My World Is Empty Without You

by McPoodle

Chapter 3B

My World Is Empty Without You

Chapter 3B

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The words were spray-painted on a brick wall directly facing the exit of the diner, the conclusion of a poem by Evening Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

The color of the paint was identical to that of the bricks, and could only be detected by somepony with bat pony blood.

Therefore, the first thing most of the sighted ponies saw when they walked out of the diner was not the poem, but rather a menacing robed pony barring their way. A pony…armed with the Staff of Sameness.

Daring assumed a combat-ready stance. “You’re outnumbered!” she declared. “Hand over the Staff, and nopony gets hurt.”

The robed pony responded by pointing the Staff at Daring.

“Scatter!” Daring ordered.

The group was about to obey that command, but at that very instant, there was a flash of light behind them, and the robed pony revealed his face.

It was Daren Do, Daring’s long-lost archaeologist father. “Twenty years,” he said, in a voice that sounded like it came from a cavernous tomb. The voice caused all who heard it to be frozen in place, having no choice now but to hear him address his daughter. “Twenty years you left me to rot in the demon world behind that tomb.” The pony threw back his head and howled like a beast. “It was a living torture! Why couldn’t you follow the clues I left for you? What kind of a miserable excuse of an archaeologist are you?!”

Well, these were the words that Fluttershy meant for the group to hear. But this was in fact a spell, and the purpose of the spell was to cause the victim to think themselves confronted by one who’s respect they feared to lose the most. Instead of Daren Do, Twilight Sparkle saw Princess Celestia in that robe. Spike saw Twilight Sparkle, despite the fact that the real Twilight Sparkle was right behind him. And three of the ponies saw their fathers. These are the words each of them heard:

“Is this how you have wasted the potential that first brought you to my attention? You are worthless! Begone from my sight!”

“Is this how you have wasted the potential that first brought you to my attention? You are worthless! Begone from my sight!”

“Why didn’t you save me?”

“Don’t point those empty sockets at me! You’re a freak, an abomination of nature, a stain upon our family honor, and you are no daughter of mine!”

“Do you think you are a hero, because you’ve set yourself against the Nightmare? No, you are a failure! She was supposed to cleanse us of our sins, but you have condemned all ponykind to eternal damnation with your blasphemous frivolity! From this moment forth, you are dead to this family! May our love be denied to you forevermore!”

The words were too much for Pinkamena, who fled from the scene wailing.

Daring gritted her teeth, tears…enraged by what she was hearing.

“Wait…what?” Angel asked Fluttershy as he saw the correction being made.

“The words…changed themselves…” Fluttershy said in a small voice.

Rainbow Dash of course didn’t see Daring’s father. Instead she saw Spitfire, the captain of the Wonderbolts. “Your compassion disgusts me!” Spitfire said. “You’re too weak to ever be a…”

“Shut up!” she roared.

Rainbow was convinced that she was in a nightmare, and this certainty allowed her to resist the spell’s effects.

“You’re not real! You’re not real!” She pounced on the figure, and it dissolved into smoke.

The other ponies shook their heads, freeing themselves of their paralysis.

Mauve sighed. “Too bad that illusion didn’t leave behind the actual Staff of Sameness,” she said with a smirk. She looked around her cautiously, then positioned herself to no longer be in sight of Applejack, and replaced the smirk with a not very convincing look of fear.

“Hey, where’s Darai?” asked Twilight.

The others looked around them, trying in vain to spot the magenta earth pony.

“I’ll find her!” Daring exclaimed, trying to take to the sky, only to be instantly grounded by Mauve grabbing her tail in her teeth.

“One, you’re in no condition to fly,” Mauve told her once she stopped trying to leave. “Two, you’re Public Enemy Number One, so flying is out of the question in any case. And three, the real Staff is going to be used in about two hours. I’m her designated companion in our quest to find the Cruciform, so I’ll keep an eye out for her on the way to our chosen branch of the Archives. The rest of you need to go to yours. Right, Daring?”

