//------------------------------// // Chapter Twenty: Everclear // Story: The End of Ponies // by shortskirtsandexplosions //------------------------------// The End of Ponies by shortskirtsandexplosions Chapter Twenty – Everclear Special thanks to Vimbert for Editing Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art         “You've grown, Scootaloo.”         The last pony blinked from where she sat on an emerald patch of garden grass. Garbed in a saddlebag with a pair of goggles dangling from her neck, Scootaloo broke free from the cloud of yesterday's shivers. Her eyes refocused on a tall purple shape looming above her. “I beg your pardon, Spike?”         “Your mane, child,” the dragon stated with an iron smirk. Fuming, he stretched his limbs high and brightened the manatorches around Princess Celestia's shimmering looking-glass before falling back on all fours and marching towards a nearby pair of fruit trees. “You've grown it out some, if I'm not mistaken.”         “Oh... Oh that.” She blushed slightly as she raised a foreleg and felt—with slight awkwardness—the thin rug of bristly pink threads fanning out from the seam of her upper spine. “I guess I have, haven't I? Not out of habit, mind you.” She cleared her throat and gazed across the former Ponyville Skating Rink with a melancholic exhale, her scarlet eyes once more returning to distant thoughts. “I suppose you could say that I have been... well...” She thought of timberwolves, of Pitt, of gray ash and misery—everything that wasn't to be found at Sweet Apple Acres. “I have been distracted lately, Spike.”         “Understatement suits you like a Galloping Gala dress, old friend,” the elderly dragon murmured as the violet pendant dangled shimmeringly beneath his nodding snout. He reached into a nearby wooden crate and produced a pair of metal sheers large enough to fit his claws. He began pruning the leaves of an orange tree while murmuring, “You know, I could be of assistance in that area, if you so desire. The same talent I have for manipulating reverse-time affords me the ability to cast a chronotonic acceleration spell that could multiply the speed of your hair-growth by tenfold. You'd turn into a diva overnight, if you so wished.”         “There are many things I plan to be before the end of time, Spike.” Scootaloo exhaled with a caustic smile. “Dying, dead, and dust. But I most certainly will never become a diva.”         “Don't say I never tried to broaden your horizons.”         “Out of curiosity, Spike, is that 'chronotonic acceleration spell' the same thing you used on me when we first reunited?”         “I assume you're referring to the speed with which I sealed the wound that the trolls had dealt you?”         “Yeah, y'know, that little gem of a trick.”         “Affirmative.” Spike clipped a few more offensive leaves off and twisted a branch to get a good look at a luscious piece of citrus or two. The hanging garden glistened around the dragon in Celestia's siphoned glow. “All it did was essentially trick your body into thinking that time was passing faster than normal. Your natural healing processes performed in seconds what it would normally accomplish in weeks.”         “That's... uh... That's pretty amazing, Spike.” Scootaloo gently smiled.         “Only when it's used in moderation, child.”         “How do you mean?”         “I mean that if you use the spell too much, you'll age the body past its own self-recognition, reducing yourself to a veritable invalid.” Spike paused to cough with a spread of green fumes. He waved the smoke away with a scaled hand and glanced over his purple shoulder to squint at her. “That's an amusing thing about the legacy of magic, you see. Every healing spell comes at a price. It is entirely possible to mend a living creature so much that it dies. It's almost like overfeeding, I suppose. You nourish something with reverse-time too much, and it falls victim to it. Ahem...” He smirked ever so slightly. “The rocks and shoals of Equestria may shimmer with ash for a million years, yet still any philosopher can make sensible analogies utilizing the concept of goldfish.”         “You've been reading old scrolls for far too long, Spike,” was all a chuckling Scootaloo had to say on that.         “Scoff if you must, Scootaloo. But, suffice it to say, a simple dash of time-differentiation here and there isn't too terribly dangerous. Why, there was a time in my youth when I would gladly have utilized the spell to my own advantage.”         “What? You wanted to grow wings early?” Scootaloo remarked with a smirk.         “A mustache actually.”         “A—Snkkt—A what, Spike?” Her scarlet eyes bugged noticeably.         “Oh yes. I had wished to be a true charmer with the ladies—well—'lady,' singular, I do suppose.” He smiled gently as he fished through the branches and felt each subsequent orange with gentle, giant fingers. “You have told me that your past is filled with memories and regret, Scootaloo. I think it would help you for once to look back and see the simple things, and how blessedly therapeutic it was to abide by the nonsensical whims thereof.”         The pegasus glanced aside and muttered, “There's hardly anything sensible about cold fear.”         “Heh!” The dragon suddenly cackled, his violent pendant dangling. “We need to do something about that!”         Scootaloo sighed. “Don't push it, Spike. Let me come to terms with stuff on my own—”         “No, I mean this succulent morsel!” Spike tugged at the orange until it was plucked cleanly from its branch. “It is far too plump to remain hanging here much longer! Hmmm... Why is this so familiar?—Ah-Ha!” He grinned, raised the piece of citrus to his snout, and breathed a plume of green flames over it. The orange disappeared in a puff, leaving just a few specks of ash which the dragon leisurely flicked off the ends of his claws. “I had a sweet tooth yesterday morning. It's nice to have that taken care of. Heh-heh-heh.”         “Y'know, Spike...” Scootaloo stood up and trotted gently over by his side. “I've been wondering.”         “Hmm?”         “All of those timeless months in Ponyville that you spent doting on Rarity—what with the mustache and the gemstones and the lavenders and all—Did you ever once switch gears?”         “Switch gears? Scootaloo, I do hope you know that you're talking to an elder!”         “Heeheehee—No, Spike.” She gently smiled. “I mean, did you ever hit on any whelpling girls?”         “You mean to ask if I ever went about courting young ladies of draconian nature?” Spike glanced down at her and strolled over towards a bush of roses which he promptly watered with the aid of a rusted pitcher. “In truth, Scootaloo, I never did reach that age before the Cataclysm hit. I was a young hatchling, in every sense of the term. My feelings for Rarity were sweet, but naturally misguided. I shall always remember her fondly, regardless. It's the nonsensical things of youth that are the most memorable. Are you willing to guess why?”         “Because they're stupid?”         “Because they're simple,” he said with a winking eyecrest. “I'm hoping that you may find such simplicity in your ventures, or that such simplicity may find you. Now there's a reunion that would be utterly replete with healing.” He chuckled to himself.         “Yeah, well.” Scootaloo cleared her throat as her voice remarried a somberness to the emerald air of the terrarium. “It's been two weeks, Spike. I guess you know why I've come back.”         “You're done fetching various flames for silver? I would have hoped you'd given up your night job, so to speak, old friend.”         “Erm... Spike, I think it's time we talked about my next 'venture'...”         “Oh! Yes!” He immediately stopped watering the flower garden and swiveled his hulking scales around to regard her. “You brought what I requested, I do hope?”         “That I did.” She nodded and squatted briefly on her haunches. Reaching back, she yanked a pouch to her saddlebag open and produced a glass jar with a runed cap. “Ta daaaa... Is it everything you ever dreamed of?”         “Child, my dreams are filled with the faces of friends. I reserve shapes and mechanisms to the wheels of imagination.” He took the glass container in a gentle palm and held it up to his emerald eyeslits. “Hmmm... Yes, Late Second Age Lunar Republican Runecrafting. It's amazing the extent to which you have perfected such an art. You should be proud—if not for your ingenuity, then at least for your audacity.”         “Righto.” She nodded. “It's easy to be a heretic when there's no burnable wood left in the world, timberwolves aside. I suppose the only living things left in Equestria that protest the sacrilegious enchantment of moonrocks are the cockroaches that scatter every time I brightly ignite an alchemy trough.” She then pointed a hoof towards the contours of the runed jar in Spike's grasp. “The lid houses a spatial distortion spell. I can compress all sorts of thermal essences into a confined space through magical suppression via vocal command. That's how I've been able to safely contain all sorts of highly volatile substances like red flame, orange flame, and—most recently—brown flame.”         “And now, with my help, the great Scavenger of the Wastes can carry in her hoof green flame. Ahem. Shall I?” He glanced at her brightly while unscrewing the runed cap from the jar.         She gulped and stepped back with a few shaking limbs. “Be my guest, casanova. It's your ballgame; I just came for the peanuts.”         “How poetically trite.” Spike smirked at her, then turned to narrow his gaze on the jar. His neck crests warbled and his upper torso billowed with steam as the elder dragon summoned a huge breath from deep within his burning glands. He gave a deep bass roar, and nearby blades of grass danced from the rising heat vapors as he aimed his razor-tooth maw straight into the body of the tiny glass jar. A surging cyclone of emerald flames frothed its way over the container's lid before spilling dramatically into the tiny glass space under Spike's manipulative exhale. After several seconds, his vomit of flame lurched in a dry heave, and he swiftly slapped the cap over the steaming glass jar.         On cue, Scootaloo galloped up. Spike lowered the buckling glass just in time for the last pony to bravely tilt her lips towards the bubbling container and—sweating profusely—firmly growl: “W'nyhhm.”         The rune lit up in a flash of purple. The green jar briefly shook and wobbled loudly as if ten thousand whirlpools were buckling deep inside of it, and then the jar rattled to a stop and rested quietly in Spike's grasp, awash in a perpetual emerald glow.         “And there you have it.” The dragon beamed within the penumbra of Celestial rays. “Time in a bottle.”         “Heh, fancy schmancy,” Scootaloo droned. Her scarlet eyes twinkled green like a kaleidoscope as she took the jar from the dragon's grasp and turned it over a few times in her hooves. “Green Flame under glass. Do you have any idea how much silver this could get me in the Wastelands?”         “Scootaloo...”         “Just thinking aloud, Spike.” She half-heartedly chuckled, her face awash in the beautiful emerald haze as the pegasus gazed beyond the soup of reverse-time. “There's no silver that's worth buying this, that's worth purchasing the past, that can deliver the Sun and Moon to one's doorstep within a blink.” She gulped, her lips suddenly dry. “All it costs is ashes, one dead friend at a time.”         “Not even an entire world of ashes can purchase one life, Scootaloo. Remember, you are a visitor of the past, not its creditor.”         “Still... heh.” Scootaloo snickered as she twirled the green jar recklessly atop the edge of a hoof. “Feels like highway robbery, one way or another.”         Two of Spike's claws suddenly clamped over the jar, stopping it in mid-spin. He lowered his snout and gazed intently into her blinking scarlets. “The only robbery I foresee, child, is laying waste to the one commodity we have to work with here besides our sanity.” He picked the jar up and waited for Scootaloo to dutifully present an open pouch of her saddlebag before he deposited it safely inside. “Please do take extra care of the green flame. It takes far more than mere philosophy to conjure it. It will be a good few days before I can produce another breath for you.”         Scootaloo whistled shrilly as she tied the pouch and tightened it. “It's that potent, huh? I had no idea.”         “Well, now you do, old friend.” Spike shuffled down the far side of the terrarium with a sudden lethargy. The elder dragon spoke over his scaled shoulder as he examined several flower beds blossoming across the edges of the royal light. “Whomever you choose to anchor yourself to next, I advise you do so only after careful meditation. The concentration of my green flame, coupled by the potential release of your disenchanted rune seal, will send you back in time faster and with far greater efficiency than ever a raw exhalation could hope to achieve. You won't even need an alchemic circle for the reverse-time to take effect, so long as you aim the expulsion of flames at yourself once you're junctioned.”         “I'll... still need the remains of your...” She gulped. “Of our friends to send myself back, won't I?”         “Absolutely, only now you will not have to expend the time and resources needed to pilot your marvelous aircraft back and forth across such great distances,” Spike said with a tired smile.         “I get it. So, basically, now I've got the advantage of drive-thru time travel?”         Spike sighed into a row of dandelions. “Is it not enough that we're three centuries apart; you have to confound my mind even further with such verbal delinquency?”         “Face it, Spike.” Scootaloo smiled gently. “You were bored up until I showed up, weren't you?”         “I'm the only living thing you'll ever know who has managed to entertain himself by watching a pot boil backwards,” he mused, then pointed a finger towards her saddlebags. “You still have the baby dragon teeth that I gave you?”         “Of course, Spike.” She patted the bulge in her side pocket for emphasis.         “Then you have everything you need to truly make this venture entirely yours—as it has been from the beginning.” He tiredly blinked his emerald eyeslits and stifled a yawn tempered by the ages piled inside of his scaled frame. “Now, if you would dearly pardon me, old friend. Expelling that much green flame has taken a great deal of energy from me. I would do well to retire upon a bed of soft, pliable quartz.”         “Spike,” Scootaloo started, but faltered slightly as she bit at the corner of her lip. “Erm, I know that you are headed to bed and all, but...”         “There shall always be a bed for dragons, even beyond death, for we shall never outlast the earth.” He smiled tranquilly her way. “Please, for the time being, do tell me what is on your mind, child.”         “You were... You were in Canterlot when the Cataclysm hit, weren't you? I mean, that's the kind of the idea I've gotten from everything you've ever shared with me.”         “Affirmative. It was upon the Mount of Canterlot that I awoke to a dead world, and it was within the Bowels of Canterlot where I carefully studied on how to perform an autopsy on it.”         “So many years in caves—both in forward time and in reverse time—and all you ever had as company was scientific formulae... and boiling pots.” Scootaloo nervously finished with a chuckle, then fell into a melancholic gaze as the vials of chemicals lining the nearby lab tables reflected her face like a foalish scooter once had. “I really don't think that's a loneliness that I can come close to fathoming, Spike. Even in all of my gray, gray years.”         “Mmm... 'Loneliness,' such a common affliction, in spite of its ironic isolation.” The dragon bestowed her a cold smile. With a slight cough, the fumes of his breath lifted, dissipated, and then Spike uttered strongly, “Everything that lives is alone, and yet, we are all not. Even in a dull world where all ponies have died, there is an encompassing, Scootaloo. I do not consider this optimistic naivete on my part. I really do wish you could sense it like I can. Perhaps what it takes is age, for the slouching centuries to calm a vibrating world around you to a hum so that you can feel the finer mystical points beyond the opaque surfaces of what surrounds us. We are all driven to death, and yet we are all empowered to surpass it. Somewhere in the midst of that, there exists a connection, a purpose. Whatever the truth is, it is wordless—yes—but far from perpetually 'lonely.' How could it be? Hmm?”         “I don't know, Spike.” Scootaloo softly exhaled, gazing at the dark shadows beyond the green lengths of the garden. “I've spent twenty-five years gazing at death from beyond the portholes of my ship. I see it for what it is, an enemy—and yet a sibling. But our friends, Spike...” She gazed up with a hollow expression. “Applejack, Apple Bloom, Macintosh, Granny Smith, even Winona—none of them could see death coming. And I didn't do a single thing to help them see it. I frankly can't believe I'll ever make any of our friends see death. Do you really, really think that gives me a connection to them?”         “Your connection is far deeper and more intimate than a mystical encompassing, dear friend.” Scootaloo tiredly smiled. “In the company of your fellow ponies, I can only envision harmony.”         Scootaloo chuckled dryly at that word.         Spike raised an emerald eyecrest. “Have I struck a funny bone, old friend?”         “Maybe we both have, Spike.” Scootaloo's chortles fell into a rising sigh as she gazed up at the shimmering looking glass above them. “Life really is one giant slap on the knee.”         “Which is precisely what I will need in order to wake up several hours from now.” He yawned once more. “I really must be venturing to sleep, as you also have a venture of your own to make.”         “One of these days, Spike, we should take a venture together.” She smirked. “We could fire up the Harmony and go cruising the Northern Heights for dragon chicks. We'd find you someone to really boil a pot with.” She winked playfully.         “Hmmm, an impossible expenditure, I assure you,” he spoke in a dull monotone. “As I have searched the Wastelands of Equestria for ponies, I have likewise endeavored to find like blood. But alas, as you are the end of ponies, I can only conclude that I am the last of dragons.”         The last pony suddenly blanched at that, her lips parting.         He stretched his purple joints nonchalantly and snapped a few cricks in his long neck. “Some of the friendly faces I see in my dreams are fictitious. It's not too terrible a reality to comprehend—for someone as old as me. Be relieved that I will never again have a reason to sport a ridiculous mustache.” He briefly chuckled, but suddenly blinked as his sleepy form was encumbered by a warm quartet of limbs wrapped about his lower thigh.         Scootaloo was suddenly and unashamedly nuzzling him, her clenched eyes christened with moisture.         The dragon smiled and gently lowered a claw to stroke her bristled pink neck. “Have we warmly embraced enough in the space of three weeks, old friend?”         “No,” she murmured, rubbing her wet cheek against his knee as she gazed up with sparkling scarlets. “All those times, you were hugging me. I just felt like hugging you for once, Spike.”         “And a fine gesture it is, child.” He nudged her skull with the edge of his chin's green crests, patted her, and strolled off. “I shall carry it with me to slumber, as I do all treasures that grace my life. Safe travels, old friend.”         She watched, standing in the deep shadows of his voice, as Spike strolled alone through the side of the terrarium and out into the cold, gray graveyard of Ponyville. Every ticking second in his absence suddenly felt like another layer of her skin being peeled off. There was suddenly one thing that could cover those wounds: the flesh of an exiled Goddess.         Opening the nearest bag in her saddle, the last pony pulled out several dangling dragon teeth on an array of multi-colored strings. With a deep breath, Scootaloo gently, cautiously hoofed through one artifact after another, her senses boiling at different pitches with each calcified shard she came into contact with. Her brain spun in every cardinal direction as her soul endeavored to focus on the location of every obscured corpse lingering beyond a gentle touch.         Then her heart stopped. Dangling suddenly in front of her was a blue string, upon which a cold tooth unassumingly hung, but her heart was suddenly being throttled towards the tiny white object at seven hundred kilometers per hour. The blood in her veins boiled and her organs shifted as if she was being flung across the globe under the howl of comet-hot friction. Then, before her sparkling vision, a wide horizon of rainbow patterns streaked around one thousand and eighty degrees before reaching for her with the serrated tooth of a lightning bolt—         Ears popped in a cold hiss. Scootaloo wrenched her brown skull from the tooth's throbbing gaze. She was panting profusely, her heart palpitating like a pathetic little foal with her hooves scratching against the walls of an arcane vault. She winced, winced, then relaxed as the earth recollected under her legs, and she realized her wings had been flapping involuntarily. Retracting the brown feathers to herself, she gulped hard and flung the blue-stringed tooth towards the back of her dangling collection.         A murmur escaped the last pony's lips as she sought the next tooth—any tooth—so long as it wasn't that last one. To her surprise, it was almost as if the next tooth was reaching for her. Upon a yellow string, it shimmered invitingly. She shuddered as a silken touch encircled her soul with song, so that she was being lifted like a shivering bird through the feather-soft kiss of leaves, past the coarse veil of gray confusion, and into the velvety womb of gentle words, melodic and cherishing, dancing her tired limbs into a cushion of slumber.         “Oh goddess...” Scootaloo almost sobbed. “I have to find her next.”         Twenty-five years of going deaf, and still her voice still gave a lulling melody.         Rows upon rows of dead trees surged below like dark gray seafoam as the last pony piloted the Harmony ever westward beyond the lengths of Ponyville. Scootaloo craned her goggled face, blinking down. She was balanced on the very edge of the cockpit seat which she had tilted forward to allow her a view of the dead foliage wafting beneath the curved windows of the airship. With one hoof on a lever and another clinging to a chainlink handle, she scanned the decaying horizon, observing as the gray ashen tree trunks bled into an obsidian abyss that formed the apocalyptic husk of what was once the Everfree Forest.         In place of green tree canopies and misty knolls there spread a cancerous, ink-black, neverending quagmire of gnarled thorns—humongous twisting vines of iron thick onyx wood. The sharp, pointed barbs that protruded from these unnatural brambles were like giant glistening daggers of indestructible slade, hewn from the blackest heart of a ravaged earth. In an age where all that was green was dead, far darker and malevolent things grew from the festering pits of the earth, released from the sundered bowels of Tartarus, sucking the juice and blood from all that dared to mimic the throbbing warmth of yesteryear.         In two and a half short decades, the gorgeous Everfree Forest had been completely replaced with a wooden labyrinth spawned by the trailing energies of chaos wafting up from evacuated Tartarus, and anything that lurked within the pitch black shadow of that hellish maze could only be an abomination that fed on smaller horrors, for this was the new wilderness of the poisoned world: The Everbriar.         And the tooth was leading her straight there.         Scootaloo exhaled sharply. Goggled eyes glanced up at the tiny white bone hanging on its yellow string where she had suspended it from a copper bulkhead. With the barest of breaths, the Harmony's pilot could feel a gentle pull to her soul essence, like silken threads brushing her, coaxing her, urging her to fly deeper, deeper, deeper into the black heart of that nightmarish basin of brambles. When the last pony concentrated hard, she grew increasingly aware—and more and more despondent—of just how entrenched into the mire of that obsidian sea her anchor truly was. It horrified her as much as it confused her. The flicker of the bobbing cabin's lanternlights was of a sudden yet brief comfort to her beating heart.         “Meh. Enjoying your sleep, Spike?” the filly momentarily grumbled.         The horizon turned blacker and blacker as the Everbriar consumed everything from east to west beyond the cockpit, and yet she knew that she was just hitting upon the bare crest of Equestria's oceanic tumor. The hardened survivor's heart faltered, not so much with trepidation as with the sheer weight of the plunge that she was about to take. In truth, she looked for an excuse—any excuse—to delay her fateful dive for the briefest of moments.         However, it was for a far more somber reason that she urged herself to decelerate the Harmony. She had spotted something upon the edge of the Wasteland's blackest-of-black skins. It was a patch of stony soil just like many other millions of barren splotches across Equestria. For some pathetic reason, this patch and this patch alone stood out, occupying a singed spot within the twitching retinae of the last pony's aged eyes, so that she even memorized it from the air.         