Apathy

by Pathos14489

Emplecti Mortem [Remastered]

Author's Note:

Apathy is by far my most popular fic for... ... ...I honestly have no idea. Reading it gave me a migraine a few months after the fact, so it wasn't the quality of writing. The plot is... mediocre at best, so it wasn't the plot. And my original intentions with even basic things, like how a character should act was lost because...I honestly don't know. I titled the story Apathy, and yet the very character who was supposed to be apathetic was the most whine ass-y, emotional ball of turmoil this side of fanfiction.net.

But I couldn't stop thinking. I couldn't get my head out of this universe and all the things I never explored, all the things I left out or messed up. That's when I thought up Requiem. But every time I tried to return back to this, my reference for some material? It's just... Messy and repulsive to read it. So I thought I'd fix it and be done with it. So! Over the next few days I'll be releasing one chapter a day of the re-edited and re-thought Apathy. It's more what I originally intended but for some reason I couldn't figure out how to put it on the page because I was a dumb ass or something.

And for anyone who's still interested in the original, I'll condense it into a single chapter, all the outtakes and bonuses included, and leave it, clearly marked, at the bottom of the chapter list.

Emplecti Mortem... The one title that I don't remember what in the actual fuck it was supposed to mean. I didn't double check that the translation was the same both ways and trying to decipher it doesn't make any sense. Which, I can't really blame myself. With the relatively explosive success Pulse had, especially compared to literally everything else I'd ever written, I was in a panic to try and get as big a profit off it as I could. I literally sat down and wrote Emplecti Mortem in like... a three hour sitting and shoved it onto the site as fast as I could.

I didn't even proof read the damn thing.

Honestly proof reading was only a trait I picked up halfway through this story. And a bit later, I found SpiritOfDancingFlames, one of my best friends who literally reads everything I write nowadays and helps me edit them. My grammar is nothing to scoff at, if I can be so egotistical, but he certainly understands a few of the subtler practices better, and he's not inside my head. Not to mention he doesn't know my intent and can provide insight that only a reader can.

This chapter was interesting, because I started off the story with an entirely different intent than what I finished it with. Mainly because I was still developing the entire concept all the way through. So I apparently changed things a few times and now details are a bit screw-y. Nothing really follows the same train of thought per chapter. Not that I want every chapter to feel the same, I want each one to feel unique and to be their own experience. But if it feels like it was written by a different author every paragraph, then there's an issue.

But the original chapter was a mess. A mere fraction of the ideas I solidified later on existed at this point.

Anyway, if you read the original mess, and this rant above, and apparently you're here again, reading this once more?

Thank you, all of you who read it and still continue to read it. ...For some reason.

This was sick. "Are you sure about this, Princess?" He asked her. Such a disgusting, though strangely attractive stallion. Kinda like a snake. "I'm not certain how stable she'll be psychologically, nor physically."

"I'm certain." Celestia said with her usual stern princess voice. She was so certain of herself, so sure that when she did this, her little protegee would run up and give her a big hug and thanks. Or perhaps she knew how I would react but simply didn't care. "Start the ritual." In a way, should I feel gratitude? That I mean this much to her?

Bum bum... Bum bum... Bum bum...

I could always feel my heartbeat as I grew older, but to be a heart? It was more than merely feeling the heartbeat. It was you. Your everything was in that heartbeat—how you thought, how you felt, how you counted the seconds down—that was the pulse of life everypony shared. But only I have ever known and will ever know the horror. The ungodly willpower it took to resist the madness racking my thoughts at each beat.

His magic felt sick and twisted. I would've had an urge to vomit had I had my body, but feeling that slick, oil-like dark magic envelope my every deepest emotion, my kindest, fondest memories and my darkest hates, felt wrong in all the bad ways. It was perverse to the very essence of equinity. If he turned on her and attempted to control my magic with his, it might tear half of Canterlot off the mountain, or it might give them all cotton candy bums. I'm not sure, but I know I really like the second option. Everypony has a good laugh, and nopony gets hurt except the pre-school teachers. ‘Help, help! A toddler just ate my cotton candy anus!’ I could hear it already.

He lowered me into this soulless husk of a mare. At least she had the goodness left in her heart not to sacrifice another life for mine. She had a team of necromancers hired, and given immunity to the laws of ethical magic use—thankfully only within reason—to construct a soulless body to implant me into. I wouldn't have thought she'd be so willing to delve into the dark arts this early in my life, but the corruption to the time line might have had something to do with that.

