The End of Ponies

by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Seven: Immutable

        It was a winter's night, or maybe a spring evening. There were several nameless ponies gathered at the top of a hill under purple starlight. Word had spread through town about a natural lightshow—an amazing meteor shower of sorts. But Scootaloo could care less. All that mattered was one pony and one pony alone.

        “Wow, Twilight!” Rainbow Dash smirked between bites of an apple picked up from a picnic spread. “You're lucky to have such a rad assistant. I wish I had someone to do whatever I told them.”

        It was right there and then that the orange foal strolled up, and at the sound of the blue pegasus' exclamation, the little filly ecstatically jumped in place. “Oh! Oh! Me! Me! Me!” she smiled warmly. “I'll do whatever you want, Rainbow Dash!”

        “Oh yeah, pipsqueak?” The prismatically maned pony squinted the kid's way. “How about taking out the trash?” She tossed an apple core onto the grass.

        Scootaloo scooped it up gently as if it were made of gold. “Yes, ma'am!” She flurried over to a garbage can on the very edge of the park and hurriedly rejoined the party.

        Minutes bled into an hour as Scootaloo hummed pleasantly in the shadow of Rainbow Dash. A hushed murmur hung over the crowd of Ponyvillean stargazers as the meteor shower began, lighting up the purple night with gentle pinstreaks of white and gold. Conversations drifted back and forth, wavering from Twilight Sparkle's expert recital of trivial astronomical facts to Lady Rarity's sudden inspirations for “star-studded” pageant-wear. The only thing Scootaloo listened to in earnest was a certain pegasus' fanatical thoughts on the latest Wonderbolts airshow.

        When the orange foal attempted joining the conversation, she was inevitably drowned out. But she didn't mind, so long as she was seated within the blue aura of the pony whose wings dwarfed her own. With a deep inhale, she was only vaguely aware of a petite, purple shape crawling over to a nearby picnic basket, curling his exhausted, scaled self into the hollow of an empty punch bowl...

        And sleeping like an infant.

        “Reverse-time,” a ten meter tall Spike explained, his deep voice echoing across a large cavern. “It's the means by which I can send things into the past. It's how I was able to transport you back to Ms. Cheerilee's schoolhouse. And it is also the sole reason for all of my years of bold experimentation, deep introspection, and loneliness. Until now.” His snout melted forth a smile. “Welcome, Scootaloo, to my laboratory.”

        The last pony's ears heard the elder dragon's words, but her eyes were still exploring the mesmerizing sights around her. She rested, mending, on a granite table besides the grown dragon in the belly of a cavernous hovel. Under the gnarled roots of the late Twilight Sparkle's treehouse library, the basement had been expanded enormously into a subterranean dragon's roost.

        Above a sparkling array of multi-colored gemstones was an elaborate assortment of alchemy tables and shelves upon shelves of magical ingredients encased in glass jars. There were sparkling crystal balls, electrified tesla coils, elaborate, brass-constructed, rotating orreries of the Equestrian solar system, and then a rhythmic albeit noisy assortment of dozens upon dozens of clocks—clocks of all shapes and sizes, of various copper instruments clicking and clanking and spinning with infinitely complex precision across the sparkling lengths of the cave.

        A deep, purple haze twinkled throughout the earthen interior beneath the heart of Ponyville, breathing a resurrected spirit of Equestrian sorcery into the air, and the very sight of it made the wide-eyed pegasus' heart leap for the millionth time that eventful afternoon.

        “When the Cataclysm befell Equestria, I was a tiny dragon whelp, hardly possessing any more years than the foal that you once were, old friend.” The purple-scaled elder was applying the last of several bandages across Scootaloo's left side, patching the parts of her brown coat that were still sore, even after Spike's miraculous healing inside Sugarcube Corner. “Just like you, I had to deal with a world deprived of everything and everypony I had ever loved. Ponyville was a wasteland. Canterlot was a ghost town. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna fell into the same oblivion as did their Sun and Moon. I was alone. I needed help, I needed guidance, I needed wisdom; but when I cried out her name, drowning in the youthful fits of infinite sorrow, I heard no response. My beloved mentor Twilight Sparkle was dead.”

        At the end of his last exhalation, a green fume wafted through the subterranean hideout. Spike's emerald eyeslits faded slightly as a twirling violet pendant reflected the manalight that shimmered off the hundreds upon hundreds of salvaged clockfaces. The cadence of the multiple antique time-keepers floated him back to the present, and he once again smiled softly at the last pony, all the while gently helping her down from the granite lab table.

        “My sole inspiration for living may have disappeared, but I would rather have been cursed than let Twilight's spirit die. My desperate mind suddenly remembered an experiment that she and I had embarked upon barely six months before the Cataclysm. The brilliant young unicorn had speculated that it was possible to send items through time via my green flame as we had always been able to send things through space, such as Twilight's letters to Princess Celestia. Our exercises in chronological manipulation proved unfruitful, but like a good scientist I realized that they could be repeated. My young self embarked upon a noble crusade; to see if it was possible to send messages—and perhaps even myself—back through time to before the Cataclysm happened. I locked myself deep within the caverns of the Canterlotlian Mountains, and for years I wracked my draconian brain over every mathematical and magical formula that could make this dream come true.”

