Theater. These were new, relatively. When I was a filly my dad had taken me to see the cartoons, once, and I had loved them. A big funny looking cartoon creature called a 'human' was on the screen, and there was a big rabbit too, and they cracked jokes and whacked each other with clubs and anvils. There was singing and an operatic score, brilliant stuff. The kind of humor they did in those cartoons was peerless, and I would make time to see them as I grew up.
After I graduated from high school, I had stopped going to them. They still showed them in theaters, of course, but I never had time. Gabby had been really into them too, though the twins hadn't, they only tolerated them because I loved them so much. I remembered at first that they even had newsreels that played alongside the cartoons, and while I hadn't really cared about them, they were what my dad had wanted to see. I got to spend a lot of time with him in darkened theaters, watching the news with him, hearing him discuss it with me. I suppose I learned a lot about the world outside of Canterlot because of him, that way.
As I got older they stopped putting those newsreels on and dad and I had no reason to go to shows. I kinda missed it, but I was getting to that age where I had to do stuff without my parents. I hadn't been a rebellious daughter, but I also wasn't daddy's little princess e,ither. Still, theaters held a special place in my heart even if I never went to them anymore. I can still remember how it was, to quote my dad, a "Five bit holiday". Admission cost two bits, and I got in free because I was a filly. Then he'd buy me a popcorn for a bit and we'd give another bit to the street musicians who were always playing outside. I didn't care for the music much but dad just loved it, you could always hear the waft of jazz music in that neighborhood if you cared to listen for it. The last bit was for the tram tickets there and back, they gave you a day pass and you could ride as much as you wanted. A bit didn't go as far as it did in the old days, not anymore, so I guess that'd be around twenty bits today.
"Celestia, why did you pick a theater?" I asked her. We were both sitting in one, watching a blank white screen. The projector was on, clacking away, projecting white emptiness.
"You chose to come after me. This is the best place for it, if you think about it," she said. She was sitting next to me, we were in the front row. I didn't take my eyes off the non-movie playing, I was waiting for something to come on.
"I can't leave you here," I said.
"But I can't come with you. Watch," she said.
A movie began to play and I settled into my comfortable routine. A mare appeared on screen, both a horn and wings, standing in a field, as the camera-pony swooped in from out of the sky. It landed next to her, and they exchanged a look, but no words.
"Oh, this. It's different from your eyes," I said.
"Watch what comes next," she said.
The sun appeared, and I saw the tiny ball of rock and water that I called home appear as a tiny little black dot in front of it. The camera flew towards it, the little ball became bigger and bigger as the sun became smaller and I saw myself and my two sisters, staring up in awe at the sky. A terrible crash echoed from somewhere and the three of us scattered as a shadow of some menacing monster loomed over us. I remembered that, too, but whose eyes was it seen through?
"That's not your memory," I said.
"Isn't it? I know it isn't, but it has become tangled within me. I cannot leave this place, I am tied to it," Celestia said.
"Oh, I see now," I said.
"You should go. This is the way it had to be, from the very beginning. Go back with Twilight, you'll have to be her mentor now. Let her know how proud of her I was," she said.
"But you're so close. It'd be robbery to have you right in front of me, and not be able to help," I said.
"Fate is cruel sometimes. I could not deprive the world of you. Just go," she said.
I laid my head back, against the hard seat that separated the rows of cushions. I closed my eyes, thinking. Perhaps praying.
Elements? Keepers? Whoever you are, or were? If there's a way, I will do anything.
I felt a warm feeling in my chest and opened my eyes. Tia was gone, though the theater had no exit. No movie was playing now. In front of me was a tray, the bus that held the projector. You could push the projector around on this metal tray to move it and detach the film reels and put on others, like when the staff needed to change what movie was playing. There were several reels next to the projector, and a pair of scissors. A roll of tape hung off one side.
All the time in the world was what I had. Time didn't matter here. Time was not a thing in the realm of perceptions, unless one wanted it to be. Untethered from that cold and sterile reality outside, the place I shared with other beings, here I could work for any amount of time, no exhaustion, no hunger or thirst.
