Land of Friendship and Magic

by Archmage Ansrit

Awakening

I-I- What the hell was that!? My knees were shaking like jelly and I couldn't so much as move.

I fell to my knees and tried to keep myself up with my arms, but they too lost strength and I fell face down on the grass.

'A-alright, I need to- I understand. That's the in-between....'

I couldn't just do nothing with what I'd seen; that way laid madness. Neither could I mess with lest I go insane...

'First of all. How does this- no, does this affect me?'

...

No, it didn't.

Another, perhaps a nihilist, would have taken it as 'confirmation' that nothing one does has any meaning. Or that they could do anything they wanted because there were other 'back-ups'.

I... I... I am aware. I understand - no, others who 'understand' have gone crazy... what would that make me? I get it?

Yeah! I get it! I get it!

It's philosophy! All you truly own is yourself and your memories, your actions. We are all simple travelers in this road of life, and everything is so much better if we help each other, instead of trying to trip each other up. Who said that Sahasrara was the hardest chakra to understand?

OK, so that means that, while I am in... somewhere, that does not mean that I can do anything I want for the hell of it. Whatever, or whoever I find will still be another traveler of life just the same as I, and deserves my respect as such. It doesn't matter if I can or cannot effect anything but my immediate surroundings, I don't need to make huge waves so long as I enjoy my personal journey and grow from it.

Basically, I ended up where I started, but the journey helped me understand and settle the load better, mostly by making me understand that it isn't a load at all. I know some things, don't know others, and yet, I can understand without knowing everything.

Also, Void-dwellers have got to be the most deluded of beings; sadly, their delusions are really freaking powerful and they have an effect on others that reinforce them.

'Whatever. Time to take stock of my surrounding- wait, why is my hand so small? And why am I wearing a green jacket?'

"Missed me?" The voice sent shivers down her spine, despite it being said in a conversational tone.

She turned.

Surely in front of her was a ghost, out of her past to haunt her. Same carefree smile, same brown eyes, glasses and windswept hair.

But not a ghost. He was very real.

"Villain!" Luna bellowed in the Royal Canterlot voice; a blue-tinted sphere surrounded Typhon, centered over his heart, and parted the shockwave like a rock does a river. "Thou shan't terrorize Equestria again!"

Just as Celestia was processing the scene before her, Luna threw a spell at Typhon - a bright lance of magical energy that would have gouged a hole in rock. Typhon disappeared into a mess of blue lines, reforming on the ground.

"You know, you could have said 'no'." He took one of his strange stances, one foot and one arm forward with the other leg behind the first and the other arm protecting his chest; a blue sphere formed around him, with a fainter one extending much further.

Celestia, now much more aware of her surroundings, remembered what the sphere meant, and that few were able to even see it - mostly those who could use the same technique and produced a bubble themselves. With those reminders about Wind Whistler, it was impossible not to think of Typhon himself. Perhaps Luna had forgotten, but the denser sphere used to only reach about twice the length of his arms without a weapon.

What Luna had not forgotten, however, was that there was a rather obvious weakness to his technique - it couldn't deal with opponents with superior strength. She rushed forward and jabbed with a forehoof - a buck was certainly one of the stronger hits a pony could make, but it was insanely telegraphed and everypony and their grandma would expect it.

As the princess dove into the bubble, it deformed around her. Typhon leaned away from the blow, shifting his breath and ducking under Luna's follow up hook. The bubbles shrank until his torso was barely covered by the smaller one. Luna shot another quick spell, but Typhon could read the disturbances her head made to the air as she aimed and twirled sideways to avoid it.

"Got your rhythm." He said, neutrally, devoid of any concrete emotion.

He recovered his stance, but the bubble shrank further and deformed until it was just a wrapping to his body; it gave Luna pause, since standing up to her was something he had never done before, and with (apparently) new abilities, too. Guards poured into the too small clearing, and pegasi crowded the sky.

Celestia wanted to prevent an incident before it started.

"All pegasi, retreat!" She ordered, but too late. The flying guards were visibly struggling to remain airborne, flapping their wings harder and harder, pumping for all they where worth to no avail; ultimately they landed on top of the land-bound guards.

And Typhon didn't seem to acknowledge them.

"Ruffian!" Luna roared and threw another jab, which, to her surprise, was not dodged by running away, but by diving in after moving just the bare minimum to let her hoof graze his clothes.

He used his hand to smear ink on Luna's face.

"Bye!" And then used Luna's outrage to cover when he seemingly exploded into blue lines and vanished.

Celestia did not have time to ponder much of anything, what with her sister shouting indignantly at the top of her lungs. Typhon used some kind of magical ink that needed additional magic to remove, and the guards needed assistance, and she needed to send a letter to Twilight, and- and- and...

And she was going to need something for the killer headache she was developing.

Just like I expected.

My powers grew quite a lot, but not to the extend they 'should'. My powers came from a 'game construct' that affected even reality, but a reality made by the construct itself... this reality was made by a different magic, which didn't fit my own all that well. There was a... I guess I could call it a 'bandwidth', or perhaps a 'tolerance' or 'compatibility', where my abilities behaved just like they should, but trying to inject more power made them fizzle.

Growing in 'levels' increased the maximum, but instead of trying to go straight for city-leveling power, I preferred to expand sideways. The 'construct' assigned me a 'class', but the world tried to make sense of it by giving me an equivalent. Using the class abilities was the easiest, and getting creative with them is just second-nature, but it's Equestria itself what allowed me to stand on clouds.

