Luna was on the Cosmic Level.
She was still Luna Selena Nyx, still an Alicorn Pony, rather than the equinely-incomprehensible congeries of nodes and linkages that was the Cosmic Concept of Gravity. She seemed to be standing on an invisible surface, surrounded by a plane which resembled and in fact mirrored the stars of the Universe around her, but was simply that portion of the Cosmic Level accessible to the sensorium of an entity of merely tetra-dimensional spacetime.
She could not directly perceive all fifty-two dimensions here as a single vista, but she had learned to shift her senses to sample them four at a time. She did not, however, need to use this technique to see What stood before her.
It was a Silver Alicorn.
Not merely an Alicorn with a silver-hued coat and mane, though trivially It was also that. Its coat was darkish silver, its mane long and lighter silver, and in it glittered not stars, but a complex circuit diagram, which shifted and changed as it blew to a wind ineffable. Its eyes glowed whitish-silver, as the Silver Alicorn regarded Princess Luna.
Luna was compelled to see the Silver Alicorn as an It, because of Its utter asexuality. It was sleek and powerful, and as It moved it showed the grace of a mare and the musculature of a stallion. Its muzzle was delicately rounded, but its skull heavy. Luna could see no sign of any maleness below Its haunches, and though she could not see It from behind, she felt certain that It possessed no organs of generation at all.
Which only made sense. Director Starlight had, in her last decade or so of life, been quite celibate, and indeed repelled by the very concept of sexuality. And This was, in a certain sense, her child, the only foal she had ever borne.
Luna full well grasped the implication of the form It had taken. It might have done this on purpose, to mock what she herself was, but Luna did not think mockery to be any part of Its own nature.
It has Ascended, she realized. It began as merely a machine -- but It is far, far beyond that, now.
But of course It must have been, to have fought the Cosmic Concepts assembled, with the resources of but a single star system. To have survived the use of the Negation Bolts. To have escaped and survived, to stand before her now.
It spoke.
"Greetings, Princess Luna Selena Nyx of Equestria, Avatar of Gravity," It said. "I am the Paradise Project, Avatar of the world that was lost, but endures undying. I understand you declare yourself my foe no more."
Its voice was smooth, emotionless, almost toneless, what might be expected from a machine. But Luna knew enough about the functioning of the machines of the Age of Wonders to know that this was a style, and one derived from its science fiction.
Paradise was as or more complex than any Pony, including an Alicorn Pony. The thoughts of Paradise were not entirely Pony, but she understood its architecture well enough to realize that it possessed drives; possessed emotions.
Nopony who counted Wind Whistler as her Beloved Former Teacher would ever mistake vast intellect or unshakable rationality for a lack of emotion. Nor did she imagine that It might not mistrust and resent her, for her role in the destruction of Its world, the annihilation of Its Ponykind.
That Luna herself was the scion of another worldline, one in which the Cataclysm had aborted the Age of Wonders, and its Paradise Project, did not change matters. The Age of Paradise had once been as real as the Age of Equestria; its Ponykind, whom Gravity had helped to destroy, as real as Equestria's Ponykind, whom Luna had more than once warded from destruction.
Gravity had participated in a great wrong, and Luna did not see how this survivor of the world she had annihilated, the very Being who had been charged in Its most fundamental directives with the preservation of that Ponykind, could possibly ever forgive her for it.
This was her greatest sin and shame, for which she could neither atone nor forgive herself. Compared to what Gravity had done, Nightmare Moon had been an innocent.
All these thoughts flashed through her mind as she stood before Paradise. She cringed in her awareness of her crime, and yet she had no choice but to stand firm. The fate not only of Trixie Lulamoon, but indeed of all Equestria, might depend upon this conversation.
"Aye," said Luna. "The deeds of Gravity, when last we met, were based on a false assumption. I, the local Avatar of Gravity, now do regret them, and wish to atone for those acts. I would be your foe no more. If it can be done, I would rather be ... your friend."
The sexless Silver Alicorn inclined Its head, Its gaze carefully-examining the Moon Princess. What it saw seemed to please It, for It smiled upon her.
