No One to Remember

by WishyWish


5 - Ol' Blue Eyes is Back

Canterlot was gone.

Twilight backpeddled in the dirt until she banged into a fruit cart, causing an orange to promptly bop her on the noggin. The trauma failed to rouse her from her terror, and with eyes the size of dinner plates, she gaped at the empty cliffs of the mountain above.

“...g-gone…” the princess choked, “...i-it’s not just ponies...e-everything is...is…”

Having not been born with pegasus instinct, the princess eschewed her wings in her state of panic, preferring instead to go barreling down a random street on her hooves. Names escaped her lips in shrill cries as she called for friends, townsponies, and anypony else she could think of. The flowers remained in bloom, but the florists were gone. The produce in front of the grocery store looked fresh, but nopony attended it. Quills and Sofas had an ‘open’ sign hanging out front, but the clerks were nowhere to be found.

Stricken to the limits of her sensibilities, Twilight ran at a hard gallop until her legs would no longer support her. When her knees finally buckled, she found herself just outside of town, on a path she had traveled a hundred times before. She shut her eyes tightly, wishing she could get by without ever having to open them again, but the inevitable eventually came to pass.

Sweet Apple Acres was not only gone, it was as though it had never existed. There was a small, empty shack where the barn had once been with an ancient-looking carved sign marking the place, but only wild growth graced the fields. The place had once been a farm, but whomever settled it had moved on ages hence.

Twilight turned sharply away, the chill of late autumn finally catching up with her. She would not investigate. She could not bring herself to.

“E-everypony...a-and…a-and Spike! Spike!!”

Summoning up reserves of strength, Twilight shot back into town as quickly as she had left, one thought alone on her mind.

“Spike...oh Spike please...not you too...I can’t lose everyone...p-please not you…”

Upon the cusp of each breath the princess took came another cry for her assistant, friend, and surrogate son. She made it all the way back to the doorstep of the Palace of Friendship before collapsing again, her shouts obfuscated by choking on desperately needed oxygen.

“Spike…” Twilight barely managed through her coughing, “...Spike don’t leave me...please answer me…”

“Twilight?”

The sound of the little dragon’s stubby voice was a symphony to the Princess of Friendship’s ears. Panting from the stairs, she fluttered her eyelids and brought into view a blurry image of Spike, who was holding a green gem in one claw and gazing obliviously back at her. Concern alighted on Spike’s face as he trotted over, bobbing on his two ruddy legs.

“Twilight, are you okay?”

Motherly instinct caused Twilight to manage a reassuring smile. When the dragon was close enough she swept him up and drew him, half-eaten emerald and all, into a tender embrace, stroking his crests with a hoof.

“Oh Spike...oh, I thought I’d lost you...oh thank Celestia…”

“Thank who?” Spike tossed the rest of his gem in his mouth and spoke through chewing. “Youf okway? Yer cwaydlin me like a babee…”

Twilight blushed and sat Spike down. “Sorry, but...can you blame me…?”

Spike tilted his head. “Well, you only went out for a fly half an hour ago, so I don’t really get what the big deal--” he paused as something occurred to him, “...oh. This is about your disappearing thing, isn’t it.”

“Princess Celestia…?” Twilight ventured. “Princess Luna…?”

Spike shook his head. “Twilight, we’ve been through this. I’m sorry, I really am, but I don’t know anyponies named--”

“Princess Cadance? At least tell me you’ve heard of the Crystal Empire?”

“...uh…”

“My brother? My parents?”

“You don’t have a bro--”

Twilight rose to her hooves, spun in a circle at the bottom of the stairs, and held her forelegs aloft to the sky. “Who raises the sun, Spike? Who raises the moon? How can I be alive if my parents never existed!?”

Spike shrugged. “You do all that stuff, same as always. You’re the ruler of Equestria. You hatched me, and I...dunno where you came from. Magicky-stuff. We’ve never really talked about it.”

“Me,” Twilight touched her chest. “I rule all of Equestria. Alone.”

“...yeah?”

“Baltimare? Manehattan? Appleoosa? The Changeling lands? Is any of this ringing a bell?”

“...whatling?”

The lone princess rattled with a sarcastic chuckle. “Oh sure Spike, that makes perfect sense. Just you and me, by ourselves, an empire of two!! What about the citizens that make up an empire?”

“Eh, not exactly, but we’ve never really needed citizens before…?”

“Why a flower shop?” Twilight challenged. “Why a grocery store? Why a bunch of empty homes!?”