Still, going into the Tiers made me rise to a whole new order of magnitude. Using my breath powers like that, against the princesses, was something I wouldn't even dream of before - it was way too hard to sustain the normal Air-Control Sphere against a pony with pegasus powers, since they had a bit of their own instinctually, and it really wasn't supposed to be used against those with great strength. The advanced form? I don't know what was I thinking.

Well, that's not true. I was sad that Luna tried to attack me just like that... it seemed to me like she never got the memo. I don't really blame her or anything, she only ever had Celestia for quite a long time, and only got back from her own absence relatively recently. To her, I was still the guy who Celestia said I was (and I didn't do myself any favors by wrecking that wheat field, or those houses).

And I could feel a lot of her loneliness and pain. She vented her frustrations against me.

Still, now was the perfect time to get rid of my own corpse.

...

'I... I think I should find it a little morbid that I planned for my own death to the point I stored a bodybag inside my inventory for when I kicked it so that I wouldn't have to find one later.'

I kept a bodybag in my soon-to-be corpse. For convenience.

"Wow, my life got really screwed up somewhere along the line."

My ring glowed.

"Old news?! Don't make me put you in my pocket! I don't need all four all the time!" I shook my hand.

The ring's light blinked a few times.

"That's better." I nodded, and, though I couldn't see it, the pocket watch's face glowed too. "I know you like the pocket, but Suzy is more of an open spaces kind of girl."

I clapped my hands.

"I should give myself a proper funeral. Suzy, you have 'Star', right? Do you think you could do the same the princesses do for those?"

The ring glowed again.

"Perfect."

Everything was a whirlwind of emotions, confusion, unanswered questions and, yes, a touch of fear.

Princess Luna had sent a letter, the urgent tone distracting her from the pile of research books she had surrounded herself with to try to understand the phenomenon she had witnessed not an hour before getting the scroll.

The letter also mentioned an inbound chariot to pick them up.

That... that was not a good sign at all. It meant that whatever it was, it could not wait...

As they stepped into the throne room it was clear that Celestia was troubled. She stood at the bottom of the steps, stern gaze not focused on anything specific until a small jerk of her head brought her eyes to their group.

The last time that had happened, Discord had escaped. The princess had been understandably upset; he was immensely powerful, dangerously cunning, and disturbingly insane.

Twilight suppressed the desire to whimper as the icy feeling of dread began to spread through her body.

"Twilight sparkle, I am so glad to see you." The princess said, the relief of meeting in person slightly dampened by the fact it had happened under stressful circumstances yet again.

The princess looked conflicted for a moment, opening her mouth for a second before drawing breath and sighing.

"Typhon has returned." She said, lowering her head slightly as she remembered the look on his face. "I do not know why or how, nor why would he wait until now, but I do know that the lights from moments ago had something to do with it."

He wasn't all that pleased with her, then again, his emotions had always been subdued... until Wind Whistler died. She shook her head.

"He is different from how I remember him. It appears that he can teleport now, and he is more powerful and confident." She paused, allowing Dash to speak up.

"No worries!" Rainbow flew up and twisted and twirled, as if in aerial combat. "He won't even know what hit 'im!"

"You are a pegasus." Celestia stated, making the others blink in confusion. "If you fly anywhere near him, he will know it. I am convinced that he can sense any other type of pony as well. Luna is currently looking for him, but I did not ask you to- never mind, my sister sent the letter."

She sighed. Luna could be so painfully direct at times... at the very least she used a scribe for her missives, who Celestia had told to 'modernize' her speech.

"I do not want you to join the effort to hunt him, but I do want you to be wary; Typhon is cunning, having managed to avoid us for years. I have no doubt that he is preparing traps for my sister and her escorts."

The body in front of me turned to motes of light and ascended to the skies.

I only had the four, and for them to grant me their full protection they needed to be together... yet, at the same time, my form when susceptible to magic could not be more fitting; giving it a funeral had more meaning than just an ascension into the Tiers. Kind of... like an entirely new beginning; a farewell to my old life from so long ago into a new one.

Keeping my promise to Wind Whistler.

Speaking of which, her gravestone had a second bouquet, identical to the other one. It could only have been Celestia, since anypony else wouldn't have thought to give her such a mismatched one. They were all of her favorites, and had said that she didn't care one bit that they didn't go well together in a single bouquet. It would be just like the princess to deduct the reason and copy it.

Hmm? Something was added to the grave.

Wind Whistler

?? - ? / ? / 10 Post-Harmonia

Right, Discord's little reign made keeping track of the date a little hard. It was... three years later that a Seer and a mathematician managed to match the correct date to the old calendar. Maybe it wasn't corrected out of respect?

Beloved daughter, mother, and wife.

The founder of Las Pegasus. Your guidance, knowledge and example were an inspiration in life, and your memory will forever remain alive so long the spirit of the community you started stays within our hearts.

She added Windstorm...

Windstorm

?? - ??

Beloved husband and father.

Your sharp and inquisitive mind will be sorely missed. Your sense of justice and unwavering devotion to the betterment of ponydom should be an inspiration to all.

Did Celestia... write that epitaph?

I-I... I could feel Luna closing in. I should go; I wasn't feeling in the mood for a confrontation, and maybe... maybe I needed to cry a little.