Thankfully, time itself didn't unravel. Both she and I can count our lucky stars for that.

As he touched me into the cadavers gaping chest cavity, I felt myself click into place like a gear in clockwork. I felt my magic expanding, building and growing; flowing into the never living mare's horn.

«♦»

Flash—Clunch!

I magicked her—my chest closed instantly, shutting out the stallions magic and expelling it from near my soul as fast as I could; a cloud of black hate forming above me, before it quickly dissipated. My body seized, trying to breathe through missing lungs. My hooves smacked against the marble ground of Canterlot castle, cracking and chipping it as my innate Earth pony magic began to flow through my new body. "Hold still!" He yelled in frustration more than anything, his magic helplessly trying to still my flailing body as I acclimated and my lungs grew. "I have to open you up and put your lungs in!"

My eyes widened at him in white hot rage. I reached within my soul, pulling for my magic to my already blazing horn and shot a bolt of kinetic energy at him, but my body trying to breath with fetal lungs messed my aim up entirely. The shot went far too far left, turning the far wall to rubble as it burst out into the adjacent corridor. One of my lung expanded rapidly, a gurgling breath tore its way down my throat as my body force air into the lung.

"Twilight, stop! He is trying to help you!" Celestia tried to hold me herself this time, her magic bearing down like elephants standing on my skull. I heard my heart beat again as I willed my magic to overpower hers. Like crumbling an eggshell, the weight disappeared instantly.

Then my second lung expanded. With a wrenching breath that tasted like blood and vomit, I found my new voice. "You selfish brat!" I turned on her; screamed at her, stumbling to my hooves as my container’s once green, but now browning, mane bellowed in the air behind me, expanding rapidly; filling the room. My ancient magic had begun to taint the body like cancer, tingeing the green coat brownish; it was turning it into me. "I asked you not to! I wanted peace! You lied to me and broke my trust!"

My voice tuned itself closer to my own with each syllable. She started to retreat in steps away from me, my magic expanded throughout the castle uncontrollably like wildfire and she was straining to keep a fraction of it in this room. "You endangered all of time and space for a petty desire! You have no idea what you've risked, you suicidal fool!" I slammed my fore hooves on the floor, shattering the marble around me in frustration.

"Twilight, I'm sorry!" She pleaded as my bones shifted, my height grew to match her within seconds. "I know what did was risky and selfish, but I couldn't let you die! I couldn't kill you!" And then higher, my inches towered over her in moments.

My face contorted in emotions I can't even describe. "You should have left me in torment." I hissed at her, before calming my raging magic in an instant. "I will not play this game with you, Celestia." I stalked towards her just another step, and another, now looming over her like a mother scolding a child. "You betrayed me in the most sick and twisted way I can possibly imagine. You bet the lives of my... your… Our subjects and every other life in this universe on the small chance that they wouldn't die when you brought me back here." I stared at her a moment, and sighed as I backed to the center of the room again. I felt the movement inside my upper back as bones grew and shifted old ones around.

"Celestia, my dear old friend." I grimaced. “I ask only one thing of you. Let go.” I said with sorrow in my heart, concentrating all of the ethereal waves of power that flooded from my body into the surrounding area into the never-mare. "I just want peace, please grant me this one small request."

She yelled, charging at me with tears streaming. But my ears were the first to go. My skin peeled and caught fire, a lavender and violet fire that danced off of me. It fluttered away, taking my meticulously crafted body with it. But through the agony of scorching myself alive, and through Celestia trying to extinguish the magical fire, I could hear it calling me again.

Bum bum... Bum bum... Bum bum...

«♦»

She was beyond selfish and petty; she was not the Celestia I knew. The body this time was devoid of color, but rune signs traced along each limb from a central gem implanted on the base of the neck between it’s shoulder blades; the runes were branded on. The lungs were already in this time too, they had discovered better spells in the forbidden archive that could simply phase me through them. "I won't lose you, Twilight. I can't lose you." She said.

Around the mares horn were several golden and iron rings of various enchantments. Magic binders. She hoped to at least limit my magic until she could calm me down. She nodded to the necromage stallion, who nodded back as he lifted me from the glass vase from Celestia's study. It only had a very simple stasis enchantment I had disengaged a long time ago, nearly right after being put it in. His magic was just as horrid as the last stallions, it still rubbed me in all the wrong ways as he lowered me through the new body and sat me in place.

