//------------------------------// // Chapter Three: Of Hope and Harmony // Story: The End of Ponies // by shortskirtsandexplosions //------------------------------// The End of Ponies by shortskirtsandexplosions Chapter Three – Of Hope and Harmony Special Thanks to Demetrius and Vimbert for Editing Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art         A brown hoof dusted off the glossy surface of the record picked up from the Royal Throneroom at Canterlot. As the disc flipped over in the Harmony's cabin lantern-light, the white round label came into focus, and the name that was on it read: “Octavia – Suites for a Princess – Sessions I thru IV.” Gently, the fragile object was hoisted over the center spindle of a record player. With a cranking sound, the glossy thing spun liquidly as a needle was lowered into place. A pair of rusted speakers crackled and hissed for a brief moment, then a sweet melody of low bass cello strings bled through, dancing in the musty air of the swaying gondola.         Under the softly lulling rhythms that kissed the bulkheads, the last pony hopped up to a hammock and laid herself down, rocking gently along the starboard side of the lonesome cabin. She tilted one ear towards the music while another kept a diligent check on the hissing sounds coming from the boiler located towards the rear of the craft. Giving a prolonged exhale, the mare poured her scarlet eyes over the curved ceiling of her floating home. She let her gaze dance around metal beams and iron rivets in a synchronized waltz with the rise and fall of the age-old cello recording. Finally, as the melancholic air around her succumbed to the peaceful melody, she permitted her eyes to shut and her body to drift with the sway of her own tiny world. Her hooves rested behind her back and her hairless tail drooped over the side of the hammock as time blurred into a tranquil hum.         Outside, the great gray wasteland howled and spun its endless cyclone of mist and ash. The Harmony hovered bravely in place, a lone copper ballast in a sea of oblivion and snow. The stars above lingered on the edge of perpetual dying, and the black empty Earth below yawned for hundreds upon thousands of worthless kilometers.         The world of nothing: Equestria, population one. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Journal Entry # 2,345         I love music. I don't care how many times I've written it down. I don't care that I will be the only one to read it. I love music. I love its sound. I love its tempo. I love its movements. I love it when it begins; I love it when it ends. I love knowing that there were ponies behind the strings who made this music. I love knowing that they recorded it solely for the sake of sharing their souls, their hopes and their dreams, their fears and their sorrows. I love knowing that—in some way or another—these gifted and masterful ponies are sharing all that they know and love with me, even if it means that I am only having conversations with the dead.         Conversations with the dead are better than no conversations at all. And the reason I think I love it the most is because—in a world where there's nothing left to lose—I can remember once more what it means to feel... sad. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         One night, the last pony marched up a snowy hilltop. Behind her—through a sea of flurrying ash—the Harmony could be seen, moored to a trio of burnt-out oak trees. Ahead of her, a mound of crumpled earth buckled under her hooves as she ascended the rise. Panting, her breath fogging through the misty air, the leather-clad mare came to the top of the crest and gazed down.         Her amber goggles reflected a wide graveyard of collapsed buildings and hollowed-out hovels of earth pony architecture. In the center of the landscape was a clock tower, its circular face spilling rustedly out of the tallest point. The minute and hour hands had fallen to the doughy gray earth countless years ago, forming two stabbing obelisks into the flesh of the dead world. Taking little time to sight-see, the pegasus pony gently hovered down the slope on cold brown feathers. Landing, she trotted her lonesome way through the ruins of yet another ram-shackled village. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Her name was Octavia. She was the most gifted cello player in all of Equestria. She performed her masterpieces live, before dukes and duchesses, queens and kings, even Princess Celestia herself in the Canterlot Concert Hall. Her symphonies were recorded in mass—and to my delight, I have found discs of her exceptional talent almost everywhere: from the ruins of Cloudsdale to the sunken depths of Manehattan.         I have hoarded all of her stuff that I can find. And when I listen to them, pricking my ear to hear beyond even the heavenly layers of her masterful strings, I think I can detect the breaths of the audience in attendance. And when they applaud, when they cheer—I am there. I am with them. I am in a concert hall surrounded by thousands of living, breathing,         And then the record player stops. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Inside a collapsed building, she poked through a pile of debris, overturning kitchen utensils, saucers, plates and other assorted dishes. She briefly plowed a shovel through a pile of papery scraps and unearthed a soup can featuring the image of two smiling, illustrated foals. Several cockroaches scurried out of the hollow container and fled towards the ash-splotched walls that were still standing. Ignoring them, she knocked the can upside down with the shovel until three lone beans spilled out. Her nostrils flared while she retracted the shovel back to her cylindrical hoof piece and extended a pair of metal claws in its place. Grasping gently onto the beans, she lifted and deposited each of them into a leather satchel on her saddlebag.         Tying it shut, she paced around and marched out of the dilapidated house, trotting slowly down the snow-laden stretch of the small city's main street. The last pony's horseshoes made lonesome omega symbols in the snow as she padded her way towards a half-crumbled library. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         When I go hunting, I hear Octavia's strings. Her music accompanies me on every trip that I make, on every scavenge that I do, on every deep dive into the darkest catacombs of Equestria. Her majestic cello cries and sighs against the pale stone walls of my regular sojourn. And sometimes, in my head at least, I do not feel like I am simply a ghost—the last haunting spectre of Equestria that this holy land has somehow forgotten to exorcise. The world has forsaken me, and so I forsake it—with music.         This, of course, is extremely helpful ... until I remember that the world doesn't care. The only one who cares—or at least pretends to care—is me. And that doesn't count for much.         It doesn't at all. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Another night, the pegasus pony sat on the port side of the Harmony's cabin, her hoof bearing a cylindrical copper brace on the end of which rested a freshly inked pen. Bending over her workbench, she proceeded to write her journal entry on the blank page of a dusty, canvas-bound book that she had scavenged long ago from the ruins of a Cloudsdalian library.         Halfway through her writing, she stretched her shaved neck and forelegs. Bearing a long sigh, she gazed with bored scarlet eyes out the front windshields of the gondola. The world lingered in gray eternity, staring emotionlessly back at her. After another breath, she returned lethargically to her entry. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         I know that I have written enough about Octavia—about music, about the only thing that actually has any significance to me. But today, nothing happened. And when I write on the topic of “nothing,” I inevitably comment on yesterday while simultaneously predicting tomorrow.         