There’s a certain amiability that can be found in an empty room, but only when the slightest hints of a violent row whisper and shriek through the cracks of the foundation; it’s the contrast, I suspect.
And yet the mood of sickening sentimentality remains like a comforting phantasm; the palatial walls fade into the durable memory of century-worn cobble and mortar, and still I’m not entirely opposed to the idea that even loneliness loves us all. It might even explain how I’m still sane after… everything.
If plotting the premeditated murder of a foal can be considered sane.
The volume rises a moment later, and the peaceful ghosts are exorcised; I sigh, even as even the palace walls prove incapable of imprisoning the passions of the speakers.
The seeds were sowed a few scant hours ago, and already I feel this turmoil nurturing them like fresh fertilizer.
I rise, aching with phantom pains that even magically restored youth cannot banish, and pass by two guards: Mended Drum and Silent Knight.
I named them. I named their parents, and theirs, and so on for generations. I’ve named an entire lineage of ponies both great and small. And before all of them, I named myself.
Name Rater.
The shouts deeper within the castlabate for a moment and I find myself halted, rocked by the memory of a question.
Who named me, though?
My parents, obviously; old though I may be, senility is hardly a concern. And yet even my recollection of that time is faded, and the trip down memory lane is fogged and filled with monsters.
My name was… George. And what a dreadful name that was. It lacked meaning, pithiness, and substance, as well as any number of other essential qualities a name ought to have. It’s… frankly, it’s an ugly name.
And yet it was the name they gave a new-born me.
This pointless recollection has to wait, however; once more has some regal soul has become inflamed by what I plan to do.
Twilight, bless her, tries to explain why this deplorable act has to be done, tries to explain the stakes, but our eldest Alicorn will have none of it. Not that I’m surprised; she has almost made an art of obfuscating the less glamorous actions she has taken on behalf of Equestria. Celestia knows, in her mind if not her heart, that there is a fundamental law that must be upheld if peace is going to continue for our ponies.
Little Antithesis is dangerous, and the dangerous must either be contained or destroyed.
‘But why?’ asks some noble fragment of my mind that I have taken to calling George. It’s an ugly little daemon, and must at times be battered down for the greater good. Like now, for instance.
“Because we’ve seen how this story ends,” I, or, at least, the Alicorn named Name Rater, replies. “The princesses defeated, the tenets of friendship cast aside for the sake of power, the Ur-Bane and the death of magic.”
There is nothing that remains but madness and despair should Antithesis be allowed to live freely, and given there is no barrier of sufficient strength to contain her…
Something wells up in my belly and scratches at my throat; I realize too late that it is bile. I clean the mess as well as I can, interrupted occasionally by convulsive dry-heaving.
I suppose this is something I ought to be proud of, this weakness of the mind. It is proof, at least to me, that as monstrous as this necessary action may be, monster I am not.
‘That isn’t how it works,’ George protests, but I ignore it, if only to settle my stomach.
I march to the noise of heated argument, consciously willing my body to breathe. It’s only a moment later that I realize I’m laughing, or maybe sobbing; when in the world did I become somepony Twilight would argue with Celestia for? Somepony that could compel a meeting of Alicorns?
Twilight. Celestia. Luna. Cadence.
I named them all. I’ve named eternal heroes alongside immortal villains.
It’s a thought that reminds me of my parents, and like flint and steel cracking together within my head the memory reveals the monsters to be mere shadow and the fog to be simply that.
I remember my mother. I remember her terrible attempts at gardening, her spotty vision, her desperate artistic hopes strangled by a zeitgeist that demanded agriculture above personal desires. I remember her hugging me close like a shield and her whispered, hoarse, advice, the sort that she herself was far too afraid to follow; I remember, young though I was, asking about my own name.
I don’t remember what I said, but I can recall the reply as crisply as a summer morning rain.
‘A name is the first gift a parent can give their child,’, she said, and the daemon George echoes, even as the momentary revelation fades once more into the dark and monsters resume their watch within my head.
What does that make me?
I falter in my step even as I feel a renewed kinship with the ponies who raised me: Celestia is the mother of Equestria, so does that make me some sort of demented and forgotten father?
The interior of the house. The years spent looking at photos or images at countless cooing colts and fillies. The names, the titles, the days and nights of isolation. It’s not a place where age and death exists, just one where a pony gets older listening to imagined laughter. Everything else is lost, thankfully; I could not endure if that were not the case.
Painful memories are often forgotten; was I a painful memory? Is this why I feel something inside me twist and tear and weep when I hear my old name?
The present is a poison to introspection, and I slam snout first into an ornate door; a chilly sort of light filters through its edges, the sort that echoes of dueling ideologies and desperate arguments.
