The sun quivered in anticipation below the horizon, pre-dawn birds were beginning their morning songs, and Princess Celestia rose from her bed with a giddy bounce. Yes, today would finally be the day. After thousands of years in a Utopian wonderland, she was going to shuffle off her mortal coil.
After throwing open the window and nudging the sun into the sky, Celestia skipped to the door. The Princess paused a moment and looked at the sheets of her bed, where they lay in disarray. Well, that wouldn't be her problem by tonight. She laughed musically at the thought of never performing such a menial, pointless task again.
Celestia stopped to compose herself before the entering the Royal Breakfast Nook. Her sister, Luna, was seated on a cushion, chewing on a plate of scrambled eggs. The Princess of the Night's teeth crunched through the ceramic with ease, and she swallowed the jagged shards, noting with some satisfaction how her immortal digestive system barely registered the abuse.
Cadence was at the table, as well. The Princess of Nothing in Particular would be visiting for the next week, all the more reason for her aunt to kill herself now. The pink princess was idly flipping through the style section of the Canterlot Times. Break-ups, weddings, affairs. It filled her with a strange sense of duty, seeing all those hearts and broken relationships to mend.
Celestia's mane stretched out as if billowing in the wind, resplendent with the rays of her risen sun. She threw her head back, striking a pose that could make a sculptor or painter famous, and announced, "Luna, Cadence, from this day forward the two of you will run the kingdom for I," she paused dramatically, as the light bounced through her mane like a stained glass window, "have decided to kill myself."
"That's good," grunted Luna, finishing her plate and picking up her butter knife.
"Did you hear what I just said?"
"Very interesting," sighed Cadence. This would be the third time in less than a month she'd have to save Prince Blueblood's marriage. Maybe some ponies were just better off apart? She hastily banished the thought from her pretty, pink head.
"I am going to end my immortal life," Celestia clarified, crashing her hooves to the tiled floor in a manner that seemed dramatic and purposeful, and not at all like a foal having a tantrum.
"Of course." Luna scooped up a pad of butter on the knife.
"You two are going to have to manage the kingdom forever, without me. Because I will be dead."
"Why not?" The Princess of the Night swallowed the lubricated utensil in a single bite.
"Luna, I think you should go on a diet. You've been putting on weight since you returned from the moon."
Luna's blue ears pricked up at the mention of her name, and she hissed, "We have not!"
"Were you two paying any attention to me?" Celestia pouted.
"Yes, we were," said Cadence, finally dragging her face away from a story about Iron Will's disastrous career as a marriage counselor, "You're going to try to kill yourself."
"You've said it before," said Luna, now digging a spoon around in a jar of raspberry jelly, "Like that time after mom died, when you channeled the heat of the sun into your body and cooked off all your flesh. It took two years to get the smell out of the palace. Or when you hung a millstone around your neck and drowned yourself in the sea."
Cadence joined in, "A few years before you came back, she went on a three week expedition to the deepest jungles of New Zebrica. She came back with some crazy combination of Ebola, AIDS, acne, necrosis, sclerosis, halitosis, syphilis, alcohol poisoning, chlamydia and the common cold. She literally sneezed bloody semen. And, it was acidic too, like it would eat through the walls."
"Nice," said Luna before chomping the head off her jelly coated spoon.
"But it all cleared up when I forced her to drink a big bowl of soup and gave her a round of penicillin in her bum," the licensed childcare professional nodded her head proudly.
"This time I really mean it! I can no longer abide this immortal existence," Celestia said, trying another track, "do you know what it feels like to outlive one's children?”
"Yes," replied her sister, "We do. We understand because we actually insured that the bloodline would continue. You always said you had a headache."
"Well, I mean, what about all my memories? Our minds were not meant to hold so many years of information, of regret."
"What were you doing at this moment 500 years ago?" Cadence asked.
"I don't know, how am I expected to remember details like that?"
"Exactly. You don't remember. Your brain isn't some labyrinth built up over centuries anymore than any other pony's. You forget stuff, and have exactly as much information in your head as I do."
Celestia's face spasmed between fury at her niece's cheek and despair at how nopony was taking her seriously.
"Watch out," cautioned Luna, "she's gonna start quoting Nieghtzsche next."
"I was not!" The Princess of the Sun insisted.
"Kierkegiara, then."
"I was going to quote Dante, but if you two insist on not understanding my plight..."
