Celestia crawled, her hooves trembling against the frozen ground, her fur ruined, coat devastated, a path of white feathers behind her. The dirt clung to her in strands, streaked with ash, blood, and the remnants of a world unraveling. She forced herself up, painfully with her legs shaking, every motion was a battle, against the exhaustion that had hollowed her out completely. Her breath came in shallow exhales, gasps, just one body, a million tear stained eyes, her ribs aching with every step as she staggered forward.

There was nothing left. Nothing to lose.

She reached the cliff’s edge, where the land broke off into nothingness. The wind, sharp and biting all night, stilled the moment she arrived. The air fell heavy, suffocating in its silence that basked her. Beneath her, the ocean stretched endlessly, its surface smooth, devoid of any motion, any flow, its waves frozen mid-motion, caught in a moment of suspension. Time has abandoned it, life has fled this place in the wake of these events.

She stared downward, her eyes dry, her face numb. Her body numb and all that called to her was the abyss, not with a violence, a malice, not with anger or hatred, but with a quiet inevitability, a pull that could not be resisted, the unbreakable pull of fate.

Her left hoof, shaking, caught her attention suddenly. She looked at it, the fur ripped against the dark earth, splayed. From the center of her hoof, golden ichor spilled out, a strange light bled out from an open wound on her body. A splinter from the pyre. She hadn’t felt it, hadn’t noticed it until now.

The ichor shimmered faintly, catching the rays of the golden hue of the rising sun, pooling and dripping to the ground below. blood. It wasn’t hers. But it was in her.

So she closed her eyes.

And then she let go.

The wind carried her, the absence of it, just the weight of her body which vanished into the air. She felt nothing as she fell, no rush, no fear, only the quiet, only the cold.

The Wheel turned above the cliffs. Its dark surface was motionless for a moment, suspended in a mourning unseen before, and then it resumed its slow, gyration. There was no hum, no vibration, no roar of its previous presence. Only silence, heavy and vast.

The land was still. The ocean remained frozen, its vast expanse empty. The mountains stood like sentinels, their peaks shrouded in gold from the sun that no longer warmed with anything left to devoid its energy too, it had died aswell. Life had ceased, not in violence but in surrender, as if the very world had given up. But.

The Wheel remained.

It spun slowly, what it gave off was an aching sadness which filled the air. Unexplained. Its motion was endless, purposeless, a relic left to mourn the echoes of a life that no longer was.

There was no terror here, no chaos, no destruction. Only quiet. Only stillness.

And somewhere, deep within that silence, a sorrowful cry let out so vast it could only belong to the last thing left turning.

Alive
I'm the only one left alive
I'm the only one left alive
I'm the only one left alive
Alive
I'm the only one left alive
I'm the only one left alive
I'm the only one left alive

Author's Note

Thank you, John Balance.