//------------------------------// // 126 - A Complicated Goddess // Story: Re:Harmony // by starcross7 //------------------------------// Open your eyes, Prima. Open your eyes and cast judgment to the wretched filth who stand before you! The moment she ate the fruit of Creation, the pony known as Prima ceased to be. Twilight Prime was born at that day, and it was day of reckoning. At her current base form, she did not appear intimidating. Even so, they stood no chance. In the face of two armies closing in on her, Prime felt elated, and she felt free. No longer were her muscles and joints were in pain, and walking felt effortless. A trot evolved into a gallop, and before she knew it, she moved faster than light and lighting. A single burst of speed with a kick of her hind legs toppled scores of soldiers in her wake. Her hooves cracked and crumbled the ground when she slid to a stop, bowling several more soldiers out of her presence. One leap soared her twice the height of a dragomech. One landing completely crushed a bulky exosuit. She could dodge every bullet, but she did not need to. Her fur shredded any projectile before their mangled remnants ricochet off her skin. The biped soldiers lobbed grenade after grenade and shot missile after missile upon her being. The explosion upset the balance the ruined hulk of the black spacecraft from where she found the Element of Creation, and it toppled over where Twilight Prime stood. When the smoke and dust cleared, Prime stood on top of the space hulk unfazed and unharmed. Day in and day out, the Empire and the Republic’s many starships dropped their mechs and soldiers to obtain the power contained in a single pony. That pony met them head on, and she lay waste to tens of thousands without effort. The land was littered with mounds of fallen soldiers Twilight Prime lorded over as her trophy and a testament to her power. By then the combined forces decided to attack her from the air. In their never-ending panic and lust for her power, they bombarded the surface several times over, and they cared not for civilians or soldiers that were left behind. Nuclear fallout rendered the Planet of Death uninhabitable once more, except for the one lone survivor who withstood their ineffectual weapons. Twilight Prime grew wings and brought the fight to them. She decimated waves of their airship fleets by ramming headfirst through the hulls, passing each one as if they were paper. She caught the wings of their aircraft with her teeth, savagely tore them off, and watched each one crash land before she flew to beat out the ejecting pilots. The pony conquered the skies just as she conquered the ground, and she turned the horizon into an inferno. The Empire-Republic Alliance retreated to the stars, thinking that she had not yet evolved to chase after them. They thought they could preemptively defeat her by destroying the planet she was on with their planet-killer weapons. However, Prime struck first. She needed a way to conduct her ethereal power with pinpoint accuracy, and so, Prime evolved a horn upon which she directed to the stars. One by one, their Empire and Republic’s planet-killer weapons were destroyed years before they had a chance to start up and fire. Then she turned her sights on the enemy’s habitable planets themselves, and mercilessly destroyed them with a single shot. Prime herself had become the ultimate planet-killer. The remnants of the Empire-Republic fled to further out into the galaxy arm and hid out in a massive colony ships away from large celestial bodies. For decades, they schemed new ways to defeat Twilight Prime. They enslaved their citizens, robbed them of their freedoms, and for a great majority of them, robbed them of their individuality. They finally settled on a single plan, the building an intergalactic weapon in the size of a hypergiant star. Stars and habitable planets were sacrificed in the construction of the spiked monstrosity that the Alliance pin their misguided hopes upon. Nearly a century had passed, and the Empire-Republic were at ninety-nine percent completion of their so-called “galactic cannon”. The creatures were about to twist the last screw, hammer the final nail, and enter in the closing programming code. The near-immortal bipedal leaders woke from their self-induced hibernation to celebrate their assumed victory with wine and fanfare in their opulent viewing bridge. The clink of their wine glasses was their last. Twilight Prime manifested before their pathetic galactic cannon in her penultimate form. No longer was she the stocky pink pony genetically designed to be a mere pet for a noble. She became taller and slender. Her wings multiplied from two to six, and her horn was now like a saber. Prime gave no quarter towards her enemy and did not distinguish between combatant and non-combatant. With one swing of her horn, the galactic cannon split in half and exploded. She used her magic to accelerate the planet-sized shrapnel so that they struck the fleeing colony ships. Twilight Prime had already wiped out most the Empire-Republic’s population while she remained on the Planet of Death, but her latest attack reduced their current numbers to just ten percent. She was not done. Vengeance continued to fuel her being, and she mercilessly hunted the remnants of the Empire-Republic Alliance in all the corners of the galaxy. Her vengeance was not limited to them. Star systems and planets not involved with the Alliance fell victim to her indiscriminate wrath, for they were just as evil as the Empire and the Republic that had attempted to destroy her. She saw fit to punish their mere existence by permanently crippling their civilizations. It could be said that Twilight Prime waged war against life itself, but she was motivated in waging war against all forms of intelligence life. Her god-like powers allowed her to attune herself with their thoughts and emotions, and she found nothing but ugliness within them all. For almost a hundred years, she made her impact permanent. She rendered civilized worlds back to their primitive state, and she ensured that these creatures feared her eternally. As such, the survivors prostrated before her and erected towering visages towards her divinity across the galaxy. For a while, they reestablished society based on a cult around her, but even then, Prime continued to find their thoughts reprehensibly sickening. It was just as bad as before, for the myriad of cults began to violently hunt down and brutally punish or execute heretics and non-believers. Her vengeance had not been sated, and it never will be. Twilight Prime created a Dimension of Hell within remnants of the galactic cannon, and transported all