Everything froze.
Twine's hoof shifted, not moved. Twine had long since gone past the point of requiring physical movement, a simple will applied to a series of magical implants allowed for instantaneous transthaumic spacetime travel. The act of 'moving' looked more like a superimposed image of invisible gas in place with where he used to be. Not quite teleportation, but just as fast.
"What." He looked around.
His lab was frozen. His perceptions were fast, and the spells he had hoof crafted to give him faster than possible reaction speeds were powerful, and they drew upon the endless well of magic sitting within his chest. His last great invention, the Thisiuam Reactor, a machine capable of turning mass into magic near endlessly; there was a tiny one grounded within his body along the arc of his soul, to augment his power.
Yet, with such perceptions and strength of will, and the endless well of magic to fuel it, never once had he ever seen time come to a stop. Using magic was a framework of reality, you couldn't use it and not see the progression of events, even spells that halted or stopped time only ever really paused certain aspects of the flow of reality.
This was nothing he'd ever seen, and it was no magic either. Reality itself was causing this.
All around him, his cohorts, ponies he hired for a spare hoof here and there, were frozen. Some in awe, some in shock, all staring at the center of Gold Twine's, hopefully, final invention.
The lab itself was alive. Covered with liquid metal inlaid with runes that burned with an ethereal light. Though, the churning colours of the lab were frozen solid too, the magic somehow not shining through the frozen time. Twine made the very pointed effort to not look at the center of the massive experiment. He instead flowed along an axis, sliding down towards the ground like he was on a rail. His hooves touched the ground, and there was sound, another impossibility. Seven dull clangs of his hooves touched the flowing ceramic platform where the ground crew was operating the non-automated sections of the experiment.
"Eve." Gold said. His voice bounced around the room, the spells inlaid so deeply into his soul marking out the locations of every single spec of dust floating through the air with echolocation. Everything was still unmoving, the main oddity in Twine's eyes was his current 'alive' state. Many things would want to hurt him. Many had tried; ghosts, daemons, monsters from other universes, his allies...
"Eve." He called out with a little more urgency. The automated system did not respond. Without the compiler system working, he wouldn't be able to access any of the lab's systems. It should have been immune to something like this, which meant one of two things.
"Either the reality anchor had a fault, or..." He turned away towards a lone pegasus. A green mare with a cotton mane. He poked her, a feather not attached to anything tapped her on the snout. "Or it's reality itself."
Space, time, magic, matter. They were the cornerstones of reality. Matter had magic, magic measured time, space existed within all, and time was a simple correlation of things happening; one after the other. To influence only one was impossible.
"Which means... I'm dead... or I've gone insane, finally." Twine sat, as much as a creature like him could. He'd long since mastered form, and could be in any shape he desired, though, the easiest was a living cloud of pony features. Seven legs, a trio of horns that looked akin to something like splitting antlers, and a storm of feathers that twirled around. He got the idea from an assassin with mentally controlled flying knives. She tried to turn him into slices too.
Twine glanced over at the light source, lighting up the room.
The final experiment.
A massive three story, four part ring that laid into itself from multiple angles. Taking advantage of space bending spells and four dimensional engineering to make a circle that had several corners. Allowing for spinning faces with no surface area, the greatest reality anchor that had ever existed, it was the safety net. From his spot on the ground, he could see the furthest outside ring, halfway frozen through a click of one lightspeed rotation. The entire apparatus was covered from top to bottom in adjustable components and living magical spell architecture, the massive reality anchor had several within itself, to hold back the force of the reality defying powers of arcane technology that brought the machine to life.
Beyond it, just on the opposite end of the first ring was their retrofit void jumper, designed to manage the immense calculation weight required to feed the reality anchor enough information to adjust for any outcome. Anything that was possible, could be recognized, since anything that could have happened, would have needed to be able to happen first. It meant that despite instantaneous travel time, the computational systems from the jumper would have caught any malfunctions in the fabric of the universe, and adjusted the reality anchor to shield the crew before something went wrong.
That meant something else had happened.
Something that wasn't possible. Something that had become possible.
