Aftersound

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Written by: Oneimare & Geka

Preread and edited by: Jay Tarrant, IAmApe, DuvetofReason

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To dodge the Junction

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Flower stared at me in bewilderment.

“Is that how you looked when you were… you know?”

My gaze slowly returned to ‘me’ and ‘my’ friends fishing for Applejack’s whereabouts. My glowing mechanical eyes lingered on the bright face of a young purple unicorn; watched her lips form a heartfelt smile as she chatted animatedly.

I looked like that when I... was.

“You were pretty,” the oblivious filly persisted. “I mean, it’s not that you don’t look pretty now—”

“Thank you,” I absentmindedly cut her spluttering.

Yet it succeeded in drawing my attention from… myself.

The sunlit street lived its own quaint busy life; it abruptly ended a few paces away, becoming night in the ruins and no smell or sound passed that invisible border. Observing the horizon or figuring out how far the rift went resulted in severe mental discomfort.

Around me preternaturally well-preserved ruins stood silent, offering me only the occasional gusts of wind; sand, carried by its coarse touch whispered its rough murmuring song against my suddenly so metal body.

My memories tugged on my hooves, imploring them to step into the light. To rush to my friends and ask them for help, knowing I'd receive it. To walk to Twilight Sparkle—she would know what to do; she always did, back then.

I turned away, into the remains of the present.

My friends had disappeared and I had no intention of abandoning them.

Also, common sense insisted on not experimenting with walking into that anomaly whatever it was.

An illusion—one of the mirages I had been so concerned about? But what kind of mirage showed the events of half a millennium ago with such disturbing precision?

Flower longingly glanced over her shoulder; she saw a place of enchanting beauty, not a deeply troubling echo of the past.

The skeletons of once-sturdy wooden girders rose around us. Almost every house had its roof caved in, often taking the walls with it as well. Dodge City wasn’t even supposed to be a city when the trial of time exposed it to the elements—the settlers built those houses to be temporary. Sand should have swallowed everything at least two centuries ago.

However, the enigmatic preservation of the town didn’t disturb me as much as the sky full of unrecognisable constellations—not just dilapidated. And despite the cold moonlight sparing us of blindness, I couldn’t bear witness to its source. The Moon always remained behind our backs, even with Flower’s help to catch sight of it.

Whilst I kept frowning as my horn kept detecting irregularities in the flow of magic, Flower complained about the constant buzz in her ears—’white noise’.

My legs buckled under me when I suddenly became reacquainted with a sensation I had almost forgotten—pain.

The ruins warped and flickered, plunging into pitch-black darkness or becoming lit by the blinding daylight from the unseen sun.

Then the agony blinded me, leaving only a grainy shimmering whiteness.

As unannounced as it came, the torture ceased at the forever-lasting moment of its apotheosis.

Blinking away tears—

I dabbed my eyes with my hooves and stared at the glistening smears of oil.

My head screwed around in search of Flower—as if that was enough to overpower the steel of my vessel…

She could also have been claimed by another of those phantasmagorias, but that didn’t happen—unsteady on her hooves, the shaking filly rose from the ground, blood dripping from her nostrils and rolling down her cheeks.

I rushed to her. “Are you alright?”

Flower spat red and weakly nodded, gulping.

“What the fuck was that? And where the fuck are we?”

The reality didn’t leave a split this time—we’d ended up in the heart of the nightmare.

Only rare stone foundations marked the ground with the tombstones of homes. Bleached and bone-dry, timber turned into fossils half-eaten away by the wind. No mysterious moonlight bathed the almost erased from existence town—only the alien stars sternly gazed down upon us, barely casting the shadows away.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

Hidden eyes burned me with their piercing attention. Tense silence hungrily listened to every rustle we made amidst the forgotten ashes.

I almost jumped when something touched my flank—Flower firmly pressed herself to my body, her head jerking from side to side, looking for the unseen observers.

Her heartbeats resonated through my frame counting long seconds of the invisible presence churning around us. But it neither became worse nor abated—patiently waiting for us to make a move.

Making an almost impossible effort to write it off as our imagination, I still was left with the undeniable fact—Flower shouldn’t go through any of those shatterings of time and space.

Flower’s heart pounded a few dozen beats until I finally found enough steel in myself—or foolishness—to cast our surroundings into the pale candlelight of a spell.

