The Modern Prometheus

I killed myself not two weeks later. It was not an act of passion, but carefully calculated, designed with all the cleverness that I could muster to make sure I’d be brought back. I knew most ponies, had I told them what I planned, would have tried to dissuade me. “Rainbow Dash,” they would have said, “you’ve gone quite mad.” Suicide was still taboo, thankfully, and discouraged for almost all, except the very sick. I told nopony, and left no note, and though I was dead, in blackest night, in nothing, I call well imagine the scene with which my butler was greeted in the morning: a large glass tank I’d filled with water, sealed on every side, and inside, my cold and floating body.

I had my reasons—I was growing old, and did not like the thought of death; I sought to prove once and for all my genius, and quell the whispers of my cowardice; and secretly I held the hope that in my resurrection, my ruined wings might heal—but mostly I was curious. What had happened, I could not help but wonder, to cause Fluttershy to kill like that? Was this another, long-delayed effect of resurrection? Did the mind eventually collapse? I had spent my life upon this process, if there was an error I must know it. Yes, I was curious—and I was worried.

I could have worked it out, I think, without this final step, if I had tried. I wanted not for evidence; I had as many subjects as I could ask for, and many years of thinking, too; I need only have put it all together, to construct, as once I had from that dread book,

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS,

a solution from all those scattered clues. I know myself too well to think I would have done it. No, despite the information at my hooves, I needed to see it for myself, to learn exactly what it was the thing I’d built had done, to feel what ponies felt as they passed from life to death to life again. So I ordered my tank, and climbed inside, and let water fill my lungs.

To bend the natural magicks of this world to my will had been my great achievement; to take its strictest rule and tear it down my lasting glory. Yes, my glory and my ruin. I knew not what I’d bound, what magicks I had meddled with, what principles my invention could not destroy, and so had warped instead. I might have seen it sooner, if only I had experimented with the living, instead of with the dead.

What is there beyond death? Nothing. Or, if there is something, it’s too mighty to remember. When wrenched back to the mortal plane, the mind remembers naught of where it has just been. There is a pause, that much is certain, but no longer than a hair, like closing one’s eyes and taking a breath, and in that breath you cease existing. And back.

I opened up my eyes, and saw the horror of all I’d done. I was completely fine.

“Lady Dash?” A voice came from before me. “Lady Rainbow Dash, are you all right?”

I opened my mouth to scream, but found I had no reason.

“Yes,” was all I managed, “yes, I’m quite alright.”

The mare smiled, and moved away. I sat up. One of my machines stood blinking, bubbling, singing all around me. I felt a pang of irritation it had not been my first, the one I’d built myself. I laughed as I saw that all my fears had been for nothing.

For the rest of that day, I wandered round in something of a haze. Twilight came to see me, and Pinkie Pie, and Rarity, and Applejack, and shook their heads at my designs and wandered each of them off again. I ventured to go see Fluttershy, in the cage she’d been confined to—I say cage, as if Discord ever would have let us; it was more of a barred hotel, in truth—and stared at her and wondered what had happened. I felt, for all that I was come back to life, shockingly well-rested. Deciding, to my satisfaction, and my sadness, that the flaw had been Fluttershy’s all along, I left her there, and returned to my house to unwind. How appropriate, I thought, as I picked up the slim red book to read again.

Night passed. I woke up exhausted, as if I had not slept a wink. Too much excitement the previous day, I thought—after all I had come back to life—and so resolved to spend the day quite peacefully, in study, contemplation, and invention.

Every time I read my book, that volume,

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS,

I never failed to take something new away from it. A detail of the journey, a sentence constructed poorly, a new interpretation of the resurrection in it: that day, that reading, I discovered nothing. Oh, it was all exactly as I remembered, to the very dot and letter, but nothing fresh about the text surprised me. I sighed and thought I should be sad indeed if I had reached the end of its great depths, but decided to move on. A shipment of sorcerer diaries had just arrived from the Zebra Homelands (I had no need to rely on Zecora alone for my supplies, and besides, she had not taken kindly to my invention), and although they were, by rule, rather dull and boring things, I shrugged and thought I may as well. I picked one up, and read it all, and put it down again, and realised only then I had not retained the slightest of it. Of all those hours, I could not recall a word. This was strange, and I went to write it down, and got no further than the second line before I discovered that, too, was well beyond my grasp. Disturbed, concerned, and thoroughly put out, I returned to bed.

It felt I woke up but a moment later; I closed my eyes and took a breath and there I was again, the morning sunlight streaming in across my sheets. I frowned, and buried my face deep in my pillowcase, and wished for slumber to reclaim me. It refused.

I was no stranger to late nights: creation required it, obsession demanded it; but this was something new. I had never in the whole course of my career felt as tired as I did just then, as completely exhausted, as if sleep had barely come at all.
Was this the price of coming back? I wondered. Did everypony come alive live with such dreadful weariness? Was sleep the energy it stole to give me life? You will see how close I was.