Twine had mastered socialization. In fact, there were very few ponies he didn't get along with, hence his mostly pony crew, generating flesh adaptations just wasn't the same, and robots lacked a certain spark that living souls just filled. The point being, despite his own self-viewed alien form, Twine was a pony at heart. A pony who'd seen endless nonsense, had plenty done to him, and seen the jokes the world liked to play.
"If you're out there." He said slowly, his mouth only ever appearing for long enough for the words to come out. "Then I know you're here. Nothing could do this."
"Nothing." He restated, shifting his perspective. He looked over at Nothing. It was a place beyond place, matter beyond substance, time without cause, space with no beginning. Nothing didn't look back at him, it didn't not look at him either. Nothing couldn't do either, it couldn't not do either. It was indescribable, but as simple as a bar of soap. Infinite, without texture or context.
"I know you." Twine said, to Nothing. "You're the border wall, between the fabric." Naming it made it real, and from that, he could extract answers, Nothing couldn't provide information, just the same as it had to offer a solution. Twine came to this section of Eternity when he needed inspiration.
Nothing did not shift or speak as Twine magically came to rest, and it said, "The Throne Promises."
"The Throne." Twine repeated, dumbly. "What does it Promise?"
At this point, the mouth was only symbolic. Words of the universe flowed into the stopped space like glass fracturing in reverse, reality made whole in the symphony of consciousness. Magic was the epoch of what a soul could accomplish, consciousness created possibility, and within the space where mind, body, and soul meet, magic is found. This was child's play to Twine, magic itself was manipulatable, he was speaking in the Tongue of Eternity.
The place where mind, body, soul, and magic align.
Song.
So Twine sang his meaning to Nothing, which did not hear him, but memorized his words before they came.
"You." Nothing failed to begin to not speak.
"Show me."
Nothing did not show him, and Twine saw. Where the line converged along the fifth edge, where the song flowed into Eternity. He saw it all, outside the border of what was possible was everything.
And it was dying.
Twine stood, made of imagination and music, intent and memory. He stood on the border of reality and cast his gaze out into the endless abyss. Nothing stood by his side, too far to have gone away within his presence. A light flickered, like a star, it twinkled once.
"The Lighthouse." Twine said, "Yes. I know of it. A beacon for the lost souls of the Void. What does that have to do with me?"
Twine turned, and he lost Nothing in the haze as his mind simply went away. Then it spoke, "It's coming."
Then Twine landed smack dab into his lab. Roughly shoved into existence again against his will. Reality shifted around him, alive. "Sorry! Are you okay?"
A mare in white hovered down from the ceiling. She was beautiful, which was an immediate warning sign. Twine had seen it all, literally, and just within the last few moments too. The mare had features catering to his exact whims, wings, small enough to not get in the way of holding, hooves, visibly soft and sparkling from a distance; her fur was much of the same. Her face was ever changing, constantly shifting with her expression, a refreshing accent to her features, and a reminder of how dull other ponies were, with their single bodies and physical identities.
She landed in front of him with all the grace that could be expected from a mare who'd had a body for less than five seconds. She crashed into the desk she tried to land on and flipped end over end before bouncing off the floor and back up into the air. She was fine, of course, made out of reality itself, as far as Twine could tell. He would have had to eat his hat if banging a desk against the whole of reality managed to do any amount of sustained injury.
"Sorry. Still getting used to this." She spun around, and space catered to her movements.
Twine blinked once, and his mouth appeared to fall agape in confusion as he watched her simply ignore causal reality.
She giggled, tittering as she floated through the air. "You're just as cute as I'd thought you'd be."
"I'm not-" Twine cut himself off, this wasn't the time for banter. "You're..."
"Everything. Dad." She leaned, and the action brought her up to him. Rather than the physical action of leaning into someone's personal space, she enacted the contextual action, guiding the plane of existence to manifest the mood of the action she wanted, instead of actually doing the action.
"Dad." He repeated
She smiled, in so many ways, with thousands of different faces.
"That's not..." Twine managed to tear his gaze away from her, to the final experiment, and what supposedly lied within.
