What's the Worst That Could Happen?
“Take your damn pills, Zephyr.”
Fluttershy gasped, and her wide-eyed stare at Pinkie lasted only a moment before cutlery clattering onto plates around the table made her jump in her seat. Pinkie could sometimes be insensitive, but she’d never been outright rude before. Their booth at Sugarcube Corner, which had been filled with lunchtime conversation a moment earlier – containing nothing less pleasant than gentle ribbing between friends – was now a desolate wasteland, frozen as if determined to last forever.
But Pinkie didn’t look in the least bit abashed or apologetic, staring Zephyr down with a hard brow.
“It’s not like I really need them or anything…” Zephyr mumbled, struggling to meet Pinkie’s eyes.
“Yes you do,” she said at once, “that’s why you were prescribed them. I know jokes, and taking your antidepressants is not one of them.”
Rainbow looked on with pursed lips, eyes flicking between the two of them like she was watching a buckball game. When she’d suggested the lunch earlier that week, she’d made a point about Pinkie being a good pony to study regarding getting on with siblings she had little in common with.
Fluttershy didn’t think this was what Rainbow had expected, or meant as being good to learn from.
Oh no! She could see Zephyr shift his posture, leaning back in his chair and trying to look laid back. Desperately she tried to kick him under the table, because this was obviously one of the few occasions when taking Pinkie anything but seriously could be disastrous.
“Why not?” He flicked his fringe out of his eyes, and Fluttershy found she was biting her hooves. “They’re just some dumb pills. What’s the worst that could happen if I don’t take them?”
Pinkie folded her forelegs in front of her, resting them on the table and leaning forwards at Zephyr. “The absolute worst? Let me tell you…”
On a rock farm to the South West of Equestria lived three grey earth ponies. They were sisters, and they’d been left the farm when their parents died. But they hadn’t been full-grown mares, so Princess Celestia said they could only stay on the farm by themselves, especially with all the bunny stampedes in the area, if an adult moved in with them. They didn’t have much choice, so they agreed, and the princess sent Captain Spitfire to live there and be their guardian.
The eldest of the three sisters was called Limestone. She’d gone her whole life knowing she’d inherit the farm one day, when it would become hers to run until she too died. She had the comfort of that certainty there’d always be a place for her, and the confidence of being born to rule it. But she also knew she’d be stuck there for life, blocked from any ambition outside the farm. That restriction became the cornerstone of who she was, making her bitter and waspish to everypony around her, as she was shaped into a hard-working, no-nonsense mare by the farm she could never love.
The middle sister was Maud. Even among ponies who grew up in the middle of nowhere with only rocks for company, Maud was odd. Sometimes she felt like she was only half a pony, like there were big gaps in who she was supposed to be that just got left out. Everypony else seemed so alive and expressive, and Maud didn’t understand why she wasn’t like that too. She was the smart one, and spent some of her time travelling Equestria studying for her rocktorate.
Lastly there was Marble, the youngest sister. Marble was quiet and sweet, and all she wanted in life was to be loved and accepted for who she was. She’d have happily stayed on the farm her whole life, content with her familiar corner of Equestria and without much need to see more of it.
Perhaps it could have worked out, you know? Perhaps Marble could have stayed with the farm, knowing the others were grateful she was there to tend to it while they went out to see the world.
But they all had their issues. And none of them had been given the right medication.
Limestone had to be the best at everything. Perhaps it was the pressure of knowing she’d be running things herself someday, or perhaps it was the guilt of knowing that position would come to her solely because of her birthright, rather than anything she’d actually done. Either way, she was always pushing harder. She hated herself when she couldn’t keep up, and she especially hated anyone else doing better than her. But she also hated when others fell behind her, feeling they weren’t trying hard enough at pulling their weight.
This fell particularly hard on Marble, the other full-time farmhand. Limestone saw it as Marble lacking a work ethic. Marble should have seen it has having interests beyond farming rocks all day, every day. But she didn’t. She, too, saw it as lacking Limestone’s work ethic, and how she could never measure up to her sister’s example. The more Limestone pushed her, the more she folded in on herself, until she barely spoke a word to anypony.
Maud, meanwhile, was disconnected from it all. When she was elsewhere, working on her studies, then Limestone resented her absence. And when she was on the farm, Limestone resented her more, with any success on Maud’s part stirring up feelings of inadequacy that maybe the farm should have gone to her instead. Marble would try reaching out to Maud, telling her she had to live for something more than rocks, and that more than rocks would miss her when she was gone. Maud tried to understand, perhaps even to connect with Marble as much as she was able.
One time she even managed a smile.
But, for the most part, she’d learned to keep to herself. Her way of appearing emotionally blank frustrated Limestone all the more, who saw it as indifference to things she ought to care about, and, when arguing, would push all the harder to try to break through it and get an emotional response. But Maud would always remain stoic and seemingly unconcerned.
On her rocktorate travels she’d met a pony called Starlight Glimmer, a mare with a plan to remove cutie marks from her village so all ponies would be equal. Helping Starlight to find a suitable cave wall for storing those cutie marks had been the first time anypony had valued Maud’s input as a rocktologist, rather than an unskilled farmhand in a position she was born into, and that put Starlight on a bit of a pedestal in her eyes. Of all the unhealthy figures to idolise, Maud picked Starlight Glimmer.
This volatile balance between Limestone, Maud and Marble was what Spitfire had to deal with as a surrogate parent figure. She didn’t take to it well.
She’d never wanted foals. Even if she had, she was well aware how woefully inept she would be as a mother. The best she could aim for, in her estimation, was a cool, protective but relatable big sister.
