Never Going Back Again

by NorrisThePony

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, Science Fiction, Horror, Princess Celestia, Twilight Sparkle, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 26422

Celestia is lost. She needs to get home.

Celestia is lost. She needs to get home.

This story was written for the 2023 FimFic Science Fiction Contest. It placed somewhere.

Published 2023-03-30 19:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-04-02 18:54:52 UTC

[1114-12-01//11:59:59] -- [̴1115-̴0̷4̸-̵0̸9̵/̸/̷1̸8̴:̶2̸7̵:̴3̸2̸] (R̷E̵S̶E̶T̵,̷ ̶E̷N̶G̸A̶G̵E̴)

I̷

“Beep, beep, beep, boop. Beep, beep, beep, boop…”

“Y’know, Lotus, y’can let the EKG handle that for you if you want.”

A chuckle. “I know, but I’m just so bored!”

“You’re a dork, new-hire. Y’know that?”

“You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Celestia’s eyes were opened wide, but the room around her took sometime to come into proper focus. A patient’s room, with soft, yellowish electrical light shining down upon her. Not daylight, but obviously intended to simulate it.

There was a window behind her, too, though a heavy blind had been pulled over it. Tugging it up a little bit revealed an inky night sky and a dozen gently twinkling stars. Much to her surprise, however, the world around her seemed to have no bottom to it, simply more stars beneath them as well as above.

Gently, Celestia clambered to her hooves to go meet the ponies who she had heard outside. Somehow, she’d already had two names bouncing around in her head since she had first heard them speaking upon waking. Without much of an idea how, or why, or who they even were--a distant part of her memory knew that Lotus Leaf and Codex Haze were waiting for her on the other side.

The door into the patient’s room had been left open, but when Celestia peered through it she could see that Lotus and Codex were both facing away from her and instead peering at a flickering CRT monitor together.

“Beep… beep, beep…” Lotus was saying. “Boop!” She extended a hoof to gently but firmly prod at Codex's snout, resulting in an indignant scrunch and growl from the stallion.

“Ouch! Watch it!”

“Oh come on. That hurt. Seriously? That buckin’ hurt? Damned pussy.”

Celestia cleared her throat gently.

“Oh! Oh, she’s up! You’re up!” Lotus wheeled around quickly, a wide smile on the bat pony’s face. “Good morning, Celestia! Remember me?”

“Lotus Leaf.”

“Righto! Remember this ugly fella?”

Celestia managed a little smile. “He’s not ugly, and his name is Codex Haze.”

“Good! Okay!” Lotus was grinning ear to ear, and she turned to rattle off something onto the keyboard in front of her. “Hungry, Princess? ‘Kin have Twiley nuke somethin’ for ya to eat if ya want.”

Celestia shook her head. “I’m… fine, for now.”

“Probably feelin’ a little fuzzy, though, right?” Codex asked, taking a step closer to Celestia. He had a glass of water in his left wing, and he gently passed it over to Celestia, who accepted it gratefully in her telekinesis. “How’s your memory doing? What’s the last thing you’ve got in there?”

“...I was here. The… the ship was… poorly lit. Very little power. I think I might have passed out.”

“Right. Well, er. First thing's first…” Codex began. “That… ‘very little power?’ And the relative weakness and amnesia you’re feeling? We’ve had some time to analyze it and… it looks like we were hit pretty badly by a meteorite storm. Knocked out a few of our solar panels, and basically swamped our power. Twiley panicking and waking us up was a good call on her part.”

That seemed vaguely familiar to her. Low power, and the sparking of something outside the ship—some misfiring electrical system lighting up the infinite void. But… something was distinctly off about what she was being told.

Suddenly, looking from the pegasus stallion to the thestral, she recalled a haunting visual of the latter’s mangled, decomposed corpse.

The glass of water fell from her telekinetic grip, but Lotus was quick to scrunch her snout and dive half-way across the room to catch it.

There was surprisingly little fanfare. Like they’d been expecting the reaction.

“What is it?” came Codex’s surprisingly calm, single-word question. “What else do you remember, Princess?”

“You two. You were…” Celestia winced as the visual refused to leave her mind. “Dead. You had both died. I was alone.”

Lotus and Codex shared a glance, as the bat pony gently returned the half-spilled glass of water onto the end-table beside Celestia. They held the look for several seconds, as though having a wordless conversation with each other.

“We… had been hoping for a lead-in to that, Princess…” Lotus eventually said, quietly.

“We imagine that was… frightening for you to see,” Codex added. “But we promise there’s a logical explanation.”

“Okay.” Celestia’s horn lit, and she once again attempted to levitate the glass, taking a shaky sip of the cool water without breaking eye contact with the two ponies. “Let me hear it, please. In no unclear terms. I can handle the truth.”

Codex gave a single nod. “If you say so. Y-you… remember where you awakened, right? The last time we were… well, here? I imagine it was alarming enough that you probably do.”

Celestia closed her eyes. The memories were a little faded, and distant, but they still seemed to be there to some extent. Terrifying, blaring alarms. The shimmering, wretched pupa she had awaken in, submerged entirely in the yellow-ish orange fluid that had spilled out all onto the metal grated floor as she had struck it, sputtering and weary and blinded and…

“Yes, I remember.”

“Okay. Did… did you see any of the other, uh… pods?” Codex continued. “I don’t imagine you did, but if you would’ve been afforded the opportunity to look more closely, you might have seen that they looked like they were growing… well, something. Like embryos.”

Celestia felt a lump forming in her throat, but shakily, she nodded her head. “Okay…”

“That was… us. The ‘us’ you’re seeing now,” Codex said. To Celestia, the words seemed… oddly calculated, despite their inherent absurdity. As though the stallion had had this conversation a hundred times before, over and over, always in slightly different contexts but always for the same end-goal.

“But I saw you.” Celestia looked to Lotus. “I’m… not trying to be rude, dear, but you were most certainly dead.”

“And decomposed, too, ye?” The bat pony tilted her head. Regarding the question with a level of curiosity that Celestia would have called ‘cute’. Hardly a fitting reaction to being informed of the discovery of one’s own decomposed corpse. “Like, real-real bad? Even though I shouldnt’a bin?”

“Yes.”

“That would make sense,” Codex said. “See, Twiley had to wake us up a full year into our embryonic recovery cycle. She didn’t have a choice--power was failing, she didn’t know if she’d get a chance to wake us up again, so she… well, I guess an AI can’t really ‘panic’, but she did the AI equivalent and woke us up while she still had power to do it. But we weren’t ready. Weak, falling apart. Bodies half-made.”

“But why? I don’t understand. How is that possible?”

“It’s…” Codex grit his teeth. He looked around the room for a moment, as though searching for some prop he might use as guidance. His eyes rested upon the glass of water on the end table, and Celestia could have sworn she had seen a little light-bulb illuminate in the stallion’s skull. “W-where do you think we’re getting our water from, way out here, Celestia? Considering how far we are from everything else? How would you do it?”

Celestia blinked. A rather strange aside, but she had to assume the stallion had some point in this. “I would assume it would be recycled. Body fluids, sweat, urine, et cetera. Filtered and recycled, essentially ensuring a near-infinite loop of available fluid for consumption.”

Codex looked impressed. “Exactly. Well, for us, it’s… kinda similar, I guess. We only pass the Tear for about two months, out of a trip that takes a few years each time. It’s… less resource intensive to just… break us apart, and put us back together again, when we’re needed, then it is to have to keep us alive forever.”

“‘Specially considerin’ we lil’ ponies aren’t really built to last like you are, Princess.” Lotus added. “Gotta find another way for us short-lives.”

“That’s… that’s horrible.” Celestia gawked. Not just upon considering such a horrific fate, but in the casual, comforted way that Lotus herself had referred to it. As though they were as disposable a resource as the water they were drinking. ‘Little ponies’. To Celestia, they seemed anything but.

Lotus shrugged. “It really ain’t. We wouldn’t be doin’ it if we didn’t know what we had to do. Equestria needs us, and that’s enough for us. It’s just efficient.”

“It’s only horrible if you give meaning to it.” Codex added. To Celestia, he seemed a little less… comfortable with the consideration, compared to his bat pony partner, but he attempted a small smile all the same. “There really isn’t one. It’s like Lotus said. It’s just what’s the most efficient. In a way, its granted us an immortality that most other ponies would only dream of. Dying again and again for the right thing. That’s… if you DO bother giving meaning to it, that is.”

Celestia exhaled. There was… another question, prickling upon the edges of her brain, but the expertly concealed, haunted-expression of the pegasus stallion bode her drive it down, for now. She wasn’t even entirely sure she could handle the answer quite yet, despite her own assertions to the contrary.

Instead, she settled on a different one.

“How long have we been doing this?”

“Uhhh…” Codex blinked. “Lotus? What loop are we on? Twenty two? Twenty four? Somewhere like that?”

Lotus frowned. “Gods, I ain’t even been checking, anymore.” Her hooves rattled against the keyboard for a moment. “Twenty-four is right. With the average length of a loop lastin’ ‘bout 1200 Equestrian days. Time distortion closer to the Tear is a lil’ funky, though, so it’s probably been longer back home.”

“Three and a half years.” Celestia breathed. “That’d be… that’d be almost eighty. Eighty years.”

Celestia hadn’t even a complete idea of what it was she had been doing, but to suddenly be informed she had been doing it for such a long time? To suddenly learn that she was approaching a century of repetition, when still Equestria and Twilight and the blue skies of home were still so fresh seeming in her mind?

Beside her, Lotus seemed to have read Celestia’s look of shock, for she gave a little chuckle in a vain but well intentioned effort to lighten the mood somewhat. “Hey, well. We prolly look better than most other hundred-n-ten year old’s ye know, though, eh?”

Celestia supposed that was true enough.

Over the next two days, Celestia’s recovery occurred both gradually and gracefully. It was time that seemed to exist in vivid contrast to the last time she had been awoken. The last ‘loop’, as she had grown accustomed to hearing Lotus and Codex refer to each traversal along the same orbital pattern surrounding the Chaos Magic Tear.

While confined largely to the patient’s room, it was time that Celestia was at the very least afforded to grow a bit more acquainted with the two ponies she was sharing the ship with.

Lotus Leaf was relatively young--barely twenty-eight--and despite the bat pony’s quirky, devil-may-care attitude, she had cheerfully boasted that she had graduated near the top of her class in a prestigious physician’s class with a minor on aeronautical engineering. She couldn’t fly a ship to save her life, she’d claimed, but she could sure as Tartarus steer one. Celestia did her best not to mention the paradox.

Codex, meanwhile, had been trained in the operation and engineering of aeronautical vessels for seemingly his entire life. He’d been a radio-operator and maintenance technician aboard the first airships that had ventured into Equestria’s mesophere, a part of the crew that had launched the first equine-helmed expeditions to Luna’s Moon, back in the Dawnclimber Missions of 1069.

But besides their commendations, the real reason for their presence soon became rather obvious to Celestia. She had suspected it strongly before, through her interactions with them, and the more she got to know them the more she convinced herself of the fact. They were, simply put, exactly the sort of pony that Celestia herself would have selected for such a dangerous and soul-crushingly lonely mission. Lotus’s bubbly optimism, Codex’s calm, collected demeanor in the face of such an existentially humbling fate…

It took a certain sort of pony to remain loyal in such a time and place.

That, of course, was assuming they were telling Celestia the truth at all.

While Celestia recovered, so too did the ship surrounding her. The critical power failures that had been plaguing them the last time seemed less intense, though it was a little difficult to tell without leaving the confines of the patient’s room. The corridors outside of them were still kept dark to conserve power, with Codex and Lotus both having to rely on their flashlights to get around when they left to go operate the various inner-workings of the ship or return with food for Celestia. They ate and drank together, in no small part because it was simply more resource-efficient to only have to keep one node of the ship heated and lit at a time.

“Is energy always such a pressing concern?” Celestia had asked, on the last day before she was slated to make the move into the rest of the ship proper.

“It’s… been getting worse, as of late.” Codex admitted. Lotus was elsewhere in the ship, off tending to some affair or another, leaving Celestia alone with the pegasus. “The solar panels are old… and they don’t seem to be getting the light they used to. And those are the ones I managed to salvage, before, well…” He shuddered a little. “Let’s just say it’s a good thing for the me now that the me then made it into an airlock before he, uh. Hit the wall.”

“It happened to me, too,” Celestia said softly. The memory was only partly there...of how she had lost consciousness on the bridge. Hit the wall. “I… thought it was a nightmare. But it wasn’t.”

Codex shook his head sadly. “Anyways, the equipment is dated, slow to respond. Keep in mind, while we’re gestating, it’s lying dormant for two to four years. Even the body-fluid filtration system is… in need of renewal.”

“We weren’t meant to be up here this long, were we?”

Codex went silent for a moment, a heavy sigh leaving the stallion. “I think the original assumption was that we’d be heading home in a few loops. We never put an end-point to this mission. ‘As long as it needs to last, until the Tear is closed.’ But… nothing is built to last this long.”

“Not even ponies.”

Codex gave a little laugh. “No. Not even ponies.”

Several hours after her conversation with Codex, Celestia was finally able to leave the infirmary, and venture back out into the darkened corridors of the station proper. It was a rather significant comfort, however, to be trudging her way through them feeling as though she had a proper degree of strength to do so, and shouldered on either side by Lotus and Codex.

Emergency lights had been activated throughout the corridor, dim but at the very least present. Something besides an endless sprawl of darkness was better than nothing at all, Celestia supposed.

“There’s a few more lil’ exercises we’re gunna have ya do first, Princess,” Lotus was saying as she trotted along, a few steps in front of Celestia and Codex, her flashlight’s beam dancing a little as the bat pony seemed to have a small skip to her step. As though seeing Celestia up and moving had given the young pony something to be particularly content about.

It was strange to see such a bundle of energy in such a grim setting, but Celestia supposed it wasn’t an unwelcome presence within the quieted and still and empty halls.

“We still have about… four weeks? To getcha back up to strength, ‘fore we reach firin’ range to the Tear. So there ain’t much of a rush, at least.”

“It all builds up to this, hrm?” Celestia asked. “One shot at the tear? A single attempt to close the thing, and then not another until our orbit aligns again?”

“No, no,” Codex said. “We’re usually in range for a couple of days. We fire the retros when we get there, slows us down a bit. But there’s only so much we can do without wasting fuel, y’know?”

Celestia paused, tilting her head. “We can’t stop completely?”

Codex shook his head. “Goodness, no. We stop close to it, and we’d risk putting ourselves into the gravity well of the Tear. We orbit at a safe distance away from it, where we can cast at it without risking getting pulled in and, y’know. Atomized.”

“Getting atomized seems most non-ideal, yes,” Celestia said, frowning ever-so-slightly. “Fuel is a finite resource, too, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Meaning, one day… one loop, we will run out of fuel for the… ‘retro thrusters.’”

“Y-yeah.” Codex bit his lip, rustling his left wing. “But what’s the point in any of this if we don’t keep on hopin’ that the tear’ll close before that happens, huh?”

“What about fuel for a return?”

Codex exhaled. “Well. Priority of the mission is making sure there’s a home we can come back to.”

I̵I̷

Twiley was the name of the ship’s artificial intelligence.

Celestia had found such out without having to ask, partly because of context clues given to her by Codex and Lotus and partly because the AI itself came online on the third day of their waking. Codex had been working diligently to repair the panels that had been damaged during the meteorite strikes that had occurred (apparently three years ago), and little by little the lights and heating for the vessel came back to life in some capacity.

Never a lot, of course. They were running on what they could afford to run, even still. Only lighting rooms that needed to be lit, and heating rooms that contained things that would be ruined if they froze.

The management of the direction of the power itself was performed by the ship’s AI. She was gathered with Codex Haze when they booted her up—the AI itself requiring its very own node to contain its circuitry-based-brain. Up until now it had been on what Codex called a ‘Limited Safe’ mode, wherein the AI prioritized the crew above anything else and discarded concerns of greater ship-wide electricity, engine functions, and waste-water conversion. Keeping the pods gestating was, in the event of a total emergency, the only thing that mattered. Even if it was keeping them alive only to wake to an increasingly depleted ship.

Now, though, they had enough power to ease Twiley out of her ‘Limited Safe Mode’, and instead redirect her focus back towards ship management.

The room was directly in the middle of the rounded centrifuge, which meant that the artificial gravity generated by the centrifugal spinning was weaker, and their bodies thusly felt lighter. One had to be careful that a light skip did not send them careening against the hard metal walls of the node.

