//------------------------------// // Chapter III // Story: Epilogue // by TyphlUpgrade //------------------------------// It had been several months since they had left the city of Distant Shores. The fruitless weeks spent searching for Fate’s family in the acres of grey, rusted metal, and glass had begun to wear on the group’s resolve, and they had unanimously agreed to leave for greener pastures. Twilight had watched the city disappear beyond the horizon as she walked away for the last time. No emotions stirred. She had spent the last hundred years of her life in that city, and yet Twilight found that she remembered very little of her time there. There was nothing there worth remembering. Twilight returned her attention to the road with a new determination brimming inside of her, feeling a new chapter of her life had begun. The months outside of the city passed as they had within it. Their time was spent searching for Fate’s family, which amounted to choosing a direction and hoping that they’d run into them. Fate could offer nothing in the way of guidance. She could not read maps—could not read anything, as she was quite illiterate. This offense had proven too egregious to ignore, so Twilight had taken it upon herself to teach the filly how to read, which had seemed a good idea at the time. By the end of the first week of instruction, Fate could rattle off her ABC’s with little difficulty, and recite half of a town’s name on the map on a good day, but she remained ignorant of Equestria’s geography, again leaving Twilight without any leads: “not even a bone,” as the Diamond Dogs would say. Twilight reserved the night for personal matters. When Spike and Fate had fallen asleep, she would take her leave, leaving the two abandoned on the ground while she indulged in the sky. It was everything she had imagined. The freedom, addictive, becoming a bird out of its cage, all of Equestria disappearing underneath the inky veil of night—and she was alone. Up there it was like no one else existed, had ever existed, as if the entire world had always just been clouds and ink. And frankly she found that, up there, she couldn’t care less. No one was there to make her care. The scroll for the immortality spell would lay in her saddlebags, untouched. Starswirl himself had said such a spell was impossible, but Twilight, the Element of Magic, begged to differ because it was her only solution for Spike’s aging problem. She would promise herself that she would work on the spell more as she returned to the camp, once again feeling the drain of the hourglass. Spike knew. He knew that she was making an immortality spell, or that she was procrastinating, or that every night she fucked off and pretended not to care about anything and failed to progress whatsoever on the spell that would save his life. He knew something. But he refused to say a thing about it, whatever it was. When morning came, Fate still fast asleep, and Twilight’s hooves touched the ground once again, he would be awake, and he would meet her eyes with an undecipherable expression, stony faced, resolute, like an immense purple gargoyle. “Firewood,” Twilight would say, holding out the detritus of trees she had gathered, and would throw it into the dying campfire. The months continued to pass. The search continued to bear no fruit. Spike continued to hold his knowledge of her secret trips close. During these months, on a day like any other, the group arrived at a valley. The trees were dense here, enough so that every direction would look the same from within. As it so happened, Twilight knew of an observatory from her student days (she had interned there when she was 16, before she had completed her dissertation), which was in the general area. It was located on the very top of the highest hill in the valley, and it would give them a good vantage point to plan their next move. “This has nothing to do with Fate’s family. You just want to check it out, don’t you?” Spike said, his voice teasing. “We’d have to go up there anyways, if we wanted to have any clue where we were going.” Twilight snapped, drawing her forehoof up defensively. “Besides, weren’t you the one who said I needed to do more things for myself? So here it is. This is my indulgence of the day.” Spike’s face fell. “Alright, Twi. Give an old dragon a break. I’m not scolding you. It’s a good thing.” She tried to quench the anger that had arisen unbidden. Deep breaths seemed only to fan the flames. “I—I know, Spike.” Her tone was carefully even. “I’m just making sure everything’s clear here.” And there it was again, that stone faced expression as he met her eyes. Twilight shifted uncomfortably in place. Aching seconds passed. A bead of sweat trailed down the nape of her neck. She felt her skin was simmering under Spike’s gaze, as surely as if he were to breathe fire down upon her. She could barely breathe, barely think, and yet a voice in her head still whispered, “This is your punishment for keeping secrets,” it said, “Spike dutifully keeps you company for a thousand years and this is what you give him in return. You should tell him that your resolve is fading, and that you find it harder to find the willpower to find a solution to his mortality with each passing day. It’s what he wanted all along, and you still can’t find it in yourself to tell him.” “I can’t.” Twilight muttered to herself. “Why not? Is it pride? Is the Element of Magic