Daring snorted in frustration, then turned with a sigh. “I’m trusting you to take care of her, Mauve,” she said, before reluctantly walking into the gloom, accompanied by Vinyl Scratch.

“Since when was Mauve so commanding?” Twilight asked suspiciously, before being dragged away by Applejack and Spike. Their group made up the first search party, their destination on the outskirts of Canterlot.

Daring and Vinyl Scratch headed towards the branch of the Archives closest to the Palace.

Mauve stood in the abandoned courtyard next to the invisible poem, waiting. Once Mauve was sure she was alone, she walked over to the drainpipe of a nearby building and knocked on it five times.

In response, a pegasus glided down and landed beside her.

“The magenta-colored pony,” Mauve said in a cold commanding voice. “You saw where she went?”

“Yeah, she ran right to the hiding place,” the pegasus stallion replied in an oily voice. “Hid herself in a corner far from witnesses. Want me to take care of her?”

“No,” said Mauve. “Leave her to me.”

* * *

It took nearly an hour for Twilight’s party to reach their designated location. Twilight’s magic made it easy for them to break in unnoticed, but it was another half an hour before Twilight was sure that this branch of the Archives didn’t have the Cruciform.

“So that’s it,” she concluded. “We won’t be able to get to the Palace in time to help anypony. We might as well rest up for what happens next.”

“And what will happen next?” Applejack asked.

“Aren’t you paying attention?” Ryooki addressed the written page. “Daring is going to save the day!”

“Next will be the battle of our lives,” said Spike. “Literally, in my case. We’ll be up against somebody with complete control…of everything!”

“And how are we supposed to fight that?” Applejack demanded, gobstruck.

“With this,” Twilight assured her, tapping her own temple. “Try to remember your foalhood, and the wildest drea—”

“—Why are you wasting time with these three?!” Angel demanded, getting in Fluttershy’s face. “They have nothing to do with either Daring, or the pony you’re going to replace her with!”

“…Right,” Fluttershy said, shaking her head as if to wake from some sort of trance. “I’ll…fix that all later.”

* * *

Mauve sauntered into the alleyway, which was silent except for the soft sobbing of a magenta pony.

“Go away, Brass Q—”

Pinkamena stopped mid-sentence, as she spotted Mauve, standing over her, smiling gently.

“I can’t be a hero,” Pinkamena whimpered. “I’m not her. I’ll never be her. And it sickens me every time they look for her to solve their problems, and then they see me, and for a moment, for one brief moment, they can’t hide their crushing disappointment.”

Fluttershy stopped, as Angel groaned.

“This is important,” Fluttershy scolded gently. “To continue the series, this has to work, and… Darai isn’t… I wanted her to be happy, coming out of her shell slowly, energetic, but she’s…”

“A buzzkill dumb pony who does nothing but frown?” Angel said flatly. “Also, you forgot to make her rhyme.”

Fluttershy laid her head down on the table, groaning softly.

“N… Sort of,” she sighed. “I’ve been using Pinkie as inspiration but I think I’m not… Pinkamena’s more complex than that, and… And Mauve is now just too dark. Way too dark for this story. Darai needs to be able to recover from this. She can’t be… broken. I have to fix this.” She thought for a second before adding, “And this part is too important. I’ll put the rhymes in later.”

“Don’t worry,” Mauve said gently, in a tone of kindness. “When I look at you, I see just another victim of her own cutie mark.”

Pinkamena stood, shaking her head slowly. “But… it’s not mine. It never has been.”

“Wh… What?!” Mauve asked, reeling back.

“I don’t have a mark,” Pinkamena insisted, voice rough. “This? This isn’t mine. I can’t use it.”

“Then why are you so miserable?” Mauve asked incredulously. “If you just… That has to be your mark, because you’re a mess, being controlled by it!”

Pinkamena put on a tiny little smile. “Because this is who I am. I don’t have to be happy all the time. Bad things happen to good ponies. Everywhere. All the time. But you know what? I keep going. Without a cutie mark...wi...without the family who rejected me. I. Am. Still. Me.”

