Ashes to Ashes
Some called it the sound of the universe itself. When asked, listeners compared it to the peal of a bell. Humans knew it as the herald of their savior. The Ood called it the song of freedom.
The sound came in a series of pulses, each one summoning a piece of the Tardis out of the time vortex. A pulse, and the ghastly shade of something became perceptible to the eye before fading back into the vortex and out of time itself. Another pulse, and it came into focus. As if the machine was being coy with its pilot, it winked out again, but another pulse brought it back, this time for good.
The Tardis, a time traveling vessel disguised as a British police public call box, looked out of place in the home of the ponies. With creaky hinges, the door opened and out slipped a single stallion.
His eyes... so old and begotten by countless years of adventure, heroism, and pain. Anything that understood the pony’s nature would see untold ages of knowledge behind those eyes, be it the capability of great things or the power to wreak destruction. Hero, savior, god. John Smith, Theta Sigma, The Oncoming Storm. Clockwork, Time Turner, Doctor Whooves. He was a time traveler and the last surviving Timelord.
But all life knew him by a single title. The Doctor.
The stallion, a brown pony with a black mane and hourglass cutiemark, stood immobile. The ripened fruit before him was absolutely nothing like he had envisioned the edenic and paradisal land of Equestria to bear in its future. The skies, once lush with refreshing blue skies or bloated rainclouds, was now home to a solid, encompassing shroud of ash.
The Doctor’s first instinct was the ash had been snow. Despite his travels, his adventures across thousands of galaxies and millions of worlds, very rarely had he encountered the delightful, lethargic fall of snow or the endless fields of white they produced. The silent splendor of such events was a beauty to behold and treasure. Until, that is, he detected the lingering scent of smoke and decayed flesh in the air, and he knew that there was something dreadfully wrong with the snowfall.
“No...” The Doctor whispered to himself with silent horror. The Doctor looked to the northeast. The familiar landmark he expected to see in the distance, a castle wedged into the side of a mountain, was obfuscated behind a wall of darkness and ash.
The Doctor shivered and coughed. It was cold, ever so cold. The air was thick with ash, making it difficult to breathe in the now forsaken lands of Equestria. The Doctor turned on his hooves and walked back into the Tardis, which had already accumulated a thin layer of ash on its blue features. After a few moments of silence, the Doctor returned to the dark landscape in a coat and a scarf around his mouth and head. He set out; he knew what he would find, but he needed an answer. Sixty years in Equestria’s future since his last stop, and all he saw before him was barren death. Why?
It was a good thing the Doctor returned for his coat and scarf. The ashfall was slow, but steady and non-stop. All around him, the ground, hills, and long-dead grass, were all covered under a thick, fluffy blanket of ash. The Doctor wasn’t even sure what he was stepping on. A cobblestone pathway? Somepony’s garden? The decomposed remains of the dead?
The Doctor fiddled with one of his suit pockets and pulled out a small, cylindrical device with his teeth. The device’s lens hummed to life with blue light, illuminating the Doctor’s ashen steps. His gut and long experience as a Timelord told him it was roughly noon, but the skies were dark under the layers of ash clouds. The ash was starving the land of its light and heat, inducing a deathly cold that cut to the Doctor’s bones. Fortunately, he knew of a cave nearby where a young colt used to visit and play. Perhaps a pony had taken refuge from the bleakness and possessed the answers he seeked.
The Doctor made slow progress through the near neck-high ash banks. Every step stained his coat and suit with black and grey streaks.The land had not been disturbed in the longest time. Once, the ground he walked would have been tilled and planted to perfection by legions of Earth ponies. After long days of hard work, they would return to their homes and families, eat, kongregate with loved ones, and sleep before beginning anew the next day. Now there was nothing but ash, cold, and quiet.
As if to counter his thoughts, a burst of thunder and red light shot out of the south. The Doctor turned and examined this new event with scrutiny. For a moment, the red glow was bright enough to pierce the never-ending ashfall, but was soon swallowed like everything else. The Doctor thought for a moment. The thunder could easily be explained by a buildup of static electricity in the ash, but what was that light? Actual lightning? Fire? Some type of atmospheric distortion?
