Ponyville.
The total sum of Equestrian civilization. The tiny hamlet with a habit for producing nothing. Under the forlorn eaves of an empty cliff above, she sleeps; dreaming of better days, glad tidings, and the sounds of ponies who once were.
The town’s fires had long since cooled, and in their wake lay a desolate street that sliced the otherwise pristine halves of the town in twain. Along that path, the decorations had been laid out two-fold - extra strands of lights, more wreaths, and additional bits of greenery that had been levitated in to replace the scorched flora. The attempt to mask the destruction was in vain; a beautiful, narrow Band-Aid plastered over a terrifying wound. Thus, bogged down by the lameness of Tiny Tim, Ponyville ushered in the cold season with a grimace. The temperature was not without benefit - flowers and produce, left to wilt for weeks in the weak autumn sun, would require no further attention until the dawning of spring.
Twilight Sparkle wondered how the seasons had managed to change on their own, and if reality would survive to see the lilacs bloom again.
The only structure that still bore lights both within and without was the Palace of Friendship. Two-thirds of the building was as quiet as the rest of the town, for the mistress of the house required little space. Throughout its halls rang the echoes of rustling tinsel, the crackle of a warm hearth, and a single voice, raised in solemn song.
“Pony’s voices fill the night,
Hearth’s Warming Eve is here once again.
Happy hearts so full and bright,
Hearth’s Warming Eve is...here...once again…”
There was a pause, but the stubborn lyricist didn’t give up-
“Oh, what a sight,
Look at the light,
All for...tonight…
Hearth’s Warming Eve is…”
“...is here…”
A sharp shattering noise brought an abrupt end to the tune. Treading air above the great hall on her wings, Twilight stared down at a single ornamental star, which had escaped her grasp only to be ended upon the solid floor. She floated down to her hooves and cocked her head, regarding the mess thoughtfully.
“Spike?” The princess called. “Sorry, can you grab the dustpan?”
There was no response, but neither did the princess falter. She merely smiled and ensorcelled the requested equipment herself, cleaning and depositing the unproductive offal in a nearby wastebasket.
“Thank you Spike, I’m sorry to bug you with that. I know you’re having a good time tonight.”
With that, Twilight went about the business of reviewing her transformed abode. She walked slowly amongst the tall tree, the boxes wrapped in beautiful paper, and the empty barrels that ought to have contained top-quality cider. She turned her head, changing her address with each movement:
“Rarity, you really outdid yourself on the ribbons. I can always count on you too keep a sharp eye on the decor.”
“Fluttershy, how’s your bird chorus? Do you think they’ll be ready to lead the carols later?”
“Rainbow Dash, slow down! You’re indoors, you know!”
“Oh Pinkie Pie, where do you get all that party energy? What would we do without you!”
“Applejack, I have to say that the cider seems even smoother this year!”
“How are you feeling about everything this year, Starlight? You know you can always come to me if you need anything.”
“Derpy, please be careful with the star!”
Twilight scooped up a silver tray with two fine chalices upon it and grinned towards the main entrance.
“Princess Celestia! Princess Luna! Princess Cadance! I’m so glad you all could make it! I know you must be busy with your own celebrations, so it really means a lot to me for you to pop in.” Twilight waggled her eyebrows and nudged a bale of hay loosely shaped like a pony. “My brother talked you into this I bet, Cadance. He can’t get enough of seeing family over the holidays. You’re going to have to tie him down, I bet! Oh here, try the cider!”
Twilight respectively sat the chalices atop the hay bale, and another one that looked just like it, only broader. She then sat the tray aside and spun into the center of the room, her forelegs held aloft.
“Smell that pine, everypony! Hearth’s Warming Eve really is….”
Twilight opened her eyes.
“...is...it really is...here….”
Around her, the decorated hall was filled with several dozen makeshift sculptures of ponies in hay, of various heights and girths. They were crude, and in some instances required various accoutrements, such as scarves, hats, or boots, just to tell what they were supposed to be.
Twilight looked down, and dipped her hoof to bring up the familiar periwinkle scarf that was draped loosely about her neck. She stared at it, as though the world held nothing else of note.
“...y-you know Spike, I...made a joke the first time you gave this to me, but I really love it. And I love you, too. I…” she blinked hard, “...I thought I should tell you that now, you know...in case something happens and I don’t get the chance to say it in the future. Just in case, right?”
Twilight stood in silence for a full minute, her mind alive with roaring laughter and hearty conversation from all angles. Finally she turned on her heels and marched into the round room that held the palace’s treasure, the Cutie Map.
The room was as silent as the rest of the palace, but the table itself was alive with the glowing magic that fueled it. Unfurled in all its phantasmal glory, the Cutie Map was in a constant state of alertness. In the center, atop Ponyville, flashed the cutie mark of Twilight Sparkle.