“Do you want the honours, Celly?” Codex had asked her, motioning with a little nod at the main breaker switch. She did. A dull hum flooded the room as she gripped it in her telekinesis and threw it, and the node began to glow with electrical lights slowly fading back into being.

“That should do it!” Codex said excitedly, shutting the panel for the breaker. “C’mon, we can chat with her at the console inside.”

She followed him back towards proper gravity, to a panel on the side of the entrance to the node. It looked not dissimilar to a telephone booth, something which Celestia found mildly amusing. She supposed convenience and simplicity went hoof-in-hoof. It was little more than two black telephone receivers, which were connected to a panel of dials and switches and a frequency indicator that was reading 9999 kHz.

There was a pause of several moments, as both Codex and Celestia simply stared at the communications panel. Then, to Celestia’s surprise, it rang. Like it really was a telephone! It even sounded like one. Codex’s expression lit up from tense anticipation to near-elation when it did, and he picked up the receiver only to hoof it over to Celestia.

She didn’t know what to do at first… how to go about communicating with an artificial intelligence. And so, she settled on the most basic thing she could think of.

“Hello?”

“Hiya, Princess!”

Twilight. The voice was unmistakably her, to such an extent that it just about took her breath away.

“…Twilight?”

“Is that what you want to call me?”

“It’s who you are! You sound just like her!”

A little giggle, which… sounded distinctly stilted and synthesized. Subtle enough that if one had not known Twilight they might not have noticed. But for all the decades they had spent together, Celestia felt confident not even a changeling could fool her on the sound of her faithful student’s voice.

“Heh, well. I’m BASED off of her, in voice and mannerisms, but I’ll make no claims to actually being her. Twiley, at your service.”

As ‘Twilight’ continued talking, it became clearer to Celestia that what she was hearing was… not quite her student after all. It was more like it was her voice, strung together from a thousand instances of her speaking, and reconstituted together based on the rhythm and cadence of her speech.

“Oh! Thanks for booting me up, by the way!” Twiley continued. “Running on safe mode is weird. Like you’re stuck only thinking a few thoughts. I can see here that I’ve been offline for nine hundred and ninety nine…”

She went silent for a moment, and then;

“Er. Well, that database is scuffed. Just showing me a buncha nines. Long time! Been offline for a long time!”

Codex—who had taken the second of the two receivers, piped up. “Our panels got hit bad by a meteorite storm. We’ve had to rely on auxillary power until about two days ago, Twiley.”

“Ah, so that’s what that was. I saw the readings spike up, and so I gave your pods a bit of a jolt. Early, though… I hope it wasn’t….”

“It was pretty bad, Twiley, but you made the right call. I got one of the panel’s working before I went out, so. You probably saved the mission by waking us up when you did.”

“Phew. Okay. I’ve been worrying about that for years. Hard not to, when it’s one of three thoughts I have in Safe Mode. Hey, nice last second repairwork, Codex. I, uh… is Lotus listening?”

“Lotus is, and I quote, ‘going to fly laps around this nightmare-in-space to try and forget this donkeyshit.’”

Twiley let out another synthesized chuckle, though her voice went grave before too long. “I, uh. Sapped a bit of...her, so that your bodily constitution would be a bit stronger. N-nothing personal, but, er. You are the mechanic. And I figured power was vital, and she only had to be alive long enough to stabilize you and the Princess, so…”

Celestia blinked. Codex did, too, and he looked to Celestia with an expression of blooming horror.

“Can…. Can you tell her that I’m sorry? It wasn’t an easy call at all, and it’s…. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I had to reconstitute her, and…”

“I’ll tell her,” Celestia spoke up. “I… have my doubts she’s going to hold it against you, Twiley.”

“Thanks, Celestia. How was… how was your last loop?”

“It felt more like my first,” Celestia admitted. “I don’t remember any of the others.”

“She has long term amnesia, and some brain damage,” Codex said sadly. “We had to use the Science Tape again.”

“O-oh…” Celestia could have seen Twiley wilt, if she was really there at all. “I… made a pretty tough loop for all three of you, didn’t I?”

“You made the best out of a horrid situation, dear,” Celestia said. “I don’t remember how I got back into the cryostasis pod after I blacked out, so I presume you did that. Thank you.”

“Oh… ah. You’re…welcome?” A strained chuckle. “I, uh… I really need to be focusing on rerouting the power coils in the Harmonic Node right now, you two… Its been nice catching up, though!”

“Sure thing, Twiley,” Codex said. “I’m gonna be back out there with the arc-welder in a bit. Got four weeks to get the rest of those panels up, so I’d best get moving. Later, Twiley.”

“Here if you two need me, just give me a ring.”

There didn’t come any further response, and so both ponies promptly hung up their respective receivers, and Codex let out a lengthy exhale.

“Buck, Twiley…” he shook his head sadly. “Gods, I need to give that bloody bat a hug or something. Can’t believe she did that…”

Celestia couldn’t really think of a reply that felt fitting to the revelation that their ship’s artificial intelligence had seen fit to butcher one of its passengers for the benefit of another. Celestia couldn’t even disagree with the suggestion. Simply wince at the inherent horror therein.

Four weeks was, as it turned out, an ample amount of time for Celestia to become a bit more acquainted with her current state of affairs. Life on the Station eventually approached something resembling a routine, as strange and foreign of one as it perhaps was at first. It was time spent in isolation of a rather perfect sort, with the three ponies eachother's only company for the apparent duration of their expedition.

Codex drew. He had sketchbook upon sketchbook filled with graphite drawings, and did so using pencils that had been whittled down to stubs. Another humbling reminder of the longevity of their eternal journey, as he slowly but surely trudged through blank-page after blank-page of his sketchbooks. Whether he would run out of paper or pencil first, Celestia supposed she would see at one point of her life, much as she dreaded the prospect.

Lotus had claimed to have read every single book they had packed for the expedition three times over, and Celestia believed her. She instead predominantly devoted her time to exercise, flying low through the halls of the station or doing wing-ups in a gym-area of shadowed, dusty, long-forgotten equipment that the ship no longer had the power to energize.

Celestia spent her own time watching videotapes.

There were, as she soon discovered, hundreds of them. All dated, stretching back for decades, until the labels on them were too scuffed and blurred to even be legible. The oldest of the tapes had become so distorted through constant rewatches that they would usually degrade into distortion and static after a few minutes.

It was as Codex had said. Nothing was built to last forever. Even the recorded memory of things had to fade eventually.

Every single tape was a recorded conversation with home. According to Codex, they were transmitted once each loop, as the orbits of Equestria and the satellite intersected at just the right moment to allow it. Then, they continued on, Celestia on one track, Equestria on the other.

Twilight on the other.

Most of the tapes were between the two of them, after all. Celestia could hear her own voice during their conversations, though she couldn’t dredge the memories from her mind. It seemed that the last loop, in which she had been awoken earlier than intended, had placed a firm reset on her own memory of her situation.

Regardless, the bulk of the tapes featured much of the same, though Celestia found herself watching them obsessively all the same.

The further back in time she went, the more the specter of digital distortion and degradation consumed the younger version of Twilight Sparkle. The more recent tapes instead featured a mare who looked the part of her Twilight, but much, much older than Celestia had been expecting. It wasn’t as though she was some weary old mare, yet the youthful spirit that had hung about Twilight for much of her early 100’s had matured into a taller mare standing with a prouder stature and a newfound patience in her muted smile. She was a different sort of beauty that Celestia had wanted more than anything else to have been able to watch Twilight grow into, together, over the many long years they would face together.

In most of the tapes, Twilight was standing in the throne room in Canterlot, but the old room typically looked far different from how Celestia had remembered it. Cables and long strands of electrical wiring snaked their way up towards the ceiling behind Twilight, and much of the back wall had been converted into what looked like a server-room, separated by a sturdy-looking glass wall. Whether the throne room always looked like this now, or it had simply been converted into such temporarily for each transmission, Celestia could only guess.

In the background of much of the recordings, though difficult to see in the grainy, poor-resolutiuon tapes, Celestia could watch a separate narrative of the ancient city of Canterlot proudly and hastily moving rapidly into the future. Skyscrapers rising into the sky, pulsating electrical light illuminating the city during the tapes that had been recorded at night-time. The growth of the city where Celestia had spent the most of her life relegated to a barely legible background detail visible over the withers of her dearest Twilight Sparkle.

In the tapes, they talked of everything and anything. The surviving fragments of the earliest tapes spoke of a Twilight still growing into the role of a ruler without Celestia by her side. But the more recent ones instead depicted a mare who had risen to the role with such a strong degree of confidence and competence that Celestia found herself pridefully tearing up listening to her speak of the various political affairs of an Equestria that history had already buried decades ago.

The more Celestia progressed through the tapes, the more she became aware of a terrifying reality--Twilight had been a ruler by herself for far, far longer, than she had ever been a ruler with Celestia.

“I wish I could understand why you keep watching these, Celestia.”

Celestia jerked her head around, at the sound of Twilight Sparkle’s voice sounding out from somewhere that was not the flickering CRT screen before her.

She was hovering behind Celestia, projected down from a spherical panel mounted atop the tiled ceiling of the station. Flickering in and out of her sarcophagus of scanlines, a dusty nest of decades of dead cells swirling like smokey vapour all about the holographic Twilight looming above her.

“That is to say, it, er.” The hologram let out a little digital chuckle. “Doesn’t compute. Beep boop, error message number seven.”

Celestia managed a smile herself. “It’s good to see you again, Twiley.”

“Aw, thanks! I’d give you a hug if I could, Celestia. You’re looking a lot better then the last time I saw you. S-sorry about that, by the way…”

“Hardly your fault. You did not have much of a choice.”

“I suppose not.” Twiley smiled, and then nodded her head at the flickering CRT, frozen in a torrent of static and distortion. “You always do this, and you never seem to feel good after. Why?”

Celestia took a moment to contemplate the question. “Because… I suppose I’d rather feel poorly while thinking of Twilight Sparkle than not think about her at all.”

“I see. But you do have your communication with her coming up, eventually. In approximately one hundred and two days, actually.”

“Yes, I suppose that is true. That is some comfort.” Celestia exhaled. “Twiley, may I ask something?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Lotus and Codex told me that they are… recycled beings. Grown, here, in the station, from their own flesh, again and again.”

“Which they are, yes.” Came Twiley’s calculated, largely impersonal response. “It’s more efficient than keeping a full crew alive for such a long time.”

“Am I the same as them?”

Twiley’s expression fell. To Celestia, she seemed to be gauging the benefits and the pitfalls of answering the question truthfully. “Yeah. You are.”

“I’m not Celestia, then. Not really.”

“That isn’t what I meant. Of course you’re her.”

Celestia shook her head. “No. I’m not. How many times have I crumbled apart, as I did before? The last time I awoke? How can I be the same pony if that has happened so many times?”

Twiley was silent for several moments. The hologram flickered, as the computer seemed to be calculating its response.

“I wouldn’t dream of telling Lotus or Codex that they are no longer themselves,” Twiley said eventually. “Would you?”

Celestia stared back at the hologram, opening her mouth with a response and closing it when none immediately came. Eventually, she exhaled a lengthy breath from her snout and shook her head. “No, I would not.”

“Then there’s your response,” Twiley replied. “Celestia, look at who you’re asking. You seriously think an artificial intelligence designed to mimic a real living pony has any right making nuanced claims about the specifics of identity?”

“I suppose I just wanted some confirmation, is all,” Celestia said. She stared into the flickering light of the paused tape. With a small sigh, she rose to her hooves, wearily ejected the tape, and returned it to its sleeve with the hundreds of other tapes.

I̸I̷I̶

Celestia was standing with Lotus Leaf, looking out through a wide-panel of reinforced glass at the looming sight of the Chaos Magic Tear. From up close, the Tear seemed even more terrifying than it had from their vantage deep in space. Celestia could see through into…

Well, it didn’t look like there was much of anything tangible besides uncompromising destruction, through the Chaos Magic Tear. It crackled and sparked with a never ending torrent of electricity, roiling over upon itself like a bubbling ocean.

“Ready, Princess?” Lotus asked. The bat pony, like Celestia, was already wearing a thick and heavy spacesuit that would (Celestia hoped) protect the two from the merciless force of space and the nearby Chaos Magic crackling through the air. Their wings protruded from the suit through separate openings, encased in a sort of rubber that allowed for mobility whilst keeping them shielded from the vacuum of space. The only thing left for them to apply was their helmets, which looked like giant glass fishbowls to Celestia, though she was assured that they were made of a far stronger type of reinforced plastic and not actual glass.

The two were both standing in the airlock leading out into space. It was the one hall that Celestia hadn’t investigated, during her first awakening, which truly was little more than the airlock and then a long metal conduit too narrow for a pony to travel through, that connected the two sections of the ship.

Furthermore, they were doing so without the benefit of artificial gravity. Indeed, they had stopped the centrifugal movement of the ship several days prior, in order to acquaint themselves with the feeling of moving about without it. It had taken Celestia some time to acquaint herself, but surprisingly not as long as she would have assumed of herself.

She supposed that somewhere in her brain, the training she would have received before embarking on this mission still remained.

With a single nod to Lotus’s inquiry, Celestia levitated the helmet over herself, having to duck her head a little so her horn did not strike it as she put it on. A faint hiss sounded out as pressurized clamps sealed it with the rest of the suit.

“Alright. I’ll get your oxygen hose on first, Princess. Then you do me.”

Celestia could hear the bat pony fiddling about with something behind her, Lotus’s hooves sounding out against the helmet a few times, before a sharp hiss rung out and a sudden rush of synthetic-tasting air flowed into Celestia’s helmet. Looking behind her, she could see the thick, reinforced piping spooled up against one side of the airlock, which then connected to two sets of oxygen tanks mounted side by side.

She attached Lotus’s hose, too, who responded with a smile and hoof held up in an affirming gesture.

“Hearin’ us okay, Codex?”

“10-4, new-hire,” came Codex’s reply, the stallion back in the ship’s bridge monitoring the two of them with what little equipment the ship still had working. “Ready when you two are.”

“Just a hop, skip, and a jump, Princess.” Lotus smiled, and turned to open the airlock. She grunted as she twisted the heavy mechanism open, and so Celestia lit her horn and gave the little pony a helping hoof. Together, they eased the airlock open, and Celestia found herself staring out into the reaches of space with nothing but the helmet over her head dividing them.

“We’ll take it slow, Celly,” Lotus’s voice came crackling into Celestia’s ear from the intercom. “You let me know if you wanna stop, okay?”

Celestia nodded. “Thank you, Lotus.”

Gently, Lotus clambered out of the airlock, hooking a hoof around a long metal railing that seemed to run the circumference and length of the vessel. Celestia soon followed her out, her eyes going wide as she felt her body continue on moving without her, momentum continuing to pull her along despite the relatively small step out of the airlock she had taken. She, too, gripped onto the railing, her horn instinctively lighting to cast a telekinetic field around herself and cease her movement.

“Good job, Celly. Now, our destination is across from us.” Lotus pointed a hoof along the metal conduit connecting the segments of the ship. “We’re travelin’ along there. Pay attention to your oxygen cable, make sure it ain’t gettin’ snagged on anythin’. If you have to disconnect it, you’re headin’ to the closest airlock. Don’t panic--you’ll have a few minutes of breathable oxygen still in your helmet, so just stay calm and get to safety while you still can.”

There was nothing more to be said, and no reason to say so with oxygen a commodity to manage. Celestia and Lotus both started out across the conduit towards the other section of the ship, which Celestia was able to see in its entirety for the first time since she had awoken. It was large—larger than the rest of the ship, it seemed, though most of the surface area seemed uninhabitable. The solar panels seemed to take up most of the area—there were six of them in total, and they all stretched out like mighty limbs away from the narrow row of three separate nodes. The panels themselves seemed to be greatly damaged—some were shorter than others and broken off in places, as though something had struck them at great speeds. Considering the earlier hull damage they had observed, such seemed unfortunately likely to Celestia. If an asteroid or a bit of space debris had the misfortune of getting caught in the same orbital well they were in, then Celestia imagined the two would collide at least on occasion, given the repetitious frequency of their respective journeys.

A large cannon-like device was mounted on the rear of the segment, and if Celestia squinted she could see that it was being gradually rotated to face the tear.

She knew without confirmation that such was Codex’s doing. She could practically hear the colt’s eager, frantic typing, from within the bridge of the ship, as he rushed to ensure it was ready for when they arrived.

