//------------------------------//
// Chapter Thirty-Three:  For the Moon is Hollow and I Have Touched the Pie 
// Story: The End of Ponies 
// by shortskirtsandexplosions 
//------------------------------//


The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions


Chapter Thirty-Three – For the Moon is Hollow and I Have Touched the Pie


Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing


Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art





        I wish I could explain the nature of the enthusiasm that so greatly motivates me these days. The fact that I can refer to this time in my life by the measure of “days” and not “stormfronts” is a testament to the fact that things have changed.

        It's not so much that I do things recklessly as it is that I do them eagerly. That wasn't always the case. Surrounded by the Wasteland, encircled by monsters, and encumbered with a lack of resources, I used to live my life in a steady but lethargic grind that was animated by the sheer necessity of the given situation.

        These time jumps—these bold and dazzling trips into the past afforded me by Spike—have given me something entirely different to live for. Still, my present life here in the ashes of desolation hasn't necessarily become inconsequential. I always know what I need to do in order to survive, and I make every effort to preserve myself—my real self—no matter how “invulnerable” my Entropan ghost of a body can be in these regular, chronological escapades.

        I think the key is that I've lived my life so long for the future. Now that I have the past to look forward to, I spend my time in the present with much speedier momentum. I'm not half the daredevil that Spike thinks I've become. Much rather, I do what I've always done—only I do it with greater ease, greater concentration, and even greater confidence. I wish he could see that, instead of worrying over my “impulsiveness”. I've learned what impatience can do to hurt ponies in the past; I have no doubt that it's only harmful to me in the present.

        In the end, I can only wonder what you think of all this. Have I abandoned you—or the notion of you, now that I've been blessed and cursed all the same to swim in the basin of my warm memories again? I've never known you to be a jealous thing, albeit you are certainly a possessive one. I don't think I've ever asked anything of you, and Celestia help me if someday I ever fall so low that I might.

        But if I was to make a request of you, I think it would be something akin to a test. I would like to see what might happen if you looked for once upon the past, if you saw the gravity of everything that you've ever done, if you tasted of the great emptiness that you personally helped carve, and then maybe—just maybe—you might, like me, learn to let go of all the heaviness.

        But I doubt it. I doubt you.









        With a flick-flick-flicking sound; the flints in Scootaloo's lantern yokes sparked true, and soon the shouldered jars burned with an amber dimness. The last pony raised her goggles and squinted with naked scarlet eyes down the faintly lit lengths of the deep tunnel that she had just carved with billowing fingers of electricity. She blinked closely at the curved white wall enshrouding her. Raising an exposed hoof, she brushed a few flakes of lunar powder and studied it up close.

        “Hrmmm...” A shrugging of her limbs, and she trudged slowly onward—following the bouncing halo of her yoke's spotlights. “At least I'll have plenty of ingredients if I need to fall back on moonvision.”

        Into the heart of the dislodged mountain of moonrock, Scootaloo spelunked. The hulking body of the ivory material hummed and hissed dully above her, telegraphing the pressure from the immense stormfront surging all over the exterior of the dome. To describe the air as stale would have been an understatement; the last pony's breaths stretched thinly as she found herself summoning great strength to make the simplest of hooftrots down the stuffy depths of the gigantic, dense structure. She briefly considered wearing her breathing mask for this sojourn, but instantly decided against it as soon as the pink-stringed dragon's tooth throbbed beneath her neck.

        While her mouth may have been starved of oxygen, it was not starved of sweetness. Invisible trails of taste spun like candy canes, tugging her deeper and deeper into the body of that celestial stone. The deeper she traversed into the cylindrical tunnel, the lower and lower the tooth yanked at her, until she felt as if the cotton candy fumes of her anchor's pull were becoming one with gravity. She couldn't fathom just how much further the lateral cave extended from her lightning gun's blast, but soon it wouldn't be important. At some point, she would have to dig her way straight down. She couldn't pretend to explain why, but with each cinnamon burst of heart-beating excitement, she obeyed the dragon's tooth and trotted further, further, further—

        Then suddenly, her entire body jolted. With a muffled shriek, Scootaloo leaned over to see that half of her front left horseshoe had cracked open a flimsy hole in the bottom of the freshly-made tunnel. The carved corridor had evidently skirted the ceiling of a hollow cavern inside the porous rock. This was of little to no consequence to the scavenger. She had come to expect such natural perforations to be found at random spots in a chunk of moonrock this large. She was about to hop over the hole and keep trotting forward... when she suddenly felt air filtering out from the jagged opening.

        Curiously, she leaned her muzzle down towards the crumbling gap. Her brown coat formed goosebumps of pleasure upon an instant kiss of a cool breeze, like a fan had been aimed at the ceiling of the cavern beneath her. With a pair of flaring nostrils, she was even further surprised to be receiving a delightful burst of oxygen. She breathed her first easy breath since ten minutes beyond marching into the flesh of the large rock. The nature of this sudden air movement briefly concerned her; the taste of hot chocolate wafting off the dragon's tooth erased her fears.

        Gripping the upper walls of the tunnel with her forelimbs, Scootaloo dangled her lower body over the hole and kicked at it with a pair of copper horseshoes. After a few well-placed bucks, the tiny hole shattered into a bulging mouth. A mere three meter drop yawned beneath her. Shining her yoke lanterns into the fresh abyss, she saw a convergence of three tunnels—one of which was leading deeper into the moonrock, towards where the dragon tooth was tugging her.

        Holding her breath, Scootaloo dropped down. Clouds of lunar powder briefly lifted and fell as she abandoned the corridor she had burrowed for this sudden, natural formation of passageways. She flashed her bright amber beams down each neck until her muzzle was pointed in the direction towards which the dragon tooth pulsed the most. In a brave flexing of her muscles, she trotted onwards, navigating the labyrinthine arteries of an alien mountain.



~*~*~*~*~*~



        It was a slow process; it always was a slow process for the scavenger. Exploring a landscape—both terrestrial and alien—meant a trot of icy precision, where the lone pegasus would glance over every nook, cranny, and corner with veteran scarlet eyes. In an existence where she had nopony but herself to watch over her well-being, Scootaloo had long learned to see a danger in everything. Even now—as an infrequent time traveler—she couldn't allow her excitement to drown out her caution.

