Chapter Twenty-One: Everbriar
The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions
Chapter Twenty-One – Everbriar
Special thanks to Vimbert for Editing
Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art
Scootaloo decided to approach the Everbriar from its eastern border, trotting carefully at sea-level. Flying directly down through the ceiling of the thorny forest was hardly a novel idea, considering the many shadowed things with jaws that might be lurking just beneath the brambles. Trucking her equipment over lurching shoulders, Scootaloo navigated clusters of dead tree husks, petrified piles of scorched foliage, and segmented rows of sedimentary deposits. All that was robbed of life morphed into all that was devoid of it. The perpetual grayness gave way to a deep, earthen black-on-black that blinded Scootaloo in every haphazard blink.
The twilight haze from above bled through the miasma of thicker and thicker clustering thorns, illuminating the last silent hill of doughy snow before a slanted sea of solid granite stretched into the depths of infinitude. Scootaloo sauntered down a dried-up river bed, dipping into the raked flesh of the earth where the Cataclysm's blast waves had pulverized all dust away from the rocky bone of the world.
A roof of pale white roots formed a cylindrical tunnel that dug into the darkness. The last pony skittered like a lone insect down this natural half-pipe, until she suddenly realized they weren't natural roots at all, but instead she was actually navigating the discarded ribcage of a large serpentine corpse. At the crooked neck joint, she exited, glancing back to see where the long spine ended at a reptilian skull adorned with twin tufts of flaking facial hair—one half bright-orange and the other half a grayish purple.
“Heh. Guess Sweetie Belle was right after all, Apple Bloom,” the last pony briefly murmured to the air, and then steeled herself into silence, for that was the last time she could afford herself the luxury of speech. Just beyond the giant skeleton were the true shadows of Everfree, as well as the nightmarish plunge yet to come. Only scavengers who desperately wished to die would dare make a sound from henceforth.
Scootaloo sat down on her haunches and rummaged through her things. She produced a thick coat of leather armor, varnished solid black to match the darkest shadows imaginable. The armor was of such tanklike thickness that it would cover her wings entirely. It was a necessary precaution for the upcoming sojourn, as she had no reason to fly blindly through the looming abyss before her. Adorning this, she proceeded to sheathe her copper rifle and magazines, both of which had been camouflaged with black tarps to cover the glow of the runestone ammo. She equipped a black leather mask, accompanied by an oral mouthpiece custom-built to diffuse the noise of her breathing while also filtering invisible streams of dust from the bitterly cold air.
Aptly shrouded for the shadows ahead, Scootaloo then rummaged through the far side of her saddlebag. She afforded herself one last look at light—an emerald light—as she glanced at the runed jar of green flame resting in a safely padded pocket on her flank. Spike's breath lingered anxiously within, bubbling and frothing in anticipation for the first enchanted murmur of a dutiful time traveler. Scootaloo resealed the bag tightly, affording no escape of green light from its hidden housing. Indeed, there could be no light afforded for this descent, not even her usual yoke of lanterns.
Verily, she rummaged through another pocket and produced a pair of goggles that she hadn't used in a long time. The frames of the eyepiece were wide, clear, and contained a thin hollow between both lenses. The copper frames of each eyepiece were studded in four cardinal positions with tiny runestones. With practiced precision, the last pony reached into her saddle, retrieved a tiny leather pouch, opened it, and poured two liberal spurts of powdery white moondust into the twin hollows of the goggles. Once the lenses were aptly filled with lunar sediment, the scavenger snapped the copper frame shut and brought the crafted article to her lips.
“Y'lynwyn.”
There was a stifled purple haze. Scootaloo's bracelet of unicorn horns had also been covered with a thick leather band of black, obscuring their magical strobe. There was a very brief flash of vanilla light emanating from the twin hollows of the goggles, and the eyepiece vibrated with lunar enchantment as the last pony raised the thing to her brown skull and slid the article over her scarlet eyes.
Her vision fluctuated as she was suddenly assaulted with squirming trails of black-lines-on-white-snow. It had been several months to a year since she last used the moonvision spell; she could forgive herself for needing a few minutes to readjust. Every contour and shape of the Everbriar danced and billowed before her like obsidian hash marks against ivory bone. A dancing static of white miasma surged beyond the magical foreground, and as Scootaloo turned her gaze left and right she could make out black highlights that discerned obstructions from the rest of the lifeless world. It was all thanks to the runed refraction of energy bending through the enchanted powder that fluctuated between the runed lenses.
Finally, Scootaloo was ready. She felt the tiny, stabbing weight of a dragon tooth resting between the double layers of leather armor and her brown coat. A velvety soft kiss was tugging her forward into the deepening maw. With an iron breath, the flightless pegasus marched like a silent tank, piercing the blind world through binocular moonvision. The great Briar stretched before her like jagged black barbs against an all-white world, and with careful precision she descended into the sundered belly of the planet, hopping down one giant onyx vine after another.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo could see, and yet she couldn't see.
It was of little consequence; the Everfree Briar was not a jungle destined for mortal eyes. There were things—strange, skittering, mindless shapes of things—that lingered and throbbed there, basking in the deadblink of infinite shadows, parting in a mute swath on either side of the last pony's advancing hoofsteps. Scootaloo saw them as mere black scrapes against the white froth of her billowing moonvision. All she heard was the sound of her own breath being filtered from the air and deep into her own ears and her ears alone. In such a claustrophobic bubble, she shuffled zombily forward, downward, trespassing deeper into the thorn-infested womb of Equestria one shuddering heartbeat after another.
The trip was frighteningly vertical, with the weighted pegasus having to bound down one gnarled slope of a thick black vine, and then another, and then yet another. She was at a total loss to stretch forth her wings, or even her wits for that matter. The last pony kept a desperate mental note of every hop, every shuffle, every side-step that took her down the depths of that harrowing hollow in the ground, for she would have to eventually double-back with four times as much effort after getting what she came for.
What she came for: it spoke to her with gentle silken stabs of the yellow-strung dragon's tooth planted firmly against her bosom. With each brave drop she took, leaping down one thick stalk of thorns after another, Scootaloo felt the soft velvety tug all the stronger, like a quiet song lulling her through this nightmare. It had a wilting voice, soft and melodic against the cacophony of the last pony's hissing breaths that were constantly thundering through the leather mask.
One last descent, and the ground evened out, marking the bottom basin of where all the soil that had ever existed in Everfree once lingered before the Cataclysm evaporated it all. All that rooted there now were hellish stalks of iron-thick thorns, forming a forest of sword-sharp barbs that danced like coarse black swirls in the moonvision of Scootaloo's hobbling sojourn. Through this sea of white static, the last pony marched her leathered flanks bravely, glancing left and right to map out the pitch-black hazards that lie before her. Carefully, she navigated bowed brambles that threatened to decapitate her with low-hanging, errant thorns. She marked out finite fissures in the stone floor, hopping over them while briefly retching into her mask from the barest scents of sulfur and brimstone billowing up from the bleeding heart of Tartarus.
