My eyes drifted.
How many years had it been? I can’t recall. It had been long enough to have this society develop in this land of ponies. Which was long enough for them to give me this bed to lie in, and this ceiling to look at.
I scanned the ceiling once more. This was one of the newer bunkhouses, designed by the son of one of the earth ponies… Orange was a good father; he’d groomed his son into becoming a pillar of the community. The constant influx of revolutionary inventions in the orchards and in Tall Tale’s architecture was evidence of that. Each beam stretched out below the thatched-roof above was immaculately carved, and when I squinted, small carvings of ponies and aspects of their lives could be seen, all just as carefully made. It was far better than anything I could have done myself, had I been the one to teach it to them.
But just like everything else, they had learned to operate without me. They still called me their Keeper, but they treated me like Andrew.
Andrew, the old man.
I unclenched my fists. “I swore,” I whispered.
Two weeks have passed now, and days since the herbal grasses and medicines have been able to quell the pain. Bedridden, though, a far more eternal pain leeched; I was ensnared in the worst trap of all: my thoughts.
“I’m being left behind.”
I was a farce. They hadn’t really needed me. They still would have reached this point without me. When I was young, sure, I would’ve never said that, but the truth stands bare to me now, decades down the line. Once, we had been an aspiring settlement. Now? A small kingdom, and me—the Keeper of the kingdom—little more than a figurehead. Tall Tale and the surrounding villages grew rapidly without me, and technology I had never thought to conceptualize was being disseminated faster than I could be introduced to it all.
The conflicts, the rise to ‘power.’ I’d been there. Led the charge. But I had not been the way forward, I was just that, an instigator. An accelerant to the embers of fate.
“I’m sick of this sickness,” I said to one of the ponies as they applied the last herbal remedies for the day. “When do I get out of here?”
The pony smiled kindly. They were genuine, but they had no words to offer me beside "Goodnight."
I closed my eyes. I opened them. I squeezed them shut.
This is no sickness. The pain is completely within. There is no cure.
A hum. It came from the doorway, and filtered across the room. It was pure, magical, and eased the pain. I opened my eyes once more, and began to sit up.
“Bushkeeper.”
A shudder passed through me. That voice.
I weakly slung myself onto my feet as the pain resurfaced. I grabbed at the carved staff by the head of my bed, and pulled it into both hands. I turned, and crept towards the doorway with the staff pointed outwards.
“You can’t be here!” I gasped.
She spoke with the same voice, but her body was not the same; for the first time since we’d met, Harmony stood without a puppet. The god had taken the form of an impossible tribe of pony: a tall winged-unicorn. One thing stood vividly different, however: where once she had been surrounded by an ethereal blue miasma, Harmony stood now in vibrant hues: a red mane and tail, and a pristine alabaster coat. The mist was gone, though she still appeared ghostly transparent.
“You… you haven’t shown yourself in years! You should be gone!”
She didn’t move.
My grip tightened. I looked at the ponies’ beds to my right, and placed myself between them and her. “You won’t hurt them! Not anymore!”
Harmony’s visage softened; her visage creased outward, and a slight frown was set in place. She stepped forward.
“No…” I said. I shook as she stepped closer. “Stay back!”
She stopped halfway, and there she stood still, her face still locked into that look.
“I have come with a promise.”
“What?”
“Time is meaningless to ‘us’. But we have spent a significant amount of time looking for a way to be rid of you, Keeper. To reclaim our power that you have awoken in your diaspora.”
My face visibly hardened, but Harmony continued gently. “But a far greater power has already laid claim to you.”
“What do you—?”
“Tonight, you will draw your last breath.”
Silence reigned. I stood frozen as her face contorted further.
I lowered my arms. “Why should I believe you? You brought ruin to the Greenland, sought to destroy what we built, and continued to do so for years after!” As I finished, I realized my lungs were heaving. A cough erupted from me before I could hold it back, and I released my grip on my staff to hold my chest.
“You have no reason to trust me,” Harmony admitted. “Just as ‘we’ had no reason to trust mortal creatures with power. But ‘I’ have changed. Because of you.”
I let my eyes soften, but reaffirmed my stance. “You’re not possessing my ponies anymore,” I bit.
I watched Harmony search my face. She spoke quietly as her eyes landed on mine: “Mint’s legacy will not be forgotten. I promise you that.”