        The one tunnel had bled into two, then three, then five and seven more sporadic branches. What was currently a simple descent would inevitably turn into a mind-numbing maze upon her return trip, and Scootaloo had every intention of making a successful and safe return trip. For this measure, she had packed an extra quantity of runestones—tiny ones—which she drove into every branching path of tunnels behind her, breathing into them with the appropriate lunar tongue so that they would glow and light the path leading out of the hollow dome upon the last pony's journey back the way she came.

        The winding corridors were awkward, worming things. With every meter navigated, Scootaloo mutely pondered how they could have come into being. She knew a great deal about how to exploit the magical qualities of moonrock, but she knew very little about how they came to be in the shape that they were in. Whatever it was about the Cataclysm that brought the moon to its destruction, it was hardly a natural thing. The lunar body was meant to be as alien to the planet as the stars themselves; such had been the case since the Sundering of Consus. She had no way to guess what would have caused a maze of jagged tunnels to form in the heart of the pearl to the past's night's sky. In dizzying nausea, she remembered how she had once sat on the rooftop to the Apple Family's barn, gazing up at the very same moon from which this chunk of rock had dislodged. Through time and space, the last pony had leaped the gap between the earth and its sacred satellite. She was suddenly too exhausted to digest the marvel of that contemplation.

        Something peculiar marked the lengths of her diligent spelunking. With curious eyes, she gazed upon the walls and was amazed to see that the jagged nature of the lunar stone was smoothing out into solid lines. What was previously a random wormhole of porous rock was graciously—even deliberately—morphing into perfectly geometric molds. She blinked several times during her canter, wondering if perhaps the same hallucinations that had plagued her in Fluttershy's Everfree Forest had somehow found their way to her natural brain stem in the present. There would be no better place than in the heart of the moon to suffer a bout of lunacy, Scootaloo briefly mused. It was a passing thought—more absurd than bitter—that she processed for the sole sake of distracting herself from just how disconcerting the smoothness of the tunnel was appearing before her.

        “Just what gives?” Scootaloo finally murmured aloud, her voice a dull echo against the suddenly concrete walls flanking her. “Did I just stumble upon the gift shop—?”

        She flinched, her scarlet eyes squinting at the presence of two dim lights resting at a distance ahead of her. In a startled heartbeat, she pondered if she had somehow marched in a full circle, for she had apparently stumbled upon a pair of runestones that she had hammered into the wall to mark her previous passage. But there was something off about them; she never once hammered two runestones so closely together. What was more—upon a slightly more focused inspection—she realized that they couldn't have been the same runestones. There was something different about them, as if they were carved out of a different rock, as if they were hewn forth into existence with different tools—with greater precision than the last pony had ever mastered in all of her years of runescaping.

        This time it was her curiosity—and not the dragon's tooth—that tugged her forward. In a breathless gait, Scootaloo drifted closer and closer to the pair of runestones. She was struck by how rigid and immaculate the embedded rocks appeared, as if they had been chiseled into being with the sharpest axes in all of Equestria. They were incredibly bright too, so much so that she swiftly extinguished the lanterns in her yoke and found that she could still see every contour of the surrounding corridor with perfect ease.

        It was with belated contemplation that Scootaloo understood the meaning behind the configuration of these stones. Both runes were as much words in the lunar tongue as they were constructions, though for some bizarre reason they were positioned upside-down to what the last pony had memorized from the history books. Her heart skipped a beat as the lines started connecting dots in her throbbing mind.

        “Oh dear Epona... Can... C-can it be...?”

        She stared once more at the runestones lodged at a solid space apart from each other along the white wall. The one on the left spelled out “H'juulm,” which stood for “door.” The glowing rock on the right spelled “H'Luun,” which was a word that the last pony had seen far too many glorious times in every royal tome that she had ever stumbled upon. It was a holy word, a sacred word, an immortal name. It meant “Luna.”

        After gazing at the seemingly impenetrable wall, the last pony stood up straight and boldly uttered out loud: “H'jem!”

        There was a bright flash—like a crescent sliver of light being born out of darkness—and the wall disappeared in a cascade of purple magic. A huge gust of pent-up air billowed violently against the pony, kicking at her short pink mane as she weathered the exploding gale. After a few wind-blown seconds, stillness returned to the corridor, and the breathless scavenger found herself staring suddenly into a great cavernous expanse... and it was lined with pony-made pillars of concrete.

        Stepping slowly—numbly—into the echoing chamber, Scootaloo stretched her brown neck into the dead black thickness of that mysterious interior. She gazed with twitching eyes left and right, noticing a phalanx of dull runestones etched into each pillar that ate at the shadows. Barely discernible shapes of wooden things, porcelain things, and silken things lingered just beyond visual comprehension. Her heart was racing a kilometer-per-second. She could barely register the taste of the dragon's tooth anymore from the sheer gravity of what she had just stumbled upon.

        Below her, a piece of fabric was lying on the smooth white stone of the floor. It was the tattered piece of an ancient flag. Kneeling down, Scootaloo turned the thing over with a hoof. A series of silver threads were exposed, woven into the purple fabric to form the unmistakable image of the Mare in the Moon. It was the banner of the Lunar Empire.

        “I-I don't believe it...” She murmured and stared up in gaping awe. “...Ponymonium?”

        Dead silence. There were too many shadows and not enough truth.

        The last pony bravely gave the dimmed runestones a lasting glance shouted: “Y'lynwyn!”

        One by one, the pillars lit up, exposing before the tiny shivering equine figure an enormous royal chamber bathed in lunar manalight. The lengths and breadths of Nightmare Moon's forsaken throne room billowed with regal brightness, filled to the brim with the stone-wrought effigies of a battle-hardened Alicorn and her dozens upon dozens of military advisers. The ghostly spaces of the purgatorial fortress shimmered with tapestries and illustrated pottery exalting the beautiful fury of the once-glorious despot of the night. It was a place built by a millennium of despair, tears, and magical fury.

        The last pony couldn't remember a time when she felt so small and yet so lucky all at once. She trembled there, a shivering soul drowning in the dead-silent divinity of it all.









