//------------------------------// // The Purple Mare of the Sands // Story: Immortality // by IGIBAB //------------------------------// The alicorn lowered her gaze. Sat down in the library of her castle, she was looking at three foals sitting in front of her. Twilight smiled. "What brings you here today, kids?" "Is it true that the moon was only in one piece before?" asked the small pegasus. "Oh, yes," answered the princess, tenderized by the question. "Before, it was an enormous sphere that soared in the sky, and only showed itself at night, taking the place of the sun." "What happened?" said the little unicorn, curious. "It's a long story, you know. Are you sure you have time for it?" "Yes!" the little ponies answered together. Twilight had a radiant smile, bringing some cushions for the foals and for herself to be better sited. When everyone had took their place, the princess started: "Well, first of all, let me tell you about the other three princesses of Equestria." "The other three?" repeated the foals, looking at each other, as they had never heard about another princess, beside Twilight Sparkle, before. "It was in a very old and ancient time," explained the alicorn with a nostalgic smile. "I was still young back then. To be honest, I was born under the reign of those three princesses. A bit older than me, there was Cadance. She was the princess of love. Everywhere she went, she would spread love in ponies' heart and allow them to express their feelings." The little unicorn had stars in her eyes while looking at Twilight. "She must have been so pretty!" "She was," kindly answered the alicorn. "So much so that she managed to seduce my brother, Shining Armor, and married him." "There was a prince?" asked the pegasus. "Two. My brother, who became prince after marrying Cadance, and Blue Blood, who was the nephew of the two princesses I'm going to talk about now." The three foals were focused on the princess, carefully listening to her and with a great interest, imagining the characters she was describing to them. "The youngest of the two was named Luna. The princess of the night, a great alicorn with a dark blue coat and a mane coloured like the night. She had the heavy duty of moving the moon during the night, and watching over ponies' dreams, to make them avoid nightmares. Her cutie mark looked like a night sky. "So, she moved the moon, and you the sun, princess?" asked the earth pony. "No, this task was endorsed by the greatest princess. The most ancient, princess Celestia, Luna's big sister. A tall alicorn, as white as a cloud and with a mane spotting blue and lilac tints, possessing, naturally, a cutie mark representing the sun. She was the main ruler of Equestria and it is her, with Luna's help, who founded Equestria." "Luna and Celestia created Equestria?" said the unicorn, surprised. "It was Celestia that moved the sun?" asked the pegasus. "Yes, and yes," answered Twilight with a smile. "These princesses ruled Equestria before I became a princess myself. Cadance only a few years before me, but Celestia and Luna had already been there for a long time at my birth, at least a thousand years." "Ooooh," said the foals, impressed to learn so many things. "And where are they now?" asked the earth pony with a bit of a sad stare. "Are they gone?" Twilight felt a little sting in her heart, slightly grimacing. "Yes." The mare painfully opened her eyes, not that she was blinded by the sun reigning over her head, but tired. With slow gestures lacking motivation, she tried to get back on her legs, but the ocean of sand she used for a bed was, as usual, a real ordeal to stand up on. The sand was sliding under her hooves, getting stuck in her coat, and an unpleasant sensation was running along her left flank, on which she had slept. Ignoring the dark circles under her eyes, her tiredness and her hunger, she stretched in length, looking at the arid stretch of sand in front of her, spotting some dunes that broke the monotony of the landscape, overlooked by a sun at it's zenith and a fragmented celestial body. She sighed. Again, she would walk. Not a cloud on the horizon. And it was for the better. In this place made of sand, any rain would cause torrents of thick sands and the poor mare had to galop in all directions, in search of a place where she would not sink to a certain death. That being said, maybe death would have been preferable. Maybe it was more delicate than this great nothing that was animating her, that surrounded her and in which she was moving forward, with her slow steps. "What happened?" enquired the little unicorn. "A great disaster," answered Twilight, eyes closed and with a dark tone. "After many centuries of reign, something happened. An enemy, more ancient than princess Celestia herself, coming from a forgotten time, surfaced back. Its power was way beyond everything I had faced before, and even the Elements of Harmony, our most powerful artefacts, were ineffective against that master of magic. We thought that the end of Equestria had come." The three foals were focused