The End of Ponies

by shortskirtsandexplosions

- ACT FOUR: DREDGEMANE - Chapter Thirty-One: Heart of Pinkness

The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Thirty-One – Heart of Pinkness

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art

Scootaloo was alive, for what it was worth. Lying on her back in the gentle sway of her beloved hammock, she let her scarlet eyes wander over the rust-red ribcage of the Harmony's cabin. There was a tranquility about her expression; it was neither joyous nor melancholic.

Octavia's strings were long concluded, replaced by a crackling static as the record player a few trots away from the hammock skipped and skipped at the end of the needle's cyclonic sojourn. Scootaloo had been too lazy to change it, but there was something else too, something cold and contemplative, something dim and glistening that illuminated the pale eggshell lengths of her insides just as the lantern-light above her kissed the bowels of the airship cabin. The last pony was lying still as a tombstone, but her mind was flying at a million kilometers per hour inside her skull. It wasn't the first time her brain had done this to itself. Only, on this occasion, there was no leaking of tears.

Something else begged to be squeezed out of her, to be bled forth upon the blank canvas of her lonesome life. So it was with a breath of finality, tugging at all the threadbare bits of her, that she eventually rolled herself out of the hammock and marched numbly towards her workbench... towards where a hoof-brace, pen, and ink pad resided.

Gathering the necessary utensils, Scootaloo dragged her journal down from a dusty shelf and swung the leather spine open until the ivory pages of the tome spun dustily to the earliest unmarked page. With a sharp inhale, the brown filly tossed a short mane of violet hair over her neck and, squinting in the light shimmering from the aircraft's boiler to the rear, she slid the brace over her hoof, stuck the pen in it, and began to write.

She tongued the insides of her mouth, tasting the faint effluence of sugar, peppermint, and other assorted remnants of overabundant sweetness that laced her soul self as the granite memories were still clouding her mind, all of which she promptly spread on paper like butter over a loaf of cinnamon bread.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Journal Entry # 2,357

There are many words, and yet there are no words.

Having lived an entire life in the Wasteland, opening my mouth has lead to sobbing. After what I've just now been through, I only want to laugh, a delightfully mad thing. Over the years, I've grown used to doing the impossible, the crazy, and the stupid. But madness? That is a whole new ballgame. You'd think that the last pony would have more sense, but I know you better just as you know me better.

Yes, I realize that it's been a long time since I wrote to you, much less talked to you. You couldn't possibly have missed me, though I haven't paid much attention to you. You're always circling around me, orbiting me, treating me with as much respect as a spider might hunger for an ensnared moth. I can never consider myself lonely, can never consider myself forsaken—not so long as you're around. You've been with me longer than all of my doubts, fears, hopes, and tears. You're an older companion to me than Spike, and even his green flame—as I've discovered—couldn't separate me from you, from the smell of your blacker-than-black coat, from the residue that you leave behind while flying concentric loops around me.

In these Wastelands, you have been my constant companion, my dear and dreadful shadow, the one to hear my unanswered prayers and the sole witness to my bleeding wounds. There was a time when I used to think that you enjoyed my suffering, but then I came to realize it was impossible. I mean, how could you? You wouldn't know what suffering is, you wouldn't know what to do with the many disparate pieces of the machine that is “pain,” even though you thrive off of its locomotion. You're like a child, in a way, and children are just as stupid as they are cruel.

I met another child several days ago—or should I say “several years” ago? Twenty-five hours and twenty-five years serve the same blink to me now as three centuries have come to produce a twinkle in Spike's emerald eyeslits. I don't think the dragon means to mold me into a numb pariah to the transience of time like he's become. There are a lot of things Spike simply cannot understand, though he sends me embarking upon the chronological fathoms courtesy of his own breath. It is ultimately I who must take the plunge into the warm abyss of yesteryear. A part of me wonders if he is envious that I get to be the sole scavenger of time after all of his personal research, but then I realize that I'm actually doing him a favor. I'm bearing a burden that I seriously doubt his draconian soul—as aged as it is—would be capable of shouldering. A spirit can be as wise as the most regal of Equestrian sages, but it takes a life tempered by hardship to wear that wisdom like a suit of armor.

Nevertheless, I met a child several days ago, and unlike you she does not coldly watch the lonely souls of existence form afar, but rather she sails straight through them with her mouth wide open as if they were made of syrup. She's a sunrise that refuses to reach high noon, for to go any further would risk killing the glory of a beautiful day. She laughs when ponies should be sobbing; she giggles when all other souls should be dying.

For a while there, I thought she was a rude spirit who enjoyed laughing at misery, until I realized that she is only laughing her way through misery. She is colored with so many shades of happiness that my Wasteland-tempered eyes can barely register her; Celestia knows she's snuck up on me enough times to make me jump out of even Princess Entropa's skin. When I first bumped flanks with her, I wanted nothing more than to kill the mare on sight. Even now, a large part of me still wants to, but that hasn't happened. I am here; I am alive. I have come back to live, to muse, and to write, carrying as much restraint as I have sanity or something vaguely resembling it.

Sanity is my curse, a far more venomous and discouraging thing than “hope.” I didn't realize how much I've clung to sanity until I met her—this child—until she taught me that some things don't have to be comprehended before you can boldly launch a pie pan at it. In the Wasteland, sanity appealed to me. It shone like a great golden beacon, so that my naturally inverse response was to reflect the same light skyward in a prismatic facsimile. Sanity bred insane acts of desperation, so that I maintained an equilibrium while dealing with the horrors of this dead and decaying world.