"Hello, fellow immortal here. And Discord outback. We all get along just fine without the melodrama. And, I think, Chrysalis is pretty old, too."
"She dyes her exoskeleton." Cadence said in a stage whisper.
"Well, maybe the burden of doing my job instead of cavorting off in pursuit of world domination is what I can't bear anymore. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
Luna's face fell. "You take that back."
"What are you gonna do if I don't? Kill me?"
The Princess of the Night was on her hooves in a moment. She chased her elder sister through the palace, throwing bottles of syrup and loaves of bread.
After having evaded death at the hooves of her sister, Princess Celestia set about finding death at her own hooves.
She thrust her nose back into the bag of ragwort hanging around her neck. Beside her were a box of arsenic pellets and a bottle she'd stolen from her sister's room labeled, "Brain Medicine."The shells of castor beans crunched under foot, like peanut shells in a cheap bar. Finally, she washed the whole mix down with two bottles of FlimFlam's ExtraSpecial Moonshine. The 190-proof liquid turned to vapor on her tongue, and she felt the alcohol fumes scar the inside of her nostrils.
Then, she sat down to wait. Or she tried to sit. Her legs twitched and shuddered in rebellion. Her stomach burbled. Strange chemicals congealed and met in her intestines. The sound of her heart ram-slamming against her breastbone filled her ears like a drumbeat of Tartarus. She stood up, laid down again, then jumped back to her hooves. Sweat dripped off her body as a raging fever stole through her.
Here it comes, she thought. It was a shotgun blast from both ends, and the Princess felt her her body compress like an accordion under the immense pressure.
Projectile vomit soared from one end of her body and bloody feces erupted from the other, painting bizarre abstracts on the walls. She wished that she'd had presence of mind to do this between two canvases, her death could have been art.
Celestia only had a moment to admire the patterns of blood and stomach juices, randomly mixed with lumps of roots and leaves before she heaved again. This time her anus prolapsed and her intestines flopped out to the floor where they flipped like dying earth worms. Her esophagus leapt up through her mouth. The flesh tube hung like a tongue or the proboscis of a mosquito. Another heave, this time accompanied by wretched coughing, sent one of her lungs out to plop on the ground.
Celestia staggered across the room, dragging her organs along behind her like a royal gown. They twitched, blood pooling around them. A fresh seizure between her hind legs ripped her vagina open, dropping her ovaries and uterus to the filthy ground.
Her breath came in ragged gasps around organ meats. What little food remained in her digestive system from the night before was slowly leaking out with her stomach acid. She was hollow, her body almost entirely gouged out by poisons.
But the suicidal sovereign was still alive.
"Me dammit," Celestia gasped. Time for Plan B.
The noose hung from the ceiling, already prepared. The Alicorn clambered on top of a pile of books, mostly copies of Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, and Being Really Tired of These Long Ass Books. The death-seeking immortal stuck her head through the noose, feeling the rope wrap rough around her throat. The fibers chafed through her fur, but it wouldn't be a problem for long. With a strong kick, she disordered her philosophical foundation and went swinging into the void.
The rope snap-crack-popped hard around her neck, and then snapped above her neck. She was falling. So this is what it feels like to die? Falling and falling forever.
Less than forever. Her forelegs struck the ground, jabbing into the hard floor and twisting. Bones cracked. Little white fangs erupted through white fur, blood freckling their edges. Her body crumpled to the ground. She stared up at the broken rope, a silent accusation against her dietary overindulgence. So she was fat as well as old and bored. All the more reason to kill herself.
This is the moment where lesser creatures would give up. Or they'd be dead already. However, Celestia hadn't become a princess and supreme ruler of all Equestria by giving up. She'd done it by being born, and she'd do it again, assuming that's how reincarnation worked.
The Princess dragged herself back to her broken forelegs. A razor floated through the air and slid down the inside of her legs. Her veins ripped open, spilling what little blood hadn't already escaped and dying her fetlocks red.
Celestia wasn't naive. She knew that simply opening her veins was a recipe for nothing more than an extended hangover and a month or two drinking six glasses of orange juice a day. This was only the first part of her master plan.
The Princess stalked the corridors of the Palace like a ghost, dragging her organs behind her and leaving a thick snail trail. Every few steps, she stumbled, and when she reached the grand stairway, she only threw herself head first down it. At the bottom of the stairs, her head cracked open on a bannister.
The Alicorn lurched to her hooves, a monster from Tartarus and bound back that way. Her left eye dangled from its socket, held in by a bundle of nerves. Her brain matter peeked out through the jagged edges of her skull.
