A Mad Dash Through Time and Space

by Joseph Raszagal

Chapter Six - She Who Surpassed the Gods

A Mad Dash Through Time and Space
Chapter Six – She Who Surpassed the Gods
A commission for an anonymous brony
As written by Joseph Raszagal

A dim light at the end of the green tunnel told Rainbow Dash that, against all odds, her battered frame had somehow carried her to the edge of the Everfree Forest intact. Feeling as though the Pale Pony would soon arrive to guide her across the mortal horizon (though in her addled and wearied state, the thought hadn't come to her in quite those terms), she bit her lip and kept her pace, hobbled towards Fluttershy's cottage with a determination that went beyond her body's already spent limitations.

“Even if this kills me,” her mind raced, “I have to bucking make it! I just have to! Can't stop! Can't stop! CAN'T STOP!”

She was a mare on a mission and nothing short of her limbs fully detaching in a gory display of separating bone and tissue was going to keep her from completing it.

Worse yet, as that exact thought streaked briefly through her brain, the pegasus convinced herself that she would still somehow soldier on, dragging herself the rest of the way with her chin if necessary.

“I won't fail them!” Rainbow's thoughts screamed wildly. “I'm the bucking Element of Loyalty, dammit!”

“Zecora!” she shouted as she at last approached the quaint home, slamming her forehooves against the front door with all the remaining strength she could muster. “Zecora, h-help!”

A scrabbling of hooves answered her calls and a moment later the top half of the door flew open to reveal a very distressed looking zebra.

“Stars and stones, if it isn't Rainbow Dash!” gasped Zecora, her eyes wide. “Did you not take off with the others to join in the clash?”

“N-no time... to explain,” Rainbow choked as she fell to the ground. “P-please... take me t-to the... the blue box. I don't know... why... b-but I have to go there. Th-they need help, we lost... I need s-something inside that box. They need it... n-now.”

Having heard all she needed to hear, Zecora scooped up the beaten pegasus and draped her over her shoulders. Looking back into the cottage, she shouted, “Applejack, look after the others and tend to them your best! It seems I must assist Rainbow Dash in taking care of the rest!”

With that, she took off in a powerful galloping sprint for Ponyville's town square, the place where all of this madness had begun.

As the zebra and her pegasus charge dashed down the dusty trail, Applejack hobbled to the door in time to see them disappear around a bend.

“Applejack?” came Rarity's strained voice from a few rooms over. “Was that Rainbow Dash? Is she alright, dear?”

Biting her lip, the apple farmer replied, “It's fine, Sugarcube. Zecora just had... some business down in town. Everythin's fine.”

As always, the lie weighed heavily upon her conscious, festering there and eating at her. All Applejack could do as she closed the door and returned to tend to the others was hope and pray that her lie would prove true in the end... that everything would be fine.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Uncharacteristically serious, Raszagal narrowed his eyes and growled, “That is not my question to answer.”

“And yet you must answer it,” smirked the Doctor, letting loose a bloodied grin. “You don't want to break your own rules, do you? That wouldn't be very sporting of a great game-player like you.”

“That is not a fair!” howled the Eternal angrily.

“Fair?” retorted the Doctor, his expression grim and, for the first time in quite a long while, utterly loathing. “Fair?! Ha, so we're bringing fairness into the equation, are we? That's a laugh, really it is! You kidnapped a young girl, wounded several others, threatened to destroy their homes, not to mention their entire world, and now you want to bring up fairness?! This isn't a friendly game of chess, Raszagal! No, I think we've gone well beyond fairness at this point. Well beyond.”

“But... but it is too soon.”

“Oh yes, I know.”

“You still have Demon's Run and the Asylum to face! You of all people, Time Lord, should know that you must either die or face the events in their proper order! Would you really risk creating a paradox centered around one of the most wildly fluctuating time-lines in creation, your own?”

“Interesting, isn't it, how little I can care about the future when I'm constantly rewriting it? Some were even frightened enough of me to lock me in an inescapable cage and very nearly doomed the entire universe thinking that I was going to be the one to doom it.”