        I have been bizarrely blessed to have seen many an amazing sight in my lonely years of wandering the Wasteland. I've trotted the Great Wall of Stalliongrad. I've traversed the lengths of Ghastly Gorge. I've walked through Princess Celestia's throne room and the impenetrable silver vaults of Whinniepeg. I've seen the great Ivory Bluffs of the Eastern Seaboard, the blackened depths of the Everbriar, and the enormous mountainous hollow that was once the rams' capitol city of Skyhorn. All of these places I've had the grace to visit by the sheer fact that I am the last pony ever to witness them.

        Never in my life—never in a trillion years—would I have ever imagined myself fortunate enough to have stumbled into a random chunk of moonstone to find—right before my eyes—a surviving piece of Ponymonium, the forsaken bulwark that Nightmare Moon had built centuries upon centuries ago after she and the majority of her closest subjects had been banished to the lunar structure by the Elements of Harmony, which had put an end to the Celestial Civil War a dreadful millennium ago. For centuries, Equestrian scholars had studied the Mare in the Moon from afar and had made scant guesses about the lunar city of legend, and after Princess Luna had returned as a cleansed and redeemed Alicorn, her sacred silence only tossed more fuel upon the flames of intense rumor and speculation.

        Now I know that the presumptions were true. This scavenger has trotted the halls of Princess Luna's melancholic glory; she has seen up close the chambers and rooms carved out of rock by an exiled army whose numbers dwindled to death and dust as the thousand years of banishment consumed all that had once made Nightmare Moon powerful, until the malevolent entity herself would no longer be fit to possess the throne which she had so fitfully desired. One day, she would no longer be strong enough to possess Princess Luna either.

        There has always been death and desolation in this universe. The Cataclysm was merely a dull punctuation to an epic and colorful history. The fact that this last pony is a time traveler is blissfully ironic. All that is good and marvelous is in the past; it's only fitting that I spend my life honoring that, an appendix to all things awesome.

        As for the future, I won't expect to leave a mark even remotely as special as what I have been born in the shadow of. Restoring the Sun and Moon is a fantastic notion; but there will never be another Ponymonium. I can't even pretend to be worth that much.









        Scootaloo marched like a lone brown shadow down the pale rows of gigantic concrete columns. The piles of discarded and shattered craftwork doubled and tripled the further she strolled along. Then, as she randomly had to hurdle over gigantic horizontal crossbeams of archaic stone, it occurred to her just what was odd about the place.

        Everything was upside down. The banners, the runes, the doorways, the marble stairs that were on the “ceiling;” they showed the undeniable signs that this surviving chunk of Ponymonium—as miraculous as it was—had landed roof-first when it slammed into the heart of the earth. It certainly explained to the last pony why everything was in disarray. A part of her had deeply wished that many of the ceramic pieces of art and fragile bits of armor had been much better preserved, but she knew better than to expect such. It was a miracle in and of itself that this throne room would be in any cohesive shape, especially following the cosmic plunge when the Cataclysm had thrown it from the heavens. Scootaloo theorized that the same runic construction that magically preserved the throne room in all its glory also gave the chunk of moonrock a bizarre invulnerability that not even a violent collision with the Equestrian surface could upset. The engineer inside of her couldn't help but admire the legacy of Nightmare Moon for such tenacity. Being the end of ponies meant observing the wonders of the past—both dazzling and malevolent—with an unwavering angle of objectivity. It was one of Scootaloo's few true gifts at her disposal.

        There were no bodies along her humble sojourn through Nightmare Moon's lair. She didn't expect to see any unicorn remains, quite frankly. Nor did she plan to stumble upon the bones of sarosians—Nightmare Moon's sworn night guard. Scholars had long guessed that the many soldiers and families of Lunar Empire sympathizers that had joined Nightmare Moon's fate wouldn't even have lasted a fraction of the thousand-year banishment. Even if they had learned how to transmogrify barren moonrock into consumable resources, the only soul that could have lasted the entirety of the thousand years had to have been an immortal one. Scootaloo speculated—more like hoped—that the Princess lodged inside Nightmare Moon's essence had given the bodies of her long-deceased subjects a proper burial. The Goddess of the Night had once been a creature of terror, but never in the grand history of her legacy—possessed or not—had she ever been stripped of honor.

        Even Scootaloo knew that she lingered there far longer than she needed to. There was simply no diffusing the mesmerizing waves of awe that were cycling through her trotting body. As she passed room after room and chamber after chamber, she closed her eyes and imagined the hallways filled with subjects of the Lunar Empire. She envisioned unicorns, soldiers, sarosians, equine souls hustling and bustling with activity, maintaining the glory of the one Alicorn they had sacrificed their entire lives and titles for.

        Perhaps it was the spirit of history that invigorated her, but she could not personally bring herself to detest the legacy of the Lunar Empire. A great part of her pitied them, even respected them. They saw their fascist regime as a “Republic,” and they would have followed Nightmare Moon until the bitter end of Equestrian Civilization, even if it could have been the tainted Alicorn's ambition that snuffed out all of ponydom instead of the Cataclysm. In the heart of the moon, they built Ponymonium, hoping that it would be the center of a magical new democracy long promised to them under a curtain of demented lies. Instead, they had fashioned themselves a grave, one that would also have consumed Luna as well, hadn't the Elements of Harmony purged the Goddess of her ongoing affliction.

        It was easy for the last pony to sympathize with an entire army of ponies who built a city out of nothing, knowing that their only fate was death, for they were the last of their kind. If those doomed souls pledged everything to Princess Luna, who was the last pony's patron deity—Entropa?

        It took an eon before the pegasus became aware once more of a vanilla warmth fluttering across her taste buds. She batted a hoof at the dangling, pink-stringed dragon's tooth around her neck. To her pleasant surprise, the spirit of sweetness was aiming her down a nearby corridor. Hanging a left, Scootaloo navigated her way down a descending stairwell. She marched slowly, careful not to let her hooves slide on the smooth and stairless “roof” to the winding corridor she was presently navigating. The haze of the throne room's lit runestones disappeared behind her, and she was once again cast into the bitter darkness of the giant moonrock's heart. Outside, she knew a grand storm endlessly pelted the walls of the dome. How many years had passed—she wondered—with lone and destitute souls passing over this pale mountain of white stone, not knowing the historical relic that lingered deep inside... until she and she alone discovered it?