too proud to admit that she finally found a spell that she cannot solve? A miracle she cannot make?” “Twilight…” Spike intoned, smoke streaming from his nostrils, “are you sure you’re alright? You’ve been acting awful strange lately. You know you can talk to me if there’s something wrong.” “Tell him why.” The voice uttered. A tense silence came and went. Twilight stood shock still. Spike snorted and snapped his head back to the path forward like a twig. “Never mind. For a second there I almost worried about you.” The guilt finally overcame Twilight’s apprehension. Not saying anything would be like ripping out her own teeth. “Wait, Spike!” She called out to him. Spike looked back at her hopefully. “I…um…” She hesitated. She wasn’t quite sure this was the right time to tell him after all. “I—err—I love you, Spike. Y-you know that, right?” Disappointment flashed across his face, almost imperceptibly. Twilight caught it for a fleeting instant, the expression disappearing just as quickly. “…I know.” The rest of the walk up to the observatory was had in silence. Twilight made a few token efforts at conversation, just to break the awkwardness, but the looks she got from Spike made her feel more like she was trying to crack jokes at a funeral. Spike was having none of it. Twilight promised herself the next time would be different. As soon as she found the right moment, she would tell him everything. The immortality spell, the flights, the guilt. She just needed the right moment. Twilight opened the door to the observatory. The release of the heavy door’s latch sent echoes through the room. It was a small, conservative affair, but well lived in. The walls were painted a drab grey, though this was barely visible from behind the mountains of yellowing notebooks, not to mention the pages plastered across the place, the walls, the ceiling even, hurried observations from another time kept where their author would not absentmindedly misplace them. The collection of ancient papers fluttered in the breeze from the door opening, some snapping in half where they lay, like dried moth wings. Twilight took in a deep breath, relishing the scent of old books and paper. Smells like this always reminded her of her library back in Ponyville. Long hours spent in deep study, longer hours enraptured in conversation with her friends, all captured by this single scent. They were good memories, though Twilight didn’t often call on them, for fear of invoking the memories of what came after. It was a scent like home. “It’s perfect.” Twilight breathed. Spike was too large by far to fit inside the room, but he gave it his best go, insistently pressing against the doorway so that the view outside was blocked by his tremendous eye. “Twilight.” He rumbled, and the whole room shook with it. A tower of books collapsed into a pile of plastic covers and disintegrating paper. Twilight’s wings flared nervously at the sight. “Could you please not get so close to the building? One wrong brush from you and the whole place could come down.” “Sure,” Spike said, not moving an inch, “but you aren’t going to forget why we came here?” “What does that have to do with—I mean, of course.” She nodded furiously just to get him to move away faster. “I was the one who came up with it, remember? I’m going to go up to the top floor of the observatory and use the telescope to figure out the best direction to head in. Anything else is extraneous, but much appreciated. Don’t give me that look, Spike. I promise I won’t take too long, okay?” “…Okay.” “Okay. Great! So, I’ll see you back here in around an hour or so, and then we’ll be on our way again. Could you move away now?” Spike gave an unenthused grunt of affirmation. He finally drew away from the door, grumbling and coughing and billowing smoke like a petulant steam engine. “What’s his problem?” She muttered to herself once she had closed the door. “Is it the argument back on the hill? Is he still angry about that?” She weaved carefully around the mountains of books towards the stairs, right where she remembered them being, lodged into the corner of the room. There were three flights of stairs to the top floor, two of which, Twilight recalled, she had fallen down over the course of her internship. She could not properly dwell on this fact with the type of nostalgic reverie she had been intending to, however, for she found her mind preoccupied by Spike. “I—I couldn’t just tell him everything right then and there!” Twilight growled. “That’s just—unreasonable. And how could he expect me to articulate the complexities of the situation properly after that death glare he was giving me?” The question echoed in the narrow stairwell. The walls were concrete and had a painful lack of acoustics. Nothing came back that sounded like a response. “He wouldn’t like what I had to say, anyways. Either he’d be mad that I’ve been contemplating giving up on the immortality spell, or he’d be mad that I was doing it at all! He just expects me to move on, treat him as if he was dead already. Meanwhile, he’s going geriatric, and he doesn’t even care, or act like he cares, or do anything but pop painkillers and complain!” She stamped her forehoof down pointedly. She tripped when the hoof went right through the hole where a stair once had been. “Well, guess what, Spike,” Twilight grumbled, picking herself back up onto her hooves, “I’ve decided I can’t give up on you that easily. Whether