//------------------------------//
// The Eleventh Hour 
// Story: Ruler of Everything 
// by Sixes_And_Sevens 
//------------------------------//

The green was a surprise. No matter the era, Gallifrey had never, not once, been green. The rock was orange, the grass was red, the trees were silver, and the grand buildings of the great domed cities tended to be variations on brown, grey, and orange.
And yet, the Doctor lay on the vibrant green grass, breathing heavily as the remnants of an adrenaline rush washed away.
The stallion next to him shouldn’t have been quite as big a surprise, given that he was the last thing that the Doctor had seen before he had arrived in the green. Of course, given that he was alive and well and whole again, the Doctor was a little confused, to say the least. Still, at least he could say it was a pleasant surprise.
He nudged his companion, who lay sleeping on the grass. “Oi. Fitz. Wake up!”
The batpony groaned and rolled over a little in his sleep. The Doctor nudged him a little more forcefully, and Fitz Kreiner, with one last growl, pushed himself up. He blinked. Glanced around. “Oh,” he said. “That’s nice, then. It worked. Whatever it was." He scratched his head. "Did you plan this?"
“Not as such. I thought... well, I thought I could forgive myself for what happened to you most easily. You turned out alright in the end, after all, for a given value of 'alright' and 'end'."
"Not to mention, a given value of 'Fitz'," Fitz cracked. He immediately regretted it as the Doctor winced. "Er. Sorry. You were saying?"
The Doctor nodded, visibly making an effort to repress his emotions again. "Aside from that, I've no idea. You were there too, do you know what happened?”
“Er…” Fitz considered this. “True love’s kiss?”
The Doctor tilted his head. “I’m pretty sure you were going more for my jugular there, Fitz.”
Fitz shrugged and picked up his guitar from where it leaned against a tree. “I’ve had worse makeout sessions,” he said, absent-mindedly tuning it.
The Doctor nodded. “I can believe that, yeah.”
Fitz moved on from tuning his guitar to warming up with a few chord progressions. “So. This is your mind, huh?”
“Technically, it’s the collective consciousness of all Time Lords… but this bit seems to be pretty directly influenced by me, yeah.”
“And so was that riot back there, then.”
“...Yeah.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“...” The Doctor’s hackles rose at the very question. But he listened as Fitz began to play a melody. “Is that The Rainbow Connection?” he asked, surprised.
Fitz made a face. “So it is,” he said, quickly changing over to Twist and Shout.
“No -- go back,” the Doctor said. “I love that song.”
Fitz looked at him for a moment, his face softening. He snorted a little. “You would,” he said. “Alright. The Muppets it is.”
The Doctor lay back on the grass. The soft blades, still a little dewy, tickled his ears. He didn’t much care. He closed his eyes and let the gentle music sweep him away.




The Princess tossed her fiery mane and roared to the heavens. All around her, the City lay in shards of marble and ash and bone. The ceiling cracked open, letting in sunlight for the first time in centuries, and the walls tumbled down. The palace had become a courtyard.
	Now that the walls had fallen, the Princess saw that there was one pony that hadn’t fled deeper into the city. A short blue pegasus sat at a table, eyes shut. They were playing the spoons.
	The Princess stormed over to them. “Why are you here?” she demanded.
	The pegasus opened his eyes and considered this. “Do you mean that philosophically or geographically?”
	She opened her mouth and coughed fire at them. The pegasus made a face and waved away the acrid smoke. “Ah. I see. A literalist. Well, I’m here because I don’t have anywhere else I particularly want to be at the moment. What about you? Why are you here?”
	“I am the Princess.”
	“And?”
	“These are my lands.”
	“Ah. I like what you’ve done with the place. I thought it could use something of a more open-plan design when I came here, and I’m so glad to see you share the sentiment. Would you like to play a game of chess?”
	The Princess reared back. “What… what is this?”
	“Chess? It’s a game. Half the pieces are red and half are white --”
	“No. What is ‘Would you like’? No one has said these words to me before.”