Almost indistinguishable from the impenetrable night, a dark stripe of Hayseed Swamps blotted the horizon—the only landmark in the void of the black desert.

We silently crept by the headstones of the long-perished houses, cast into a shadow so sheer, we could not comprehend it—an adult dragon looming above a pair of ants.

“Twilight?” Flower’s practically inaudible voice cut over the tinkling silence.

I shot her a glare, but didn’t find it in myself to reprimand her—the filly’s voice applied a soothing balm to my mind straining under the onslaught of the preternatural. It must have been a reprieve for herself, too.

“Have you ever noticed that there are only seven Thunderspires in Canterlot?”

“Are you sure this is the best time to bring that up?”

Ignoring my frown, she continued to susurrate, “The Butterflies blew up the eighth and its arcanium tip fell, shattering. The whole district… it has changed—they call it the Breach.”

Hundreds of tonnes of the most volatile and magically potent material in the world meeting the most uncompromising force in the universe. A whole city could have been lost to the fallout, not just a district.

“A breach…” I nervously looked around, at the darkness lurking in itself. “...to where?”

My hoof shot sideways to stop Flower—something moved at the edge of my candlelight spell.

We stood in the middle of a luminescent purple lake like two statues, peering into the night. I desperately hoped for it to only be my imagination.

Flower tensed and clutched my hoof.

An equine silhouette, glowing ever so faintly, glided glacially into the circle of light.

The lambent mare had neither wings nor a horn, yet her hooves didn’t touch the sand. A pale and ghostly radiance of twinkling colours, vaguely familiar, greyed out her features. She seemed to mourn with her head tilted and eyes cast downward.

I took a step back, but my hoof failed to find a steady purchase on the small pebbles and I teetered. Sand and gravel cried under my metal limbs.

The mare snapped her head—

It became turned at us, skipping the entire motion. Hollow eyes transfixed at something behind, or even beyond, our scared faces.

Then she screamed.

A deafening, terrifying, inequine wail cut straight into my mind, flooding my vision with burning static.

I was screaming myself, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. Flower’s mouth was open in just as silent a cry, her nostrils and eyes glistening with fresh crimson.

Blinded by pain, I hurled stunning blasts at where the shrieking spectre should be and one of them turned her howl into a gurgle. Not wasting my time to regain my senses, I grabbed Flower and flung her on my back as I skidded on the treacherous ground, darting away, tripping over my hooves.

The sound of something fundamentally horrible reached me, but it came not from the throat of that thing—the world was falling apart around me.

My hoof caught on a stone and I fell, fell for an eternity full of pain.

And landed on something soft.

“Rainbow! Would you watch where you fly?”

The static faded from my eyes and I found my vision full of a lavender flank.

Twilight and I scampered away from each other, staring into one another’s eyes.

Not even the utter bewilderment could darken the painfully pure innocence radiating from that mare, only five years younger than me. She knew no crippling bereavement, no crushing failure, no flames of war.

She was Twilight Sparkle and I was Twilight Sparkle, but we were not the same pony.

Whatever wild questions my appearance had raised in her mind, they seemed to be instantly forgotten when she glanced at my side, gasping. Before I could follow her horrified gaze, Flower’s groan alleviated my fears.

“I didn’t know anypony could fucking screech louder than Wire,” she grumbled, then squinted at Twilight. “Did you hit my head or something? You look different…”

“I… I didn’t hit you!” the unicorn blurted, recoiling. “I’ve just met you!”

“Neither did I.”

I tapped Flower’s shoulder and she whipped her head betwixt me and, well, me, sending red droplets around—the tithe paid for passage to this reality.

“This filly needs help—she is bleeding!” Twilight yelled.

“Nah,” she muttered, standing up. “Could be better, could be worse.”

Flower waved her metal hoof, smirking proudly; but she couldn’t hide the haunted look behind that smile. Twilight seemed like her eyes would pop out of her skull the next time the situation escalated, or maybe she’d simply pass out.

However, she demanded from me, frowning:

“Who are you?”

“Twilight Sparkle,” I firmly replied, meeting her eyes. “From the future.”

“There can’t be two ‘me’s’! It’s not scientifically possible!” She stuck her hoof at me, simultaneously cross and triumphant. “You’re not scientifically possible!”