Why did no one tell of it? I discovered that the fourth day: I could not. “I am tired”—yes, this was something I could say. “I have not slept.” But I could not impress, for all that was left of the life of me, to anypony, the suffering I now endured. I could not speak as I might wish, I could not say of half what I meant to. As nights marched on, I grew weaker, and wearier, and could not breathe a word of it. I felt that I could take no more of this; that soon I must die, again, and that that would not be so bad, all things considered in their turn. There were worse fates than death, I knew, and I was coming to realise this was one of them. Oh, what little I knew then of that.

I found myself wondering if this burden was mine alone, or if this was the impetus that had brought Fluttershy to murder. I went to see her, but could not ask her what I wanted, so I sat before her now instead and looked into her eyes, and startled at the sorrow I saw brimming there. How had she borne so many years of this? I felt I should snap within the month.

I spoke to Featherweight, my assistant, and put in an order for another glass tank. Wrote out a note Do Note Revive. After another week, I drowned myself in it again—or tried to. However much I thrashed, and gasped, and choked the water down, I would not die. I was pulled from it alive by Twilight Sparkle, who warned me seriously not to try to kill myself again. “Help me,” I tried to ask her, “kill me,” but I could not. I could not die, I could not live. I was trapped in this awful limbo, this in-between of crazed exhaustion, where I could tell nopony of my dreadful fate, nor think to overcome it. If I had died by accident, I should have been more than glad; I woke and prayed for it every day, it was my dearest wish and only hope, for I could not kill myself. The glass tank was my one idea on that front, and however deep of water I drank, my body would not die.

I had known obsession, I had known that interest which takes the forefront of one’s mind, settles in and nestles there, and allows for nothing else for months or years—this was quite its opposite. A fog upon my mind through which I could not speak, could not think, could hardly move. Could do nothing except wish, and long for something better.

In desperation I reached out to Princess Luna, to ask her walk my dreams, and see what lay in wait there, for she had done it once before.

“I could not find you,” she admitted, “I cannot find any of the returned.”

“Did I not dream?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “You were not there. There was nothing. I suppose, it seems, the dead don’t dream.”

She was wrong in that—the dead dream more than most, though only waking, and only of death itself. I had not even the satisfaction of fantasies on that front; the only dream I had, could muster, was that of the damned glass tank, and floating there, and choking there, and dying there again—it was my only respite, and though my fellows thought it morbid, I took to sleeping there too, drowning every day before I slept in hopes of never waking up again. I was misery itself: trapped in this vacant form, this vacant state, I could not even mourn what I had done to others, had not capacity to regret my monstrous actions. I retreated to myself, and dwelt only on my death.

I am not a hero. Yes, I hear your laughter now, you know that I am not. But be assured, I thought it then: I was the hero of Equestria, parading round its towns and ponies on the backs of a hundred, thousand, million like I would become: the profiteer of all their agony, the prodigy of all their pain. If anypony deserved the hell I made, it was I. I deserved it ten times over, for the ponies whose lives I stole. I say it again: I am not a hero. Not even of this tale; no, that hero, as ever, of course, was a pony far stronger than I, possessed of such steely mental fortitude, such keen awareness, such force of will, it puts the rest of us to shame. Only she could have managed what she did; only she could have mustered the courage.

Floating in my glassy tomb, the world seemed wavering and small. Water swamped my lungs, lay heavy in my chest, filled every sack I had within me, and the pain was tremendous. It kept me feeling, though, reminded me I was alive, even if that was quite reverse of my intentions. I heard nothing but the water, knew nothing but the cold, distant and echoing as my mind itself. I had closed my eyes for the night, prepared to wake again in just a moment, when something of a clatter made its way between my ears. I frowned. Of all things this was most unusual: when I had liked to read, I had chosen staff for their light tread, their quiet and their discretion; never was I to be disturbed again by noisy servants. And, most especially, in my underwater grave, not a hint should then have reached me. That sound must have been loud indeed. I opened my eyes, half expecting morning to have come again, but it had not. Night was still upon me, moony, silver rays reflection strangely through the water. All was silent once again. A pair of eyes stared back into my own.

She said something to me, I know not what, before she drove the brick into my vat, and shattered the glass around me with a thousand tiny cries. I hit the ground among the glass, shards great and small driving up and through me, bloodying my chest and staining my fur dark red. “Thank you,” I whispered, as the blood drained from my heart. “Thank you.”

Fluttershy bared her teeth in a small, sad smile, and said, “I’m sorry.”

What had she to apologise for? Nothing, less than nothing; it was I who should be on my knees in front of her, kissing her hooves, begging for her forgiveness. I did not understand it, I do not even now. I have no answer save that she was Fluttershy, and no pony else was better. She beat the brick into my head, again and again and again, even as the sounds she’d made called the house staff running. She was crying as she turned my brain to mush, pounded it against the floor, and I was crying, too, and I think, I own, our tears were much the same—tears of joy alone, and gladness, and I had just time enough to see how much I loved her, before the world went dark.