Her destination stood before her. A vast, black door covered with strange figures. Beyond was the barracks of Luna's personal guard. The bat ponies.
The soldiers leapt to their feet hastily as their leader's sister entered the room. They dipped their heads in reverence, although they weren't certain how to take her wretched state.
"Look at the blood!" she gasped around the organs trailing from her mouth, "come and feast!" Celestia flicked her wings pushing herself into the air. She tossed her forelegs wide, mimicking the gesture she made during the Summer Sun Celebration and spreading her blood around the room. Her organs spread down from her body like a banner of flesh. It wouldn't be long now, thought the Princess, they would sever her mortal chains with their fangs.
The guards, however, didn't move. One or two of them made disgusted faces. One of the guards nudged the other in the ribs.
"Tell her," he whispered.
"No, you tell her."
Celestia slowed as she wasn't swarmed by ravenous mouths. Instead, she started getting the awkward feeling that comes from accidentally saying zigger in a crowded room.
"You aren't feasting ..." Celestia said as she lowered back to the ground. She winced and nearly collapsed.
After several moments of scrambling, one guard was finally shoved forward, "We, uh, we don't drink blood, Your Princessness."
"But," Celestia dragged at the ground with her hoof, "Bats." If she could have died of embarrassment, well that would have made all this whole business much easier.
"We're … we eat fruit. Sometimes insects," The guard shuffled slightly.
“I like lollipops!” shouted a guard in the back.
“Yes, and Dark Stalker likes lollipops.”
“Red lollipops?” Celestia gurgled as the corners of her mouth twisted up into little curls. She proffered her blood-soaked hoof to the crowd.
“Ew, no, only Butterscotch flavor.”
Celestia sighed, "I'm sorry for drawing negative assumptions about your personal habits based upon your appearance."
With that, she left the room, having learned a very important lesson about stereotypes.
Princess Celestia stood on the top of the highest tower in the Palace. Blood loss had given her skin a grey, ghostly pallor, and she felt a stiffness in her limbs as rigor mortis set it. It triggered a spearing ache between her shoulder blades that cut along the course of her spine. She felt like she was carrying a great weight. The weight of her own eternal existence.
“No one understands,” she whispered. Well, no one but Luna. And Discord. Maybe Chrysalis. Cadence would get the point eventually. Dragons, at least some of them. So there were ponies and creatures around to talk to, but that never seemed to get her anywhere.
Her wings were taped to her sides. The tape was very scratchy and irritating. Celestia looked over the edge of the parapet and took a deep breath with her remaining lung. Her legs kicked, and she hurtled down to the welcoming embrace of the concrete. Her organs uncoiled behind her and flipped in the air like streamers.
The formerly white Alicorn impacted the ground with a wet meat smack. Her neck broke, driving shards of bone out of her body like shrapnel. Her ribcage turned renegade, caving in and driving vicious knives through the places they were supposed to protect. This time there was no blood. All nine gallons of liquid Celestia had already been spread around the Palace.
After a few moments of unconsciousness, Celestia came to. Her body was an indistinguishable wad of pain. A piece of tenderized meat. It was also alive.
"Give her some air!" shouted one of the ponies clustering around her. Her subjects scattered as Celestia dragged herself to her hooves. One of her wings had come loose during the impact, and now twisted and flopped brokenly along the side of her body.
“Princess, what happened?”
Celestia didn’t answer, instead she shoved her carcass into the highway, expecting to be trampled to death by oncoming traffic.
The two ponies approaching her saw the sudden movement and swerved to the side, crashing into another carriage. The carriage behind them plowed directly into the first ponies’ wagon. The light frame of the third carriage flipped into the air, crashing down inches from the Princess.
Color faded from the street and a howling void opened between two air molecules. A skeletal Alicorn, his horn curved wickedly forward with an edge on the underside, slid into existence. Death had arrived, but not for her.
"No!" cried Celestia with some difficulty, "this was all my fault! You have to take my soul instead of theirs."
"Hmm," the skeletal figure looked around the scattered wreckage. “That won’t be necessary, Princess. For today is opposite day. I'm not Death, I'm … uh ...” the One that Always Follows After paused, scraping a chipped hoof against the ground before finishing lamely, “I’m not-Death.”
His horn didn't glow so much as leech light from the area around it as his magic spread across the street scene. The pile of indiscriminate wreckage moved in reverse, bodies reassembled themselves and shattered timbers knit back together. After a moment, the street was returned to its relative peace.