on the alicorn, not loosing a single word of hers, their little hearts racing when listening to such a story. "But something was noticed," continued Twilight. "Despite all its strength, this enemy was easy to deceive. Magic had evolved in its absence, and some subtilises from spells, often times looked over as minors, escaped it. We could trap it with that, but not vanquish it. To do so, we'd had to resolve ourselves to use a magic that would have harmed the very essence of Equestria, and caused damages so great that it could not have been called a win. However, princess Celestia had a plan." The princess remembered that day. That moment, in an isolated place of Equestria, where the four princesses had discussed their plan. The very moment when Celestia had exposed it. The serious look on her face, resolute and firm, shared by Luna, even if she had seemed a bit more saddened. The shiver of terror that Twilight had felt, even though she didn't knew the terrible consequences of that plan. "A trap was set up. The three princesses lured the enemy in it, and forced it to fight them on a terrain where they could let go of their magic, without any risks of collateral damages." "Where?" As an answer, Twilight slowly raised a hoof to the sky, directed towards the fragmented celestial body. For that matter, it was strange that the sky was visible while being in her castle, but the alicorn didn't pay attention to it. "The trap brought the enemy on the moon. But it would have quickly find a way to come back, if the princesses hadn't come with it. Once up here, alone with it, they used their magic. No one knows what spell they used, but a few minutes after the trap was a success, an enormous magical explosion, bigger than anything I had seen up until then, detonated at the surface of the moon. The light was so intense that it was as if another sun had bloomed in the sky, the shock wave so powerful that all Equestrian mana was disturbed for a few days. Horns crackled, enchantments momentarily fell, and even earth ponies and pegasus affirmed that they had felt a strange and powerful disturbance in themselves." Twilight marked a stop, trying to not look too sombre while telling this story. In vain. "When the light finally dissipated, the moon was in the same state at it is now: fragmented, smashed and disfigured. There were no traces of the enemy, nor of the three princesses. All of Equestria's telescopes were mobilised to search any traces of the princesses on the lunar surface, even on its dark side, but to no avail. All four had disappeared, and the moon stayed unmoving forever in the sky." "And there was only one princess in Equestria," Twilight concluded in her own mind. She had assumed that role. She had prepared herself to it, when Celestia had emitted the possibility that they might never come back from this battle. Twilight had to stay back, not because they thought to easily defeat the enemy without her. If they could have brought her, they would have, to ensure victory. No, if Twilight had been left in Equestria, it was because this nation demanded a ruler. After such a crisis, ponies could not be left on their own, running the risk to, once more, spread discord between the races. At least, it was what Twilight had thought, for some time. But as the years had passed, while she was rehashing this moment, another conclusion had come to her mind. An explanation, coming from the remorse and the regrets she felt towards that plan, and what she had done before. She was left behind as a punishment. "A punishment for what?" the little earth pony asked, even though she hadn't said any of this. The princess had a little hiccup hearing this oh so terrible question. What she had done. Or rather, what she hadn't managed to get done. "Before that plan was implemented... there was an attempt to use the Elements of Harmony. As the embodiment of Magic, it had been my duty to always find a new generation of Elements. And I did so. When the enemy appeared, I brought the five ponies that were responsible of them, to face it. We engaged our attack and..." The alircorn's voice broke down, not willing to continue. The small pegasus came to her, a piercing and almost sadistic look on his face, eyes on her. "And?" he asked without an ounce of curiosity in the voice. Twilight's hooves trembled. "I failed... The enemy infiltrated their hearts and managed to spread fear in Loyalty's one. The balance was disturbed and our attack didn't had any effect. The enemy then responded, killing Kindness and Honesty, causing Generosity and Laughter to run away... It's my fault if all of this failed. I wasn't careful enough in my researches for the new Elements and that mistake costed their lives, and many others..." The mare looked up from the ground, feeling something flowing on her cheek. Water? Yet it wasn't raining. She had noticed that phenomenon before, sometimes, while she was walking, without ever finding an explanation. From time to time, it was accompanied by a strange taste in her mouth, and a feeling of tightening