The ground started to incline, but the Doctor did not follow the hill upwards. Trotting to a large clump of ash, the Doctor began digging at it with his hooves. Halfway through his task, a larger clump collapsed on the Doctor and stopped his digging. It only took a moment to remove himself from the obstruction, but the Doctor did not flee. He was determined, if anything, determined to find out what happened to the ponies that once flourished in the magical land of Equestria and why its diarchy had left its land in such despair. He had not seen any bodies, but he recognized the scent of scorched flesh when he smelt it. He did not want to think about his fears, but they came anyway: Equestria, in the very near future, was about to die.
The Doctor broke through the ash and stumbled into a dark, dry cave. Once again, the immense ash accumulation collapsed and sealed the entrance. The Doctor did not care; there was light up ahead.
The Doctor, wary of any foreign presence, tread slowly and carefully forward. The narrow cave’s own natural acoustics made every step echo. It wasn’t long before he encountered the source of the light.
A single, elderly stallion lay on his stomach on the dry, musty floor. It wasn’t a large room, only ten by twelve feet at best and barely large enough for a pony to stand. Books littered the floor, most of the scholarly in nature with a few for personal reading. The room had a single crystal emitting a soft green glow, the only source of light in the barren cave. Several water canisters and apple bags were unceremoniously gathering dust in the corner, all empty and belonging to the room’s single occupant. The stallion, a dappled black and brown pony with a magnifying glass for a cutie mark, looked up at the newcomer.
“...Doctor... So the stories were true; you haven’t aged a day.” The stallion’s deep, baritone voice betrayed his weariness and resignation. The Doctor looked into the stallion’s ice-blue eyes and saw what he dreaded: a broken spirit.
“There are legends about you. I’ve heard songs composed in your name, great ballads telling the tale of a hero whom sails the stars on a ship made of light with only the hopes of those who believe in him to guide his path. I’ve heard them in royal courts to the lowliest watering holes. The young, the old, the wealthy, the destitute, they all know of your deeds. The Prance and Hoffinay war, Cyberponies, the Weeping Pegasi... the stories about you, whether real or constructs, have seeded our souls. A simple Earth Pony capable of so much, deeds that not even our Elders Celestia and Luna...”
The stallion’s breath caught in his throat. The Doctor let him have a moment to himself, and he soon continued. “...not even Celestia or Luna could match. I have heard many young ones wish to grow up and follow in your hoofsteps, including myself sixty years ago. We would all claimed we would gain our cutie marks and follow you into the beyond.”
The Doctor was silent. He had seen souls like the one in front of him. Broken, dispirited people and ponies with nothing left to give. This stallion with no more food and water knew that staying in the cave would guarantee a single outcome. He was just waiting, waiting for the now-granted hope that somepony would come and listen to his story. His final act of life.
“So... you want to know what happened to this land, Doctor?” The stallion gave a weary laugh.
The Doctor nodded.
“Then please... let me finish before you speak.”
The stallion stared blankly at the ground, silently collecting his thoughts. The Doctor left the stallion to his own devices. He hated seeing the stallion this way; the cave was the stallion’s own private little clubhouse when he was but a colt, back when the skies were clean and the land was rich with life, back when he was a happy, young colt without a care in the world.
“It started with a flame. I was there on the day of the burning. I was...” The stallion’s face was completely devoid of emotion, but the Doctor knew these ponies well enough to know when they were troubled. The stallion’s eyes were, for lack of a better word, like the Doctor’s; they belonged to a young body, but carried experience and pain far beyond his age. “...but a child.
“You changed my life when you saved me. Me, above all the other fillies and colts, it was my life that was in danger and was saved by the legend himself.” A small smile crossed his lips. “The other children were envious of my tale, those that believed anyway, that I met the Doctor.”
The stallion’s smile fell and he took a breath. In a tired, haunted voice, he continued, “It started only ten years after you saved me. We never anticipated our peace would not last forever. Why wouldn’t we? Our kind endured so much, for so long. The escape from our ancestral lands, the Chaos War, the Schism of Shadows, Nightmare’s Return.... When the Gates of Tartarus shattered, we expected nothing else. What fools we were. Arrogance, was what it was. Complacency.”
The Doctor put away his sonic screwdriver and undid his scarf to clear his muzzle. The Doctor, however, did not attempt to interrupt the stallion’s monologue. "We were all children in the face of that disaster. Helpless, and afraid. The first cinders became an inferno... and the fires began to rage. Never before had our kind endured such wanton carnage. A Burning, fueled by the evil and hatred locked away since time immemorial. So much was consumed in the first week alone. Our lands, burned to the ground. Our people, scorched to ash... and then the beasts came. In droves, they came. Hundreds, thousands, using the fire to craft a new home to suit their needs, they came. The Gates had fallen, and the monsters were free, free to ravage the lands once again. They tore us apart and away from each other. Those who weren’t killed for fun were collected for food... my son was among them.”