It became easy, with that in mind, for Spitfire to embrace her wilder side. Beer for breakfast became her staple, with a dozen others through the day. And, while the nearest town was neither close nor large, there was no shortage of stallions to fall at her heels, stallions she flirted with far more than many observers would consider decent.
Most of which merely served to cloak her own issues, or sometimes exacerbate them. There she was, abandoned by her superiors to a nowhere assignment, just as her father had abandoned her half a lifetime before. Missing her girlfriend from her Academy days, and knowing how out of her depth she was with caring for her charges. At least she had her pet penguin for company.
Yes, a penguin. Nopony really knew what was going on with that.
And one thing Spitfire had perfected over the years was snapping her act back together in an instant as soon as she was needed in a crisis. When the first sign of the bunny stampede came, Spitfire leapt to action stations, commanding the defence of the farm from above.
A fluffy white head appeared on the horizon, with long whiskers and longer ears. “Angel!” Spitfire shouted, identifying it as she tracked it with her binoculars. “Angel attack!”
The first few stampedes went… ok, I guess? Maud had a habit of waking up afterward covered in bandages, while Marble complained about the ceiling above her sickbed. The farm held on.
But for those living there, each day was worse than the last.
Marble, to whom ‘wild’ appeared as ‘childish,’ really, really wasn’t the sort of pony to be impressed by Spitfire’s debauched lifestyle. Limestone was, but she quickly came to see Spitfire as a rival rather than an idol, and their shared mealtimes became all the more frosty and tense.
Each time Limestone led the farm defence, she grew even more insufferable, grinding the others’ faces in how she was the one keeping them safe, and that they needed to up their game to be worth anything. And when Marble or Maud led, Limestone became steadily more venomous in her insecurity.
The more times Maud fought to defend the farm, the more expendable she considered herself. And the more she watched differences between the four of them keeping them at each others’ throats, when they should have been united in a common goal, the more Starlight’s equality plan seemed a good idea. Few reminders of how Limestone was doomed to her station in life were more pertinent than Spitfire’s born-to-be-a-Wonderbolt cutie mark.
As time went on, the bunnies adapted. Each stampede came closer to breaching the farmhouse.
Limestone was overrun during the twelfth stampede, which knocked her confidence into a downward spiral.
The fourteenth took down her down with ease, followed by Maud and Marble too. They were only saved by Marble going into a berzerker rage in their hour of need, rising from the ground where she fell, screaming like a wild animal. She didn’t just defeat the bunnies, she ate them.
A wide-eyed Spitfire suggested Marble possibly hang back come the next attack, please? Yes, Marble saved them, but, maybe not eat any more bunnies, if she could possibly help it?
That put even more strain on an injured Maud and a flailing Limestone, of course. When the next stampede came, Limestone was a rabbit frozen in the headlights of rabbit headlights.
Specifically, she was immobilized and made powerless by the bunnies’ mind rape ray.
Totally a thing.
So poor Limestone was stuck there, having to relive all her foalhood traumas – and she grew up on a rock farm, so, y’know, that is a miserable foalhood – and Spitfire was still kind of reluctant to let Marble loose on the bunnies again because of the whole eating them thing. That meant it fell to Maud to have to save Limestone, and you can imagine how the latter felt about that.
For 53 seconds they had to stand in a room together afterwards. Maud made the mistake of offering some sincere, helpful advice, and Limestone threw a punch.
The next stampede left Limestone feeling so useless that afterwards she ran away.
She left behind a Maud who nopony expected to survive, hospitalised by so very many stomping bunny feet, and an inconsolable Marble.
That is to say, Spitfire tried to console Marble, but Spitfire’s method of connecting with ponies is to sleep with them, and so she sat down on Marble’s bed and offered herself up on a metaphorical sexual platter.
This was some pretty questionable surrogate parenting, especially since Marble was only fourteen, but Spitfire’s hot, so we’ll just gloss over that. Needless to say, Marble didn’t take Spitfire up on the offer, and instead freaked out and retreated further into herself.
But there was some good news – Maud came back to them. Physically, she was in better shape than anypony had predicted. Mentally, though, she wasn’t even sure who she was anymore. She remembered the facts of her experiences with Starlight, but not the emotion of that bond, and, while her sacrifice in the last battle had been to save Marble, she now had no memory of it.
Maud had gone from feeling like only half a pony to not even being sure which half she was.
A few days later, Spitfire finally managed to find Limestone. She was in the remains of a dilapidated house in one of the local villages, lying in a rusty bathtub with the water stained red. By the time Spitfire got her back to the farm, Limestone was in a coma.
Marble, feeling cut off from Spitfire, who propositioned her, and Maud, who struggled to remember her, figured her best chance to find consolation and companionship was by staying with Limestone, watching over her. When sleeping, Limestone looked so serene, at peace with herself as well as with everypony else. And Limestone’s inability to talk or shout meant Marble could finally ask the questions she’d been afraid to before.
“Why do you always push me away? Why is what I do never good enough? Why am I never good enough for you?”
No answer came, of course.
Frustratedly shaking Limestone’s unconscious form provoked no response either, but it did expose her most intimate areas. Marble, to her credit, totally didn’t start masturbating over the sight.
Definitely not. And if she did then I certainly couldn’t tell you about it, because she’s under eighteen and there are rules about that sort of thing which is good because we all know that teenagers are bastions of responsibility and never do anything inappropriate or perverted or capable of making others uncomfortable but instead remain perfectly chaste and pure until their eighteenth birthday when they magically overnight become mature enough to handle grown up stuff and so rules curtailing what those under eighteen can be shown doing totally aren’t restrictive in any way of accurate, nuanced, realistic portrayals of teenagers and that’s fine.
