The Monolith That Fell On Twilight's Front-Left Hoof
nothing is any fun anymore.
Twilight Sparkle awoke with the biggest grin she’d ever worn on her stupid purple face. “I don’t know why, but I feel like this is going to be the best day of my life!”
She slipped like a slug covered in butter from her bed and sauntered over to her window, whereupon she thrust the curtains open. The sun was shining down on the ruins of Ponyville; most of the homes were little more than scorched timbers, a few errant fires still blazing here and there.
Twilight’s smile didn’t falter an inch. If anything, it seemed to grow wider.
“Glad to see everypony’s doing just fine!” she exposited. “I think I’ll go and check in on my student and that dumb showmare she hangs out with!”
Twilight galloped and pranced out of her room, and slid the whole way down the first floor on the banister just as she’d done as a little tiny babby filly all those years ago in the distant past. She landed on the cold crystal floor with a bone-snapping crunch and immediately righted herself again, snapping her leg back into place.
She lifted her front-left hoof, which was twisted 180-degrees around, and pushed her horn—that had snapped clean in half and was dangling from the stump by a tiny frayed thread of nerve—back into place where it melded seamlessly together as if it were made of putty.
Twilight turned around and saw Spike standing in a far corner of the room facing where the two walls met. “Spike!” She shouted very loud. “How’s your morning going, number one assistant?”
Spike slowly turned around. His face was old and weathered, as if it had been pickled in a jar of brine left unattended in some basement for decades. His scratchy five-o-clock shadow was stubbly and unkempt, sprouting from creases in his scales. In his grubby lil talons (which were missing a finger each, and a thumb on the left one) he held one of Twilight’s paperweights, a heavy glass blob, with a fragment of pink coral from the southern Celestial Sea encased within.
She didn’t use that one paperweight often; in fact, as Twilight recalled, this was in the fifth tier of her preferred paperweights—which is to say it wasn’t very preferred at all. In all honesty she’d forgotten that she even had it until now.
“Have you ever noticed how beautiful this paperweight is, Twilight?” A hissed, rasping voice emanated from Spike's throat. It sounded like he had aged fifty years overnight, which is like five in dragon years. A better analogy would be that he’d spent those fifty years smoking, except dragons also have fire and smokeproof throats due to, y’know, being dragons and whatnot. He sounded really goddamn old is what I’m trying to say.
“Actually, that one’s at the bottom of my fifth tier of preferred paperweights, which is to say that it isn’t preferred very much at all,” Twilight said, pointlessly repeating what I’d just explained in the narrative two paragraphs ago. “In all honesty I’d forgotten that I even had this one until now.”
Spike turned over towards the light coming in from the high windows and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. “The inexhaustibly interesting thing is not the fragment of coral inside, but the interior of the glass itself,” he said in his old, tired voice. “There is such a depth of it, and yet it is almost as transparent as air. It’s as though the surface of the glass were an arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. I have the feeling that I could get inside it, along with the crystal chairs and the friendship map and the jasper engravings above the doors, and the mahogany grandfather clock on the other side of the room and, indeed, the paperweight itself. This paperweight is the room we are in, the coral is your life and my own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.”
Twilight blinked silently at Spike, her smile still wide and vapid. After a moment, she finally spoke.
“Spike, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You sure are a riot!”
Spike looked at Twilight with his weary visage, a single tear rolling down his creased cheek. He looked as if he were about to say something, and even opened his mouth to speak, but instead he let loose a deep and pained groan. He clutched at his chest with his thumbless claw, the paperweight slipping from his other to shatter against the floor into a million dazzling shards of glass.
The fragment of coral shot out from its center by the force of the break, and jabbed itself into the fetlock of Twilight’s front-left hoof.
Twilight watched with mild interest and her cheshire smile as beads of blood leaked from where the coral had imbedded itself. Brushing it off and out without even a twitch of her lip downward, she left Spike spasming and frothing at the mouth behind her, whistling a happy tune as she left out the double doors of her crystal castle.
Twilight briefly considered going to Applejack’s Banana Plantation to check in on her and her many siblings (those filthy dirt ponies bred like rats—although that isn’t entirely fair to rats; at least rats are intelligent and capable of navigating mazes) but when she crested a hill and saw that all land stretching out in that direction had been turned to bone, and the sea, on the distant horizon, to blood, she decided against it.
