When I first submitted End of Ponies to Vimbert's review thread, he reacted positively to most of it--but he expressed open disapproval of Chapter five. If I recall, candle-stick-head's exact words were "SO VERY BORED."
Well, here's why. The original version was about eleven pages longer, and most of it consists of Spike monologuing like Treebeard.
I went back through and essentially rewrote the whole dayum thing. It's better how I changed it, but in this version you can see me layering the exposition like Victorian lingerie.
There are good ways to do exposition. And then there are bad ways. The bad ways aren't so... bad, but that's assuming your audience is drugged up on dopamine.
The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions
Chapter 5 – Immutable
“I was a mere dragon whelp—wingless and crest-less; I was no older than you, Scootaloo, when the world of Equestria met its end. It is not a day that I recall with any fondness, as you can well guess. Everypony that I was ever close to perished horrifically. Every friend I ever had, every acquaintance and loved one—they all vanished in a blink. I was on my own, a baby dragon clamoring for resources in the mountains beneath the ruins of Canterlot, attempting to make sense of the end of all things sensible. But as the Sun-less days bled into perpetual twilight, I began to realize that my fate was not something to be paraphrased by the horrible blight that befell this land. Much rather, I was to undergo an evolution, a blossoming metamorphosis that transformed me into something greater than my physical self. If time was satisfied to freeze the world into a miasma of gray limbo, then it would become my life task to transcend time—and with the art of several arcane dragon spells, I was able to do just that. The mystical arts are an amazing thing—yes?—as they serve their purposes best when the civilization that depends on them no longer exists to judge them in the first place. I imagine you too, Scootaloo, understand the truth behind this...”
The last pony's ears heard the elder dragon's words, but her eyes were still exploring the mesmerizing sights of the cavernous hovel. Under the gnarled roots of the late Twilight Sparkle's treehouse library, the basement had been expanded enormously into a subterranean dragon's roost. Above a sparkling array of multi-colored gemstones was an elaborate assortment of alchemy tables, shelves upon shelves of magical ingredients in glass jars, sparkling crystal balls, electrified tesla coils, elaborate brass-constructed rotating models of the Equestrian solar system, and then a rhythmic howbeit cacophonous assortment of dozens upon dozens of clocks—clocks of all shapes and sizes, of various copper instruments clicking and clanking and spinning with infinitely complex precision across the wide sparkling lengths of the cave. A deep purple haze twinkled throughout the earthen interior within the heart of Ponyville, giving the place a spiritual glow that breathed a resurrected spirit of Equestrian sorcery into the air, making the wide-eyed pegasus' heart leap for the millionth time that eventful afternoon.
“Scootaloo?” An elderly voice deeply vibrated through the laboratory, forcing her to glance up at the warm sight of a purple dragon's face lowering to meet her eyes. He was applying the last of a series of bandages across her left side with large but gentle clawed hands. The spot underneath her wing where the bloodthirsty trolls had stabbed her was completely and miraculously healed, but a tight soreness persisted still as her old draconian friend finished his ministrations. “I can understand quite perfectly the extent to which you must be distracted this very moment, but I do hope my words haven't been too utterly wasted.” His iron lips curved in a toothed smile; a violet pendant glittered in mana light from where it hung around his neck.
“I-I'm sorry, Spike,” the filly said, trembling slightly from where she sat on a lab table with her legs folded underneath her. Her leather armor and equipment was deposited neatly on the floor besides the mounds of multicolored gems so that the dragon could properly bandage her. For the first time in as many years as she could pretend to count, the mare felt naked—exposed—and yet ... not vulnerable. “It's still so hard for me to ... to believe that this is happening. I was nearly killed by those horrible monsters, and then not only do I find out that you're alive—but you actually sent me back through time?”
“Hmmm,” he nodded and gently tightened the bandage against her wincing side. “Your shock is hardly something to apologize for. If there's anyone who should be apologizing—alas, it must be myself. Though I dispensed with your attackers, I was anything but graceful immediately afterwards. Still, you proved to be a much sturdier pony than I had anticipated.” He chuckled hoarsely and winked an emerald eyeslit at her. “If I had instead relied on a bow and a 'how-do-you-do', I wouldn't question a rigid survivor like you narrowing the sights of one of your guns on my hapless snout.”
Scootaloo bit her lip, her gaze falling towards the floor. “I guess that's true. Funny—yesterday, I would never have thought twice about aiming a weapon at something to survive. But here and now—in the company of a friend—it all seems so... so...”
“Poetic?”
She made a face at him. “Barbaric!”
“Ah yes, 'barbarism',” Spike smirked. On heavy haunches, he slithered massively across the cramped cavern and re-shelved his medicinal ingredients inside an assortment of marble-carved cabinets. “Now there's a word that had resonance before the Death of Equestria. I've always believed that when the first dragon who ever lived took a bite out of the delectable flesh of the planet, what separated her from the horrid beasts of this world is that she was the first to pause and ponder over what tiny but undeniable piece of nature she had verily sent to ruin.”
“I'm sorry ...?” Scootaloo blinked helplessly.
Spike smiled at her over his purple shoulder. “True barbarism, my little pony, belongs to a creature that devours indescriminately without bothering to digest its sustenance via the invisible organ of the conscience. Much like those mindless herding trolls that so merciessly assaulted you up above.”
“Heh... Guess you're right,” the filly smirked at him with a calming breath. “All of this can be 'poetic', can it?”
“With Equestria reduced to a veritable blank slate, I know it's been incalculably hard for you to find a standard against which to judge the nature of your actions—both loathsome and noble. But if it is of any consolation, Scootaloo...” He strolled towards her and gently tilted her chin up with the base of his claw, smiling. “...I have long waited for this moment, when I would be blessed by the presence of the last living thing that carries the same breath of purity that Equestria was founded on—and I have not been disappointed. I could not ask for finer company.”
She swallowed a lump down her throat, gazing up at him. A suddenly painful breath, and her scarlet eyes curved as she sympathetically murmured: “You've changed, Spike. I know that I have been through a lot. B-But you...?”
He solemnly nodded. “We both have been transformed by our own respectful trials. You, as I can very well see, have been righteously hardened by a long life of ingenious adaptation and survivalism. My experience is analogous in many respects, but it's not quite that simple.”
“How so?”
“Well—For example: as you have lived one hardened life, I suppose it's safe to say that I have lived several.”
“I...I-I don't understand,” she muttered, her brow furrowing.
“You did hear me when I said that I took it upon myself to transcend time, yes?”
“Well, that much is obvious, Spike—Though it's still a big pill to swallow,” she gulped as she said this, gazing at her bandages. “That spell that you did on me—in the ruins of Sugarcube Corner, when you breathed your dragon fumes on my wound--”
“I doused your flesh with an Accelerated Chrono Spell,” he nodded matter-of-factly. “It tricked your body ever so briefly to assume that several seconds were actually several weeks. That's why the wound closed up so quickly.”
“And...” She bit her lip, hesitating slightly before finally coming out with it: “Your age, Spike...?”
He chuckled, “What of it, girl?”
Scootaloo nervously blushed. “I-I remember you being a dragon whelp and all when I first saw you in Ponyville—I think even Twilight Sparkle explained to me that you were barely older than I was. But... B-But I've done a lot of reading over these desolate years--”
“Heheh—I can tell...”
“--and dragons' lifespans dwarf that of ponies by over tenfold. As a result, the draconian growth period should be way longer than equines'.” Her eyes narrowed on his grand purple frame. “You should be a lot younger than how you appear to be right now.”
“Merely the consequence of Intro-Chronomanic Incantation.”
She blinked. “Intro-Chronic-Wh-What, now?”
Spike's nostrils briefly fumed with passive smoke. With the violet pendant dangling, he paced over to his bed of gemstones and reclined with a weathered sigh; but then he bore a courageous smile as he nodded and began: “When I was alone in my half of the same wasteland that was thrust upon you, all I had to go by was the spirit instilled in me by my one and only mentor...”
Scootaloo exhaled in a somber breath, “Twilight.”
He nodded. “She was the most magnificent unicorn that ever lived,” Spike spoke in a distant voice as his emerald eyes retraced his long and scaled history. “I do not think it is a simple bias for me to state that fact. If things had not gone the way they had—and if Equestria had at least one century left to live out its Fourth Age in daylight—I have no doubt that Twilight Sparkle would have become not only the most powerful magician in all of the land, but she would have dwarfed all of the sorceresses that proceeded her—save for those of the Royal Family, of course.” A slight chuckle, and he continued: “To be able to work with her, to assist her, and to be counted as her very close friend is an honor that I have never forgotten ... and never will. When she was suddenly ripped savagely from my life, it was a tragedy almost worse than the destruction of all Equestria—to me, naturally. Living those first few anguished years alone in the Canterlotlian Heights was a purgatory I shudder to relive, but must—at least in my heart—because those bleak days would form the building blocks of a grand magical experiment to put all previous projects in the realm of mysticism to utter shame.
“In my young heart, I felt the only way to bring sense to the apocalyptic world was to see it through my late mentor's eyes. 'What would Twilight do?' I would ask myself. The world had been stripped of its Sun and Moon. There were no more days and no more nights. It was as if the one reason that death came to the world of ponydom was because time itself had abandoned all living things. I started to see time as an organism—a selfish and slothful creature that suddenly needed to be spurred back into responsibility. And it was out of that relatively hyperbolic perception that I imagined something too amazing to disregard.
“I remembered immediately a series of experiments that Twilight Sparkle had engaged me in just weeks before the Disaster. But before I get to that, dear Scootaloo, you must understand the one useful quality I had in the gifted unicorn's employment. Ever since the first day I began working as the lab assistant to Princess Celestia's star pupil, I was always chiefly used as a messenger boy. With a basic translocation spell that thrived off the magical aura of purple draconian green flame, I could transport objects across leylines with a simple act of teleportation. This, of course, we used on a regular basis to send Twilight's priceless letters on friendship to the Goddess of the Sun. As I grew older and my mastery of green flame improved, we began dabbling in my potential to send different kinds of objects to new and unheard of locations with the simple exhale of a jade breath.
“This led to Twilight's experiments, which were noble in their imaginative scope—howbeit almost too imaginative. My mentor had been pouring through several tomes regarding cosmology, quantum physics, and the spacial transience of leylines. She drafted a hypothesis based on the possiblity that—as I had until then transported objects through space—I could also potentially transport objects through time. Using my physical body and elemental essence as a base, it was theoretically possible to employ my soul as a vessel through which to communicate into the past and future, and my green flame would be the river upon which such chronological messages would drift.
“What followed were several intriguing yet failed attempts to accomplish such a remarkable feat. I remember staying up all hours of the night, waiting on an adorably disheveled unicorn to finish scribbling the last of several overly-complicated mathematical theorems before sending my green flame through the rinse. I belched so many infernal letters to ashes that I thought I was going to burn a hole in my nubile fire glands. But I didn't mind—I was excited about the entire prospect, but not nearly as excited as my mentor. No, Twilight was positively electrified with anticipation—I don't think I had seen her so focused on a spell since the days she obsessed over the return of Nightmare Moon. In the end, though, every letter that I sent appeared at the target coordinates at the precise same time that they dissolved in flames at my side of the laboratory. All except one—in Twilight's slightly delusional observation, at least. We all chalked it up to her exhaustion at the time, but she swore afterwards that one of the letters we sent made its appearance two milliseconds later than what would be considered 'natural'. Only now do I look back and realize that—yes—perhaps we were actually making history...
