Everything That There Ever Was
Today was the best day Starlight Glimmer had ever seen.
That was the nice thing about days like this. They didn’t have to be remarkable. They could just be. She didn’t have to think about specifics to make it beautiful. It was all that it ever was. It was all that ever will be. It was all that ever has been.
She’d gotten off the train in Manehattan. The late afternoon sun bathed her in a warm blanket, aglow all around her. She smiled at the ponies who she passed. She was glad they were there. She was glad they were alive.
Starlight had never been to this particular apartment building. It held no sentimental value to her. It held no special importance in her memory. It didn’t have to. The fact that it was here, and that so many ponies lived inside of it, passing through their lives like hippocampi through water—that was enough. That’s all it had to be.
She entered the building and went straight for the stairwell. She waved to the mare at the front desk.
“Hello there, Miss.” The mare at the front desk had a nice smile. Starlight briefly wondered what her life was like. Where her favorite diner in the city was. What she liked to do at the park. What she thought of the impressive skyline. Her opinion on Equestrian politics. How well she liked her job. What book she was currently reading. “Are you here to see somepony?”
Starlight didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. There was an awful noise from outside like a sack full of wet flour hitting the pavement, and the mare at the front desk recoiled in shock. Starlight caught the beginning of a gasp as she opened the door to the stairs.
The building had an elevator. Starlight didn’t want to take it. She wanted her limbs to ache, she wanted the muscles to burn, she wanted to feel the effort of climbing all 24 flights of steps.
It had always seemed odd to her that the convention of Equestrian buildings was that the actual “first” floor was instead referred to as the “ground floor”. Floor Zero.
The thought left as fast as it had come. She was once again focused on nothing but the act of climbing the stairs. Sweat had begun to bead down her forehead, streaking down her cheek. She could have easily used her magic to brush it away, but she didn’t. She wanted to savor the sensation. She wanted to savor every sensation that the effort and exertion brought to her.
The stairwell was sparse. It was clear this was mostly used for maintenance. The walls and stairs alike were an eggshell-white concrete. The clack of her hooves echoed about her in the empty ascension.
Starlight closed her eyes.
Still walking along, putting one hoof in front of the other, step after step, she climbed with eyes screwed shut. She wasn’t here in the stairwell. She wasn’t here in the building. She wasn’t here in Manehattan. She was there in Ponyville. She was there in the castle. She was there before Twilight Sparkle, and Pinkie Pie, and Rainbow Dash, and Rarity, and Fluttershy, and Applejack. She was there in the crowd, she was there surrounded by everypony. She had been forgiven by them all. She could feel herself wrapped in the warm glow of acceptance, so light on her hooves she could float away.
Starlight opened her eyes.
She had reached the top. She flung herself against the door to the roof, nearly tripping over her own hooves as she burst out into the late afternoon sunlight. She felt as if the glow were still around her, as if she were in danger of being carried off the rooftop by the breeze blowing about her.
Starlight giggled. Spun around, trotted gleefully to the edge of the building.
Took a deep breath. Her stomach fluttered, and she felt a shiver run through her.
She leaned forward over the edge.
Let the wind kiss her face.
Took her hooves from the stone.
Took one last look at the Manehattan skyline.
Took control of her life.
Lept out into the open air.
As Starlight fell past the 23rd story, she saw through the window a scene that had happened just a few days prior. She was standing in the room, along with Twilight. Starlight had been crying.
“Is this all that I am, Twilight?” she’d blubbered to the princess. “Is this all the worth my life has? Am I just a means to an end? Do I only exist here before you, forgiven, because if I did not, things would be worse?”
“Starlight, no, that’s not—”
Starlight in the apartment—which contained the Friendship Table despite the Tree of Harmony being 35 miles away—cut Twilight off. “My life is not worth living for its own sake. I am a character in a play I don’t want to act in.”
Twilight opened her mouth to speak, and the Starlight falling outside the window watched her fall out of frame.
As Starlight tumbled past the 22nd story, she was exposed to the sight of her hopping about the Junior Speedsters’ Flight Course nearly fifteen years ago, locked in magical combat with Twilight Sparkle. Trying her absolute hardest to wreak havoc with the most important part of Equestria’s history. Using her magical talent and prowess to create timelines of tragedy. Letting that raging void consume everything. Taking her failure, her lack of ownership to her actions, out in such a way that it immolated everything.
“I’ve destroyed a perfect past,” she found herself whispering aloud.
“And is that all that I am?” Starlight found herself asking again, watching herself bring Sugar Belle into the fold of Our Town through the window as she careened past the 21st story. She watched as she lied to her, as she filled her head with empty promises, as she took her cutie mark from her. “A prop of destruction?”
On the 20th story, the town was in midsummer. It was nighttime. Starlight in the apartment, which was actually Our Town, was standing in the center of the village. She was staring up at the sky, watching the stars twinkle into light. She felt a swooping sensation in her gut that had nothing to do with the fact that she was plummeting through the air. She was remembering what she had felt then. That hollow emptiness. How everything had gone to hell inside of her.
How, no matter how many ponies she brought under her subjugation, she’d felt worse and worse.
How she always had to have something more.
And how it was never her who was to blame.
Starlight fell past the 19th, 18th, and 17th stories, watching the same stories play out as she slowly became younger and younger in the apartments she looked into. She took more ponies into Our Town, leading up (or was it down?) to Double Diamond on the 17th story, right there at the foundation of her miserable cult.