I snort in irritation, as does the flickering recollection I have of George: it’s almost always in these quiet rooms, smoke-filled and tinged with brandy, that history is made; a thousand warhawks silenced by a single document penned by those who, more often than not, had never tasted a hint of conflict.
But now there are outliers, infiltrators in the ranks, and the quiet necessity of our proposed action is considered with the seriousness it deserves: Twilight, warrior princess; Cadence, Empress in her own right after ripping her own land back from the thrall of another; and Luna, eternal foe of Nightmares and other such things that go bump in the night.
Can those in power do what must be done?
I enter the room.
***
Nothing of note happens while within that place. Luna sides with Celestia and Twilight with me even as Cadence dithers, clearly sighing with relief when we make the decision, unanimously, to take a break.
Sycophantically sisterly to the end, I think Luna glares at me. Celestia merely frowns, as if in thought. Twilight retreats to some corner of the castle’s library to sniffle in solitude, too afraid to take her friends with her to Canterlot for fear of them discovering the morbid truth.
Cadence is the one who surprises me with her approach, and we tour the castle’s museum of art together.
“So, Name,” she said, “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? How’s the search for a special somepony going?”
Of course. When all else fails, when a pony is confronted with two equally unacceptable courses, trust them to revert to old certainties.
“I’m not looking for one,” I reply, uncaring that my words are rushed and charged with irritation. “Same as the last time we met, and the time before, and so on.”
“Hm,” is all she replies in that infuriatingly self-certain way all the more … established Alicorns did. It’s enough to set my blood to boiling, but I remain silent as we both gaze, thoughtfully, at the painting before us.
It’s a simple thing to describe, abstract to the extreme; it’s a night-sky, speckled with chips of light so bright they’re almost agonizing to look upon. Honestly, if it weren’t for its name, it’d be a forgettable piece.
“Huh,” Cadence says at first, squinting at the nameplate, before asking in an almost conversational tone, “Why do you think it’s called-”
“-Asphyxiation? Because that’s what it is,” I reply evenly. “What do you see?”
“I see freedom,” she says even as I sigh. “I see infinite potential, and a land without boundaries.”
“As you would and as you should,” I mutter, even as we near the canvas. I see by her expression that this is not enough, and rejoin her questioning glance with, “Only the winged or the horned see the heavens as achievable.”
Cadence, witty to the last, merely ruffles her feathers and twitches a few sparks from her horn; in unconscious sympathy, my own follow suit.
“I guess I simply see my past as more powerful than my present,” I reply, stiffly, even as I cast an even more critical eye upon the painting.
Tricky beast, art; one can design and craft a toilet, and all the declarations that it is a throne will be treated as the rantings of the mad. But art, well, the name is part of the thing, shapes it and crafts it all the same as the thing itself; toilets become thrones, love turns to loneliness, and the limitless becomes so truly limiting.
Was that something my wife had said?
Cadence, gift that she has, seems to note the change in my posture, my eyes. Or maybe something in my aura shifts, as I dream of wildflowers and calm meadow streams. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.
“Tell me about her,” Cadence beckons, softly.
I am no romantic. Poetry eludes me. I suppose that’s why the couple of guard-like shadows at the other end of the exhibit shuffle uncomfortably during my rant.
“-breath like that rotten cheese Luna demands these kitchens stock and a snore that could wake the dead. Her frown might as well be etched in granite for all it changed, and she had more lines on her face than a piece of graph paper-”
And through it all Cadence nods quietly, smiling and frowning at the tones rather than the words. It’s only once I begin to pant from lingual exhaustion that she finally says, “You miss her.”
I remember carrying her, my knees trembling and sagging under the weight; a body shouldn’t be that heavy, and yet her’s was. I remember shoveling, digging away, and the lonely funeral that followed. She had friends, though none were in attendance; she had outlived, outlasted them all. I had been too sturdy an anchor for her, it seems.
I remember that meek exhalation, that quiet ‘sorry’ that she muttered.
“She was my dawn,” I reply, softly; the lights of the painting blur, if only for a moment, before I choke down the lump of pain in my throat and grunt, “You get used to losing folks, I suppose. Or you find ways to keep them around.”
“What was her name?” Cadence asks, and the words seem to lash at me like the thorns of roses.
“I named her-” I try to say, but a hoof as soft as a ghost’s cares halts me.
“Her real name,” Cadence clarifies. “Not her title, not what was on the birth certificate, not what she legally changed her name to. What you called her, and what she answered to.”
She demands the impossible. There are some things we sacrifice to forget, things that would likely destroy the paradigms of more naive Alicorns; the being before me has loved with the strength and passion to manifest miraculous magic, but she has yet to grieve with equal abandon.