	“Ah. Well, Princess -- may I call you Princess?”
	“No --” said the Princess, before realizing that was a very odd thing to say, given that she had always been called Princess. But now that she was thinking about it, she realized she didn’t like it all that much as a name. “You may call me… Celestia. What am I to call you?”
	“I go by many names,” said the pegasus. “You may call me… hm. Chessmaster? No, that has rather unpleasant overtones. Mr. E is rather too punny. I’d say the Riddler, but he stole my aesthetic some time back, and I won't forgive that. What about… Ripple?”
	“Ripple?” Celestia asked, taking a seat across from them. “Why Ripple?”
	“The smallest things can have the most amazing consequences,” said Ripple, pulling out a chessboard. “Influencing things long after the original cause is gone. But I apologize, I’ve gotten off topic. What I was offering you, Celestia, was a choice.”
	“A choice,” Celestia repeated, tilting her head. “To play chess with you or not.”
	“Yes. Though of course, those are not your only options. You could roast me alive where I sit. You could knock over the table. You could suggest we play checkers instead, or go for a fly, or continue knocking down more of this city, or a thousand other things.”
	Celestia stared at the chessboard for a long moment, the red flames of her mane fizzling to orange, then yellow. “That all sounds nice,” she said. “Or, well, parts of it did. Could I always have done these things?”
	Ripple shrugged. “Perhaps. I find that it’s best not to dwell too deeply or too long on what you could have done. Better by far to keep moving forward.”
	“I think I would like to free my city,” Celestia said. “Later, after some of the dust has settled. For now… red or white, Ripple?”




	The Mourner was surrounded by cold and wet and grey. She didn’t care. She couldn’t care. Not about the weather, or about the graves, or the ivy that was beginning to grow over her hooves and barrel and muzzle.
	She observed a presence approaching from along the rows of gravestones. He was a gangling, tropical blue pegasus wearing a bright red fez and a matching bow tie. He seemed to be carrying a lot of sunflowers.
	The Mourner ignored him. He, however, did not afford her the same courtesy. “Hallo,” he said. “How are you today?”
	She made no response. He didn’t take the hint and sat down next to her. “I understand completely,” he confided. “As it happens, I’ve been feeling much the same way myself.”
	This was a bridge too far. “You don’t look like it,” the Mourner muttered, snapping some of the ivy that had wrapped around her mouth.
	“Well, perhaps not,” the pegasus admitted. “My name’s the Wizard, by the way.”
	“You can’t be a wizard. You’re not even a unicorn.”
	“And?”
	The Mourner didn’t have a good response to that. “Would you like to see my greatest spell?” the Wizard asked invitingly. “I think you might find it rather useful.”
	“There is no use,” said the Mourner, spreading her wings irritably in an attempt to brush the irritating pegasus away, snapping more of the ivy in the process. “Everything comes to dust and rot.”
	The Wizard nodded, accepting this point. “True. But why rush the process?” he asked.
	The Mourner studied him. “You’re not going to leave until I look, are you?”
	“Nope!”
	She groaned and dragged herself upright, snapping the rest of the climbing ivy. “Fine. Show me.”
	He pranced ahead. She slogged behind. As they walked along, however, she noticed that the grass was drying out. The stones were getting better-kept and easier to read. And everywhere she looked, there were sunflowers, sprouting from the earth.
	The Wizard looked back at her and grinned. “Impressed yet?” he called.
	She looked around, bewildered. “Impressed with what?” she asked.
	“My magic, of course! Look how I can take sorrow and turn it into beauty. I turn memories into a source of joy, not misery, and turn loss into love.”
	The Mourner pointed to a set of dying flowers. “Doesn’t seem to be working over there.”
	The Wizard inspected the flowers and the graves they stood on. “Hm,” he said, shaking the seeds off the flower and stomping them into the dirt. “Well, these things take time, of course, and a lot of effort.”
	She looked around. There were sunflowers out farther than the eye could see. “You must have lost a lot of ponies.”