«♦»

Flash—Clunch!

My heart sat in place as I regained feeling in my hooves in almost an instant. Air flooded into my new lungs again; the small hole letting access to my heart and lungs closed. "You’re a disappointment." My first words, they managed to tune this one's voice a lot more like mine. Were these another circumstance, I would've been slightly impressed.

"Twilight, try to understand." She trotted over to me, staring into my eyes. "Please try to understand how much I can't do what you asked of me."

"I understand, Celestia." I can feel my magic building at the base of my horn. It feels like my skull might explode from the pressure, the enchantments are actually somewhat decent for the period. "There is little I don't understand." Brute forcing them would be too dangerous, it might hurt her. "One of those rare things however, is why you can’t understand my wish and give it to me." I opened my eyes, glaring at her from the floor. "What I don't understand is why you would give me your word–"

"Twilight–"

"Why you would give me your word that you would help me find peace, then immediately steal my very soul away and endanger countless lives in the process." I found the weak point in the first ring, I snaked my magic into it and started on the next.

"If I didn't, you never would have let me try to help you!" She waved her hooves around, whether she were trying to justify her actions to me or to herself I don't know. "You would have stopped me before I had the chance."

The second and third ring fell quickly; I had learned the pattern. "Let you help me?" I laughed at her. I openly, without any restraint, laughed at her. "Let you help... Do you have any idea what this feels like? To be the the reason everypony you ever loved has died?" Then the fourth.

"Twilight… I unde-"

"You don't understand anything!" I laughed again. "You've had Luna all your life, even when she was gone, she was never once gone forever. You always knew she'd be back." I closed my eyes. "You think you realize what it's like, but you've only experienced half of it. One day, when you lose somepony like Luna? Somepony who you thought would never, ever go away?" I opened my eyes again, my magic disengaging the enchantments on the magic binders at once. "That is when you will get a hint at what I feel like, that is when you will want to die, and that is when Twilight will steal your death from you as well." My mane floods the room again, Celestia and the dark mage backing off in shock.

I sighed. “I’ll never give this up, Celestia. Never.” The runes covering this body turned to soot, the gem falling out and tinkling on the floor. I concentrated it again, poof.

Bum bum... Bum bum... Bum bum...

«♦»

She used to talk to me, plead with me to reconsider every night; tell me about her day. Now she keeps me in the dark like her shameful little secret. I felt a new, equally horrible, magic engulf me, I couldn't decide whether her ignoring me is a blessing or a curse as I was lowered into yet another body.

I'd long since lost track of time. How many years had she been trying to force life unto me? How many decades had passed now? How long until she grows up enough to end this menagerie of denied torture and risk?

If I'd learnt one thing from immortality, it was patience.

«♦»

Flash!

In an instant my senses spanned out, they had refined the process to a simple teleport and a quick spell cast. No messy holes in my body, nothing of that sort. "Are you ready to accept life this time?" Her question was dull and impassive. She had grown past the begging and pleading, instead now seeming to treat this as a monthly chore.

This time, I didn't even bother to talk to her. I didn't even look at her. What should I do this time? I have a mental list of everything I've done to reset the destroy my bodies, I do ever so hate repeats. Maybe I should teleport all my skin off and replace her bed sheets with them? I wonder at what point she'll finally kill me out of anger and spite? What can I possibly do to anger her that much? "Are you already thinking of how to kill yourself this time?” Duh. "Don't you even want to know what's at stake this time?"

I curled an eyebrow up, keeping my eyes closed. Trying to plead with her kindness and her mercy had failed. She didn't care about her subjects as much as she cared about me. In some twisted way, I should feel a sense of importance, but it only gives me sorrow.

My only option is patience.

I heard her hoof steps close in near my head, barely an inch away. Then I felt her warm, peppermint scented breath on my face. "I love you so much, Twilight. Please, let me save your life." Everything has it's end, Celestia. Even me. In fact, my end was supposed to happen a long time ago. ...Or in a very long time, depending on how you look at it. I almost hummed to myself in thought. After all my experience with time magic, I still have issues with that. Is something that happened before for me but in the future considered before or after?

