Chapter Twenty-Four: Everkind
The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions
Chapter Twenty-Four – Everkind
Special thanks to Vimbert for Editing
Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art
“Uhm... Fluttershy?”
“Yes, Scootaloo?”
“How did the Everfree Forest get its name?”
“Oh. Ohhhhhh... Now there is a good question.”
The two pegasi—older and younger, yellow and orange—sat side by side on the green reading seat of Fluttershy's front room. Together, on folded hooves, they stared serenely out through the wide-open windows of the animal caretaker's cottage and watched as the wet-wet world sloshed and billowed under an endless curtain of afternoon rain. There was a blue haze to it all, as if Princess Celestia had decided to bounce her sunlight off a dozen giant mirrors before finally casting its lazy dimness over the thundering landscape. The dense green earth all around the quaint home squeaked and hissed with the energy of a billion leaves applauding to this righteous downpour.
“Is it such a good question that it's not worth answering?” Scootaloo smirked after several soft seconds had drifted by.
“Hmmm? Oh! My apologies, Scootaloo. I guess I was just distracted...”
“Nothing wrong with that, Fluttershy,” Scootaloo said with a smile. Behind the two of them, the cottage's fireplace crackled warmly, bathing their dry bodies in a happy heat as they stared leisurely out into the monsoon. “I know a lot of ponies really dig rainy weather. Sweetie Belle says it puts her to sleep sometimes. And Pinkie Pie likes to get her mane wet.”
“Pinkie Pie likes to get a lot of things wet,” Fluttershy said, blushed, then helplessly giggled at herself. Her flighty chorus was briefly joined by Scootaloo. Then the mare smiled and asked, “Are you a fan of rain, Scootaloo?”
A pair of violet eyes blinked. The flightless filly imagined several barn crossbeams rotting away while a drizzle of rainwater somehow always, always found its way down to Scootaloo's one and only blanket in the middle of yet another shivering night.
“My mom and dad are always telling me to stay out of the rain,” she murmured with knee-jerking instinct. “Leave it to older pegasi to be afraid of water. What's up with that?”
“I... uhm... I am slightly aquaphobic,” Fluttershy said and blushed into her pink locks. “Among other things...”
“I mean, it's not like my wings are gonna fall off because I just happened to splash into a puddle or two! Pffft!” Scootaloo raspberried and rolled to her side, playfully kicking at the air with orange hooves as she squirmed further into the plush reading seat. Scootaloo winked in Fluttershy's direction. “I heard about this theory that pegasi evolved from ponies that were made for living underwater. Could you imagine us with gills instead of wings?”
“I... uhm... I wouldn't know about that, Scootaloo.”
“You don't believe in seahorses?”
“I'm... I'm not sure that I would want to...”
“Heeheehee!” Scootaloo's grin was wide. “Sometimes you can be a real hoot, Fluttershy.”
“Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be—”
“That's a compliment, Fluttershy, yeesh!” The foal rolled her violet eyes. “I thought you grew up with Rainbow Dash!”
“Oh, but I did.”
“How come you can't recognize when somepony's playfully teasing you?”
“Because when I was your age, I was teased an awful lot. And—uhm—it was not a very pleasant thing.” The mare shrunk into herself, biting a lip.
Scootaloo blinked. She rolled upright and sat—slumped—on her hunches. She produced a guilty breath. “I'm sorry, Fluttershy. That's... That's really sad. I had no idea—”
“There is nothing sad about a life that has seen me come so far...” Fluttershy looked up, smiling sweetly. “...and that has given me so much to be grateful for. Such as your company, Scootaloo. I'm glad to have you here to talk to. If I could go back into my past, somehow, and change things from the way they were, it would affect what I do now, and furthermore what I enjoy. So don't be sorry, Scootaloo. Sad things only happen to make us stronger, and they carry a grace all of their own.”
“If you say so,” Scootaloo murmured, her tiny wings drooping slightly.
She gazed at the several leaves of a nearby bush glistening in the pelting rain. Moisture dripped off of two white roses, flickering to her like a pair of white names, white rocks, white spaces lost to her life. The rain suddenly had a low hum to it, like a bass violin that Scootaloo had heard on Granny Smith's record player one day while the pegasus was visiting Apple Bloom. There was something divine and powerful about melancholic strings in the hooves of an equine artist.
Scootaloo would never admit it to her fellow crusaders, but she had often daydreamed about having a record player of her own someday, so that she could listen to what her close friends could only call “boring and stiff” music. Sitting down and drowning in violin music was a stone's hurdle away from the likes of riding a scooter, zip-lining, or wrestling alligators, but there were times—gray shadowed, lonely times—when there was nothing else that Scootaloo wanted to do more. Even at age eight, the foal wondered if all things in nature simply wanted to stay put and release from time to time, much like the stationary raincloud enshrouding her and her melodic-voiced acquaintance before the window.
“Would you still like to know, Scootaloo?”
“Uhm...” The foal blinked, then glanced aside. “Huh?”
Fluttershy's face smiled like living platinum in the dancing kiss of the warm fireplace. “About how Everfree got its name—”
“Oh! Sure! Ahem...” The young pegasus smiled bashfully and gestured with a hoof. “Fire away!”
“Fire? Why would I-I want to fire someth—?”
“Flutterrrrrrshyyyyyyyy...”
“Oh. Eh-heh-heh-heh. Ahem. Everfree was named when pony explorers surveyed the land in advance of the Faustmare caravan that settled in Ponyville.”
“I know.” Harmony nodded her black mane.
Fluttershy blinked, creeping pensively through the densely shadowed forest that loomed hazily on either side of their sluggish trek. “You know?”
The copper pegasus smiled sweetly. “I've heard the story of Everfree's discovery before. I have to say, it was told to me remarkably well.”
“Oh. Then I can't presume to tell it any better.” Fluttershy's hooves dragged limply in the rich black soil.
Harmony chuckled. “On the contrary, I'm all ears.”
“But, Miss Harmony, I thought you said—”
“What matters most about this place is what it means to you, Miss Fluttershy. That will make itself obvious to me in the telling. And if I'm to collect all of my information for Her Highness Princess Celestia, then the 'how' is just as important as the 'what,' especially when it comes to the things you know about this place and all that it means to you.” She gazed aside and winked pleasantly at the mare. “So, please, tell me a story, Fluttershy.” She gulped slightly, but maintained professional airs. “I like hearing your voice.”
The caretaker's yellow coat blushed rosily from underneath. For whatever the time traveler's words were worth, they ushered a gentle current of energy into Fluttershy's spine, so that she strolled with an evidently firmer gait alongside the “Canterlotlian clerk” as the two ponies made their way into the sprawling heart of Everfree, on the lookout for an elusive Capricorn.
“Well, like I said previously, the land needed to be surveyed before Faustmare and her pioneers even set hoof here. After all, there could have been several unforeseen dangers to ponies, especially when the richest farmland was located so close to an unchecked cluster of forest...”
“...and in those days, nearly halfway through the Third Age, wildlife was not as capably stewarded as it is in the present,” Fluttershy explained, her wings twitching before the rain-swept window of her cottage. “Cloudsdale wasn't formed until about two hundred years ago. The closest place to find pegasi like you and me was in Stratopolis, and that was located over the Eastern Ocean, and not north of Stalliongrad like it is today. So you see, Scootaloo, the earth ponies were on their own when they founded Ponyville; they did not have the flight advantage to tame the skies as well as the land.”
“Well, didn't they have unicorns to at least cast protection spells?”
“Hmmm... That's just it. There weren't as many unicorns willing or able to live outside of major cities in that time period. You see a lot of that today, of course, but several hundred years ago was a different matter altogether. Aside from places like Canterlot and Whinniepeg, you'd be lucky if you could even find more than one unicorn out of a thousand random ponies! It's on account of the huge number of unicorns who... who died during the war with the Lunar Empire, you see...”
“Yeah. I think I remember Twilight Sparkle mentioning something about that.”
“Without unicorns and without pegasi, earth ponies couldn't use magic or flight to tame the landscape. They had to rely on sheer willpower and courage alone. That means that they had to plan ahead. So, long before Faustmare dared to bring her many traveling families into the center of the Great Equestrian Valley, she sent a brave band of ponies to investigate the land and determine what earth ponies could take advantage of and what they had to look out for. It were these courageous surveyors who came upon the forest just beyond this cottage here.”
“And then they named it Everfree, right?”