Beyond the hollow of her claustrophobic breaths, the silence was murderous, so that the great emptiness of that forsaken Briar coalesced into one endless, imaginary scream that dared the last pony to rip her mask off and submit to the utterly black sarcophagus that she had witlessly buried herself in. With a brave breath, Scootaloo once more felt the feather-light stabs of the dragon tooth tugging her forward. As the dream of a melodic voice ever lingered, she carried herself forward in an icy trot, and bravely challenged the inky depths of Everfree.
A solid hour into the grave voyage, and the black shadows in front of Scootaloo doubled, tripled, quadrupled. At first, it was merely a thickening of thorns, forming an acidic labyrinth of porous dips, twists, turns, and tunnels, all of which the last pony agilely traversed with barely a sweat. But then the shadows came alive, animated by something far paler and colder than life, and they moved even when she stood still. Under a chilling air of caution, Scootaloo slid towards the perimeter and scuffled her body silently against the wooden surface of several vines.
Her canter bled down to an oozing limp, barely advancing more than ten centimeters per minute as she cautiously eyed the skittering shadows through her goggles' moonvision, and those shadows were many. There were thin shapes, hollow shapes, breathless and bloodless shapes that rolled like paper leaves against the white blemish of the obscured Briar before suddenly producing hundreds of squirming fingers and shooting off into the penumbra of madness at the speed of light. Coiling intestinal shadows that resembled seas of snakes solidified into solid hulks too gargantuan to possibly be that soundless, and yet they lingered just beyond Scootaloo's masked snout, writhing upon forests of twitching spindle-legs, barreling about with the cold cadence of cobwebs against rust.
Another hour, and Scootaloo had to completely halt her advance. The last pony sat, hunched against a fork of crumbling vines, watching as a quivering puddle of black splotches limped and thrashed before her like dead fish atop a concrete surface. The reason she waited was because a thick cluster of hairy black filaments was presently circling the wounded creature, pattering on clawed toes as it narrowed its orbit and converged upon the center of her static moonvision. It thrusted itself upon the thrashing splotches with dagger-black mandibles, tearing the quivering shape to obsidian ribbons with a frigid silence that permeated the very fabric of nightmares.
Scootaloo stared at this scene for so long and with such concentration that the thing's exoskeleton nearly came into focus beyond the limits of moonvision, revealing ever so briefly a twitching mass of hundreds upon hundreds of souless black eyes, framed by curling feelers. The ash-less air grew thick with copper humidity, and soon the shadows faded into the white haze of the moonvision, but Scootaloo didn't move. She knew that the creature was still there, just as it knew that she was there. The last pony could feel it pulsing in an opposing rhythm to her claustrophobic breaths.
Scootaloo was barely halfway towards her goal; she couldn't let this deathly moment drive her into doing something fleeting, stupid, or impulsive. With coolness that could freeze fire to ice, she stealthily reached back to her saddlebag and pulled her tarp-covered rifle free. There was a slight shuffling from beyond; the black shapes resurfaced and were just as quickly reburied in the white moonvision. She pretended to be as indifferent to them as the nameless things were to her. Extending the brass barrel of the gun, she held the thing outward like a fifth limb, her lips close enough to make love to the concealed magazine of runestones as she waited, daring to outlast the darkness.
Her heart was beating heavily. Scootaloo ever so briefly remembered a foalish shade of herself that had cowered in the corner of a cave, weeping fractured lullabies under the marching cadence of Wasteland trolls. Here, bordering the skittering claws of many faceless abominations of Tartarus, an adult Scootaloo barely winced. The world was a lot less scary on the thicker end of a long life tempered by murder. She clung to her rifle and her rifle clung to her: brass twins suspended in a darkness framed with gnarled thorns.
She would wait them out. All she had to do was wait them out. Survival in the Wastelands only meant outlasting the patience of all things that drooled, until Death itself forgot how to salivate. She felt her heartbeat again; the dragon tooth was reassuring her, a suddenly soft companion, a devoted witness to this sightless spectacle.
In the darkest abyss of the universe, Scootaloo closed her eyes to the moonvision and relaxed, for once again the melodic song came to her upon gossamer strands of gentleness. She was pulled in two directions at once, several fathoms forward and two and a half decades back. As the many-eyed husks shuffled away into the sea of thorns beyond, the last pony took the time to split in half, her mind levitating briefly upon the witless gap that her memories allowed her to bask in.
“Are they... uhm...” The orange filly nervously sweated in the warm, spring air. “Are th-they gonna bite me?”
Fluttershy lightly giggled as she squatted down at a pond's rippling edge besides Scootaloo and nudged the tiny pegasus forward. “Do not worry. Even if they did, it would merely feel like a love pinch.”
“Y-yeah, okay.” The foal bit her lip and stretched both hooves out, cupping a sprinkling of bread crumbs. “Just warn me before they 'love pinch' my eyes out.”
A pair of pink-feathered cranes tip-toed through the water's edge, regarding Scootaloo with sideways, beady eyes. A tilting of their necks, a flutter of feathers, and the two birds stretched their beaks and lightly tap-tap-tapped the inner edges of the foal's forelimbs, snatching up the tender morsels of bread before shaking the food down their elongated esophaguses and fluttering off into the depths of the crystal blue lake.
“See?” Fluttershy smiled proudly and gathered more edibles from where her wicker basket was lying beside a line of fronds and cattails. “With enough patience and tenderness, you can wait any creature out. The soul of a pony is such that our calmness can outlast the impulsive instinct of nature. It's very beautiful, in a way. It's as if we were built solely for being the caretakers of all walks of life.”
“Is that so?” Scootaloo jolted slightly as a duck waddled up from out of nowhere and selfishly pecked the last of the crumbs from her grasp. It flew away over the waters like a skipping stone, sending ripples across a placid lake that was utterly blanketed with a mesmerizing bustle of activity, from swans to otters to tortoises to dragonflies. “I gotta admit, Fluttershy. You're like a friggin' magnet to all of these critters. You don't suppose you feed them too much, do you?”
“Mmm... Well...” The pony's yellow cheeks blushed slightly as she busied herself with treating a surfacing turtle to a leaf of crisp green lettuce. “I admit that I sometimes do give a little too generously to the local animals. But I cannot help it. They're so peaceful to look at, and the more of them that are around the more the air just has this... I can't explain it. It's like there's suddenly a delightful hum to the world. I've noticed this since the first day I landed on solid ground. There's a separate peace in the company of wildlife, something that you could never find in Cloudsdale, or in downtown Ponyville for that matter.”
