The End of Ponies

by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Forty-Five: Eternal Pinkamena on the Spotless Pie

The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Forty-Five – Eternal Pinkamena on the Spotless Pie

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art

Harmony hung the Winter Wrap-Up vest inside the door of the wardrobe besides a pair of black trunks. In the hazy silhouette of prancing ponies, an obvious stain of crimson shimmered across the turquoise material. The last pony tactfully rearranged the vest so that its deathly blemish was hidden, but that didn't drown out the shadows of the room any better. With a sigh of ironic regret, she hung the green beret off a hook, and Harmony was finally naked. Her copper wings twitched freely in the glare of the clown-pony lamp in Pinkie Pie's bedroom.

The last pony stepped back, staring at the many varied outfits stuffed inside the wardrobe, the numerous crazy things that her anchor had worn on so many a delivery for Ms. Marble Cake. A tropical shirt, an orange hoodie, and a black top hat immediately struck her eyesight. Beyond them, however, was something she didn't remember seeing... except that she did. It was a light-blue helmet with yellow stripes running across the surface.

Not even in her foalish years did Scootaloo remember Pinkie Pie riding a scooter. With a furrowed brow, the last pony crossed the wires in her Entropan skull, until she remembered a wild afternoon of speeding through Ponyville with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, a hunt to find Rainbow Dash, and a certain “Auntie” who hitched along for the ride. The entrance to Sugarcube Corner glistened over the horizon and...

---

The bright foal stands alone in the middle of a granite expanse. She is surrounded by rocks. Her family leaves her. The darkness enshrouds her. She bends down to the Grave of Consus and sighs.

---

Harmony shuddered. She raised a hoof to her skull and shook her head. With a flaring of nostrils, she gave the pink-colored room one last somber look and marched out into the adjacent hallway.

As soon as she was outside, she heard the voices. They were ragged, whispery sounds—like twin ghosts on the verge of an exorcism. Beyond the penumbra of a single lantern, Harmony glanced towards the cracked door to a blacker-than-black bedroom and silently craned her ear.

“—and the Harvest is coming soon. Haymane needs my support, more than ever. It is my job to keep the Council's eyes on the path to righteousness, Pearl. You know that.”

“And you are good at your job. And you are a most—” A hacking cough. “—a most righteous pony, Quarrington. But Haymane, as much as you love him, isn't the only pony who needs your support.”

“Pearl, if this town goes to ruin, if it loses sight of the spirit that makes it strong, then what will become of our lives? What would become of your life?”

“I was born here and I was raised here.” Another wheeze, then a brave breath. “I know very well what has become of my life.”

“Pearl... I can't do this without you. You have to keep fighting. You have to remain strong.”

“Oh Quarrington, our strength ran out years ago. We need to let our daughters be strong now. They know how to do it...”

“They are so helpless without my guidance—”

“Your guidance has influenced them just fine. Now they're being strong in their own way, even if we like it or not.”

“It's not their strength that I'm worried about, it's what will become of their lives, what progress they will make.”

“Quarrington... beloved...” A lingering fit of coughs. “Look at us. Just look. Tell me what progress do you see...”

There may or may not have been an answer to that. Harmony never found out. She had taken her leave down the stairs.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Blinkaphine sat in her bed, across from its empty twin that belonged to Inkessa. Surrounded by half-finished sketches that lingered in the dark, she clutched her rear limbs with her forward hooves and rocked gently forward and backward while staring into the deepest of the shadows.

Harmony stood there, watching her for the better part of five minutes, until she finally built the courage to trot over, sit down on the bed beside the white-white mare, and glance gently at her. The last pony's eyes narrowed on the slowly rocking sibling as she studied the ivory-gray complexion of her nearly immaculate coat.

“There's not even a single bruise on you...” The copper pegasus murmured. “After all of those times we came to blows.” A gulp, and her brow furrowed. “And I do know we came to blows, Blinkaphine.”

The mare was mute. Her golden orbs dipped and dipped forward in her icy rocking motions. She was just as stale and lifeless as the plethora of landscape art around her.