And yet I still write. I'm sure there was a noble reason for why I began making journal entries in the first place. Quite possibly, when I was still rather new to this whole routine—I had the naive hope that everything I put to pen would someday be read by other ponies. But I know that's utter bullcrap; because I'm a pony and I can't bring myself to read the older entries I have made.         Still, I am what I am, and that necessitates that I produce something ... anything ... to prove that I exist. It's the least and yet the most I can do with my presence here on this world, or so I try to tell myself.         Thus, as always, here goes: ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         She trotted swiftly down a field of petrified trees, all bent backwards in the fossilized signature of a blast wave having seared them to ash long ago. A fine, blue mist lingered coldly a few centimeters off the once-forested floor as the goggled mare shone a pair of glowing lanterns ahead of her. She focused the hazy beams of gold past the gray husks of wood until she narrowed the light onto a pale chunk of stone embedded deep in the sandy black earth. All of the trees leaned away from the alien rock as if it was something venomous. Without a moment's hesitation, the pony galloped up to the thing, knelt down, and produced a pick-axe from her saddlebag. She began chipping away until the cold white stone bled forth random nodes of muddied colors. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         I found several moonrocks this week. Seven, to be exact. From them, I was able to mine three more emeralds, two more sapphires, one topaz, and a ruby. This fills my spectral stone quota for the signal over the next several stormfronts—with the exception of a flamestone. The one I've got right now is almost out of mana, and I though I'm sure I've got plenty of reliable suppliers, payment is going to be something of an issue—considering that I've just recently lost one of my biggest clients, Gilliam. Though, it is probably more accurate to say that he lost me... and most likely his life in the ensuing altercation. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         A tattered tent flap billowed in the blistering winds.From the miserably gray world outside, the last pony poked her head in through the shredded fabric.She raised a hoof to her goggles and adjusted her lenses to take in the dim interior of the partially collapsed shelter.         Bodies were lying in a tight circle, all huddled around a lone lantern in the corner of the tent that had long dimmed.The claustrophobic air was ripe with stale musk and decay.Scraps of flesh and hair hung off the canine, mammalian, and reptilian figures, all frozen in unsung death throes.Whatever doom had befallen these souls, it happened not too long ago.         On the far side of the tent, several discarded and rusted tools conveyed the intelligence these starved wretches possessed until the very moment of their death.With nostrils flaring, the pony shuffled into the tent, strode apathetically over the corpses, and began rummaging through the dead's unclaimed loot. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Finding creatures willing to pay me in silver strips for random tasks is going to be a bit difficult if I can no longer trust in Diamond Dogs to hire me. I can only hope that many of the canines unaffiliated with Gilliam's “Dirigible” crew are still willing to do business. But I fear that the damage is done. Tick off one dog, and you've likely petted the entire pack the wrong way. That's what I get for trying to survive at Gilliam's behest. They say that history is made by the victors. But, triumphant as I may have been as of late, I am still only one pony. History only pays attention to those who survive by their seed, and on that front I am doubly screwed. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         With a loud clatter, the last pony dumped the spoils of her latest scavenging trip all across her workbench.She stood back in the port side of the Harmony and sealed her saddlebag, gazing at the many random tools and nick-nacks, most of them likely to be nothing more than junk.Pausing, she raised her goggles and squinted with naked scarlet eyes.         Reaching a hoof forward, she fumbled through the pile of ash-stained tools and pulled out a leather scroll.She held it curiously, as if not remembering that particular scrap of parchment when she had first pilfered it from the creatures' tent.After a few seconds, she yanked the thread loose that was tying the scroll shut and unrolled it.Her eyes took in a rough map of sorts, drawn haphazardly by a hand possessed more of claws than cartography skills.         She rubbed her chin in thought.After a brief bout of contemplation, she marched across the gondola and opened a chest beneath the record player on the starboard side.She pulled out a series of leather scrolls, all in far better condition than the scrap she had just recently salvaged.         Then, in swift order, she marched to her workbench, swept the rattling tools off it, and sat down to add the details from the creatures' map to those already in her possession.         Gradually, the illustrated landscape beneath her sketching pen took shape.Several years of attentiveness and recording had dutifully created a continental shape across the brown surfaces of her maps.A grand body of water loomed to the east, joining a thick sea that ran east to west across the southern banks.The continent brimmed with mountains: sharp and jagged in the east, heavily snow-capped in the north, and intimidatingly tall along the west.         An enormously wide plain inhabited the Wasteland in between the mountainous barriers and the sea to the south.A dense forest of insane proportions hugged the western mountain range, and in the center of the valley, a little towards the north, an immense pit loomed next to what resembled an emormous gold tower.To the east, along the western edges of some of the highest mountains, a series of steep canyons and sharp plateaus lingered, their detailed descriptions obscured by the haphazard illustration of an equine skull.         In seemingly random places all across the map, from the eastern shore to the northern mountain snowpeaks to the western promontories, several black circles were labeled with somber words, bearing names that were once full of life:“Manehattan” in the southwest, “Stalliongrad” in the far north, “Whinniepeg” in the northeast, “Torontrot” and “Dream Valley” along the eastern shore, and “Baltimare” along the southern sea's coastline.The eastern mountains bore the name “Canterlot” not all too far from where the equine skull was drawn, and a few spaces to the left of the once-royal city, a large portion of the map was noticeably grayed out.         The last pony's pen made a great effort to avoid this spot.Instead, her hoof wandered northwest, east of a spot marked “Griffon Mount.”After carefully studying the parchment salvaged from the dead creatures' tent, she added a new black circle and wrote down the name “Fillydelpia.” ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         What were once cities are now sepulchers.What were once maretropolises are now mausoleums.In a dead world, everything is a tomb, and there is no use in paying respects, not when one wants to live.         I learned long ago that hesitating to grab what I needed from the graves around me only meant risking starvation or worse.There are creatures in this world who were born in misery and made to sow misery.I am not one of them; I can't let myself become such.And yet, as ugly and as decrepit as everything is, this is still my world.Something in my blood has earned it long ago.I know this; I feel it everytime I wake up to the desolation that masks my dreams.         If any soul deserves to rob from these graves, it's me.It is my duty to commit the sin first, to beat the surviving monstrosities to it, because allowing other creatures to enjoy the spoils means allowing true desecration. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Minding the cockpit of the Harmony, the pony squinted hard at a leather pull-down map of Equestria, scribbled and painted over in several dozen places with apocalyptic alterations. After gazing at the newly sketched circle to the west of the large plain, she snapped the map back up into its holster and lowered her amber goggles. Shoving a pair of levers forward, she accelerated the zeppelin and watched as the mist beyond the windshields parted, timely revealing a horizon of shattered skyscrapers looming before her.         Carefully, the pilot navigated the ghostly spires of Fillydelphia. The copper-colored airship dipped low, passing between enormous building after building of the abandoned maretropolis, swooping briefly under a pair of crumbling towers that had collapsed into each other to form a quivering arch of steel and concrete. Landing in a cobblestone intersection filled with randomly overturned stagecoaches, the pony moored the Harmony and stepped out on hoof, holstering a rifle before exploring the ruins to her immediate north. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         I am always hunting, always scavenging, always clawing at the bowels of Equestria for things that I need. I can't remember a time when I was not searching, fishing, or scrounging. In this Wasteland, being still means being useless, and if there's anything I hate more than being alone, it's being useless. I've broken into homes, kicked in the doors to shrines, broken into banks, smashed urns apart, and even pilfered the storage lockers of hospitals. Nothing can be overlooked. Nothing must be wasted.         I have to remember that there is one important thing, something that is more important than one's pride, something that is more important than one's ethics, something that is more important than learning to love or hate oneself when trying in vain to fall into the bitter limbs of sleep. And that something is my life. Be it long or be it short, it is the only life that will ever mean anything to me. It is the only life that matters in Equestria, period. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         A pair of lantern-lights shimmered over a brass pony statue, its metal face blindfolded, its hooves dangling a rusted set of iron scales. The leather-armored mare trotted slowly down an abandoned courtroom. Her goggled eyes glanced back and forth. She spotted a door behind the judge's seat. The shadows of the courtroom seats bobbed and weaved as she strolled towards the far end of the room, nudged her way through the collapsed doorframe, and stumbled upon a musty office full of dust and sediment.         A gentle flurry of snow greeted her. The pony spotted a stretch of shattered windows that overlooked the dead lengths of Fillydelphian skyscrapers looming several stories below. But that wasn't what caught her attention; the pony made a straight line for a pile of collapsed books lying beneath an overturned set of wooden shelves. Flipping through the pages with a metal-laced hoof, she raised her goggles, squinted at the words, and proceeded to store a good chunk of the literature into her saddlebag. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Books. Books are the hardest thing to salvage. A part of me knows that I must do something—anything—to preserve as many written words as I can. I'm not the only scavenging creature in the Wastes of Equestria, and I know that any literature of ponydom will be utter garbage to dog, goblin, or monkey-kind. But I only have so much room in my saddlebags, and even less weight for the Harmony to handle. On top of that, there is something that I know I need more than words, and that's warmth. Tragically, many pages serve better use in the boiler.         But the ones that are special—or at least the ones that I feel are most important to the history of the Equestrian Spirit—I keep. That's a tough thing to think about. All of our history, all of our lives, all that we've ever done or accomplished shall have its merit determined through the filter of my lonesome approval. That's one thing that I never expected to have on my shoulders. Then again, I never expected to have any of this on my shoulders. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         The last pony sat on the edge of a tall skyscraper, her brown feathers fluttering in the cold winds funneling down the death-striken sprawl Fillydelphia.The gray air around her echoed from the groans of many tenuous, rusty steel girders of the thirty-story building as it settled beneath her from time and neglect.Two piles of books sat on either side of the mare.         With her goggles slid up to her shaved brow, she picked one of several books up and squinted at the cover.She opened the thing and flipped through page after page about desserts, baking, and kitchen etiquette.With a loathsome sigh, she flung her hoof forward and tossed the tome—pages fluttering—over the building's edge and into the rubble-strewn streets below.         Tiredly, she picked up another tome, skimmed through, tossed it, and did the same with the next two books.Finally, she paused upon picking up a written almanac of old Fillydelphian farming techniques.She perused a section on irrigation, her brow furrowed with thought.After several minutes, she clapped the book shut and placed it down upon the short pile to her right for preservation.         Without a second breath, she picked up the next book and resumed the process of emotionless elimination. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         What I haven't gotten from experience, I have gotten from books. How to keep a fire going, how to keep a healthy diet, how to maintain the structural integrity of a zeppelin, how to filter steam through a steady pipeline, how to do anything to keep oneself alive without anyone to tell me by ear—I have learned to teach myself by eye.         Books have been my greatest teachers in a world without mentors. The writings of Aristrotle, Camule, Neightszche, Descanter—I have devoured all of their words, made many of them my own, developed a writing style so as to have dissertations with long dead phantoms.         It's funny, because I was never too keen on reading or learning when I was a little filly—and then when I was thrown into the world beyond the Cataclysm, it was a titanic struggle to teach myself the vocabulary that I did not yet understand. I accomplished most of this by reading simple books and jumping immediately to the more complicated ones, so that the meanings of things bled their way to my mind between the cracks of definition.         Many things in my life like this I had to overcome by learning them on my lonesome. In so many ways, it has always been like this, even before the Cataclysm. Perhaps I was the most fortunate pony in all of Equestria to end up being so unfortunate. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         “H'jem,” she uttered. A runestone dimmed, unlocking a sealed bookshelf lying against the Harmony's starboard side. The compartment opened, revealing half a dozen rows of thick, canvas-bound books.         Still shaking the fresh ash and snow off her armored flanks, she reached into her saddlebag, grabbed a few new volumes in her snout, and shelved them with the rest. Taking a breath, she stepped back and gazed forlornly at the quiet rows of tomes until her goggled eyes rested on two large books—the largest of the library by far—resting at the toprightmost shelf. Two crests were emblazoned across their spines, plastered in gold and silver respectively: the Sun and the Moon. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Two books in particular, I know I will preserve with every fiber of my existence. They are the sacred words of the Equestrian Princesses, journals kept by Celestia herself and a much similar diary maintained by Luna. I found the two of them on my second trip to Canterlot. Enough time had passed for me to embrace the present darkness, and I took it upon myself to commit the unthinkable. I looted the Royal Palace.         