“Yeah. Besides, the day I have a bird walk up and eat stuff out of my hooves at Sugarcube Corner is the day Mrs. and Mr. Cake call for the exterminator.” Scootaloo reached for more bread crumbs and blinked suddenly at a pair of squirrels crawling over bravely from a nearby tree trunk flanking the pond. With a smirk, she tossed the bits onto the ground before them and watched as they drew closer with shifty black eyes before desperately snatching the crumbs and scampering off with a victorious wave of their bushy tails. “Y'know, according to Sweetie Belle, there are some rodents on the far edges of Equestria who can actually talk. You ever heard of that?”
“Oh, the world is a vast and strange place, Scootaloo. There are many wonders to behold. And... er... Y-Yes, what to you and I may appear to be a normal member of wild fauna could very well have a distant cousin with enough intelligence to rival ponydom. Any animal is capable of amazing thinking skills. I bet it would surprise even you. Take, for example, Princess Celestia's prize pet, Philomena. On the surface, a phoenix appears as simple-minded as any partridge or songbird. But it is in fact a very noble and smart creature. It understands our language very well; ponies are just not advanced enough to understand the likes of its beautiful, fiery melodies.” The yellow pegasus ended her speech with a breathy chuckle.
“Phoenix... Phoenix... Phoenix...” Scootaloo thought aloud, her orange face scrunching under a wind-kissed mane of pink. “Remind me, is that the really scary thing with a chicken's head that”—she gulped—“turns innocent ponies to st-stone?”
“Oh, no, Scootaloo.” Fluttershy gently shook her head as she patted the munching turtle and turned to face the foal. “That's a cockatrice. They're not nearly as intelligent as phoenixes, and they're far more irascible.”
“Far more irasci—Huh?”
“Meaning that they get angry a lot more easily.” Fluttershy explained with a bashful smile. “Phoenixes may look scary, with their flaming wings and all, but they're very peaceful creatures, if not a teeeeny bit mischievous.” She produced another giggle, flanked with an embarrassed blush that Scootaloo could barely comprehend. “Still, it's not a good idea to... erm... anger a Phoenix.”
“Heh, I'll be sure never to do that,” Scootaloo said.
There was a sudden crackle in the air, like the peaceful earth was being split in two. The animals thinned in half, a good chunk of them flocking on flustered feathers towards the sky. Fluttershy too was spooked, briefly yelping with a girlish octave before calming down and murmuring towards the local wildlife: “It's okay! It's okay! No need to be frightened!” She nevertheless gulped and braved a more solid breath. “It's just thunder! The storm's still far away, my pretties!”
Scootaloo eyed the horizon, spotting the dark clouds in question as they thickened more and more meatily over the western edge of the Equestrian Valley. “Seriously—Today of all days? I thought the weather fliers had already scheduled a storm last week!”
“Winter Wrap-Up is long gone,” Fluttershy said as she tossed more crumbs onto the pond's surface for a gaggle of geese that had courageously returned to the sound of her solacing voice. “Now that summer's almost upon us, there's a very busy quota to fill if we're to buffer the coming heat. I'm not... erm... exactly an expert on climate control. Rainbow Dash tried explaining it to me one time. She mentioned that if storms aren't made early enough, then the moisture could build up into a cyclone by mid-July, and nopony wants that sort of a dreadful thing...”
“Heh—I wouldn't mind a little bit of excitement like that!”
Fluttershy gulped. “Scootaloo, have you ever been in a cyclone?”
“Not yet.” The orange filly yawned, eyeing the darkening horizon.
“Well, I have, and it's anything but a pleasurable experience! Equestria can be a scary place when weather goes unchecked.”
“But then you've got hurricane parties!”
“Erm... Hurricane parties?” Fluttershy's blue eyes blinked obtusely.
“Yeah!” Scootaloo beamed. “Apple Bloom told me all about them! Three years ago, this really nasty cyclone struck Ponyville—because Winter Wrap Up was finished late that spring or some crap, what-the-heck-ever—but the Apple Family made a whole thing with it, and when they waited the storm out in their cellar they played music and had caramel apples and told scary stories and stuff.”
“That sounds most delightful.” Fluttershy smiled bashfully. “But, Scootaloo, you hardly need a terrible storm to enjoy tranquil moments.”
“Why not?” Scootaloo hunched down over folded hooves and smirked devilishly at her reflection in the rippling water. “The world can be a really stiff and boring place sometimes. Fluttershy, have you ever wondered just how—I dunno—relaxing it'd be if things just shut down for once?”
“Shut down?”
“Y'know—Ponies going to their daily jobs, the same newspaper delivering the same boring stories, the delivery pegasi flying the same mundane routes; if all of that just stopped—like all of the sudden—well, I think that could be a very fun day. With nothing to do, you'd have everything to do. You feel me?”
“It almost sounds like you want the world to end, Scootaloo.”
“Pfft! Don't be silly, Fluttershy.” She smirked once more. “So much of what goes on in Ponyville is so... so boring.”
“I dunno.” Fluttershy tossed a light pink mane over her fidgeting features and muttered: “I don't really go into town too much. Well.. erm... except for when Rarity invites me over for tea or something delightful like that.” She said this with the barest hint of a smile.
“You of all ponies should know where I'm coming from, Fluttershy, even if I can't exactly spell it out.” Scootaloo gestured with a hoof. “You hang out with animals all the time. Animals don't have the same curse of boredom that ponies do, right? I mean, they just come and go as they please, eating out of your hoof when you let them, or stealing out of your basket when you don't.” That said, she winked pointedly over Fluttershy's shoulder.
“Hmmm?” The yellow pegasus did a double-take at her belongings and gasped breathlessly at a pair of squirrels who were presently dipping their greedy paws directly into her bag of bread crumbs. “Oh no no no no! Don't be rude—Please!” She made a start to close the bag; the rodents shrieked at her with a chorus of shrill barks and scampered angrily towards a distant oak tree. “Ohhhh—That's the third time those two have done that this week!”
Scootaloo blinked. “You memorize every squirrel?”
“Only the mean ones,” Fluttershy murmured, staring with sudden mastery towards the tree branches and forcing the two bushy-tailed scavengers to flee. “Rest assured... uhm... it's a short list. Eh heh heh... Hmm...”
“Maybe you and Sweetie Belle could fetch their distant cousins to talk some sense into them.”
“Then I would be out of a job, would I not?” Fluttershy braved a wink.
“Heaven forbid!” Scootaloo chuckled. Resting her snout against her forelimbs in a sudden sigh, she gazed up at the blistering noonday sky in question. Against the solidifying wall of dark distant thunderclouds there hovered a wispy pair of beds that contrasted sharply, like two pale rocks against a dull earth. White granite names flickered across Scootaloo's violet eyes and were gone in a decaying shadow, like yesterday's scent. She eventually murmured, “Fluttershy?”
