Chapter Eight: Live to Die
The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions
Chapter Eight – Live to Die
Special Thanks to Demetrius and Vimbert for Editing
Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art
Several hours later, somewhere in the bubbling gray clouds of the Central Heights, the Harmony vibrated with the wilting chords of Octavia's melancholic strings. The last pony sat at her work bench with her back to the crackling record player. With her hooves entwined in cylindrical tool braces, she proceeded to fix and tinker the battered copper rifle that she had retrieved from the depths of Ponyville's town hall. As one cello suite bled beautifully into another, she briefly looked up from her diligent engineering and spotted a blurred mirror hanging from a nob below the shelves where she kept her multicolored gems.
Only the barest, upper-left corner of the mirror provided a decent reflection. From beyond a rusted fog, a thirty-three year old mare with a brown coat and tired scarlet eyes shyly came out from hiding. She blinked at her weathered self, noticing the lines beneath her eyes, the nicked and bruised skin that flanked her ears. Finally, she tilted her snout to the side and studied her neck, squinting at a thin forest of violet stubble that came out coarsely to kiss the lantern-lit air of the airship's cabin. She ran a tool-braced hoof over the mane, feeling the tiny stalks, briefly imagining them giving birth to a long dead curtain of pink threads waving gracefully outward from her slender form.
But in a final blink, the shadow of Scootaloo disappeared, replaced once more with the last pony, her fine orange coat having bristled into brown ruggedness, her violet eyes having paled to a bitter scarlet. The rusted air encompassed her like a dried butterfly in a specimen jar. She sighed, and as Octavia's record began skipping at the end of its instrumental, she hung her head towards her half-built weapon and lingered on the images fluttering across her mind.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Journal Entry # 2,352
Today... something happened.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo grunted and swung the axe in her teeth's grip one last time. With a mighty crunching noise, the two-meter tall mushroom fell down into a flurry of powdery ash. She dropped to her knees to scrape the edible material out of the hollow of the gigantic fungus, when a flurry of tiny insects swarmed over her in a skittering black blanket. Yelping, she fell back and swung her hooves wildly, fighting a legion of shadowy trolls in her mind.
With a gasp, she opened her eyes wide to see once more a harmless forest of gigantic mushrooms waiting to be cut down. The insects had all scattered, and she was once more alone.
Sighing, she gazed into the hollow of the fungus, disdainfully observing the colony of paper husks that had long filled the spoiled stalk. With a woeful groan, the pony dragged her axe towards the next giant mushroom, and in the shadow of the tethered Harmony she proceeded to hack away at the withered structure.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
I have been made an offer. I have been given an opportunity to literally go into the past, to venture into a warm and colorful world that my mind has preserved but my heart has forgotten over these many gray years. And yet, there is no hope for changing anything with this “gift.” There is only the past, the damnable dying past.
The best that all of this potential experimentation can do is end the twilight that hangs above the lengths and widths of Equestria. The worst it can do is probably the only thing it can do—and that's reopen so many festering wounds hiding deep underneath my coat that I shudder to even contemplate them.
What would it be like to see Fluttershy again? Or Applejack? Or Sweetie Bell or Apple Bloom or ... Rainbow Dash?
In the days after ponies died, I've had my life saved twice. Once by Rainbow, and a second time just now by Spike—as he royally trashed the trolls that had ambushed me in Ponyville. In many ways, my whole life—twenty-five years in the Wastes, so I've discovered—has been one gigantic service to the one blue pegasus who saved me, the one pony I have always believed in, and in some ways still do. Does this mean that I owe Spike all the same? I know he obviously doesn't mean to obligate me in such a manner—But how far is he willing to go compared to how far I am able to go?