So imagine my confusion when I found myself submerged in a realm of insanity, and I discovered that the only proper solution was to react with ten times the craziness, until the world itself crumbled felicitously under the psychotic pressure of it all. A single soul can be audacious enough to produce a rainbow out of pure darkness with no light to inspire it. I wonder how well this child would have done in my place, in these Wastelands. She might have become Queen of the Wastes; she could have turned fossils into garlands and taught monsters to sing and dance.

But what has amazed me the most, what has brought me back here to pen and paper, the fulcrum of my lonesome soul, is that she knew about more than insanity, she knew about more than song and dance, she knew about more than finding a light in the darkness. She knew about you—Yes, you. She knew about you long before I ever did, or would ever admit to knowing. And though she was gifted with this knowledge, she never boasted about it. She never preached it to the ponies around her. She never once gave a sign that her tangled webs with you ever dotted the sugar-coated recesses of her soul. She didn't have to show or to tell anything, for she had long learned to overcome you, which is something that I have never learned, and probably never will.

So, for the first time as I can ever remember, I dedicate this journal entry to you. It is as important for you to read this as it is for myself to write this. Because if I don't write this, if I don't share this with someone or something, I will go insane. I do not have that child's tenacity nor her lucidity. To taste of her madness is to urge a monarch butterfly out of its cocoon even when all the flowers of the world are dead.

I need sanity like I need water, and every now and then I release it all the same. Only this time, you have no choice but to hear me out. After all, I listen to you all the time, and I don't care if the legacy you've left makes you “fair” or “unfair.” You're going to digest all of this like the good healthy child that you are. You will need to grow big and strong for the future to come, for someday I will no longer be around for you to share the darkness with.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

A grand sea of gray stone blurred underneath the throttling airship. Then, upon a glint in Scootaloo's amber goggles, there was a break. Twin reflections showed a steep canyon slicing its way through an expansive plateau of rock lingering beneath the lone pilot's gaze. Her brow furrowed and she pulled at a series of levers flanking the cockpit, slowing the Harmony to a gentle hover. With a soft breath, she flung a brown hoof to her face and slid the goggles up. Via naked scarlets, Scootaloo squinted at the furrowed landscape beneath her.

Through the yawning windshields of the zeppelin's gondola, the first of many serpentine trenches could be seen threading deeply across the body of the rocky continent. The plateau above these sudden and labyrinthine dips was flat, flatter than the surface of a pond and just as placid. There was a bizarre and almost divine pattern to the breaks in the ground. From a bird's eye view—nestled in the Harmony—the last pony almost imagined the canyons forming a spiderweb silhouette, or the wireframes of an enormous bird's wings.

There were structures inside the canyons. Ruins rested in clusters beneath the shadows of the sharp, rocky walls, hidden from the twilight that shimmered above, almost blanketed from the forever-falling snow and ash that flaked the plateau. It was as though this bizarre and gray-laden town had decided to bury a grave for itself long before the Cataclysm had ever pondered searing to dust the bodies that dwelt unassumingly within.

Scootaloo took a deep breath and leaned back. She gazed out the port and starboard side portholes, checking the stony horizons for anything to anchor the airship to. She saw random clusters of dead trees, distant specks that spelled of fire-blasted farmsteads, and the occasional, fossilized remnant of a boggy oasis. The barren nature of the landscape was of little surprise to the pegasus. To arrive here, she had flown a six-day trip straight northeast from the ruins of Ponyville. She didn't come here just to sight-see. She had been here before, when she was wearing a different skin.

Finally, the last pony settled for a sharp “hook” in a rock formation overlooking a run-down cathedral built inside the crook of a nearby canyon. Slowly drifting the Harmony towards it, she slid her goggles back on, hopped out of the cockpit, and trotted towards her workbench where—among her usual equipment—a thickly bundled cylinder of white leather rested beside a knife of brittle charcoal.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When I first ever started scavenging—when I was still barely past my foal years—I was merely looking for survivors. I was searching the wreckage of Cloudsdale for other ponies that may hopefully have survived the catastrophe. When that naivete faded, I scavenged in desperation for the basic things I needed to survive. As I grew older and my coat bled into a dark brown, I rummaged and looted for things that I could sell for silver strips and another bite to eat.

These days, I've come back full circle. It's not like I'm looking for survivors once more—but rather, I am looking for the precious treasures that all the world's dead ponies have left behind. I seek them not for what their value is in the greedy eyes of the mangy beasts of the Wasteland that fool themselves into thinking that they're sentient. Much rather, I seek them for a worth that surpasses even myself, that will outlast myself, that will see to a world that could hopefully—once again—experience a sunlight that surpasses it, even if I won't be included.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Four copper horseshoes touched down in the atrium of a hollowed-out cathedral. Scootaloo folded her wings beside her armored saddlebags and trotted slowly down the rubble-strewn space between aisles of half-collapsed pews. Lone echoing hoofsteps sang off the rooftop of the large building, which had been reduced to a ribcage of barren stone arches stripped clean of a ceiling. A few flakes of snow floated down through the exposed body of the sanctum, blanketing the last pony as she made her solitary way to the altar and came to a stop. With goggled eyes, she gazed at a tall pane of stained glass art behind the pulpit. Half of the multicolored plates were missing, so that the splendid image of an ethereal alicorn and her majestic wingspan was obscured by jigsaw gaps that revealed the lingering stone gray walls of the canyon beyond the edge of the building.