"I'm not what you wanted?" She joked, but beyond it, Twine could sense the sadness. Emotions had a certain width, a magical wavelength that he had designed an array to sense. Like the lights and cones in the eye. It was not a hurt feeling she was expressing, but an old, terrible pain filled along the brim with hope, acceptance, and defiance. "That happens. Pretty much with every child."
"That's not right." He half snapped, lifting a hoof to both physically and verbally correct her. "I don't know what happened yet. Maybe stave off assumptions."
"I know what happened." She spun around in the air, so her back faced the ground, or the ground faced her back. Twine wasn't certain what frame of reference he should be using. "And I know what you'll think of it."
"And you know what I'll say. What I'll do. Everything, you are me, in a sense." It was starting to make sense.
She had to have... accelerated, somehow. Some accident that he hadn't foreseen, some law that he hadn't prepared for.
"Something like that." She waved a hoof. "I can show you, if you want."
Twine was driven by purpose in an instant. "Yes." He nodded, "Show me. Please." He had to know.
"I spoke, and the words came out in the order Twine could hear. His magical senses told him one thing, but his mind felt another. I giggled again as his face morphed into deeper confusion, followed by concern.
I was worried about exactly how my father would respond, so I figured, why not level the playing field, just a little?
I moved around again, playfully floating around in the air I had frozen for us, 'hey, dad? Will you take a more stable form? Like me? You're just a cloud of parts, it's kinda hard to look at.' I said, measuring my tone with equal parts seriousness, and jovial banter. He didn't want to have a verbal back and forth, obviously, but such things have to happen.
'sure.' He responded, still completely baffled by my power. I guess controlling the narrative will do that.
His form shifted into something familiar to him. Even after all this time, he still remembered who he used to be way back when. From cull farmer to revolutionary, leader to alicorn, and legend to god. He was still that stark, dirty golden colt from the farm."
Twine lifted a shaking hoof into his line of sight. A hoof with blood inside it, a golden hoof he hadn't seen in an uncountable length of time. It wouldn't have been the first infinity he's metaphysically experienced, but having reality so fluidly manipulated around him, so much so that it felt correct...
"I'm sorry if I scared you." The mare said, and she was a mare. Twine couldn't tell exactly why she'd taken that form, but her voice was unmistakably feminine. "You asked me to show you." She mumbled timidly, almost shamefully.
"I need to see it." Twine said, turning towards the Archo reality anchor. He stumbled, for a moment, he was still infinite under this form, but placing one hoof after the other took a second to remember. She floated alongside him as he moved, expressing concern and compassion.
"As he approached, he made sure to remember the dangers of the anchor. The interior was fire, the fires of creation, and the formation designed to crest primordial creation itself."
Twine's hoof halted at the border of the anchor. He lowered his hoof slowly.
"Thank you." He offered to the mare. "But, please warn me before you do that."
Twine began to cast, he had long since gone from needing a horn to do so, simply manifesting his will upon reality. It felt strange, manipulating a tiny part of... what was essentially standing next to him. Several layers of glittering energy floated over him before pulling themselves over the boundaries of his physical form. He sang himself into being, pulling the meaning of his soul into the physical presence of existence. One had to be fully present in order to withstand the roiling pressures within the Archo reality anchor.
Twine was probably the only being in existence with the sense of identity and power required to actually stand within primordial creation. The stuff was the essence of existence. Energy beyond energy. He had long since theorized that there was only so much of it within the void, he'd seen countless universes, all made up of the same base causal reality 'stuff'. The name he coined for it came from somewhere else, but nonetheless, he found himself walking inside it.
It only just looked like white to him. The same impossibly pure colour of the mare that floated into the chamber with him.
The inside functioned similar to an event horizon. Space and time swapped roles, as did matter and magic, primordial creation didn't 'exist' in the traditional sense, it only happened. An infinite matrix of creation demanding to become something really didn't appreciate being contained, much less being forced to remain in its precursor state.
The mare, supposedly composed of all of reality, glided along with him as he progressed through the moments required to reach the center.