This is assuming, of course, that I am going anywhere at all.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
One day, Scootaloo tore her way through a splintering door. She pierced the center of an abandoned apartment complex along the downtown stretch of Baltimare. As gray filtered light seeped in through the mildewed windows, she spotted several equine corpses lying in a tight circle in the center of a living room. Trotting over to them, she nudged a few bones with her hoof until she finally found what she needed—a unicorn skull.
Squatting down besides the skeleton, she extended a blade from her horseshoe and planted it at the base of the body's horn. It wasn't until half a minute later that Scootaloo realized she hadn't yet begun carving the dead stub off. A deep pale glow washed over her, and she swallowed a lump down her throat.
With a shuddering sigh, she lifted her goggles off her head and ran a hoof over her moistening eyes. She stared miserably past the bodies and at a heap of belongings that had fallen out of a trunk, spilling onto the floor. She saw scattered utensils, toys, Equestrian stationary, and—finally—a pile of faded photographs with several smiling and living faces poised eternally, staring back at her as she lingered over the same family's discarded husks a few meters away.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The legacy of ponydom has given me so much that I have used over the decades. It is only right that I find a way to give back to it. But how does that stack up when all that could possibly change is the bright face of Equestria itself, an Equestrian future with no ponies in it?
I only wished to be a survivor, and perhaps to reunite with some other stray members of my own kind. Now that I know—thanks to Spike—that I am indeed the last pony that will ever breathe, what point is there in trying to bring light to a world with no pure eyes remaining to judge it? It's like a tree that falls alone in the forest—But how selfish of a presumption is that on my part?
What right do I have—or Spike for that matter—to determine how we memorialize this world, when we've done so much to pilfer from it? Does the fact that we're the last living things to care about it all excuse us being the last souls to make something of it?—Even if for the sake of making something?
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo yanked on the lever and her signal fired its prismatic beams into the air above the stony plateau. The multicolored spectrum pierced the cloudy overcast in a burning swath, but the lingering twilight above remained unphased. The snow and ash was still falling, the mist still covering the circle of metal barricades in an infinite rust. Under the shadow of the Harmony, a disenchanted Scootaloo marched up towards the signal, propped herself onto two hooves with her shoulder leaning against her rifle, and stuck her left limb into the burning beams of light.
The sky briefly strobed as her hoof floated lazily from red to green to indigo and softly back. She watched with momentary fascination as the lights bumped and wavered with each other, but ultimately remained rigidly divided into the seven artificial hues, as directed by Scootaloo's flamestone that shot beams of light into the strategically placed gems.
The last pony tilted her snout up and watched with a sudden boredom, observing the glistening heights of her once-treasured beacon. It was exactly what it always had been, a message to dead ponies. Being the only one to read what the signal had to say made Scootaloo feel dead as well, because she knew where this rainbow began, and could spot with her naked eyes the lingering twilight above where it ultimately ended.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
I was sent back in time. Ever so briefly, I tasted of the past. I saw a rainbow—And it was real. I could not see where it began, and I could not see where it ended. I didn't care. It gave me hope, like I always knew it would. But only now do I really understand where that hope stems from.
Hope is a disease, an affliction to all living beings. The only thing sentient creatures such as ponies had ever accomplished was dying, and yet we had always clung to hope. This perhaps made sense in an Age when Goddesses walked the fields of Equestria—But now? Princess Celestia's eternal life ran out. When she and Luna vanished, all that was left was the decaying wasteland of mortality, forever festering in the unburied penumbra of her shadow.
Perhaps that's the way it has always been, and what brought about the explosive end to the Goddesses of Prosperity was not an unknown curse—like Spike suggested—but a self-destructive realization that the Goddesses themselves discovered when it was too late: that life is absurd, that it's always been absurd, even for them.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“The Mountain Ogres suffered another setback,” said the komodo dragon over his mug of ale.His goggles reflected the lanternlight of the M.O.D.D. as he took a sip, belched, and leaned over the table.“Their explosive cache along the east front of the Valley of Jewels caught aflame.The explosion could be felt all the way to the Northern Wastes.There's rumor of sabotage.”