        Scootaloo limped aside, giving the large, adult dragon room to shuffle past the last pony and towards a granite stretch of wall. With swift precision, Spike breathed hot green flame onto his finger's claw, rendering it to a literal firebrand which he proceeded to etch from left-to-right across the stone. Upon finishing a crude diagram, the elder dragon gestured towards the smoldering illustration. There was a straight horizontal line titled “Past-Ponydom,” and carved to the right of it was a crude “X” labeled “Cataclysm.” To the right of this was a zig-zagged line which Spike simply marked “Wastelands-Fourth Age.”

        “Decades passed since the Cataclysm, and finally I made a breakthrough. I discovered reverse-time, a way in which the currents of chronology sink backwards via the same fluidity of forward motion, like waves upon the beach. Excited and enthused beyond measure, I proceeded with great courage to perform the first trip back through time ever committed in this world.”

        Spike proceeded to draw a curved line leftwards from a point in the zig-zagged future all the way back to the “X.” There, his burning claw stopped, and he uttered in a cold breath:

        “Imagine my horrendous disappointment when I discovered that I could only go as far back as the first day after the Cataclysm. The day that Princess Luna and Princess Celestia died had become an impermeable barrier. The sundering of magic that marked the moment of their perishing acted as a solid wall which my draconian self could not pierce through, no matter how much green flame I conjured. Still, I refused to believe that all of my experimentation was for nothing.”

        Spike's finger curved back towards the first time-jump at the right of the zig-zagging diagram, so that his etchings formed double ellipses between the “Cataclysm” and the jump.

        “So, after several years of planning and calculation—all the while spent re-living the same period of time in the hollow of the Canterlotlian Mountains’—I again made a voyage back along the pathway of reverse-time, and again I struck the barrier.”

        Scootaloo's eyes watched dizzily as Spike's finger formed the loopty-loop course, an infinity symbol, always starting in the future and yet always stopping just to the right of the “X” labeled “Cataclysm” in the center of his grimly etched diagram.

        “I repeated this desperate attempt over and over again,” Spike murmured, “everytime growing smarter yet every time growing more and more despondent in my endeavors. After more than fifteen trips back into the past, I had to finally accept the grim truth: there was no going back to warn my loved ones of the horror that ended them all.” He boldly circled the “X” at the point of the diagrammed “Cataclysm” and lowered his sizzling claw with bitter finality. “Equestria was doomed to stay dead forever.”

        “Fifteen trips?” Scootaloo finally spoke up, stammering. “Spike—Just how old are you?”

        He took a weathered breath. “Taking into account my rate of growth, cross-analyzed by a relativistic calendar that I manufactured for myself long ago, I would say that I am something close to three hundred and seventy-two.”

        “Spike!” Her face grimaced. “That's a long time...”

        “To ponder the fate of the only world I've ever loved,” he gazed deeply at her, “it's not been long enough.” Spike's woe-some face aged one reflection at a time across a panorama of ticking clockfaces that flanked his reclining figure. “Funny... My life as a whelp, frolicking side by side with close friends in the living green of Equestria, was a scant nine years. And I've spent the better part of three centuries constructing a desperate appendix to what's ultimately been a very trite chapter in my exhausting life. But it's the only chapter that holds any merit, that still makes my heart leap to remember the sound of Twilight's voice when she called for quill and ink from across the library, when she patted me on the back for an assistant's job well done, when she tucked me in at night as I gave into young draconian slumber, dreaming of the magical morning to follow.”

        Spike sighed thoughtfully, green fumes kicking into the air and brushing past a rotating array of brass planetoids. After pausing for thought, he turned to smile in the last pony's direction.

        “I think that's the real reason why I locked myself inside the sarcophagus of the Eastern Mountains to do my experiments. I refused to stare at the gray sky until I could somehow bring myself to see the Sun once more. It's been over three hundred years, and yet I still hear her voice... and dream of the golden dawn.”

        Scootaloo gulped. “Spike?” She trotted limpingly up towards his towering figure and gazed forlornly into his eyeslits. “Do you know how old I am?”

        He squinted at her, rearing his green crested neck back in thought. “If my memory still serves me right, you had to have been eight years old at the time of the Cataclysm. And at your chronological level, it has been twenty-five and a half Equestrian revolutions since the end of pony civilization. So that makes you—”

        “Thirty-Three,” Scootaloo exhaled. She blinked as the words left her in a misty sigh. “I am thirty-three years of age.”

        Her voice wilted as she avoided the gaze of the clockfaces. She stumbled like a blind ghost towards the dead roots sticking out of the earthen rooftop along the opposite side of the cavern.

        “I-I remember when I was a little foal, and our teacher—Ms. Cheerilee—told us how old she was: 'Thirty-Three'. And I thought to myself how... how strange it must be, to be over three times as old as I was, to be three decades old, to be an adult.”

        She paused to glance at the many chips and dents in her hooves.

        “And here I am. And those years have v-vanished in a gray bl-blink.” She gulped, blushed, and gazed apologetically at the purple dragon looming behind her. “I-I'm sorry, Spike. I know th-that can't possibly compare to three hundred years.”

        “You would be surprised, child.” He nodded at her. “Centuries all blink the same.”

        “And in all those years, in all of that time,” Scootaloo murmured, avoiding his face like she knew she was avoiding his coming response. “You never saw another pony? You never found another soul besides myself?”