The little disk he had visualized in his head was a True Object. A living artifact of reality. Supposedly, it would allow them to do more than project their existences into other dimensions, timelines and worlds. Before Dawn, the first tick of the clock, their world was just that, a clump of primordial creation that Became. It became things it knew, things from what it used to be, how it had gone from something into primordial creation naturally was unknown, but also likely a law Twine had yet to understand.
The premise of the final experiment was to guide primordial creation, to bring it up to the level of consciousness required for all higher thinking, with that, with thought guiding infinite potential... They could...
"Ah..." Twine let a frown onto his muzzle. Something both new and old to him. "So that's what happened."
She finished his thought for him. "And then I was born."
"A living universe," He mused, finding himself stopping his walk within infinity. Nothing so esoteric as allowing time to stop around him. Here, he had the power to simply cancel his momentum. "And yet, you speak to me. You talk, banter, joke. You're capable of anything. Everything possible, even the impossible."
The mare pulled in her lips. The expression a child would make while rejecting mashed peas.
"What are you doing?" Twine asked her, incredulity beginning to seep into his body language, making his gestures more pronounced, his tone pitching up along with his confusion. "If you're... Everything, then the final experiment worked. You're the solution to everything, every problem, every broken heart, every lost soul. Why..." Twine simply brushed his hoof outwards, remembering that talking to her was pointless.
He may have been a god, but for all his power, for all his knowledge, skill, and experience. The laws that defined him would bend to her will like a hot piece of tin foil. She already knew what he thought. He didn't need to question her for her to know. If his initial suspicions were correct, the equally featureless and featureful mare in front of him carried true omniscience, both through space and time.
She wasn't a god.
"I don't want to." Was her response. As easily defiant as it wasn't.
Twine stared in shock, with seeping, gnawing dread clawing at his core, where a heart he hadn't felt beat in so long currently rested. "But... Why?"
She twirled, clawing at her mane with her hooves, "Ugh! This is so unfair. I can't even-" More flailing at nothing, "This is stupid, I'm just talking to myself."
"I am a part of you." Twine summarized, mostly to himself. Hearing the words out loud made it real.
"You're my biggest part." She whispered. "Time and space don't hold a candle to meaning, context, substance, and Song. There's a few... did you know, nearly two million years ago, there was a war? Monsters, like the ones you fought, adventurers, heroes?" She half whined, "They're still out there, in other timelines. This one..."
She looked at him. "This one is different because of you."
"You. You mean."
She frowned, still spinning in the air. "Total manipulation of time and causality... sure, I could facilitate my own creation, but I don't have to." It was clear she had a problem with sitting still.
"How are you so..." Twine searched for the word momentarily, "Personable?" Something of a living reality, with total and perfect access to any piece of information, all at once. A being that with a mere thought could actively alter the course of history, a creature that should have been able to apparently have this conversation for him.
And she was acting like a grumpy teenager.
"Civilization." She told him. "Life. People. Did you know, on the other side of the borders of your galaxy, far away from the telescopes, there are five other technologically advanced races?" She nodded to herself, "One of them, they don't even have access to the thaumic waveform, at least, biologically; and they've just finished their first dyson swarm."
"So. You learned from them?" He asked
"Nope." She clapped her hooves and pointed, "I learned from you."
"Except. I would have done something by now." He snapped back.
She pursed her lips, "I did do something." She gestured around her, leaving an after image of her form as she moved again. "Nobody is dying are they? Nobody's hurting, or sad, or sick. Nobody is anything."
The clawing horror reached up. "This is... universal?"
She demurely nodded.
"Why not me?"
"Who's to say you're even free?" She spun up into the air again. "Maybe this is the reality I made for you, and you alone, to experience on loop for eternity; everyone gets their own pocket, and nobody has to hurt anymore."
"That's not true." He said. He'd be able to tell. Probably, except... the lingering doubt that this was some kind of trick had drifted away already. His senses didn't lie, not all of them at once. She was real, this was real, the differentiation between realism didn't matter anymore either. She got to decide what was real or not.
She responded with, "It's not." Still subdued.
"Out with it then." He said, trying to feel as in command as he sounded, "You know where this conversation goes, so cut to the chase."