What I once thought was a crime turned out to be the most noble thing I could have ever done, because where is there a better place for the Exalted Family's Legacy to reside ... but in the safely flying hovel of their last royal subject ever?         Luna's book is barely filled—mostly blank pages, on account that she was bequeathed the journal shortly after returning from her imprisonment as the Mare in the Moon, which was ironically just before the Cataclysm. But Princess Celestia's book—it is an indescribable masterpiece of poetry. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         As another record of Octavia's strings sang to the lantern-lit air, the pony squatted in her swaying hammock upon folded legs. Celestia's golden book was carefully laid out before her. With her goggles pulled up, the last pony's scarlet eyes liquidly melted over the finely woven starlit calligraphy. A lump formed in her throat as she inhaled sharply and turned a page, a thick and focused pulse stretching visibly beneath her brown coat. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         She writes of joy. She writes of hope. She writes of royal subjects and their daily lives, of magical apprentices and their friendships. Most of all, she writes of her sister, of the hole left in her life during Luna's thousand-year absence, and subsequently the immeasurable rapture of embracing her beloved sister's return. In almost every entry that Princess Celestia had ever made, she was full of optimism, of anticipating the joy and prosperity that the next Sun-Raising would bring. When I first read her works, I was hoping to find a sign—any sign—that would suggest that Celestia at least expected the coming Cataclysm that would end all of ponydom in Equestria—including the lives of her and her sister.         What I found instead were a few entries of the deepest, most overwhelming sorrow I could come to expect from anypony, much less the Goddess of the Sun. I had always known that Princess Celestia was immortal, but what I didn't know was the repercussions that came with her long life, of loved ones beneath her protective wings who would die in waves over the passing centuries, of friendships and alliances that started, blossomed, and withered away in as little a time as it took the Royal Princess to blink.         I've read those entries of hers—the sad ones—thousands of times more than her happy ones, because I soon came to realize that I was the only pony in the history of existence who could, in some fashion or another, relate to her. The only difference is, of course, nopony is going to read about my losses, like I have faithfully read all about hers. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Transcending the cloudy overcast of the world, above the ashen snowfall, the last pony clung to the outside of the Harmony. Angling her wings back to steady herself in the high winds, she hissed through clenched teeth that tightly gripped a welding tool. She expertly climbed the outer rungs encasing the copper leather body of the zeppelin's starboard side. Finally, the pegasus zeroed in on the source of a loud rattling noise that had been bothering her for several days. Raising a hoof to her goggles and adjusting a pair of nozzles, she tinted the lenses before aiming the welding torch at the bulkhead and fusing a new cluster of rivets into place. Sparks fell through the bone cold grayness and fluttered past the swaying gondola of the Harmony below. After the welding task was done, she re-gripped the welding tool and waved her wings into the air.         Swiftly, she darted up to the very top of the zeppelin and hovered down onto the center of the balloon's chassis, where a pair of criss-crossing, rune-studded bulkheads had rattled loose. Griping to herself, she grabbed a few more rivets from her saddlebag and welded them into the right places, tightening the outer framework of the copper airship and silencing the rattling noises for the time being. With a deep breath, the pony briefly sat down on the “roof” of her lone, hovering vessel.         She had no reason to stay there—but something possessed her to delay flying back to the aperture entrance at the lower bow of the gondola below. She raised her goggles and gazed straight up with naked scarlet eyes, watching as twinkling specks of sickly-pale light hovered far above the miasma of the dead globe. A breath escaped the pony's nostrils, but try as she might, she could not tear her lonely gaze away from the horrendous abyss that perpetually engulfed her. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         There is no Sun. There is no Moon. There is only ash and perpetual twilight. It isn't day. It isn't night either. The roof of the world remains lit, but fails to snuff itself completely out. It's as if the distant stars are half-heartedly attempting to make up for the celestial bodies that the Princesses used to maintain over Equestria, bodies that are gone forever.         In the end, the result is a constant and unending haze of dimness, as if to gaze towards the sky is to look out through the eyes of an elderly mare on her death bed. Any second, any heartbeat, and everything should go dark. And yet it doesn't.         Sometimes when I sleep—or try to sleep—and the great gray glow continues its pale dance beyond the portholes of the Harmony—I beg for the darkness, I beg for the end of all things. But I stop myself every time. To ask for the end is to give up, and that is not a luxury that I can afford. The darkness will come, some way or another, some time or another. Until then, I can't even pretend to know the time nor the place. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         She brought the hammer down one last time over the edge of a horseshoe, straightening its warped edges.Lifting the metal article up to her scarlet gaze, the pony examined it from every angle possible.She pivoted from her workbench, bent over, and started fitting the shoe onto her left forelimb.         Lethargically, she paused to glance up and out the distant windows of the cockpit at the front of the gondola.The world hung in gray clouds of ash outside the Harmony, drifting forever and ever.With a sigh, she finished fitting the horseshoe and stood up to test her weight on it. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         I can't even track time efficiently. All I remember is that I was young when the Cataclysm happened. Since then, there has been no Sun to rise or Moon to fall. Hours are your only friend—everything else is just an imaginative figure. In the land of twilight, you have no definition of age.         At some point, when I realized that lightning storms over the Wasteland transpired at regular intervals, it occurred to me that I should try to measure the passage of time. After finding several miraculously-preserved hourglasses in an abandoned Whinniepeg laboratory, I timed the number of occasions I had to rotate them between the regular lightning storms.         I found out that the time between these weather patterns averaged out to approximately one hundred and twenty hours. If the average Equestrian day was twenty-four hours—then that meant there were five days in between regular storms, almost enough to fashion a new “week” by. And if there were three hundred sixty five days in an Equestrian year, then that meant approximately seventy-five storms marked out a year.         Since I began this experiment, I have counted a total of one thousand three hundred and fifty-eight storms. Ultimately, that means that I have been living in the Wasteland for well over eighteen years. I am certainly not a young filly anymore. But, then again, I hardly remember how long I was “young” for. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         After mooring the Harmony to a jutting spire of rock, the pegasus descended and trotted through a grand forest at the bottom of a snow-laden plain. However, the large gray bodies that drifted past either side of her weren't trees; they were mushrooms. Giant, six-meter-tall stalks of fungi swayed and bowed in the cold wind.         