in her chest. Occasionally, she would take the opportunity to stop and think. She was asking herself a lot of questions. She had always done so, since she had realised that she could think, in fact. It had been something weird. All of the sudden, it was like she had discovered that, in her own head, she could qualify objects, put some designations, some "words". It had took her a moment to find the word "word", and to understand its meaning. Of course, it wasn't the first term she had used. No, the first thing she had managed to name was the sand. This word had come to her mind on its own, while wandering in the desert. It was a good word, "sand", it resembled the sound it makes from afar. Then came the words "dune", "rock", "sky", "sun", "moon", "sound" and finally "wind", after she had seen sand falling from a dune for no reason. It was at this moment she had truly realised that she could name things. And those names associated ideas in her head. It was such a discovery, and what had followed was even more fabulous. After the word "word", she had remembered "think" and "reflect", even if it took her an eternity to understand the difference between the two. Because, in fact, she couldn't get it. If the goal was for those words to designate things, why would there be many for the same thing? And, on the contrary, why could she qualify every dune she encountered as being a "dune", even though they were all different from each other? All those questions sometimes required a long thinking, that could have been counted in weeks if the sun was still setting. And, as far as she could remember, it was the only thing she had done, apart from walking. And another question, more than any, had stayed without an answer: Why was she thinking, and why those words? What were they? For she, who had only known loneliness, could not even begging to imagine other living beings on this world. She didn't even knew what being alive meant. The fact that all of this had been invented to communicate was literally unthinkable for her. She could not imagine something she didn't knew. But every time she would discover a new word, or answer a question, she got a strange sensation out of it, that she appreciated because it broke the monotony of her travel, but at the same time, it scared her. With that feeling, sometimes, came reactions from her body. Some kind of convulsions, with small sounds emitted by her mouth. She didn't even knew what those sounds were, neither how to do them on purpose! She had tried moving her lips, but no noise came out of them. Alone, the mare was learning, slowly, what language was. She had successfully managed to name parts of her body, and she had even given herself the word of "pony" to designate her entire being. She had acquired self-awareness, without really knowing what it meant. Her thoughts wandered without a destination, as her body did in the desert. Even if she recovered thoughts, she couldn't see any purpose to it. In fact, she didn't even knew what "purpose" was. A thinking shell, without a goal, without a past, without a future, without anything. Lost. "And then?" The princess opened her eyes, looking at the three foals facing her, that seemed to be rapidly decomposing. Yet, despite their state, they kept on staring at her, without blinking, probing her being with there empty look. "Then..." continued the alicorn, rehashing bad thoughts, more recent and yet so far. "There was a great time of peace, where Equestria developed, as well as the rest of the world. Many things happened, but few great catastrophes..." "And?" the foals then insisted, as if they only wanted to hear what followed. "Until the day... of the first great extinction." Twilight's throat tightened again. Oh no, she didn't liked that story. Even less than the previous one. "The Tree of Harmony. It had always held the roots of evil captive. The evil of the Everfree Forest, that could not be destroyed, only contained. An evil that only sought to eradicate all order, all the good in this world. A day came, after hundreds of millennia, where the Tree... withered. Exhausted by all those years, by the use of it's fruits, the Elements of Harmony, it died. It was a possibility for which I had been prepared for a while. At least, I thought... The brambles of the forest spread faster than ponies could gallop. The trees uprooted themselves to chase the survivors. Foul creatures, forgotten, came out of the bushes looking for fresh meat. I was ready for everything but that. All the old land of Equestria was covered in a few days, and all our efforts in trying to stop the forest only delayed something that now seemed inevitable. The problem started to spread to the neighbouring countries, and would soon expand to the whole world." The alicorn took a little pause, her voice lighting up a bit while pursuing: "But then, something we couldn't hope for happened. As of today, I still don't know if it was an ultimate attempt to save us done by the Tree, if it was all planed from the beginning, or if it was simply the product of