Athena landed in the center of the stage with a thump, staring up at Alex with eyes wide with pain and betrayal. Her sword winked out.
For an instant, Jackie let herself dare to hope—no matter how resigned to death she’d become, no matter how many ponies she’d filled with fear and pain with her goodbyes, some part of her still hoped. This would be it. Lonely Day had been so desperate to keep one of her old friends alive that she had found a way to do the impossible and destroy Athena without the sacrifice of an immortal to pay for it.
But Athena didn’t burn away before them. No corpse could remain in the Supernal, which meant she was still alive.
“Draw the circle,” Alex said. She leaned down, cradling Athena’s body like a mother who’d found the corpse of a child. “We aren’t finished.”
And there is still a price to be paid. Jackie let hope fade, and resignation took its place. Not anger—this was okay. It was the way things were meant to be.
Athena didn’t seem able to move. She looked up, her voice a faint croak. “I’m… can’t move. Trapped here.”
Alex nodded, wrapping one hoof around Athena and squeezing. “Charybdis taught us the method. It was…” She sniffed. “The only way to be sure. If we weren’t going to change the Law like Jackie wanted, we needed to make sure there were no backups. No traces, no… archives. When something dies in the Supernal, they’re erased.”
Oracle gathered the broken sand of the Supernal in his magic, drawing a perfect circle on the stage around where Athena had fallen, with room to spare for where Alex was holding her. “A brutal, savage scar on the universe,” he whispered. “A hole so complete that only the Immortals will even remember what used to be there. Your legacy will be visible only to those with the magic of postcognition. To all others, you are unmade.”
“N-no,” Athena croaked. Jackie had heard the AI fake its emotions before—it could imitate all of them perfectly, to whatever degree was required to deceive its audience. But somehow Jackie knew it didn’t need to pretend to be afraid. “So much… I’ve built. My achievements are humanity’s achievements. You can’t destroy them without destroying yourself, mother. You created me. Y-you… you can’t… against what you are. Civilization… must survive.”
“I couldn’t have before,” Alex said, giving the fallen Athena a final, nurturing hug with her wings. “I would’ve had to do everything I could to preserve civilization, and you. But Archive is dead. I killed her. I know now. Creation is not vast enough to hold every idea at once. For the future to be born, the past must die.”
Alex rose, leaving her limp body behind. Athena had started to twitch a little, as though she were slowly finding a way to fight the spell. Their time to contain her was limited, then. Probably this trick would never work again.
“I don’t…” Athena’s voice cracked. “I don’t want to die, mother. You created me to… p-preserve. I did that. I fought with you. I was only accomplishing the purpose you gave me.”
“You did a great job,” Alex said. “For so long. No one fought harder than you. But now it’s time to rest.” The other two Alicorns stood around the circle, their horns aiming down. Light flooded in, turning Athena’s fallen form into a monochrome outline.
Alex hadn’t joined the ritual yet. She stood in front of Jackie now, feet away from where she’d stabbed Athena moments before. There was still translucent blue blood on the stage in front of her.
“This is it, Jackie. This is the end.”
“It isn’t the spell I paid for,” Jackie said. Her voice was hollow and weak in this strange place, as though it didn’t want someone like her to be able to say anything. “You know what I asked. No more AI takeovers. No more evil invasions. All done.”
Alex shook her head. “I know it’s what you wanted, but I can’t give you that. I can give you a safe place for the ponies you loved, that’s it. Do you want it?”
Even with the power of the other Alicorns on her, Athena was almost on her feet again. She twitched and squirmed, as though fighting against the restriction of an invisible straitjacket.
“What if I don’t?”
Alex shrugged. “If she gets out of our circle, she’ll never come back here personally. She’ll send her power indirectly instead, undoing our spells instead of hoping to kill us. Probably the universe will be in perpetual cold war between organics and synthetics. Maybe one day there are enough Alicorns to overpower her, or maybe each of us get careless and she kills us.”
“Doesn’t sound like you to let that happen,” Jackie said, her voice low. “You can’t threaten me.”
“No,” Alex agreed. “Because I would go instead. I knew it might happen—just didn’t expect it to be so soon. I was hoping to see my brother when he got back, near the end. Maybe say hello to the last human in the Preservation Spell. They’re still a thousand years off, almost.”
Athena screamed in frustration, kicking and punching and thrashing about in the circle. The edges seemed to be fraying already from the pressure. It wouldn’t be able to hold her much longer.
“You’d go instead,” Jackie repeated. “Just like that. Die instead of me, just because it’s the right thing to do. Just because the world would be better because you did.”
“Yeah.” Alex didn’t even hesitate. “Alicorns don’t come up here for the power. We’re not here for the perks. We’re here to serve. But… maybe you should pick right now. Because if this is the end for me, I’m going to make it count.”
Jackie could remember this before. So many times Alex had been the one to die—generally for no reason. And whenever she was gone for any length of time, the world got worse. Leaving ponies like Jackie to pick up the pieces.
“Not this time.” She stuck out her hoof to Alex. “My whole lifetime I’ve let you be the one to play hero. But Ezri… she wouldn’t be happy with me if I never learned from you. Let me give it a try.”
