//------------------------------//
// Stainless Steel Fox's Ponei the Deathless (melodic_harmony's "You Think You Know Somepony") 
// Story: Never the Final Word (Vol. 2) 
// by FanOfMostEverything 
//------------------------------//

Once Pinkie had gone, Twilight opened an eye. Had she overdone it? Possibly, but it was a genuine shock. She rose to her hooves and looked in the direction her friends had gone. Should she tell them? They should understand if anyone could. She almost unconsciously checked the link to her phylactery, Spike. 

It was obvious in hindsight. Alicorns were immortal, and could survive conditions that would kill a mortal pony in seconds. If that wasn't enough of a clue, when she'd become an alicorn. her original body had become a scorch mark on the floor of the library. When she'd appeared in the astral plane, she'd been as dead as a doornail, and when Celestia had explained it to her after the fact, she'd had a freak-out to make the Smarty Pants incident look like a tea party.

Effectively, alicorns were a form of lich. However, whereas regular liches used necromancy and the life energy of others to prepare a phylactery to hold their soul, alicorns were empowered by harmony and instinctively stored their soul in something tied to their magical nature and purpose, with great personal meaning. For Celestia and Luna, the sun and moon. For Cadence, Prisma's cosmic spectrum stone. For Twilight, it was Spike, the subject of her first magic surge, where she'd unlocked her potential to become the Element of Magic and ultimately Princess of Friendship.

Since it didn't require necromancy, they avoided the withered, skeletal look of conventional liches, However, their new bodies were just constructs, emulating life, and carrying their awareness around. Celestia and Luna had long since figured out how to deconstruct and reconstruct their bodies at will, allowing them to eschew conventional teleports for turning their bodies into a ball of light or a dark mist to travel quickly, but Twilight was centuries away from being able to do that.

She had wondered if having Spike as her phylactery meant she would die when he did, but some research showed the link treated the anchor as an object, so as long as Spikes bones were more or less intact, that would do. Not that she ever intended to let anything happen to Spike. It did mean that if Cozy Glow's plan had worked, and on the third day magic artifacts had lost their power, all four princesses would have instantly died as their phylacteries failed.

Except Flurry Heart, who was an anomaly in every sense of the word. Cadence's constructed body had somehow created a foal, possibly because of her portfolio as alicorn of love, a new soul in a living body. Twilight's best guess so far was that like Twilight, Flurry Heart had a living being as her phylactery, her own body. Since she never had to discard her original body and take on a replacement, it was still alive, and she was living and growing in it, as well as using it as her soul anchor if it died.

She pushed away her rambling thoughts. She would discuss the idea with Celestia, Luna and Cadence, though she would keep her friends' natures a secret. In both cases, it wasn't her secret alone, and she would not betray a friend's trust. Fortified by the decision, she walked after Pinkie, wondering if there was any popcorn left. While by default, a constructed body couldn't taste anything, one of the first spells Celestia had taught her was a sensory emulation effect that did the same job. Because cake.