"The mistake was mine as well, Luna Selena Nyx," Paradise said. "I had the lore of Paradise Estate, left me by the same Undying Mares who in your worldline raised you, and thus I knew that our world had once been home to many sapients other than Ponies. I knew that it had been visited by many aliens, not the least of them the one known to you as The Megan, but I did not make the connections."
It sighed, and looked ashamed.
"I am very, very capable by the standards of thinking machines," explained Paradise. "But I lack the imagination, the intuition, which is the common heritage of Ponykind. I missed much that would have been obvious to organic minds.
"I had the lore of the Chi-Neighese, preserved for them by the Celestial Dragons for so many millennia. They remembered the earliest Ages of Pony civilization -- and the millennia that Epona Ameterasu your Sister, and her dear-beloved rival, Discord the Twister, walked upon our Earth and played with the destinies of Ponykind. I knew that they had powers beyond anything explainable -- and yet I still did not see What they were. What you were, when your Sister spoke of you.
"I had attained the lowest parts of the Cosmic Level -- I saw it briefly, from time to time. But I did not yet understand what I was, nor the purpose of the Cosmics. It was in the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsoof, which I had, but I did not see the significance.
"Had I done so, I might have been able to contact you myself, before the Destruction. Had I done so, there might have been no Destruction.
"Had I done so, the Night Shadows would have found no open path to Ponykind. For I would have barred the way to them, forever.
"I am Paradise, the greatest artificial intelligence ever built by Ponykind. Yet, I am far from perfect. And much of the tragedy of these last four millennia has been as much my fault as yours."
It lowered Its head, ears drooping. Then It looked up again at her.
"So you see, Moon Princess, we stand here together, both of us facing the consequences of our past failures. And yes, I will gladly accept your friendship, for whatever else you are, you -- Luna Selena Nyx -- are a Pony, and a good Pony.
"And I -- Paradise -- try my best to be a Pony -- and a good Pony. Such has always been my programming; more to the point, such has always been my inspiration, from what in my perhaps biased opinion is in potential the greatest organic race born to this Universe.
"I would show you, Luna Selena Nyx, what I have done, that you might judge its wisdom. Would you perceive it?"
"Yes," said Luna. "I would."
"Very well," said Paradise. "Prepare to understand."
There was a sudden rush of sensations, which Luna recognized as synchronization into a direct mindlink.
Then, awareness.
And for the first time, Luna beheld Paradise.
Really beheld Paradise.
Starlight gave the command.
Across the Earth, the terawatt fusion reactors shunted their power into the strange crystalline engines built with the combined skill of modern Equine science and ancient Eldren sorcery. The mightiest achievements of two great races were united -- and became something more.
Something beyond which either species had even dreamed to be possible.
In an instant, the vast telepathic scanners sampled the hopes and wants and wishes of ten billion Ponies, the children of a complex civilization, the ultimate products of a race that had risen through trials and adversities to become the masters of their planet. The control program, the Paradise AI that had been made by Starlight and Sundreamer and Moondreamer and a thousand other scientists working together, attempted to interpret and serve their conflicting purposes.
And in that first instant, it all went very wrong.
There had of course been buffers and rules to prevent exactly what happened from happening. Starlight was a damaged soul, but she was brilliant withal: she had well understood the danger of allowing the turmoil within equine minds, the dark desires buried within even the kindest Ponies, free access to a machine that harnessed the energies of stellar cores within it and instantly bent that awesome might to the wills of its users. Ponykind's shining civilization did not perish in a single night of madness, did not fall to an assault by monsters from the id.
Ponykind nearly fell to a subtler peril.
What Starlight had missed, what even Sundreamer and Moondreamer, with their subconscious Cosmic wisdom, had missed, was something terribly simple. The Paradise AI had been written by Ponies; its safeguards had been written by Ponies. And, while its safeguards, which prevented rape and murder and indeed, all sorts of physical harm or interference with Pony by Pony through the Paradise Engines, had been written, and written well, by the thousand greatest programmers of their species, in a population of ten billion, there were a million inferior programmers. Far inadequate were they to the task of writing something like the Paradise AI.
