//------------------------------//
// Lost 
// Story: Children of Darkness and Light 
// by Aquaman 
//------------------------------//

The colt in the hospital had been right. The exposed soil glowed, suffused with arcane energy, and Spike already knew that while the city might recover with time, repopulate, even renew itself as a living memorial to the final act of the world’s last great war, no building erected here would stand, and any streets laid upon this ground would crack apart and dissolve as weeds and bushes and trees with trunks like skyscrapers pushed through it from the saturated soil. 

This was what happened when alicorns fought — what had made a place called the Everfree Forest in the nation he’d once called home, and what would soon spawn an impenetrable pockmark of wild magic on the face of a rapidly industrializing planet. In its own way, it would be beautiful. But it wasn’t what he’d come here looking for.

He found it at the foot of a collapsed municipal office, visible even from a distance against the soot and ash caking the ground around it: a flower, pure white from stem to gossamer petals, not just glowing but glaring as bright as a guiding star. As he knelt next to it, Spike felt something within it reaching out, trailing over his scales and frill, nestling within his heart where he knew it would gladly stay if invited. For a moment, he thought about letting it in. For a moment, he imagined himself as something he wasn’t.

The flower had no formal name, and only a clawful of mortal creatures had ever known it to exist, let alone seen it. To the Guild’s knowledge, it had sprouted twice before in recorded history: within the ruined Castle of the Two Sisters a thousand years ago, and in Aris Bay less than six years prior. It came from something breaking that was meant to never bend — from the will of an alicorn failing, and the limitless font of magic within them briefly escaping containment. 

Celestia had used the first flower to raise Twilight Sparkle from studious unicorn to ageless royal paragon. Flurry Heart had used the second to create a weapon that could reduce a city and all its inhabitants to dust in a matter of moments. And this was the third, spawned by a mare who used to read to the little dragon she’d hatched until he fell asleep tucked underneath her foreleg and dreamed of great machines flying through cloudless skies, dismissed as borderline treasonous fantasy by Guildmasters who had forbidden Spike from even speaking of it aloud, let alone searching for it. 

Now he had found it. He’d known it existed, and he spoke to everyone who could give him any scrap of information about its location, and now he knelt before the universe’s solution to the mortal faults of immortal beings — a tiny, glowing, cosmically bestowed reset button.

With this, he’d have power enough to defeat the tyrant he’d lent a claw in raising, the psychopath who had murdered the greatest pony he’d ever known and denounced her as a Orlovian defector to millions of creatures celebrating the Alliance’s victory over the forces of evil. That had been his intention when his search began: to do what was truly right for every creature everywhere, or at least find someone capable of the same.

And then he’d spoken with creatures who’d seen what he hadn’t, learned what his sister and niece had done in the name of peace and prosperity, and seen himself in both of them: in Flurry’s polite savagery, and Twilight’s mix of well-meaning impotence and self-righteous fury at its consequences. They had both been good once, and thought they were fighting for the only correct cause. And in equal measure, absolute power had corrupted and cowed them, and Garnet had been right about the world built in their image that Spike now knelt within.

Maybe, with an alicorn’s power, he would be different. Or maybe one atrocity would beget another, and no living thing could be perfect, and no matter what he would still be a cog in a machine bigger than all the creatures serving as its components. He didn’t know. No creature could ever really know.

But he could give some creature — all creatures — the gift of never having to find out. For good or ill, he could ensure the path the future took would be something other than this.

Spike knelt next to the flower for a while, thinking his choice through from every angle, solidifying it in his mind. Once the sun had sunk completely below the horizon, he plucked the cog-and-lightning medallion off his collar, placed it gently at the flower’s base, and concentrated until the eternal flame in his belly rose into his throat and burst between his parted teeth.

The flower ignited the moment his fire touched it, but he kept blowing until even its farthest-reaching roots had been completely and utterly destroyed. He felt it die, heard it scream in a thousand voices that sounded like every creature he’d ever loved, and he shut his eyes against the tears beading within them until the sound was gone and the light had gone with it. When he opened them again, the world was dark, and he was alone.

There would be no more alicorns: none magically summoned by would-be saviors, and none born to the one who remained, rendered barren — so he’d heard — by what the little plant she’d taken so much from had taken in return from her. But someday, there would also be no more divinely appointed rulers, and no unassailable forces to commit acts of unspeakable evil in service of undefinable good. 

Empires of all kinds would persist, maybe for years, maybe for centuries upon despotic millennia — but now, inevitably, they would end. And when they did, it would be the task of mortal creatures to ensure the world they left behind was better than they’d found it. Spike would have to live with that. He was willing to give it a try. And in the meantime, he had a long way to travel before he was someplace he could consider safe.

Twilight Sparkle’s number-one assistant stood up, dusted himself off, and walked until he disappeared under the cover of night. All the world’s hope went with him.