the determination shown by all of those fighting the forest. But a seed sprouted in this chaos. A new Tree grew, and ponies unveiled themselves to carry the new Elements, different from the old ones and yet very similar. Bravery, Dream, Hope, Altruism, Felicity and Wisdom. Together, after weeks of fierce fights, they pushed back the forest and even got her further away than she was at the origin, reducing the forest to a square of only a few kilometres wide. The new Tree of Harmony was planted at its centre, to contain it, like its predecessor, and the stones were put back in their place. After the disaster, the world preferred to unite, to avoid such cataclysm from happening ever again. Cultures mixed and a durable peace finally set everywhere in the world." "But it was short-lived." Twilight retched when seeing the face of the foal that had just spoken. Or rather, the absence of a face. He was only a skeleton, and so were the two other foals by his sides. Even with their eye sockets empty, Twilight could paradoxically feel their morbid little stare directed toward her. "The world fell," continued the apparition, seemingly growing as Twilight suddenly felt crushed under its presence. "Life went extinct. By your fault." "No!" The mare jumped, frightened. Her ears lifted, solicited by this sudden of brutal use. The sound was still echoing on the dunes, weak, and ended up vanishing completely. It was the first time she had heard a sound like this one, aside from the thunders she had sometimes witnessed, and weirdest of all, it originated from her. So strong, way more than all other sounds her body had produced up until now. She tried to reproduce it. But, like each time, the mechanism to make sounds was a mystery to her. Small screeching sometimes got out of her mouth, but nothing comparable to what she had just heard. And, just like the sounds her belly occasionally produced, she ignored the meaning of all of this. So, head low, the mare continued her journey, allowing herself a couple of hours to think about what had just happened. After some time, something attracted her eyes. A familiar shape was drawing itself on the horizon, getting the traveller to stop when she noticed that she had, once again, come back to this place. Lotte. Lotte was tall. Taller than everything else the mare knew in this world. A great rock, that stood many hundred of meters tall, composed of a serrated plateau at its summit, as if broken by some kind of astronomical force. But the detail that got the mare thinking it was indeed Lotte, and not just any big rock, was this strange formation. On Lotte's left flank, great rocks were poking out. They took on shapes the mare had never seen anywhere else. Flat, suspended in the air, pics arose from it and one of them, the tallest one, ended in a broken half-sphere. Lotte was unique because of that. Every time the mare had seen a great rock formation, she had come to realise it was Lotte. There were no other great rock formation in this world. It was the fifth time that she had encountered Lotte and, each time, she had try to depart from it from another direction. But her hooves seemed to always brought her back here. In this place she called "The mountain can't her Lotte," or Lotte for short. She had no idea about the meaning behind the words "mountain", "can't" or "her", of course, but that name had came up to her mind when seeing the structure, without any raison. Once, she had climbed to Lotte's top, to see the strange formation at its summit. From up close, it looked like what the mare had sometimes encountered during her travel: Rocks almost smooth, at times put in a single bloc, wide, and at others slimmer, thinner, often linked to other rocks of the same kind, creating geometrical shapes, squares, domes. All broken, of course, largely incomplete. And other rocks lied on the floor, anarchically. She knew how to differentiate between stones with a pattern and those without one. This had been an occasion for the alicorn to learn many new words. She sometimes called those rocks "walls", "houses" or "ruins". That being said, Lotte was much different from the other ruins. There was this great hollow rock, that stretched to the sky. The mare had one day gone into it, and found a way to climb to its top from the inside. There, she had took a stunning view of the surrounding area. Never had she stood so high, at least from what she remembered. The vastness of the sand, dunes and desert that had unveiled to her eyes, and the wind that had blew in her mane at that moment, the mare still remembered it. A pinch had caught her torso and still now, as she was thinking about it, the feeling was overwhelming her. Once more, so, she found herself nearby Lotte. It had been a while since she had seen it. Even if it was difficult to have an understanding of time, literally since the mare had never thought about that concept. She knew she had walk a lot before coming back to Lotte. She had encountered two oceans, some rock formations and even some white sand, some "snow". As the