A sense of déjà vu hit me—those words had left my mouth once already, except… Twilight had yet to say them when a Twilight from the next week came to warn her; that happened… would happen a few weeks after the visit to Dodge City.

“What happened to you?” she gushed. “Why are you wearing that armour? Is there some epic pony war in the distant future?”

I had a suspicion about that place serving as a portal to the past, but recalling that memory made me realise—if I couldn’t remember running into a metal version of myself and a filly with a metal hoof, then...

“It’s not time travel.” Not giving Twilight a chance, I spoke again, “What did you give Rarity on her last birthday?”

The unicorn’s wide eyes locked on me, two wells of amethyst confusion. The initial surprise passed, yet she failed to answer. Anyone who knew Twilight for at least a day knew it was a book.

She didn’t.

This Twilight Sparkle possessed the depth of reflection in a mirror.

“I can’t remember,” she uttered, defeated.

“We keep running into magic anomalies that transport us into refractions of Dodge City’s different temporal states. This appears to be one of them.”

Her brow furrowed and her lips pressed together so hard, they turned white.

“I know,” Twilight admitted to my bewilderment. “My memories are missing, but I can remember being here for… many, many years.”

“Have you always been aware of…?”

All that youth she had seemed to have faded, leaving a mentally exhausted mare that whispered, “As long as I don’t focus on that, the events unfold naturally and it becomes easier to forget, to pretend I’m Twilight Sparkle.”

Silence, long and heavy settled betwixt us.

“How can I... get you out of that loop?” I carefully asked.

“You can’t,” Twilight huffed, “unless you can fix disrupted ley lines.” A small wistful smile crept on her muzzle. “But you can tell me about the future. I’ll never have it, but I’m still curious—what’s it like?”

Horror gripped my mind as the faint rustle of reality folding into itself murmured a promise of pain into my ears. Twilight’s ear flicked—she knew it was coming.

“Full of wonders.”

“Thank you,” she mouthed and shattered.

Blinking dark oil from my eyes, I found Flower leaning on my body, heaving; a sheen of sweat on her coat and scarlet streaks on her cheeks glistened in the moonlight.

My head snapped to the sky.

“I don’t wanna complain,” the filly rasped, spitting, “but I’m kinda tired of all… that.”

“It seems like we are back to the original reality.”

The empty sky vomited unsettling colour upon us, wooden houses perpetually rotted in the shifting sand, magic radiation unpleasantly tugged on my horn.

The latter reminded me about the parting gift from Twilight’s stuck echo—damage to Harmony’s ley lines had caused the chaos that claimed Dodge City. My hypothesis suggested avoiding nearing the corrupted arcane currents might save us from a journey into another refraction.

I reached out with my vision beyond sight and—

A white-hot nail lodged itself in my horn—literally—a shower of sparks, both magical and not rained before my eyes, lighting up Flower’s scared face as I recoiled in pain.

Much more slowly and carefully I expanded my mind and felt my horn warm up and ache as it sensed a violently swirling and thrashing flow of magic nearby.

After five minutes of cautiously exploring the arcane tapestry as far as I could reach, I had a path mapped out for us. Bracing myself, I motioned for Flower to follow me.

As we crawled through the debris and darkness guided by memory and occasional checks for proximity to the ley lines my theory seemed to be proven; unless we’d just been tricked by fortune.

Then my horn sniffed out a disruption ahead of us like no other—dark and cold. In the real world, it manifested into muffled shrieks—unintelligible yet equine. Flower prodded my side and met my eyes with a questioning and worried look—she’d heard them, too.

Despite the source of the yells possibly being one of our friends in distress, I had forced both myself and Flower to creep towards the noise with caution.

Still, even at the deliberate pace, it took us to get to pass by only a few dilapidated buildings before we emerged into a clearing—a crossing of two streets.

Right in the middle of it, a living shadow fought back a group of… things.

They vaguely resembled equines, sex and race lost to the horrifying tumours mutilating their bodies where the light didn’t filter through the translucent limbs and organs. And amidst discoloured flesh, shards of arcanium malignantly glistened with reflected starlight.