Harmony glanced across the sparse bedroom and saw a wardrobe—far larger than Pinkie's. She wondered how much of the structure could hold Inkessa's clothes and how much of it could hold Blinkaphine's. Surely there could have been enough room for the Royal Grand Biv's.

With a soft exhale, Harmony turned and glanced once more at the white-white pony. “Blinkaphine...” She paused, swallowed, and even more gently murmured, “Blinkie, I know just as well as you do what you are.”

Blinkaphine suddenly paused in her rocking. It was a decidedly explosive movement, even if it was a lack of movement. Five heart-stopping seconds passed, and she resumed her rocking motions, staring infinitely forward.

“I... I can only pretend to imagine what you think that you're accomplishing by being who you've been, by defacing so much of the town, by wreaking such havoc across the masterpiece that Mayor Haymane and his cohorts have established.” Harmony gulped and squeaked forth in addition, “But I can no longer blame you for it.” Her face stretched sadly. She raised a hoof to Blinkaphine's silken mane, but suddenly couldn't bring herself to so much as touch it, as if a bruise might finally reveal itself before the infinite shadows of that candle-lit house. “I can only hope that somewhere... someplace inside of all this”—she motioned towards the mare's pale cranium—“you have it inside you to understand why I've fought you the way I did for so long.” A deep, painful breath. “Then maybe... maybe you can explain it to me.”

Harmony tried smiling. It had no better effect on herself than it did on Pinkie's younger sister. Swiveling her lower hooves, Harmony faced away from the rocking mare and stared into the dull floorboards of that somber house.

“I guess I've always been fighting you. Even... Even in the Wastelands...” Harmony very openly murmured to the darkness between them, helpless to find the colors hidden beyond it, the colors that used to enrapture her, that used to inspire her. “Because... Because everytime you so much as entered my mind, it made me happy.” Her eyes were closed at this point, and the pit inside her throat was immeasurable. “And I didn't think I deserved that happiness in the middle of all that misery. It was a distraction. After all, you were gone, and you were never coming back. And... And it doesn't matter what Dinky said. It d-doesn't matter if you admired me or not. You were just a distraction, a light that didn't belong in a great, great darkness. And so I-I fought you. I fought you for so long and...”

Harmony blanched. Her amber eyes opened. Beyond a great refracted kaleidoscope, she saw Ice Song and Suntrot drowning in an immensely bloody sea of mine soot and limbs, limbs limbs.

“I'm sorry...” The last pony squeaked towards the unfeeling lengths of the Grave of Consus. She brought a hoof up to her quivering face. “I'm so, so sorry... for fighting you...” A deep, shuddering breath. “It's not... It's n-not your fault that you could never c-come back to me like you promised you would.” She cleared her throat to swallow the shakiness in those last few words and very quietly, very swiftly marched out of that room.

Blinkaphine resumed her rocking motions, the same ghost that she was before Harmony entered the room, as if she never was there to begin with.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Through the house's front doorway, she saw Pinkie Pie seated on the porch outside. The mare was a bright blemish against an otherwise pristine horizon of desolation, like a lone airship hanging in a bed of ashen clouds. Also like a zeppelin, she spurted forth her own puffs of steam in the form of numerous paper airplanes which she gracefully folded, creased, then rocketed effortlessly one after another into the misty air above the stony plateau. Within the fluff of her pink tail hairs, a dwarven alligator curled in lazy slumber, its emerald scales glistening with the condensation of early morning.

Harmony slowly strolled out to stand behind her anchor. She had successfully regained the dryness in her amber orbs by the time she let forth, “You should work for air traffic control, maybe that's your special talent.”

“Hmmm?” Pinkie blinked over her shoulder. One of her many airplanes circled back and crashed against her skull, poking her in the eye. “Owie! Heeheehee...” She rubbed her lids with a hoof and smiled brightly. “You're a real crack-up, Har-Har, even if there isn't a single dent to be seen on you. The closest I've ever come to conducting air traffic was this one time I accidentally frightened a flock of geese into Rainbow Dash's weather flying team.”