The last pony marched until she was within hoof's length of a knee-high mushroom. After depositing her saddlebags onto a gray patch of earth and mulch, she produced a long blade from her pack, slapped it hard into the neck of the gigantic mushroom, and began viciously sawing through the body of the thing.         After the structure fell loose, she quickly produced a sharp brass claw and approached the hollow of the thing. Positioning a gas lantern to shine its golden glow into the cylindrical body of the mushroom's stipe, she dug her snout in—teeth gripping the claw—and began carving loose several rubbery flanks of fungal material. These she stuck into a leather pouch. She tied the pouch shut, and dragged the sawblade towards yet another knee-high mushroom to repeat the entire procedure, all the while under a gentle rain of powdery snow. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         No Sun means no light. No light means no plants. No plants means I have to bend myself backwards to find the nutrients I need to stay alive. As almost everything that was living before the Cataclysm turned into a grand heap of “dying” afterward, the fungal population exploded through the roof. The same cold winds that kicked the snow and ash around also gave lift to spores, and mystically large mushrooms spread thickly outward from the deepest caves of Tartarus—no longer food for subterranean beasts and with no forested walls to impede their progress.         If, when I was younger, I knew that some day I would be flying over an endless wasteland subsisting entirely on a diet of mold and mushrooms, I would have gagged myself to death. In many ways, I still do—but it's what I have to do to acquire the energy that I need to live.         But energy isn't everything. In a green world vibrant with life, ponies could afford to grow beans, potatoes, carrots, and all sorts of plentiful plants that a healthy diet required. Here—in the realm of oblivion—I've had to do away with conventional pony agriculture. And also, as I would soon discover, I would have to do away with conventional pony ethics... ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Marching back towards the Harmony with her saddlebags full of mushroom bits, the pegasus froze. There was a vicious stirring up ahead amidst the powdery mounds of ash. Crouching low, the last pony crawled her way through a field of fungal stalks and peered over a crest of flaking dirt. She reached a hoof up and adjusted the lenses of her goggles. Several meters ahead, blurring into focus, was a full adult cougar with tattered fur. It snarled and hissed, digging its jaws into the scrumptious tendrils of a dead vampire bat caught in its maw. Tearing the wing off its prey to expose more tender muscles, it was briefly oblivious to the four-hoofed survivor spying on it from several snow flurries away.         With a deep breath, the pony shook her flank sideways. Her brass rifle slid loose from its sheath and she caught it. With gentle and silent precision, the pony extended the long shiny barrel, pulled the levers out, and loaded in a cold magazine of dimly glowing runestones. She breathed against them, and the furthest stone in the magazine shone with a purple brilliance. Cocking the wooden stock of the thing against her shoulder, she aimed the barrel icily across the hilltop until the sight of the weapon landed square over the image of the distracted feline.         With no hesitance whatsoever, the weathered mare whispered into the mystical aura of the runestone: “H'rhnum”. The bracelet of horns on her right forelimb flickered. Thunder roared across the dead landscape as the manabullet flew solidly, and the cougar's body fell flat into a crater of snow, moving no longer. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         I have eaten meat. I have killed animals and consumed their flesh. I know that these teeth of mine were not granted me by the Goddesses for partaking in anything other than plants and herbs. I know that I was born with hooves instead of claws. I know that every book of law ever written by any society in the history of ponydom can now brand me a savage and an outlaw.         But I also know that I do what I do because the only Goddesses that have ever existed are now dead or gone, and I am not. And being alive has always meant—and shall always mean—doing so at the behest of other things that try to be alive.         In the past, I could afford to overlook what I now know to be a gritty reality. Because resources were in abundance, civilization afforded me the ability to exist above the ranks of a common animal. But I also know that—to preserve any scant trace of that same civilization—I must preserve myself by any means necessary. To climb so high, I must fall so low.         These are paradoxes that only I have to contend with. It does make me wonder, though, if everypony who died could magically come back to life and see me eating meat in desperation for protein, would they be proud of me on account of all of my logical excuses? Would they grant me pardon, even when they discovered that eating meat has been the least of my transgressions...? ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         She covered the last few centimeters with a burning sweep of her blow torch. Finally, after slicing the last sliver in a metal door, she cut the torch and pressed her entire weight into the entrance frame of a large, marble building in the center of ruined Stalliongrad. Grunting and sweating with her effort, she finally succeeded, her lithe muscles managing to rip the door off its hinges.         There was a large clanging noise. A heap of ash lifted and spewed forth across the atrium of the unsealed building. Not expecting that much dust, she coughed and raised a leather mask over her snout, just in time to shield herself against a rustic stench rising dreadfully from the interior. Sparking the light inside her yoked lanterns, she trotted slowly into the domed building and was only briefly overcome by the melancholic discovery of what lay inside.         The pegasus counted ten... fifteen... twenty five... at least thirty-five bodies. It was a veritable pile of corpses, most of adult stature, some the size of young foals, and they all formed a circle around a bronze altar in the shape of Princess Celestia. This was Stalliongrad's Temple of the Sun, and a good chunk of the neighboring populace had apparently flocked there in desperate prayer the very moment that the Cataclysm had hit. The bodies were well-preserved, right down to their dresspieces and horseshoes. But it wasn't the metal of the shoes that the last pony had interest in, it was the unicorns themselves.         With a sighing breath, she sauntered towards the closest body towards her, the first of two dozen salvageable skeletons just like it. Flicking the metal band on her left hoof, she produced a tiny razor-toothed blade, and began sawing with expert precision at the top of the skull, severing the dead unicorn's horn from its cranium.         An hour or so later, the pegasus trotted out of the Temple of the Sun and towards the center of Stalliongrad where the Harmony was parked. She had hanging from her neck a bag filled to the brim with severed horns. Stepping onboard her airship, she went immediately to her workbench on the top level. She produced a strip of tanned cougar leather. Then she emptied the contents of the bag before her and began stitching together a brand new bracelet of unicorn horns. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         When the Sun and Moon disappeared, so did everypony—everypony but me. What rendered all of my species to ash and dust—yet spared myself—I still to this day cannot fathom. But whatever it was, it too brought about the end of Princess Celestia and Luna. Somehow, that meant the magic that bonded them to the galactic elements was severed, and as a result I now hover above a dead carcass of a world, starved of the pools of mana that once animated it.         