        Slowly, the elder dragon shook his head. His voice came out like a funeral dirge, “When I wasn't time traveling or experimenting, Scootaloo, I was searching. Searching for Celestia, searching for Luna, searching for... Twilight. In all of my excursions, in all of my cold and lonely flights across this barren world, the only essence of ponydom I ever found was dead essence, until I found you. The fact that you're alive is as much a joy as it is a puzzle, for what shattered the world wasn't a Cataclysm of physical means, but of magical means. The ponies—earthen, unicorn, and pegasus—were all turned to dust by the sheer annihilation of their essence. I am so sorry, Scootaloo, but you shall be the last friend I will have the grace to speak with again. The day that you die will be the true end of ponies.”

        The last pony shuddered. She clenched her scarlet eyes shut and bowed towards the ground, as if all of the years that had leeched the brightness from her body had suddenly crumbled all over her at once. She fought the tears, but the sudden and gentle stroke of Spike's hand against her shaved mane told her there was no point in the struggle. She sobbed quietly, shortly, under his soothing shadow, until she finally rediscovered the strength to speak:

        “Somehow I knew. I knew it. All these years, alone with my fears and my hopes, I knew the truth. This lifeless world t-told it to me, with heartless gray eyes that flurried on forever. Right now, I c-can't even begin to think of what it was that kept me going—that kept me living. I think, in a lot of ways, I wanted a m-moment like this to come, a reunion with anypony, with anybody, even if it was a dead friend. And as h-happy as I should be to see you alive and well, Spike, I can't be. I want this reunion to matter. It's something th-that I have always dreamed of, in the scant moments in my life when I've actually been able to dream. And yet I can't hardly feel a th-thing. It's all so much, Spike. What this Wasteland has taken from us; it's so m-much that I can h-hardly feel anymore. I hate it. I hate it so dang much.”

        “I do too, child,” he murmured towards her. The violet pendant dangled from his neck as he lowered his snout to gaze her lovingly in the eyes. “If there's one philosophy that I've held strong to, that has kept me working so hard all of those time jumps in pursuit of the same impossible goal, it's that it is not always important to feel. Sometimes you only have to be.”

        She inhaled sharply, gazing at him with brimming tears. “That's just it, Spike. That is my dilemma. I'm the last pony—All I'll ever do is be, and someday that too will come to an end.”

        He squinted his eyeslits at her, bearing a brave and knowing smirk. “You are more than just the last pony. If I assume correctly, you are a scavenger, a hunter, and ultimately a preserver. As you have traveled the skies from east to west, I have traveled the last two and a half decades from future to past. And I too have learned a thing or two about preserving. There's something quaint and amusing about time; if you know how to play with the streams just right, you can make a moment last forever. Suddenly—having no choice but to be can provide an eternal practice, even for you, Scootaloo.”

        That uttered, the dragon gestured his clawed hand towards the far side of the laboratory. Scootaloo's scarlet eyes dried in time to gaze clearly across the cave. Hobbling over, she stood gazing in wonderment at a series of bright shapes resting beautifully in an array of glass jars.

        “Flowers,” the mare murmured, disbelieving, as she raised a hoof to gently brush the petals of the yellow and gold things blooming before her. They were soft to the touch, just like the wings of a butterfly that danced before her during a phantom sojourn to Ms. Cheerilee's schoolyard. “But—How did you find these? They should be dead!”

        “All things should be dead,” Spike said, stomping over towards a pile of rattling gemstones beside her. He perched majestically and folded his wings about his purple self as he said, “But all things that have ever been—even the dead things—are alive forever in memories. That's what's so wonderful about the past. All things considered, history is nothing more than a pile of eternal recollections. To visit the past along the streams of reverse-time is simply a way to relive memories from the inside out, instead of from the outside looking in.”

        “But you can't go back into the past, Spike,” Scootaloo murmured aloud as she gently cradled a jar of daisies in her hooves. “At least—You can't go past the Cataclysm. You just told me that...” Her voice trailed off in mid-speech. A pair of wide scarlet eyes blinked at her from the sheen in the glass. She spun around and nearly dropped the flowers as she gazed at Spike with a sudden breathlessness. “But you can send me? How, Spike?!” Her gaze darted nervously towards the burned diagram on the cavern wall. The swirling infinity symbol brushed up against the “Cataclysm” as it brushed up against her soul. “How was I able to go visit Ms. Cheerilee when you couldn't?”

        “How is a pony capable of living so long in the absence of the Sun and Moon?” Spike socratically returned. “Why would a dark and dismal world, forever angry at the legacy of ponydom, fail in every aspect to slay its last living target?” He smiled gently. “It's all for the same reason that I have been enamored with equines since the day I was hatched. It's your spirit.”

        “Spirit...” Scootaloo droned, gazing defeatedly at the flowers as they rattled in her cold shadow. “Do I really have a spirit, Spike?”

        He reached over and planted a hand on her shoulder, smiling. “I'll show you.”

        It used to be the Ponyville Skating Rink, a large warehouse of a building where weekend ponies would spend laughable hours rotating the elliptical arena on wheeled hooves in each other's merry company. Beyond the Cataclysm, under the careful alterations of a purple draconian steward, the place had transformed into something else entirely, something beautiful.

        Scootaloo stood in a gaping stupor, her eyes reflecting a veritable labyrinth of hanging plants, flower beds, blooming vines, fragrant wreathes, and bowing fruit trees. The luscious vegetation grew joyfully in a naturalistic splash of life across the retrofitted interior of the warehouse. In place of infinitely looping skating platforms there were now gigantic basins of granite that housed soil, moisture, and enough room for several hundred species of flora to flourish.

