You know, when you've spent your entire life watching the world end, that fearing the inevitable was something only a fool could do anymore.
Then what was I now? Staring as the earth tears itself apart, shredding itself into nothingness, standing before a growing void and all I can feel is dread. Not fear, no, but something far deeper, unsettling to the very core. This wasn't the inevitable. It was the end.
Something about that terrified me above all. In all my life, from the very first day I saw the sky crack to reveal... what was beyond, watching the wildlife turn upon itself, the plants steadily ceasing to grow, the vile, rooting madness that struck each and every one of us in some form - simply a side effect of existing in a shattered plane, I suppose - to now witness this shouldn't be much at all. The world had been disintegrating ever since I were young. It was going to cease entirely before long, wasn't it?
Yet, something about what was occuring right now troubled me to my very core. Everything else that had been occurring was... Natural process. The world dying from overexposure to planes that were intended to be adjacent: for example, the magical plane from which the Unicorns have drawn their power from for centuries, is, for reasons unknown, integrated with our own in the grossest of fashions. Our shattered sky leaves an insight to an infinite maelstrom of raw, chaotic mana, and it spills in constantly. It tears our realm apart at the very seams, bleeding from the ground, overflowing from whatever cracks in our world it can find, but at least that seems to be occuring by some form of natural process, even if what started it was artificial.
This...erasure was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Things broke down and died here, and never before had things simply ceased to be. Something about it simply wasn't right. Distinctly wrong.
Father always told me to trust my gut, claiming his own had never failed him, with the exception of when it came to gorgeous mares and considerable quantities of fine spirits. Given there had been neither here for some time now, I have cause to believe that what I felt - that this simply wasn't part of the world's natural death - was something to hold faith in.
If it was, then I couldn't do anything about it anyway. If it wasn't, well... much the same, really. I am an earth pony, after all. I am no magician, and I didn't know of anyone else other than a, long lost, half-brother that might be able to explain it, but not do anything about it.
But, thinking that, I turned away from the growing abyss, and began to walk, as if the Madness had suddenly taken root and suggested my body go elsewhere. It had happened before. That wasn't what was happening now, though.
In the distance, over scarlet plains I had explored many a time in hopes of finding anyone else who had...lost themselves in this broken world - I saw a tower, standing upon a hunk of rock that appeared to have been torn from the earth quite recently, floating some way above the ground it likely originated from.
I had seen this tower many a time before. Its doors would never open, and all possibilities to get inside were sealed by magic of a calibre alike nothing I had ever witnessed up until that point. Up until now, it had been rooted to the ground, like most of the buildings that existed, even in this shattered world.
And up until now, there had never been a light coming from the room at it's very peak.
I wasn't expecting it to remain there when I blinked - trapped in a sort of disbelief, my mind protesting against the possibility of someone being up there, but, there was something about the light, the gentle wavering blue hue that screamed "Magic" with all it's being.
That meant there had to be an occupant, a unicorn perhaps - someone, surely, and maybe, just maybe, they might have some clue as to what was going on.
For the first time since I was young, I ran, throwing myself forth with every bit of might my body could muster, something about the cold dread of the world coming to an end acting as a catalyst, making me go forth with every screaming ounce of desperation I could muster, knowing that behind me, the world was ceasing to be.
Was this the feeling Father told me about before he threw himself to that beast? The indestructible flame of the Phoenix? The absolution to finish what was started, no matter the cost? The power granted by the will to sacrifice oneself? But granted by what exactly? I never discovered.
And if so... Was it to consume me and burn out just the same as it did with him? Could I control it? Was I even feeling it at all, this sensation really being nothing more than a desperate, fighting terror?
It didn't matter. I had to get to that tower, and I didn't give a damn if what fueled my muscles was my own determination or the fire granted by a being I couldn't comprehend.
What mattered now was getting to that tower, and finding whatever answers I could. There was more possibility of fixing the world there, rather than standing around and letting myself endure the same fate as the rest of this world.
