//------------------------------//
// Chapter Seventeen:  And the Earth Gives Back 
// Story: The End of Ponies 
// by shortskirtsandexplosions 
//------------------------------//


The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions


Chapter Seventeen – And the Earth Gives Back


Special thanks to Vimbert for Editing


Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art




        “Do you know who I am?”

        It was an honest question, even if from a dishonest pony. There, staring into the mouths of gleeful death—mouths that lusted after her and drooled for her—Harmony remembered that the only honest sound in the whole history of existence was a scream.

        She didn't yell; she murmured before the bent wall of wooden blades, torches, teeth, and pale beady eyes, eyes, eyes. If they feared her, they would hear her. If they didn't fear her, they would soon. She knew what they didn't know, cherished what they didn't know, and preached what they didn't know. She was a copper torpedo that had been slipped beneath the blankets of reverse-time to suddenly and splashedly explode this moment of Entropan clarity before the quivering limbs of them. For the first time in eons, the last pony hadn't run from those cretins, and so it was with a ghastly breath that she finally came to realize just how incredibly stupid those harbingers of chaos were.

        They were weapons of the past; she was a wound of the future; and her twenty-five years of ash-tempered weight suddenly and numbingly outscored their millennia of stone imprisoned slumber. So, it was an honest question, and as she crackled under the sound of it, she found herself repeating it—or else it repeated itself. Either way, the divine interrogation rumbled righteously through the torchlit air, harnessed by her calm features as she slowly trotted towards the abominations, her thick legs guarding the barricaded cellar door and the quivering family hidden beneath—and her anchor.

        “Do you know who I am?”

        They shook and quivered with spring tight muscles of leathery hatred. At any moment's spit, they would be upon her—thrashing and impaling her, or so they thought. They leaned on this festering crutch, and Harmony brazenly kicked it out from beneath them with the ever patient hum of her cold voice.

        “I am the end of ponies. I have no name, for I don't need one. You may not know my face, but you will. Someday you will chase me and you will hunt me and you will hate me as much as I hate you now. You will stab me, you will make me bleed, and maybe—one fateful stormfront—you will finally kill me. But this is not that day. This is now, this is beautiful, and you are ruining it.”

        Her eyes glistened like amber firebrands. A tremor ran up her spine and billowed a threatening mange through her copper coat as the next few words came out in an ashen hiss.

        “This land is not your land, this earth is not your earth, and I am not going to let you have this family's home. But you can have me. You can have a whole lot of me. But I promise you that you're not going to like the taste. After so many years of outrunning you little turds, the only home I have is in pain.”

        Before a phalanx of blinking pale eyes, the last pony's reflection melted in the center of them. Her wings stretched limply as she slunk down to her haunches and raised both hooves outward as if she was in free fall. With the rattling breath of an extinct species, she effortlessly beckoned the army of trolls gathered before her.

        “So come at me; let's go home together.”

        For the first time, they wrenched their eyes off her. They exchanged briefly confused faces. Dull and brutish minds had surfaced suddenly to the bloodthirsty shells that flimsily covered them.

        “Come at me,” she repeated, her tongue like a dagger.

        That did it. The fangs returned to the starlit air. With torches flailing and claws glistening, the trolls marched, bounded, and throttled as one surging missile of muscle towards her petite form.

        Her frown was a titanium shield. “Come at m—” The first fist flew diagonally across her face. The second pounded mercilessly into her shoulder. The third yanked her black mane like it was a flag and flung her helpless snout into a blistered, bone-hard knee. Two clawed swipes ricocheted off her belly. A pair of legs thundered into her lungs. A torch slammed hotly into her face, followed by the full splintering length of an oaken club—and then three whole bodies of leather plowed straight into her, so that she bounded and tumbled and slammed weightedly into a collapsing crate of oats across the yard.

        At the end of the pummeling, the gang of leathery creatures whooped and howled victoriously, kicking cold dirt in a circle upon her lifeless corpse. Several monsters beat the quivering earth with their clubs—and their companions as well—as a drunken array of grins filled the festering aura between their clamoring, torchlit bodies. In a solid train of leather, they then lurched hungrily towards the hay-stack covered sight of the cellar door.