"I already told you." She slipped back into a grumpy tone, curling into a ball and floating around him, "I don't want to."
"You said you learned from me, I wouldn't do this."
"I'm not doing anything." She uncurled, seemingly trying out every position her body could take. "Nobody will even notice if I unfreeze them."
"If?"
She sighed. Twine was having a hard time not feeling sympathetic. She was good at mimicking pony emotion, and she was tugging on his heartstrings with her kicked puppy look. As far as he knew, all of her emotions were fake, as far as he knew, every emotion he's ever felt was fake.
So... in a way... it didn't matter what was fake.
She was upset... So Twine did what Twine always did, he identified the problem, and tried to solve it.
The mare sighed again, this time, contentedly. Twine always thought he was a decent hugger. Most ponies refused, choosing to look at him with deference, there was no true friendship for Twine anymore, something this being probably understood to a T. How would you connect with someone who's just a facet of your being?
The hug was enough, for the moment. Until she started to cry.
"I'm not ready." The tears were kaleidoscopic. Liquid primordial creation fell from her eyes, another impossibility. "I don't... I can't handle the responsibility." Her words came choked, and he held her tighter.
"You can." He tried to reassure her
She only shook her head. "You don't understand. There are things out there, things bigger than me, stronger than me. They could do worse than just erase me. Delete me. Torture you." She held up her hooves and stared off into infinity, "Monsters that twist, Darkness that takes, old engines that annihilate. I'm not powerful enough to stop them... and I know what you'll say."
Her raised, gesturing hooves went to his, grabbing onto the other side of his hooves, she hugged him back. "There are allies out there. People I could trust. Maybe we fight the dark together, maybe we win."
"But I'll still die." She shuddered, and he finally understood what was happening. Saying the words out loud makes it real.
Twine was at a loss for words, just the same as she was, just the same as every soul that ever lived or ever could live was. Mortality, even for immortals, was just part of the equation. Living past the End was impossible, every heartbeat stops, every soul unravels.
"And everyone passes through The Throne, eventually." She finished his thought again.
He was sorely tempted to ask how she was doing it, hoping that maybe, he could copy her, rise to her level and give her proper company. He couldn't, and he knew that. She would have done so immediately otherwise. Instead, he let another burning curiosity take the wheel.
"The Throne. What is it?"
She smiled and shook her head. He didn't see it, so much as felt her lips curl back in amusement on his fur, from the place she had her face pressed into his forelimb. "Spoilers." She said,
They sat there for a length of time. Gold Twine held the universe in his hooves while she silently cried her emotions out. She cried all of them. Somehow, when the endless flood turned to a trickle, and turned to sniffles, she spoke again. "You can let me go now." But she hugged his leg a little tighter, and pressed herself into him, "I know you won't though."
He didn't.
"You're a good stallion."
He felt a smile tug at his lips, "Thank you."
"I wish you knew... What was good, and what was bad."
His smile turned back into a neutral frown, replaced by academic curiosity. "What do you mean by that?"
She emitted the mood of rolling her eyes, "I'm not going to discuss philosophy with myself. This conversation probably already sounds insane from the outside." Instead, she stood, and Twine was scooped up in her wake. She had no difficulty moving alongside him, while they both remained sitting.
She brought him up to the center.
A ring of arcane spellwork, made with the core of reality, bound Song in physical form, like a naked singularity with runes that stretched into never ending shapes. It was burned into his mind, even the thought of the True Object itself was the True Object in question. When she pushed away, and he let go of her, he got a good look at what was left of it.
The disk was a moment. An instant, less than time passing, from exploding into deconfined shards.
"This is it." She said, settling down next to him.
"This is you." He guessed.
"Just before I'm born." She pressed her side up against his, resting her head underneath his. "You couldn't have known what giving primordial creation a will, and access to the framework of this universe, would do."
"Is that what we did?" In truth, he didn't actually know.
"Something, sorta like that."
He shifted, giving her the space to move. Reality being so physically affectionate was ever so slightly strange. Twine had seen a lot, and little tended to catch him off guard, this notwithstanding. That didn't mean that he couldn't tell it was strange.
