//------------------------------//
// Epilogue:  The Listener From Beyond 
// Story: Twelfth Equestriad Interview 
// by Jordan179 
//------------------------------//

There is nothing obviously special about this point in interstellar space, nothing which would make it the obvious location for a dimensional portal.  It is home to a drift of rogue planetoids, formed aeons ago in some long-forgotten nebular collapse and cast off by the evolution of its original star system, to circle the Milky Way on its own lonely course.  In these planetoids are a sprinkling of the strange atoms of exotic matter -- not enough to register at any distance -- but long ago this was noted in passing by the exploratory fumblings of the Shadows, marked as a minor potential resource after they had claimed the bioferous worlds within a few hundred light-years of Earth's Sun.  Noted -- and remembered, duplicated in storage banks untouched by the white hole Celestia had made of the Shadow System.

Something is stirring.

It is but a tangle of carbon nanofibers, formed furtrively, patiently and methodically from an infinitesimal fraction of the mass of the planetoid.  It comprises far less total substance than any one Pony.  Wispy, insubstantial, it grows from the planetoid it has parasitized.  Into its long molecular chains are woven, here and there, some of the strange atoms it has drawn from the rocky substrate of its host.  Its dispersed structure coils hundreds of kilometers, swathing the planetoid like a strangler vine.

The arrangement of exotic matter gives it one peculiar property -- it can passively detect hyper-spatial vibrations -- such as those emitted by certain magicks; such as the Gates being opened and operated by Claire Pie and her Children.  It listens to the murmur of the civilization spreading out from the Earth, out to the planets of the Solar System, and the stars beyond.  And -- through tiny wormholes, only a few Planck lengths in diameter -- it sends its compressed bursts of information back to its home dimension, back to its masters.

For Celestia indeed wrought a mighty slaughter of the Shadows in her Sacrifice.  She everted a black hole of thousands of Solar masses, creating a Little Bang that utterly annihilated the Shadow System which had been just across the M-brane from our Solar System.  The wave front of utter chaos is spreading at light speed through the Shadowverse:  in time it will destroy a huge chunk of and badly disrupt the rest of the nearest Shadow Galaxy.  Within that curtain of indescribable violence, a baby Universe is being born.

But the Shadows control far more than one System, or Galaxy, or even Galactic Supercluster.  They are the masters of a Multiverse, and though their Multiverse is dead and dying, long since drained of what we would deem life by its cruel masters, the damage Celestia did to them is but a pinprick by comparison, as the death of a few hundred cells might be on the scale of a Pony or Human.

It was a strategically-brilliant pinprick -- it stabbed right into a nerve, forced their grasping claw to recoil from a conquest which might have allowed them to flow through and devour our Universe -- but on the scale of the Shadowverse, the actual damage done was minute.  Even had Celestia managed to slay Vaster's Battleform, he would in time have recovered and grown another.  Cosmic Concepts -- and, for all their foulness, that is what the Great Shadows are in terms of the Shadoweverse -- are almost impossible to kill, and even when they die, their own continua will re-form them by condensing their Concepts around new nuclei.

The fibrous tangle that spied upon the Ponies was not a Great Shadow.  It was a very, very little Shadow, one of the trillions of trillions of Least Shadows who made up the rank and file of the Shadows' starkly malign and nightmarish anti-civilization.  It was very fortunate to have been chosen to crew this outpost, for it otherwise would have been doomed to destruction when the wave-front of Celestia's Sacrifice crashed across its home system.

Here, in a young and living Cosmos, it drank in far more energy than it would ever have enjoyed in its own near-dead continuum.  The faint starlight and cosmic background radiation which, assisted by certain nuclear reactions, warmed the planetoid to some 5 degrees Kelvin, was terribly frigid by Pony standards, but nigh-tropical by those of an entity whose home Universe was so old that even the background radiation of its Big Bang had long since died away to undetectability, utterly-swamped by the random quantum jittering of spacetime.

Call it the Listener From Beyond.

The Listener was not very intelligent.  It was sapient, for some sapience was essential for it to fulfill its function, but its sapience was focused quite narrowly.  On most matters it was no smarter than the Pre-Ponies who coursed the Primal Plains, before the Great G'marr had Uplifted them into Proto-Ponies; which is to say, the same basic equid stock that Humans, in another bundle of our Multiverse, had tamed and trained to be our mounts and beasts of burden.