Gazing left and right, Scootaloo's goggles glinted as she scanned the sepulcher interior for any signs of life. There were no bodies here, deceased or otherwise. A trail of waxy white puddles led her curiously towards the edge of a massive organ, where several candles once rested in copper holders. Her breath briefly left her as she stumbled upon a scrap of brown cloth, the remnants of a robe that had found its way somewhere in the middle of the cathedral's desolation. She stood over the stretch of fabric and briefly shifted it with a serrated horseshoe. At the sight of the clerical garment, a lonesome gulp hollowed the dimples in her brown features, but she soon shook it off with a shrug.

Turning about, Scootaloo trotted slowly out a gash in the cathedral's east wall. Before her there suddenly yawned a street of snow-drenched cobblestone. Each and every brick that filled the pathways was unique, in that it had been engraved with the name of a separate equine soul, along with a haunting allotment of dates. The darkly etched characters beneath the last pony's hooves only magnified the mare's isolation as she trotted through a cloud of echoes to get to her eventual destination.

The tight walls of the canyon led to an even tighter barricade of buildings that hugged either side of the steep trench. No square centimeter of the burrowed landscape had been wasted; the ruins filled every nook and cranny of the winding ravine, so that it was twice as difficult to see where the serpentine city began or where it ended.

Scootaloo slowly trotted down the twisted “main street” of the dwelling, gazing up and shuddering at the sensation of the building faces and the stone walls above them threatening to collapse over her at any second. The colonized hovel was dark, not quite Everbriar-Dark, but the sheer depth of the trench dimmed the urbanscape so that it had become a worming shadow. From deep within the spine of this twirling passage, the dwindling twilight appeared a hundred times as bright, so that the Wasteland glistened with an alien brilliance that briefly made Scootaloo glance at her own hooves to make sure they were presently brown and not copper.

The rows upon rows of black obelisks—dead torches drained of oil—mocked the last pony as she stumbled ever onwards into shadow. She would have lit the lantern yokes about her neck, had she not felt keenly aware of where things were in this place. After another fifty meters, she came to a stop and glanced to her left. The run-down shell of a saloon stretched before her, just off to the side of a convergence of four trenches where a massive town square lingered in the snowy haze. Hollow and dilapidated market stands bordered the granite expanse. A half-collapsed clock-face dotted a building front looming above. Off to the side was a blacksmith's shop, the front entrance of which had been shattered brutally. Finally, in the center of this courtyard was a dried-out fountain that framed an alicorn effigy. Unlike the statue of Celestia in Ponyville, this town's equine figure embodied a different kind of divinity. The alicorn's horn was shorter, and yet its wings stretched wider than Celestia's, matching the glory of the shattered stained glass image that Scootaloo had seen in the cathedral.

The last pony sauntered into the snowy center of this echoing cobblestone expanse. Hundreds of phantom hoofsteps shuddered through her soul like so many dead names engraved into the rocky street below. Glancing past the alicorn figure, she spotted a curious blight upon the otherwise immaculate landscape. A large pile of decaying refuse was lying in the center of the plaza. Flakes of wood and crumbling bits of debris had formed a haphazard mountain of charred bric-a-brac before her. It was not the signature of the Cataclysm that had marred the rubble, but rather burn marks of a different sort that stood the test of nearly three decades. Scootaloo was hardly surprised, for she knew exactly what it was and why it was there.

There was something that fatefully caught her eye within the rubble. Marching towards it, she was surprised to see a shape that glinted in the dim twilight wafting down from above. She reached a hoof in and knocked aside shattered bits of furniture, a melted photo album, singed sewing equipment, and other miscellaneous samples of burnt junk until she could see the reflective object in greater clarity. It was a silver flask, a drinking canteen that had melted in on itself like a deflated balloon, its ivory edges stained brown with soot. In a sad breath, the last pony raised the hollow of the desecrated item in her hoof, observing the distorted letter “V” emblazoned across the side of the utensil in Celestial font. Against all odds, the last pony did a mad thing in that abandoned grave. She smiled, and in a warm voice she murmured towards the ashen lengths of the place:

“And so it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end.”

Upon a sudden pang of remembrance, Scootaloo was forced to turn around so that she faced the lone and decrepit saloon resting across the courtyard. She marched straight towards the building at a somber pace. Once there, she slowly pushed her brown figure through the dilapidated entrance. One half of a swinging door teetered creakily behind her as the last pony trotted over a sea of broken bottles, splintered chairs, and fallen oil lamps. She peered momentarily towards the far end of the run-down drinking hole. A stage lingered under a shredded web of purple curtains, moth-eaten and shriveled after years of neglect. After navigating the length of the dimly lit bar, she strolled down a series of steps and found her way into the cellar of the abandoned saloon. A crack had formed in the wooden floorboards between the theater area and the basement, allowing a meager patch of light to waft through a sea of scattered spiderwebs. The last pony navigated a forest of wooden support beams. On instinct, she sniffed the air for a rancid scent. Her ears twitched, as if she heard distant braying laughter that was there and gone again.