Anyway, Marble is the lowest, and she knows it.
Meanwhile, Maud felt the time had come for a grander move. An end to the divisions between ponies that she saw as only causing pain, with her belief that removing those barriers would create a shared understanding of the suffering they all experienced themselves and caused for others.
Out on her rocktorate travels again, Maud returned to Starlight Glimmer’s village. There she betrayed Starlight, having come to believe that her plan of one perfect, equal village was too insular, too selfish in its focus.
Maud stole the Staff of Sameness, the artifact by which cutie marks are removed.
In the midst of this came the biggest bunny stampede of all, which could only be described as an all-out assault on the farm. Faced with their total destruction, Spitfire made the decision for them to abandon the place and flee. With Limestone too heavy to carry, they instead sealed her inside the gem caves beneath the farm, as out of the way and safe from bunny paws as they could manage.
Then they fled, the pony screams echoing from neighbouring farms behind them.
Even with that motivation, Spitfire practically had to drag Marble by the hoof, such was the wallowing despair she’d slumped into.
The bunnies, though, having tasted blood, gave chase. And they also rampaged through every inch of the farm, including over Holder’s Boulder.
That was a big mistake, because, even when in a coma, one thing was guaranteed to set off somepony’s Limestone Sense.
The cave wall shattered in one buck. A dozen bunny skulls in the next. Limestone was a crazed whirlwind of devastation, sending fluffy rabbit bodies flying in all directions, and putting Marble’s earlier violent meltdown to shame. With a string of clouded quartz around her neck, Limestone knew who she was and where she belonged in the world: her farm was under attack, and that could not be allowed to stand.
But bunnies are fast, and depressed earth ponies aren’t. The hare vanguard of the bunny army caught up with Marble and Spitfire.
Spitfire managed to fight them off, but received a mortal wound in the process. Concealing its severity from Marble, she managed to get the pair of them to an abandoned village, where a tethered air balloon stood amongst the scattered possessions of ponies who had dropped everything and ran when lookouts first spotted the approaching stampede.
There, with the tide of bunnies bearing down on them, Spitfire bundled Marble into the balloon basket, untied the rope, and took one last shot at motivating Marble to snap out of her funk and save herself.
“Marble, life is brutal. The world isn’t kind, there is no plan, and sometimes Princess Celestia seems so very far away. Like she’s forgotten about you. And, maybe she has. But either way, she’s left you to get on with it. Nopony – not one pony in the whole history of Equestria – has ever made anything better by giving up. If you’re going through Tartarus, keep going.”
“But you’re not me! You didn’t grow up with Limestone breathing down your neck day after day. You don’t know what it’s like to have that, to know you’ll never live up to expectations. You don’t understand!”
“So fucking what if I’m not you!?! That’s no excuse, it doesn’t mean you’re allowed to give up. I will never forgive you if you give up. Nor will Limestone. Or Maud. You think I don’t have my own shit going on I have to deal with? You think a well-adjusted adult would have been this incompetent at caring for her charges?
“Why do you think Celestia was ok with sending me out here? I’m no superstar captain, I’m just some wildcard still hung up on a father’s approval I’ll never get and a connection to ponies so shallow we drink to forget it. I’m a fuck up, and out here is where I belong. It’s the only place Equestria has any use for me.
“I’ve regretted mistake after mistake, failure after failure, and I still claw myself back up again every time, because not doing so is always worse. You learn something about yourself, you build your own picture of who you are, you hold yourself to your own standard, and whatever comes, you face it on your feet.”
The bunnies were drawing near, and nothing Spitfire had said looked to be working. In a last bout of self-acceptance and awareness, Spitfire acknowledged that her lips communicated best when not speaking words, and, with that, kissed Marble.
Full-on, properly kissed her. Very definitely a grown-up kiss. And, unlike Spitfire’s last questionable move of that kind toward Marble, this time there were no complaints.
“See how much life you have left to experience?” Spitfire whispered after pulling away, a good few seconds later. “Live, Marble. One of us has to.”
In a flash, Spitfire ripped the Wonderbolt pin from her chest and slammed it into Marble’s own, pushing her back onto her haunches sprawled in the balloon basket. Before Marble could scramble to her feet, Spitfire released the mooring rope, and the balloon lurched away skyward with Marble inside, carrying her away from the encroaching bunnies.
Exhausted, Spitfire collapsed, rolling onto her back as the darkness closed in. She was barely done bleeding out when the rabbit horde tore her body in half.
Far across Equestria, Maud was nearing the end of her journey as well. She had reached the Castle of the Two Sisters, with the Staff of Sameness wrapped in a cloth and lashed to her saddle.
For every ten bunnies Limestone tore through, a hundred took their place. Hemmed in on all sides where she stood atop Holder’s Boulder, Limestone was eventually overrun. She still tried to drag herself back upright, clawing at the rock and swearing to kill them all, even though they’d already pulled her entrails out. But that cry died as the herd piled on her for the last time, leaving nothing.
From far above in her balloon, Marble could only watch and scream.
Maud descended the steps into the barren chasm and crossed its floor, stopping at the opening to the cave containing the Tree of Harmony. She untied the bundle from her saddle, pulling at the string with her teeth. Then she drew out the Staff of Sameness and approached the Tree, the sunrise cresting the horizon behind her.
Suddenly Starlight was there, calling down from the top of the ravine, urging Maud to give back the staff and let Starlight lead the equalisation process.
“I’m not your plushie,” Maud replied, with a glance back. Then she returned her focus to the tree, advancing on it.