The final step of grief is killing the ghosts of loved ones stuck inside your head, after all.
And yet my mouth hinges open and a voice not quite of my own volition spills out, saying, “I… called her Gneiss.”
The daemon George has struck again, and at the recollection of the pet name I recall (or perhaps re-realize) an old pain in my chest. I whimper so quietly it is more thought than sound.
And Cadence looks at me as if there is hope for me yet.
But then the bells chime once more, and we are summoned to deliberate on murder once more.
Can those in power do what must be done?
***
They clearly cannot, if such a debacle can be expected from every gathering. Twilight is wavering in her conviction; where once her voice was unbreakable rock is now as soft and pliable as magma. It’s only in the faintest glimmering twinkles in Celestia’s eyes that I realize Twilight was not as alone as I had imagined.
The most I can truly claim is a similar, if far more subtle, shift in Cadence’s feelings. Still, she does not back me, and I suspect this is a vote she shall never commit to.
We… I am losing traction, and this is a conflict I cannot afford to lose.
I remember the draught I drank of, a sort of seer’s syrup, and recall the abominations that are allowed to transpire should Antithesis truly come into her own. There is no ‘activation’ to halt, no wings or horn to sever, no ritual of great and terrible importance to subvert; just a scared filly in possession of more power than she ought and the ability to corrupt that which is pristine. A robbery of light where the culprit is their own greatest victim.
A frigid, disturbed fragment of my own past shambles to the forefront of my mind and chuckles, at least as much as a revenant truly can; of all the threats to face this land, from berserk Alicorns, mad gods, foul and sapient shadows, a plague of shape-shifting bugs, to even some twit capable of throwing us all for a relativistic loop, and it’d be some hornless filly who’d kill us all! It baffles the mind, and yet there’s a certain… rightness to it all.
But such a part is only a fragment, and I beat it back shortly enough.
I feel the ire in my guts grow with every stolen glance at Celestia, whose eyes never quite abate in their glimmering; some part of her seems to be reveling in this charade, enjoys making a mockery of my prognostication and the seriousness it carries. It, admittedly, drives me to act in a way I regret, in retrospect.
I’m not much of a Unicorn, and even less of a Pegasus. Earth, however, never fails me, even when I slam upon the stone-table with enough force to drive it into the crystalline floor like a nail into wood.
And I look upon the table, now flush to the floor, and remember how the dangerous must either be contained or destroyed.
“I … need a break,” I finally say, even as the rest of the room’s inhabitants stare at me as if I’ve grown a second head; it’s a petty victory, but at least Celestia no longer seems just amused at this debacle.
I disappear from the room in a flash of magic, only to reappear in another cell; where I go is only as real as the most vivid of dreams, an illusionary place crafted from memories and hopes with enough rigidity to build an admittedly glass-like fantasy. I am not nearly gifted enough to create something even this insubstantial; it is both gift and condemnation from the purple princess, who demanded we test every variable, every moment of every second foretold, to see if the future is malleable.
For the thirty-seven thousandth, two-hundred and eleventh time, I watch a mare borderline explode as vital organs are inverted, forcible shifted from innards to out-ards. The spell that forces time to stretch like taffy activates just a second later, just in time to see a filly go from weeping over her mother’s corpse to laughing at the thrill of murder; an inversion of her own innocence.
Seconds pass as hours here, and I take a deep breath to steel myself even as the next few days are quietly dreaded. I have become numb to blood through all this testing, and yet it’s always this moment, this transformation, that forces my breathing to hitch and me to wince. This is not a story of heroes and villains, just one of necessary evils and victims.
I manage to watch Equestria fall halfway into ruin before the slowed twinkling of teleportation magic hints at an unwanted visitor. I turn around, expecting purple.
Instead I see white gold.
“So this is where you’ve taken to hiding yourself,” she says with remarkable calmness, given how phantom blood paints the walls around her.
She watches the projected end-times pass, I watch her face shift and twitch with carefully managed displays of emotion. She is serious for a change.
“She told you where to find me,” I say, even as the future phantasmal Twilight is corrupted into villainy; I say it without a trace of bitterness, a non-accusatory observation of reality.
The other Alicorn nods in reply; harmony dies as we stand together in awkward silence.
“I shouldn’t have lost my temper,” I finally say, the words short and clipped from swallowed pride and copious shame. “I’m sorry.”
“I should’ve been taking your warnings more seriously,” the white Alicorn replies, her tone more melancholy than I could’ve anticipated. And yet, before I can adjust, she continues, “I forget, at times, the respect others are due, simply because I disdain the subject being discussed. And I forget how poisonous bitterness can be.”