“Well, we gave up on the experiments. Twilight resumed her normal magical curriculum, her letters on friendship, and her happy days of being the young pony she had every right to be. And then ... And then when everything was consumed in flames, and I stood alone in the absence of her—what seemed for a brief lapse in logic to be an utter travesty of scientific research suddenly transformed into a golden mean before my mind's desperate eye. I had to find out if there was truth to the experiment beyond a few failed attempts at meager mathematical propositions. Twilight was far more gifted than I had ever hoped to be, but the unicorn's resources were limited. After the Cataclysm, the Equestrian Wasteland opened up to me a grand cornucopia of opportunity, of endless tools to my disposal, of a voluminous backlog of written archives left miraculously in tact at my claw-tips. Salvaging the Canterlotlian libraries of all that I could find on cosmology, leylines, and magical exploits—I burrowed my way deep into the Eastern Mountains and imprisoned myself within a perpetual state of research and self-introspection. For countless years I beat my scaled head against the surface of one single confounding quandary—Could I turn back time? Could I send a message back to myself? Could I possibly undo the horrible holocaust that had rendered all of my friends to dust and myself to an orphan of desolation?
“You must understand that I thought I was the only living thing—much less only living dragon—in all of Equestria. I was in Canterlot when the End came—And I still hadn't grown my wings, so there was nowhere else to go. In the heart of the mountains, I fashioned my own home into a time capsule. Life between the opaque walls of rock was twice the limbo as the lingering twilight above the Wastes could ever hoped to have been. It was just what I needed; because the only way I planned to scale my mastery of time was if I felt the chronological currents bending before my will. It wasn't enough to observe the results of my experiments. Magic is a science second, but an experience first. I told myself that I would not leave those mountains—that rocky cage I had forced upon myself—until I could exit them not just through space, but time itself. I wasn't about to commit suicide, mind you—I had all the rubies and gems I could eat, and all the insulation that a dragon would require. Hours crept into decades, as I went against the grindstone of the cosmos—And somewhere deep in the mind numbing thick of it all, I succeeded. I came upon an epiphany. I found what I was looking for.
“What I discovered was 'Reverse-Time'. If chronological energy is like waves on the beach, then 'Reverse-Time' is the effect that one sees upon the advent of a huge tsunami when the shoreline briefly and hauntingly recedes back into the body of the ocean, prophecying the huge tidal wave to come. On that same note, time is also a lot like the ocean; it may appear enormous and infinite, but time—much like space—has its limits. The key is understanding just how many daunting drops fill that 'ocean', and how cohesive they are with one another. It wasn't enough for me to discover 'Reverse-Time', but I had to control it somehow. The solution, I found, was to energize the current of time forward—as if I was instigating the massive tsunami in the first place, and the undercurrents of time would naturally flow back in a variable relationship to the forward surge that was sparked.
“Though I cannot expect you in so short yet verbose a dissertation to understand the intricacies of what I'm trying to convey here, Scootaloo, I think you can very well empathize with the overwhelming euphoria I felt with my discovery. In the end, all it took was for me to conjure up a burst of green flame strong enough to set off this metaphorical 'tsunami', so that I could kick-start 'Reverse-Time' and hopefully ride it back to a moment that took place before the disaster--”
For the first time in minutes, Scootaloo finally reached a bursting point. “And did you--?!” She all but leaped off the table, her eyes wide. But just as soon as she exclaimed such, her features began deflating. She didn't even need to hear Spike's next words; his grave face gave the obvious answer.
“No, old friend,” he inevitably said. “Though I was successful—and I became the first dragon ever to travel back in time—I hit a blockade. When I came to, I felt the mountains around me crumbling in the tremors of a horrificaly familiar Cataclysm. The chaos ended, and I broke the surface of the rock for the first time in years. What I discovered on the outside was the same perpetual twilight and mist that still blankets our world today. I had indeed traveled back in time—But the furthest I could go was the very moment of Equestria's death. I could go no further back, no matter how many times I tried. And I did try, on multiple occasions. In different niches of the same mountains, I carved myself a new home and laboratory, slaved away over the ensuing years, and sent myself back on Reverse-Time just like I did every moment previously. And each time, I traveled back to the past only to stop at the horrific punctuation of the one and all-encompassing apocalypse.
“You see, my green flame requires a full circuit upon which I can travel chronologically backwards. That 'circuit' is none other than my soul, my life essence, that which defines me as an entity beyond all conventional means of physical science. If we had no souls, Scootaloo, there'd be no reason for magic to exist in the first place. I know that sounds a bit poetic—but it really is that simple. As I would discover—there would forever be a schism in my soul, a break in the 'circuit' at the precise point when the Cataclysm happened. It took me a while to digest this truth; the Cataclysm was as much a magical catastrophe as it was an elemental one. Whatever destroyed our Sun and Moon—whatever consumed the souls of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna—it also brought death and destruction to all things ... to all souls enchanted, even on the most basic level, with magic. That is what brought the end to ponies, Scootaloo: a magical blight. It's what petrified all equine flesh and reduced them to the ashes that forever haunt this world. And, sadly, there is no way I can travel back in time to precede it.”
Scootaloo leaned her head to the side. “If that's true, then why are you still around? You're magical, aren't you?” She blinked, and her face paled. “Why am I still around?”
Spike's green crests flickered. Scootaloo noticed an odd twitch to his eyelids' scales as he nonetheless gravely uttered: “Dragons are naturally infused with magic—Yes—but they are also very much immune to countless types of mystical energies that might assault the scales. But that is hardly an ample excuse for why I am still around. The only real hypothesis that I have is that whatever caused the disaster was fundamentally devastating to the essence of ponies—and not dragons, or any other creatures for that matter. It would explain why so many things not touched by the Sun or Moon are still alive today—While all of ponydom is deceased.”
“All but me...,” Scootaloo said deflatedly, her eyes wandering in aimless circles across the hundreds of clockfaces ticking unemotionally at her. “I always thought it was just dumb luck that I survived. But now--” She gulped as a wounded expression billowed up to the surface of her face. “It's so absurd.”
“Is it?” Spike cocked his head to the side with a curious smirk. “Where were you when the Cataclysm hit?”
She looked at him. She knew the answer to this. She had gone over it so many times in her head—dreaming of a moment, a moment like this, when she might finally tell her tale to someone, when there might finally be a shoulder for her to lean on and share all of her anguish and pain, when there'd be another voice besides her own to judge if she had truly taken advantage of the second life granted her, if she had actually made herself out to be something more than the last Equestrian statistic ever. But now that the moment had come, and Spike—the tiny annoying boyish whelp—was suddenly a majestic and wise dragon awaiting her testimony, she couldn't manage a single breath. She felt her limbs buckling, because she had never expected this moment to be so ... so bitter. She felt guilty, and she wasn't entirely sure why.
It was to Scootaloo's infantile relief that Spike saw straight through her and instantly resumed his monologue as if it had never ended: “I had, in my manic and desperate experimentation, made a total of eight whole trips in Reverse-Time to the moment of disaster. Each time, I was occupying a different part of the mountain so as not to run into my past self. And each time, I was coming closer and closer to understanding the true nature of time—as I was also coming closer to grasping the truth that I could not entirely master it, at least not well enough to achieve my dream of going to a moment in time prior to the Cataclysm. Settling on the fate dealt to me, I experimented in a different form of chronological manipulation—Intro Chronomanic Incantation. I was able to persistently slow time down within me, allowing myself to accomplish more in a single year than any other practicing sorceror could in an entire decade. This became a priceless tool at my disposal, as I could extend my research and perfect my mathematical formulas without having to simply hurl myself back into the past like a badly thrown stone across the lake of reality.”
“So you're telling me that—in one lifetime—you've jumped back in time on over eight separate occasions, and you've even found a way to slow time around you?” Scootaloo squinted.
“I slowed time within me,” the purple dragon smiled. “It's about as ridiculous as it sounds, but most assuredly true.”
She stammered, “Spike—Just how old are you?”
He took a weathered breath. “Taking into account my rate of growth, cross-analyzed by a relativistic calendar that I manufactured for myself long ago—I would say that I am something close to three hundred and forty-two.”
“Spike!” Her face grimaced. “That's a long time...”
“To ponder the fate of the only world I've ever loved...,” he gazed deeply at her, “...It's not been long enough.” His woe-some face aged one reflection at a time across a panorama of ticking clockfaces that flanked his reclining figure. “Funny—My life as a whelp, frolicking side by side with close friends in the living green of Equestria was a scant nine years. And I've spent the better part of three centuries constructing a desperate appendix to what's ultimately been a very trite chapter in my life. But it's the only chapter that holds any merit, that still makes my heart leap to remember the sound of Twilight's voice when she called for quill and ink from across the library, when she patted me on the back for an assistant's job well done, when she tucked me in at night as I gave into nubile draconian slumber, dreaming of the magical morning to follow...” He sighed thoughtfully, green fumes kicking into the air and brushing past a rotating array of brass planetoids. A beat, and he turned to smile archaically in the last pony's direction. “I think that's the real reason why I locked myself inside the sarcophagus of the Eastern Mountains to do my experiments. I refused to stare at the gray sky until I could somehow bring myself to see the Sun once more. It's been over three hundred years, and yet I still hear her voice ... and dream of the golden dawn.”
Scootaloo gulped. “Spike?” She gazed forlornly. “Do you know how old I am?”
He squinted at her, rearing his crested neck back in thought. “If my memory still serves me right, you had to have been eight years old at the time of the Cataclysm. And at your chronological level, it has been twenty-five and a half Equestrian revolutions since the end of ponies. So that makes you--”
“Thirty-Three,” Scootaloo exhaled. She blinked as the words left her in a misty sigh. “I am thirty-three years of age.” Her voice wilted as she avoided the gaze of the clockfaces. “I-I remember when I was a little foal, and Apple Bloom's teacher—Ms. Cheerilee—told us how old she was: 'Thirty-Three'. And I thought to myself how... how strange it must be—to be over three times as old as I was, to be three decades old, to be an adult.” She glanced at the many chips and dents in her hooves. “And here I am—and those years have vanished in an utter bl-blink...” She gulped, blushed, and gazed apologetically at the purple dragon looming before her. “I-I'm sorry, Spike. I know th-that can't possibly compare to three hundred years.”
“You would be surprised, child,” he nodded at her. “Centuries all blink the same.”
A dizziness slowly wafted up to the center of Scootaloo's adult head. Between Spike's monologues and the spinning hands on the clockfaces, she suddenly found herself encumbered with an awkward nasuea. She murmured something unintelligibly and got up onto her wobbling legs—still wincing from the bandaged wound on her left side. “Gotta t-touch the ground... Feel like I'm in a cyclone--”
“Allow me, old friend,” Spike said and lifted the very tip of his massive tail over to give her something to lean on. She graciously accepted his help and hobbled down onto the ground like a shivering, newborn foal. Gathering her senses, she breathed a bit steadier and shuffled across the underground laboratory full of jars, spinning globes, and crystal balls.