mare was trying to locate where she was, to find a new direction from which to depart, something caught her eyes. A big formation of dark clouds had appeared out of nowhere, on Lotte's left. Weird, usually rain clouds would take some time to group up. The clouds darkened more and more, nearly condensing in a single point, as small purple lightings could be seen on their surface, despite being far away from the mare. The latter, intrigued by this phenomena, lifter her head to try and take a better look at what was happening. The wind stopped for a fraction of a second. Then there was a violent, but brief, aspiration, that the mare felt from where she stood. A huge layer of sand was lifted, dragged towards the clouds, before slowly falling back on the dunes, just a couple of moments later. Silence fell once more and the mare saw a great purple lighting burst the sky, violently striking below the cloud, a few kilometres away. The shock was so great that it lifted cubic meters of sands in the air, before everything settled again, as the sound wave was propagating in the air. The mare saw the wave come, shaking the dunes in its path, before it got to her, ruffling her coat and pulling back her mane, while she had no idea of what all of this was. On the other hand, she could clearly see that the clouds had dissipated. And that event was something new. Her curiosity, her only driving force, told her to go and see what it was. And she went. Twilight was surrounded by tall shadows. The three alicorn's gigantic skeletons were judging her with their empty eye sockets. Despite being made of bones, their figure and their voices sounded horribly familiar to the princess. "Well, Twilight?" asked the tallest. "Where is Equestria?" The four of them stood in the middle of a desolated field, the soil turned over, covered in debris and corpses, as if a hurricane had passed her a couple of minutes ago. The sky was dark, grey, as was the landscape nearby. Twilight didn't have the will to look up. Sat down, she kept a low head, hooves shaking. "In front of you, princess Celestia," she answered with a lump in her throat. The skeletons were deprived of eyes, but Twilight could feel their gaze getting a lot more aggressive. She knew she was going to get reprimanded, and she deserved it. She deserved the anger of her mentor, but it's not what she got. "You disappoint me, Twilight..." whispered Celestia with a horribly cold tone, way worse than if she had started to yell. "We entrusted you to take care of this country," continued princess Luna's skeleton. "I know," stuttered Twilight, shaking with her head still lowered. "We had faith in you," said Cadance. "I know," the alicorn answered once again, on the brink of tears. "I thought you would knew better, when finding the new embodiments of the Elements of Harmony," concluded Celestia. The three skeletons stood up and looked away from the mare made of flesh. Twilight lifted her head. She was silently crying, looking at the three figures going away, without daring to move to follow them. In a last ditch of hopelessness, she bursted into tears, yelling: "What did I do wrong!? Where did I made a mistake!?" She collapsed on herself, her face finding a refuge under her hooves, crying. The three skeletons had stopped, but weren't saying anything. After many long seconds, even minutes maybe, Twilight finally slowly stood up, whipping the tears flowing on her cheeks in vain. "The world was at peace since the first great extinction... All the peoples of the world were united... It had been centuries without any danger... And yet, I was still finding new creatures to bear the Elements of Harmony. Yes, I was less cautious, I was mostly trusting the reaction from the stone to designate them. But I thought the world would never have to use that ultimate weapon... I thought the mere strength of all creatures united would be enough to push back any danger..." Celestia slightly turned her head towards her ancient student, looking at her from the corner of her empty eye. "You lost everything we gave to you... Here is where you made a mistake." Without any other words, the three skeletons went away, slowly, before vanishing in the darkness, leaving the alicorn alone, in distress, as she could only lament. "It's unfair... You abandoned me..." The light slowly went back around the alicorn, as she was completely collapsing into sobs. A slow hoof sound approached and a great mare with a pearly white coat and a long ethereal mane entered into the light. With an infinite kindness, she passed the bottom of her wing under her student's chin and slowly lifted her head, looking at her with compassionate eyes. "Don't let yourself be fooled, Twilight," said Celestia with tenderness and compassion. "I would never say such things. Those dark ideas were ingrained into your mind by the Enemy and the years gone by, don't listen to them." Twilight looked at her mentor, with tearful eyes and shaking jaw. "B-But they are right..." she sobbed, "I failed... If you had been in my position, you wouldn't