        It was with an icy grimness that all one hundred of them lurched to a halt, their scrappy ears pricked by a shuffling sound behind them. The torchlight pivoted as their blinking faces did, gazing in stupid breathlessness while the earth suddenly stirred from underneath them.

        Harmony was hobbling back onto her limbs, gaining the feeling back into her extremities with each throbbing second. She was dizzy, she was groaning, she was disheveled—she was alive, and there wasn't a single scrape or bruise on the entirety of her copper body.

        The last pony shuddered, her copper eyes returning to the flickering twitch of reality. Just as she expected, not a single solitary blow from the trolls had broken her Entropan skin. But what she did not expect—what she hadn't planned to happen, what she was suddenly and joyously reveling in—were the waves of pain surging through her projected soul self.

        The trolls didn't give her another solitary second to quietly contemplate this. At the instant that she stood up on four hooves, they were on her again. Sharp blades of splintery wood flew. What should have hewn her shoulder in half merely sent her stumbling to her belly. Three rows of trolls pounced on her back, digging their serrated fangs into her flank—only to feel their teeth jutting bloodily back into their quivering mouths.

        There was a fountain of yelps, and two more rows of trolls rushed in to replace the first wave. They kicked and stabbed and pelted the ragdolling pegasus with every poisoned inch of muscle granted them by a heartless chaotician forever lost to stone. When the brutal melee pounded and lashed the last pony into its third maniacal minute, the tallest of the gang marched firmly into the violent circle, raised a torch up high into the farm's air, and shoved it deep into her twitching gut. The blaze that ensued was blinding, and several stupid bystanders shrieked as their own limbs caught ablaze from the ringleader's audacity. They rolled and howled in the dirt while the rest of the creatures stood in a circle of filth, chanting mumbled curses into the blaze between them.

        Then something happened that could make even a demon gasp. A shadow stood up from within the tongues of flame. The trolls stumbled back—mesmerized—as the copper pegasus effortlessly stepped out of the dancing plasma. She flickered cold wings, trailing briefly with green plumes. Harmony breathed and breathed and breathed again. She swallowed deeply, and she waited until the green haze flickered back to nothingness. When she opened her eyes, she was still there, she was still suspended in the past, and she was still hurting.

        She hurt. After two days of hovering above the gorgeous garden of Equestrian yesteryear—juggling the shameful indulgences of a land far too fresh and green to ever belong to her—the last pony had unraveled the numb blanket of Entropan glory covering her body, and she opened herself once more to pain. The clamoring army in front of her could just as well have been a sea of rusted weathervanes, an ocean of green cutting knives. They bounced off her all the same—only now she could feel the ice cold kiss of deadly claws that were raking against her immutable flesh.

        She allowed herself to feel it. She needed to feel the pain, because it reminded her of all those gray years when only her fear saved her from death, but not from the wounds. She remembered all of those weak moments of the bleeding and the sobbing when the best she ever could do was run from the things that hated her. She recalled a stormfront—a billowing strobe of lights that danced beneath her hooves as she stood upon the ceiling of the world and screamed all of her hatred into that eternal twilight.

        For the first time since she arrived there, the last pony felt pain, and she remembered... she remembered what it meant to feel angry. And the smirk that it summoned back to her copper lips was something that could shatter diamonds.

        “Princess Entropa,” she murmured in the deadly silence of the exultation. Her wings retracted—both physically and spiritually—so that she lowered her hooves righteously to that living, loving earth. “Princess Entropa, bless you, I am finally strong enough.”

        The trolls doubled around her, tripled. Their anger was endless, their stupidity and pride reinforced like iron spokes.

        In a timeless grin, the smoldering pegasus breathed all of them in before breathing out, “You want blood?” Her face solidified in a divine snarl as she rocketed towards the leathery mass of them. “I shall give you blood!”

        The trolls exploded. They exploded, billowing outwards in a spray of flailing bodies as the pony flew mercilessly through them, raining the pristine farmland with a shower of screaming shadows. In a single breath, they pounced on her once more, carving invisible lines into a body that refused them, but sang with their pain and their hatred all the same.