“Fuuu... Hrmmm...” She swallowed her nervousness away and forced herself into taking a severe interest in the sights of the place. “Well—At least your long life explains the décor. I've never seen things built so intricately...”
“I said that I imprisoned myself inside a mountain and banged my head against time travel formulas,” Spike smiled. “I never said I gave up on hobbies.”
“And you obviously never gave up your craving for gemstones,” she briefly smiled at him.
“Guilty as charged, Scootaloo,” he placed a clawed hand over his chest and smirked through a brief curtain of fumes. “You've done rather well for yourself, if I may say so. I take it that your appreciation for my equipment comes from an engineer's standpoint?”
“Heh,” she chuckled briefly at him while gazing at an elaborate set of sparkling tesla coils. “What gave it away? My gear?”
“Weren't you always something of a tinkerer?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “I was?”
“Don't attempt to trick draconian memory, child. I remember you being quite the inventive sort—What with your scooter and ziplining and other random bits of improvisational transporation.”
“Mmm—I dabbled when I was a little filly,” she stated, bravely unphased at the implications of her own words. “But honestly, Spike—What I've become since then has merely been a result of trying to stay alive in all the madness.”
“Which your talents aided you in, no doubt.”
“Yeah, well...,” she grunted and took a weathered look at her ever-blank flank. “My talents have a funny way of being facetious.”
“A curiosity that—even until this day...,” Spike murmured while scratching his green chin crest with a pair of claws. “...—you never got your imprint.”
“You said it yourself, Spike,” she muttered as she ducked under a revolving brass planet with twin clack-a-clacking moons in orbit of it. “There was a blight on the magical essence of ponies everywhere when the Cataclysm hit. Whatever mystical force gave us cutie marks was very likely cut off at the head.” She sighed, “What's the point in getting a cutie mark when all this is as good as it gets?”
“Perhaps it's because I was born a dragon, but I always felt that ponies allowed their sense of self-importance to hinge far too predominantly on the possession of a cutie mark.”
“Yeah, well,” she chuckled. “Gilda would say the same.”
Spike raised a scaled eyecrest at that. “That irascible griffon is still alive?”
“Yup,” she muttered and gazed at her reflection in a crystal ball. “As alive as she will ever be. Why?—Does that news thrill you?”
“To be perfectly frank, not entirely.”
“Snkkkkt-Hahahahaha...” Scootaloo broke out in a fit of giggles.
Spike smirked. “Now there's a pure sign of magic in the bloodline of ponydom if ever there was one.”
“Eheheh—Ahem. Wh-What was that?”
“You laughed.”
“Why not? Life is absurd.”
“Keep up that attitude, old friend, and you'll never get your cutie mark.”
“A worry of the past, Spike,” Scootaloo droned as she passed a chemistry set and several jars of ingredients. “Unless you wanna reverse-time us to the past and brand me with an iron in the shape of a broken heart.”
“The least of my concerns at the moment, I assure you.”
“That makes me feel much better,” she added in a monotone voice, as her mesmerized gaze was caught within the sight of something. She drifted towards what turned out to be a meter-high hourglass suspended in the center of the laboratory. Inside the top and bottom glass cases of the thing a bizarre phenomenon was transpiring. At one moment, there was a brilliant plume of violet-blue flowers in the bottom glass. Then, in a blink, the flowers withered and faded to ash—while an identical pile of ashes in the top glass coalesced oppositely into another bouquet of violet flowers. Another beat, and the top bouquet would wither into dead matter as the ashes in the bottom half of the hourglass grew back at fast-forward. This revolution would proceed infinitely, with opposite jars of the hourglass possessing interchangeably dying and growing flowers in a timely crafted cycle.
“Do you like what you see?” Spike was suddenly standing above and behind her on his haunches.
She jumped slightly, locking a trembling gaze on the hourglass'd cycle. “I'd pay a hundred thousand bits to understand it before I even contemplated freaking out.”
He smiled. “I melted the glass out of Green Flame—the two halves at alternating frequencies. The result is that both are balanced in a flux of time and reverse-time, acting off each other like opposite swings of a pendulum.” The dragon pointed astutely with a glistening claw. “The flowers in each jar are experiencing quantum shifts in time—forward and reverse—kept in flux by the equal energy of its sibling. I could never have possibly conceived of manufacturing this thing when I first set upon my experimentations. But by the sixth occasion that I rode reverse-time back to the Cataclysm, I felt it was appropriate to artistically express just how far I had come along in my research. I frankly never expected to show it to anyone.” A warm smile. “But then you came along.”
She briefly smiled back—her eyes still locked on the immortal back-and-forth of the flowers and ashes before her. “They're... Th-They're beautiful, Spike. Uhm...” She bit her lip ashamedly. “What are they? The flowers, that is...”
“Lavenders,” Spike said. “Very fragrant—As sweet smelling as they are for gazing at.”
“How on Earth did you stumble upon them?”
“At the end of one of my trips back, I ventured out into the wastelands and found a single patch of ground that hadn't been burned to a crisp. I salvaged the flowers before they could be consumed by the inevitable blight that would blanket the landscape.”
“Guess it helps to be a time traveler...”
“Mmm. To an extent.”
“Why lavenders?”
“Oh...,” The immense dragon's jaws curved into a gentle, iron smile. “They were the favorite of one delightful pony I knew—She was the most resplendent and elegant unicorn in all of Equestria—a filly who set this young whelp's heart a'flutter, long-long ago.” His aged eyeslits narrowed on the dying-and-sprouting twin bouquets as they cast a faded blue hue across his scales. “Having them here, in limbo like this, means that I can appreciate them forever, as I still will appreciate her forever. And, one day, when I am long gone—my ashes will dissolve, but these flowers will outlast me, and perhaps her memory will in turn.”
Something long neglected inside the mare's iron-wrought heart fractured briefly, and she let forth a bursting sigh. Making up for it, she smiled bravely up at him and murmured in a wavering voice: “I am most certain she would appreciate that, Spike.”
“Hmmm—She was always an avid appraiser of all things beautiful.” A long breath, and he smirked down towards her. “And she would thrash you within an inch of your life for so savagely curtailing your own gifts, child!”
“What?—OH,” she half-giggled and brought a hoof up, rubbing it over the harsh violet stubble that made up her shaved mane. “You mean this. A very long time ago, I learned that having a beautiful mane was pointless in the Wastes. To be honest, I was always something of a tomcolt—I didn't care much for doing my hair up like Sweetie Bell or Silver Spoon or the other girls my age. But I learned quickly that monsters smelled me easily by the scent on my hair—And my mane did a much better job being woven into insulating materials and rags and—well—anything you can imagine, I-I guess. There h-haven't been many frickin' beauty pageants since the Cataclysm, and besides—I don't really have..h-have much use in mirrors.” She took a deep breath, gulped, and smiled up at Spike—but her smile was buckling, and her eyes were turning into moist concave pools as she tried in vain to outstare him. The mare ultimately failed, allowing her face to fall in a convulsing sob.
The dragon lovingly drifted in and scooped her gently in a strong arm, weathering her helpless cries as she leaned her weight against his thigh. She covered her face with a hoof and gnashed her teeth, twitching involuntarily as the waves of misery buckled savagely through her. After several minutes of shuddering, she finally rediscovered the strength to speak:
“I-I'm so sorry, Sp-Spike. You've done so much for m-me, and I-I st-still can't believe that y-you're even here...”
“It's quite alright, Scootaloo--”
“No, it's not alright!” She hiccuped and hyperventilated. “I've been s-so alone for so long, and wh-what have I-I got to show for it? I'm a p-pathetic crybaby. I'm b-better than this! I know I am...!”
“It isn't easy being strong when there isn't anyone else left to be stronger than, child,” he said as he gently stroked her violet-stubbled neck. “Trust me, I know. You have to invent your own scale of courage and tenacity. We're both sides of a horrible coin that fate flipped, Scootaloo. But we're also a miracle—if you could extend that metaphor to confirm that the coin hasn't landed on either face, but impossibly ended up on its side.” He winked and smiled. “If survivors are crybabies, then so be it. It means they still have a heart to give merit to the miracle of their continued existence.”
“It's j-just so unfair...” She murmured, sniffling. “Why'd this have to happen to us? Why were so many destroyed—But the two of us remained? Certainly you with all of your reverse-time wackiness can at least make an educated guess ...?”
“And then it would only be a guess,” he said. “Believe me, Scootaloo—What troubles you is a mystery that I too wish to resolve. And I belive that the time for that is at hand.”
She shuddered as a painful wave of thought flowed through her and manifested out her mouth: “Just answer me one q-question, Spike...”
“Ask away.”
“In all of your multiple jumps back in time to the moment after the Cataclysm—In all of those years spent living and re-living in the heart of the mountains beneath Canterlot—You had to have been aware of my existence in Equestria.”
“It eventually dawned on me, yes,” he nodded. “I knew that you were fated to arrive at Ponyville today. By the end of my eighth revolution, I planned to be here in time for our paths to meet.” He took a deep breath, expecting what was to come next.
She did too: “Why d-did you wait until now to meet with me?” She asked, her eyes suddenly like twin scarlet daggers that surged heatedly through her brimming tears. “Why did you leave me alone all of those years?”
“Aside from knowing that you wouldn't die during the interim?”
“Yes.”
“Because I knew that if I brought this upon the last pony twenty-five years ago—Whoever she may have been—She would not have been ready for what lies ahead.”
“I-I don't understand,” she sniffled and stared at him with a quivering mouth. “Bring what upon me?”
He stared steadily at her. “Have you yet wondered how it is that I cannot myself travel further than the one point in the past when the Cataclysm happened...” His eyeslits narrowed. “...and yet I just sent you to Cheerilee's schoolhouse on a beautiful crisp morning in Equestria, twenty-five years ago?”
She gazed breathlessly at him. In the midst of her numbed heart and mind, she hadn't taken the briefest of seconds to contemplate that. “Spike, are you meaning to say--?”
“I found a way, Scootaloo,” he smiled. “I found a solution to breaching the wall brought upon by the magical schism of the Cataclysm. But where I fail to be the pilot of such a time jump—Somepony like you can succeed. If you were any younger, your soul wouldn't have survived the trip. And even if it did—That would not have been a pony equipped with the means to potentially pursue what comes next.”
“...and that is?”
“A chance—the one chance in history—to make a tragedy into a triumph, Scootaloo.” He took a deep breath and gazed proudly down at her. “Don't you see? All this time I had myself locked away in mountains, trying to figure out the universe—and the answer all along has been you. You're the solution Equestria needs. And now—with my three centuries of planning and your quarter-century of growing, we can both come to the center of the hourglass and make poetry out of this limbo. But only if you're willing.”
“I... I don't even know what you're asking me to do.”
“I will tell you, but on one condition,” Spike leaned his head to the side. “If you would do me the honor of sharing with me just what happened in those twenty-five years.”
She blinked confusedly, wiping the tears away. “And j-just what would that accomplish?”
“What else?” He grinned warmly. “It would let me catch up with an old friend.”
