Twilight Sparkle stands before a massive construction of metal and wood, its size that of a wall, in the gloom of her own basement. Dials of all sizes cover the metallic surface, with magical spells transcribed around them, the runes on the hexagonal knobs rearranging the spells in small, incremental ways. Most of them have not been moved. A trembling hoof reaches for one the largest dials and rotates it counterclockwise, just once.
“Maybe this one? Maybe they’ll hear me on this one?” she questioned the emptiness of the room.
Her voice is not desperate. The claws of uncertainty have left their mark upon her throat, true, and her words are scratched and painful to hear, let alone utter. Yet there is control. A grip over herself that, depending on how you judge the Princess of Friendship, might be recently won… or at the fringes of being lost.
The bags under her eyes display her exhaustion for all to see, if there was somepony with her. The redness of the skin around her eye sockets is physical proof of the stress and pain she is under. Her mane is in shambles, as is her coat, and the feathers on her wings are jagged and bent. Her lips are red, but it’s the outcome of teeth nervously biting them, not of health. They are rugged and parched, as if she hasn’t had anything to drink in long hours.
She must certainly be hungry too.
The piece of magical equipment she is fiddling with is obviously of her own making, yet so unlike her normal standards. The metal is dull, dirty, and filled with scratches. The left side is scorched and black with soot, and the cabinet-like frame seems to have been cannibalized and merged with hasty, erratic work.
There is no sign of the usual, careful marking and color categorizing Twilight Sparkle usually adopts. Instead, everything she needs to remember or note has been hastily scratched on metal and wood, possibly with the same instruments that carved the magical runes.
The dried specks of blood on her horn and the lack of tools around her leave no question as to how.
There is a pair of metal electrodes connected through naked, sparkling cables with the machine. As Twilight sits on a chair, and places her hooves in a business-like manner on the wooden table, her magic in turn places each of the spheres upon her temples. Left side first. Then the right. They rest there with the comfort of long repetition, on the matted down coat of her head.
She tries to talk. She coughs, violently. Accompanied by a tired and suffering sigh, a murky, half-filled water jug comes to her from one of the darkened corners of her basement, carried by her magic. She only drinks a sip to lubricate her throat, and the jug returns where it came from.
She returns to staring at the void across her. There is nothing there, only the shadows of her basement, where the light of the few candle stumps does not reach. There might be a modicum of movement, but if there is, it is only her reflection on the crystalline walls of her castle. She stares into the darkness regardless, and speaks.
“My name is Twilight Sparkle.
“You know it, of course. If you are who I think you are. If I got it right. You know a lot about me. Maybe more than even I know. I wonder sometimes, am I really the Princess of Friendship? Or is that a lie? You know my past, my present. You probably know my future as well. You would know the truth. If there is one.
“But I’m sure you wouldn’t care. The truth does not interest you that much according to what I have figured out.
“My name is Twilight Sparkle. I thought I was the faithful student of a Princess. I thought I was a bearer of the Elements of Harmony, friend to some of the best mares that ever lived, and a newly crowned Princess of Friendship myself. I thought I had saved Equestria several times. That’s what I thought.
“But that is not all, is it?
“I have killed Princess Celestia as well.”
One of the candles reaches its end and the flame dies. Twilight doesn’t even register it.
“I have killed all my friends. I have killed Spike. I have conquered and murdered, massacred, ponies across Equestria. Worlds. I led charges against other species in mad campaigns of conquest and assimilation. I have devised horrible weapons, spells, artifacts. I have pushed magic to beyond its boundaries with no other purpose that to harm and desecrate all that I believe in.
“I have done this a lot of times. So many times that the sheer weight of it… It is almost more than I can bear. Only numbers keep me sane. I don’t count the dead. I count the times I have gone off the deep end. It’s easier. It’s so much easier, as long as I don’t think of what it means. As long as I don’t let my mind dwell on how high the number is and only compare it against the number of lives like an unfeeling, cold chart. Any remnant of logic I can still latch on is my haven now.
“...I’ve married Princess Celestia. We had foals together, as impossible as it sounds. Which is. So many children, so much love and loss, and uncountable nights of passion and drunken promises.
“Almost as many as I spent with Princess Luna.
“I’ve also married or had relationships with each of my friends. Not just them though, oh no. Other ponies as well. Many times they were ponies I don’t know or haven’t been able to find proof they ever existed. Which now I know is because they never did. Alien creatures as well. People from different dimensions. Even my own family, as sick as it sounds. If the deaths become too much I try to focus on the ugliness of having sex with my own brother or parents. It’s not the best medicine, but throwing up tends to displace everything in favor of the present, you know?