The entire cabin of the Harmony surged as Scootaloo compelled herself to pull at the braking levers, coasting the zeppelin to a complete stop. She took a deep breath and reached a hoof up to the handle that would send the craft into descent, but she merely gripped the thing and hung her suddenly flimsy weight from it. A nervous pit had formed in her stomach, and she bit her lip as she gazed at the dangling white tooth and the black expanse refocusing beyond its flimsy white shape.         Once again, she felt gentle feather-touches of silken softness pulling her lovingly towards the black abyss of that thorn-brambled hell lingering beyond the cockpit windows. With a surrendering sigh, she reminded herself that the same placid heart that animated that silken touch also possessed a voice that lulled her tired mind towards the familiar patch of land just edging the brink of madness below.         Scootaloo reasoned with herself that this was not a delay, but a precursor, a necessary prelude to a purgatorial plunge, as this one spot in Equestria had always served every lonely moment in her young life ever.         With one final breath—not so much for strength as for relief—the last pony gave in. She put her weight into the chainlink handle's grip. The Harmony descended rapidly towards the tiny barren patch among patches, and she found a sufficiently strong tree among its dead brothers and sisters to moor the aircraft to before trotting swiftly out, unarmored.         She left the tooth behind. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Her metal-laced hooves plodded across dead stone. All the grass had been evaporated. Any remaining soil had been vulcanized to obsidian glass. She trotted forward, her shadow but a black facsimile of herself in the lingering twilight. Out there, on the dead edge of the black sea of thorns, the world was quiet enough for her to hear the flakes of ash kissing the ground.         Metal horseshoes scraped bits of gravel off of the earth's exposed bosom as Scootaloo strolled forward, retracted her brown wings, and stood still before a sudden array of effigies. There were headstones, over sixty of them, sick white things stained with the green mildew of goddess-forsaken time.         Beyond this neatly arranged phalanx of rocks there rested the entrance to something. It was a crumpled, ugly, fluke of a hole, with several offensively heavy boulders having half-heartedly filled its gaping mouth. Criss-crossing rock-clustered entrance was a splintery web of wooden planks, nailed into place by ghostly equine hooves three decades ago. The flimsy barricade had shuddered, bowed, and crumbled over time, barely managing to hold tight the bouldery plug they once so bravely guarded for countless years.         But Scootaloo's gaze wasn't fixed on the haphazard hole in the wall of granite. She wasn't even remotely interested in the five dozen white rocks lingering before her. Instead, she shuffled lethargically—knowingly—straight towards a tall gray obelisk standing in front of her. The thing was twice her height, a dull ghost of its once pointed glory. After decades of pelting snow and acidic blight, the thing had melted into a lump of porous rock, but something still shimmered halfway up the front face of it.         The last pony raised her goggles. He nostrils flared as she diligently raised a hoof towards the front of the obelisk and wiped a layer of dust off, revealing several words chiseled in the Celestial Tongue.         “The Everclear Seventy.”         The words engraved in the monolith glistened in the noonday sun.         “In Memory of the Hard-Working Souls Who Lost Their Lives to Tragedy Deep in the Heart of the Everclear Mine.”         As the words bled in and out of focus, young Scootaloo's orange face drooped in the polish of the reflective granite. Two violet eyes blinked painfully, like lost twins. It hurt her gaze—pinpricks burning—and she suddenly shuddered to wrench her gaze away from the monolith, staring breathlessly as she leaned half of her body atop the body of her scooter. The eight-year-old filly blinked as she took in the many, many white rocks lingering between soft blades of grass and fluttering flower petals.         The memorial stretched gracefully across the meadow with the headstones forming neat little rows, wide enough for two visiting earth ponies to trot side by side in silent reverence. It was twice as quiet that day; Scootaloo was utterly alone. Otherwise, she would never have shown up there to begin with.         The filly pulled her helmet off and freed a tossed mane of pink hair that billowed in the soothing, warm wind. She fought the sun with cold shoulders, gazing with shuddering sickness as her eyes traveled bravely across the distant walls of the granite mound beyond the memorial ... towards where the deathly mouth of the abandoned mine lingered. Several fresh wreathes of lilies crowned the wooden barricaded entrance, like garlands sacrificed before the gagged mouth of a giant serpent. Scootaloo's foalish eyes blinked, and the site was once more an ordinarily barricaded mine shaft, innocent and barren of all the souls that had ever been consumed within.         The filly bit her lip. She knew what was coming next. She planned for it, sickly dreamed of it during lonely nights spent under tear-stained stars. Pensively, she clutched her helmet to her chest—tighter and tighter to the point of breaking—as she bravely forced her violet eyes back towards the glossy black body of the obelisk, traveling down a chiseled sea of names, names, names.         Most of the titles were of earth ponies—nearly all of them as a matter of fact. This was subtly conveyed with chiseled white illustrations of trees that flanked the corresponding titles. However, there were a few names accompanied by the shapes of starlit horns, and even fewer names—no more than five—accompanied with ivory white wings. And at the very bottom of this last list, centered with starking peculiarity, were two names joined in stone as they had been joined in life: ~~~^~ Thunder Dawn ~^~~ ~~~^~ Cloudskip ~^~~~         The second name in particular, Scootaloo's vision haloed about. Something that had been stowed away in the dusty corners of her eyes bled hotly with every hungry second spent pouring over it. She raised a shaking hoof towards the white winged engraving, and her ears pricked to hear her melodic voice, like something that the foal hoped had been following her over the kissing leaves of every nightly howl, a dream that she could never let go of.         