Chapter Twenty-Six: Everdizzy
The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions
Chapter Twenty-Six – Everdizzy
Special thanks to Vimbert for Editing
Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art
The Capricorn stirred and squirmed under the lanternlight of Fluttershy's manger where it lay in a disheveled bed of hay. Several various foodstuffs rested in an array of dishes before its snout, but the endangered animal refused a single bite. Its ivory eyes glossed over as it panted wiltingly into the night, where the dangling stars above did little to re-energize its heavy limbs and tail.
A hardened pair of blue eyes scrutinized the torturous lengths of this creature, until finally—with a toss of her gray-scarlet mane—Captain Redgale stood up and muttered towards the cold night air, “It's dying.”
“You would say that,” Harmony droned, glaring from where she stood in a lean against a wooden stable behind the elder pegasus. “Is that your best prognosis?”
“I doubt that Miss Fluttershy here could provide a more encouraging second opinion, without the risk of forcing inaccuracies.” The off-ruby Cloudsdalian half-snorted. “Isn't that right, child?”
“Yes, Captain Redgale,” Fluttershy predictably murmured in a deflated voice from where she sat on folded hooves beside the groaning creature. “It is severely dehydrated. Its system has been starved of cosmic starlight for so long that even the night sky isn't feeding it. We... uhm... We'll be lucky if it lasts until morning after all that it has been through.”
“This is just like the one case twenty years ago with the Scorpius that was discovered having fallen onto the rooftops of Fillydelphia,” Redgale muttered, trotting around the Capricorn while giving it disinterested looks. “The apartment tenants who discovered the creature thought that it was a monstrosity; so they wounded it and left it—abandoned—inside the deep, dark alleyways of the city. Lo and behold, once the city council had discovered the unfortunate beast, it was too late to nurse it back to health. Oh, how I hate to see history repeat itself—”
“Oh come on!” Harmony barked with a frown aimed the Captain's way. “Don't compare Ponyville's chief animal tamer to the likes of a bunch of impoverished thugs with arachnophobia! Fluttershy here did her darnedest over the course of several days to find this creature, and with no help from you, much less any dang City Council!”
“What surprises me, Miss Harmony of Her Majesty's Esteemed Service, is that it took her so long to do just that! These are hardly the grimy back alleys of Fillydelphia! Miss Fluttershy here has had several years to make herself acquainted with the lengths of the Everfree Forest. For once, an endangered creature falls into her backyard—of all ponies—and the best she can do is deliver it to its grave!”
“And what surprises me,” Harmony spoke with a poisonous smirk, “Is that you obviously have a record of something like this happening before. So maybe it was in Fillydelphia where a cosmic creature once fell to its death. So what? I bet it took the entire city council days to figure out that focused starlight was the means to finding it, huh?”
Captain Redgale said nothing. Her lips clenched tighter and tighter as the seconds following the copper pegasus' bold inquiry burned away.
“Well?!” The time traveler hissed. “Did you ever think to share that tidbit with Fluttershy any? Or maybe you just wanted her to fail from day one!”
“Harmony...” Fluttershy murmured—
“Was that it?!” Harmony further growled.
“Any of the devices that the Cloudsdalian Commission has at its disposal, so does Miss Fluttershy.” The Captain gazed cooly across the lantern-lit manger at the “Canterlotlian Clerk.” “The Ponyvillean Caretaker's competence has been fully tested, Miss Harmony. When and if you report your observation of this to Her Majesty, I'm sure you'll find that she will be in perfectly logical agreement with me.”
“Oh, sure.” Harmony scoffed with a bitter chuckle. “And all that test took was the blood of one near-extinct creature.”
“Everything that lives eventually bleeds, Miss Harmony,” the Captain spoke in an off-ruby glaze. “Our sole job is to maintain this equilibrium, not to change it.”
“Why you smug, arrogant, heartless—!” The last pony marched the length of her sneer towards the elder pegasus.
Fluttershy stood in the way, staring. “Your assistance has been most appreciated, Miss Harmony.”
Harmony blinked, her lips parting. “But... B-but Miss Fluttershy—“
Fluttershy twirled with a silken swish of her pink tail and stared painfully up at the elder. “Captain, as always, I defer to your expertise, and to the authority of the Cloudsdalian Council. What would you have me do with this poor creature?”
Redgale stared ambivalently at the anguished shape occupying a good half of the hay-strewn manger. “Your facilities here are replete with medicinal herbs and natural anesthesia, I presume, child?”
Fluttershy blinked. She breathily made to utter something sharply, but soon deflated upon the serrated point of contemplating it. With a wilting voice, she hung her head obediently. “Yes, Captain Redgale.”
“Then you already know what needs to be done.”
“Yes, Captain...” Fluttershy shuddered. She gazed sadly at the slow rise and fall of the creature's starry ribcage. “I shall see to its... to its ease of passing.”