“Hmm,” is the sum totality I can muster in reply; foreign territory, I’m beginning to suspect, is not my strong suit.
“This is her?” Celestia asks a moment later, snout gesturing at the tiny filly gamboling through her early life. I nod as the filly nuzzles her mother, and Celestia murmurs, “Sweet thing.”
“For now.”
Harmony and friendship once again prove ineffective against the unyielding future this little filly promises.
“Where are we?” she asks before blinking at my expression; a morbid chuckle follows even as she adds, “True. If they cannot handle this, we’re likely dead.”
“So we agree on that much, at least.”
“On that much, yes.”
“...you’re still going to oppose me. Even after testing every conceivable variable.”
“In spirit, if not in form. At least for what you currently plan.”
“Your greatest student faces a fate worse than death and you still think my option is worse?”
“Infinitely so.”
“Why?”
She doesn’t answer immediately, instead choosing to survey the middle-distance placidly even as I shuffle in poorly contained outrage. Finally she asks, “How many times do you think the world has ended?”
My reply is to simply look at her in askance.
“A hundred and seven. I have seen over a hundred civilizations fall in my life. I remember the first, an empire of sapient ice; the seventh perished when Lord Minos’ drowned; fourty-sixth, a coup went terribly wrong and the army imploded upon itself quite literally. I’ve seen a hundred ways Harmony has disappeared from the world, and a thousand-fold more wars that promised the same. It has left me somewhat… selfish, admittedly.”
I snort in impatience. “Our future is dwindling while we speak. I get it, you’re old; what does this have to do with her?”
Her eyes twinkle as she replies, “I’ve combatted every aspect of societal poison and corruption I can find, going to any lengths to do so as long as it didn’t compromise my own morals. And now I see this ‘doom’ in its most naked form, and it’s one of the innocent I’ve strived to protect.”
“And she’s going to destroy Equestria.”
“I suspect that Equestria will perish on a far more fundamental and important level if we do kill her. We are leaders, and to justify her death, well, where that mentality goes is too bleak by far.”
“And when we all die, what then?”
But that daemon George already knows, and whispers the words a quarter of a second before she does; “Then we die knowing we did right. We remain a bastion others may strive for, a light untouched by corruption. We die free.”
The mood is somber, and yet somewhat relaxed; this is a funeral, held by the dead for the dead.
“And yet we still die,” I say, softly.
“Perhaps.”
“You’re placing stock in miracles, aren’t you?”
“I find they have a high return on my investments, Name-”
The mood is dashed as I turn upon her like a wolf, teeth chattering land clacking like dozen explosive cartridges lined alongside each other. Perhaps I speak, perhaps it’s George the daemon; I suspect they are one and the same at times. “This is not the place for falsenames, Susan. A name is a gift, the first. What I give is just a sham and we both know it.”
“It’s only as much of a sham as you allow it to be, George.”
“Hmph.”
“I’m still not exactly happy with you either, Na-... George.”
I sigh even as I reply, “Nor am I, in hindsight. Had at least four other Alicorns to speak with, and I pick-”
“-pick the one who, moreso than any of us, ought not be forced into these sorts of decisions.”
“Why? Because she threatens traditional ideals and is a revolutionary little fire-cracker?”
“No, because she’s still a child herself, and adults must bear the weight of the world until the young are strong enough.”
Of course she would claim that; a smothering yet loving influence to the end, a worried old watchdog that simultaneously knows it’s well on the way to relaxation and retirement yet forces yet another day from its fragile bones simply so the puppy doesn’t face the hungry darkness alone.
‘And yet she’s right,’ mutters George the daemon, and I cannot help but feel my neck nod in agreement.
We watch the end a few dozen more times, occasionally tweaking some inconsequential variable only to witness a future that refused to change. In time, we retire once more to that most frigid of conference rooms.
Can those in power do what must be done?
***
Twilight is not here, though she left a letter declaring she had shifted her vote to one of ‘abstain’.
I would’ve long since departed to find an adequate coffin were it not for Celestia leaving in the same manner as her disciple. And so this charade continues; conversation has withered into non-existence, much like the flowers on the center of the table, and only the desperate and somewhat inane comments from Cadence keep this from devolving further.
Luna glares at me, and I think the walls threaten to crack from the chill alone. I return the sentiment with a grunt and a growl, even as I slump against the table; cloaking deserved fear in the facsimile of fury is exhausting. Cadence looks between us, clearly somewhat torn in her loyalties, but unwavering in her adamant refusal to vote or abstain from the proceedings entirely.
And so we stew silently, the three of us, ‘immortal’ fools to the last.
