Chapters I never thought that I’d become an egghead. That was never part of my dream. When I was young—you will laugh—I wanted to be an athlete. A star flier, soaring through the skies like a bird or dragon, wings tucked tight against my back, diving faster, faster, toward the ground, until...
Well, I broke my wing in a racing accident, and that was the end of that. I had to find myself a new pursuit, a goal to keep my mind and body occupied. It took me thirteen years, but find it I did, stumbling upon it quite by accident, and as the years grew it consumed me, ate me up, piece by bloody piece, till all that was left it swallowed in a gulp. But you know that part—or, at least, I think you do. There are few enough who don’t, I fear, and if you’re reading this, you’re not likely one of them.
I recall, lying there in the hospital, in the days after the accident, worried faces surrounding me at every turn, Twilight and Pinkie Pie and Rarity and Applejack and Fluttershy, thinking it were better had I died. At least then they could move on—weep, shed a tear, but get over it—instead of standing there, just standing, so terribly serious, talking in hushed, quiet voices about me. At least they could be elsewhere, and live their lives, without this wingless, useless weight hanging about their necks. As for me, well, I’d be dead, and not thinking much of anything at all. Or so I thought. Probably it would have stayed that way.
It was then I started reading, first Daring Do, then Clover the Clever, then Faust’s Histories , burrowing into greater, older volumes as time stretched on. I did not read as Twilight read, although Daring Do had been her recommendation, from books heavy with language and lore, but from older, stranger tomes. In Zecora I found a companion, a pony who was happy to sate my rising appetite with arcane volumes from her homeland, full of ancient heroes and scholars who left conscience quite by the wayside. In the Zebra Heartlands to be an egghead was a thing of power, and philosophers and students to them were as wizards and adventurers to us. Their magic, you will see, spilling forth not from horns of focus parcelled out unequally, but books and recipes instead: words—and it does not take wings to speak.
You may imagine that all this reading kept me quite engrossed, but this was not the case. I read because I could do little else: I had not the strength for earth pony labour, nor the skill for any more delicate employment. It was something I did to pass the time; an interest, but never an obsession.
In this fashion I spent the most of my youth, in total thirteen years, drifting through the world in a grey depression, reading aged Zebra manuscripts and watching life go by. I remained friends with all the Elements, but my relationship to them changed. No longer could I dart in ahead, take a monster in my stride, now I had to stay behind, become a different pony, watch as others did what I once could. Watch as others filled dreams that once were mine.
Until, of course, that dreadful night, when, in the darkness of the storm, a knock came at my door. A small and pitiful thing, and the pony who made it not much better. Twilight Sparkle was come with news.
Fluttershy was dead.
Fluttershy, that kindest, dearest of ponies, who had stayed by my side longer than any other, who had watched over me the whole of my hospital repair, was gone. She had hardly left my bedside in all that time, sitting there with an animal or three, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, always caring, so attentive that at times I felt like shouting her away, letting my frustrations boil over and scorch her—but what would be the point? She would be there the next day anyway, that was just how she was, and I knew my worthlessness would not prevent it.
There was a sadness in her eyes, I thought, every time she looked at me, which I hated: a remembrance of all that I was, inevitable because of how we had met, that hurt me every time I looked at her, and she at me. All this flooded back, of course, as Twilight sat me down, quite carefully, and explained to me into nes as dry as dust just how the mare had perished. I barely heard her. In that moment I felt all the weight of all my years of idleness settle heavy on my shoulders, as I had not felt in ages, the worse because I, who did so little, who wasted her days in nothings and forgotten texts, who spent one third of every day wandering around the town for no particular reason, hoping only to see somepony with whom to talk, to smile, to share a word, but too ashamed to answer when they did, was alive—and she, who did so much, was not.
She left behind her grieving friends, grieving family, animals who were quite lost without her. If I died, I knew I should leave behind none of that. These thoughts I could not banish, even as I despised my very self-absorption. The kindest of ponies was gone, and the most wretched could not even mourn as she deserved.
My own misery was nothing, however, to the misery of my friends, who had the advantage of their own abilities, and thus the knowledge they could have saved her. It hung like a cloud over each, and Twilight especially felt the pain of it, and though she took care in public to seem smart and cheerful, behind her eyes she was much the same as she had been that night: tiny, tragic, and utterly detached. They were wavering, they were grievous, the rain that echoed still within their hearts was slowly wearing them away, and I wished again and again for something, for anything I could do, to break the cloud above their heads as once I did with ease. Months passed, I discovered nothing.
