//------------------------------//
// Survival 
// Story: Ruler of Everything 
// by Sixes_And_Sevens 
//------------------------------//

Romana, Blueblood, and Granny Smith had barely returned to Ponyville proper when they saw Starlight running full tilt toward them. “Romana! Hospital! Golden rift! Growing!” 
She came to a halt right in front of the trio, eyes bulging and spittle flecking her lips. “Help?” she concluded.
“Okay,” Romana said steadily. “Starlight, could you take a few deep breaths for me?”
Almost resignedly, Starlight took a few exaggerated deep breaths. Nevertheless, she began to calm down. 
“Alright,” Romana said, nodding. “Yes, we’re aware of the rifts. There’s another one up at Sweet Apple Acres. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the two are spreading toward one another.”
Starlight nodded. “That’s what I would guess, too, based on the direction the one in Ponyville General was pointing,” she said. She wasn’t calm, exactly, but she seemed markedly less wild-eyed than she had moments before. “How long do you think we have before they meet?”
“I’d need to look at the other one to be certain, but at a guess… perhaps forty minutes.”
“Right. What happens then?”
“Imagine the worst case scenario,” Blueblood instructed.
Starlight stared off into the distance and nodded. “Alright…”
“Worse than that,” Blueblood said.
Starlight’s eyes went wide again. Granny smacked Blueblood on the withers. “Now you done gone an’ set her off again,” she grumbled.
“Fortunately,” Romana said, “I have a plan.”
“Alright,” Starlight said. “What can I do to help?”
“Obviously, you’re the greatest scholar of time travel born on this planet,” Romana said. “And although I literally learned how to calculate temporal vectors in kindergarten, I have considerably less experience with magic than you, and I’d greatly appreciate you helping me to translate my ideas into concepts that make the most sense in this universe. At the same time, I urgently need you to hold back the rifts. Can you do both at the same time?”
Starlight laughed. “Can I do both at the same time? Yeah, probably. What kind of spell do you think would work best?”
“These things are rifts in spacetime, but the holes themselves are only three-dimensional,” Romana said. “A spell to slow or stop time in a localized area ought to work.”
“Ought?” Granny asked, arching an eyebrow. “Ah don’t much like th’ sound of that.”
“This is entirely theoretical, I’m afraid,” Romana said, “and even most of the theories concerned don’t address any situation remotely like this. We’re flying by the seats of our pants.”
She paused at their blank expressions. “Er, that expression probably makes more sense for a species that wears pants,” she admitted. “But you follow my meaning.”
Starlight nodded. “C’mon, let’s go back to the hospital. It’ll be easier to shape the spell at one end of the rift.”
The four ponies started back toward the hospital apace. “Did you actually learn how to calculate… whatever you said you did… in kindergarten?” Blueblood enquired.
“Oh, yes,” Romana said. “I was in the gifted and talented program.”





At long last, Dinky’s horn wasn’t the sole source of light on the stairway. As soon as the two mares saw the faint illumination on the wall, Dinky broke into a run up the stairs and out into the light of the hallway. “Oh, thank Celestia!” Scootaloo said, slumping down onto Dinky’s head. “I don’t think I could’ve taken much more of that.”
“You might have to,” Dinky warned her. “There’s no guarantee that we’re on the right floor.”
“Well… I guess,” Scootaloo admitted. “But at least we get a break, right?”
“Mm.” Dinky looked up and down the corridor. “We can’t really split up,” she mused. “Which way?”
“Back the way we came,” Scootaloo said firmly. “When we got thrown out of the tower, we landed right in front of the main doors, so the room has to be that way.”
“Huh. Good call,” Dinky said. “One problem, though. Which way is that?”
“What do you mean? It’s obviously…” Scootaloo trailed off, trying to work something out in her head. “Um… Wait, wasn’t the door downstairs on the other wall?”
“Exactly. The spiral stairs completely threw off our sense of orientation,” Dinky said. “I don’t think there’s a good way to figure it out, either, given that we know the internal dimensions of the tower are completely screwed up.”
“Oh.”
“It was a good plan, though,” Dinky said hastily. “If we were literally anywhere else, it would’ve worked.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Uh, I guess I’ll pick that way, then,” Scootaloo said, pointing to the right. 
“Right it shall be, then,” Dinky said, setting off at a trot.
“Should we be worried about the staircase moving on us again?” Scootaloo asked.