What she heard instead wasn't nearly as lulling, but upon a silken breath of feminine grace and endearment it very delicately resembled it. Still, the tiniest of contrasts cut her brain like a knife upon the precipice of its utterance, under a peripheral fluttering of pegasus wings: “Oh! Hello, Scootaloo.”         The foal immediately jerked back from the obelisk. She cleared her throat, straightened the orange face in the granite reflection, and gazed with dried eyes towards the yellow shade having suddenly touched down behind her.         “Ahem. Fluttershy, hey there. Uhm...” Bearing a brave smirk, Scootaloo spun about and casually leaned on her scooter. “What brings you to this neck of the woods?”         “I was about to ask the same of you,” returned a melodic voice along the gossamer threads of the warm spring breeze. A pink-maned pegasus with soft blue eyes stood with a pair of wicker baskets saddled over her flanks. Several white flowers danced on either side of her as she sauntered up on pale yellow hooves and proceeded to lay the lilies one at a time across the rows of white stones. “Somepony said that I might find you here.”         The orange foal blinked awkwardly. “Really?” A frigid cloud fell over the suddenly naked air of that place, and her teeth chattered. “I'm not in trouble or anything, am I?”         “Heeheehee... Good heavens, no.” Fluttershy giggled. It was a flighty sound, as if smiles could sing. “Hmmm... Quite the opposite, actually.”         Scootaloo squinted quizzically at her suddenly joyous acquaintance. “What's gotten you in such a cheerful mood today?” She sported a helpless smirk, however briefly.         “Ohhhh...” Fluttershy paused in the midst of laying flowers down and smiled towards the sun. The noonday breeze played with her hair like the teasing hands of a doting mother. “I just had the most cheerful thought, of circles within circles. Kindness is like a dance, and everypony is sharing the floor with each other... mmmm... whether they know it or not.” The yellow pegasus blushed slightly. With a warm breath, and she gazed sweetly the foal's way. “It is a joy to see you, dear Scootaloo. It always is.”         Scootaloo's cheeks flamed from within. In an uncomfortable shiver, she fluttered her wings and shrunk within herself, murmuring aside: “You've been sniffing those flowers a bit too much, ya think, Fluttershy?”         “Heeheehee... Perhaps.” Fluttershy took a deep breath. Steeling herself, she shuffled further in her task of flower-depositing and murmured in a more somber voice, “Do you know what this place is?”         “Beats the heck out of me.” Scootaloo offensively rubbed the inside of her front forelimb and scrunched a tomcoltish face towards the obelisk, the headstones, and the abandoned mine shaft beyond. “Looks like a bunch of ordinary rocks. Seems like a really silly idea to put all of this out here where somepony could trip over them.”         Fluttershy gasped at that last utterance. “Oh, it is far more than just a bunch of rocks, Scootaloo! This is a memorial erected in dedication to ponies who died in a horrible tragedy that happened at this very site less than a decade ago.”         “Ya don't say?” Scootaloo smirked slightly. There was a deep twitch to her lips, but she hid it professionally. “Seems like an awfully peaceful place for something so bad to have happened.”         “It's only peaceful because the citizens of Ponyville have done everything they can to keep the grounds nice and organized,” Fluttershy said between breaths as she laid flower after flower down before the white stones with clenched teeth. “Many ponies around here have lost loved ones to the mine collapse, or else they knew friends who lost family to it. It's common for them to come and pay their respects. So it's only fair for the grounds to be maintained in good order, in respect of those who died, if nothing else.”         “Is that... uhhh... what you're doing, Fluttershy?” Scootaloo blinked her pink eyes as she watched the yellow pegasus stroll past in her dutiful flower-laying. “Are you paying respects?”         “Mmm... In a manner of speaking, yes.” The mare stood up, bearing a delicate smile. “I... erm... I'm chief groundskeeper of the Everclear Memorial,” she added in a humble breath.         It took Scootaloo several seconds before she realized that she had gasped at that. “You are? Since when?”         “Since I volunteered years ago.” Fluttershy paused briefly in her service, standing in the sea of white stones as Celestia's sun rained down golden light on the living and the dead alike. “Do you remember my story about how I got my cutie mark?”         “Nnnngh, yes.” Scootaloo briefly rubbed her temple with an exhausted hoof. “I'm pretty sure I can still hear you reciting your song whenever I duck my head underwater.”         The adult pegasus' skin turned rosy as she hid behind a lock of pink hair and murmured forth her memories. “Well, the night after I landed on earth and discovered my talent with animals, I slept beneath the monolith here. The memorial had just been constructed and I didn't know any better. When morning came, a family of farm ponies had come to pay their respects. At first they were angry at me for using the sacred site as a bed. But when I explained what had happened and how I got there, they quickly forgave me and let me stay at their house until my mom and dad could come down from Cloudsdale to get me. That's how I first met Applejack and her family—when I stayed at their farm for the first time.”         “Heh.” Scootaloo smirked with bizarre pride. “Guess you had a thing or two to learn about finding a place out in the open to sleep.”         Fluttershy innocently responded, “Actually, I felt horrible. My first day on the ground of this lovely world, and I thought I had ruined a very special place to earth ponies! So, the first moment I could, I volunteered to return here and assist with the groundskeeping. As years went by, the Ponyville Department of Wildlife Affairs realized I was good at tending to animals as well, and I was soon generously given a place on the edge of the Everfree Forest to move into.”         “Oh, so is that how you got your cottage?”         “Mmm, yes. I felt so lucky and blessed. Since then, I haven't missed an opportunity to pay regular respects to this memorial,” she said, suddenly wilting into a sighing somberness as she gazed sadly at the stones upon stones. “Such a wonderful land, and yet such a horrible tragedy. My heart goes out to every one of the souls these monuments are dedicated to.”         “Why?” Scootaloo squinted. “Sounds like you didn't know a single one of 'em, Fluttershy.”         “Does it matter?” She blinked steadily at the foal. “All life is precious, both breathing and not breathing. In a way, the world's been sharing the same single breath since the beginning of time. Who would we be without those ponies who have set the foundation of things before us?”         “I...” The little orange pegasus squirmed atop her scooter. When Fluttershy wasn't looking, she stole a bitter glance towards the bottom of the monolith's granite face, at the last two names flanked with white white wings. “I can't pretend to be that deep, Fluttershy.”         “It doesn't have to be a matter of pretending, Scootaloo.” Fluttershy smiled at her, laid down a few more flowers, and chirped into the lively wind, “If you're calm enough, patient enough, and polite enough, the world makes everything clear to you. Life has always been built on nice things, even in spite of the occasional ugliness. If that wasn't true, how could something so beautiful as this place—as this moment—exist where there was once so much pain?”         Scootaloo gulped and replied with a swiftness that startled even her own foalish mind. “And what of sadness, Fluttershy?”         “Sadness has a niceness to it too,” the adult pegasus said as she padded softly towards the front of the monument and lowered herself on folded hooves. “Insomuch that it reminds us that there are precious things left in this world for us to hold onto—so long as we're able—and that they're worth every second of cherishing.”         “Pfftt!” Scootaloo couldn't help but launch a pathetic raspberry at that. Her childish face smirked. “But Fluttershy—!”         “Shhh, Scootaloo. Please, if you don't mind,” the mare ever so softly chided.         Scootaloo silenced herself as if she had been stabbed with a red hot poker. She watched curiously as the Ponyvillean animal tamer shut her eyes, craned her skull towards her yellow reflection in the granite, and murmured a ritualistic prayer along the warm threads of the noonday wind. It was a natural chant, as if the mumbled words had been etched into Fluttershy's vocal cords, waiting for this very naked moment of release.         But they were sacred words, and—try as she might—Scootaloo could barely hear the phrases that were uttered. She suddenly realized that she was never meant to hear them. The white rocks rang with the echoes of Fluttershy's intimate tongue, the only discernible utterance being the holy name of “Gultophine” every other breath or so.         Eventually, the sacred moment had passed. “Thank you, Scootaloo,” Fluttershy dripped forth as she stood back up, her baskets empty. “I'm very sorry if I put a damper in your afternoon. It's just that this place is very special to so many ponies. I think it's encouraging to see you get so much exercise on that scooter of yours, but you should be careful where you ride that thing. I would hate to see you make the same mistake I did when I was your age.”         “Hey.” Scootaloo shrugged with a smirk. “That's what I've got older ponies like you for, eh Fluttershy?”         She chuckled softly beneath sealed lips and drifted towards the foal. “You're all alone this afternoon?”         “Huh?”         “Oh! Mmm... I... I didn't mean anything nosy by that. It's just that I'm not used to seeing you without the company of your two delightful friends, Scootaloo.”         “Meh. Apple Bloom's been stuck on the farm for one thing or another,” Scootaloo said, then rolled her eyes as she added, “And Sweetie Belle is swimming in a huge freakin' pile of homeschool lessons, as always. Seriously, I hope Rarity someday lets her sister live a little before the day she dies.”         “That's no way to talk!” Fluttershy gasped with a look of pale horror on her face, as if a plague had suddenly swept over the landscape at that last utterance. She leaned forward with earnest blue eyes glimmering. “Rarity is only caring for Sweetie Belle's future! You know very well that your filly friend is constantly traveling back and forth between Ponyville and her grandparents' place in Trottingham, and she's lucky to get as many lessons done in between trips if she wants to have something that even remotely matches Ms. Cheerilee's curriculum!”         “Alright—Alright! I get it! Yeesh!” Scootaloo rolled her eyes and smirked. “I thought you were the expert on animals, not schooling!”         “Oh... uhm... I'm sorry. I... I didn't mean to be outstepping my boundaries.” Fluttershy wilted slightly and brushed one foreleg with a nervous hoof. “I really do care for the whole three of you, and I know that Sweetie Belle is constantly busy for a reason. I just hope that you don't make the horrible mistake of blaming her for getting the necessary lessons that she's constantly dealing with. Erm... Not that I wish to insinuate that you're shallow or anything, Scootaloo, I... uhm... oh dear...”         “Heheheh—Fluttershy, it's okay.” Scootaloo leaned from her scooter and rested a hoof gently on one of the pegasus' front legs. The mare's coat felt velvety soft to the touch. “I'm not angry at either of my friends. I bought Apple Bloom a postcard from Sugarcube Corner, and I briefly visited Sweetie Belle just to bug her. I know it's only natural that the Crusaders can't hang out all the time. I guess I was just... meh, I dunno... friggin' bored, I guess.”         “What are your parents up to?” Fluttershy asked.         “My p-parents?” Scootaloo bravely breathed. For a brief moment, her eyes bobbed over the sea of stones. “They're gone...”         She blinked, then jerked a glance up at Fluttershy.         “On vacation.” Scootaloo smiled. “Would you believe it? The one day in the year that there's a Wonderbolt Performance in Fillydelphia and they leave me behind to house-sit! Like I really need to be watering the frickin' plants while they're off watching Spitfire and Soarin' do loopty loops. It's on account of the 'Fillydelphian Cider' that they said I couldn't come. What a load of horse... well, y'know. Like I'd ever drink the stuff! Worst thing I ever poured down my throat was a bottle of prune juice, and that was on a dare from Apple Bloom. I swear, I dunno how Granny Smith stomachs that crap.”         “It's a good quaff for the digestive system.” Fluttershy smiled.         “Er—Huh?”         “Prune juice. It helps ponies and other living things when they need to... to... erm...” She blushed suddenly like a beet.         “Ohhhhh—I gotcha.” Scootaloo winked. “When they gotta literally make a 'load of horse y'know.'”         “Eeep!” Fluttershy winced. “Scootaloo, I never made jokes like that at your age!”         “Something tells me you'll never make jokes like that when you're one hundred.” Scootaloo smirked and placed the helmet back on her head. “Well, it's been awfully nice shooting the breeze with you, Fluttershy. But I best be off. I've got a few errands to run before I check on mom's ferns and see if they've croaked yet.”         “Oh really? I—erm... that is... Hmmm.” Fluttershy brightened, dulled, then kicked limply at the dirt.         Scootaloo blinked at her with violet curiosity. “Something the matter?”         “Oh, no.” The yellow pegasus snickered softly. “There is nothing wrong. I was just momentarily thinking—erm—since you were out and about, and I was also doing a few random tasks, if you might want to join me, Scootaloo, in feeding some of the little animals around the nearby pond? That is, of course, if you were maybe looking forward to... uhm... some company.”         Scootaloo giggled. “No offense, Fluttershy. You may be all about taking care of cute fluffy creatures, but sitting around by a lake and feeding ducks isn't exactly my idea of an... exciting... afternoon...” The orange foal's voice limped off in a similar fashion to her fading smile. She found herself blinking helplessly at the sight before her.         Fluttershy—ever patient, ever kind—was doing her tranquil best to smile. But at the crest of Scootaloo's muttered excuse, there was a wilting to the adult pegasus' limbs, blossoming outward from two blue eyes that fluttered earthward painfully, like lost twins. The young pegasus instantly recognized that abysmal expression of loneliness: pinpricks burning.         Like an exploding thundercloud, Scootaloo's lungs shifted and she megaphoned through a bright smile, “You know what? I love ducks! They're like daredevil seagulls who dive underwater and don't afraid of anything!”         “Huh?”         The foal shrugged and re-gripped her scooter's handles. “My afternoon's clear. I'm sure Mom's silly ferns can live for another few hours without me. So are we going to the pond or do I have to race ya?”         “Oh, that's wonderful!” Fluttershy jerked up straight, nearly giggling. Her yellow coat shone suddenly with a golden sheen that matched her silken voice. “Erm... But I'm afraid I've never been all that good at racing other ponies, so I doubt it would be a worthy challenge.”         “I was just teasing. Jeez!” Scootaloo rolled her violet eyes and tightened her helmet. “Show me the way, Fluttershy. The last time I went to a pond I thought I could earn a cutie mark for alligator wrestling. Needless to say, I never went back.”         “It's due east,” Fluttershy said, softly taking wing with a breath and a smile. She gazed down as she kept a low altitude so as not to leave earshot of the scooter-gliding foal. “While we're at it, maybe you'll let me teach you how to tell the difference between local water fowl?”         “Heeeeeey,” Scootaloo cooed with a sway of her shoulders as her tiny wings throttled her forward over the grassy fields. “Who am I to turn down the Stare Master?”         “Heeheehee.”         After several redundant hours of circling, the last pony had come to a decision. She moored the Harmony—employing both hydraulic claws and four sets of chains—to the granite face of a steep mountain looming several hundred feet above the edge of the black Everbriar. This was not an easy task. It took several sweating attempts at steambolting the clamps to the rockface and over fifty minutes of fiddling with the chains to make sure the airship was perfectly anchored, but it had to be done. To position the Harmony at sea level within reach of the giant black thorns of the Everbriar was tantamount to reckless suicide, as any unforeseen monstrosity could very easily shred Scootaloo's pride and joy to copper ribbons.         “At least I'll remember where I parked,” she murmured to herself with a nonsensical smile.         Her voice was brief comfort to her in the ghostly twilight winds of high altitude. From high above, she stared forlornly into the black-against-black sea of thorns looming below her. Squatting on the edge of the hangar deck's aperture entrance, her lower hooves dangling, she sipped long and hard from a canteen of water and shuddered forth a wilted sigh. On either of her shivering flanks were piled tall stacks of equipment, three times the size of a normal sojourn's payload.         This was not a simple trip into the hollow mausoleum of Canterlot. Nor was this a venture into the abandoned hovels of Ponyvillean buildings. This was a neck-deep plunge into ravaged Mother Nature, a landscape dictated by wilderness run amok with the fleeting limbs of chaos and unrest, a dark and gnarled world dragged up to the surface of the earth by a sundering apocalypse in the bitter absence of Celestial Light. Sunken in the depths of those tangled obsidian vines were things that did not sleep, born of Tartarus unto a dead world, forever outracing the perpetual gray twilight in their sheer audacity to exist.         And as Scootaloo once again produced the dragon tooth, dangling it before her dull scarlets from its yellow string, she felt the soft tendrils of her melodic voice drawing her down, down, down towards the obsidian pits below.         “How in Celestia's name did she friggin' end up there when it all ended?” she drunkenly slurred, or at least she wished she was drunk. It might have more fittingly excused the stupidity she was about to exercise. With a lasting groan, Scootaloo stood up straight, hoisting her thrice-thick bundle of gear onto heaving shoulders. “H'jnor. W'nyhhm.”         The catseye aperture sliced shut behind her, glowing with purple runes of protection, all of which she promptly abandoned in a steep dive as she flung herself like a brown comet towards the thorn-pierced womb of Everbriar below. The Harmony hung behind, like a copper moon, longing for its fragile winged satellite. Scootaloo pondered—as she always briefly did on these excursions—that it could very well be the last time she saw her “home”. To not contemplate that would have been unhealthy.         The last pony faced forward for the rest of the trip.