Spike began counting on his talons, with all the logic Princess Luna had used in Canterlot. “Flowers are pretty and it’s nice to have a place to store them, you never know when we might need some extra food, and we figured maybe we might get visitors someday?”

“We figured maybe?” Twilight snorted. “But if there’s nopony left in all the world, why would we ‘figure’ that!?”

“Well,” Spike hesitated. “We don’t actually know that for a fact about the whole world…”

“So you’re telling me that all of Equestria is just you and me, in this town we built in case there’s some other sapient creature somewhere who might come calling while we hang around eating gems and watching the stars.”

Spike checked his claw, as if he were expecting to see something new to munch on there. “Well, not exactly. You don’t eat gems, for one.”

Twilight let her face fall into one hoof. Without looking up, she asked her question yet again, knowing what the answer would be:

“Spike, how many Elements of Harmony are there?”

“Two.”

“Of course there’s only one--wait, what?” Twilight looked up. “Two? You have an element?”

“Tch, what? No,” Spike replied. “Not that it wouldn’t be awesome, but you know what I mean.”

Twilight drolly narrowed her eyes. “Enlighten me.”

“Magic and laughter,” Spike said simply. “What good is a magical life if you don’t have laughter, right?”

“So...Pinkie Pie is…”

Spike pointed into town. “Probably baking something awesome. Whenever she gets to baking we always get to try it. Who else is gonna eat it, right? Yum!”

“Spike, is there anypony, or for that matter anyone else, who has ever lived in this town, as far as you know?”

“Nope.”

Twilight sank into deep pondering. She could spend all day questioning Spike’s logic - how there could be books written by others, where Pinkie’s family was, and so forth - but she had the feeling it would do no good. There was still a riddle to solve, and so long as anypony was left to save, the time had not yet come to give in. She began to postulate aloud:

“...somepony has to be behind this, since Discord said this wasn’t his idea...and that somepony would have to be awfully important to him, or he somehow awfully beholden to them, for him to knowingly damage all of reality for them…” She glanced into town. “...could that somepony be Pinkie Pie? Why would Discord do something like this for Pinkie Pie? They’re not that close...”

Spike stepped up to Twilight’s side and tried, once again, to reassure her with a smile. “I said it before Twilight, if you say there’s something wrong...I’ll do whatever you need me to.”

“Is it you, Spike?”

Spike blinked. “Is what me?”

Twilight waved her foreleg towards town. “Are you behind this?”

Spike raised a brow. “Twilight, seriously...I’ve been trying to understand what you’ve been going on about for like two days now. You said you were worried something might be wrong with you instead of the world, went off to do some brain check on yourself, and now you’re back here.”

“That’s not an answer to my question, Spike,” Twilight said uneasily.

Spike looked boldly into the princess’s eyes. “You know...I’m sorta hurt you would even suggest that. Do you really think I would be behind whatever it is you’ve been talking about all this time? You’re barely ever making any sense lately, and now you’re gonna go so far as to--”

Twilight wasn’t listening. Spike’s lips were moving, but in true single-minded form, the princess only had her attention on Spike’s eyes.

His green eyes.

“...you didn’t do this, did you Spike. I’m sorry.”

“--and furthermore--huh?” Spike stopped. “No, I didn’t do anything Twilight, I’ve been trying to tell you--”

“Pinkie Pie. Her eyes.”

“...I...what? What about them?”

“They’re blue.”

“That’s not really uncommon knowledge,” Spike smirked. “Everypony in Equestria knows it, after all.”

Twilight looked back towards the town as if she were expecting it to suddenly burst into flames. “...she...why would she...but it’s the only logical answer, she’s the only one left who fits the description…”

Spike was once again lost. “Sooo...does this mean we’re gonna go see Pinkie Pie now?” There was fire again in the princess’s eyes, and even if Spike didn’t understand the source, he was glad to see it again.

“Hop on,” Twilight said as she knelt to accommodate. “Yes, that’s exactly where we’re going. We’re going to put an end to this, and...Celestia willing, reverse it somehow…”

Spike was about to say he could walk himself, but he knew better than to argue when Twilight Sparkle had that look on her face. A moment later the pair were headed straight for Sugarcube Corner.

“Reverse it…” Twilight whispered to herself. “...but Discord said, he can’t do anything about it at this point...only I can. How can I reverse all of this…?”