        The stairwell finally opened to a wide corridor, beyond which a soupy blackness consumed all sight. Scootaloo dutifully re-lit her lanterns. In a bobbing, amber halo, she swung forth her light to reveal several large basins above her. Scraggly bits of roots and branches still clung—dangling—to the ivory surfaces of the plaza above. The “ceiling” below her was littered with petrified bits of leaves and foliage. Scootaloo pleasantly realized that an Equestrian garden had existed directly above Princess Luna's throne room in the heart of Ponymonium. The fact that, in all of those centuries, a portion of Nightmare Moon's spirit valued nature and antiquity gave solace to the pony's soul. Whatever part of her ever questioned Princess Celestia for showing her sister mercy following the thousandth year reunion faded in an instant.

        As the last pony walked under the remnants of the lunar gardens above, the dragon tooth throbbed with greater and greater intensity. She felt stabbed on all sides by peppermint daggers, and as she approached the center of the wide corridor she could have sworn that a burning sea of licorice was boiling beneath her. She slowed her gait, squatting and pressing her ear to a crackling square of concrete beneath a dangling hollow of a dead fruit tree. The dragon's tooth baked, filling her throat with the aftertaste of banana bread and sugar.

        “She's nearby...” Scootaloo murmured. A part of her almost entirely forgot about her anchor. As amazing as Ponymonium was, she had to remind herself exactly what she had come down there for.

        Unstrapping her saddlebag and planting it down on the layer of concrete, Scootaloo produced a pickaxe from a pouch on the broad side of her leather belongings. She brushed her hooves over the patch of floor, feeling for the quickening throbs of the dragon tooth. Finally, she settled for a lone piece of fragile rock and began hammering away at it with the bladed tool. She sweated and panted with the effort, briefly wondering just how long she would have to be chiseling her way towards a blind goal. She knew that, with the lightning gun spent, she would have to perform methodical labor somewhere within the hollow of this rock. Even with the unexpected framework of Ponymonium giving her a firm starting point, she had no idea just what length of time would be consumed by—

        An enormous cracking sound: Scootaloo shrieked and plunged. At the last second, she dropped the pickaxe and clasped two front limbs to the rocky floor. The last pony dangled in a sudden hole, her body pelted by flakes of white moondust billowing down past her. Breathless, she glanced down and saw an abyss of utter blackness gaping beneath her lower limbs. With a gulp, she pulled herself up via two flapping wings. She shuffled about and reached for her belongings, dragging the lantern yokes over and shining them down through the fresh hole.

        With thin scarlet eyes, she watched as the halo of lanternlight pierced a sudden gap between the body of Ponymonium and a great splotch of petrified Equestrian landscape encapsulated below. It occurred to Scootaloo that the giant dome of moonrock had a concave edge to it, and when it had slammed hard into the body of the Cataclysmic Equestria, the curved structure of moonrock had preserved a chunk of the cratered environment instead of utterly pulverizing it.

        “Well, sonuvawonderbolt.” Scootaloo sweatily smirked. “Perhaps she is in one piece.”

        Scootaloo got up and rummaged through her things. She produced three of her own runes and stabbed them into the lid of the fresh hole she had made in the concrete. This formed a halo of light marking the edge of the opening that could easily be seen from the desolate landscape below. Carrying the lanterns, a few metal scraping tools, and an airtight leather satchel, Scootaloo took a dive, gliding her way down toward the sheltered patch of earth on brown wings.

        After a gentle descent, Scootaloo soon landed with four hooves atop a soft bed of soil. Blinking, she glanced down to see very real—but very dead—flakes of grass and flowers beneath her hooves. She was standing in a one hundred square meter splotch of miraculously preserved Equestrian landscape, where the soil and bits of dead vegetation had not been blown to ash like everything else in the thundering Wasteland outside the dome. The moonrock's impact was rather obvious from the way in which the topography had been devastated. At the same time, however, there was nowhere for the debris to have gone, and there was certainly no Wasteland winds to shift it around. Everything lingered in perpetual stillness, unblemished by any white dust or ash. It was as if the flames of the Cataclysm had just died hours ago, and the last pony found it positively haunting.

        Shining her light across the enclosed hovel, she spotted the bodies of blown dead tree trunks flickering like amber ghosts before her shuddering vision. She slowly pressed forward along the pulsing tug of her dragon's tooth; it felt like a vanilla bath stinging all over her.

        The last pony paused briefly, for she had stumbled upon an amazingly intact wooden sign having fallen to the ground. Several painted arrows, charred from the Cataclysm flame, pointed in opposite cardinal directions. South was “Ponyville”. East was “Trottingham” and “Canterlot”. North was “Cloudsdale” and Northeast was “Skybreak Point”.

        She didn't see the wagon until she nearly tripped over it. Gasping, she shuffled to a stop and bore witness to an overturned cart complete with wagon wheels and leather reins. The thing was lying on its side, and splashed over the dead brown grass was a pile of skeletons, their limbs frozen in infinite pain and horror. They were earth ponies—every one of them—and not only that, but they were foals.

        There was no mistaking it, the entire spillage of the wagon consisted of very young bodies. Scootaloo imagined that they were no older than six or seven winters each. There was something unique about their bone structures, something discouraging. There was a brittleness to their calcium framework, as if something had eaten them alive from the inside out during their pathetically abridged lives. What so many frail and obviously unhealthy foals were doing together in the back of a wagon mid-country when the Cataclysm hit, the last pony was at a loss to guess.

        Then there were three more bodies lying just a few meters away from the overturned wagon. These were adult skeletons. Marching over, Scootaloo studied them closely. Two were adult earth ponies, only a few years apart. One skeleton—however—was far different from the other two. It had a thicker frame to its ribs, a longer snout, and far stronger hooves. For a moment there, Scootaloo couldn't guess where she had seen the likes of those bones before, until she suddenly remembered her first trip in the Harmony to the desolate remains of the Northwest Deserts.

        “A zebra?” She murmured out loud in perfect confusion. “What in Epona's name was a zebra doing here—?”

        The dragon's tooth around her neck exploded in sarsaparilla suds. She felt like her jaws would fall apart in a sugar coated apocalypse. She winced and stumbled forward until she was staring face-first into the joyless hollow of one of the earth pony's skulls. To the floundering of her swiftly beating heart, her scarlet eyes took notice of a few flimsy tufts of mane hair still clinging to the skeletal cranium... and they were all a grayish pink.