“Well, no, not at first,” Fluttershy murmured as she nervously inched her way down a series of steep steps made out of exposed tree roots.
Harmony had hopped down beneath her. Trotting a circle in the moist earth, the time traveler spun about and leaned up on her rear limbs to offer a strong hoof to the mare. “Well, they had to do it sometime, right? I mean, it's not like they took one step past the treeline and settled for 'Evermuddy.'”
“M-most certainly not.” The caretaker's yellow limbs wobbled, quivered, and slid. “At first, they didn't even dare trotting near the place. It's written that the untouched landscape of the Equestrian Valley was brimming with enough manticores, hydras, and timberwolves to put today's wildlife to shame—Eeeep!” Fluttershy completely missed a root and plummeted—
—straight into the last pony's grasp. Harmony awkwardly but professionally caught her. She gently lowered the twitching pegasus to the rich earth. “Y'know, you have wings.” She winked.
Fluttershy blushed deeply, fidgeting with her iron-tight, coiled appendages on either side of her. “You may have better luck convincing them that they're there.”
“Heheh...” Harmony motioned eagerly with her skull and led the duo's trot down a deep ravine bustling with shrubbery, butterflies, and various scampering amphibians. “So, the Faustmare surveyors ran into a lot of danger? Or were they smart enough to avoid it?”
“At first it didn't matter. Many of the creatures attacked their campsites while they were still several hundred meters from the treeline.”
“Yeesh! Talk about cranky history!”
“They sustained several injuries. Many ponies in the group wanted their chief explorer to write back to Faustmare and declare the land untameable. One writer in particular crafted a very popular note where he wrote that—let me see if I remember it... Oh! Ahem. He wrote, 'Though Her Highness' esteemed decree of Manifest Destiny is divine, there is very little chance that ponydom will ever be free from the forest's presence while in the bold act of colonizing the Equestrian Valley, for the landscape is perpetually malevolent at best.'”
“Or something to that extent...” Fluttershy added.
“Wow. Ponies wrote with a lot of flowery words back then.”
“It was a simpler time, Scootaloo. There weren't nearly as many distractions for the settlers as there are today. Literary eloquence was a matter of habit.”
“So that's how the forest got it's name? Cuz it was—uh—'Ever-Malevolent?'”
“Well, the truth is far more encouraging.”
“Oh really?”
“The Royal Court of Canterlot forwarded the letter to Faustmare herself,” Fluttershy explained. “She was... mmm... put off by her own ponies' fear and reticence, to say the least. In a potentially suicidal act, she herself traveled to the unsettled Equestrian Valley. She brought along her foal, a daughter, a brave act which has been poetically discussed in several books written since. Unfazed by the treacherous landscape ahead of her, Faustmare made sure that the camp was rebuilt from the animals' attack first-hoof. And then, along with a few of her most trusted pioneers, she marched into the depths of the Everfree Forest. She led the first expedition into that foreboding landscape. Under her courageous lead, the first earth ponies of Ponyville made careful written observations of everything they saw. Several hundred unknown species of animals were discovered in that week-long expedition alone. There were trees that nopony had ever seen before—rock formations and weather phenomena too. By the time Faustmare and her troupe had come back, she had gathered enough data to produce a book, which is famous to this day, named—”
“Lemme guess: Faustmare's Home for Imaginary Wildlife.”
“Heeheehee—No, Scootaloo. It was far more appropriately called A Pioneer Pony's Journal of the Ever Free Forest of Equestria. You see, Faustmare had found a way to turn around the rather negative words of her dismayed associate who had first written about the woes of the colonization to Canterlot. The point she made in her book was that the forest bordering the Equestrian Valley was innately special, for it was—and still is—a free landscape where wildlife runs unchecked and yet remains perpetually self-sufficient. The grass grows, the animals eat, the weather does as it pleases, and if any pony attempts to tame this landscape, he or she would ultimately be harming it instead of preserving all of the amazing things that dwelled within.”
“Sounds like Faustmare was a tree-hugger.”
“Miss Harmony!” Fluttershy flashed her a bothersome look as they strolled under a low ceiling of green canopies beside a glistening waterfall.
“Heheheh—I'm just saying.” The time traveler smirked. “She brings a kid no older than three winters to the edge of Equestrian civilization and she ends up writing a five hundred page book about grass? Sounds like earth ponies of that day and age were more than simple; they were friggin' bored.”
“Faustmare was an exceptional example of earth ponydom, and if it weren't for her courage, tenacity, and leadership, then Ponyville would never have come into existence, much less have survived for a single season! It was her genius and her genius alone that transcended fear and ignorance while revolutionizing the way ponies would forever admire and respect the wildlife in their backyards.”
“I like listening to you talk so favorably of this 'Faustmare,'” Harmony said with a knowing smirk as she bent a few branches out of the way for Fluttershy to pass through unharmed. “It fills your voice with a strength that's sorely lacking, if I may be so bold as to say, Miss Fluttershy.”
“Oh... uhm...” The pegasus bit her lip. “I only meant to defend Ponyville's founder and her legacy.”
“And there's no need to. I know what awesome things Faustmare did. I... uhh...” Harmony squinted slightly, then brightened with: “I read up on her right after I was assigned to this... uhm... this fact-finding visit.”
“Then why are you asking that I share everything that you already know?”
“Didn't I already tell you, Miss Fluttershy—?”
“Why do I feel like there's another reason for why you've asked me to talk during our search?”
“Well...” Harmony took a brave gulp and smiled her way. A few stray hairs escaped the mahogany cascade of her amber-streaked mane as she bravely uttered in a flippant voice: “All of this discussion has gotten you to forget the fact that we're about two kilometers deep into a forest full of crazy animals who would like nothing better than to eat us.”
“Eeep! OhdearOhdearOhdear!” Fluttershy instantly scrunched up against the last pony, shivering as if a million earthquakes were bubbling down the fault-lines of her buried face and clenched eyes. “I had no idea we were this far into Everfree! Eeek! That log—that log—it has a timberwolf's claw marks all over it! And that smell! We're being stalked by a cougar! I know it! I could smell that from across a room full of sk-skunks!”
“Actually, cougars smell muskier than that.”
“How could you possibly know that, Miss Harmony?”
“Well, I... uhm...” Harmony blinked into the green canopy. Her eyes fell upon the dangling webs of a copper spider, bouncing like lanternlight over a steamy broth of meaty soup. It took a dinosauric amount of will-power to resist the shamefully habitual growl of an Entropan stomach. “Let's just say that I'm well fed—er—read... I'm well-read in 'cougar.'”
“Ohhhhhh!” Fluttershy practically hung off of Harmony's flank like a tattered yellow cape. “It will take us too, too terribly long to make our way back now that we've come this far! Oh... whatever shall we do?!”
“Uhm... Since when were you named 'Wussyshy?'”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Miss Fluttershy...” Harmony smiled sweetly and knelt down on her haunches. She clasped the caretaker's trembling forelimbs with her own steady hooves and gazed into the mare's twitching blue eyes. “You were doing so well until you realized that you were doing so well. So what's to stop you from—y'know—doing so frickin' well?”
“But it's just that we're so deep into this forest and by the time we went back to the cottage—even if we turned around now—darkness will have fallen! Nopony wants to be in Everfree at night! It's suicide!”
“Wasn't it also suicide for Faustmare to march straight into this same dang forest hundreds of years ago with no prior knowledge of the place and—might I add—no wings, no magic, and certainly no talent for short book titles?”
“Erm...”
“Miss Fluttershy...” Harmony stifled a chuckle and made sure that her anchor got the full blast of a beaming grin. “Don't you get it? Your admiration for Faustmare and other pioneering ponies isn't just a vicarious thing, it's indicative of who you are. You are strong, you are knowledgeable, and you are gifted in all the right ways to do the sort of stuff you think you have to be scared of! Don't you see? When you put your mind to it, you're brave! Heck, you're braver than brave!”
“Mmmmm....” Fluttershy curled up against Harmony, gazing past her own pink tail-hairs and regarding the surrounding shadows with concave blue eyes. “But you're here! I wouldn't have gotten this far without you!”
“Feel free to shudder all you want from this, Miss Fluttershy, but—Bullcrap!”
Fluttershy demurely convulsed just as the time traveler had prophesied.
Harmony didn't pause for a single breath: “All I've done is tag along and listen to your awesome dictations. You've been doing all of the navigating and searching and... uhhh... Capricorning.”
“And we still haven't found it.”