My breath hitched as I recoiled. “Don’t you dare say her name!” I snapped. Reflexively, I turned around and looked to where the ponies were sleeping. My eyes widened, and I walked over to them. I crouched over the blue-green unicorn closest to my side of the room; she had stopped breathing. I checked her pulse, and waited.
Nothing.
And then something.
I turned back to Harmony and stayed where I was. “What did you do to Minty?” I hissed. My eyes strayed as I searched the rest of the room; all the other ponies’ barrels weren’t moving. “To… to all of them?” I muttered aghast.
“We are in my time,” she answered as she crossed the room. As I stood again, she stopped. “Your ponies are not hurt, and will not be; the only one affected by this passing is you. This grants us… more time.”
Her face was still lit by that frown when I returned my focus to her. I scanned her with my eyes, and she let me do so without rebuttal.
“You want to talk.”
“Yes. I wish to speak with Andrew.”
I shuddered as my name passed her lips. “He’s listening.”
She sat down on her haunches—and more out of reflex from years of lowering myself to speak with my ponies—I lowered myself to the floor and sat, too. From where she sat, she loomed over me, but there was no fiery anger in her eyes, and her tone remained easing and gentle.
“I do not associate with the Sky Gods any longer.”
I was immediately at attention. “Why?”
She sighed. “Their anger... is unquenchable. They incessantly disparage your name and your intentions. They have sought to understand what you meant when you once addressed us directly. 'We' have sought to understand what you meant by your parting words.” A laugh bubbled out of her, surprisingly natural. “I was envious of you, an affliction I never could have seen affecting one such as I. We had tried desperately to understand you, and many have gone mad. But I know now what you meant.” She paused. “You were able to unite your own kind, when we could not.”
"...Are the other gods gone, then?"
Harmony shook her head. "No. The gods, separate as they may be, will no doubt come together when your herd are at their weakest. I am sure of this. You have done much to prepare for this event, but the work is never over."
“...Harmony,” I began. Harmony's ears bristled. “If I can really trust your word, what am I supposed to do? You're practically telling me that the Sky Gods are prepared to gloat over my... my passing.” I sagged. “And if you're right, then there's nothing I can do.”
“You are not hopeless, Andrew. You are hope itself. A god of your own, as you once said. The power your herd draws from.” She stood and walked to where I sat. “Ultimately, you have completed your vision, and the Sky Gods have achieved nothing. They are in ruin without me, but they will only be held back by this power vested in your... ponies. I will stand vanguard over your work for as long as your herd wields my power.” Harmony reached a hoof out, and placed it on my shoulder. It was warm to the touch. “This is my promise, and one I intend to keep.”
I grabbed her hoof firmly. She was real flesh. “Please, don’t be lying to me.”
“You have done great things, Andrew. You are no pinnacle of perfection, but it is from you that I have learned that even gods cannot be perfect. You have done the best with the power at your disposal, and made them available to the ones in your keeping. You have sown the seeds to a greater design, one in need of endless time and care. You have created a greater paradise than the one we had envisioned. I seek to make amends with you, Keeper. Your herd will not be forgotten, nor be treated wayward by the world. Your actions will withstand your time.”
My eyes watered. I breathed, and collapsed into her. Harmony embraced me.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“Speak,” she responded. “Speak your heart to me.”
“I can’t help them.”
“You have. You set them on this path.”
“But they’ve been doing all this on their own.”
“And they would have never seen the chance without your guidance.”
“And yet you say that they won’t be safe.”
“My boons saw fit to seek you, and now I will place my boons with them. You worked with what you were given, and you have done more in a task that I had once deemed impossible.”
Harmony slid away from me, but I continued on. “I tried so hard. I did all I could to raise them. But I feel I haven’t done enough. And I never will be enough! I could have done so much more, but I’ve been held back by… by… myself. I got old so quickly, outdated and useless. They stayed young, aspiring and alive. They create such wonderful things, Harmony. You know. You’ve seen what they’re doing. What they’re capable of! I wasn’t able to help them anymore, and now I’m too old to do anything more for them, too old to even stand beside them, too old to stay any longer. Why was I destined to come here if it all had to end in this… this pain?”
“You have struggled for them, Andrew.”
“I have, but—”
“And you have succeeded. As insignificant as your words and actions may seem on the surface of the world, this land is marked by the steps of your kind. Your journey was not the first to draw power from the Sky Gods, but it was the first in this world to truly succeed. You have come here and accomplished what many mortals have failed to achieve. You have ventured into this veritable land, fought the ancient powers of the gods that have destroyed other mortals for less, and overcome to create a new breed of mortal. Ask yourself, where does this pain truly stem from? Your disdain for your actions, or from your fear of a world where you cannot be present?”