Either I arrived there faster than anticipated, or the tower itself came to me - the door, open, as if it had been waiting for a visitor. Myself unable to recall the leap to scramble up the edge of the floating rock, nor the journey here, beyond setting off. Considering the absence of anyone else in the world, perhaps its owner had finally decided to open its doors, in case they weren't the only one left.
Perhaps, but considering the number of times I attempted to enter there in the years prior, any inhabitants might not be...suited to contact with others. Beyond the seemingly timeless door - somehow being both in perfect condition and centuries of wear all at the same time, the metallic stink of condensed magic leaking from it as I passed by - appeared to be a stone spiral staircase, albeit upon further inspection, it hardly went beyond six steps before it had fallen too far into disrepair to scale with my own four hooves.
I was mere moments away from cursing aloud, prepared to stamp the ground and yell with all the rising bitterness that threatened to erupt - but in that very instant, as if my very outrage were heard without need to speak it, my fury was silenced as, step by step, a shimmering staircase, a cold, ethereal blue in colour, begun to construct a way up into the peak of this aging structure.
Whoever up here must have been powerful beyond measure to have sealed this place off for so long, and even these steps reeked of excess magic: in fact, each and every one enough steps was constructed of enough mana to easily disintegrate me if it weren't controlled. When one could often see through ordinary magic, in this case, I was looking into something opaque, into some beyond...I could see stars. Stars. I cannot emphasize how profound that is - what kind of power was this?
Could whoever was here stop this?
"No."
The word rang through my mind as if my skull had been struck with a hammer - a spoken word with such power it was shouted when my mind attempted to translate it into understandable thought. It made the edges of my brain sting, forcing me back a step, even making me reconsider scaling the tower lest I incur the wrath of whomever it was that dwelled here.
But if they couldn't stop this, and if they weren't looking for visitors - why was the door finally open? Why was I even here if there was nothing that I was here to do?
My limbs begun to tingle with the tell-tale stinging of magical interaction, and regardless of my own will, I begun to walk up the steps some way before feeling the grip loosen, as if someone had grown tired of me thinking it over, and wanted to make a harsh suggestion to get a move on.
Hey, so long as you don't speak inside my head again, I'll be up there in a second.
So with that, I resumed the pace they had established for me, scaling each of the ethereal steps with little caution, able to feel a burning sensation, somewhat alike pins and needles, as my hooves made contact with the magical platforms, each step making a curious sound similar to walking on stone, yet, as if that sound echoed up from the depths of a well before being given a slight "twang" for good measure, in case it wasn't magical sounding enough.
I was, quite honestly, expecting a somewhat stereotypical wizard looking character - greying mane, grey beard, wise beyond their years and, as for their years, countless... But something really hit home when it turned out that I was exactly right.
As I emerged into the room that made the peak of the tower - a seemingly nonsensical expanse of enchantment tables, bookshelves, alchemical equipment, hexing frames, mysterious crystal doors, bizarre magical curios, thousands upon thousands of notes, each and every one of them covered in maddening scrawl that only a wizard could comprehend, and yet, sat in a corner within this strangely boundless, illogically arranged expanse, were two comfortable seats, an oak table between them, along with a kettle sat upon it - strangely, this kettle seeming to be the oldest item present, along with...
The Wizard himself, draped in deep blue robes that had seen the wear of decades, a frail body and auburn red coat beneath it - a body that bore many scars even from what few I could see here, especially for a wizard - along with a pristine white mane that clearly hadn't seen a pair of scissors since the world came apart, and a beard that would easily reach down to the floor if he were not sat upright.
Perhaps most unnerving was that his left eye, and much of the flesh surrounding it, were crystal of a blue so deep that, if I hadn't looked twice, I would have thought it were entirely black, more unsettling still, I knew it could see. Not as my eyes do, but in some unknowable way, as if it were looking into my very core with it's cold, unyielding gaze. His still ordinary eye - a shimmering sky blue filled with a focus that betrayed the stallion's age - wasn't much warmer as it looked at me, but at least wasn't entirely dead.
