• I •
They marched her out into the coliseum with her broken horn and clipped wings and the crowds of endless, nameless ponies, booing and jeering at her in her weakness. Two guards gripped her with steel clamps on poles tightened round the neck. They threw her to the ground a good way to the centre.
“Now you’ll know what it’s like, you stupid bitch.”
Why? Six mares dead in the frozen north, that’s why. Their ruined bodies were all that was recovered.
She gave the orders. Too much faith in her student made her blind. They couldn’t win.
Truly she had lost a lot, but more pain was to follow. Her council soon revealed themselves not the docile dogs she thought them to be. Six mares plus a guard unit were dead because of her, and her little ponies would not stand idly by.
On shaking limbs, she rose to her hooves.
“Oh, Celestia…”
That voice. She looked ahead to confirm. The black alicorn stared at her; malice thinly veiling despair. She looked about ready to die; just one thing keeping her going. She was skinny and bruised all over, with a broken horn just like hers. Most of the feathers were ripped out of her wings.
They had broken her. She knew what it was like back in the cell. The snarling, the beatings, the violation, the contempt. Putrefied food and dirty water. Bread spoiled with cut up, broken glass inside. They had truly hated them.
Luna had found refuge in her own hate. With her mind cowering inside, and her magic and strength spoiled, she was nothing but a rabid lunatic frothing at the mouth for any blood her masters would give her.
“Sis…te—” she could not finish.
She was crying from dilated eyes and resisting the urge to vomit up the remaining bile in her empty stomach.
“No words, Celestia. I’ll kill you and be queen. It’s destiny.”
The maniac charged her with the shrill scream of a banshee. Celestia could not move. The black horn stub pierced her chest. Her lung filled with blood before she coughed and collapsed to the ground.
Hooves broke bones and tore the skin from her cheek. She wanted to fight back and put her sister out of her misery, but she was too weak. She didn’t know how long they would keep torturing her in the cell. Her mind had made the decision die with valour, but her body refused.
A few more hoof strikes and she lost her sight and sense of feeling. And then it was over. Luna would die a week later, surrounded by enemies on a cold stone floor coated in her own viscera. For their sins against pony kind they would not be forgiven.
A thousand years of keeping the peace would be forgotten for one failure. For all the modesty and forgiveness in the world would not give way to one moral: Justice. They had crossed the line to the unjust and were in the eyes of the law, no longer real ponies.
And so, the spectators cheered at the bloodshed knowing they were in the right and it was ok. And those wicked mares couldn’t hurt them or their families anymore.
Until it was their turn.
• II •
A cold wind blew across the baking desert hill just once. Five wooden poles stood erect from the ground with five ponies tied to them with rope, forelegs broken so they could not support themselves properly.
From right to left: White coat with shorn head, chest heaving up and down with visible effort; head tilted down to the side with bruise over the eye. Rainbow mane covering face, hung down and dripping with vital sweat; little movement beyond occasional cough. Orange mare, head struggling to keep up, eyes full of desperation and hate at their target; resolve failing. Butterscotch pegasus; limp. Pink pony – the same as the others yet different – still with purpose; looking forward, summoning the will to speak.
Twilight sat on the ground in front of Pinkie looking up at her in her derelict state. The wing of her monarch outstretched over her body like a protective sheath. Celestia looked up with contempt and satisfaction at the burning wooden fortress behind them.
“Twilight… How could you?”
Her words just one more knife, but it hurt all the same. Twilight could not look on. Hey eyes, welling with tears, averted to the ground.
The pristine tips of Celestia’s wings nudged twilights face, bringing it back up to look the pony in the eye. She stuttered trying to force out an answer, but she could not. There would be no sorry.
It was no single decision that lead to this. There was a time when she could have stopped it, but it crept along so slowly she forgot it was moving. The first prompt from Celestia should have been sign enough: A recall to the palace to help her deal with tricky diplomatic issues. Only temporary of course. But it was extended. Then extended again. Then her friends’ visits were blocked. Celestia grew more needy by the day.
Then came the suspicion. Things brought up from her friends past. Inconsistencies. Lies. Words twisted against them with no one to speak in their favour. Divided they would fall.
They took Applejack first – the fighter – and locked her away. The rest fled, amassing what support they could against the ever maddening ruler. They begged Twilight to help – to see reason, but she would not. It was already too late.
The elements could have defeated her, but Applejack was beyond Twilight’s help already. They had no chance.
Others saw what was happening and offered to help the remaining elements. They were quicker than her, but not quick enough.