In the far corner of the place, a large wooden trunk took up one half of a brick-laid wall. With remarkable purpose, the last pony marched directly towards the object and opened the dusty lid up with a creaking noise. Inside of the trunk was a tinier wooden box, fitted with a single padlock that had been blighted by rust over the decades. Scootaloo yanked the smaller trunk up into the dusty air of the rubble-strewn room. Planting her right horseshoe against the nearby wall, she rotated the copper circle of it counter-clockwise until a thick blade popped out. Next, she aimed at the rusted lock and effortlessly shattered it to bits with one swing of the horseshoe's blade. Retracting the tiny cleaver, she opened the trunk and peered inside. Her scarlet eyes reflected the colors of the rainbow.

In a soft breath, Scootaloo reached into the trunk and produced a grand cloak that was dyed prismatically with every color of the spectrum. From the deep dark hood of the article all the way to its flaring coattails, the mysterious outfit sang brightly from red to green to blue and all of the many colors in between that the brown pegasus knew by heart. The thing was as beautiful as it was curiously garish, and the merest hint of a curve to Scootaloo's lips was undeniable.

Turning the thing further around in her grasp, she produced a black velvet mask that had been hidden deep within the fabric, complete with a pair of cracked ruby goggles that glinted in the tiny streams of twilight. With a curious shuffle, Scootaloo turned the gown upside down so that she had access to the flaring rainbow coattails of the thing. She studied it at multiple angles, then backtrotted half a step and jerked the outfit like a whip into the dusty air of the cellar. With a metallic ring, the coattails extended a fan of rusted, multi-colored daggers. The last pony whistled, not so much in surprise but in a bizarre rush of pride.

The lonesomeness of the moment refilled the air; Scootaloo stuffed the body of the dense rainbow cloak into her saddlebag and tossed the empty trunk into its larger counterpart. She bounded up a series of steps leading to a cellar door and knocked the panels loose so that she emerged once more onto the deep canals of the city. Marching past the alicorn statue situated in the center of the town square, she followed one lone trench out of many, a corridor that led westward from the heart of the buried town. This was a barren and lifeless passage, missing all of the structures that so densely filled the rest of the trenches previous. Eventually, the passage came to a dead end, and stretched before the deathly thick wall of stone beyond was a four-story bricklaid structure surrounded by a forlorn fence of thick rusted bars.

Shuffling up to the massive steps of the place, Scootaloo paused briefly to glance to her side. A small wooden shack resided behind the massive cornerstone of the building, almost hidden from view. Adjusting her copper goggles, the last pony magnified her perspective, so that many scattered bits of debris made themselves known in the collapsed doorway of the hut. She saw wooden bottles, scraps of Zebraharan leather, and small felt containers spilling loose petrified bits of grainy herbs. The last pony briefly hummed to herself, feeling her tongue spin lyrical circles inside her hollow mouth.

Facing ahead, Scootaloo effortlessly marched up the steep incline of granite steps and made her way into the double-doors of the gigantic facility. A checkerboard floor clattered beneath her metal hooves as she sauntered past the front desk of the atrium and fearlessly marched her way up a winding concrete stairwell beyond.

She paused briefly on the third floor. Her amber goggles glinted in the hazy streams of twilight that shimmered through the barred windows across the building's front face. With a shuffling of hooves, she peered into a wide room full of white dust-laden tables and collapsed chairs. Several long stretches of glass separated the room from the adjacent hallways. Many of the windows had shattered ages ago, blanketing the black-and-white tile with all sorts of brittle debris that crunched under her copper hooftrots. There were no bodies to be seen in this building either. For the first time since the scavenger could recall, this pleased her.

With another shuffling of hooves, Scootaloo doubled back and ascended up the stairwell once more. She walked effortlessly onto the fourth floor and strolled down a long, dark hallway at the end of which was a shimmering glow: the floor's only outlet to the outside Wasteland and the dim twilight beyond. She squinted under her goggles as she finally entered the heavily-windowed room. The last pony was graced with two dozen empty beds lying against the walls of the once-sterile hospital dwelling. A pair of wooden desks flanked a series of medical cabinets. The checkerboard floor was awash in little metal nick-nacks, little horse dolls, deflated rubber balls, and various other tiny things that once resembled toys. Tattered canvas dividers leaned against each other and a pile of rusted contraptions: iron lungs, heart monitors, and other mechanical devices that were now as useless as the stone landscape that lingered beyond.

Scootaloo took a deep breath. The scavenger was a different pony; there was no denying that. She had no legitimate reason to be here. This place didn't have what she had flown the Harmony to the half-buried town for. And yet—standing there in the top floor of the hospital, in the barren absence of both life and death—she could think of no better place to be. Her memories still hummed with the sugary echoes that lingered in those dust-laden halls.

Meditatively, the time traveler closed her scarlet eyes. Her body was still, and she could almost hear—in a breathless pause—the innumerable giggles of young souls. Their voices swirled and swayed, dancing for a melodic spell. And then—as always—there lurched something darker beyond the rest, something that pierced the last pony's heart like a sick pair of sapphire eyes from across the room, something that laughed, lingered, then rattled.

And another voice—a voice from the past and future all the same—hissed back with enough clarity to burst her eardrums: “I hate you. I hate you so friggin' much.”

Scootaloo's scarlet eyes flashed open beneath her amber lenses. Her heart was beating, her neck was sweating, but she was alone. Everything was silent, and the only thing that moved was the alien muscle inside her mouth that briefly dreamed of mimicking the bitterness that still clung to those phantom words.