“Very good, child.” The off-ruby mare brushed a few straws of hay off her hooves and trotted indifferently towards the edge of the manger. “I will admit: you do have a gift in aiding weak things. As for the nature of this latest... example of your 'talents at work,' we shall discuss it on a much firmer date—Sooner than later.”
“That's it?” Harmony blinked in disbelief. “After all that work, we're just going to let this thing croak—?”
“And you.” Redgale glared directly into the pegasus' amber eyes. “I expected more from the likes of Canterlot's elite! You should have been a stronger example to the mare you were charged with observing. This field of work she's in: it takes more than frivolous compassion. It takes tenacity, without which...” She pointed at the lifeless Capricorn decaying dustily before them. “Things like this can happen. Alas, these are the lessons we must all learn with age. Maybe someday you'll grasp this, but I can't presume to hope. As for now, farewell.”
With a burst of hot air, the Captain took to the skies, and returned north towards the star-shaded haze of Cloudsdale. The two ponies were left with the shadows of death, festering beneath them in intermittent bleating sounds that shook the shells of their souls.
Harmony shut her eyes. For once, the perpetual snow and ash inside her mind was a welcome reprieve from the muted tragedy bleeding before her. When her vision returned, she blinked to see Fluttershy having padded over towards the horned cranium of the stirring beast. With a soft breath, the caretaker laid herself down beside the neck of the Capricorn and gently nuzzled it, murmuring melodic words of comfort that vibrated with the strings of somepony's twenty-five years of empty dreams.
It drew the breath out from the last pony's lungs like a low, whimpering scream. “What... Wh-what are you going to do now, Miss Fluttershy?”
“I'm going to be here.”
Silence. Harmony finally realized that Fluttershy had answered her. The copper pegasus cleared her throat and prodded further. “For how long?”
“As long as it takes,” Fluttershy murmured. Her blue eyes were like opposite ends of a rainy horizon as she stared into the cloud of the creature's cosmic effluence. “I have all the ingredients to make the process painless for it... But nothing to make it swift.”
The last pony glared into the shadows with a sigh. “Isn't that always the way it is?”
Either Fluttershy didn't hear her, or she was too busy formulating a proper way to say: “When you write to Princess Celestia, I do hope you have the grace to mention that Captain Redgale has only ever meant to inspire me to greatness. I know that you have your own convictions, Miss Harmony, but despite the way it looks, this creature's life was completely an incidental tragedy. There was no sabotage involved.”
“What are you getting at?” Harmony squinted at her.
“You have done so very much to help me, and I am exceedingly grateful, Miss Harmony. But you need not stay any longer. Your work is done; mine is just beginning.”
Harmony stared into the abyss that was the hazy blue space between Fluttershy and the spasming death that she was cradling in her hooves. The melodic lengths of the caretaker's voice yet again adhered to the last pony's beating heart, so that she mewled in a foalish breath that resembled an orange shadow trotting down a ghostly set of stairs somewhere.
“I don't want to leave you, Fluttershy.”
A pair of sad blue eyes darted her way.
Harmony gulped and reiterated, “I do not want you to be alone in this. I mean it.” She produced a painful smile, and then in a voice that could mold glass: “Not after your Captain has abandoned you, not after Cloudsdale has ignored you, not while...” She bit her lip, then whimpered, “Not while you're so alone.”
“I'm not alone, not really. I'm just—” Fluttershy stopped in mid-sentence. She turned and gazed suddenly with a solid pair of stone blue eyes, taking note of the sparkling bolts shimmering between the Capricorn's twin horns. “Hmmm...”
Harmony blinked. “What?” She squinted harder, shuffling towards the animal caretaker. “What is it, Miss Fluttershy?”
Fluttershy continued studying the creature. Her yellow hooves gently stroked the rigid contours of the electrically brimming horns. A blue-violet aura lingered just a few anguished centimeters from the bleating creature's face. Nevertheless, the hulking cosmic entity breathed slightly easier under the porcelain touch of the graceful animal tamer.
Fluttershy's voice was a pindrop, and yet it shattered the silence like the bow of a battlecruiser. “Do you truly wish to assist me, Miss Harmony?”
“Anything, Fluttershy! Name it.”
“If you would be so kind as to gallop quickly into my cottage. There is a desk positioned against the wall opposite to my reading seat. Please do me a favor and grab a book entitled A Third Age Study in Cosmic Zoology and bring it back here, if you would.”
Harmony saluted like an age-old rainbow soldier and dashed off. It was halfway through her night-lit canter that she faltered briefly, assaulted with the brief fear that she might incidentally trot her way beyond the limits of Fluttershy's anchor. Her venture, however, took her harmlessly into the depths of the caretaker's house beyond the manger. There was no risk of green flames as she swiftly lifted the aptly titled book from its wooden shelf and rushed back. She wondered if perhaps the size of Fluttershy's heart allowed the time traveler to fly loops around the moon and not be thrown back to the Everbriar of tomorrow. Harmony knew better than to bother testing that notion.
