The holograms had grown so thick and numerous that they almost seemed real, rendered in the pale blue light of Shining Armor’s magic. A crowd of translucent Proto-Vandrare had filled the bridge, the blurred remnants of still-smoldering buildings in the background making Spike seem that he was almost among them, staring up at a stage as a man in round glasses gave a rousing speech, proclaiming victory and other things that had a very different meaning to him than they did to Spike.

Spike looked to his side. Emerging from the crowd, surrounded by the images of the wide-eyed bipeds, stood Shining Armor, his half-stripped head floating in his tube, Spike at his side.

“It’s time,” he said. “I will start at your order.”

“No,” said Spike. He held out his claw. “I’ll pull the trigger.”

Shining Armor’s eye slowly drifted to Spike. His head, being bolted in place, could not turn; he no longer even possessed all but the most rudimentary remnants of a neck.

“Revenge won’t help you,” he said. “It won’t make it better.”

“It isn’t revenge,” said Spike, facing his brother—and his closest living friend. “You know what it means. What it does.”

“I know. I can handle the burden.”

“No. You can’t. Because when they’re back, I want you to be able to look Flurry in the eyes. Give me control. I’ll do it.”

Shining Armor hesitated, but acquiesced. “Thank you,” he said, his magic tracing lines into the space over Spike’s left palm, magic forming itself into solid matter. Spike’s claw closed around a fully assembled detonator.

With the claw of his thumb, he flipped the translucent cap open, exposing a pleasantly large red button. Even now, Shining Armor seemed to have a sense of humor.

Spike looked up at the hologram of the man in round glasses as he gesticulated and spoke about things that no longer mattered, his voice carrying across space through Shining Armor’s mind.

“--Mankind is coming, and A.R.E.S. will lead the way!” This was followed by rousing cheers. The hope of a whole world, in the relief and glory of their clear victory.

“It’s funny,” said Spike. “They never even asked. Never questioned it once.”

“Asked what?”

“What we actually came for.”

He brought his thumb down on the button.

Across the entirety of Earth, the Extractor suddenly activated. Individual units, hundreds of them, placed across the laylines of the planet. While A.R.E.S. had been defending the cities of the continent and country they deemed most valuable, the actual operation had been conducted elsewhere: in the jungles of South America, the vast grasslands of Africa, the steppe of Siberia, the plateaus of India, the icy wastes of Antarctica and northern Canada. No one had even tried to stop them. They had never even bothered to consider the possibility that they were deceived.

On the surface, every Proto-Vandrare suddenly stopped as a strange sensation overtook them. They paused, not in pain and not in discomfort, but just slightly confused. Then the cells of every living thing on the planet ruptured, broken down on a molecular level as their Milk was drawn out and directed upward to the sky, toward the Iron Defender’s forward antenna. Their bodies collapsed to dust, the entirety of the planet sterilized to fuel the Alicorn. It ultimately only took a matter of seconds.

“Hold on,” said Shining Armor. “You might want to brace yourself. This is about to get hairy.”

Spike grasped the metal of the ship with one hand as the wave hit. The entire life force of a planet: ever animal, every plant, every fungus, and every bacterial cell, but most importantly the combined effluvium of nearly two billion Proto-Vandrare.

The Iron Defender shook as it channeled the force through it, immediately superheating from the sheer strain of carrying that much magical force. The flesh-golems screamed in pain as their bodies boiled and burst, then disintegrated into charcoal. The ponies, though, remained safe; they had been returned to Equestria or sealed in specialized chambers that insulated them from the blast. The bridge, of course, had not, because there was no need to. Shining Armor’s tube was resistant to thermal damage, having been designed specifically for this purpose, and even as the atmosphere suddenly increased to several thousand degrees he remained cool and unaffected. Spike was likewise unaffected, although not from any particular insulation effect; rather, he was simply a dragon. The the extreme heat had no effect on his biology. It was, though, the first time he had actually felt hot in a long time without being exposed to a nuclear blast.

The Iron Defender did not absorb the Milk; doing so would have been suicide. It simply served as a focus, driving it outward in a single collimated beam, directing it toward the fourth planet of the star system.

The beam crossed space at the speed of light, striking the planet. Spike did not see the effect, although Shining Armor was aware of it. At a distance, it did not look especially impressive. A single brilliant flash of light in the darkness of starry space. A flash caused by the heat of an entire planet’s quantity of Milk, resulting in the instantaneous atomization of the planet, then the splitting of the atoms into increasingly downscaled subatomic particles from the sheer energy of carrying that much power.

And yet the beam was still directed. As Mars was vaporized, one fragment remained, the only piece of Equestrian technology that could survive the blast. It was a continent-sized ring, forged to the schematics dredged from the deepest madness of the Xyuka Codex: the Soichet Ring. A vast, ring-shape array of magic and metal that drew on the power passing through it even as it heated far beyond its own theoretical maximum temperature. With this power, it sustained itself—and with it, it opened the gate, pouring the fuel back to Equestria.

On the surface of the silent and now-dead planet, the ash that had once been life drifted in the air. Plumes of carbon drifted in the quiet wind, and the rain came down black with what had once been people and their world.

One particular cloud of carbon began to drift, but then suddenly recoiled back upon itself with a thump, reforming itself instantaneously into Starlight Glimmer. The temporary death did not bother her and was not really her concern; it was not the first time she had been Milked, nor would it be the last. The draining of her entire vital force was barely an inconvenience; she had long-since transcended the need for life-force to continue her perpetual survival.

She looked up at the streets of the empty city, every shadow and surface lit with the brilliant light of Mars in flame, and she sighed as the lethal amount of radiation rebounded harmlessly off her body.

It was now out of her hands, metaphorically speaking. She was still a pony, unlike the rest of them, because she chose to be. She did not require the Alicorn because she had simply elected to supresede it--and the results of that choice, its consequence so to speak, had finally come to its terminus, the end of her path.

She had upheld her end of the bargain, and her job was done. The rest was now beyond her control.

A wooden door appeared beside her, a door that was peculiar in that it had only one Starlight on only one side. She opened it with her magic and stepped through, leaving one side with no Starlights at all. She was gone, forever leaving this Earth totally devoid of life with her departure.

Author's Note

In a sense, life itself must be considered as a question. Continuance is one possible answer, although if it is, the existence of the question itself is inherently negated.