I pulled out the first reel of film and looked at it. Some of this was Celestia's memories, personality, ideas, hopes. Some of this was some other creature's, some other entity had shared itself with her. It knew things I didn't, had seen places I could only guess at. The far reaches of the universe, the depths of the earth. I cut those frames off and pasted Celestia's together. I had only some idea of how long it was taking me, for though time did not pass here, I still had to do this cutting and editing in my own idea of time. Just as crossing the room had distance, though one could never run out of meters, doing something expended time, even if I could never run out of it.
I worked off the first reel of film, and it took me months, years. Decades. Small price to pay. The labor was tiring, emotionally, not physically. I saw all of Celestia's innermost feelings, I saw her jealousy, her displeasure, her triumph, her pride. She was not perfect, and never pretended to be, yet all the rest of us told ourselves she was. She was as close as any pony could be to that lofty ideal. Still, it hurt to have to see it. Sometimes she was petty, sometimes she was cruel. She had done terrible things to the weak, the poor. She cried in regret, having nopony to confide in lest she admit the deed. She had spent so much time alone, even in a crowded room. I wished I could cut those parts out too, but that? Unforgivable. A pony is as much virtue as vice, to excise the flaws would be to excise a vital part that I loved as much as the others.
The second reel was the same as the first, but farther along in her life. So intertwined with the Unmaker was she that there was no way she could have undone these bonds herself. I wondered how far she had been from losing herself completely within it, it was so much grander a creature than her. I cut and snipped and examined and evaluated. More centuries passed, now millennia. Celestia was over ten-thousand years old, as I was, and that meant all those memories had to be checked over. An ordinary pony would have gone mad to work at the same task for so long. Thankful, I ought to be, that I was no ordinary pony.
I labored over those film reels in silence and loneliness for another millennium. Sometimes I wanted to give up and just quit. Give up, go home, sleep. My friends were distant memories, I hadn't seen them in a dozen lifetimes, yet I knew they were mere seconds away from me had I wished to see them. Celestia was more important than my own desires, this was something only I could do. Another thousand years of my editing and tinkering. Another. Seven total before I had cut all the parts that were not her. Another three hundred years to put them all back together. I watched them all, sped up sometimes, skipped sometimes for brevity. I had to make sure I had not missed anything. I even, in my saintly patience, resisted putting in a memory of my own, about how awesome Amoria was and how much she deserved to not be randomly pranked for no reason.
At last, the finished reel lay before me. I had cut a million tons of film, more than all that the real world had ever printed and may ever print, and discarded it in nothingness, to be banished from existence as soon as I lost notice of it. My task complete, I relaxed on the theater chair and closed my eyes as I had before.
Yet I was compelled to return, yet again. All this work and there was still more to do. Ponies relied on me. I had to go to them.
I opened my eyes to see myself standing on the elevator, battered and broken. My friends, no longer faint sparks of light, lay before me, surrounded by the buckling flesh of the Unmaker's shell. How I had gotten here was of no importance. What was, was that Celestia lay with us on the elevator, as it began to ascend.
Great things were happening below us. When we returned to the shrine of the elements, I found that the elemental treasures were gone. Who could care what had happened to them? It all seemed so insignificant to me now, all I cared about was the safety of these five ponies before me. I dragged them off the platform and lay them all near the door. Only Luna stirred as I did so.
"Amoria? Is that you?" she asked. Her eyes were open. Perhaps she refused to believe them.
"It's out of our grasp now, Luna. It's all up to the bearers now," I said.
She could not feel it, but I could. The fountain of energy and emotion that had set off below us was being contained, restrained. With each second that passed, I felt it become slightly smaller, slightly lower in the ground. Whether or not we had done anything to help was a moot point now, it didn't matter to me. What mattered was that Celestia was here.
"Will she be all right?" Luna asked.
"We'll not be able to tarry long getting her to the surface, but I'm sure she'll hold out," I said. Celestia was breathing, though it'd be a wonder if she could lift her head. Perhaps that black shell she had been wearing had sustained her, so far from the sun, but now she was without it and every bit as weak as when we were last here.
We watched over her until the others awoke. They didn't speak of what had transpired below us, perhaps because they wanted to forget it, or perhaps because they knew on some primal level that it was something nigh unexplainable. I could only guess at what I had done, refusing to give up? Refusing to die? Pushing and tearing at something even without a body to tear at it with?