When she returned and hoofed the book over to Fluttershy, the animal tamer immediately flung the dense tome open to a chapter located halfway through the dusty forest of pages. Her blue eyes swept through paragraph after paragraph as she exercised the skills of an avid scholar. All the while, she held one hoof up to her side and gently stroked the twitching cranium of the terminal creature to her side.
Minutes went by, consuming half-an-hour from the quiet misery of the dimly lit manger. Harmony began to stir uncomfortably, expecting something to melt to dust at any moment. She couldn't tell which would crumble first, the Capricorn or the discovery that Fluttershy was evidently about to make.
It was finally with a fractured breath that the yellow pegasus deflated from her hard-skimming of the book. “It is as I feared,” she stonily murmured.
“What, Miss Fluttershy?”
“I had my suspicions, but I wasn't entirely sure of myself until you brought this book to me.” She sadly gazed the Capricorn's way, staring pointedly at the thing's glowing horns. “Thank you very much for your help, Miss Harmony. But... But I really think you would do yourself well to leave.” She sighed sadly and nuzzled the edges of the stirring creature's neck. “Dear Gultophine, have grace and mercy...”
“I don't get it!” Harmony cackled. “What's going on, Fluttershy? Can't you at least give me an idea? What could possibly be worse than this thing dying?”
“You are a very sympathetic pony, Miss Harmony, though sometimes you do not possess the grace to express it. You needn't worry about my task at hoof.”
“It can be our task if you just let me, Fluttershy!”
“This was never your burden to share,” Fluttershy droned in a somber tone. “It's hard enough to bear the brunt of two deaths, much less one.”
“But you're going to need somepony to—” Harmony dropped off in mid-sentence. She blinked, and her eyes burned suddenly with hardened amber. “Wait... What do you mean 'two deaths?'”
Fluttershy stroked the goat-like mane of the whimpering, glowing Capricorn with silken hooves. “Captain Redgale was right. This creature won't make it past the following day. But the Captain's years of working as an intermediary for the Cloudsdalian Commission has made her forget the finer details of animal caretaking. It is important to take into account any and all details of the lives under our observation.” She gently brushed a hoof towards the sparkling pair of horns atop the creature's head. “See its crown? See the blue sparkling energy dancing between the bone structure?”
“Uhh... Y-yeah?”
Fluttershy stared back. “She's pregnant. Her body's fluctuating with the need to discharge her infant in the form of energy. She came back to earth to go into labor. But someway—somehow—something intervened, and she fell.”
Harmony didn't realize she had fallen down to her haunches until she felt a crater of hay fluttering to a stop around her legs. “She... Sh-she's foaling?!”
“Was foaling, Miss Harmony,” Fluttershy melancholically explained. “The book you fetched for me provides a detailed explanation. This creature's propagation is nothing at all akin to the process that ponies go through. Capricorns—much like Ursas and Scorpia—reproduce by replicating their body patterns in the form of energy. Since they were all created on earth, they must migrate back to the planet's surface and find terrestrial mana crystals that can reflect the energy of their offspring long enough for them to materialize in the flesh. After months of development, their flesh grows with cosmic energy, and they can join their families in the stars, completing the natural cycle.”
“Then... It... It needs these mana crystals...” Harmony thought aloud, her head painfully swimming through her thoughts left-and-right. “They're in Everfree, I'm guessing! That's why the Capricorn landed here of all places?”
“Mmmhmmm...”
“Then... Then let's go fetch some crystals! We can—I dunno—get it to zap its baby into the things and save it from—“
“It's far too late for that, Miss Harmony. Look...” Fluttershy gently turned over a lengthy flank of the stirring creature's fish-tail, revealing a wide swath of scales that had been seared brown as if from a giant hot iron. “At some point during its speedy trip to earth, a cosmic anomaly of unknown proportions mortally wounded the creature. It cannot deliver its child naturally anymore.”
“What do you mean by 'cosmic anomaly?'” Harmony blinked.
Fluttershy went on: “And even if it could deliver its young, just a hoof-full of mana crystals would not do the trick.” The yellow pegasus sadly shook her head. “It would require an entire cave lined with the magically attuned material to allow for a naturally energized foaling.”
“And Everfree has caves like this?”
“It's long been assumed so.”
“Then what if we—I dunno—dragged the fishgoat to one of those places and let nature run its course?”
“You mean move her now? In this condition?”
“Isn't it worth a try, Miss Fluttershy?”
“No, Harmony. It's not.”
“But—”
“This heavenly creature was doomed to die—its child in tow—long before it even touched the ground from its fall,” Fluttershy gravely said with finality. “Do not let its immense size fool you. The book here describes Capricorns as terribly fragile creatures. I'm amazed that it has stayed alive as long as it has. If we had found it three days earlier, there still would have been nothing we could have done.”
Harmony winced, gnashing her teeth as she suddenly avoided looking at the moaning beast. “All this time that your beloved Captain Redgale was here, you knew this, didn't you?”