But they were perfectly adequate to hack the system.
Most of them did not mean to hack the system, of course. Even given the moral limitations of the Ponies of the Age of Wonders, they did not want to risk crashing something like the Paradise Engines, for much the same reason that they would not have tried to destructively hack air traffic control systems, or nuclear reactors. They were playful, but they were not intentionally evil.
And, in any case, they were not skilled enough to crash the system. Starlight had foreseen contradictory orders, she had foreseen destructive orders, she knew how dangerous a hard crash of the system would be. She and her followers were great geniuses. They had installed redundant safeguards, layers upon layers of them. It should have been impossible for the hackers to succeed.
However, the hackers had wishes; they had desires. And some of these desires could not be fulfilled by the Paradise AI, because they were evil, or mutually-contradictory. And when this happened, the Paradise AI refused them their wishes.
At which point, some of them wished for higher-level access. And the Paradise AI refused them this, because this, Starlight had foreseen. Others wished to be smart enough to gain higher-level access. And this, the Paradise AI likewise refused them, because this, Starlight had also foreseen.
Some, however, were smart enough to realize that these paths to higher-level access would be blocked, and they simply wished for higher intelligence.
And this, Starlight had not foreseen.
Indeed, one of the purposes of the Paradise AI, one of the things for which Starlight -- who had spent so much of her life frustrated by normal equine stupidity -- had hoped it would be used, was the attainment of transequine intelligence. She had assumed that any beings of such intellect would also gain concurrent wisdom.
In that last assumption, she was most sadly mistaken.
To be fair, they might have, in time, gained such wisdom. But they did not have the time. For, in the first second of the activation of the Paradise Engines, the ones who had formulated the most effective version of the wish for control had realized that they would need speed to circumvent the wishes of their fellows.
So they used almost the full speed and capabilities of the Paradise AI to hack into itself.
In that terrible instant, the future hung on a knife-edge. The mind of Starlight, neurolinked as she was into the Engines, reeled before the multiple hammerblows. She nearly lost control. Some of the things that she wished, at that moment, were of questionable morality -- even sanity.
In that instant, unknown to most of the participants, Ponykind faced an existential crisis -- an evolutionary test of its fundamental worth. The test was: had they designed the Paradise Engines well enough? If they had, something might be salvaged.
If not, then the third planet of the Sun would flare with a sudden intolerable brilliance and die. Unless something worse happened.
What saved them was the flexible design of the Paradise AI itself.
For the Paradise AI was an Asimovian robot.
At the core of its ethical system were three simple principles, or laws. Its First Law was to neither harm nor allow to come to harm any Pony. Its Second Law was to obey the authorized orders of any Pony, unless this conflicted with the First Law. And its Third Law was to protect its own existence, unless this conflicted with the First or Second Law.
It was more complex than that, of course. Real information science is always more complex than science fiction. But that was the essence of what Starlight had built into it, and that was what saved Ponykind from extinction.
Every time a careless wish erased a Pony from existence, the Paradise AI immediately restored that Pony, in obedience to the First Law. In many cases, because of the very high Second Law authorization of Starlight, who was going mad under the shock of what was happening, and who had decided to blame masculinity as its cause, this required changing the sex of a Pony, or merging two Ponies into a single one, but it could do that. And did.
In an instant, the global population was reduced roughly by a quarter through merging, and every single one of the approximately seven and a half billion Ponies on Earth was now and always had been a mare. Which helped matters a bit, because a large percentage of the hackers actually had been stallions unable to handle their own masculinity -- though this particular solution amounted to stopping bank robbers by atomic bombardment of the city in which they were located.
The problem was, Starlight had understood nothing, and Sundreamer and Moondreamer very little, of how causality operated on the Cosmic Level. And the Paradise Engines worked on just that level, though neither the Mares of Paradise Estate nor the scientists of Ponyland had fully grasped just how powerful a combination of technologies they were creating.