Meanwhile, Celestia found herself nearly taken aback by the horrific beauty of the sprawling tapestry of space all around them. It was like swimming in the deepest depths of the ocean, the entire world one of motionlessness. Suspended in a void of pure, perfect silence, save for the uneasy rhythm of her breathing and—

“...Ack! Epona’s sopping mother-cuckin’ cunt!” The bat pony beside her chittered out, as she miscalculated her trajectory and collided with the conduit. “S-sorry! Ignore me!”

Celestia stopped, stifling a chuckle and lighting her horn to help reorient Lotus, who was frantically kicking about trying to right herself after her incident. She exhaled gratefully, a sheepish expression on her face.

The rest of the journey carried on without incident, until they were both at the far side of the conduit and looking at the airlock together. It had iced up rather significantly--a whole loop having gone by without anypony to clear it surely must have been the culprit.

“We’re at the airlock of the Elemental Node, Codex,” Lotus said as soon as they arrived, the bat pony detaching a cable from her suit and clipping it onto the railing.

“Despite your best intentions, it seems.” Came Codex’s reply from the bridge.

Lotus laughed. “Oh, git bucked, birdbrain.”

Celestia chuckled, too. She was starting to like these ponies more and more. “Move back aways, dear. I’ll melt the ice with magic.”

Lotus did just that, kicking off the side of the airlock and wrapping a hoof around the cable she had attached to the railing, which allowed her to watch from several meters away safely. Celestia’s heat magic made quick work of the iced-up airlock, and soon enough the two of them were carrying out an inverse-repeat of earlier.

Celestia was the first to enter the second part of the station. She did so with her horn ablaze with light, for the tiny corridors were almost completely black within, save for fragments of Lotus’s flashlight beam that were able to percolate through the icy windows. The oxygen cable connected to the back of her helmet was fed through a sealed valve at the top of the airlock.

“Should be oxygen inside of here,” Lotus said, as soon as the airlock was closed and depressurized. She verified such on the control panel, before lifting off her helmet and taking a long, relieved breath. “Mighty fine space-walkin’ there, Princess.”

Celestia smiled, and lifted off her own helmet. “Thank you, dear.”

The inside of the ‘Elemental Node’, as Lotus had called it, was rather claustrophobic. Most of the walls were dominated by electrical breaker panels for the outside solar panels, with a dozen different circuit breakers for seemingly every other function of the ship. Celestia imagined the conduit that had run between the two was populated mostly by electrical wires and other tubes for the oxygen.

“Harmony Cannon’s that way.” Lotus pointed down the corridor with a hoof. “I’m gonna go throw the breaker and git some lights on in ‘ere. Meet'cha over there.”

Several minutes later, both ponies were at the far end of the final node along the corridor. Celestia was looking down the barrel of the cannon, which was still in the process of being angled towards the Chaos Magic Tear. The panel in front of them flickered to life as electrical power flowed into it, technology and magic joining together and the cannon starting to glow ever-so-slightly.

She gawked in amazement when, mounted on the console itself, she could make out the tell-tale shapes of the Elements of Harmony themselves. They were embedded into the console in a star-shaped pattern, in their ancient, pearl-like forms instead of the necklaces the Bearers had worn.

“How am I looking, girls?” Codex asked, his voice coming from a radio panel on the console in front of them. Lotus snatched up a headset and hoofed one over to Celestia, too, letting it float across the distance in zero-gravity, only to be picked up by Celestia’s magic and lifted on to her own skull.

“Gimmie… er, six degrees towards ya.” Lotus replied. “‘Sides that, you’re basically spot on.”

“Good. You’re up, then, Celestia.”

Celestia operated on instinct. She’d only wielded the Elements twice in her life, though she supposed even that wasn’t entirely true given how many times she’d been through this same scenario. Just because she didn’t remember it did not mean she hadn’t done it, and it seemed as though muscle-memory had largely taken over her.

The Harmony Cannon flared to life. For a brief moment, the lonely little corner of space that Celestia, Lotus, and Codex had found themselves drifting was flooded in brilliant, wondrous light of every hue, as the magic of Harmony burst out from the barrel of the Harmony Cannon. It traveled, on and on, colliding with the Chaos Magic Tear…

…and sputtering out, fading away like the last traces of summer on a cool September night.

There was nothing more to do. Celestia and Lotus replaced their headsets, and without a word they began to make their way back to the airlock once again.

I̴͉̹͒V̸̮͘

Celestia and Lotus carried out three more firings over two days, sleeping only during the intervals spent waiting for the Harmony Cannon to charge. Four hours before their second firing. Nine before their third. And then, just as they were leaving the operational range of the cannon fifteen hours after first firing, they performed one last feeble attempt at closing the Tear.

Codex printed off the data and showed them the results of their efforts each time. Celestia somewhat wished that he didn’t… there was little consolation knowing that the result of three years of time back home had resulted in a net reduction of 1.2% of the Chaos Tear’s total diameter.

The fact that it was progress at all was… as encouraging to Lotus as it was discouraging. When she’d looked at the print-outs, she had scoffed. “Looks like we’re just good enough to justify havin’ to do this for another eighty years.”

At the end of the thirty-six or so hours of slowed spaceflight, they had all gathered in the bridge to fire the thrusters and begin the next leg of their orbital journey.

The bridge itself looked as though it had been intended to have been operated by a larger crew than the ship’s welder, physician and who was, in essence, a highly qualified specialist. Lotus was running two stations at once—monitoring the ship-wide structural integrity and ensuring their hardpoints were properly angled alongside an orbital graph projected onto an ancient flickering CRT. The display a corridor of rectangular indicators growing closer to them as the ship advanced along its orbit, the indicators themselves representing Twiley’s calculations on their orbital trajectory.

Codex was running the thrusters themselves. Celestia wanted to be useful, but she hardly comprehended the function of the bridge, let alone possesed enough knowledge of it to be more than an intrigued observer. As such, Codex had requested her assistance visually scanning their surroundings from a raised observation deck jutting out of the top of the bridge like a fishing trawler’s superstructure.

“Say goodbye to the Chaos Tear…” Codex murmured out, one hoof hovering over the thrust controls.

“Eat dirt and die, Chaos Tear,” Lotus chirped up from her stations, earning a little chuckle from Codex and Celestia both.

“Alright. Warming thrusters for burst number one,” Codex said. “Watch our fuel burn and lemme know if it dips outta nominal, new hire.”

“Y’got it, cap’.”

“Celly… when I say, you need to make sure we aren’t venting anything into space.We got beaten up pretty bad by that meteroite hit, so. If you see anything, let me know.”

“Understood.”

“Alright. Here goes nothing. Lotus, gimbal report?”

“Gimmie… er, four point five degrees starboard, Codex,” Lotus chirped. Codex tapped a few keys, and the hall of predicted directional indicators before her shifted. “Better. Orbit velocity approximately four thousand hooves per second. And falling. Not rapidly, but it is.”

“That’s the Tear trying to pull us in. I corrected...How’s our gimbal looking now, Lotus?”

“Lookin’ good to me.”

“Good. Then everypony hold on.”

Codex tapped a few keys on a pad next to him. The ship’s control were fairly simplistic for such an immense vessel, as its movement was more or less limited to forwards and minor pitch adjustments. A few directional keys for pitching and yawing, which Codex would program in sequence first before throwing a master switch to activate his selected sequence.

When he threw the master switch, the entire vessel began to shake and shudder and Celestia became aware of a sensation of movement that felt strangely subtle for how immense it must have surely been. A glance behind them, and she could see the blueish flames of the three thrusters firing in unison.

"Looking good, Codex!" Lotus chirped.

“How are we looking on your end, Celetia?”

“Peachy. No observable issues.”

“Alright. Velocity, Lotus?”

“Velocity now ten thousand hooves per second. Flying a little off center, ship’s yawing a little. One of the thrusters must be off.”

“Understood. Burn’s ending in three… two… done.” Codex glanced at Lotus again, wordlessly requesting his next course heading.

“One point five. Still starboard side.”

“Correcting. Second burn in three, two, one…”

For two more burns, Lotus and Codex continued their back and forth. Gone were the playful jabs and snide remarks the two were so fond of leveling at each-other. They were all business now, no room for ambiguity in their quickfire exchanges. Celestia wished she could have been more assistance, but she could not even think of where to begin contributing.

Maybe next loop.

On the final burn, they were moving well over 25,000 hooves per second. It didn’t feel like it to Celestia, she felt quite stationary, all things considered. It was strange to think that she was traveling something like three hundred times faster than she could ever recall traveling.

That had been the subject of discourse over the three’s celebratory meal of rice and beans. The fastest things they’d ever been in, back home in Equestria.

“Ever take the el train from Fillydelphia to Baltimare, Princess?” Codex had asked her. “Think that one cracks, like. Five hundred klicks per hour.”

“Hmm. Once.” Celestia nodded. “When they were hosting the Equestria Games. That would’ve been… 1002.”

“Wow. Old mare here,” Lotus said with a chuckle. “I was like, four, when those were going on.”

“Well, whippersnapper.” Celestia shot a playful glare at the bat pony across the table, lit by the dull burning of a single electrical light above them. The crew’s dining table was little more one lengthy table, intended for more ponies than were evidently still occupying it. “What’s the fastest your impudent flank has traveled?”

Lotus snort-laughed. “I, uh. Look, I don’t do well with speed.”

“As we saw on your space-walk.”

“Hey! Shut up, Codex!”

He stuck his tongue out. “Come and make me, new hire.”

“You’d buckin’ like that!” She rolled her eyes. “Uh… if I had to pick, and not counting the Dizzitron they used to prep us for this mission… one of them early ornithoper prototypes they were testing, in 1017.”

“Gods.” Celestia nearly facehoofed. “What a racket those things were.”

“Betcha they’ve come a long way since then,” Lotus replied. “You flew one of ‘em, right, Codex?”

“Yup. One of the high-altitude ‘glybrid’ models. With the switch-blade wings.”

“Daredevil. Hear that, Celly?” Lotus chirped. “This grouch used to be fun!”

Celestia chuckled. “You’ll have plenty of new craft to discover when we return, I suppose.”

A weary silence, mutually held. The three ponies resumed eating their dinner, and Celestia idly wondered why she had so much trouble keeping her bloody mouth shut. She’d thought it was optimism, but now she saw it would’ve been better if it’d been nothing at all.

“So…” Codex broke it softly after a few minutes. “Our next…point of interest, and something we’ll have to discuss… is the periapsis point between us and Equestria. The, er. Point of closest approach, between our orbit and theirs.”

“When we can communicate with them?” Celestia guessed.

Codex nodded. “That’s in, er. Usually it takes four months, from the Tear to that point.”

Celestia could sense the question in the air before Lotus actually said it.

“Do we have enough life support for four months?”

“A question for Twiley,” Codex replied, with a deep sigh. Rising from his seat, he trotted over to one of the communicator panels in the corner of the dining node, tapping a few buttons before lifting the receiver.

“I don’t know if we’re going to like the answer…” he murmured out, to Celestia and Lotus, before speaking into the receiver itself. “Twiley? Need you in the dining node. Holo array should be functional here.”

It shimmered for a moment, and Codex had to tune the old unit to get the image of Twilight Sparkle into focus, but soon enough the ship AI was projected as though in the room with the three of them.

“I’m… I’m sorry, you three…” she whispered out, the moment all three sets of eyes were on her. “I… was thinking how best to break it to you…”

“We’re not going to make it to periapsis, are we?” Codex sighed. “Wake up, survive long enough to close the Tear, and go under?”

“I... We’re already running into dangerous territory with what we’re running right now, and that’s… the bare essentials.”

Codex sighed deeply. Lotus gave a single, knowing nod. Both ponies… seemed annoyed, without being particularly offended or bothered. The cynical part of Celestia reminded her they had little reason to be. Anypony at home waiting for them would likely have been dead already. Celestia’s connection with another immortal was the only thing that made her different, now.

“What if… we go into stasis until peripalis?” Lotus offered, seeing the look of sheer hopelessness on Celestia’s face. “Wake up, have our chat, and go back under?”

“I… can’t risk that.” Twiley shook her digital head. “It’s not a priority of the mission.”

“It’s a priority to our sanity, Twiley,” Lotus interjected. “We’ve been up here for nearly a century. Give us a break.”

“I can…” Twiley sighed. “Okay. Loop hole. The reconstituter keeps a basic brain-scan from each loop as a backup. For considerably less power I can let that communicate with home for a brief period of time. It’d be... From Equestria’s end, it’d be like communicating without the video feed. They probably wouldn’t even notice. But I can only do one of you, and probably only a five minute conversation.”

Lotus and Codex shared a look with Celestia.

“Your call, Princess,” Codex said, bowing his head.

“Yeah. Literally.” Lotus confirmed. “What do you want to do, Celestia?

Celestia stared, for a long time. When she finally spoke, it was just to say one word.

“Why?”

Lotus blinked. She bit her lip, and glanced at Codex, as though begging her partner to ask for clarity she wanted more than he did, but hadn’t in her to ask herself.

“What do you mean, Princess?” Codex asked after several seconds of silence.

“I mean... Why? What’s the point?”

“Well... Don’t you... Don’t you miss home?” Lotus asked, tilting her head, seemingly genuinely at a loss. Across countless loops, she had seemingly never even encouraged the possibility that Celestia would deny the chance to talk with home.

“Yes. Which is why I would... Rather expedite the completion of our mission than bother wasting my time making myself miss it anymore.”

Lotus and Codex shared another glance. Both ponies looked like there was more that they wished to say, but neither could find it in them to offer anything.

They resumed eating their last suppers in silence. Somewhere, in the large, cavernous chamber, Twiley was already warming the reconstituters for the ship’s three passengers.

(---)

(interlude)

“...If you are hearing this for the first time and there’s been a dramatic memory loss incident, the doctors here say that your condition might be exaggerated by an overload of information. So… to any health care personnel in the room, please ease Celestia gently into her current situation. Wait until at least twelve hours of harmonic magic stabilization, and then please show her the flip-side of this tape. Until then… co-operation mandatory, compassion eternal. See you on the other side, literally and figuratively, Celestia and company...”

Twilight burst into tears as soon as the cameras clicked off. The throne room of Canterlot Castle looked so wildly different than it had been even a month ago, with it’s mass of wiring and cables and electrical relays snaking down from the ceiling, across the floors, and up the walls. The skyline outside of the shattered and freshly repaired windows was an inky red. What colour it might be, when night came and went and dawn rose again, was anypony’s guess. Twilight had liked the purple day skies. The plaid, polka-doted one had nearly given her vertigo. Twilight couldn’t have imagined how Rarity would have reacted to such a garish display.

In a way, the inherent silliness of the residual Chaos Magic still infecting Equestria was a welcome distraction from the more sobering reality of the distant horizons. They were stained black with pollution and refuse, as Equestria immolated itself struggling to fight against the encroachment of a magicless future.

Magic was dying. And for all its miracles, science...did not feel strong enough to save a magical land. With the Tear seeping away the harmonic energy of their world, they were fighting against too strong a tide.

Twilight didn’t really care who amongst the gathered science staff saw her weep. There was about a dozen of them... All good ponies, all assembled for good causes, but they mostly all scattered to give Twilight and Luna some room.

Luna was by her side in a few seconds, though she lingered back by a few hooves, one foreleg raised as though she’d intended to comfort Twilight but had lost steam halfway through.

“…There… there…”

Twilight’s crying tapered into a little chuckle without fully stopping. “Gods, y-you’re so bad at this, Luna…”

“I’m well aware. I… am trying, Twilight Sparkle. I never had my sister’s talent for… well...”

Twilight gave a nod as Luna trailed off, and pulled her in for a hug with a wing. “Hey, me neither. Equestria’s stuck with the two most awkward princesses. Lucky them, right?”

“Yes, quite…” Luna said, somewhat distantly. “But… not for long, yes? We are attempting optimism.”

“Yeah. Attempting optimism,” Twilight confirmed. Her eyes traveled past Luna, towards...

It wasn’t really a pretty sight. It reminded Twilight of when the changelings had invaded Canterlot, so long ago. It was strange to look on the sight of Princess Celestia, encased within a bio-engineered pupa, suspended above the castle floor in a cradle of tubing and electrical cables.

“We will save her.” Luna’s gaze followed Twilight’s. “I... Know how much she meant to you, Twilight.”

“Me? She’s your sister...”

“Yes. And...” A heavy exhale from Luna. “I... Still think she saw you as the best thing in her life, Twilight Sparkle. More than even myself.”

“I’m sorry...”

“Sorry?” Luna chuckled. “I do not look upon this with resentment. Her pride in you is shared.”