you like it or not. I will not let this be another Ponyville, because you’re Spike, and I can’t—I refuse to—live without you.” She took another step up the stairs, in spite of the protests of the aging wood beneath her. “He’ll see. As soon as I get to figuring out this stupid spell—" She stopped as she reached the final step of the stairs, and stared dumbfounded. There’s nothing here, Twilight thought. She remembered the room being grand. The domed ceiling had gaped above ponies in the room as if in imitation of the sky the room had been built to observe. A clever system of gears allowed the ceiling to part like the mouth of a great frog, so that the dragon sized telescope in the center of the room could observe the heavens uninterrupted. As she climbed the last few stairs, she emerged into the room in its current state. A great hole had opened from the ceiling to the floor, as if half of it had just slid and fell away into the valley. Twilight suspected that was exactly what had happened. Ivy and moss covered every square inch of what remained; even the heap of rusted metal in the center of the room was not spared from the incursion. Where’s the telescope, Twilight thought, but she already knew the answer. She tried the crank that used to open the ceiling. The mechanics made a few dutiful groans before the crank snapped right off its socket. She dropped the now useless piece into the ivy, before thinking twice of it, and spending a futile ten minutes trying to find the crank as a trinket to remember the observatory by. And that was it. There was really nothing else left. The air had changed and Twilight began to feel as if she had been walking on tombstones. Remembering what she had promised Spike, Twilight went to the hole in the side, which looked out over the valley, to see if she could not determine a decent direction to travel in at the very least, but the same sense of futility settled in again before long. To the east, there were trees. To the north, trees on an incline. There were no landmarks. There were no smoke signals. There was nothing. With no better avenues of action, Twilight sat and watched the sun set over the valley, settling herself into the soft carpet of moss and ivy. The sky shifted in shades of orange, then magenta, then indigo. It was pretty enough. It didn’t help. She was exactly where she had started. Twilight let out a deep sigh, like her lungs were collapsing, and tried hard not to think any more about it. Tried hard not to think about the fact that she had accomplished none of what she had come to the observatory to do, or the feeling of resolve leaking from her like a sieve. “Twilight?” Fate hobbled towards her from the stairs with an awkward, lopsided gait. The pale filly’s leg had not yet fully healed; the cast that Twilight had jury-rigged was still firmly in place and weighed Fate’s leg down like a brick. “Spike asked me to come find you. He said you were taking too long.” “Oh.” She couldn’t muster the heart to give herself a proper admonishment. “I guess the time just slipped my mind. Silly me. Can you tell Spike I’ll just be a little bit longer?” “Okay, Twilight.” But Fate did not leave immediately as she had agreed to. She stood next to Twilight, squinting out of the hole in the side of the room, her face scrunched in confused bewilderment. “What are you looking at?” “Err, nothing. Just some trees and whatnot. It’s pretty, though, isn’t it?” “Not really,” she admitted with surprising bluntness, “it looks the same as all of the other trees I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of trees.” Twilight couldn’t help but be a bit put out by that. “Well… it is.” “Whatever you say.” The alicorn considered her next words carefully—whether she was to say them at all. “…Fate,” she began, in her best teacher voice, “did you know that this place used to be an observatory?” “An observa-whatnow?” “An observatory. It’s a building where ponies used to look through these great metal tubes called telescopes at the stars and planets up above and would study their motion. I interned at one, way back when.” Twilight made a thoughtful noise. “Actually, I think we only really studied planets. Professor Moon Watcher was always so obsessed with finding aliens…” Fate reached out and stretched the alicorn’s cheeks, eliciting a small yelp of surprise from her and thoroughly ruining any pretenses of education Twilight had when she decided to tell Fate about the history of the place they were in. “Why do you talk like that, Twilight? You aren’t that old. Your face isn’t gross and droopy. And your mane isn’t grey! You look younger than my mom.” “Well, looks can be deceiving. I’m older than I look.” Twilight ran the numbers in her head. “One thousand, one hundred and twenty-two years, to be precise. Err, that’s my age, I mean.” It felt strange saying it out loud. She certainly didn’t feel that old. Ponyville felt like it had only been months ago. The Exodus, yesterday. Everything in between had passed in instants, like frames of a slideshow. To define her age in such objective terms was exaggerating just how much she had fully experienced. Such a number only felt right on the Princesses themselves. Which she supposed included her. How long ago had her coronation been? Fate’s jaw dropped. “You’re lying. You have to be.” The alicorn just smiled apologetically and shook her head. “But how? Grandma died when she was