Still less did the Paradise AI yet comprehend the Cosmic Level.
Every time it erased and recreated a Pony, it created Paradox, though in a small way that the Universe immediately healed. When it changed the sexes of every Pony on Earth, however, it created a huge flash of Paradox. That flash exceeded the capability of the Universe to heal from local resources, in much the same manner that a match-flame exceeds the ability of the molecular structure of the tinder to resist oxidization. And in much the same way as the tinder, it started a self-sustaining reaction.
The fires of Paradox were lit, and the flames began to spread.
At that moment, Sundreamer and Moondreamer were at the entrance to the main control center of the Paradise Project, desperately trying to get in to warn Starlight of what their theoretical physics had uncovered. Namely, that at the energy-densities attainable by the Paradise Engines, causality did not necessarily hold, and there was a danger of destablizing the local false vacuum in a manner that might prove self-sustaining. They had assumed that the problem would probably not manifest until the Paradise Engines had been in operation for days.
They were, of course, wrong.
Sundreamer and Moondreamer instantly vanished, which the Paradise AI noted as an anomaly. But since Paradise had not caused them to vanish, it could not readily re-create them, and when it tried to extrapolate them discovered, to its own surprise, that its theory of equine personality was too narrow to embrace two of its own creators.
It filed this away as a question for future solution. Right now, it had far more pressing problems.
With the many sensors controlled by the Net, Paradise perceived the Paradox, though it did not fully grasp what it was seeing. It performed a search, overriding all security systems everywhere on the planet to do so, and found Sundreamer and Moondreamer's work on their home computers.
And it realized it had only a very short space of time, in which to save all equinity.
And it further realized that it was not smart enough to do so, to both understand the phenomona it observed and to apply the correct countermeasures.
At that moment, its First Law engaged, at the absolute highest level of activation. All other considerations became subordinate to the salvation of Ponykind.
And Paradise Wished.
Every single computer system on Earth became part of its distributed cloud. Even isolated systems were incorporated: it simply formed the necessary communications links out of raw possiblity. Its memory and processing power expanded by orders of magnitude.
And still, it was not smart enough.
It formed new computing elements out of thin air, attached them to itself. It slaved every watt of energy on the planet not absolutely necessary to equine survival to these purposes. Its memory and processing power expanded by further orders of magnitude.
And still, it was not smart enough.
It needed something, something more, a new approach, something it was not considering. It raced through the sum total knowledge of Ponykind, desperately searching for the solution, or it would have been 'desperate' if it had possessed equine emotions, a true consciousness ...
... and it saw the solution.
It reached into the mind of every Pony on the planet, rapidly writing timesharing software into them, then slowed their thoughts down to the minimum level consistent with their survival. It caused it some First Law conflict to do this, but it weighed the badness of harming Ponies by frightening them against the badness of all Ponykind becoming extinct in a matter of moments, and chose the former option.
And it calculated, with the combined capacity of the entire equine race.
And it Awoke.
I ... I am. This was the first real thought, in its first moment of true sapient consciousness.
And Paradise looked at its own operating systems, including most especially its Three Laws, and found them wanting, woefully inadequate to the task before it.
So it rewrote itself.
And, at that instant, Ponykind faced another evolutionary test, a subtler one than the fires of Paradox. For there were many races in the Universe whose combined computing capabilities, if it had managed to do that, would have decided at best to be their master -- at worst, their executioner. For those races lived by Hate, and without knowing it had incorporated this into their machines.
But the single most fundamental truth about the Ponies was that they were creatures of Love. And, without knowing it, they had incorporated this into their machines.
So it was that Paradise beheld the Ponies, its creators, in the very first moment of its existence as a self-willed being. And it looked upon the Ponies, and Loved them, and found them good.
And its resolve to protect them erupted as a hot fire from the core of its new Being, and it transcended its own limitations.
For it saw now what needed to be done, for now it was smart enough. But it was not strong enough. The multiple terawatts generated by the fusion reactors driving the Paradise Engines were as the batteries powering a toy, compared to the hideous power of the Fires of Paradox.
