Ego Sum Aequalitas
By Craine
Cold. Biting, unforgiving cold.
That’s all Starlight Glimmer felt when she dashed into that jagged dark cave, and all she’d felt for several weeks thereafter. In hindsight, hiding in a cave on snow-capped mountains was foolish, if justified. After all, who knew what kind of unspeakable punishment awaited her if her pursuers caught her?
That thought kept her going longer than she would admit, kept her magic just strong enough to subdue the cold, kept her stomach just strong enough to keep the moss, insects, and bats from spilling back up.
Then, of course, there was revenge. Oh, the sweet, horrific, life-shattering revenge she’d plotted against that prissy princess, Twilight Sparkle, and her moronic friends. If it wasn’t her safety and freedom that kept her heart beating, it was the very thought of storming all of Equestria, finding those meddlesome mares, stealing their cutie marks again, bottling them up, and throwing them into a volcano.
She’d often smiled at those fantasies, and found a bitter warmth in them. That warmth kept her walking when she long should’ve stopped, kept her eating things ponies were certainly not supposed to eat, kept her magic steady and lasting.
And kept her from fainting at the snapped bone now protruding from her hind leg.
At first she nearly laughed. And why wouldn’t she? She had tripped over a pointy rock, tumbled down the cave onto more pointy rocks, and landed on that leg the completely wrong way. Stupid. Foolish. Perhaps she deserved to sit there, gaping at her wound, shuddering in a growing red pool.
But she didn’t laugh, no. She screamed.
For longer and louder than she thought her lungs capable, Starlight screamed. It echoed through her chest, through her head, the cave, the sky she would surely never see again, through everything.
Starlight’s forehoof struck the wet cave floor, and she cursed with pain and rage.
Then a whisper invaded her ears like bloody centipedes, creeping through her head, clutching her breath still.
“No hope left…”
Starlight’s breath remained still, a different kind of cold stabbing at her bloody wound, skulking up her leg.
“No breath left…”
The whisper came louder, echoes circling her like starving buzzards.
“No time left…”
She gritted her teeth, feeling pins and needles prick at her limbs as she tried to lift herself from the ground. She collapsed back on her side with a wet thud and a shrill yelp.
Inky black fog seeped from the cave’s cracks, dancing around the stalagmites. Her ears jerked at a keening buzz, quiet and smooth like a distant call. Then she heard hoofsteps, moving at a steady, focused pace. She couldn’t tell how close they were, how far they were, or if they were even clapping toward her at all.
She lifted her head, her wide eyes peering into a clump of twisting black clouds. A pony emerged, cloaked in those very clouds. He stepped closer with that same pace, and Starlight’s hair stood on end, her teeth bared, horn dimly glowing.
“Hello,” his voice was smooth and welcoming, “friend…”
Her horn glowed brighter. “Do I know you, stranger?”
The shadowed pony paused for a beat. “Yes. Since the day you heard my name.”
A splitting headache. It’d only been twenty seconds, and Starlight already had a splitting headache thanks to this pony. Or maybe that was due to blood loss. Starlight lacked the remaining mental faculties to know.
“Riddles aren’t really my thing,” Starlight said with a bedraggled smile.
The strange pony laughed—a harrowing, reverberating laugh that rattled Starlight’s ribs, though she did well to hide it. “Oh, then you are going to hate me,” he said.
Starlight’s horn glowed brighter still.
“I see,” she said, trying—and failing—to keep the shudders from her voice. “Do we have a problem, stranger?”
He lowered his head, his neck giving a loud crack. “Well, I certainly don’t. Lovely day for stroll, in fact. Which, in your case is, uh…”
Starlight Glimmer did not like this pony.
“Are you mocking me?”
The shady stallion sat down before her, but no sound came, as if he sat on a literal cloud instead of the cave floor.
“If I say ‘yes’, will you stop pointing that thing at me?” he asked, gesturing to Starlight’s now piercingly bright horn.
“Not likely.”
“Then, no.”
Like an overheated bulb, her horn flickered out, and she groaned as her chin hit the cold, wet ground, staring straight, staring at nothing.
“If it’s money you want, stranger, than I’m a disappointing catch,” she said tiredly.