Surrounded by the inky ribbons, Trixie used them only to fling hooffuls of sand at the abominations. No wonder—even the hairless coats of those monstrosities shimmered with the trademark hues of the arcane metal that refused to bend to her dark will. Nor had Dodge City positively affected the Former One in general—her ragged form barely stood upright.

My situation left me with the same option—I couldn’t risk using my magic on the volatile splinters of… whatever those ponies had become.

A massive slab of bricks, still held by mortar, rose from a mound of debris, gaining height to become a bomb.

Yet it didn’t drop.

It would pulverize flesh and break bones, inflicting fatal injuries. Those ponies didn’t appear to have any consciousness left, only reacting to movement and sound. They led a wretched preternatural existence and it would be a mercy to end it.

What happened to the stallions who tried to violate Del? Did they survive the wounds I inflicted upon them? I did what had to be done to save an innocent—how was it different now? Why did I hesitate now?

Trixie yelped as a toothless jaw snapped at her, barely missing her neck.

How many did she murder in the name of the Ebony Warlock?

The hold of my magic on the wall fragment loosened and it plummeted down, whistling ominously. When only a blink of an eye separated it from digging itself into the sand, I grasped the bricks again and, grunting, turned their acceleration into angular momentum.

The bodies of the abominations scrunched and squelched as the deadly pendulum sent them soaring into the ruins, trailing ichor and pieces of arcanium.

The Twilight Sparkle I met today wouldn’t have committed that, and not just because she was only an echo.

The last of the deformed ponies rushed to me, rattling with metal lodged into their very bones and I tugged on the slab.

Bones snapped and something sprayed onto my cheek—I couldn’t look.

Shuddering, I took a hasty step back from the puddle of dark blood that invaded the corner of my vision, spreading to my hooves.

Circling the tombstone made of broken brick I created for my victim, I approached Trixie.

It couldn’t be denied now—she had two outlines, two different shadows. Hunched, she stared at the ground, cowering before me.

“You hesitated,” she bitterly whispered and a long pause followed her words; her eyes rose to meet mine. “Why did you save me?”

“I wanted to hear why I should have done that.”

As featurelessness as her knit of darkness face was, it couldn’t fail to reflect anguish twisting it into a grimace.

“I’ve changed.”

“You willingly joined the group of the vilest warlocks who have more digits in their kill count than you—hooves,” I deadpanned.

“I never killed anypony!”

Her second outline almost tore itself away with a sudden jerk.

A young female unicorn with a mane-do similar to what I once had, but with more streaks. She silently snarled in pain and protest, trying to pull herself from Trixie—to no avail.

The icy stare I gave her needed no commentary.

“She…” Trixie squirmed in guilt and turmoil. “It was an accident… I had no choice…”

As I remained silent and impassive, she continued to plead:

“I know you don’t believe that I never truly served King Sombra and I can’t deny the horrible things I’ve done. I’ve been doing everything to make up for the wrongs I’ve committed. Twilight, I ask you for a second chance again!”

Again.

Did Twilight forgive her back then? But knowing the mare I should be, she should have—the memories told me that everypony deserved at least one more chance.

Trixie was a war criminal who still readily used her heinous ability—she’d turned the ponies of Pepper’s gang and Butterflies’ gryphons into fine ashes. Yet she allegedly betrayed Sombra—according to the words of another individual who served the enemy; and she acted as a vigilante in the Tunnels.

Her judgement was not mine to give, anyways. I knew her only as an exceptionally abrasive wandering joker and a strange dweller of the deep who helped me.

Princess Luna could judge her properly—maybe that was why Trixie actually had sought her.

“Alright.”

My answer seemed to take her by a bigger surprise than anything else before—which was a feat, considering her already perpetually flabbergasted expression.

“What?” I asked.

“Twilight… She never forgave me.”

I froze on the spot, my proverbial heart skipping a beat; yet I managed to squeeze, my voice only barely quivering, “Saying you changed but still acting like the mare who boasted she could best anypony in Ponyville—show a little gratitude.”

Trixie gave me a long unreadable look.

“Thank you—” she cut herself midway awkwardly and averted her eyes.

Flower crawled out of her hiding place amongst the debris and joined the living shadow—shadows?—who followed me silently when I headed to Hayseed Swamp peeking at us from betwixt the ruins.

As Trixie shot the filly a relieved glance, she asked, “What about the others?”

My answer didn’t come immediately as I concentrated on the ley lines once more.