“I... I had my suspicions, yes,” Fluttershy somberly admitted. “I almost dismissed the idea, until I saw the creature's horns up close. There is no denying it now.”
“Okay, so you had your suspicions,” Harmony groaned inwardly, buckling under a brief twinge of anger. “You suspected that there was more tragedy here than the old bag-of-wind could possibly see, and yet you said nothing to her?”
“This is a very dismal scene that we have been granted the solemn grace to witness, Miss Harmony. I... I had no intention of making it more dismal than it already is.”
“Even if the truth could have excused you in Redgale's eyes?”
“It's not that simple—” Fluttershy bit her lip, then re-uttered: “It's never been that simple with the Captain. I cannot expect her to see what I see, not all the time. It... erm... It doesn't matter. All that matters is that I must see to it that this life here comes to an end peacefully, and not drowning in the sorrow that this poor creature is undoubtedly comprehending. To lose a child is the worst pain I could ever imagine—and to multiply that by the loss of one's own life before being able to grieve such a tragedy...”
Fluttershy inhaled painfully. Her eyes glistened as she came down the crest of that liquid breath. She gave Harmony a forlorn glance..
“So, as you can see, your presence as an observer is no longer required. This... This is hardly the dazzling side of my job as Ponyville's animal tamer. But... But it is so terribly real, nonetheless. I... I'm sure that Princess Celestia knows all she needs to about death and loss.”
“Maybe so.” Harmony nodded, then in a breath that superseded her Entropan voice, she remembered just how old she was. “But I need to know about it.” She walked over softly and sat down on the other side of the creature opposite of the caretaker. “I'm staying with you, Fluttershy. And with them... Both of them.” Her hoof gently stroked the white mane of the twitching creature. For a brief moment she forgot the dark thorns of the future that anchored a chimeric skeleton such as this one to a stone wall of desolation.
Fluttershy's gentle smile was appropriately haunting.
Even the most epic of good acts was easier said than done.
Accompanying the throes of a pitifully dying creature was a job fit for a Goddess, much less two mortal ponies landlocked by the endangered specimen's constant, rattling moans. As the night bled slowly onward, Fluttershy murmured various words of comfort into the beast's shimmering hide. The two mares could only imagine that the Celestial Tongue held merit in the animal's twitching ears, while they were both helpless to measure the hollow significance of its own bleating cries.
Minutes stretched into hours; hours stretched into blinking eons. The lantern of the manger had to be replaced several times. Under Fluttershy's directives, Harmony made even more trips into the inside of the cottage to acquire medicines, herbs, and various tools. The liquid miles of the anguished evening would ever so randomly be punctuated by the thrashes and kicks of the creature's hooves or fishtail—and then everything smoothed once more into a quiet hum of lingering pain and confusion.
When Spike had first reunited with Scootaloo and offered his “gift” of green flame, the last pony didn't quite know what to expect. She had lived a life of death—of witnessing a gigantic landscape turned into a virtual cemetery of ashen fossils—but actually being seated in the past along the front row of death's rattling dance was one thing she hadn't anticipated, for all of its bleakishly messy textures, like this disheveled hunk of stardusting meat that lingered before her and failed to go quickly beyond the black curtain of night.
It wasn't that Harmony pitied this shell of an animal. As the droning hours limped by, she shuddered to so much as look at the thing. The closer Fluttershy got to it, and the more she nuzzled and murmured to it like a distant kin, the clearer and clearer the last pony saw a sea of thorns encapsulating the two of them, like dead twins strapped to the same umbilical threads of the future, where all fates shared one womb and one womb alone... and there was no sign of Epona's brilliance to be found anywhere in the pitch black reality of it all.
Just what did this creature mean—in the manger, or in the Everfree Briar? If Fluttershy and this Capricorn were together at the moment the Cataclysm hit, did that mean that the creature would actually live past this long and fitful night? Would an Ursa Major find them both in each other's hooves—like an owner and its pet—and drag them both to the same unmarked grave in the festering abyss of tomorrow?
Harmony's breathing suddenly sharpened, for she knew that she was thinking too hard. She was forcing logic down avenues where it did not belong. As Fluttershy's breaths slowed to an oozing pattern that matched the terminal wheezes of the creature against which she was cuddling, the last pony could only see one plausibility burning its way towards her like a constellational creature hurdling towards the earth.
Perhaps it was not the Cataclysm that ended Fluttershy. Perhaps it was the immutable will of time for the Capricorn to die—and the yellow pegasus as well—right here and now.
With stabbing pinpricks of spear-laden thoughts, Harmony instantly dove back into the dammed up pools of her painfully clogged memories, and all she saw was a curtain of gray afternoon rainwater surrounding her last memories of Fluttershy like some infernally thick prison. She hadn't realized she was hyperventilating until she saw the straws on the manger floor dancing from her heaving breaths.