But magic is a lot like normal mass and energy. It cannot come from nothing, and likewise it cannot become nothing. The magic had to go somewhere, and with everypony in Equestria dead, the world's magic had to collect around the one equine who was an exception: me.         Long ago, I learned that I could perform very minor magic spells—like the ones I learned in the books I collected. But I could not perform the spells very well, no matter how hard I concentrated. Even with all of the magic in the known universe, I wouldn't be able to do much. It's because I am a pegasus, and much like an earth pony, my body is mostly inert in the realm of sorcery.         But the unicorns: they were naturally gifted with being living magic batteries. They could master all forms of enchantment, and when they called upon the holy power of Celestia and other Goddesses like her, they could even perform supernatural feats that rivaled the Creation of Equestria itself. The matter in their horns was the substance of their mystical talent, and even beyond death the cyclical bone structure still acts as a conduit for magical energies. My guess is that when the unicorns died during the Cataclysm, a piece of their life essence—the magical part—was retained in their horns.         Though I am a pegasus, fashioning a bracelet out of unicorn horns has provided me a way to cheat the rules of magic, so long as I am the last pony left to act as a gateway between the physical realm and beyond. With so many horns contained in one place, I can focus a magic spell through them, and perform all sorts of helpful tricks to assist me in my sojourns through the Wastes. Though I cannot harness enough energy to levitate or transmogrify matter, the power granted me by these scavenged buffers have been immeasurably useful in finding, hoarding, and killing whatever the Wasteland randomly tosses my way. But as grim a necessity as the bracelets are, I do not rely on dead bones alone. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         In the storage compartment of the Harmony's lower gondola, the pony leaned over an alchemy table full of bubbling glass jars and glowing vials of smoking liquid. Wearing a chemist's pair of wide-lensed glasses, the last pony finished carving a chunk of white moonstone into an arcane shape. Filing away the last jagged chips from the edges of the stone, she lifted the thing in a pair of forceps and dipped them into one steaming beaker after another. Smoke of various shades filled the hangar with a mystic smog as she then cooled the stone off into a trough of water and sprinkled herbs over it. Gazing into a tome, the pony chanted a few archaic words in deep monotone. A glittering aura shone from a bracelet of horns over her right hoof, and the stone within the trough began glowing.         After several minutes, the mare removed the cooled stone from its trough. Staring at the glowing shard closely, she raised an eyebrow and experimentally stuck the letter-shaped chunk of enchanted moonrock into a matching hole in a square black tablet. She then stuck the tablet into the toppiece of a magazine filled with identically crafted stones before finally loading the whole ensemble into her copper rifle. Cocking the weapon, she removed her glasses, marched over towards the circular aperture of the Harmony, and manually opened it. There was the usual flurry of cold wind. The pony aimed the glowing rifle out into the snowy overcast of the Equestrian sky.         Her lips moved icily: “M'wynhrm!” Her bracelet strobed yet again. The freshly crafted runestone burst in a crimson glow, and a bright red manabullet rocketed down the length of the brass barrel and flew deep into a cloudbank. Half a second later, a gigantic explosion of burning red plasma consumed one half square kilometer of misty sky, briefly lighting the dead twilight in a frothing haze, until all was once more ash and soot. The pony steadied herself as the entire two-level gondola of the Harmony rocked and swayed from the explosion. A whistle escaped her lips, and she patted the rifle with meager affection before returning back to her alchemy table. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Runestones: they are the centerpiece of a long-forgotten art of magic, with emphasis on mineral infusion and verbal enchantment. The school of sorcery is almost as old as Celestial Alchemy, though it has always served far less benevolent functions.         The last time runestones were used—much less crafted—was in wartime, long ago, towards the end of the Second Age, when Nightmare Moon turned traitorous and led the armies of the Lunar Empire in a violent attempt to overthrow her sister Celestia. Warhorses marched into battle, holstering explosives and ballistics armed with runestones as their triggers. It was a strange and archaic time when focused mysticism was used almost entirely for bloodshed, unlike the subtler schools of Canterlotlian sorcery taught during the peaceful millennium that followed the war: otherwise known as the Third Age, the Age I was born in.         This was to be the Fourth Age, the Age of Princess Luna's Redemption. This was to be the Age when the Twin Goddesses oversaw the revolutions of the Sun and Moon, as they were naturally born to do. The Fourth Age barely lasted one pathetic year—or so I assume. I vaguely remember one Winter Wrap-Up before the Cataclysm happened. Everything that made up the Fourth Age, including the inane necessity to chronicle the Fourth Age to begin with, was consumed in fire.         How ironic it is, then, that I was fated to stumble upon a book in the ruins of the Royal Palace, explaining the intricacies of the forbidden art of Runestones; and that I adopted its practice for my own use—archaic words of the Lunar Tongue and all—with an abundance of moonrock strewn across the Wastes at my very disposal. Perhaps there is a prophecy that foretells this, that speaks of an era when one pony resurrects the elements of a great war that threatened to kill all ponies, only to use them in an age meant to bless all ponies. But in all of the books that I have scrounged up, I have found no scripture that hints of this apocalypse, of this lonely twilight, of this gray forever-after that dwarfs the brief and anticlimactic return of Princess Luna.         The fact is, I don't need prophecy to explain this dead world to me. I only need to open my eyes, to breathe through my own nostrils, and make do with what I have given to me, in flesh or in text.         I am the end of ponies; I am the Fourth Age. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Under the cadence of Octavia's strings, the pegasus sat at her workbench where she polished several multicolored stones, one after another. There were seven stones total—magnificent translucent gems that shimmered from the distant boiler's burning light, which refracted prismatically through them—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. They gleamed after each polish the pony gave them, rubbing them with a cloth of shaved mane hair.         After making each of the stones sparkling clean, the mare turned her attention toward a lead box lying securely in a shelf just above the corner of the work bench. Placing her cloth down, she reached a hoof over and dragged the lead box towards her. Narrowing her eyes cautiously, she opened the container, bathing herself and the rest of the cabin in a bright red glow. A crimson flamestone shimmered from its holding inside the box. As bright as the thing was, it could have been brighter; the aging mare knew this, and she frowned.         Still, she sighed away her disconcerted thoughts and closed the box before swiveling from her workbench and leaping towards the cockpit. Climbing into the seat, she lowered her goggles and disengaged the autopilot. Eyeing the puttering steam-powered gauges of her dashboard, she made an instinctual judgment of her location and pulled several levers and chain-linked handles, dropping the Harmony into a deep descent and angling the vessel towards a wide plateau stretching beyond the gray mists below.         