She didn’t want to be asleep. She didn’t want to be awake. She didn’t want to be. Sassaflash lay on her back staring up at the rafters overhead, numb and empty and wondering when the dawn would come or whether it mattered. It would be the last dawn for several days, of course, until she could organize a group of unicorns and train them in the old solar magics that the ancient Unicornians had once known. Until then, if the ancient legends were true, the Sun and Moon would share the sky, drifting aimlessly around one another in slow, lazy circles and leaving half the world in chilling shadow and half in glaring sunlight. Yes, that would need to be attended to immediately after Celestia and Luna’s fall. Very important. Couldn’t be neglected. She wondered why she was having so much trouble caring.
Some hours later, the weary pegasus woke from a sleep that she hadn’t remembered falling into. It didn’t seem to have done her any good; she still felt exhausted. Still, Sweetie Belle might have already released Discord, and when that had happened she needed to be ready to act as swiftly as possible. Abandoning the idea of getting any real rest, she crawled up out of her pit of a bedroom to see what the world had in store for her.
The noonday Sun greeted her, warm and welcoming. She scowled at it. Discord hadn’t done its work yet, then. At first she thought something might have delayed or stopped her acolyte, but after a few tests back in her lair, she quickly ruled that possibility out: the vast web of hungry, groping unreality that had been oozing across the world from Voormithadreth since time immemorial was utterly and completely gone. Discord had been freed, then, but was...hiding?
The Dark Lord shook her head. Of course it was. She should have expected it. Discord would remember what had happened the last time it had faced Celestia and Luna, and it would be cautious this time, waiting until it could secure the magical Elements of Harmony that had locked it away in the first place. Well, there was no worry on that score. The Elements answered now only to six simple ponies, not the Princesses, and such paltry creatures could hardly be considered a threat to Discord, the Scion of Tartarus. It would soon discover this, and force Celestia and Luna’s hooves.
Until then, though, there was nothing for her to do. Nothing she could do except think, and that hurt. The world felt wrong, as though some fundamental part of it had been ripped away, leaving her clinging in desperate surprise to the remaining fragments. The Mule should be by her side. He was always by her side, honest, plain-spoken, and good. She was a Dark Lord, and he was her minion. That was how it was, and how it should be.
He couldn’t have left. It was all a mistake, somehow. It couldn’t really have happened. Her memory of the pained betrayal in his eyes must be a mistake. Surely he hadn’t pleaded their friendship to her, only for her to brush it haughtily aside? Surely she hadn’t stood there in the darkness of a Dreaming wood, proud and confident in her righteousness, and spat defiance at him? Her friend, her friend, her only friend…
A miserable anger flared within the lonely pegasus—anger at herself, at the Mule, at existence itself. How dare the world arrange itself in such a way? How dare reality conspire to hurt her like this, and to hurt him too? He should have been her ally, standing at her side as she ushered in the dawn of a new golden age. Fire burning in her eyes, the Dark Lord Sassaflash whipped around, tail lashing, and stalked out of her home, bound for the Ponyville hospital. She would talk to him and make him see reason, and then everything would be as it ought to be again.
When Sassaflash arrived at the tidy timber frame hospital, though, she discovered that the Mule was not there. He had left early in the morning, the little white-clad orderly told her, hobbling out the door on a pair of borrowed crutches despite all the doctor’s remonstrances.
Sassaflash stared. “But he isn’t well! He’s just going to hurt himself! Did he say why he left?”
Shaking her head, the orderly replied, “No, not a word. He was very urgent about it, though. He seemed to think it was a matter of life and death. And he was technically well enough to leave; he had just been going to stay a few extra days on Doctor Horse’s recommendation.” She paused. “Excuse me, but are you named Sassaflash?”
Sassaflash confirmed that she was.
“Then he left a message for you. It was just one word: ‘Canterlot.’ I don’t suppose you know what that means?”
The pegasus made no response, staring blankly ahead while her mind whirled. Canterlot. He must have gone there to try to intercept Sweetie Belle before she could awaken Discord. He had failed, obviously enough; Tsathoggua was dead. But the fact that he had tried…
He had really meant it. Everything he said. Sassaflash turned away from the hospital, making her slow way back to her home. It wasn’t a mistake or a misunderstanding. It was all real. For the second time in her life, she had lost somepony she couldn’t bear to lose.
Leaving her alembics and thaumometers behind, she crept back into the darkness of her underground chambers, tail dragging in the dirt. She didn’t want to watch the sky. It probably didn’t matter all that much, anyway. Surely, even buried here underground, she would notice the signs of a war between Gods. The magical echoes of that struggle couldn’t possibly be missed. Feeling her way through the lightless room, she slumped forward on to her pallet and stared into the darkness, tired, miserable, and alone.
In time, her eyes slid shut, and she drifted into strange dreams.