“I’m taking Flower out of this place and then will return to search for them.”

The whole confrontation made the mental map slip out of my mind and I was forced to probe around, extending my senses as far as possible.

An echo flared across the ravaged arcane landscape—a spark of magic, distant and weak. Considering the deterioration of the creatures that prowled Dodge City, I had my doubts about them casting any spells, which left the most likely possibility—Red Wire.

How long would it take for me to guide Flower out and then make it back? Would a barely adolescent unicorn with impaired magic be able to survive that long?

Neither Flower nor Trixie questioned me as I led them into the heart of the city, though soon I began to doubt my decision.

Shards of glass and stone hovered, frozen in the air, stubbornly refusing to abide gravity and rest on the, glittering with arcanium, sand, ash and… bones. The further we got, larger objects started to hang high on invisible strings—fragments of buildings and train carts; as if time had stopped for them in the middle of a powerful explosion that ripped through the entire Junction.

We passed under another of those wreckages when flashes of golden magic lit up the surreal ruins in the sky. Following them like a beacon, we entered the railyard.

Railways endlessly stretched away, branching out like fractals into the horizon, the webwork of steel and wood blotting the sky. The misaligned images melded together, turning the split from a broken mirror reality into an impossible landscape.

Most of the carriages belonged to the freight trains, yet, every so often, passenger cars gazed at us with dark, empty windows. Whilst some of them somehow remained in pristine condition, others sagged, melted or collapsed into themselves in the lingering clouds of rusty mist.

A sparkle of sunlight illuminated a filly unicorn and a pegasus trapped by shambling deformed equines in an alleyway formed by two rotting train cars; the sight turned our hurried yet cautious trot into a frantic gallop.

We skidded to a stop behind the pack of monstrosities; a glance at Flower and Trixie told me we shared our lack of ideas of how to help Wire and Del, who hadn’t even noticed our approach—too busy fending off the onslaught of withered terrors.

My magic tugged on rails or crossties but they either remained steadfast or crumbled into dust. Nothing around me could serve as a weapon, not that the narrow space allowed for much, anyway.

Wire finally saw us but was denied a cry for help as one of the distended ponies lunged at her, forcing the filly to shoot a harmless whirl of sparks into its eyes, buying herself a chance to dodge. She bumped into Delight who swung a broken shovel clutched into her jaws.

A couple of abominations saw us as well, prompting me to come up with a way to save the girls and ourselves.

Our surroundings could offer only decay, death and arcanium.

An insane thought crawled into my mind.

Every chunk, flake and even mote of the arcane metal floated to me and I cautiously funnelled my magic into the capricious ore. Though my plan relied on it, the state of arcanium—raw—still caught me by surprise. Still malleable to magic, it softened and then liquified taking the form of a flimsy blade—months of practising arcane forging at the RCRC made the process almost effortless.

I watched the dagger solidify for agonisingly long seconds; above its warping surface a group of creatures infused with the same metal amassed on my friends, not to mention more and more were splitting off in our direction.

Yet as the blade gained a deadly sharpness, it marked only half of my work.

With precise mental motions, I plucked away each miniature ley line around the weapon, turning the piece of metal into an antithesis of magic—‘deafening’ arcanium.

The moment I finished, I had to test the result of my craft, thrusting the dagger at the leg of the abomination that leapt at me. The withered skin and sinew practically melted under the touch of the hollow blade’s edge, rivulets of dark ichor sprout from the deep cuts.

Though half of my slashes missed their mark, those which found purchase in the decaying flesh made the difference, severing tendons and leaving the disfigured ponies to wither and slobber on the sand, harmless.

When my efforts created an opening in the mass of attackers, Del and Wire rushed into it and then past me.

Bite wounds covered the pegasus’ blind side, deep enough to still bleed and one at the base of her wing rendered her flightless. Whilst the unicorn had fewer injuries, she had her prosthetic no more—only a few cables poked out of the empty eye socket; blood, oil and soot marred the grimace of pain her face had become.

Not only did the arcanium abominations cut us off from the way we came, forcing us to flee deeper into Dodge City, the endlessly folding into itself fractured and refracted reality hid any landmark that could signal a way out of that nightmare.

Pressing on in one direction remained the only option and I couldn’t help but fear if it had any guarantee to it in a place like that.