Mauve scowled, but took a step back. “So what? You’re not special, I gave up my mark, and— I mean, my mark was taken and I’m fi— f—” Mauve stuttered, and seemed incapable of completing the sentence that would so thoroughly betray her truth.

With a bellow of rage, she blasted Pinkamena with every bit of magic she had.

Pinkamena blinked and looked around her, patting her fur to find herself completely unharmed. “What do you know?” she mused. “You’re just as worthless as I am.”

Mauve pulled out the small wand that she had used to cast the mind-altering spell on the ponies earlier, and stared at it. She had thought...she actually had the nerve to believe, that her vaunted inequitable equality would somehow still allow her to cast magic beyond the norm.

“I gave it all up,” she whispered, wide eyed and numb, speaking as though the words were being dragged out of her. “I gave up all the skill I had, because I thought it’d fix the world. But if your mark does nothing for you, and you’re still doing all the insane things you’re doing, I… What point is there?”

“They all want to fix it, don’t they? As if our very own creators made the world this way on purpose. If They couldn’t do it…” She looked away and sighed. “You know, Vinyl Scratch said something to me once: ‘why can’t we just make our own purpose?’ Arrogant as always, but I think she kind of has a point.” Getting up, she walked past Mauve out of the alley, arriving at a four-way intersection.

The other pony followed her numbly. “If they couldn’t do it, then what makes me think that I could?” Mauve sighed, tears beginning to fall. “My… I don’t have a purpose. It was to try and put things right. So nopony hurt how I did. But… That’s gone now.” She turned away from Pinkamena to look down the western road.

Pinkamena pointed into the darkness that Mauve was facing. “That is the past, the place where we knew everything bad that has been done to us.” She gently turned the unicorn around to face the opposite direction, where the pre-dawn sun was preparing to rise. “I like this direction better. I tend to be blinded by the light, but I don’t mind.”

“My mother left me when I was eight,” Mauve suddenly announced. She had no idea why she had said it. “Because I… My magic surges, they… It wasn’t easy on her.”

Pinkamena looked off in a slightly different direction, the direction of her own family’s home. Then she glanced over her shoulder in the direction of Ponyville. “Everypony does something unforgivable once in their life,” she said, looking into the rising sun. “Your true family are the ones who forgive you anyway.” She then looked over at Mauve. “I forgive you.”

“Why would you do that?” Mauve asked, burying a sob under her anger. “You don’t even know, I didn’t even tell you… You can’t just… fix it like that!” she shouted, as her cheeks turned dark, eyes red.

Mauve was transparently desperate to be hated. It was the only thing that made sense in her mind, and to have a pony so resolutely refuse to do so despite all of the reasons for it was baffling to her.

Pinkamena looked at Mauve in confusion. “My earth pony ancestors deliberately tried to starve your unicorn ancestors to death about fifteen hundred years ago. You don’t hold that against me.”

“But I should, right?!” Mauve whimpered. “There isn’t… The only lesson my mom ever gave me; ‘You can’t just say sorry when you’ve killed somepony, Mauve!’”

She was trembling, her mind focused on her own mother’s words from so long ago, and completely helpless before the pony she’d been about to trick into being brainwashed and abused by a maniacal chancellor.

Pinkamena walked over and looked carefully at Mauve, and then followed the direction that her eyes were focused on. She then positioned herself to the side of that empty spot and bucked. “There,” she declared. “I just bucked your mother into the ‘bad parent bin’.” She looked down into the imaginary hole. “I forgive you, too.”

Mauve laughed. It was a weak, small laugh, but it was genuine.

Pinkamena reached up and put a hoof around Mauve’s withers. “The sun is rising, sister,” she said gently. “Do you know where the Cruciform is?”

“I do,” she whispered. “And… we might have enough time left to get it.”

Pinkamena’s eyes glistened. “Look…” she said, pointing.

Mauve turned her head to look...at her restored cutie mark.

It was a wand. It looked just like the wand she’d used earlier, but surrounded in purple sparks, with a ghost-white wisp of magic coming off of it. She knew the symbology of that white wisp. It was a rare feature of unicorn Marks, more common in Earth Ponies: it was the Changing of the Self. Once a sign of the ways she broke those around her, now it was finally personal.