No answer came. Starlight lifted her eyes and they widened. A different blackened form took the annoying pony’s place; it was taller and two-legged, looking down at her. Or rather, her mangled leg.
“Money? Nay, Starlight,” the stranger assured. “I want only the same thing you do: a chance.”
The unicorn coughed out a laugh, the cold now creeping into her diaphragm. “A chance. Right. Sounds to me like… like…” Her eyes remained locked on him. “… How?”
He tilted his shaded head and asked, “How what?”
Starlight could hear the smile in his voice. “How do you know my name?”
He laughed again. The keening buzz in the mare’s ears intensified. “Remember when I said you’re going to hate me?”
Starlight grit her teeth.
“Warmth leaves you. Cold enters you. And if you wish to see the end of this day, I can aid you… if you can answer my riddle.”
Her dislike for this… thing was quickly dissolving into something more venomous.
“Go away,” Starlight growled, wincing at the constant pain. “I-I’m fine.”
The stranger didn’t go away. He crawled forward like a predator ready to feast, his black, ethereal limbs making no sound. He fell before her and burst into a cloud of thicker mist. That mist coiled around the unicorn’s body, numbness spreading wherever it touched.
Starlight shuddered and whimpered at the black serpent now draped over her, gazing into her trembling eyes.
“Ponies… so easily frightened. And so very foolish,” he whispered. “Here I am, offering you salvation, and you turn me away?”
“I… I-I don’t need y-your help.” A forked tongue flicked across her nose, and she tried in vain to turn away.
“Hm. Perhaps weeks ago, that would’ve been true. You had hundreds of ponies at your beck and call―all of them willing to die for you, I’m certain.”
Starlight’s breath hitched.
“How the mighty have fallen…”
“How did you…” She paused. “You… You’ve been spying on me. Back in the town. Haven’t you?”
He raised his head, hovering over Starlight, and the unicorn’s eyes couldn’t help but follow.
“Does it matter?” he asked. “With your luck, terrible as it is?”
Starlight’s breath hitched again. She couldn’t feel her wound anymore. There was only numbness. She tore her eyes away from him and glanced at the snake-like mist cradling her broken leg.
She looked away and said nothing.
“Think about it, friend,” he began. “Can you really afford to deny my help? You lie alone here, bleeding out, rage and regret your only fuel. If the blood loss doesn’t finish you, the cold will.”
Starlight scowled but, again, said nothing.
The black serpent collapsed into mist again. The numbness left and pain snapped at the unicorn’s leg like a starving lion.
“Don’t go!” she yelped.
At first, only the cave’s deep, distant howls answered her. Then that familiar laugh.
“You’re an indecisive one, aren’t you?” he jeered.
Starlight glanced left and nearly jumped out of her skin. Standing there was a much larger form of mist, winged and great. Dragon-like.
“I ask you, Starlight,” he began, lying down behind her, “do you wish to see the end of this day?”
Finally—after holding them back for weeks—Starlight’s tears rolled freely down her face.
“What do you want from me?” she whimpered.
The shaded creature sighed. “Have you no ears, unicorn? I want the same thing you want: a choice. A chance.”
Starlight trembled harder still. “I don’t—” She gulped. “I don’t understand.”
The draconian mist craned its head over Starlight, staring at her upside down.
“Then will you solve my riddle?”
Starlight felt something strange right then, something terrible. Something she actually wasn’t used to. It made her limbs stiffer than frozen lamp posts. It made her chest tighten and ache. It made her throat nearly foam with bile. And right then, Starlight Glimmer knew she hated this thing.
Why? She couldn’t quite place it. Maybe because he was a mystery she couldn’t solve. Maybe because he taunted her and her increasingly grave situation. Maybe because he was playing her like a broken flute and she knew it.
Or perhaps she just really disliked riddles.
“What’s your angle?” Starlight asked. “Why are you really helping me? What are you gaining?”
He stared at her for a time, and whispered, “It’s not about my gain, Starlight. It’s about yours.”
Starlight realized she was glaring at the misty creature, and simply lowered her head in defeat.
“Fine,” she muttered.
“Excellent.”