But that was all.
Twilight approached the table with a ponderous gait. Ponyville was represented there as it had always been, but the rest of the map was nothing but a swirling morass of black nothingness. She had tried several times to fly to those places, only to find the sheet of nothing - the unmaking force she could neither affect nor penetrate - moving slowly and inevitably inward. The effect was gradual, but its course was obvious. Nothingness was slowly strangling the last remnants of Twilight Sparkle’s world to death.
Twilight stared at the mocking emergency flash of her personal symbol above her town. If the mark on her flank was still pulsing in time with it, she had long since stopped noticing.
She rumbled, and her hoof came down upon the edge of the table. “Stop summoning me! I tried, okay!? I’ve tried everything! I can’t fix it this time, so leave me alone! J-just...just let me have one last Hearth’s Warming in peace! Let me say goodbye to everypony the way they would have wanted!!”
“My, what an attitude,” a voice replied. “One might think you cross, Princess.”
A patch of blackness just north of Ponyville on the table quivered, and from it rose the long neck and head of Discord; emerging like a great serpent to strike at the helpless world below. His body followed, until he was floating above the table with a cup of tea in his grasp and a saucer in his lap, sitting as though upon a straight-backed chair. He opened his mouth, but Twilight cut him off and turned away.
“I don’t want to talk to you, Discord.”
Discord summoned one of the hay-ponies to his side and reached out a talon to scratch it under the chin. “Are you certain? It looks to me as though all work and no talk is making Twilight a dull girl. Or perhaps simply a mad one.” Discord popped off his head and brought it to the tea, in lieu of bringing the cup to his lips. “Not that I can’t relate. I suppose from my perspective, you’ve become quite normal indeed.”
Twilight returned to the great hall, knowing the everpresent draconequus would follow. “You think I’ve gone crazy. I was getting pretty used to everypony calling me that, when there were still ponies here. I’m not, you know. I know that they’re all gone.”
Discord appeared from inside the tree, floating out from it without disturbing a single delicate ornament. “Oh? Why the voodoo dolls then?”
Twilight had been looking at the tree, but she darted her eyes sharply away. “It’s an homage. A show of respect. I know that nothingness is coming. Everypony...everyone, deserves to be recognized and remembered. This is the least I can do.”
“Mm, I suppose that’s it then,” Discord shrugged. He finished the cup of tea, tossed it into the boughs somewhere over his shoulder, and took to moseying about the room at a casual float, examining the hay-ponies as though in a museum. “Oh, this one must be Princess Sunny. Look how tall you made her. A bit taller than she ought to be, though. Hero worship, I’m sure.”
Twilight said nothing.
“Oh come now!” Discord snorted. “That ought to have at least drawn a smart-aleck request for me to hush up, or perhaps a vehement denial of all the pictures of your mentor you have under your bed?”
Twilight didn’t even try to deny the allegation. “There are no pictures. She doesn’t exist anymore, remember?” To illustrate her point, the last princess waved her hoof at a collection of shelves. Thereupon were spread out myriad framed holiday photographs from various moments in Twilight’s past. Every single one depicted only her, from fillyhood on through the years.
Discord changed the subject. “Such trouble you went to. You’re a better sculptor than you think you are, even if the medium is dubious. Why, I can even recognize them all.” He vanished in and out of existence, appearing next to a different decoration each time in order to appreciate and name aloud the pony it depicted. When he appeared before a window, he glanced at the sky. “And it’s snowing, to boot. Makes one wonder just how you went about a miracle like that, what with nopony having ever existed to staff the factory.”
Twilight wasn’t interested in discussing her methods. She stood before the hearth, transfixed by the flickering flames as they reflected in her eyes. “...why didn’t you stop this?”
“Moi?” Discord laid a claw on his chest. “We’ve been through that, have we not? All I could do was set it in motion. It’s out of my claws, paws, and cloven hooves now.
Twilight didn’t move, save for the narrowing of her eyes. “I remember what you said. I just didn’t believe it. Everything I’ve tried for the past month - every incantation, every spell. I thought to myself, if this doesn’t work, if none of it works...Discord won’t really let things stay like this.”
Discord floated around Twilight’s head. He was dressed in a lab coat with wild gray hair, and he touched a stethoscope to the princess’s forehead. “She thingks gut, zis one, but she does not listen, no no! I haff told her ve can do nothing! Zat only she can!”
Twilight shrugged off the touch and stepped closer to the fire. “If you knew you’d be unable to stop this once it started, then why did you do it? I don’t care what that pony said to you, I don’t care what’s at stake - how could you live with this, knowing what it would do to all your friends? To Fluttershy?”