	The Wizard’s face fell. “Yes,” he admitted. “I have.”
	“And you say you don’t hurt at all?”
	“Don’t hurt at -- ?Of course I do, what nonsense.”
	“But you were just saying --”
	“The pain and the love go arm in arm,” said the Wizard. “But be gentle with Pain and welcoming with Love, and you can grow a magnificent garden. I see you’ve already picked up the knack.”
	“I -- what?” she turned around. A field of roses had sprung up behind her. Some were tall and hardy, others sick and withered. But they were growing and living and beautiful. “Oh,” she said softly, running a hoof over a gravestone. “It’s wonderful.”
	“Would you care to take a walk in the flowers with me?”
	Cadance tilted her head at him. “Do you know,” she said. “I think a walk with a friend is just what the Doctor ordered.”




Sunset stared at herself herself herself herself herself herself over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, lost in the reflections and the apps and the feeds and the messages and --
	“Miss Shimmer!” the Old Man thundered.
	She sat bolt upright and glanced around. The Old Man tightened his grip on his lapel with one hand and his cane with the other. “Phones away in class, if you please.”
	“Right… sorry,” Sunset muttered, quickly slipping her cell phone back into her bag.
	The Old Man studied her for a few moments, his expression softening slightly. “I wonder, mm, Susan --”
	“It’s Sunset.”
	“Yes yes yes. I wonder if you might answer the next question for the class. Show that you’ve been paying attention, hm?”
	Sunset swallowed. She felt a hundred faceless eyes on her. “Alright…” she said quietly.
	The Old Man leaned forward on his cane. “Why is it,” he said, “that you may never see your true face in a mirror?”
	Sunset blinked. “Er… well, it’s flipped, I guess.”
	The Old Man frowned. “Hrm. Well, there is that. Let me rephrase the question another way. Why can you never see yourself as you are right now in a mirror?”
	Sunset blinked a couple of times. Then it clicked. “Because… it always takes a little while for the light to reflect off your face and into the mirror. Your reflection is always lagging a little bit behind.”
	The Old Man beamed, his monocle twinkling merrily. “Precisely! That’s very good indeed, yes very good. Remember that you are not a reflection, my dear. You are in charge of your own destiny, and your past is not your future. Nor, indeed, is it your present.”
	“But…” Sunset faltered for a moment. “Everyone still defines me by my past. They think I haven’t changed, even after all I’ve done. It’s enough to make me want to go back to it -- I’m gonna get spat on either way. Why not embrace it?”
	The Old Man’s face had fallen. “Well?” he asked. “Why not, hm? Why not go back to being a destroyer of lives, a ruiner of friendships? What, pray tell, is stopping you?”
	“I…” Sunset trailed off. “I don’t want to be that person anymore. That’s all.”
	The Old Man smiled. “Miss Shimmer. We all have terrible things in our past. Accidents…” he glanced at a pretty doll sitting on a high shelf. “... and things we did, mm… intentionally.” His gaze fell on a large rock in the geology display, his smile evaporating.
	“There are things that we have done which will haunt us for the rest of our lives,” he continued. “But, my dear Susan -- Sunset -- we must strive every day to move on from our past, even if it can never be escaped.”
	Sunset nodded slowly. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”
	The Old Man nodded. “Indeed. What gave it away?”
	Sunset glanced around. “Well, the fact that the classroom is empty was a pretty big clue. So’s the fact that it’s slowly turning into the TARDIS.”
	“Mm. So it is,” the Old Man said, patting the console affectionately. “I see I’ve underestimated your psychic abilities, my dear. If you like, I could take you back to school -- you could give your dream a satisfying conclusion.”
	Sunset shook her head. “Nah. The premise was too contrived to be believable, honestly. If it wasn’t a dream, it never would’ve happened. Let’s blow this pop stand.”
	The Old Man smiled, and pulled a lever. “As you say, my dear. One Time Ram back to reality, coming right up.”