The arcanium no longer shyly presented itself as lonely flakes—whole shards menacingly hovered in the air, buzzing with deadly potential.

“I believed it when the Crown announced Luna dead because everypony in Canterlot could feel the explosion that supposedly took out the Hive,” Trixie commented. “But now I wonder if it was this place. Must have been a shipment to build another Spire.”

Reality and anomaly had lost the boundaries betwixt them; the sky above us changed, failing to decide on afternoon, sunset or midnight. Misplaced shadows on the ground became tears into the night itself—from the cracks in the ground, stars and nebulas gazed indifferently at us, the coldness of the void breathing through the gates to the cosmos.

Pain lanced through my crystals as the magic tapestry deteriorated into one huge distortion. Wire moaned, echoing the aches that assaulted her horn; Trixie had to fight her second shadow as the chains betwixt them had loosened; blood dripped from the girls’ muzzles.

An eternity seemed to pass before the twisted railroads came to an abrupt end, but I wish they hadn’t.

Like a compass, massive slivers of arcanium forever stuck in the air pointed at the rotten heart of Dodge City that ripped reality apart with each malignant beat.

I gazed into an ever-shifting broken kaleidoscope that simultaneously showed each time of day, each state of the town. When my eyes tried to focus on the centre of that phantasmagory, static started to claim my vision. Protuberances of magic emanated from that hole in the time and space continuum, and they felt… feral—primordial and deadly.

And out of that warping refracting chaos, something lunged at us.

Searing pain shot through my horn when I yanked the girls out of harm’s way. Sand and arcanium exploded where we were mere moments ago and from the cloud of dust, a horror rose.

A constantly shifting mass of distorted flesh, rotting and yet still living, clinging to the deformed bones and long sharp shards of arcanium, both seamlessly lodged deep into that congestion of decaying tissue. A single featherless pegasus wing stuck out of that mass, twitching miserably; an array of unicorn horns branched with tumorous growths like those of a deer; the massive carcass of some former resident of Hayseed Swamp had its jagged ribs protrude from the distended skin into the sky; amidst all that putridness, a bare skull of a buffalo sneered.

The sight paralysed me, leaving me to helplessly stare at the towering form wobble madly as it shambled towards us, gaining speed at a terrifying pace.

Something heavy and metal struck my head hard enough to make it ring.

Flower looked at me with wide eyes, shaking my shoulders; I realized that somepony was screaming my name. Delight held me by the withers and desperately tugged on my heavy body.

Scrambling on my hooves, sending ashes and sand all around me, I made off after the girls.

We dashed along the curving line of trains and their wreckages with no direction in mind other than away from that thing. Innumerable mouths moaned and screeched from behind me, flesh squelched and I felt the heavy thuds.

Yet we slowed down—Dodge City had already taken a heavy toll on the girls and that burst of adrenaline could offer only so much energy.

They needed time.

I came to a sudden halt, turning to face the manifestation of the Junction’s malignancy. Ignoring the agony splitting my skull apart, I funnelled all my magic into my horn.

The mass of putrid flesh exploded in a fountain of fire and gore, stumbling back, stopped in its inevitable onslaught. A mortifying wail came from thousands of throats cut into the air.

I missed.

Rainbow rocketed across the ever-changing sky, the turbine of her suit roaring fiercely and guns smoking. Yet before I had a chance to rejoice, somepony—Flower—crashed into my shoulder, sending us both spinning.

With deafening thunder cracks echoing in the perpetually crumbling realities around us, Rainbow’s guns fired, tearing into the rotting hulk. A twisted skinless decaying limb, a claw of fused bone and arcanium whistled right above us.

I grabbed Flower from in front of me, there the collision brought her, dragging her back at the same time as a ghostly spectre of the limb that just missed us followed its corporeal counterpart.

She quietly yelped when the shadowy claw passed right through her and became limp in my hooves.

The howl of the abomination drowned out my cry as Rainbow fired at it again. However, the heavy weaponry failed to stop the monstrosity this time—using its claw to propel itself forward, it left me only a few seconds to draw upon all the magic I had to envelop everypony in the purple glow.

Author's Note

Special thanks to Jay Tarrant.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this story so far.

If you notice any mistakes sneaked in through the editing, let me know.

Stay awesome.