-----
Pain. A dull, cold pain was pressing against Sassaflash‘s mind, heavy and insistent. Floating back up to consciousness, the Dark Lord became aware of some heavy weight pressing against her right hind leg, and an odd pressure at her back. Her eyes flickered open. A weird half-light was filtering down from somewhere below her—no, above her. She was upside down. Why was she upside down?
With an effort, the pegasus pulled her scattered faculties together, trying to grasp what had happened. She couldn’t see very much, and her eyes were stinging for some reason. Her face felt wet. She tried to raise a hoof to wipe whatever it was away from her eyes, and found that she couldn’t; it was trapped under—she twisted her head around, trying to see in the dimness—it was trapped between several beams of wood, covered in mud and grit. She was underground, she thought, or buried under a building. An earthquake? Had her home collapsed on top of her?
Swallowing the panic that had already begun to well up within her, she forced several deep, steady breaths in and out of her lungs, and began to try to work herself loose. By degrees, moving carefully so as not to bring a house’s-worth of wood and earth rushing down to crush her, she managed to wriggle her forehoof free, and after some further exertion managed to work her hind leg out from the heavy beam of wood under which it had been pinned—bruised and bleeding, but thank the stars, not broken. Twisting herself upright, she made a tentative wriggle upwards, towards the light.
Reality everted itself. The thin, winding passage ahead of her remained constant, but everything at her sides shifted away in a contorted blur of shapes and shadows. To her right, the muddy beams were replaced by a network of broken pipes emerging from a sheared-off wall of dirt, while to her left a slab of cracked stone warped and vanished, blending smoothly into a rough incline of shattered crockery, leading up out of the earth to a gap that opened on a twilit sky.
For a moment, Sassaflash remained completely still, frozen in shock. Then she made another tentative movement forward, and everything at her sides morphed again, blending into a different mass of rubble and collapsed housing, while the path ahead and behind her remained the same. She turned, rotating around her own axis. Suddenly everything was stable again—as long as she was turning, and not moving backwards or forwards. Experimentally, she stepped backwards. Again, the same stomach-churning, mind-breaking distortion of space.
The muddy, bleeding pegasus ceased her attempts to move, her breath catching sharp and shallow in her throat. Something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Was she drugged? Hallucinating? This wasn’t an earthquake. Space itself seemed broken, somehow, and wasn’t acting like it should. She wormed her way forward, and again, everything not directly along her line of motion blended smoothly away into a completely different place, while the areas directly in front and behind her remained the same. She inched backwards, and the old scenery returned. She revised her earlier opinion; space wasn’t broken, it had been rearranged. Everything was still connected, just in a completely different, alien way.
Assuming, of course, that she hadn’t simply lost her mind. A concussion, maybe. That was probably the most likely explanation by far.
Well. If it was real, it offered a way to escape, at least. Trying to remember her previous movements, the Dark Lord wriggled and turned in the mud until she had brought herself back to the second space she had encountered, with a low incline leading up to a twilit opening at her left. Turning carefully, she moved forward up the slanting slope, trying to ignore the dizzying flash of scenes and wreckage spinning by her sides, and after struggling a bit at the lip of the opening managed to force her way out to the surface.
A weird, whistling wind whined through her mane as she stared out in stupefaction at the devastation that greeted her. She recognized nothing; what had been a bustling, happy town had been utterly razed, cratered, torched, crushed. There was nothing that hadn’t been obliterated; far beyond the borders of the town forests had been upended or uprooted, slabs of earth rearing up out of the ground at ninety degree angles or hovering upside down in the sky, while in the distance the mountains themselves were horribly distorted, some half-melted, some broken and cratered, and others simply gone. She swerved around, trying to spot the distant Canterhorn. The distortion of space made it impossible to guess where it should be. She thought she recognized one slumped half-mountain as what had once been the Canterhorn’s base, its top sheared off and the remainder riven in half, but she couldn’t be sure.
The Moon and Sun hung close together in the sky, drifting aimless and unguided around one another, and Sassaflash remembered that both the Mule and Sweetie Belle had been on the Canterhorn. She fell forward, stumbling through tortured space. Staggering to a halt, she stared frantically around her, caught in a rising tide of panic and horror. It all felt too real to be just a hallucination. Something hot trickled down her forehead and fell to the ground, spattering wetly in the mud. She looked down. Blood.
