Everything was ash. Whether that be the black flakes that blew across Ponyville on the stagnant wind, or the solid compound that framed the ponies in their final moment of life. Everything was cold and empty.
Celestia stood atop a precipice, unwilling to descend the slope to check for survivors. It didn’t take long from her vantage point to realize that any search would be futile- any hope in vain. The words of her mother came back in a fragmented memory; remnants of an ancient time when she was still young. Innocent.
Immortality has a price.
That had been the last words she’d uttered before her departure. A cowardly act, and yet, thinking back on it now, a fulfilling one all the same. Celestia found herself searching for an end herself, now that her Kingdom and land had crumbled.
It began slowly, like creeping death or a patient viper, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. Corruption, greed… but most of all, disharmony. The process started two generations after Twilight Sparkle's ascension. Together, the three of them tried to curve the rising problems, return harmony. Yet each time they succeeded and moved a step forwards, they fell back two. It had been a losing struggle, one with only a single outcome. Failure.
But they were blind to it, so lost in the determination that the perpetual corrosion could be stopped, that they forgot to fear the end. That might have even been their downfall- the disillusionment derived from the fact that they could usher change.
Even that elusive horizon line of gold vibrancy was gone now for Celestia, replaced by a long-standing darkness that she had no will to raise. What was the point in basking a dead land in light? That seemed cruel, as if defiling what darkness should be keeping safe. The devastation would never see the light again.
I left the glory of the illumined Mind,
And traveled through a vastness dim and blind…
Taking a deep breath in and coughing on the dust of death that saturated the very air, Celestia began to descend from her perch above the land with a heavy heart and a dull mind. Mount Canterlot, its peak blasted open from the magnitude of the volcanic explosion, began to fade once more into the bruised clouds. Her sights were no longer on the horizon line, but on the darkened plain she would now have to traverse.
Mingling among the dead and damned, their bodies, contorted into positions of terror and uncertainty, stood stock still and frozen in place by the ash. The tableau portrayed the state of Equestria in its last moments; a laughable shell of what it once was. To the left, a whoring mare was frozen in an eternal trot to a destination that she would never reach. To the right, a stallion pointed an accusing hoof at his brother, whose expression was one of remorse and hate. In front, a filly was slouched against the wall with a stupefied look, surround by bottles of hard Equestrian Ale.
Maybe it was best, this exodus.
Mount Canterlot was the beginning and end of Equestria; its harbinger of life and its herald of death. From its first mighty waterfall the land was fertilized and her mother was born, to its last, sealing explosion that purged everything. There was no reset button, there was no second chance. This was now Equestria, and it was here to stay. The realization was like a knife wound in Celestia’s side. An affliction she was doomed to suffer from until her death- still a long, long way off, if she planned to allow nature to take its course.
Even as the last strands of hope were cut in those final centuries of chaos, she found solace and reconciliation in her sister and student. They were always there for her, and yet fate took even them in time. Not even an immortal’s death can be avoided if impaled through the heart by a dagger. Luna, while on a mission of peace two hundred years ago had been ambushed and killed, while Twilight, in Ponyville when the explosion occurred, had no chance of survival as the suffocating ash descended. The only thing she could control now with purpose was her own life. She could end it right here, right now, amidst her once faithful subjects. She would become one of them, as all were equal in death.
To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.
I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime…
She would not suffer a day longer, and with the devastated land as her witness, she would give up on what she once held so dearly to her heart. However she knew that death would not be received on this mortal plane; she needed to go to Tartarus and finish the act there. Her horn ignited- a silver beacon amidst the gray. The shadows of the land sprung to life, as if absorbing the few seconds of light before it would fade forever. Celestia’s horn shone brighter, casting the land in an ethereal glow before all at once disappearing. The surroundings fell into it’s resting state of darkness.
When the world came back into focus, Celestia was on the slimy gray shores of a distant plane. Beside her, a pool of black blood lapped at her hooves, staining the dove white fur there with impurity. She gazed dully at her surroundings, taking in the bleakness with diminished curiosity. Gray hills spanned in all directions, disappearing into a horizon line that muddled the boundaries between earth and sky; the sky was muggy, and the same shade as the ground.
Finding that there was not much to see, Celestia brought her gaze to the murky pool she’d appeared by. Her reflection-bony and gray-stared back with hollow eyes, previewing what she’d look like once the ritual was complete. The unbinding of immortality was a simple procedure with a titanic outcome. Once Celestia completed the act, she’d cease to exist. Turn to dust. Blow away. Be forgotten.
At this point, that fate was better than living on in a world she was guilty of ending. Yes, it was true. The explosion had been triggered by her. It was by her actions alone that everypony died; but to what end? She had been well aware of what needed to be done, and yet she didn’t want it to end. The period of disharmony had been a mere grain in comparison to the span of a provident history, and yet that was all it took. A single period of problems.
Again and again Celestia was reminded about how a single bad event could destroy so much good, so quickly. Similarly, how the explosion destroyed a race in a day. Or how her mother, a mare who lived for thousands upon thousands of years, ended her existence in a second.
As she was about to do now.
And yet I know my hoofprints’ track shall be
A pathway away from Immortality
Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes, tears of anger, remorse and frustration. Leaning down she shakily whispered a verse to the pool. From its depths, a stone mortar, tied to a serrated obsidian blade, rose to the surface. Retrieving the equipment, she dipped the mortar into the pool of brackish fluid and placed it beside her. The act, in all its finality, drained the princess mentally and she collapsed, allowing herself to cry freely. Her grief wracked sobs fell mute on the deaf mounds of gray.
Taking a deep breath to steel her nerves, Celestia brought the blade to her chest and made an incision, collecting her blood on the flat face of the dagger before dipping its slickened surface into the filled mortar. Mixing her offering into the potion, she took note of its change. All at once, the solution became clear. At the bottom of the mortar, her name, written in an ancient hieroglyph, appeared.
This was her way out. At long last, she could rest. A sad smile fell over her muzzle and she brushed away her tears. She was to take death like an Alicorn should: with pride, with acceptance, with honor.
She brought the cup to her lips and drank. Closing her eyes, she allowed herself to fall into the pool. All at once she felt it pulling, accepting her into its cold, eternal embrace.
That will usher on a new beginning.
The body of an immortal lay amidst the ashen landscape: her once vibrant mane still, her broad wings pulled close, and a sad expression carved into her muzzle. Her white coat stood in stark contrast to the grayness. She was not covered in ash. As a final act, Celestia had wanted to die with the hope to decompose and return what she had taken back to the earth; she wanted the assurance that for all she had done to hurt the world, her own body could still help. The one thing she still had control of.
Time went by. The ash settled. The warm wind returned.
The corpse of an immortal lay amid the ashen landscape: hair and teeth remaining on a polished skull. She’d decomposed and turned to soil. And from the remnants of a once great queen, a single sapling grew.
As the phoenix will always rise from ash,
Civilization will outlast.
Author's Note
Well, something Tragic to sate your appetites until I come out with my next big story.
Enjoy.
Big thanks to my amazing Editors, Tsunami Rain and Mikemeiers.