Something crinkled under her horseshoe suddenly. Blinking, the last pony glanced down. Through her goggles' refracted vision, she saw a sheet of paper, wrinkled in innumerable spots. No, not wrinkled: it was folded. In a gasping breath, she immediately knelt down and scooped the miraculous relic in her hooves. It was none other than a paper airplane. The edges were tattered, but the bulk of it was still fantastically white. What was more, it wasn't always a paper airplane. As Scootaloo slowly and carefully unfolded the length of it, the brittle remains of a wax drawing exposed itself to her scarlet eyes. The illustration depicted a tiny yellow filly prancing outside of a hospital building with two larger equines of a similar hue. The unmistakable style and characteristics of the art piece danced its way murderously into the pegasus' heart.

“Suntrot,” she muttered. It was a bittersweet name, like a ray of sunshine across a granite headstone, and the pain of it shot through Scootaloo's body until her goggles fogged from the inside. She slid her lenses up to her violet bangs and wiped her eyes with a forelimb. Sniffling, the scavenger stared up into the granite recesses of the ceiling for the full three or four minutes it took for her to compose herself. Finally, resurrecting a strength that she had built over a quarter of a century, Scootaloo stood up, slid the sheet of paper into her nearest saddle pocket, and lowered her copper goggles once more.

With a flick of short pink tail hairs, Scootaloo sauntered towards the nearest broken window and stretched forth her wings to fly off towards the looming plateau. She paused suddenly, glancing through the peripheral of her goggles to see a board hanging from the broad wall of the room. Several tattered strips of paper—much like the airplane—had scattered to dusty bits in the endless pelting winds that hissed through the canyon's dead end. But one or two muddy-white sheets remained on the board. They were splashed all over with more foalish scribbles, of charcoal equine images joined hoof-and-hoof. In the center of each—grinning a crescent moon—was a figure dotted three times over with a pink hue.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I have this creepy sensation come over me every time I return from a time jump. After each venture, I feel as if a part of myself is left behind, and I feel the shadows of where I just was following me like pinpricks against an amputee's phantom limb. A part of me is in this world, and a part of me still remains in the world that once was. I know that I can't be in two places at once, but it's not so easy convincing my soul... which constantly goes through the conveyor belt of becoming and un-becoming Goddess Entropa's avatar.

It's been two days since I returned from my last jump, since I spoke with Spike, since I reignited the furnace in the heart of the Harmony and set course for the distant corpse of a remarkably grim city that I once had the dismal grace of witnessing first-hoof. And yet, I am still there. I am still floundering behind the tail of my anchor. I am still making horrible mistakes in the name of sanity. I am still refusing to laugh at what Entropa's immutable grace has landed in my lap.

In truth, I am hardly bothered by this sensation. With such a split nature, I achieve a unique clarity, so that it helps me write entries like this, even when they're not dedicated to you. I have to capture the feeling—the heart of the sensations that I have just experienced—so long as they are still fresh within me. It is so dang easy to believe that the many frightening moments of my time jumps have never happened. It is so easy to perceive everything I've ever gone through as dreams, as fleeting moments of strange visions strung together on translucent dragon flame.

There is no going back to the way things were. Even if Spike and I never succeed in restoring the Sun and Moon to this dead land—even if all of these crazy trips into the past are for nothing—there simply is no returning to the life that I used to live. The Wasteland to me is no longer a giant treasure trove of yesterday's pointless spoils. There are fossils here now that breathe to me, that speak to me in voices of warm things that I've had both the blessing and curse to once know and then meet again.

I'm not sure I can succinctly convey what this all means to me, what this means to any living thing that has ever existed. I'm sure you yourself have known a soul or two that has encountered a crisis of this magnitude somewhere in this lopsided universe of ours. But I know that you're never telling me your secrets. Why should you? You like to keep things interesting by playing silent.

I thought I could play silent too. For decades, I thought that sobbing was a refuge of the weak, that the last tears I would ever be allowed to wail forth upon this world were through the breaths of a lone foal in the company of Fluttershy, or else in the simple shadows of a once-starved loneliness.

And then I met Spike, and the shell that was around me collapsed. There's yet another skin I wear these days that is neither my own nor Princess Entropa's. I cannot for the life of me paint the colors of this mare's new coat, of this exoskeleton she's suddenly fit herself with, that draws the ash of this world inward suddenly like a sponge, so that every hoof-trot taken into the graves all around her are suddenly worth more pauses, worth more silent moments, worth more breaths of contemplation than could fill twenty million lifetimes of extinct ponies put together.

Scavenging was another angle of exploring. These days, I'm suddenly venturing out into the Wastes for another reason. I'm retracing my paths. I'm finding the fossils of not only dead memories, but of my own memories. It makes me nauseous just to contemplate it; I bet you think it's downright funny. I wonder what you might actually say, even if it means breaking your vow of silence, to witness the moment when I discover a lone fossil and I find out that fossil is me. Perhaps you will let me live that long, just for the sheer curiosity of the paradox. That is, of course, assuming you believe in immutability half as much as Spike does. It seems to be right up your friggin' alley, doesn't it?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Grunting, Scootaloo slid her leather mask over her snout and marched shoulder-first into the flurrying winds that skimmed the topside of the stony gray plateau. Her amber goggles frosted against the random blankets of snow that billowed over her as she bravely trotted across the endless horizon of rock that stood tall above the entrenched city. The dead hollows of many soil-stripped tree trunks lingered on either side of her as she pressed onward, undaunted by the wind chill, her short violet threads rustling in the gales.