He was easily sixty years old - in fact, he looked older, but between what was the wear of age and the wear of hardship, I could tell that his life had been arduous, at least, the latter part, along with the length of his horn. As unicorns approached into old age and their magical understanding reached a peak, their horn would be the very last part of them to continue growth, provided they continually fed their minds with knowledge.
Even then, though, I could tell his horn must have been long since he were a mere colt - as it rivalled the length of that which an Alicorn should have possessed, and needless, to say, their power must have been-
"Tell me, boy. Are you Ashwell's son?"
As if to interrupt my thought process, the wizard spoke with profound clarity, his eye meeting my gaze with such impact it was as if he had grabbed my very spirit. His voice bore the tell tale signs of growing old; posessed the ragged pain of grievance too, but, something hard lay beneath all that.
It had been a long time since I had spoken, and the words did not come easily to me, but in response, I answered: "Yes. Yes I am. What about you?"
"Doesn't matter. I can't say that I'm sure myself." The wizard jabbed in response, almost seeming to take offense at the question to his identity, not because of the question itself, but rather because the answer wasn't something he was certain of. Wizards don't like to second guess themselves. He raised his brow, specifically the one above his still living eye, and grumbled critically: "I thought you might be. Both of you think as if you are the only one that can hear your thoughts. He liked to narrate himself, too."
A dry chuckle emerged from the aged unicorn, and, I now feel somewhat unsettled in my thoughts, to say the least. Guessing from his smile, he is well aware of this himself. "Sit", I heard, although I knew for certain he hadn't spoke the word, a faint glow within his crystal eye corresponding with this bodiless speech.
So, I approached, becoming uncomfortably aware of the sheer magical aura he possessed as I drew closer, feeling the skin upon my bones tingle as the air was simply drenched in latent magical power like which I only felt when bordering on the fissures between our world and the magical realm, albeit without the brain scrambling chaos that came with it, to then sit opposite him.
I was about to ask a question along the lines of "why did you bring me here" to be interrupted by a coy smile and a plaintive tone, the wizard answering without ever being asked.
"I didn't bring you here. I merely opened my doors to see if I weren't the only being witnessing..." The wizard looked to a window that I am damned sure wasn't there before, gesturing to the blackening horizon with a hoof. "That. Do you know what that means?"
"No. If I did, I wouldn't have come. I just know it isn't something I can stop." I replied, honestly, with some personal bitterness towards this truth. "Do you know?"
"If I did, I wouldn't be asking. I was under the impression that it was occuring because I was be the only living Equestrian left - with you here, that's out of the question. It eliminates one hypothesis." The wizard stated this with clear irritation, in the tone of someone tired of trying to figure something out. "It does mean something, though."
"And what is that?" I queried, raising a brow, a faint tweak of excitement invading my tone: the odds of anything providing some countermeasure against the oncoming oblivion to be excited about.
"There is still something higher than us, boy. We did not start this...erasure. Do you know what I am implying?"
The question hung in the air. I thought the answer, knew the answer, but couldn't speak it aloud, couldn't bring myself to even mention what they were, who they were - and where they could have went.
At the silence, the wizard knew my answer, knew it long before the silence even grew between us. So, standing up from his seat, the frailness of his body compensated for by sheer magical power, to the point where he was designating no thought to the automation of his vessel, deep blue mana pouring off of his greyed auburn coat, he cantered over to the window, before speaking once more - something in his far more steeled and determined all of a sudden. "It means that this isn't happening by nature. Anything that doesn't occur by nature..."