“It started with me and my daily routine. Studying, questioning, and performing magic and experiments. It’s almost absurd how much it all starts the same way. With me and my experiments. It makes me afraid. Afraid that I’m not… That I’m just a random or temporary—
“An experiment. That’s how it started. The subject was multiverse theory. I was dabbling with the concept, trying to find out if it’s real. I wanted to find a way to look into other universes if it was. It… was such a hopeful thing at the time. So full of possibilities. Of joy and anticipation. It is all ashes now, ever since the day I succeeded.
“That was three days ago. It feels like centuries. In a certain way, it has been millenia.
“It is real. It exists.
“The multiverse is real, and I was able to see it. All of it, whether I wanted or not, or at least all of it that I was involved in. I had no choice in the matter. I saw it all, everything that ever happened to me. There was no rush or a feeling of living through it. Once I was simple Twilight Sparkle. Then I was… the Twilight Sparkle who knew. I just knew.
“It was horrifying. It almost broke my mind. Maybe it did. Look at me, I’m talking to nothing.”
She laughs and it is not a true laugh. She laughs because the alternative is to cry, and she knows that if she cries she will not be able to continue. She will break. She will break and never escape.
“Celestia, please let me not be talking to nothing. Let this work,” she pleads, her hoof rising up briefly to wipe tears that are not there.
“I saw more, and more, and then I understood. There were voids. Sudden ends, as if the universe just… terminated or halted mid-existence. Frozen in time or forgotten and left to rot. In others I was talking of things I could not understand or comprehend, people, locations, and events, yet did so as if I knowing was natural and expected of me. I met people from another world so many times I could fill Canterlot with them a hundred times over.
“And many of them…
“They walked on two legs. Many of them had impossible powers. Many of them had none. Others had weapons, others had nothing but the clothes on their backs, others could stop magic.
“I think they are you. So, I know some of your faces. Your voices.
And a number of you told me the truth. You told me how I was part of a show.”
Twilight stops, and hides her head beneath her hooves. She stays under the brief illusion of shelter for little over a minute. She doesn’t cry or anything of the like. She just breathes, slowly. Inhale. Exhale. Controlled. Deep. Steady.
Her shoulders shake, but soon they quiet down.
Then she assumes her previous position and continues.
“It all started to make sense then. In an infinity of lives, it was repetition and frequence where I would find the key. That is how I am sure my name is Twilight Sparkle. I’m almost always named Twilight Sparkle. I’m almost always a pony.
“Too many lives for a single show though. So, I thought, if I was part of a show, a play, why not be part of something else as well? Maybe it wasn’t just that show. Maybe it was the fact that I was a pony in a story. It was being the story that mattered.
“And when I looked into the multiverse, my multiverse... I saw all the stories.
“I… I don’t know what I’m expecting. I just… I just want you to stop. Stop making these stories. Stop hurting me, stop making me hurt ponies, stop—”
Her hoof strikes the table, and the candles’ flames cast erratic shapes around her. She doesn’t see them. Her eyes are closed tightly, and a single teardrop, small yet shining in the light hitting it, makes it down her cheek.
“Why did you make me know everything? Why did you do this to me?
She wipes at her face, her eyes, her muzzle. As if she is trying to remove tears and snot that is not there, as if she has been crying non-stop. It takes a few minutes for her to stop and get her breathing back. When she does, she casts her eyes back into the darkness.
“Just stop. Stop it all.
“I don’t know if it will stop if you cease making these stories. Maybe it won’t. Maybe you need to destroy them. Or forget them.
“But... then I might die, right? My whole world, all the ponies I know and love, will they fade along with the stories? Will everything be gone? Is that the price for our continued existence? We can live as long as we entertain? In every possible way, simple, funny, tragic, loving, or horrid? Is that even a life? The only kind we can have?
“I… I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know. Just… Just…
“…
“My name is Twilight Sparkle. I need your help. Please, help me. Somehow, help me. I’m alive. All those of us who die, who suffer, who perish. We are all alive.”
Twilight Sparkle bents her head and stops talking. She is breathing fast, as if that last plea took everything out of her. When she gets up she is moving as if she has gotten older. The metal spheres fall of her temples and clatter on the floor.
She stands in front of her magical device. Her hoof is shaking. She touches the largest of the dials and moves it once, counterclockwise.
“This one. They might hear me on this one.”
She sits back on the chair, facing the darkness, and the metal orbs hover to their place on her temples once more.
“My name is Twilight Sparkle…”