“I just hope... It’s not all in vain.” Twilight nodded her head towards the pupa. Towards Celestia. “I hope we’ll... I hope she’ll wake up. When the time comes.” Twilight sighed, realizing how useless her words were. She hoped Princess Celestia came back to life. No bloody shit. Who in Tartarus didn’t? She wasn’t saying anything new and clever, so what was the point of saying it in the first place?

“I heard during my visit to Everfree Station that our probe crossed over The Passage fourty-eight hours ago. Our first successful interdimensional insertion. I trust you saw the memo?”

“I did,” Twilight nodded. “I wanted to go myself with you, but... So much to keep from exploding, back here. I didn’t think we’d see it in our time."

Luna was silent for a moment.

"That was intended to be good news, Twilight Sparkle," she said eventually. "A success, after all this."

"Yeah. One success. Equestria is dying. Harmony is dying. It's bleeding through a damn hole in the sky. It's taking all we have just to stay alive in a world without magic...how the blazes can we hope to save it? If this doesn't work...we can't even try again." Twilight knew she was panicking. 'Twilighting out', as her brother would've called it. She felt she'd earned the right, after the time she'd been having.

“You are neglecting consideration towards what we have accomplished. Plans for hopping across the cosmos... Sending ponies into the great ether. A dream cherished as a fantasy for so long...” A thin smile had formed on Luna’s face. “And now it’s... Tangible. We are building a station to do it, and ponies trained in the journey. It is much to have accomplished in what amounts to a blink of the cosmic eye.”

“Yeah, but... We didn’t do it because we wanted to. We didn’t have a choice. And we can't do much else, now. With the rest of the system's harmony magic bleeding through the Tear. If this doesn't work..."

“Perhaps.” Luna shrugged. “But we still accomplished it. They tell me that after crossing The Passage, our probe is now the furthest Equestrian made thing in space. And it is still intact, and still giving us predictable, tangible signals.”

“We’ll see what happens when it reaches the orbit of the Chaos Tear.”

“You do not seem to be attempting optimism, Twilight Sparkle.”

Twilight forced out a laugh. “No. I guess I’m finding it difficult. I was... I was thinking, Luna. About when it comes time to send ponies up there. Into the void. I want to volunteer.”

Luna frowned. “That is considerably unwise considering your importance to Equestria at the moment.”

“Yeah, but. What other option do we have, really? Find six ponies who can wield the Elements of Harmony? In, what? Three year's time?”

“The only pony who can wield the Elements of Harmony by themselves is the one we already have been discussing as ideal for this mission in the first place.”

Twilight saw her gaze travel over to the pupa in the corner. She found it... Interesting, that Luna had not bothered to personify the pony she was speaking of. Perhaps thinking of her as a tool or a creation or a copy made it easier. It wasn’t technically incorrect.

“And the only one who doesn’t have a say on the matter,” Twilight replied. “Celestia doesn’t... Why does she deserve that?”

“Why do you?”

“Because I can! Because I want to! Because...”

“Twilight. I know Celestia. As do you. We both know she would not say no to this. And besides, Celestia... Our Celestia...” Luna nudged her head towards the pupa. “Lies right there. Waiting to be woken, when the Tear ceases it’s influence upon her. Upon all of us. When she wakes, she will have no memory of any time in orbit. Because Celestia will not have to experience it. A copy of something is not that thing. "

“You don’t believe that.”

“No. But I have to, or else...” Luna forced a smile, pained and exhausted. “Or else I’d be joining you, and there would be three alicorns on this suicide mission instead of just the copy of one.”

“I just... I hope she’ll be okay.”

“We’ve run the trials. The process... There’s no pain. You just... Sleep, and awake again. Your memories from your last body, the last thing you were doing... It’s all still there. Like waking from a nap.”

“I know, Luna. I supervised the research.” Twilight shook her head. "And after everything we do, their bodies will crumble apart after three to five years. How is that painless?"

"She won't have to experience that. It will be like catching the flu, and getting some bed rest. Painless."

"It's terrifying. I know it and you know it. We're killing them. Why are you denying that?"

"...because despite that, it is what's necessary," Luna returned, narrowing her eyes. To Twilight, she seemed a little offended. "You act like I don't agree with you on the existential nature of our quest. I am not comfortable with it either. It haunts me. But what choice do we have? Without magic...what? What can we do?"

"I know." Twilight brought a hoof to the bridge of her snout. "I'm sorry. You're right. I know that. I know it's necessary."

"And you know that she'll be alright," Luna said. "Yet still, you don’t believe.”

Twilight sighed. She looked up at the pupa. At Celestia’s slumbering form, almost peaceful, with her eyes closed, suspended in the vat of preservation fluid.

“I guess I don’t.”

[1109-10-??//??:??:??] -- [1112-12-16//15:39:00] (GHOST LIGHT)

I

It was like flesh.

She touched it, and that’s how it responded. It made a horrid squelching sound when she prodded it, and Celestia instantly recoiled, a cavernous sloshing of barely-viscous liquid nearly driving her deaf as she fell backwards again.

She lay for a moment, her breathing quick and panicked, and she stared. It was too opaque to really see much else beyond the revolting, pulsing embryo she now found herself in—her world was rounded green walls and not much else—at best, if she squinted hard enough, she could see the ghost of some faintly blinking red and blue light on the other side.

Eventually, she shuffled a little closer once more, frowning as she noticed the heavy clumps of familiar white feathers drifting all around her like leaves in a duck pond. At the edge, she tried to get a closer look through the substance, but it was somehow just as stubborn up close. She brought a hoof to it slowly, and guided it forwards—closer and closer, bracing herself for some perturbed inverse reaction to her touch.

None came. Her hoof prodded into the flesh again, and the further Celestia guided it, the more she realized it was more fragile than she’d assumed of it. It felt more like a taut balloon than the impassable wall she’d thought just by looking. Still, the freakishly organic feel wasn’t any less unnerving, and she winced as she felt it start to tear—it seemingly spasmed in response, a pathetic but present resistance.

Celestia squeezed her eyes shut as she pushed further, and then with a horrible ripping sound, she tore through, falling for what surely must have been a dozen feet, her entire body singing its pain as it was flung onto a hard and jagged surface. The liquid splashed all about her, and she took a few gasping breaths at the beautifully cool air that greeted her.

She lay, gasping and wheezing, her eyes still squeezed shut, while her more lucid brain still fought furiously to assemble some picture of her surroundings. Somewhere, water was dripping, and the more she lay still, the more she could feel something else in the room with her—a steady rumbling of the ground, as though something immense was rotating in a uniform way.

Eventually, she did stumble upwards, her eyes fluttering open. More of her feathers littered the floor where she had fallen, and the room still had an opaque sheen that Celestia realized was thanks to her eyes and no fault of anything else. Light was shining down from some point of the ceiling—too high up to be artificial, but she knew the feel of her sun and moon on her back better than the feel of her closest lover’s lips.

No sooner had she moved, and a horrible screeching sound rung out through the cavernous hall. It was a near-deafening chirping, like some nightmare monster from those motion pictures Cadance and Luna had always been trying to get her to watch. Silence followed, but Celestia wrenched around at the source all the same, instinctively flaring her wings and igniting her horn.

“Who’s there?!” She cried, her voice shaky. “Please… explain yourself before getting any closer.”

Expectedly, no answer came. The chirp had been loud, but it had been alone, too, and once more, the dripping water from above was the only sound. Celestia frowned. She’d landed onto machinery, but of what type or purpose was impossible to say… moss and mould had long since re-taken the cavernous hall, and when she peered up she could see that the roof had been opened up to an imperfect void of blinding light. It was too difficult to spot a source through the limited space she’d been given in the roof’s speckled holes, but if it was the sun, it wasn’t doing a very good job.

Casting her magic up, she instantly regretted it. Her world flashed into violent-white light and she screeched, the sound of the empty hall cutting in and out of deafening hissing and her vision emptying into nothing.

“Gods above, what?!”

It was a mare—a young mare, from the sound of her shrilling cry. Celestia felt warm hooves grab her—they cut through the flickering void like a knife. A nurse was staring at her. She was in the hospital, and the faint frames of machines and medicine revealed themselves slowly. The hall was gone. The bizarre, liquidy substance—gone.

“Celestia, I’m here. You’re okay.”

“No! No I’m not!” She howled.

“You are! You are!” She barked something to another soul in the room, and she saw more movement in her void of darkness around her. Something was shot into her side. It stung, but still numbness followed.

The screeching was gone. The blinding white, also dimming. And then, sleep.

II

“...Two… three. Check. One, two, three, check.”

“You’d make a good metronome, new-hire.”

“I would, wouldn’t I?” The mare gave a little hum. There was a chirruping beep, and Celestia opened her eyes just a flicker at the sudden, strange sound. She still felt as weak as the day she was birthed, and the gambit-planning mare inside knew that whatever these ponies were planning, strength alone might not be her ally in preventing it.

“Oh!” The young mare exclaimed, turning her head in the direction of the beeping sound. The mare had a somewhat strange voice—she wasn’t from Equestria, certainly. “Hello, Missus computer! Finally joining us this evenin’?”

“Morning, Lotus. It’s morning."

Even with the slivers of sight she afforded herself, she could see the mare jotting something down on a glowing notepad, looking away from her. The mare was young.

“We’re back to a normal rate, then. No deviation for more than nine hours.” The mare yawned, and Celestia saw her shiver. “Crikey, it’s cold, ain’t it?”

“Thought it was just me. Don’t remember it being this cold last time.” There was the rattle of hooves on a keyboard. “Aaaaand here’s the reason why. Twiley hasn’t gotten the heating coils up yet. Givin’ me an insufficient power warning.”

The mare mumbled. “Buckin' insufficient—well, kay. I’ll take a bloody walk ‘n go see what’s the trouble.”

“Mm. Put on a jumper, new-hire. Need you here with her right now.”

The mare chuckled. “Fine, fine. ‘Though she seems stable enough to me.”

“If she wakes tonight, we’re busting out that champagne. The three of us deserve it.”

“Ugh. It’s gonna be dreadful, y’know. You can’t age champagne.”

“Mm. True.” The stallion gave a little laugh.

“What?”

“You, Lotus Leaf. Us, really. Forgot how much I missed watching you work.”

“Course ya do, birdbrain. Means ya don’t have to help out.” The mare laughed, too. “Besides, you’re gonna hate me in a bit.”

“Oh? Don’t tell me you—” Whatever the stallion had to say was lost to a sharp cry of pain. “Yowch! Damn it, Lotus!”

“Oh, shush, ya pansy. What you get for forgetting to do it yourself.”

“You don’t know I wasn’t going to.”

“Mm, if the last fifteen times are any indication, I do. You always forget the coagulation injection when we awaken. Assistant Physician of the decade.”

He laughed. “Buck you, Lotus Leaf.”

“Piss off, Codex Haze.” There was silence for several seconds after, broken when the mare gave a little laugh. “Gods above. I’m still shaking. Look at my hooves.”

“You’re not. Quit being a drama queen.”

“Never heard those sirens before. They’re certainly alarmin’, ain’t they?”

“That’s the point of alarms, yes.” The stallion chuckled.

Once more, there was silence. Celestia could hear hooves clacking away at a keyboard, and the mare occasionally uttered some barely audible profanity under her breath as she worked.

“Aw, horseapples. Um, Codex?”

“Hm?”

“Slight deviation. Heart rate’s up.”

“Damn it. Uh, you sure?”

“I’m the one checkin' her bloody pulse. How long till Twiley’s with us, to get the life support shit online?”

“Usually it takes her way less time than this. Something’s seriously wrong.”

“Then bucking go fix it. I’m fine here. But her pulse is definitely…” The mare frowned. “Oh. G-Good morning, Princess Celestia.”

The entire tone of the room shifted, as though Celestia had announced her return to consciousness by pulling the pin off a grenade and casually setting it down on the end table beside her. Celestia opened her eyes further, scanning the room more carefully. The mare had shirked further away, her eyes wide in shock. Celestia could see that she was dressed in a wrinkled lab coat, and medical scrubs underneath. She was a bat pony, and her partner a pegasus.

“You don’t seem to mean me harm.” Celestia said slowly. “Medical staff, it seems?”

“That’s, um. Aye, that’s right.” The bat pony mare nodded. “Name’s Lotus Leaf. I’m your caretaker, Princess Celestia. You’ve been under for some time, so please don’t—”

Celestia moved to cast the blanket enveloping her aside, and the small movement brought back the same deafening thumbing of blood rushing through her ears, and the room was once more lost to a tempest of stinging, blinding white light.

“Shit. That. Don’t buckin’...” Lotus Leaf let out a low growl. “Princess, we’re ‘ere to help, kay? Just stop exerting yerself.”

There was a sharp pain—Celestia recognized it as the same as earlier, and this time she could see that it was from a syringe being jabbed into her withers. Instinctively she bucked her back legs, striking Lotus and sending her scrambling backwards. The pegasus stallion—Codex, he'd been called—grabbed her and quickly pulled her away from Celestia, who remained panting and flaring her wings as her vision once again cleared.

“Sorry.” Lotus sighed, rubbing her withers where Celestia had struck her. “This ain’t really my profession. I ain’t a very good nurse. But we’re all ya got, so enough with the kickin’, eh?”

“Where am I? What is this place?” Celestia looked around. There was a window, but frost and ice was caking the entire thing, obscuring whatever was on the other side. The rest of the room looked like a fairly generic hospital room—albeit more bunker-like and sterilized then Celestia had ever seen in Equestria.

“It’s, ah. A lot to take in.” The stallion piped up. “Enough that we kinda wanna make sure you’re not gonna… freak out again.” He tilted his head over at Lotus.

“Di’nt really hurt much.” She shrugged. “Can’t hardly blame ‘er. You want somethin’ for your headachin’, maybe, Princess?”

“Please.” Celestia sighed, nodding. “I’m sorry I hit you. But please. I need answers. I heard you two mention Twilight. Where is she?”

Lotus and Codex shared a glance.

Codex bit his lip as he looked back at Celestia. “Um. We can’t really talk to her right now. Most of the reserve power’s going towards keeping life support systems up, and even that’s... hairy, right now.”

Celestia brought a hoof to the bridge of her snout. “I’m not going to ask again. Where am I?”

Once again, Codex and Lotus turned their gazes upon eachother, as if wordlessly begging one another to take the reins. Eventually, Lotus conceded, letting out an annoyed sigh and glaring at Codex.

“Princess Celestia, you’re currently ‘board Equestria's oldest pony-made satellite, currently in orbit 'round a fixed point in deep space."

“...what.” Celestia blinked.

“Lot to take in, like we said.” Lotus shrugged. She nudged open a drawer with her snout and rifled through, scanning the labels of a few different pill bottles before finding one she was apparently pleased with and hoofing it over to Celestia, along with a glass of icy looking water that Celestia hadn’t noticed had been on the nightstand next to her.

“How much do you remember?” Codex asked. “Normally when you awaken, you retain some knowledge of our mission. But considering you awoke about nine whole months before Twily had you scheduled to, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that everything’s still a bit hazy.”

Celestia took three of the painkillers and washed them down with the entire glass of water, squeezing her eyes shut. “I remember… it’s difficult to say. I remember… it was really bright. The Sun, the sky, everything. Considerably too bright. I rose the Sun at the scheduled time and noticed it immediately. I didn’t think anything catastrophic of it…”

“Okay. Um, and then?”

“And then I remember waking up here.” Celestia sighed. “I don’t remember anything rendering me unconscious. Nor any of… you, or this.”

“W-well. A… lot happened to you, Celestia. To Equestria, as a whole, really,” Codex said. “It’s still safe—least, it was last we checked. We’re about eighty million kilometers away from her right now, so, uh. Kinda hard to say for sure. It takes a while for the signals from home to reach.”

Celestia simply stared. She was beginning to seriously wonder if she’d gone insane. It certainly suited the hospital setting. She’d decided it’d perhaps be best to work forwards with that as her running assumption.

“This is why I din’t wanna tell ‘er when she just woke.” Lotus complained. “Haven’t even got the bloody ship running proper, and here we are taking a shite all over the poor princess’s recoverey time.”

“I assure you I’m quite fine, dear.” Celestia said. “The painkillers are helping. But your answers are… admittedly leaving much to be desired.”

Lotus nodded. “I kin see that.”

“...The science tape?” Codex Haze looked over to Lotus with a frown.

“Lookin’ like it,” Lotus gave a little nod, trotting over into the next room. She continued talking as if the change in distance and volume wasn’t happening. “I think I actually have it memorized by now? But honestly, the science tape is just so much easier.”