The stallion’s face was as impassive as ever, but streaks of tears flowed from his eyes and cleaned lines of ash off of his face. He stifled a momentary sob before continuing again. "We turned to our elders, Luna and Celestia. We begged them to save us.” The stallion’s voice broke for a moment. “But the fires consumed them too..."
The Doctor gasped at the news. The two royal ponies, pillars of strength that endured and guided the ponies for untold millennia. Alicorns were rumored to never die, even under the most grievous and devastating wounds imaginable. He had met the two royals on several occasions during his journeys.
Strong and powerful Celestia, great ruler of a wonderful nation, yet absolutely adored her sister more than life itself. Sweet Luna, short-tempered and bull-headed, but a loving and docile soul that only wished to be loved by her subjects. Those two were the pillars, the cornerstones of Equestria and among the Doctor’s dearest friends. He never guessed how it would feel to have such long-lived allies like those two ripped from him.
Legend had stated the two were immortal. They were supposed to be around even after his ashes had been scattered into the vortex itself. Companions age, die, or simply forget the Doctor. It... hurt to make friends and then lose them, but it was supposed to be different this time. They were supposed to stay. To have confirmation that two beings, two gods who were supposed to be with him forever, die... the Doctor could not stop the tears when they came.
"We were orphaned... and the world burned. Then came the smoke... the clouds... littered with the remnants of corpses. There is a dark magic in those clouds, a foul, wretched evil that has seen neither rest nor sustenance as it consumed us all. Ponies, nature, land, magic... nothing escapes the Tartarus horde. Through fire, through ash, through the choking cloud of evil, we die and dwindle day by day.”
The Doctor rifled through his coat pockets and found what he was looking for: a single flask of water. He offered it to the stallion. It wasn’t much, but the stallion drank it greedily all the same.
He returned the flask to the Doctor, whom was about to speak, but the stallion held up a hoof to cut him off. When he was certain the Doctor would remain silent for the remainder of his tale, the stallion continued. "For fifty years they have roamed, devouring everything which falls under their shadow. We are always on the move, always fleeing the shadows and the flames of Tartarus. The monsters, no longer fleeing the sun’s rays under a blanket of ashen skies, fly fast in far in their new hunting grounds. There are so few of us left, so few with the resources to sustain our way of life. The land is barren, the seas have boiled... this land is dead. We are a dying race.”
The stallion once again stifled and tried to calm himself. “I have heard of a new elder by the name of Harmonia. They say she is gathering refugees by the Nekris Gorge. They say she will undo the Burning..."
“Then go to Harmonia,” The Doctor commanded. “Survive. Endure. As you said, your kind has survived so much against superior forces and impossible odds. That’s fantastic! Your people can survive and I can help close the Gates!”
The stallion’s eyes cut off the Doctor without speaking a word. For a moment, just the barest flash of energy flashed across the pony’s eyes and was gone the next. “Can you renew the skies and the sun? Can the cycle of day and night be returned to their natural state?” The Doctor’s enthusiasm had crestfallen. The stallion gave the Doctor a victorious, but tired, smile. A defeated smile.
“How do you see the world, Doctor?”
It took a moment to understand what the stallion meant. “I see the world as it is, as it was, and what it has yet to become. Every waking moment, I see time, space and the vortex itself. Every waking second I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not.” The Doctor sighed. “The burden of a Timelord.”
“And what does your sight beyond sight tell you of our fate? Can it be? Was it ever meant to be? Could the fires have been stopped”
The stallion and the Doctor stared into each other’s eyes for the longest time. In relation to each other, one was young, the other was astonishingly old, but both knew the answer.
“Somethings are in flux and susceptible to change. Others are constants, fundamentally fixed points in time that cannot be changed... this is one of them.”
The stallion only nodded in acceptance. “I think Harmonia believes that as well. But perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps she will lead the remnants of our kind out of the Burning... But I do not dare believe it, Doctor. Our world has already been murdered. All of this is just the final gasp of breath... before the end.”
“Let’s find out.” The Doctor held out a hoof. “Come with me.”