Zecora had a life before the Everfree, and had known much, she said, of grief. For this reason she kept me well supplied in months that followed with books she knew would spark my interest, books of myth and magic and terrible crime, and one day, coming by my house to find me staring out along the road at something I was sure I must have seen, she delivered me a stack of Zebra histories from her personal collection, bound in fibre, and among these, later, as I sat down to pick one out, I found a book undoubtedly you will have heard of. It was a small, red volume, unassuming as all the rest, lettered in gold on the front with the words I came to love, and hate, and would haunt me in my nightmare for all the years to come, the words I see before me still etched in every wall and crevice of my mind, burned in blackest ink behind my eyelids:
THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
Back then, it was as little and obscure as all the rest, harbouring none of the infamy it has come to bear. I heard last week that in the Crystal Empire the book is banned, that every copy which can be found is burned, that every pony who now has read it must submit to a spell that clears it from their minds. I do not know if this is the right thing to do, but surely it must be better than the alternative. Its reputation, its notoriety, must make it an object of interest to some even before its outlaw, and now, I fear, it will become much harder to forget. Harder to find, indeed, but more prized by those who have it. The only solution would have been its destruction before release, or, if not that, that destiny had contorted so that Zecora might never have bought it, that I might never have picked it up, and that the whole rest of the mess might never have happened. Alas.
Knowing none of what was to come, searching for a thing to read before I settled down to bed, I found the book among the stack and took it out to read it. Dawn, and morning, and midday—for I was no fast reader—came, and found me still awake, still reading, and when at last I put down the text and rubbed my eyes and looked around me in surprise of the brightness of the day, a smile touched my lips. “Huh,” I said, I remember distinctly, and thusly my obsession was begun.
One year later, I am standing at the door to Twilight’s castle as the night rain thunders all around me, and my knock is strong as hers was not as I hammer at the door. At length, she opens it.
“Rainbow Dash?” Her eyes are dull, dark and heavy, and I wonder, barely, if I have woken her from sleep or if this is how she looks now, that she has been sleeping as late and fitfully as I have. It does not even occur she has not seen me in six months.
“I can do it,” I tell her. She squints, and I stomp the ground impatiently. “I can do it,” I repeat. “Fluttershy. I can bring her back.”
She does not understand. She will not, not for days, till she’s invited me inside, and talked, and read the book, and read my notes, and seen all that has eaten the last year of my life. Then, she understands, and watches with eyes so wide I see their rims all white as I heave and push the shovel back into the ground, as I toss the dirt behind me, till suddenly it sinks into something that is not earth, something softer, younger, and full of rotten juices. Till she stands with me and pulls the corpse from its muddy bed and fills again with dirt the grave marked FLUTTERSHY.
That is in the future. She shook her head, and welcomed me inside. If only she had not.
I will not relate all that happened around the resurrection of my dear friend, and certainly I refuse to give instruction to it. If that is what you picked this up for, you may leave safely, frustrated in your ambition. If you are grieving, then I am sorry, but trust me, this is better. Some enemies were not meant to be defeated, some barriers should not be overcome. If mountains were made for ponies to succeed, then that is fine: whatever built our world did not mean for this to join their rank. Death is necessary. I know you know that now, I know the world knows it, but still I must repeat it; my conscience will not let it lie. The book should never have made its way to me, Twilight never should have let me in, Fluttershy’s grave should never have been broken. Most of all, our experiment never should have worked. Weep. Mourn. Move on. If that is what you need to hear, I’m glad, and you may take it from somepony who knows: do not do as I did.
For what emerged from our stone sarcophagus, the crucible in which I concentrated all my study, the coffin built to violate itself, was not Fluttershy. Or, rather, it was, but that’s what made it worse. My year paid off, my obsession worked out, my mind found itself the mother of a newly grotesque child, a thing more poorly formed than I, and for a while, I was pleased. I looked out upon my labour and judged it good. Fluttershy was returned, she was back from the dead, she could sing, and laugh, and love again.
Only she wasn’t.
Well, she was.
Except she wasn’t.
It’s complicated.
Fluttershy was not herself.
