It was always something.
There’d be a fly in the ointment, a wrinkle in the battle map, a zig where she should’ve zagged or a whisper when she should’ve screamed. Somehow, every time, something would go awry, and she’d suffer the consequences like she always did.
She’d grit her teeth through late nights and early mornings. She’d spend days solving an issue that should’ve taken minutes. She might have to fight. She might get hurt. Somepony might even die. And at some point, she’d end up coated with grime and gasping for breath at the bottom of a rocky crater—sometimes metaphorical, usually not. Almost never not, it felt like lately.
It was inevitable, she found herself thinking, cheek pressed to the shattered ground and horn still throbbing from its most recent discharge. And it was always—always—the same.
“Ooh, that looked like it hurt!”
Hovering in midair above all, surrounded by crackling black clouds of magical force, her latest hassle let out a braying laugh and began to crow over its momentary triumph. In the distance, restrained but unsilenced by a translucent wall of energy, her friends and subjects chanted for her to get up, keep fighting, you can do it Princess Twilight! They knew she wouldn’t let them down—that she couldn’t. After all, she never had before. She’d never been anything but honest, loyal, kind and generous and full of laughter and love for them.
And she used to mean it. Really, she did! She used to get up every morning unfazed by the challenges of the day, ready to give each one her all until—relentlessly, repetitively—she found a way to overcome it. Month after month, year after year, she’d been clever and confident and hopeful that soon things would be a little easier, that her hard work now would surely earn her well-deserved rest tomorrow.
And then, they weren’t. Tomorrow never came. Everything became today—today’s dispute to mediate, accident to resolve, battle to fight, war to win. She’d blink, and a week would be gone, and the only evidence of its passing would be the incremental progress she’d made on a dozen tiny inconveniences. She’d go to bed restless and wake up exhausted, and each time she brought the sun up, it took a fractional moment longer—consumed an infinitesimally greater amount of energy—to manage. And still, she’d never stopped trying, never stopped fighting for what was right and what was necessary and what the ponies of Equestria deserved.
But stars, sun and moon, gods old and long since dead—she’d never felt so tired.
“Given up?” her foe sneered, punctuating its taunt with a hair-raising clap of thunder. “I’m not surprised. You ponies are so weak. One taste of true fear, and you wilt like the delicate little flowers you are.”
Taraxippus—that was the thing’s mouthful of a name. It was a spirit more than a millennium old, manifested from the instinctual urge to panic that kept the tribal herds safe from predators in ancient times. Celestia had sealed it away centuries ago in a long-forgotten crypt. Four days ago, thanks to decaying magic and generations of institutional neglect, it had escaped.
And oh, if only Twilight had spent all of those days chasing this unholy abomination around the realm, trying to remedy yet another of her old “retired” mentor’s mistakes. But no, the relief of victory would come tomorrow, and it was always today. And today there was a municipal budget meeting, and a prairie fire was threatening Appaloosa’s summer harvest, and Rarity’s apprentice had his first big fashion show and he’d be thrilled if the Princess had time to stop by.
That was what she had to look forward to once she eventually won: more obligations, more fights, more bumps and bruises that came with both—and most of them relics of an era she wasn’t even alive for, caused by long-dead ponies who’d knew they’d never have to deal with the messes they left for her.
“Oh, what’s the matter? Are your legs turning to jelly? Am I getting to you? You don’t have to say it, I can tell. It’s delicious.”
But then again, she found herself wondering, muscles aching and thoughts mired in a fog that she could no longer remember being without, what if she didn’t win? What if she “retired” too? What if today was finally allowed to end?
That was inevitable too, really. Like Celestia’s “retirement”—their pre-arranged way of keeping the secret that gods could actually die. It would cause too much trouble if they told everypony the truth, Celestia believed. Ponies would question whether anything they believed was true. They wouldn’t eat or sleep or become friends with each other. They would fall into despair. They would panic.