"No, it isn't," Celestia muttered.
“Isn’t hm?” asked Death.
“It isn’t Opposite Day. There is no such thing, and it certainly has nothing to do with death,” Celestia glared bitterly at the physical embodiment of bitter finality.
"Ok, fine, you’re right,” Death replied, “look, your sister dropped me a line this morning. She said we might be running into each other. She really cares about you, you know. Your whole family does.”
"But I want to die! It's the final adventure."
"No, not really," Death shook his head, disordering his spiderweb mane, "Death is just kind of …" he gestured with his hoof, "not."
"My life is already kind of not."
"Look, Celly-baby, do you mind if I call you Celly-baby?" Death didn't give Celestia the option to protest, pulling the sovereign to her hooves and setting the two of them off walking together. He kept one wing draped over the Princess’ shoulders as if they were old friends. "That whole goth thing, it just isn't a good look for you. Your sister can pull it off, because she's, you know, dark palette, dark past, socially isolated for 1,000 years, black clothes, creature of the night. And Cadence, well for her it is a little endearing, you know? A holdover from being a teenager."
Celestia sighed in response, it was certainly true.
"But you, Celly-baby, you're like a mother figure. Big, white, always calling your subjects ‘my little ponies.’ You've got to get off this thing. You're only embarrassing yourself by playing kids games. What you need," Death said as he magically lifted a rolled up catalog from inside his ribcage, "is to get yourself an orphan."
Celestia looked at the catalog, labeled "Orphan Catalog (Fall)," and proudly advertising a five page feature on the benefits of adopting outside your species.
"I've got gently used Pegasi, Earth Ponies, Unicorns, Griffins, Zebras, Mules. I've even got a Minotaur on special offer. You ever thought about adopting a Minotaur, Celly-Baby? I've never got any complaints. They think manual labor and chores are challenges. You've never seen a kid so eager to take out the trash. If I weren’t always traveling, I’d adopt him myself.”
Death suddenly seemed to be emitting an aura of sleaze. Or maybe it was the dust and cobwebs drifting off his wing to coat her open wounds. Celestia would have cringed, if every bone necessary to do so weren’t already broken.
“I’ve got a ‘99 Pegasus. You can fly her right off the site where her house burned down. I’ll even throw in a 5-year warranty. What do you say, Celly-Baby? What have I got to do to get you into a maternal relationship, today?"
"I don't know," replied Celestia, looking flipping through the catalog.
"Well, Celly-baby, I don't want to rush you. Take this catalog and think about it. Here's a complimentary pen and notepad, in case you want to write down any interesting information. You just give me a call when you're ready."
"Have you got anything in a Scootaloo?"
"No, and I never will. That is not funny."
After her encounter with Death, but not death, Celestia walked along the banks of a river. There's always a river when somepony is trying to kill themselves. It’s like symbolism or something.
The Alicorn twitched slightly as crabs pinched at her stretched-out intestines. A family of wasps had taken up their home in her liver and their thrumming was agitating her like a night with a handle of Apple Family Special Bourbon.
She looked at the catalog Death had given her. Maybe he had a point.
No. Celestia rolled the pages into a tight bundle and thrust them down her throat. She jabbed all the way through her tonsils, although there was nothing for her gag reflex to do. The back of her throat, torn and battered, unleashed a fresh torrent of blood. The blood lubricated the catalog, but it also indicated her battered body was starting to heal. Soon it would be in perfect health and resume its eternal march into the nothingness of time without expiration.
The thought drove Celestia to push harder. She shoved the magazine onward, gagging and hacking around the rolled paper. Saliva foamed from her mouth, and she withdrew the object. Trails of saliva and vomit clung to it, drawing a small amount of interest from a passing stallion.
His interest withered, however, when she forced the magazine back and all the way down her throat. The force of the Alicorn’s magic ignited the paper. Smoke filled her remaining lung while her sensitive throat and nasal passages cooked. Phlegm sizzled away and the flesh beneath cracked, blackened and shriveled.
She also got several nasty paper cuts. Catalogs are dangerous.
With the magazine violating her like a severely misused snorkel, Celestia turned back to the river. The water slid along so peacefully. So welcoming.
The Princess of the Sun dived headfirst into the frigid embrace. The icy water extinguished the burning in her throat and filled her lung. Her strength was failing as she kicked deeper, through the current and in search of the muddy bottom. The water flowed into her body through her many open wounds and chilled every inch of her flesh.
