Rage Against the Light of the Dying
Unable to bear lying awake any longer, Twilight clambered out of bed and paced across the cold, hard floor to the old, familiar window. She flung back the heavy, dark curtains.
Nothing.
There was nothing there.
Of course there was.
Nevertheless, she flinched and awkwardly, hurriedly tugged the curtains back into some kind of shape. There was still a gap through which dirty grey light pushed its way, but that was too bad. She couldn’t fix curtains, and there was nowhere else to find more.
There was nowhere else.
Twilight flicked her horn at the lamp on her bedside table. The warm, soothing, buzzy glow of the imitation fireflies took her back to an older, younger day. She wondered what filly Twilight would have made of it all. Of… of this. She could guess. She’d probably have just asked Princess Celestia to fix everything. Then the Princess would have cast some brilliantly complex spell and the rough edges would have gone, all smoothed over again in a jiffy.
Twilight screwed up her face. All smoothed over, she thought. Some things didn’t change. She gave a shortened, sharpened, shrunken laugh that contained within it very little humour. Perhaps just a fragment, and even that fragment had long since passed its sell-by date.
She missed laughter. Real, true laughter.
But then she missed everything. All that was left to her now was this one little bubble of existence.
Twilight wondered how long she could keep the bubble aloft. She started to do some mental arithmetic, then thought better of it and stopped. She scratched her forehead. This would have been a perfect time to call Spike, once upon a time.
Once upon a time. It sounded like a fairy tale of another world that had vanished long ago.
It was.
The world now, if such it could even still be called, consisted of a smoothed-over ocean of dirty grey light, this single bedroom—and Twilight herself. The only life, true life, real life that remained.
She could keep going for now. When ponies let the ocean surround them, they could do that, if they had a magical bubble to protect them. But the ocean was relentless, and no pony, not even an alicorn, could keep it out forever. The other alicorns had gone—not to the Great Beyond, for even that needed a place to exist. Just gone. Now only this one alicorn remained of all the thronged multitudes of Equestria.
There was no water in the sea that surrounded Twilight’s room now. There never had been. There was not even the ghost of a gnarled and broken tree, as there had been in the world she had seen with Starlight so long ago. So very long ago.
There was just that dirty grey light. But it was coming for her, nevertheless. How long was it now since she had spoken to another pony? Another living being? Anyone at all besides her own fracturing inner voice? Time meant nothing now. Everything meant nothing. Even nothing would mean nothing soon.
Was there a slight rough edge now to the greyness that peeked sullenly between those old, frayed castle curtains? Twilight caught herself, scolded herself, asked herself: how could greyness have an edge? Was she going mad already?
“Already?” She spoke the word aloud, blinking at the sound. She felt oddly reassured that she could still hear. She wasn’t sure why. You could hear even under the ocean, couldn’t you?
...couldn’t you?
Twilight wandered over to her dusty writing desk, noting the splinters along its edges as she sank into the creaky upright chair. Once, it would have been unthinkable to let that spot fall into neglect. But that was then, the before time. Back before the Smoothing Spell. Before she had done this. Before she had brought dirty grey light to all her own world and beyond.
As she had been for so long now, Twilight was scared. She welcomed the fear: it was the one reliable emotion she had left to her. The others came and went as waves did; some of them had gone and never returned, but fear was there for her always. Back in the early Alone Days when she had still slept at times, it was there when she dreamed but there in a different way once she awoke. Since she had stopped sleeping, it had been a constant, day and night.
Twilight gave another dried-out husk of a laugh. What did that expression mean anymore?
She looked around. This writing desk was where so much of her business had been carried out since she was given the Castle, business both friendship and Friendship. She wondered whether she should, or even could, try to conjure up some of the memories she had created where she sat right now. It wouldn’t make much difference in the end, even to her, but she still wanted so badly to—
All at once she realised, and gasped. There was a tiny sliver of dirty grey light inside her room, slicing across the side wall. If Twilight had put out a foreleg, she could almost have touched it. Where it hit the wall there was nothing. Not merely a featureless surface, but nothing.
Twilight stood up and put out that foreleg. The very tip of her hoof brushed the very edge of the grey. When she drew it back, there was nothing there.
It hadn’t hurt. It hadn’t tickled. It hadn’t itched. But that part of her hoof was a dirty grey sea of nothing. It wasn’t absent, it was just nothing. When she tried reaching out again, a slightly larger area of hoof became nothingness.
Twilight limped over to her bed and lay down. She tilted her head and was unsurprised to see the grey slivers spreading towards her. Slowly, oh so slowly, but utterly implacable. The bubble, the last remnant of the time before the Smoothing Spell, was on the point of bursting.
There was nothing else to do now.
There was nothing.