The last pony noticeably winced at that. “Dare I ask what became of that?”

“They were on their way to deliver backup rainclouds to Trottingham. But when the geese hit, they accidentally crashed through the upper windows of the Ponyville bowling alley.” Pinkie leaned her head goofily to the side. “Did you know that bowling pins could float?”

“Erm... Not necessarily.”

“Neither did I, but four months of community service made sure I never forgot.” Pinkie Pie folded another paper sheet and birthed it wings. “I find it very easy to entertain myself in Ponyville. All of the many simple things in life are a lot less boring after you've been forced to mop up twenty-four bowling lanes with a bucket and a bath sponge. Speaking of sponges, did I ever tell you about the time I sat in as a substitute teacher for Ms. Cheerilee?”

“Miss Pie...”

“I was so excited about having a bunch of kids absorb the things I had to share with them, that I immediately ditched Cheerilee's lesson plan and shouted 'Pop Field Trip!' Boy was that grand! Cuz when I was a little filly, I always thought that there should be more 'Pop things' than 'Pop quizzes,' and a 'Pop Field Trip' suddenly made sense. It was totally a fun idea, and the kids were all for it, except for when we got to the landfill and it wasn't full of thrown-away bubble wrap like I had thought. Still, there was this really cool bathtub that somepony threw out and it made for a great bob sled. After five or six trips down the hill of junk in that thing, and I'm sure none of those kids fretted all the tetanus shots they got afterwards!”

“Miss Pie...”

“I love kids. They're so cute and adorable.” She flung the paper airplane and watched as it dare-devilishly looped under one or two others still gliding from her previous throws earlier. “It's also so easy to make them laugh. And that's not a cheap thing: making children laugh, because children still hold onto that little pinch of giddiness inside of them that makes their cheeks rosy no matter where they were foaled...” Pinkie's smile was a briefly glossy thing, almost as slick as the condensation against the endless granite and rock beyond. “...no matter who or what they have to answer to, they'll always have that joy inside of them. Being their friend—being Auntie Pinkie Pie—simply means knowing how to find that silliness and remind them that it's there.” A strangely somber gulp. “Forever and ever...”

“I'm... I'm sorry that things ended up the way that they did,” Harmony said in a low voice. “Honestly, I am. I... I hope that you can believe me.”

Pinkie Pie glanced up at her with a quirky grin. “And just why wouldn't I believe you, Har-Har?”

“Well...”

“Hmmm?”

“Because...” Harmony winced and leaned against a wooden support beam of the porch across from Pinkie. “Well, because I'm me, Miss Pie.”

“Well, if you were me, then I'd been in the toaster oven for too long!” She slapped the stony earth with a hoof and giggled insanely. “Heeheeheehee! Ohhhhhh...” She smiled as her blue eyes flew loopty-loops with her slowly declining airplanes. “One of these days, Har-Har, you're going to laugh. And when you do, it'll feel like gravity is giving up on you, and you won't even need a big fluffy cloud to float to where the giggles take you.”

“Is this something...” Harmony began murmuring but briefly paused as her eyes blinked across the gray landscape.

---

The bright foal stands alone. Everything is desolation. In the eternal night, she shoves rocks forever uphill. There is a rumbling in the distance. Her blue eyes quiver in response.

---

Harmony cleared her throat. “Is this something you've learned from experience?”

“What, the giggles or the toaster oven?”

“Does it really matter anymore?”

“Good answer! Heeheehee!” Pinkie Pie flung a hoof up, blindly caught a paper craft in mid-air, re-creased its wings, and flung it back towards the heavens. “There's nothing for you to be sorry about, silly filly. Everypony is different, even if we all put our bridles on one ear at a time. We can't all be expected to prance the same way. Some of us don't even prance at all. It makes me feel sad, but I can cash those checks if life wants to make 'em.”

“Is this it, then?” Harmony folded her front hooves and squinted down at the bright pony. “Is this you 'being sad?'”