        “Oh...” She murmured in a return of somber breath. “So there you are, Auntie.”

        Standing up straight, the last pony inhaled long and hard as she took in the entirety of the lifeless old friend beneath her. She had been through these motions before. She had juggled Applejack's skull and bathed herself in the pulverized ashes of Fluttershy. But no amount of brittle horror and no amount of Ponymonium wonderment could ever distill the solemnity of what she had to do next, what she always had to do. Hopping from dead world to dead world would have been a great deal less exasperating if she didn't have to treat the fossils of friends like pool water.

        “Good thing I learned how to breast-stroke.”

        With a harlequin smirk, Scootaloo fought the waves of bitterness away as she knelt down, gathered her metal tools, and started dismantling the pieces of Pinkie Pie one by one.




~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        When Scootaloo marched back up into the rune-lit throne room of Nightmare Moon, she had a great deal of extra weight in her saddlebags. The rear pockets of her belongings bulged with tightly packed bones as she sauntered into the light and squinted across the immensity of the Ponymonium interior. Far off into the forest of ivory pillars, rooms upon rooms of endless wonders stretched beyond sight.

        There was a long way to trek back to the carved tunnel that Scootaloo had made into the body of the lunar mountain. She knew that it would be a matter of hours before the stormfront outside the dome ended, and then she had a long, arduous march back to Ponyville to look forward to. If she was wise—if she knew any better—she would find a quiet place to squat, lay her head down, and rest before covering the exhausting distances ahead.

        But as she stared further and further at the sights before her... a pathetically helpless smirk graced her features.

        “Oh Celestia help me.” She grinned and trotted off towards the nearest rocky alcove. “I'm such a friggin' scavenger.”



~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        In under two hours, Scootaloo had covered nearly three dozen rooms. She had wandered into every chamber and compartment that she could find. There, she stumbled upon ten times as many relics as she knew what to do with. There were suits of Lunar Imperial armor, banners bearing the image of the Mare in the Moon, bladed weapons armed with vicious runes that had dulled with age and neglect, photosensitive cloaks for sarosian citizens, and mountains upon mountains of tragically useless ivory bits—the lunar currency. She found scrolls rolled up with papery parchment, detailing hundreds of military engagements that were never executed because the lunar banishment had promptly ended the Celestial Civil War. There were commissaries full of eating utensils, bunkers full of sleeping mats, and—to Scootaloo's awestruck yet humble surprise—nurseries for the infant descendants of the Lunar Empire.

        Then there were books. These and these alone were what Scootaloo salvaged. She nearly soiled herself at the sight of them, at the mere thought that she had the grace and dumb luck to have found several solid tomes, priceless chunks of text, all brimming with thousands upon thousands of pages of literary history that had been lost for an eon from the annals of Equestrian lore. She nearly sobbed to find—at the end of her librarian escapade—a cluster of musical sheets, all labeled with a name that she never knew, for the composer had been born on the moon.

        “Sweet tap-dancing Nebula—I think I finally discovered my foalday!”

        Scootaloo nearly drooled as she shuffled down a thin concrete hallway lined with portraits. The canvas images clung upside-down to the ivory walls. With a tilt of her pink-haired head, the last pony could make out propaganda art detailing the impressionistic triumph of Nightmare Moon over Celestial adversity. Several illustrated phalanxes of hard-working, hard-fighting unicorns followed the shadow of their lunar savior... even unto cosmic death.

        The last pony was so engulfed in her historical imaginings that she barely realized she had trotted onto a part of the throne room that she hadn't stumbled upon before. Glancing up at the “floor” to the compartment, she was slightly surprised to see a velvet-carpeted platform stretching down like an inverted ziggurat. At the very peak of the construction was a square piece of concrete that stood before a sharp incline in steps.

        The wheels turned in Scootaloo's brown skull, and she transposed the upside-down image of Celestia's throne room over what she was presently witnessing, and everything looked the same. In a phoenix-flaming blink, she eagerly looked for one object and one object alone. After a few darting glances, she found it. It had fallen from the overturned floor of the grandiose interior countless years ago. Shuffling over, she pressed her entire body into the mahogany structure of the piece. It took some straining and a vigorous flapping of her wings, but she finally managed to push the thing upright.

        Standing back in a breathless stance, Scootaloo proudly stared at the very wooden throne of Princess Luna. It had a deep blue finish, something that likely matched the dark hue of the Alicorn's starlit mane. Carved in the surface of the thing was a gorgeous engraving of dozens upon dozens of sequences, events that depicted the rise of Nightmare Moon and the glorious foundation of the Lunar Empire. Nothing—of course—illustrated that same Empire's long and dwindling death in the bowels of a celestial rock.

        A gleeful surge of foalish impulse bubbled through Scootaloo's soul, with more sugary absurdity than ever a dragon's tooth could usher. Clearing her throat and battling a goofy grin, the lonesome pegasus shuffled up, turned around, and slowly... slowly squatted in the royal chair. The last pony briefly sat upon the throne of ages, staring out at an upside-down grave of Equestrian legacy, with all the ghosts of the past bowing before her in endless death and silence.

        “And as my first royal decree, I declare all talent shows to be officially forbidden!”

        Silence.

        “Ahem. Yeah, that was lame.”

        She smirked to herself and kicked off the throne. The wooden seat rattled, and suddenly something that she had barely noticed—something that had been mounted at the top of the throne's frame—fell off with a metallic rattle and rolled across the concrete “ceiling” beside her. She glanced over, blinking, and suddenly marveled at the round clattering object.

        “Oh no way...” She trotted over, her mouth agape. “No friggin' way.” Scootaloo smiled stupidly.

        It was a helmet—but just not any helmet; it was one of Nightmare Moon's helms. The perfectly round, perfectly reflective cranial piece was made to fit the shaved skull of the dreaded Alicorn menace. A hollow, cylindrical sheathe stood in place of where a sharp rigid horn would fit through.

        In trembling hooves, the last pony picked the armor piece up. She turned it over several times before her squinting scarlet eyes, marveling at the silver surface of the metal that was still polished and unblemished after so many years. The last time it could ever have been worn was no less than twenty-five years ago.