“The Pandorica,” Raszagal uttered.

“Indeed, though that's neither here nor there right now,” the Doctor continued, grinning maniacally, “so tell me, even at the cost of what could possibly be both of our futures... Play the game and answer my question. What. Is. My. Name?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As Zecora ground to a sliding halt in front of the Doctor's Type-40 TARDIS, Rainbow Dash threw herself from the zebra's back and onto her hooves.

Well, that was what she had intended to do anyway.

The stuntpony toppled, hitting the ground with a loud and very nasty “crunch”, yet still forced herself to her hooves regardless. With teeth clenched hard enough to crack them, she trudged forward and began banging desperately on the door with her forehead, screaming for the familiar mare inside to open it and allow her entry. Zecora watched with a hoof to her muzzle, aghast at what she was seeing.

Rainbow Dash, as physically devastated and drained as she was, simply would not stop.

“Amy!” the prismatic pegasus pleaded, smacking her head against the wooden wall with enough force to draw blood. “Amy, p-please, let me in! I need t-to get in! Th-they're dying, they need help! For the l-love of Celestia, l-let me in!”

When the door finally did open, stained several times by Rainbow's reckless persistence, the mare standing there to greet them took in the sight before her with a look of complete horror.

“Th-the Doctor,” mumbled Dash, verging on incoherence as her eyesight began to fade, “A-all of them... they're gonna die. Th-they're all gonna die. I... I need help. I th-think the Doctor w-wanted me to c-come here... to the box. Some kind of plan. Please, c-can you help me? I can't let them die, I j-just can't. I'd rather d-die a hundred times myself. P-please...”

Still shocked beyond all words or reason, Amy nodded silently and, with Zecora's help, lifted the rainbow pony up off of the ground and carefully brought her inside, placing her down as gently as possible in front of the control panel.

Pacing back and forth in a panicked frenzy, the Doctor's companion rapid-fired, “So he wanted you to come to the TARDIS for help? That makes some sense, I guess. She's... oh, how would he word it? The TARDIS, she's alive. This 'box', the thing we're standing inside of right now; it's a living thing.”

“A-alive?” questioned the pegasus as she struggled to remain conscious.

“Alive and intelligent,” Amy replied, rushing through her thoughts as fast as possible. “A while ago, the Doctor told me that it helped a couple of his old friends out when they really needed it. The girl, I think her name was Rose, she looked into the heart of the TARDIS, into the vortex inside of its core. It gave her the power to travel back through time and rewrite history, but... they had to use a tractor or something to rip the controls open to find it. And we don't have enough time to find a tractor, do we? Dammit, dammit, think think think... Wait! The other one though, the other person he told me about; she wasn't really a friend, was she? I think she was an enemy of some kind in his custody.”

“Are you g-going somewhere with this?” choked Rainbow, her breathing reduced to ragged gasps for air and lucidity escaping her with every added second.

”I'm getting to it!” shouted the red-maned mare. “I'm not the Doctor, I don't have all of bloody time and space memorized! I need time to remember everything properly!”

Cradling Rainbow Dash in her forelegs, Zecora could sense that the darkness was rapidly encroaching upon the weathermare. Urgently, she screamed, “Young one, to dally any more would be a crime! She's dying, please, we haven't much time!”

“P-please...” Dash whimpered, closing her eyes.

“I know, I know! This other person... she, uh, she said she'd learned her lesson and just wanted to be set free, but the Doctor didn't believe her and was ready to take her back to her home planet, where she was going to be executed for being an intergalactic criminal or something. Oh, what did he say she did? Something easy; no heavy machines or ripping things open at all!”

The wounded pegasus began retching chaotically in her friend's black and white grip, her spasms followed by another series of gut-wrenching, crunching and cracking sounds.

“Easy,” Amy pondered in a frenzy, beads of sweat streaming down her brow like rainfall. “It was something so easy.”

In a flash of insight, the Doctor's companion remembered, and all of a sudden everything seemed so very simple.

“I... think... all she did in the end was just ask the TARDIS to help her,” she concluded quietly, the concept of just asking for help strangely obvious to her in hindsight.