“I wouldn'ttttt put it past the Fire Ogresssss,” the dirigible dog replied with a fanged smirk.“Those heartlessssss bastards are gonna win the war!Probably because they're heartless!”
“Or perhaps because they're cunning enough to fight for Mount Ogreton with zeal.”
“Feh!” the goblin at the table grunted, rotating his mug in tiny hands.His frown was a venomous thing.“Fire Ogres... Mountain Ogres... they're all the same!Ruthless, motherless slavers, I tell you...”
“Hah!” The reptile smirked.“You're one to talk!”
“Yeah, and you're one to sit on a steam propeller and rotate!”Sneering, the goblin flung his mug at the lizard's skull.
“Gahh!”Bleeding, the lizard coiled his tail, sprang, and pounced on the goblin.The two creatures' ensuing scuffle smashed through the table as the dirgible dog leaned back with his pint and guffawed.
Across the Monkey O'Dozen Den, the last pony sat at the bar in a dull slump.Scootaloo's tired scarlet eyes swam over the grime and stains of the countertop as Pitt strolled up, sighing towards the distant fight.
“I'd pray to the monkey gods for one of those three to go extinct, but for the life of me I can't pick one and be happy with it.”He filled a mug with a sudsy beverage and smirked the mare's way.“It's a good thing I don't live out on the Wasteland, or else I'd be killing everything that moves just for some peace and quiet.”
“Instead you're killing everything that comes here with your drinks,” Scootaloo muttered.
“Guess that explains why you ain't extinct,” he said while sliding the mug towards the patron next to her.“You don't even have a tab.”He wiped his hairy palms clean on a rag and raised a moth-eaten eyebrow.“What in Mother Feces' name are you still doing here anyways, Harmony?You paid for your lousy steam catridges, didn't ya?Normally you would have hopped into your floating fart vessel and blown this popsicle joint by now.”
She sighed long and hard.“Suddenly, there's nowhere to go, Pitt.”She gulped, continuing to stare into nothingness.“There's nothing to explore...”
“Pardon me for being a stick in the ash, but when did you ever have anyplace to go, four legs?”
Scootaloo slowly pivoted to bequeath him her deadpan stare.
He smirked.“There are few lively things left in this crap-heap of a world, and you hardly count.I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Harmony, but there really aren't any other saddle-bearing hay-jobs left to gallop circles with, now are there?”
Her nostrils flared.“Pitt, tell me...”She leaned against the bar, squinting her scarlet eyes.“You have eleven brothers, right?”
“Unfortunately.”
“You think you'll be lucky some stormfront to have a zeppelin fly by and magically deposit eleven sisters for you and yoru kind to copulate with?”
“As intriguing as this raunchy conversation is, exactly where are you trotting with it, sweet-cheeks?”
She gulped and said, “What would you do, Pitt, if you knew—beyond the shadow of a doubt—that you were the very last of your kind?”
His nose crests undulated with a deep breath.The balding baboon dropped the rag to the floor and leaned forward to stare fixedly at her.“I would die, Harmony,” Pitt murmured.“And I would keep on dying the way I wanted to die, alone and proud.”His uneven eyes swam lethargically over the Den, brushing past the images of drunken souls and miserable faces and the great gray mist seeping in from the outside wastes to drown it all.“Does any of this look like a place worth living in?”He gazed at the floor and muttered, “Someday, we'll all be extinct, and the ash will have the last laugh.”
She said nothing as he picked up a tray of empty cups and strolled towards the rear of the bar.
“The trick, I suppose...”Pitt tilted his head back towards her with a smirk.“Is ending everything with a worthy punchline.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
And as much as I rationalize to myself the pointlessness of it all—painting a far bleaker picture than I had ever imagined in all of my most bitter of dark-lit scavengings—why is it that I cannot shake the rainbow out of my head, the real rainbow, the real rainbow that I saw with my own eyes?