She squinted briefly to her side as she trotted beyond the remnants of an age-old bog. The muddy contents of a deep basin had been vulcanized to dense brown rock. Half-submerged in this baked quagmire was a behemoth skeleton, a reptilian thing with four long necks that stretched out from the solidified mud in the anguished pose of a suffocating death throe. To this, Scootaloo bore a brief and unsaintly smirk under her mask as she passed the unsightly creature's multiple skulls.

Glancing far north—beyond the haze of the ashen winds—the last pony saw a deep ravine, far deeper than the trenches within which the town had been built. This new drop was an unnatural thing; a gigantic quarry had been dredged from the rocky bosom of the world by several generations of earth ponies with archaic knowledge of reshaping the land. In the present, the quarry had acquired so much snow and sediment that it had become a virtual lake of shifting debris. It would be utter suicide to fly—much less trot—near that deep and drowning basin. The very thought of it filled the scavenger's heart with trepidation, like being offered before a serpent's mouth on a plate of white stones. Scootaloo pressed onward.

As her daring march lingered upon the precipice of an hour, the lone pony passed by a hut constructed out of piled rocks. She gazed briefly inside, reaching a hoof up to her goggles to readjust the lenses momentarily. Piled inside the igloo of jagged stones was a series of blacksmith tools. A furnace and several anvils formed a cold circle beneath the structure, and beyond them, shadowed in ash, was an even colder heap of of dried-up skeletons—the first bodies she had witnessed since coming there. They were hardly the fossils of ponies. Stocky frames dangled forth cloven hooves, and each stunted cranium bore a majestic pair of spiraling horns. The bodies were as sagely in death as they were in life. The deep hum of their chanting voices still haunted the time traveler's ears. She breathed silence to allow them one last acoustic blessing, and then she trudged forth.

Finally—an hour and a half since she flew from the hospital window—Scootaloo stumbled upon her destination. It was a farmstead, one out of many that blanketed the stony plateau some half-kilometer apart from one another, like distant boils upon the rocky bosom of a dead gray beast. A rickety outline of wooden fencing surrounded the crumbled frame of a two-story farmhouse. The frame of an overturned silo had decayed into a sea of splinters. Finally, the shattered spindle of a grand windmill leaned precariously against a pile of wagon remains. A half-fan of wooden shingles spun back and forth creakily on a hollow axis lined with the brittle shells of decade-old mushrooms.

Scootaloo took a somber detour through the house, marching through the rubble left from the second story's cold collapse. The tables, benches, and shelves of the place were dotted with hundreds of wax puddles, the tell-tale remnants of ancient candles. A paper box rested on the floor beside several sheets of paper, each of which had remarkably complex landscapes illustrated with crayon. The family dining area had melted together with a filly's bedroom from above, and spilling out from a shattered wardrobe was a surprising array of miscellaneous colors that broke the endless gray of that dead landscape. Deflated pink balloons, tattered red streamers, scattered blue confetti, and bright yellow party hats had long vomited out of the contents of the cabinet, filling the ruins with a nauseating degree of half-buried joy.

That wasn't all that spilled out of the crumbled wardrobe. Upon closer inspection, Scootaloo discovered a hauntingly familiar array of clothing. She spotted a bright blue shirt be-speckled with tropical palm trees and seaspray patterns. She saw a long black coat with a white vest. There was a pair of khaki pants, an orange sweaterjacket, and two hats—one a black top hat, and the other a scrappy thing made of straw. Then, Scootaloo jolted upon the sight of a bright turquoise shape. She immediately reached a hoof down, but the fabric in question merely dissolved upon impact. However, she discovered something more solid underneath. When her hoof retracted, she was holding up a faded green article, a thick canvas beret with the markings of Zebraharan military duty inscribed across the brim. A sick curve alighted Scootaloo's face, and the scavenger could not help herself—neither could the warm soul sharing the same shell of a body. She packed the thing away in her saddlebag, claiming her third “souvenir” since she jumped out of the Harmony.

As somber as this site was, it was merely a distraction, like a sullen memory. There was still one thing and one thing alone that the last pony had truly come here for. On swift legs, she trotted out of the ruined farmhouse and back once more into the cold winds of the farmstead. She made straightway across a field splashed randomly with multicolored rocks and headed directly towards a flat wall of mountainous stone that shadowed the far side of the soil-less “field”.

Her heart beat faster and faster with each step that brought her closer to the wall. Hope battled with despair as she saw a thick bramble of dark green vines having long blanketed the naked surface of the stone face.

“Come on... Come on... Don't friggin' tell me it's gone. Don't tell me...” The scavenger hissed as she desperately leaped towards the curtain of vines and yanked viciously at them, tearing them to brittle shreds as she exposed the pale rockface to the yawning, gray world. There was a deep, lasting gasp—and she froze, her jaws agape as she formed a slow and methodical smirk. “Whew... Well hello there, Harmony. How have you been?”

Before her, the wall had been carved deeply—etched in many innumerable spots—with deep holes, shattered impressions, wide swathing beams of curved lines, and several chiseled characters that outlasted both the Cataclysm and the drooping wings of time. Among the illustrated array of madness, only a few characters structurally stood out from the rest, and those had been sketched in the words of the Lunar tongue—the one language that no random local or visitor could possibly have understood upon seeing the haphazard mural... except for her.

