//------------------------------//
// BenRG's Coda (shortskirtsandexplosions's "Step Right In and Start Again") 
// Story: Never the Final Word (Vol. 2) 
// by FanOfMostEverything 
//------------------------------//

"So you have finally arrived, Starlight Glimmer."

The only  light is the light spilling out of the doorway of a closet-like blue box with 'Police Public Call Box' glowing above the door and a flashing yellow  beacon on the top. A brown earth pony stallion stands there, looking at her with sadness and wisdom in his eyes. "In so many ways, this is where the Princess and her friends should have come first when trying to find  you, if they could... if this was somewhere they could even imagine."

"W... where am I? Where is the Princess?"

"The proper question you should ask, Starlight Glimmer, is 'When am I?' The answer is that you are at the one place you cannot leave because of your curse because there is nowhen left to go forwards. This is..." the stallion gestured around him grandly. "This is it. This is the last period of the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last page of the last volume in the library of Time. Not even time itself exists forward of this point... if anything could be considered 'forward' of a place and time that is now utterly void of all matter and is eternally unchanging... except for you, of course."

"I... don't understand!"

"You tried to push time into the shape you wanted it, Starlight Glimmer. In doing so you became a great wound across the continuum. You became an infection that Time itself sought to squeeze out." The stallion shook his head sadly. "You forgot the greatest law of time: If you try to push Time, Time pushes back. Hard."

Starlight gulped. "This is the punishment Princess Twilight Sparkle decreed for me? To drift in this... void?"

The ancient sorrow in the stallion's eyes broke Starlight's heart. "The Princess? No, Starlight Glimmer. More than anything she tried to avoid this outcome. She drove herself to the edge of madness trying to prevent it. No, in the end, it was you who made this choice and brought this upon yourself, although you were too foolish and blinded by jealous anger to  realize it. By creating a recursive paradox in attempting to prevent the Princess and her friends from finding their destiny, you created a tear in time that inevitably dragged you across time and space as far as it was possible to go, the only place where an anomaly such as yourself could exist without damaging the space-time continuum... the very place where the space-time continuum ends. Here, so far into the future that easy-to-pronounce numbers can't describe it. Long after every particle has died of old age, every force has withered away to nothing and every last photon has finally been soothed away to nothingness."

Starlight panicked, looking around in horror, trying to find something, anything to serve as a point of reference. "What... What are you saying? How can I get out of here?"

"You can't, Starlight Glimmer. In a very real sense... this is the only place where you can exist anymore. For what it's worth... I'm sorry." Before Starlight's horrified eyes, the stallion walked into his box, the door swung shut and, with a strange, grinding noise, it faded away...

Leaving her in the dark.