I have become. That’s it. An empty, singular act; a transformation into a motionless body. I lay here on sweat-soaked sheets with my lover wrapped around me, the full meaninglessness of my becoming swimming in the thick summer air and crashing over me in waves. As the moon pulls the tides, so too does fate pull me towards infinity. I drown in endlessness.
I stare blankly at the third pregnancy test this month. Nothing. My mothers voice cuts through the static, a distant trickle of bitter memory, and reminds me that no news is good news. I burn that thought up with the rest of them and my brain is a raging inferno. I can barely hear my wife through the roar of flames, barely feel her touch as my body is consumed by fire. She tugs one last time and I am sent snapping back into the softer reality she has tried to create.
Rainbow Dash has never been great at softness. That, among many other qualities, is one of the things I admire most about her. She is rough around all the right edges, like a fine grit sandpaper that smoothes away any worry that threatens to breach my tumultuous thoughts. Still, despite her jagged demeanour, she tries her best to offer me some sort of bulwark of comfort in an increasingly uncomfortable world.
“Twilight. It’s going to be okay.” The look in her eyes says she’s telling the truth. The look in her eyes says she doesn’t even know what okay is supposed to be anymore. The look in her eyes says that we’ve run out of doctors to ask questions to.
“I know. I think, at least. I think I know. I hope.” Complete sentences fail me in ways that they haven’t in ages. I’m so used to using my full faculty of speech that to be robbed of coherency feels almost as devastating as the scorched-earth body I’ve been cursed with. “I want to talk to the Princesses about this. See if they know anything.”
Rainbow smiles and nods and her eyes say she’s afraid. For me. For us.
—
“I’m afraid there’s not much I can do, Twilight. I don’t think I’ve needed to see a doctor in… centuries, at least.” Celestia is, as always, sympathetic. It’s really all I was expecting from her but it would feel rude not to approach her first.
I nodded, my lips a thin line and my teeth grinding away at each other. “You mean you never tried—”
“To conceive?” She coughs and I flinch. “No, no I haven’t. I never really had the time and even if I did… I don’t think I’d be a good mother. A princess, a teacher, a warrior; maybe. Never a mother.”
“I understand. I just feel so helpless in all of this. Nothing the doctors have tried helped, nothing Zecora has tried helped, there’s no magic anywhere that I can find that can actually do anything about this.” I sniffle, a pathetic little noise, as tears threaten to mar perfectly good mascara. “It’s just not fair.”
“Life, especially as a princess, brings with it a lot of challenges. Some of them we may never expect.” Celestia rests a hoof on my shoulder and I understand. She wants to help. She wants to be useful, a trait I picked up from her more than anypony else in my life. Just this once, she can’t. So all she can do is hug me and mumble empty platitudes. “I know that no matter the outcome, you and Rainbow will get through this together.”
I hope she’s right.
—
Luna is far harder to corner for a conversation of this nature. She’s always been very private, a part of her I certainly can’t fault, but my frustration bubbles at the edge of my mood regardless. We’re walking in the royal garden, the moon casting a pale light over the carefully curated floral arrangements, and I can feel the magic in their petals course through the air unhindered. She and I are quiet for some time, letting our thoughts slowly untangle as we prepare to speak.
“You seek my help in this matter.” Luna is curt and polite as always, her gaze fixed at the hillside in the distance.
“I do. Any help at all, really. I’m running out of options.” I want to stop and turn and look at her, grab her beautiful face in my hooves and beg for some deeper understanding. I instead continue walking, matching her leisurely pace, and stare at the same blasted hillside.
Luna stops. She turns. Our eyes meet and it is only now that I am faced with the deep pool of doubt that circles her countenance. She shakes her head. “I cannot help you, Twilight Sparkle. To mother a child is beyond what I am capable of. It is not what I was meant to do. I am the bearer of the moon and naught much else.” It hurts me to see her this way.
“I know, Luna.” She is so much more and she knows it. Just as I know she chooses these words to save me, to protect me from myself. From the reality of the pony I’ve been made to become. “Thanks anyways.”
—
Cadance. Cadance has to be able to help. I can skip the pleasantries, skip the formalities, and get right down to business. My brother sees the wild look in my eyes as I stride into the throne room, Rainbow Dash following behind, and I know he can scarcely imagine the storm I’m bringing with me.