        The fragrant, dew-laden Eden shimmered with green and pastel colors, all the while shimmering beneath one single light source: a gigantic mirror that hung on suspended chains along the ceiling. The vertically hung sheet of glass was framed with gold and crested all along its circumference with ornamented bands of solar swirls. To her heart's stuttering amazement, the last pony immediately recognized the looking-glass from an illustration she had seen in a book scavenged from the Royal Palace of Canterlot. It was none other than—

        “Princess Celestia's chamber mirror,” Spike murmured as he strolled mightily past Scootaloo and raised his upper body to once more reignite the manatorches flanking the dangling artifact. “For countless millennia, it served as the sole means by which a retiring Goddess could regard her blinding visage. After so many Ages of basking in the aura of the Bringer of the Sun, it's only natural that some of her glory still resides in it. And, when properly stimulated, it still resonates with her majestic glow—like an immaculate seashell having captured the heart of an ocean.”

        The dragon lowered and took a deep breath, gazing proudly at his indoor preserve which basked in the gentle golden rays emanating from the spotless mirror.

        “It took several breathless moments—on multiple occasions between my time-jumps—to capture bits of the dying world on the day after the Cataclysm. But everything I managed to salvage I brought here, and the mirror in turn. It took the combined effort of over ten of my past selves to construct this terrarium, piece by piece, but I do believe the labor was worth it. So long as I am alive, I shall look after this living monument to the past. It's the least that I can do. And I'm sure you can relate, Scootaloo, when I say that the least we can do for the Wastelands is ironically the most that we can do.”

        “It's amazing, Spike,” she murmured breathlessly. Her brown coat and scarlet eyes stood out like a pale shadow against the screaming colors engulfing her as she trotted across green ground and red mulch. “Half of these things I've already forgotten about.” She squinted as a bizarre insect surged past her, filling the air with a raspy buzz. She squinted long and hard in confusion until she witnessed the thing nestle itself within the crimson bud of a rose. “Bees,” she half-giggled in a queer breath. “I've forgotten about bees...”

        “Don't agitate them, child, or else you'll learn that they've not forgotten you.” Spike suddenly darted his snout every which way, looking desperately for something. “Oh, blast, did I forget to bring a mana-prysm? Where is my mind, these days?” Suddenly, the elder dragon lurched. In a wretching motion, he belched forth a plume of green smoke—and out from the flames there dropped a glass container magically into his palm. “Ah! Heheh—Well, that was awfully thoughtful of myself.”

        Scootaloo blinked at the container. “Uhm...”

        “I brought you here, old friend, to test something.” He strolled over towards her with the tiny jar in his scaled hand. “Though I suppose one could say that the sudden trip I sent you on at Sugarcube Corner was a necessary test in and of itself—But right now I desire to perform an experiment that will hopefully illuminate our situation to a desired degree of clarity and... and...” He blinked suddenly at his lone pony companion. “Scootaloo? Do you see something of interest?”

        “As a matter of fact, I friggin' do.” The Wasteland wanderer stumbled up to something that stood out against the pristine oasis. In the center of the transformed skating rink there rested a meter-high hourglass positioned atop a silver platform. Inside the top and bottom glass cases of the thing a bizarre phenomenon was transpiring. At one moment, there was a brilliant plume of violet-blue flowers in the bottom glass. Then, in a blink, the flowers withered and faded to ash—while an identical pile of ashes in the top glass coalesced oppositely into a separate bouquet of violet flowers. Another beat, and the top bouquet withered into dead matter as the ashes in the bottom half of the hourglass grew back at fast-forward. This revolution would proceed infinitely, with opposite jars of the hourglass possessing interchangeably dying and growing flowers in a timely crafted cycle.

        “Do you like them?” Spike was suddenly standing above and behind her on his haunches.

        She jumped slightly, locking a trembling gaze on the hourglassed cycle. “I'd pay a hundred thousand bars of silver to understand it before I even contemplated freaking out.”

        He smiled. “I melted the glass out of Green Flame—the two halves at alternating frequencies. The result is that both are balanced in a flux of time and reverse-time, acting off each other like opposite swings of a pendulum.” The dragon pointed astutely with a glistening claw. “The flowers in each jar are experiencing quantum shifts—forward and reverse—kept in flux by the equal energy of its sibling. I could never have possibly conceived of manufacturing this thing when I first set upon my experiments. But by the ninth occasion that I rode reverse-time back to the Cataclysm, I felt it was appropriate to artistically express just how far I had come along in my research. I frankly never expected to show it to anyone.” Spike gave a warm smile. “But then you came along.”

        “And, what, this garden wasn't artistic enough?” She laughed nervously, her eyes still locked on the immortal back-and-forth of the flowers and ashes before her. A soft breath escaped her. “They're... Th-they're beautiful, Spike. Uhm...” She bit her lip ashamedly. “What are they? The fl-flowers, that is.”

        “Lavenders,” Spike said. “Very fragrant—As sweet smelling as they are for gazing at.”

        “Everything in this place is gorgeous, Spike. But why frame lavenders? What's so special about them?”

        “Oh...” The immense dragon's jaws curved into a gentle, iron smile. “They were the favorite of one delightful pony I knew. She was the most resplendent and elegant unicorn in all of Equestria, a mare who set this young whelp's heart a'flutter, long-long ago.” His aged eyeslits narrowed on the dying-and-sprouting twin bouquets as they cast a faded blue hue across his scales. “Having them here, in limbo like this, means that I can appreciate them forever, as I will appreciate her forever. And, one day, when I am long gone, my ashes will dissolve; but these flowers will outlast me, and perhaps her memory will in turn.”