have failed... I was dumb, I chose the wrong Elements." "You were alone, Twilight," wisely answered Celestia, "By our own fault. During my reign, I only had one trial where I was alone, where I was Equestria's last hope. During your reign, you've been in this situation dozens of times. You have always been put in moments where you were Equestria's first and last defence. And you succeeded, every time, but one. If someone would have to reproach you for that one and only failure, it would most certainly not be an old alicorn who always had her sister and her student to succeed where she would fail." The great mare gave a kind smile to her student, trying to reassure her, and she dried her tears, giving her back a small smile, still sniffing. "You really think that...?" the purple alicorn still asked. "I'm the product of your mind, Twilight. A memory. The important thing is not that I think it's true, but rather that you think it is, and that you be honest with yourself." Twilight's head lowered a bit, before Celestia added with a lighter tone: "I'm also flattered that I'm still the pony your mind calls to comfort you, despite all this time." "I understand..." the student said, slowly recovering her composure. "I failed, but I did what I could, and for a long time." "And the time as come for you to take a well deserved rest..." continued her mentor. Twilight looked up at her, a bit perplex. "You mean... to die?" "The world has died, Twilight," said the alicorn, once again with wisdom. "Evil has consumed every bit of life in this world, and died of hunger after destroying everything. It is what the Enemy desired when it planted the seed of the Everfree. A world freed from good and evil, forever deprived of life. My sister and I sacrificed your life by making it eternal, to allow billions of others to know a happy passage in this world. You've wonderfully fulfilled your role, thanks to you all this ponies, and even uncountable other creatures, were able to live happy. Equestria is no more and so is your duty to protect it. I won't force you, not this time at least, but I think you could use some time to rest now." Twilight remembered it, the second and last great extinction. Only a few centuries after the first one, while the world was still recovering from it. The last embodiment of Bravery had heard tales of the heroes from the first great extinction, and wanted to become one too. He wanted to cut down the tree to free the Everfree once again and save the world from it as well. Twilight had responded that it was dumb and to really not do it, but she hadn't paid much attention to that idea. Yet, Bravery convinced Dream to help and, together, one day, they cut down the Tree of Harmony. The Everfree was released and they died only a few seconds after that. Twilight realised what was happening too late and the world plunged into chaos once more, submerged by the strength of the forest embolden by its first failure. Twilight wanted to fight, but she was powerless and, this time, no new seed sprouted. The princess managed to save herself by flying higher than the brambles, higher than where the pegasus could fly, higher than where ponies could still breath. But, when she turned back, she only saw a devastated world, covered in brambles, from which echoed yells of desperate creatures, for a few days. She tried to save many, bringing them along in a magical construction. But there was no food nor water up above the clouds, and Twilight's magic was fading as the Everfree was consuming all the sources of mana in the world. Only the alicorn was able to survive, her body only needed so little natural mana to keep on existing. She saw, one after the other, the last beings of this world die of hunger, of thirst, or even suicide and kill each-others. She witnessed that ultimate carnage, helpless. It's only months after all this that she was finally able to go back to the ground. The evil had died, along with the rest of the world, and there was nothing left, aside from fine sand, dust and an alicorn, alone. "I understand your opinion," Twilight finally said, after thinking back about all this, "But... I refuse to believe that life is going to stop there... I want to keep on hoping, that life will come back. And I want to be here to welcome it, to guide it, if it accepts me..." "Twilight..." said Celestia, a bit saddened, "Look at the world around you. It could take tens of thousands of years, or even more. Do you really plan on spending all that time, alone, without anything? You will become mad from it, Twilight..." "I already lived a few thousands years, I can go on with living some more, if it allows me to save a new world." "But y-" "I am alone, princess," interrupted the alicorn, a bit abruptly, looking at her directly in the eyes. "You said it yourself. You're just an image. There is only me and some ruins. Not a skeleton, not a grave, nothing can still attest that there was a world before the ocean of sand. That there was life. I am the last witness of this world. If I die, everyone will die with