Grey winds gust over an ocean of ash. The stars smear across the sky, distorted and warped like an oil painting being doused in acid. The moon is pockmarked, the sun is bleeding.
At least the flames have burnt out, consumed themselves in a passionate firestorm that melted rock into slag; now the cinereous remains feel as chilly as a lightly packed snow. Warmth abandons the world, excluding small pockets of well-hidden and well-guarded love. Seeds of a sort, ready to bloom when day breaks. But the night is long.
Travelers wander by, at times: the brave ones, at least. Sometimes they gesture, with extinguished horn or grounded wing, sweep the limb across the horizon and simply say, “Equestria.” And sometimes, they say more.
Sometimes it's a story about the one who still dwells in that palace of cracked and crooked light. Other times, a tale about how the tribes united under a single banner, or how the purple warrior princess with a penchant for reading had saved a world of honeycomb sweetness from vile villains, or even a saga on the two nigh forgotten sisters who moved the heavens themselves. There are other stories, of course; rainbow lasers and friendship cannons, harmony and the elements thereof, but they are less frequently told.
None of these stories matter at the moment, however, save for the first.
She awaits, and where she goes the Ur-bane follows. Blood becomes ink, light radiates shadow, inside inverts, twists to become out; crackling spindles of crystal ice bathe the room in heat, while the fireplace stows rock and other such digestibles.
Even the dead are torn from their rest, marionettes on rotten strings of sinew.
And in the center of this mad little universe sits Antithesis, cackling gleefully at the merry display of destruction pirouetting around her.
Yet an antithesis cannot exist in isolation, and nor can she.
Does she laugh or sob?
Does it even matter if all that can hear her are the chattering dead?
The light inside is broken, and yet it still flickers at times. There is no justice in the world; mercy has no atomic weight, nor righteousness, or even love. These things do not exist in reality, after all.
So therefore they do, even if it’s just for a moment at a time.
It is impossible, of course; the decayed resurgence of a filly, little more than the inversion of an inversion, cannot triumph over a twisted thing that has mastered a thousand ways to strip the life from the stones themselves. A teddy bear is no defense against monsters.
Except, just this one time, it happens. And the fortunes reverse, and again, and so on; the pendulum swings, back and forth, bones twisting as powerful magics warp not merely the form but also the metaphysical nature of the mare.
Destroyer. Savior. Monster. Hero. Thug. Donor.
She, they, scream in pain; it brings a certain sort of clarity, agony, and in a moment the filly realizes, deems that the antithesis, the inversion of existence is-
There is no princess here to judge or rule, no senator or noble to parlay and debate; in the end Antithesis is the queen of the world, what little that remains.
Can the one in power do what must be done?
And then there’s nothing, nothing but the certainty of a decision made.
***
Things that exist strive to continue existing, even if it is only as the corpse of something greater. And yet the world pulls inexorably forward, and ash succumbs to earth. A world of grey goes green, albeit slowly, and there is structure, tenuous at first, then thriving as the seeds of light and life go into full bloom.
What remains from Before is scraped together, a last desperate bundle from the old world flung into a dying flame to keep away the dark: in ancient grottos dwell flightless Gryphons alongside Sea Ponies, in the burnt-out remnants of some ancient and dead tree a collection of equines eke out a meager existence around a sleeping dragon, in half-dug hovels huddle a smattering of souls across the land.
The light slowly grows; friendship is magic, after all. It isn’t ideal, but for now, it’s enough. And in time, even the sun and the stars shall be mended; just wait and see.
Now go to sleep; there’s much to be done, and I want you up bright and early.