“Probably,” Dinky admitted. “But we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. We can’t be so afraid to leave the stairs that we never find the right floor.”
Scootaloo tilted her head in a noncommittal gesture. “Yeah, true,” she admitted. “Alright.”
They continued down the hall. Scootaloo kept glancing over her shoulder until the door was lost in the gloom. “I hope the others are alright,” she said.
Dinky said nothing, but she squared her shoulders.
The corridor was wider than the one downstairs, and better decorated, too. Tapestries hung on the walls, and busts sat on plinths set into the walls. Many of them were recognizable as some of the incarnations of Rassilon that had been on display in the foyer. “Geez,” Scootaloo said. “This guy must’ve had some kind of ego.”
“What was your first clue?” Dinky asked drily.
“Yeah, okay, the tower-sized memorial in the middle of a death-trap desert probably should’ve been a giveaway,” Scootaloo admitted.
“It says a lot about Time Lords in general, don’t you think?” Dinky asked, half-jokingly.
Scootaloo was silent for a long moment. “What?” Dinky asked, glancing back at her.
“I just…” Scootaloo huffed slightly. “Listen. It’s none of my business, but I really don’t think you should be so hard on the Doctor.”
Dinky stiffened noticeably and turned to face forward again. “He abandoned Mom. He forgot about us.”
“Yeah. And she forgave him for that, like, ten years ago. He’s been working so hard to be there for you, dude.”
“He should have been there for me when I needed him,” Dinky growled. “I felt so alone for so long. You don’t know what that’s like. You’ve always had friends.”
Scootaloo crossed her hooves. “Yeah, think about what you just said. I’ve never been alone because I have friends. It’s almost like letting ponies love you and loving them back is a good way to not be alone, huh?”
Dinky let out a short huff of air through her nose, but said no more. Scootaloo shrugged. “Alright. Your call, not mine.”
“Yeah. It is,” Dinky grumbled. Then she stopped. “Huh,” she said. “This looks like it might be something.”
Scootaloo peered over her friend’s head. Laid out before them was a four-meter square chessboard, taking up the entire floor ahead of them.





Nurse Redheart studied her patients again. They all seemed to be in relatively stable condition. Shining Armor and Trixie had stopped suffering from magic drain, although Sombra and Rarity were going through the IV drips at an even more rapid pace than before. The alicorns and draconocci were still suffering from a variety of unique and unpleasant effects -- Sunset’s flaming mane and wings had gone out completely, Cadance was dripping with dew, and Discord seemed to be in a state of total paralysis, not to say rigor mortis. There was little she could do for them, if anything. On the bright side, using the term very loosely, the black ooze that Luna was sweating seemed to be putting out the small fires that Celestia kept starting on their shared bed.
She sighed and took a seat on the lone chair in the corner of the room, shut her eyes, and rubbed her temples. Celestia, what she wouldn’t give for some company right now. Whatever Romana had done to her earlier, she wasn’t at all sleepy, but the loneliness and hopelessness of the situation was beginning to wear on her.
Her pager buzzed. She ignored it. She couldn’t exactly tear herself away from the coma ward without anyone around to replace her.
It buzzed again. Redheart growled a little in the back of her throat and snatched it from the side table where it lay. She was about to shut it off when she saw the messages.
Hey, hon, the first one read in glowing white letters.
The second said, Cloudchaser, stop shoving!
Redheart took a deep breath in and let it out slowly, shakily. “This isn’t funny.”
The pager buzzed. It’s not a joke, it said. We’re still here, but we’re ghosts.
Setting the pager down with hooves shaking, Redheart considered this. “Prove it,” she said. “Tender, where did we go on our second date?”
There was a momentary pause. The pager buzzed again, and this time an image appeared on the screen. It was a picture of a clearing in Whitetail Woods, where the two mares had gone for a hike in early April. 
You had to leave early because there was a cart accident near town square, the message below read.
Redheart nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said. “...Okay. Um…” She blinked several times and then abruptly began to cry.
Almost immediately, the pager started buzzing so much that it nearly fell off the table. Redheart gave a little phlegmy chuckle through her tears. “It’s fine, I’m fine,” she said, wiping her eyes roughly. “I’m just so glad you’re here.”
I’m glad I could be here, too.
Yeah, okay, great. So what exactly happened to us?
Cloudchaser! Can you not?
What? We deserve to know.
