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// End of the World - Part 3 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
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Twilight took a moment to shake herself out. "Who are you?" she asked.
"Just a traveller, and not by choice," the stallion replied. "I would have much preferred never to get involved in this whole thing, but life had other plans for me. My world had its own creature, its own equivalent to the Behemoth. It gave us enough time to study parts of what was happening, enough time to figure out how to travel with our equivalent of scales. And one day, time ran out. Now my old home is an inhabitable wasteland, and everywhere I end up isn't much better. Until I got to your universe, at least."
"So you're just jumping from world to world, finding different scale equivalents in each to keep going?" asked Twilight, while the back of her mind was occupied with processing the received information. 
"Sort of," the stallion replied. "But finding new things is dangerous, nearly impossible in some of the worlds. I can manage to find a few at best, often none at all. In some it's too difficult to bother searching. There's something else to it. It turns out, the world a portal takes you to doesn't depend just on what scale or feather or whatever you use, it's about what universe you're in as well. It makes things complicated, and you end up somewhere you could already get to sometimes, but it still opens up a whole lot of travel possibilities."
"How do you keep track of all of them?" Twilight immediately asked. "With every new universe giving you a new set of potential destinations for each previous item, and potentially new ones that also have their own uses in previously accessible universes, even factoring in repeat universes that's still a mountain of data to keep track of."
"I have good memory." The stallion smirked. "And lots of practice."
Twilight took mental note of the unicorn's smugness, but moved on. "I take it that's how you could get in and out of the castle so easily. I take it you also found a way to direct where a portal ends up when you open it, haven't you?"
"That one I'll be glad to teach you."
Twilight nodded. She took a deep breath. "What have you managed to figure out about these things?"
"From travelling alone across ruins, occasionally of civilisations with languages not my own? Not much. Bits and pieces of what was being figured out before the disasters, in those worlds that had some time to study them. But they all start with the same findings we and you made, I haven't come across any that got particularly further along compared to where we'd gotten. Someone had managed to figure out it was happening across different universes, but now all that's left of those researchers is a few frozen scraps of writing buried underneath a mountain of ice. I saw these creatures called abominations once, the rest of the wall the sentence was carved on had been melted by acid. The only thing every world had enough time to figure out is a name for what was invading them."
Swallowing, Twilight decided to get to the question she'd been dancing around for a bit. "So you're saying my world is going to be destroyed, too?"
The stallion looked at her. "If we can't figure out a way to prevent it, then yes. Your world will end up like mine, and like all the ones we've seen."
The scene darkened, as the impossibly large, half there shape of the sectioned, worm-like creature in the far distance obscured whatever unseen source of light had been illuminating the place. "How much time do we have?" Twilight asked.