Hours passed as Celestia breathed steadily. She did not wake, until at last I heard a shout from the elevator's pad. It had descended quietly without me noticing, and now it came back up with six ponies in tow. The battle outside was over, and there was no hostile force below us. My special senses quieted for the last time, never to reactivate.
"Princess Celestia!" shouted Twilight Sparkle. Her head was adorned with that tiara she had always referred to as a 'crown thingy', which bore a six-pointed star as a gem on it. She rushed over to us, surrounded by her five friends. Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rarity. The bearers of the Elements of Harmony, at once jubilant and grim.
"Is she okay?" Twilight asked me.
"She'll be fine," I said. She hugged me before I could react, and they all breathed a collective sigh of relief, all at once.
"So it's over? It's all over?" Twilight asked me. She hadn't left Celestia's side, though her friends were introducing themselves to mine, chatting about what they had seen, and done. Pinkie and Inkie had embraced, then promptly tried to scold each other, before laughing at the absurdity of it. Fluttershy was about ready to die of postponed terror, having put off feeling scared and vulnerable until after the fate of the world didn't rest on her.
"Yes, it is. How many is that? How many times have you six saved all of us?" I asked.
"I lost count," she said. She wasn't excited or happy like everypony else was. Her face betrayed something else, something she had seen while they had not.
"What was it like? What did you have to do?" I asked.
"My friends held it still. It was strong, and I couldn't do it myself, so they held it still for me. And I went in alone and – " she said. She stopped and turned to me, a tear in her eye. She blinked to dash it away, hoping I hadn't noticed it.
"It begged me to finish it off," she said.
"Oh, Twilight," I said. She was not reassured despite my efforts.
"It was angry at you for putting it down there and not letting it out. It said it was sorry for having done all this, and it knew it had to die so everything else could live. It didn't want to be trapped in its own maddening hell anymore, and it begged me to kill it," she said.
I couldn't bring myself to say anything after that. Celestia did it for me.
"Twilight," she said, raspy and weak, "I'm so proud of you."
Twilight nuzzled her mentor as Celestia went back to sleep, tired even to have spoken six words.
Everypony was preparing to leave, and not a moment too soon. We had a long walk back to the surface ahead of us and it would not be helped by us having to carry Celestia up with us, at least until she was strong enough to walk herself. Before we could depart, Luna called me over to the metal lumps still in the corner. They still hummed with electrical current.
"What are we to do of them?" she asked.
"I think this is a fitting tomb, don't you? This place will be forgotten, and they along with it, and that's for the best," I said.
The gentle electrical hum intensified for a moment, having heard our speech and recognized it. A light turned on on the top Redeemer's head, though it could not turn to face us, and a monotone mechanical voice spoke from somewhere within.
"Commander. Luna. Is. The. Mission. Complete?" it asked.
"Yes. The mission is complete," she said.
"Con-firmed. Engage. Shut. Down. It. Was. An. Honor," it said. The hum of power in it ceased and the light went dark. The last Redeemer was gone.
With nothing to stop us, the trek to the surface was long and uneventful. The dark forces of the Faceless ones were gone, forever. The caves of the Abyss had lost their bizarre appearance and become glassy black obsidian rock. The Ziristone now had large, obvious holes in it as we approached the shell, where before there had been weaknesses only I could sense. Luna's impeccable sense of direction led us up the same path we had taken to come down here, as the two of us carried Celestia's inert body up through the caves and back to the mine shafts that would lead us to the surface.
Eventually she recovered and insisted on walking herself back up. It was only with a lot of coaxing that we put her down, and she had staggered but shoved us away when she tried to help. She laughed at us and we laughed back. Each step she took made her stronger and lifted her spirits higher, until ahead of us I could finally see a sliver of the night's sky through the mine shaft ahead.
Gabby insisted on knocking the boards in herself, impressing everypony with a display of martial prowess the envy of any action-movie star. Outside the mine entrance, I looked at the glow of the coming dawn and asked Celestia if she would raise the sun for all of us to watch. She did not answer as it came closer, and when the sun dawned, right on time, she had stood looking at us, not using her power. It had dawned on its own.
"Everything is as it should be," she said. Her smile was warmer than the rays of the sun ever could be.