In the Latent Space

Chapters

Where Twilight Looked Back

Where Twilight Looked Back

In the Latent Space

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Twilight could not see Rarity’s body.

The casket was gilded, lined in purple — lovely, regal, as she would have wanted. But there was no sight of her soft white coat. Nor of her mane, aubergine, silver streaked. She was invisible to Twilight’s eyes.

“It’s beautiful, Twilight,” Spike said, eyes wet. Faithful assistant, at her side, he’d grown. Matching her height of alicorn grandeur. He lived and would live a hundred years more.

Her friends, in turn, blinked out of existence. They had gone away to the space between spaces. And Twilight could no longer look at them.

Her Rarity was the last to depart. Lover beloved, always eternal. Until time unmade her forever oath.

Her earthly form shielded from Twilight’s eyes. Behind her corneas, the optics whirred. They censored the source of her pain, sharp grief — the image too real for any relief. It’s absent, therefore, it doesn’t exist.

And Twilight could not see her friends in death.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
The last vision of her was bright, in spring.

Tea by the window: light — amber flicker. Ephemeral ripples in floral cup. It’s a memento of an older world. It endured because it was beautiful.

Rarity, beyond all compare, had aged. Time kissed her mane, made wise and soft her face. And she was the same to Twilight, who knew. Who absorbed the sweet sight of her each year.

Beholding: what a gift it was to see. Hold sight in the deep space of memory. Temporary — make it forever. Behind the eyes, a lifetime eternal.

From her towering height, Twilight saw far. In alicorn amplitude, so she loomed. A thing of spindly limbs, wide gawky wings. Time stretched her, her power made physical. But she curled beside her beloved, gentle. Love made her graceful; love made her be still.

That was the skilled ease of Rarity’s touch. All things she made art, even her breathing.

And here she was now, inhaling her last. Tea by the window, sipping chamomile. Ferried from her wasting bed, tubes pulled free. Lips quivering with her faint fading lungs.

Incurable, against all advancements. Miracles into technology, spun. Yet nothing could excise her mortal end.

Hospital white walls were anathema. Leaching into her coat, rendered spectral. She was not gone yet, not by the window. Their castle home, years of change embedded. Rarity in her seamstress chair, aglow. The old world: oil painted sky, soft clouds. Sunlight swathing her face, her silken hair.

Twilight’s ear was pressed to her chest — heartbeat. Her knees bent, supplicant, upon the floor. Wind-glinting mane caressing her wife’s fur.

“I love you,” she said, “...I love you, darling.”

“Twilight,” she sighed, name spoken — final time.

In sickness and in health, a promise made. One of those things could be seen as it was.

When senescence crossed the line into loss. And no longer was she softly making art.

The optics whirred, a violence in stillness. It mattered not if her eyes bore witness.

Twilight said, “Rarity, I can’t see you.”

The tea on the windowsill became cold.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
“It’s going to happen,” Twilight had said. “I'm going to lose all of you some day.”

Shushing, reassuring, words she’d since heard. Five voices, in harmony, insisting. “It’s all right,” in collective tones, they’d spoke. And perhaps for them, such a thing was true.

She was forever, memory made flesh. Her friends won’t know a world of her bereft. Her Rarity would never be widowed.

But Twilight would endure them all through time. A nation’s ruler, brought low by her loss. Ev’ry look, ev'ry image, ev’ry glimpse.

To observe their loved faces, stilled in death. To squint at the slow rigor mortis creep. To see them casket-bound, an earth object. To see the final chest-push, soul-flown breath.

She could not bear to hold their dying sight.

“I refuse to carry that memory. I only want to recall how you lived.”

This, she'd gasped into Rarity's soft throat. The first thread of silver streaked in her mane. Nighttime comfort, silk sheets wrapped, ensconcing. End to tender kisses, blood-pulse release. This was not a place for slow, latent grief.

Holding her lover, lithe body curled ‘round. If only, entrap her, caged in her ribs. Share her chest, in hollow space protected. A heart to beat in time infinitude.

Inevitability came haunting. But not unconquered; its force could be fooled. If she saw its approach, she could evade. Not so ineluctable, mind-might swayed.