        Something long neglected inside the mare's iron-wrought heart fractured briefly, and she let forth a bursting sigh. Making up for it, she smiled bravely up at him and murmured in a wavering voice: “I am most certain she would appreciate that, Spike.”

        “Hmmm—She was always an avid appraiser of all things beautiful.” He produced a long breath, then smirked down towards the pony. “And she would thrash you within an inch of your life for so savagely curtailing your own gifts, child!”

        “My what-now?” Scootaloo briefly blinked, then blushed. “Oh.” She ran a foreleg over the violet stubble lingering on the back of her neck. “There aren't many frickin' beauty pageants in the Wastelands, not like I was ever into keeping my looks up when I was a little foal anyways. Besides...” She sighed. “My hair has made far better use as insulators and filaments for chemical runecrafting.”

        “I completely understand,” Spike nodded. “Though it makes my test here that much harder.” He cleared his smoking throat and smiled politely. “Would it be much of a bother if I asked you to part with one your eyelashes?”

        “I beg your pardon?” Scootaloo made a face.

        “I promise it won't hurt,” the elder dragon bowed. “And you've suffered enough lately for me to ever bother asking for a blood sample.”

        “Eyelash it is.” Scootaloo stood up towards him and softly closed her eyes. “Just be careful where you point those claws of yours.”

        “I always am, child,” his voice came closer as a pair of claws lit up under a green exhale. Effortlessly, the gentle dragon plucked a hair from her face and dropped it into the jar.

        Scootaloo fluttered her eyes open in time to see the dragon breathe a plume of emerald fire into the glass container. The bright green tongues billowed around the near-indiscernible eyelash as he swiftly closed the jar, twisted it shut, and raised the glowing thing up towards the center of Princess Celestia's mirror. The glass at the top of the ceiling projected a beam of light through the jar—shining through the combined essences of dragon and pony—and out the other side of the prism there refracted a dazzling array of moving pictures framed by billowing green waves of magic.

        The last pony watched with mesmerizing disbelief as several memories of her life were being replayed before her in a spinning array of images. A grand, gray kaleidoscope of twenty-five years of Wasteland exile flickered before the two of them. She saw a playback of a drunken ogre harassing her in front of Pitt at the Monkey O'Dozen Den, a goggled rodent smiling from across the hazy interior of his airship, and even a lonely pony reading Princess Celestia's Journal in a swaying hammock under lanternlight.

        “Ah—So I was right!” Spike suddenly beamed as he pointed his free finger towards the floating image of a pony lighting up a lattice of prismatic light beams. “You are the source of that rainbow beacon! For years, I've pondered over the source of it, unable to give up my experimentations to investigate closelyHmmm... what other creature in the Wasteland besides a pony would produce something so magnificent?” He smiled and winked her way. “It was in good faith, you see, that I erupted random bits of green flame over the rooftops of Ponyville, figuring that it would attract you in turn.”

        “Dang right it did...” Scootaloo numbly droned, still overwhelmed by the spinning kaleidoscope of her memories that were rotating before her. There were so many moments, so many lonely scavenger hunts, so many gray trips into desolation, so many brushes with death—and yet they all looked the same, were colored with the same lifeless hue. A lump formed slowly in her throat.

        “Hello...” Spike's eyes narrowed on the cackling face of Gilliam. The Dirigible Dog's metal-plated skull floated translucently between the two of them. “Who's this handsome creature?”

        “More like who was that handsome creature,” Scootaloo spat before a clearing of her throat. “Uhm, Spike—Do you mind? I-I'm not entirely enthused about looking at all of these... again.”

        “Oh, by all means,” he nodded and gave the jar a little shake as he lowered it from the shimmering face of Celestia's mirror above.

        The images were replaced with memories from nearly twenty years ago. A pony with a brighter coat and softer eyes was seen hammering together the pieces of the Harmony, crafting moonrocks, constructing the signal lattice, shaving the hair off her mane and tail. With another shake, Spike lowered the jar further from the preserved sunlight. The spinning images flickered, flickered—then briefly roared with a red flame as Scootaloo's essence leaped the Cataclysmic bridge.

        “Yes—There we are.” Suddenly, all the images shone with vibrant color. An orange filly with bright violet eyes rocketed across the shimmering lengths of Ponyville atop a scooter. Dozens of colorful faces smiled into view, of crusaders, of mentors, of friendly strangers and bright smiles. There were rivers, there were mountains, there were clouds—and there was a sky, a blue sky. Finally there flickered forth the laughing and grinning faces of ponies, of foals and blank flanks, of a forest and a clubhouse, of blue feathers and a rainbow mane—

        In a flash, the lights all vanished. Scootaloo sharply inhaled the vacuum left behind them, and her eyes twitched moistly to see the green oasis coalesce back into view, buckling slightly from the very real and gray world lurching outside. She was almost too numb to register the words coming from Spike next:

        “It is as I thought. I'm able to get glimpses into the past from your essence.Alas, they are nothing more than glimpses, and all subjective to your foalish days in Ponyville.This means that there is much experimentation to be done, especially since the others at my disposal provide us with nothing...”

        Scootaloo gulped, rubbed her face with a foreleg, and gazed at him. “The others, Spike?The other what?”