My fur stood on end. My blood began to bristle as if it were on fire, and my mind begun to "twitch", images forced into my mind from the sheer excess of magical energy the wizard begun to summon - as I watched his aura begin to broaden, his robes disturbed as if by a gale, spirals of magic beginning to envelop said aura, violent sparks of power beginning to contest for a place within this colossal magical maelstrom, as the entirety of the room was steadily consumed by more magical power than I had ever witnessed - on par with that that must have shattered the barrier between the realms, even, and as it washed over me, I expected to be obliterated, or at least horribly injured.
Rather, it was alike sitting in the eye of a storm, deathly calm as if the rest of that maelstrom were simply for show, the air deep blue and crackling with power, stiflingly so, such that even breathing made my lungs tingle as if the very air were electrified - at this kind of magical density, it truly was. That was when the wizard - spirals of condensed mana wrapped around his horn, at the tip of which sat a condensed star of sheer magical power - he turned to me with his crystal eye, fully illuminated to the point I could now almost see my own reflection within the azure ball, then, above all? The greying wizard smiled.
"Anything that doesn't occur by nature... I am willing to defy. For her. For Us."
The maelstrom retreated in an instant, as if the universe had suddenly became a vacuum - and collided into the focal point that was the wizard's horn.
In that very same instant, alike a star becoming a supernova, the focal point exploded spectacularly: all I had opportunity to see was the flash, and that utterly blinded me, even wiped my mind clean of thought as it passed through, leaving my brain crackling as if it were full of lit sparklers, the world, for a moment, nothing more than an incoherent ocean of blue...
Then, as if a plug had been pulled inside my mind, the excess magic drained out, leaving me in a position to string together thought once more, granting me back my sight and my senses, although it took quite some time to actually pull myself together to do anything more than sit there, stupified and paralyzed.
I was going to ask the wizard what he had done, but the answer came before I had the voice to ask it.
"Before, we had a few hours before oblivion. Now... We might have the day." Now, as I looked out into the blackness, it became obvious as to what he had done - all of that magical energy he had just harnessed, the kind of power that could probably obliterate what there was left of the world, was now acting as a barrier against the oncoming erasure.
It wasn't stopping it, by any means, but it had been slowed to a crawl from the devouring pace it had before. That was something. That was everything we could do, right now, wasn't it? Delay it so we could figure out how to fix...whatever it was.
The wizard returned to his seat, somewhat slower than he had left it, his smile gone, but instead, something now seeming to drag on his mind. Nostalgia, if I had to guess from his demeanour. Two crystal cups appeared, the kettle levitating itself to fill them with tea, before settling down once more.
"So. What do you know about how this...came to be?" They asked, referring to the world on a whole. "Not a clue?" To this, I nodded, the wizard having read my mind once again, before I responded honestly:
"All I know is that when the barrier between this world and the magical realm broke, it broke the world. Is that right?"
"Indeed. Things that are meant to be separate tend to cause malfunction when...aligned in the same space time. But have you any idea how that came to pass?"
I shook my head solemnly. No one knew what, or who shattered the barrier. Nor did we know why, or even how, or if it should have even been possible to begin with. So, once more, the wizard went on.
"How much do you know about the war? How much do you know about your Father? Did he ever explain what caused the Divide?"
"The Divide?" I queried, having never heard this term before, my brow raising as a way to emphasize I had no clue as to what he was even referring to. "Is that what started the war itself?"
The wizard begun to laugh. Not a kindhearted laugh, nor one of amusement. It was something between being ashamed and sickened, as if it were mocking someone, not myself, but, rather, someone else.
"You're telling me that Ashwell never told you what started that godforsaken war? Figures. He was always one to take the excuse of "bygones are bygones" when it came to what happened to the world. Your father had a strong heart, but he was a damned fool. No matter..."
With that, he sat forward, a grin working into his features, his horn sparking with unknowable intent and...undeniable excitement, something about the way he just changed hushing any further questions I had. Slowly, deliberately, and with a spark in his eye reminiscent of youth, he proclaimed:
"You'd better stay sat there and be quiet, Kid, because I'm going to tell you a story."