What makes us rulers?
The two of them are looking at me. I must have pondered that aloud.
“...power, pure and simple,” Luna says, simply; she looks melancholy for a change. “Immortality tends to tip the scales in our favor for almost any conflict; that which cannot be stopped in the moment can almost certainly be outlived.”
Cadence, for her part, looks appalled at this answer. “What, just like that? Longevity is no basis for a functioning government!”
“But isn’t it?” I ask, tired beyond belief, and the two other Alicorns seem shocked I would agree with Luna on anything.
We’re all a bunch of fools and we deserve every weapon we’ve crafted.
Oops. Said that aloud as well.
I find myself pondering the future after us, if only to drown out the shouting. I always reset the vision after Twilight becomes a husk of her former self, but now I wonder, what then?
There is fire, death and misery, that much is certain. But such things cannot be sustained eternally, surely?
Food for thought, if nothing else.
The shouting dims and slowly ceases.
I look to Luna, passionate and somewhat abrasive as always. Of the two eldest, she is the warrior poet, painting a night sky with constellations even as she banishes nightmares. A veritable stone-wall of willpower, she cannot be outlasted, not by me.
“Nothing is going to change your mind,” I observe, more sleepy than irritated; there will be nightmares tonight, I can feel it. “We’re just going to be circling this subject until the stars go out.”
“Correct.”
“Hey, I might vot-”
“No you won’t,” Luna and I interrupt Cadence, albeit somewhat gently. Luna looks at me for a moment before continuing, “If you were, this would’ve been over hours ago.”
“Go to lunch, be near your child, and talk with your family,” I add with a sigh, before muttering, “Goodness knows it’s more productive than being here…”
Cadence leaves in a blur, pausing only to hug Luna and, far more surprisingly, me.
And then there were two.
“Name Rater,” Luna says in acknowledgement.
“Monica,” I return, and I think I see her smile for a moment as youthful, nostalgia-tinged memories flood back to her.
“We’re going to be at this until the world ends, aren’t we?” Luna asks, tone clipped and business-like.
“World’s ending a lot faster than you might think,” I reply, equally curtly.
“So you say. And yet, here I stand. Or sit, as the case may be.”
“Hm.”
We stare at each other for perhaps an hour before she speaks again.
“All things are yoked together by will alone, Name. Harmony will not falter; trust in it.”
“I’ve seen contrary.”
“Then trust us, George.”
“I do trust you all. I trust you all to do the right thing. Even if it seems stupid.”
“Look-”
“And I trust you to never back down from a cause you believe in, which is why I’m abstaining at this point. Congratulations on your victory, Monica; I just hope you’ve got a better solution than murder. Fare well, because goodness knows I won’t.”
I kick open the door as I leave, despite knowing full well how utterly unnecessary such an action is. I shout over my shoulder, “And tell those lazy sacks of garbage they can name their own stupid kids; if I so much as get a letter, I’m burning it.”
And with that, I blink away.
Author's Note
There will be three epilogues, from what I think to be the absolute worst possible outcome to something far more ideal.
I'm not a fan of utilitarianism, but I'm trying to give the philosophy a far shake in this story.
The cottage is what a generous soul might call ‘cosy’, and an honest one would declare ‘tiny’. And yet, it was home for hundreds of years.
I rub my muzzle against the aged mortar, and breathe in the scent of centuries past.
Most of them, to be fair, smelled abysmal.
I trot back a few steps, look upwards at the caving roof, and sigh; a thousand years at least, and not a single renovation to my name. No architectural beauty, no majesty of art and function, just a dinky little shack to work and survive within. I can almost feel the disappointment my family would’ve surely had pressing down upon me.
A month has passed since the penta-umvirate, and three weeks since I’ve last seen another pony; I wouldn’t be surprised if I am being avoided.
I pop open the cap of my bottle of orange juice and guzzle from it, looking for all the world like an Alicorn hobo; admittedly, not too far from the truth at the moment.
That said, being a self-exiled pariah comes with certain perks. Like, purely as a matter of course, drinking from a bottle of orange juice in public whilst wearing a ratty bathrobe. I’m… still not quite certain where I got said bathrobe, but that is purely a matter of speculation.
I doff the robe a moment later and teleport to the nearest river to bathe.
‘This is all just mindless nonsense to keep yourself from thinking of the future,’ mutters George the daemon. The voice has been nagging me, harassing me, shaming me to the best of its mediocre ability.
“Bingo,” I reply to the voice in my head, or at least I try to; being underwater, the closest I can come up with is, “Gurgle gurgle”.
I surface a moment later and simply… float along. It almost feels nice, being guided along by something as passively powerful as a river-current; why resist the inevitable, after all?