I did not expect to be revived. I should not have been. I saw the pictures; I saw what was left of my body, when she was done with it. They should not have tried.

The next thing I knew was blinding, furious agony, that was all, incomprehensible, unintelligible, mindless torment, the absence of all light, before they put me out my misery again. I can only think in what state I must have been. Splintered through with glass, my skull completely smashed, my brain so much grey slop upon my bedroom floor. It was Twilight put me in, I think, though I have not seen fit to ask her, and never mean to, either. Such thing are better left far in the past, and I know too well the pain of losing a dear friend, the lengths it will inspire. It was wrong to try and wake me up, but I do not begrudge her the attempt, however ill the consequence.

It is truly strange to have lived so long. To have seen so much come to pass, to rise and fall and vanish forever. It does not feel so long as it is—but, then, I did not live it all.

When I woke again a hundred years had passed. This time there was no pain, this time was much as the first: darkness, a breath, confusion. I opened my eyes and stared around in horror. No! They could not have brought me back, I would not allow it. I would not be made survivor to another gruelling nothing, another restless half-existence, to satisfy my friends.

“What—” I looked around. “Who—?”

Twilight shushed me. She was different than I remembered; that was how I knew that years had passed. She was taller, longer, more filled out. As regal as Celestia, and large as that princess ever was. “Quiet,” she said, and smiled. I looked down; my body was complete. I searched across my fur for any differences, the proof these limbs were not my own. She shook her head.

“It’s yours,” she told me. “We grew it fresh, from what was left. Say, do you like it?” She winked at me, and I felt for the first time in countless years the flutter of feathers move against my back, the stirrings in my wings. “You are whole at last.” She kissed me gently on the forehead.

“Kill me,” I tried to tell her, “help me.” My tongue stayed silent. In dawning horror I realised I was the same, that nothing would change, that slowly, surely, I would decay again, that sleepless night would build on sleepless night and bury me beneath their weight. I screamed, for what else could I do? I said nothing, for what else could I do.

In the century since, my machines had grown. Larger and more complicated, wilder and less sane. If I had never understood what I had built, with these I had no hope, even had my mind been able. I knew not half of what they tried to do; I knew too well the horror that they actually inflicted. I held back sleep as long as I well could, but eventually I had to cave: all was as before, and in the morning, a breath later, I resolved to do things differently.

I saw my friends: they all had been brought back, they all looked dead inside, strange and listless behind their eyes—all save Fluttershy, who after a fantastic killing spree had been interred once more inside a cage; a penitentiary, a sole convict whose only visitors were artists and psychologists, and her lover, Discord, who could not leave her be. Even Twilight had long ago given up on visiting her, weary of the madness that she spoke. The irony of this did not escape me, and when I saw her next, as soon as I could contrive, she gazed at me with eyes so bright they could have passed for stars.

“Oh, no.”

A look then passed between us, as she sat me down, and served me tea in a teacup that somehow managed not to spill a drop, despite its nonsense nature, and told me, “It’s imagination, don’t you see? It’s the only source that has anywhere near enough power to do it. That’s what’s keeping us alive.”

Somehow, Fluttershy had retained her mind—somehow, Fluttershy could think. I endeavoured I would do the same, and break her out: I would beat this curse, and destroy the empire I had created, that Twilight had expanded in my absence: I would tear down each and every machine that ever brought a pony back, and set up in their place seven statues to the damned. And I would do it all without compassion. For that was Fluttershy’s flaw, that saved us surely as mine had damned us: she had compassion, and could not stand by while ponies suffered. If I was to succeed, I must be cruel as she was kind, I must watch, and choose not to act, choose not to storm ahead and release them from their pain, not yet, else I’d end up next to Fluttershy, and our destiny would then be sealed.

As once I would have marvelled in my newfound wings, now I did abhor them: as a symbol of all I must not be, of what I must leave behind if this evil was to be destroyed.

You know the rest.

It took me eighty years—I had not nearly Fluttershy’s resolve—but at last my task was done, the truth was out, my machines torn down, a million ponies put to death, released from the nightmare I had dragged them through.

I was glad to see my friends destroyed; and I kissed each one before I slit their throats. Too long forgotten they had been, and as I killed each one, the spark of hope that once had fuelled them sprang again into their eyes, for just a moment, before they died.

All that is left is Fluttershy and I. I know not what she intends to do now, how long she means to live. However long it is, she’s welcome to it. As for me, as soon as I am done this story I will bid this world farewell. I have lingered long, and done too much, and Equestria deserves to be rid of me.

“How did you manage it?” Twilight asked me the other day, as we were sitting to tea at her palace. “I can only imagine all it must have been. I’m not sure I could have done as well.”

I leaned back in my chair, and fixed her with a grin. “Determination,” I told her.

“Some would call that obstinate.”

“Maybe. In the end, though, I think it was loyalty.”

As she laughed, that laugh turned to a yawn. She sounded old, tired. I looked into her eyes, and wondered how alicorns were made.