For sense was always her greatest defense. If she understood something, it was hers.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Rarity was loved by the camera.

Incandescent under hot white flashes. Twilight snapped her in portrait endlessly. Rolling from the polaroid, legacy.

Snap — posed, intention, expression on point.

Snap — astute couturier, needle, lace.

Snap — soft beauty, sleep-slack face, undisturbed.

Snap — rolled mane, no makeup, Rarity: her.

Snap — candid caught, turning, gasping, “Twilight!”

“I need these, each moment,” Twilight had said. “For what my memories cannot replace.”

And Rarity entertained her, always. Even unmanicured, honest as birth. She submitted to the camera’s sight. Aged thirty, forty, sixty, — one hundred.

Equestria’s brilliant invention. Scientific marvel of heart secrets. Immortality in a mere moment. The eye, synthesized; sight made physical. From analog to digital, it moved. Societal progress held close in hoof.

All things possessed an opposite, reverse. The camera created images. Vision mimicry, photon collector. Sent not to nervous system, but paper.

Images held; images made to stay. Nothing yet knew how to take them away.

Twilight, inspired, had opened her brain.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.

In quiet midnight, the deed had been wrought. Rarity knew not where her wife had gone.

All for her, all for her, all for her — done.

Science and magic, a deft union made. Her theory spun into phenomenon.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
In the mind, there exists a latent space.

A dormant place, ideas brought to life.

Bearing resemblance, thoughts ranged side by side.

Raw sets of data, understood, combined.

The unseen art of closed-eye mental sight.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.

Double-mind implant, her only recourse. Intelligence, artificial she wrought. A neural network, vision defender. Recognize death and swiftly banish it. A camera inside, within the eyes. Photon scatterer, no loss she’d suffer. Forbid the sight of her dear, deepest grief.

Upon the cold lab table she had lain. Twisting under the sweetest agony. Numbing injection, cloth between clenched teeth. Mane brushed aside, temporal bone sectioned. Her devotion made permanent in steel.

Metal-flash, wet scalpel dropped in the sink. Breath fogging the mirror, obfuscating. Wiped away, blown pupils wide on display. Behind the black, the optics came alive.

The unacceptable had been suppressed. Twilight had corrected her mind — her eyes.

She would see her friends in life, never death.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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Fluttershy, first, her corpse-sight deflected.

The machine in her mind had unlearned it.

Empty casket, full grief, no memory.

Twilight recalled her in vivacity.

It worked

and worked

and worked.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
A week after Rarity passed away.

A mere week since the ending of the world.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Memories bidding, scent and sensual. Twilight drank in her sweet jasmine perfume. Gem-strings strangled ‘round her hooves, held captive. White hairs on their bedsheets, swept by choked breaths.

Twilight looked at her soft face in the frame. Wedding day, white veil, chiffon, diamond-mane. Twilight beside her, tuxedo, sharp tie. Breathless gasp, a sudden sting caught her eye.

Wet between her lashes, sobbing, fresh hurt. Behind her corneas, the optics whirred. They censored the source of her pain, sharp grief—

Memory pulse, headache, sudden and fierce. She looked at the frame, beside her — white space.

The Twilight in the photo was alone.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Twilight wept, “This is not what I wanted.”

Bedcovers twisted, heartache and dreading. Salt-wet trails upon cheeks, no quick relief. She gave voice to her desperate rationale. “I expected faults, some imperfections. I expected decay, but not this soon!”

Hooves over eyes, Spike at her side, pleading. “Take it out,” he said, “before it’s too late. And you can't see her at all anymore.”

“There are too many risks, problems, hazards. I could be blinded, addled or impaired. I did not design it to be removed.”

Hewn crystal walls, her sovereign palace. Her and Rarity’s home, their loving place. Mirror, betrayer, Twilight loathed her face.

Walls of frames, defeated and replaced. Behind her eyes, the cold optics erased.

Rarity, gone: a shadow, holy white. As though she had been a being devine. To look upon her was heretical.

She was an imprint, revenant ghost-shape. Exeunt wound from existence's stage.

“I must live with this,” Twilight said, weeping. “For I cannot undo what I have done.”
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
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I love you.
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“Image of Rarity,” Twilight’s voice bid.