“Mmm?” Fluttershy cooed, glancing over from where she was tying her bag of crumbs shut. “Yes, Scootaloo?”
“I... I was just curious,” Scootaloo muttered as she dug a hoof lethargically into the moist edge of the pond, kneading the horizon between the dry earth and the anchorless firmaments. “I know that you're the head groundskeeper and all, but... did you know anypony, specifically, who died in... uhm... who died in the Everclear Mine?”
Fluttershy immediately shook a somber head. “No, Scootaloo. Though I have met and talked with many ponies who have dealt with that tragedy: Caramel, Carrot Top, Pinkie Pie—”
There was a painful twitch to her orange ears; Scootaloo sat up with a sharp jolt. “Pinkie Pie lost somepony she knew to Everclear?!”
Fluttershy bit her lip pensively. “Erm... N-not exactly. But her hometown of Dredgemane has dealt with an ongoing tragedy that's rather similar. The same horrible substance that poisoned so many Ponyvillean miners—infernite—has been known to pollute the rock quarries and the farms where Pinkie's family is from. Even to this day, many orphaned foals struggle to survive, battling lung disease on account of the infernite that was horribly given to them by their parents before they too passed.”
“That...” Scootaloo gulped a lump down her throat, feeling guilty for reasons she struggled to explain to her own quivering mind. “That sounds awful, Fluttershy.”
“Yes. It is. Terribly awful.” Fluttershy nodded somberly. “Lately, Zecora has been making several trips to Dredgemane to see if Zebraharan medicine might produce a remedy. But many ponies believe that it's too late, even if most of those polluted mines have since been cleaned up. There's just so much damage. And Pinkie's mother...” The yellow pegasus found her blue eyes staring past the trailing edges of her last utterance. She wilted instantly.
Scootaloo narrowed her eyes at her. “What about Pinkie Pie's mommy?”
Fluttershy cleared her throat and not so stealthily changed the subject. “But there's no sign of infernite left in Everclear. All of that was scooped out years ago by teams of Canterlotlian unicorns specialized in the field of metallurgy.” She smiled placidly. “So, there's no chance of any groundskeeper you know getting infected anytime soon.” She winked at the end of that... as if it was necessary.
“I'm not worried about that, Fluttershy, I guess I'm just...” Scootaloo tongued the inside of her mouth, exhaled through thin lips, and gazed once more at the forlorn thunderclouds. “I'm just wondering what made ponies want to work in a deep dark place that was so dangerous to begin with.”
“Some did it for bits,” Fluttershy straightforwardly explained, nuzzling a train of ducklings as they passed by the pegasus and plopped into the rippling surface of the pond, skimming after their mother. “Others did it because they knew the work was dangerous, but they were skilled enough to prevent other less expert ponies from putting themselves into harm's way.”
“Do you suppose that... that...” Scootaloo shrugged, cleared her throat, and gazed decidedly away from Fluttershy. “...that some of them did it for their families?”
“Oh, most definitely.” Fluttershy smiled, her voice like a melodic song. “Ponies do not live on bits alone; they work to provide for the ones they love. You know that, Scootaloo.”
“But if ponies worked in the mines for the sake of their families, isn't that kind of selfish?”
“I don't think I understand, Scootaloo.”
“So many ponies at Everclear died because the stuff that they were working with was dangerous.” The foal stared with iron violets aimed the yellow pegasus' way. “And they knew it was dangerous. I'm not trying to be... uhm... insulting to the Monument I stumbled upon today, Fluttershy, but can't you see how a lot of those ponies—and their families—were kind of asking for what happened to them?”
“Life asks for much from all of us, Scootaloo,” Fluttershy responded with a swiftness that surprised the blinking foal. “But we ponies answer the call of our marks bravely, because to back away from what we're talented in would be an even greater insult to what we mean to our families... Erm...” She deflated with a suddenly rosy breath, but it was hardly a warm one. She glanced away with a pale sigh. “At least... uhm... that's what I have always believed: that our talents are all about honoring our... uhm... honoring our families. You're welcome to make your own judgments of course, Scootaloo...”
Scootaloo raised an eyebrow at Fluttershy's sudden digression. She glanced suddenly at the pegasus' flank. The three pink butterflies that made up the filly's cutie mark were as beautiful and striking as always, but they paled suddenly in an inexplicable shade. They appeared lonelier somehow; the yellow-coated spaces between them stretched towards infinity.
The foal wrenched her eyes back towards Fluttershy while braving a smile. “What you do here, Fluttershy—taking care of the animals and the cottage and the Memorial and all—is it something that you do because it means a lot to your family as well?”
Scootaloo's smile was not so easily reflected in Fluttershy's face, at least not immediately. The adult pegasus limply replied, “Uhm... I don't exactly see my family much, Scootaloo, but I do visit them from time to time in Cloudsdale, when the schedule permits.” After a deep and tranquil breath, Fluttershy basked in the moist air as the sound of fur and feathers flapped breezily around the two of them. “On any given day, the animals are my family. What I do honors them. I think that's the way it should be for all ponies; in some way or another we are all working to impress Mother Nature.”
“Heh... I can't say I've made her happy,” Scootaloo groaned. “I track dirt across Mother Nature all the time with my scooter.”
“Oh, do not feel bad for something so trivial.” Fluttershy gracefully nuzzled Scootaloo's pink mane. “You should be happy... and proud, Scootaloo, that you have loving parents who entrust you with such a respectable degree of freedom.”
Scootaloo wanted to smile, inhaling the warmth of Fluttershy's gentle contact, but for the life of her, she couldn't, not on the crest of those last few words. Still, a melodic tone in the yellow pegasus' voice lifted a dead weight from the orange foal's stomach, so that she levitated off the precipice of sadness, enriched by a hope that lingered beyond a curtain of memories that was once just as soothing as the filly's silken voice.
When the next roll of thunder hit, it was Scootaloo's turn to gasp. Before she knew it, she was being pelted with hard wet daggers of rain from a suddenly overcast sky.
“Oh dear!” Fluttershy gasped. She hopped up onto frail limbs and gazed with twitching blue eyes towards the horizon. “I wasn't paying attention! The storm is happening already!” She squeaked through clenched teeth and flashed Scootaloo a sad gaze as the animals beyond them thinned out and flocked away towards dry cover. “I'm so, so terribly sorry, Scootaloo. How irresponsible of me! I should have been paying attention to the weather, but instead I was... I was...”
“Fluttershy, it's fine.” Scootaloo stood up straight, stretching her limbs lazily in spite of the thickening rain that was starting to suffocate them both. “I'm not a frickin' infant anymore!” She kicked her scooter up with an expert hoof and gripped its extended handles. “I know my way home. I won't get too drenched.” She put on a poker face. “I promise.”
