thing bumpily down the hill, rolled out under a cascade of giggles, then frantically dragged the container back up to the top in order to repeat the whole process. They had the entire afternoon to enjoy this beautiful repetition. Either they would run out of time or the cardboard would rip apart, but they expected neither. Their laughter carried them on—faster and with greater earnest.
Lyra eyed the children for a moment, watching them set themselves on the top of the hill before sliding back down. She reached an empty bench and she paused there. Breathing. Absorbing.
There was a flutter of wings overhead. She looked up to see a single crow dotting the bright blue sky. It wove its way towards the distant treeline where it made a permanent black spot against the horizon, seemingly never vanishing no matter how long Lyra watched.
"Trouble sleeping?"
Lyra turned around to face the bench.
Bon Bon looked up with a smile. She sat on folded hooves. An open book lay before her.
"How did you know?" Lyra asked, smiling back.
A wink. "B.F.F.s, remember?" Bon Bon hummed. She wore her mane like a photograph. "You wanna share?"
Lyra sighed. "It's not much worth sharing."
"It brought you out of your bunk, didn't it?"
Lyra nodded at that. Lazily, she let her limbs go limp. She fell until she was slumped against the bench's backrest. It was like a feather landing. "Just a nightmare I had."
"That's odd," Bon Bon hummed, turning a page.
"It's only odd because I don't have many of them these days," Lyra said. She looked at the book Bon Bon was reading. None of the words made any sense. "That's part of growing old. Real life is too scary for your subconscious to make scarier stuff."
"You still wanna share?"
Lyra chuckled. The children laughed in cadence. She looked off to see them getting back in the box and sliding uphill. "I was on a steamship on the ocean."
"Start from the beginning," Bon Bon said.
Lyra gulped. Dark shadows darted overhead. She looked up to see another pair of crows flying towards the horizon. "There... was a war. A Great War," she said. "Equestria versus the griffons... and other non-ponies." She slowly shook her head. "Can't remember how it all started. So many details... so many angry words... so much madness."
"But you found yourself on a steamship."
"And we were being evacuated... y'know? Because the war had gotten so bad. Half of the Equestrian countryside was on fire. But that wasn't the half of it." Lyra took a deep breath. She watched the foals gliding up and down the hill. Tree branches split the sleepy sunset into wayward beams. "The Royal Sisters had discovered that the griffons had invented this weapon. Something... unimaginably horrible. An alchemic concoction. Ancient magic. Pure death. In my dream, there wasn't a name for it. So we just called it The End."
"You're right," Bon Bon said. "Your subconscious isn't very creative."
Lyra smiled in spite of this. "Well, we were all packed onto this Steamship to get away from the mainland... because we figured that that was where The End was going to hit. Suddenly, there were these squadrons of armored pegasi flying overhead. As fate would have it, a massive battle between ponies and griffons was happening over the very sea where we were sailing on."
"Funny how the last thing you ever want follows you in a dream."
"I know, right?" Lyra watched another flock of crows skimming overhead. "Anyways, we watched as our winged brothers and sisters engaged the griffons in battle. And it was pretty scary at first. But—eventually—our army completely and totally thrashed theirs, y'know? And... and we all cheered. Every pony on the boat. Laughing and sobbing and dancing. Because we showed them! Damn those evil pony-hating griffons. They got what was coming to them! And for the briefest moment, despite the blood and the pain and the loss of home and life, there was hope."
Bon Bon's slowness to answer was the only eerie thing. "And then what?"
Lyra clenched her teeth. "The End." Foals laughed, their voices carried like soft chimes over the windblown trees. "I knew it the very moment it landed. And it didn't exactly land on us. That's the cruel part."
"Oh?"
"No, it landed several hundred miles out in the ocean. And the reason I knew this is because the whole horizon became water." Lyra's pupils shrank as her ears folded. "A horrible... terrible deluge—a solid wall of impenetrable death rose for miles and miles in the sky... instantly propelled into the atmosphere by the mother of all magical weapons. And... and there was no sound. No crying. No sobbing. Not a single one of us on the boat had the energy to even breathe. But we all knew it was coming. The seconds broke off like glaciers, with the unbelievably high wall of water rushing towards us... perfectly ninety degrees to the placid waves below. And I didn't mourn and I didn't rage. All I could think to myself—in a bittersweet mental whisper—was 'They did it. They actually did it. This is The End. This and nothing else is all that will ever be. And I am now facing it.'"
Bon Bon nodded.
"And so..." Lyra looked over at her friend in the cool shadow of evening. "...I woke up.
"You seem awfully calm about it."
"Hmmmm..." Lyra nodded, her muzzle curving ever so slightly. "Because I can be."