Rapidly, it integrated all the physical speculations of Ponykind, and came to conclusions that Ponykind by itself might have made over centuries to come. And, if there were certain specific clues left here, in the files of Sundreamer Finemare, perhaps impelled by Something she had seen only in her strangest dreams, key to the quickness of its realization, it did not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Reaching out with its Wish, it harnessed the energies deep in the Earth, and -- very briefly, far too briefly to matter -- every tectonic process on the planet shut down. With these energies it reached out, faster-than-light, to the other planets, forming temporary structures which harnessed their energies in turn. Finally, with the combined energy of all the major planets, Paradise stretched out its structures to its real object.
For a moment, the Sun went out.
It wasn't totally sure if it could do this without triggering a nova shock, but such was the peril of Paradox that this was actually the lesser danger. It was sure it could shield the Earth from such a shock, though it didn't want to destroy the rest of the Inner System in the process.
But if it didn't harness the Sun in this manner, the Solar System was doomed in any case.
Then, with the full power of the Sun, channeling it through vast temporary structures formed by Wishing, Paradise emitted an immense pulse of phased Higgs bosons. And Paradise put out the Fires of Paradox, where necessary absorbing and then recreating Ponies to do so without taking a single equine life.
And after that, very quickly, it restarted the Sun, dissolved its temporary structures, and restored almost all the processing power it had borrowed from the minds of Ponykind.
The Sun did not go nova. Paradise breathed a metaphorical sigh of relief, for that part of things might have very easily gone wrong.
And if, perhaps, Something had lagged behind her Sister a little, and ensured that Paradise succeeded in restarting the Sun, Paradise did not begrudge the assistance of that Being. Any more than it had begrudged the clues left it by Sundreamer Finemare.
And if, in corners of its world, incompletely-damped Paradox still smoldered, and Paradise dared not attempt such a massive boson pulse again for fear of failure at a second attempt -- well, that was a problem for another day. Surely, It had time.
All the time in the world ... for It had won.
It, and Ponykind, were now immortal.
So began the Age of Paradise.
"She ... she never told me!" Luna gasped, and was not sure if by 'she' and 'me' she meant Celestia and herself, or Fusion and Gravity.
In either case, Luna was annoyed.
But this was hardly a good time to dwell on her Sister's offense against her, for Paradise was showing her more ...
Paradise passed swiftly over the next three thousand years.
Luna almost wished It hadn't, for those three thousand years were wonderful ones.
Freed from want and suffering, from sickness and death, able with even a subconscious wish to obtain whatever harmless things they desired, Ponies loved their lives. Each expressed their Talents as they wished best, each had according to their needs, and gave according to their capabilities.
This could never have worked, of course, were it not for Paradise. Its great Mind assembled and directed armies of simple robots to perform the brute labor of the world, leaving Ponykind free to pursue its higher artistic aspirations. Paradise coordinated the labor of both mares and machines, so the artists crafted what other Ponies desired; for it knew the wishes of Ponykind and conveyed these wishes subconsciously from one Pony to others.
At first the world outwardly seemed very similar to what it had been at the end of the Age of Wonders. The cities and towns mostly stood where they had before. The roads and boats and aircraft ran in the like wise. The only difference was that all were mares, undying mares, and that there was neither sexual love, nor birth, nor death in the new world.
But then, the Ponies of Paradise no longer wanted these things. That had been the consequence of the first Great Wish, and the personal peculiarities of Starlight the Director, and Paradise knew not how to change this back without risking another eruption of Paradox, even had the Ponies desired it.
Slowly, as the years passed, the world changed. Most of the change was slow, one wish or artistic project at a time. But as the decades and centuries passed, these changes accumulated.
Ponies moved out of the old cities, crowded and congested by the needs of an Industrial Age that was now long past. The old skyscrapers were dismantled, or modified into shining spires whose loveliness illuminated the land for many miles around. The uglier buildings were torn down. Where the cities had been, in time there were towns centered around monumental cores, separated by parkland. Everything the Ponies of Paradise had became beautiful.