Celestia torched their fortress and hung their leaders out to bake under her sun. Applejack was reunited with her friends on the stake. Celestia looked down at Twilight.
“My faithful student. I am so proud of you.” Her eyes were the same motherly eyes she always had. There was no part of her to second guess herself, nor any part of Twilight. And from now until the end, the tyrant would be her only friend.
She could only pray what madness struck the alicorn would soon afflict her too and she would forget all about this.
• III •
It was dark in the cave with the heat of stagnancy and the stink of rotting meat. They had run out of food a long time ago and had already eaten Fluttershy to survive.
A tiny stream trickled water, that was mostly fresh, through the cave, but they could not leave because of the apocalypse.
The dead had risen to consume the living, and the screams of the damned permeated the earth, and the filth of corruption spread through the land, and the vile taint of plague had claimed the rivers, and the minions of hell had spilled forth to torture the survivors and drink their blood, and the earth itself had grown chitinous and unloving to the creatures that walked upon it.
But they were safe in the cave.
“So, how about a joke?”
“We’ve already heard them all Pinkie.”
“A mule walks into a pet shop and asks for some paint for his parrot—”
Flying up to her face: “Shut the fuck up Pinkie, we got sick of your jokes a week ago.”
“Afraid I’ll have to agree, darling.”
“And you! Still uptight when you’re waiting to die in a cave?! Ever herd of priorities?”
“Alright, I’m sorry.” Lies.
“Rainbow, calm down. We’ve been here a while and we’ll be here a while longer.”
“Hmph. Have I bitched about having nowhere to fly today?”
“I do believe so. You’ve been doing so every six hours since day one. Maybe you have something else to chat about and give us a distraction from the drear, hm?”
“You’re full of shit Rarity!”
“Moi? It is you who is full of themselves! You moan about the underground all day. And after what you did to Fluttershy. You think we were ok with that?”
Pinkie watched uneasily, trying to think of something to say. Applejack more coolly just sent an eye in their direction.
“Rainbow… I’m so sorry.”
Slam! Rainbow bucked her in the face. She stumbled for balance, but knew she couldn’t fight back. Rainbow stomped her head into the ground three times.
“Rainbow, you butcher. I should have killed you and kept Fluttershy alive.”
“Oh, don’t act like I’m not doing you a favour. We both know how this is going to go. You could have pulled me off with your magic at any time. You could have put me to sleep before it happened. You’re the strongest and we’re all at your mercy. What happens when it’s just me and you left? Now there’s a joke for Pinkie to tell!”
Rainbow walked over to claim a share of the spoils. Twilight looked over at the group. They were afraid of her. Even the cool Applejack could not cast a glance at her without looking awkwardly away afterwards. It wasn’t fair.
Twilight was hungry.
• IV •
She couldn’t take the biting and gnawing anymore. All she had left were her rats. The mean rats. Six of them. They had eaten the other animals.
Not the big ones of course. She had to take precautionary measures for those; decide which ones she could afford to feed and which would need to be put down.
However long ago (there were no longer days to measure time by) the sky filled with ash and blocked out the sun. The ash came in plumes from underground – she had seen them when it started; before the ash was too thick. It blackened the sky, then came down to the plants and spoiled the crops. The water was still ok if you filtered it first.
Scarcity in towns caused looting and murder. They would not survive the mistrust. What little they had quickly dissolved as it was taken. Any survivors would have taken what they had and left.
Only individuals or small cliques could survive.
Fluttershy lived out close to the Everfree Forest in a place that was not known well enough to be a target for looting attention. She had food for a while. She didn’t know what she would do when it ran out, but she would stay alive for now.
She had to do away with most of her animals, but she could not part with all of them. They had as much right to live as she did, so she kept as many of the small ones as she could: rats, guinea pigs, rabbits (including her pet angel), squirrels and hedgehogs; nothing carnivorous.
Food was tight and she had to ration it. It was less than any of them were happy with. Portions got less each day until the animals couldn’t take it. And the rats ate the guinea pigs and the rabbits and the squirrels and the hedgehogs one by one. They had nowhere to run to and Fluttershy was too weak from malnourishment to keep order.
They even ate her precious angel bunny, pulling him from her hooves and ripping him apart from his soft belly and facial features.
After that they began eating each other, starting with the weak, until one clique only remained.
There was no food left now. The rats kept biting her and they wouldn’t stop. Every few minutes they would be back and she was losing the strength to repel them.
She had begged them and pleaded with them and beseeched them and bartered with them and appeased them and cried to them and eventually asserted herself against them: far too late, they had already won.