On stumbling, Entropan hooves, the last pony limped numbly around the full length of the cottage and all but collapsed inside. Under candlelight, the filly's knees and joints wobbled. Her wings weighed a million kilograms. Even if a million timberwolves were chasing her in the future, the sensation would not make her collapse like she was wanting to right then and there. Ignoring the burning sight of a wooden stairway to her left, Harmony lurched through a space of floorboards still kissed with the blue haze of a phantom table and flung a hoof into a thin wooden door...
...that opened to the first floor bathroom.
“I'll be out in a sec!” Scootaloo called over her shoulder.
“Take your time, Scootaloo.” The yellow shade of Fluttershy could be seen adding more logs to the fireplace. Then the door shut on her like a passing dream.
Alone, the eight-year-old slumped in darkness. A guilty cloud coalesced over her shoulder, colored with the frowns of a violet-haired foal that had nearly taken off on a scooter twice as cold as the rain pelting the bathroom windows behind her.
The dimly refracted light of the dying afternoon danced across the pony, so that she was suddenly swimming in a sea of dull, ivory shadows, like bleached white stones in front of a barricaded mine shaft.
The young soul winced all the harder. Stifling a weak breath, she dipped her hooves...
...into the sink before her, splashing cold water over the gasping lengths of her copper features. A breath shuddered, like so many groans that had bled out of the lips of a dying Capricorn, the chimeric harbinger of Fluttershy's crucified remains. Black thorns encrusted the the peripheral of Harmony's eyelids, so that she instinctually reached up to push away goggles that weren't there, and a tiny bright shadow mimicked her.
Amber eyes bulging, Harmony looked straight ahead. Her hooves parted a slick wet black mane, and soon she was staring into the face of an exiled Goddess. In place of an Alicorn's horn was an amber streak of hair. It shimmered in the mirror...
...like a hollow reflection off of a granite obelisk, dancing with names-names-names that flickered off the black surface of it along with so many shadows of the refracted raindrops blanketing the shadowed bathroom walls.
Scootaloo stammered, her heart palpitating as she swam down the etched names, searching for the ivory-winged pair that still spurred her stubby legs into a blazing gallop, even when she was standing still. But beyond her reflection was a darker aura, something that scared the rain shadows into hiding like shrouded lightning strobes beneath an eternally black cloudbank.
With a trembling breath, she stretched a tiny orange forelimb...
...and raised it to the numb shell standing beyond the glass. For the first time in three decades, another pony was actually looking at her, and not this foreign shell encasing it. Harmony shuddered under the sensation, her knees buckling as her hoof closed the gap between her projected soul-self and the cold kiss of the reflection that scoffed at her with each clock-ticking-second wasted in the hovel of some learned purple dragon that was waiting for her in the past, in that Spike was waiting in the future, but the future was just as predictable as the past—and yet the past was something of color and spontaneity and mystery that stuck the last pony with pins and needles much like this moment of...
...breathless confusion that drowned the foal, that froze her—with every centimeter of her hoof contacting the glass wall that barred her from her every dream ever, encapsulated so weakly in this banal ghost of a pony that she was trying so terribly hard to outrun, outgrow, outlast. And yet this shadow followed her, echoed her on every shadowed sojourn into the abandoned hovels of Ponyville where she thought—and wished—that her sobs would be heard by her and her alone, and not by this stranger from beyond who was leaving a large ringed smudge...
...from where her Entropan hoof had pressed thoughtlessly against the mirror. Harmony blinked and pulled her forelimb back, gazing at the ghostly familiarity of the solid ring within which a foal's grasp could easily fit.
Her heart was beating ten thousand kilometers per minute when the ice first started creeping down her copper temples. In a panicked breath—her lungs full of black thorns—she spun back towards the door. Her copper wings bumped into a shelf along the wall, knocking something over. There was a dainty crashing sound.
The last pony looked down—panting—to see that a porcelain rabbit had shattered across the bathroom tile. A breathless whimper escaped...
...the foal's lips as Scootaloo spun from the circular smudge in the mirror and stepped in something. Glancing down, she saw the ivory fragments of a snow-white bunny figurine spread across the floor. She all but collapsed back into the front room on teetering limbs, summoning a curious gasp from...
...across the atrium. A furiously sweating Harmony flashed wide-amber eyes upwards. In her bobbing vision, she saw a yellow ghost of a pegasus lying on a green chair in deathly slumber. An orange shadow was burning down the wooden stairs towards it, one thunderous hoof at a time.
Squealing, the last pony blinded herself from the sight with Entropan hooves, hobbling on two back legs until she fell fatefully through the front door of the cottage and rolled—sprawling—onto the lawn's springy grass, dancing with invisible monarch butterflies in the warmth of Cheerilee's schoolyard. Her ears roared beyond a Goddess' heartbeat with the frozen rain of an undying golden afternoon, so that she forced herself to fly an airship past the gray ashen shadows—like a screen of moonvision—and beyond them the briar thorns stretched bloodily and blackly, tying the past and the future together like a dead sun and moon, and no matter how loud she wanted to scream and pound against the hard metal surface, she knew that Rainbow Dash was never going to hear her from the flames beyond the arcane vault.