I can well remember the lump of Angel Bunny curled by my hooves in bed. Back at the hospital, his presence was as constant as Fluttershy’s herself, and mostly I enjoyed it. He demanded her attention, and in my blacker moods this was awful welcome. Since her death he had become morose, drooping about at Apple Farm as if he wished to die. I was surprised he did not—I spent several days in expectation of the news, that her favourite rabbit had died of a broken heart; longing for it, almost. He had survived: and part of me wonders if he knew she would return. Animals have a wisdom all their own, as Fluttershy knew well, so perhaps he did, and this is why he clung on so very long. In any case, planned on not, his endurance was rewarded, and I am told reliably his cause of death was happiness when she came home. His heart stopped quite cold upon his seeing her, and Doctor Fauna assured us that, while far from common, this very thing was not unheard of. Poor Fluttershy—to see, so soon upon undoing her own demise, the death of her Angel. A tragedy for all concerned, I’m sure, had not I just invented a way to chase death off. Angel Bunny was not long cold before he jumped to life again, and undead mare and rabbit reunited joyfully. What a wonder! What a miracle! What delight! Ponyville was full of laughter, and Pinkie threw her very first ‘Welcome-Back-from-Beyond-the-Pale Party.’ All was celebration, for a while. Fluttershy was returned, and the wound within our hearts began to heal, within mine most especially—at last, I had my moment of heroism, at last, I had found my dream anew.
Fluttershy was only cheerful, if bewildered, though asked me more than once how it was I’d brought her back. Flush with pride, I showed her round, and at my introduction, the fear that she’d been harbouring, as she told me later, that some other creature had exchanged their life for hers, was put to rest.
Luna and Celestia descended from on high to see my work, and frowned and hummed and hawed at my machine, though failed to find a fault with it, for I had, I own, broken through that final barrier: I had remade life, and not with any weird technique, involving magic dark and perilous, but words, and potions, and nature itself: even they conceded my success. I had defeated death, and at no cost. I had found a purpose, and saved a friend. Life was glorious, and would never cut short before its time again.
Two months after my first, twin victories, I had my second pony patient. My machine had not been quiet in those intervening months: no, it had been working almost constantly, churning away from dawn till dusk as I worked upon my project. For, you see, having beaten death, I now determined I should find out how I’d done it. For all my genius in putting the thing together, in collecting the scattered clues of
THE MODERN PROMETHEUS,
in piece by piece assembling my machine, I knew not how it worked. Yes, there were connections; yes, there was a certain sense to how the whole thing functioned, but to take such simple parts and make of them this masterpiece, this thing that could with ease defy the laws of nature, was far more art than science, and I hungered to learn its secrets.
My newest subject returned as quickly as the previous. Carrot Top, although forewarned by Pinkie, had been killed by the falling sign of Pony Joe’s, her chest and lungs crushed flat by the heavy wooden board, and was still bleeding when I strapped her into my machine and brought her back to life. She gasped, and gasped again, and before my eyes I saw her chest inflate, her lungs expand, and she could walk again. This, I thought myself, could only be a sign, another hint at the explanation of my machine. Fluttershy’s corpse had been long interred, and mouldering for a year, when we pulled it, stinking, from the ground and brought her back to life. Since then she had improved; her skin had mended, her fur returned. Her very life force seemed to heal her body, and this too had happened to Carrot Top. What I had invented cured not death only, but any thing, and I resolved to test this next on a pony who had succumbed to disease. Fluttershy would not let herself be an exception, and I supported her in this: I wanted as many ponies as I could to test my creation, with as many different types of death as possible. I was, as Twilight said incredulously, collecting data.
With the extraordinary healing of the body after resurrection, I could not help but imagine what other possibilities might await the pony who dared to reach for them. I wondered, for example, what would happen if I changed a pony’s form before I brought them back; sewed on wings, perhaps, or grafted on a horn. Would the changes stick, or would they fall away? I longed to know, and dwelt privately for many weeks in consideration of it. For I knew what nopony, not even the mare herself, did: Fluttershy’s hoof had been so mangled by the shovel as we dragged her out, I’d gone back later and dug up another body to replace it. Her left hoof was somepony else’s, and I did not remember whose. I’d tried to get the fur as close to match as possible, and it seemed I’d chosen well: nopony had noticed it quite yet, even though there was a difference.