“Maud... please! Wait… Maud!”
“No. Marble is calling me.”
And Maud thrust the Staff of Sameness into the Tree of Harmony. Thunder shook the ground, waking some residents of nearby Ponyville. Lyra Heartstrings rushed out to her garden shed, where her array of magic detectors were going haywire. Over in Canterlot, Moondancer’s eyes bulged as her lab instruments picked up the unidentified energy source coming from the Everfree Forest.
A colossal, two-dimensional image of light filled the sky, showing 32 cutie marks interlinked with Old Ponish script and symbols, representing earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns and alicorns. The Tree of Harmony became the Tree of Life.
In the nameless village Starlight called home, her followers, unaware of Maud’s betrayal, rejoiced.
“An end to pain,” they chanted. “An end to difference. An end to separation.”
Maud, wrapped in the blinding light of the Tree of Life, began to grow.
“Free Harmony from the artificial constraints of Diatonicism and Modality,” the villagers chorused.
The roof of the cave exploded upwards into smithereens. Maud continued to increase in scale. The Tree of Life uprooted itself from the floor of the cavern and rose into the sky, keeping pace with Maud to stay level with her chest as she grew.
Moondancer tore from machine to machine in her lab, shouting out readings despite there being nopony else there to hear. “Analysis pattern grey! It’s… a pony! An earth pony!”
“I don’t understand,” Lyra swung her attention from one dial to another. “How is it still increasing?”
By that point, if Moondancer had stepped outside, she would have been able to see Maud towering over the landscape, even from Canterlot. The villagers did see her.
“An end to isolation. An end to hierarchy. Equality is here.”
Maud cupped her gargantuan hooves around Marble’s balloon. Marble, powerless before the giant spectacle, curled into a ball and covered her head, trembling. She screamed for Limestone, too scared to be aware Limestone was far beyond her reach.
“I can make it stop,” Maud said, looking down at Marble to address her. The nimbus surrounding Maud and the Tree of Life reached out towards Marble hesitantly, asking her consent.
The fear and despair in Marble’s eyes slowly segued into resignation. “Mm-hm.”
Like smoke in the wind, Marble’s cutie mark melted from her flank, appearing mid-air in front of her, where it circled a similar projection of Maud’s. The two marks span faster and faster as the distance between them closed, combining in a flash.
“How is this possible?!” Lyra swept a hoof over her eyes, certain they couldn’t be telling her the truth.
“Identity boundary collapsing!” Moondancer cried. “Destinies combining!”
The Tree of Life, Staff-of-Sameness-first, loomed nearer to Marble, the white halo now encompassing them both and pushing them together, until they seemed to share the same space. Marble tingled as the Tree slid through her, and then they became one.
Princess Celestia watched calmly from her balcony, knowing it was far too late to stop the events, and that there was nowhere in Equestria anypony could run or fly to escape. “Elemental power, warped with a tool of unicorn magic, and linked to an earth pony’s heart. Will it lead us to a utopia I never managed? Or leave us envying the days of windigoes?”
Taking a sip of her tea, she turned her head to regard the moon, low on the morning horizon. “Were you way ahead of me all along, Luna?” The splotchy image of a mare’s face on its surface was almost too pale to see. “Are cutie marks by their nature unbalanced, and is their legacy one of lives condemned to suffering?”
In Starlight’s village, off to one side of the chanting mass, stood two ponies slightly less indoctrinated than the rest. “Did… did we do the right thing?” Sugar Belle whispered.
Party Favor forced his eyes away from the spectacle in the sky to offer her an incredulous look. “How should I know?!”
Maud’s voice rang in Marble’s head, everywhere at once. “I can see into your heart now. Let me show you.”
Marble, a filly of not more than four years, was splayed out in the dirt giggling as she played with her big sisters. Together they’d built a crude approximation of their farm on the barn floor, shaped out of mud and twigs. Maud and Limestone laughed along with her, rolling around on the ground.
“Limestone! Maud!” Their mother’s voice cut through the air as her silhouette appeared in the barn doorway. “What are you doing messing about in the mud like that?! You come with me this instant. Limestone, you in particular should know better than this…”
The other fillies were led out with their heads hung low, leaving Marble standing staring down at the miniature farm they’d built while her lower lip wobbled. In a flash of anger, she brought her hoof down on it, smashing it beyond recognition. Then she dropped to her knees and reached for it, pushing the lumps of mud back together to rebuild it through a haze of tears.
“Sweet Celestia, Marble,” Limestone growled, “would you just sort it out already? Why am I the one who has to do everything around here?”
“Because,” Marble spoke aloud, where in the scene she remembered she’d kept her mouth firmly shut, “now ma and pa are gone, you’re all we’ve got.”
Limestone’s head whipped around, jaw dropping open, but even has her eyebrows began drawing down into a scowl, her grey coat rippled into the golden feathers of Marble’s other supposed mother-figure, looking up at her from the balloon dock as dark clouds closed in behind. “You think a well-adjusted adult would have been this incompetent at caring for her charges? I’m a fuck up, and out here is where I belong.”
They were in a bedroom, and not one Marble recognised. After a single glance around, she felt her cheeks flood crimson, having spotted the self-described fuck up on the bed, doing… exactly that. After a moment, though, Marble felt she had to take a second look, just to confirm that, no, she didn’t recognise the arctic blue mare whose thighs Spitfire’s head was buried between. She was young, but then, a closer inspection, as detached as Marble could make it, showed Spitfire couldn’t have been over twenty herself.