In a hissing breath, the last pony rediscovered her center and hugged it—like she hugged a cold scooter to her bosom on so many fitfully freezing nights—and the snarl that came out of her scared the leathery bodies away from her mind just long enough to reopen her twitching eyes once more to an alien night sky that lingered in purple surreality above her.
“Keep it together... Friggin' keep it together! I've battled hydras... I've hunted down Goddess-forsaken timberwolves... I'm stronger than this... Stronger!” Her wheezes had no merit, like a dying mother giving birth to an unsung eulogy under cold and apathetic lanternlight. “Dang you, Spike. You should have told me that there would have been side effects... You should have friggin' told me that there'd be danged side effects to all this... this... this!”
She shivered, all alone—always alone. The past and the future made no difference, spread no different a shade on her endless sojourns. She had floated down into the blackest Briar of the Wasteland alone. This frolic through the past was no different. Even if she danced rings around Fluttershy's lamentable form, she would leave no imprint on her immutable fate. When the pegasus' body would finally be unhinged from a dead wall of stone, it would be by decapitation and pulverization in the presence of an Ursa Major, like a big blue exclamation point at the end of the biggest joke in Equestria, and the last pony would never... never give it the grace of being laughed at.
“Nnnngh... And you did tell me, Spike.” Harmony hugged herself tighter and shivered under the piercing starlight, as if her soul was being pulled inside out from the forest's shadows, the harbinger to a dreadfully heavy remembrance. “Somehow... You did... You told me everything.”
She was suddenly too tired to cry.
Her legs still wobbling, Harmony stood up with a sigh and slowly, slowly trotted back towards the manger. She decided on a whim to go around the side of the cottage opposite of the direction from which she stumbled, as if the only way to solve a paradox was to obstinately circumnavigate it counter-clockwise like an infant's hoof stubbornly pushing back the minute hand of time.
And then—in yet more pins and needles of fate—Harmony stumbled upon something. Beside a hauntingly familiar storehouse there rested a pile of lumber, within which a few planks of wood stabbed the soft meaty parts of her soul with curiosity, like pearlescent inquisition. With amber eyes narrowing, the last pony numbly strolled forward for a closer look. There was a reason for why those lonesome planks of wood looked familiar. As her gaze fell deeper and deeper upon the blue finish still painted over them, she remembered a warm night—a night of guilt and a night of glory—that perpetually sang across the hollow edges of her soul, reminding her she still had one.
“Hmmmph...” Harmony smiled a pale smile. “Fluttershy: pack rat or saint?” Blinking, she turned towards the manger and limped over to find out which was the truth. After gazing at the soundly sleeping form of Fluttershy—draped silkily against the wincing shape of the Capricorn in an angelic embrace—Harmony got her answer.
It was a golden enough sight to solace her. Soon, her head was spinning in a new circle—a softer circle—and it rolled with the locomotive words of comfort, the one piece of Celestial Tongue that could usher a mythological beast peacefully into the great beyond. On whisper-quiet hooves, Harmony rummaged through a wooden trunk in the corner of the manger. She acquired a few basic carpentry tools, blanketed in dust and cobwebs from years of feminine reticence and neglect.
Shuffling back to the woodshed, Harmony carefully pulled out every blue piece of lumber she could find. Then she laid each fragment side by side in the star-kissed dew of the grass aside Fluttershy's cottage. Seating meditatively before it, Harmony focused on her golden anchor, and—with a little help from a lonesome shadow seated in a claustrophobic airship's cabin somewhere—she set herself to work, tool-in-hoof.
“Small things. One at a time. Thattagirl...”
Fluttershy's eyes twitched open. When they did, the dim kiss of sunlight stabbed her deeply. She shot up with a gasp—only to have a pair of copper hooves gently embrace her shoulders from behind.
“Whoah... Whoah, easy, Miss Fluttershy. It's okay...”
“But, I fell asleep! Oh dear—The Capricon—!”
“It's okay,” Harmony said, then bit her lip. “Erm... Well, what I mean is... you haven't missed anything.” She gestured towards the still-stirring form of the starry creature occupying the haybed of the manger. “You haven't slept on the job, so to speak, Miss Fluttershy.”
Fluttershy scooted over, wincing through a throng of stiff muscles, and gently stroked the frothing white mane of the beast. “Has it been experiencing any pain? Does it need more medicine—?”
The “Canterlotlian Clerk” slowly shook her head. She sat solemnly in the fading shadows of the other two bodies in the waxing kiss of dew-laden day. “If that was the case, I would have woken you sooner, Miss Fluttershy.”
“I... I see...” Fluttershy murmured. She continued to gently stroke the wheezing creature as she tossed a tangled curtain of pink hair out from her brow. “I hadn't expected it to last this long. It's such a brave... brave creature.”