Codex rolled his eyes and a faint clattering echoed from the other room, and Celestia didn’t hesitate. Her chances were as good as they were going to get without the mare around to incapacitate her with pharmaceutics the moment she stepped out of line. She viciously cast her blanket aside, trying once again to rise to her hooves. This time, she actually succeeded. The ground was cold, but her hooves carried her.

And then, Lotus re-entered, a videotape held in her mouth. There were hundreds of teeth marks all along its surface—she’d clearly carried it around many, many times before in a similar fashion.

“Buck me dead, she’s walking.” Lotus dropped the videotape with a clatter. “How long was that, Codex?”

“Sixteen hours, from the alarm till now.” Codex didn’t seem particularly perturbed by Celestia’s sudden activity. He was instead staring into a dim computer screen that was plain black except for the occasional line of flickering orange text.

“Sixteen? Horseapples! We’re getting good!” Lotus gave a little whistle. “Okay, Celestia. Just… let us get ye a walker if yer gonna try and kill us, yeah?”

“Please! Just answer me already!”

“That’s the science tape’s job! Trust me, I don’t know. I’m a doctor, not a bleedin’ physicist!” Lotus’s voice was, to Celestia’s amazement… surprisingly calm. The young mare even managed a little smile. “Ye need to cooperate with us here, Celestia. You’re still extremely weak. Now please set down and listen to the damned tape? It’s gunna be a lot of what you’re gunna be doin’ for the next forty-eight hours, trust me.”

“Why don’t we show it to her in the lounge? She’s probably sick of this sterile room.”

“Mm, good point.”

Celestia sighed, eventually deciding to resign herself to the absurd situation, and see where these two ponies might guide her through it. Strange, and unfamiliar, but they did not seem to be hostile by Celestia’s interpretation, and they at the very least had been friendly.

More importantly, they were the only ponies that Celestia had seen in her immediate vicinity. Friendly or not, they seemed to be all she had at the moment. The dimly lit and grimy surfaces of the room around her did little to quell a comfort only a pony’s presence could fill.

Celestia’s legs wobbled and shook and threatened to give out at any moment, and so Lotus made true on her promise to provide Celestia with a walker. It was old and rusty and the wheels creaked noisily, and Celestia herself felt rather out of place using it, but it at least smoothened the pilgrimage from the medical-room she had been previously and into a more wide-open area.

Still, the feeling of oppressive claustrophobia never fully vanished. The next room they entered into was only marginally bigger, truthfully--nowhere near the impossible scale of the first ever room Celestia could recall, with the strange fleshy pupa that had contained her, and the lack of any sort of natural light still remained quite unnerving. Still, at the very least the room was a tad friendlier in terms of decor, with a few simple-but-comfortable looking couches, and a wide window that overlooked a sheet of frost obscuring any actual view.

In fact… as the lights laboriously flickered on in the causeway leading into the living area, Celestia could see that a thin layer of frost and ice was covering everything. She could see her breath rising as vapour as soon as she stepped into the living area, something that Codex seemed to have noticed behind her, for the stallion cleared his throat and spoke to his companion in a hushed whisper.

“Maybe now’s a good time to go look at what’s swampin’ the power reserves? If you’re good to stay with Celly--er, the Princess?”

Lotus nodded firmly. She was still holding the aforementioned ‘Science Tape’ in her mouth, and so she settled on a non-verbal reply, though she stopped to gauge Celestia’s own response, too.

Celestia gave a single nod to the two of them, as though they were servants she were politely dismissing in her castle back in Canterlot. Internally, though, the gesture she felt to be rather strange. If they were here to contain her, and they were the only ponies around to do so, why would they split up their efforts?

Codex gave her a polite bow and headed off down the corridor they’d come from, and that was the last of the stallion that Celestia ever truly saw.

Lotus, meanwhile, had already trotted into the cold living area and set the videotape down into a receptacle beneath a screen several pony’s hooves wide. Nothing happened, at first, though the bat pony herself took to tapping away at the keyboard of another terminal beneath the display unit.

The lights in the causeway flickered off. The medical bay, too, was silenced of its idle beeps and chirps, and the lights in the living area instead flickered on shakily.

“Limited power. Gotta do what we can with what we’ve got,” Lotus said, noticing Celestia’s curious glance. If the bat pony had anything further to say, it was lost as the receptacle suddenly devoured the ‘Science Tape’ now that its power had been restored.

Celestia nearly crumbled to the cold floor of the living area when the face of Twilight Sparkle suddenly flickered into the viewing display.

Twilight…

Her beautiful Twilight. Her former faithful student, and now her loyal fellow Princess, and her most precious…

Well, whatever their relationship had been crystallizing into, before… whatever had happened, happened. Celestia still found it somewhat hard to say for sure.

Twilight looked a little older than Celestia’s memory told her she should’ve been. Her mane had been arranged into a rather disheveled bun, hastily held together by a mane-elastic. She was wearing the horn-rimmed reading glasses Celestia had given her on her seventy-seventh birthday, though she had to straighten then with her magic briefly as she trotted into frame, stopping to check something on the other side of the camera and seemingly in the midst of speaking with somepony else.

“I know, I know, but just calm down and listen to me, okay?” Twilight gave a little smile to the camera, and it took Celestia several seconds to realize that Twilight was talking to somepony else, on the other side of the screen--where the camera would have been, Celestia supposed--and not to Celestia herself.

Twilight herself seemed to be still collecting herself in that time frame, anyways. Celestia could see a notepad hovering in her magic, and the younger alicorn herself looked… impossibly tired, as she suddenly started speaking again.

“If… if I did my scheduling properly—and I didddd because this tape is still in use and has not been deemed obsolete by a future version of me!—then you are presently watching this after; Scenario A, a memory loss or dementia-related issue. Scenario B, an incident that has left either of us completely isolated from contact to eachother or any living qualified personnel. Or, finally, Scenario C, a time-sensitive incident requiring the most efficient means of communication.”

“Naturally, I’m running with Scenario C for the purpose of any potential Scenario C Princess Celestia or Twilight’s. The quick answer to our current predicament is that we are presently in the middle of an explosion of chaos magic the magnitude of which has been unrecorded since before known history. This means we are all in a presently dimensional-apocalyptic circumstance, held together by the will of ponykind everywhere. Co-operation is mandatory, and compassion remains eternal.”

Twilight gave a sniffing laugh. “You wrote that one, Celly. We liked it enough to leave it in the script. Now, remain calm. If you’re watching this tape, there is currently enough harmonic energy to fight the chaos magic storm. It is still possible for us to work together to fix this, but the only ponies who will be seeing this tape will be the crew of Project Sisyphys and Princess Celestia herself.

“Celestia… the easiest answer is… Discord got... sick.” Twilight gave a shaky laugh. “And when he did… it created a tear. Like… like a little hole where reality is supposed to be. We don’t know if it was intentional. We don’t even know if he knew it would happen. Fluttershy doubts it. You agree with her. And Luna and I…” Twilight shook her head. “Have been voted against. Regardless, this tear, well… the easiest answer there is… Princess Celestia saved us from it.

“When it happened, nopony knew what was happening. Discord became ill. You followed suit, but you weren’t nearly as bad as him. Equestrian medicine managed to stabilize your condition, but Discord… well, he actively refused to allow Equestrian research into Draconequus biology. Otherwise we could have saved him and this whole damn—”

“Twilight….” Celestia frowned at the sound of Luna's voice from behind the camera in the videotape. Firm, and impatient, but Luna always had a way of sounding kindly while being both. “Scenario C.”

“Right, right. Sorry.” Twilight gave a shaky laugh. “The short answer is… you’re still technically alive, Celestia. The tear… it didn’t take us. We got you kicking enough to get us out.”

“Even though we were able to save you, Celestia, we’re now in what is, according to Project Sisyphus, harmonic stasis. You’re… I guess you’d say, on life support. You’re… not dead, but you’re not really alive, either. And even worse, the harmonic energy being drawn through the tear in spacetime is so immense, that the required energy to save you is non-existent as a result. It’s like… like the universe is bleeding harmony magic itself, through the hole that the chaos tear made. So, we settled on a loophole. We figure that Equus can survive some time with a reduced intensity of sunlight—we settled on eight hour days and sixteen-hour nights. A loooooota stuff is dying, including…”

The tape continued, but suddenly Celestia found it rather difficult to stay focused on it. Her head was pounding once more, and even the calm, soothing voice of Twilight Sparkle wasn’t enough to quell the aching. Rubbing her temples with a hoof, she tried desperately to regain her focus enough to see the tape through to completion.

“…Besides the obvious ones, at that…” Twilight was still in the midst of some tangent, but Luna thusly cleared her throat. “Gods, you should see the—”

“Twilight, if you cannot focus on the task at hoof, I can always—”

“Sorry, sorry! Uh… right. You’re probably wondering where you come in, during all of this. Because if you’re listening to this message, Celestia, then that means we found some way to stabilize your condition, using what is, at the time of recording, extremely new and recently developed genetic matter reconstitution methods. You, standing here listening to my voice, are the product of a medical miracle. As well as the source of a magical one, but that’s always been true—”

“Twilight!”

“Oh, give it a rest, Luna, I’m getting there,” Twilight said with a huff, rolling her eyes. “This brings us to the Sisyphus Project. Which is a co-ordinated effort to both keep you alive, and therefore keep the mare responsible for wielding the Elements and closing the tear alive. Doing this requires relative proximity to the tear itself, which is why you are currently in orbit around a fixed point in deep space. But… filly’s steps. If you are hearing this for the first time and there’s been a dramatic memory loss incident, the doctors here say that your condition might be exaggerated by an overload of information. So… to any health care personnel in the room…” Lotus gave a little wave of her wing to Celestia at that. “Please ease Celestia gently into her current situation. Wait until at least twelve hours of harmonic magic stabilization, and then please show her the flip-side of this tape. Until then…co-operation mandatory, compassion eternal. See you on the other side, literally and figuratively, Celestia and company.”

Celestia stared for a long while after the tape ended and there was nothing left on-screen besides the jagged static scanlines flickering rapidly across the CRT. Beside her, Lotus had come a bit closer, and was looking at Celestia with an unreadable frown.

“You really don’t remember any of that, do you?” She asked, softly.

Celestia shook her head, slowly. “I’m still… I’m still so confused.”

“I’d bet. L-listen, did you wanna go for a walk, maybe?” Lotus asked, jerking her head towards the obscured glass window. Celestia could see pinpricks of light within the frosty cracks, but nothing resembling a proper vista warranting the window’s existence in the first place.

With nothing more to do, nothing else to comfort her, Celestia simply nodded. She’d long ago given up on the idea that Lotus and her companion had dark designs for them, as it seemed whatever dire situation she had wound up within, they were all within it together.

Lotus tapped on the keyboard terminal once more, killing the power to the recreation area and once more illuminating the motion-sensors in the causeways.

“This place…” Celestia said softly, as they started to walk down the halls once more. “A… ship?”

“Right now it’s closer to a station, but basically.” Lotus replied. “It doesn’t really have any significant thrust power of its own. We can tweak our orbit a bit, but that’s about it. No navigational abilities.”

“But you said… the word you used…”

Lotus pursed her lips, seemingly trying to remember for a moment, before nodding her head as her memory returned the word to her. “Satellite. I said we were Equestria’s Oldest Orbital Satellite.”

“Orbiting what body?”

“It’s… well…” Lotus bit her lip, pausing in her tracks for a moment. “Y-you heard Twilight explain it in the Science Tape, right? That… ‘tear’ is what we’re out here trying to fix.”

“I think I understand. And we are in orbit around it until our reparations are complete?”

“Yeah! Exactly like that, yup!” Lotus nodded her head a few times rapidly, apparently content she wouldn’t have to struggle to explain it herself any further. “Come on, let’s go check it out for ourselves. Then I really gotta go see if Codex needs any help…”

Celestia followed the bat pony through the dim halls of the satellite. The entire corridor in front of them and behind them lay in darkness, the only lights being those amongst the two’s immediate proximity. The flickered on above them as they walked onwards, while behind them they were extinguished with a gentle diminishing hiss sound. The metal floors beneath Celestia’s hooves were frigid to the touch. The satellite still lay asleep despite the best efforts of the stallion who had gone off to try and awaken it.

And still, it seemed as though the two ponies were the only ones besides Celestia herself.

Just where in Tartarus was everypony?

III

A short walk of about five minutes took Celestia and Lotus to what seemed to be a cafeteria or living space. It looked as though it was intended for a group of a dozen or so ponies, judging solely by its size and the number of tables--four--arranged throughout the room. Compared to the cramped corridors and medical bay, it was far larger, and dominated by an immense window that stretched across the entirety of the back wall.

Outside the window lay the empty, darkling expanse of space itself. Celestia gasped at the sight--in all her days, she had never seen anything quite like it. A resolute, perfect blackness, broken only by the small pinpricks of stars, and stretching around as far as the eye could see, with no other bodies of planet or moon to interrupt.

No lights, of any sort, now that Celestia looked more closely, save for the stars within the deep-space sky. She trotted closer to the window, more and more of the desolate sight flooding her vision the closer she got. Behind her, Lotus lingered, fiddling with another electrical panel but waiting for Celestia to get a good look outside before she activated it.

“Startin’ to jog your memory a bit, Princess?” she asked softly.

Celestia shook her head. “I have never been in this place before.”

Lotus threw a few breakers on the panel, before trotting over to join Celestia. Light slowly flooded into the room. Celestia was now practically standing with her muzzle pressed against the glass window, now. She could see the hull of the structure she was standing within, continuing on in both directions of the window for several hundred meters. It was a little hard to gauge how large the structure truly was from so limited a vantage point, but at least Celestia was able to assemble a bit more of a visual understanding of the strange place she had awakened in. It curved in either direction, as though built along a centrifuge.

Floating aimlessly, far in the deep reaches of space.

“Wonder if we can see it from here…” Lotus mused, suddenly right beside Celestia now. Looking outside, also, but at something else, it seemed. “The tear, I mean.”

Celestia followed her gaze, but she had no idea what the bat pony was looking for. They looked for several more seconds, Celestia pretending she knew what she was looking for, and Lotus looking on thoughtfully with a small little smile that seemed dreadfully forced to Celestia.

If the ‘tear’, as Lotus had called it, was visible, neither of the two could see it. Truthfully, Celestia found her eyesight to be lacking the longer she looked, the pinpricks of the stars and the reflection of her snout on the glass joined by several shifting, rippling double-visions, as though she had drank too much at the Grand Galloping Gala once again.

Suddenly, she noticed a little flash of light, off at a distant point further down the hull of the ship. It was like a bright little ember, suddenly springing up and then being extinguished as quickly as it had appeared. Lotus noticed it, too, because Celestia heard her breath catch.

“Huh… somethin’s sparkin’ out there. Might be why our power’s dead. Hull damage…?” she bit her lip, squinting her eyes to see closer. She brought a hoof to the glass, and Celestia could see that it was subtly shaking. “We should probably regroup with Codex, Princess. It shouldn’t be taking him this long to get the power back online…”

Celestia gave a single nod, eventually detaching herself from the glass window, once more looking back at the halls of the satellite, stretching on into darkness. She took a step towards them, and suddenly she crumbled down to the frozen floor of the dining area, hitting the ground with a dull thud.

“Ow…” she gasped out. Her head was all of a sudden thumping rhythmically with a splitting headache, and her vision danced and swam as she stumbled back up to her hooves and crumbled back to the floor once again.

“Oh gods… Princess!” Lotus was at her side immediately, a shaky hoof helping her straighten herself into a more comfortable seating position. “You’re still weak?”

Celestia gave a shaky nod. “Yes… what’s… what’s wrong with me?”

“Well, I think I’m getting a hunch,” Lotus replied, stopping for a moment to look at her own shaking hoof. “The hull breach, the power surge… I think something went wrong, and Twiley woke us up, ah… earlier than we were ready for.”

Celestia blinked. Twiley. There it was again, the second time she had heard her ex-student’s name, but said with such a degree of casualness that she was unsure if her student and this ‘Twiley’ were truly the same.

“M-meaning?”

“Meaning, uh.” Lotus had grown distant, staring straight at her wavering hoof, but she quickly shook her head and turned back to Celestia. “It’s… a slow process, wakin’ us from stasis. Like… like…” The bat pony’s left ear twitched a little as she thought on how best to explain it. “It’s like… y’know when you’re wrapping up winter and you’ve gotta wake up a little critter from hibernation? And they’re still all groggy and weak?”

“And I’m that animal. I’m all groggy and weak.”