“Twilight! I haven’t seen you in ages!” Cadance makes her way down from her throne to greet me, stopping dead in her tracks just feet away. Her face is hard to read even as mine is an open book. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes.” The mood in the room sours. “I need to talk to you. Privately.”
We’re up on the roof of the palace now, nothing to separate us from the vastness of the cosmos above us but a thin layer of sky. It’s a humbling feeling, to be dwarfed so completely by the sheer magnitude of the world I pretend myself a ruler of. I shall be dust before the sun reaches even a half of its life, the Friendship that sustains me burning out far sooner than our boiling star ever will.
If only I could be so grossly incandescent. If only I could burn the way it does, to sing in helium fire, to thrum with all the heat of life and light. I would dash myself upon the crystal plaza below us if it meant I would be reborn as a celestial object, an orbiting body of a complexity beyond and outside the life of a pony. I would trade every decision to be unmade into something other than what I am.
Decision. What a joke. To think that any of this was decided by me, for me; to think of myself as anything more than a puppet. It is a just fate, I suppose. The world will always need an avatar for the magic of Friendship and it is best that I bear the burden. That I be made to bear the burden. None of this was my choice. None of this. I wanted to live, read, mother, die. Instead I am forced to live and live and live and live and live and live and—
“Twilight.” Cadance speaks and I am dragged willingly from a bitter spiral. “You said you needed to talk?”
I nod, the words breaking free from my lips before my mind has the chance to stop me. “I can’t have kids. I don’t know why.”
To her credit, Cadance’s face remains neutral. I should’ve seen her first, really, before my friends or the doctors or the other princesses. “I’m assuming you’ve tried everything already.”
“More than you could possibly know. I have, and I mean this literally, tried every trick in the book. Books. Several of them. Exhaustively cross-referenced against advice from a dozen friends and twice as many medical professionals.” It is a relief to finally let all of this spill out. I’ve been keeping it contained, hiding the worst of it from my friends and family. I don’t care that I can feel a steadily-mounting wave of panic and desperation rising up around me. I don’t care how plainly it shows in my eyes, how afraid I must seem. I don’t care.
“I see.” Cadance furrows her brow, scanning the horizon as if the dying sunlight might hold some answer I’ve yet to discover. I turn to face her but her gaze is resolute, trained on anything that isn't me. “Twilight… What if it’s always been this way?”
She isn’t looking at me. I don’t blame her, certainly. I couldn’t look a dear friend in the eyes while delivering the type of truth I’ve burdened her with. It’s unkind of me to trap her into a contract in which the only escape is pain. It would’ve been easier for the both of us if I had just accepted that some things aren’t meant to be understood. If only it were that easy. “I’ve considered it. Really, I have.”
“And?” Cadance, her gaze still firmly on the horizon, quietly demands an answer.
“And… it was unsatisfying. It was too simple. I thought that if I just rolled over and accepted it, I was giving up.” I felt stupid. Childish in my fervor; like all the years I had spent disentangling myself from the clutches of logic had been wasted.
“I… get that. I do. I really, really do. Would it matter if you knew why? Would anything change?” Cadance began walking, aimlessly pacing a wide circle around the wind-polished crystal of the roof. I didn’t follow her.
“It would matter to me. I know I can’t change anything; not without ruining everything, but it would matter to me. What if me becoming an alicorn caused this?” Cadance whipped her head around to face me, stopping dead in her tracks. I blinked away the tears and continued. “What if I was just… normal, before all of this? Why didn’t I get to choose who I became, Cadance?”
I stepped towards her, my countenance ablaze with grief and fury. She backed up slowly, always keeping a good distance between us. I didn’t stop walking until she was pressed up against the edge of the roof, the rolling hills of the Crystal Empire stretching out beneath her like a yawning maw waiting to be fed.
“Why didn’t I get to choose? If I had known, if it was ever explained to me… I could’ve done something.” I turned away for just a moment, sucking in a deep breath as I tried and failed to steady my nerves. I had spent too long keeping all of this bottled up inside. “I know you can’t tell me anything. I know you can’t help.”
“Twilight…” Cadance reached out for me as I turned to leave. I didn’t look back.
“No one can.”