Hours later, Scootaloo perched on the one remaining balcony precariously hanging atop an outstretched branch of Twilight Sparkle's former treehouse. Her front hooves dangled with a youthful playfulness as she motioned with her snout towards the hovering sight of the Harmony, which she had tethered to the top of the tree thirty minutes ago for the purple dragon to see with his naked green eyeslits. The mist of Ponyville hung gently around them like fog off of a morning snowbank before an upcoming Winter Wrap-up. The air was briefly bereft of the usual morose gloom brought upon by the gray twilight above. Two friends gathered, warmed by each other's voices, as the grave village bowed to their gentle shadows.
“She's powered by steam—With a boiler lit with gold flame. Every twenty storm fronts or so, I have to restock on the burning energy source, but for the most part the vessel's pretty self-sustaining. There's an auxiliary compartment built into the upper hollows of the dirigible that can levitate the ship on hot-air alone, if the need presents itself. The propellers are—duh—for propulsion, and they're built out of Cloudsdalian bronze just like the rest of the bulkheads. The lateral rudders control the climbing or descending. The exterior shell is insulated and non-conductive, which is nice for when I might end up navigating a lightning storm. I have four built-in generators for housing electrical power—mostly for interior lighting, a loudspeaker system, and generating energy for when I'm runecrafting.”
“So you are dabbling in runecrafting!” Spike beamed. “When I first sensed your magical aura from across Equestria, I almost thought that you were a unicorn.”
“Oh, half of the frickin' ship runs off of runecrafting! I have several devices keyed in by runestones that respond only to my voice--”
“Spoken in the ancient Lunar Tongue, no doubt.”
“Y-Yeah. Moonwhinny. How did you know?”
“I researched more than just time in my days, girl.”
“Well, I've done a lot of research myself,” she nodded. “It's amazing what you can find from the most hidden libraries in Equestria. I used to think that since Ponyville rested in the shadow of Canterlot, that this side of the kingdom would be the only place with anything remotely worth reading. But I was wrong—I've found useful ancient tomes in places as far away as Stalliongrad and Chicacolt. Half of my knowledge of runescaping comes from the Grand Torontrot Library.”
“I'm rather flabbergasted, girl. The Scootaloo I remembered was more fond of doing somersaults and bungie jumping than becoming a bookworm—or employing what she's learned from it to boot!”
“Yeah, well—I may not have had three hundred years to get to where I am now, but a filly's gotta make do,” she shrugged, gazing down past her dangling hooves as the shadow of the Harmony hung over her. “Imagine my 'surprise' when the Wasteland had a lot less ramps to jump a scooter over and a lot more trolls to fly away from.” She snickered briefly to herself. “It wasn't enough that I had to teach myself how to fly—But when I finally built my aircraft and really took to the air, I had no idea that so many other creatures of this world were doing the same—From griffons to goblins to frickin' Diamond Dogs. Can you believe it?—They call themselves 'Dirigible Dogs' and try to keep a straight face. Heh...they could kiss my butt. My only alternative was to build my zeppelin better. I added to it—enchanted it with runestones, added a hangar level so that I could have a portable laboratory with me, began crafting rifles and weapons and leather reinforced armor—The works. For a while there, it felt like the only reason I lived was to arm myself even further to the teeth. Then, one day, I realized nobody was outright threatening to me anymore—because I had gone too insanely far. The Harmony had pretty much become a battleship, and an intimidating one at that. It was around that time that I realized I was here to stay; I had become the very same scary cloudskipper that I first worked so hard to defend myself against.”
“It still intrigues me—That name.”
“What--'Harmony'?”
“Yes, girl. Any specific gravity to the title that you haven't told me about?”
Scootaloo paused; she stared at the black branches of the late Twilight's treehouse, the snow falling on them, the creaking chain that tethered the wholesomely named airship to them. She blinked—and for a brief moment saw Rainbow Dash's smiling face from behind black bars, heard her voice murmuring something, three syllables.
“Nothing special,” she muttered. “J-Just something that... that I didn't quite yet understand when I was a filly. I was trying to hammer things together and turn them into tools in a land without grownups, much less a solid prospect for 'tomorrow'. I needed food, light, fire, and weapons. But more than anything, I needed hope. I guess that's where the name fit in—I dunno.”
“I think I do,” Spike smiled. “Do you realize what the word 'Harmony' meant before the Cataclysm--?”
“Does it matter?” Scootaloo suddenly snapped, frowning at him.
Spike squinted at her. He was silent.
She sighed, rubbing a hoof over her shaved mane. “Nnngh—S-Sorry, Spike. I'm just remembering things that I thought were long forgotten.” She paused briefly, then blinked at him. “Rainbow Dash was the last pony I saw alive before everything went to heck...”
“You don't say?”
“She saved my life. If it wasn't for her, I would have perished along with all of Clousdale,” she murmured into the falling ash around them. “For all I know—she's the sole reason I'm still around today. She's the reason that I...” Her voice trailed off. She bit her lip, swallowed hard, and looked at her reunited dragon companion. “It is true, isn't it, Spike?”
“What's true, child?”
“Just so that we're clear—I mean, you obviously know a lot with all of your years stacked up on one another—And I want to sound like a stupid idiot for as briefly as possible.” She breathed deeply and let it out: “But I am the last of my kind, right? You've never... n-never come upon another pony in all of your days--?” She didn't need to finish the last sentence.
Spike was already shaking his head, his violet pendant swaying. “You rightly knew what you were before I ever did, Scootaloo. If that was not the case, and there was a multitude of survivors on the ravaged face of Equestria—I would have done everything in my power to bring you all together as soon as possible. No lonely fate is worth spending separately--”
“--unless those fates were separated permanently to begin with,” she nodded with a bitter, knowing smile. “Separated by extinction. I'm beginning to understand why I had to be alone for so long. Any other lifestyle, and I wouldn't have been strong enough to face this awful truth.”
Spike's green crests deflated with his ensuing sigh. “I am sorry, Scootaloo. I wish things had been different; that you weren't the last specimen of such a noble race.”
“Don't I know the half of it?” She chuckled and flicked a few flakes of snow off the rickety surface of the crumbling balcony. “You wouldn't believe what I've been doing all this time—All the hours and days I spent working to scrape bits out of the wallets of nefarious sky creatures, just to put together the funds I needed to fire up this silly little beacon of mine—It was absurd then and it's doubly so in hindsight. Amazing how much a single blinking day in the twilight can change your whole outlook on life.”
“Beacon...?” Spike squinted curiously.
“Yeah—Uh, powered by glass lenses, multicolored gems, and a really rare thing called a 'flamestone'—probably a spicy treat for you. Every few stormfronts, I would fly to the east and regularly shine a--”
“The rainbow beacon?” Spike smiled broadly. “The one that shines from the Eastern Heights every fifty stormfronts?”
Scootaloo gazed at him, cockeyed. “That's a noble description coming from a frickin' time-lizard stuck in the heart of a mountain!”
“But you forget—I only traveled through reverse-time on eight occasions. Since then, I've been living in the surface world—Waiting for today.” The dragon pointed with a smile. “I always thought that beacon may have been yours. It warms my heart to realize I was right about my assumption.”
“Heh...,” Scootaloo rolled over and rested with her upper hooves behind her neck and her lower legs propped up playfully. “I made the dang thing to attract 'surviving ponies'. All I ever got was a few raccoons, a bunch of trolls, and an empty wallet every so often. I never thought I'd attract dragons.”
“And if I did suddenly descend from the snowy clouds to greet you at the signal...?”
“Right, I'd probably go 'Oh hey, a motherfluffin' dragon' and hop straight to the Harmony's harpoon gun.”
“You have a harpoon gun?”
“No—But I would have the first second after realizing that I'd have to do horse-tango with the likes of you,” she chuckled briefly to herself, sighed, then murmured: “It was for the best that I met you here, Spike. Even as crazily as I reacted, you wouldn't have had a hope of reaching through to me anywhere else.” Her face tensed up into an iron frown as she gazed across the gray skies. “It's frightening how heartless this world has made me. I never expected for a second that I might have friends left.”
“But you thought that you might have kin,” Spike pointed out. “I think there could be no stronger gesture from the heart than to build that symbol. Especially since...”
She raised an eyebrow and peaked up at him. “Since what?”
“A rainbow symbol, Scootaloo??” He smiled. “Unless you truly grasp the ironic significance of 'Harmony', I can only think of one reason why you chose that.”
“Care to enlighten me?”
“A source of inspiration, perhaps?”
“Yeah, whatever,” the surviving pegasus waved a hoof and gazed back at the gray sky. “None of that matters anymore.”
“Doesn't it?”
“Why should it? Our paths have crossed, you've got your reverse-time green flame thingy, and you've got a flesh-and-blood pony. So...it's just a matter of moments before you enlist me in your little escapade.”
“And what 'escapade' is that, Scootaloo?”
“You think I'm a dunce?” She cackled and grinned wildly at him. “Is that why you keep calling me 'child'? Cuz I'm three hundred and twenty-something years younger than you?” She half-raspberried. “You're gonna tell me that you wish to send me back in time to where you can't go so that we can stop all of this horrible Cataclysm stuff from happening and then all live happily ever after! And as ridiculously crazy as that idea is, I can't believe how—I dunno—bubbly it's making me feel! I can just about forgive you for never hunting me down earlier than today, Spike. Especially when it's all so simple!” She chuckled drunkenly into the air on a brief cloud of mania.
But Spike was gravely silent...
Scootaloo's ears pricked in the coldly mute air. “Spike?” Quiet. “Spike—It...It is that simple, isn't it?” Ash and snow. “Sp-Spike...?” She sat up and squatted on all fours, blinking her violet eyes deflatedly his way.
He stared at her with dim green eyeslits. His snout shook from side to side. “No,” he breathed. “No, Scootaloo—It is not that simple.”
“But...” Her chest palpitated with a visible pulse from deep within. She struggled up into a standing position, trembling. “Y-You said...You said you found a solution! You can't send yourself back in time past the Cataclysm—but you can send a pony! You can send me! Y-You said that earlier in the laboratory, right?”
“I know what I said, Scootaloo--”
“Then do you awfully mind repeating it so that I'll have a friggin' clue whether to bite your scales off or not?!” She snarled, her brown coat writhing in the cold mist.
“I think we should go for a walk--”
“I'm fine standing right here!” She barked.
“Scootaloo,” his smile gently returned. “If there's anything you will learn from what I'm about to tell you, it's that the only thing we have available to us in abundance is time. I suggest we use it well.” That uttered, he spread his wings and offered his backside to the edge of the wooden plank she was on.
She took a few fuming breaths, calmed herself briefly, and dropped down until her bandaged form balanced itself onto the square of his back. She held on gently as his large body sauntered across the ruined hovels of Ponyville, drowning the two in a panorama of ghostly memories as he walked and talked with her:
“I told you before that time is like an ocean. It flows and surges as the sum of its polynumerous droplet parts; it has cohesion. But, as mind-numbingly vast as that ocean is, it too has its limits. When part of that ocean is evaporated—it does not vanish, but rather it transforms into a different form of energy, much like the energy that I utilize when I propel myself backwards through reverse-time. There is a reason for this necessary conservation--”
“Is it to make my head spin?” Scootaloo droned from his backside.