The stallion chuckled, the first real sign of anything but depressed acceptance he showed since the two reunited. “I cannot Doctor... my bones are sick with ash and the corruption blanketing this land. I am too old to join you on any adventures. My body sprouted from these lands. It is here where they will rest.”
The two were silent for a full minute. The Doctor, despite hating letting people – ponies – die, could not help but admire the stallion’s acceptance of his fate. Some squirm and fight the cold, black shadow of death, but this one accepted his fate, however helpless he may be.
“What will you do now, Doctor? You admit that this event is inevitable.”
“Inevitable, yes. But there are facets of time and space, events that lead and branch off from this cataclysm that are subject to change. I... am so sorry for not being able to help. I am sorry for not having the power to stop this, but I will not sit by and accept the bleakness.
“I have faced evil and impossible odds. I have faced my equals and inferiors. I have fought gods and made some my friends. Enemies that consume all they see, Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans alike, have stood up to me and those I care about. They threaten everything I hold dear, and I do not always come out unscathed. It hurts to lose friends, and it hurts even more to have them survive and not be able to see them again.
“But I know that trapped in my darkest moments, there is always hope.” The Doctor smiled. “There are some corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible of things.” He leaned in to the stallion. “They must be fought. For as dark as the darkest times get, no matter what, be it a hundred, thousand, or even million years away, a glorious dawn awaits.”
The stallion stared at the Doctor. That was not the reaction that he intended to provoke, but what he received was as equally welcoming. The stallion smiled, the first, genuine smile he had seen from him since they last met sixty years ago.
“Be it a hundred, thousand, or even million years away...” The stallion’s voice trailed off for a moment. “Good luck Doctor, and farewell.”
“There is always hope.”
“I have none for myself or those that remain. But if you could do one thing for me, Doctor, and only this one thing?”
“Yes?”
“Find somepony. Go back and find somepony. You need us as much as we need you. Don’t lose yourself, for the hopes of the past are in your hooves.”
The pain of loss flooded back into his mind. Letting go of Sarah Jane, leaving Rose Tyler in another universe entirely, the cruel fate of Donna...
Sweet River Song...
“I already have. She’s back in the Tardis right now.” It will hurt. The wounds he acquired will never stop hurting. But the respites in between wounds, the cerebral and euphoric adventures of traveling with another. Those moments of friendship and pain, given and treasured, were worth the price. Sharing tears, laughs, and the thrill of throwing caution to the wind as the Tardis was jettisoned through time and space, it was worth the moments of heartbreak. Every single moment.
“Than these bones can rest in peace.” The stallion’s eyes drooped now that their conversation had concluded. Quietly and orderly, he closed his books and stacked them into a pile. When everything was neat and orderly, he folded his legs and set his head down.
“You can rest now. Goodbye, little colt.”
That tugged at the stallion’s smile once again. “Ever since we first met, I wondered who was peaking out the Tardis door.” The stallion chuckled. He rested his head against his legs and closed his eyes. The Doctor could hear the stallion’s heart and breathing slow; he was nearing his end. “Goodbye, Doctor. May the stars forever light your path.”
It was not long until the stallion’s breathing stopped. Being one so old and ill in a ravaged land, he was fortunate to have lasted this long. The Doctor said a quiet prayer, wrapped his scarf around his head, and prepared to return to the dark, ashen landscape and his Tardis. But there was still one more thing he could do for the stallion.
The Doctor exited the cave once more, burrowing through a fluffy layer of ash in the process. Burrowing through his pockets, he retrieved his sonic screwdriver one more time and activated it. The screwdriver hummed as he pointed it toward the cave entrance. Within a few moments, the earth rumbled with the sonic resonance and a crash echoed out of the cave.
The entrance had been sealed. It was an ancient custom of Earth ponies to be returned to the stone and earth. It was not much, but it was the least the Doctor could do for funeral rites.
However, he had a companion waiting. The Doctor sighed and turned around, but couldn’t help but give the tomb one last, mournful look.
“The universe will sing for you, my friend.”
This is a fanfiction in response to the PonyInABox Productions universe. You can find them on Tumblr and Youtube.
Ashes to Ashes is a non-cannon fanfiction of Broadcaster’s vocal submittal: Last Hope.
Chapter Commentary: LINK
Editors: Wolfmaster1337, DMDeck16, Maverick Frond