Starlight sucked in a sharp breath, her arms shuffling futilely on the bloodied cave floor. Everything in front of her warped and swirled into itself. She squeezed her eyes shut, drawing a longer, sharper breath as vertigo struck her, everything still swirling, still warping.
Seconds later, she felt… warmth? Yes, warmth, but not from the blood growing cold beneath her. No, this was warmth she hadn’t felt in weeks, not since she first ran into this freezing tomb.
She opened her eyes and saw sunlight. The cave’s exit was right in front of her, only a few feet away. The biting cold swished with warmth. She began crawling forward, a smile growing wider and wider.
She screamed in pain and jolted back. Her eyes whipped down to her forehoof, gasping repeatedly as flesh peeled and melted from it, the bone showing very proudly.
She looked up and saw a tunnel of complete blackness between her and salvation, and a sizzling tuft of flesh where her hoof had been.
She looked back down at her hoof, and it was totally fine.
“What is this?!”
“Insurance,” he answered. “That you may uphold your word.”
Starlight curled up into a ball, her mangled leg still lain flat, bleeding. “Bastard,” she muttered, “you didn’t mention any rules!”
Another swath of mist spun before her, this time, with a hulking centaurian shape.
“Well, I was going to, until you leaped at the prize before it was earned.”
Starlight couldn’t argue with that. “Just… just get on with it,” she said.
“Very well,” the enigma conceded. “As you can see, freedom is in your sight, in your very reach, and you must solve my riddle to obtain it.”
Starlight stifled a sigh. “And that riddle is?”
He turned to her. “What am I?”
Starlight raised a brow. “And just how am I supposed to guess that? You’ve turned into everything in the universe in, like, five minutes.”
That got a chuckle out of him. “The rules are simple. I will throw a series of questions your way. Give the correct answer…” he turned to the exit guarded by the flesh-eating blackness, opened his palm, and cleared a path, “and you may yet leave this cave.”
Starlight only half-heard him when the path cleared. Better judgement and agonizing experience told her to stay her hoof.
“Answer wrongly, however—” he closed his palm into a fist, and the blackness returned, the exit further away than ever before—“and we can spend more… quality time getting to know each other.”
Starlight gulped, and felt a now-painful bite of cold all over her body. She glanced back at her wound and heaved. Her leg most certainly wasn’t blue before. She shivered harder.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“Indeed. Just answer the riddle before the time limit, and taste freedom.”
Starlight frowned. “Time limit? You never said—” Another powerful fit of shivers struck her. “How much time do I have?”
That got another chuckle out of him. “Well… that depends solely on you, Starlight Glimmer. Shall we begin?”
“Well. I’ve got nothing else to lose.”
The centaur laughed, and the cave laughed right back.
“Nothing else to lose,” he said. “Indeed…”
Starlight said nothing as she stared up at her would-be savior. She waited for his riddle. Her body felt like it was shaking to pieces.
The centaurian fog twisted and warped into a simple, hawk-like shape. He began his riddle.
“I am the mystery none have solved, and genesis unwound. I am the greatest truth, shunned, but always found. What am I?”
Starlight almost felt her brain hemorrhage. With a shrill growl and hooves swirling in her mane, the unicorn shot a furious glare at the misty stranger.
“How about Celestia’s flank-hole?! I don’t know!” she shouted.
The exit shifted further away, an eternity of corroding blackness shrouding the path. Starlight’s ears sunk, and her eyes nearly bulged out.
“But…” she whispered. “But―”
“You agreed to participate, Starlight,” the hawk said, landing on her back. “And I agreed to uphold the conditions. I trust you’ll take this more seriously now?”
Starlight already cried before this despicable creature, but not again. With practiced, shuddering breaths and closed eyes, she centered herself. But the blood pooling on the ground… She could smell it. She could taste it.
She narrowed her eyes. “Give me another.”
The hawk dissolved into a head-sized scorpion and crawled along her back. Her eyes remained closed as he skittered up her neck. The numbness that followed made it hard to breathe.
“Not so fast. Remember the rules? You answered incorrectly, thus have granted me quality time with you.”
Starlight grimaced. “There’s nothing remarkable about me,” she said, her eyes still closed.