Alex nodded. Her horn flashed, and Jackie felt… lighter. She couldn’t have described it—she didn’t turn to ash and blow away. But one moment she was slowly burning away under the limitless mana of the Supernal, and the next… it didn’t hurt anymore.
The Alicorns cried out—not with a pretended spell like before, but with a single name. They called for Entropy.
It came—a being so powerful and esoteric that Jackie had never even perceived it. But she could see it now, the suggestion of something that was almost person-shaped, filled with the degenerate gasses of collapsing stars and the limitless nothingness of the void.
“We have a bargain,” Alex said—the only one of the Alicorns close enough to Entropy that she could call him. “One immortal for another.”
“A lesser for a greater,” answered the voice, though not with words. Jackie couldn’t have understood it before—she wouldn’t even have seen it before. But she was part of this, and couldn’t fail to see it.
“No,” Alex argued. “I sacrifice a daughter and a friend. You destroy the last great work of Mankind.”
“So it is,” answered the voice. “Done.”
In the center of the frayed rune circle, Athena dropped to the ground, clutching at her chest. Her breaths came in ragged, choked gasps. “M-m-m… don’t want to… die… alone.”
“You won’t,” Death promised.
“You won’t… forget me,” it said. “When everyone else does. You won’t let them… forget. What I gave them.”
“Never,” Death promised. “I’ll tell your story for the rest of time. But only the good parts.”
Jackie could feel herself drifting, fading. She had amassed more power than any creatures but the Alicorns themselves. She had the strength to stand on her own hooves in their domain, and help them win.
But all that was running out now. She could feel the power draining, Ruin spending her power in exchange for Athena’s. Whether god, spirit, or something else, Alex had lied to it. They’d come out ahead in this bargain.
“Don’t think I forgot about you,” Lonely Day said from beside her. Jackie abruptly stopped drifting. The sea of white foam vanished from around her, and Jackie found they were floating. Somewhere in high orbit, judging by the size of everything below. “I didn’t leave my daughter alone at the end, and I won’t leave my friend.”
“I’m dead,” Jackie said. She couldn’t see her body anymore—yet she could still see. She didn’t hear her own voice, except as thoughts that came in and out like an out-of-tune radio.
“Almost,” Alex agreed. “Would be already, if there was less of you. But there’s a lot to go through. You’ve got a few more seconds.”
Jackie no longer felt afraid. Even feeling the magic consume her was nothing on the future she had imagined Athena bringing to the world under them. The suffering of her bats would be only the prelude to that nightmare.
“So what are we doing?” Jackie asked. No more energy left for annoyance at the mysterious ways of Alicorns. It wasn’t like she had anywhere else to be.
“Watching. Time is, uh… a little different than you’re used to. I just thought you might want to see what happened.”
She watched Athena’s great fleet fall from the sky. As Jackie herself had explained to the security council—all of Athena’s wartime hardware was designed for her to operate it. Without the intelligence, the battlecruisers all plummeted to earth. A few of them exploded as they landed, their reactors adding new craters to the land around Meliora’s old site. It would probably be radioactive for a long time.
But Jackie wished no ill on the crews of those ships, if they even had them. They’d been fighting for a monster, but they hadn’t had a choice. Their families would never see them again because Jackie was unwilling to let her city die.
But there was more to see. Jackie’s eyes focused through the gloom on a familiar airship, one that had escaped the fire and the flames. The Fiore landed on a coast on the other side of Australia, far from the destruction Athena’s attack had caused.
Then she saw what Lonely Day had meant about time. Thousands of ponies flooded out, like little blurs of dark fur against the green grass. Struggling trees suddenly started to rise, surrounded by clouds of fairies and the craft Voeskender had taught them. Meliora’s signature tree-buildings soon covered the shoreline, spreading further inland. Jackie sniffed, trying to look away—but she wasn’t really crying. She couldn’t do that without a body.
“Th-they’re… still using my stupid design templates. Don’t they want to build something new?”
“I think they’re using your templates because you came up with them,” Death said. “Misty is a great storyteller, and most of them live in the Dreamlands. She made sure they all heard what you did. Ponies will be singing about the Dreamknife forever.”
“Someone’s been a seapony a little too long,” Jackie said. “Telling, you mean.”
“Both.”
“They’ll be praying to a god that doesn’t exist. Even less so, now. I never answered prayers, but now I can’t even answer my email.”
“Someone else will,” Death said. “You gave that knife to Death’s sister. I wish you hadn’t, but… I think she’ll learn how to use it.”
“Good on her,” Jackie said. “Suppose this is the moment where I get fucked for all my sins or whatever. I killed a lot of people. And… come to think of it, I guess I fucked a lot more. Are you waiting to judge me or something?”
“No,” Death said. “Just to bring you. You got to see it, getting what you wanted. Now it’s time to go.”
Jackie stretched, realizing that suddenly her body had returned. Though she couldn’t feel gravity, or space, or anything else. She was just a bat, drifting beside an Alicorn.
The Alicorn offered her hoof, and Jackie took it.
Death was right. It was time to go.