“I know that goofy Pinkie Pie will have some laughs for me,” Twilight said, turning from the apocalyptic scene to set her sights on Sugarcube Corner.
Sugarcube Corner had remained standing despite the smoldering craters littering the remnants of the town beside it. Indeed, the upper portion of it was ablaze, and had been since Twilight had first looked out from her window this morning on Ponyville.
Twilight stood there and stared up at the fire, watching the flames dance in the same three frames of animation for what could have been hours. No part of the structure was damaged.
Twilight entered the bakery.
Pinkie Pie in her incredibly racist gypsy getup from season two episode seventeen “It’s About Time” was perched behind the counter, encased in a coin-operated fortune teller’s box, complete with crystal ball.
She was also made from metal, wires, springs, and hinges. She had been manufactured in a factory in the Manehattan industrial center that also produced cheap alarm clocks and spring-loaded rat traps.
Twilight pulled out one (1) equestrian bit and slid it into the slot on the front of the fortune teller’s box. The mechanical Pinkie Pie jerked to life, her eyes blinking as she swiveled her head with the grinding of gears and the twang of springs to meet Twilight’s own. Her mouth fell open with a rusty-hinged creak.
“Go directly to Jail! Do not pass Go! Do not collect two-hundred bits!”
Twilight snorted and shook her head. “Oh, Pinkie Pie!” A rusty, tinny laugh-track echoed throughout the room. Several feathers fell out of Twilight’s wings, and she laughed aloud.
“You’re always there for me when I need a good cheering up the most,” Twilight said, grin still plastered across her muzzle, hugging the box tight. She ground her snout against the glass, extending her tongue to give it a long, languid lick.
The tension was unbearable; Twilight thrust her front-left hoof into the glass of the fortune teller’s box. Shards of glass stuck into the soft underside of her hoof, leaving deep gashes in her frog.
Twilight’s spirits weren’t about to be dampened by something as trivial as that, however.
“Give me a kiss, Pinkie,” she whispered seductively, her eyes lidded. The mechanical effigy of Pinkie Pie did not move.
Twilight was moments from shoving her big dumb smiling face through the shattered glass when she felt something move in the gash left in the underside of her hoof. Bringing her hoof back to face her, she watched as the skin bubbled and warped. From the deep cut left by the shard of glass emerged a bloated and fluorescent green wasp. Twilight smiled down at it and crushed it with her other hoof.
“What a cute little critter! I better go show this to Fluttershy and see if she can identify this!”
This next part is very important. I need you to imagine that Twilight has not been voiced by Tara Strong during the course of this story, but instead by Rosie o'Donnell, from the first paragraph until the word “identify” in the previous one. Starting with “identify” and after continuing to the final paragraph she is once again voiced by Mrs. Strong. Thank you for your cooperation.
Tucking the half-crushed and still-twitching insect behind her ear, Twilight skipped gayly (no homo) down the path to Fluttershy’s cottage. It was as placid as usual and unremarkably affected in any way. Butterflies floated and fluttered about, squirrels scampered to and fro, and bunnies hopped and frolicked about in the grass.
Twilight went right up to the cottage door and knocked twice. There was no reply. She stood there in silence save for the occasional chatter of a squirrel, manic grinned the entire time. She didn’t blink, not even when a fly landed on one of her gigantic eyes and crawled into her right nostril and did not emerge.
“Twilight!” Fluttershy’s voice came from behind her after around five minutes of this. “Don’t look back!”
Twilight did just that. Fluttershy froze in place, turning to grey stone immediately. A small breeze wafted by and she disintegrated into dust, lost to the winds for all time.
“Classic Fluttershy!” Twilight chuckled.
The fly flew out of her ear, the very same one the wasp was tucked behind. The wasp had died.
On her way back from the edge of the Everfree, where every tree had been turned into some sort of nightmare creature with thorny and wooden lashing tendrils, which grasped and clawed birds out of the sky, and thrust their roots into anything that walked too close, Twilight had passed beneath Rainbow Dash’s cloud villa.
She paused to admire its structure and architecture and to expose upon it dazzling rays of light refracted off her eternal smile. Almost immediately, the floating construction began to collapse in upon itself like a dying star, pulling into a single point located at its exact gravitational center.
