The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever.

There lies a nation known as Zebriawae. It is a landlocked country in the far east of Aezilan, deep within the sandy borders of Utan. A populous nation of strange people - remnants of the Once Great Deer, their tongues cut out at birth by tradition, and zebrican shamans speak in tongues - buffalo priests, minotaur industrialists. Zebriawae is a nation of blended culture and lifestyle.

It was not always.

In the past, there was a King - a King of the Once Great Deer. He was an ancient warrior lord, clad in spell and sorcery with a rule of steel. His cruelty was unimaginable, his greed and vanity unmatched - yet, it was not for these reasons that he was deemed so hated, so loathsome as to have his name struck from the world. On this day, more than ten thousand years ago - his words were stuck into the side of Utan like a butcher's knife. The nation was gutted and bled as he ordered the execution of every prophet - no matter their age.

Thousands died that day as the Judicators tore their path of carnage through Utan. Mothers and fathers used their bodies like shields - but it was for naught, as the magic of the deer had no equal. The soils of Utan were drenched with liquid life, the crimson color sinking so deep into the ground itself that the soil was forever tainted. Bodies, mutilated and hauled, were laid haphazardly in what could only be called a mass grave.

Something new was born there. Fragile, mystic minerals, clumps of stone forming in the recently spilled blood of the innocent. In the presence of so much carnage - reality melted and twisted - and the damage only grew greater as the Lord of Chaos stepped onto Aezilan.

Beneath the whole moon, there is a corpse lying in the far east. Skin and muscle are strewn over its grisly frame. The tongueless corpse wore a formless crown of Steel on its head, as it spoke in a voice that was not its own, moved by a mind that was not its own, gifted clarity that was not its own.

Its words were long and eldritch, as it recited a poem in a thousand different tongues into the void. Fingers curled around a shard of purest iron that had been formed in the carnage wrought by the Once Great King, blood dripping from a growing wound. The blood was sickly, twisted, grim, gruesome. It should not have existed but was brought into this world forcefully- screaming and kicking all the while.

A heavy tongue of steel and bone spoke in a rolling motion in the tongue of a thousand dead gods, spoke the words of a thousand dead prophets -

A hue of rainbow tore through the sky. A sound like the mountains themselves beginning to crumble and fall echoed through all of Aezilan as they looked up at the sky.

The sky was a facsimile. Most of the brave folk who could call themselves Royal Astronomers or the rulers of the world knew this - but none knew this better than Celestia. There was a time, where the chimaeric tyrant had torn the fake sky from the world to let all bear witness to it - and with it, it brought madness. The Outer Beyond was not something meant for the untrained eye. It was a starless, starry void of death - the rotting, putrid carcass of a dead, oxymoronic God more imperfect and perfect, more terrible and more beautiful than any could comprehend.

The Sun and the Moon are constructs. Representations of pure magic, conduits connected to the much larger - and much more impossible to move True Bodies. And so, as a hue of rainbow light tore through the sky with echoing booms louder than any thundercrack could dream of being - the people looked up at the whole moon, the whole sun.

Few saw the lavender lightning. Shredding through the surface in a horrific pattern that lingered at the edge of conscious thought, that moved with such speed and ferocity that it reminded the Deity of the Sun of the Primordia that she had bound in Adamantia, oh-so-long ago.

Yet only two gazed weeping upon the wreckage of the shattered True Moon - as the corpse spoke its last words before its otherworldly presence faded from it.

"Fear the Lady in Lavender."

For in Canterlot, Twilight Sparkle has just been born.

There were a handful of rather popular misconceptions about Celestia. Ones that she had debunked and denied time and time again - but yet they persisted. She never found herself offended by any of them - or, well, some of them, and even still, she did not fault the misconceptions for spreading. While she was humble, she did not believe in false modesty. Her beauty was striking, her power moreso:

So it was not unreasonable that the first misconception about her would be that she was a Goddess. This was the one that angered her the most - but anger directed at something different than the offending pony who had asked, most usually. The times of her youth were long past; and thanks to her own work, the hierarchy of divinity was something that was far from common knowledge.

