//------------------------------// // End of the World - Part 2 // Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot // by Equimorto //------------------------------// Twilight looked at him. "I don't. I can make a guess, but I wouldn't know the specifics." She looked around, not that there was much for her to look at. "I've never seen anything quite like this. All signs point to some sort of magic being involved, and almost all the worlds we've found have been in some state of ruin, but I couldn't tell you what exactly happened here." "This right here is not the only piece of the planet left," the stallion said, still staring into the distance. "I've managed to find a few others. It turns out at least someone saw it coming before it was here, though there was nothing they could do about it. You can still see it if you get lucky, but I've only spotted it a couple of times." He was silent for a bit, but purposefully just not long enough for Twilight to interject. "They called it the World Eater. I think you can figure out why." Twilight took a moment to process that. She had a few ideas of where the stallion might have been going, and she decided to ask something else she'd been planning to instead, just to see if it did lead down one of those roads. "What about the feather you left us?" "From the Ziz. To be quite frank I left it more for the sake of leaving something than anything else. Of the things I could, it was one of the nicer looking ones, and one of the least useful to me." He turned to Twilight, lifted his cape on one side, and opened his saddlebag. "I've got quite a few things in here. Feathers of a few different varieties, pearls, eyes, claws, other kinds of scales, even a tooth of the World Eater. And a couple of scales from the Behemoth, if you'll forgive me for that," he said, pulling out stuff from his saddlebag. Each item with the same odd, pearly look Twilight was familiar with. The alicorn had been distracted for a moment by what looked like a scar partly visible on the stallion's back, but she'd quickly focused on the items being displayed in front of her. She just stared at them, afraid to touch one or use her magic, until the stallion put them back where they had come from. "How many?" she asked, as she thought about the implications of what she was being told. "Every one," the stallion replied. "As far as I've seen, at least, every world these can take you to has its own Behemoth. They're not in the state you find them in by coincidence, some just have it worse than others. Some have more time before things get bad." Twilight's mind caught on to the first wrinkle in the picture the stallion was painting. "I found a world with no evident damage yet. A world where ponies live." "Ponies still live in your world, too," he replied. "And as far as I know, I might have been able to get to it before the Behemoth did. But I can't confirm that. The point is, it's likely just a matter of time before something shows up in that other one as well. Now we've got something else to talk about, and I'm sure you still have questions you want me to answer."