It would be the work of years, I knew, to figure this all out, and I dread to think how long it would have taken, had I had the patience for it. The world, I imagine, would still be using my machine, had I stuck to only those who came to me for help. But I was never good at waiting; the Elements gave me Loyalty, not Patience, and for once this flaw proved to my benefit—and the benefit of every pony, too.
I know not how many years went by before I worked it out. Oh, I’m sure the number could be calculated, if I cared to do so, if I had not burned every scrap of evidence of my successes, if I had not tried, for far too long, to put it out of mind, forget it all. Long years, I trust, and many; long enough to start to age, to look into the mirror and see a face too old, for grey to start to show along my mane, for my back to start to hurt at every step. In all those years, though its secrets strayed my grasp, my creation shot me to fortune so high I thought it near to fine as flying. Ponies, when they heard of the device, flocked from all across Equestria to see their friends be born again: to see their sister, killed by Tirek, brought back to life; see their husband, drowned at sea, come back again; see their filly, dead by suicide, alive once more. At one point, the machine so popular, and in such high demand, I resorted to asking payment before I’d bring them back—and they would pay, despite the price, they all would pay it, for what’s worth more than life itself? The Princesses came down upon me for that, and asked me rightfully what in Equestria I thought I was doing. I told them a mare must eat, and after some deliberation they agreed: I was to become a part of the state, the machine folded into their public health sector, and I was given the rank of Lady. Lady Rainbow Dash —I enjoyed that all too much.
My experiments continued through this, though, and I discovered in the course of them the machine had limits few indeed. As long as there was enough of a pony left they could conceivably be alive, the machine would make them so: if there was not enough; if there was only half a pony, or a head, or a pony disembowelled, the machine would do its best, and I would have to put the thing brought back out of all its screaming misery. I came little closer to its true nature, though, within those many years. No, that would not come until the day just after Rarity’s fifty-first, when we all of us realised that Fluttershy, although she should be old as we, looked no more than twenty-five. Less than half her age—and however much she protested the benefits of time in the sun and the calming effect of animal companions, it was becoming obvious. The mare was not ageing. As the rest of us grew older, she stayed young, as our cheeks sagged, hers did not, and as Rarity exclaimed, too enthusiastically, how lucky she was her fur was white, for how well it hid her grey, Fluttershy looked away.
That realisation brought another: surely rabbits did not usually live so long. Angel Bunny was just as lively and aggressive as ever, and even Fluttershy had to admit that he was now impossibly old for a creature so small.
I had, it turned out, made Fluttershy immortal. She did not age; she could not wane. She was joined in this by only two types of thing: the other ponies I’d brought back, and the princesses of the realm. Nopony knew how old Celestia and Luna truly were, and Twilight, we knew, was set to last as long as either, and showed as much sign of her age as Fluttershy did.
I comforted myself this was a good thing. Discord stood outside of time, and in the beginnings of their relationship there had been worries—never mentioned before her, of course—about such a couple that could only end in tragedy. Now, that issue was resolved: Discord would never have to suffer the same fate as Cadence, who saw her husband grow daily older as she stayed same. She would bury him one day; I had spared Discord that. Fluttershy and he would live forever, it seemed, and I wished them well, however alive the rest of us were to the fact that Twilight, Fluttershy, and Spike would all live to see us dead.
But what, you ask, was wrong with any of this? Nothing, it seemed, aside from the fact I’d be outlived by a rabbit. No, for all this time Fluttershy, and the rest of the returned, were perfectly sensible: they were all as they had ever been in life—exactly as they had been in life.
And so I began to glimpse it.
There were experiments, early on, about how far the machine extended—what type of death it could undo, how long dead a pony could be. Skeletons did not work; there had to be flesh left on the bone, otherwise they lived a moment in gaping horror before collapsing. Likewise, it could not cure old age. A pony dead of natural causes at age one hundred might live for a day or two longer after resurrection, but no more than that—which is why the immortality of Flutteshy surprised me as it did. It could give a pony back the life they had before they’d died; if they were old, they were old, if they were lame, they were lame; if they died crashing into a tree fast enough to lose their head, the body must be found and reattached before they could be brought back. It could heal a lot, but hardly everything.
Immortality was an unexpected side effect. It was not the only one. A mare returned could not get pregnant; a stallion returned was quite infertile. A child returned would not mature.