“Perish the thought!” Fluttershy practically hissed, leering over Scootaloo with a sympathetic gaze. “The last thing I want to do while your parents are away is cause you to get a cold or—” She gasped. “Even worse! Pneumonia! You must wait out the storm with me! My cottage is just over the hillside.”
“Uhhhh... Eh heh heh.” Scootaloo sweated profusely under the cover of wet precipitation. She shuddered, her limbs instinctually melting, becoming ten thousand times weaker than Fluttershy's, or so she felt. “Fluttershy, I'm fine. If I get a little wet behind the ears, it's no big deal. There's no need to—”
“I do not only have a duty to the animals and the land, but to all living things.” Fluttershy picked up her wicker basket, saddled it over her flank, and gazed kindly at the foal as her melodic voice hummed: “As far as I am concerned, Scootaloo, you are my family too. Please let me give you shelter. Let me honor you and your parents.”
Scootaloo's eyes went concave, for she saw in Fluttershy's blue pupils a reflection that suddenly matched the yellow pegasus' expression, that of a sudden wilting, a mirrored tunnel of burning pinpricks, two lost twins to the pitifully soiled moment. It wasn't even the stare, and still Scootaloo knew she couldn't say “no,” especially when every concealed and starving centimeter of her shivering soul had begged for years to say “yes” to this golden invitation. For a gorgeously paradoxical moment, it was honor—and not strength—that urged her forward.
“But...” Scootaloo nevertheless murmured in a sudden wave of apprehension, her memories vexed with torn crusader capes and cockatrices. “You do remember the last time I stayed at your place, right?”
“That depends.” Fluttershy smiled with a bold hoofhold of the situation. “Do you?”
Scootaloo bit her lip. “Right. I promise not to break any blue tables this time.”
“Do you, now?” Fluttershy stifled a knowing giggle.
The orange foal raised a confused eyebrow at that.
“Okay, then.” Fluttershy's voice magically hummed with a bottled jolt of subtle exultation, as if she was an Alicorn daughter discovering her sibling for the first time ever. “Follow me; I know the way home.”
“Sure thing, Fluttershy.” Scootaloo followed the pink swish of the mare's tail on a glistening scooter as the rain chased them hungrily. “I'm sure you do...”
The last pony stumbled, lost in darkness, following the silk kisses of the dragon tooth as she navigated the white moonvision forward. In the deepest depths of the Everbriar, a solid web of thorned vines blanketed the white static ahead of her like a sheet of black foil. Here, the skittering shadows of unlife dissipated, so that she proceeded forward in a confident breath, crouching and threading her way through a thin cleft of barbed stalks.
She pierced a spacious vacuum on the other side, startled to experience a sudden break in the brambles. Her moonvision paled into snowy blankness, and for a space in time she shuffled herself on three hooves, one forelimb outstretched to feel for any sudden obstruction as she blindly limped forward. She felt the leathered layers of armor shifting on her shoulders as she lurched to the sound of her masked breaths. The air felt colder than cold, numbing her with the drip-drop of condensation off her holstered rifle's brass barrel.
The blindness of this furthest venture naturally worried her, and were it not for the increasingly fervent pulses of her dragon tooth, Scootaloo wouldn't have been risking this sojourn. Something about this open space in the Briar felt unnatural, as if it had been carved out of the thick forest of barbed vines by something with greater audacity than the meager black shapes that had skittered out of the range of her moonvision upon first arriving there. Still, the last pony knew that she had no intention of lingering in that remote hovel. As soon as she acquired what she had descended for, Scootaloo intended to gallop back the loathsome way which she came. The phantom image of the Harmony's toastily lit cabin suddenly throbbed with a heavenly intensity in the back of the lone scavenger's mind.
The dragon tooth was positively burning now, like a paradoxical string of silk-soft firecrackers licking up and down her sternum. Her heart fluttered faster and faster as she trudged along her velvety path, and suddenly a great black wave of matter was lurching before her upon the horizon of her goggles' moonvision. With a mute gasp, she glanced up through the bubble of claustrophobic breathing to finally grace the image of her target.
And that's when everything went utterly black, a black so damnably dark and pitiful that even death itself had to have been brighter. It was with a low, grumbling curse that the last pony realized the enchantment had dwindled from the runes in her goggles. Her moonvision had run out.
As horrible a situation as this was, Scootaloo had very easily planned for it. She wouldn't be alive after so many years of Wasteland trips if it wasn't for such veteran foresight.
With a calming breath, she knelt down onto the cold stone earth and reached blind hooves back to her saddlebag. She produced the leather pouch of moondust from its pocket and gently laid it on firm ground ahead of her. She then removed her leather breathing mask, shuddering as a wave of exhaled vapor wafted up to her nostrils in the frigid air. With steady hooves, she slid her goggles off, or so she mentally told herself; her naked eyes couldn't tell if she was unmasking or not. With expert practice, Scootaloo refilled the goggles with moondust, like a surgeon operating on an infant in the dark. All the while, the tooth against her chest pulsed and pulsed, liquidly tugging her soul towards an inexplicable wall lingering—unseen—ahead of her. Scootaloo knew that her target was just within a ghostly lunge, and all she needed was to find a way to see what was directly in front of her.
Finally, she finished refilling the goggles. Snapping the frames shut, she raised the article to her unmasked face, squeezed them firmly against her sockets, and daringly uttered her first vocalization since diving into the ravenous depths of that abysmal place.
“Y'lynwyn.”
The dead world exploded in white moonvision. Immediately, in the snow-billowing midst of it, there stretched a black stalk of jagged streaks, framed with what looked like angel wings. A mute shriek immediately escaped Scootaloo as the tooth pressed to her chest melted in a silken slosh of pain and comfort all at once, for stretched before her against a wall of granite—like a hollow crucifix—was the skeleton of a pegasus, strung up and suspended by hundreds upon hundreds of wire-thin thorns that wrapped in and about the spaces of the long dead pony's rib cage and vertebrae. Fluttershy's skull was tilted to the side, devoid of all of its pink threads, and the flaky wisps of feathery impressions haloed her as a pair of anorexic wings sharply flanked her propped remains. She resembled a soft butterfly preserved against a wall of impenetrable slade.
She wasn't alone either. Scootaloo gaped to see several other skeletons plastered to the solid black wall alongside Fluttershy: the brittle bodies of deers, songbirds, snakes, owls, and several other scrumptious things that used to fill the green depths of the Everfree Forest. Whatever strung these skeletons up wasn't a graceful creature. The wall was cracked and impacted in several places by frustrated craters, crunched in the shape of gigantic pawprints.
But what mesmerized Scootaloo the most was the skeletonous form that was positioned closest to Fluttershy's corpse. It was mounted on the wall remarkably near to the deceased pegasus, an act that seemed far too deliberate to be accidental.