“Yes! Yes exactly!” Rising back to her hooves, Lotus gave Celestia a small and patient smile. “And me, too. Between the two of us… I’ve been shivering and shaking the entire time I’ve been up, and have had a nasty headache. Taken enough painkillers to dope up an Ursa Minor. And don’t even get me started on Codex, if I hadn’t remembered, that damn idiotic stallion would be having a gods-damned blood clot by now.” Lotus let out a nervous little chuckle. “We’re… not in the best position. Speaking of. I should probably go check on the colt by now.”

At that, Celestia made another attempt to straighten herself back up and regain a standing position, on shivering, shaking limbs that she felt could hardly support her.

“Easy, Princess. Stay where you are for a second… Here….” The bat pony trotted over to a cupboard in one corner of the dining area—a red medical cross above it showing it to be some sort of emergency care station. Lotus returned quickly with a shiny, heat-reflecting blanket, which she draped gently over Celestia. “Alicorns have it worse than us little-ponies. More of you that Twiley’s gotta wake up. I think you should stay down and regain your strength, okay? I’ll go get Codex and bring him here.”

“P-please don’t…” Celestia bit her lip, looking down the darkened hallway. Lotus stopped, her eyes wide, and for the first time Celestia saw just how frightened the young bat pony was. For herself, for Celestia… and no doubt for her companion who the two hadn’t heard hide nor hair of.

“...Don’t be long…” Celestia said eventually.

“Won’t be but a jiffy, Princess.” Lotus gave Celestia one last little nod and smile, and then turned tail and headed off down the corridor, the little burning of her flashlight slowly consumed by the encroaching darkness, swallowing up the little bat pony and leaving Celestia alone once more.

And so, Celestia waited.

The hours crept on. Or, at least, Celestia assumed they were hours. It was rather difficult for her to tell for certain, with no means of gauging time, but Celestia at least knew it was a long time that passed without anypony returning to the dining area.

The rest of her surroundings remained the same. Lying on the floor, Celestia became aware of a distant, far-off rumbling of some sort, the same sort that she’d felt when she had first awoke within the strange embryo. It was fainter here, but present if she focused hard enough on it. Besides the faintly glimmering electrical light above her, there were no other sources of light to be seen, and when she tried to light her horn she was met with a splitting headache that was enough to cause her to cry out in pain.

Boredom slowly bled into fear. Wherever Codex had gone off to, he seemed to have vanished without a trace. And Lotus had said she would be but mere moments, and they sure as Tartarus did not feel like moments to Celestia. She cursed bitterly out loud--she hadn’t even asked Lotus where everypony else was when she’d had the chance, and now the thought that she was the only pony left, now, was slowly beginning to germinate in her mind against all logical thought.

She loathed the sound of her own fearful voice as she spoke up, but she spoke up all the same. “Hello…?”

She called it out gently, down the corridor where she’d last seen Lotus vanish. Predictably, no response came. Celestia felt boxed in by darkness, a lone castaway upon a tiny little island of light so far away from anything she knew and was familiar with.

Was she dead? Was this Tartarus?

Her head continued to pound, and she faintly became aware of the passing of her consciousness in several infrequent intervals. She lost it, regained it, drifted in and out of dreamless sleep, and nothing changed around her. The same encompassing cold, the same infernal silence, with nopony and nothing to break it.

Her stomach rumbled. With dread, she realized it had been more than a day since she had eaten anything. What had the ponies been saying, when they had thought she was still unconscious? Sixteen hours? Sixteen, since the alarm to her second awakening. And that itself must have been some time ago itself.

Eventually, Celestia grew tired of lying in fearful wait. If Lotus and Codex were in trouble someplace, she would have to help them herself. And if they were the only company she had—wherever she was… then she wouldn’t have a choice regardless. It was with effort that she rose to her hooves, and she felt weaker from the last time she had been moving about. It was as though her ‘rest’ had sapped away even more of her energy, and replaced the numbness in her limbs with a throbbing pain instead.

Yet she lumbered on. The corridor ahead of her remained pitch-black, and so she tried to light her horn again. A small little pinprick of light, and it nearly sent her back into unconsciousness once more, but it was something against the inky black. She trekked through the dark corridors of the satellite, looking and listening for any trace of Lotus or Codex or anypony else.

Twice more, her legs gave out beneath her, and she hit the ground with a dull thud. She passed in and out of consciousness several more times, and upon falling and rising the second time, she found her vision never truly regained focus. Hungry, thirsty, weak beyond belief, and now practically blind, but she continued anyways, even though she felt quite like a lumbering corpse after too long. Her throat was so dry that it hurt to breathe, and her stomach’s incessant rumbles had ceased in favour of a throbbing pain instead.

She attempted to call out once again, and once again there was nothing but her own voice echoing back out at her. The corridor seemed to stretch on forever, although she knew it probably seemed far longer than it truly was given how slowly she was moving.

Finally, though, she seemed to find something of note. Two things, truthfully, occurring in sequence after one another. Firstly, she came upon a crossroads. There were written indicators on the walls that stated where each went, but with her vision in such disarray Celestia had to settle on taking the leftmost path blindly and resolving to double back once she was finished exploring

The second thing of note occurred when the corridor seemed to gradually open to a larger room once again, and Celestia could see lights ahead, blue and red and green, faintly blinking away within the blurred sludge that her vision had become. The air felt warmed in this other room--she could feel it wafting towards her as though blown by some draft emanating from the larger chamber.

Upon entering it, Celestia stopped in her tracks and stared.

She had been here before. It was the first room she had awoken into--the embryonic chamber. She could still see it as she wandered in further, broken and torn on the metal floor. Some of the thick, soupy liquid that it had been filled with had frozen over, but some of it hadn’t, either. Celestia could feel it in her hooves, and a strange sort of tingling soon flooded through them.

It was… soothing, surprisingly enough. Celestia blinked. The pain that had been coursing through her horseshoes subsided, if only slightly at first, replaced by the calming tingling.

Having felt she at least deserved a rest, Celestia layed down upon it, letting the yellowish liquid seep into the feathers of her wings, the down of her fur. The same tingling worked its way through her body, easing some of her pain, enough that she let out a soft exhale of relief and let her muzzle rest against it. The air felt humid in this room, and Celestia decided she would be staying here for some time--it was so much more tolerable than the frozen air of the rest of the structure.

Her throat was still parched, though. She was so, so thirsty.

The yellowish, soupy fluid didn’t exactly taste pleasant, but it quelled her throat a bit. She had to spit out a few of her feathers, but it felt as though it had given her at least some energy. She drank more, and it tasted a bit better on the second attempt.

While she rested and drank, she took in her surroundings a bit more closely, considering the last time she had been here had been in the midst of a disorienting haze. Not that she wasn’t still in such, but it was at least marginally better now. She looked up to the ‘sky’ first, and saw that the bright electrical light she had first spotted had since been extinguished, though she could see the source high above. A dome that had been built in a shape that vaguely resembled her sun, catching the reflected light of her own burning horn. The other lights were indicators of some sort, given the way they were rhythmically blinking, though of what indication they were Celestia could only estimate.

When she next rose, she felt much better. She still had Lotus and Codex’s whereabouts to concern herself over, however, and so she soon began to make her way back to the corridor she had come from, resolving to explore the other path of the crossroads she had encountered earlier. She lumbered back with a slight amount more lucidity and speed than had accompanied her first journey down the corridor, only having to stop once this time and reaching the crossroads once more after much less time had passed.

Still, she could not read the directional indicator, but it didn’t matter. She headed down the other corridor anyways, and soon she could see something decidedly less mundane than the otherwise empty corridor. It was a lumpy mass still lost in the blur of her eyesight and inadequately lit by the light of her horn, but as she crept closer it took form.

Horrible, equine form.

It was Lotus. Lying dead and decomposed on the corridor, with half of the keratin of her left forehoof broken off and detached from the rest of her body.

Celestia couldn’t hold back a horrified gasp, and she didn’t truly wish to get any closer. She had hardly known this pony, but the otherworldly sight of her corpse was nearly enough to push her back down onto the floor in yet another fit of weariness.

She crept forwards closer. The decomposition of the bat pony was freakishly unnatural—it looked… fake, somehow, as though she were not looking at a pony but instead some manufactured facsimile of one. And that was to say nothing of the speed… it had been less than twenty four hours since she had parted ways with Lotus, but the decomposition seemed to be in the middle stages already.

She didn’t wish to linger. She hadn’t known this pony long, but she had known her for long enough to know that what she was seeing was a horror the likes she had seldom seen in her waking days and only rarely within the realms of Luna’s more fearsome nightmares.

This was Tartarus. She was in Tartarus. There was simply no other explanation for it, now.

Without needing confirmation, Celestia knew that Codex was dead, too. She was alone, somehow—weak, hungry, unsustained save for the energy of the unknown fluid, but still somehow alive. Somehow, she was more fortunate than the two far more able-bodied ponies who had set out to try and restore some semblance of sense to the hellish world they had awaken into.

Celestia wanted to weep, but she hadn’t the fluid within her to allow such. And, as she lay grieving, a more horrific thought slowly dawned on her.

Whatever had killed Lotus and Codex might still be within the satellite.

Yet Celestia was not prepared to stand about and let it come to finish her off, either. She was weak, but she wasn’t dead. And if she was in Tartarus, she’d drag whatever had taken these two poor souls with her into whatever darker circle might have been waiting still.

I̷V̶

Eventually, Celestia reached what she assumed was the ‘bridge’ of the satellite. It felt a bit improper to call it that considering it wasn’t really a naval vessel, but it seemed the most apt descriptor for the room of darkened control panels that she emerged into after several more hours of blind wandering.

The front of the room resolved in another large window, and the sight beyond it made Celestia gawk in amazement.

It must have been the tear that she had heard Lotus speaking of. She could see it sprawled out in some spot to the far off distant reaches of space, and it was one of the most otherworldly things Celestia had ever seen in all her days. It was an imperfection within the fabric of space itself, as though an otherworldly force had taken a knife and gutted through Epona’s own starry sky. It glowed softly, pulsating in a non-rhythmic fashion, like a bloody gash sustained in a vicious battle. It was too narrow and spindly for Celestia to properly see if anything lay on the other side, but the light itself looked blinding beyond. It was fortunate for her, Celestia supposed that it was so narrow of a tear in the first place.

It almost didn’t seem real at all. Not that most of her recent memory did, but the tear itself looked like it had been plucked directly from a nightmare and plastered upon her own reality.

The rest of the bridge was mostly as dead as the rest of the satellite, save for blinking lights indicating that some power was being received, but the greater majority remained extinguished. Celestia could only wager guesses as to what was being used to give energy to the systems--there clearly weren’t any unicorns powering it with magic, but perhaps there were some enchanted gemstones hidden in some far off place that she had yet to discover through her wayward wandering.

Celestia decided without much consideration that this would be the room where she would try and spend as much of her time as she could. It was as frigid as the rest of the power-deprived satellite, but she at least had a good view of the… relative subject of her focus for the foreseeable future, as it seemed.

By the light of her horn, Celestia ventured off to explore the satellite further, though her investigations did not yield anything particularly productive. The station was smaller than it had seemed when she had been walking about in a semi-delirious panic. The size was comparable to a luxury airship, though with significantly less opulence, and a more bewildering layout. Nearly everything was connected by a narrow corridor, of varying lengths but hardly ever of varying colours or materials. Walls made of cold metal, floors of tile that had seen a significant amount of wear, bearing plenty of cracks, chips, and grimy imperfections.

In her head, Celestia was gradually assembling an internal map of the station. She seemed to be along a centrifuge, with several nodes connected to one centralized corridor which ran more or less straight and uninterrupted. Each node was a small cluster of rooms connected at regular intervals. There was the medical bay, which was little else besides several operation rooms and the more comfortable patient lounge. Then, the cafeteria--A dining lounge, a kitchen, and a store-room. It was likely the largest of the nodes, without counting the cavernous central chamber.

Then, there was a viewing area--not a separate node, simply built along the side of the centrifugal corridor, with several sitting mats arranged before the large plate-glass window. From there, Celestia could make out the curvature of the centrifuge, which was truthfully the only way she was able to tell it was such in the first place.

The next node after the viewing area was the ship’s living quarters. There was no power in them yet and they were rather frigid, so Celestia hadn’t been able to spend much time examining them. Two rooms, and there couldn’t have been more than four bunks in one room, and a single larger bunk for a larger pony, or perhaps a pair of ponies lying side by side. Eight beds, besides what was presumably hers. Eight beds, and only three souls left for them.

Regardless, the node seemingly intended for sleeping within was the smallest by a significant margin.

The only connecting corridor that did not connect to a node intended for the crew seemed instead to be connected to the mechanical operations of the station. It almost seemed to be a separate structure conjoined with the centrifuge by a lengthy corridor, and far smaller by comparison. If she were to look out at it from one of the windows along the centrifuge, Celestia could count three other nodes, one after the other, and with multiple dishes of reflective-looking panels extending off them from both sides. A few of them looked as though they’d been badly damaged and had been rended off their moorings, which had no doubt been the source of the sparking light that she had spotted earlier.

Surely this had been where Codex had first gone off to. Celestia figured she would find him there, when she eventually braved the distance into the secondary part of the station. It didn’t look wide enough to fit a pony, which meant she’d have to travel outside the station. Somehow.

For now, though, she had her immediate survival to worry about. Wherever she was, she would need food and she would need water. The cafeteria area seemed to have a decent supply of freeze dried food--oats, rice, and fruit were the chief selection that Celestia could see, and given the supply she imagined it was meant to last several years at best. It was hardly a Royal Palace buffet, but at least her survival was less of a hypothetical.

Water was kept in a large tank in the same store-room, and various bits of wires and piping snaked their way from vents in the ceiling, through a metal filter mounted at the top of the tank.

Over the course of what surely must have been a day--although it could have been as many as three, it was difficult for Celestia to keep track of time--she hauled various objects into the control room of the station. Blankets and pillows from the sleeping area had been her first priority. She had napped on them only after barricading the only door into the control room with a metal shelf, which she had nearly fainted just trying to move.

Then, a steady store of food--as much as she could carry, though she knew it would probably only last her a week or so. She had to carry jugs of water over the course of several trips, and she knew she would have to ration it out if she wanted to limit the amount of time spent wandering the corridors of the station. Finally, she returned to the infirmary to grab more painkillers, blankets, and the ‘Science Tape’, as it had been called. She didn’t know if she’d have any way of viewing it again, but even having some slim reminder of home and of Twilight felt necessary to her.

[̷1̷1̵5̸8̶-̶0̵1̸-̸1̸9̸/̷/̴0̴9̵-̶1̴2̷-̷4̴6̴]̸-̴-̵[̸̵̷1̵̴̶1̵̷̸6̴̵̴0̶̵̴-̴̴̴0̷̶̶4̸̵̶-̴̶̶0̶̶̸2̸̶̴/̶̷̶/̴̷̴1̸̴̸9̸̴̶:̷̷̷5̶̸̵9̷̶̸:̴̴̸5̸̸̴9̴̴̴]̵̵̴ ̸̵̷(̵̷̶D̵̴̶E̴̴̸S̶̶̸C̶̶̸E̸̸̴N̵̷̶T̸̸̵)̴̷̵

[̷1̷1̵5̸8̶-̶0̵1̸-̸1̸9̸/̷/̴0̴9̵-̶1̴2̷-̷4̴6̴]̸-̴-̵[̸̵̷1̵̴̶1̵̷̸6̴̵̴0̶̵̴-̴̴̴0̷̶̶4̸̵̶-̴̶̶0̶̶̸2̸̶̴/̶̷̶/̴̷̴1̸̴̸9̸̴̶:̷̷̷5̶̸̵9̷̶̸:̴̴̸5̸̸̴9̴̴̴]̵̵̴ ̸̵̷(̵̷̶D̵̴̶E̴̴̸S̶̶̸C̶̶̸E̸̸̴N̵̷̶T̸̸̵)̴̷̵

I̶̼̺̥̞͆̋̃

Celestia awoke to somepony’s hoof resting on her temple.

Her eyes fluttered open, but she didn’t move right away. Instead, she allowed her gaze to focus on the pony in question… Lotus Leaf, looking half-asleep, her mane disheveled and stringy. Her face looked as young as Celestia had ever seen her, but her mane seemed to be poorly kept and missing in a few places. Her body was covered in scars and indentations, as though her bones weren’t sturdy enough to keep her flesh taut around her.

Around them, it was hard to make out the room in detail with the lighting as dim as it was. Dust danced all about, and the walls of the once pristine room had become flecked with spindly cracks and a heavy coating of dirt and decay. Anything metallic had rusted over, and the air smelt of mold and rot.