“Now we're getting somewhere.” The last pony smirked to herself. Her heart raced as she laid out a pouch before her and produced the broad white cloth of leather that she had brought from her airship. Using rusted metal stakes, she impaled the far corners of this tarp to the rock until it was pressed clean to the etched mural along the naked stone wall. Then—with expert precision—she hovered on brown wings and rubbed a knife of brittle charcoal over the entire length of the cloth, transferring the image from the rock onto the sheet, preserving a message that was twenty-five years old.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Each time I go diving into the past, each time I go plunging my shivering body into the currents of Spike's green flame, I lose greater and greater cohesive chunks of myself, so that I feel with each trip a greater sense of hopelessness and dismay. And yet, every time I return from such a descent, I come back refreshed, as if I've just stapled together a great rift in the world that had been torn loose ever since the Sundering of Consus.

Do the feelings I have after my returns overwhelm the apprehensions I suffer when I first embark upon my chronological leaps? So far, I cannot say. The life of a scavenger is all about learning to hold your breath and hope for the best. I could descend into the deepest and darkest hole, search for days, and come back up to the twilight of the surface having caught nothing. Yes, that may mean that I'm empty-hoofed, but the fact that I've made it back with the greater whole of myself intact should be a victory on its own, right? Heck, why am I asking you this?

I shouldn't lie. For a while there, I thought Spike's experiment was going nowhere. A part of me still feels that; it's only natural to doubt. Visiting Cheerilee didn't teach me a thing about what caused the Cataclysm; it only showed me how paranoid and disastrously impulsive I can be. Defending the Apple Family's farm from trolls didn't bring me any closer to figuring out how Equestria ended, but I did bring peace to the earth ponies' lives while I learned the limits of my Entropan abilities. Being with Fluttershy showed me more vulnerable wounds within the fabric of myself than I had ever been willing to admit, but Celestia help me if I so much as lifted my and Spike's understanding of the Cataclysm by a single centimeter.

But now—so beautifully now—I think I'm starting to get a grasp on things. It may be nothing, it may be a wild goose chase—but it is certainly hopeful, and that's done a number on my other curse of “sanity.” I need to know that there is more to my trips into yesterday than a mere excursion in past and present memories. I need to feel that I'm accomplishing more than just blessing a few meager ponies' lives who—though they may once have been my friends—are mere pindrops in the great echoing well of history. A time traveler can't afford to be selfish, and in spite of all of Spike's subjective and philosophical assurances to the contrary, I need to be moving away from my anchors and deeper into the sea of understanding the past. I'm starting to think that I've begun that. Ironically, only time will tell if my efforts are fruitful, but it will be my time to tell and no longer simply the naked moments stolen from history's ghosts.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Reunited with the toasty interior of the Harmony's cabin, Scootaloo slapped the last of her leather armor and equipment onto the workbench. She reached into her saddlebag and gently—very gently—produced the paper airplane with the golden figures drawn upon it. This she plastered to the wall above the surface of the workbench so that it caught the gentle kiss of the lanternlight at just the right angle. She breathed easier, as if discovering a third lung inside herself.

As the Harmony climbed high through the cold winds above the plateau, the last pony placed the vessel into a steady hover and marched down the spiraling copper staircase with the rolled-up cloth of white leather in her grasp. Once descended into the hangar level of the Harmony, Scootaloo shoved aside a tiny metal scooter, approached a worktable littered with runeforging tools, and spoke to the runes in the lanterns above her. The dark metal bulkheads glowed with pale moonlight.

She proceeded then to stretch the tarp across a wall until the entire folds of it stood majestically before her peering scarlet eyes. The charcoal etchings bled into a semblance of a pattern. The many white lines and dots and curves formed a broad constellation, a naked and lucid map of the Equestrian night sky from twenty-five years ago. In the center of this natural clustering of stars, planets, and galactic streams there blossomed a great thick miasma of conjoining dots, a tumorous array that was seemingly harmless to anypony alive in that time... but not to the last pony.

With a smirking breath of discovery, Scootaloo sat on her haunches, produced her journal, and began re-redrawing the constellations before her in a penciled sketch across a series of blank pages.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

My days with Fluttershy gave me many memories that I will never forget—and all of them for personal reasons... except one. I had heard something beyond the layers of Everfree madness that pierced me harder than anything I had ever heard before. I've never truly been a pony of faith, but the sensation I felt in the Forest had to be believed. I feel... as though a voice came to me, where a voice wouldn't have come to anypony else—time traveler or not. It spoke to Entropan ears and Entropan eyes, knowing fully well that they were camouflaging an infectious splinter lodged into the flesh of that very time and place.

My close draconian friend is a huge fan of immutability, so it would only be just to speak for him when I write that “nothing happens without a reason.” In Everfree, I was a lone spirit detached from her rightful timeline. I was in the absolute most random and inappropriate spot for my soul-self to have been projected. And yet—then and there—something spoke to me. I cannot take this as a mere coincidence, as a mere whim of madness. There is something driving me, aiming me towards unraveling the mystery of the Cataclysm. And if I was to make such a daring guess, I wasn't the only spirit who was willing this into fruition.

