A Friend to the End
The sun shone brightly as ever in the sky that fateful day, but the lands of Equestria looked so very different from when they had many eons before. Before the floods, the droughts, the famines and fires; before the plagues, the wars and the ever-present decay of time had taken its toll on the landscape. Or at least, that was how Celestia saw it. Gazing out of the ruined castle of Canterlot always brought a sad ache to her heart, no matter what she did.
To be honest, there was not much to do; the ponies of Equestria had long since reformed into splintered nations across the surface of the world, long-since abandoning the ruins of their once great kingdom. Many had not progressed technologically in well over a thousand years, to the point where any and all technology was almost stagnant. Most ponies didn’t want any more change, and as such, the most advanced pieces of machinery included trains and steamships. So, all in all, the world was basically the same as it had been several thousand years before.
This new age of course was long after the technological regression that had occurred during the Great War. Celestia and Luna had been helpless to try and stop it, and since their few allies had only sought to keep themselves and the princess’s safe, the rest of the world had fallen under the evil that had arisen then. Good had arisen in time with the aid of the princess’s and their few allies and had managed to rid the world of that evil, but it had cost many lives.
Celestia would still think back to before the dark times: before the Empire. Life without her faithful student, her friends and really the whole of Equestria had taken its toll on the alicorn. She could remember all of the adventures they had shared in. the times of trouble and triumph, and all the things they had helped see through to the end. Honest Applejack, laughing Pinkie Pie, generous Rarity, kind Fluttershy, loyal Rainbow Dash and magic Twilight; they truly had been some of the greatest ponies the alicorn had ever known in her entire, ageless life.
Still, the fact she wasn’t here alongside her was a testament to how time could change any pony. Twilight hadn’t been able to handle the prospect of immortality, just like Cadence hadn’t, and so had chosen to simply live a normal life of a princess, though one who lived several decades longer than most. In the end, however, she too had left this world, and if she were to return somehow with all of her similarly deceased friends, they would all weep at what they saw.
The only other pony that knew of Celestia’s pain was her sister, Luna. She too had long since seen countless generations pass her by, something she had not been privy to on the moon. Even now, with all of those bad years behind them, the pair did not like to talk about what had transpired the night she had become Nightmare Moon. Maybe it was better that way; this journey would be better without additional painful memories.
“I was just thinking about you,” Celestia said softly as gentle hoofsteps echoed through the abandoned throne room. “Are you ready?”
“As ready as we shall ever be,” Luna replied softly, stepping up beside her sister. “Tell us, Celestia; will it hurt?”
“No, it will not,” the larger alicorn said, though she was only a fraction larger now. Luna had grown into nearly the same size as Celestia had been when the Elements of Harmony had chosen their bearers, and as such Celestia was only larger now due to her slightly longer horn and neck. “None of us will feel a thing; one minute we will be here, and in less than an instant, we will be gone.”
“Perhaps it is best that nopony else in the world knows what will happen,” Luna said as the two stepped out onto the balcony. “Are you sure it shall come to pass?”
“Undoubtedly,” Celestia replied. “I am tied to the fate of the sun, this one unassuming star in the vastness of the universe, and now... I know what fate awaits us. So, shall we be off?”
“Will he meet us there?” Luna asked softly as the pair of alicorns began to flap their wings. It had felt like ages since they had flown, and to be honest, it had been. They had never strayed far from the ruins of Canterlot, usually only wandering the former lands of Equestria to accept the fortune fate had bestowed upon it.
“Oh, he will; he said he wouldn’t miss the end of the world for, well, the world,” Celestia said with a small smile, and with a gust of wind assisting in their ascension, the two were off into the sky, soaring majestically on the breeze.
The pair said nothing as they flew, simply looking down and remembering all that had happened; all that had caused Equestria to look the way it did now, stemming from actions so long ago. A flood a few years into Twilight Sparkle’s rule as a princess had cost much of the country’s interior farmland to become highly unusable for years, leading to several food shortages in some of the larger cities. Thankfully nearby countries had come to the kingdom’s aid, but perhaps such an inability to feed its own subjects had led many scholars of the time to practice and teach several unheard-of ideas for new government and economic practices. However, it had happened before with nothing to show for it, and nopony could have foretold of the problems that would arise and wreak havoc on everything.