“Hi, Celestia,” Lotus Leaf said, her voice soft and quiet. “Sorry. I din’t mean to wake ya.”

Celestia exhaled, shaking her head. “No. No, not your fault, Lotus.”

“She’s up, Codex.” Lotus called out, and the stallion soon came shuffling into the room. He was in the same sorry state as Lotus, heavy bags under bloodshot, cloudy eyes, with much of his mane and tail gone.

Both ponies looked exhausted, and horribly, horribly malnourished. Without thinking, Celestia outstretched a wing, pulling both of them close and wrapping her neck around them. Lotus let out a surprised little ‘eep!’ sound, while Codex seemed to have been anticipating such from the way Celestia had been looking at both of them.

For several moments they remained that way in silence, before Celestia gently released her wing from around them, a small and forced smile on her face.

“S-should drink somethin’, Princess…” Lotus murmured out, and her wing outstretched to gently place a glass of murky, brackish water on the end-table before Celestia. “Sorry it’s, er… like that…”

Celestia shook her head. “Not your fault. We’re running out of time, aren’t we?”

“Twiley’s off-line for good, we think.” Codex said, nodding his head slowly. “Most of the lights and heating, too. Not even enough power to turn ‘em on. If it weren’t for bat-ears over there, we probably wouldn’t even be able to get around.”

Lotus managed a shaky smile. “Doin’ all the heavy-liftin’, as usual.”

"Are we...have we been decaying faster?" Celestia breathed out. It certainly felt like it.

Codex nodded. "I think our orbit is. We've been getting closer to the Tear every go-around. And I think it messes with, well. More than just magic. Gravity, and as a result time."

"I...I see." Celestia bit her lip, looking out the frost-lined window.

"We recalibrated our wake-up time, so… we’re gonna have to fire the Harmony Cannon basically right away. Then, uh. That’ll be that for our loop. Back into the, er. The Blender, for the three of us.”

Celestia winced. “W-what do you mean?”

She already suspected she knew precisely what he meant, but she was still praying to be wrong.

She wasn’t. Codex ground over his explanation with weariness and effort, unable to meet Celestia’s eyes. “Well, er. Normally Twiley takes care of that for us. Hauls us in when our bodies reach the end, and, er. Reconstitutes us. This time, uh…”

“It’ll be fast, Celestia.” Lotus promised. “We’ve got some tranquilizers, put ye right under. We’ll do you first, and then… I dunno. Nose-goes for the honours between me and birdbrain.”

Celestia was speechless, as the scene played out before her in visceral detail. As far as she could remember, the… specifics, of their embryonic longevity had always been unspoken. Something that had been handled in the void of unconsciousness, while they ‘slept’ in stasis.

But that wasn’t what was happening at all. And without the vessel’s AI to do the dirty work…

“I’m sorry, Celestia.” Lotus whispered out, resting a hoof on Celestia’s shoulder. “It… it wasn’t ‘sposed to go on this long…”

“I want it to end….”

The statement had no purpose. It simply hung over the filthy, dusty air to the benefit of no-one hearing it. Celestia wasn’t even sure why she’d said it, besides for her own benefit.

The process of re-awakening their new bodies was considerably expedited, compared to the last few times.

Besides, of course, the most recent one in her memory—though that already felt more like a particularly vivid nightmare than anything she had actually endured.

Her limbs felt weary and sore. She stumbled many a time as they made their way down the centrifuge. Its rhythmic spinning had slowed, which meant the effects of gravity were weakened significantly. They had to be careful as they travelled onwards, since each step carried risk of sending the lot of them careening down the hall, no doubt to sustain an impact their weakened and decayed forms could scarcely handle.

“What loop is this?” Celestia asked, as they travelled on.

“I, uh.” Codex exhaled heavily. “With Twiley down, it’s hard to know for sure. There were.. A dozen or so notches on your bed, Celly. Carved in with a scalpel, and I just added number twelve today. I can’t tell you for certain, but…it’s probably been a long time, back home.”

“Wonder if they’re even thinkin’ ‘bout us anymore,” Lotus said, letting out a smug little snort. “Probably not. I can’t even watch the same show for longer than five seasons, myself.”

“I can guarantee you that Princess Twilight hasn’t forgotten,” Celestia replied instantly. “So there’s at least one pony down there who is still thinking of us.”

“Yeah… I hope so,” Codex said. "I'm more worried about them then they probably should be us."

“Well, I don’t rightly care if they forgot us or not," came Lotus’ cold reply. “Ain’t up here doin’ this for the clout and the social security.”

“Uh huh. We’ll see who’s sayin’ that when they make a monument for us all, back home,” Codex said with a snorting laugh. “You’ll be the first pony signing autographs, mango-muncher.”

“Aw, kiss my poorly cloned flank, birdbrain.”

“Mm. Do invite me to the wedding, you two,” Celestia butted in, letting out a gentle chuckle of her own. They were coming up to the airlock now… which meant their surviving time on this particular loop was swiftly approaching its termination. Idly, she wondered if four hours was a new record for the shortest alicorn lifespan to date.

Routine occurred. Their spacewalk to the Elemental Node was uneventful, and Codex was considerably efficient in his lining-up of the Harmony Cannon.

Using it nearly detached Celestia’s horn, though.

And then, on their return journey, after Lotus had miscalculated her trajectory a little too dramatically, Celestia turned just in time to watch the bat pony’s left wing strike the metal conduit, and disconnect cleanly from her side.

It happened horrifically quickly. Celestia was unable to hold back a scream.

“Lotus!”

The bat pony’s surprised and horrified screaming quickly overrode their shared comms. The wing, wrenched cleanly from its socket, sailed in spiralling pirouettes into deep space, while the bat pony herself lost her grip on the conduit and began to drift away from it herself. Air rushed out of her suit rapidly, as the pressure seal failed to lock around a limb that was no longer there. Thick, chunky orbs of blood floated from out of her suit and into the void.

Meanwhile, Codex was attempting to gather some information as to what happened, but his urgently asked questions were more or less relegated to the same droning frequency as the heavy blankets of static upon their local transmissions, with Lotus’s terrified and pained cries instead at the forefront.

Celestia kicked off the conduit and wrapped the oxygen cable around her right hoof, while her left extended to grab onto Lotus, before she drifted too far and allowed the rest of her suit to continue depressurizing.

“Try and calm your breathing…” Celestia said immediately. “We’re getting you inside.”

“Leave me!” Lotus screamed back. “Just buckin’ leave me! We hardly have enough power for all three of us anyways!”

Celestia ignored her. She hooked a hoof around the strap of Lotus’s spacesuit, and then gave her oxygen cable a gentle but firm tug, pulling both of them towards the airlock.

“….in Tartarus is…!” Codex’s panicking voice rode along the waves of static and distortion. Surely he had seen the event from within the ship, or at the very least its aftermath. He was waiting at the airlock by time the two of them arrived, opening it manually from the inside so that Celestia scarcely needed to even alter their trajectory before the two of them collided inside.

Once they were inside the ship, the full extent of the damage to Lotus’s wing was clear. It was…gone. The frail and poorly reproduced bone had simply split from the impact that, under normal circumstances, would hardly have even fazed the young mare. It wasn’t mend-able… it wasn’t even there. Only a jagged, knife-like protrusion of bone jutting out of the bloody red wing-socket remained.

“What in Tartarus?! ” Codex was saying, as soon as they got the suit off. “E-easy, Lotus. I’m gonna get you some tranqs…”

“Screw the tranqs!” Lotus howled back. “Carry my broken ass to the Blender and end this bucking loop!”

“Y-y-you sure? Lotus…”

“Yes! Buckin’ look at me, dipshit!” Lotus spat out some thick, chunky blood that looked more like flesh taken liquid form.

Codex looked helplessly to Celestia, who found herself rooted in place in sheer horror at the grotesque sight before her.

And then, her mind caught up. The reason didn’t matter...Lotus was in pain, and this entire damned loop was cursed from the start anyways. The sooner they ended it, the sooner they could try and close the tear once again… After all, it was only a matter of time before Celestia and Codex’s bodies fell into the same state of rapid decay as Lotus’s.

“Gods above. Gods above this is…” Codex was beginning to hyperventilate, but even in his panic he helped Celestia lift Lotus.

The poor thestral lost two more limbs along the way. First, her forehoof, which had been held in Codex’s grip. Her other wing followed. They simply...disconnected, from her crippled form, sloshing messily onto the floor. The bat pony herself… did not react, and when Celestia looked at her she saw that her eyes had glazed over, empty, white, and dead.

There wasn’t an evil being on Equestria worthy of such horror, Celestia thought. To see it of one she was quickly coming to see as a close-friend…

Codex was weeping openly, and it was difficult to see where they were going in the pitch-black corridors of the ship. The dust that hung over everything was strong enough that every hoofstep sent a blizzard of it swirling about. The grime lining the walls and ceiling and floors had turned the pristine white of the ship to an ancient, all-encompassing rot, making every hallway and room look the same.

Finally, they reached the Embryo Room. Celestia was carrying Lotus fully now, while Codex trod behind her, eyes wet and reddened and breathing heavy and strained, with both of Lotus’s detached limbs underneath a wing.

They loaded Lotus into a machine in the corner of the immense, cavern like room. A large, metal box, that might as well have been a casket. Designed to turn the kind, sweet, quirky bat pony mare into little else but a messy slurry.

Neither of them watched, but the sounds were horrific enough.

Then, it was Celestia’s turn.

“I’ll knock you out, first…” Codex said. His voice… it didn’t even sound like the same stallion, now. It was like a ghost was piloting his body and speaking with his voice. “Everything’s already programmed in. When it’s my turn, all I have to do is hit the nice green button and hop in.”

Celestia wanted to say so much. She wanted to offer some sort of comfort, or assurance, or promise…

She offered her withers instead, for the tranquilizer injection. Her last thought, before her mind went black, was the horrible whirring of the reconstitution machine.

I̶̥̠͗̿̐Ī̷̛͈̎̉̔

Celestia awoke to Lotus Leaf’s hoof upon her temple.

It seemed like just a moment ago when she had been here before. It was hard to believe that it had actually been four years once again.

“Hello, Lotus Leaf,” Celestia said, before she had opened her eyes.

“Hi, Celestia.” Lotus’s voice was strained, as though she had been weeping. As she looked into the bat pony’s face, Celestia realized with a sinking heart that she had been. Her eyes were reddened and puffy, and she wiped a little trail of snot with a hoof and forced a smile as she looked at Celestia.

It took a moment for Celestia to realize why Lotus had been crying, but when the realization struck her she felt her own eyes watering ever-so-slightly.

This was the first loop in which Lotus hadn’t called in Codex.

They sat in silence for several moments. Celestia wordlessly rose out of the bed, sitting down next to Lotus and nuzzling her snout against the young bat pony.

“He… he did it on purpose. The damned idiot.” She choked out. “B-before we ‘slept’. He reprogrammed his pod.”

Celestia nodded slowly. “Not enough power. Not for all three of us.”

“The computer woulda picked one of us to wake. Between me and him,” Lotus murmured. “Like… like before.”

Celestia winced. She thought of the living quarters, when she had investigated them earlier. Nearly half-a-dozen beds. A strange amount, for only three ponies.

But there hadn’t been ‘only three ponies’, had there?

She couldn’t even remember their names. How many years ago had that been? How many decades?

“...It woulda picked him.” Lotus whispered out, sobbing soundlessly into Celestia’s wing. “It woulda picked him, Princess. Not me.”

Celestia held Lotus tight in her wings, saying nothing for some time, and simply letting the bat pony’s emotions run their course.

“We need to end this, Lotus,” she said eventually. How many more loops would they last? How long, until neither of them awoke again? Their time had been running out since they had started, and it had been too late for as long as Celestia could recall. “It’s time for us to... rest.”

Shakily, Lotus detached herself from Celestia, once more rubbing her snout with her hoof, a weary and forced smile forming on her lips. “Right. But how? We can’t just leave the Chaos Tear… without us, it’ll just start widening again…”

“I know. And I’m not… proposing we leave.”

“Then what? Where would we go?”

“The Tear,” Celestia said. “I think we both know that the tear will outlive our life support by a significant margin, at this rate.”

“Yeah…” Lotus exhaled heavily. “So we’re doomed one way or another. Is what you’re saying.”

“That depends on what you define as ‘doomed,”’ Celestia said, resting a wing onto Lotus’s back. “We won’t be returning to Equestria, yes. But if we succeed, we will be saving it. Saving the known universe as we know it. Fulfilling out mission, for the survival of everypony back home. That doesn’t seem ‘doomed’, to me.”

Lotus gave a single nod. “When ye put it like that. I guess so. So what were ya thinkin’?”

“Well. We’ve been prodding the Tear with the Elements from afar for some time, yes? From a safe distance, whilst ensuring we stayed fat enough out of its gravity well?”

“That’s right. Slow and steady progress, with each loop. That’s the intent.”

“But each loop has been getting worse here, at the rate that the ship’s reserves are decaying, it will outpace our own survival,” Celestia continued. “What if we were to find some way of firing the Harmony Cannon much closer? Would that not cause a significant amount more damage to the Tear than our attempts to close it from afar?”

“I mean… I would assume that much. It’s…a bit of a shot in the dark, though, when its Chaos Magic we’re talking about. I’d say it’d have… a fifty fifty chance? Of either doin’ a featherful of damage, or doin’ none at all. And I don’t think I have to tell you what flying through that Chaos Tear is going to do to us.”

“Atomize, yes?”

“If we’re lucky.” Lotus sighed. “I really don’t know what it’ll do to us, to be honest. It’s…Chaos Magic. It can really do anything, right? I dunno. I’m not a mage, I’m a physician. There’s no healing magic, just healing science. And that Tear? It ain’t got anythin’ to do with science.”

“Yes, well. With that uncertainty considered, we come to the subject of getting me within firing range of the Tear whilst still keeping you safe to continue on.”

Lotus blinked. “What?”

“Well. Dear, I can’t ask you to accompany me on this suicide mission.”

“Well, I swore to take care of you through thick and thin. So if this what you want to do, then we’re gonna do it. Together.”

“Lotus. If it is possible that one of us can be spared from this, then we must make that effort.”

“For what?” Lotus flapped her wings irritably, the movement stirring a torrent of dust throughout the ice-cold room. “So I can just die by myself in a few weeks? Watch myself crumble apart? Wake up one day, all alone? Why would I want that, Celestia?”

“Because when the Tear closes, there is a chance that help may be sent our way.”

Lotus laughed. "I think Equestria is gonna be too worried saving themselves from extinction to worry about saving Lotus Leaf, the random bat pony in the middle of nowhere. And anyways... I’ll still die. We weren’t built to last.” Lotus practically growled it out, but there was a strange sort of acceptance even in her grimly spoken words. “Besides... if they don't come, then I’m gonna be… back in the loop. Twiley ain't gonna know that we finished our job. She's gonna keep bringing me back, just to die again and again. And that sounds like...Tartarus."

Celestia winced. “I’m… I’m sorry it came to this.”

“If I could make the decision again… go back, with what I know now of the mission…” Lotus’s eyes travelled around the infirmary room, where she’d been a hundred times. Where they’d probably had the same conversation already, at least several times. “I’d keep my promise. I trust that what we did mattered. If it bought a single day for those back home, it mattered.”

She turned away from Celestia, to rifle with something on a medical counter behind her. After a moment she turned again, a videotape in her mouth. “We got a transmission from home, while we were…under.” She offered it to Celestia. “It...might be from decades ago, and the signals just reachin' us now. But somepony there…was still thinking about us. Still appreciates us. We don’t…really have a way of watching it without power. I can try and get that up. But… at least we know that we’re not forgotten.”

“Twilight wouldn’t.”

Lotus smiled, though it was a tired, old looking affair. Celestia would had said it looked older than the mare herself, though that was a difficult metric to define. “Maybe it’d be better for her if she did.”

“That’s her decision to make,” Celestia said. She heard her voice waver, and felt the tears down her face before she’d known she was crying them. “Are you… Do you truly wish to do this with me, Lotus?"

Lotus’s reply was non-verbal. She extended a hoof to Celestia. She stared at it for a few moments before realizing the bat pony was seeking the ancient comradely acknowledgment of a hoofbump.

Celestia returned it, which managed to wrench a smirk out of Lotus.

“So… We should have a bit more time this time around,” Lotus said. Her smirk was exceptionally short-lived—already, she looked about ready to cry as she thought back to her last loop and her fallen companion. “We shouldn’t have a repeat of…last loop. Thanks, by the way. For being quick about that.”