        “The samples—The remains of all the ponies who have died before you, child,” Spike said. He handed the smoking jar to Scootaloo, who merely gazed at the smoldering ashen bits of her eyelash inside the container. “Using my green flame as a telescope, I've attempted looking into the past beyond the day of the Cataclysm through which I cannot time travel. To do this, I've required the essences and ashes of dead ponies as a reagent. But your essence—that of a living pony—transcends the Cataclysmic blockade while the others give me nothing but static. If nothing else, your venture to Cheerilee's schoolyard confirms it.As of now, I have no doubt whatsoever.”

        Scootaloo gazed confusedly at him as he walked across the lengths of the garden. “N-No doubt of what, Spike?”

        “That you can go where I cannot,” he stated matter-of-factly as he strolled over towards a crate full of gardening tools and other supplies on the broad side of the overgrown warehouse. “Because you are the last living pony, I can send you back to a time before the Cataclysm by anchoring the essence of your soul—your soul-self—to the ponies that were just as alive then as you are now. Granted, even that will have limits.” He effortlessly opened a heavy crate with his massive limbs and rummaged through it. “For instance, I will only be able to send you back to the years when I was alive, and within range of the ponies whose souls I was in constant contact with. Ms. Cheerilee is one such example. Because you're alive now, and she was alive then—your common pony essence can make contact, bridging the gap in magic that the Cataclysm sliced when it ended the lives of Celestia and Luna.” He smiled victoriously as he produced a familiar glass jar from the crate. With a hot breath, he covered the container in green flame, sending it back to five minutes ago. “It's only fitting, Scootaloo, that you can venture back to a time where I can't.”

        The last pony glanced at the identical jar in her grasp. In a nervous jolt, she dropped it to the garden floor like it was the plague and gazed shakily at the dragon before her. “M-me? Spike, I-I don't know. This is all too... t-too... Nnngh!” She clasped her head in two hooves, fought away the urge to hyperventilate, and all but snarled: “I mean, what the hay, Spike?! Suddenly I can go into the past?! Just like that?”

        “It's hardly a development that happened overnight, Scootaloo,” he gazed calmly at her as he strolled back on aging haunches. “To come to this point of epiphany, I had to undergo countless years of magical and mathematical calculations. You are quite simply the missing key I needed to make the journey complete. How ironic is it that the last pony alive would fit into such a puzzle?”

        “Ironic?” Scootaloo balked at him. “Maybe it all fits together just fine for you! You, who have spent eons lurking about in caves and laboratories trying to piece this whole mess together! But I've spent barely a fraction of those years trying to deal with just how everypony I've ever cared for died, knowing full well that there was not a single dang thing I could do about it!” She sighed heavily and rested a pair of hooves on one of his arms. “Spike, you can't possibly ask me to do this! Haven't I had enough weight on my shoulders?”

        “And what do you think it is that I'm asking of you, child?”

        She gulped and gave him a hollow expression, something of mix horror and excitement. “Y-you want me to go back into the past... and change all that has happened, somehow, don't you?”

        The last pony was surprised to see how swiftly and solemnly he shook his head. “No, old friend. That is not what I am asking of you.”

        “It's n-not?”

        “Because the past cannot be changed, Scootaloo. The Cataclysm—in all of its monumental horror and dread—must happen, no matter what you or I do.”

        The air of the garden collapsed instantly. Not even the insects buzzed overhead. Celestia's mirror seemed a lot dimmer as Scootaloo's tired scarlet eyes wandered the room in an aimless lurch. Soon, her gaze fell back onto Spike and she murmured in a foalish whine: “But why?”

        “Because time is immutable, child.”

        “Immutable? How do you mean?”

        Spike inhaled deeply. A gentle breath, and he clasped a hand softly over her shoulders. “Here. Walk with me.”

        Once more, the soft snow and ash of the wasteland fell coldly on Scootaloo's coat, christening her. She sat her bandaged self atop Spike's broad backside, resting as he gently strolled through the decaying ruins and wounded vistas of Ponyville. Shattered buildings and splintered trees drifted softly past them as the purple dragon carried the lone pony over the fossils of yesteryear.

        “Tell me, Scootaloo, with the knowledge from your years of roaming the skies and reading—Who are the Six Alicorn Sisters?”

        “Seriously?” She raised a humored eyebrow and smirked at his green neckcrests. “You want me to recite that kindergarten lesson?”

        “Humor me, if you would,” he half-chuckled.

        The brown-coated mare took a deep breath. Her scarlet eyes scanned an invisible book as she recited emotionlessly to the ashen air, “The Six Alicorn Sisters—as everypony knows—are the divine Alicorn daughters of the Goddess Epona, who ascended to the stars in the Cosmic Exodus after the death of Epona's mate, the God Consus, a celestial stallion whose passing brought about the end of the First Age.”

        “And who were the six Alicorns specifically...?”

        Scootaloo stirred, then laid herself down atop Spike's bobbing shoulders and monotonously went on: “The Goddesses of Prosperity: Princess Celestia and Princess Luna stayed on earth to oversee the rising of the Sun and Moon over the land of Equestria. The other Four Sisters would leave halfway through the Second Age much like their Cosmic Mother Queen Epona, though their essences remained in the physical world. The first two were the Goddesses of Elements: Princess Elektra, the Goddess of the Land, and Princess Nebula, the Goddess of the Firmaments. The other two were the Goddesses of Law: Princess Gultophine, the Goddess of Life...”

        “And who else?”

        The last pony blinked, her brown ears twitching in sudden interest as she heard herself murmur: “Princess Entropa, the Goddess of Time.”