No. She was not a goddess; she would never be a goddess - and most definitely, she would never come in contact with a god. Oh, yes, she was close. Like her, she had met friends and foes that carried within them a Shard. To call her divine would be more accurate, or a deity - but she was not a goddess, and would always deny being as such. She wasn't even close.

She hoped that it would remain that way. She had met three creatures, all one step removed from the Last True God. To say it had been - humbling would be an understatement to say the least. Her greatest failures, her greatest fears, and her greatest source of humility all came from these Not-Quite-Gods. The Children, as they called themselves.

There was no true name for her or those like her. They convened once a year under the broken ruins of Asgard as equals, where Celestia's father had once ruled - but they had never settled on a proper or definite name. Embodiments. Spirits. Aspects, all interchangeable. Celestia, herself, was quite partial to the name Aspects - for she found a sort of irony in it. She was the Aspect of the Sun - yet she was cold, peaceful, calm. Her sister, the Aspect of the Moon - was quite the opposite.

The others, too, were much like that. Lord Zarrat of the Earth was flexible and ever shifting, while Lord Hermes of the Air was stubborn and adamant. Despite her sheer bulk and appearance, The Fire Queen, Lady Beollyssurth always looked for peace first, war second - while Lady Thaola of the Water was a borderline warmonger.

Despite their faults, though - they were essentially family. The closest you could come to family without being blood related. The news of Luna's - fall, to the Terrors Beyond had been equally devastating to them as it had been to her.

Celestia sometimes wondered if she could have borne that burden alone.

The other misconception was that Celestia was immortal. No, Celestia was not immortal. She was not even sure she was ageless - as far as she knew, all Aspects, much like the dragons, only grew stronger with age. But all Aspects of the past had their lives struck tragically short - be it by spell or blade. It was difficult to kill them - almost impossible, and Celestia herself had before shrugged off decapitation (although, admittedly, it was at the height of her power in her own domain.)

But she was not immortal. As far as she knew - even the enigmatic Children were not immortal. While no weapon she or her sister had utilized had been capable of so much as scratching their greatest foe - it was not to say that they had never seen him wounded. Indeed, in a battle with his eldest sister - the scars he suffered were grievous, and Celestia often wondered if he had ever truly recovered from such a conflict.

There was only one immortal she had met. Their meeting had been brief - and every day, she thanked the Queen that it had been blessedly so.

He was unspectacular, at first, save his size. A wolf - a rather reclusive species that lay deep in the North, past the Tyrant's Empire. But not unheard of - although, he did tower a head taller than even Celestia. It was rare that she had to look up. She sensed no great power from him - while he was stronger than any mortal she had ever met, he still paled in comparison to her and her kin.

Then, she saw him fight. He had been terrible - a force of nature. He fought with reckless abandon, with no care for his own harm as he was mutilated and torn apart. He moved with speed that could be compared to the fastest creatures in the land, struck with strength and precision that others would be envious of - every part of his body a weapon, his magic used masterfully: and by the end of the battle that she had witnessed, he was little more than a wolven skeleton. White sinew growing on rotten, warped bone as he snarled and hissed.

Her friend-turned-foe had once claimed that it was through his immortality that he had earned the moniker of the most dangerous creature in the universe. No physical weapon or mystic spell could do little more than slow him - and his energy seemed as infinite and eternal as he was. He won his battles through a war of attrition, which he had always won. The 'quus had claimed that he had never lost a fight to anyone, but his mother - and Celestia was inclined to believe him.

It sickened Celestia that a creature could be like that. With such a lust for blood, such a lack of care for their own pain and suffering. It did not surprise her - considering his mother was the ferocious entity who had brought even the trickster god down to his knees.

She thanked the Queen that she was not immortal - just close.

Considering how durable Celestia was, it wasn't surprising to hear that her ponies believed her to be immortal. Few had seen her wounded, and those who had only had a deeper belief in her immortality as she pulled a blade out of her heart and cleaned it off of blood while her guards dealt with the assassin. The only times she had ever come close to death was when she was mismatched in terms of weight class - she was certain that if Discord ever felt the interest in striking her down, he would be able to do as such. Fortunately, he claimed that his passion for blood and violence had worn off long before Celestia had been born.