There was no single word to describe the creature. A large skull with a slender snout—twice the size of Fluttershy's—dangled precariously from a cluster of thorns that had snapped halfway loose over the decaying decades. A pair of goat horns stretched out from the cranium of this teetering beast. Two large, cloven hooves extended from thick forelimbs, but directly below the torso the creature's body transformed into a severely segmented spine that ended in a vertical fin. Whatever this mammalian skeleton was, it had the lower half of a marine animal, more appropriately a gigantic river fish. What was more: surrounding the dangling body of this battered specimen was a charred imprint in the rock, and it looked decidedly like mana burns.
“What in blazes...?” Scootaloo bravely, stupidly muttered aloud in the frigid tomb of the Everbriar. She gulped and gazed sickly at the bizarre chimaera that stretched before her. “What was she doing when the Cataclysm hit? And with this freak of all things?”
Scootaloo hummed curiously to herself, but in truth she was delaying what came next. With a resettling melancholy, she gazed back up at the crucified shape of her former friend. She trotted up towards the blackness before her moonvision and stood up on her hind-quarters, bracing herself with forelimbs that clasped the hard granite on either side of Fluttershy's pinned figure.
“I can only hope it was peaceful.” She pretended to be talking to herself. “Just like your life was.”
She gulped. A part of her—something colored with the faint shades of Spike—believed that this moment needed a prolonged pause. However, she was still the same scavenger who unceremoniously fished Applejack's skull out of a run-down storm cellar; she attempted to take what she needed here with no less brevity. Twisting her left horseshoe counter-clockwise, Scootaloo extended a curved blade from the copper material and aimed it at the ancient thorns anchoring Fluttershy's cold spine to the wall.
“I'll find a place for you—just like Applejack. I promise—”
She was answered midway through her utterance by a sudden field of white, utterly blanketing her goggles' enchanted vision. All discernible shadows faded into the ivory miasma with a flash. Grunting, Scootaloo fumed to think that the enchantment of her runes had died out again. But this was somehow different; everything hadn't faded to black. The moonvision was simply betraying her, refusing to display the spatial distortions that she knew were obviously there with every lingering touch her hoof and blade made to Fluttershy's hapless skeleton.
In a desperate grumble, Scootaloo once more throated, “Y'lynwyn.” Nothing happened. “Y'lynwyn.” Again, nothing: the same pale malaise encompassed the entirety of her monochromatic vision. It was then that Scootaloo gave into baser instincts... and slid her goggles up from her eyes entirely.
The pain that burned into her scarlet optics was excruciating. For a moment there, she believed that she had literally been stabbed in the face by some randomly flying creature of the underworld. Scootaloo could only wish she was that lucky. The wheels turned in the last pony's head, and soon the black world bled into nightmarish focus. For the first time in several solid hours of exploring the Briar via moonvision, Scootaloo was being exposed to actual light. She briefly speculated that her saddlebag had fallen open and the jar of Spike's green flame had dripped out to overwhelm her enchanted goggles. But, as the pain in her eyes settled, Scootaloo finally managed to identify the color of the strange alien glow.
It wasn't green; it was blue.
This, in addition to a low bass rumble that suddenly vibrated the very foundation of that stony hovel, and Scootaloo was forced to turn icily around. From beyond the wall of porous brambles, the last pony was perplexed to be staring at starlight. She blinked... blinked again, but there indeed still lingered a blazing carpet of twinkling blue cosmos—only it wasn't a carpet; it was a coat.
It was fur, and out from this magically glowing flank of flesh there extended titanic claws over four meters in serrated length. Scootaloo's wincing scarlets followed the billowing limb up, up, up, up—until she found herself staring at a mammoth titan of a creature, shimmering blue from feral head to tail with living constellations, looming beyond the web of thick brambles that allowed the last pony enough space to see a thick, muscular skull with glistening twin fangs and a bristled blue forehead crowned with an eight-pointed sapphire star.
Scootaloo gulped, standing suddenly in the center of a starlit den, fully understanding exactly what it was that had mounted the stone wall with so many trophies of its prey... and cratering paw prints.
“Yeah, okay. I'm dead.”
In an ear-splitting roar, casting a thorned kaleidoscope of blue-and-black bands across the stony floor, the towering Ursa Major raised a muscular paw and smashed through the iron thick wall of brambles before charging the tiny pony on all fours. The basement of the world shook under a hail of razor sharp wooden scythes. The flightless pegasus gasped and stumbled across the rumbling rock floor, struggling to avoid the deadly projectiles—until she floundered helplessly into the path of the Ursa's stomping forelimbs. With a ravenous growl, the gigantic, starlit bear slammed both paws down at the ill-fated pony.
Grunting, Scootaloo barely flipped out of the way. The sheer impact of the gigantic beast's weight knocked her five meters through the air so that she landed through a dusty pile of bones and dried fecal matter in the corner of the lair. Coughing in a haze of filthy blue dust, she looked up in time to see a forest of glinting claws once more flinging her way. In a brave gasp, Scootaloo breathlessly leaped forward, bounded off the Ursa's hairy wrist, and dove past its monumental lunge. The blacker-than-black world rumbled once more as the beast's claws raked the dry earth. The creature lurched to keep up with the tiny equine shadow as Scootaloo galloped suicidally between its legs and then dodged a heavy swish of the monster's cedar-thick tail.
Scootaloo dove, tumbled, and slid until she collapsed into a crumpled heap against the wall beneath Fluttershy's skeleton. Panting, her goggles bent and cracked, she flashed a look at her old companion's remains, at the Ursa Major turning menacingly around, then back up at the angelic spread once more. “OhcrudOhcrudOhcrud—So sorry about this!” She leaped high, clasped all four hooves over Fluttershy's neck, and tugged at it with all her weight. “Nnnnnnnngh!”
The Ursa Major roared. Red-on-yellow eyes brimmed with hate, and the celestial beast charged thunderously.
“Hckkkt—Scrkkk!” Scootaloo hissed through sweat and pain as she pulled and pulled. The dead pegasus' spine started to bend and crack.
A cataclysmic thunder: the gigantic bear's serrated paw flew down at full force.
With a cry, Scootaloo jerked her torso back. “Ungh!” Fluttershy's skull gave way with a snap. Scootaloo fell to the lair's floor just in time; the Ursa Major's fist instantly pulverized Fluttershy's headless corpse to dust. The wall cracked with a thousand rivulets, shaking loose several dozen sets of pinned skeletons that rained down on Scootaloo's panting figure as she hooked the pegasus' skull under a sweating forelimb and limpingly scampered on three hooves towards the shuddering wall of thorns stretched wide ahead of her.