“It's had very delightful hospice up to the end,” Harmony said with a fragile smile.
“I don't think it's that, necessarily,” Fluttershy ever so humbly remarked. A painful gulp. “Let nopony ever underestimate the power of a mother's will.”
Harmony shifted uncomfortably. She brushed aside an amber-streak of her mane and murmured, “Miss Fluttershy, you said it yourself: the creature was doomed before it hit the earth. It has to give up sometime.”
“I know, Harmony.”
“We... We cannot pretend to give it hope.”
“I know. But... But I suppose it's not her hope that I am thinking about. I just...” She bit her lips. With a shuddering sigh, Fluttershy gazed beyond the creature's bleeding stardust to say, “I... I have always dreamed of someday being a mother.”
Harmony gently smiled. “How come that doesn't surprise me one bit?”
“It's always been a deep, deep wish of mine.” The caretaker breathed. In a soft voice that cradled the creature's twitching ears, she said, “Nothing fills me with more joy than to look after precious and fragile things, to bring them into this world, to bestow them with all of the things I have learned, to bless them with all of the hopes and aspirations that I could expect them to live up to.” She gazed over her shoulder at the “royal clerk.” “I... I really think that is why I have such a talent with taking care of animals... and occasionally Miss Hooves' delightful little foal.” A passing smile, then she gazed off into the shadows. “It's all just an extension of the same dream... of perpetual motherhood.”
Harmony wasn't thinking. After all, the last pony didn't believe she needed to think for what she said next: “Why don't you do it, then?” A hopeful grin. “Why don't you become a mother, Fluttershy?”
The caretaker's ears drooped. She drowned herself once more with the sight of the dying Capricorn's starry essence.
Harmony's eyebrow raised quizzically. She leaned her head to the side, as if a sharper angle of the yellow-coated pony could somehow render an explanation.
Fluttershy's voice had a hollow echo to it when she finally said, “Let's just say... it takes more than a fall from the cosmos to shatter a dream, Miss Harmony, no matter how heavenly.”
The last pony wilted from that. She wanted to pierce the issue, to dig deeper just like she was so darkly burrowed into that moment. Try as she might, she couldn't. The hush of the blossoming morning stretched her eyelids to the extreme, and all she could feel was... weak and helpless.
Just then, there was a monumental roar. The manger shook and shuddered as the Capricorn suddenly thrashed, kicking hay about while its ivory-white eyes exploded in a blistering new vitality.
“Good heavens!” Fluttershy gasped, clasping her limbs over the creature's hide in a desperate attempt to anchor it down to the floor.
“Whoah—What gives?” Harmony gasped, her gaze dashing left and right in a sudden panic that mimicked Fluttershy's reaction. “Is it dying? Are these its death throes?”
“I can't explain it! It's like she's suddenly got a new surge of energy!” Fluttershy leaned down to hiss and coo whispery sounds into the spasmatic creature's ears; it did not pacify it.
Harmony bit her lip. Black thorns flickered across her amber eyes like ghostly shadows through moondust. “What if... What if...” She gave the creature's goat-head a fitful glance, taking notice suddenly of several blue sparks dancing between its porcelain horns. “Miss Fluttershy, what if it's giving birth?!”
“Impossible!” Fluttershy sputtered. “There would have to be an object nearby capable of being enchanted! If you do not believe me, consult the book!”
“What about that mana-crystal stuff you were talking about last night? Maybe she found it?”
“From this distance? Dozens of kilometers away from the central caves of Everfree? I'm telling you, Miss Harmony, it simply is not possible!”
“Then what the heck's gotten her thrashing about?!” Harmony pointed a shaking hoof towards the increasing storm of energetic sparks between the creature's horns. “I'm no zoologist, but that sure has heck looks like cosmic labor to me!”
“If that was the case, then she's using her every last ounce of strength to discharge her infant's unborn spirit into a nearby mana battery! But that would mean—” Fluttershy froze, her blue eyes shrinking into sapphiric pinpricks. Clasping the Capricorn's shivering fishtail, she flashed a sweating expression up towards the copper pegasus. “Harmony! What time is it?!”
“I... I don't know...” Harmony wracked her brain, pacing in circles. “The Sun rose up two hours ago. I was watching you and I lost track. Why, what are you thi—?”
“Good M-M-M-M-Morning, Miss Fluttershy! We brought breakfast!”
Fluttershy gasped as if the ghost had left her. The Capricorn stumbled onto its front cloven hooves, its jaw lurching in a shuddering wail. “H-Harmony!” She pointed a hoof out beyond the walls of the manger towards where the chirping voice had emanated from. “Fly out there! Stop them! Make them turn around!”
“The heck?! Fluttershy, I don't get it! What's—?”
“Dinky!” Flutttershy literally snarled. “Get Dinky away from—!”