Open hearts were not profitable in this world. They would be devoured, digested and built into more rows of teeth for the next of the cruel.
She gave up eventually and they dug into her from the side. The quivering did not bother them as they chewed at her innards. They shredded the red mass in an engorged frenzy. It took them days to eat it all, and once they were done, they ate each other until there was only one rat left.
The last rat turned on himself and ate at his paws until the blood drained out and he passed too.
There was no more movement in the cottage.
• V •
In the heart of the world on the edge of a ledge leaning over a crackling canyon of conflagrant stones and searing steam stood the mare: Twilight Sparkle; and for a reason she was there indeed. For it was quite literally the heart of the world: the place where the seams of molten rock met and moved about each other with the entropy of the planet, gifted by the heat of the sun. And she was there to stop it.
For whatever reason, what was once dormant within the earth was now very much conscious and without. It was alive, you see, and all very much connected. The system by cracks in the crust and the consciousness within the cloud of the mind.
Forms broke off and took shape and ransacked the planet: white hot, living stone and flame. Defences were holding well enough for now, but there was always more of them and only so many ponies, so they needed a plan, and a plan they had.
Twilight had analysed the magic of the marauders and found it all pointed quite clearly to one place. They had to get there, and that was a problem, but it would be overcome; Twilight knew it.
The route was dangerous and precise and with lack of light to see and air to breathe and searing heat and jagged rocks. She would have to go alone. Or even less as she could not trust herself.
She would reconfigure her mind: set it all up on auto-pilot. The magnetic fields and temperature differentials would be too hard to consciously compensate for. It was dangerous and extremely painful, but she had to do it. Neurons formatted and restructured like a hard disk allowed her to get through with her magic in a series of teleports and shield spells.
And she was there.
It was a suicide mission – that she’d always known. When the heart was frozen it would seal up the tectonic plates. The gaps she used to get down would be gone and she would be trapped down inside the earth.
On the edge of that ledge, she charged her magic and reached down into the pit.
It was warm.
Motherly.
It showed her friends and herself. Memories of trial and triumph and endless sunny days in Equestria. All of everything that gave her life worth. And it would be over either way.
She could freeze the core and die down inside the earth or go back and die with her friends. She considered the valour of a hero’s death. Her friends would be saved but not for her. For her it would be over.
She was sure of this before.
New neurons firing.
Was it doubt or enlightenment that plagued her now?
She couldn’t tell in her fear. Her mind was very persuasive.
Her friends were in her mind.
It was there her world existed.
She knew for certain – knew; she had to live to protect it. She couldn’t freeze the core and she couldn’t go back. She would die either way, but there was still hope.
The core! The core was warm – energy. She could live down here. On the magic of the earth. The oldest magic.
It was so much!
So warm!
It would last forever!
She leapt into the fire and her coat ignited and cauterised her skin as she screamed in surprise and denial and dread. It was truly horrible.
As the fire below swallowed Twilights body, so too did the fire above, swallow the next line of Equestria’s defences.
• VI •
After the night of the wedding the plans began for the hunt. The monster would pay and everypony would know that the world maintained order and the kingdom was safe.
An army was drafted (and their special weapon would come along too) to siege the badlands and destroy the remains of the changelings.
The changelings were quite hated – the propaganda spread between the ponies, who were without enemies for a long while – and their hate brought them together against their foes. They backed each other up: the military propaganda skewing the public mind to support the military and the public support urging the military to fight harder.
The changelings hated them back. The hatred of a cornered beast, whipped and bloodied and scarred and beaten and starved and mad – very mad. And in its madness it changed itself.
They grew new spines from under their chitin: protruding bone with gnarled tips and poison secretion glands; ill-matched limbs with sharp edged plates of bone – outsizing their heads – that could fell trees; voraciously dripping darts in mouths slung by atlatl tongue.
And like the beast of old that ruled the world before them, the ponies fought them back. In deserts they slew them and on plains they crushed them and through outcrops they hunted them and down canyons they threw them.
And they changed some more. They burrowed into the ground like trapdoor spiders with gaping jaws of jagged skeleton that bisected ponies any which way. They split snakes from their backs that grabbed and thrashed against rocks showing no mercy to wayward flesh. They used disease: bulbous sacks growing from front and back until they could hardly move; hurled into battle, bursting on their prey.
Yet still the ponies fought.
And they pushed them back to their home in the caves under the earth. The caves like the multi-faceted maw of a mountain worm, lined with mucus and sickly trappings. They went underground and tore through flesh and carapace until they reached the Queen.