The roaring Ursa swiveled about and stomped after the last pony's pink tail hairs. A chorus of deathly percussions exploded nearer and nearer. Scootaloo was practically limping; she needed all four limbs. With a grunt, she flung Fluttershy's skull up and through a random space in the briars before galloping at full speed, leaping, and sliding herself under a tiny sliver of split thorns. The serrated wooden teeth knicked her brown coat as she stood up on the other side—
The briars exploded behind her. Scootaloo yelled, blinded in the cyclonic toss as she flew with a rain of wooden splinters and thorny shrapnel. A throbbing century later, she slammed into a stone outcropping and slid down to the dust-littered floor. Wincing, she tearfully flashed a panicked gaze upwards, helplessly looking for a sign of where Fluttershy's tossed skull landed amidst the blinding sea of briar bits and shards.
Her breath vapors lit up with a bright blue horror. Scootaloo gasped, glanced up, and pounced out of the way of a lunging paw. Another swing, then another: each furious throw of the Ursa's limbs formed huge craters in the dead womb of Everbriar beneath her. The titanic bear howled in frustration and dumbly belly-flopped, as if the whole bulk of its weight would be enough to finally squash the elusive equine.
Through sheer luck, the flightless pegasus slid beyond the crook of the glowing beast's upper armpit. The monster's collapsing weight flung her yet again across the black subterranean expanse, only this time she tumbled into something that knocked into her forehead with a silky kiss of powdery dust.
“Unnngh—” Scootaloo blinked—then gasped with psychotic euphoria. “Yes!” She grasped the miraculous skull of her old friend in two hooves and kissed its pale surface. “I love you!”
The crooked shadows of the deep place shifted as the Ursa lurched, slowly hoisting its hulking weight upwards. Scootaloo's twitching eyes spotted a direct path towards an ascending bridge of criss-crossing vines... and freedom, but there was one gigantic, dumb, blue thing in the way. Something snapped inside the frazzled survivor's synapses, and with dilated pupils she stood up, grinded her hooves, and clamped her teeth over the jawbone of Fluttershy's skull, holding it. “Nnnnnnngh—Aaaaaaughhh!” With a suicidal roar into the muffling bone, Scootaloo blitzed the rear-end of the lumbering titan.
The Ursa Major flinched in shock as it felt the desperate pegasus'shooves scamper up its tailbone, over its rump, across its spine, and finally kicking off the starry crown of its forehead with a gallant leap. Scootaloo propelled her body through the air and towards the bridge of thorns. She landed with a victorious, echoing clop and charged up the length of twisting vines.
No sooner had the last pony begun this precarious gallop than the Ursa Major was murderously pursuing with a rampage of flinging paws, reducing the iron-wrought length of the vines at Scootaloo's tail to sundered twigs. Scootaloo panted and hissed into her toothed grip of Fluttershy's skull, horrified and elated at the same time to have the blue aura lighting her desperate sprint the entire time.
The bloodthirsty Ursa Major illuminated the bowels of the Everbriar with sapphiric menace as it angrily chased the hapless equine. Scootaloo's adrenalized mind briefly scoffed at the death-blink of the situation; she was hardly anything that could fill the Ursa Major's stomach... nor was Fluttershy's meager flesh, so many years ago—when the lone cosmic bear had to have been no more than a mere cub. Why was this monster hiding in the darkest, most abandoned spot in all of Equestria? Why was it so angry?
Another thunderous impact shook Scootaloo out of her twenty-kilometer-per-hour pondering. With a muffled shriek, she flew forward upon the sheer propulsion of her thorny bridge having exploded from underneath her. She soared in the direction of the Ursa's last flung fist, until she suddenly slammed into a hanging fork of thorns that squeezed her dangling body in place from above.
Scootaloo gasped as she found herself helplessly spitting Fluttershy's skull out from her jaws. She watched as the remains of her friend coldly rattled to a stop across a plateau of slade-black stone beneath her. The last pony's limbs weightlessly flailed from where she dangled, helplessly pinned in between the two hanging thorns compressed into either side of her thick armor.
“Come on—Come on!!”
She tried spreading her wings to shake herself free from the saddlebag encompassing her, but her gear was tied too tightly about her brown-coated form. Suddenly, the ceiling of the Briar shook as the blue haze intensified brighter... brighter... brighter. Scootaloo panted, blinked, then in a sudden epiphany, she exhaled every bit of breath out from her lungs.
Her body deflated; her ribs shrank. She slid victoriously down from the squeezing thorns—and then the Ursa's jaws were upon her. The world turned hotly dark, and all four of Scootaloo's hooves splashed into a spongy puddle. She didn't even need to look; the last pony bounded forward, breathlessly leaping off of the Ursa Major's tongue a bare millisecond before the beast's teeth clamped down.
The concussive blast of the snapping jaws flung the pegasus forward like a missile. She ricocheted over the rocky plateau like a skipping stone across an obsidian lake. Her saddlebag tore open and her bruised face winced before a flash of emerald light. Gasping, she spotted the fragile glass jar of Spike's green flame rolling free towards the edge of the cliff. With a grunting lunge, she flung her body forward and clamped two front hooves over the runed container before it could plunge into the deep blackness below—
The Ursa's blue face surged immediately into view. With a spitting roar, the giant bear gave the stone cliff a massive uppercut. The plateau sundered in two, with the shattered floor beneath the pegasus upending so that she slid back, back, back towards a pitted hollow of gnarled thorns below. She tumbled and cascaded in reverse, gasping at the sight of a brittle white skull sliding several meters parallel to her and towards a deep and inescapable crevice.
With a hissing breath, Scootaloo kicked against a crumbling chunk of earth, cartwheeled over towards the skeleton in mid-slide, and juggled it along with the green glowing jar in two hooves as she reached the end of her glide, tumbled upside down, and ragdolled across a space of rocky floor.
“Mmmf!!”
The thorny roof to the claustrophobic hollow shook and shuddered above with each blue step of the menace beyond the encompassing vines. Scootaloo hugged the skull and jar to herself, flashing a panting glance every which way for an exit from her current prison of serrated barbs. The only way out was the exact way she rockily slid in, and suddenly occupying that deathly exit was the gaping maw of a murderously giant bear. Scootaloo had nowhere to go, nowhere to run, nowhere to flee... but backwards. Her scarlet eyes blinked at the only avenue of freedom available to her. She gulped, glancing forlornly at the precious skull that shook in her hooves with each thunderous paw-step.
The Ursa Major roared and lunged its cosmic neck through the crumbling frame of the hollow's opening. Starry arteries under its translucent skin twinkled with bloodthirsty constellations as it snapped its jaws further and further towards the cornered pegasus, closing the gasping centimeters with each toothed snarl.
Scootaloo's spine was pressed straight back into a wooden wall. With a brave growl summoned from deep within, the last pony shut her eyes, gripped the skull tight in two hooves, and viciously slammed it over her forehead. Fluttershy's bones dissolved to dust, blanketing the scavenger from snout to torso in white snow. Bathed in the reagent, Scootaloo juggled the jar up past the slicing swish-a-swish of the Ursa's drooling fangs, and she screamed into the runed cap as she simultaneously shouted down the bear's echoing throat:
“Y'hnyrr!”