If hope is a disease, and all it will ever lead me to is misery and self-annihilation, when why do I cling to it so? Why does it make me excited, like I am starved? Why does it always plant me steadily upon this knifing precipice of—dare I say it—joy?
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Why so emoquine, Harmony?”
Scootaloo stared listlessly through a green haze of smoke, her scarlet eyes unwavering. There was a shuffling movement besides her, and a furred paw waved obligatorily before her face.
“Hello? Customer of most esteemed appreciation? Is old Equestrian joke, da? Vhy so glum, pony friend?”
She snapped out of it. She pivoted to glance across the merchant vessel and threw a faded smile the flying squirrel's way. “S-Sorry, Bruce. I've just got a lot on my mind, that's all. What were you offering again?”
“Is more than pony's mind. Brucie thinks it is stomach—or another organ close to it. Hopefully not part of pony sensitive to cancer stick, nyet?” He chuckled under green goggles, flicked his cigar some, and continued showing off a pair of leather bands as their dual ships bobbed in the air, docked to one another. “Forty strips each—Dual reinforced dragonskin! Finest from vhat remains of Zebraharan mountains—”
“No—No!” The mare briefly snarled, shook a shuddering breath off her, and paced across the racks of wares. “Thanks, Bruce. I know that I need new armor, but... anything but dragon leather, if you don't mind.”
“Pray tell Brucie why? Date with sky serpent, pony plans? Bah!” He tossed the thick bands into a pile of collapsing metal knick-knacks while snapping his tiny paws. “Brucie can do something better!” He kicked off a bulkhead, glided over to a coat of armor, and gruntingly lifted a breastplate in his quivering limbs. “Nnnghh—Best in ramcraft! Fashioned out of tempered titanium! Brucie promises—hckk—no fire breathing snakes harmed in process of metallurgy—Ach! Nyet, you overgrowned rust heap—Ugh! Only takes getting used to hauling around! Like you sporting pretty mane made out of iron, da?”
“I know you're doing your best to help me out, Bruce. But—seriously—all I need to do is browse quietly for a bit, and then I'm sure I'll find the... armor that I need,” she murmured, her eyes once again gazing into a grand nothingness beyond the shelves of rattling miscellany.
The green-goggled squirrel saw it. Scratching his furry forehead, he scampered up a metal shelf and perched above her. “Kind of armor pony needs is something no strips could buy, Brucie thinks.
She did not reply.
He rubbed his chin some, then brightened. “Perhaps you are nervous about stormfront?” He smirked and gestured nonchalantly out a nearby porthole. The gray clouds were darkening as several deep flashes of lightning started to bubble from within the wispy clusters herding punctually their way. “Vell, pony should only fear for money bag, because Brucie has greatest lightning rod from squirrel motherland of St Petersbrittle—Guaranteed to protect against any storm, but sure is not cheap!”
“It's not that, Bruce. It's...” She bit her lip, shifted uncomfortably, and finally looked at him, naked eyes to fogged goggles. “Bruce, let me ask you something—Pilot to pilot.”
“To pony's question, Brucie has answer, possibly, maybe—If Harmony needs it.”
She ignored the address and squinted, murmuring: “Do you enjoy what you do?”
“Selling to favorite customer? Absolutely! Brucie is always—”
“No no no—I mean what you do,” Scootaloo emphasized. “Your life, Bruce. Do you—Is this life all that you are willing to accept? Would you be ready to... to change it into something happier, something brighter—If you had the ability to do so?”
“Hrmm...” the overgrown rodent merchant rubbed his chin, puffing on his cigar. “Philosophy is not one of Brucie's strengths. Does not earn silver, only headaches, da?” He smirked wryly and flicked his cigar with emphasis. “If life vas so terrible, perhaps is reason Brucie smokes it away? HaHA!”
She sighed heavily. “But if you could change this—All of this. Would you be willing to do so?”