“But we will, Miss Fluttershy! Have faith in the moment, like I do in you! You think I have a clue about how to find this giant cosmic question mark? Heck, no! For all I know about this Forest, we're practically lost!” She chuckled, tilted her head up, and gazed about the green landscape. With a blink, her brow furrowed. “Well, shoot, I think we are lost. Now... nngh... dang it, where did we...?”
“Mmmmmm! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Oh Miss Harmony, I am so sorry—”
“Pfft. Just a minor setback.”
“Minor...?”
“In a worst case scenario, I'll just fly us both out of here. That is the extent of my assistance here, ya see?” She patted Fluttershy's shoulder and smiled again. “Think of it this way, now we have no excuse but to come back with the Capricorn. We're in here so deep: what else is there to do but accomplish the task that the Cloudsdalian Commission Board Thingy has laid out for you?”
“But what if I panic?” Fluttershy gulped and quivered. “What if I just lift off, leave you, and fly all the way back to the cottage?”
Harmony stared at Fluttershy. She cast a bored glance at the pegasus' tight yellow wings. Then she stared at Fluttershy again, unblinking.
Fluttershy blushed deeply. “Right. Uhm... Let's go find the Capricorn, I suppose...” On trembling legs, she bravely shuffled forward. It was a fifty-centimeter-per-minute waddle, but it was enough to bring a brave smile back to the time traveler's face.
“Don't worry, Fluttershy. If you must know, I can and will protect us if need-be. But I really don't think I have to. You've sooooo got this, girl!”
“Your words of encouragement are as charming as they are... mmm... misguided.”
“Why are you so frickin' hard on yourself?!” Harmony exclaimed. “For crying out loud! All I wanna see you do is get your job done so that you can rightfully shove the fruit of your talents right into Corporal Rosefart's face!”
“Captain Redgale.”
“Whatever—Don't you want to show her off?” Harmony winked as she trotted slowly to keep within the caretaker's “courageous” gait. “That uptight basket of gray feathers treats you as if you're weak and helpless.”
“But I am weak and helpless.”
Harmony never wanted to choke and hug something more than she did right then. With a groaning breath, she traversed the palpitations of her Entropan heart and managed, “Miss Fluttershy, if you just let ponies treat you like crap—and I don't care if they're hired by Cloudsdale, Canterlot, or Her Majesty herself—then that's all you're ever going to get in life: crap! You owe it to yourself to have more faith in who and what you are, not to mention in all of the amazing things that you're obviously more than capable of!”
“I... uhm... I've always believed that it is never my place to owe... But rather to earn.”
“Same thing, isn't it?”
“N-not exactly, Miss Harmony. Like I've said, I am very weak and helpless.”
“Nnnngh...Miss Fluttershy—”
“Hear me out.”
It was a command, very rigid at that, almost like a certain elder pegasus' off-ruby glare. The last pony was instantly silenced by the suddenly rough edges of that voice as Fluttershy next spoke:
“I have my faults and my shortcomings. There is nothing I can do about them; it is an essentialist thing. But... uhm... who I am and what I do is a result of the fact that I have... I have tried so hard and so long to become something useful in spite of my weaknesses. And do believe me when I say that I have weaknesses, Miss Harmony. It's even a factual thing; you can look into the Cloudsdalian Medical Records if you have any doubts. I was foaled over a month earlier than I should have been. I grew from infancy with very brittle limbs. My wings took an extra year to stretch out, and even then I couldn't pass flight school at the same time as all my peers. On top of that, I'm very susceptible to the side effects of magical resonance and I have too many clinical phobias to even bother listing out loud. These are all very real, very true things that I know exist in my life. To deny them is to deny what I am and the long way I've ascended to become Ponyville's lead animal tamer.”
“And you should be proud that you've come that far.“
“That's just it, Miss Harmony. As far as I've come, I still have too many weaknesses. They are things that will never go away, even if I make enough accomplishments to put the legacy of Faustmare herself to shame. No matter what I do, or where I go, those weaknesses come back to haunt me. They're the reason why I can't get anywhere near an adult dragon, or why it's so hard to even think about buying a home in downtown Ponyville, or why my family never... n-never...”
It was after three successive cracking sounds of broken branches underneath her hooves that Harmony realized Fluttershy had ended in mid-speech on purpose. With a squinting expression, she gazed curiously back at her anchor of kindness. The pegasus' face was hung, a posture flanked by lingering sighs. Her hooves padded the earth steadily, shuffling bare inches away from tripping on her own silken mane. It was a practiced type of trotting that the caretaker had obviously mastered, a pitiable talent. Her platinum wings remained locked in porcelain imprisonment, an ironic yet delicate stranger to clouds.
All of the sudden, that deep and dangerous trek into Everfree didn't seem worth it, not even for an endangered Capricorn. Harmony felt the same as she imagined Fluttershy did—for all of her life, staring into a mirror and only seeing the flaws. It was such a natural conclusion to the wilted creature limping before her that the time traveler shuddered to think of how easily she could have come to believe it; she sank all the more at the thought that so many other ponies could and did.
Fluttershy was an angel, camped out on the edge of a demonic forest that threatened to lash out at her at anytime, simply for the carnivorous impulse of the bleeding moment. While Ponyville hustled and bustled a cantering dance away from the cottage in leisure habit, the villagers all had one softest-of-soft souls standing as the thankless bulwark between civilization and a tree-laced cluster of naturally clandestine madness. The same blatant stigmas that forged that horrible dichotomy had equally forced Fluttershy to make the same blasé conclusions about herself that an apathetic hovel of ponydom had flippantly and lazily stapled upon the hapless mare.
Harmony sighed. She was three-and-a-half months away from the most horrible Cataclysm that could ever transpire, and yet here—knee-deep in the unassumingly somber fountains of yesteryear—she was constantly discovering more and more tragedies that rocked her heart harder than she could ever remember the waves of fire and ash doing. Harmony briefly wished she could hug Fluttershy, just wrap her strong Entropan forelimbs around her soft shell forever, and yank her impossibly back to the blistering gray skies just to have her there, to smile with her, and to teach her that weakness is an animal of a different color that too can be tamed by a life dedicated to preserving all of the good things about ponydom, the very things that Fluttershy reveled in as much as she epitomized, though she apparently lacked the grace—or perhaps the permission—to tilt her head up from the ground that she had forever descended to and simply acknowledge it.
Still, the last pony knew better. If the Everfree Forest merely terrorized Fluttershy, then the likes of the Wasteland would utterly destroy her. Precious things lived in a precious world, and Fluttershy's caution sang with an ever-present wisdom that preserved her as much as it preserved her faults. Tragedies existed because happy things did, and Harmony suddenly felt too tired and too sick to continue beating her charm over the caretaker's skull like so many teasing bludgeons of innately caustic pony grit had done before the Entropan avatar even arrived there on green flame.
Searching for Fluttershy's spirit would have to be like searching for the Capricorn; it would take time, and time was the least of Harmony's weaknesses, while it was the only true one of Fluttershy's.
“Tell me more about Everfree, Miss Fluttershy,” she uttered with a meditative smile while trotting alongside the caretaker.
“Uhm...” It was Fluttershy's turn to raise a quizzical eyebrow. “What more is there for you to hear about?” She blinked, then nodded her face towards the grim foliage surrounding them. “Or to see?”
“How about 'to think?'” Harmony smirked . “It had to have been more than a history lesson that got you to live so close to this creepy place.”
“I... uh...” Fluttershy trembled one last time from the shadows, took a deep breath, and remarked, “I guess that the Everfree Forest... uhm... reflects a certain philosophy of mine.”
“Fluttershy's Philosophy?” Harmony grinned wide. “Now this I gotta hear.”
“Miss Harmony, wouldn't you rather deliver to the Princess the facts that I know about local plant life or how to keep parasprites from spreading beyond the tree-line or—?“
“We can talk about that sort of stuff after we find the Capricorn. Speak to me, Miss Fluttershy. You know you want to.”
“I do?”
“It's only because you sound so fond of the place,” young Scootaloo said before the window. “I mean—before I knew about Cockatrices, I thought it was just some ordinary forest. Now I understand why you think it's so friggin' scary.”
“Scary things have a nobility to them, Scootaloo. I know that must sound rather... uhm... silly, coming from a pony who is so often frightened...”
“I think you're one of the bravest ponies I know, Miss Fluttershy.”
“Heeheehee—Aren't you forgetting a certain weather flier?”
“Well... I did say one of the bravest.”