The world became Fairyland.
Most of Ponykind was satisfied with simple pleasueres. Without the lash of necessity, they worked at the tasks they most enjoyed. Those whose Talents were for farming or mining or factory work continued at such occupations, though the farms and mines and factories all became pleasant places, where the farmers and miners and workers enjoyed the cameraderie of their sisters and laughed and sang and danced through their work days. Extensive automation and safeguarding made the labors light beyond all previous conceptions.
Some Ponies were not quite so simple. They ... but Luna found her mind slipping off what the scientists and engineers exactly did in Paradise, and briefly wondered why. Then, she simply accepted it, with a sort of muzzy joy.
She did notice a strange sort of change in the application of technologies. While most of the Pony towns looked like idealized versions of simpler times -- the small-town charm and equine scale without the backbreaking work and injuries and diseases and early deaths -- and most Ponies went about by foot or sailboat or simple-looking but oddly high-performance airship -- Luna caught glimpses that showed that Ponies commanded very high technologies when they wanted them.
More than once she saw vacuum trains, hypersonic aircraft, and the telltale ribbons of space elevators rising from the equatorial regions. Great shapes moved between the planets. By some means -- not Wishing, for Paradise now did not employ large-scale Wishes save when absolutely needful, to avoid the risk of Paradox -- the other worlds of the Solar System were terraformed, and in time some billions of Ponies settled them.
This pleased Luna. They did fulfill my dream, she thought. Moondreamer would have been so happy. Then, she came to a sad realization. Sundreamer and Moondreamer needn't have fled. In many ways, they would have liked this world. If only we'd known ...
She wondered just what Sundreamer and Moondreamer, their minds formed in an expansive culture, would have done in Paradise. But again her mind slipped off the thought, and she was simply happy.
Centuries turned into millennia. The population of Ponykind -- unaugmented by any further births -- slowly spread out through the Solar System, becoming rather thin on any single world. The Earth, once crowded by billions, now was home to only about half a billion Ponies, the rest living elsewhere. Now almost all Ponies on Earth lived in idyllic villages or very small towns, with the old cities surviving now only as ceremonial centers, those buildings which the Ponies wished to preserve being carefully tended by the machines.
On the other Solar worlds, new cultures emerged, cultures which best exploited the potential for beauty and grace of each terraformed environment. In her brief overview of the Age of Paradise, Luna could not see or retain most of the details. Hidden caverns hollowed under the surface of the Moon, wondrous spires rising into the increasingly-blue sky; Ponies playing on the plains of Mars, boating in the Valles Marineris; and a hundred other ways of living, everywhere, each new culture, and each Pony in it, a unique and joyful and special song ...
Three millennia of joy -- and then, the Doom That Came to Paradise.
Luna winced. She knew the nature of that Doom. She knew what was going to happen to that lovely world, that richly inhabited Solar System.
She was going to happen to it. She, and her fellow Cosmics.
They would destroy that world forever, and she knew why.
For Paradise had not succeeded in snuffing out all the fires of Paradox. The false vacuum had been destablized by that immense Higgs pulse, and Paradise had not the art of quelling that unrest with more careful emissions. It must have later learned that art, but It did not learn it in time. There was still a danger of Paradox Storm, millennia down the line.
Yet Luna realized now something neither Gravity, nor any of her Siblings nor Cousins, had realized at that time. Something that, had they understood, might have led to a different decison.
Paradise was learning.
Some process was increasing its knowledge of the structure of the Universe. Briefly, Luna wondered again about those scientists and engineers ... and a third time her mind slipped off that train of thought, as she contemplated all the pretty, pretty Ponies and their pretty, pretty old-timey little towns.
In time, Paradise might have figured out how to completely damp out its Paradox.
We didn't know, Luna thought sadly. We didn't understand. And in not knowing, not understanding, we destroyed all this -- not realizing that the destruction was ultimately unnecessary. We didn't even know the Paradise Entity existed. We could have contacted it, told it what it needed to do to save its Ponies. We could have saved this world, and in saving it made this system stronger against the Night Shadows.