And Tender and Redheart deserve a proper romantic reunion, but you just had to butt in.
Luna’s tits, but you’re a bleeding heart. No wonder you and Flitter got together.
Nurse Redheart cleared her throat. “Well, now that the moment’s been completely ruined anyway, yes, I’m more than glad to tell you what little I know.”
How did we die? Was it cool?
“You’re not dead.”
There was a long pause. Red, honey, we’re ghosts.”
Redheart sighed. “Look, Romana could explain it better than I can, but from what I understand, you were de-aged.”
…?
“You got so young, you were suddenly never born. Most of the others got turned into babies.”
...What.
“I know, right?”
There was a sudden noise in the waiting room. Redheart’s ears pricked up.
Speaking of Romana… said the pager.
“Come in,” Nurse Redheart said.
Romana pushed open the door and stepped into the room. “Were you talking to someone just now?” she asked.
Redheart passed her the pager. The Time Lady’s eyebrows rose. They rose further as she looked through the list of notifications. “I see. That… is fascinating, but unfortunately I can’t really work through the implications at the moment, because in a little over half an hour, relatively speaking, Ponyville is going to be the epicenter of a fracture in spacetime that might consume the planet entirely.”
Redheart stared at Romana for a moment. “Seriously?” she asked, rubbing her head.
When it rains, it pours, said the pager.





Shining Armor and Trixie hurried down the corridor, shaking the pins and needles out of their limbs as they went. “How are you feeling?” Shining asked.
“Trixie has had better days,” Trixie replied grimly. “But she will get by. That, however, is more than can be said for that Nightmare creep if it’s hurt one flame on Sunset Shimmer’s head.”
“Yeah,” Shining said. “If Twily and Cadance aren't alright... well, I'll try to leave you some scraps to stomp on. Where is the tomb from here?”
Trixie glanced around. “Trixie isn’t sure. This part of the tower looks… well, Trixie was going to say ‘unfamiliar’, but really, the problem lies in the fact that every part of this tower seems to look a lot like all the other parts.”
“Hm.” Shining glanced around the corridor. “Yeah, that’s a good point. Not to mention, there’s no guarantee that the halls out here won’t start behaving like they did earlier, sticking us in another endless loop.”
Trixie glanced around. “Hmm… aha!”
“What? Did you find something?”
Trixie gestured toward an alcove. “Trixie will knock over that bust and smash it. That we, we will know immediately if we are going in circles!”
“...Okay…” Shining said. “Uh, but what will we be able to actually do about that?”
Trixie considered this for a moment. “You think too much,” she decided, reaching up to smash the statue on the ground.
At least, she tried. The statue didn’t seem to want to let go of the pedestal. Trixie struggled and pushed, but it barely moved.
Shining looked a little more closely at the bust. “May I?” he asked.
With bad grace, Trixie stepped aside and let Shining take her place. After studying it for a moment, he noted, “This is the same guy Rarity pointed out to us before. Pandak.”
“Then we are going in circles?”
Shining shook his head. “No. At least, I don’t know. This guy doesn’t have a chip in his ear, see? So it’s the same guy, but not the same bust.”
“Fascinating,” Trixie muttered. “By all means, take a last moment to appreciate the art before smashing it.”
Shining ignored her. “Isn’t it funny that Rassilon would put a bunch of statues of his political rivals in his own tomb?”
Trixie tilted her head, thinking. “Huh. It is,” she admitted. “Trixie would never put anything in her tomb but herself, and some of the things that made her happy in life. Actually, Trixie might just ask to be buried in her wagon.”
“It’s almost like it was meant to stand out,” Shining said, carefully taking the face of the bust in both hooves. “Like a way to mark a point…”
He pulled the statue toward his chest, and with a grinding noise, it slid forward. The back wall of the alcove receded, revealing a dimly-lit secret tunnel. “... or a door,” Shining finished.
“Impressive,” Trixie said, lighting her horn and peering into the gloom beyond. “You think this leads out of the tower?”
“Could be. I’m reasonably certain that it leads around the tower,” Shining said. “We might be able to travel a little more quickly this way. We’re almost certainly less likely to be detected there.”
Trixie stepped into the darkness. “Very well. Trixie is down for this.”
Shining followed her into the narrow passageway. A few minutes after they departed, the bust of Pandak slid back into place, the wall closing again as if it had never moved.