“Mmmhmmm.”
“Seriously, though, that one time you totally outstared that ugly Cockatrice was soooo cool!”
“I only did it to protect such precious things as you and your friends. But, really, the Everfree forest means more than just being a place full of scary things. It represents something that is inherent to life—that nature works cyclically. There's a reason why living things are self-sustaining, in Everfree as much as elsewhere. I believe that it's all because of a spirit, a spirit that exists solely to maintain that everything takes care of itself. In a way, you could say that there aren't really living things—plural. But, we are all the... the multiple parts of just one living thing. We all have a purpose, and it's to ultimately support each other, rather than compete with one another, though sometimes the way in which we support each other can... erm... can be interpreted as cruel... and even scary competition.”
“You really believe that?”
“Is it so strange that I do, Scootaloo? I assure you, there is a spirit of kindness that embodies all things that are.”
Through emerald glades cobwebbed with the shadows of ageless trees, the two pegasi marched in search of the Capricorn. Wingless, they climbed hills of mulch, navigated the uprooted intestines of ancient cedars, and pierced the mossy curtains of row after row of gnarled foliage. The labyrinthine bowels of Everfree quivered about them, as if the great green body of Equestrian nature would expel the two foreign objects at a moment's tremor.
The shadows of furred and leathery things stirred from the overhanging branches. Harmony was quick to spot them before a fleeting Fluttershy could, all the while ushering the caretaker forward and forward, keeping the mare's blue eyes locked on the grassy spaces within which an elusive cosmic creature could be—hopefully would be—but inevitably did not happen to be residing.
As the brisk forest stroll steamrolled into an interminable limp of lethargic proportions, Harmony resorted to far more drastic methods of surveillance. With Fluttershy's permission, she took to the air, spreading the distance between the two ponies by a tense twenty meters, thirty meters, forty; all the while she tested the lengths of her green-flaming anchor.
Wordlessly, Harmony hovered at the level of the ginormous tree canopy, peering her amber gaze for any sign—a cosmic silhouette or a flickering aura against the expansive green sea of the forest—that might point out the Capricorn to the last pony's elevated sight and render this search to a successful finish. She found it hard to concentrate, though, as the ever-gnawing fear of being whisked away on green tongues to a dark thorny world pierced her inner soul with the snarling fangs of a feral blue monstrosity.
The sky above—or what scant golden shred of it that could be seen through the living ceiling—melted from a gentle blue to an autumnal yellow as the day began its ritualistic slide into the cascading afternoon. It never ceased to surprise the time traveler how fast an actual Equestrian day went by. The rise and fall of Princess Celestia's orb, no doubt the most beautiful of beautiful things, was a disastrously short poem compared to the epic lengths of a gray Wasteland Dirge. Harmony wondered if there might come a time when she could anchor herself to a pony or to a point or to a moment in the past where she might simply lie down and allow the full length of a spinning day to wash majestically over her. However, the last pony had to remind herself that it was reverse-time that she and Spike had at their disposal, not everlasting-time.
Touching back down to the springy Everfree floor after a solid hour of elevated hovering, Harmony had to apologize to Fluttershy with a helpless shrug of twice-helpless shoulders. The time traveler had personally urged the caretaker to make this sojourn into the forest, and despite all of her emphatic assistance, she could not get Fluttershy any centimeter closer to finding the source of Captain Redgale's imperative. She wondered for a moment there if Fluttershy would have had any luck even if she had ventured into the forest on her own before Harmony's arrival. Somehow it didn't seem like this creature wanted to be found by anypony, even if an entire legion of warhorses had been sent to track the star-fallen Capricorn down.
For the next hour and a half of hiking, it hurt Harmony to look at Fluttershy. It hadn't taken long, but the bitter shame of somehow failing the pegasus had impaled Harmony's Entropan soul more than a million trolls could ever hope to achieve. Finally, when she did manage to give the Ponyvillean animal tamer a solid look, what she saw was an image that brought all of the gray ash of the future shooting out of her in a single breath.
Fluttershy could best be described as a dainty doll of a pony. A touch of melancholy hung off her face with the grace of wilting flower petals laid before a field of white stones. However, the speed at which she was suddenly and fluidly charging this stoic expression forward through the mist-laden froth of Everfree gave her the presence and the inertia of an iron battleship plowing its way through a soupy cloudbank. Somewhere in that silky platinum heart, wrapped placidly in a yellow coat, was the burning determination of adoration—like a mother's love—that drew Fluttershy to puncture the depths of Everfree in search for an unknown, mysterious creature as if it was the one and only thing chiseled into the insides of her lonely eyelids.
Harmony had—once or twice—imagined herself a courageous pony, as if she could somehow have brazenly imitated some prismatic shadow from her past. It occurred to her then, as it had occurred to a rain-watching orange foal several eons ago, that the one true hero of her childhood was not a mare that could shape the weather with her wings, but one that could selflessly console a trembling soul when the weather itself refused to bend.
In Harmony's adult lifetime, she had tackled hydras, outrun trolls, battled harpy pirates, and infiltrated crumbling ruins. Still, the last pony had never—in all of her years of angst and struggle—ever once taken the brunt of a merciless world's blow for another and far more naïve creature, nor had she ever ventured headlong into a life-threatening melee when her only weapon was the utterly absurd refusal to use weapons altogether.
With one single afternoon stride into the Everfree depths, Fluttershy had suddenly shown more courage than the last pony had exhibited in a lifetime of torture. Harmony's brain ached over this realization, until she realized that her heart wasn't aching, and she realized the difference between herself and Fluttershy. Harmony scavenged out of the sheer will to survive. Fluttershy marched into the gaping green maw of that forested landscape to look for a creature that she—or any other pony for that matter—barely had a common concept of. Fluttershy's pursuit was not a task of survival; it was a task of love. The last pony felt equally honored and shameful to be within the same breath as this peaceful anchor of anchors.
She clung to her, like a foalish shadow, and she held her smiles as she held her secrets, close to her Entropan chest, until the occasional moment when a certain melodic voice would spark the heart beneath her copper coat to beat. Such breaths suddenly made her feel far safer than any brass rifle or weighted runestone magazine ever could.
“Kindness is more than just a word, more than just an Element of Harmony. It's a gift that keeps on giving for lives that keep on living. When you do something kind for a pony, you're doing something good for another pony you may not even know about. It's because the first pony whom you've blessed is likely to be inspired by your generosity and be moved to do something kind or nice as well. In Everfree, in a forest where such amazing examples of life brush up with each other like an endless sea of nutritious roots, you can see how the natural things of this world are perfectly and infinitely connected. And what's so amazing is that this intricate labyrinth of interrelationship was not forced upon the environment by individual minds of logic, but rather it all happened because of the essential motivations of Mother Nature.”
“I was always taught that Princess Gultophine breathed life into the world that Elektra and Nebula had built.”
“Mmmm... A very divine truth that is, Scootaloo. But have you ever wondered why Gultophine was motivated to instill purpose and animation into the many things of this world?”
“Because her parents, Epona and Consus, made her do it?”
“Heeheehee—Kindness is eternal, Scootaloo. Of this, I am convinced. Kindness has forever been, will forever be, and very presently is the inspiration behind all things that are alive. The goal of all living things is to help each other; don't let a hoof-full of horrible monsters and other bad eggs in this life make you think otherwise. This world is a kind world; it wants to be. The only proof you need for this is the world that we live in: Equestria. Equestria is a result of the spirit of kindness having nearly achieved its one noble goal throughout the history of existence.”
“And what goal is that, Fluttershy?”
“Harmony.”
The shadows of the dying afternoon devoured the kaleidoscopic mosaic of Everfree leaves that had infrequently bathed the grassy floor over which the two ponies had been treading. A soft girlish gasp filled the echoing spaces between branches; Harmony realized that Fluttershy was yawning. When she gave the pegasus a concerned look, the “Canterlotlian Clerk” merely received a velvety soft smile as a response.
The last pony's mind limped over a distant mirage of sensations, of apple trees and daffodil alfredo and leather bodies collapsing in the moonlight. The time traveler briefly thought that she had actually mastered persistence when visiting Applejack, that she had become the epitome of patient hard work and strength rolled up into one Entropan sandwich. As the minutes of Everfree bled into hours, and she witnessed a once-trembling Fluttershy marching ceaselessly across the lengths of a Capricorn-less forest, she realized that there were still some creatures of ponydom that could put even the most superheroic feats to shame, for they were the very things that gave the world before the Wasteland its toasty joy and glow, the magical spark between painful breaths that made the briefest of lonesome dreams in the ashen clouds worth crying over afterward.
