Fate Chooses You, Cozy Glow

Cozy Glow awoke face down in sand. She rolled over and wiper her face off, not wanting to get want in her eyes. It took her a minute, but she came to find herself back in the desert wasteland.

“Welcome back… Cozy Glow,” the Tree spoke to her.

Cozy Glow turned to face it. She got up and stared it down.

“No more,” Cozy Glow said sternly. “I’m not having any more nested dreams. I’m not going back to that place. I’m going to be left alone.”

The Tree stood there in silence for a moment. “I know, Cozy Glow… however… you need my help if you want to shape the world into something more… alive.”

The filly considered this for a moment. Did she really need help? Cozy Glow was an alicorn, and she had all the magic that had ever existed, excluding that of the Tree.

“I guess,” Cozy Glow said. She preferred company over the sad nothingness of the plain world she made.

The Tree turned around and began walking into the distance. Then… they evaporated. Cozy Glow concluded that they were gonna help her as a spirit, and on the astral plane.

“Well,” Cozy Glow murmured to herself. “I’ve got to do something.”

Cozy Glow flew into the air and began at once. She teleported to where she knew the now crumbled Canterlot was. It was a barren wasteland, the only remarkable thing in it being the giant hill of sand where there used to be a mountain.

With her unmatched powers, she lifted tons upon tons of heavy sand and rock and sorted out any left over chunks of building that might be in it. In the end, she found a fair amount of material, but of course not the whole city. That would take years to recover.

“Okay,” Cozy Glow lectures herself. “How about… a house.”

She used her magic to reconstruct a house. She made a floor, a semi-complex layout of walls, and a roof. She summoned moisture out of the atmosphere and combined it with crumbled rock to make a concrete-esc substance, which she used to secure the structure.

Cozy Glow flew into where the front door was to be. It was… a wreck, in all honesty. It felt as if it just conveyed the sheer hopelessness of her hopes and dreams.

She sat down in an empty room—if you wanted to call it that, hence many holes. She tried to envision a future here: ponies sleeping in bunk beds; a living room with a fireplace; a kitchen fit for two; not to mention actual ponies living here in general.

However, a sad realized had settled in. Cozy Glow had killed or caused every pony to be killed. She truly, and undeniably truly, completely destroyed the world.

“I can’t give up,” Cozy Glow said through tears. “I need to redeem myself, to be able to forgive myself.”

Once again, Cozy Glow teleported. She appeared outside the crappy house and brought more sand up and sorted through it. She found but a scrape of wall, and a dead and decayed oak tree.

“Fuck,” Cozy Glow cried. “Fuck! What am I gonna do? Everything is gone, gone, gone! I wish I could just go back.”

Cozy Glow sunk to the ground. She felt defeated. Sure, she had just defeated fate itself, but now she had to solve a dilemma bigger than any that had ever existed when it still existed.

She lied down and sobbed. Her tears, the few there were due to her lack of water, seeped into the ground. And she lied down there, for hours on end, accepting defeat, accepting her physical fate and the consequences of what she has done.

“Allow me,” the Tree broke into her thoughts. “Allow me to… help you.”

“Go away,” Cozy Glow whimpered. “You can’t just bring them back. You can’t bring anything back.”

The Tree remained silent for a moment. “My apologies… allow us to help you,” it said.

“Huh?” Cozy Glow questioned. She finally looked up and gazed at the Tree of Harmony—and six other glowing beings.

Twilight, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and the Tree. They all stared down at her, all of them somehow there in the desert wasteland with her.

Only glowing. That must’ve meant they were… ghosts.

“I-oh, I… I uh,” Cozy Glow struggled with her words. “I’m so… s-sorry.”

She began to cry. The ponies didn’t say anything, but they stared at her calmly.

“Please, forgive me… I’m so, so… so unbelievably lost. I don’t know what to do anymore. And it’s all my fault. If I wasn’t to power hungry and didn’t go on a r-rampage and did all of… this… then you, and the entire world, would still be alive,” Cozy Glow spoke her mind.

“I can’t believe I did all of that… I’m horrible,” Cozy Glow concluded.

Twilight stepped towards Cozy Glow. The Princess reached out her hoof and touched Cozy Glow’s cheek.

“There’s no words to describe how much you messed up,” Twilight spoke. “However, don’t let it haunt you. You do deserve a horrible, horrible fate… but you also deserve to understand. To understand where you went wrong. And Cozy Glow, my friend, after having watched what you went through to change your fate and redeem yourself… we all as a collective has decided to forgive you.”

Cozy Glow broke out in tears. Twilight has not only called her a friend, but she forgave her. And they all did, too. Cozy Glow finally found some level of peace with this.

The Tree stepped forward and Twilight stepped back. “We feel… that you are redeemable,” it announced.

Cozy Glow started to celebrate, but was quickly silenced when she felt something tug on her leg. A tendril belonging to the Tree.

“There’s a catch,” it said.

A few years later, Cozy Glow was having lunch with her new friends, the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Only this time around, they were true friends, and not just a means of getting trust for global domination—the lack there of of a globe, hence this weird plane of existence known as heaven.

Cozy Glow waved goodbye and headed for home. She enjoyed her life so much, and she constantly thought about how grateful she was to have been given a second chance. In her new life, she had been able to prove her own redemption and has been accepted as one of the most kind ponies in heaven.

She made her way up the stairs and into her own bedroom, ready to relax. She spent long afternoons up here with friends reading books and playing board games. With no school nor anything in this realm, it was always the weekend. A very, very pleasant weekend.

It was a literal wonderland, one personally made for her, its mood shaped by her own desires. However, there was a tiny something that always bothered Cozy Glow, like right now.

When she drifted off to sleepy, no matter when or where, she’d see the Tree of Harmony through a flash of memory… but she couldn’t figure out why. She had been killed—very tamely—and aloud into heaven, assuming Fate didn’t show up saying she didn’t deserve it. But she saw the Tree every time she went to bed, like they were watching her, making sure she remained there. As if she could escape there…

There was also another thing: did Fate lie about personal wonderlands? That couldn’t make sense; there had been no reason to lie when it came to everyone having a personalized realm for them when they perished… but how could all of Cozy Glow’s friend’s exist here if they were dead and in their own scape? She wished she could ask, but didn’t bother. Why ruin a good thing?

As Cozy Glow drifted to sleep this afternoon, ready for a well deserved nap, she thought she saw a glimpse of a snowy cave, but wasn’t quite sure. Maybe it was a trick of the light, or just some image in her head. She knew well that that had been her original fate… but was that the one she got anyways? Or was she also—or only—safe and sound in heaven? Only Fate could tell.