Spike chuckled. “No, old friend. What I am attempting to convey is that time is immutable. We may be able to surf its currents, but we cannot rightly expect to redirect the imprints that time's hands have divinely carved.”
“You speak as if time is a living thing that refuses us to dabble in its job.”
“And could that be far from the truth? Hmm?” Spike bobbed his head up in a gesture as he traversed the rows of hollowed-out houses. “Tell me, Scootaloo, with the knowledge from your years of reading—Who are the Six Holy Sisters?”
“Seriously? You want me to recite that kindergarten lesson?”
“Humor me, if you would.”
The brown-coated mare sighed long and hard before moaning dully into the ashen air, “The Six Holy Sisters—as everypony knows—are the divine alicorn daughters of the Goddess Epona, who ascended to the stars in the Cosmic Exodus which brought about the end of the First Age.”
“And who were these alicorns specifically...?”
Scootaloo groaned. She laid herself down atop Spike's bobbing shoulders and monotonously went on: “The Goddesses of Revolution: Princess Celestia and Princess Luna—stayed on earth to oversee the rising of the Sun and Moon over the land of Equestria. The other Four Sisters would leave halfway through the Second Age much like their Cosmic Mother Queen Epona, though their essences remained in the physical world. The first two were the Goddesses of Elements: Princess Elektra, the Goddess of the Land, and Princess Nebula, the Goddess of the Firmaments. The other two were the Goddesses of Law: Princess Gultophine, the Goddess of Life...”
“And who else...?”
The last pony made a face, but surrendered with a muttering voice: “Princess Entropa, the Goddess of Time.”
“So not only is time an immutable law—But it's a governed law! And if I may boldly state the obvious, old friend—You and I are but mere mortals living upon the currents of energy that have been architecturally produced by divine beings far grander than us, long ago, before cataclysms even existed to give birth to or even take away life.”
“That doesn't mean we should resort to a cop-out!” Scootaloo frowned, almost pounding his draconian skull with a shaking hoof. “So maybe time was something looked after by Princess Entropa much like the Sun was the responsibility of Princess Celestia! Since when has that made things set in stone? Princess Luna was in charge of raising the Moon—and she went on a jealous rampage so that her sister had to take the reins herself over a thousand years! And don't get me started on Princess Entropa! She and her three sisters split for the cosmos much like their mother did--”
“--and later aided in Princess Luna's release, bringing things full circle,” Spike smiled back at her as he traversed a ring of demolished apartment buildings. “You can take the Goddess from her element, but you cannot take the element from the hooves of its Goddess. The only way to separate the two would be to end the two—in death.”
Scootaloo exhaled gloomily. “Like how Princess Celestia and Princess Luna died...”
“...and the Sun and Moon perished with them,” Spike nodded. A somber, fuming breath: “Alas, we live in a world of endless twilight, the bitter result of the shadows of two dead Goddesses blanketing this landscape forever. But Entropa—no, she is alive. She may be in exodus like Queen Epona, but she is very much a presence in this universe. Could you imagine a reality where time didn't exist?”
“N-Not really, no.”
“Well, thankfully, you and I do not have to,” he smirked. “For Entropa's essence prevails, and we have her to thank for the persistence of time. But we also must deign to respect her lawful reign over time—in all of its cohesion.”
“Why couldn't Entropa see what happened to her two sisters...?” Scootaloo depressingly thought aloud, gesturing towards the dead twilight above with a random hoof. “Why couldn't she make an exception this one time and undo what time has done to the whole of Equestria—to its legacy?”
“A good question—But you make it sound almost as if time itself is to blame,” Spike said, stopping suddenly in his tracks. His wings folded on either side of him as he motioned with his snout. “Look, Scootaloo. Do you see where we are...?”
Scootaloo crawled up to her hooves and trotted a few meters along his neck. As soon as her vision rounded the green crests of his skull, she froze. The mare saw before the two of them an array of dull white stones splotched across a thick black mound of earth in the center of Ponyville. For all of the cataclysmic horrors that shook the terrain of her home, she was almost as amazed as she was heart-broken to be presently staring at a remarkably well-preserved cemetery, a place that she rarely ventured to in her foalish years.
“There's always been death in Equestria,” she murmured educatedly into the misty air. “I think I see where you're going with this, Spike. Why didn't Entropa intervene on their behalf?”
“Perhaps because it was Gultophine's job to monitor the passing of souls into the great beyond,” Spike somberly nodded. “Or perhaps because Entropa—as a Goddess of Law—necessitated being a princess of neutrality. Whatever the case, our mutual need to question her reasoning only highlights our mortal nature. Earth ponies gifted in the knowledge of medicine and unicorns employing various talents in mysticism have struggled for millennia to construct countermeasures for death, but they could never in any fashion prevent it. Otherwise, all of these stones here would have been replaced with immortals to this very day.” He turned and gazed over his shoulder at Scootaloo with dim green eyeslits. “Similarly have I—in three hundred years of optimistic searching—attempted to find a way to change the sway of time. And like so many other Equestrian physicians before me, I have failed.”
Scootaloo's eyes glazed over the sea of ivory stones. “Because time is immutable...”
“Like an ocean that you can penetrate, but never replace.”
She squinted at him. “But would it ever hurt to try, Spike? What's the harm in experimenting with altering the timeline?”
He chuckled suddenly, breaking the somber air above the nearby graveyard. “You say that under the presumption that I haven't tried, child!”
She blinked confusedly at him.
He motioned with his head, lumbered around, and strolled liquidly away from the sacred stones. “Long ago, I was in the same mindset as you. I very strongly desired to change the past. As you well know, it was the sole basis of my chronological experimentations that led me to discover Reverse-Time to begin with. But by the sixth time that I traveled back to the day after the Cataclysm, my mathematical formulas were teaching me a truth that I suddenly refused to accept: The past would always stay the past, even if I was able to breach the wall separating me from going back to before the day when Equestria died. I was furious—almost driven insane in despondence—I had to have proof that all of my experimentations was for nothing! I was a scientist, after all. I could never completely separate myself from the young faithful lab assistant that Twilight Sparkle had once trained me to be.”
“Wh-What did you do...?” Scootaloo asked, blinking inquisitively.
“I decided to break a sacred oath that I had made to myself—an oath that I thought maintained the safety and untainted nature of my time jumps.” He turned to glance at her as he passed under a few petrified trees. “You remember how I told you that I moved to a different part of the Eastern Mountains after each jump in order to avoid my 'past' self?” After witnessing her nod, he faced forward and continued: “Well, I decided after my sixth ride on reverse-time that I would go and infiltrate the location of where I was to be after my second trip back. But instead of going to face my past self directly, I embarked upon a sightly subtler form of interaction—If you could call sabotage 'subtle'. I always kept notes of what I did and when I did them, and looking at my journals I discovered a date when my past self scavenged for a large supply of Canterlotlian gemstones within the lower spire of the Eastern Mountains.
“I had my lonely self locked away in those mountain caves for ages, Scootaloo. I needed something to eat. According to my journal, I had stumbled upon a rather large deposit of gemstones that provided me sustenance for nearly a decade to follow. So my later self decided to be a trouble-maker; and on the day prior to the excavation, I went in there and ripped out the entire gemstone desposit in a matter of hours, leaving the entire site a virtual hollow hole in the mountain, devoid of any dragon food whatsoever. I took the gemstones that I stole from my past self to my new niche in the mountains and recorded any information that I could find as evidence that my very own history had been tampered with.
“But nothing happened. I was still my healthy self. There was no indication that anything about my life and state of being had changed. Looking back at the whole 'experiment', I must admit it's all so terribly silly. Just what did I expect to happen? Would my wings suddenly droop because my past self had been magically robbed of nourishment a relative century prior to that moment? Would the journals in my possession that led me to the 'sabotage' suddenly vanish because I would never have had a reason to chronicle the finding of the gemstones in the past? Or—even more preposterous—would I suddenly blink into nothingness because of the inherent paradox that I had placed myself into?
“Being a scientist, I realized that I was exercising an absurd practice. Even if there was a result to study, there would be no point in waiting for it to transpire, because all of the experimentation had been in the past. Anything observational would have to be in the here and now. So, enraged with an undying curiosity, I bravely revisited the hollow cave where I had gone a week previous to 'sabotage' my past self's food supply. And would you believe what I found? The cavern had been refilled with gemstones. I kid you not—There were twice as many edible rocks this time, as if some divine hand had magically replaced all of the gemstones that I robbed from my past self and then doubled them just to toy with me. Everything was just as my past self observed it to be, written it to be, and—of course—deliciously benefited from. I even briefly observed my past self from afar—and indeed, my experiences had been unaltered. On top of that, I had no memories of anything having gone awry with the food I collected way back when.
“So, what was the answer? Was this all some form of divine intervention on behalf of Princess Entropa—punishing me for attempting to manipulate the immutability of her essence? In some fashion, you could potentially interpret that to be the case—But the truth was far subtler and more poetic. Upon closer observation, I realized that the gemstones I had excavated from the hollow in the mountain were all acting as one massive support strut for an even larger deposit of rubies in a cavern located directly above it. When I went back in time and robbed all of the scrumptious gemstones from my past self, the structural integrity of the upper cavern failed—and three times as many gemstones fell to take the place of what I had pilfered. It turns out that that was the immense supply of rocks that I discovered and wrote in my journal about after my second ride on Reverse-Time. So, in spite of all my work, time itself maintained that the same order of events happened, and in some bizarre way—my future self actually helped my past self in the process, rather than harmed him.”
“That's remarkable, Spike,” Scootaloo nodded, slightly mesmerized, but a trademark frown blemished her features, suspiciously. “But it was only one experiment. You could just chalk it up to freak circumstances--”
“Which is why, like a good scientist, I attempted on more occasions to 'sabotage' my past self,” he nodded his scaled head. “Here and there—weaving my way around my various past selves—I tried many things to interfere with my previous experiments, my previous constructions, and my previous means of self-preservation. And every time—every single of the many dozens of times—the ritualistic throes of cause and effect undermined every task I did, while at the same time miraculously possessing them—so as to maintain the flow of my past into my present, with my self and memories completely unaltered.”
“Then did you ever—I dunno...,” she hissed in frustration, “...try to actually meet up and talk with your past self?”
“Yes,” he smirked at her. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
She blinked, her eyes twitching as if something broke in her brain. “And...erhm...how did that go???”
“Exactly as I expected.”
“What do you mean 'as you expected'?”
He chuckled. “Meaning, old friend, that after my seventh Reverse-Time trip, I went back to visit my past self from after the sixth. And it was a very boring conversation.” He winked. “Because I remembered everything that was said and responded to, verbatim. I kid you not.” He smiled and fumed into the snowy air. “Trust me, you've never lived until you've played a game of hide-and-seek with yourself.”
“That...,” she blinked, hissed, and rubbed her skull painfully. “...that is so hard to imagine. Wh-What if—like—you poked the eye out of your past self?”
“Oh, I could never do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I never did that,” Spike remarked. “Not for lack of trying, mind you. My past self had already conceived of any such notion, quite frankly—And my present self was more than aware of that and his own misgivings. That's the funny thing about time-travel; a paradox is a paradox, even when it's staring you straight in the snout—in that it's not staring you straight in the snout, because for it to happen—It could never happen, thus the paradox.”