intelligent life into there. Even with her omnipotence, it remained an easy task. After her ascension, Twilight Prime had eliminated 99.9% of all life in the galaxy. Upon their teleportation into the Dimension of Hell, Twilight Prime stripped them of their belongings and clothing. She randomized every one of their arrivals so that no one of their same species stood next to one another. Their minds have been rewritten that, if by a small chance that ran into another one of the same or similar species, they would not be able to understand one another, but all would understand her words. Prime also modified their organic chemistries and DNA to equalize their survivability. Naked and confused, her prisoners immediately prostrated before her as she sat on a towering black obelisk of a throne like a cold judge. Normal beings would kill to be worshipped as she was. To her, the idea of worship was an affront. Twilight Prime issued unto them this decree: “Suffer.” The Dimension of Hell existed outside of normal space-time, and the tortures she instituted upon the sentient survivors were too horrific to describe. She reveled in their screams, their crimes, and their pleas. Prime preserved their consciousness, if not their souls, every time their tortures destroyed their bodies or when they destroyed themselves, and she rewrote their personalities so they would not be able to enjoy the tortures they suffered. She purposely kept them in perpetual hunger, thirst, and pain. An equivalent of an eon had passed in the Dimension of Hell, and Prime thought she would finally be content on the eternal suffering of these creatures. One day, the survivors stopped fighting amongst themselves, and had the nerve to band together and gather around Twilight Prime's obelisk throne. Their elected speaker, a red-skinned and horned humanoid, fell to his knees and clasped his mangled hands in prayer. “We beg for your forgiveness, oh exalted god,” he said. “Release us from our eternal damnation. We have understood the error of our past lives and we wish for a chance to repent!” Twilight Prime, omnipotent and vengeful, was not moved. While most of her prisoners in their past lives were civilians, in her eyes they were guilty of allowing their leaders to commit countless atrocities on others and on themselves. As for the one humanoid pleading to her, the gall of him! In his previous life, he ordered the execution of thousands simply because he did not like the color of their skin. “Foolish creatures,” spoke Prime. “Let it be known once more that the mere sight of you is a blight. My stomach turns at your repugnant stench. My ears bleed whenever you speak. You dare insult me with your pathetic cries for help after your collective sins of existence? I will never forgive your kind!" Her booming voice sent shudders and shivers among the survivors, and they dug deeper in the featureless black floor in their prostrating. The Dimension of Hell was quiet, but far off the distance, she heard was unmistakably a child's cry. Odd. Prime made sure she sterilized these creatures every time she forcefully reincarnated them. Most of their children had already died in her war against life in the galaxy, and those who survived she artificially matured into adulthood, knowing full well that they will grow up to be just as evil as their parents. Twilight Prime pulled herself towards those cries, and could not believe her eyes. Somehow, she allowed a female child to exist in this Dimension, and to complicate matters, she even had a mother! The "mother" tried to calm the child down, but she kept on crying. Prime swatted the "mother" away, and then placed her hoof on the child. Her aberrant existence piqued the goddess's curiosity, but then she remembered her first love, Trista, and all the memories she thought she shelved away. Fate was mocking her. This child had the same purple hair and elven ears. It was mathematically impossible. "Please, exalted goddess!" cried the supposed mother. "Have mercy! She does not know why she's here." "She just appeared all of a sudden," said another biped. "SILENCE!" screamed Prime. Her voice shook the entirety of the Dimension of Hell. The goddess did not want to hear any more and after lifting the girl into the air, she immediately disintegrated her in a flash of light. The supposed mother groveled herself upon Prime's hooves and wept, but the goddess silenced by slamming her hoof on her head. Yet, that pathetic mother creature was still alive, still sniveling at the elimination of the aberration. The rest of the damned pleaded louder, and Twilight Prime yelled out for them to be silent. "You wish for mercy?" she asked. "You wish for salvation? Very well! I will entertain your meager request. Know this that eventually you and your descendants will devolve yourselves back into your factions, your strife, your genocides, and your atrocities. When that hour occurs, I will be waiting to pass final judgement." "You will free us?" one asked. “Your so-called ‘freedom’ is all but an illusion in my eyes, but by ‘free’, then yes. You will no longer occupy my Dimension of Hell. However, your release will be under my terms. These bodies you currently possess are mere shells that is an abomination to my eyes and my being. What I desire now is your souls. Souls in which I will remake my universe in my image.” “We will be reborn and purified?” Prime answered with a smile. At first, the survivors were elated. They hugged one another smiled, and sang praises to their six-winged pony goddess. If only they could see the deviousness behind that sinister smile, then they would have found out that they freedom was more than they bargained for. Twilight Prime lined them up and arranged them like cattle, like they did to non-sentient creatures as well as humanoids they superficially deemed as undesirable, exploitable, or both. She made all of them witness as she, one-by-one, ripped out the soul of an individual with the utmost agony. She could have made the process painless, but she chose to make it as painful as possible. Twilight Prime sat on her throne reveling in the screams of the bipeds whose souls she ruthlessly peeled away, and if they attempted to resist, she increased their physical and spiritual pain receptors tenfold. Even with 0.01% of sentient life remaining, they were still many. Prime ferreted these souls into individual pods inside massive organic starships known as Arks that she programmed to land on planets suitable for life in normal space-time. The destroyer had become the creator, and soon life returned to those planets per her divine instructions. However, there was one planet that she held close to her heart, for better or worse.