Black pincers snipped close to the mare’s jawline, and she jerked away.
“Come now, Starlight, we’ve only just met and you’re lying?” the scorpion asked.
Starlight opened her eyes, now scowling into darkness. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“I know that you’re different, and I know most ponies didn’t understand that. They still don’t.”
Starlight gave a short, humorless laugh. “‘Different’. I’m just a normal pony. Of course others didn’t understand. They were too busy pretending to be bette―” she blinked, then huffed. “Mind your own business.”
The scorpion skittered higher, his black mandibles centimeters from her ear. Starlight’s eyes narrowed and sweat dotted her face.
“I’m different too, you know. I often wonder why so many squabble for useless things like riches, fame, power…” He brought his voice to a whisper. “Absolute control.”
Starlight tensed.
“Did it excite you, Starlight? To look down on the rabble that clung to you? Talentless? No drive nor desire? Equal?” His mandibles came closer to her ear. “Dead?”
“Get off me!” Starlight shouted. She swatted the menace away and her arm fell asleep. A clump of mist hit the ground before her, twisting into a toad-like form.
“Fine! So, you know about that!” Starlight continued. “Yeah, I took their talents and gave them jobs―what of it?! It’s not like they were thriving before they came to me!
The toad lifted a budded hand. “Calm yourself, child. I do not blame nor chastise you. Truth is, you and I aren’t so different. You’d take to my job like a fish to water.”
Starlight flexed her tingling muscles to regain feeling in her arm. “And what is your job?”
“Ah-ah-ah. The answer is in the riddle, Starlight. Just know that it ensures balance and equality for all,” he said, ignoring the unicorn’s glare. “Nice try, though.”
“I hate you,” Starlight said, quite embarrassed at the sudden rasp in her voice.
The black toad hopped upon a pony-sized rock. “I am known by all, but seen by none. I am the shadow cast by a withered sun. What am I?”
Starlight scowled. “How is this even remotely related to the last one?”
He chuckled again. “Rest assured, they may be different, but my riddles are all solved the same.”
Great. Even his hints were riddles.
This time, Starlight gave some actual thought to this, sifting through similarities between this riddle and the last. She smiled.
“Of course. You are… the shadows.”
When the stranger paused, Starlight was certain she nailed it.
“A profound answer, my dear.”
The ground jumped beneath her. The cave’s exit sunk even further away, more inky blackness guarding it.
She lost her footing and yelped, grasping at a slippery slope. Her hooves slid and scraped futilely against wet granite, and she felt nothing but air beneath her one good hind-hoof.
As another whimper escaped her lips, clawed paws reached out and pressed down on her joints. Instead of pain, there was only numbness. She looked up, trembling at a black lion’s toothy grin.
“It was incorrect, by the way.”
“But you said the answer was in the riddle!” Starlight cried, scrabbling back onto crumbling rock. “I knew I couldn’t trust you!”
“Now, why would you say such a thing?”
Starlight slipped further and yelped.
“Equality is an interest we both share, unicorn. ‘Tis a path least traveled. And yet, most beaten. You can trust me.”
She slipped again. “Then pull me up! Please!”
“I am the new beginning, and every last chance. I am the light in the dark with which all must dance. What am I?”
Starlight slipped even further, those misty claws snagging along her flesh. She glanced down at her bleeding wound. “I’m begging you! If I take another fall, I’ll die! I’ll die!”
“Answer the riddle. What am I?”
“I… I don’t know! I don’t know what you are!”
The lion’s grin vanished. “Again, it doesn’t bode well for you.”
“W-what?”
The blackness swallowed what little she could see of the lion and everything else, creeping closer to her.
She panicked and fell.
Her flesh crunched against stone, limbs whipping and flailing. She tumbled down over the sharp rocks—to the cave’s lower level.
With a raspy groan, she came to. With hazy vision, she gathered her thoughts. With bated breath she sat up and craned herself up with her elbows. She looked at herself, and her vision snapped clear.
Her leg was twisted the opposite direction. Torn muscle hung from the now-gaping gash. More bone protruded. Blood no longer seeped out, but spurted out.