“Life is life. Sometimes life is too much life, sometimes too little,” he uttered as he squatted in his pilot's seat and propped a leg up, leaning back casually in the green haze of his cramped vessel. “But rather than think of things dat need changing, Brucie likes to focus on things he is glad for and be thankful for them.” A warm smile shone under his reflective, emerald lenses. “Like pony friend! If dis life vas changed, vould not have you to look forward to, da?”
She stared sadly at him. “That's just it, Brucie. The only thing you're guaranteed to run out of in life is friends.” She swallowed sorely. “The reason I know this is because there's so much magic lost from this world. And eventually that too will be gone.”
“Hmm...” he leaned further back and puffed. “All better reason pony has to spend time vith friends...” He smirked. “Or make new ones...”
“...or old ones,” she added in a low breath.
“Vhat vas dat, Harmony?” No sooner had he asked, but a loud rumble filled the roof of the world, forcing the two ships to rock and weave from the thunderous vibrations. “Mother Rushnut! Is getting vorse, the storm!” He kicked out of the seat and rushed up to a porthole, gazing out with a frown. “Brucie is afraid that he and pony friend must cut transaction short! You cannot outrun storm anymore than time itself!”
“Perhaps somepony can,” she once again murmured, then nodded her snout towards a series of brown leather bands along the far end of the gondola. “I'll take five of those over there.”
“Twenty strips each.”
“That works for me.”
“Then done is deal, Harmony!”
After the exchange of silver for goods, the mare trotted towards the metal bridge between his ship and hers. She lingered in his windblown doorway. “Again, Brucie, my name is not Harmony.”
“Da, da! Ve have been over dis! Pony is anonymous! Ha!Hilarious irony ensues—!”
“'Scootaloo.'”
He spun around and squinted at her through cockeyed goggles. “Vhat vas dat?”
“My name is Scootaloo,” she said, fidgeting. “And... I am glad to have you as a friend too, Brucie.”
The squirrel stared at her. After a spell, he smirked, then grinded his cigar to death against a bulkhead. “Another day vorth living, da?” He waved her off. “Off vith you, Scootaloo! Storms of twilight have no friends!”
She took a deep breath as the warmness left her cheeks and she marched outward to her hangar on the other side of the bridge. “Don't I know it...?”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
It has been several invisible, gray days since I last saw Spike, and I am no closer to an answer for his proposition than I was the first minute I flew myself away from the strangely inviting sights of Ponyville's ruins. That place is once more a potential home to me, and yet it pains me to see it the way it is. I'm reminded of something Bruce said without quite meaning to put much effort into it: that life is sometimes 'too much life,' sometimes 'too little life.' But when I look out the portholes of my airship, and when I see the desolation all around, I realize that any creature that attempts to neutrally philosophize like that is only attempting to protect my feelings. There is no life out here—only ashes.
The fact is—when Equestria exploded, it had to have been ponydom's fault, in some fashion or another. What Gilda hinted of and what most of the patrons who frequent the Monkey O'Dozen Den believe is at least partially true. The Sun and Moon would still be here today if something horrible hadn't happened to Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. Equestria was never a land that belonged to only ponies, and the fact that I'm the last living pegasus means that I, in some fashion, owe it to the world to get a second chance at seeing light once more, so that these perpetual shadows will no longer force otherwise harmless creatures into believing that 'life' is simply quantifiable.
A month before now, the same pony who's writing this now would never have given this blighted world a second thought. But as of a few days ago, I now know that I can potentially leave a mark, a very warm, golden, and glowing mark upon what would otherwise remain a world as grave if not even graver than what I now see before me. For years, I gave my all to maintain a rainbow symbol to spark hope into the souls of ponies who I always hoped were alive... but secretly knew really weren't. Now that I know what I can do and whom I can do it for—creatures like Bruce, Gilda, and even Pitt—could that change Equestria for the better? Could it give hope—however absurd—to a new society that might transform it into something beautiful, as opposed to its present ugliness? Can existence transcend essence, even when the likes of Spike and myself are long gone from this potential future kingdom?