“You know,” came Spitfire’s voice from beside Marble, and suddenly she was there too, with Limestone beyond her, all three of them watching the scene together, “I look back on this as the time in my life when I was happiest.” And this Spitfire was the one Marble knew, a mare of thirty with legacies of dark circles under her eyes. “And yet, it wasn’t love, not really. Just two young cadets who thought they were the shit, and thought this was the best way to bond with each other. I miss her, but did I ever really even know her?”
“You found it easier to jump somepony’s bones than just talk to her,” Limestone sneered. “That’s stupid.”
“Ponies are stupid,” Spitfire shrugged. “All of them, at one point or another.”
“This is an easy, reliable connection to make,” Maud explained, announcing her presence on Marble’s far side, “rarely rejected and immediately rewarding. It is an attractive choice.”
Spitfire snorted. “We all want to feel wanted. Needed. Desired. This is an effortless, fun way to get there.”
“So it’s just you propping up your ego,” Limestone said.
“It made me happier about my life, yeah, no denying that. But you’re right, as choices go it’s a selfish one. More about reassuring myself than connecting with another.”
“Then you don’t miss her.” Maud nodded towards the bed, where the cavorting couple had switched positions. The blue pegasus looked up at young Spitfire with adoring eyes. “You miss what she gave you.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Spitfire sighed.
Limestone looked across at Spitfire, considering her. “Will I be that bad when I get to your age? So eager to lose myself in someone else, just to feel worthy?”
“Probably,” Spitfire shrugged. Out of nowhere, she had an open beer in her hoof. “Fuck up begets fuck up, after all.”
Marble said nothing. Though Spitfire’s methods of being close to others were all the more off-putting when seen directly, they remained more effective than anything Marble had ever managed.
Limestone lying in her bed, comatose. Marble sitting on the side of the bed, watching her, shaking her, being honest with her at last.
Just as in the last scene, the four of them stood to one side, watching the memory play out. Limestone was pinching the bridge of her nose, eyes closed. “Why would you only open up like this the one time it’s pointless, since I can’t hear you?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Marble murmured.
“Of course I wouldn’t! How can you expect anypony to understand you if you don’t say anything?! I’ve lived with you for fourteen years and it feels like I barely know you! I am so damn tired of being the only Pie around here who knows how to express herself. Who isn’t afraid or incapable of letting the world know how she feels!”
“Do you ever think that might be the problem?” Once, Limestone’s anger would have kept Marble silent. But wrapped up in bleakness as she was, she couldn’t find the will to care enough even to guard her tongue. “You wear your feelings so openly that ponies are scared to provoke you, and nopony can get close.”
Spitfire watched silently, notably not disagreeing with either party. And she’d know, being the neutral observer of her wards’ bickering.
But Maud interjected. “Did you try to get close, Marble?”
Eyes on the floor, Marble whispered, “I tried.”
“Yes you did,” Limestone said, disdain and disgust in her voice and on her face as she looked towards the bed, where Marble had started to… oh. Limestone turned away from the bed to face the observing Marble directly, and then pulled some provocative poses, making bedroom eyes that never hid her fury. “Why don’t you ‘try’ some more now? We can all watch!”
Spitfire looked decidedly uncomfortable at the prospect, and even Maud’s mouth was a little downturned.
They were on the Ponyville Express. It must have been sunset outside, because orange light streamed in from the windows. The carriage was empty, with only Marble occupying a seat.
Limestone loomed over her, teeth bared. “I just needed somepony I could count on. And instead I got you.”
To keep her eyes on the floor through that was an instinct so ingrained Marble followed it without thinking, even as she muttered far more defiance than she’d usually have the nerv to say aloud. “You still aren’t answering the question. Why do you act like I can never measure up?”
For a minute, Limestone just looked at her, mouth slightly ajar, like she was weighing up what to say. Or, rather, how honest to be. Then she shrugged. “Because you never do. You don’t work as hard, you aren’t as strong, you can’t sort out your own problems to the same extent. What else do you want me to say?”
Leaping to her feet, Marble shouted, “I want you to say I’m your sister and you need me! Please, care about me! Love me!”
Then Limestone and Marble were at the farm, alone in the kitchen together. Limestone sat at the table, forehooves crossed in front of her chest, while Marble stood nearby.
“I don’t need you,” Limestone said, looking straight ahead rather than up at Marble. “I learned to cope without you – without anypony – a long time ago. Ma and Pa died. Maud left. I don’t know why you’re still here.”
Marble gripped her mane by the roots, rocking from side to side where she stood. “Because this is my place, and where I belong,” she said. “Because you’re my sister and I love you, like sisters are meant to.”
“Liar. You’re here because you’re afraid of change. You don’t have the stones to go out into the world, like Maud did.”
Each pronouncement struck Marble like a physical blow, and cringing away from it did nothing to stop them coming.
“And you don’t love me,” Limestone continued. “You hate me, and you’re right to, because I make you miserable. You don’t need me, you just need somepony. Anypony will do.” Finally Limestone looked up at Marble, with weary resignation. “And if you’re that disinterested in who they are, then why would they need you?”
“I do love you,” Marble said, and even she could hear how petulant it sounded leaving her mouth. “I do!”
Limestone snorted. “You don’t even know how.” The room surrounding them flashed to Limestone lying comatose again, with Marble appreciating the view, and then back to the kitchen. “All you have in your life is yourself, who you don’t even like. And if you can’t love yourself, how in Tartarus are you going to love somepony else?”
Marble collapsed to the floor, grabbing at the table to catch herself. Her flailing hoof missed, instead closing on the pot of rock soup, and sent the scalding liquid everywhere as she fell.