*   *   *   *   *

Twilight’s hooves knew the way to Sugarcube Corner better than her wings. So well in fact, that their owner put the entire quartet on autopilot whilst she ground her teeth in anticipation of their goal. By mere process of elimination, there was only one pony left who could be responsible for the unmaking of reality. Twilight knew her bubbly friend was eccentric, but to think that Pinkie Pie would champion such a heinous act, and for so petty a reason as presumed revenge, was difficult for the princess to even fathom. Worse, Twilight couldn’t even imagine what she might have done to engender such a response from one of her closest friends. Her embittered confusion might have been as much directed towards herself, were she not already boiling over with rage.

The colorful bakery that had once belonged to an innocent family who had been ripped from reality loomed in the empty streets. Ponyville remained a crypt of silence, such that Twilight could quite easily detect her quarry’s presence simply by listening to the cheerful humming coming from the kitchen. She paused long enough to let Spike down and approached the door. This time, in lieu of worried beating, Twilight spun about and snapped her heels, applying the most wicked buck her studious body could manage to the wood. The door stood tall, but the blow was enough to jar the knob and send it flying open.

“Pinkie Pie!” Twilight announced, a bewildered Spike cowering behind her. “We need to talk!”

Pinkie had already emerged from the kitchen. She was pacing behind the bakery counter with a bowl of batter balanced upon one hoof, which she was stirring via a ladle impossibly wrapped in her poofy mane. Her hum had evolved into a pleasant whistling rendition of If I Only Had a Brain, and the mollifying scent of blueberries under fresh pie crust wafted from the kitchen in her wake. She brightened at the arrival of her visitors and turned to face them.

“Oh hey Twilight and Spike!” The earth mare sang. “Here for a sneak peek of today’s treats?” She shook her head (and thus the ladle) at them in a semi-mocking scold. “Now now, you know you’re going to get to try them all anyway, later on. Who else would eat them, right?” She pondered, touching the ladle to her forehead and spattering batter over her cheeks. “Hmm, although I guess I eat most of them. But if we ever have any visitors, I’m sure they would...unless they don’t like pies or cupcakes, but really that’s crazy talk, who wouldn’t like--”

“PINKIE!”

Pinkie came back to herself and sat the bowl down, only to hold up a foreleg for no apparent reason. “Oh, sorry! Forceful armpit!”

“That’s ‘force of habit’,” Twilight muttered as she completed the process of letting herself in. “Pinkie, I’m really not in the mood today. You know that we have something to talk about.”

“We do?” Pinkie glanced at the ceiling, again inadvertently touching her muzzle with the ladle in her hair. “Waaaaait a minute...is this about the spider costume at your birthday the other day? Because I totally thought you liked spiders, because you have all those dank corridors in your basement that are totally full of them.”

“Wait, how many spiders are we talking here?” Spike whimpered.

“My birthday?” Twilight repeated Pinkie’s words. “So now it’s my birthday?”

Pinkie blew on her bangs. “Pfft, no silly. Your birthday was yesterday. Spike’s is in three months, four days, seventeen hours, three minutes, and forty-seven seconds. And mine is a couple months after that but eh, who’s counting, right?”

“Never mind whose birthday it is...was...whatever!” Twilight roared. She stamped over to the counter and leveled a hoof in Pinkie’s face. “Pinkie Pie, I’m surprised at you! How could you do something like this!? If you had a problem with me, why didn’t you just come over and talk it out? Do you really think what you did is okay??”

Pinkie blinked, and touched the tip of Twilight’s hoof, which had come up short, with her bubblegum pink muzzle. “What did I do about...what? Did you not like the boysenberry turnovers last thursday?”

“What in Equestria did you say to Discord to get him to systematically unmake all of reality?” Twilight went on. “I know he’s had his faults, but I can’t believe even he would do something like this without an amazingly good reason for it. He says you’re the one behind this, and I want to know why.”

Pinkie faltered. She scooped up a power cord that was running to the blender in the kitchen in one hoof, while holding upon her other a different cord of unknown terminus. “...’this’ cord? Which cord? This one, or...this one?”

“Don’t play dumb with me!” Twilight heaved. “This is not okay! I have to know what you said to him and what’s going on here, so I can deal with this situation and hopefully undo it before we all stop existing!! He says only I can fix it, but I can’t do that without your help!”

Spike kept both his voice and his gait cautious as he wandered past the threshold behind his princess. “Twilight, listen to her...she doesn’t know what you’re talking about any more than I do…”

Twilight never took her eyes off of Pinkie. “She has to know, Spike. She’s the only one left that could possibly know, and I’m not going to let her pull her disappearing act again.” She loomed, her forelegs on the counter and her eyes like fiery brands in the other pony’s coat. “I have my eye on you, this time!”