“Oh, far from it!” She began making another airplane. “Just because I can feel sad doesn't mean I have to be it. 'True living means feeling without feelers.' That's something goodly Brevis once taught me, the smelly sap! Heehehe... Ahem. If you only live by the way you think you should feel, all you ever are is a feeling, you feel me... filly? Heheheh...”

“I... guess...” Harmony shrugged. “Still, all the things that happened today, all the horrible stuff that we witnessed, the crap with the council, your... uh... your father...” She gulped and bravely uttered, “Nopony would blame you for feeling very sad about all that.”

“I used to be sad,” Pinkie said as she squinted one eye and aimed the latest airplane. “I used to be sad a lot, a whole heaping bucket of sad. But the way I see it...” She flung the paper thing very high this time, and watched as it performed daring corkscrews in the air. “...horrible things happen, and then they're over as quickly as they begin. Why should ponies try and be so sad for so long, as if they're writing some really boring and yucky sequels to the quick, nasty moments in their lives?”

“Some ponies have no choice, Miss Pie. Sometimes sadness is all they know...” She murmured and glanced at the invisible, emerald flame beyond the reach of the paper airplanes. “Sometimes it's... all they have to go back to.”

“If there's anything I'm truly sad about, it's that Zecora has to do boring community service at Stonehaven,” Pinkie murmured in a pout. “And that you have to leave before you finished all of your stargazing.”

“Star... gazing... ?” Harmony numbly mouthed. She then hissed through her teeth and raised a hoof to her forehead. “Oh dear Epona... Stargazing!” The last pony wanted to slap herself. Suddenly, a thundering army of memories galloped to her across a billion stretched-out years between herself and a rooftop where a lone pegasus sketched the night sky across an endless sea of paper sheets. “Bullcrap on a bullcrap biscuit, I forgot about the stargazing.” She sighed through flaring nostrils, her weathered face torn to shreds by so many bleeding, shouting, intensely prevalent things that had roared across her soul self like so many trolls and capricorns. “Is there really no end to it, Spike?”

“Spike?!” Pinkie Pie made a face. She flicked her tail, forcing a protesting chirp from the resident reptile. “I see an alligator, but no baby dragon! Heeheehee!”

“I... I'm so tired, Miss Pie...” Harmony foalishly murmured, running a shameful hoof over the lengths of her copper face. She had drawn every constellation she needed to, and though she could still invent a way to convince her anchor to help her permanently preserve those stars before leaving for the future, it suddenly didn't seem anywhere near as important as the many bitter strings left unraveled all across the deep trenches of that town. It was like a possessed Dinky and a frightened Apple Family were being chased into a lonely corner by serrated clock hands, and the future scavenger wasn't even sure just how much of the green flame she had left to save all of these phantoms at once. “Just... so tired... and so... so...”

“Screwloosey?”

Harmony's lips curved ever so slightly. “And to think you ever once called me the Queen of Random.”

“You deserve to be the Queen of Something, Har-Har.” Pinkie hummed as she watched the planes. “That Council...” She gulped. “This city is a good city, just with some very grumpy ponies in it. Maybe someday, it will change for the good. It's just a shame that it didn't change for you...” Her blue eyes quietly danced towards the granite bosom of the world. “... or for the foals.”

“Somehow, Miss Pie...” Harmony murmured into her hoof. “I don't think that's in your power.”

“Hmmm... Funny...” Pinkie Pie said in a curiously emotionless drone.

“Funny? Why don't you sound amused?”

“Just, for a city that has—all my life—valued progress above anything else, Dredgemane never really wants to change, is all.”

Harmony slowly lowered the hoof from her face, her amber eyes reflecting an orange shade from beyond the lengths of the misty horizon. In a deep voice, she quietly quoted, “'And so it is the world began, and so it is the world shall end.'”

“Hmmm?” Pinkie Pie glanced over her shoulder. “What are you on about now, Har-Har?”

“Miss Pie, do you...” The future scavenger swallowed deeply, then continued, “Do you know about Ponymonium?”

“Sounds like a fungus that grew underneath the refrigerator at Sugarcube Corner.”