Neither the burning or hitting the floor really reached Marble where she could feel it, just numb as she lay there in the spill she’d made, looking up at Limestone and wishing with all the will she had left. “Please… love me… need me… tell me I matter… please, just… help me.”
She could see, right in front of her, the last trace of pity drain from Limestone’s eyes, taking with it the final vestige of what passed for warmth from her.
“No.”
After a few long, reeling moments, Marble lunged at Limestone, wrapping both hooves around her throat. Her muscles locked up, choking the life out of Limestone with such force Marble lifted her from the ground, holding her in mid air by the neck.
The room slowly revolved, a panorama of overturned chairs and empty bottles.
That was the moment the happy piano music started up.
The world became a series of images. Flickers of snarling faces, an unhealthy amount of strangulation, dead animals drawn by traumatised foals, a whole lot of weird stuff. By the time the drums kicked in, it got weirder.
“Was it my fault?” Marble asked. Images of her whole life shot by, too fast to discern. Herself, Limestone, Maud, Spitfire, they were all there, a myriad of tiny glimpses into lost moments, some happy, some sad, but all very alive. “No one understands me, but did I make that happen by shutting them out?”
Marble’s shy smile across the kitchen. Limestone’s face while hauling granite. Maud with a towel around her head after bathing. Marble watching a sunrise over the eastern field one frosty morning, alone. Limestone rolling her eyes. Marble’s uncertain frown at Spitfire’s breakfast drinking.
“Yes,” came Maud’s voice. “By turning inward, you cut yourself off from being hurt by others, but also from the magic of friendship.”
Limestone fixing the drainage in the lower field. Maud and Boulder curled up with a rocktology book one Hearth’s Warming Eve. Spitfire stretching before her morning flight, while Limestone downed her coffee. Marble getting her cutie mark. Maud helping clean up the ashes afterwards.
“I thought you said you could make it stop? Why do I still feel alone?”
Spitfire dumping hot sauce on her dinner. Limestone charging through an oncoming bunny horde, sweeping a path before her with each swing of her crowbar. Maud in a skintight white suit for no real reason.
“You thought somepony else would complete your friendship lesson for you.” Maud’s voice, flat as ever, was neither condemning or consoling.
Marble in the gem cave trying to make out with a stalactite, then turning purple when Limestone walked in on her. Spitfire sharing a hoofbump with her penguin. Hoof-wing bump – whatever.
“I… I feel very attacked right now!” Marble wailed, shouting about how Maud had betrayed her feelings.
Marble being far too sheltered to ever go to a local stand-up comedy show, and thus not learning the crucial life lesson to never put herself in a situation where she needed bringing up short by somepony in that line of work.
“Other ponies died so you wouldn’t be attacked,” Maud stated. “Your family fell to stop it, yet you embraced it anyway.” There was a pause, in which Marble could practically hear Maud – Maud, of all ponies – shaking her head. “That was love. You’ve misunderstood all along.”
No, that couldn’t be true. Nopony wanted her. She’d been saying it from the start. But this time, anger took her further, and she told Maud ponies could all die. Maud’s response was deliberately cryptic at best, asking what her hooves were for, and then her heart.
Marble could feel it all slipping away from her. Somewhere in another life she imagined she’d asked if it were ok for her to exist, deciding that yes, yes it was, and everypony had congratulated her. Here, the question was met with silence.
Marble screamed.
Back in Equestria, Moondancer was hunched over her instruments, eyes glued to the dials as she bellowed the readouts. “Energy source approaching stratosphere! Pegasus weather patterns compromised!”
Maud, so large now that whole countries could be shadowed by the span of her hooves alone, still stood opposite the floating Tree of Life, which was also Marble.
“Wait, what?!” Lyra said, tapping the humming crystal to make sure it was working correctly. “That can’t be right!” When the reading showed no change, she banged her head against it, just to be sure. “The origin point is… dividing?”
Far above the world, six ethereal forms emerged from the Tree of Life, forming a ring around it in the sky. They began as orbs of light, but coalesced into the shapes of six ponies, each shining a different colour: purple, blue, orange, yellow, pink and white.
“The six are resonating together, feeding back and reinforcing the original!” One of the glass valves on Lyra’s spectrographic thaumometer shattered, followed by another. “What does it mean?!”
“Cutie magic field disruption spreading across Equestria!” Moondancer yelled, head in her hooves. “Mark permanence destabilising!”
Princess Celestia watched, silently.
A great white wave emanated from Maud across the surface of the world. In the centre of the pale plain it created stood Maud, now a similar ghostly-white, with crimson eyes, bent forwards and sheltering Marble with her gargantuan body. She towered over the planet, the horizon curving away on either side.
Coloratura’s voice rang out, singing about how she wished she could turn back time.
Moondancer shrieked. “Mark collapse detected! Cutie marks disappearing across Equestria!” She pulled her eyes away from the readings to spare a glance for her own flank, clutching at it as faint swirls of magic appeared around the moon and star emblem it had borne her whole adult life.
Maud grew wings.
Yes she did. Colossal feathered appendages sprouted from her back, stretching far into space above her, framing the moon between them.
“I see it all now,” said Princess Celestia, taking in the view from her balcony as if for the first time. “I realise that boundaries between night and day are merely conventions.” She shook her head. “All boundaries are conventions.” Again she found herself looking to the moon, hardly visible by daylight. “And any convention can be transcended. All it needs is for a pony to imagine doing so.”
Ghostly copies of Maud appeared all over the world – regular-sized Mauds, or there wouldn’t be much of a world left – each seeking a particular pony to help free of their cutie mark.