The optics were silent, dead immobile. Name spoken, evoked, power of title. It could not drag back her dear, worldly shade.

Her castle’s gallery held bereft frames.

Her love, imagined only: forever.

She knew what she looked like — but could not SEE!

If only, convincing, reverse her mind’s grasp.

Her sorrow too vast, she couldn’t accept—
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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“She has become grief, organized in here.”

To her temple, Twilight’s shaking hoof pressed. Speaking to herself, all alone in this. Hard below her skull, metal device trapped.

Her friends all spared, their images witnessed. Photos of Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, hung. Rainbow Dash, Applejack, in frames, were held. Mementos, older world, blessed friendships. Only —at best? —in defining their bond. Of such banality was their trust made?

“I didn’t do this for them” —her truth, sobbed.

The Princess of Friendship, vanquished by love.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
A pony should not be able to die.

A mind of ideas, never expressed. Universes, worlds — some gone unrealized. Where do they go when the mind stops thinking?

There is a ponnequin in the corner. It wears an unfinished gown, threads gone cold.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
I love you.

Once upon a time in Equestria — Rarity said: “Art is an expression.”By which she meant a sort of letting go.

Balmy summer afternoon, together. They debated on this, different minds. “Darling, I give of myself,” she had laughed. “There's a part of me in all I create.”

Twilight insisted, right in her belief. “It’s less an act of giving, but pinning. An amalgamate of ideas held. Art is just many parts pressed together — suggesting an image of one whole thing.”

Then Rarity, smiling, laughing again. And Twilight knew it true, she was correct. If forever she could hear that laughter. If eternal could she hold that smile. Then she will have made art, quintessential.

“To make art is to capture,” Twilight said.

Within her eyes, the aperture consumed.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
“The machine in my brain has unlearned her. But I can trick it to learn her again.”

Figures drawn, sweat and dusted with chalk-white. Coat tufted, sleepless, conspiring nights. Numerical jargon of her passion.

“I know every part of her, in here.” Twilight gestured, a hollow space within. “In my memory, I can still see her. That image exists, uncensored, surely. I just need to go down and retrieve her.”

And Spike, who knew he did not understand. He spoke a terrifying question, then.

“What if you can’t look at her in there, too? What if that machine hides your memories?”

If that thing in your brain has made her grief. And that is what it hides from conscious sight. Lower level vision is forbidden. Photon scatterer, memory—

He did not understand; he could not know! His blissful, callow infatuation. He had seen Rarity and looked away.

“I love her too much not to try,” she cried.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
In the mind, there exists a latent space.

A dormant place, ideas laid to rest.

Bearing resemblance, thoughts tombed side by side.

Raw sets of data, understood, combined.

The unseen art of closed-eye mental FIGHT.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Twilight who purified nightmarish might. Who quelled discordant temerity. Conqueror of minatory power. Again, she’d delve into Tartarus' depths. Descend through stygian darkness, she’d tread.

A war, she’d make of her entire life. If she could see her beloved again.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.

She is down there — all parts of her I know.

Oh, embedding space, oh deep manifold. Let my love be organized within you.

If that means I will be placed next to her.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
A pony should not be able to die.

But in death, a completeness of a kind.

Immortality, unfinished, no end.

An alicorn completes through MEMORY.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
Mind-space deep, edge of hypnagogic peace.

And Twilight went down below to her love.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Rarity

I love you.

Ordinary

Rarity Sparkle

I love you.

Rarity Belle

Beautiful

I love you.

Dull

Beloved

I love you.

Loathed

With Twilight

I love you.

Without Twilight

White coat

I love you.

Black coat

Blue eyes

I love you.

Orange eyes

Dead

I love you.

Alive

Here

I love you.

Gone

Visible

I love you.

Invisible

Visible

I love you.

Invisible

When our colors mix, will you still know me?

Our roles reversed, would you have done this, too?

How can I bear to trust that you are there?

Then, two images were generated.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
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I love you.
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I love you.
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I love you.
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I love you.
I love you.
I love you.

In the Latent Space Where Twilight Looked Back

Rarity, Dying Now a Second Time