In the center of the plateau, there was a pony-made structure: a circle of iron-wrought barricades. And in the apex of the circle there rested a thick metal brace ... for the signal ... ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         What is my purpose? I ask myself that in making every journal entry—which is likely why I rarely go back and re-read them. Because there is no answer—only the question, otherwise why would I still be here?         Why did the Cataclysm kill off everypony and yet I was spared? Why were the beautiful equines of this world destroyed, and yet the uglier and more despicable creatures allowed to fester onward into eternity? Why am I struggling so hard to stay alive day by day? Why has anything ever lived, against all the odds of doing so day after day in the great history of the world?         Why do I kill creatures and turn their hides in for profit? Why do I chop mushrooms to make stew and slay animals to cook meat? Why do I hunt down sacred phoenixes and sell them to double-crossing Dirigible Dogs? Why do I pilfer from Fillydelphian skyscrapers and rob from Stalliongrad tombs? Why do I harness magic that isn't mine to toy with or fashion deadly weapons to carry with me into the ruthless abyss every waking moment? How is it that I came to teach myself to read and write, to appreciate Octavia's music, or to build myself an airship when there was nopony to tell me how to weld steel, or to harness steam, or to even fly with my own naked wings?         Is it enough that I struggle to exist for existence's sake? There are times when I have believed so. But I've come to label such moments as “defeats.” It can't possibly be called a victory when I give into the nihilism that mirrors the opaque cloudscape that has constantly surrounded me these last two decades.         I wrote before that, on some level, I can relate to Princess Celestia. And for all of her many reasons to lament the lonely immortality of her existence, Celestia was somehow convinced to see the silver lining in things, so much so that it constituted the majority of her own personal journal entries. If Princess Celestia—the one and only pony responsible for bringing the Sun to this world—could find a reason to be optimistic, then that means I, the last pony of Equestria, must also discover her reason to be hopeful and to focus on it.         Who knows? I too may find my silver lining. There certainly are enough friggin' clouds for that, at least. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         The Harmony was moored by a series of thick metal chains attached to the circle of rusted iron barricades. The airship drifted gently over the pony's shaved mane as the mare slid a heavy metal lattice into position, locking it into the thick iron brace at the center of the barricades. Not wasting a sweating second, the brown mare reached into her saddle bag and produced all seven of the multi-colored stones. Pulling a canvass tarp off the metal lattice, she exposed seven large spotlights to the gray ashen air. One by one, she slid open the lenses to the spotlights and dropped the colored stones in—from Red to Green to Violet and everything in between. Finally, she slid open a brass compartment at the base of the metal lattice. Into this, she deposited the glowing red flamestone, shutting it tight with a metal clang. On the outside of the compartment was the space for a runestone—which she aptly filled with a shimmering moonrock.         The mare next paced around the lattice and rotated it until the lights were aimed directly skyward. After a few precise tilts—with the ease of rotating valves and gear meters—she achieved the precise angle she traditionally desired. She lowered her lips towards the compartment with the glowing rune, and raised her braceleted hoof at the ready. For a moment she lingered, as if in solemn contemplation of an ongoing habit that was suddenly clouded by the gently falling snow settling around her. But she shook this off, lowered her goggles protectively over her scarlet eyes, and throated authoritatively into the runestone: “Y'hnyrr.”         The rune's glow dissipated, and a bright, ghostly fire billowed from within the embroiled compartment of the lattice. The pegasus wrapped a hoof around a rusted metal lever and yanked at it. The lights flickered and sputtered and died. Cursing under her breath, the pony yanked and yanked and yanked again, grunting harder with each effort, until the last swing of the lever connected. The enchanted flamestone burst through a series of built-in prisms until they connected with the lens compartments. The seven multicolored rocks sparked, glittered, and lit up. In a frothing hiss, the seven colors of the rainbow surged upwards and pierced the gray soupy sky, burning through the clouds and impaling the twilight ceiling of Equestria with miraculous color and life—a prismatic beacon—the signal. Everypony's signal. Her signal.         She took a deep breath, gazing up at the solid beam of artificial spectrum. It was dimmer than the last two times she had ignited the signal, as the flamestone was jaded and needed to be replaced with one containing a stronger enchantment. But somehow, less bright or not, the signal was worth the trip, worth the fuel to get there, worth the silver strips earned through scavenging to supply it, worth the restless, lonely nights of self-doubt... just to see it.         The last pony took a deep breath, stared at the grand burning lengths of the conjured rainbow, and then closed her eyes in order to savor the frozen image as she stood there half-naked against the cold wasteland winds. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         There was a time when I used to dream in color. I've read books where literary ponies philosophized over the nature of dreams—and that they were all “in black in white.” Perhaps, in another lifetime, that would be true. But that's not the case for me. My life is in black and white; it has been for forever. But when I dream, I live in the past; and the past was something of color, of warmth, of so many amazing and interesting shades that most of them are now eternally lost to me.         That was a time of rainbows, when magic was a nature unto the world, not a resource for a scavenger to exploit. Rainbows existed in a time of prosperity, when there would be a promise of another day with similar blessings, and even more to be had. Rainbows were a sign of hope, of delightful and optimistic expectations for the good things in life granted naturally to everypony. If it weren't for hope, why would ponies dream to begin with?         In this world of ash and twilight, there are no rainbows. There is no hope. Perhaps that is why ages ago I concocted the idea of this signal: the artificial rainbow. It was because I believed that the only place left for rainbows to go was in the world of dreams. And if I could mimic that, if I could capture an essence of that in a bottle, with the best of intentions, I could provide a shining beacon for every living soul in Equestria to see. And if there is even one single pony besides me left in the world, that would have to be a pony that dreams, like I dream—every day—that this is not all that there is, that there is a reason for why my fitful slumbers conjure up shades that contrast the endless gray of this nightmare land, that there is more to life than a single piece of meat with four hooves trying to scrape up a pitiful existence, that I am not the last pony.         This is why I do what I do everyday. This is why I exist to do more than existing. It's to produce this signal, to fire this beacon into the dead sky, to continually beckon and wait for another Equestrian soul besides mine to come and find me, even if beyond the grave, for death has been defeated before during multiple miracles of the First, Second, and Third Age. And maybe—just maybe—somepony, anypony, can come join me, and we can all be the Fourth Age. We can begin things again. We can... begin things again.         