        Harmony's screams were like Octavia's strings, echoing torturously with the thousands upon thousands of dead equine souls whom she had never had the grace to meet—until now. She sang back into their leathery skulls with the iron-hoofed rage of twenty-five Goddess-forsaken years, and the eight lonely winters of foalhood before that had so painfully prepped her for this—for this dance, for this righteous earthquake against the mound of chaotic weaponry that the apathetic slings of fate had flung at the Apple Family, not knowing that it would instead be taunting her.

        All of that pain, she shoved back into the trolls' drooling maws, breaking jaws and shattering bone to make a new music that gave meaning to the hapless murmur of the quivering night. Harmony had become a creature of destruction herself. She was worse than the trolls, she was a troll. She was the time-forgotten and cataclysmically crowned queen of trolls, a heretic from the future come down to earth to corral the sins of the past into the gray misery of tomorrow, where a new magic would be born unto horror and darkness. There, beyond the ashen curtains of fate, she and she alone would wield control over the veil of twilight, and spring the warming curse of light back onto the damnable peons of chaos forevermore.

        Somewhere in the hellish melee, a line of leathery muscle flung her—barreling—through a splintery wall of the Apple family's barn. She stumbled briefly in a fountain of red splinters, her body bobbing up and down through a baptismal pool of agony. Her Entropan nerve endings sputtered green flame and retracted with a phantom laughter.

        “Hah hah hah—You call that 'barn-storming?'” She chuckled and she spit into the advancing waves of hatred. “Give me a reason to be impressed.”

        Her wings flung her forward at the end of her words, soaring her across the acreage of her anchor to Honesty. She didn't realize she had hit anything until a splash of living leather cascaded around her and slammed her into the crumbling face of an abandoned brown silo that lurched overhead. She screamed out loud—something that hung off of the collarbone of masochistic hilarity—and she wore their clamping jaws like earrings as she spiraled, flung her hooves across a sea of bleeding faces, and rammed her spotless copper snout into another throng of fools. Immutable.

        “Nnnnghh—Hahahaha! So... nnngh... so one day—” She uppercutted a wave of monsters and plowed through another floundering mass of screeching victims. “—you got up off your mangy butts, grabbed a bunch of sticks and decided to become the legions of chaos! Pffft! Give me a break!” She bucked two trolls into a crashing wagon behind her and laughed as the crumbling splinters snuffed out the last of the torch blazes, flinging the heated bloodbath into the cold shroud of night where only her eyes burned brightly. Immutable. “You couldn't even scare a foal into hiding,” she lied and divulged truth all the same. She was everything and nothing but heartache. The pony let them hear the agonized breath of it at the end of her cackling. “Discord was only kidding when he enlisted you. How pathetic; to be the biggest joke in the history of the world.” She laughed at them. She laughed at them.

        The dark world melted twice over. They came at her full force. They rebounded, redoubled—then rebounded and redoubled again at the crest of each of her blood-curdling taunts, curdling with their blood. But they did not care; they did not think. They piled on her and piled on her again and recircled and restrategized and re-charged every single time that she flung them back onto their sorry hindquarters. So long as they bled—and she didn't—the trolls did not let up, though at any stuttering moment she could very well have righteously snuffed the entirety of them out.

        No, she would not kill them. They did not deserve death. That kind of peace would be reserved solely for ponies. She knew this, and with every screaming blow, she preserved this. She was the end of ponies; death stopped at her. In a cyclone of screams and breaking bones, the only thing she gave them room for was hope, something that they had never been gracious enough to allow her, and whether they knew it or not... they would suffer for that transgression, a transgression of the future.

        Screaming like the Harmony's boiler into the madness of the night, the last pony would not grant them any penance.







        The Apple family shuddered and quaked under the endless tumult of the screaming world above—all but one of them.

        Granny Smith clung to a metal rack beneath a teetering lantern. She gazed quietly with gray eyes into the roof of the cellar, her face calmly locked to the sightless soul fighting for the safety of all four ponies. There was a righteousness to those banshee screams, something that glued together the cracks between her wrinkles, something that she had somehow been waiting for all of these last few lingering years of fitful decay.