“It's a place, Miss Pie. A place of legend, a kingdom that the Lunar Imperialist Army... s-supposedly built inside the moon—in honor of their Empress and Ruler, Nightmare Moon—after the army was banished along with the dreaded Pony of the Night over a thousand years ago.” Harmony squinted up towards the half-lit disc in question. “Scholars and experts say that the dark blemish—the Mare in the Moon that existed for so long across the lunar surface—was really just an extension of the architectural glory of Ponymonium.”

“Oooooh... Sounds like a really happening place.”

“That's just it. It couldn't have been, Miss Pie. The only ponies left in Ponymonium today are either corpses or lost spirits,” Harmony said in a low breath. “When Princess Luna returned to Equestria, and after she was subsequently cleansed of the taint of Nightmare Moon, she confessed that there had been no surviving members of the Lunar Republic for centuries. They all died out nearly four hundred years ago. Nightmare Moon had been living alone in the palace that her deceased subjects built for her. A ruler of dead ponies is hardly a ruler at all.”

“What's with you and your horrible bedtime stories?”

“Don't you see, Miss Pie?” Harmony shook her head and gazed fitfully across the landscape as she thought out loud. “This city... this town... this entrenched hovel built into the ashes of Consus—the same petrified bone matter that makes up the moon—is a deathly, purgatorial thing. It has no beginning and it has no end. Haymane and his associates have built Dredgemane into a Ponymonium on earth, for it is forever a dead and dying now, devoid of hope, devoid of life, and devoid of the much-lauded progress that they praise Gultophine for and... and...” She winced visibly, tilting her head up and hissing through clenched teeth “There is just so much darkness in what they're trying to build, because they have filled this place with that darkness, more darkness than there is even on the moon...”

“Heeheehee... You say that as if you've been on the moon yourself, Har-Har! Who's loony now, huh?”

Harmony said nothing. She was staring deep into the abyss once more, only this time she was piercing the opaque blackness in front of her with an ease that she never grasped before.

“Har-Har?” Pinkie asked.

Harmony didn't reply to her. But she saw her. She saw...

---

The bright foal stands alone. There is a rumbling in the distance. She stares beyond the fields of desolation and she greets it. She greets a brand new horizon, a horizon not of one color, but of many... a single one-ness of light that splits into the infinite, joyous screams of the spectrum.

It does not take the Sundering of Consus to behold this sudden and multiplicitous chaos. It only takes a smile, a smile that goes on forever.

---

“She saw the bright shinies,” Harmony awoke to say.

Pinkie Pie raised an eyebrow beneath a mane of phenomenally blown hair.

Harmony's amber eyes darted viciously across the horizon, because there was suddenly too much to absorb in such a felicitously short amount of time. “Miss Pie... Miss Pie, there's a reason why Haymane and Company have built so much darkness here. They're worshiping the wrong spirit...”

“How do you mean, Har-Har?”

The last pony sighed long and hard. It was the opposite of painful. “Perhaps Gultophine did bring life to this desolation. Perhaps the patron Goddess of Rainbows did honor Consus by instilling this land with her spirit of progress and cultivation. But Goddess Gultophine left, Miss Pie. She finished whatever it was that she started and she left Equestria, along with three of her sisters. Say what we want to say, write what we want to write, preach what we feel like—we cannot change the fact that Goddess Gultophine is gone. Though her spirit may remain, she left us. What's more, Gultophine never came back.”

A shuddering gulp. Harmony's gaze fell, fell, and lovingly settled upon her anchor's pink face.

“But you did, Pinkie. You came back to Dredgemane. And you kept coming back to Dredgemane, to shine a singular and joyous light in the midst of so much darkness. You came back.”

“I... I...” Pinkie Pie innocently blinked, her lips pursed as she suddenly tilted her head to the side as if to study an awkward sight in front of her. “Har Har? Why are you crying?”