The jar unsealed. The cap flew off like a bullet. Spike's emerald breath wafted over her in a wave of chronometric heat.
The Ursa Major's jaws flew shut over her.
Scootaloo shrieked—only to have the ashes of Fluttershy tightly lasso around her bruised and twitching figure. With a metaphysical tug, she was pulled backwards on gossamer strings, her hooves kicking away from the Ursa Major's chin as the creature's snarling face flew away at a million kilometers per second. The last pony's vision was overtaken by the billowing emerald tunnel she was being forcibly ferried down. Her eyes teared and flamed from scarlet to amber. Her pink stubble billowed blackly outward like a kite's tail as she twirled on the length of Fluttershy's ashes, her body spiraling down the dancing corridor between Ages. Instinctually, she flung her copper wings out and dragged friction through the suddenly blossoming air before landing in a smoking heap on a soft mound of grass besides a babbling brook... and a soft pegasus' familiar, tranquil cottage.
Silence.
Then there was a gasping voice, that of a startled foal just a few meters away from the soft crater Harmony had made.
Wincing, the time traveler tilted her head up from her smoking crater in the grassy yard. Harmony squinted weakly towards the sight of a petite, gray-coated unicorn blinking wide-eyed at her from across a tiny teaset replete with glistening pitchers, saucers, teacups, and various stuffed animals seated around a pink table.
Several seconds of silence fluttered between Harmony and the blonde, blinking foal, until the last pony hissed a dry chuckle, her smiling lips simmering with a few last trails of green smoke. “Mind if I h-have a s-sip, please...?”
The mark-less foal nod-nod-nodded, gulping and wordlessly passing a full pitcher of mint tea across the petite table in a pair of shaking hooves.
Harmony lurched over, embraced the utensil in a shuddering grasp, and drank for all of her life's worth. The tangy quaff that rolled down her throat was electrifying, and it shook away the horrific shadows of the Briar's bruises as Harmony squinted at the cottage in a glistening noonday Sun before exhaling with a mighty: “Hoboyyyyyy.” The last pony slapped the pitcher down onto the table, heaved for a few breathless seconds, and finally... finally stood up on all four hooves.
“Did you just fall from the sky, Miss—?” The foalish unicorn murmured in a strangely intelligent tone; she had to have been no older than four, maybe five winters, though she sounded practically twelve.
“'Harmony',” the time traveler obligatorily uttered. “And—Yeah, sure. I fell from the sky, kid.” She flexed her copper wings and muttered dizzily, “Where is she?”
“My name is 'Dinky'.” The filly matter-of-factly nodded her tiny stub of a gray horn. “I'm going to be a scientist when I grow up.”
“Uh huh. That's cute. Where is she?” Harmony resumed scanning the horizon with frustrated amber eyes.
“Are you looking for my baby-sitter?”
“I...” Harmony paused. The scent of pondwater flew phantom paths through her nostrils, giving her the sensation of kicking a scooter through an afternoon downpour. She glanced down at the foal as if she was regarding the kid's existence for the first time ever. “Yes. Where is your babysitter, Dinky?”
The unicorn child twirled about and pointed a petite hoof towards the cottage. “She's in there, talking to a stiff, mean, unhappy lady who just flew in from the Cloudsdale Animal Commission. I don't think you want to bother them.”
“Yeah, well, we'll see about that.”
“Did you know that the average pony eats about four live spiders in a lifetime of sleep?”
“Wow. That's amazing. Look, I gotta go... uhm... talk to your babysitter.” Harmony stumbled dazedly towards the front yard of the beautifully flowered cottage, traversing a babbling brook. She flippantly called back over her shoulder. “And I'm telling your mommy, by the way.”
“What for?” The foal calmly blinked.
“You really shouldn't be talking to strangers, kid.”
The gray foal shook her horned head. “I'm not scared.”
“You should be. It's a dangerous world.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I exist.” Harmony swallowed a brave lump down her throat as she made her way over a tiny bridge and slowly approached the golden doorstep of another long dead friend.
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Wow, why no comments ? Its such a big fic
The Royal Grand Biv was... But how is that...? Where did she get...?
GAAAAAAH!
I am terribly confused. Who is Harmony talking about when she says you in the hooded entries? A goddess? Epona? Entropa? Gultophine? And how is it that Blinkaphine is rainbow? Royal Grand Biv? Is she a fellow time traveler? No. The goddess that Harmony was speaking to? Who knows. But I really want to see a cure to that darned infernite poisoning. These last chapters of death, gloom, and doom, capable of bringing forth many a manly tear, could do with some achievement or success of some sort. Oh dear lord, look at the time. 7 am. I should get to sleep...
Given your general outlook on life, I bet you think this passage is incredibly cheesy, but it (and the scene it comes from) is really powerful and maybe my favorite bit in the story. I know you don't like her, but you've done a very good job characterizing Pinkie in this arc: you toss her into very dark situations and have her react in a way that doesn't seem out-of-character or willfully ignorant. She's ineffectual and often clueless, but cares and empathizes deeply with the people around her. Seriously, props: she's an easy character to mess up, and you didn't here.
Was the thing next to Fluttershy some sort of seapony? At first I thought it was Discord, but the body description didn't match and he never returned in this universe. I must figure out what that thing was!
"Oh, do not feel bad for something so trivial.” Fluttershy gracefully nuzzled Scootaloo's pink mane. “You should be happy... and proud, Scootaloo, that you have loving parents who entrust you with such a respectable degree of freedom.”
So out of character. 'Do not feel bad for something so trivial.' I can't imagine Fluttershy saying that. Ever. Even to her friends, her style of talking wouldn't be so fancy.
Okay, so we learned that the cataclysm, whatever it was, affected high-magic races. Ponies and dragons who have lots of natural magic were destroyed. Even Discord apparently? Although the body description of the thing next of Fluttershy doesn't match Discord. He only has one cloven hoof (he actually made a big deal about this in canon), one goat horn and one antler. It makes sense if it destroyed high-magic races and left things like talking squirrels, gryphons and diamond dogs more or less okay. However, why is the Ursa Major (possibly the same Ursa Minor that was brought to Ponyville?) unaffected? Given that it's made of stars I would have to assume that it is also a high-magic creature.
Also, how does the time travel work again? Scootaloo uses it to get out of being eaten by the Ursa Major, but I was under the impression that Scootaloo's real body was being left behind and only her mind was being sent back. Spike can physically go back in time and stay there, but that seems to be slightly different method of time travel. Scootaloo goes back in time and gets a nigh-invulnerable body several years younger than her actual body with a different coat and mane color than what pre-cataclysm Scootaloo should have.
Have some more stuff =)