Harmony found that the role of “helper” that she had silver-tongued her way into becoming for the caretaker was as literal as it was necessary. When Fluttershy needed a boost up onto an earthen cleft in the forest floor, Harmony hoisted her spine to lift the trembling pony to her platform. When there was a muddied space of sloshing earth that needed traversing, Harmony was quick to carry the yelping mare over in a conjoined leap. Any and all malevolent shadows that briefly flanked the thin paths available to the two wandering souls: the last pony was quick to spot them with her scavenger's eyes and tactfully steer Fluttershy away from such dangers.
With each means of assistance, Fluttershy's blushes grew hotter and hotter in boiling humility. If the engineer inside Harmony could somehow string together a steam-operated meter for scaling Fluttershy's adorableness, the last pony had no doubt that the resulting explosion of such a device would render half of Equestria to ashes three months in advance. Being so close to such a dreamily beautiful soul should have made her sad, Harmony speculated, but the proximity of the mare's aura tamed the crumbling beast that was her countenance, so that she was forced to remember a certain platitude that was spoken to her in melodic breaths, that sadness was something that possessed a certain grace of its own. Harmony somehow couldn't feel the normally venomous fangs of desolation in lieu of that.
The green haze of the world died away, and there wafted through the canopy a deep redness that ushered an ever pervasive throng of crickets and several more unnameable choirs out of hiding. The impulsive trembling briefly returned to Fluttershy's shoulders, but Harmony was quick to console her with a nudge of her snout... and a smile that reflected twice in the caretaker's pearlescent gaze.
The forest may not yet have yielded a Capricorn, but as Harmony served an ever loyal caboose to Fluttershy's brave sojourn, there were many happy breaths hanging from the branches above them, and the dark trees lingering ahead.
“We live in a harmonious world. It's beautiful, it's rich, it's vibrant. It sings beneath our hooves and it gives weightlessness to our wings. Just talking about it right now almost makes me want to burst into a chorus.”
“Oh seriously, Fluttershy. Uhm... There's no need.”
“Hehehe—No, I suppose not. There's a hum to everything as it is. If you're quiet enough, soft enough, and patient enough, you can feel it in your heart. You can feel the soft silken threads of the spirit of kindness pulling you, tugging you, urging you to do that which you were foaled for, urging you to make all things that live enjoy being all things that live, to the best of yours and their ability, until the one sad day that they can no longer be. This is our purpose; this is our golden rule. We exist together, so it is only natural that we help each other. To this end, kindness works like a circle. When you look hard enough, you can see such a spinning pattern of self-sustaining wonders. And in the Everfree forest, the truth of it all is... well... it's positively dizzying.”
For a brief moment of adorable absurdity, Harmony stood on her hindquarters, leaning back against the wooden bark of a tree as she apathetically watched a quaint scene unfolding right in front of her. Fluttershy had paused in the midst of their Capricorn quest to usher half a dozen hapless frogs from the bone-dry center of the forest clearing and into the delightfully moist edge of a pond just beyond a throng of bushes. She murmured lovingly and clicked her tongue against dainty lips as she urged each amphibian into their new watery homes. As each wart-laced creature plopped one after another into the muddy depths, Fluttershy cooed with increasingly warm breaths of relief.
Harmony raised an eyebrow. She tried not to grin, but it was like fighting a mountainous avalanche one-hoofed with nothing more than a dustpan. This soft, joyful reverie briefly distracted the last pony, so that she was almost oblivious to a multicolored string of scales suddenly drifting down from an errant tree branch located directly above the caretaker's hand. With bulging eyes, Harmony gasped and sprung into action. She lunged forward at a dangling coral snake and heroically batted it away with an Entropan hoof before its flicking tongue got within a centimeter's length of Fluttershy's mane.
The Ponyvillean animal tamer glanced up in time to blink at a nervously grinning Harmony, her forelimb innocently scratching the back of her amber-streaked head. None-the-wiser, Fluttershy flashed a cheekish grin, cleared her throat, and trotted with an exhausted gait towards the last, unexplored lengths of Everfree's eastern fringe.
Exhaling sharply, Harmony followed after her in a depressed slump. She cast a lonely, forlorn gaze towards the dimming forest canopy above. Beyond the wind-blown leaves of Everfree, the stars were twinkling into existence. Though the sight of the blossoming constellations should have overwhelmed the apocalyptic time traveler with joy, she shuddered with an immediate wave of helpless shame, for the only cosmic sight that she deserved to track down had eluded the two of them completely that day.
As the last legs of the trek fell into the foreboding thick of black night, Harmony struggled with a lump in her throat. Her mind fought the skin prickling visions of ink-dark brambles suddenly thorning their way into her memories with each fruitless hoofstep she made herself take... and made Fluttershy take in turn...
“If Everfree's such a big example of this 'spirit of kindness' fluff, then why are you so scared to go in there all the time, Fluttershy?”
“That's a good question, Scootaloo. As beautiful as Equestria is, we still live in an imperfect world. I do whole-heartedly believe that living things naturally want to help other living things. But I never pretend to believe that the world accomplishes this perfectly. There are... mmm... there are weaknesses, Scootaloo.”
“Weaknesses?”
“You cannot have strong things without weak things. This is the sad but real split in reality that has existed since the Sundering of Consus, when Goddess Epona herself was forced out of sorrow and heartache to take flight and make her exodus to the stars. But just because the world's weaknesses still plague us with the same violent monsters, diseases, and misfortune that ended the First Age, it does not mean that we have to give up hope. We can be strong—we can be so strong, Scootaloo, so long as we fill in the gaps of our weaknesses with love... and with kindness.”
“Do you really think it's that simple, Fluttershy?”
“Scootaloo, I am very happy that you are here.”
“Uhm... eheheh—What does that have to do with anything?”
“Quite simply that you are filling a gap right now, though you may not truly know it. And... And I thank you. I thank you for that, Scootaloo.”
“It's very kind...”
An exhausted Fluttershy glanced over towards Harmony at the tail-end of the pegasus' utterance. “Yes...?”
Harmony shook her head. “Ahem. Don't mind me. I was just...” She looked across the dim foliage and blinked in concern at her anchor. “Erm... Miss Fluttershy, do you need a breather?”
The frail pegasus nodded with a wilted shudder. “I think that would be most comforting, Miss Harmony...”
Harmony smiled gently and guided the two of them over to a soft mound of grass alongside the beaten path. The lengths and breadths of the Everfree Forest croaked, chirped, and billowed about them. Scant bursts of starlight flickered directly overhead between the waving clusters of tree branches.
There was an eerie tranquility to the place, far from resembling the utterly obsidian nightmare of the future Briar. Not a single drop of fear had alighted the time traveler's mind. Perhaps it was on account of her durable Entropan body, but Harmony hardly feared for her life. During the entire fruitless trek, she had kept her sights on Fluttershy. So long as Ponyville's animal tamer was safe, the last pony didn't fret the freakish shadows of the dense wilderness. At the same time, she was undeniably proud—not to mention inspired—by the firm degree to which Fluttershy was unwaveringly pursuing the lengths of their suddenly nocturnal search.
“I gotta hoof it to ya, Fluttershy,” Harmony mused in a humming voice as the two reclined on folded legs. “You hardly resemble the freaked-out mare that I had to shove into the forest when we first set out this afternoon. What changed?”
“Erm... Nothing changed.” Fluttershy gulped and scrunched low beside her “assistant.” “This is still quite a dangerous and foreboding environment.”
“You hardly seemed fazed. As a matter of fact, you were trotting even faster than I was.”
“Only because, as frightened as I may be, the Capricorn has even greater reasons to be scared.” Fluttershy bit her lip and gazed with sad eyes towards the far corners of the green, star-kissed place. “It is a creature of the heavens. To be lying here on the earth for so long can't be healthy for it. I'm more frightened for the Capricorn's health than I am for our well-being. Each second we lose in our attempt to find it, the bleaker the whole situation becomes.”
“I'm sure Her Highness will find that trait of yours admirable.”
“What trait?”
Harmony smiled. “In the end, Miss Fluttershy, you think more about the creatures you're in charge with caretaking than you worry about yourself. Princess Celestia is a sucker for selflessness. Erm...” The time traveler blushed slightly at her choice of words and flounderingly punctuated with: “A r-royal sucker.” She gave an awkward grin.
