The Desolation of Elysium
I am alone.
Have been for quite some time. It's hard to tell how many years it's been without the sun to mark the days. I've gotten used to the darkness, the cold, the silence.
The despair.
Everything dies eventually. It's just a matter of how long somepony has before they reach the end.
I suppose that makes me lucky last.
Equestria had its time in the sun. Make no mistake, it had centuries of happiness and peace, if one could say a nation had a life of its own, this one was long and well-lived.
But of course, it had to end someday.
It began when the sun began to dim. Ponies didn't notice at first, at least, most didn't. The Royal Astronomers Guild was the first to inquire of Celestia what was amiss. I saw the sorrow in her eyes as she told them that their world was ending. They panicked, of course, as ponies often did, but she was able to soothe their fears before they could spread it to the general populace. She informed them of how it would be many centuries still before the final curtain fell on Elysium, and even then, it was no guarantee that they would not find somewhere new to call home.
If only we had.
The entire planet rallied around the common goal of finding a new world to colonize, launching an era of technological and thaumaturgical innovation the likes of which the world had never seen. Several organizations formed to pursue space travel as an option. Several more were formed to explore the possibility of colonizing a parallel world. A few looked into methods of replacing or energizing the dying Sun. One group even put forth the desperate idea of using a variation of the time displacement Sombra had wrought on the Crystal Empire. One way or another, all roads eventually led to the same conclusion.
There would be no escape from this end.
One by one, the space programs foundered as resources, ideas, or the laws of nature themselves brought an end to their efforts, often killing many in their desperate bids for a future among the stars. It was the same for those seeking an alternate world. Hostile inhabitants, hostile environments, or combinations of the two prevented many groups from finding a new home for us, and one group…
Twilight's group…
Flurry Heart's group...
They vanished into the void when their apparatus suffered a catastrophic resonance cascade failure. The Princess of Friendship, her friends, her team, my daughter, and their entire research campus, including the School of Friendship, all gone in the blink of an eye, most likely torn to atoms in the cataclysmic maelstrom of raw energy or lost in the nullspace between worlds, a fate worse than death.
We all took the loss hard, but Shining Armor, he never really recovered. I would find him sitting with something of Twily's or Flurry's, just staring into space, lost in his memories of her and his gnawing guilt at having failed in his role as big brother or father, the protector. He knew it was silly to think he could have done anything to stop the cascade when an entire team of dedicated experts, including two alicorns, failed.
He never forgave himself. Even on his deathbed when he died of old age.
Time marched on, the sun continued to dim, and the effects it had on Equestria's immortal diarchs began to show.
Celestia and Luna both began to feel the effects as their power, tied as it was to their celestial partners, began to wane. The Lunar Princess in particular, seemed to gradually fade until she was but a ghostly shadow, silently walking beside her sister like a drifting pall of smoke. Celestia, in turn, gradually lost the subtle radiance that had made her such a presence among the courtiers and populace, her mane lost the ethereal ripple of the solar wind, and in the final days before the sun collapsed into a quasar, her eyes gradually lost the light of awareness as she joined her sister in whatever world they inhabited now, her physical form continuing to walk the halls of Canterlot Castle beside the ethereal shape of her sister, neither showing any sign of awareness of those around them, looking as if they were in a trance that might be broken at any moment.
I know better than to hope.
Without the immortal sisters, and with the bitter cold rapidly engulfing the planet in its embrace, the ponies looked to me. I did my best, but I was never the great leader Celestia was. Slowly the dying world took its toll, the population dwindling as lack of food and disease whittled away at even the heartiest of souls, the last remnants of the many races of Elysium eventually gathering within the Crystal Empire in one last attempt to establish a sustainable source of food and shelter under the protection of the Crystal Heart.
We didn't even last the month.
When I felt the last survivor succumb to the inevitable, I could feel my own power fade, and awaited the moment when I would drift free of my physical being, leaving my body as another animate relic of our world when i finally rejoined my aunts and sister-in-law.
Waited.
I waited for three days, yet my power never dipped any further. In desperation, I flung myself from the top of the Crystal Palace, hoping to force an end.
That's when I discovered that I could not die.
It's been millennia since that moment, and the ravages of time have not been kind. Without food, my body is little more than fragile skin stretched over bone. Without light, my coat has thinned and faded into translucency, as I discovered once about a century when I managed to summon a small whisp of magelight. Most of my feathers are gone and my mane and tail, what's left of them anyway, have faded to near white.
Elysium is a barren, dusty world, the air so thin nothing mortal could hope to survive, all sound swallowed up by the near vacuum. Any trace of life or civilization has long since crumbled to dust. The only signs that anything once lived here are myself, the shuffling form of Celestia's ghost and her shadow, Luna, a mere silhouette in the dark, like her beloved moon.
It took me many years of searching and studying, but I finally discovered why I'm still here, and will still be here for the rest of eternity, even after the planet itself has turned to dust and the last of the stars have gone out.
Love. My aspect, the very source of my power.
When the sun collapsed, Celestia died in all but body. Her sister accompanying her just as the moon cannot shine without the sun's light.
It was a mercy, I think, that Twilight did not live to suffer like this, as she and I are possibly the only two alicorns capable of true immortality.
As long as their is a heart that feels love, love cannot die. As long as love persists, I cannot die. I still live because I still feel love for all those I've lost, and the love I feel won't let me forget them.
So I continue to walk across this desolate, empty rock, the last of my kind.
Alone, but for the memories I carry.
Author's Note
Now you know the deep dark thoughts I have about pretty pastel ponies and the world they inhabit.
I encourage feedback, so long as it's civil and constructive.
This is my first published work and I welcome any help I can get to polish it to its full potential.