        “Ah, so you do recollect her.” Spike's snout flexed as the result of a hidden smile. “I'm proud of all the knowledge you've retained, child. You are far from the upstart little foal that used to forsake trips to the library for zip-lining her way through the Everfree Forest.”

        Scootaloo produced a bitter smirk as she gently rested her cheek against his back. “You're not the only one who's changed, Spike.”

        “Still—It is quite important that you understand the part Princess Entropa plays in the fabric of time,” the dragon spoke as he strolled the two of them across the shattered womb of Ponyville. “She may be a Goddess in perpetual Exodus, like her mother Queen Epona. But she is far from utterly detached. Her essence still animates the flow of time, maintaining it as a law, but not just any law. It is an immutable law. Time cannot be changed. It can be traversed, much like a sailor crosses an ocean. But you cannot convert that ocean into something else. Even when traveling the currents of reverse-time as I have mastered, there is no alteration to time itself. As a consequence, there is no way to change the cause-and-effect of events as managed by time. We cannot go back and prevent the Cataclysm from happening, for it was the tragedy of the Cataclysm itself that gave anyone impetus to time travel in the first place. Changing the Cataclysm would not only be a paradox of logic, but it would be an abomination of Princess Entropa's sacred law, which is simultaneously her essence. What has transpired—no matter how tragic—must remain immutable.”

        “But if Princess Entropa's law is so sacred, why would she let something so horrible happen—And to her sisters of all ponies?!” Scootaloo suddenly moaned. “Wouldn't she want living things like us to—I dunno—intervene on behalf of Equestria and stop the Cataclysm from ever happening to begin with?”

        “That's a very noble question, child,” Spike's neck bowed. His shoulders briefly stopped lurching as his body came to a stop. “Scootaloo, take a look before us. Do you see where we are?”

        Blinking curiously, Scootaloo crawled up to her hooves and trotted a few meters along his neck. As soon as her vision rounded the green crests of his skull, she froze. The mare saw before the two of them an array of dull white stones splotched across a thick, black mound of earth in the center of Ponyville. For all of the cataclysmic horrors that shook the terrain of her home, she was almost as amazed as she was heart-broken to be presently staring at a remarkably well-preserved cemetery, a place that she had rarely ventured to in her foalish years.

        “There's always been death in Equestria,” she murmured into the misty air. “I think I see where you're going with this, Spike. Why didn't Entropa intervene on their behalf?”

        “Perhaps because it was Gultophine's job to monitor the passage of souls into the great beyond,” Spike somberly nodded. “Or perhaps because Entropa—as a Goddess of Law—necessitated being a princess of neutrality. Whatever the case, our mutual need to question her motive only highlights our mortal nature. Earth ponies gifted in the knowledge of medicine and unicorns employing various talents in mysticism had struggled for millennia to construct countermeasures for death, but they could never in any fashion prevent it. Otherwise, all of these stones here would have been replaced with immortals to this very day.” He turned and gazed over his shoulder at Scootaloo with dim green eyeslits. “Similarly have I—in three hundred years of optimistic searching—attempted to find a way to change the sway of time. And like so many other Equestrian physicians before me, I have failed.”

        “But did you at least even try, Spike?” Scootaloo gazed back at him. “Granted, I know you couldn't go back far enough to experiment before the Cataclysm—But in this timeline? In the Fourth Age, surely you had to have tried to change history!”

        “An astute assumption on your part,” Spike said with a nod. He turned away from the cemetery and marched back into the depths of Ponyville while the pony settled once more onto the square of his back. “I did experiment, Scootaloo. After my sixth and seventh trips on reverse-time, I performed many acts of blind sabotage on my past selves to see if my interference could alter my present condition in any fashion. What I discovered was that on every single occasion some coincidental event would either catastrophically undo all of my manipulations or else ironically link my affectations to real circumstances that my past selves had chronicled as having happened.”

        “Were they all blind experiments?” Scootaloo asked, all the while rubbing her aching head. “Did you ever—Oh, I dunno—try talking to your past self?”

        “As a matter of fact, I did.”

        The pony blinked. She nervously chirped: “H-how did that go?”

        “Boringly, considering I remembered everything that was asked or answered. A deep discourse with time's doppelgangers doesn't afford any deviance from the immutable truth that confounds us today, Scootaloo. Though, I must admit...” he smiled as a whelpish shade of yesteryear bubbled briefly to the surface of his adult purple scales. “You've never lived until you've played a game of hide-and-seek with your chronological double.”

        “So then, that proves it?” Scootaloo murmured defeatedly. “After so many repeated experiments—This is what we have to work with? Could... uhh... could the Cataclysm be somehow different, Spike? Or could I be somehow different?—Because my pony essence allows me to go into the past further than yourself? Maybe time won't be unchangeable for me! Maybe—” Her voice cut off at the sight of him briefly twisting his neck about to gaze sadly at her with a shaking head.

        “What I calculated, what I tested, and what I experienced, Scootaloo, is something that can be explained, but never shared. Not directly, at least,” he murmured and faced ahead once more. “But, suffice it to say, it laid in concrete a truth that I could no longer deny. The past can be visited, it can be witnessed, and it can even be supported—But no, child, it cannot be changed. What dies must remain dead. What lives must remain living. It has been that way since the twilight years before the First Age, in the blossoming days of creation, when all that was One split into the forces of Harmony and Discord, and everything has remained necessarily dichotomous since.”