Goodness knows nopony else does.
And at that bitterness the world seems to grow just a mite more muted, just a touch dimmer and less vibrant.
I know the Royal sisters, at least, are looking for me; experiencing such disasters as Nightmare Moon have left them rather trigger-happy in spying the same developments in others. Though, I can’t help but chuckle at the idea of ‘Nightmare Name’, calling the things he dislikes hurtful things.
What a silly world I live.
My laughter stops when I remember it won’t be silly for too much longer.
‘You can still do something,’ the daemon George whispers in my head. ‘Nothing is written that cannot be erased.’
“Real sage advice, that,” I grumble sarcastically, but I still find myself pondering.
Antithesis. Special Talent: Inversion, whatever that means; it’s inexact, always inexact, but it seems she takes the right and makes it wrong, takes the light and makes it dark. She will come into her own soon enough, perhaps a few years, and then Equestria will fall.
We cannot act, for royals do not do such things. So deems the ruling body of Equestria, it seems.
I ruffle my wings and let a few sparks dance off my horn; I am one of them, in body if not in soul. I am lumped with the mighty and yet I am weak. What’s the point of being a Prince if it shackles you, traps you into a miserable fate?
I suspect it has something to do with my ascension; no philosophical insight into the nature of the world, no marvelous display of magic, no primal necessity being fulfilled. Just a trick deemed too useful to lose and a raw transference of power.
Huh.
Nothing kept me like this, nothing but the ill thought out machinations of a pair of immature princesses empowering me. I am a Prince by circumstance.
And circumstances change.
***
There is a trick to using enough energy to burn out of this form; I am no wizard, and the spells I know, excluding teleportation, are more cantrips than anything else. And it isn’t enough to simply become exhausted; there’s an element of extraction needed for something like that to even remotely work. In the end, without Twilight’s scientific mind to aid me, I scrape together what little knowledge I have and hope it is sufficient.
To explain the crude process as simply as possible, the idea is to teleport myself into two seperate places simultainiously; the matter of me (along with the flimsy remnants of my original magic) to one destination, and the... rest... to another. If it succeeds, hey, I can move forward with my plan.
If it fails, well, at least there’s nopony around to traumatize. And in six years, what was already fated to happen, will.
I begin to charge my magic.
***
The deed is done. My lungs burn, my eyes bleed, and I’m heaving red chunks of something that feel almost meaty against my tongue, but I’m alive for the moment.
I stumble off in search of a tool.
***
I try to make it gentle. But I need to strike twice just to be sure.
***
The trial is quick and I am a monster. That, nopony disputes. Not even myself.
***
The blanket is as soft as a hemp pillow, the cell as dark as a starless sky. I will not be here long; whatever I did is borderline irreparable, and the princesses didn’t even deign to visit the trial.
Occasionally there are night-terrors. I long for them; nightmares are more common.
At times I find myself pondering that perhaps Antithesis, inversion of magic and will that she was, had somehow twisted even my visions of her. That is to say, perhaps what I saw was the result of inversion, a grand illusion birthed by the manipulation of prophecy to see that which shall not be…
These are the thoughts I find myself thinking, even as formless things itch and scratch from the shadows. They whisper at times, foul and hateful things that have never know the caress of a warm summer breeze or the playful shove of winter’s bite.
I almost wish I still heard George at times. But no. George is gone, and Name Rater remains.
I hug the blankets closer. It’s cold tonight.
I’m so alone.
Author's Note
You can probably guess how I feel about the ending of Antithesis at this point, but this is by no means an attack upon the author or his work; rather, this is essentially a sustained counterpoint to the portrayal of 'imprisoning/killing of the dangerous' as a good thing.
Utilitarianism is a funny thing, and while I disagree with it, I'm not going to betray the spirit of the philosophy in these epilogues. Remember, this is, to me, merely the most dire possibility.
Grey winds gust over an ocean of ash. The stars smear across the sky, distorted and warped like an oil painting being doused in acid. The moon is pockmarked, the sun is bleeding.
At least the flames have burnt out, consumed themselves in a passionate firestorm that melted rock into slag; now the cinereous remains feel as chilly as a lightly packed snow. Warmth abandons the world, excluding small pockets of well-hidden and well-guarded love. Seeds of a sort, ready to bloom when day breaks. But the night is long.
Travelers wander by, at times: the brave ones, at least. Sometimes they gesture, with extinguished horn or grounded wing, sweep the limb across the horizon and simply say, “Equestria.” And sometimes, they say more.