Huddled under a desk in her lab, Moondancer shivered with her hooves wrapped around her head. She jumped at a touch on her shoulder, springing back at the sight of the dreamy grey pony looming over her. But then she blinked, and it wasn’t some eerie spectre anymore: Twilight Sparkle was there, the brilliant former classmate oblivious to social cues who Moondancer once assumed she’d grow old with. Twilight gathered Moondancer in her hooves, holding her close as her cutie mark faded from her flank and drifted skyward.
Looking up in a daze from the smoking ruins of her equipment, Lyra hardly reacted to the foreign presence in her shed. A moment later, she wondered why she thought she should have been startled at all. She let out a contented breath, gazing up at the nice mare from the sweet shop who Lyra wished she’d had the courage to start a proper conversation with. The mare cupped Lyra’s face, and her cutie mark flittered away.
Enjoying her lie-in on one of her rare days off, Bon Bon rolled over in bed, vaguely aware the ground had been rumbling, and that strange music was coming from somewhere. She cracked her eyes open, smiling at the unexpected sight of the pretty green unicorn who came into her shop at least once a week, responding without hesitation when the mare leaned in to kiss her, hardly even noticing the sweets on her flank disappearing.
In Starlight’s village, Party Favor thought he saw the grey pony from the sky advancing towards him, but felt a whole different kind of tension when he saw it was actually Night Glider. A burst from her wings brought her to his side, and his breath caught as she cosied up to him. Sugar Belle, meanwhile, took the hoof of a big red stallion she’d never seen before, but immediately knew she could trust. Two more cutie marks slipped away.
On the tallest tower in Canterlot, Princess Celestia smiled through tears as she saw the dark alicorn gliding down towards her. “I knew you’d be here,” she said. “I can I feel your heartbeat as clear as my own at times like this, and it tells me that separation is an illusion.” She closed her eyes, at one with the world. “My life extends far beyond the limitations of me.” An orange sun ringed with eight rays left Canterlot behind.
“Harmony is redefined,” chanted the crowd in Starlight’s village. “We end unmarked and equal, just as we began.” The sky above the village filled with rising cutie marks. “All is well.”
Starlight herself was lying on her back on the floor of the ruined main hall of the Castle of the Two Sisters, looking up at Maud and basking in her iridescence. Sunburst stood over her, though everypony knew he wasn’t really Sunburst.
In fact, Starlight had never met the adult Sunburst, so her vision of him was based on some extrapolation, taking the colt she’d known in her foalhood and making him taller and beefier, adding some washboard abs and a tailored jacket. Much better that than him being some loser with a pretentious beard or something.
Having achieved her dual lifelong dreams of seeing Sunburst again and bringing equality to Equestria and beyond, Starlight took her shining moment of triumph to reflect upon her catastrophic failings as a pony.
Clearly, she was just awful.
She confessed that she never believed she deserved to have friends, and thought Maud would be better off without her, pushing her away as soon as Starlight had the cutie mark vault expertise she needed. Sunburst hypothesised that Starlight had been lashing out at everypony around her, driving them away before they could get close enough to reject her. An... interesting... theory, for the pony who had dedicated her life to bringing ponies closer together?
But then Maud was there – three Mauds, one naked, one a foal, and one covered in bandages – confirming that, yes, even Starlight, the mare behind the whole plan for equality and ending divisions between individuals, at heart was afraid to connect with other ponies, and so closed herself off from them.
Hmmm. So she was actually doing the whole thing just to see Sunburst again? And her bringing utopian equality to Equestria had been, what, just a happy side effect?
I sure hope Sunburst was worth all that effort, and didn’t turn out to be some cape-wearing wizard virgin who still needed his mother to run his life for him, and didn’t continually undervalue, take for granted and fail to put any thought at all into his friendship with Starlight, or appear to have the faintest inkling how much it meant to her. And, on the horrid chance that that nightmare scenario did come to pass, I certainly hope Starlight had the self-respect to call him out as toxic and sever her ties with him, and absolutely didn’t pull strings to get him a job where she’d see him every day as well as setting him up with a career for life.
That’d be really unfortunate.
So yeah, then Marble was there too, but she was giant and holding Starlight in a hoof, and Starlight begged for forgiveness but instead Marble bit off her head. Bandaged-Maud picked up a keepsake from Starlight’s dead body because she was sentimental like that.
Then Maud gave a big, big flap of her wings – like, the biggest flap ever, and whole weather systems went skittering across the globe – and reared up onto her back legs. She stuck out her forelegs in front of her, and maybe the cutie marks rising up from Equestria thought she was offering them a hug, because they all flocked over to her. They were zooming round and round in circles, but then stigmata opened up in Maud’s hooves and they poured inside her.
I’m not sure that the appearance of stigmata is medically considered a good sign? But, if it hurt, then she didn’t show it, because Maud’s pretty badass like that, all cool indifference even when the world is ending.
And those six very familiar pony projection things were still glowing away in the sky around her, only now each of them pulled out a copy of the Staff of Sameness. Then they opened up their chests and impaled themselves, driving the staff right the way through and out the other side. And they kind of made orgasm noises while they were dying, and looked very happy about it, but they all had Maud’s face so it was triply weird.
And then whooosh, the whole world melted into a fizzing red sea of cutie marks, a wave of this burning orange colour rushing across the planet, and everywhere it touched grew forests of giant crosses made of creepy green light. Between all the crucifixes the orange water boiled and burst upward in sprays, as huge swarms of cutie marks bubbled their way up into space.
The six impaled Maud-faced projections hung in space with their hooves outstretched to either side, like sticking staffs the whole way through their bodies wasn’t brutal or iconic enough so they needed to pull crucified poses too.