It's always been tough being the last pony. And it's even tougher now. If this stormfront I'm flying in doesn't kill me, I think my confusion will. If there should be another entry, it will be by another pony, one who has transcended doubt, as Spike has transcended time. This I promise—this I hope.
-End of entryyyyyyyyyy---
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo's last penstroke smudged across the page of her journal as the Harmony experienced another jolt. The boiler at the back of the room flickered as it tried to maintain autopilot in the surmounting turbulence surging all around the craft. A warning bell clamored as a couple of sparks flew from a tesla coil on the port side of the cabin.
Cursing breathily, Scootaloo slapped the journal shut, swiveled away from her workbench, and all but pratfalled across the careening gondola, landing awkwardly in the cockpit's seat. As she harnessed herself into place, a wide panorama of bubbling clouds and random bits of lightning surged from beyond the stretched array of windshields. The world had punctually become an obsidian mesh of inky fog as a fresh stormfront rumbled across the rooftop of Equestria on the latest of its regular intervals.
Yanking at a few levers to re-orient the bobbing vessel, Scootaloo flashed an angry glare towards her instrument panel. A red light was flickering as a tiny brass pipe of steam blew through an alarm whistle. Her elaborate warning system was attempting to convey that part of the zeppelin's lateral support struts had loosened dangerously.
“Friggin' figures. Can't ride a storm these days without it turning into a drunken Wonderbolts performance,” she snarled, then silenced herself by clamping her teeth over a hanging chainlinked handle. She pulled hard and the boiler towards the rear billowed, pumping steam into the balloons over the gondola. Slowly, the Harmony lifted above the crashing black promontory of the advancing stormfront, aimed towards the highest point it could go above the dark, lightning-ruptured overcast. A wayward cloudfront thundered angrily at Scootaloo. She snarled back: “Yeah, well, you look fat and ugly too!”
An hour later, safely above the rumbling overcast of stormclouds, the grunting and griping pegasus struggled with a loose set of rivets that she was presently attempting to tighten back into place along the starboard side of the Harmony's zeppelin chassis. The black roof to the Equestrian Wastes groaned and roared beneath her, briefly flickering phantom illuminations of silver lightning hues across her blank flanks as she struggled to finish her task. At one point, the wrench she was twisting flew loose. She inadvertently struck herself in the small of her left foreleg. Scootaloo gave forth a loud groan—something that mutated into a furious snarl—and she banged the rivets with an opposite hoof, half-shocked to hear them rattling back into stubborn looseness.
With a huge deflating sigh, Scootaloo leaned her snout against the copper body of the zeppelin and hung there, brown wings fluttering in the brief winds, as the thunderous world gargled beneath her. She clung to the bosom of the Harmony in a gentle and lonesome sway, for what had to have been the better part of an hour, until she finally opened her scarlet eyes to the ever-lingering twilight overhead.
Distant, gloomy stars half-blinked down at her, never living and never dying. There was no real light in this world, only the half hearted imitation of brightness, like Celestia's mirror in Spike's garden. It almost looked pretty, but it was hardly the real thing. Scootaloo was tired of staring, and yet a strange peace was wafting through her with as much electricity as the stormfronts boiled with far below.
Hooking her wrench and other tools along the lateral struts of the airship, Scootaloo took wing, hovering down several dozens of meters below her hovering vessel. She then did something that she hadn't done since she was a little foal; she touched down with pegasus hooves onto the wispy surface of the overcast cloudbanks. Her legs made contact and she stood upon the dark beds of cloud cover. What had been nothing more than a permeable mist of disgust for two-and-a-half decades was suddenly a grand wafting plain of opaque fog—like a phantom shadow of the Ponyvillean valley—and the twilight above impersonated a childhood sky.