Harmony sniffled, running a hoof across her face and grinning in a sudden sunlight that only she could bask in. “Because I just remembered...” A shuddering smile. “I-I came back too...” She closed her moist eyes and bravely stared down the gaze of an absent-minded, purple dragon. “I too came back.” A swallowing, and her voice was more solid than the rock of that land. “And it was for a reason.”

“What reason...?”

Harmony cleared her throat. In a gentle embrace, she clasped her hooves to Pinkie's shoulders. “Miss Pie, I... Dredgemane needs your help with something. Follow me.”

---

In the far corner of town, where the dead shadows of the night met the insufferable haze of the morning, four elder ponies sauntered out of a warehouse and loaded several heavy crates of tools into the back of a rickety wooden wagon. The four of them grabbed opposite corners of the cart. In a lifeless canter, they tugged and pulled at the creaking vehicle, dragging it like a wheeled coffin across the misty lengths of Dredgemane dawn. In the far corner of the wagon, hidden in dust beyond the clattering of their tools, several beat-up violins rattled, just as devoid of sound as the four elders' beards were devoid of color.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

What kind of strength does it take to see light in the middle of a grand and infinite darkness? How much more strength does it take to make oneself into the source of that light?

Pinkie Pie must have known, for she had done just that. At one time in her life—a very bright and explosive time—she had come to know colors where once there was just a one-ness of illumination, an illumination that was hidden from her, and yet she found it, and furthermore she found the courage to keep on shining it through a smile that never ended.

What can you say to a courage like that? What, out of the many disparate and violent things that you have done, can possibly stack up against such boldness, such bravery, such gloriously absurd audacity?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Along the far side of Stonehaven's granite structure, a wooden pair of doors opened. Vimbert appeared to the gray haze of morning, his blue eyes overcome with bloodshot dreariness. Casting the misty sky a despicable look, he shoved the double doors all the way open and cleared the path for Nurse Angel Cake and Inkessa.

The two mares in nurse's gear stared down at the ground, a motion that they had been through many times previously during this all-too-familiar task, a task that involved the two of them somberly carrying a tiny wooden casket across the side lawn of Stonehaven Sanitarium, where Vimbert's wagon waited for it. Once the casket was laid down in the rear of the cart, Vimbert trotted over and tied himself to the vehicle’s rigging. He gave the two nurses a deadpan nod, and quite steadily pulled the rickety thing out from the dead end and down the trench that led to the awakening, gray heart of Dredgemane.

Nurse Angel Cake and Inkessa watched from afar. In a momentary breath, they leaned against each other and weathered the melancholic spasms jolting through each other's lungs.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Far above, from the fourth floor of Stonehaven, Suntrot had clambered up to the window pane. With twitching gold eyes, the tiny filly stared out upon the Grave of Consus. The gray morning mist wafted across her moth-eaten mane as she searched the desolate lawn in front of the Sanitarium and finally, finally spotted Vimbert and his wagon.

As the orange unicorn departed with the casket in tow, Suntrot murmured something. Deep, glistening pools formed underneath her eyelids. She would have cried, if only she wasn't overcome with a wave of unstoppable coughs. They dragged her down from the roof and plastered her—trembling—to the black and white tile floor below.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

In the upstairs hallway of the Pie Family Household, Quarrington shuffled silently out of an infinitely black bedroom. He made a bee-line for the stairs, but stopped halfway. Frozen like a ghost in the pathetically dim lanternlight, the adult stallion slumped up against a wall. He slid down to his haunches and brought a pair of hooves up to the sides of his skull. Once so limply huddled, he found an infinitesimal spot on the floor, and burned his twitching eyesight into it in a desperate race to melt away the moisture.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

At the bottom of the quarry, where the shadows were still darkest in early morning, Deacon Dawnhoof stood under a single flickering torch. Before him there stretched a sea of unkempt canvas beds. Half of them were still stained with blood, still smelled of phantom rust. The young priestly unicorn had an unscrolled parchment in his hooves, opened to the middle of Gultophine's Chronicles. But the unicorn wasn't reading it. His chestnut eyes were too blurry. He sat there, alone, like he had for the previous hour, like he could for decades to come, waiting feverishly for an exiled spirit to anoint him.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

We are all alone in your great, horrible darkness. Each and every one of us is alone. I may be alive while the rest of ponydom is not, but that still doesn't stop us from having a commonality in our isolation, in our polynumerous dead end legacies, in our fitful flounderings in the bottomless pit of you.