Her form now a sickly bloated being spread across the chamber, unable to support its own weight, with an assortment of vile orifices like the scores on a suckling pig, opening and dripping with oils and juices in a final agony of the dead. From each hole spewed new life, new monsters up against them. The last acts of a mother to tribute her newborns to the god of war.
They took out their secret weapon: the elements of harmony. They sought peace restored, and so it would be.
The rainbows fired forth through the tunnels, capturing everything inside, then sent chromatic tendrils outside to gather anything alike and drag it down. Their final act: to seal the exits with an unbreakable barrier, trapping the monsters below forever.
In the caves, matted fur of many colours clung to the walls and toned muscle digested in the stomach of their prison. They were swarmed by the inflow of changelings from the elements.
They did however succeed in their quest. Peace was restored. That was… until the investigators and mages found a way to break into the prison.
After that all hell broke loose.
• VII •
The white overglow faded from Rainbow Dash’s eyes and she fell to the floor with a thud: one, two, three, four, five, six. Her friends were there with her.
Returning from her otherworldly magical coma took time. Pieces had to fall back into place one by one and acting as half a complete mare could be both confusing and dangerous. Needlessly she stirred; rising to her hooves on a reflex before reason took hold. To compose herself in front of her friends. She would need that. She had agenda’s and time was short.
Mind coming together she recalled what they were.
She was angry.
She started to act but remembered. She could not.
Weakness.
She didn’t have the upper hand and she had failed before.
Barter.
That was her chance as much as it pained her to admit, she could not win on her strength and she would have to try something else; something cowardly, but she was desperate. More than desperate even, she was desperate a while ago.
She could see again. It was a sight she had seen enough times before, and however impressive she had little time for it now.
It was the bastion. An egg shaped chamber carved into Canterlot Mountain with a cut off hardwood floor to stand on and exits to other rooms at six symmetrical points. The stone edge of the room was perfectly smooth and anything attached to it was made accordingly so it would not upset the acoustics. The bastion’s pride was the crystal in the centre, which was a glorious golden stone of light around which pricks of brightly burning dust flew in an aura. Other smaller stones formed tiers of rings around the edge of the room, giving off a dull red light as to not interfere with the centrepiece. At the lower levels of the egg, a detailed wall of crisscross wood with cloth in between stood in an attempt to make the place more homely to its inhabitants.
Her other friends were slower to rise than her. All except Twilight who was already on her hooves (and probably never left them) checking the readings on the focal stone with placid indifference. Now was not the best time, but she couldn’t bear to wait.
She approached Twilight showing her weakness. If anything the pity of a friend would help her, and though it pained her to manipulate her friend she could not stand the alternative and so she spoke.
“Twilight… that’s six times now.” Twilight looked over at her with an undecided expression half way between a knowing resignation and the most heartfelt of sorrow. “I can’t do it Twilight! I don’t see what you see! You look upon millions and condemn them to hell with a flick of your horn and you use me to do it and even though I’m just on the outskirts of it all it’s ripping me apart! I’m so scared!”
“Rainbow, I’m so sorry you have to be in on this. I’d take ten times the suffering if it would get you out of it, but all six of us have to be here.”
“No we don’t. We could leave. Just let it all end in the natural way.”
“I won’t let it happen. Even for your life I can’t justify that.”
“Yes you can. What we’re doing is horrible.”
“There are millions of ponies alive right now because of what we do. We have to keep going.”
“But we’ve caused so much more damage! Six times! The world died six times and each one was as real as this! They’re as real as us! Don’t you get it! Each time we could end up in their place just as easily as waking up again in this room! Doesn’t that shred your insides?!”
“And what if we don’t? What of ponies?” She left the question unexpanded on, just hanging in the air above Rainbow.
“Maybe it’s just time to let go.”
Twilight thought. Her upper eyelids drooped down and her eyes softened, but only slightly.
“No.”
“We have to protect them, Rainbow Dash.” Fluttershy spoke. She was tender with her words, knowing she was needed here. “They don’t know what goes on here every day. We have to do this for them so they can keep going.”
Rainbow had the most horribly flashback to number four. It made her want to vomit.
The world had been living on borrowed time for so long and its debt collectors were furious. Celestia’s rule marked a change in the way of the world. Nothing was constant. Things changed so quickly. Enemies sprang up and died off quickly. New life would replace the old with bloodshed rather than the rigors of age. Ponies would suffer, and that suffering would bring them closer to the end. To the goal. Not their goal, but a goal.