The death of Discord so many millennia ago had opened up the gateway to Tartarus. Discord was a god of chaos, the god if you will, but as in all mythologies, the current generation of deities gives way for a new one, though in his case, it was not some violent overthrow. He died of his own volition, his magically-created daughter the goddess of peace taking his place. In the end, the thing that surprised the princesses most was what he believed: he was letting go of this world with the thought he would simply wake up in another one. He did not account for the accidental opening of Tartarus upon his death by a secret cult that worshipped him and the resulting chaos and destruction that followed. Celestia and Luna had been forced to raise and build armies to combat the creatures that plagued the realm, and after a massive and costly battle, they had finally managed to seal the gates to that chaotic realm once more. Only this time, they had made sure to keep it that way, and with spells both ancient and powerful, they had hid it away from the rest of the world.
The death of so many ponies in that struggle had caused a divide between the two rulers and many of the subjects along the fringes of their country. They saw themselves as mere tools and pawns in never-ending games of chess the princess’s played, something that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Resent turned to anger, anger turned to radicalism, and radicalism turned to outright revolt and revolution. Ponies from all walks of life took up arms against those who they saw as repressive and heartless, something that broke the hearts of the two alicorns. After three full-scale rebellions and twenty assassination attempts, the sisters had to flee into the mountains with their few remaining friends as ever-growing armies of these revolutionaries marched on the capital. In the midst of their flight, they had instructed their loyalist subjects to flee to other lands, if only to be safe from retribution from the revolutionaries.
In many cases, it was not enough; the republic that arose from the ashes of Equestria lasted for merely three decades before it was toppled in favor of a military dictatorship, an empire that conquered quickly and subjugated many. The original leaders were a small band of outcasts from the first revolution, whose well-connectedness and utterly ruthless way of strengthening their power tore through their enemies like a lawnmower. Countless neighboring species, be they the diamond dogs, minotaurs, griffins or the naga far to the humid south were conquered and often enslaved or forced into serfdom, a crime with which no punishment could match the savagery of the guilty. This dictatorship lasted far longer than its predecessor, though the leaders were often assassinated or died mysteriously between ten to fifty years after their coronation. In this time, military service was unyieldingly strict, freedoms were nigh extinct, and the threat of a looming civil war was certain. Then, after one hundred and thirteen years of bloodshed, conquest, corruption and repression, the government broke down and went to war with its own kind. Ponies who rallied behind cries of freedom allied themselves with the repressed minorities of griffins, minotaurs, diamond dogs and countless other species.
The war itself was terribly vicious; friend against friend, brother against father, and city versus city. Whole areas were scorched with the thought that the enemy would be unable to use them; the death toll was catastrophic in the larger cities, where more than ten civilians were killed on average for every rebel. One of the repressed species, the naga, was extirpated from the rest of the empire, with only a small portion of survivors fleeing to the deep interior of the southern jungles. Nopony heard from them after that, even though sightings had remained to this very day.
It was during this war that a dragon and his family were caught in the crossfire of a major battle a ways away from the mountains. Spike the dragon, looking after his great-great-granddaughter’s family, watched helplessly as most of his descendants were killed before him, even as he tried his hardest to reach out and save them from the dictatorship armies. He flew into a rage never seen before, and although he returned to the princess’s with the last three of his infant descendants still alive, he never told anypony what he had done to the armies. Suffice to say, it must have been terrible indeed, for the government collapsed within a few days of that. The freedom fighters, called terrorists and rebels by the terrible government, soon brought forth a democracy, founded on the ideals the princess’s had strived for under the reign of Discord so many millennia before. Spike himself never again let his descendants leave the safety of their hidden homes, far away from the likes of the world he had once known. He never set foot there again either, and soon enough his contributions faded to legend.