me. If life emerges after, and I'm not there to teach them why the world is made of sand, or why the Moon is how it is, never will they know that you existed before them. I watched over this world and even if I already don't recall most of the faces I have known, I still remember our traditions, the big events, our mistakes. If I die, the world will die a second time, the Enemy will have won, and I will have been useless. I allowed a lot of people to live a happy life, yes. But, for me, my mission is not done. I'm the memory of this now gone world." Celestia stayed silent for a moment, before closing her eyes and bowing slightly as a sign of approbation. "I understand your choice Twilight. However, you said it yourself: You've already stated to forget the faces you knew. How much time will you go on before forgetting Equestria?" "I casted a spell on my own memory, a long time ago, to not forget important details and... some people I knew a while ago. If my brain wants to succumb to forgetfulness or madness, I'll let it be. But if the magic from my spell holds, and if one day I encounter another form of life, the spell will bring back those memories. And my sanity with it, I hope. The spell has some side effects, like uncontrollable recollections during dreams, but they are forgotten on waking... And it's worth it." The alicorn attempted a smile that was trying to be reassuring, but sadness emanated from it. However, her mentor approved once more in silence, recognising her student's motivations. After all, who was she to judge her, aside from a simple memory? After a short reflection, she had a light smile, both proud of her and moved. That's when she followed with: "In that case, princess of the sands, I'll stay by your sides in this journey, for as long as you will allow me to." "For as long as my memory will be willing to, you'll be with me," answered Twilight with a little laugh, amused by this sudden serious tone. She was joined in her laugh by Celestia, both continuing for a while as the light around them was fading. It took the mare some time to find the place where the lighting had struck. But in the end, she managed, through back-tracking, to put her hoof on it. And to be honest, it was pretty obvious, there wasn't many craters in the area. A perfect circle, around the point of impact, of around twenty meters of radius. A soon as the epicentre was in view, she felt that something was different. Or rather, she saw. Something she had never imagined. She had already noticed that things, in addition of being different in form and touch from one another, had another visual features. A colour. And while she had found sand yellow, sky and sea blue and herself had been purple, here it was something else. Like blue but more... yellow? The mare wasn't sure. It was different. Definitely not blue, nor anything she knew. By approaching this little bed of unknown colour, she also noticed that a few rocks, grey, were arranged in a semi-circle on it. Surprisingly, they nearly all had the same shape, rectangular at the base and a rounded top. Stones, she had seen a few yes, but such a pattern repeated and so well disposed, no, apart in ruins. Where those ruins then? The mare stopped at the edge of the little circle, looking down. In front of her hooves, there were small things, long, thin, pointing in the air, and it was those who gave the bedding its colour. They were mixing, superposing, but all came from what was bellow. The beast leaned a bit forward to take a closer look. There was another colour, this one closer to the sand, but deeper, less bright. But it's not what assailed the mare and made her move back a bit, surprised. No, it was something else. Her muzzle. It had shivered and her nostrils had suddenly found themselves filled by a fresh air, and a taste that was just as much. Never had she known such a stimuli. It was soft, far from the smell and the heat of the sand, fresh, unlike the dusty ruins, and very different from the tumultuous ocean. Nice, that was the word. The mare was going for surprise after surprise, but she didn't had enough. She had to learn, to feel more. Closing in, she inhaled the air, willingly this time, just above those little sprig-of-things-with-a-weird-colour, and savoured this new smell. It was the best she had known up until know, which was surprising because she had never thought about ranking them before. But this one beat all the others, without any hesitation. After enjoying this scent, she had to resolve to the next step. Feverishly raising her hoof, she brought it close to those little things. She was expecting to get cut and stabbed, seeing how the sprigs seemed sharp, but to her relief, it didn't happen. The stem was flexible, and those odd things slowly pack down under her hoof. It was soft, unlike stone, and she wasn't sinking into it, unlike sand. It was fresh without being cold, and it slid on the hairs of her hoof without sticking to it. What a feeling. Without hesitating any more instant, now convinced that nothing bad could came out of those