These were trifles, though. Foolish as it was, these seemed piddling things to pay for making death antique. I was commissioned to make duplicates, and by the time of Twilight’s ascension to the throne, sudden death was as small an inconvenience as the common cold. Oh, there were some who shook their heads and warned it unnatural, some who put down in slips of paper they did not want to be brought back, but these were outcasts, exceptions: it was as normal to die, and live again, as it was to get a cast to heal a broken limb. Indeed, some ponies, less patient even than I, preferred the extraordinary healing powers of resurrection to the weeks to set a shattered bone. Sometimes young, stupid ponies, or even, to the embarrassment of all, ones older, would take suicide as a dare. Some of these ended disastrously when, in leaping off a cliff, there was not enough to be recovered; but this failed to truly discourage those drunk, or stupid, or high enough to attempt it.
How awful all this is to you and I now. How normal it all seemed then.
I have hinted before at the truth that was soon to strike me, that I started to see when I discovered Fluttershy would likely live forever. I am ashamed to say that, even with all that I knew, it was another ten or fifteen years before the real cost of all this mockery became apparent. You will say I am responsible for this lapse in good judgement, and I will agree. That is not to say I was alone in it, but it was my invention, and my obsession, and so my fault, in the end. In truth I did not want to find it out. My work had brought me almost everything I could have wanted, and I harboured a secret desire then when the time came, it would deliver me that last wish, too. I looked at my project with too close, and too loving an eye: I had changed the course of history. I had brought my friend back. I was, all in all, a hero, certain to be remembered throughout time as the mare who bested death. What was an athlete to that?
For far too long, Fluttershy was all right. If it had been any other mare, I suspect we might never have seen it; but Fluttershy was Fluttershy, so it could not have happened otherwise. She was sixty-five when she snapped at last, and provided fresh worry for my great project, and fresh sorrow for all the rest of us.
I was in my study, reading afresh my copy of
THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
(not, of course, my original copy, that one had been taken apart into its two hundred and fifty-three component pages and hung in a museum long ago) when reality fizzed, and my hair stood on end, and a tear opened up to the realm of chaos just before me. A claw reached though, and pulled me in, and then my study was empty.
What did you do.
It was not a question, it was not something I heard, it was something that filled my mind, that echoed throughout the universe in the screams of stars and nonsense planets. I struggled for comprehension, to make it out among the noise, even though I knew quite clearly what he was asking.
“I— I don’t know!” I called, and a red fury took the world, anger lighting up the hundred moons of a distant galaxy as well as it did the china teacup that shattered and reassembled and shattered again two inches from my face.
WHAT DID YOU DO.
“Please!” I tried, “I didn’t do anything!”
LIAR .
And suddenly he was before me, in all his godlike splendour, powerful as I had never seen him, angry as only a universe could be.
“What did you do.” He grabbed me by the shoulders, slamming me against a wall that appeared just then behind me. Pain shot through my legs, my back, my broken wings. My head filled with stars, each one of them firing rage.
“I— I don’t—”
The wall behind me vanished. The universe seemed to cool. Discord stared at me with an icy temper. “Look ,” he growled, and suddenly I was back in Equestria, and the universe of noisome suns was gone, and I could think again.
“What. Did. You. Do.”
Fluttershy’s cottage. She had never moved on from here, for what ever reason, and I had always supposed it to be because, with Discord, here could be anywhere. Now here was scarlet.
Fluttershy sat upon the couch, raising an empty teacup to her mouth every now and then, a vague, vacant look in her eyes. Her muzzle was smeared with red. Her hooves were smeared with red. The teacup was smeared with red.
At the other end of the room, her pack of animals quavered, shivered, and I felt I might almost have smelled their fear, if another scent hadn’t filled the room with dread. Iron stung my nose, lay thick and heavy on my tongue, invaded my fur. Blood sprayed the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Now that I could see him clear, blood sprayed Discord, too. Something red and stringy dripped from the light. In the middle of the room, something small and white and broken lay in two separate pieces. I knew it immediately.
I’m sorry it took so long for me to understand it, truly. But not for this, I doubt I would have seen it at all.
Fluttershy looked over at us, a dainty little smile upon her lips. “He’s dead,” she told me, with some satisfaction. “I finally got him. He’s dead. Oh, it makes me want to laugh.”
And so she did.
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.
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.