Fluttershy stifled a yawn and pressed her sad muzzle towards the soft earth. “No offense, Miss Harmony, but I am far more concerned with what the Captain will think of my failure than the Princess.”
“Who says this is a failure?”
“Please, I do find your enthusiasm encouraging, Harmony. But...” Moist blue eye scanned the slivers of purple starlight above the branches. “This situation would be all the more rapturous if we had actually succeeded in finding the poor creature.”
“How come it's so hard to find, you think?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly, Miss Fluttershy.”
“Mmmm...” Fluttershy narrowed her eyes, her yellow face scrunching in thought. She murmured finally, “It is a cosmic creature. Like a fish or an amphibian, a Capricorn can drown outside of its element. But instead of water, the Capricorn's element is the stars.”
“I imagine it'd be rather difficult to fill a tank up with stardust and just—uhm—dump the Capricorn inside of it.”
“Most definitely. Still, it feeds off of starlight. With the trees of the forest blocking the night's sky so intensely, it's no wonder that we haven't just stumbled upon the animal along these shadowed paths.”
“You... uh... You think that the Capricorn would have wandered beyond the lengths of the Everfree Forest so it could bask in uninterrupted starlight?”
“I highly doubt that. Capricorns are as pensive as they are endangered.”
“Heh. Who'd a thunk it?”
“If we only had enough starlight of our own to work with... we might... we just might...” Fluttershy began but her tongue tripped over a thick valley of sighs and she slumped once more to the earth.
Harmony raised an eyebrow and pivoted her copper face towards her. “You think there might be a way to coax the thing out of hiding?”
“So long as these shadows are bathing us—and it—I hardly imagine there could be a way, Miss Harmony.” With a stifled groan, Fluttershy gazed towards the far ends of the forest. “I am so very sorry. You are here to help me and to report back to the Princess, and so far you've only been rewarded with boredom and frivolity.”
“Uhhhh.... I beg your pardon?”
“It's not enough that your kind and proper assistance has been wasted, but I haven't been able to help you in any fashion whatsoever.”
“Miss Fluttershy, assisting you is hardly what I call a waste. I've learned new and nifty things about the Everfree Forest, I've been refreshed in my Faustmare history lessons, and I've seen first-hoof how you... uhm... corral frogs!”
“You had all of these questions that you wished to ask me about the local wildlife, and I hadn't even addressed a single one of them.”
Harmony gulped. Her amber eyes traced the ceilings of her skull. “Well...” She mentally tap-danced around the chirping lengths of the night-drenched forest until she fell once more into the center of Fluttershy's soft gaze. “We could tackle those anytime, y'know.” She smiled innocently.
“Well, what did you want to know?”
“Oh... Oh... Hmmm... For instance...” Harmony kneaded her hooves into the soft pliable grass beneath them. This was the last pony's moment, hopefully the first of many occasions in which she could grill an expert observer of the past on the red dawn that would precede an unimaginably horrible storm. “Have you... Miss Fluttershy, have you noticed any bizarre things with the local wildlife as of late?”
“Is there something specific that Her Majesty may be concerned about?”
“Oh, I dunno...” Harmony cleared her throat and attempted to smile her way through the next few hurdles of inquisition. “Mass migrations, disruptions to the food chain, unnaturally nomadic habits, indications of... uhm... instinctual panic?”
“What kind of panic?” Fluttershy blinked steadily. “And for what reason?”
Harmony hissed under her breath. This was becoming a constant game of plate-spinning, in which she had to find the appropriate degree to which she could press a holocaustal issue without so much as describing it. She realized that there were very rare occasions when she could actually make use of her resilient Entropan body. Time traveling was more delicate a process than stitching together silk, and there she was plopped down in the middle of a forest with the titanium shell of a compacted elephant.
“Do you... Uhm...” Harmony squinted off into the starry purple slivers dancing flimsily above them. Tactfully, she reached a hoof into an ancient afternoon hanging somewhere beside a pond full of ducks, cranes, squirrels, and turtles. In an energized breath, she quivered in a foalish voice: “Fluttershy, do you remember the cyclone that struck Ponyville approximately three years ago?”
“Oh, absolutely! I had to ask several local ponies to help me in building a shelter for all of my animals to take cover in! It was absolutely frightening!”
“Before that storm hit, did you notice any changes in the local wildlife that may have forecasted it?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. But it wasn't until later that it suddenly all made sense to me.”
“Like—What kinds of things did you notice?”
“The rodents had hid themselves away in burrows. The birds had all flocked south. The larger creatures—bears and coyotes and manticores—had foraged for food and fled to their lairs. It was quite the elaborate bustle of activity, but it wasn't observable until the very last second.”
“Are we talking about days in advance of the cyclone?”
“More like hours, Miss Harmony.”
“Oh. Oh... Uhm... Okay...”
“It is far easier to foresee a coming season in the behavior of animals than it is to predict a single frightening event of inexplicable weather. Animals possess a great deal of far-reaching senses, but they aren't all magically enabled to foresee more than the average equine. We mustn't forget, Miss Harmony, that ponies are animals too; we are simply of a blessedly complex variety.” Fluttershy finished with a stifled yawn and a soft smile.
“So... uhh... I guess that you haven't witnessed any strange or frightened behaviors of the local wildlife lately?”
“I can't say that I have, Miss Harmony.” She shook her head and tiredly blinked. “Why? Is the Royal Court of Canterlot expecting a terrible storm?”
“In a manner of speaking...” Harmony began, blinked, and felt the weight of the gray future bubbling like a distant blizzard on the back of her neck-hairs. “...No. Not really.” The words that came out of her next felt numb, defeated, stale. “But if there ever was to be a terribly large and incalculably damaging... weather pattern, the Canterlot Court thinks that animals could be a far better form of prediction than—say—transitory leylines. Unicorn magic isn't all it's cracked up to be lately... or something. Meh, I dunno...”
“I'm... I'm sorry to have let you down with my lack of answers...“
“You haven't let anypony down.” Harmony smiled gently over at her. “I swear, I'll never understand why you're always so quick to blame yourself, Miss Fluttershy.”
“You needn't try to understand, Harmony.” Fluttershy blinked tiredly and sat with drooping yellow ears. “Even my friends have a hard time withstanding my personal habits.”
Harmony raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Mmmm... I think so, sometimes.” Fluttershy produced a yawn, and her gaze fell into the soft grass as she played through the springy earth with demure hooves. “So many of them are nice and supportive of me. But I can't help but think sometimes that I'm more of a chore than a joy to be around. I'm just not as brave nor as outgoing as the rest of the ponies I've come to know over the past year-and-a-half. It's because I'm so—”
“If you say 'weak and helpless' again, I swear, I'm gonna toss you so hard into the sky that we'll put the 'Flutter' in your name to the test.”
“Eeep!” She shrunk into the shadows of herself. “But it's so true, Miss Harmony! If only you knew how much my friends have had to sacrifice, how much they've had to slow their exciting days down, how much they've had to give up just for the sake of floating down to my level...”
“Has it ever occurred to you that they've done all of those things because they love you?” Harmony bravely smiled. “And that they find it a joy to do those things, if it means that they could be around you?”
“I can't see what could possibly inspire them to do that besides pity.” Fluttershy sadly shuddered.
Harmony loaded the runestone, cocked the rifle, and fired. “Kindness?”
Fluttershy blinked. Her cheeks instantly turned rosy as she lifted a tired gaze to inhale the trailing scent of that word.
Harmony smiled again. “I've been around quite a bit, Miss Fluttershy. On account of working for the Court and all, I've seen...” A bitter gulp, but she continued. “I've witnessed the legacy of ponies. We're not creatures of obligation. We follow an unbreakable spirit. There's something about each of us that loves and adores our kin, not because we're obligated to, but because we want to. I think a lot of this has something to do with your favorite element, Miss Fluttershy. Kindness flows through all of us like electricity through a ring of batteries, getting stronger and stronger with each revolution. When something gives way or something shorts out, we replace that dying part with love and devotion just to keep the spark alive. This is because we know what a happy and wonderful thing it is to live in this glorious world, and the best way to live is to...” She closed her eyes, inhaled, and punctured the thick wall of irony. “...is to do so in perfect harmony.” She reopened her amber eyes and managed: “Kindness is what makes that possible. And your kindness, Miss Fluttershy, is positively infectious.”