        “Whew.” Scootaloo whistled shrilly to herself as she further examined the large object. “She certainly did have a big friggin' head, now did she?” A pause. She bit her lip and glanced gaily aside, left-to-right. In a deep breath, she squatted on her haunches and lifted the helmet up over her cranium. When she finally released her grip, the celestial relic broadly swallowed her skull and rocked back and forth over it like a bobble-head. She hissed under her breath and bravely stifled a foalish giggle before it could rise to her throat. “Pfft... Oh yeah. Get a load of this, Ponymonium. Bow in fear for your new Mistress, Princess Scootalooney.”

        She briefly pondered taking this with her along with the scavenged books. She undoubtedly planned to make return trips to this amazing place, but in the meantime it couldn't hurt to have a fear-inducing helmet marking the bow of the Harmony. If not for scaring off trolls and harpies, it could give Bruce something to choke on his cigar over.

        Scootaloo was about to take it off when—in a blinding flash—her vision was violently and magically assaulted with the image of a pair of purple eyeslits, emblazoned in cosmic fury.

        “Nnnghh-Augh!”

        She shrieked painfully and tossed the helmet off of her. She reeled back against the wooden frame of the throne, blinking, seeing stars. All the while, the cranial armor piece rattled and rolled to an echoing stop in the center of the room. Scootaloo sat in a sweaty slump, panting and panting as if a chunk of her soul had been ripped out through her eye sockets by celestial teeth. She glanced forlornly and saw—ever so briefly—a dim glow pulsating from the empty horn-socket of Nightmare Moon's helmet. As soon as the light died, several rows of runestones along the ivory pillars of the grand room fluctuated in sequence. There was a brief but very real rumbling through the depths of Ponymonium, and then all was silent once more.

        “Uhhhm...” She gulped and bit her lower lip. “Th-that can't be good.”

        There was a hissing noise. The smell of steaming runestones lit the room. Nervously, Scootaloo glanced left and right and was startled to see shapes surging from the thick ivory walls of the throne room. With a flurry of lunar powder and ash, white crusty things lurched out onto the floor, their joints snapping craggily in the stale air. Soon, to Scootaloo's confused horror, several dozens if not hundreds of living statues were shuffling mindlessly towards her. In the center of each pony-shaped chunk of rock, a buried runestone shimmered. From several different angles, the last pony could make out the word that each runestone was emulating: “Guardian.”







        You're laughing at me. I know that you're laughing at me. Even as I write this and think back on the occasion, I can feel the Harmony bobbing from the infinite waves of your blatant hysteria piercing the clouds.

        You must understand—though I somehow doubt you will try—that I can hardly ever afford myself peace or joy in the Wasteland. And whenever I almost do, whenever I stumble upon the crest of inane self-indulgence and happiness, this sort of crud happens.

        I would write “Go drown yourself in a ditch,” but even that would be inviting more calamity. If there's any enjoyment I can safely cling to, it's that there is no event in life so stupid that I can't survive it just to experience something even stupider.









        Scootaloo stood up on nervous haunches and slowly backed away from an ever-thickening circle of craggy equine statues shuffling towards her. The last pony suddenly knew what had happened to every dying soul that breathed its last breath under allegiance to the exiled Nightmare Moon. The last generation of royal subjects had been spiritually transferred into these rooks, a last bastion of defense that the possessed Alicorn had built within Ponymonium. When Princess Luna returned to Equestria on the thousandth year and was cleansed of the Nightmarish spirit, she never bothered to diffuse the black magic that was left deep in the celestial object, for there was never any expectation of another equine soul planting her hooves on lunar ground again—ever.

        Scootaloo was very “lucky” that day indeed...

        “Of course there'd be friggin' moon golems,” she hissed to herself, flicking her gaze back and forth as the circle of menacing statues shuffled closer and closer on jagged white limbs. “You can't have a purgatorial city of lunar rock without moon golems. That just wouldn't be proper! Friggin' luck of a drunken ogre, I swear to Epona.” She gnashed her teeth. After a clearing of her throat, she bravely exclaimed, “Look, the Celestial Civil War is over! There's no need to fight anymore! Go back to... uhm... your eternal slumber, good and faithful servants of Nightmare Moon!”

        The golems marched towards her undaunted. The runestones in their featureless white craniums strobed like cycloptic eyes as their necks unnaturally jerked and their limbs dustily stretched towards her.

        Scootaloo scrunched herself up against the throne. In a panicked breath, she switched gears and thunderously roared, “Stand down, thou insolent foals! Uhhh... For it is we, Scootaloo, immortal niece to Nightmare Moon and rightful heir to the throne of Ponymonium! Thou dare approacheth us?! Halt thy petulant hooves, we commandeth thee!”

        Glancing down at the cursed helmet, she kicked it with a hoof so that it rolled lifelessly towards the clambering limbs of the golem army.

        “Doth thou not see our armor so righteously discarded?! We have verily taken ourselves to another kingdom to harken upon a new era! Thy allegiance is no longer required! Get... uhh... Get thee to a lunar quarry and... uhh... l-layeth thine heads down in immortal slumber! So proclaimeth thy new and most awesome liege!”

        The golems stood briefly in a lurching pause before the helmet. After a few mindless seconds, they stomped forward in a furious gait, viciously crushing the discarded armor to shrapnel as they murderously made their way towards the last pony.

        Scootaloo winced.

        “Yeah, I didn't think so.”

        In a flash, she flung her entire weight against the wooden throne and shoved it towards the wall of advancing statues.

        The priceless seat slammed through a row of white figures before exploding into mahogany splinters. The split wave of guardians pounced at Scootaloo.

        She immediately took to the air and vaulted with twitching hooves over the necks of the lunging monstrosities. She struggled with the weight of lunar tomes and Pinkie's ashes that bulged in her saddlebags as she flapped her brown wings and aimed her body towards the far end of the throne room. With a shriek, she felt her scant tailhairs being yanked down by stony limbs. She kicked and bucked down at the lunging sea of possessed lunar rocks. Clumps of white powder and ivory dust filled the room as row upon row of statues piled up and clambered all over her.

        The corridors of Ponymonium that had been deathly quiet for a quarter of a century were now suddenly and violently filled with the cacophony of this murderous struggle. Scootaloo kicked and thrashed and wrestled with the rocky limbs converging on her. Finally, she grasped a forelimb of moonrock in her teeth and brutally twisted. The leg snapped loose with a crackling of brittle dust, and she proceeded to smack the remaining bulk of the thing across three more faceless heads glistening in front of her.