The dam broke. Rearing up on to her hind legs, wings thrashing uselessly in the magic-less air, Sassaflash gave a desperate scream. “Mule!” She galloped forward, space whirling in a mad vortex at her flanks as she swung her head right and left, desperately searching through the maelstrom of madness for some sign of life. “Parchment! Sweetie Belle! Angel!” She stopped, spun, and galloped off in a different direction, her eyes stinging with tears and blood. It couldn’t be. They were out there, they had to be. They hadn’t—She hadn’t—
A flash of color, distinct from the chaos of rubble and mud that was all that remained of the world, spun by in her peripheral vision. Screeching to a halt, the desperate pegasus inched backwards. Something. Somepony. She had seen somepony, she knew it. She would find them, and they would explain that it was somehow all a mistake, it hadn’t really happened, it wasn’t really real…
There. She had reached the right point in space, and slowly turned, careful not to move forward or backward and twist space around her again. Not far off, standing together in silence, were two tall mares, hornless and wingless. One was a deep blue, her mane pale and hanging limp and muddy at her side, and beside her stood a taller rose-maned mare, her dirtied coat colored the palest pink. There was something oddly familiar about their graceful, slender forms, something she thought she recognized. Making sure that they were dead ahead of her, Sassaflash stepped forward.
As she drew nearer, the smaller of the two looked up, and then turned to her taller companion and, pointing in the pegasus’ direction, murmured something that Sassaflash couldn’t hear. The pale mare started, and followed her companion’s gaze, her ears laid back and an expression of sublime despair on her face. It was Princess Celestia, powerless, brought low, and the mare at her side was her sister, Princess Luna.
They made no motion towards her, allowing her to make her awkward way over to the ruined basin where they stood flanked by the wreckage of a world. Things shouldn’t have gone this way. They were supposed to contain Discord, defeat him, and drain themselves in the process. Things shouldn’t have gone this way. Stumbling up to them, the mare stammered out, “I—I don’t understand. How could this have happened?”
Luna turned her head away. Celestia gazed down at the small, bedraggled pegasus before her, drew a shuddering breath, and whispered, “I’m so sorry, my little pony. We tried. Believe me, we tried.”
“But what happened?” Her voice caught in her throat, and she repeated, “How could this have ever happened? You and Luna should have won! You should have defeated Discord!”
“We did win, little one. Discord is dead.” She raised a hoof, and gestured to the wasteland beyond. “This is victory…” Then a flicker of confusion crossed Celestia’s face. “But how do you know that name?”
“I’m a scholar. I was a scholar. It doesn’t matter.” Sassaflash shook her head. “But you defeated it before! You brought it down, you saved Equestria. You saved us.”
Luna turned. “Nay! The Elements of Harmony saved Equestria, not us—and the Elements have long since passed out of our keep. We had naught but our own dwimmercraft with which to face the Worm, after he did away with the Elements’ Bearers. Without the Elements themselves in his grasp, he did not dare to take any risks. Alas that our strength was not enough!”
“So you fought,” whispered Sassaflash. There must have been something else. Her plan couldn’t have done this. She couldn’t have done this. She was only a mortal. Mortals didn’t destroy worlds. Mortals didn’t kill Gods. They couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.
“Aye, we fought.” Luna nodded. “We tried to save you; tried to save all of you. But Discord used our compassion against us, smiting the world with mad fury in order that we might spread our strength thin. We managed to bring some out of this valley, away from the chaos—I know not how many. ‘Twas not enough.”
“Mountains walked,” murmured Celestia, staring dead-eyed across the rubble-strewn plain. “The sky burned...” And Sassaflash remembered Celestia’s oldest name, the name she had had before Luna ever came into being: The Ouranocaust, the sky-scorcher.
The Sky-Scorcher, the Worm, and the Nightmare. She had pitted them against one another. Gods had warred, at her will and at her command, and the world had perished. Her vanity and her hubris, her power and her madness, had ripped the world to pieces and destroyed everything she had ever valued or learned to value.
The Dark Lord Sassaflash had risen—and fallen.
-----
Cold winds lashed at the broken waste, twisting in strange eddies as they wound their way through the contorted angles of space, and in the shadow of a broken fragment of mountain, lying half-sunken in the crater it had made after being hurled from one of the distant, shattered peaks, the body of a pale turquoise pegasus lay silent and still, her hooves curled tightly against her sides for warmth.
And in the Dreamlands, Sassaflash walked through the whispering grasses, her wings hanging slack at her sides. She had just been to the mules’ home, in its little glen under the shade of the spreading oak, to tell his wife that her husband was dead.
Those eyes. Sassaflash could still see Missus Mule’s eyes as the pegasus’ words sank in, haunted and hopeless. There had been no anger, no violence—Sassaflash had been half expecting the mule’s wife to try to murder her, and wasn’t entirely sure that she would have tried to fight her off—just that deep, profound misery, and a few whispered words: “Why did you kill him? What was it all for? Why did you kill my Mule?”
Grass swished along Sassaflash‘s flanks as she wandered, aimless and lost, across the rolling hills. What was it all for? She had had reasons, once, and she remembered thinking they were very good reasons, but she seemed to have forgotten what they were. Oh, she remembered some ideas: Conquering death. Overthrowing a tyrant. Bringing her mother back to life. Very grand and powerful they had sounded, right and good and worthwhile. But now...just ash. Ash, and rubble, and ruin, and nothing was left of all she had hoped for and loved.