“I... I do try...” The caretaker tiredly blushed. She avoided Harmony's gaze. “I just want all of my friends to be happy...”
“I'm quite sure they know that.” Harmony nodded. “And that is what keeps them coming back to see you. You're not a chore, Miss Fluttershy. You're a treasure.”
“Isn't everypony?”
“Thanks for making my case for me.” Harmony helplessly giggled.
Fluttershy laughed lightly—only because the time traveler did. After a deep breath, she murmured past the curtains of her own exhaustion: “You must have many friends, Harmony.”
Harmony froze at that. She gazed aside in a sudden cascade of shadows and stifled a sigh from rising in her lungs. “I have many memories...” She winced at having uttered that, but bravely recovered with: “Happy memories. They grant me wisdom occasionally, though I'm always on the lookout for other ponies to share things with.” She gulped. “Ponies new and old.”
“But surely...” Fluttershy suffered another yawn and curled up next to her. “Surely you have close companions now... hmmm?”
“I... I have... I had...”
Harmony gazed off into the green haze of Everfree. She blinked, and between the snow-gray picture frames of her adult mind she saw, or thought she saw, two foals prancing across the purple starlight. Their blank flanks shimmered with crimson and gold capes, emblazoned cutely with blue and yellow patches of an immutable crusade that drew the bouncy souls within them across the growing lengths of time, long before a great red flame fell to consume their faces. Before the end of galloping days, they turned around to call back to the last pony: green and amber eyes, yellow and white coats, red and lavender manes, smiles and smiles and smiles... and ash.
“I had a foalhood...” Harmony's dead words fluttered through the cricket-crackling air of the night. “It was full of fear, it was full of tears, and it was full of hunger.” She gulped and murmured. “But... because of them... it was full of smiles as well, so that all of the rest really wasn't all that bad. No... No, it wasn't that bad at all.” The world blurred out of focus. A pair of amber pools trembled in the middle of a copper face, stone still, like an obelisk outside of Everclear. “I'm not an expert on kindness, M-Miss Fluttershy, but I know all the things in my life that have kept me... that have kept me living for hope of invisible things that were once as real to me as raindrops. And it wasn't just because of them.” She smiled painfully into the everlasting echo of a melodic voice. Pivoting, she smiled bravely and spoke towards the heavenly source of it. “But it was because of you—“
Fluttershy was asleep. In soft, cloudy waves, her yellow coat inflated and deflated, preserving a warm breath that only her soft shell of a body could ever feasibly house in the great Equestrian void. Her pink tail hairs had entwined foalishly with the curves of Harmony's hooves. Her cutie mark's butterflies shimmered suddenly like a nightlight, casting a permanent halo on her immaculate soul.
With a deep breath, Harmony smiled. In the blind gap of her companion's unconsciousness, she finally granted the tears freedom to pierce the night. Swiftly drying her cheek with a forelimb, Harmony gazed sideways at her anchors, feeling the glen light up with the phantom glow of an invisible fireplace. Before her beating heart, the forested hovel magically illuminated with a toasty aura indicative of a cottage atrium, blossoming suddenly in the starved corner of the last pony's mind. Before she could confusedly blink the sensations away, she heard—or thought she heard—a creaking of stairs. Gazing aside, she saw a series of wooden steps, and there shuffled down them an orange foal with no room for tears and even less strength to afford them. The ghostly image trotted quietly towards Fluttershy on the green grass, and the world threatened to explode upon their forbidden contact—
Harmony immediately buried her face into shuddering hooves. With sweaty palpitation, she reopened her twitching amber eyes into the dark folds of the Everfree forest. Her friends were gone. The fireplace was gone. The stairs were gone. Her orange childhood was gone. All that was left was shadows...
...and Fluttershy, in immortal slumber, her limbs heavenly devoid of thorns or ash. It would not be this beautiful forever.
“It doesn't have to be,” the last pony said in a wise, somber voice.
She regained her smile by staring at Fluttershy. With motherly ease that haunted her, the pegasus got up on all fours, trotted over, and effortlessly nudged Fluttershy until she had planted the whole of her dainty weight atop her Entropan shoulders.
“Hmm... Light as a feather. Friggin'' figures.”
Her voice was punctuated with a grin and a sigh at the same time. With greater caution than she had ever afforded the brass instruments of the Harmony, the last pony balanced the anchor of kindness safely on her spine, sprouted her wings, and flew the two of them up through the forest canopy of Everfree, and safely towards the caretaker's home.
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So... wait... does this mean that the story's over?
I'm sorry; I don't think I can do this anymore.
I've already said much of what I could say regarding the story's length, but I was already struggling to enjoy it as it was; now with the chapter's average lengths effectively being doubled, I don't think I could feasibly enjoy a story that seems to honestly "drag on" as much as this does.
I'm not going to assign a rating because I know it's more my own personal bias these dislikes stem from, but I honestly only read every third paragraph in Ch 16 and 17 as an experiment and found I didn't really miss anything too important. That's not a good thing any way you slice it.
Personally, I like the length. I'm a fast reader, so the stories I read need to be this long in order to keep me occupied.
This is, without a doubt one of the greatest works of literature I have ever seen. If I could do it, I would give it 6/5 stars.
87694 [challenge acknowledged] word of advice, increase your reading speed by at least 20% at level/ch11 or feel under leveled / under prepared for the lengths of time consumption to come, lol. Also im taking a much needed break after ch15 so if this might give you a chance on catching up or even get a head hehe.
"Suntrot was laughing at this point, practically giggling as she charaded with her <b>hands</b> the bizarre machine that had brought her back to life. "
There were probably one or two more gaffs like that, but that's the one that grabbed me. And wow, the chapters are definitely awe-inspiring in length, detail, and emotion. Hope you don't burn out, we're only half way through Scoot's anchors!
I was hoping Harmony would use Sladeburn's face as a new mining tool, and I loved the last chapter. Thank you for writing this, cause its one of the best fics out there.
Wow. This is being hosted on the wrong site. This is no mere 'fanfic'. This ....is a novel. Hell, damned near an epic.
This better not be the end! This story is one of the best I have ever read. EVER. Man, I wish there was a way to rate above five, because you deserve it. Deserve it so, so much. On a happier note, I was expecting Harmony/Scootaloo to fly out into the middle of the mob and explode into flames or something. Loving this story.
90362 lol i read very very slowly i have dyslexia....but i will see this thow ,it may take me a month or two to get to the end of this to the likes of chaper 17 and i am nerves about the donting task of reading a chaper over 30000 words long
..i can do it ;D... i hope 
Ahh...I am caught up. Took me about 14-16 hours over 3 days to do it, but I am caught up.
And damnit, this is still the best thing ever
Don't you ever stop, you crazy, amazing, sexy beast of a person.
Oh, and a tidbit for you readers out there who may have missed this on the first run through!
The first half of the first chapter of the Pinkie Arc actually takes place AFTER Scoots returns from the past. You should totally re-read it after you're caught up, it's much less confusing and much more satisfying the second time around!
92797 Thanks I'll try to keep that in mind when I read it, its the next chapter for me after all lol.
Just finished chap. 18.
I'm impressed. I used to thing that Your chapters are very long, but now [paste mother of god meme here] average length of chapters doubled. Holy crap. You may find this funny, but I've readed whole "Past Sins" in just one day, but that "Rosenscoots and Guildenpie Are Dead" took me two days =P I loved previous chapters, I love new (even if they are more into filosophy than adventure).
Just... as far as I can say, this is brilliant story.
PS: @Soviet Brony I can imagine Brucie listening to Alexandrov Ensemble vinyls ;) He is great character.
What is "infernite"?
No lie, this is one of the best stories out there. There are very few stories that affect me emotionally, but holy hell, when Ice Song and Suntrot (kinda) died... manly tears were shed
94882
Its a fictional unstable metal I believe this author created that explodes when struck and makes noxious dust that sticks in the lungs, slowly destroying it. Kind of a bad thing to have in a mine where striking rocks with drills and picks at random is done all the time.
I read 21 chapters in 2 days. No-life? Who care's, I'm on break with nothing better to do
Any ways, can't wait to read the next part of the story, whenever it comes out
109574
21 chapters in 2 days? WOW! O_o You must be on some kind of drug
So I noticed this a few days back and started reading through it in my off time. Finally finished it.
I think it's criminal that there's as few comments, and as little recognition for this as there seems to be. Presumably much of the reason for that is it's length, but hell. I read through the Baroque Cycle. I can handle six hundred thousand or so words.
