//------------------------------// // Chapter 7: The World That Was Not // Story: Nightmares Are Tragic // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// She stood at the top of the castle's tallest tower and looked out into the forest. The effects of the titanic dispelling were finally dissipating, the mostly-bluish rainbow of colors wavering off into insubstantiality, the cloud tearing apart under the lash of the powerful ley-currents of the Everfree. The effects on her heart were slower to fade. I know who she is ... the Moon Princess thought again. I know who she was. I know why she hates me. She remembered ... Long before she was Princess Luna. In a time when she was not Moondreamer. In a dimensional direction normally kept folded within subatomic particles, one which no mortal could normally perceive ... She streaked across the skies of an Earthly paradise, ebon wingtips cleaving not only the atmosphere but the very fabric of reality. Below were gentle rolling hills, meadows, fairy pagodas of buildings, frisking little ponies -- a world of happiness and beauty beyond all belief. Which was the problem. For the makers of this paradise had made it through one great Wish -- an acausal effect whose implications they had failed to clearly understand. Those who had made this paradise had not understood the forces they were unleashing. With their mighty Wish, they weakened the very structure of spacetime, sent forces rippling toward past and future and in other temporal directions few mortal languages had the words to delineate. Reality bent, rippled, ruptured. Flaws in the Cosmos propagated, as Paradox piled upon Paradox, straining the underpinnings of causality upon which depended all Existence. Effect after effect was unsupported by cause, not merely in the quantum microverse, where the Heisenberg Principle would have decently concealed them in showers of mutually-annihilating virtual particles; but in the macroverse, where each hammerblow of impossibility sent pulses of fully-manifesting energy and matter, to further rape Reality. Had the Wishers kept the high ambitions they had once had, when they had been the indomitable ponies of the Age of Wonders, they would have torn apart the Cosmos in a few seconds of self-amplifying singular glory, the wave of annihilation of all spreading outward from the Earth at the speed of light, dooming all Creation. Had they done this, the Cosmic Principles might have had to amputate a whole sheaf of timelines, burning a great cautery wound thousands of light-years in diameter in a Milky Way Galaxy torn apart by the forces unleashed. Fortunately, the first thing they had done was to Wish away their high purposes, becoming simple, happy creatures who lived for songs and dances, smiles and hugs, cake and ice cream. For parties. So they lasted for thousands of years, thousands of years of mostly-mindless happiness, laughing and playing like fillies – for maleness had been one of the first flaws in their race their Wishes had corrected – while the flaws in spacetime spread mostly much slower than the speed of light. When the Cosmic Principles finally realized what was happening, they only needed to cauterize a patch a light-year or so in radius around a single star. The Solar System. This was the Last Day. Cosmic Luna knew transcendent joy as she streaked across the sky at a ground speed of roughly thirty thousand miles per hour. She was a night-dark cosmic Alicorn the size of a mountain, and her legs and wings and heads and horns thrashed as she performed her holy labor. She was only vaguely equine, but she was terrible and beautiful beyond any mundane compare. The leading edges of her wings, harder than any diamond, sharper than any razor ever honed in mortal forges, sheared not only the atmosphere, but not infrequently individual nuclei of the very atoms which composed it. The most refractory metals would have glowed white-hot and spattered into vapor at the tremendous friction of her passage, but the ebon substance of her self did not even heat into the infra-red The atmosphere, however, was torn into gouts and sheets of star-hot plasma. She trailed a wake of lightning that set forests afire, a roll of thunder that leveled the fairy towns of the little ponies, leaving toppled trees, ruined houses, shattered and torn flesh. That was not the true nature of her destruction. It was merely incidental to her work, a devastation caused mostly by her total lack of concern for the well-beings of creatures who in any case were doomed to a fate far more final than the concept of death would ever describe. The true nature was the ebon black radiance that issued from her many eyes, mouths, heads and horns. Flashes of nonexistence leapt like her lightning, but unlike the lightning they did not merely blast and burn and shatter. Nothing so trivial. For where that ebon lightning struck, things were not, and never had been. That lightning was the ultimate weapon of the Cosmic Principles, bolts from the