//------------------------------//
// Betrothed 
// Story: Lo, 
// by Botched Lobotomy 
//------------------------------//

If there had only been a little more―
Six seconds was the current estimate. Time enough to run back through the cavern and make it free to safety. Three seconds, for Ma. They had been buried in stone.
The train from Baltimare back to Canterlot had been unreal, disconnected, like it was floating in a sea detached from time. The train from Canterlot through Ponyville and into Rockville Station had been shuddering and iron, belching great big clouds of black into the sky and past the windows as it rattled like a great bolted coffin towards its destination. Cousins I hadn’t seen in years and had barely known I had at all came to greet me at the platform, offering condolences, compassion, commiseration for the ponies that were gone. Ponies I had hardly seen in years. Ponies I had hardly known at all.
Dinner and a bath and I was staying with Cloudy at her mother’s place, in a room that smelled strongly of smoked fish and tar, and I had the will to crack just one weak joke about it to Cloudy before I keeled over completely. I slept as fitfully as could be expected, chased by dreams of strange pursuers and stone ponies in the darkness. A mare hatched from a giant egg and told me this would be me, too, someday.
After breakfast visitors came over and offered some more sincere condolences, and I told them I was glad I was inheriting my parents’ house, else I’d have no idea where to put all these condolences, but they just looked at me with sympathy and asked Rose Quartz if I was eating. An elderly mare and her grandson came by with legal papers and peered at me through half-moon spectacles and told me where to sign. There: my name acknowledgement of death. There: my name to transfer ownership. There: and there: and there: and there: and suddenly I was in a little chapel dressed in black, and everypony looking very grave lowered empty coffins to a grave and caught up gravely over old Mrs Pumice’s home cooking. Faces, names, and places wandered by. Sometimes I’d put name and face together and my brain would give a little jolt―mostly, I stayed silent. Flax Seed and Nettles Stone came by to stuff yet more commiserations in my pocket, and as Tuff Schist Granite Stone patted me on the back resolutely I had the vague impression of the jaws of some long-evaded trap closing gradually around me. Snapping in slow motion: six seconds, five, four, three...
Let me step back.
Let me step back.
Please, let me step back...
In a cold tomb in the 4-5 mineshaft, I addressed the dead.









The two of us stood by the pairing stone in the silver light of midnight.
“It is smaller than I remember it.”
“It is practically a pebble.” I bent to examine the smooth, hard surface of the stone. “Are you sure this is the right one?”
“Touch it and we’ll see.”
Now that the moment was come, I felt a strange trepidation at the thought. This―from this we had been running all these years. For the sake of this, Zomponies and Vampires 2. For the sake of this, our small apartment. For the sake of this, a decade.
“It’s strange,” I said. “I should not care, it should mean nothing, even if there is some sort of signal, there’s nopony saying that I have to follow it―”
“I mean, I might,” put in Cloudy.
“―yet still,” I glared, “I hesitate. I wonder why.”
“I hesitated, too,” she said, after a moment. “I did not put my hoof upon it until the old mare pressed it down, and then it was too late.” Cloudy gave a small smile. “What is the worst that could happen? Nothing? You have no destiny at all? It’s not so bad.”
“I know. I do, I know. But still...”
“All right, all right.” She took my hoof in hers, mumbling beneath her breath about how she'd been fifteen, and I had no excuse, and, hesitating just a moment longer, pressed it down upon the stone. We both let out a sigh. The completely ordinary, unremarkable pebble was cold against my hoof. I rolled my eyes, she smiled, and neither of us was even slightly prepared for the dry, raspy voice that echoed in the clearing as I went to pull away. It sounded like old rocks rumbling along some prehistoric ridge; like wind upon a mountaintop carving down the highest peaks; like a boulder worn by time untold sitting tall outside my window. The voice of the Pairing Stone filled our minds like stardust, booming out as from a King on high, and it said, “OI!”
We froze.
“STOP THIS FOOLISHNESS AT ONCE!
“THIS HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH!
“THOU SHALT LOVE ONE ANOTHER AND BE DONE WITH IT!
“GOODBYE!”
The wind died down, the mountains with it, and the thousand grains of sand upon the beach that once had been an ancient moon stopped trembling. I stared at Cloudy. She stared at me.
“For Celestia’s sake―!”
“What was that―”
We looked at each other. I looked down at my hoof, still held in hers. Slowly, haltingly, she started to let go...
I held on.
She swallowed. “Well,” she said, with the tone of a pony who’s just spotted a particularly interesting type of geranium, “that would explain the first time.”
“We are so, so stupid,” I agreed.
“Can’t outrun destiny.”
“Not for lack of trying.”
She bit her lip. “Maybe this time we could try just going along with it?”
I nodded, swallowed, nodded again. I traced the curve of her jaw with the tip of my hoof, she shuffled forward, and slowly, awkwardly, I bent to kiss her.
And lo, it was so.