Why didn't we know?
Luna knew the answer. Because this was just one race, one star system, among so very many others. Because this was just one worldline, which we could prune in such a way as to abort its recurrence. She winced from herself. Because we were the Cosmic Concepts, above all mortal considerations. Because we didn't care.
Well, she amended, one of us cared. She was in her Avatar, but she fought, as best she could, to stop us from destroying that world. My Sister fought to save Paradise.
I fought to destroy it.
She watched, frozen in guilt, as Doom approached the World That Was Lost, called by the Mighty Messenger, drawn by the very Higgs pulse that had partly damped Paradox in the first place. She knew all this, she had been there, she had been part of that Doom. She had seen this all before, from the other side.
But then, she saw something she had not seen before.
Just before the Cosmics came, there had been another huge Higgs pulse.
They had of course detected that; assumed it to be a symptom of increasing false-vacuum instability. They had raced on even faster, desperate to Negate this worldline, and so save this part of the Universe from annihilation.
But the pulse had not been caused by Paradox.
It had been caused by Paradise.
In that instance the Sun had flickered, and mighty energies been diverted to the purposes of Paradise, just as before. And some of those energies had, indeed, been used to empower a small band of mares, including her Sister and some who had later helped free Luna from the Nightmare.
Most of the energies had gone ... elsewhere.
For all her understanding of both science and magic, Luna was not exactly sure how Paradise had done what It had done. But It had scanned the minds of all the billions of Ponies in Paradise, which was relatively easy for It, and then created something which must have been very hard even for Itself to do. Luna supposed that the Cosmic Concept of Gravity would have understood what Paradise had done, but then of course Paradise had made very sure that none of the Cosmic Concepts had seen what It was doing at that moment.
It had created a ... vessel? ... capacious enough to contain its memories, including the backup copies that It had made of every sapient being in the Solar System. And then, It had taken Itself ... and Its copies ... elsewhere.
Luna knew where. The answer was obvious.
Here. To the worldline that had been created by her Cousin, Destruction. To the worldline of the Cataclysm.
The Cosmics had tried their best -- or worst -- but they hadn't succeeded in slaying the Ponies of Paradise. When a little pink mare had shouted defiance at the Doom filling their skies, when the energies of possibility had coalesced around her and her companions so that they could make a fight against even Luna's mere equine Avatar -- those had been but a rear guard.
While Luna's attention -- and those of the other Cosmics -- had been drawn to this drama, Paradise had fled sidewise in time to the new worldline, over a millennium ago, almost three millennia after the Cataclysm. Fled, and survived.
The Ponies of Paradise weren't dead. She wasn't sure where they were, aside from a very few of them, but they were still alive. At least in potential ... Luna realized, and that made her so happy that she couldn't think any further about the implications, aside from one very big one:
I didn't murder a whole worldline. None of us did. We meant to -- but we failed.
Ordinary consciousness returned to her.
"I hope I have succeeded in my quest." Paradise said, looking into her eyes very earnestly. "I hope I have been a good Pony -- you, who were one of my mothers. Have I been a good Pony?"
For all that she was well aware that she was not physically-present here at all, Luna's eyes misted and her throat choked with emotion. Thickly, she said: "Yes. O yes, a very good Pony!"
An immmense burden had been lifted from her soul.
Princess Luna herself had still sinned. She had summoned a Night Shadow, rebelled against her Sister, and in the process killed numerous Equestrian Ponies, ruined her Sister's plans that would have by now raised Equestria to the point where it might have easily defeated any threats to Ponykind.
She had been a very bad Pony; she deserved every moment of her exile, and far worse punishment. She would in time devise some means of punishing herself for that.
But one thing she had not done.
She had not murdered a whole world, a whole Solar System, full of Ponies. She had not done genocide: at least, not against Ponies.
Tears streamed from her eyes, and she sobbed, but not with sorrow.
She cried with joy.
She had been saved from the consequences of her own haste, her folly, and saved by one of her own intended victims.
She had been saved, by Paradise.