        In her desperation, the last pony successfully smashed a hole loose in the ranks of the possessed golems. With one massive kick to the statue clasping her tail, she broke free and flew violently towards a series of pillars. She slid and rolled to a stop—wincing—and hobbled up just in time to hear a stampede of stone hooves clattering up behind her. Looking down on the concrete “ceiling”, she found a discarded breastplate of Lunar Imperial armor. Clasping it in a pair of rattling teeth, she spun and flung the thing like a disc into the advancing waves of golems. The metal plate sliced through the air and severed three golems’ “skulls” in one expert throw. The runestones flickered to dim death and the lumbering bodies dissipated in dust as several hundred more golems advanced in wake of the meager three's demise.

        Hissing under her breath, Scootaloo scampered helplessly away from the stampede of rocky creatures. Their speed and maneuverability doubled as their spirits re-acclimated to the timeless shapes of the upside-down lunar city. In a matter of seconds, they were rushing up alongside her flanks, flinging stone fists and violent headbutts at her desperately galloping hooves. The last pony hopped over heaps of dust, chunks of broken pottery, and bits of overturned armor as she fought the futility of outrunning these mindless abominations that filled the hallways with thunderous chaos.

        Glancing from afar, she could barely make out the rune-lit entranceway that bled into the dark tunnels through which she initially entered. Before she could stretch her wings into action, the inviting sight of her one and only exit was blocked by a fresh resurgence of moon golems leaping directly in her path.

        “Oh come on—Augh!” She yelped as two statues pounced on her. She viciously bucked them off, ducked another's dive, and leapt straight up in a desperate breath. Her twitching eyes caught sight of a hanging strap of velvet carpet that had half-peeled from the “floor” of the throne room above. She clasped her teeth onto it and fluttered her wings like a foal adding propulsion to an invisible scooter. With such an effort, she magically flung herself over a leaping mountain of clambering golems beneath her. Then the carpet snapped down its fragile length.

        Scootaloo shrieked, somersaulted, and flew through a pile of clattering armor bits. She tumbled to a stop against the partially crumbled doorway to a darkened chamber built in the side of the throne room.

        “Unnngh...” She stirred and sat up, wincing through foggy vision to see a solid line of pale shapes advancing on her, trapping her against the wall and barricading her from her one and only exit. “Okay, that's it!”

        She snarled and flung her saddlebag forward so that her rifle flew out. With a righteous clak-a-clak of copper, she aimed the extended weapon at the thick phalanx of zombified stone.

        “Playtime's over, you walking sacks of moon crap! Let's do this the hard way!” She spat: “H'rhnum!”

        The magazine of runestones in her rifle lit with a purple glow to match her bracelet of horns. A lifetime's mastery of lunar magic ironically flung its fury back at its own kind as the last pony launched manabullet after manabullet into the advancing army of stone guardians. She aimed for the heads, severing several flickering runelit skulls at once with each blast. The air filled thicker and thicker with a bloody white powder as she whittled the militia of golems away one by one. But as the shots rang out and the squadron of advancing statues greatly outnumbered the quantity of runestones that Scootaloo knew she had left in her rifle's magazines, the pegasus was quick to take count of the hopeless situation.

        “Gotta clear a path!” She panted to herself as she cocked the rifle and spat loose the empty, smoking magazine. “All I need is a path!” She loaded the second magazine—this time full of explosive runes lit with a dim purple haze. Scootaloo snapped the levers of the rifle, aimed, and growled: “M'wynhrm!”

        A manabullet flew into the pale crowd, lodged itself into an unlucky golem, and exploded. Chunks of moonrock and sundered white limbs flew in a frothing cloud. The army still advanced on her. She backed up, constantly shuffling into the dark-lit chamber beyond the doorframe to her flank.

        “M'wynhrm!” She launched another exploding manabullet. She cocked and reloaded the rifle, shouting again: “M'wynhrm!” The statues shattered and splashed all over her. She hissed for a solid breath under the constant rain of powder, still desperate to carve a clear path in the army before her. Panting and heaving, she backed up further and again hissed: “M'wynhrm!”

        Another explosion, but at the tail-end of it there was an unsettling sizzling noise. The air filled with burning, acrid smoke. A heated wind kicked up from behind Scootaloo, like a sudden and inexplicable backdraft from a forest fire. Blinking quizzically, the last pony tossed a forlorn glance over her shoulder. There was suddenly an entire throng of blinking lights shimmering from deep within the dark-lit chamber that she had backed into. To the last pony's undeniable horror, she realized that she had stumbled upon an armory... and stockpiled to the brim inside that suddenly enormous hovel was a veritable mountain of bulbous black bombs. The sea of explosions were rigged with ancient runes... runes that were suddenly shimmering—everyone of them—because some stupid pony had uttered the lunar trigger word within magical earshot of the entire cache.

        “Awwwwwww buffalo biscuits.” In a flash, the last pony recklessly plunged herself forward. She flew within a meter's reach of the lumbering moon golems' limbs. Sure enough, they all violently reached for her, but just as they did—

        Ponymonium exploded. A frothing bubble of flame and plasma erupted behind Scootaloo's desperately flapping wings. The clambering army of pony-shaped statues helplessly flailed and lost their grip of her as their pulsing ivory forms were swallowed by an advancing wave of magical, rune-lit fire. The entire throne room baked and quaked as the burning wave of chaos swam through it, chasing a lone pegasus' dangling limbs.

        The witless survivor screamed for every ounce of mindless strength as she fought to outfly the searing tongues of flame eating at her tail. Before her, the walls and ceiling of Ponymonium collapsed unceremoniously, tossing dozens of frightening projectiles into her bobbing vision. She sneered through clenched teeth as she focused her flight, barreling up and over falling debris like a prismatic savior had once carried a shivering orange foal through the collapsing chaos of Cloudsdale a holocaustal twenty-five years ago. Before her twitching scarlets, row after row of ivory pillars fell towards her. She dipped under them and breathlessly arced her flight to bank past several more as she hurdled her twirling way towards the suddenly collapsing exit in the distance.