Not a second later, Rainbow Dash took in one last aching breath, her eyes rolling back, and roared~

“PLEASE, HELP ME SAVE MY FRIENDS!”

And with a thud, the pegasus collapsed to the floor, devolving into a long series of wracking coughs that gradually became bloodier and bloodier. Staring at the new red stains coating the mesh paneling beneath her, Rainbow Dash groaned out in pain as her vision blurred one last time before she blacked out completely.

Amy rushed over.

Zecora shouted.

And an ear placed down to the weathermare's chest revealed... no breathing.

No heartbeat.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“I... do not know,” sneered Raszagal, his muzzle curling to display his teeth.

Clapping his forehooves together and ignoring the spike of pain that lanced through his broken leg, the Doctor triumphantly declared, “And there it is! Right there! The real reason you object! It's true, it isn't your place to answer that question. You see, I've been thinking. Thinking hard. And I don't think Silence will fall when The Question is asked. I think it's going to fall once The Question is answered. And you can't answer it. You're not afraid of the Silence. You're embarrassed that you don't have the answer to begin with, that there's something you truly do not know!” Laughing, the Time Pony shook his head and asked, “How does it feel, Raszagal? Oh, it must burn you up inside; you're just standing there, dumbfounded, letting me stall. It's brilliant.”

Under his breath, Raszagal scoffed, “So clever, so infuriatingly clever... yet still such a fool.”

“What now?” questioned the Time Stallion, tilting his head.

“It's true, I do not know your name,” the Eternal admitted. “But you mistake me, Doctor, for I do fear the Silence. Everyone does. Everything does. And it is not my place to bring it upon the universe... upon every universe. I wish to undo you, Time Lord, not all of time itself.”

As the Doctor took a moment to register those words, a sound unlike any other pierced the quiet.

A very, very familiar sound.

An unnatural wind followed, tossing the manes and tails of everypony present; swirling around a small patch of grass just a scant few inches behind Spitfire and the wounded Twilight Sparkle.

Smiling, the Doctor locked eyes with his enemy and said, “Well, I can't say I expected to hear that. The most fearless beings in all of creation... afraid. Of me. Or something involving me at the very least. Dunno if I like that. Well, regardless, that part at the end about undoing me instead of time itself... I'm sorry, Raszagal, very sorry, but I have a sneaking suspicion that time itself is about to undo you.”

“No,” breathed Raszagal, his voice a shocked and terrified whisper.

As if on cue, Spitfire clutched the motionless unicorn tight against her chest and took a look back behind her, turning just in time to see a box more blue than the clear sky up above them manifest itself.

The Wonderbolt was then forced to raise a hoof to shield her already halved vision as the doors parted open and a blinding golden light brighter than Celestia's sun emerged from inside.

Standing amidst the light show, dressed in a shimmering silver version of her Grand Galloping Gala gown, was Rainbow Dash. Her eyes, no longer magenta, glowed fiercely with the same golden aura radiating off of her.

Stepping out into the ruins, time literally stood still wherever her hooves were planted.

“No!” Raszagal repeated, unbridled fear filling his eyes brim.

“D-Dash...?” questioned Spitfire, her jaw hanging open in disbelief. “You came back... You really came back...”

Turning her head to face her fillyhood idol, the weathermare nodded and said in a full spectrum of echoing voices all at once, “I'd never leave my friends hangin'.”

Wiping tears from her good, unbloodied eye, Spitfire looked from Dash down to the purple pony still held fast in her forelegs. Swallowing a suffocating lump in her throat, she quietly cried, “But you're too late, Dash. She's... she's gone. I couldn't keep her with me. I tried, but she... she just~

Wordlessly, Rainbow Dash trotted forward and knelt down to nuzzle her lifeless friend.

“Don't worry,” spoke the prismatic pegasus as a single, sparkling tear slid down her cheek and onto Twilight's brow. “There's no such thing as too late anymore.”

Stepping forward, the Doctor held out a hoof and warned, “Rainbow Dash, no, you don't want to do that.”