The new democracy barely lasted two hundred fifty years before it was corrupted beyond repair, this time from the inside out and not by conquering dictators. Special interest groups, powerful families with nearly unlimited wealth and politicians became the new dictators, though from the shadows and through the absolute control of the media. The ponies of the land rose up again, in the midst of a drought-induced famine, and although the bloodshed was great once more, the sheer destruction the countless armies caused this time made the lands of Equestria all but unlivable. Survivors fled to countless different places, with many small bands forming their own tiny kingdoms in faraway places. Soon enough, these tiny kingdoms grew, expanded, went to war, combined and splintered, and after four thousand years of this, they eventually became countless countries and empires stretching over the world. Still, none returned to the lands of Equestria, a place lost to time and memory.
Equestria was a myth to many of these creatures, though some knew it as simply a place in the long-forgotten past. It was not a place to go if one wanted to learn about good things, for many knew only of it through terrible stories and horrific tales of bloodshed, chaos and absolute madness. Perhaps that was why after so many years, the bloodlines of the few survivors who had stayed in the mountains came down and settled in the long-forgotten ruins of a once thriving kingdom. Their villages were simple and tiny, surrounded by vast tracts of forests and crumbling, ancient cities. Trade between the small villages was often just foodstuffs and whatever treasures they could find, be they ancient weapons, scrolls or gold. War did not exist here, and peace was universal for these small settlements, since they all relied on one another for everything they themselves could not make.
The sisters flew over these villages, feeling at least a bit better when they saw the simple lives these ponies lived. Farming, surface mining, forestry and animal husbandry; these were by far the most advanced labor-related tasks these ponies did. Their homes were built out of wood and sod, with some of the few larger buildings having been built around the remains of old stone structures. Most of these ponies seemed to have peculiar features that one would not expect to find among pegasus, unicorns and earth ponies, but that was to be expected when pretty much all of them shared a common ancestor with one particularly scaly creature.
“What lies beyond the border, sister?” Luna asked as the pair flew over the drained remains of a long-ago dammed lake. The dam had long since crumbled away, leaving only scooped-out canyon-like walls and a small river running through the middle. There had been a port on its banks once, but now that too was gone.
“The border is where the devastation occurred,” Celestia called back as the two rose over a small, oddly-shaped mountain range. Before them lay an absolutely massive tract of desolate land, all of it stretching out for mile upon dusty mile. It was as though the sun itself had come to rest on this one spot, if only for a few moments, and though this had happened many thousands of years before, the area had still yet to recover. Blackened rock, scorched earth, the twisted and blackened remains of what surely must have been trees at one point. It was as though Tartarus had given birth to this place, a place of sand, rock, death and heat. Strangely, in the middle there lay one tiny spot, untouched, where a small forest and a tiny, spring-fed lake still lived on. It rained in this place as often as not, but the ground would not soak up the waters; countless lakes would only sit there, devoid of life, until they eventually evaporated.
“Is this... where Spike was?” Luna asked softly. She if all ponies had wanted to know what had happened, but she had never been able to find out what had occurred on that day. Spike, other than Celestia, had been her closest friend after the Elements of Harmony had passed away and the tree of Harmony was forever lost to the Everfree forest.
“He was in this area, so it was, most likely,” Celestia said. The dragon had not told her either what had occurred that day, but the princess had a fair idea of what had occurred in this place. A regular dragon’s wrath was terrible; the wrath of a dragon born of magic, as had been Spike, was something else entirely.
A loud rumble behind them made them turn around. The small mountain range they had passed over hadn’t been a mountain range at all; the spiraling towers had in fact been massive spines, gnarled and twisted by time and growth. It was the body of a dragon, an absolutely massive dragon, but the titanic head that rose up towards them wasn’t fierce, or angry, or even surprised-looking. It looked gentle, kindly, and wrinkled, like that of a very old grandfather who had lived long, seen much and waited around for relatives to come visit.
“I thought one of you would have figured that old story out long ago,” the rumbling giant said, resting on his limbs as he stretched slightly. The ground shook as he moved, but luckily for the countless descendants living in the shadows of Equestria, they knew it to just be him.
“Spike, when you said you would meet us here, I had not expected the here to actually be you,” Celestia said as the pair flew down and landed on his great snout. “How long have you been laying there?”