        In a calm breath, the elder gazed at the rest of her family. Macintosh was pacing endlessly across the far end of the cellar, nearly tripping over a murmuring Winona as his crimson muscles twitched and bulged at the end of each punctuated thud from above. With pent up masculine anger, he randomly kicked at a wall or a teetering barrel, shooting iron daggers at the terminally shut cellar door located at the stairs above them. His teeth were grinding as his heart palpiated through his fine coat, and neither of those anxious habits could bring this holocaustal situation to a righteous halt.

        Apple Bloom was a quivering mess. In various fitful bits of shivers, she nearly trembled herself into exhausted unconsciousness. Every time, either the loud noises from the shaking earth above or the pounding heartbeat of her older sister would wake her once again to the naked misery of that endless wait. She clung all the more to the orange limbs enshrouding her, her pained amber eyes locked onto the flakes of dust and ash falling forlornly from the shuddering ceiling of the cellar.

        And Applejack—she murmured and murmured endlessly. Breathless prayers lit the cold lengths of the lantern-lit room. From a billion miles away, her orange lips kissed the white headstones that had long reflected her blanching face, that had beckoned her on the flimsy tails of bitter memories to be strong. Sitting there, her flesh and blood but a cramped horse-trot away, she could do nothing but wait... and be helpless. She could have been stripped of all her skin and muscle, and still she wouldn't feel half as vulnerable as she did then—huddled around herself and Apple Bloom like twin fetuses awash in the womb of the earth, and she couldn't tell if that would come to her aid either.

        Then, several agonized minutes into the madness—or several breathless hours—the noise and bedlam finally, finally came to a stop. The silence was like an avalanche: it numbed the claustrophobic subterranean room as much as it blessed it with tranquility.

        Apple Bloom was the first to stir, lifting her reddened face from a sister's damped forelimb to gaze bitterly at the cellar door. Big Macintosh's pacing game to a scraping stop, his lips agape in mute wonderment. Granny Smith said nothing; she was still waiting, though this time her gaze was on her older granddaughter and not on a certain visitor from Canterlot.

        Setting Apple Bloom down, Applejack breathlessly sauntered up to the base of the cellar steps. She spoke with all the words of the frightened family, in that she said absolutely nothing. Strolling up the flight of stone hoof-holds, she squinted at the creases between the solid doorframe. She could barely make it out, but there was a faint golden glow from beyond the wooden boards. At first she thought it was torchlight, except that the glow suddenly quadrupled after a large object noisily slid out of the way from blocking the fissures in the door. Then, there was nothing: no movement, no noise, nothing but the glow.

        Applejack gulped. She glanced back over her shoulder. The farm mare looked at Apple Bloom's frightened face, at Macintosh's confused expression, then at Granny Smith's calm gray eyes. There was a nodding of a wrinkled head, and that was just the excuse Applejack needed to do what came next.

        With a slight grunting breath, the farm mare effortlessly pushed the cellar doors open. She was instantly blinded by a familiarly warming sight. As her green eyes focused, she stepped out into glistening sunlight. Several things came into focus, several twisted, ugly, white things. She gasped in a rediscovered horror to be standing in the center of a sea of stone bodies—murderous bug-eyed trolls frozen forever in a helpless flight from the Celestial orb rising over the far reaches of the eastern green orchards. As the seconds peeled into a flustered minute, Applejack realized that the stones weren't moving, and so long as there was a sun in the sky—they never would.

        She stepped out, blinking dazedly, her heart pulsing sharply with each dart of her eyes as Big Macintosh, Granny Smith, and a trembling Apple Bloom nervously rose to the earth's surface behind her. Winona scampered out and trotted breathlessly across the violent swirls in the earth beneath the granite objects.

        Every troll statue was covered in bruises, in cuts, in burns, even one or two of them with granite parts spilling out of their flesh. But all of them had their eyes open. All of them were in one piece. All of them were alive up until the moment of fateful freezing. But there was no sign of—

        “Miss Harmony?!” Apple Bloom was the first to call out—a mewling sound.