Sometimes it's a story about the one who still dwells in that palace of cracked and crooked light. Other times, a tale about how the tribes united under a single banner, or how the purple warrior princess with a penchant for reading had saved a world of honeycomb sweetness from vile villains, or even a saga on the two nigh forgotten sisters who moved the heavens themselves. There are other stories, of course; rainbow lasers and friendship cannons, harmony and the elements thereof, but they are less frequently told.
None of these stories matter at the moment, however, save for the first.
She awaits, and where she goes the Ur-bane follows. Blood becomes ink, light radiates shadow, inside inverts, twists to become out; crackling spindles of crystal ice bathe the room in heat, while the fireplace stows rock and other such digestibles.
Even the dead are torn from their rest, marionettes on rotten strings of sinew.
And in the center of this mad little universe sits Antithesis, cackling gleefully at the merry display of destruction pirouetting around her.
Yet an antithesis cannot exist in isolation, and nor can she.
Does she laugh or sob?
Does it even matter if all that can hear her are the chattering dead?
The light inside is broken, and yet it still flickers at times. There is no justice in the world; mercy has no atomic weight, nor righteousness, or even love. These things do not exist in reality, after all.
So therefore they do, even if it’s just for a moment at a time.
It is impossible, of course; the decayed resurgence of a filly, little more than the inversion of an inversion, cannot triumph over a twisted thing that has mastered a thousand ways to strip the life from the stones themselves. A teddy bear is no defense against monsters.
Except, just this one time, it happens. And the fortunes reverse, and again, and so on; the pendulum swings, back and forth, bones twisting as powerful magics warp not merely the form but also the metaphysical nature of the mare.
Destroyer. Savior. Monster. Hero. Thug. Donor.
She, they, scream in pain; it brings a certain sort of clarity, agony, and in a moment the filly realizes, deems that the antithesis, the inversion of existence is-
There is no princess here to judge or rule, no senator or noble to parlay and debate; in the end Antithesis is the queen of the world, what little that remains.
Can the one in power do what must be done?
And then there’s nothing, nothing but the certainty of a decision made.
***
Things that exist strive to continue existing, even if it is only as the corpse of something greater. And yet the world pulls inexorably forward, and ash succumbs to earth. A world of grey goes green, albeit slowly, and there is structure, tenuous at first, then thriving as the seeds of light and life go into full bloom.
What remains from Before is scraped together, a last desperate bundle from the old world flung into a dying flame to keep away the dark: in ancient grottos dwell flightless Gryphons alongside Sea Ponies, in the burnt-out remnants of some ancient and dead tree a collection of equines eke out a meager existence around a sleeping dragon, in half-dug hovels huddle a smattering of souls across the land.
The light slowly grows; friendship is magic, after all. It isn’t ideal, but for now, it’s enough. And in time, even the sun and the stars shall be mended; just wait and see.
Now go to sleep; there’s much to be done, and I want you up bright and early.
Author's Note
Utilitarianism is such a tease, ain't it? It promises all sorts of awesome returns and yet it's still a melancholy mentality when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it.
I don't hate people who adhere to it, mind you; hating someone for a genuine philosophical difference is absurd, like hating someone for having a sixth finger or an alternatively place heart.
But utilitarianism is basically 'settling,' ain't it? Kinda leaves a hollow sensation in the pit of your stomach, even if everything works out alright, because you turned reality into numbers to avoid looking at the genuine human cost of the actions.
But maybe I'm looking at all this wrongly; I dunno, but it feels, on a fundamental level, that utilitarianism doesn't allow for catharsis.
Somewhere something was burning. It probably wasn’t the house, but Polish knew probability went clear out the window whenever her daughter was concerned. Her heart-rate accelerates in her panic, buying that organ perhaps an extra beat or two.
Not good; a twinkle of magic later, and a small barricade consisting of blocks and dolls line the interior of her front door. It’s by no means going to stop her when she slams through, but it will take her just that extra bit of time, just those few heartbeats that traitorous organ stole.
She clears the blocks in just a moment; the timing has to be just right, just so. A second early and it’ll be for nought; a second late, and, well, Mrs. Polish is going to have to be buried in a bucket.
And there’s the little hellion herself, playing on the roof as if it were the ground.
They say things, words that have been heard enough times to lose all meaning and simply become a mess of animal noises. It’s all the same anyway; mother wants what’s best for child, child acts rebellious, mother transforms into something more at home in a biohazard bag.
I… think I’ve spent a bit too much time watching and rewatching a mare explode and a filly go insane; it really hasn’t done any favors for my sense of humor.
But this time, there won’t be any grievous displays of gore. Hopefully. I think I measured the poison just right…
Ah. Yhup, just right. Dead as a doornail; I half expect some grand revelation, some shattering of earth and splitting of sky to follow as denouement of this murder, despite it having already been approved by the victim, but there’s nothing.