Entropy that was the one force they themselves feared, a force compared to which the sunfire bombs that Moondreamer (had made? Would make?) was as butterfly wings beside typhoons. These were aimed and struck precisely. Cosmic Luna’s many brains contained a list of those she would glean and those she would cast aside as chaff. For when this whole world was not, and never had been, it would be restarted from its last save point – a point shortly before the Great Wish had been made. And some of those souls – the ones which had shown drive and intelligence even in this poisoned paradise of Wishing – they would be recycled, reborn as new Ponies. Of course, it would be pointless – and dangerous – to simply allow the Wish to be cast again. This time, Destruction would visit them. The vast engines which they had built to toy with causality would first fail, vomiting forth many gigatons of energy and searing their own immense installations away as eruptions of supernova-hot fundamental particles. The Age of Wonders would end. Civilization would fall. But this time, there would be a future. The Moon Princess shivered at the memory of the glory and horror that was her Cosmic self. Cosmic Luna was beautiful and terrible beyond all lesser comprehension: powerful and pitiless in the purity of Her purpose. To Cosmic Luna, all Equestria was but a verdant woodland pool, Princess Luna merely a stray train of thought within Her greater being. Did she love? Hate? She had emotions, of some kind, but they were as far beyond Luna's understanding as the mind of a normal pony would have been beyond the understanding of a frog in that pool. She was a Transcendent Being. Yet She had been humbled, once, and by a denizen of that doomed timeline. By Pinkie Pie. In the skies above this doomed world, others moved, doing their shares of the assigned collection and neutralization. Some were Alicorns like herself. Others were the Cousins – the creatures of Chaos, who cooperated with them fully only on such a holy mission. The Alicorns were terrible, but beautiful. The Cousins were worse. They were nothing as simple, nor as friendly, as Draconequi Avatars. These were Cosmic forces of Chaos, and they shifted from one impossible form to another with each passing whim. Whereas the Alicorns loosed few and precise bolts of annihilation, the Cousins spit them forth wholesale, ripping great rifts of nonexistence in the uninhabited portions of the planet, doing wholesale what the Alicorns did retail. They knew a pure joy at destruction which was beyond anything any sane Cosmic Alicorn, even Luna, could feel. The Ponies could do nothing but scream, and die, and cease to be. Some tried to find shelter, tried to find safety, but always death and non-being found them. Most just stood there crying; some looked up to the sky, where for the most part the clouds of steam from the tortured, riddled remnants of what had been a living planet prevented them from even seeing what was doing the destruction. A very few unfortunate ones caught glimpses of the Cosmic Alicorns and shrieked in even greater terror. The most unfortunate saw the Cousins, and instantly went insane. Some did not go mad. Some chose to fight instead ... One pink little pony stood on the crumbling pavement of a dying town. There, at the last of her world, she and a few others had remembered the high courage that had let their ancestors make the Great Wish at its beginning. “Why?” she screamed. “Why are you hurting us? We didn’t do anything to you! We didn’t do anything to anyone. Why can’t you just let us live? Maybe we could be friends!” Reality was riven by the intensity of her Wishing. Her defiance amused one of the Cousins. He dared her to fight the little pink one, hoof-to-hoof, through an avatar made of mere flesh and blood, reduced in power to only super-equine abilities. It was a challenge she could not refuse. Even at so limited a level of power, her avatar commanded forces of Nature, gravity and electromagnetism, and had a speed and strength unknown to mortal ponies -- especially the little ponies made weak and soft by millennia of ease. She should have guessed what would happen. Already, the surviving forces of the Great Wish were swirling around Pinkie Pie. The little pink pony was not so much running or bounding as transitioning from location to location without bothering to occupy the spacetime in between. When they met on the field of battle, Luna's lightning bolts struck empty air as Pinkie was abruptly not where she had been. Pinkie Pie struck again and again from all directions, from insane angles and with a force unknown to mere Terrestrial biology. Despite her total lack of skill or training, despite being the soft scion of a decadent reality, Pinkie Pie was winning. Luna knew what was happening, of course. The Great Wish had been self-maintaining. To equinimorphize its structure, it wanted to live. In its last extremity, its power had concentrated itself upon the few Ponies who remained