Bon Bon turned another page. The ink was everywhere, spreading. "Then what do you still wish to tell me?"
"Something I've wanted to say for a while," Lyra said. "But... I never did. Because it's awfully grim."
A chuckle escaped Bon Bon's lips. The hair from the photograph overshadowed her eyes. "Is that so?"
"Yeah..." Lyra chuckled, rubbing the back of her head. "And you know how annoyed you get when I wax psuedo-philosophic."
"Yes, and?"
Silence. The leaves had stopped rustling. The sun hung distant on the horizon, cold and peering.
"The equine mind is an incredible thing," Lyra muttered. "The ability to retrace memory... to recall thoughts that were abandoned for years." A breath. "That kind of power... the sheer magnitude it takes for neurons to fire and activate brain patterns by command—both lucid and autonomic—is unlike anything else in the recorded universe." She swallowed. "I-I never read many scientific journals on the process, but I always got the feeling that... that what one experiences in a dream takes only seconds to happen in reality. Milliseconds, even. Like... you ever wake up from a dream that felt like it took place over the course of several months... but in fact it really only happened during a five minute nap?"
"I'm guessing you have."
"More often than I'd want to admit."
"Heh..."
"So... I got to thinking to myself..." Lyra gazed across the shadows of the park. "...if the brain doesn't entirely die when a pony's body does... then what's to stop the mind from dreaming afterwards? And just how many subconscious lifetimes might we live—neurons firing and brain cells gradually dying—in those few fleeting seconds that the spark remains?"
"Are you talking about an afterlife?"
"That's the grim part," Lyra said. She tried to chuckle, but her breath had left her. "Considering all of the hopes we cling to... all of the anxieties that plague us... all of the sorrows and fears that run our lives through charcoal black mazes every day..." She blinked. "How can we expect anything but hell from our beleaguered little minds when we actually give up the ghost?"
"Or perhaps the universe will cut us a break. Give us all our private little heavens."
"Nah..." Lyra chortled at that. She listened to the foals' squeals drifting slowly away on sheets of ice. "I don't believe in heaven."
"Why not?"
"It's not heaven if it can't end. And... besides..." She rubbed her cheek. The first of many tears. "Best that heaven doesn't exist at all. The flames will burn that much colder."
"You say that like you've been a bad pony."
"Have I?" Lyra's eyes darted back and forth, watching the crows as they blotted out the sky. The pinprick light of the sun flickered, struggling to stay intact. "I've followed the rules. I found a dance and I stuck to it. Every day and every night. Never trying to change... because changing means thinking and thinking means having to care. It's so much easier just to blend... to never have to answer for anything. At least if I was 'bad,' it would count for something. Evil makes change happen... and that's the first step in passion. But doing nothing? That's the slowest road you can take. I understand now why it's so tempting. It carries with it the illusion of savoring things, when all you're actually doing is gliding on by with gravity."
"What have you been missing?"
"Nothing," Lyra replied. "Everything." Another tear. It felt just like the first—in that it didn't feel like anything at all. The ink had spread across the empty bench, and Lyra floated—like a derelict underwater. "The sun. The feel of wet earth on a hot summer day. The smell of a friend's breath as she hugs you. The tiny dots that fill up the shadows of an old photograph. Orange juice." She listened to the foals' screams as they vanished in the blackness. There were too many crows now; she couldn't count them apart. Like jibberish across the pages of a book with no beginning or end. "You get into the rhythm of being... of avoiding. What's more... you let the world and all of its friends and enemies slide down the same cold chute along with you. You get used to the momentum... the emptiness... the lukewarm lurch of time. And it's just as numb being alive as being asleep. Pretty soon, you can't even tell your dreams apart from your awakenings. They're all memories, anyway. And our souls are all just... the helpless appendices to something that should have been... but never could quite be."
"What do I want to do now?"
Lyra sniffed. "I want..." She clenched her teeth. The tears were flowing, making the next part difficult. "I want to watch the sun set," she mewled. "I want to f-feel its warmth. I want to be with... I want to imagine that I'm with ponies... lots of ponies..." She rubbed her face again, but she couldn't see her own fetlock in the faint glow that remained. The sun was a tiny candle at the end of a long pinhole. "...that we're together and happy and we have nothing to hate each other about or fight over..."
"...or miss or regret or fear..."
"...or hope..."
Lyra gazed. It was all she was now. Even in that great thick darkness, the light receded. It grew infinitesimally smaller by the epoch, but somehow a part of her—a part of her forever divided into worldess halves—was aware of it... of how swiftly it was forever drawing away.
There were no questions. There were no answers.
Burning—at least—would have been merciful.
