Twilight Sparkle was many things.
She was a wonderful daughter, a loving sister, an accomplished student of magic, an ex-librarian, a bearer of the elements of harmony, a survivalist, and most importantly, a failure.
In her entire life, her biggest fear was the fear of failing; of disappointing those around and those she looked up to, and so, she strived to ensure that she never failed at anything she did. For a while, it worked. She was the top of her class, she was the perfect student and apprentice to princess Celestia, she always did what was asked for her with an exceptional amount of effort put into it. She was on an unbroken streak of being perfect for several years.
However, all streaks are broken in the end and she was certainly not special enough to be an exception.
She looked out at the sea, ignoring how the water was wetting her hooves. The sun had gone below the horizon and the sky was a deep purple, sprinkled with a million little stars and a few light pink clouds. The light breeze blew over her, and the only sound was that of the waves coming onto the beach. A single black silhouette that was used to be the peak of the Canterhorn mountain decorated the empty horizon. It was a calm and peaceful solitude.
It was perfect.
She almost laughed a bitter laugh. How ironic it was that she, an imperfect thing, was named after such a perfect time of the day. She could have– no, she should have lived up to the name she got, instead of failing at what was supposed to be an easy task.
Her cheeks felt wet, and the sea wasn't the culprit.
She missed her friends. Both the ones she had made and neglected in Canterlot, and the ones she met in Ponyville for just under a week. She wanted to apologise to them all for her horrendous behaviour despite their friendliness.
She missed her family. How she hated herself for drowning herself in her studies instead of being with them for the little time they had.
She missed the princess. She missed how she was always there to help her, and to comfort her.
She wanted to go back to when she had them all, if not to apologise for her cruelty to them, then to at least hug them. She wanted to go back to before the nightmare had come. Before she had failed to defeat the nightmare, forcing the princess to fight. Before the horrific battle which brought the sea upon the world.
Twilight's throat hurt and ears dropped as she suppressed her tears. Would crying help when she was surrounded by all sides with salty water?
She was all alone on her little island, with no creature to hold her and let her cry, nobody to tell her it wasn't her fault, nothing to make her feel nice about anything.
She wondered what things would be like if she had her friends here all of a sudden.
She almost smiled as the first thought that came to her was about her eccentric pink friend, Pinkie. She would have already decorated the little hut that Twilight had built on the beachside, and she would have already produced a cake from somewhere. There would be a banner on top of the door reading "Twilight's Stop-Feeling-Sad Party" or something to that effect, and like clockwork, Twilight would go in and have her mood uplifted.
Rainbow Dash and Applejack would have set up some game or something to take her mind away from the dark thoughts and cheer her up. If she didn't get up from her little sad spot on the beach, they'd have dragged her away.
Fluttershy would have given her a shoulder to cry on and an ear to vent to, followed by some kind words.
Rarity... she...
Twilight couldn't really tell what Rarity would do, but she was sure it would be something nice. However, she was disappointed in herself for not spending time getting to know her. She had spent– no, she had wasted her time, literally locking herself up in the library to study the mare in the moon and find a way to defeat her.
Looking at the waves roll onto the beach all alone made her wish that she had not wasted her time on her studies and instead spent it with the people who mattered: her family and friends.
She sat there, regretting all the time she had spent in libraries, hunched over books, and all other stuff that was ultimately useless. She couldn't save the world.
She was alone because of nobody's fault but her own. If she had been better, more perfect, she wouldn't be here at the newly formed beach, silently crying all by herself. She'd be in Canterlot, or Ponyville, enjoying her time with her friends, making up for lost time with her family. She'd be doing anything but work.
Alas, she had no chance at any of that. The world was gone and she only had the sea to keep company as the days passed, up till her inevitable end.
A thought came to her.
She knew that death was inevitable, having seen it four times, when her grandparents had passed away one by one. However, it wasn't death that interested her. It was the life before it.
She knew very well that her grandparents had all lived good and fulfilling lives and died happy. She knew that she wouldn't have any such thing happening for her. All because she couldn't see the treasure she had right in front of her.
Everyone else had suffered an untimely end as well, it seemed.
The sea was always there, and it was always empty. There were never any boats at the horizon, no signs of life of any kind. There were only pieces of driftwood in the sea.
The sky grew dark, and so did Twilight's thoughts.
She was intelligent, and she knew that there should have been some sign of life even after the great flood. Ponies, or rather, life was scrappy and resilient.
Yet, the horizon was always empty.
Was she comletely alone?
The answer came to her quickly: yes, she was alone. It made her heart sink.
She didn't have any evidence for it, but she just knew that she was all by herself — alone, after the end of the world. The elements of harmony had failed to defeat the nightmare, but they had teleported her away from the battle that followed. By the way the sky had shifted from midnight to midday told her that time had passed in the teleport.
She remembered her first days and how distressed she was at the change in time and scenery. While she didn't know how much time had passed exactly in the teleport, she knew it was a long time. Beaches didn't just form overnight and mountain peaks don't become tropical islands in just one season. Or maybe they did, since there was nowhere where the great sea could have come from.
She had spent the next few months up until now surviving on the island, making rainwater collectors, catching fish, scavenging edible plants, and building shelter. She was like Hayinson Cobsoe, surviving on a tropical island for a long time, but the difference between them was that unlike him, she had no hope of rescue from her island.
How would she? She was the reason why anybody who could rescue her was dead.
The sky was completely dark now, and there was no moon to illuminate it. There were only the stars with her.