The wonderful irony—the hilarious joke that I now get but you must positively hate—is that as lonely as we've all been, as lonely as we'll all ever be, it still won't be as lonely as you.

I wonder what it's like to be you, to be one and only, to be everything and nothing and both at once. Nopony can relate to you, not even the end of ponies. No wonder you've taken so much from us and continue to do so, even to your own detriment, for soon I will no longer be around to bear witness to you.

Now there's a tragedy.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The four bearded ponies dragged the wagon across Dredgemane, across Town Square, beyond the saloon, past a pair of cloaked figures, and finally towards the edge of town, where a gravel road dragged down to meet the hollow trenches of Gultophine's Refuge. There, they stopped the wagon and dragged from the rear of the rickety cart an assortment of chisels and metal spikes. With ritualistic precision, they shuffled up to where the natural granite bosom of the Grave of Consus met with the brick-laid cobblestone of the City, and they began chiseling away at the rock until the solid gray sea below broke up into brittle gasps of black space.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

In a slow, sluggish trot, Vimbert finally reached his destination. He pulled his wagon to a stop in front of a giant, red brick building erected at the southeasternmost corner of the entrenched town. Four large smokestacks stretched up out of the building's three-story foundation, and there was a deep bass rumbling from within.

After untying himself from the rig of his wooden cart, Vimbert strolled around to the rear of the wagon, unloaded the tiny brown casket, and carried it slowly towards the entrance to the Dredgemane crematorium.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

From the balcony to his office, overlooking the gray abyss of his city, Mayor Haymane “stood” in a slump, his upper body propped upon the wooden railing to the lofty structure. His lower body squirmed lethargically upon the teetering tripod of squeaky wheels beneath him. His eyes quietly searched the distant horizon, dancing across the many lone farmsteads in the continental distance of the plateau. As his city slowly came to life below, murmuring with a deep hum like a household full of excited foals, the mayor took a deep breath, and quivered as a helpless victim to the tear or two that strolled down his cheeks.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I now know what it means to be stronger than you. I now know what it means to be courageous in areas that you never will be. It is simply impossible for you to be brave, as it is simply impossible for us not to be brave.

After so many years—my years and my friends' years—spent in forward and reverse time, I can safely say that I've figured you out, as well as your lies, as well as the many black shades you've used to paint your mistakes over.

And the biggest of your mistakes is thinking that somepony like me can simply be as miserable as you for the sake of being what I am. That's as fallacious as any argument can be. I am, in essence, an individual, for I stand apart from all others like me... and I stand apart from you.

You... what do you have to stand apart from? For one thing, it saves you from the horrific terror that embodies the act of being an individual. For another thing, you are robbed of the euphoria, robbed of the blind but blissful act of running—head on—screaming into the blackness that you once thought you had made perfectly opaque, but in fact it was full of colorful and beautiful stars, full of the bright shinies.

And, oh yes, it is so amazingly, fantastically mad.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

With hammers and pickaxes, the four elders chiseled large gaping holes in the rock. Once enough space was cleared, they each took turns reaching into the wooden crates in the back of their wagon and removing fresh new cobblestones. Each of the bricks bore a different name and a different set of dates, respectively matching the title and lifespan of a tortured miner who had passed away sometime through the dreadful hours of the night. Like a mechanical factory, they laid each brick—each name down into the granite spaces, and began pounding them into place with rusted mallets, adding to the cobblestone deaths of Dredgemane.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The tiny wooden casket slid open like a collapsible box. A foal-shaped shroud lay on a metal tray as it was rolled up to the iron mouth of a great furnace. A soot-stained worker nonchalantly flung the door open to a great, ravenous flame, briefly filling the bricklaid bowels of the crematorium with ash and embers.

