Twilight stared in utter disbelief at the page, fuming with rage. It wasn't just what was written there, no. While the rows and rows of black-on-white characters, neatly lined and encased in their column like an army of soldiers ready to assault her mental health, each black letter looking like a bloodstain left from the wounds in her sanity, were certainly more than enough to make her ponder the possibility of incinerating the building which housed those responsible for the creation of such a crime against reason itself, that wasn't it. What really made the purple alicorn fume was the little box below that, where ponies from all over Equestria sang the praises of the author of that article, like he was some sort of prophet. The fact that those ponies knew who he was.
In a particularly violent fit of rage born from the third paragraph of the sin against intelligence she was holding she threw the entire newspaper across the room. Though calling it a newspaper was very much an overstatement, and most definitely a title it didn't deserve. It was more like a collection of words, printed on pages and then bound together, meant to be bought in the morning and thrown in the trash in the evening.
The Broken Knot, it was called, the logo an image of a rope knot cut in half by a sword. A clever title and image, Twilight had to admit, one they'd either paid someone with an actual brain to come up with or found in some book written by such a pony and shamelessly stolen, judging by the sharp contrast between that and what was inside.
Beyond the stale and mechanical reports of facts from around the country, written with no more talent than what a foal would possess, there were two other components to the nefarious bundle of paper and ink.
The first one, which justified its popularity, and which even Twilight had to admit, was rather enjoyable, was a collection of stories and images produced specifically for the thing. They weren't works of art, but they didn't try to be, and they were good for what they were. Before them was a picture of the writer and artist, his neck on full display as well as the lack of any head above it.
The second one was a short editorial written by that same pony. That was the problem. The pony had no eyes, no ears, and most definitely did not have a brain. And it was clearly evident from what he wrote. Nothing but a bunch of falsehoods stated as facts, born out of his impossibility to correctly perceive the world around him. Not a shred of logic or deduction. Just empty sentences, at best meaningless, at worst wrong.
And that was the problem. That ponies would think, despite knowing this pony had no head, that he could still have an opinion. That they agreed with him. That somehow, enjoying the silly art he made gave them a reason to agree with him. As if his ability to produce enjoyable content was somehow related to his ability to produce a solid reasoning. It made no sense.
Twilight recovered the newspaper with her magic. She was still going to read the stories, those were entertaining enough. She was about to open the correct page when a knock sounded at her door.
Without waiting for an answer, Applejack, Rarity and Rainbow Dash walked in.
"Twilight," the second spoke, "I see you've already read today's editorial. What did you think of it?"
Twilight got up and walked closer to them. "Same as always, girls."
Applejack and Rainbow Dash smiled to each other. "Yeah, great as always," the pegasus said, and the orange pony nodded.
Twilight froze on the spot, dropping the teacup she was holding in her magic to the ground where it shattered. A rather weird thing, considering she hadn't been holding a teacup before. There hadn't even been one in the room. "What did you say?" she quietly asked.
"I said the article was great," Rainbow replied, and the other two nodded.
Twilight cleared her throat. "Er... Girls? It wasn't. It was horrible. We just went through hundreds of words detailing how and why."
"But Twilight, what if I agree with what the author said?" Rarity asked.
Twilight dropped another teacup. "How can you agree with him? Don't you see how his reasoning is non-existent, based on false premises and perpetuated through illogical deductions?"
"No Twilight, because I don't think when I read it, I simply nod and accept what the author says."
Twilight dropped three more teacups. "Why?"
Rainbow Dash intervened. "Twilight, he's an accomplished writer, and his stories are so good, clearly he's right when he says something."
Twilight dropped two teapots. "But Rainbow, he's got no head! He can't think without a brain!"
Rainbow scratched her chin, thoughtful. "Explain," she asked.
"Rarity, would you trust a pony's opinion on magic if he had no horn?"
"Well, I guess not, unless he proved that he knew what he was talking about. And I'd know then, because I have a horn."
"Applejack, would you trust a pony born without his hind legs talking about what it's like to buck a tree?"
Applejack disagreed with the notion that she would, finally achieving her almost insignificant purpose in the story.
"Rainbow Dash, would you think a pony with no wings would have an opinion on what it's like to fly that was worth something?"
"No!" the blue pegasus had to agree.
Twilight smiled. "See? Then you shouldn't agree with him or trust him."
"We still do," the other three replied.