“Unnnnghhh...,” Scootaloo dug her face into Spike's scales and lightly banged her head with her hooves.
“What I calculated, what I tested, and what I experienced, Scootaloo, is something that can be explained, but never shared. Not directly, at least. But, suffice it to say, it laid in concrete a truth that I could no longer deny. The past can be visited, it can be witnessed, and it can even be supported—But no, child, it cannot be changed. What dies must remain dead. What lives must remain living. It has been that way since the twilight years before the First Age, in the blossoming days of creation, when all that was One split into the forces of Harmony and Discord, and everything has remained necessarily dichotomous since.”
“It's just so... so unfair,” the brown-haired mare murmured. Spike brought the two of them into the skeletal hovel of an old garden behind a hollowed-out restaurant. He let her down as she trotted forlornly past a cluster of large mushrooms and gazed into a statue of merry foals frozen in mid-gallop. “Why would you be granted the ability to move back and forth in time when you can't even make a difference from it?”
“Why do things live to dream and desire—But only to have death as their ultimate fate?” Spike socratically replied. “These are the tests of mortals—We can only question them as we live them.”
“Like I said,” she sighed and squatted down onto a marble bench partially overrun with vines. “It's unfair...”
“An apt description. But if I know you, Scootaloo—You're the last pony on Earth to let an unfair life bog you down.”
“I... I suppose that is true,” she exhaled with a gentle, bitter smile. “It wasn't just the Cataclysm that taught me how to fend for myself. I was always alone...in some degree or another.” She slumped her chin down on her folded hooves and sighed. “What I wouldn't give to have a taste of what you did, Spike—To talk with my past self, to tell her that the next twenty-odd years in the wasteland would lead to this moment, this numbing blink in the center of this crumbling garden. I think my past self would still fight to survive—But she would be a lot less anxious about it. Now there's a peace that you can't buy, no matter how many bits you scrounge from the Wastelands.”
“You may still yet have that chance, Scootaloo,” Spike spoke gently, squatting his hulking purple self besides her with no less grace. “Howbeit, I promise you—it would have far less grim results.”
“Nnngh...Just what is the point, Spike?” She gazed up at him. “Even if you can send me further in the past than you can send yourself—What would it accomplish? I can't change the past, I can't prevent the Cataclysm—So what's the flippin' use?”
“The use, as you so aptly put it, my little pony, is to observe a world that is long forgotten to you,” he said. “So that you may discover that which is a mystery to you—That is a mystery even to me, in all of my centuries of study and Chronological Speculation.”
“And that is...?”
“You may be able to find out what caused the Cataclysm. And furthermore...you may even be able to bring light back to the Wasteland.”
Her ears and eyebrows perked up at that. She stared up at him in quivering disbelief. “Bring light back?”
“And kiss the perpetual ash and twilight goodbye.”
“Spike, you're pulling my tail,” she frowned. “How in the heck would something like that be feasible?”
“If you go back and open your eyes—You may find out.”
“Even for a scientist, that's a stretch.”
“Is it?” He raised an eyecrest and glanced at her sideways. “We already know that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna are dead. And with their deaths—the Sun and Moon also vanished. What brought about their end had to have been a magical catastrophe of such enormous potential that it slayed the Goddesses at the stems of their very souls. If this wasn't a divine event—something that would have been prophecied in the arcane books available to ponydom, then that means--”
“--It was a spell,” Scootaloo murmured knowingly. Her violet eyes narrowed in thought. “In the tomes that taught me runecrafting, I found that the Lunar Republic had briefly worked on channeling a spell that would bring about the end of Princess Celestia—by cursing her very soul to death. Before Nightmare Moon's army could discover an incantation, the Elements of Harmony imprisoned their leader into the Mare in the Moon. If history hadn't gone that way...”
“--Something akin to the Cataclysm could have happened much sooner,” Spike nodded. “It would have been an entirely different Third Age indeed.” He pointed at the brown mare with his clawed finger. “If you utilized your practiced skills in reading into observation, you could return to the days before the death of Equestria and deduce what it was that jump-started this holocaust. And assuming it was a curse, you and I—here in the present—could feasibly undergo a ritual that would undo the damage that it has done to the Revolution of the Sun and Moon.”
“But...,” Scootaloo gulped and murmured “...even if that did work, Spike—What kind of a world would result? What would become of the Goddesses? What would...” She took a shuddering breath. “...would there even be a ponydom?”
He slowly, gravely shook his head. “No, child. But in such a scenario, we would have painted a gorgeous future for this world, restoring the celestial objects in the sky, bringing back night and day, and doing away with this perpetual nightmare of twilight once and for all.”
“And you and I will die, the last of friends,” Scootaloo breathed numbly. “Unheralded saviors, buried in a beautiful world, with no ponies around to ever know what we've done.”
He gazed deeply at her. “Could you think of any greater epithet—for the magical legacy of Equestria?”
“Could I think of anything greater? Heck yeah, I could,” Scootaloo sighed. “But could I afford it? No. Obviously not,” she ran a hoof over her face, wincing. “Spike, I really don't know what to say—I mean, how would all of this be accomplished? How is it that your green flame can send me back into the past beyond a certain point, but not yourself?”
“In truth, I wasn't entirely certain that it would work until I was suddenly able to transport you back to Cheerilee's schoolyard,” he smiled in a mixture of pride and nervousness. “The Cataclysm severed the magical essence of ponydom when it ripped our world asunder, did it not?”
“So I'm starting to believe, sure.”
“And magic exists because the essences of our souls exist—I know that's a rather plebeian correlation, but do bear with me—My soul has always been the sole conduit of traversing reverse-time, and my green flame has been the fuel for such a trip. But there's a juncture that I cannot pass beyond—and it's the blockade formed from when my soul was jarred by whatever spell or phenomenon ended the lives of Celestia and Luna. I soon realized that if there was anything that I could send back beyond that singular juncture, it would have to be something that resonated with the essences of the ponies' souls that were alive beforehand. I couldn't send myself, I couldn't send physical objects, I couldn't send transcribed messages, but I could possibly be able to send--”
“--a pony,” Scootaloo nodded. “You could send a pony back.”
“Not so much the pony herself—But her soul essence,” he grinned wide. “And to do that, I would have to bind her to the essence of another soul.”
“Like wh-whose soul?” The mare's face contorted nervously.
“The soul of someone who existed only within the limits of my own lifespan,” Spike explained. “The soul of someone whom I was close to, whom I came into contact with, and—most especially—whom I had formed emotional bonds with. As a matter of fact, it is no single soul—But quite a few.”
“Your friends,” Scootaloo's eyes brightened slightly. “You can send me back in the past to the presence of your friends, Spike...?”
“And once your soul-essence has been bound to such a past acquaintance of mine, you would make yourself manifest in the physical, and be restrained to the proximity of that one pony and that one pony alone. You could interact with her, talk to her, make contact with her—But if you so much as left her side, your link to her soul essence would dissolve, and you would return along the current of green flame to the present—You would return back to me.”
“And back to all of this...,” she pointed flippantly towards the gray decay of the Ponyvillean ruins. “...back to reality.”
“The past is no less real than the present, Scootaloo,” he smirked. “As I'm sure you may yet discover.”
“I...,” she shivered with sudden chills and curled deeper into the seat of the marble bench. “I-I don't know, Spike. I mean...it makes sense, in a way. I n-now know what you meant when you said I was the 'solution', but...but...”
“Be as honest as you need to be, child.”
“It's asking a lot, Spike,” she gulped a lump down her throat. “It's asking a lot of me. I mean—So what if I go back to visit Cheerilee? Or Twilight Sparkle? Or Rarity? Or any of the other people you obviously knew? It's just...It's just so much. I don't know if I can handle it—”
“And you do not have to, Scootaloo.”
She frowned at him. “Spike, you've obviously mastered reverse-time. Don't try to pull reverse-psychology on me as well.”
He chuckled. “But I mean it—In all sincerity,” he gestured a clawed hand over his chest. “I have reached the limits of my potential, child. After countless years of repeatedly leaping into the past, of scouring my burning insides for the green flame to make all of this experimentation possible, I have done all I could ever possibly do for Equestria. What I ask of you—What I propose of you is merely humility on my part. You have already done your duty for Equestria, Scootaloo. You have lived. And you have lived mightily.”
“That's an exaggeration if I ever heard one,” she muttered.
“Is it?” He leaned his snout to the side and gazed at her sharply. “You are an intelligent, crafty, responsible, and tender-hearted individual, Scootaloo—Even underneath that rough, shaved exterior, you are everything your race has ever endeared itself through the Ages to be. Do not let two and a half decades of tragedy and pain disguise the legend that you have become. You are not only the end of ponies, but the epitome of them.” A gentle exhale, and his face turned melancholic. “Do I honestly, truly think that sending you back will absolutely grant us the ability to undo the curse that has robbed night-and-day from the wastes of Equestria?” He slowly shook his snout. “No, Scootaloo. I do not. But I do know this—You are the last pony. And before you die—And you will someday die, like all of your friends and kin have done before you—Would any other soul deserve no less a chance to revisit that which gave her breath, that which gave her purpose, that which gave her the memories of hope to become this amazing creature which you so mightily are right now?”
“I can't say, Spike,” her voice choked as she struggled for an answer. “What you're asking of me is to attend a funeral, for which there will never be a eulogy read—Even if I was the one to write it. Because no matter what I do, it all ends with me.”
“Which is why I advise this of you instead--” He stood up on his haunches and paced across the garden. “Leave Ponyville.”
She blinked wildly. “Wh-What?”
“Leave,” he said, gazing softly back at her. “Take off in your splendid airship, spend time inside the womb of Harmony, do what you normally do in the clouds above the wastes—live out your life like you've always lived it out these last two decades. But most of all—Do not return until the end of the next coming stormfront. And then...you may come back to me, and—if you wish and only if you wish—I will send you back to the days before dying, and we can write that eulogy together, Scootaloo.” He grinned warmly. “What do you say...?”
The last pony stared back up at her old friend—at the purple shades of the past standing like a surreal ghost before her. And for the briefest of moments, the snow cleared, and in his emerald eyeslits she saw the reflection of a tiny filly, its violet eyes bright and its pink mane fluttering in a draconian twinkle. Something akin to a foalish smile, and Scootaloo breathed: “I'm liking this idea.”
Several hours later, somewhere in the bubbling gray clouds of the Central Heights, the Harmony vibrated with the wilting chords of Octavia's melancholic strings. The last pony sat at her work bench with her back to the crackling record player. With her hooves entwined in cylindrical tool braces, she proceeded to fix and tinker the battered copper rifle that she had retrieved from the depths of Ponyville's Town Hall. As one cello suite bled beautifully into another, she briefly looked up from her diligent engineering and spotted a blurred mirror hanging from a nob below the shelves where she kept her multicolored gems.
Only the barest upper-left hoof'd corner of the mirror provided a decent reflection. From beyond a rusted fog, a thirty-three year old mare with a brown coat and tired scarlet eyes shyly came out from hiding. She blinked at her weathered self—noticing the lines beneath her eyes, the knicked and bruised skin that flanked her ears. Finally, she tilted her snout to the side and studied her neck, squinting at a thin forest of violet stubble that came out coarsely to kiss the lantern-lit air of the airship's cabin. She ran a tool-braced hoof over the mane, feeling the tiny stalks, briefly imagining them giving birth to a long dead curtain of pink threads wavering gracefully out from her slender form.