The 16th story was blacked out. The lights were off. She couldn’t see anything in there. But she could hear, and she could feel. She could hear the squeak of the mattress springs. She could feel the sheets underneath her. She could hear the heavy breathing. She could feel the hoof across her belly.
The lights were on on the 15th story. Starlight looked on into this room, very glad that she was no longer privy to the experiences of the 16th story. The 15th story was even an ostensibly positive experience—she was being lauded as the most promising magical prodigy of her hometown. She still had streaks of black in her hair, and the eyeliner was egregious. But she’d smiled, she’d been smiling, and she felt adored and that was all that had mattered to her.
The 14th story was a stab in the gut for her to witness. She watched her teenage self trash her room in a fit of rage—why, Starlight couldn’t even recall at this point. All she could remember was the fury her little heart had been ablaze of, ripping band posters from the wall, flinging books, smashing her guitar against the floor.
The 13th story was almost comical. Starlight felt the corners of her mouth turn upward as she looked at her younger self, just barely a teenager, in the bathroom of her father’s house. This had been the first time she’d tried dying her mane black, and gotten streaks of bleach all down the sides of her face and neck, creating a rather... unfortunate look. She’d been rightly embarrassed by it. Hadn’t gone outside for a week, hadn’t gone outside until she’d found a spell to change it back. Then dyed her mane black with magic, too.
Her preteen years passed in a blur as she fell past the 12th and 11th story. Loneliness hung heavy in her heart, growing heavier and heavier. Both scenes were of her alone. On the 12th story, she was in the woods. On the 11th, at the edge of a lake. Both times she’d thought of doing something very bad.
Starlight dropped past the tenth floor. She had spun a small somersault, and she was looking at the scene upside-down.
There she was, alone in her room. Staring at her hooves. Seeing it turned on its head did not make it hurt any less.
Facing through the windows into the ninth story, Starlight spiralled past the scene in her life that caused her the most displeasure of all.
This is where she had rooted all blame for everything. This is why she’d done the things she did, ruined the lives she had.
Ended the worlds she’d ended.
But that wasn’t very satisfying, was it? That wasn’t really enough. But it was easy. Yes, it was so easy to pin the blame on Sunburst, or at least, hinge the weight of the responsibility on him as a catalyst for what had happened. But the truth was known to Starlight as she’d seen in the stories she’d passed before this one.
It wasn’t just this. It had been everything.
On the eighth story, Starlight had been a bully. Her adult form watched as herself in foalhood teased a filly, another unicorn, for being awful at magic. The elder Starlight felt sick to her stomach.
On the seventh story, Starlight had been bullied. She couldn’t remember for what, exactly—it didn’t matter, really. It was just like the story on the 14th floor. All she could remember was the shame, the pain, the fury. It briefly occurred to the falling Starlight in a twist of irony that she’d been so angry on the 14th floor because of somepony bullying her. But who, she could not say.
The sixth and fifth story flew past her. She caught little flashes of sensation—a warm hug, the smell of baking bread, the tinkle of glass, the hum of a horn—and for whatever reason even though she watched the events that originated these sensations, her mind did not put together anything visually for them.
On the fifth story, Starlight watched little more than her and her father hugging. She reached a hoof out to touch the glass, a high pitched keening singing around her as it scraped off the window. Her gut twisted into knots.
The fourth floor was going to be the most painful to look in. Starlight wasn’t able to muster the energy to turn her head from the scene, so she watched it unfold.
Her mother was there. They were sitting in the living room, before the fireplace. It was Hearth's Warming. She had been singing to her.
Starlight knew why all this was so painful. She spoke it aloud to herself yet again. “My life doesn’t mean anything; only has meaning as a function of history,” she said to her parents through the glass of the third story window as they watched their little filly frolic and play about them in the grass that shouldn’t have been inside an apartment.
Falling past the second story, she was invited to see herself as little more than a toddler, wandering around the room and testing out the limits of her horn—levitating a toy here, moving a picture there.
“She’s got quite the curious nature,” she’d heard her father say. “She wants to know everything.”
“That’s my girl,” said her mother, the pride crystal clear in her voice.
Starlight watched her tears streak upward away from her as she passed to the “first” story. She didn’t look inside the window this time. It was too painful. She wished she had had the courage to avoid looking in all the windows since the seventh floor. She was weak. This was something she already knew. It had been reaffirmed to her this one final time.
She didn’t want to watch the first story. It wasn’t even the “first” story to her.
As Starlight flew towards the pavement, she couldn’t help but look inside. It was a fault of her nature.
She was looking into the lobby of the apartment building. She was there, walking past the mare at the front desk to proceed to the stairwell. That wasn’t what caught her eye the most.
No, that was the two ponies sat right before the window on the Chintz sofa. They were a stallion and a mare she knew all too well. Curled in the arms of the mare, swaddled in a pale blue blanket, was a tiny filly.
“Look at her,” her mother said. Starlight could see the glint in the corners of her eyes.
“She’s got such a life ahead of her,” her father said, nuzzling his wife’s neck and resting a hoof lovingly atop the bundled filly.
“The best life anypony could hope for,” the mare said, and the two shared a kiss.
“There is nothing left to feel,” Starlight whispered outside the window, and she hit the ground at terminal velocity.
Starlight Glimmer caught the beginning of a gasp.