I'm not one for long elaborate fanfiction comments (I tend to save those for reddit.), so I'll just say that this has taken my spot as best serious fanfiction. I know that many authors thrive on recognition of their effort, so I want you to know that I'm reading this and thoroughly enjoying it.
I eagerly await the next installment.
110015
I am, it's some pretty good stuff called "The End of Ponies"
It took me a good long while before I started reading End of Ponies, simply because the premise of it all was just so damn depressing. But after a while I took heart and started reading it, and I'm glad I did.
You have some serious writing talent, you really do. I consider myself pretty well-read in both Swedish and English in genres from Russian classics to Robert Jordan, and terms of language this is one of the heavier stuff I've gone through. At times the story is hindered by somewhat overly heavy tones and quite deep dialouge, but the quality still shines through.
Language and phrasing is especially important for this piece I think. Compared to other long MLP-fanfictions such as Fallout: Equestria, Past Sins or It's a Dangerous Business the language is almost a character in itself the way you use it. I'm especially impressed by the latest update with Pinkie Pie and how that character is used in a more adult setting - it fits exceptionally well and the writing sets it all off in a terrific way.
Thank you so much for what you've written sofar, and I hope I get to see more of it in the future.
By the way, the pace at which you write is absolutely crazy! 500k words in like three months? Very impressive.
Something that I would like to be addressed at some point is why Spike can go back in time permanently, while Scoot can only go back for a certain amount of time, and not only that, but she has to be anchored to someone.
If it was said already, then I missed it
Nothing here comes close to the quality, depth and sheer size. This can no longer be held back by the label fanfic, this is practically a full fleged novel. Don't stop writing cause sure as heck i won't stop reading.
I read the entire story and then my head exploded.
PLEASE, PLEASE tell me this is not the end!
121770 PRACTICALLY a novel? This is longer than all THREE LOTR novels COMBINED.
I just started: can't wait to read it all!
121770 126912
So I did some quick research and math. According to several (website) sources, the average novel page have about 250 words on it. At about 506,000 words (so far), that puts this monster at 2024 pages long...
And kids, we are only about half done
Holy bucking bits, I can't believe I finally managed to finally get around to reading Pinkie's arc. Like what you've always done, you tear my heart asunder and then patch it up with love and hope, despite the whole grimness of the circumstances.
And we're only halfway through. By Celestia's mane, my brain is slowly rotting reading such a huge story. I just don't know how I can top this story's brilliance! It just can't be done!
At any rate, I hope to see the next arc soon.
this should not be a 6....its should be the first 7 STAR STORY!
I've been reading this on Google Docs forever, and I love it! This one incredible story has rekindled my interest in reading, I used to read constantly novel after novel, story after story and by the time i was 16 I was sick of it, no stories held my interest anymore, so many respected authors bored me, and everything read was too easy to figure out the ending right away thus making it uninteresting to read. Now I am 28 and this story has kept me riveted right from the start, occasionally I know where it's going to go, but not often.
My only complaints are very small and kinda petty, horses don't have snouts, they have muzzles, and you occasionally get a certain word stuck in your vocabulary like Maw, skull, Freakin' or snout, when you could use another word to keep the flow of the story clean... but even if you never ever fixed that about it I wouldn't care, I love the story!
There are parts of this story that have made me laugh very hard, parts that have brought tears to my eyes, and parts that have made me nearly yell out "YES!", I never get this involved in what I am reading, thanks for opening up a whole new realm to me! Keep up the great work!
144580
Harmony is not her surname (pretty sure), but instead is just a name that she came up with for her avatar in the past, which she got from the name of her airship
I can not sing enough praises about this story. I've forced friends to read the first few chapters to get them into it. I've played it with a (horrible) Speaking program to force my stream audience to hear it. I quite simply have never read anything as colorfully written, interestingly thought out, or overall just fucking pleasant to read.
Nothing compares to this. You wanted Best Fic? You got it as far as i'm concerned.
Damn
Now post something from the new arc, it's been ages since i was third person limited over the revolution of Dredgemane. I need more to gush about.
Derpy Derp appreciates your subtle references
just an fyi for everypony out there the next arc is halfway done and it WILL be much LONGER and more awesome
than pinkie pie arc!
198974
I didn't get chills. I cried during those parts. Think about it. Live that long since a world altering cataclysm. Meet none of your own species after the fact. Eventually get opportunities to go back in time to before said cataclysm. And somebody from that time suddenly brings back the last words said to you from that time in your life.
Frankly, in Scoot's shoes, I'd be a nervous-goddamn wreck at that point...
Although very sombre and emotional, this is a very magnificent story so far. I can't wait to continue reading more when the next chapters are ready.
It took me 2 weeks to read through ch1-24. I am ready for more
The writer of this story is now better than Jack London, Charles Dickens, and the person who wrote my little dashie. This story makes it canon.
Really though...GREAT JOB!!! I swear to celestia, i can tell, just by the comments, that this is going to be an AMAZING read.
I don't know how, why, or who made this story, but i can tell they put an incredible amount of effort into it. 500,000+ words must have taken several countless days of 3 or 4 hours of sleep, for weeks, possibly months, assuming you worked every day. Im rating this 5 stars, tracking, and favoriting, and i can't wait until i finish it (if i CAN finish it :D)
/] congrats bro
I now love you :D
Hello! I don't really know why I'm posting, but I just wanted to say that I love you, and that while I am anxious beyond belief to the next MASSIVE update, I can wait patiently.
I also wanted to let you know that I didn't forget about you!
For some reason I had it in my mind that I had faved this story a long time ago...
How I didn't realize it wasn't the case I can only blame on alcohol and distractions.
>>Rainbow pony is best pony There is a author named Coal Buck that is catching up to this story in word count. I don't know about how sadness and how rating works in these story's but i do know that his story is catching up quickly. The name of the story is My second life. Anyways this is not a advert its just some info on how things are going so far in word count
I notice that you use 'smirk' quite often. It seems out of place because it usually indicates malevolence or meanness.
HOLY BUCK THAT'S A LOT OF WORDS.
Well damn. I would read this if I had the time, but I don't. That's crazy awesome though, man. That's amazing. Seriously. Just the fact that you have it going that long.
<---- me amazed
I read this when it first came out and am currently re-reading to do a little bit of art. Sadly, I just learned that this is on hiatus. Will it ever come back?
206739
same here
i guess all we do now is wait
I'm usually turned off by really long stories. I always enjoy them at first, but once they start exceeding 150k words or so, I begin to lose interest as I'm often distracted by other stories.
"The End of Ponies" is apparently an exception. I've sped through all 24 chapters of this, read every one of its more than half a million words, in less than a week, and that's with college classes and homework constantly distracting me. And yet my interest in this story has only grown with every long chapter.
If this somehow got published, I would buy it. Heck, I'd sell some of my other books to make room on my bookshelf. I'm not kidding when I say this story has become my favorite fanfic of all time, and that I am greatly looking forward to reading the next installment, no matter how long it may be. Keep up the brilliant work and good luck with the next arc! I can't wait to read it!
Finished reading what you have so far. Obviously, you must really love what you do to put this much work into your fiction, and it truly shows.
I have been constantly surprised by this story, and the cliffhangers and edge-of-your-seat action is golden. I keep trying to guess what'll happen next, only to be completely baffled by the actuality. The unpredictability, darkness, bits of humor, tragedies, all of it is brilliantly played. I love it.
This is by far and away one of if not the best fanfics I have ever read, rivaling several of my all time favorite novels. What am I saying, this is a novel. It just needs to be sitting in a bookstore. The story line, arcs, character development, and fluency is just beautiful. Seeing as you've only done three of the Mane Six so far, I think it's safe to assume there will be arcs of the other three, which will likely put this well over a million words in length.
Keep doing what your doing, and take as much time as you need. I eagerly await more chapters.
And seriously, when all is said and done, I want this in a book and sitting on my shelf. I would fork over every penny I have to buy it.
I tried reading this again and again, but this is like eating a good ol' steak dinner. Very delicious, but I cannot digest it all! Please shorten the chapters. I don't care if you have to make it 500 chapters. It will make it so much easier to read
316907
Try reading up to "the next journal entry" or even "the next section break" before taking a break/finishing for the day. That's how I divided this fic up when reading it.
Wow... just... wow... Words cannot describe how epic this is. No wait, there are. img.chan4chan.com/img/2009-03-26/1238048579531.jpg
~Parajack