Celestia believed him. For he had never killed a pony - injured, sure. Driven to insanity - yes. Maybe that was a fate worse than death - but regardless, he was not a killer: and Celestia was thankful for that. She was certain that otherwise, the world would be nothing but dust.

There were other times that she had come close to death. Some had been out of youthful arrogance, out of the belief that she was immortal - that fate willed it so. Her sister had fought against a fearsome dragon before Lady Beollyssurth came to reign. Her sister's wings had been torn off in a bloody display like an instinct - and Celestia herself had more than half her body sheared off. She was certain that, if it was not for it being high noon - at the peak of her power, that she would have perished.

Sometimes, the other embodiments asked her about her guard. They were less durable than her - and any threat that could truly harm her - it would be like throwing a foal into the mouth of a den of ravenous dragons. It was true - but the guard's role was two-fold.

Firstly, they were for the affairs of mortals. A deeper still, a surface-level police force, and a standing army was a deeply spread surveillance organization that kept her entire nation safe. Secondly - they were a display. A display to the world that she was not immortal, not a god, not divine. If she ever needed to go somewhere where she was truly in danger - she would travel without them.

Tonight, mere hours after the True Moon had shattered - and Celestia, much to her relief, was thankful that her corrupted sister had been imprisoned in the False Moon - this was one such occasion.

This was at the edge of her city. It was a place she rarely tended to visit - not for any disdain or sense of superiority, but because there was little business for her there. She had long intended to - for lack of a better term, clean it up. It was a mess of slums, drug dens, crime lords that only floated along because it was easier to control them than it was to cut them out entirely. It was the underbelly of the city, sickly and rotting.

The sheer amount of magic oozed from this building made rot quite literal. As the oldest (active) creature on the planet, Celestia had a rather heavy experience with magic, to put it lightly. She had studied under Starswirl the Bearded, cast spells that wove the very fabric of the world into what it was today - ascended a shard of divinity within herself through sheer magical skill, met the two most powerful entities in all the realms-

And yet, she had never felt magic like this.

Magic had many forms - the solid form, ley, an organic-crystalline construct that formed naturally within the biology of those who used active magic - with a tendency to find itself within keratin cages. The liquid form, known as vis - a fuel that was absurdly difficult to distill and even more so to refine, but a few drops of it could fuel a train for a month. And lastly - there was æther. Not quite gaseous, not quite a plasma - rather, its own state of matter entirely.

The best description of it was a web. Reality was a metal sheet, with this web of æther over it. The lines of the web were leylines - greater leylines that travelled the great expanse through the Outer Beyond, lesser leylines that curled around planets and concentrated in its thaumosphere and magical core. This was the magic used by creatures simply existing - without æther, life as they knew it would be simply unable to exist.

There was a problem, though. The æther was, unstable, to put it lightly. It hated being near each other - and it constantly fought to expand. Yet, when in high enough density - it pulled it together, creating a rather lethal effect known as magical radiation. There were attempts to harness magical radiation for a source of clean power - but Celestia had cut them short. Magical radiation was such a threat that in sufficient quantities - it could kill even her.

There was another type of magical phenomenon, known as magical pressure. The disparity between two creatures caused a sort of physical pressure to weigh down on the weaker one. It was why many felt awed and cowed in Celestia's presence - and why some ponies found themselves utterly paralyzed by Discord. In fact, in the brief time that the Eldest Daughter had walked among Aezilan - some mortals found themselves simply rotting away into dust in her mere presence.

The walls dripped with vis. Fluids had been frozen into ley, the magical radiation so great that Celestia - even with her additional protection due to her sheer power, would have mere minutes at most once she was deeper into the field. The magical pressure - it felt as if she was standing in the presence of the Eldest Daughter.