She knew all this because the glowing Celestia head told her when they got here. She was dead and they were to replace her. It was her will and testament delivered to them on the day of her death that they meet here.
Harmony.
Things were running smoothly and that upset the ones who ran them. Equestria was a spot of indigestion in the intestines of the god of entropy. A static world in a moving sea. And it was only so long before he would dislodge us and we would fall into the event horizon of chaos.
Celestia had been fighting this for over a thousand years. The pull started softly. She could repel it with magic, but it was difficult to track. She built this room to scry for chaos in the world, but it quickly became too much for her mind to bear. Little bits were slipping by and they were building up.
They hit a tipping point eventually. Took her sister from her. She supressed it, but it was clear things would need to change for Equestria to go on. So she repurposed the room.
The pull could not be fought directly. Sacrifices would need to be made. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction. That was the premise for the new design.
To propel our world away from death we would have to send in something else there with enough thrust to buy us some time.
It started off hard and only got harder. It was six days ago that Celestia finally broke. Her mind was destroyed under the pressure.
They could choose a fork, sometime in the last five years or so to begin. They would need a large application of magic to cause the split. Celestia had enough, and so did they if they used the elements together.
They had to go back make a change somewhere, then watch to make sure it didn’t repair itself and stop anything that tried. And for this they would be given time. Precious time. Their last escapade brought them twenty-nine hours. A good haul.
Pinkie Pie chimed in, trying to lighten the mood, though aware of its seriousness. “Don’t worry Dashie. You still have your friends. I can bake you a super-duper special cake so you’ll feel better.”
Rainbow did not want to think about food right now. “Pinkie… I can’t deal with this right now.”
Pinkie couldn’t bear to see Rainbow Dash suffer. “But… if you don’t have your friends… then you’ll be all alone… and if you’re all alone, you’ll just get sadder… and—”
“Pinkie. Listen—” She began to argue until number three hit her again. The image of Pinkie’s face smashed into the floor. She stuttered, stifling tears. She amended her statement. “You’re right. That would be great.”
“We’ve all had a stressful day. I could take you down to the royal spa to relax. I’ll make sure they treat you right.” Rarity was trying at diplomacy. She had been for the last few days; assuming a role she knew nothing about. It was mostly just annoying.
She saw her idea wasn’t going over well and retracted it. “Or… whatever you want. Just let me know.” She laughed awkwardly.
Rarity looked over at Applejack to see if she could get any support. Applejack had been depressed since we started. She was just sitting on the floor, not looking at us.
“How about it, Applejack.” She spoke with plastic excitement. “I’ll treat you out to anything you want. I know you must be getting bored just sitting around all day.”
Applejack stirred a little, but didn’t look over. She waited a few seconds, then spoke.
“’Tain’t right y’all.
“This ain’t a right life to be livin’.
“Real life’s one with four hooves on the ground. One where a pony’s responsible for herself. One where she can live by her strengths and make her own mistakes. We’re takin’ that away from ‘em. What else is there to live by?”
Rarity replied with no understanding. “Darling, I’m sure you can think of something. Just try come with me.”
Applejack did not reply again.
“Twilight, this is killing me. Please tell me you’ll at least talk about this with me.”
“Rainbow, I want to do everything I can to make this easier for you. I’ll listen to what you have to say.”
“Oh, thank you Twilight. Thank you!” She ran up and hugged Twilight. Twilight hugged back in a motherly way. “It’s just so stressful being on the edge of death every day. I’m learning things I never wanted to know and they’re changing me. Things about you. I see them and I’m so sorry but I look at you and I feel sick and I just can’t help it. And things about me I just can’t bear. I can’t even think without them getting in my head and telling me I’m a monster. Taking away my reasoning and turning it against me. Ponies weren’t meant to see this stuff Twilight. Celestia was practically a god and it killed her. What’s it gonna do to us? How can we live? Please help me!”
Twilight leaned into Rainbow closer and stroked her mane with a hoof. “Here’s what we’ll do Rainbow. Tomorrow we’ll take the whole day off and have a picnic. Get some fresh air and I’ll be there to talk about it with you as much as you want. We’ll work something out between us, I promise.
“We just have to take care of one more thing so we can clear our quota.”
Rainbow was paralysed, but quickly recovered. She kicked Twilight in the chest as hard as she could. “No. No, Please! Not again today!”
Twilight’s horn glowed and each of their eyes begun to white over as they crossed back into the magic field.
“I don’t want to know any more Twilight! I don’t… I—I…” She lost control of her voice. If she had looked up she would have seen Twilight crying.
Number seven began.