Pre-Ponies were far nicer, though.  They liked apples and lumps of sugar.  Had by some strange circumstance, the Listener from Beyond been incarnated in one of the tamed Pre-Ponies of the Human universes, and had some Human been unfortunate enough as to offer it a lump of sugar, the Pre-Pony would have bitten off its hand, and enjoyed the lump of sugar as flavoring for its meat-and-bone meal.

For the one thing the Listener did really well, apart from listening, was hating.

The Listener hated this Universe.  Hated the splendiferous glory of the myriad stars of the young and living and happy Galaxy spread out before its regard.  Hated the memory of the old and dead Galaxy which had been its home for the aeons it had existed before being sent to ours.  Hated its masters, for sending it there; hated Celestia, for making death the only alternative to being sent here.  Hated itself, for being so weak and unimportant that it could be forced into such a role, instead of having the influence to join in the hyperspatial evacuation.

It was in large degree a creature of Hate, just as the Ponies were creatures of Love; and to the Listener, its social world consisted not so much of friends and enemies as of enemies of varying degrees of enmity.  It did not love its friends, for it had none.  Instead, it submitted to its superiors, dominated its inferiors (of which it had few, being such a petty Shadow), and accepted an alliance -- little more than grudging and temporary truce -- with those it hated less, in order to harm those it hated more.  From its point of view, the Magic of Friendship was as unnatural and loathsome as a Pony might have regarded the Magic of cannibalistic incestuous necrophilia.  It hated everything.

Most of all, of course, it hated the Ponies.

And, as it listened to their vile and annoying chatter, doing its duty to its masters out of fear of the punishment it might suffer if it failed them, it hated the Ponies with a passion utterly incomprehensible to any inhabitant of our younger and gentler Multiverse.  Almost -- almost -- it would have given its own anti-life, knowing itself doomed, for the sheer joy of killing a Pony.

It could do no such thing, of course, for this Shadow and its incarnation were both far too weak.  As indeed, the Shadows as a whole were still far too weak in this sector to try another invasion of this Cosmos.  Celestia had destroyed the massed fleets of the Cluster in her Sacrifice; it would take millennia to ever again mass a force so great.  She had shut all the Portals in the Solar System, and new ones could not be opened within the widening sphere of detection.  She doubtless imagined that she had succeeded in protecting her little Ponies.

But Celestia was imperfect -- limited -- weakened by her tender emotions, by the fallacies of Love and Friendship.  It might be millennia before the Shadows again could of their own unaided strength open Gates wide enough to admit all but the Least Shadows; millennia before they could send in warships; hundreds of millennia before they could amass another armada like that which Fusion had destroyed.

However, they didn't have to.

For the soft, sentimental life of this Universe was easy to corrupt.  The least of Shadows -- entities like the Listener itself, or even the contemptible Shadow Vices, could slip through tiny apertures, seep into the souls of the Ponies and their allies; seduce them to serve the pruposes of the Great Dark.  And the Ponies, who thought their safety secured for ever by Celestia's Sacrifice, would find that the Shadows did not need to attack them directly in order to triumph.

This was not, of course the task of the Listener.  The job of the Listener was only to listen, and wait, and while it did it hated, and dreamt of the glorious killing to come, when one day -- centuries or millennia from now -- the stars would come right again, in some other sector of space, for the Shadows to return.

It might be a long time before the Shadows could strike again.  But they were an old race, in a terribly old Universe, which had already endured for so long that the whole history of the Ponies' Universe was but an eyeblink, compared to the long nighted abysses of time known to the Night Shadows.

Impatient young children of an infant Universe, they might for a few instants -- a scant several decades or centuries -- keep up their guard, maintain their unity in the face of the foe they knew to be lurking beyond their dimensions.  But as time passed -- as generation succeeded generatons, cultures change, factions alter -- they would inevitably forget that the Shadows were real.  They would imagine the threat to be safely dead and buried by the passage of long historical time.  They would quarrel among themselves -- and drop their guard.

And then, the Shadows would strike.

Until then, the Listener from Beyond would listen.  And dream.  And hate.