All sound in the room suddenly drowned beneath the epic roar of the Capricorn's skull lighting up in a blue cyclone. Harmony's amber eyes reflected it as she burst forth a knowing gasp: “Oh hoarseapples!” In a copper blur, she soared out of the manger, wings slicing the morning air.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Hey look, Muffin!” Derpy Hooves grinned wide as she trotted up the beaten path towards Fluttershy's cottage. “A welcoming p-p-p-p-party!”
“Oh?” A tiny, helmeted unicorn cutely yawned from where she was perched in the mare's mailbag.
“Miss Hooves! Miss Hooves—!” An airborne pegasus shouted, flailing her copper legs as she hurdled murderously towards the pair.
“Hi, Mister Squirrel!” The wall-eyed pegasus cheerfully waved back. “Do you like doughnuts?”
Dinky suddenly squinted, her educated eyes reflecting a bright blue glow from beyond the grassy knoll. “Uhhhm...” She shrunk nervously into the leather folds of the bag. “M-mother...?”
“Dang it, Derpy!” Harmony snarled against the beating wind of her flight. “Turn around! Go back! Get her away from—”
An explosion. A bright blue beam of magic energy shot directly through the side of the manger.
Harmony spun around, eyes wide. In a heroic breath, she lunged her Entropan body directly into the path of the cosmic discharge. With a crackle of star-laden thunder, she was suddenly being plowed seven meters through the exploding earth, for the Capricorn's beam had knocked her aside. Her vision briefly blurred in emerald tongues of madness, and once the hazy horizons of the past had miraculously coalesced back into existence around her, she found her world rocked by a perpetual wailing sound, haunting enough to drive a world of gray ash into hiding.
Hissing, Harmony struggled up to her haunches. She was rubbing a green-smoking forehead just as a series of galloping hooves arrived at her side.
“Miss Harmony, are you all right?” A melodic voice dripped into her ear, followed by soft forelimbs that grasped her shoulders.
“I'll live to die another day.” The scavenger from the future grumbled. In a dizzy spell, she glanced aside. “The Capricorn...?”
Fluttershy exhaled. “Deceased. As soon as that energy billowed out from her, she gave up the ghost. Her body is now a pile of cosmic dust in the manger.”
“Dust, you say?” Harmony's numb soul was no stranger to sudden elation, though it would be short-lived. “But... But what about—?”
Fluttershy's gasping shriek was the firmest answer the last pony could hear. “Oh, dear Celestia, no!” She shot forward.
A tired pair of amber eyes followed her, then widened at the sight of a burnt crater, to the side of which a tiny helmet rested—smoking—with a great hole having been magically blown in the center of it.
Harmony's twitching gaze rose up the lengths of a shivering gray pegasus, cradling in her forelimbs the quivering body of a unicorn foal, her tiny horn shimmering brighter than the Sun as Dinky's mother desperately held her. The child's eyes were blisteringly bright, shimmering from within, carrying more heat than ten thousand Harmony boilers could ever fathom achieving. Steam kissed the air as the foal's tears instantly evaporated, and her lips mumbled an indecipherable constellation of words as she convulsed and shivered in endless spasms.
“M-M-M-Muffin? Oh, my darling Muffin, speak to me! Please!” Derpy glanced up, blanching breathlessly as the winged mare grayed even further, stammering: “Miss Fluttershy, what in Nebula's name is wrong with her? What was that bl-bl-bl-blue flash of light?!”
“Oh no no no no no!” Fluttershy fought back her sobs as she clasped the unicorn's cranium in two twitching hooves. She had to squint to so much as look at the faint edges of the foal's strobing horn. “It's just as I feared! Worse than I feared!”
Harmony stumbled up, panting. “You mean to say that the creature's friggin' unborn child is inside her horn?!?”
“What?!” Derpy nearly wretched. “What creature? What unborn child?! Miss Fluttershy, what's wrong with my daughter?!”
“All of the energy has stored itself in her horn. But it's not enough to contain the Capricorn essence!” Fluttershy gulped and shivered to speak. “Not even an adult unicorn could maintain such pressure! A pony's nervous system isn't equipped for it! It'll collapse in on itself with the force of a hundred shattering leylines!”
“What... Nnngh... Miss Fluttershy, what does that mean, exactly?” Harmony's gaze hardened against the shimmering spectacle between all three worried pegasi. “Is Dinky's horn going to explode?”
“No, Harmony.” Fluttershy's voice dripped under a tearful pair of eyes. “Dinky is going to die.”
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And for a minute there, I was wondering how the heck Harmony enchanted the table by putting it back together.
All I have to say... is
holy
f |_| ( |< ing
s#17...
baby's having babies what's this story coming 2? but truly a good chapter and I want to read more but sleep calls me and I must go
Oh dear...
Feel train to Feelingston, Feelesota departed at feel past feel this feeling.
Feel ticket was bought and feeled, used just in time.
Feel meter just feeled itself.
Halfway there, living on a prayer
Why the heck would the mc suddenly be so weak that can’t even block a simple cosmic beam?!