I said nothing. I already knew my answer.
“You must struggle before you find peace. You have found your peace, and have lived in it. But your words and final days have told me the whole, and unaltered truth. You wish for time. Time to watch the new world you’ve shaped. To watch it grow, prosper. To see the consequences of your words, your teachings, your ponies. Where they will go, how they will grow, and what they will remember of your name. But now at your time’s end, you feel you have accomplished none of these things, and will never know of these consequences. You have used your life to craft a prophecy, and you wish to follow your tenets to their end. But you cannot.” Harmony extended a hoof. “Perhaps you have suffered enough.”
I took it.
She led me through the room back towards my bed. I sat down, and she stood beside me, levitating my staff away from me to lean it gently against the bed's headrest. “I don’t want to go.”
“I understand. I did not want to let my power be freed, either.”
I let out a mellow laugh. “It was… addicting. To be part of it all. To watch it grow. To be the one growing it while they followed. And then they stopped following, and they went on with their new lives without me.”
“Mortals change, Andrew. You—and now I—know this.”
“Yes,” I said, looking out across the bunkhouse where my ponies slept. “And I guess… I guess I am happy with how it all turned out.” I smiled.
From the corner of my eye, Harmony smiled, too. “I am... happy, to hear that.”
I sat there, watching over my ponies. Harmony waited quietly.
“Well, what now?“ I asked.
“Now, I have one last gift for you, Andrew. You might find it as wonderful as the gift of leading your herd into prosperity.”
I looked at her.
“I have been watching you since your first ripples in the state of this world, absorbing your thoughts and studying them. And I have made a collection of it. A collection that allows me to offer you this gift.”
“I offer you a dream. A dream of this life. A chance to relive your time with your ponies once more. To watch them grow, to watch them prosper, to be there with them to the end, once more.”
“Tonight, you will sleep. I will watch over you. You will dream of your lifetime. Of your prophecy. Of your ponies. Of this world and the time between.”
“And you will pass. Your ponies will continue without you, but you will always be a part of their mortal heritage. You will see to the past, and I will see to the future. This is my promise to you, as the eternal keeper of your ponies. You will sleep, and you will live this long dream.”
“Do you wish to dream this dream, Andrew?”
“Yes,” I whispered, barely comprehensible.
But she heard; Harmony lit her horn in a swirl of magic, and I laid down.
The carvings of the ponies above me smiled down, and the carving of me among them waved, too.
Harmony’s light bounced off the cloudiness in my eyes, and I leaned my head back further.
I shut my eyes. Through my eyelids, the light grew. Intenser, closer, and closer.
I thought. Of my life before and after. Of both worlds. Of my ponies.
Soon, all that I sensed was nothing. Nothing, save for a hum.
And I thought no more.
A hum. Impossibly incandescent, the hum filled the air, and so too did the scent of deodorant, fresh linen, and the dense aura of sugary drinks. All of this wafted in from the back of the minivan, just as the passing woodland welcomed the visitors to its sanctuary; the forest lush with green and brown, earthy and natural. The unnatural dirt road beneath the metal carapace lashed out at the battered car’s wheels, but the occupants responded with mirth and rancorous laughter, and the car with its lingering, ever-building hum.
Andrew woke.
“Looks like shotgun’s finally awake!”
Andrew turned. His friend’s face focused after a moment.
“You good, man?”
Andrew’s eyes drifted out the front window of the van. The trees shimmered in the early morning sunlight, and he reached a hand out over the dashboard, slowly turning it over in the warmth. He yawned, but the sound was buried underneath the cacophony in the back-seats. “Yeah... yeah, I’m good.”
“Ha, well you still sleep like a brick.” The corner of Andrew’s mouth ticked up at that. “Hey, do me a favor and check the GPS for me. Road's been full of potholes, and I don't want to walk the rest of the way.” As if to emphasize his point, his hands rolled as he maneuvered the van around one of the gouges in the earth.
Andrew peered over his friend’s arms and squinted at the device. The green-and-blue map on the display was featureless, save for one yellow road winding through the unmarked forest. His heart thumped in his chest, but he thought nothing of it; the end of the road was ahead, and their hike through the hinterland was about to begin.
Grinning, Andrew turned to the rest of his friends.