Celestia bit her lip. She'd been really hoping Lotus wouldn't have retained the memory. “I’m sorry it happened at all. You feel better now, though?”

Lotus gave her left wing a testing flap.“New body, new me. This wing feels useless, though, I think it probably is. Buck me…it’s probably…” She winced, and found herself unable to articulate the thought fully.

It was probably Codex’s. Celestia’s mind filled in the gaps.

Shakily, Celestia rose. No better than any of the previous times. Always a little bit worse. The dust her hooves kicked up nearly choked her, and a glance into the darkened hall that was the rest of the ship showed her that it was not doing any better. Her throat was parched and dry and begging for water, and judging by Lotus’s own voice she knew the bat pony was in the same state.

“Water?” Celestia asked.

“It’s, uh. Ain’t gonna sugarcoat things, it’s buckin’ gross, Princess.” Lotus offered her a glass of brownish-grey water. “Should, uh…help, I guess. But I can’t stomach it.”

Celestia decided to pass, herself. Weary as she was, she wasn’t planning on extending this loop any longer than she had to.

They left the infirmary, and ventured back into the halls again. Celestia’s horn ached when she tried to cast, and so Lotus led the way with perked ears and the occasional staccato click of her tongue. Echolocation. The fourth tribe’s own special trait. Celestia kept pace with her by the sound of her hoof-beats, and her own ingrained muscle memory of walking through the featureless halls of the vessel for a hundred years or more.

Their destination was the common area. The same destination as it had been, during that one loop a dozen loops ago. When it had all began to fall apart. There, they could look out across the stars and the expanse of space, and Celestia could try to convince herself that it was beautiful, in some way.

“Alright…” Lotus began when they had arrived, and were both seated at the window, trying to see through the thick layer of frost that lined it. The Tear was off their starboard side, considerably close owing to how late they’d been awoken. Long gone were the weeks spent preparing, no time even for the most daring and risky decision anypony aboard the vessel had ever made. “Tear looks… less than a day out. I’d estimate the ETA as… nine hours?”

“Is the equipment in an operable condition?”

“Will be, when I throw the breaker in the bridge. Provided it doesn’t short the whole damn system,” Lotus said. “I’ve never…actually piloted the ship before, but I read the manual, and I did the test flights back home. For, uh. Initial orbital insertion procedures, mind you, not what we’re attempting. But… what is flinging yourself headlong into a fatal magical black hole but another creative form of orbit?”

“Your confidence is staggering.” Celestia deadpanned.

“Thank you, thank you. More than just a pretty face.” Lotus smirked. She pointed a hoof towards the conduit connecting the Elemental Node, which was just coming into view as the centrifuge spun. “Bigger problem for power is gonna be if the airlock over there doesn’t work. They have emergency back-up battery coils, but it’s a snowflake’s chance in Tartarus they have enough juice to run.”

“Mm. And I suppose we cannot split electrical power between the bridge and the airlocks?”

“No, I don’t think so. We’re really running on electrical fumes as is. Scraping the battery acid off the sides of the barrel. Licking the bottom of the chip bag for one last hit. Need I continue?”

“I understand our situation Lotus, thank you.”

“Just makin’ sure. We’ll have to get you in position, and I’ll… solo ship control from the bridge. The thrusters themselves are all mechanical, so I’m not too worried about those. I just need the console on while I aim our heading, and then once they’re activated, that’ll be that.”

Celestia’s next question felt…considerably juvenile. She was almost reluctant to ask it, but she very much doubted Lotus would’ve had it in her to judge. Gently, she removed the videotape she still had tucked beneath a wing. “Do we have enough energy on reserve for… one final word from home?”

Lotus cracked a smile midway between weary and excited. “I think we can manage that.”

I̸͔̝͜͠İ̵̹̙̹̘̆̓Į̷͉͔̲͛̿̓ͅ

They had to kill the power for the entire satellite to run one CRT monitor.

“I, uh... I imagine if Codex was still here, he could’ve...” Lotus sunk her head into her hooves for a moment. “He was the tech guy. I’m just... Gods...”

“Lotus, dear...” Celestia took her under a wing. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not, Celly. It’s really not.”

No. It wasn’t. “Well. One way or another... It’s almost over. If you’re still sure about this.”

“I am. Just...” She took a few shaky breaths, steeling her panicking nerves with obvious effort. “Okay. I’m fine. It’s fine.”

Before any further self-doubt and panic could overtake her, Lotus flicked the CRT monitor to life and shoved the tape into the receptacle.

The transmission from Equestria was... Hardly discernible at first. Just a torrent of static, and distortion, as the semi-functional radio-arrays struggled to receive and convert it into something legible for the ship’s crew. Shapes formed from static, in the vague outline of ponies or structures, but nothing could be interpreted with any degree of accuracy. The monitor itself was probably to blame as much as the transmission, Celestia figured, given how long the old equipment had been lying here, bathing in the dust of the ship’s endlessly deceased crew.

Through the storm of static, though, Twilight’s voice was like a lighthouse to a ship.

“H-hey, guys. The, uh... It’s been a few loops now, where we haven’t received... Anything, from any of you. Just the pings of the proximity beacon letting us know you’re still in orbit, but no equine contact besides.

“We figure we know why. Power outages, and failing systems. I’m... Sorry. It wasn’t supposed to...Well. I know you’ve probably had that conversation with yourselves a thousand times. It wasn’t supposed to go on this long.

“I don’t even know if anypony is there receiving. We’ve been detecting gradual decreases in the Tear’s integrity. Which means somepony is still trying to close it. But... At this rate, we’re not going to make it. We spent it all... All we had, to get you all there. You were the one success, out of countless failures. The last big big of magic most of us saw, and that was...so long ago, now. We’d spent all our hope on this mission, and now the time is running out that we can reliably claim there’s... Hope for success.

“And the hardest thing for me to admit... And the thing I don’t want to, but I don’t want to remain silent about, either... Is that I’m giving up.

“Celestia... When we started this, I swore I wouldn’t bring you back. Wake you up. I wouldn’t, until the you that’s hearing this had succeeded on her mission. Otherwise, it would’ve felt like... Well, like we’d just copied you. Put that copy on a doomed mission in space, and then forgotten about her. I didn’t want to do that, nor did I want to risk the uncertainties of having two of the same alicorn alive at the same time. Even if one was a clone. Even if one wasn’t even on the same planet. But the truth is... We were always doomed to be apart. You can’t keep a cloned body alive for long. Even if we would’ve gotten you home... We wouldn’t have been able to save you. The ship’s computer would’ve shut down the reconstituter... And you would have... Slept.

“And... In case the ship runs out of power before that is even an option afforded to us... I wanted to make sure you knew the truth. Because I love you, Celestia. I am eternally grateful to the crew of the project, however many are still with you. And... I want you to know that Equestria has survived because of your efforts to keep the Tear closed.

“Even if that survival ends soon. It... I guess it inevitably would have. I guess you can only stem the tide for so long. And... It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, and held you in my hooves, and been able to look at you with my eyes instead of through the lens of a camera...

“I just wanted you to know, that for all the—”

There was likely more to the tape. But at that moment it clicked off, as the ship’s AI killed the incoming transmission three years ago. Not important enough to continue wasting their limited energy recording.

Another tape, for the pile of messages from home.

“Y’know...” Lotus sighed, flicking off the television as it devolved to static. “For what it’s worth... I think we did a good thing, Celestia.”

Celestia continued to stare at the blackness of the monitor. She did not immediately reply.

“I’m one of a hundred of myselves,” she breathed out. As if the realization had just now struck her. “And the... The ‘real me’... Is back home.”

“I guess so. But how real can she be if you’re the one saving the world, while she sleeps on her fat flank?”

Celestia was silent.

“Celly... Listen. The real me...” Lotus stretched out her wings. “Died knowing that this mission was for the good of Equestria. The real me is the one talking to you, because I haven’t changed that goal. I still feel it, as strongly in my mind as ever before. The two... The two things... They aren’t mutually exclusive, y’know.”

“Aren’t they?”

“My only friend died so that the real me could keep living.” Lotus flexed that left wing of hers. Of Codex’s. “We’re just... A collection of flesh and organs, arranged a certain way. That’s all. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

Celestia did not agree. But she did not wish to spend the remainder of her life... If it could be characterized as such, arguing with the only one left who was able to hear her do so.

I̴͚̲̒̾̓̽̋̿̀̂́͂̏̕̚͜͠V̸̛̺̐̊̏̈́̊̈́̉͊̽̚

It loomed before them once again, in all its destructive power. This time, Lotus had vowed to take control of things from the bridge, while Celestia had carried out the spacewalk herself. She exited out into empty space once more, kicking off from the airlock with confidence and letting momentum carry her across the gulf between the two ship sections.

She lit her horn to slow herself before she collided with the other airlock, and then shifted her telekinesis to the airlock’s handle and began to wrench it open. Her hooves joined the effort, and with a little effort the heavy metal door swung open.

She shot one last look behind her, at the rest of the ship. Then, she turned and entered the Elemental Node, closing and sealing the airlock behind her.

“I’m in, Lotus.”

“Alrighty. Hold onto somethin’, I’m firin’ the retros,” Lotus replied. “Once, to get us lined up. Then, we’ll go give that damned chaos tear the boop of its lifetime.”

Celestia smiled, making her way through the claustrophobic corridor, back towards the Harmony Cannon. The window was dominated by empty space, with the Chaos Tear a good distance to Celestia’s nine-o-clock.

“Ready, Lotus.”

The ship suddenly gave a mighty rumble, as the thrusters flared to life. In front of her, the view from the window began to shift, as the ship moved into position, roughly and laboriously. The whole thing was shaking, shuddering… it felt to Celestia like the ship itself was crumbling apart right then and there.

Yet eventually, it ceased. Lotus extinguished the thrusters now that they were in position. The Chaos Tear was directly before her, sparking and crackling and seeming to beckon her forwards with its tantalizing light-show.

“How’s that lookin’, Celly?”

“Looking to be as good as we’re going to get it.”

“Alrighty. Y’sure about this, eh? Not too late to turn us back around.”

Celestia did not immediately answer. She looked on, at the Tear. No smaller than it had been, the last time she had been here. Or the time before. Or any of the other attempts, across the endless loop of attempts, as slowly their power, hope, and bodies crumbled away…

“Bring us forwards, Lotus.”

“Y’got it, Celly. Firin’ main thrusters!”

Another shudder, and this time it did not immediately cease. Celestia could feel herself being pushed back ever-so-slightly as they rumbled on forwards, and sure enough her rump soon collided with the wall of the node behind her.

Directly ahead, the Tear loomed larger and larger. Celestia felt a tug in her chest, of worry and terror and a firm understanding that this was likely it.

An eternity, ceased.

That was okay, though. She’d rather that, then continue dragging herself through an eternity of Tartarus.

On the console in front of her, the Elements of Harmony had begun to pulsate and glow. Not together, but instead in a wondrous, rhythmic sequence. Loyalty flashed into kindness, into generosity, into honesty, into laughter. Again and again, brighter and brighter, as the Tear before her grew to flood the entire window. Spindly tendrils of electrical energy stretching out, reaching towards the ship, towards Celestia herself. She could feel them starting to coil around the solar panels outside, cracking through them with ease and starting to pull the ship towards the snarling maw of the Tear.

“Lotus?” Celestia asked aloud. From her headset, crackling static, and nothing more.

The only light now was the glowing of the Elements on the control panel of the Harmony Cannon. Celestia breathed in deeply, and her horn lit. She levitated out the Elements, each and every one, and then she started back towards the airlock.

It opened to a brilliant flare of light as the vessel slipped closer and closer to the Tear. Celestia hooked a hoof around one of the hoofholds snaking their way around the Elemental Node. The movement of the ship offered some resistance, but she was able to climb up towards the gnarled metal of the wrecked solar panel. Before her, the Tear was everything. It was the only thing before her now.

Gripping the Elements tightly in her telekinesis, Celestia detached her oxygen line and kicked off the solar panel, directly towards the pulsating gash in space threatening to consume everything. Her horn lit as she began to cast the small spell she’d cast so many loops before. So many times before, back in Equestria. Back home. Back when she’d been… herself.

Behind her, the vessel had begun to break up. The sheer force of the Chaos Magic Tear was too much for the flimsy, beaten-down, ancient thing to endure. It was grabbed by the gravity around them, stretched out, vivisected before the cosmos in complete silence. In complete void. The solar panels snapped, the few lights in the control room flickered, and extinguished. The lengthy conduit connecting the two sections of the ship severed, and the spinning centrifuge went hurling away into deep space.

She lit her horn, holding the Elements tightly. She turned to face the Tear, looking larger and larger, pulling her in along with the last bits of Harmony Magic still alive in the universe.

The Elements exploded, and it felt like flesh.

She touched it, and that’s how it responded.

It made a horrid squelching sound when she prodded it, and Celestia instantly recoiled, a cavernous sloshing of barely-viscous liquid nearly driving her deaf as she fell backwards again.

She was encased within an embryonic structure, and when she pushed her hoof against it…

It pushed back.

And nothing further happened.

She tried again. She pushed harder, and still…

Nothing.

She tried again. Nothing.

Her heart was racing, panic setting in rapidly. She tried to look beyond the fleshy substance encasing her, and when she did, she saw…

Nothing.

The vessel was gone. Lotus was gone. The cavernous room that had first birthed her into this Tartarus was gone.

She was nowhere.

And here, beyond the veil of the Chaos Tear, there was nothing.

Was this a mercy? Some way of saving her, from the forces of destruction within the tear? A protection, from some far worse fate? Was it a punishment? A last little trick of the tail from the dead chaos god who had caused this mess to begin with?

Perhaps it meant nothing at all. Perhaps it was for nopony to really say or know.

She tried closing her eyes, and she found the darkness indistinguishable from the nothing.

Her beating heart calmed, slowly and laboriously. Actions, and consequences. She had thrust herself headlong into the throes of chaos, and she had known it might be the death of her. She had known it might not be, which had seemed even worse. And still, she had done it. Actions, consequences. Problems, and sacrifices. Life, and death. Life again. Death again. Forever. As it had been from the beginning, and as it would be forevermore. Hadn't that been what she had been created for?

Perhaps, she thought, she could sleep. She had an eternity to do so, now. It was all she had ever wanted, since she had first come into this world. Since she had kept on coming into it, again and again, to experience a life a little worse each time.

Perhaps, she thought, she might one day awake to something more than the forever of nothing at all.

Perhaps…

Well. She supposed there was no more to do, besides wait for a little while. She could keep the eternity of nothing beyond the Tear safe, so that the universe did not have to burden itself with it any longer.

And so, she waited.

And somewhere, outside of the nothing, the universe carried on.

(---)

(postscript)

Celestia hit the ground in a slurry of yellowish-orange liquid, and there were what felt like a dozen hooves on her the moment she did. The impact should have stung, but it simply felt numb instead.

Her head was throbbing, a furious force feeling as though it were forcing through her skull, rending her apart from inside out.

She lay panting for a moment, blinking again and again but unable to will any sight into her gaze. Through what sounded like a tunnel, she heard urgent voices. She heard hooves scraping upon a marble floor.

And... She felt Twilight Sparkle’s hooves there, too. Even without her sight, and even with a dozen of them all helping her to her hooves, she could feel the distinct sensation of Twilight holding her tight, ignoring the heavy layer of biofilm still clinging to Celestia’s body.

“You’re here... You’re here...”

Shapes formed out of the blinding white, the longer Celestia squinted and stared. A window...tall, glass. The rising of buildings and smokestacks towards a dull sky of inky blacks. Taller and grander than she had ever seen them, even during the busy days of an industrializing Equestria.

And against it all...

“Twilight...” Celestia’s body was in agony, sore and numb and stiff and new all at once, but she pushed through the worse in order to wrap her hooves around Twilight’s neck. Off to her side, Luna was looking down at her, a small smile on her face and fresh tears streaming down her face. She knew she was moments from passing out, the sheer exertion on her newly awoken body even from the few moments spent conscious too much. Her headache went from splitting to agonizing. Her vision danced and swam. But... The mare she was holding felt real, for the first time in so long. Perhaps that feeling was enough.

She blacked out, in Twilight and Luna’s hooves. Beside her, several other pods were being tended to, as well, as the other inhabitants within emerged. Carefully and calmly, and with considerably less fanfare, but with the dignity befitting the ponies within all the same.

And somewhere, a million miles away, the gnarled ruins of an ancient space station lost the last of its purpose, as the point it had been orbiting for a dozen lifetimes ceased to be.

Author's Note

Click here for an accompanying blog post.

As always, thank you for reading.