Bringing her mother back to life. The pegasus slumped down on her haunches, staring numbly into the grass. That was what it had really been; the other goals were only excuses, lies she had told to herself to justify her actions. All of this, all this devastation, because one lost, angry, hurt foal hadn’t been able to accept that all stories had to end.
Well. She’d got what she’d wanted, hadn’t she? Celestia and Luna had fallen, and the spells they had woven to keep the gates of time shut, to bar the Hounds of Tindalos from ravaging the world, had dissolved away. She could rescue her mother now, if she wanted. It had taken the murder of ten thousand souls, but now she could go back in time and—
She could go back in time.
Sassaflash‘s heart stopped, her breath caught in her throat, the waving grass stems froze, and the wind stilled. She could go back in time. The silver key that would unlock the vaults of history was in her grasp. She could return to when this had started, to before this had started, and prevent it from ever having happened. She could save the Mule, save Sweetie Belle, save Crowded Parchment and Angel and all of Equestria from her own mad, blind selfishness. In fact, if she went far enough back, if she saved her mother as well, the chain of events that had led to this would never have even started, and…and…
The hope rising within her abruptly stalled, its growth choked off. No. Time didn’t work like that; if she went back, she would still have been acting based on what she had experienced here. That past—this present—it would all still exist, just along a different branch of reality. For a moment she considered doing it anyway, retreating to a halcyon parallel cosmos and leaving this one behind her. Time's flow would be diverted into two paths, and she would go swimming along the one in which her mother never got sick, never died, and was never half-revived. Her mother would see what her daughter had become, how her talent had blossomed far beyond even her own knowledge, and she would be so proud of her daughter, her Sassaflash, her little ghoul.
The beautiful possibility hung suspended in Sassaflash‘s mind, a glittering glimpse of the happiness she could have. She could slough this world off as a snake sheds its skin, leaving its ruin behind her. It would be so easy, so simple. For a moment Sassaflash hesitated.
But every night she would see the ruin of Equestria in her dreams, hear the misery in the mule’s wife’s voice, and feel in her soul all that she had done and all that she had destroyed. I can’t do it, she thought. Mama, I’m so sorry. I can’t save you. I thought I could, but I can’t. They need me too, Mama. I can’t leave them like this.
Sassaflash rose to her hooves and drew a deep breath, her wings folding back at her sides and her head lifting as the wild wind rushed through the grass around her and the scent of dreams hung in the air. Time and the cosmos itself stood athwart her path, but she defied them. She had spoken with ghouls and with wraiths. She had seen Cthulhu’s Eye, and lived. She had brought the dead back to life. She had broken a world. She had killed Gods. Let Yog-Sothoth behold her and tremble, for she was the Dark Lord—
No. The pegasus sighed. No, that wasn’t who and what she was at all. She was a lonely, lost, hurt pony, very much out of her depth, who had done something horrible and was going to try to make it right. Whether she succeeded or not, she would still be that pony, her soul blackened with unforgivable sins, her life a history of pain, sorrow, and selfish, pointless anger.
She was only Sassaflash. But even so, she was going to save the world from herself.
-----
In the middle of the waste, a heavy slab of stone slowly tilted back, half-rising and half-sliding across the thick mud. A grimy claw-hoof grappled on to the edge of the slab and pushed it back, and a gaunt, half-equine and half-canine creature emerged from the darkness below. The beast heaved itself up on to the slab, squatting atop it like some hideous gargoyle, and solemnly surveyed the devastation around him. He inhaled, drawing a deep draught of stagnant, wet air through his muzzle, and gave a disgusted whuff. Bodies, buried in pits, trapped under stone, drowned in mud—more than he could ever eat before it rotted away. He hated waste.
There was a flicker in his peripheral vision, and the ghoul turned. For a moment nothing further happened, and then Sassaflash warped into view, carefully walking backwards to bring herself on a straight path to the ghoul through the contorted space of the wasteland. She turned, and stepped forward, her face haggard and her eyes burning. “I knew you’d answer my call. I knew you’d survived. You haven’t lived this long just to be killed by a mere apocalypse.”
Crowded Parchment scowled, and his rubbery ears flicked back against his hairless head. “My burrows run very deep, necromancer. What dost thou want?”
“Help. I was wrong. I was so horribly, horribly wrong. Please. I need to save them.”
“Save them?” The ghoul’s eyes widened in incredulity. “They’re dead! Thou’rt skilled in thy craft, but not all thy skill could undo this!”
“No.” Sassaflash shook her head. “You’re right, I don’t have the skill. But somepony else might. I need you to help me find my lab, Parchment. I need you to help me find Starswirl the Bearded.”
----