Twilight nodded, slurping up a long line of drool that was dangling from her bottom lip from smiling so long uninterrupted. “Everything appears to be in order here!” Her front-left hoof itched slightly. She slapped it into a nearby rock several times until the hoof cracked in such a way that it appeared cloven, which it actually was in a certain sense of the word. This is called “wordplay”, which is a lot less sexy than it sounds. See? I’m a very talented wordsmith. Fuck you, Miss Sadler. There’s a reason you teach high school English and I’m a famous and popular author on a My Little Pony fanfiction website.
Twilight did not go to visit Rarity because fuck Rarity.
“Ah, there’s my favorite two mares on this side of the Maressissippi!” Twilight said as she returned to her ridiculously opulent and somewhat garish castle.
Trixie and Starlight were in front of the friendship castle.
Starlight was standing with legs locked, staring straight ahead of her. There was a thin wire coat hanger laying before her. Trixie was collapsed on the ground. Her mane was disheveled and unkempt, swept across her face.
“Nothing is any fun any more,” Trixie said. She was holding the glass paperweight that Spike had earlier. It was in pristine condition as if it had never been broken. She opened her mouth, placed the paperweight on her tongue. It was of a size that either side bulged her cheeks out slightly. Twilight watched with her unerring elation as Trixie closed her jaw and began to chew. The snapping and grinding of glass and teeth soon followed.
“I don’t feel anything,” Trixie blubbered through a mouthful of glass shards and broken teeth. Blood poured down her chin. “And there is nowhere to go.”
Trixie fell through the ground like a crappy unity model noclipping through an improperly mapped horizontal plane, swiftly and silently.
There was a sickening crack. One of Twilight’s bottom front teeth popped out and fell to the ground where it shattered in a very similar manner to the paperweight. Twilight’s smile didn’t fade for even a second. Starlight didn’t notice, or did a very good job of pretending not to.
“It feels like everything has gone to hell inside of me,” Starlight said, and she thrust the coat hanger through her eye. Twilight watched as the back of Starlight’s skull split open, blood running down her cheek as her eye turned to a pulped gore.
The sky shattered into a panorama of fractiles, all spiraling out from a center-point in the sky. Suspiciously, each segment was a different color, coordinated to the scheme of each individual pony that had ever been born. A spooky black dot began to grow at the center, becoming bigger and bigger with each passing second. Something was falling from the sky, rapidly approaching Twilight.
It was a massive onyx monolith, thirty-five feet high and eleven-and-a-half feet wide on its front face. She could not pinpoint an exact measurement for the side faces, but they were narrower than the front. The monolith slammed into the earth, sending a massive shockwave which did not move Twilight in the slightest, and displaced an absolute tsunami of dirt and cobble and rock from its impact point. It had just barely managed to crush Twilight front-left hoof with the edge of the face that faced her. It had sliced it clean off.
Twilight raised her left foreleg, inspected the stump. It was a clean cleave, a flat smooth and glossy plane left behind. It was as though she were made of ceramic.
“Oh, rats,” she said. Still her smile was there. Her voice was softer than it had been at any point today, however.
The monolith cracked open like an egg split down the middle. It fell apart, revealing an oaken door suspended ten feet in the air above the crater.
The door opened, and out stepped Twilight’s parents, Twilight Velvet and Night Light. Then Princess Celestia and Luna followed. Then Princess Cadance, and Cadance’s husband Shining Armor. Then Spike. Then Pinkie Pie. Then Fluttershy. Then Applejack. Then Rarity. Then Rainbow Dash. Then Trixie. Then, finally, Starlight emerged from the door. Each time a pony left the door, they glided seamlessly and quietly to the edge of the crater where Twilight was. They gathered around her, the manic-grinning mare with her front-left hoof obliterated, in a circle. And they began to clap.
“Congratulations,” said her mother.
“Congratulations,” said her father.
“Congratulations,” said her mentor.
“Congratulations,” said her mentor’s sister.
“Congratulations,” said her sister-in-law.
“Congratulations,” said her brother.
“Congratulations,” said her number-one assistant.
“Congratulations,” said her five friends in unison.
“Congratulations,” said her old nemesis.
“Congratulations,” said her student.
Twilight was in tears, her gap-toothed smile as wide as ever as she beamed down at all the adoring faces around her, wreathed in the ringing hoofbeats of their claps. “Thank you. Thank you all so much!”