Twilight dropped a metallic kettle. It shattered the same way the cups and teapots had. "What? But why? He has no head, no eyes, no ears, no brain, he can't produce reasoning and he can't even base himself on concrete and actual facts. How can you still agree with him?"
"That's all true, darling. But you see, dear," Rarity said, bringing her hooves to the back of her neck, "we're all headless down here." She removed her head, which then fell to the ground and shattered.
Celestia jerked upwards in her bed, sending her covers flying upwards, the remains of her own scream still ringing in her ears. She was panting, covered in cold sweat, still shaken by the nightmare she'd just had. She took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm herself, watching as the light of the Moon drifted in from the window, then she looked up at the ceiling.
Three pairs of eyes returned her stare, six image's of Celestia's face reflecting in their shiny bulbous surface.
Celestia pouted. "Did you have to charm me and make have that nightmare? Really, Twilight. This wasn't what I had in mind when when I agreed to this." The alicorn crossed her legs in a manifestation of dissent.
Twilight's eight legs clicked and clacked along the ceiling's surface, as she moved a bit closer to Celestia, lowering her head. "Sorry. But it was important that you saw that." She moved a little closer, and her fangs began to nibble on a strand of Celestia's mane.
Celestia tilted her head to the side, smiling as she fondly looked at the large arachnid-like being above her. She tentatively lifted a hoof, and Twilight noticed it. The creature lowered herself on the bed, and Celestia began to lovingly stroke her once-student's deformed neck, as the other softly purred.
"Are you up for a session tonight?" Twilight asked, her unnaturally contorted body shifting as she moved closer to Celestia, making it almost impossible for an outside observer to accurately determine her shape, especially in the dimly lit room.
"I always am," Celestia replied.
Twilight chuckled, in that weird spider-like way she had of chuckling. "I'll go prepare the cross then," she playfully said, lifting her horrifyingly warped body of off the bed with eldritch, undecipherable movements.
Celestia chuckled. "Prepare the#######too#######
The sound became disturbed by a persistent buzzing.
The image began to shake and go out of focus, spots of grey static appearing here and there.
The entire scene became unintelligible.
Twilight gave the screen another hit, the sound of metal against metal resonating in the room, but to no avail, as the image remained disturbed and the sound impossible to understand. Something was interfering with the frequency they'd been using, probably.
She brought her metal hoof to her metal chin, a thoughtful look crossing the part of her face that was covered and didn't leave the gears and wires underneath exposed. "Twilight?" she called, "Do you think there's a way to fix this in time?" she asked.
Twilight looked up from the copy of Twilight's body she was working on, her pair of additional limbs stopping right before she began to weld some circuits. "I don't think, no," she said, her mouth moving despite the noise coming from the speaker in her chest, "maybe the position simply shifted, and we'll have to locate that universe again." The gears in her neck turned, and she went back to working on the Twilight she was building.
"Fine, I'll tell Twilight about it." Twilight exited the room and began to walk up the stairs to the communications room.
Celestia watched her walk out of the scene. The image in the mirror waned and flickered, then finally disappeared. Celestia sighed.
The mirrors had been showing rather strange things ever since the last Hearth's Warming. That had been the day before that. And the one before that. And all days before that for quite some time, in truth. She was rather glad the mirrors room had remained unharmed, even if the path to reach it did have the admittedly annoying tendency to change.
She looked to her right, at the far end of the corridor. The empty nothingness of the void around them, and the stars far in the distance, framed by the broken and twisted ruins of a section of the wall, was the sight she witnessed, like many times before.
No words from Twilight yet, and Discord seemed to either have no idea of what was happening or don't care about it.
Between two of the mirrors was a web, and Celestia found the spider in the middle a rather curious case of unusual colouration, given its white appearance. She wondered if it would be reset too, like the rest. Would she go that far?
She shook her head and looked away. She hadn't caught sight of what Twilight had been watching. Was it worth worrying about that? No, she couldn't find out either way, and besides, it didn't affect her.
She got up and headed for the stairs, if one could call them stairs. Maybe the library would be there this time.
A moth flew by, and got caught in the spider's web.
One of the mirrors came alive, showing Shining sitting at a bar with Lyra at his side, Big Mac behind the counter.