We can... ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Several hours passed, during which the lonely beacon of rainbow light started to dim and flicker into a dull pale beam. The pony sat, hunched over, in a chair positioned atop a six meter tall tower that flanked the circle of metal barricades and the glowing lattices in the center of them. The copper body of the Harmony hovered overhead, aglow in the dying rainbow's penumbra. Snow fluttered through the soft air, insulating everything in a deathly silence.         The pegasus lingered upon the precipice of consciousness, her hooves kicked up over the railed edge of the tower. Her brown coated body rose and fell in gentle breaths as her head bowed towards her chest, the goggles fogged over with lazy condensation. Moisture beaded off the barrel of the brass rifle propped to her side; the magazine full of glowing runes twinkled restlessly.         After yet another long stretch of silence, a ringing noise filled the naked air. There was brief silence—then another shrill ringing, and the pegasus started, nearly pratfalling out of her seat. Snorting to blinking wakefulness, she wiped the sheen from her goggles and leaned forward, peering across the gray lengths of the plateau.         A dangling string was bouncing from where it stretched out from a rusted stake pounded into the rocky ground. Ages ago, the pony had erected a complex web of cords and yarn in a spiraling formation from the epicenter of the barricaded signal location. Those cords were equipped with custom-made cowbells at every three-meter intervals, all built to alert the pony of any incoming body on four limbs. Right before her, the one ringing noise was joined by several identical clanging sounds, so that she was swiftly engulfed in a cacophony of bedlam zeroing in on her location.         Her pulse raced. With shaking hooves, she raised her goggles, reached back, grabbed a spyglass from her saddlebag, and peered down the extended length of it. Through the dim porthole of light, the pony stared across the mist-laden horizon of the stony plateau. The projected image bobbed and bounced with each throb of her lonely heartbeat. Then—out from the shadows—she saw them.         There were shapes, bodies—not colorfully maned and hooved, but instead leathery and sharp-fanged... bounding towards her on all fours by the dozen. A whooping noise filled the air as a pack of mangy, bone-pale creatures stampeded homicidally towards her elevated location.         She cursed under her breath. Grabbing her rifle, she pounced off the tower, grabbed a dangling chain tethering the Harmony to the earth, and slid agilely down the length of it. After landing in a roll, she yanked hard on all the chains, unhooking them from the airship's clasps above. Next, she scampered over to the lattice where she hastily retrieved the seven colored rocks and the now-dim flamestone. The earthen plateau beneath her shook fiercely; the rusted iron barricades rattled from the angry feet of the blood-thirsty marauders.         Wasting no time, the pony mightily shouldered the weight of the hulking metal lattice on her back, clasped the rifle in a pair of angry teeth, and stretched her wings out, beating them ferociously against the combination of snowy air and ruthless gravity. She somehow managed to lift the entire ensemble, herself included. The pegasus levitated upwards just as the howling and drooling bodies hurled their way over the first barricades and pounced at her. Fanged teeth and razor sharp maws snapped just centimeters beneath her dangling hooves as she desperately hovered her aching body upwards, climbed the last few meters between her and the airship, and finally collapsed—sprawling—at the aperture entranceway of the Harmony's lower gondola.         From there she cocked her rifle and aimed it cautiously down at the leaping, braying creatures. They leered and spat up at her, their eyes like beady, soulless specks that reflected the gray twilight. As they watched their crafty prey rise ever so far away from the stone face of the plateau, they spun back into a slithering mass of herding leather and thundered, howling, back into the blanketing mists where they joined the ghostly hum of the dead Equestrian Wastes. The pegasus took a long, long breath and leaned back against the round entrance of her airship, shutting her eyes and struggling to fight an impervious frown chiseled into her disappointed face. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Trolls. Goddess, I hate them. It figures that when all ponies disappeared from the face of the earth, these soulless beasts crawled out from the woodwork—no longer forced to hide under bridges and dank cave roofs, waiting for unsuspecting victims or passerbys.         More times in the Wasteland than I can count, I've had to deal with them. They track one's scent from miles away, so I did away with the most fragrant part of an exposed pony: her hair. They're attracted to wood-kindled flame, so I switched to using gas lanterns in all of my flashlights. They stampede at cheetah's speed, so I never wear extra armor when I'm trotting across the Equestrian plains, so that I can fly away at the drop of a hat.         But what I hate about them the most, what makes me wish that the Cataclysm had wiped them off the face of the earth instead, is that the last three consecutive times that I had lit the signal, it was them who I attracted. My naive heart would leap every time at the thought that the herd I had called was the one herd I was always looking for. And every one of those times, I was severely disappointed, and rightfully so.         What more can I expect? There are so many ghostly creatures left haunting this world—from dogs to goblins to wolverines to harpies—and almost every one of them has wanted me dead at one time or another. Many of them blame ponydom for the great blight that has befallen the land, never mind the fact that it took the whole of ponydom with it in the holocaust. Many see me as a delicacy—an exotic edible or a future museum curiosity at best. The closest thing I have for allies are soulless mercenaries who only need me for my talents, or begrudgingly register my existence at an exchange of silver strips over a bargaining table stained with dirty blood.         It's when I go through the process of disembarking from the signal that my faith is the lowest, that the artificial rainbow dies away and I wake up once more to the monochromatic singularity of my existence. What is there to hope for in a world where I am the only source of that hope? There's a name for living within the repetitious prison of your own making: and that's “insanity.” These slobbering trolls—these creatures of the night that seek to rend me to ribbons: they are the sane ones. Only a monster who embraces the savage wilderness of eternal twilight has any reason to hope for things in this world. They will last longer. They will leave a deeper imprint, not by shining fake rainbows into the cloudy air, but by raking the earth with the claws of their nefarious passion, and soaking it with the blood of their enemies... as every civilization has done, including my own in Ages passed.         I've been raised—delightfully sprinkled and polluted—with notions of peace, of tolerance, of friendship. All of those values would have worked once, in a lifetime before I had to kill things to survive and make excuses for it afterward. Maybe some day—maybe in a future journal entry—I will realize the one burning truth of who and what I am: that I cannot pretend to be friendly or hopeful in a world where everypony is gone.         Just look at what I'm writing: “everypony.” Over two thousand journal entries into this nonsense, and I really shouldn't bother to write that anymore. From now on, I think I should just chicken-scratch the term “everybody.” For that is all that's left in the graveyard of Equestria: bodies. And I am their grave keeper, for as long as I live to absurdly shine rainbows into the Abyss.         -End of entry.