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// 9. Travel an Eternity Road 
// Story: Where Black Seas Lap the Shores of Dead Stars 
// by The Hat Man 
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She blasted a billion miles down the length of the galaxy’s pinwheel arm.

She shimmered like a silver tear as she veered around a white-hot pulsar and rode the wave of its crashing heartbeat.

She gusted past columns of star-crusted nebulae that stretched upward into spires and arches of red and blue light. They formed statues light-years in height that took the shape of a trio of ponies arching their necks upward, their very nostrils the size of whole star systems.

She passed billowing nurseries where nascent stars took shape in the heart of maelstroms of plasma, their first light gleaming from within their swirling wombs and set to shine for billions of years.

She skimmed above the rings of a gas giant, letting its gravity take hold of her as she whirled and danced at the edge of escape velocity before rocketing back out into the void.

She roamed through plumes of black cosmic dust and ice, her hull chilled to near absolute zero.

She roasted at ten thousand degrees as she passed beneath the arch of a solar filament that flared to the length of twenty planets before loosening her sails to ride back out past impossible worlds of sand, of water, of methane, of diamond…

She drifted in silence for centuries through emptiness so vast that it seemed to mock the very idea of infinity, and yet she eventually arrived at the next star, ricocheting from one system to the next, always keeping an ear out for a word in Ponnish but staying silent lest the Foresters that Xerxes spoke of found her and skewered her tiny form from the heavens.

And then there was Agamemnon. A dark monster crested by a furious ring of distorted light. At the speed of light, it would take a week to swim past its dreaded shadow. And she would not be going that fast.

A black hole. Agamemnon was as dense as a hundred thousand suns and it dominated her horizon as she approached it for a hundred years, riding burst after burst from her Hyperdrive to keep her momentum until the ravenous behemoth took hold of her in its gravity.

She rode as close to its edge as she dared. It was a swirling funnel of searing white light that ringed a sphere of blackness so pure that it tested the very definition of what "darkness" could mean.

The warped and tortured cry of its perpetual feast of debris reverberated throughout her slender body and she felt it twist and distort and elongate as the very fabric of reality approached the limit of possibility around her. A single misfire, one overcompensation, and she would be stretched to a filament as thin as an atom and spiral into its event horizon in a moment that might last a billion years.

And yet she rode on the edge of that calamity, her speed as she curved around it gaining to the very edge of light speed without the use of her Hyperdrive.

And when at last she was flung free and spun off into the final stretch of space, she was like a ray of light as she streaked across the cosmos toward Equus.

But though it had granted her speed, it had stolen time. When she came out of that hell, the stars around her had shifted in their positions. In the impossibility of time dilation, warped by Agamemnon's tyrannical gravity, millennia had sped on around her.

When she arrived, her hull had been pierced by microscopic fragments of ancient asteroids, and her mechanical guts had been lacerated by blades of radiation, but she was still intact. She finally slowed as the ships came closer.

What now piloted the vessel had once been a robot named RO-513. "Rosie." But time and the tide of cosmic forces nearly pulled her mind apart and the fragmented pieces struggled to come together.

But they did. And in a moment of clarity, Rosie sent out her signal.

They called back. Ponies were there, still living, and so she gave them her message and completed her mission.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as the weariness and madness of a journey through eternity finally wore down her last resolve. “I hope… I hope this was enough.”

There was just enough power left to do the job. There was a jolt of electricity, a brilliance of light that flashed through her.

And then, at last, she knew peace.