“Oh, I’d say about one thousand years,” the great dragon said, brushing off a small forest that had grown on his right hand. “Time flies when only your descendants come to talk to you as a rite of passage, or when they need some advice. I only needed to move my left hand and my head, so the land tried to reclaim the rest of me that didn’t move.”
“Indeed?” Luna asked. “Do they view you as a god?”
“More or less, though less with the whole “immortal deity” aspect and more like their extremely long-lived progenitor and source of wisdom,” the great dragon said with a smile. “So, when will it happen? The end, that is?”
“Within the hour,” Celestia said softly. “Before it happens, Spike, could we ask you something?”
“Go ahead,” he replied, his voice softer than one might expect a mountain range-sized dragon to be. If only he had been this large when the wars first started, all those thousands of years before...
“What happened here?” Luna asked gently, gesturing out towards the barren wasteland.
Spike was silent for a few moments, as if trying to recall a painful memory. With his age, though still younger than the sisters, he had experienced far more than most could even imagine. “That is where those armies came across my family, and fell upon them,” the great dragon said, his voice void of emotion. It was that he did not feel anything; he just knew that shedding tears over something that had happened so long ago, with the end of the world at hand now, would be just a waste. “Dragons were driven from these lands long before I was born, and these newer ponies did not appreciate half-breeds, no matter how diluted my blood was in them. It did not matter that they were of a lineage older than the dictatorship, my own descendants and under my protection; they fell upon them without mercy, and I was helpless for the briefest of moments. My helplessness, even for so short a time as it was, cost me many of my descendants, and... I fell into a rage I had never felt before. I whisked away the only survivors, and then turned upon the armies. I... I burned them: I burned them all with a fire hotter than I ever thought I could produce.”
“But... there were tens of thousands of them in all, I heard; the majority of the Empire’s entire armed forces,” Luna said with a soft gasp.
“There was nothing left when I was done,” the dragon said, a soft rumble echoing from his throat. “Most died within an instant of me passing through; the area burned for weeks like a stain upon the Earth. Did you not suspect why the sky to the west had turned so dark?
“We... we had thought it was just another volcano along the coast beginning to erupt,” Celestia said. “Did you think we would banish you from our sight if we had known at the time?”
“No, but I didn’t want anypony telling my descendants I had done that,” the dragon said softly. “I can only thank you two, though, that you helped to take care of them after they lost the only family they had had. I was too large by then to be the parent they needed, so... thank you, again.”
“It was the least we could do for our staunchest ally and friend over these many, many years,” Luna said. “Tell us, Spike, what do you expect will happen afterwards?”
“Maybe I’ll see all of my friends and family again,” the great big dragon said with a smile. “It is a pleasant thought, no? I can only hope Discord was right about it all. If not, I’ll have to find him and kick his ass.”
The two sisters chuckled slightly as they settled down onto the great dragon’s massive snout. High above them, the sun went on as usual, but another light in the sky grew steadily larger, and from the trajectory, it would impact the sun very soon. “A white dwarf, a star very much like how ours would have been many, many eons from now,” Celestia said softly as she could feel the change in her bones. It was happening soon; very soon, and then there would be nothing.
“Thank you both for coming,” Spike said softly as the sun suddenly began to swell up in the sky, growing ever larger with each passing second. “There no other ponies in this world I would rather spend my last moments with than you two.”
“We feel the same about you, Spike,” Luna said as the sky continued to brighten. All around the world, ponies were looking up in surprise and awe at a spectacle none had known would ever happen.
“A friend to the end; we could ask for nothing better,” Celestia said softly, the collision having very nearly driven the air from her lungs. Mere seconds away from oblivion, and all she could think about was how thankful Spike and Luna were there to keep her company. Three... two... one...
And then there was nothing; all of the Earth was reduced to cosmic dust as the sun exploded, its remains expanding out into the vast emptiness of space. Mercury, Venus and even Mars shared its fate, and though the outer planets were spared, they soon found themselves drifting aimlessly without their warm sun and small blue sister to keep them company.
So ended the tale of the blue planet and its many, many wondrous inhabitants, and with its passing the universe seemed just a little less brighter than it had been.