        Applejack spun and hissed at her. “Sugarcube! Can it! There could still be—” She froze from witnessing a copper shadow seated in her peripheral. With a gasp, she spun about and saw the messenger from Canterlot. She ran up on numb legs, her hooves kicking up splinters of shattered weapons and burnt ashes. “Miss Harmony... Miss Harmony, are you—... D-did they... Y-you...” Her voice came to a stop as her legs did. She stood suddenly upon the edge of disbelief.

        Harmony took a deep breath, squatting meditatively with a slight flicker of her black tail as she gazed deeply into the welcoming kiss of the Eastern sunrise. “This is beautiful too. I only forgot because I chose to. Pleasure is a lot like pain, really. They're both words—but when you turn them into screams, they suddenly become powerful.” She shuddered, and something on the edges of her cheeks curved, like a copper smile. “Oh dear Celestia—I wish I would never have to fly from this either.”

        “You... You...” Applejack stumbled. She reached a hoof out, but was too afraid to touch the pegasus' shoulder, as if the world might implode if she did. “You t-took them all on? And yet y-you didn't k-kill them?”

        “I thought of it.” There was something like a chuckle. Harmony sighed, basking. “But then I realized that if I started weeding out their numbers, they would split up—and many of them would run back into the woods.” She exhaled sharply. “Nnnngh—No. I couldn't give them that satisfaction. So, I ticked them off. And, like all trolls, they're either all in or all out. I made sure it was the former, all the way to dawn. Celestia's glorious light did all the real work.” Another soft smile. “Just like it was supposed to all along.”

        “You...” Applejack ran a hoof over her blonde mane as her features melted with a sensation that had been lost to her since the day she last buried somepony she loved. “Th-there's not even a sc-scratch on you. Good heavens, H-Harmony, h-how could that b-be...?”

        “Persistence, Miss Applejack.” Harmony finally turned around. She bore a placid expression, like white stone reflecting white stone. “It's something that trolls are good at—so much so that they are blind to when a pony happens to use it against them. And now look at them.” She gazed boredly at the dozens upon dozens of stone shapes littering the otherwise immaculate farmland around her. “They're as useful as they'll ever be. It's a fitting end for creatures who have never given to the earth.” She finished with a sparkling grin, soft on the edges. “Don't you think?”

        “Oh darlin'...” Applejack finally collapsed. She draped herself over Harmony's shoulders like a shroud and shook fresh tears into her, the mare's first tears in years of stubborn strength and fight, all dammed up for a moment of glorious relief, a moment like this... a warm moment. “I thought I had lost y'all. Oh thank Gultophine, I-I th-thought I h-h-had lost y'all...”

        Harmony calmly raised a hoof to the mare's face. “Shhhh... Miss Applejack...” She smiled. Two days of telling lies melted under the weight of this divinely honest exhale, weathering a pain for once that was not her own. “A wise pony once told me that there was no use in crying. There is still much work that needs to be done. That's what I'm here for... and that's what you're here for. Now that the night is over, what do you say?”

        Applejack sniffled. She looked bravely into the pegasus' face, and after several shuddering breaths she shouldered her emotions and bravely uttered: “Y... Y-Y... Y-Yeeeeha...” A crackling grimace of a grin, a lasting pair of tears: she cuddled her face briefly against the curve of Harmony's hoof for the final few breaths of healing that she so desperately needed.

        Harmony took the fleeting moment to glance past Applejack's shoulder. She spotted Apple Bloom giggling under tears of her own. She saw a confused but elated Macintosh sporting a lopsided smirk. She even spotted a barking Winona and her stupid grin. And then she saw Granny Smith, and Granny Smith saw her. The two mares—lives separated by eons—joined their curved lips into one nebulous smile, so that the merit of the moment shined on the elder pony just as it shined on the last pony in turn.

        “So then, you are a gift.” The uttered breath was as quiet as a prayer.

        Harmony didn't even need to hear it from that distance. On iron-wrought legs, she stood up and hoisted Applejack along with her into the orange-blossoming sunrise.

        “It's a wonder to be alive.”