“Then you know that I can do it.”

“The list of differences between something that you can do and something that you should do is so long that if I started reading it now, all of creation would come to an end before I finished. I've seen what you're about to do, seen it happen before, and it didn't end well for him. He wishes he could die.”

Closing her glimmering eyes, the pegasus muttered, “And I wish she didn't.”

With those words said, Rainbow Dash stomped a single hoof and watched as Twilight's eyes flew open. Breathing heavily as though she'd just breached the surface of the ocean after nearly drowning, the unicorn looked up at the ponies surrounding her, her face dominated by a look of total confusion.

“Wh-what... where am I?” she asked, dazed and dizzy. “Didn't I just... a-and then... Raszagal... He stabb~ He impaled me, didn't he?”

Smiling, Dash nuzzled her again and shushed, “You got better.”

No less confused, Twilight simply nodded her head in perplexed acceptance. Spitfire pulled her into another airtight embrace and the two of them sat silently as Rainbow Dash turned her attention to Raszagal.

“Thanks for waiting so patiently,” commented the shining stuntpony as she addressed her enemy. “Though I guess 'waiting' and 'scared stiff' aren't really the same thing, huh?”

Taking a step back, the still-shocked Raszagal replied, “You can't be. You're... you're impossible.”

“You haven't been paying attention at all, have you? Just ask the Doctor. I'm not impossible, I'm improbable. There's a difference.”

“No, you're the difference!”

“Hmm, alright then, you know what? You're right. I suppose I am. But you know what else? There's more to it than that. So much more. We never got to properly introduce ourselves, did we? Not really, anyway, so allow me to fill you in on all the little details you might have glossed over while you were trying to kill us all. I'm Rainbow Dash, a proud pegasus of Cloudsdale and servant to Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, and the kingdom of Equestria. I'm the Element of Loyalty, betrayer to none. I'm all of time and space rolled into one neat package; everything that has ever happened and will ever happen. I'm pure, unfiltered power. I'm the Time Vortex. I'm the decider of your fate. Oh, and one more thing. Just one more~

Narrowing her blindingly bright eyes into dangerous slits, she reared back onto two hooves and roared, “I am bucking pissed!”

That was all the Eternal had needed to hear. In less than a nanosecond, his wings unfurled and he vaulted himself skyward, another explosive Sonic Rainboom raging across the already crumbling ruins and shaking the old castle close to complete collapse. Everypony present, aside from the pony in the glimmering gown, found themselves knocked violently to the ground.

Rainbow just stood there, unphased, her expression that of a barely suppressed rage.

“Doctor?” asked the glowing pegasus, her many echoing tones all deadly serious.

Gulping, the Time Stallion stood upon quaking hooves and replied, “Yes?”

“Go get Pinkie Pie. I've got some unfinished business to take care of with our buddy, Razzy.”

The second sentence had come out with a laugh and a grin.

A jagged, murderous grin...

Closing his eyes, the Doctor sighed and said, “He deserves the worst, Rainbow Dash. A punishment more severe than that which can be comprehended or conceived. But be careful. Be careful not to enjoy administering that punishment. Don't stoop to that level. Don't be like him. Please, don't be like... me.”

Taken aback, the shimmering stuntpony turned her gaze in the direction of her rapidly fleeing foe. So many rebuttals came to her mind, but before she spread her own pair of wings wide, all she could think to say was, “I'll try not to, but I can't make any promises.”

And in an instant, she was gone. Simply... gone.

The ponies left behind blinked and searched their surroundings for any sign of the sky blue mare, not certain if Rainbow had flown off faster than they could see or if she'd just vanished into the thin of the air.

All but the Doctor.

He turned his head in the direction that Raszagal had taken off in as well, certain that the pegasus was already there confronting him, already administering her own brand of vengeful justice. He didn't need to question it. He just knew.