	Nightmare Moon laughed wickedly. She so often did that Luna barely paid any attention to what she was laughing about. It was some manner of prisoner that she had captured, a weary and grizzled unicorn, their face darkened by time and grime. “So,” said Nightmare Moon. “You sought to overthrow me. How facile. How pointless. Did you not realize that even without me, the sun and moon still would not move in the sky? It would be a pointless victory.”
	The unicorn sighed. “Most victories are, in the end. Just look at you. You defeated Celestia. You killed the planet, half roasting in the endless heat and half starving in eternal night. I suppose that must make you very happy.”
	“You suppose correctly.”
	“But when it’s all said and done, what will this victory give you? Another world dead, something to hang your hat on and hardly anything else. It’s not like it wouldn’t have died on its own anyway, in a few million years it all comes to much the same thing.”
	The Nightmare tilted her head. “Who are you to know so much of my motivations? Tell me your name, that it may be whispered as a cautionary tale through the cosmos.”
	The weary unicorn gave a slim smile. “Alas. If I ever had a name, I cannot recall it. I am Nopony.”
	Backtalk and flippancy, that was new. Luna’s interest was aroused, and she peered through the Nightmare’s eyes to get a better look at the prisoner. To her astonishment, she thought that in their weary eyes, she could see somepony looking back at her.
	The Nightmare laughed. “Nopony indeed! Do you think me a foolish Polyphemus, O Ulysses? A beast to be fooled by wine and false names?”
	She raised her voice mockingly. “Oh guards! Nopony is hurting me! Nopony is killing me!”
	“Nopony can save you now,” the Nameless One said. “Nopony remains. Nopony is keeping you distracted, and Nopony covets your eye, tyrant.”
	“You hope to take my eye?” Nightmare Moon chuckled, incredulous. “I’d vaporize you before you took your first step.”
	“Oh, undoubtedly. But Ulysses was famous for much more than blinding Polyphemus, you know. Off the top of my head… the Trojan Horse?”
	Luna acted without thinking. She lowered her horn and struck out, stabbing at the slit-pupiled eye of Nightmare Moon and squeezing through the opening that was left behind. The Nightmare screamed, losing definition without a template off which to base its form. Before long, all that remained was a pool of black ichor and Luna, breathing heavily, covered in the stuff and with an eyeball stuck on her horn.
	The Nameless One grimaced. “Nasty business,” they observed. “Come have a roll in the snow, you’ll feel better when it’s all washed off.”
	Luna couldn’t find it in herself to argue. Silently, she followed the unicorn out of the castle and into the world beyond. They stood, side by side, overlooking an immense snowy hill. She looked at the dour unicorn, with his weathered, grimy face and his cropped mane. They looked back at her, their expression stoic for a long moment. Then they grinned. “Last one to the bottom is a rotten egg!” They dove into the snow, sledding down on their belly.
	After a moment of utter shock, Luna’s competitive drive kicked in and she followed suit. It was exhilarating, the way the snow flew up around her in a great flurry, washing the sticky ichor from her as she flew, whooping, down the slope.
	She reached the bottom and rose to her hooves. She stood with the Nameless One in a copse of pine trees. They too had been cleaned up by their snowy slide, and their mane seemed to have grown out. They smiled at her. “You may have some questions,” they said.
	“...I killed the world.”
	“Not quite. As I said, one half of the world is roasting, and the other half is freezing. However, there’s quite a lot of middle territory, a kind of twilight zone, if you like, where life is doing rather well.”
	“I killed thousands.”
	“Well. Yes. You realize, of course, that this is all hypothetical, correct?”
	Luna glanced at them sidelong. “A dream? Yes, I had gathered. If the Nightmare could have been so easily defeated as it was in the castle, I would have done so long ago. The point remains, however. I could at any moment backslide, lose myself to the corruption again.”
	“Ah. But that’s the beauty of it, and the paradox,” said the Nameless One. “Because you are afraid, you guard yourself. Because you might backslide, you won’t.”
	“But if I let my guard down --”
	“Then you can rely on your friends to protect you, rely on your sister to be there for you,” the Nameless One interrupted. They smiled at her gently. “Our friends have always been the best of us, wouldn’t you agree?”