Across the basement of dancing crimson shadows, Vimbert stood. Leaning against the brickwork, the orange unicorn watched from afar, staring with blue eyes that once more—as always upon this next fragile moment—forgot how to blink. Blindly, he reached into a pocket of his black jacket and produced a flask. His sip was quick, bitter, and unsatisfying.

The worker cranked an instrument on the outer belly of the furnace. With swift and emotionless precision, he reached a pair of limbs up and slid the metal tray in. The oven swallowed the foal-shaped shroud, and closed behind it with an echoing clang of the shutting iron lid.

Vimbert exhaled long and hard. His body was still as ice, but the silver vessel in his hoof rattled and rattled and rattled and...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

One brick after another, the elders filled the cobblestone sea of ghosts, until one lonesome stone was added to the ocean, sliding hissingly into its frigid crevice like a pebble dropped into the black heart of space. And the name that was on that stone read “Ice Song,” a coldly etched pair of words that briefly glistened in the morning dew, until a rusted mallet slammed it like a rivet into the Grave of Consus, blanketing the street with brief and pointless thunder before hundreds of dull hooves trampled blindly over it for eternity.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

No.

No, I can no longer be mad at you.

I can only pity you.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The misty morning of Dredgemane turned twice as thick as normal, as the fumes from the quarry's foundaries mixed with the smoke from the flanking crematorium. Fraternal smokestacks pierced the desolate air, billowing forth the pride and tears of a city built in the wing-shaped trenches of the continent.

Mister Irontail was in the middle of lethargically sweeping debris from the front of his blacksmith shop when the first fleck of ash fell on him. He ignored it, of course, choosing instead to straighten his beard and sweep his way towards the opposite side of his shattered window.

In the Town Square beyond his shop, hundreds upon hundreds of Dredgemaners strolled mutely along their routes. They hung their gaze directly forward, blinding themselves to the dead names beneath them while simultaneously ambivalent to the remains of their loved ones snowing down from above. In such numb fashion, Mayor Haymane's good citizens pursued their progress, their shuffling limbs unaffected by the errant flakes of dark gray ash that they were too diligent to recognize as either a memorial or a prophecy.

Against the flow of them, piercing the purgatorial miasma, were two cloaked figures. They made their way past the sea of earth ponies and trotted on an undisturbed path down the trench that led to Stonehaven.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

There was a knock on the door to the hut.

Sitting alone in the desolate interior, robbed of all her belongings and tools, Zecora glanced over with a frown. “Bah! Is it not enough that you strip me of my possessions?! Can I not sleep without another Dredgemane intercession?!”

In a grumbling breath, the zebra stood up, trotted over to the door, and flung it open.

“Unless it is time for my forced laboring, could you at least leave me to my...” She blinked confusedly at a pair of cloaked figures standing outside of Stonehaven and facing her. “...slumbering?”

“Heehee! Come on, Zecchy!” One figure lowered the hood of her cloak. A bright and shiny Pinkie Pie lit the air with her smile. “You call that a rhyme?”

“Pinkamena Diane Pie...” Zecora's blue eyes squinted. “Are you not in as much trouble as I?”

“And about to be in even worse!” Pinkie nudged the figure to her side, who promptly disrobed.

Standing beside her anchor, Harmony spoke in earnest. “Zecora, there isn't much time, and I can't explain why, but we need your assistance.”

“For what reason, pray tell, do you approach me?” The zebra nervously glanced over the two mares' shoulders. “I assumed you were a legally banished pony.”

“I am, and I don't care.” Harmony's eyes were like twin, amber daggers. “I'm here to make a cure to Immolatia.”

“You... Y-you confuse me, Miss Harmony.” Zecora made a face. “Do you not mean 'a remedy?'”

“Not a 'remedy,' not a 'salve,' but a cure,” Harmony said with a frown. “We're going to friggin' get rid of infernite poisoning once and for all, and we need your help.”

Comments

[ShimmeryLuna]

ooh... shit's gonna get serious.

[Warrior Kitten]

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