Discord appeared atop the hearth, where he lounged, dangling a cluster of grapes above his head. “We never finished the game, you know. You only got two wrong.”
Twilight didn’t look up. “I don’t want to play anymore.”
Discord rolled his eyes a full 360 degrees in his head. “And I suppose that’s intended to prompt me to ask why. Way to be passive aggressive, princess.” He sighed dramatically. “Alright, fine. Why?”
Twilight bypassed the long tables that were set out for a feast, and made her way towards the vaulted foyer. There she tightened her scarf and began the task of threading her hooves into a quartet of fuzzy moccasins. “Because the party is over. My friends are gone, and they’re never coming back. But you know what? I know how to save the world anyway.”
Discord, genuinely intrigued, flitted about in the air and said nothing, waiting for the princess to elaborate on her own.
“It’s so simple that I should have thought of it before,” Twilight punctuated her words with an unstable chuckle. “Don’t you see? We all need one another to exist! If we’re not here to live in the world, what point is there to the world at all? It’s like the tree falling in the forest. If nopony is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” She gestured to the landscape outside the window, “if nopody is here to live in the world, how can there even be a world to live in? The world knows that, and so it’s unmaking itself. But I can stop it.”
Discord folded his arms, cocked a brow, and waited for the rest.
“I can stop it by making friends!” Twilight announced.
A low rumble rolled to life in the pit of Discord’s stomach. By the time it had traveled up his throat, it was ready to be released as a hearty, high-pitched giggle. “Oh Twilight, I knew all of this would eventually drive you mad! It was only a matter of time.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yes yes, I’m sure you are,” Discord converted his paw and claw into the heads of the princesses of Sun and Moon, whom he entered into conversation with:
“My dear princess Sunny, I wonder if you could help me with something?”
“Why, whatever can I do for you, you handsome beast?” Head-Celestia replied.
“Tsk,” Discord smirked. “Not in front of other ponies, dear. Could you enlighten me on the first thing that’s required to make a friend?”
Head-Celestia scrunched her brow in thought. “Well, I would have to say kindness, understanding, the ability to compromise--”
“That’s not what he asked!” head-Luna scolded. “And while I must admit that he is indeed a handsome beast, he asked for one thing, which indubitably must be the first, most important thing, above all else!”
“And I suppose you are the best candidate to answer such a question, Miss Mare-in-the-Moon?” head-Celestia chided.
“No more or less than you might be, Miss Daymare,” head-Luna sniffed.
“I resemble that remark!”
“Ladies, ladies!” Discord chuckled smoothly, “Don’t argue. You both resemble your remarks equally!”
“Indeed!” Both head-princesses harumphed. They vanished, and Discord sighed deeply.
“I swear, finding good royal appendages these days is just so much trouble. They may have been useless to explain it themselves, but the point is this:” Discord dipped down, imposing his craning neck into Twilight’s field of vision. “The most important thing when making a friend is to have a pony in the first place to befriend. Not that you haven’t saved the world before by making friends, oh friendship princess, but how do you intend to do it when there are no ponies to do it with?”
Twilight’s smile was disturbingly merry, and stark contrast to the deep purple bags under her eyes. “I just told you. I’m going to make friends, of course!”
Discord found himself at a momentary loss. The pendulum of Twilight’s tenuous emotions swung again, and she touched his snout playfully with the tip of a hoof.
“Don’t you get it? I’ll make so many friends that the world won’t have any reason to not exist anymore! It’s too late for my old friends, but what difference will it make when I’m surrounded by new ones? Everything will totally go back to normal then!”
Discord pointed weakly at the great hall. “...isn’t that what you were already doing with the straw brigade back there?”
Twilight levitated a wool cap and settled it about her ears. “Psh, no. Like I said, those were just memorials.”
“Not the way you were talking to them they weren’t…” Discord muttered.
“Anyway!” Twilight sang, a manic tinge to her voice, “it’s time to go! Time to save the world again with the Magic of Friendship!” She moved towards the double doors, leaving a befuddled spirit of chaos in her wake. “Take a letter!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Take a letter, Spike!” Twilight shouted at the draconequus.
Discord actually jumped, and in a moment he was sporting a quill and parchment. Twilight began to recite, her voice strangely upbeat:
Dear Strange Pony,
I still don’t know who you are, nor what I ever did to you that made you want to destroy everypony in the world, even the ones I’ve personally never even met. But, I guess it’s time to congratulate you. You win. I’m all alone, and if you wanted me to suffer? I’m suffering. You have no idea how much I’m suffering. I’m suffering so hard that my suffering is suffering. Every single life that you plucked away from me is another pony in my head who begged me to save them, and I failed each and every one. I cried out my last tears a week ago, and I’m starting to forget who I even am, because there’s nopony here to give me an identity anymore. I do very much hope you got what you wanted.