Billions and billions of cutie marks, all surging up from the surface, running around in a big hollow ball, like water round a plughole, before plunging into Maud’s stigmata. So thick was the torrent of cutie marks that from further away they looked like a solid pillar supporting the sphere they’d formed. Maud still stood there on her hind legs with her head tipped right back, looking off into space with her blood-coloured eyes, descending violin arpeggios filling the cosmos.
A third eye opened up in Maud’s forehead, which might have been weird but it also looked kind of like a vagina so that’s fine. And Marble, who was the Tree of Life, sank down towards it, with the roots of the tree poking the eye and then just keeping going and forcing itself right the way in and through, like, branches and all, as Maud absorbed the entire Tree.
Once she was done, her forehead was totally smooth again, with no outside trace of the eye, the Tree, or Marble Pie.
Inside Maud, Marble opened her eyes. And they were her eyes again, she didn’t feel part-Tree anymore. Rivers of cutie marks flowed about the place, giggling as they went. Maud copies stared at her and crawled in her direction.
Then her vision again became nothing but a fast montage of images, only this time they were flickering and blurring and moving around way too quickly, so Marble had no idea what was going on. Instead of it being, like, Spitfire chugging a beer at dinner, it was this black squiggle curling left, this white light eating it, this frowning face turning inside out and purple, stuff like that.
And then there were the voices!
Mares’ voices, loads and loads of them, some familiar and some unknown. All breaking up with Marble, rejecting her, perhaps accusing her, often as viciously as they could.
“Don’t talk to me.”
“I could never love somepony like you!”
“Please don’t make this difficult.”
“Get away from me, freak!”
“Why can’t you just take a hint?”
“Don’t you have rocks to fuck or something?”
“It’s better when you don’t say anything.”
“What makes you think I’d be interested in you?”
“I’m sorry, your sister’s just a bit cuter than you are.”
“What? Say something! Am I so beautiful that you’ve no words left?”
“You could’ve washed it first.”
“Not even Princess Cadence could make me love you.”
“Please don’t go waving your feelings around in public.”
“I just need some space right now. My astronaut training isn’t going well, you see.”
“It’s not me, it’s you times a million no takesy backsies.”
“I’d rather eat yak excrement than help you pass on your rancid genes.”
“Why can’t you just quietly die screaming?”
Then Spitfire was there, hovering in the air above Marble, offering to make it stop. And then propositioning some more. ‘Hearts and bodies becoming one’ and all that. Spitfire really needed to get laid.
Limestone got in a final statement. “Love you? I’d rather die.” Which was ironic, since she did die, earlier.
Then reality ended.
“So, basically, the worst is pretty bad.”
Fluttershy wasn’t sure how long it took for her to really realise Pinkie was done talking. She jumped when Mrs. Cake touched her shoulder, squeezing her eyes shut a couple of times like she could wring the trance-like state from her brain.
Mrs. Cake’s brow furrowed, and she cast an eye over Fluttershy that looked concerned. “I said would you like any dessert, dearie?”
“Oh, um…” Fluttershy grabbed at the menu on the table, hurriedly saying the first item she read, “I’ll have the Strawberry Evangelatin please.”
While Mrs. Cake was writing that down, Fluttershy turned her attention to Rainbow and Zephyr, both of whom looked like they were just emerging from a similar daze. Rainbow yawned, and that set Zephyr off too. Although that wasn’t that unusual for either of them.
“Just a glass of Thirst Impact for me, please,” Rainbow said, still blinking, as Mrs. Cake turned to her.
“Ooh, yeah,” Zephyr chimed in, “could I get a Hedgehog’s Dilemonade?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Cake said, and, while Fluttershy did register that her brother hadn’t said please, she wasn’t really in the moment enough even to frown at him over it.
Imagined scenes from Pinkie’s tale replayed in her head, beyond her control. So very many bunnies...
Pinkie was also scanning the dessert menu when Mrs Cake finished writing down the other orders, even though she worked there and no doubt devised most of it herself. “Oh, but it all looks so scrumptious!” Pinkie covered her eyes with one front hoof and jabbed at the menu on the table with the other, then looked to see what she’d blindly picked. Her face lit up. “May I please have one Cumin Instrumentality Project?”
With a smile and a nod, Mrs. Cake left them to it and bustled back to the kitchen.
Fluttershy had only met Spitfire a hoofful of times, but the thought of her dying like that, trampled by all those tiny feet… And of just how miserable the earth ponies had been; was life on a rock farm really that severe? Was that what Pinkie had moved away from when she came to Ponyville? And when Fluttershy recalled the story’s climax, she shuddered.
“What’s wrong, Fluttershy?” Pinkie asked, calmly stirring the last of her hot chocolate and sprinkles. “Everything alright?”
“Just, um, you know, a bit haunted by the idea of everypony in Equestria becoming nothing but a big orange ocean.” She looked at the table as she spoke, but she did notice that Zephyr did the same.
“Don’t worry about it, silly,” Pinkie waved a hoof, “it wasn’t real. Just a fanta sea.”
A weak grin would have to do as an answer, because Fluttershy didn’t think she’d be forgetting in a hurry.
But Rainbow seemed to be in higher spirits, despite all the bits about her idol coming on to a child and then dying. “So the moral of the story is, what, ‘take your damn pills’ or you might end up hallucinating some really weird stuff?”
Pinkie grinned. “Yeah! Or staying up all night watching some strange Nipponese things on Netflanks!”
Author's Note
The H in Neon Genesis Evangelion is for Happiness.