She passed by corpses that looked familiar. Skeletal ponies, their flesh sloughed off into liquid - blood mixed with sickly shades of brown and yellow in the disgusting clumps of dirt. The hotel was rotting and abandoned - as if it had been so for centuries. In truth, it was merely the presence of something within this building that had been causing such damage.

Celestia walked past the gore. She dared not to light her horn to guide her steps; instead, content walking through the darkness. The backlash that she would receive from summoning up her magic in a place so mystically dense - it would, at the very least, blow her horn off.

Likely, half of the Canterhorn with it.

She came to the center of it. Her legs trembled a bit as she felt her nose grow wet. A quick tap of her hoof and an inspection - showed that it was her blood. Pink blood, which had not been shown to the world since ages long past - since her sister. A small part of her felt proud - for any other creature would have succumbed to the pressure and radiation. But she was no mere creature.

She was the Sol Invictus. Celestia powered past - until her legs carried her to a door. The door handle was rusted and locked, but the wood itself was brittle and rotten. The lightest of taps sent it cascading down into dust, along with a pillar of wood - one that Celestia quickly sidestepped as it smashed down where she was moments later. The wood splattered, and Celestia couldn't help but cringe at the strange and unearthly sound.

Within this room - the lounge was the most gruesome sight she had ever seen. Bits of pony were strewn about all over the wall - entrails hanging in ritualistic patterns reminiscent of the ruins of the Once Great Deer. There was the skeletal corpse of a wolf by the very center of it - as well as a pony. Her matted fur was an ailing shade of velvet, her eyes seemingly gouged out of her head - until Celestia's eyes fell to her stomach, and she repressed a gag.

Something had eaten its way out from her insides. Celestia's mouth felt dry as she recognized the marking of pony teeth gouging into pony flesh. From her stomach, a trail of sickly fluids trailed down past her pelvis - which had been fractured, her body covered in scars, down the couch - over to the corner of the room.

Celestia let out a soft gasp. There was a filly - her coat marred and bloody, her hooves black as night - her fledgling horn a piercing spear drenched in blood. She had the fur of a pegasus instead of the expected hair of a unicorn - and her teeth were slightly pointed, much like a dragon's. The foal lay there sleeping - her breath shallow as she was drenched in her mother's own blood.

Her breath shallow, as more magic than Celestia had ever seen in her life, oozed out of her.

"Oh, dear child." She whispered. The filly merely twitched in her sleep. Celestia stepped over and placed a hoof on her forehead - channeling her earth pony magic through her hooves. Her foreleg splintered under the magical pressure as she did so, causing her to wince - but it worked, as the blood left the foal's lungs - and slowly, the magical pressure began to recede.

As for the magical radiation - there was only one true way to deal with such a threat.

The logical thing to do was to kill the filly. She was young, defenceless - and with such power...her actions would shape the very world itself. To take her power away from her would be to neuter her - and the effort would undoubtedly destroy the entirety of Canterhorn and take Celestia out in the process to do as such. Something capable of spraying out this much magical radiation, this much pressure - it was an abomination. Surely.

Celestia glanced down at the sleeping foal - and found that she was not a logical mare.

Celestia's mighty wings spread as she curled her hooves around the foal wordlessly - one beat of them sending them cascading into the sky. Her horn lit with a tremendous effort, as a great spout of sunfire tore itself from its tip - illuminating the night as the hotel was burnt to cinders. The fire would not spread, so great was its heat - it would consume the hotel and nothing else.

Celestia soared towards Canterlot castle as she held the lavender filly tightly in her grasp.

She didn't notice that the stars shifted ever so lightly.

She didn't notice that over the nation - six fillies had been born at the exact same time.

She didn't notice that the Adamantia had begun to chip away and fade.

And she didn't notice the twitching corpse of the wolf in the burning wreckage of the Sunfire.

The Lady in Lavender

A story by Via

Author's Note

Behold! A discord server!

Please be aware that this fanfiction contains scenes of heavy gore, implications of a non-consensual relationship, and deals with other serious topics. Further detail could be provided in a PM if necessary.

Know that this fanfiction will never contain any explicitly sexual content, as this author has little interest in blending adventure with smut.