Pinkie’s ears flattened and a dry chuckle rattled in her throat. She cast several oblivious glances at Spike, but each time, her vision was pulled back to the amethyst orbs that burned like twin suns above her. At a impasse, she grabbed a random pie from under the bakery counter, dipped her hoof in it without looking, and brought up a smattering of sweet-smelling red goo.

“...w-want some cherry? Eh heh…”

Twilight raised a hoof. Pinkie flinched, but in the turning of a second, Spike was on the counter and between the two ponies. He cast a reprimanding stare at the ruler of Equestria.

“Twilight, I know you’re upset, but I’m not gonna let you hit her.”

“Hit…?”

Twilight repeated the word blankly and glanced up at her own raised hoof, as though ignorant to its plans. When she looked down again, she found her beloved assistant leveling a scowl in her direction, and her dear pink friend, cowering in such uncharacteristic fear that the expression was twice as potent than from anypony else.

“I…” Twilight choked, her foreleg dropping. “...I-I’m sorry I...b-but if you’re the one behind this…”

“She’s not, Twilight,” Spike reproached. “Nopony is behind anything. You’re being paranoid.”

Cowed into silence, Twilight found that she could do nothing but stare dumbly at her friends. They stared back, and the standoff continued until Twilight’s expression began to erode, like thousands of years of water pouring over a cliff face. She pushed off of the counter and turned away, her face hidden in the crook of her elbow.

“...S-Spike…” the princess whimpered, “...I-I...I need you to tell me if I’m going crazy…”

Spike sat down on the counter and swung his legs. “Nah,” he ventured, “you’re not crazy, Twilight. You’re just...confused I guess, and--”

“Applejack,” Twilight interrupted. She whirled about, her cheeks a mottled mess of tears, and gestured to her forehead as though she were stroking the brim of a wide hat. “Always wears a Stetson, kicks like a mule, the most honest pony you’ll ever meet?” Twilight’s gesture changed - she nabbed a muffin from a side counter in her magic and began to pantomime powdering her cheeks with it. “Rarity? Dramatic, theatrical, eye for fashion...generous to a fault, but steadfast enough to do whatever she has to in order to achieve her goals? You have a huge crush on her, Spike! Don’t you remember?”

Spike and Pinkie only stared.

Twilight took to her wings and did three small loops around the room, puffing up her chest with pride when she landed. “Rainbow Dash? The Wonderbolt? Brash, headstrong, but never gives up on her friends?” Twilight nabbed a cupcake with a fondant bunny face from the cabinet and took to stroking it lovingly with a hoof. “Fluttershy? Talks to the animals? Sweet and kind, but possibly the bravest of us all because she’s not afraid to show us how scared and shy she is?”

Pinkie tried offering a smile. “They’re...really cute names, Twilight!”

Twilight tossed the entire cupcake in her mouth and depression-devoured it like so much ice cream. Wilting again, she hung her head. “...Princess Celestia, my mentor...she made me who I am today...Starlight Glimmer, who was just learning about how to brighten the world with friendship...little Flurry Heart, who never got a chance to grow up...m-my parents...m-my...my brother...I love them all so much, they can’t...can’t just be gone…”

Pinkie scrambled for the right thing to say. “Gee, uh, maybe...maybe a nice cake would make you feel better, Twilight? We could make it huge, like seventeen layers, all your favorite flavors, and we could go have a picnic by the lake?”

“Hey, yeah,” Spike kept the thought going. “That sounds great, doesn’t it Twilight? And afterwards, we can have the biggest book-sort-cation ever! We’ll organize like the entire neighborhood!”

“Psst,” Pinkie whispered out of the corner of her mouth. “That sounds totally bori--”

“Ix-nay on the oring-bayyyy-” Spike nudged back. “We’re talking about wilight-tway heeere….”

Pinkie wrinkled her snout. “That’s like the worst pony-latin I’ve ever heard. Clearly her name is light-tway.”

Spike hissed out a shushing noise, but Twilight’s attention was already back on the pair. The fire she had built up on her way to Sugarcube Corner was ashen, as was her expression.

“...please Pinkie, if nothing else...at least tell me what I did.”

Pinkie picked up the ladle, again with her hair, and took to licking at the batter on it. “Well, you came in the door, and you were all mean, and then we started talking about books and ix-naying, and--”

“No,” Twilight interrupted softly. “Tell me what I did to you. Tell me what was so horrible that it justified this.” she waved her foreleg towards the window, and the empty town beyond. “Even if this is the end...even if I can’t do anything about it. Tell me why it happened...please. I’ll beg if I have to.”