Peacefully—in a tranquil pose—Scootaloo slowly trotted forward across the blackened clouds. With each shuffling hoof, a patch of dark mist brightened strobingly from the deep lightning below, illuminating Scootaloo's brown coat randomly during her 'walk.' She didn't notice, for she had her eyes shut and her snout tilted skyward. With her wings meditatively outstretched, the last pony took several deep breaths, and opened an invisible third eye.
She saw Ms. Cheerilee's schoolhouse—or at least an effluent crimson shade of it. And beyond the schoolhouse was a misty lake of crystal blue water flanked by ivory mountains. The world blossomed with green beauty, like hair that had been shaved for years but was suddenly given the chance to grow again; and it bloomed all around her, kissing her with soft blades that swayed in a deep earthen wind. There were living things in this shady dreamscape, things that fluttered and danced in the breeze instead of slicing mercenary paths through it. And the children—the foals flocked to her, smiling, inviting Scootaloo across the playground into a game of Red Rover. Sweetie Bell's horn glistened in the morning mist, and Apple Bloom's drawling laughter filled the schoolyard with an undercurrent of static excitement, like being at the edge of a waterfall, or prancing along the fringes of the Everfree Forest, or gazing through the window of Sugarcube Corner while the sounds of streetside musicians reverberated off the freshly varnished wood of surrounding storefronts—
—and the thunder swallowed it all once more, with misty black teeth that lurched and hummed dreadfully beneath the twilight expanse. Scootaloo's scarlet eyes opened, and when they did they were not brimming with tears, but instead boiling with a steam of a different sort, a frothing burst of burning air that no amount of pressure forced upon the Harmony's boiler could ever hope to produce, a hissing outburst of blood-throttling menace that two and a half decades of levitating imprisonment had forged ever so demoniacally in the iron-wrought heart of one solitary hoofed creature doomed to aimlessly skim the gray leprous flesh of the planet.
And she screamed. All of her hate and all of her pain and all of her regret she screamed into the gray-on-gray horizons lingering before her, until her wailing voice outroared the great thunder booming from below and scared the strobes of lightning off into hiding, until all of the Equestrian Wasteland finally knew what it had taken from her, and that she was the only living being in the history of time that was capable of giving anything back.
And when the scream was done, and her wings were still heaving as she stood shakily on the womb of the buckling cloudbeds, it was not a sob that graced her face. It was not even a sneer. It was a smirk.
Spike was busying himself with a series of chemical vials in the center of his laboratory when the trap door to Twilight's former treehouse slammed wide open above him. He turned calmly to see a breathless, brown pegasus soaring down and hovering wide-eyed in front of him.
“Send me back, Spike!” Scootaloo panted. “Send me back in time!”
“Now Scootaloo,” the sagely dragon pointed with a clawed finger. “Have you adequately thought about what you're—?”
“There is no thinking,” she glared at him. “There is only now. And I am sick to death of now.”
He raised an eyecrest at that.
She frowned and growlingly reiterated: “I'm ready, Spike. I'm ready to do this. Send me to the past.”
Gradually, he smiled, and gave a gentle nod of his headcrests. “As you wish, old friend.”
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....... dat second to last line...
wooo!
A good chapter; though its toooooo long to make any direct criticism on.
a couple of times, AJ's lines seemed a tad off, but (as i have said before) this is likely a subtly different interpretation. But, it is still a FANTASTIC fic.
And a long one
The conversation with Granny Smith after AJ and Big Mac go eat some oatmeal was quite heartfelt.
, however this chapter was anything but perfect and I comment as I do with intent of constructive feed back to the author. It feels as though the section after revealing her gift to Granny Smith, the 13 so paragraphs, had no purpose and drug on pointlessly. 
The section has some good stuff but doesn't develop the character, relationships, world, etc at all and is better viewed imo as a mediocre journal entry of some kind. 