The world finds no fault in this, somehow. Hrm.
Still, the magic’s already working its way onwards, sinking its claws into the already toppling mare’s corpse, but you cannot slay that which is already deceased, little Antithesis...
The mare rises, alive once more. The filly, panicked, falls into her mother’s hooves. Tears are shed: we three leave.
***
“It’s still murder,” I mumble around a mouthful of liquid fire, only to wince in pain at the sound of my own voice; I cannot match the practiced alcohol tolerance of either sister, and attempting to do so was, in hindsight, stupid.
They are silent, though I suspect it’s more for my benefit than any ability I have to actually stupify them. I glance again at the bottle held in somepony’s magic; either my eyes deceive me, or we’re imbibing 160160 proof. That’s about eight-thousand percent…
Huh. This really was an error. Focusing long enough to mumble out a sobriety spell feels like driving an ice-pick into my brain, but at least the world refocuses after a minute.
“He’s right, you know,” Monica/Luna replies tiredly, her reply muffled by the self-imposed yoke of the glass cup on her muzzle. “A pony did die, and we’re responsible. Her coming back to life a moment later doesn’t really change that.”
“It was for the greater good,” Susan/Celestia points out, her warm and welcoming tone having finally abandoned her and leaving her sounding a great deal less certain of her own existence. “And, to be fair, she did agree to the plan.”
Monica/Luna and I rise from our respective drinks to just . . . look at her like she was some sort of baffling extraterrestrial.
“If asking ‘Do you want to help Equestria?’ and subsequently blasting all memory of that conversation out of her brain counts as ‘consent,’ I find myself becoming more and more mortified at our language,” Monica/Luna grumbles, hissing as she tilts her head back and sups again at the undefinable cocktail of substances in her glass.
“Let’s be honest,” I add a great deal more somberly, “The only reason this plan is alright and the other wasn’t is because your’s didn’t directly involve a child.”
“Essentially,” Susan/Celestia replied with a sigh, before making little work of her glass of … honestly, I can only describe both of their drinks of choice as essentially complicated poisons, with perhaps a cheery little umbrella here or there that subsequently dissolves from the sheer potency of the drink. “Perhaps some of this is purely semantics, but I feel less wretched when it’s a fully formed being, one who has already had some ability to do something with their lives.”
“How many does this make?” Monica/Luna asks, and for a moment I can see every single year Susan/Celestia has lived marked clearly upon her face.
It’s quite a heavy number.
“Too many,” Susan/Celestia says around the lip of her glass at first before finally sighing in defeat and mumbling, “Including the fire about two centuries ago? If so, I’m personally responsible for about sixteen-thousand, four hundred and twenty nine individuals meeting their end prematurely.”
“That’s a lot,” I find myself muttering.
“It will only grow with time,” she replies, before letting out a hollow little laugh and adding, “And while only a tiny fraction of those are active murders, I find those are the only ones I find least issue with. And somehow I have two Alicorns who somehow look up to me as some sort of role-model-”
“-three,” Monica/Luna interjects, and I see a smile crinkle away some of the lines in the older sister’s face.
“-and I have absolutely no idea why.”
“I suspect that’s a burden all immortals must eventually bear,” I venture.
“No,” Susan/Celestia replies, and I find myself furtively leaning behind a long-emptied cheese-tray as if it can somehow shield me from her. “Not them,” she promises, and I hear some ancient instinct being invoked in her tone, almost mistakable for genuine malice; an old watch-dog shielding pups. And yet at the same time I see the weight of a world bearing down on her, and for a moment I feel an almost ghostly pressure on my shoulders in sympathy; such a thing cannot be twisted away, nor can it be averted, but perhaps it can be shared...
“Four,” I find myself grunting, and I take another drink.
And that is that.
Author's Note
Margaret Atwood made a book I loath that discussed for a few paragraphs the nature of colloquial Cynicism and Idealism; she did so by examining the game of ‘Ashes and Roses’, a game where one player speaks of atrocities and the other details triumphs of the moral spirit. It is supposedly easier to win as the Ashes player, because evil is, according to that author at least, more abundant; the trade-off for this advantage is that the Ashes player wins more easily, which even the Ashes player probably doesn’t want once the game goes on long enough.
I see a lot of ashes wherever I go. Some folks purchase its by-product. Some build sturdy houses to off-set it, as if it is nothing more than a spot of snow. And yet others feast on it until the die, detonating like mortars filled with misery.
It’s easy to forget the roses. But acts of hate give rise to acts of love. And ashes can be fertilizer for flowers.
What a stupid fucking game.