        “It's just so... so unfair,” the brown-haired mare murmured. Spike brought the two of them into the skeletal hovel of an old garden behind a hollowed-out restaurant. He let her down with a gentle arm as she trotted forlornly past a cluster of large mushrooms and gazed into a statue of merry foals frozen in mid-gallop. “Why would we be granted the ability to move back and forth in time when we can't even make a difference from it?”

        “Why do things live to dream and desire—but only to have death as their ultimate fate?” Spike socratically replied as he settled down against a wall overgrown with burnt brambles. “These are the tests of mortals—We can only question them as we live them.”

        “Like I said,” she sighed and squatted down onto a cracked marble bench. “It's unfair.” Her nostrils flared as her scarlet eyes fluttered over the snowy ground. “All I have from the past, Spike, are happy memories and regrets. The memories are happy because they remind me that I used to be something that mattered in a living world. The regrets are always there because I know that the memories will only ever be just that—memories. But now that you and I have reunited, you're telling me that I can relive those memories? Just why in the heck I would want to do that, Spike? At least when I had the tiniest bit of hope that I might not have been the last pony, memories had meaning to them. Now they're just the same dead end as the future is to me. The past is meaningless now.”

        “I wouldn't go so far as to say that, child.” He smiled gently towards her. His face and breath surged with a bizarre enchantment of pride and admiration, shaking her to her core. “Something cannot be meaningless and yet hold so many answers.”

        “Like what answers?”

        “Answers to questions that are as lost to my three hundred years of contemplation as they are to your twenty-five years of courage.” His eyes narrowed and his deep bass voice rumbled: “What caused the Cataclysm? What consumed the lives of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna? Did anypony foresee the holocaust to come? Why is it that all the ponies died, but there are still living creatures meandering across the shadows of the Equestrian kingdom?”

        “You had a good guess earlier, Spike,” Scootaloo murmured. “If something attacked the essence of ponies, then maybe that's why they turned to ash. But it doesn't explain why I'm here.”

        “You may yet be able to find out,” Spike said with a smile. “We may both be able to find out. But it involves a brave experiment, with journeys that I am not capable of taking—You are. In the past, Scootaloo, there are more than memories and regrets. If I may dare say so, there are answers. But, most of all, there could be healing.”

        “Healing?” Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. With a bitter raspberry she shook her head and gazed up towards the dim twilight hanging like an ancient ghost above the dead world. “Do I look like an expert on healing?”

        “There's always a place to start, child,” Spike said. “If not for you, then for Equestria.”

        Her ears pricked at that. She glanced aside. “For Equestria? How do you mean, Spike?”

        “If we can ascertain what it was that caused the Cataclysm—what it was that ended the Goddesses of Prosperity—then we may be able in our current age to find a way to reverse the damage that has been done. Though ponydom is gone forever, Scootaloo, we may yet find a way to bring light back to this land of death and darkness, much like I was able to construct that fabulous garden that mesmerized you earlier.”

        “You mean there might be a way to bring the Sun and Moon back,” Scootaloo thought aloud, her eyes blankly wandering the garden around them. “It would be a bright Equestria... only no Equestrians.” She gulped. “Is that really the best outlook we can afford ourselves here, Spike?”

        “I did say you could do with some healing, old friend,” he chuckled.

        She groaned. “Spike, please—It's not my place.” She slumped forward on the marble bench and sighed. “Not now, not then, not ever.”

        “Isn't it?” He leaned his snout to the side and gazed at her sharply. “You are an intelligent, crafty, responsible, and tender-hearted individual, Scootaloo. Even underneath that rough, shaved exterior, you are everything your race has ever endeared itself through the Ages to be. Do not let two and a half decades of tragedy and pain disguise the legend that you have become. You are not only the end of ponies, but the epitome of them.” A gentle exhale, and his face turned melancholic. “Do I honestly, truly think that sending you back will absolutely grant us the ability to undo the curse that has robbed night-and-day from the wastes of Equestria?” He slowly shook his snout. “No, Scootaloo. I do not. But I do know this—You are the last pony. And before you die—and you will someday die, like all of your friends and kin have done before you—would any other soul deserve no less a chance to revisit that which gave her breath, that which gave her purpose, that which gave her the memories of hope—and not regret—to become this amazing creature which you so mightily are right now?”

        “I can't say, Spike.” Her voice choked as she struggled for an answer. “What you're asking of me is to attend a funeral for which there will never be a eulogy—Even if I was the one to write it. Because no matter what I do, it all ends with me.”

        “Which is why I advise this of you instead.” He stood up on his haunches and paced across the garden. “Leave Ponyville.”

        She blinked wildly. “Wh-what?”

        “Leave,” he said, gazing softly back at her. “Take off in your splendid airship, spend time inside the womb of Harmony, do what you normally do in the clouds above the wastes. Live out your life like you've always lived it these last two decades. But most of all, do not return until the end of the next coming stormfront. And then... you may come back to me, and—if you wish and only if you wish—I will send you back to the days before dying, and we can write that eulogy together, Scootaloo.” He grinned warmly. “What do you say... ?”

        The last pony stared back at her old friend, at the purple shades of the past standing like a surreal ghost before her. And for the briefest of moments, the snow cleared, and in his emerald eyeslits she saw the reflection of a tiny filly, its violet eyes bright and its pink mane fluttering in a draconian twinkle.

        There grew something akin to a foalish smile, and Scootaloo breathed: “I'm liking this idea.”