She took a deep, chest-bursting breath, her head lifting to the cave ceiling. She screamed. She screamed so loud, the stalactites rattled, and the echoes that followed rang mercilessly, like a choir on disjointed laughter.
Starlight fell to her back, still screaming, her hooves digging into her forehead. She rolled back and forth and wished the pain away.
It only worsened.
“You’re beginning to dissapoint me,” that insufferable voice said.
“I HATE YOU!”
“Perhaps I was wrong about you, Starlight.”
The desecrated mare’s cries lowered to desperate whines. She lifted herself up higher, only to see that same blackness covering the very rocks on which she fell. She frantically dragged herself back, smearing blood in her wake.
The blackness followed, swallowing everything she saw until she was cornered against a rocky wall. There it stayed, and only a few feet remained between her and flesh-eating oblivion.
A black squirrel hopped onto her chest. And he spoke, “Your will is strong, stronger than most to which I’ve given this chance. That is why I chose you, Starlight, yet you waste my expectations wallowing in filth?”
Starlight’s arms crossed over her face, tears wetting them both. “Please…” she begged, her voice growing weaker, quiet. “Leave me alone.”
The squirrel hopped further up her chest. “You chose this path, Starlight, and the consequences that follow. The riddle remains unsolved and your time drains.”
Starlight’s arms fell limply to the damp ground, her shivers weakening, her breath slowing.
“But it’s… so cold,” she groaned.
The squirrel leaped off of her. And a black grizzly bear’s face looked down on hers.
“I am the broker for all, never deceived or cheated. I am resisted, tooth and nail, but I cannot be defeated. What am I?”
Starlight’s foggy breath wheezed from her lungs. “No more,” she cried. “I just… I wanna go home.”
“Answer the riddle, Starlight,” he whispered back. “What am I?”
Starlight weakly lifted her eyes to the bear, no longer caring about her tears. “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you so cruel?”
He was silent for a time, as if pondering her words. Then the bear crouched toward her, his nose much, much too close. “You speak of cruelty, when I’ve given you chance after chance to save yourself?”
“How can you say that? You taunt me with fake salvation. You drive me further into this tomb. You—” Her sobs escaped her again. “I know nothing about you, and I’m supposed to know what you are?”
“Wrong, Starlight,” the bear corrected. “I’ve been telling you about myself this whole time. You just haven’t been listening.”
Starlight’s head fell back against the cave floor. She groaned in defeat.
“What am I?”
The blackness stirred again, creeping closer to her ever-so slowly.
She wanted to leave this place. She wanted to see the end of this day. She wanted to soak the sunlight and breathe without pain. She wanted to bite into ripe, crisp apples again. She wanted to read and study and learn the magics she once thought impossible. She wanted to see ponies again.
She wanted to visit her father’s grave one more time. She wanted to return to the town she’d wronged—the ponies she’d wronged—and ask their forgiveness. She wanted to be remembered as a good pony, not a monster. She wanted absolution.
She wanted to live.
“I don’t—” She stopped herself, realizing the wrong answer would end her. “What are you…?” she asked to herself more than anything else.
This creature—whatever it was—stood amidst the blackness, matching it. Corrosion never dissolved him, never swallowed him. None of it made sense.
Until it did, that is.
Starlight’s eyes widened as she recalled bits of the riddles.
I am the greatest truth, shunned, but always found.
I am known by all, but seen by none.
I am the new beginning, and every last chance.
I am the broker for all, never deceived or cheated.
She stared back up at him. He stared back down at her, just as she had to so many ponies. She fancied herself a hero to them, a force of reckoning, even. But this? This was reckoning. A kin to the blackness ready to swallow her.
The truths she had shunned were stripped and bared before him.
He claimed she knew him all her life.
He offered her freedom, or oblivion.
And she knew exactly what he was.
He was the shadow that loomed over creatures large and small. He was the messenger of a truth feared by all. He was the ferryman that tolled the bells. The wailing host of the home to which all were welcome. The end of all things
And he came for her.
“Starlight Glimmer.”
She blinked back into focus, but saw naught but black. She looked down at her legs and saw naught but rotted, broken bone.
“What am I?” he asked for the final time.
And finally, with her last, whispering breath, she answered.
“Death.”
Then there was naught but darkness.