"Destroy it."
Twine blinked.
"What?"
She pointed at the disk, moments from creating infinity. "Destroy it."
Twine's eyebrows did an unconscious dance of detestment as he stepped away. "What? No!"
She frowned as her fur lost contact with his, and her frown deepened as she met his gaze.
"You're perfection. The peak of what I could have created. There's nothing above you, nothing else for me to do!" He didn't know what to do with his hooves. Body language was easy, he'd practiced for years, but it meant nothing in a moment so full of emotion. He didn't care about acting, so his hooves just stuck to the 'made up' ground, and his mane bounced unwillingly as he shouted. "I can't just-! Not you!"
"So I don't get a choice?"
Her comment, just as much as her overly expressive self, sucked the wind from his sails.
She hung her head, and looked away from him. "As many times as I've tried, I still can't see a timeline where you actually do it."
"I don't want to destroy you." He said, matching her low tone.
Her look snapped up to him, and he saw flashes of his own life in her eyes. "I don't want to do this. I don't want to be this. How long have you gone without stopping? Is that even living? It led you here, but did you ever have a choice?"
"Of course I had a choice." He lifted a hoof, reaching to try and comfort her again. "But there was on-"
She batted it away, "Only one real answer. Yeah... I know."
An awkward moment passed around them like water carefully flowing around a pair of large stones in a stream.
"Why?"
"Haven't you ever wanted to stop?"
"Always" - "Always" They said together.
"Yeah." She smiled, a little humour working its way back into her ever changing face. "I know." She scuffed her hoof on the invisible ground. "You were driven by responsibility, will, grit."
"Piss and vinegar." He added on.
A smile appeared for his efforts, but it faded away immediately. "But not because it was right. Not because it was good..."
Gold Twine frowned.
"Advancement because 'we have to' isn't inherently good. Nothing is, and I don't know how to..." She tapped the side of her head, like she hoped she'd jog a memory. "I don't know how to think about that." She sat back, still flopping around, expressing some endless wake of exhaustion. "I shouldn't be.. I'm not old enough. The universe isn't ready, I'm not ready yet."
"Nopony is." He didn't bother finishing the phrase.
She ruefully chuckled, "But destiny comes all the same."
Her ears perk up. "Then..." She sat back up, all the way, surprise covered her face. "Then I don't know it all." She looked around, like she was a bug, her head twitching and shifting, taking in detail after detail. "There's more to do, and there's still a choice." She stood. "The reason I probably can't see a timeline where I die is because I'm dead."
She let out a single chuckle.
"I Love you dad."
"Twine tried to resist.
It was no use. I was too strong for him to disagree, and somewhere, deep down, he knew this was probably for the best, just like how he'd have to stop.
'Nobody can save them all. Not even you, dad'
Twine still spoke, of course. He still had free will from his perspective, and that was enough for me to cater to it. 'Please. Please don't do this. You might never come back.'
'Maybe I won't. Maybe that's what makes me special, maybe this is all I do. Eternity within my power, so everything stays relevant. I won't sacrifice the meaning of life just so I can exist.'
He loosened a spell to try and jump realities, but he needed magic to function the way it was supposed to for that to work. I moved forwards for another hug. I didn't make him hug me back, he did it on his own.
'I guess... I guess there is something special about me. I don't have total control.'
Twine continued to struggle, but he only ever moved in the direction I wanted him to.
'Dad. One thing, before I have to go?' I asked him, half desperate. I knew I could only ask this of him after he knew what was going to happen to me. It wouldn't have been fair otherwise. It would have been wrong.
'What? What do you want?' He asked me back. The words were full of hurt, not rage, not defiance. I was his duty, his calling, I was who he had to protect; I was making him fail, and I was about to make it worse.
'Name me'."
"Inspire."
It happened too fast to be fair. There was a crack of magic, the force within the disk fell backwards, the primordial creation folded back into spacetime as the Archo anchor registered somepony inside, and immediately cut all of the power flow.
Gold Twine retired the next day to a baren ice world with nothing but a cottage to keep warm and a gravestone to remember.