The highlights imo were the conjuration of the 'Act of Accord' lie, the brief conversations with granny, the opener of her at age 17 and the trolls, the end AJ's Ma and Pa with some connection to herself, the appearence of Apple Bloom, and the talk with AJ about beaten the trolls away.
The ending was good and ties into her never being a pony to take in kindness of a bed, food, bath, and the sort as covered in the previous chapter.
man this fic makes me think so much. i always feel so bad for what scoot goes threw.
This is darker than dead space. And I had a nervous breakdown halfway through it!
Dont judge me!
“W'rhynnym!”
Gulliver's Travels?
while i love your writing, why do you keep calling them fillies? aside from characters like applebloom, they are implied as being around thier 20s arent they
? after all, a filly is a baby female pony, not an adult one. 
Yet another amazing chapter!
585073 Sometimes it's probably a term of en'deer'ment (sorry couldn't resist) sort of like calling your girlfriend 'baby' or saying you're going to hang out with the girls/boys. All three of those are terms for youth not adults and yet they're used on a regular basis
“Mmm—Twilight has a lot of talent, I reckon. She's dispensed with an Ursa Major, a hydra, and a handful of parasprites.
She's dispensed with an Ursa Major, a hydra, and a handful of parasprites.
and a handful of parasprites.
handful
HAND
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751664 I lol'd at that good sir.
I feel bad for laughing at this line in the middle of a suspensful moment:
[“But... But why?” Applejack exclaimed with a disgusted expression.
“Just because, Miss Applejack,” Scootaloo throated. “They're trolls.”]
Because trolls on the internet basically equals trolls in equestria. Thanks for putting that detail in.
So... Link's mare is a godess
he'd be so mindfucked
Lol trolls
Ooh. Very good.
Well, it took me a number of weeks, but I finished this dang chapter. I sure hope the fic picks up steam, or I'm not gonna finish this before I freaking die.
Also, there was a "handful" in there somewhere. Handful.
> Smith shook a wrinkly hoof and all but trampled the obstinate mare at a bone-rattling twenty millimeters per hour.
"until they have caused you—as much misery and suffering as possible.”
Lol, Trolls... Don't we all know it?
been reading this fic since 5pm it is now 11am in the morning only a few more chapters to go
I know you've worked a while to tweak this exceedingly long but very good fic, but I've found a major error already in my re-read.
This whole chapter is still pegged at the end of chapter 7.
Thought I'd point that out. Cheers :D
Great first act. Looking forward to learning about the cataclysm, and even more about who ever 'Harmony' was that Dash mentioned in the first chapter.
... just realized who Harmony is
Well played, author. Another stroke of genius.
2073604
Who the hell is Harmony?
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We's goin back in tahme, bitches!
Finally, read through all of Act One!
[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPqDZURCRPc]
MISTAKE SPOTTED.
“You think you'll be lucky some stormfront to have a zeppelin fly by and magically deposit eleven sisters for you and yoru kind to copulate with?”
YORU.
Nother mistake!
The green-goggled squirrel saw it. Scratching his furry forehead, he scampered up a metal shelf and perched above her. “Kind of armor pony needs is something no strips could buy, Brucie thinks.
Missing a quotation mark at the end.
So, there are 16 Spikes living in Post Cataclysm Equestria?
In the end, Spikes will inherit the world.
4785475 And their blessings shall flow forth and transform the land into dragon Eden. (
Why do you even bother, T?)
T (FN)
Didn't notice until now, but ever since she went into the past a couple chapters ago, Scootaloo was referred to by her name in the writing, instead of as "the last pony" or "the pony".
This is weird, to me, when I hear Brucie the squirrel speak, he speaks with the voice of Roman Bellic of Gta 4. Anyone else get this?
4785475
Not unless he puts his code and faith in Jesus Christ who has conquered the world F I R ST