"They don't care about the truth. They care about being right. That's why they fight. They don't want to talk, to find out that they might be wrong on some things and right on others. They start by the assumption that they're absolutely right, and therefore the others are wrong, and they must be punished for that. And they rally their armies and throw them to fight each other, rather than sitting down and talking, because they don't want to admit that they might be wrong. Because it's not a matter of truth, it's a matter of being better than others, just to feel good about themselves."
"And why won't you go down there and talk to them, try to open their eyes?"
"Because I'm right, and they're wrong, and they deserve to go through what they're going through."
Twilight tried to figure out what was happening. A rather hard thing to do, considering she had no brain to process information.
It had happened shortly after Rarity had removed her own head. The others had done the same, and then had pushed on Twilight's neck, revealing she too only had a porcelain prosthesis for a head. Not that she could remember any of it, since she had no brain and therefore no memory.
She couldn't see or hear anything. She was only able to feel the changes of the world around her through the vibrations that travelled through her body. Sounds were meaningless to her, as she had no brain to process them and understand language. All she produced was an imitation of what she experienced, achieved through instinctual use of her vocal chords.
She was a creature of nothing but basic instincts, carried out through the nerves in her body now deprived of a central structure to direct them. She moved and ate things through the hole at the top of the stump that was now her neck, no head above it, and the lack of independent thought meant she could only replicate and repeat what she took in from around her, with no re-elaboration.
She stumbled forward, dumb, deaf and blind, and bumped into her equally reduced equine companions. They stuck together and walked out as a group, entering a city of equally brainless ponies, a country of headless creatures, and together they all flocked to the capital, out of nothing but thoughtless instinct and repetition of what others were doing.
And there they found their prophet.
"Knight in C three."
"You're just copying what I said! Do you even know how to play?"
Chrysalis sighed.
~~Twilight watched the eclipse from the top of the tower. The sound of alternating steps coming from behind her, three normal hooves and a metal one, caught her attention, and she turned around.~~
~~"What's the problem?" Rainbow asked, noticing the frown on her face.~~
~~Twilight turned back again. "I don't like this. I~~
He finished crossing out that part, wiping away some sweat from his brow with two of his seventeen and three halves legs. He knew the Eye would be back on him after they'd had their talk.
"So, what did you think of it?"
"...what."
"This is going in there, anything else you want to say to them?"
"I don't have any comments on that one. I couldn't make sense of it at all, so there's not really anything to delve into."
"That's okay. How was your day?"
The Eye was back on him. He began to move, rising up from his throne of stars and setting aside the canvas of reality he was painting on. He walked up the staircase of existence to higher planes of the flat and ephemeral dimension he was confined in, and reached the image of the place where all universes he can enter are born and die.
There on a shelf sat Twilight's head, cracked and broken, as did those of her friends, but the one of the pony with no head wasn't there, as he was a creature the puppeteer had inferred through manifestations of one of his equals through the structure of the cage worlds were built upon, and therefore he had no access to his true soul.
But Twilight and her friends were creatures, if copies of others, and so he could mould them. And so he did, and he picked up Twilight's broken head and rearranged the pieces, and once again she was whole, and so he did with her friends, for their time in the crease of nothingness they had inhabited was now over. But he brought Twilight with him, for reasons he was not allowed to comprehend.
And so he descended the stairs of creation, entire universes created and ended by the simple movement of his body, as in dimensions below him eternities passed and infinite lives came and went from the mere reflection of the reflections of his existence in the infinite planes between them.
And as he moved his own essence began to unravel, and become one with the nothing, as the veil collapsed and his form was revealed for the instrument of the plan it truly was. His mind vanished as his body became no more than the very strings that were pulling him, now visible for no one to see. And as he descended so did the whole of creation, and infinite dimensions above his own came to rest on the flat white plane they'd been drawn from.
And he couldn't know, for knowing of one's non-existence means ceasing to exist, and therefore ceasing to know, but he never questioned such a thing despite knowing it was the truth for those he created, as the god above him was a merciful one and did not want his intermediary to suffer his own doubts.
And so they reached the end, though truly they were drawn there, as they'd in fact been drawn for all of the path, and there an idea made itself a creature again, by the will of her creator, to speak with him, and for a brief moment of infinity outside of time she knew the truth of her nature.
"What was that?"
"A message."
"To whom?"
"To those still waiting."
"And what did it say?"
"You have not been forgotten. Keep waiting. Things will come, one day."
"Is this the end?"
"For you, for this you at least, I believe it is. But it's not the end."
Somewhere in the distance, a storm began to rise again.
