Dear Princess Celestia,
The events of the past two weeks have changed me in ways I could scarcely have imagined. I have blood on my hooves, and even though I have searched again and again for a way to have broken the storm without pulling Rainbow Dash through the portal of life and death, I can see no alternatives. I promise you I am not justifying my actions, but there was no other way. Logic, cold logic, dictated my actions.
I haven’t lied to Dashie. She hasn’t asked the hard questions yet, so far just asking what she should tell the others. I never realized just how important loyalty was to a leader. If she ever asks me if she was dead, I would tell her she was. And if she asks me the cost to bring her back, I would have to tell her that also. I lay sleepless at night, imagining the look in her eyes as I tell her what I did. Then I cry myself to sleep.
But the children, they cannot know. Their princess will be powerful and wise, not wicked and terrible. Or so they shall think. I know that Rainbow Dash will not tell the others; she above of all I would trust with my darkest secrets. But I fear that I will lose my friend, even though I know she will serve this last remnant of Equestria to the last breath and drop of blood.
My friends!
Forgive me, my princess, I needed to stop writing. Sorry about the smudges. I just thought of all of us together for the last time when all this started. I lost my composure. I’ll try to do better. I was thinking about that night you called us all to the palace. Normally we’d have taken a train ride in the morning, but you sent three chariots to fetch us. Of course I could have teleported but I wanted to spend some time with Applejack. She had some really good ideas for making the irrigation system for the Ponyville Commons more efficient and we were having a lot of fun working on the problem together, so we rode in the same chariot. I think Rainbow Dash rode with Rarity and Fluttershy rode with Pinkie. But who knows, Rainbow and Flutters could have swapped chariots in mid-air.
When we arrived at your court, I had never seen you frightened before. You and Luna were both so agitated. You said that Luna would take my friends to the garden and speak with them there while we would speak in private. Then you told me to say goodbye to them. So I said goodbye, and then you told me to really say goodbye, and we all looked at each other and then Flutters started to cry, and we all cried and said we loved each other… then Luna walked them out to the garden. And that’s the last time I saw them.
Of course they thought they saw me after that. They saw a 5th level glamour that looked, sounded, moved, and even smelled like me. But I never saw any of them until I found Rainbow Dash twisted and torn on that boulder during that mad rush to the Ark.
When we were alone, I remember how you told me about Earth, and how we were the creations of human genetic engineers who worked for an entertainment company of all things; self-aware pleasure creatures built to order for children more than one hundred centuries dead. I could not believe it. You showed me visions of pinkish and brownish bipeds in broad hats, like Apple Jack's, who rode enormous ponies with small brains and elongated faces, Those same creatures were shown pulling plows, carrying these "humans" in massive armor as they fought and killed one another, and worst of all, rendered down for glue and meat when they had outlived their usefulness. I thought I had gone mad. You told me that this entire planet had been one of thousands created for the purpose of recreation by these humans, these godlike creatures who flew ships the size of cities and tuned the outputs of suns using collapsed stars. I was certain I was having the most bizarre nightmare.
Just when I thought all possible impossibilities had been revealed to me, you told me of the horrible end of that race. These genetically perfected psionics, who knew magics to make Starswirl the Bearded seem a child in swaddling cloth had ventured too near the galactic core, and had drawn the notice of things that had been as dead for eons, that saw the bright light of the human mind as a delicacy to be feasted upon. These things dreamed and entered the dreams of humans who lusted for power, promised them all if only gateways would be made. You told me of the terrible hundred year war that followed as the human empire was consumed from within and without by true gods, beings that were forged in the fires of creation with no souls, no warmth, no emotion that could be recognized as such; only hunger.
You spoke of when the humans abandoned us to flee towards the imagined safety of the core worlds, leaving behind their slow supply ships. We were in the path of that conquest, a morsel to be gobbled in passing, so we, the dragons and the griffons fled in whatever could fly, the Eohippus, Draco and Fury we called them. There were more ponies than dragons and griffons, so we had the largest and slowest ship. We had almost gotten to the jump point when the wavefront got there. One of the mad sorcerers saw us and pursued us with half his ravening horde of servitors, the gift he received for his service to the things at the core. They could only pursue us at the speed of light, as we jumped 12,500 light years to our destination, not without a gate at the far end to receive them. The demons are however untiring, unforgiving, and time means little to them. They had their orders to kill all the ponies from their lunatic lord Unslaad Yol, and they would obey these orders until they were fulfilled, the horde was destroyed, or the universe ended.
It is too bad the ancient pony astronomers miscalculated the length of an Earth year. Perhaps we would have known the foe was arriving when they did, before you detected their strange magics mere weeks before planetfall. Perhaps you could have stepped up the breeding program that had produced me so there would the hundreds or thousands of unicorns with the alicorn mutation, like myself, but I doubt it. You were pushing things as fast as you could, I know that. Cadence was still a young filly when you used her to cause my parents to fall in love.
This desperate plan of yours has worked so far, your highness. Well, your backup plan. The plan you said was your backup plan that I think was really the only plan. You said you weren't sure we could defeat the cursed legions and we needed to make sure the children could escape in the last extremity. So while the rest of Equestria prepared for war, I prepared a hiding place, and a ship packed with supplies and the Canterlot library and all the magical artifacts we could gather, and every filly and colt that had not fled to the countryside and backwaters their families imagined would be safe… and I cast the most comprehensive invisibility spell I had ever heard of. Did you tell no others of its properties in case they should be captured and the information taken from them?
I had so many questions. Why didn't we use all that magic now locked in our sea chests? What of the power of the Elements? Why did my friends and I not plan to use Harmony to defeat our enemies as we had in the past? You replied that we faced a horde of alien beings without souls and with minds as cold as the dark side of an asteroid, monsters and demons who only knew hunger and rage. My presence, putting the Elements in play; at best those would only delay the end.
Then you cried and held me, and I knew that all was lost.
What I wouldn't give to see my friends again…
I wonder… no, that is more madness.
Your faithful student,
Twilight Sparkle