“Alright,” he said as he swiveled and faced the precariously crumbling castle, “time to make a daring rescue. Well, I hope anyway.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Already miles away, hundreds of miles away, a rogue deity screeched through the atmosphere with an expression of wild, animalistic terror; the sort of look a mouse gets once backed into a corner by a hungry feline. He banked and swerved with a deftness that nopony in Equestria had ever seen before, but still, every single turn found him staring into a pair of inescapable golden eyes.

Something about this chase felt dreadfully familiar to him, or would have had his mind not been muddled over by pure survival instincts.

“No!” he screamed again, unable to voice anything more than his fear in the form of a broken record.

Uncaring if her enemy even heard her, Rainbow quietly answered, “Yes.”

Several times, upon seeing his pursuer suddenly appear before him without the slightest warning, Raszagal lit his horn seemingly by reflex alone and lashed out with silvery lightning. The bolts crashed into the weathermare with an unparalleled magical force, power formerly only seen a millennium ago during a battle between two regal sisters, but then those bolts would simply... fizzle out, disappearing as though they'd been absorbed by something even greater.

Again, those golden eyes appeared before him, their piercing glare containing his every worst nightmare.

“Trying to tickle me?” asked Dash, her many voices all laughing with a unanimous venom. “I could let you keep trying, but what's the point?”

In a flash, both suddenly found themselves amongst the sands of a distant desert that had only moments ago been far below them. Raszagal turned and twisted about every which way in wailing shock, his own eyes wider than they had ever been.

Rainbow Dash just sat there observing him with an ominously silent patience that she never thought she would have been capable of.

“Well, before I wanted to watch him squirm like a salted slug, anyway,” she thought to herself, smiling in a way that both thrilled and disgusted herself.

Raszagal's spinning hysterics continued for a short while, only ending once Rainbow cleared her throat to grab his attention.

“You ready yet?” she eventually questioned.

By way of reply, the Eternal alicorn took off into the sky once more...

...only to appear again where he had just stood.

This process repeated itself several times, Raszagal's dread rising and rising with each repeat performance. Every attempt to flee sent out yet another shockwave, sending gusting winds of sand whooshing across the desolate wasteland. The blasts of long-eroded stone struck against the prismatic pegasus as though an invisible shield surrounded her, her pristine appearance and glowing aura unmarred.

Bitterly, Rainbow Dash watched the Eternal's feeble struggle and commented, “You can't even face me. It's pathetic.”

Shaking her head, she allowed him a final attempt, then returned him once more to the dunes, but much to the dark alicorn's horror, she had somehow done so without including his horn or wings.

“W-what?!” Raszagal screamed, thrashing about in the dust as he looked to his back in desperation, the feathered limbs he'd hoped to see there absent as though they had never even existed in the first place.

“Princess Celestia once banished her sister to the moon for attempting to plunge our world into an everlasting night,” Rainbow spoke, her words carrying across the desert like the tolling of a great bell, “but I'm not Celestia. I'm not that kind.”

“No, please, no!” the Eternal pleaded, backpedaling in the sand until his back came upon a large boulder.

Terrified, he continued to push back at the sand, doing nothing but digging a small trench beneath him.

Again, the word “pathetic” sprang to Dash's mind.

“I never thought I knew what hate really was,” the pegasus continued, a strong wind carrying the train of her gown in much the same fashion as her rulers' ethereal manes. “I never thought I'd be capable of it. But now? Now I see it, now I see how much hate my heart can really produce if it's forced to. I'm not proud of the pleasure that I'm gonna get out of this, but then again, at least I didn't make that promise back there. Then I'd be a liar on top of things.”

Looking up, Raszagal's begging eyes met those of the mare soon to vanquish him. All he saw reflected in them was the righteous fury of an angry god.

“I'm sorry! I'm sor~

Cutting off the now-powerless pony, Rainbow Dash glared golden daggers at him and spat, “And I'm not. See ya later, Raszagal.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Far, far away, standing just outside the now completely fallen ruins of what was once a beautiful palace and pivotal piece of Equestrian history, the Doctor waved his magic wand. Looming only millimeters away, he watched with bated breath as his flickering green light brought Pinkie Pie's eyes fluttering sleepily open. The pink mare blinked several times, consciousness coming to her slowly.