What was she surviving for? She had nobody left, and she had failed. Her death was inevitable, if not because of old age then probably because of a mosquito bite. She could already feel them in the air around her as they came out to drink blood and spread disease.
She stood up, ready to walk back to her hut to get away from the damned bugs. She paused, however, as a different idea came to her.
She could walk into the sea.
It would be a way to end the useless struggle for sure. She wasn't a good swimmer and the waves would drag her under them, delivering her to Elysium where her friends and family were. If the waves didn't do it then it'd be things that lurked beneath them that would do it.
She didn't shudder as she remembered the time a half-eaten shark had washed ashore.
She walked forward, the water slowly rising from her hooves to her knees, and then, from her knees to her chest.
She kept walking, ignoring the cool water around her and how it reached up to her neck at times. Once it reached her neck consistently, she stopped and waited. She didn't know what she was waiting for but she did.
Maybe some leviathan would drag her into the sea for a quick end. Maybe somebody would spot her in the water and drag her back to the shore. Maybe she'd wake up from the nightmare that was her life at the moment.
Nothing happened for the longest time. No monster ate her, no pony called out to her from the shore, and no alarm rang and woke her up.
There was only the sound of the water around her, and the cold wind blowing on her face.
Twilight's mind dragged her back to thinking about her friends, probably going insane from the isolation.
This time around, her thoughts were more fantastical; all centred around her and her friends going on picnics and fighting magical monsters and so on. She smiled at first, thinking about all the shenanigans the six of them would get up to, and then she cried.
She was reminiscing about a past that never was. She tried to reminisce about the past that actually was.
Her parents came to mind. They always dreamed about going on a tropical island for vacation with her and Shining Armor. Somewhere in the caribouan. They never got to realise those dreams though.
Why? Because she was too busy studying.
She loathed her past self for her misplaced priorities. If she could go back in time, she'd slap and tell her younger self that failure was inevitable and that she should at least make some nice memories to reminisce about after the world ended because she messed up.
Twilight turned around and quickly made her way back to the beach. She didn't care about shaking off the water, or the sand that was getting stuck to her hooves.
At the end of the beach and the beginning of the jungle was her hut. It was decently sized and had all that one would need to survive in an island.
Twilight walked into the hut and collapsed onto her bed before she began crying loudly into the little grass pillow she had made, lamenting all the times, all the happy memories she could have had but didn't. Her sadness gave way to anger.
She cursed the elements that sat on the table nearby like the useless rocks they were. They were her key to saving the world but when it mattered, they produced no spark. The rocks were supposed to be the greatest weapons at the disposal of anybody, but when it mattered, they did nothing.
Twilight got out of bed, her face still wet with tears. She stomped over to the table, her horn sparking as the raw anger she felt brought forth magic all by itself.
She picked up the useless gems, half-hoping that they'd disintegrate under the strength of her magic. When no such thing happened, she took them outside and threw them at the beach with a cry of rage.
They didn't break then either, even though they were close to breaking the sound barrier as they hit the sand.
Twilight glared into the dark with rage, as though she was looking directly at the rocks, which would finally break under her hateful gaze. She breathed heavily and continued glaring, unable to think anything but how angry she was at everything.
Slowly, her breaths became more even and quiet. When they were back to normal, Twilight realised just what she had done.
Grabbing a torch stuck in the sand, she quickly lit it and started looking around for the elements. It took a while to find the gems and she remained anxious all the way until she got the last. They might have been useless then but they could still fix things. Twilight just had to figure out how.
Once she had found them all, she tried to her hut. She drove the torch into the sand and laid out the gems on the sand in a circle.
Above her, the stars shined brightly and the sky cleared as she started messing with the gems with wild abandon like she had for the past several days.
She hadn't given up yet. It wasn't over, she told herself.
She kept trying whatever she could with her magic, constantly telling herself that there was still hope. She repeated past experiments, she did new ones she had planned to do later in the week, she did new ones that had been barely planned out, and when she had nothing left to do, she poured her magic into the elements. All to go back, to fix what she had caused.
It was painful and she had to stop eventually.
All that she was left with was a horn glowing from the heat of high-powered magic and six rocks that were just as inert and useless as they were the day before. She collapsed onto the sand, breathing heavily and crying again. She hadn't given up yet but today's failure brought her ever so closer to it.
Twilight curled up on the sand, holding her head as she bit down on her tongue and cried.
"Please, just do something," she pleaded to the six rocks between sobs, not bothering to look at them. Her magic would take days to recover and in that time, the elements would leak away whatever she had poured into them. It was a useless endeavour, and she was just deluding herself with thoughts about it working and fixing everything.
There were only the wind, the stars, and the distant waves there to watch her with pity. How much she'd give for a hug.
Finally, long after the failed attempt at making the elements do something, and the torch burning out, Twilight cried herself to sleep.
Then, the wind stopped and the sea went still. The stars stopped twinkling and the jungle went silent. For a moment, the world went still for the elements glowed. The light from the gems grew stronger gradually, waking up Twilight. She was confused at first, seeing the gems glowing, but when her senses caught up, she was over the moon. Something was happening!
From the sea, a blue light grew, getting ever closer to the little island that Twilight called home. Like the sun rises up, the light rose up from the waves.
It was blinding, but it was warm as well. Twilight felt herself being moved as her vision went white.
Author's Note
Accompanying music piece, if you want it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FF7yjGx6oY
Funny thing is, I was gonna write a happy adventure story about friendship, for the contest but it ended up being too long for me to write in the little time I had. So, I decided that Twilight should suffer instead.
Truly, a buwomp moment.
Also, obligatory guts & blackpowder reference