Maybe the Goddesses know something about it. Maybe you know something about it. All that matters is that I'm learning more about it with each passing second, with each paragraph I place down to somehow frame and preserve it.

It all started two weeks ago, several days before I set course to the northeast province of Equestria, before I set out to find the twenty-five year old star map, before I began writing to you, before I found a reason to laugh, before I learned that there were more things in the Wasteland meant spending breaths on than sobs....

---

With a grunt, Scootaloo gave the obelisk of moonrock one last pound. The metal kiss of the scavenger's hammer echoed across the stony landscape until it vibrated off a forest of briars that formed an impenetrable wall less than fifty meters ahead of the freshly-made grave. Pocketing her tools away, the last pony settled down the crest of her aching lungs and stood before the stone that marked Fluttershy's final resting place. A hollow cubicle of petrified wood and straw outlined the spot where a rustic cottage once stood in the glittering rays of the Sun. Here, under the shadow of endless twilight, the owner of a melodic voice finally found peace.

Scootaloo exhaled, her short pink mane billowing with a brief gust of ash-laden wind. She settled down on her haunches and bowed her head before the tiny obelisk, like a foal paying reverence to an eternal memorial. After a flaring of her nostrils, she glanced back up and bravely murmured to the lonesome air of the site:

“You were always at peace here. Whether you were by yourself, or whether you were treating guests, it was this place that brought you comfort. I can't pretend to know whether or not you took my advice and sought the company of those who cared for you, but I do know what a true home is. After so many years, I know what a true home is. So long as you're here, Fluttershy, it'll never be empty. Your spirit shall endure, and it shall do so far longer than any Sun or Moon ever could over this land, resurrected or not.”

She tilted her head aside until her scarlet eyes fell upon a tiny dirt mound lying besides the larger grave.

“I couldn't help it, Fluttershy. I hate for you to be by yourself forever. So, I buried Angel right next to you. At least, I think it's Angel. I found the rabbit's bones right at the threshold to the cottage. It was as if... it was as if he was w-waiting for you to come home from the Everfree Forest. Now, he doesn't have to... wait any longer...”

Scootaloo bit her lip. Shivers overcame her. She clenched her scarlet eyes tightly shut to weather the next few breaths, and when she reopened them a pair of tears squeezed loose.

“Fluttershy, I can only do so little for Equestria. I can only come back and hug bits and pieces of you in green bursts of craziness. No matter what Spike or I may accomplish, nothing will ever change the fact that each and every one of the ponies I have ever cared for died horrible deaths on their lonesome. I will never know how you and the Capricorn ended up in the clutches of an Ursa Major. I'll never imagine what went through Big Macintosh's head when he turned his own body into a doorstop for the Apple Family's cellar. All I know is that I am only able to witness a blissfully short and bittersweet portrait of all of your lives, and just what am I to make out of such a glorious image? Do I add more color to the brushstrokes? Do I scratch off the rough edges? What does it matter when the masterpiece is going to be burned in a raging, Cataclysmic fire when all is said and done?”

The last pony sniffled. She raised a brown forelimb up to her cheek and dried her face. Several shuddering breaths later, she resumed speaking.

“You have taught me so much about the circle of kindness, but what good is kindness if I am all that there is to share it with? I have spent my whole entire life giving to myself, and not even two and a half decades combined can match the glory of spending a few short days with you. This has always been a dark and dismal world, Fluttershy. I may yet be able to bring the Sunlight back, but what's the point if you're not there for the light to shine on?”

She swallowed a heavy lump down her throat. After a few shuddering moments, she finally gained control over her pained breaths. She brought her hoof to her lips, kissed it, and planted it on the lunar surface of the obelisk. Upon making contact, however, she rested her limb there, leaning the whole of her weight against the stone like a yellow pegasus had once leaned against her for support.

“I never once dreamt of burying my parents, Fluttershy. That is because, since I was a kid, I had long committed myself to making them proud by carrying their strength with me. Now that I've laid you to rest, I commit myself to honoring you all the same. I may not know how yet, but I promise you—kindness will shine in this land, even if it's doomed to last no longer than I do. I thank you and bless you for teaching me what you know. This earth may be your grave, but I will be your vessel, as I am for Applejack. Starting with kindness and honesty, I will bring more than Sunlight back to the Wasteland. I will bring structure. I will restore... harmony.”

As soon as she released her hoof, she released her breath like a sorrowful ghost. It was a heaving thing, and it almost tripped her as she struggled back onto all four limbs. Slinging a bag of tools over her blank flank, the last pony departed from the remains of Fluttershy and made for the bulbous copper shape of an airship lingering above a pair of dead trees, all the while murmuring a breathy trio of words to the dead air of the wastes...

---

Act Four: Dredgemane

---

Comments

[AppleTank]

Ooooh boy.

[RoboRed]

And so it begins...the greatest act of the story thus far...

[FloydienSlip]

Blank flank?

[booman980]

2700624 no magic= no cutie mark.

[Warrior Kitten]

My theory is, after she's gone back and 'saved' the other elements, she'll have all the elements inside her. She'll explode in a cataclysmic burst that will restore Equestria. She'll either die in the process, or live in the restored Equestria till the end.

[NSFW]

pinkies chapter begins i presume?

[FloydienSlip]

And sixty-eight and a half weeks later, I'm finally starting the Dredgemane arc.

About friggin' time.

[Prismic]

Chapter 31 is here!