Great plan, Celestia. Just like all your other ones. Just like every other time you maintained the status quo and made sure everypony was happy, ignoring all the problems you were too cowardly or incompetent to fix and trusting that someone else would handle them at some point after you croaked. And now, every day, that someone was her. And there was always something new.
“Don’t listen to it, Twilight!” somepony shouted, buoyed by encouragement from their gaslit companions. “You can beat it!”
Yeah, obviously. She could’ve beaten it days ago if she’d had the time or energy to spare. But now she had neither, and she hadn’t for a while, and every time she set her jaw and squeezed some out of some unknowable, ever-shrinking place inside herself, what did she get for it? A hug from her friends? A ticker-tape parade? All that ever did was remind her of how trapped she was—of how she could never be truly honest with them, or intentionally leave them in a world without her. It would crush them. It would break their hearts. They would do anything to make her smile, to see her look the way she made them feel, and no amount of exhaustion could make her monstrous enough to knowingly hurt them.
Unless she lost. Unless, for once, she simply allowed herself to fail.
“Oh, yes, by all means, listen to your friends over here. I’m sure they’ll love to see what I do with you next.”
It wouldn’t be painful—or maybe it would. It would be quick—or maybe the villain of the day would drag it out. She’d end up somewhere better or worse, or at the very least someplace other than here. And as far as she’d know, the world she'd leave behind wouldn’t end or begin or repetitively, irritatingly persist—it would simply become someone else’s problem. The other ponies would understand eventually—or, of course, they wouldn’t. Either way, she wouldn’t have to care anymore.
Twilight sighed, and shut her eyes, and ground her teeth together.
But she would. Damn it to the moon, she knew she still would. It was because she cared—because she simply couldn’t bear to allow problems to go unsolved—that she felt like this. If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t be here in this crater, legs scratched up and ears ringing with the echoes of far-off cheers. If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t be this tired in the first place.
And this thing—the tara-whatsit—knew that. Just like it had known where to ambush her guards when they were least expecting it, what directions to herd frightened townsponies in to throw her off its trail, and what words to murmur in her best friends’ ears to create the moment of weakness it needed to take them out of the fight.
Just like it had known exactly what she’d been thinking about all of today, for months and years on end: What am I doing? Why fight this battle when there’s always another one coming? How am I supposed to keep this up forever?
It hadn’t come up with any of that itself, of course. Her fear—because that’s what it was, really—had been there for a long time, chipping away at her resolve as she’d handled crisis after crisis in a year abnormally full of them. In fact, she doubted it had even done anything to strengthen those feelings. It had simply pointed them out to her, idly noted that life had become stressful and monotonous and seemed like it was going to be that way forever, and her overtaxed brain had done the rest.
And now here she was, at the bottom of a crater, wallowing in it. Giving a mindless phantom—the whole stupid, obnoxious world—the satisfaction of seeing her give in.
Slowly, jaw clenched and breathing steady, Twilight got one forehoof under herself, and then the other. She pushed herself up onto her haunches, lifted her head, and finally stood back up. Behind her, the crowd of onlookers roared with anticipation. In front of her, the Taraxippus did whatever the shapeless-smog equivalent of glowering was.
“It’s not gonna last,” it seethed at her. “You know it won’t. Tomorrow, you’ll be exhausted all over again, waiting for the next thing to go wrong and the next hassle that’ll bring you right back here. And deep down, you have no idea how to get over it, and you know you never will.”
Twilight stared it down and said nothing. It was right, after all—she was still tired even now, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it or when she might start to figure that problem out. But tomorrow might be completely different. And in the meantime, beating this thing’s non-corporeal ass seemed like a decent enough way to spend today.
So that’s just what she did. And honestly? It helped a bit.
Author's Note
The cover image floated across my Twitter feed earlier today, and after staring at it and getting lost in it for a couple minutes, I opened Google Docs and wrote this instead of finishing paid freelance work. Fanfic is cheaper than therapy anyway.