Mauve leaned into Pinkamena’s grip and cried softly, before laughing. “Go, we need to go. Quickly now. I can celebrate later. Don’t want to lose it again.”

Comments

[McPoodle]

I hereby include an omake of the last scene of this chapter. It makes Pinkamena utterly OP, which is probably why I like it too much to just scrap it:

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Mauve entered the Archive, a tall building with no windows and labyrinthine passages. She first went to a cramped space behind the stairway to the second floor, opening a secret door and confirming that the Cruciform had not yet been found.

Returning to the entrance, Mauve began to stroll towards the spot where she knew Pinkamena to be hiding, loudly whistling an unnerving tune.

After a few minutes, she turned a corner and saw the earth pony cowering in a corner. She stopped her whistling and looked at her. Why, this is no hero at all, she thought to herself. Who does she think she is, trying to save the world?

“You…you’re right,” Pinkamena said quietly. “I’m no hero.”

Mauve took a step back in shock.

“I never wanted any of this. I…I just saw a pony that was hurting…and for that, I lost everything.”

“You’re not rhyming,” Mauve said, her eyes wide.

“Well maybe I’m done playing your boss’ little games,” Pinkamena said wearily, wiping off her snout with a hoof. She stood up on uncertain legs and turned to face the unicorn.

“How…how do you know?”

“Maybe I’ve been paying attention when a certain pony keeps breaking the laws of reality,” Pinkamena said, slowly advancing on her would-be predator. “Maybe I figured out how to see past the fourth wall, too.”

“S…stay back!” Mauve exclaimed, firing a magical blast straight at Pinkamena. She blinked…and the earth pony was gone. She blinked again in astonishment, and Pinkamena was exactly where she had been a moment ago, the blast burning a hole in the wall behind her.

“This is ridiculous!” Angel exclaimed, trying in vain to push Fluttershy aside so he could take over the story. “I know the pink one is weird, but remember that this one is fictional. She shouldn’t be allowed to do this!”

Fluttershy shook her head once again to break the spell the story immersion was pulling her into. She picked up the correction fluid…

“Don’t you dare!” Pinkamena yelled, her hoof pointed right at me.

Fluttershy found herself unable to move. And so, the typewriter continued the story without her.

Pinkamena turned her attention back to Mauve. “Do you really want to be doing this?” she said. “Torturing ponies to overthrow the natural order?” She swept a hoof around her. “You wouldn’t be taking over the world, you’d just turn ponykind into your eternal fillies, and then you’d be stuck taking care of them, for the rest of your lives.” She gave yet another unnerving glance. “…And you wouldn’t bring her back…your mother.”

Mauve Shadow sat down numbly.

“I know that she left you, and after you were done blaming yourself, you decided that no pony should ever be subjected to what you went through…by removing the will to decide from everypony. Believe me, I know what it’s like to lose your parents. In my case, they came right out and said outright that it was all my fault.” She took a moment to sniff past her clogged nostrils, and wipe away some of her tears. “But I got through it, with the family I chose to replace them. It’s not too late for you, Mauve. You can find a new family…with us.”

Mauve sat there, gasping as she tried to keep her own tears in. Finally, she took off a locket and passed it to Pinkamena. “Open it,” she said.

Inside the locket, Pinkamena found a verse by Evening Frost: “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—” Pinkamena closed the locket before she finished it.

“Read it!” Mauve pleaded. “Read it out loud, so you can have the good Mauve back.”

Pinkamena shook her head. “That would be too easy.” She gave the unicorn back her locket and walked past her into the darkness.

“Where are you going?” Mauve asked.

“To get the Cruciform, of course,” Pinkamena said over her shoulder. “You really shouldn’t have checked on it first.”

[FanOfMostEverything]

The thing about test of character is that sometimes, people actually pass them.

The thing about taking the camera off the heroes as they plan is that the chances of that plan's success skyrockets as a result.