A few minutes later, Apple Bloom and Rumble wandered by the self-same bust. “Why is it so dang hard to get anywhere in this tower?” Bloom demanded. “What kinda idiot designed this place, anyhow?”





The going wasn’t as hard as it had first seemed in the hall of mirrors. Between Spike’s keen eye for detail, which had been honed over years of living with first Twilight Sparkle and then Rarity, and Applejack’s innate sense of truth, they had a pretty solid system for determining how close to reality each mirror image was. If both of them thought it was too close to call, Pinkie’s Pinkie Sense was a reliable backup system.
They had encountered an astounding number of mirrors that were almost correct, but not quite. In one, Applejack hadn’t had freckles, but Pinkie did. In another, Spike hadn’t forgotten to trim his claws. In a third, they were almost sure the reflection had been correct, but then Spike noticed that the image was moving a fraction of a second out of sync with their actions, predicting a quarter of a second into the future.
Those were pretty disturbing, but at least they were mundane. There were truly twisted mirrors in here, as well, where Spike was a gnarled and twisted kaiju of a dragon, where Pinkie was a grinning maniac, where Applejack was grizzled and covered in the scars of a hundred-score battles. 
There was one where they were all changelings. There was one where Spike was a diamond dog. There was one where the two mares were, from what Spike claimed, their counterparts from the other side of the mirror portal.
And then there was the mirror where Applejack was gone.
She stopped and stared at it for a long moment. She could hear her heart beating in her ears. It was familiar, terrifyingly familiar. Spike said something, but she couldn’t tell what. This was one of the universes that she had died in, one of the branching timelines that the Valeyard and the Nightmare had used to try and sabotage the TARDIS, one of the ones that had been balled up and thrown away when they had outlived their usefulness.
How close she had come to oblivion. But if she had died, like her counterparts, would the Nightmare have failed to gain a hold in this universe? Through her sacrifice, would her world have been safe from this scourge?
There was a hoof on her shoulder. “You can’t think like that,” Pinkie said softly.
“How th’ Tartarus do you know what Ah’m thinkin’?”
“You have no poker face,” Spike said. “Ever.”
“Hmph.” Applejack glared at the mirror. “C’mon. Gotta keep movin’.”
From then on, Applejack always lingered for a moment over the other mirrors that failed to show her reflection before tearing her eyes away and trotting briskly onward.





How long she had been standing there, she didn’t know. Stone didn’t seem to experience time in quite the same way that flesh did, and the hunger made every moment that clicked past seem like an eternity. It was the hunger that picked at her, scrabbled at her from the inside -- if she had an inside. How could a statue feel hungry? How could a statue feel anything? Rainbow didn’t know. She just knew that she was hungry, and she couldn’t move, and that this was actually the best position she could be in at this point, really.
Because she knew that this was the only way to protect her friends. Scootaloo and Dinky would be gone if any of the three statues touched them. So would anypony else they happened to come across. Rainbow doubted that anypony could get through to Fluttershy and Ditzy now. If they were feeling half as hungry as she was, they’d devour anything they came across.
And that was the other half of the equation -- she was protecting Ditzy and Fluttershy, too. If they sated their hunger the way it was meant to be sated -- Celestia. It would destroy them. In her mind’s eye, she could see Ditzy staring with sudden clarity and dawning horror at the spot where Dinky had been a moment before.
Rainbow wouldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t.
She heard hooves coming down the hall. Food? wondered a distressingly large part of her brain, but she beat it back. She couldn’t see who it was. They were coming up from behind her. The hooffall was too heavy and measured to be Dinky or Scootaloo, or any of the other Crusaders.
The clatter of hooves stopped right behind her. “Pathetic,” a familiar voice said. The Valeyard. She could hear the sneer in his voice. “How fascinating. The Element of Loyalty is the sole traitor.”
She wanted to scream at him, yell about how he understood nothing of loyalty, of friendship, of anything at all. She wanted to turn around and knock him senseless. But she couldn’t. She was trapped in a position of her own design that was meant to ensure she would never move again.
For a moment, she caught a glimpse of his face as he reached over and positioned a mirror right in front of her.
“Now, just sit here and… reflect on what you’ve done. The others will have to go now, I’m afraid -- they’ve got work to do.”
As he dragged the other two statues around, Rainbow Dash stared into her own stone eyes. In them she saw hunger. Worse, she saw defeat.