Pinkie seemed embarrassed. She blew on her bangs and waved nonchalantly with a hoof. “Psh, oh Twilight, you’ve never done anything horrible to me. We’re besties!”

Twilight felt her expression cracking again. She shut her eyes and tried in vain to cram her emotions back into her heart. “But how can that be…how can any of this be…” she whimpered. “Even the pattern of things vanishing doesn’t make any sense...some things that shouldn’t exist anymore are still here, while other things aren’t...you’re the only pony left that fits the description, but you’re not even upset about anything...I don’t…I don’t…”

“You don’t...what?” Spike said gently.

Twilight let the one phrase that vexed her more than any other rip.

“I don’t understand! I’m supposedly at fault for all this, but I didn’t do anything! If it’s something so bad that I did, how can I not have any clue what it was!? Am I really that awful of a pony!? Nothing fits - none of the pieces go in the right holes! Am I just stupid for not being able to figure it out!?”

“Twilight, settle down, you’re not stupi--”

The princess opened her eyes, revealing to the room the windows to her stressed soul. “But I can’t settle down. Maybe I’m crazy...maybe nothing I know was ever real at all, but I can’t just stop! I have to keep trying to figure this out, until the very end! All those ponies...they all deserve so much more than just to blink out of existence forever!!”

“You need to rest--”

“No!” Twilight stood tall. “I need to solve this! Even if it kills me, I need to keep going until I figure it out! I need to--”

Twilight’s eyes fell on a mirror behind Pinkie. In the reflection, standing outside, was the trench-coated pony.

Twilight whirled.

“NO! You’re not going to do this again!!”

Flickering lights from the bakery cases drew the princess’s attention. When she looked again, the room around her was as silent as all the other buildings in town. The structure itself remained solvent, but the baked goods, the scents, and the warmth were all gone.

“Pinkie...oh Celestia, Spike!!”

Panicked, Twilight dove over the counter and sprawled into the kitchen. It was the only way they could have gone, but the rear door was shut tight and the room was deserted.

“No...no, oh sweet merciful Celestia, no...not both of them…not Spike!!”

With the names of her last two friends on her lips, the Princess of Friendship began to ransack the kitchen of Sugarcube Corner. She tore bags of spices asunder, yanked crashing dishes from their shelves, and blew holes in anything that got in her way. Two minutes later, the room was an absolute disaster. With flour on her coat and oven grease about her hooves, Twilight stood upon the remnants of a countertop, desperate to fill her lungs again.

“No...no no no...no please…”

Standing in the middle of the street, clearly visible through a large hole Twilight had blasted through the wall during her tirade, was the coated-pony. It stood motionless, lancing the princess with its cold-blue eyes, and finally turned down the street, speeding into a gallop.

“NO!” Twilight cried, her horn crackling to terrible life. “You will NOT get away from me again!!”

Sugarcube Corner’s roof exploded. From within burst the fiendish image of a princess scorned, white fire in her eyes and a demonic spring in her widespread wings. She found her quarry in an instant and swept down upon it, sizzling blasts of energy eradicating structures, carts, and trees as she opened baleful fire on her target.

“Come back here!” The princess screamed, her voice amplified by the power coursing through her. “Come back here and make this right! You can’t run from me anymore! I’m never taking my eyes off you again!!”

Twilight swept low, trailing the pony through the streets. She moved as it moved, her attention focused upon her goal, until a split trunk from a burning tree caught her by the leg. Never an acrobat with her wings, the princess toppled headfirst into a roll and crashed into the side of a building, as a final blast from her horn took the top story off of Ponyville Town Hall.

Twilight sputtered and fought to collect herself, but in the haze of masonry dust and floral fallout, there was nothing. No sound of hoofbeats, no trail, and no sign of her adversary in any direction. Pain wracked her body, but she forced her wings to open and bolted into the sky to track the unknown pony once again.

Ponyville, enveloped in a host of small fires, slept below. The flames crackled in Twilight’s eyes, strangely peaceful, as though the entire town had gracefully given itself over to the end of its days. Not a soul capable of sapience was about, nor was there any evidence that one ever had been, save for the princess herself.

“...c-come back…” Twilight choked, her mousey voice now just above a whisper. “Please come back...don’t let it end this way…”

There was no reply beyond the kiss of the chilly breeze and the whipping of embers. With no more wind to fill her sails, Twilight Sparkle floated down into the middle of town - into the mouth of the destruction she had wrought. It was warm there, blessedly warm.

“...I’m so sorry everypony...I...I failed you…”

Twilight thought that if she cocooned her body with her wings, maybe she would never have to come out again.