defiant, kept faith in the ethos of their world even when that world was dying around them. The Great Wish had chosen its Champions. Paramount among them was Pinkie Pie. Luna was not just fighting one little pink pony. She was fighting the life-force of that whole doomed timeline. The Cousin watched and laughed as the immortal avatar of a Cosmic Alicorn got its flank kicked by a little pink pony. To the Cousin, all this was pure fun. What did it matter if the perfect annihilation of the World That Was Not was imperfect? All it meant was a little Chaos down the road, and Chaos was the purpose of its existence. In the end the pink pony fell. The Princess was a bit hazy on the details. But she remembered Pinkie Pie fading out, sobbing over the corpse of her best friend, a cute little thing almost as green as Pinkie was pink. She definitely remembered that Pinkie Pie had died ... Died. Not been erased. Only died. Had anyone ever purged Pinkie's soul of the powers the dying Wish had granted her? No, the Moon Princess decided, I don't think that any of us bothered to even check. Sister had awoken to her true nature by then, and we were all a bit busy at the time. So the spirit of one little pink pony had been released into the Beyond, bearing with it a fraction of the Great Wish. Only a tiny fraction -- but then the Wish had been a power able to remake an entire star system to suit the desires of its casters. And that soul had -- bearing with it that awesome power -- been reborn as Pinkie, now, in this age of Equestria. As one of six Champions sent specifically to stop Nightmare Moon. That can't be a coincidence, the Princess reflected, lowering her head in thought. An enemy from my past, and armed with the ability to get her revenge. Obviously, my sister sought her out -- maybe summoned her from the Beyond? -- and set her on my trail. Now that I've seen her power in operation, I know to which element she's attuned. Laughter. She remembered merry moments in her past lives, and winced. That hurts. That was one of my Elements. Not that I've felt like laughing in a very long time, she reflected sadly. All I need to do is avoid trying illusions and direct psychic attacks against her. She needed all her power to block my more direct magics, and I doubt that she has enough of a reserve to keep that up for long. She brought the matrix of the Great Wish with her, yes, but that world is long-gone: her power source must be something more mundane now. And I doubt that her own life force could be adequate to explain the eruption of energies I just witnessed. Rituals of some kind, letting her feed as an emotivore? I don't think that ritual sacrifice would work very well with Laughter, and it's not Celestia's style. Could Pinkie be organizing some sort of gatherings, at which she can feed on the positive affect of her coven? Festivals of some sort? If true, she can't recharge easily in the Everfree. I should remain cautious, but I think that I now perceive her limitations. She won't be able to cast a spell as powerful as that one again. She nodded to herself, hoping that she had come to the correct conclusion. What -- who else has my sister set on my trail? The lavender stargazer -- she's Celestia's handpicked student, I know that now. No normal mage would be able to comprehend an alien magic so quickly. And not just any magic! If she's Pinkie's friend, she must be learning The Great Wish! She won't have the power to cast it, but she can use segments of its coding, cut and paste them to her own purposes. She'll be very dangerous to duel. And why do I have that strange bond with her? She reminds me a bit of that green pony who was Pinkie's friend -- but much more strongly of something, someone else. But I don't remember any mare like her. Not in any of my lives. Who else? That yellow mind-witch Fluttershy? There's something familiar there too, but not as strong as with the others. It's a good thing that her power seems to be telempathic projection rather than direct mind-control. I'm pretty sure I can shield against it. I'm also not particularly vulnerable against her Element. It's one of my sister's, and I realized its falsity a thousand years past. The Apple mare? She's a magnificent warrior, but no different from some others of her clan I've known. The fancy white unicorn? She doesn't remind me of anypony in particular. They're both skilled fighters, but neither of them could take any but the smallest and youngest of Alicorns. The blue pegasus, Rainbow? There was definitely something familiar about her, though she didn't remember ever meeting any mare much like her. Yet I'm sure I've known that pony before. A friend? From where? From when? When I think of her I see complex machinery ... aircraft ... I must remember ... A disturbance in the distance caught her attention. Celestia's champions had reached the river. They were only a few miles from the castle now. Nightmare Moon flashed into infra-red cold plasma, and in less than a minute she was there.