Panic surged through her and she began to thrash her broken limbs against the current. Her fighting lasted only a moment before she disappeared completely.
Celestia awoke, coughing violently. Blood, water, mud and a species of crab once thought extinct were forced out of her mouth and across her chest. Her good eye opened, and she was face to face with a pair of green orbs.
Chrysalis withdrew her hooves from the sunken chest of her rival. She spat a few times and rubbed a chitinous hoof across her mouth before speaking. "Why do you do this to yourself, Celestia?"
The mutilated Alicorn looked around the chamber she had found herself in. The river had betrayed her. Instead of taking her to a watery grave, it had delivered her into the midst of the Changeling Hive.
"Kill me. I know you want to!" Celestia snarled.
"No, not really. For my species, killing ponies would be like ... chopping down an apple tree. Sure, I might not like the tree because it tried to attack me, banished me from the kingdom and then floated into my sanctuary, but ... trees don't really do any of that, do they?” The Queen of the Changelings shrugged. “Don't you understand? Your country needs you. The ponies around you need you. These selfish endeavors don't just hurt you, they affect the lives of millions."
"My life is not worth living."
"Is any life worth living?" Chrysalis lifted a holey hoof and gestured at her filthy surroundings. "You think I derive some kind of pleasure from this hive? From being surrounded by barely sentient drones? It bores me severely. You just have to do, and steal love from ponies. Maybe overthrow the occasional country. Sometimes I play Monopoly."
The blood-soaked, lacerated, chemically eviscerated, broken-legged, drowned, hypothermic, poisoned, crushed, and battered Princess blanched at the thought of Monopoly. Truly she was in the presence of a masochist. “But if there’s no purpose in it, why go on?”
“Your life cannot give itself purpose anymore than my heart can give itself love. You have to find that purpose in others, in the way they use you. It is this interaction with others which causes me to keep going. Life is an art piece, done for its own sake."
Celestia shook her head and staggered back to her hooves. Water leaked from her open wounds in lieu of blood. She had no idea how she was still capable of walking, except that her body must be getting used to these shenanigans.
"Which way is the door?" she croaked.
"Out the main hall, past the pulsating piles of putrescence, through the enormous sphincter, and make a left at the Larval Feed Processing Plant."
The Princess of the Sun followed the long way through darkness and into the light. Every few hundred feet, she had to stop her walk of shame to remove a Changeling who had become tangled in her innards.
Maybe it wasn't worth it, she thought. With her wing broken, it would be a long walk of shame all the way back to the Palace. Weeks spent explaining what had happened to her, reassuring ponies that she hadn't been assaulted. Maybe it was time to give up and live forever.
Or, maybe, Celestia thought as she saw the immensity of the Larval Feed Processing Plant, it was time to up her game.
She shoved past the Changeling guards toward the conveyor belt. A pair of hooks, normally used for carrying sacks of grain, hung from the ceiling. The barbed points jabbed into her eye sockets. Her good eye burst under the metal assault, popping and spreading yellow pus down her face.
The Princess of the Day rose from the ground, hauled by the hooks hanging in her head. The damage from bashing her head on the bannister before had weakened the left side of her skull, which quickly cracked under the hook’s iron pull.
The still-living Alicorn fell onto the conveyor belt and heard her horn clattering to the stone floor somewhere in the distant.
Paralyzed and blind, she lay still as her body fell into the blades of the shredder. Blasts of steam and slashing steel effortlessly separated the meat from her bones, and she was conscious of every moment of it. She felt herself splitting, the meat being reduced to gel and her bones being ground into powder.
Celestia’s bones and meat were united in the form of a thick slurry, which was then piped through small nozzles and into the waiting mouths of hundreds of changeling larva.
At last, was her final thought, at last I will be free.
Six Weeks Later:
Princess Luna yawned with exhaustion. She wasn’t sure how her sister had managed both the Sun and the Moon for a thousand years.
“I’ll take care of the stars, aunty, but I’m not sure if I can raise the Sun, yet,” she muttered under her breath. Lazy, little brat.
Her internal ranting was interrupted by the sight of Celestia. The white Alicorn staggered drunkenly, her entire body caked in thick yellow slime. Her body was intact, but bone-thin, and she possessed none of the poise that she was known for.
“Sister,” said Luna, “You look like shit.”
“Yes.”