But in a final blink, the shadow of Scootaloo disappeared, replaced once more with the last pony, her fine orange coat having bristled into brown ruggedness, her violet eyes having paled to a bitter scarlet—and the rusted air encompassed her like a specimen jar. She sighed, and as Octavia's record began skipping at the end of its instrumental, she hung her head towards her half built weapon and lingered on the images fluttering across her mind.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Journal Entry # 2,352
Today...something happened.
I have been given a chance to do something so fantastical, so mesmerizingly surreal, that to actually think of it risks all of this being some bizarre dream that I'm not entirely sure I want to wake up from yet. What is the last pony to do when she's offered the opportunity to go back and visit an Equestria that existed before all of this desolation? What do I say when I'm propositioned into walking alongside ghosts of the past in a desperate bid to bring light back to this world?
Well, all of these things have been asked of me. I met Spike—I hugged him, I sobbed against him, I held his hand and he held my hoof. Spike—Twilight Sparkle's faithful dragon apprentice—is alive. And what's more, he's three hundred times as old, three hundred times as wise, and three hundred times as big as I ever remembered him. And after regailing me with mystical discoveries too astonishing to comprehend in this Age—much less any of the living epochs previous—I have been gracefully given time to think of what Spike is willing to provide me with a single exhale of green flame. He can send me to the past—I can go back into the past, into the days when the two of us were young creatures who knew nothing of misery—and I could find out how all of this holocaust happened to begin with, so that here—in the gray and dismal present—we might ascertain a way to fix the world, even if we can't breathe life back into it.
So, yes, something happened today.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo grunted and swung the axe in her teeth's grip one last time. With a mighty crunching noise, the two-meter tall mushroom fell down into a flurry of powdery ash. She dropped to her knees to scrape the edible material out of the hollow of the gigantic fungus, when a flurry of tiny insects swarmed over her in a skittering black blanket. Yelping, she fell back and swung her hooves wildly—fighting a legion of shadowy trolls in her mind. A gasp; her eyes opened wide to see once more a harmless forest of gigantic mushrooms waiting to be cut down. The insects had all scattered, and she was once more alone ... forever alone. Sighing, she gazed into the hollow of the fungus, disdainfully observing the colony of paper husks that had long filled the spoiled stalk. With a woeful groan, the pony dragged her axe towards the next fungus, and in the shadow of the tethered Harmony she proceeded to hack away at the next structure.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
All of this, of course, I discovered after nearly dying. Trolls—hundreds of them sprung an ambush on me the soonest I stepped hoof into the Town Hall of Ponyville, adding a gruesome punctuation to my long belated return to my place of foaling. I never asked Spike if he was the one responsible for the sightings of the green flame that brought me there in the first place. I had a lot a questions for him which—though he answered—still fester in my mind. Like: did he really need to wait all this time before making contact with me? Did he truly suspect from the start that I was the key to sending an observing eye back into the past beyond the Cataclysm? Did he ever give up hope, when the rest of the wasteland—the monsters that survived the disaster—all hated his guts?
Okay, so I didn't ask him that last question. I know I want to now, but that's not what's important. What's important is whether or not I want to take him up on his offer. The best it could do is end the twilight that hangs above the lengths and widths of Equestria. The worst it can do—is probably the only thing it can do—and that's reopen so many festering wounds hiding deep underneath my coat that I shudder to even contemplate them.
What would it be like to see Twilight Sparkle again? Or Apple Jack? Or Sweetie Belle or Apple Bloom or ... Rainbow Dash ...
In the days after ponies died, I've had my life saved twice Once by Rainbow, and a second time just now by Spike—as he royally trashed the trolls that had ambushed me in Ponyville. In many ways, my whole life—twenty-five years in the Wastes, so I've discovered—has been one gigantic service to the one blue pegasus who saved me, the one pony I have always believed in, and in some ways still do. Does this mean that I owe Spike all the same? I know he obviously doesn't mean to obligate me in such a manner—But how far is he willing to go compared to how far I am able to go? Assuming, of course, I am going anywhere at all.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
One day, Scootaloo tore her way through a splintering door. She pierced the center of an abandoned apartment complex along the downtown stretch of Whinniepeg. As gray filtered light seeped in through the mildew'd windows, she spotted several equine corpses lying in a tight circle in the center of a living room. Trotting over to them, she nudged a few bones with her hoof until she finally found what she needed—a unicorn skull.
Squatting down besides the skeleton, she extended a blade from her horseshoe and planted it at the base of the body's horn. It wasn't until half a minute later that Scootaloo realized she hadn't yet begun carving the dead stub off. A deep pale glow washed over her, and she swallowed a lump down her throat.
With a shuddering sigh, she lifted her goggles off her head and ran a hoof over her moistening eyes. She stared miserably past the bodies and at a heap of belongings that had fallen out of a trunk and were spilled over the floor. She saw scattered utensils, toys, royal stationary, and—finally—a pile of faded photographs, with several smiling and living faces poised eternally, staring back at her as she lingered over the same family's discarded husks a few meters away.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The legacy of ponydom has given me so much that I have used over the decades. It is only right that I find a way to give back to it. But how does that stack up when all that could possibly change is the bright face of Equestria itself—an Equestrian future with no ponies in it?
I only wished to be a survivor, and perhaps to reunite with some other stray members of my own kind. Now that I know—thanks to Spike—that I am indeed the last pony that will ever breathe; what point is there in trying to bring light to a world with no pure eyes remaining to judge it? It's like a tree that falls alone in the forest—But how selfish of a presumption is that on my part? What right do I have—or Spike for that matter—to determine how we memorialize this world, when we've done so much to pilfer from it? Does the fact that we're the last living things to care about it all excuse us being the last souls to make something of it all?—Even if for the sake of making something?
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo yanked on the lever and her signal fired its prismatic beams into the air above the stony plateau. The multicolored spectrum pierced the cloudy overcast in a burning swath, but the lingering twilight above remained unphased. The snow and ash was still falling, the mist covering the circle of metal barricades in an infinite rust. Under the shadow of the Harmony, a disenchanted Scootaloo marched up towards the signal, propped herself onto two hooves with her shoulder leaning against her rifle—and stuck her left limb into the burning beams of light.
The sky briefly strobed as her hoof floated lazily from red to green to indigo and softly back. She watched with momentary fascination as the lights bumped and wavered with each other, but ultimately remained rigidly divided into the seven artificial hues, as directed by Scootaloo's flamestone that shot illuminescence into the strategically placed gems.
The last pony tilted her snout up and watched with a sudden boredom, observing the glistening heights of her once-treasured beacon. It was exactly what it always had been, a message to dead ponies. Being the only one to read what the signal had to say made Scootaloo feel dead as well; because she knew where this rainbow began, and could spot with her naked eyes the lingering twilight above where it ultimately ended.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
I was sent back in time. Ever so briefly, I tasted of the past. I saw a rainbow—And it was real. I could not see where it began, and I could not see where it ended. I didn't care. It gave me hope—like I always knew it would. But only now do I really understand where that hope stems from.
Hope is a disease—an affliction to all living things. The only thing sentient creatures such as ponies could ever accomplish is die, and yet we have always clung onto hope. This perhaps made sense in an Age when Goddesses walked the fields of Equestria—but now? Princess Celestia's eternal life ran out. When she and Luna vanished, all that was left was the decaying wasteland of mortality, forever festering in the unburied penumbra of her shadow.
Perhaps that's the way it's always been, and what brought about the explosive end to the Goddesses of Revolution was not an unknown curse—like Spike believes—but a self-destructing realization that the Goddesses themselves discovered when it was too late; that life is absurd, that it's always been absurd, even for them.
And as much as I rationalize to myself the pointlessness of it all—Painting a far bleaker world than I had ever assumed in all of my most bitter of dark-lit scavengings—Why is that I cannot shake the rainbow out of my head, the real rainbow, the real rainbow that I saw with my own eyes? If hope is a disease, and all it will ever lead me to is misery and self-annihilation, when why do I cling to it so? Why does it make me excited, like I am starved, and plants me steadily upon the knifing precipice of—dare I say it—joy?
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Why so emoquine, Harmony?”
Scootaloo stared listlessly through a green haze of smoke, her violet eyes unwavering. There was a shuffling movement besides her, and a furred paw waved obligatarily before her face.
“Hello?? Customer of most esteemed appreciation?? Is old Equestrian joke, da? Vhy so glum, pony friend?”
She snapped out of it. She pivoted to glance across the merchant vessel and threw a faded smile the flying squirrel's way. “S-Sorry, Bruce. I've just got a lot on my mind, that's all. What were you offering again?”
“Is more than pony's mind. Brucie thinks it is stomach—Or another organ close to it. Hopefully not part of pony sensitive to cancer stick, nyet?” He chuckled, flicked his cigar some, and continued showing off a pair of leather strips as their dual ships bobbed in the air, docked to one another. “Forty bits each—Dual reinforced dragonskin! Finest from vhat remains of Zebraharan mountains--”
“No—No!” The mare briefly snarled, shook a shuddering breath off her, and paced across the racks of wares. “Thanks, Bruce. I know that I need new armor, but—Anything but dragon leather, if you don't mind.”
“Pray tell Brucie why? Date with sky serpent, pony plans? Bah!” He tossed the thick strips into a pile of collapsing metal knick-knacks while snapping his tiny fingers. “Brucie can do something better!” He kicked off a bulkhead, glided over to a coat of armor, and gruntingly lifted a breastplate in his quivering limbs. “Nnnghh—Best in ramcraft! Fashioned out of tempered titanium! Brucie promises—hckk—no fire breathing snakes harmed in process of metallurgy—Ach! Nyet, you overgrowned rust heap—Ugh! Only takes getting used to hauling around! Like you sporting pretty mane made out of iron, da?”
“I know you're doing your best to help me out, Bruce. But—seriously—all I need to do is browse for a bit, and I'm sure I'll find the... armor I need,” she murmured, her eyes once again gazing into a grand nothingness beyond the shelves of rattling miscellany.
The copper-goggled squirrel saw it. Scratching his forehead, he scampered up a metal shelf and perched above her. “Kind of armor pony needs is something no bits could buy, Brucie thinks.
She did not reply.
He scratched his chin, then brightened. “Perhaps you are nervous about stormfront?” He smirked and gestured nonchalantly out a nearby porthole. The gray clouds were darkening as several deep strobing flashes of lightning started to bubble from within the wispy clusters herding punctually their way. “Vell, pony should only fear for money bag, for Brucie has greatest lightning rod from homeland—Guaranteed to protect against any storm, but sure is not cheap!”
“It's not that, Bruce—It's...” She bit her lip, shifted uncomfortably, and finally looked at him—naked eyes to fogged goggles. “Bruce, let me ask you something—Pilot to pilot.”
“To pony's question Brucie has answer, possibly, maybe—If Harmony needs it.”
She ignored the address and squinted, murmuring: “Do you enjoy what you do?”