        With a grunt, Scootaloo angled her wings back and dove through the mercilessly imploding chamber that the once-pristine throne room had become. With centimeters to spare, she ducked through the crumbling door-frame and surged her blind way through the porous tunnels of the moon rock. She dared not slow down, not even here. To her mixed relief, the tunnels suddenly lit up in a bright amber glow as the flames plowed through the crumbling ivory behind her and fountained through the claustrophobic tunnels in a murderous pursuit of her sweating body.

        In dizzying precision, the scavenger navigated the worming gray tunnels, her scarlet eyes scraping the dull white walls in search of the dimly glowing runestones that she had innocently hammered into the crumbling moonrock hours ago. She barely saw them above the glowing gold of the frothing flames at her flank, and with crazy speed she navigated the path she had illustrated for herself through the shuddering maze. Dust and ash kissed her as she twirled through the collapsing labyrinth. In the shaking cacophony of it all, she could no longer tell what was “up” or “down” anymore. There was only forward, and she surged towards it, dipping up and down and left and right through the rune-lit tunnels as the explosive flames screamed threateningly to outrace her, to cook her.

        Finally, she saw a tiny sliver of twilight. Chunks of heavy moonrock collapsed, exposing the unnaturally cylindrical tunnel she had carved above. She ducked the first falling chunk, sideswiped a second, and pulled herself up with a mighty flap of her wings. Reuniting with the long, smooth tunnel, she breathlessly bulleted herself down the length of it, her eyes straining to stay focused on the bright window to the storming wastelands beyond. The random flashes of thunder fought the bright aura behind her as the flame began singeing the frayed ends of her violet tail hair.

        Squealing, she broke into the blinding gray world beyond. An explosion—matching the enormity of thunder all around—and she was thrown mercilessly into the stony ground by the concussive blast of the flames erupting from the lightning carved tunnel immediately behind her. A deep rumbling filled the earth, shaking Scootaloo to her very core. She winced and shook the cobwebs out from her windblown skull in time to see the entirety of the white dome collapsing in on itself. The huge chunk of moonstone imploded as explosion after explosion rocked the bowels of it. What was left of Ponymonium was soon no more; the hulking alabaster mountain sunk into the wounded crater that it had forged in the earth two and a half decades ago. Soon, all that remained was bathed in a thick cloud of white ashen debris.

        Scootaloo took a few panting breaths as she rested there on her haunches. As the rolling thunder further blanketed the Wasteland landscape around her, whatever strength she had left in her equine body manifested itself in a snarl, and soon a deep-throated growl.

        “Aaaah—Aaaaah!” She hopped up to her hooves and roared into the destruction left behind her. “I swear to all that is holy in this cockeyed universe, why can't it ever be... friggin'... simple?!”

        The deafening world was indifferent to her angry outburst. The thunder challenged her, mocked her, laughed at her.

        “You know what? Screw it! I have better places to be!” Scootaloo angrily flung her saddlebag to the ground and tore two pouches open. She simultaneously produced an earth pony's femur and Spike's green flame in one furious motion. “Screw you!” She spat at the rusted remains of an exploded lightning gun. “Screw you!” She hissed at the femur before smashing it over her skull and bathing in Pinkie's ashes.

        The sky shouted in violent thunder.

        “And most of all, screw you!” She roared back to the stormfront while clasping the jar of green flames in two angry hooves. “I don't need your incessant crap! I'm going stargazing and nopony can stop me!” After a hysterical wheeze, Scootaloo screamed into the rune, “Y'hnyrr!!!”

        In a green glow of Entropan glory, the flames erupted from the jar and clasped all over the last pony's brown body. She was yanked forcibly down a very familiar tunnel, a tunnel bouncing in eternally refracted hues of pulsing emerald. Scootaloo took a meditative breath as her angry body molded into a calm copper shell, with an amber-streaked black mane that fluttered in the absence of any explosions or thunderous noises that ever existed ever. Soon she stood—still as a lunar statue—in the haze of a sun-kissed morning.

        When she opened her amber eyes, a pair of blue irises was immediately bouncing up against her nose.

        “You!” A pink face desperately gasped.

        “M-me?!” A startled time-traveler nervously blinked.

        “Yes you!” The candy-coated mare nodded furiously. “I've been looking all over for you!”

        “You h-have?” Harmony balked. She blinked, and in that blink she made out several gold-thatched roofs and bright equine bodies. The smell of cooked food and blooming flower gardens hit her nose. “Ponyville... ?”

        “You're just the pony I need!” The blue-eyed anchor was suddenly shoving Harmony like a wheelbarrow up the steep steps leading to a majestic five-story cylindrical building. She planted the copper pegasus like a potted plant right in front of a pair of wooden double doors. “Quick! Ring the bell, and when she comes out, ask 'What goes up white but comes down yellow, gray, and white?'”

        “Uhhhhh—Wh-when who comes out?”

        “Heeheehee—Quick! Before anypony sees you!” She was gone in a pink blur.

        Harmony numbly, dumbly rang the bell along the building-front. In the span of four or five confused heartbeats, a series of hoofsteps trotted up to the doors and opened it from the other side. A hauntingly familiar face peered through, an image that the foalish shade inside the time traveler instantly recognized from many a celebratory speech in the annals of Ponyvillean history.

        “Yes?” A gray-maned mare squinted through a pair of bifocals. She was bearing a white collar with a green cravat as she leaned her head curiously to the side. “Is this official business?”

        “Uhhh...” Harmony gulped and fell back on programmed words: “Ms. Mayor, 'What goes up white but comes down yellow, gray, and white?'”

        “I... I-I hardly even know...” The elder squinted.

        Harmony was suddenly aware of a yanking string in the peripheral of her vision. She glanced up then watched in slow-motion horror as a mounted bucket swiveled at the end of a cord and dumped a fountain of white objects splashingly over the hapless earth pony's skull. The mayor gasped and sputtered, her entire neck drenched in ivory shell fragments and yellow yolk.

        Pinkie Pie victoriously slid into frame with a crescent moon of a smile. “'Egg in your mane!'” She gleefully solved the riddle. “Heeheeheeheeheeeeeee!”

        Ponyville's mayor fumed, her gray-brown coat burning hot and red. She cast a murderous glare at the practical joker, a hateful glance that the time traveler was witlessly sharing the dreadful spotlight of. “Grrrrr—Miss Pie...!”

        Harmony gulped with a deep shiver. “Hoboy.”