seventy. You’re like…a hundred Grandmas. I don’t understand.” Fate quietly curled up in the ivy. Some unseen fuse in her brain had broken. Clearly the sheer juxtaposition between the two ages had proved overwhelming. Twilight sighed. She ran a comforting hoof down the prone filly’s head, through her mane and coat. “How, Twilight?” Fate repeated, weakly, in her little rasping whisper of a voice. “It’s…complicated. I don’t think you’d understand.” “I’ll try really hard! Couldn’t you just try to explain, Twilight? Please?” “I…alright. Just give me a second to think.” Twilight left a somber pause as she thought of the best way to explain. There were several false starts. It was hard enough explaining the story a thousand years ago to her Ponyville friends, who had lived through the events themselves. Fate was a whole other beast. Twilight would begin explaining, only to be met with a blank stare and a question that would sound absurd coming from any other pony, questions like “Who is Celestia?” and “What’s magic?” and “Where is this Equestria place anyways?” It was very taxing. Twilight began to feel very old indeed. “Would you like to hear a story?” Twilight finally asked, out of better ideas. “Is it gonna be a story about you explaining why you’ve lived like forever?” The pale filly shot back. “I certainly hope so.” “Hurry up and tell it then, or else Spike is really gonna get mad at us.” “Spike can take care of himself for just a bit longer. He’s a big dragon. Now,” she began, taking a large, leatherbound book from her saddlebags and flipping to the first page, “once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two regal sisters who ruled together…” “…and one day, when the student had completed her studies, the eldest decided that her student was ready to become a Princess, like her and her sister, so that the student could rule alongside them.” Twilight stole a glance at the valley and was met with pitch black in return. Perhaps she had been a bit overambitious with their time. Fate was right: Spike was going to be livid. “And then?” Fate asked, leaning forward, eyes wide and rapt. Better finish this quick, Twilight thought. “Then it happened,” Twilght said with an air of finality, “the student became a Princess, and then she lived forever.” And with that, she closed the book with a heavy, satisfying thud. “…That’s it?” “…That’s it. That’s the story.” The alicorn confirmed with a firm nod. “Ohhh, that was an awful story, Twilight.” Fate began to whine, seemingly having forgotten about the explanation she was promised. “You can’t just end a story like that. What happened to the two Princesses? Are they really still alive? Where are they? What happened to the student after all that?” “Yes, the Princesses are alive still. Probably.” Twilight said. “Well, Luna, at least, is around. She visits my dreams just to check in sometimes, but she hasn’t physically visited for centuries. She’s still out there searching for Celestia, who is gone. Just…gone.” She refused to elaborate more. Twilight’s conversations about Celestia were never productive, nor pleasant. “But what about the student?” Twilight sighed in relief, glad that Fate had not inquired further down that avenue. “Well, that’s an easy question. If you hadn’t already realized, the student is me.” “Oh.” Fate’s only reaction. She’s taking this quite well, Twilight thought. Seconds later the alicorn was running down the stairs, trying desperately to control her breathing. Her face had become damp and it felt like she was drowning, water constricting up to her neck, streaming out of her eyes. She should have known better than to tell Fate all of that. A severe lapse of judgement. She should have figured that Fate would react poorly. It was so much information at once, and such a change in perspective to how she probably viewed Twilight—it was inevitable that something bad was going to happen. And yet the possibility of Fate running away hadn’t even crossed her mind. Here it was all the same. Twilight touched down on the bottom floor. Mountains of paper were toppled in Fate’s wake, trampled half into dust. The door was wide open. The filly herself was nowhere to be seen. Fate’s parents without a daughter. Her fault. Fate, in the Equestrian wilderness, starving, hopeless, alone. Her fault. Fate, laying on a cold concrete floor, like a cornered animal, leg snapped clean in two. Her fault. It was all too much. The argument with Spike, the observatory being ruined, and now… I should’ve just left well enough alone, Twilight thought, this was all a mistake. I’ve scared her away and it’s my fault and it would all be so much better if I wasn’t even here and if I had never tried in the first place— Fate’s voice, distantly: “I can’t believe she never told me. She’s—it’s so—awesome!” “Tartarus, is that all you woke me up for, child? You didn’t know already?” “YOU KNEW?!” Twilight all but collapsed onto the doorway in relief. They were still here. She hadn’t failed them. “Twilight?” She was really sobbing now, a pathetic little puddle on the ground. “Hey, are you okay?” Twilight wanted to say so much, tell them how much it meant to her that they stayed, how grateful she was for them. She wanted to thank them until she lost her voice. As she was, sobbing uncontrollably into Spike’s chest, none of this was particularly feasible in the moment. Spike and Fate embraced her and she gave up trying to say anything.