The thing is, since I can’t fix whatever I did to you because I don’t know what it is, I’m afraid I have to take matters into my own hooves. So for each and every pony you took away, I’m going to make another. There will be so many ponies, so many friends, that I’m afraid you won’t be able to do anything more about it. I can make friends as quickly as you can unmake them, and I’m afraid the only way you can stop that is to unmake me. But then I won’t be suffering anymore because I won’t exist, so I guess you don’t win either way after all!
I guess what I’m trying to say is, in the politest terms...kiss my pretty purple pony butt.
Your Friend,
Twilight Sparkle
Discord was writing feverishly. “...pretty...purple...pony...does your butt prefer one ‘t’ or two at tea time?” He didn’t wait for an answer. When the document was complete, he rolled it up, tossed it in the air, and incinerated it in a puff of green fire. “There now, that should send it on its way to wherever, or perhaps simply immolate it. Somehow I doubt you care. Lovely parting sentiments by the way - I could very much get used to sass like that from you. So where are we headed, commandant?”
Twilight’s cunning had returned, even if it came on the cusp of a twitching vein in her forehead and a haunted look. “To the Everfree Forest. While some of it is still there.”
Discord brightened. “Finally - I thought you’d never ask! Perhaps there’s hope for you after all, my starbutted friend! Here, let me help you with that.”
Discord snapped the fingers of his paw, and in an instant, he and the last princess were gone.
* * * * *
Alicorn and draconequus emerged in a cavern. Despite the unforgiving rock faces in every direction the chamber was quite warm, such that Twilight didn’t miss the accessories she had been magicked right out of. A shimmering glow cast their features in stark relief, passing them by to alight the walls with a constant movement that made the entire place seem as though it were underwater.
Discord blew a trail of smoke from his thumb and index finger. “This is where you wanted to be, no?”
Twilight turned. Before her, lit from their depths like an olympic swimming pool, were the patiently rippling waters of the Mirror Pool. The air was still such that the waters ought to have been the same, but still they moved, as if calling to her. Her ears twitched; an imaginary melody tickling them. She smiled.
“Yes. This is the place.”
Discord was dressed as a butler. With a towel draped over one arm, he bowed low at the waist and gestured towards the water with an upturned palm. “Your Highness, be my guest.”
Twilight quirked a brow. “You’re not going to stop me?”
“Oh, far be it from me,” Discord mused. “It’s a clever solution to an impossible problem, even if you are damning thousands of copies of yourself to oblivion in the process. So by all means, go and make your friends.”
Twilight paused. The warm water was inches away. She hadn’t before considered the point Discord now brought to bear, but something deep inside her couldn’t stand another moment of being alone. Even standing still, she was constantly fleeing for her life from the ghosts of her failure, and everypony that had been wiped from the canvas as a result. If it lasted any longer, she truly would go mad - if she wasn’t already so.
They were all in her head. They would understand.
Twilight swallowed and approached the edge. There, staring up at her, was a pristine image of herself. The reflection was clear, but for the first time in weeks of solitude, Twilight noticed just how different it was from what she expected to see. Her shambled mane. her sunken cheeks. Her gaunt countenance, sullen colors, and even the lifelessness in her eyes.
“My, you’ve really let yourself go,” Discord commented from somewhere behind. “You’re just about out of food I bet, not that you’ve thought to eat anything in ages. I bet sleeping is just about impossible, too.”
“I...I…”
“Go on, Twilight,” Discord nudged. “Do it. Make friends. It’s the only way you can keep being the Princess of Friendship, after all.”
Twilight asked of herself, “...how did things end up like this?”
Discord’s voice oozed with sugary syrup. “Make friends, princess. It’s what you do.”
Twilight began to recite: “...where...where the brambles are thickest, there you will find...a pond beyond the most twisted of vines…”
Discord floated above and checked his wrist as though there were a watch there. “It’s about time this all came to a head. I suspect it will in, oh, about five...four...three…”
Twilight went on, extreme loneliness dispelling her reason. The shimmer of the water began to increase as the incantation took hold.
“...and into her own reflection s-she stared...y-yearning for one whose reflection she sh-shared...and solemnly sweared...not to be scared...at the prospect of being...doubly m--”
“STOP!”
The voice ripped through the cavern and echoed from every wall with such force, Twilight nearly toppled into the very waters from which she intended to extract her new self. The tone was shrill and familiar, and yet not - something was different about it, such that she both recognized it and did not all at once. She blinked, and when she opened her eyes, a gray fedora was floating in the water, masking the reflection of herself.
Twilight looked up - directly into the face of the trench-coated pony, who stood upon the opposite bank, its head exposed for all to see.
“...y-you…” Twilight choked. “I-it...but it...it can’t be you!!”