“Selling to favorite customer? Absolutely! Brucie is always--”
“No no no—I mean what you do,” Scootaloo emphasized. “Your life, Bruce. Do you...—Is this life all you are willing to accept? Would you be willing to... to change it, into something happier, something brighter—If you had the ability to do so?”
“Hrmm...,” the overgrown rodent merchant rubbed his chin, puffing on his cigar. “Philosophy is not one of Brucie's strengths; does not earn bits, only headaches, da?” He smirked wryly and flicked his cigar with emphasis. “If life vas so terrible, perhaps is reason Brucie smokes it away? HaHA!”
She sighed heavily. “But if you could change this—All of this. Would you be willing to do so?”
“Life is life—Sometimes life is too much life, sometimes too little,” he uttered as he squatted in his pilot's seat and propped a leg up, leaning back casually in the green haze of his cramped vessel. “But rather than think of things dat need changing, Brucie likes to focus on things he is glad for—And be thankful for them.” A warm smile under his reflective amber lenses. “Like pony friend! If dis life vas changed, vould not have you to look forward to, da?”
She stared sadly at him. “That's just it, Brucie. The only thing you're guaranteed to run out of in life—is friends.” She swallowed sorely. “The reason I know this is because there's so much magic lost from this world. And eventually—that too will be gone.”
“Hmm...,” he leaned further back and puffed. “All better reason pony has to spend time vith friends...” He smirked. “Or make new ones...”
“...or old ones,” she added in a low breath.
“Vhat vas that, Harmony?” No sooner had he asked, but a loud rumble filled the roof of the world, forcing the two ships to rock and weave from the thunderous vibrations. “Mother Rushnut! Is getting vorse, the storm!” He kicked out of the seat and rushed up to a porthole, gazing out with a frown. “Brucie is afraid that he and pony friend must cut transaction short! You cannot outrun storm anymore than time itself!”
“Perhaps somepony can,” she once again murmured, then nodded her snout towards a series of brown leather strips along the far end of the gondola. “I'll take five of those over there.”
“Twenty bits each.”
“That works for me.”
“Then done is deal, Harmony!”
After the exchange of gold for goods, the mare trotted towards the metal bridge between his ship and hers. She lingered in his windblown doorway. “Again, Brucie—My name is not Harmony.”
“Da, da! Ve have been over dis! Pony is anonymous! Hilarious irony ensues--!”
“'Scootaloo'.”
He spun around and squinted at her through cockeyed goggles. “Vhat vas dat?”
“My name is Scootaloo,” she said, fidgeting. “And...I am glad to have you as a friend too, Brucie.”
The squirrel stared at her. After a spell, he smirked—and grinded his cigar to death against a bulkhead. “Another day vorth living, da?” He waved her off. “Off vith you, Scootaloo! Storms of twilight have no friends!”
She took a deep breath as the warmness left her cheeks and she marched outward to her hangar on the other side of the bridge. “Don't I know it...?”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
It has been several invisible gray days since I last saw Spike, and I am no closer to an answer for his proposition than I was the first minute I flew myself away from the strangely inviting sights of Ponyville's ruins. That place is once more a potential home to me—and yet it pains me to see it the way it is. I'm reminded of something Bruce said—without quite meaning to put much effort into it: that life is sometimes 'too much life', sometimes 'too little life'. But when I look out the portholes of my airship, and when I see the desolation all around, I realize that any creature that attempts to neutrally philosophize like that is only attempting to protect my feelings. There is no life out here—only ashes.
The fact is—when Equestria exploded, it had to have been ponydom's fault, in some fashion or another. What Gilda hinted of and what most of the patrons who frequent the Monkey O'Dozen Den believe is at least partially true. The Sun and Moon would still be here today if something horrible hadn't happened to Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. Equestria was never a land that belonged to only ponies—and the fact that I'm the last living pegasus means that I, in some fashion, owe it to the world to get a second chance at seeing light once more, so that these perpetual shadows will no longer force otherwise harmless creatures into believing that 'life' is simply quantifiable.
A month before now, the same pony who's writing this would never give this blighted world a second thought. But as of a few days ago, I now know that I can potentially leave a mark—a very warm, golden, and glowing mark upon what would otherwise remain a world as grave if not even graver than what I now see before me. For years, I gave my all to maintain a rainbow symbol to spark hope into the souls of ponies who I always hoped were alive—but secretly knew really weren't. Now that I know what I can do and whom I can do it for—creatures like Bruce, Gilda, and even Pitt—could that change Equestria for the better? Could it give hope—however absurd—to a new society that might transform it into something beautiful, as opposed to its present ugliness? Can existence transcend essence, even when the likes of Spike and myself are long gone from this potential future kingdom?
It's always been tough being the end of ponies. And it's even tougher now. If this stormfront I'm flying in doesn't kill me, I think my confusion will. If there should be another entry, it will be by another pony—One who has transcended doubt, as Spike has transcended time. This I promise—this I hope.
-End of entryyyyyyy---
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo's last penstroke smudged across the page of her journal as the Harmony experienced another jolt. The boiler at the back of the room flickered as it tried to maintain autopilot in the surmounting turbulence surging all around the craft. A warning signal bellowed as a couple of sparks flew from a tesla coil on the port side of the cabin.
Cursing mutely, Scootaloo slapped the journal shut, swiveled away from her workbench, and all but pratfalled across the careening gondola, landing awkwardly in the cockpit's seat. As she harnessed herself into place, a wide panorama of bubbling clouds and random bits of lightning surged from beyond the stretched array of windshields. The world had become an obsidian mesh of inky fog as a fresh stormfront rumbled across the rooftop of Equestria on the latest of its regular intervals.
Yanking at a few levers to re-orient the bobbing vessel, Scootaloo flashed an angry glare towards her instrument panel. A red light was flickering as a tiny brass pipe of steam blew through an alarm whistle. Her elaborate warning system was attempting to convey that part of the zeppelin's lateral support struts had loosened dangerously.
“Frickin' figures—Can't ride a storm these days without it turning into a drunken Wonderbolts performance,” she snarled—then silenced herself by clamping her teeth over a hanging chainlinked handle. She pulled hard and the boiler towards the rear billowed, pumping steam into the balloons over the gondola. Slowly, the Harmony lifted above the crashing black promontory of the advancing stormfront, aimed towards the highest point it could go above the dark, lightning-ruptured overcast. A wayward cloudfront thundered angrily at her. She snarled back: “Yeah, well, you look fat and ugly too!”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
An hour later, safely above the rumbling overcast of stormclouds, the grunting and griping pegasus struggled with a loose set of rivets that she was presently attempting to tighten back into place along the starboard side of the Harmony's zeppelin chassis. The black roof to the Equestrian Wastes groaned and roared beneath her, briefly flickering phantom illuminations of silver lightning hues across her blank flanks as she struggled to finish her task. At one point, the wrench she was twisting flew loose—and she inadvertently struck herself in the small of her left forearm. A loud groan—something that mutated into a furious snarl—and she banged the rivets with an opposite hoof, half-shocked to hear them rattling back into stubborn looseness.
With a huge deflating sigh, Scootaloo leaned her snout against the copper body of the zeppelin and hung there, brown wings fluttering in the brief winds, as the thunderous world gargled beneath her. She clung to the bosom of the Harmony in a gentle and lonesome sway, for what had to have been the better part of an hour, until she finally opened her scarlet eyes to the ever-lingering twilight overhead. Distant gloomy stars half-blinked down at her, never living and never dying. There was no real light in this world—only the half hearted imitation of brightness. Scootaloo was tired of staring into it—and yet a strange peace was wafting through her with as much electricity as the stormfronts boiled with far below.
Hooking her wrench and other tools along the lateral struts of the airship, Scootaloo took wing, hovered down a few naked decameters below her hovering vessel, and did something that she hadn't done since she was a little foal; She touched down with pegasus hooves onto the wispy surface of the overcast cloudbanks. Her legs made contact—She was standing upon the dark beds of cloud cover. What had been nothing more than a permeable mist of disgust for two-and-a-half decades was suddenly a grand wafting plain of opaque fog, like a phantom shadow of the Ponyvillean valley, and the twilight above impersonated a childhood sky.
Peacefully—in a meditative poise—Scootaloo slowly trotted forward across the blackened clouds. With each shuffling hoof, a patch of dark mist brightened strobingly from the deep lightning below—illuminating Scootaloo randomly during her 'walk'. She didn't notice, for she had her eyes shut and her snout tilted skyward. With her brown wings meditatively outstretched, the last pony took several deep breaths, and opened an invisible third eye.
She saw Ms. Cheerilee's schoolhouse—or at least an effluent crimson shade of it. And beyond the schoolhouse was a misty lake of crystal blue water flanked by ivory mountains. The world blossomed with green beauty, like hair that had been shaved for years but was suddenly given the chance to grow again—and it bloomed all around her, kissing her with soft blades that swayed in a deep earthen wind. There were living things in this shady dreamscape—things that fluttered and danced in the breeze instead of slicing mercenary paths through the air. And the children—the foals flocked to her, smiling, inviting Scootaloo across the playground into a game of Red Rover. Sweetie Bell's horn glistened in the morning mist, and Apple Bloom's drawling laughter filled the schoolyard with an undercurrent of static excitement, like being at the edge of a waterfall, or prancing along the fringes of the Everfree Forest, or gazing through the window of Sugarcube Corner with the sound of streetside musicians reverberating off the freshly varnished wood of the surrounding storefronts--
--and the thunder swallowed it all once more, with misty black teeth that lurched and hummed dreadfully beneath the twilight expanse. Scootaloo's scarlet eyes opened—and when they did, they were not brimming with tears—but instead boiling with a steam of a different sort—a frothing burst of burning air that no amount of pressure forced upon the Harmony's boiler could ever hope to produce—a hissing outburst of blood-throttling menace that two and a half decades of levitating imprisonment had forged ever so demoniacally in the iron-wrought heart of the last hoofed creature doomed to aimlessly skim the gray leprous skin of the planet.
And she screamed—all of her hate and all of her pain and all of her regret—she screamed into the gray-on-gray horizons lingering before her, until her wailing voice outroared the great thunder booming from below and scared the strobes of lightning into hiding, until all of the Equestrian Wasteland finally knew what it had taken from her, and that she was the only living thing in the history of time that was capable of giving anything back.
And when the scream was done, and her wings were still heaving as she stood shakily on the womb of the buckling cloudbeds, it was not a sob that graced her face, it was not even a sneer; it was a smirk.
Spike was busying himself with a series of chemical vials in the center of his laboratory when the trap door to Twilight's former treehouse slammed wide open above him. He turned calmly to see a breathless brown pegasus soaring down and hovering wide-eyed in front of him.
“Send me back, Spike!” Scootaloo panted. “Send me back in time!”
“Now Scootaloo--” the sagely dragon pointed with a clawed finger. “Have you adequately thought about what you're--?”
“There is no thinking,” she glared at him. “There is only now. And I am sick to death of now.”
He raised an eyecrest at that.
She frowned and growlingly reiterated: “I'm ready, Spike. I'm ready to do this. Send me to the past.”
Gradually, he smiled. A gentle nodding of his headcrests. “As you wish, old friend.”