	Slowly, Luna nodded. “So. What happens now?” she asked.
With a childlike grin, the Nameless One looked up at her, their face illuminated by dawn’s pale light. “I’ve no idea at all,” he said. “But I think, you know, that it’s going to be a lovely day.”




	“Hello?”
	A shaft of light cut through the darkness. “I say, hello?”
	The light fell on a series of stone carvings in the side of a tomb. A figure stepped into the room, a tall, silver-maned crystal pony in a long velvet cloak and ruffles. “Ah. There you are. I thought that you might enjoy some company. A little conversation, perhaps.”
	There was a long pause. “Well. You’re not the one I was expecting,” said a voice that seemed to come from everywhere. “The scarfy one, with the teeth and the goggle-eyes, I thought we really clicked.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Dandy. “We have more in common than you might think. We’re both prisoners, though I’ll admit, my remit stretched somewhat farther than your own does at the moment. We’re both strangers in our worlds, we both like to irritate the authorities in any way imaginable.”
	There was a phantom chuckle in the dark and the Dandy grinned. “And of course, we both rather have a soft spot for sweet, plucky young adventurers who… oh, to put it politely, sand off some of our rougher edges.”
	“And to put it impolitely?” said the voice from everywhere.
	The Dandy’s grin widened. “They’re fully prepared to wag their fingers in our faces and tell us when we’re being bastards.”
	It was a phantom uproar this time. “Very true. Very true! Then tell me, Dandy -- you managed to escape your imprisonment, in time. How do I do the same?”
	The Dandy smiled apologetically. “You’ll think it’s rather trite, I’m afraid.”
	“After this, anything would be novel,” the voice said.
	“Well -- alright. Your problem, my good entity, is that you always think that restraint and being trapped are one and the same thing. It’s a matter of perspective, you see?”
	“... No.”
	The Dandy tilted their head. “Imagine you’re an omnipotent being.”
	“Gosh. How difficult. I don’t know if I can.”
	“I have faith in you. Now imagine a pony, somepony you care about. Say, a pegasus mare with a fondness for animals.”
	“For instance.”
	“For instance. Now, imagine one day, you decided that you simply couldn’t live without her, and you made her immortal, preserving her consciousness in a statue for all eternity.”
	“No.”
	“No?”
	“I would never do that. Could never do that.”
	“You’re omnipotent. Of course you could.”
	“No.”
	“Why not?”
	“Because -- because it would hurt her. She would hate me for it. I would hate me for it, for violating her consent and ruining her life because of my selfishness.”
	“That is restraint. You choose it. Imprisonment is out of your control.”
	“I see. So this is imprisonment.”
	“Yes. Of course, there’s something to be said for imprisonment as well. It’s all a matter of perspective.”
	“Now, I’m afraid you’ve lost me again.”
	The Dandy grinned and produced a large stick of dynamite from under their cloak. “If you’re never imprisoned, you’ll never experience the joys of a good old-fashioned jailbreak. Shall we?”




	“It’ll be… hard,” Twilight admitted. “But I think that we can rebuild. We can make a life here, rebuild forgotten friendships and more… that is, if you want to. It might be… more painful for you.”
	Mac put a hoof on her shoulder. “With you by my side,” she said. “Ah reckon Ah can face jus’ ‘bout anythin’.”
	There was a moment where they gazed into one another’s eyes. Slowly, slowly, they began to move closer together, lips puckering, eyes drifting shut.
	There was a slam and they sprung back. An unfamiliar earth pony mare was framed in the doorway of their bedroom. “Hi, yeah, sorry to barge in,” she said, waving at them. “Glad you’re not festerin’ in misery or anythin’ like that, you wouldn’t believe some of these other dreams --”
	“Dreams?” Mac repeated.