things, the settled her other hooves on it and enjoyed, for the first time, not being on sand or stone. Gently, she raised her hooves one after another and rested them back again on this ground. It was truly incredible. The idea of closing her eyes came to mind. She stayed fixed, slowly breathed in the air as a soft breeze undulated in the crater and her mane. A shiver ran through her whole body, climbing back along her spine. To her surprise, other sensations added themselves in this instant. A stronger wind shook her coat and, for a brief moment, appeared before her a different landscape. A colourful landscape, endless, made out of small hills. Weird things poked out of the ground and were growing sometimes along many meters, others stayed more modest, contempt with spreading at ground level, in a myriad of different and previously unseen colours. In herself, she felt something calming down. It wasn't the weariness she had in front of the endless ocean, nor the satisfaction of avoiding a sand slide during rain, or the pinch she felt in the heart in the ruins, and even less that typical void in the desert. No. For the first time, she was chilled. Calm. No tumultuous thoughts, no questions, despite the fact that her mind was trying to ask some about this vision, in vain. "Why having them send to the future?" The mare took a moment of reflection, to find what this person was talking about. "Because I didn't wanted to let them get devoured by the great extinction... They were important, and since I can only send unanimated objects and simple forms of life into the future, I saved what I held the dearest. It was selfish, especially since the world was in crisis but... I had to. I think they should reappear in a hundred thousands years, if I don't summon them before." "I understand, your friends mattered to you." "They were my friends...?" slowly said the mare, realising something. Slowly, she turned her head towards the weird white shape, undulating like fog, and which was talking with a denatured voice. "Who were they...?" asked the mare, suddenly looking desperate. The white cloud sighed, sadly. The alicorn stuttered. "Princess... Princess..." She was trying to say its name, but nothing was coming out. "I-I forgot!" continued the mare as panic was getting to her. "I know," answered that figure that was follwing her everywhere. "You already said that, a couple of hours ago." "I-I'm sorry..." For an unknown reason, that figure was important to her. And she had just forgotten its name. But there was more grave, and tears slowly came to her eyes. "I-I forgot their names... I forgot why I saved them... Who they were... Your name and..." The mare stopped, suddenly horrified. "Who am I...?" The cloud sighed once more, answering with sadness: "I don't know." The mare slowly reopened her eyes, going back to it's landscape of desert and desolation. But thankfully for her gaze, there was also those six stones. Five where arranged in a semi-circle and the sixth one was in the middle. With a slow pace, still savouring every push of her hooves on this green surface, without even realising that she had just remembered the name of that colour, she walked towards the stones, stopping in front of the middle one. As much as that green thing seemed common, she felt just as much that those stones were special. And when she really looked at them, she saw strange particularities. There were holes in those stones. Not deep, but the mare had never seen such things. The holes, unlike those she had seen in the ruins, were regular. She wasn't understanding what she was seeing, but there was something satisfying in those hollow curves. And they all had the same depth to it, were all arranged the same way on the stones, and some shapes repeated. Somehow, one could have thought there was some kind of organisation in those holes, but the mare ignored the meaning of that word, "organisation". While she was observing the stones and thinking, something was going on in her. Something she didn't noticed until a few seconds later, when she felt a bit of water falling on her hooves. Lowering her gaze, she noticed that she was shaking. Her breath had quickened and water was still flowing from her eyes. With total incomprehension and a feeling of uneasiness that was slowly invading her, she looked up at the stones again. It was them who were provoking this feeling, but why? She didn't knew. She had... Forgotten. Not remembering something. She had knew. She she didn't knew anymore. The meaning of those tears. Simply, forgotten. That knowledge was lost forever, she would not remember it, despite all the tears her body was shedding now. Sobs were shaking her, in vain, and it seemed like her forgetfulness was only reinforcing them. "I have forgotten you..." The mare's incomprehension turned to a total loss of every notion she had up until know. That thing that had just spoken in her head, it wasn't her, it was like an echo, a distant noise, desperate. The mare collapsed into tears in front of those stones. Desperate. Lost. Alone.