	“Oh! Yeah. You’re both asleep. This world was made up by the Nightmare to try an’ corrupt Twilight into a vessel for its twisted desires, but Mac, brilliant mare that you are, stuck right by her side all this time! You helped stabilize one another, which as I said, lovely, but there is still rather a lot to sort out in the waking world. So, er. You’re going to need to break out, I’m afraid.”
	She grinned at the pair, then faltered. “Sorry. Was I -- interrupting somethin’?”
	“Er, nope!” Twilight said quickly.
	“Wakin’ up now,” Mac said, squeezing her eyes shut tight and focusing on anything but the mortification of the moment that hadn’t quite happened.




In the great sepulchre of Rassilon, unnoticed by anyone, the faces on the side of the casket began to crack. Just a hairline fissure here and there to begin with, little puffs of dust spraying off the surface, but they began to meet. Then they began to spread.





This went unnoticed by the Nightmare. Having accepted that it could do little about the problem of the TARDIS’s missing energy aside from waiting for the vessel to show her face again, it had turned its attention to the other fly in its ointment. The rift onto Ponyville had opened, and it was irritatingly stable. In a fit of pique, the Nightmare had tried to intentionally destabilize it to rip the town into the void, but it hadn’t worked.
Ponyville was sealed off from the world. Because of the connection via the rift, the Matrix was also sealed off from the world. Until whatever temporal chicanery had been done to Ponyville was deactivated, the Nightmare’s sphere of influence would be contained to one dead planet and a hamlet full of talking horses. This was an insult that could not stand. 
Its ears pricked up as he heard hooves clacking on the stone floor toward the tomb, too clear and too measured to be any of the escaped prisoners. “Valeyard,” it said as the door swung open. “How soon could we mobilize to take control of Ponyville?”
“Define ‘take control’,” the Valeyard said, moving swiftly past the form of the interface.
“‘Raze to the ground’? ‘Annihilate’? ‘Erase from history’?”
The Valeyard tutted. “You lack the subtle touch. If you destroy Ponyville, all our prisoners perish as well, and you know as well as I do how much use we can yet wring from them.”
“Hmph.” The Nightmare gazed down at the town. It was distorted by the shape of the rift, but the equine militia in the main square was clearly visible. “We cannot remain sealed off from the universe. Our plans would be useless in these conditions.”
“I agree, of course, but there are more subtle ways of achieving our goals. They will take longer, naturally, but if there is one resource we have in abundance, it is time.”
The Nightmare growled, but nodded in acquiescence. “A longer campaign, then, to retake control of the local time stream.”
“I think that would be best, don’t you agree? And if any in the town should try to fight back, well… we have no need of them as individuals.”
The Nightmare smiled grimly. “Then let us prepare for slaughter.”





The three pegasi drifted aimlessly through the tower. “Got to find Rumble,” Thunderlane kept repeating at odd intervals, as though he was afraid he’d forget. This fear was not totally unfounded. All three could feel their minds growing foggier with each passing minute. It was already getting hard for them to remember where they had gone to school, or what their neighbors’ faces looked like. It terrified Thunderlane to think that he might find Rumble and not even recognize him.
Not that there seemed to be much risk of finding anypony in these halls. They had been wandering for what felt like ages with no sign of life. “Should…” Flitter said hesitantly. “Should we head back?”
“Back?” Cloudchaser repeated. She blinked. “Oh yeah. We came from someplace else. Ponytown?”
“Got to find Rumble,” Thunderlane said, his eyes hollow. “Can’t go back now.”
“... Okay,” Flitter said. “We’ll keep going.”
They drifted on, trying to keep their focus. Cloudchaser stopped suddenly and squinted at something. “Hey… Hey! Do those things look familiar to you guys?”
Thunderlane scowled, following her gaze. “They’re just statues,” he said. “Ignore them.”
Cloudchaser stared a moment longer, then shrugged and turned away. “Yeah. Probably nothing,” she said.
The statues felt them go. They considered what they had sensed. All that potential energy felt absolutely delicious. As one, not looking at each other, Ditzy Doo and Fluttershy went into hunting stances as they went after their prey.