She chuckled. "Humor me. At least give me a little satisfaction that you know what you are going to do before you kill yourself this time." She moved away and I opened my eyes. I'm in a hospital. "She's just in the next room, please come with me and see her." I stood up, my mane extending and trailing all throughout the room behind me, and yawned impassively. I couldn't care less, but it gave me an excuse to come up with a really creative death this time. I already liked the bed sheets one. Maybe replace Luna's bed sheets? "We've made quite a few advances in magi-technology and arcane spell weaving over the last sixty years, Twilight." Cadenza? Actually, no. That might damage the time stream more than I'd like if she's traumatized this early in life.

"It feels like it passed in a heartbeat to me." I trotted over to her, my voice was perfect; save for my monotone. They had almost perfected the body after so many tries, it was a lavender unicorn mare just a slight bit taller than Celestia, but my magic was already transforming the body even more. They couldn't create her as an alicorn yet, but it was only a matter of time.

She smiled that smile she always does. I at one point found it charming, but then I learned that wasn’t her real smile. I met the real Celestia and she was beautiful. "It's all thanks to the Princess of Friendship. But, you already knew that, didn't you?"

"It’s the truth.” I shrugged.

She allowed a frown for only a moment before grinning again. "I think you will be proud of me in a moment. If I'm correct, which I usually am nowadays, I think I found the perfect reason for you to stay around." She tipped her head and trotted out of the room into what I can tell is a much larger observatory. "I’ have had Twilight researching time magic and its risks a lot lately."

"Then she should already have informed you that changing this much is already a risk."

"I've also had her researching a spell to circumvent these risks."

"Sounds even more risky than simply dealing with the problems in place already."

I trotted into the room with her and glanced down at the sight of an ongoing surgery. "She was successful in her research of course, hence why I've ordered the deconstruction of Trottingham."

I turned up and gaped at her in shocked horror. "You can't! Trottingham was a very important part of history in the next two hundred years, you can't simply–"

"I can, and I already did six months ago." She smiled at me again. I stared at her. "I went back into your future again and studied the notes and photos you left in the dungeon. I found a few things interesting and I've devised the perfect solution." She gestured to the ongoing surgery with a hoof, "I believe you knew young Glowheart?"

I immediately stood on the railing and focused down into the room, staring down at the nurses and doctors busying about around a table in the center of the room.

"'Glowheart', it's quite ironic really." She too stood on the railing, instead hooking a hoof around to rest her head on lazily. "When I saw her name and information in the birth records, I thought it was too good to be true. But there she was, Glowheart of the Spark family, a direct offshoot of the Sparkle family, the first unicorn foal born to them in nearly three hundred years."

I stared as they placed her heart back inside her carefully, strings of magic reattaching the veins and already closing her up. "What are you playing at Celestia? If you viewed my journals, you know how important she will be. She has to be Twilight's pupil, or she won't ascend. The Equestrian Republic will never come to pass."

"I know." She almost giggled from amusement. "That's why I had her glowing, golden heart removed and bound to your new body." She tapped her chin almost thoughtfully, "I had Twilight herself design the protective enchantments, and I personally engraved them. If it detects her magic at all, or if your body dies, it will engage and make her pure little heart vapourize."

As the color left my face, she lost her cheery attitude immediately and glared at me, edging her muzzle close to mine threateningly. "You've pushed my hoof, Twilight. Now you will understand how I feel." She jabbed her gold plated hoof on my chest, "I’m giving you the choice to kill her if you want to die. Do this, and I will grant you the peace you want." She backed up, leaving me mouth agape. "Show me you're capable of what you're asking me." She frowned at me.

I stared at her in the purest form of betrayal and horror. What other choice could I make?

«♦»

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E.E. Cummings

Comments

[Dlaf rferg]

Woah my head is explodified woah

[Dragonwaz]

Emplecti Mortem... The one title that I don't remember what in the actual fuck it was supposed to mean.

Well it one letter away from being
Mortem amplecti which is Embrace Death

[disnoticus]

I what I just all I can think is fuck you celestia your a Dick

[Vaguely Demented]

Playing surgery chicken is a new approach.

[Zuabug]

Wow, that blackmail.

[Kadigan]

Well, it's fairly clear that this isn't the Equestria we otherwise know... I don't think the Celestia we know would be this stupid, or shortsighted... or, for that matter, this cruel.

You don't do things at any cost.

[Shining Dawn]

I'm trying to wrap my head around why Twilight wants to die. When she was stuck as the last living thing in existence, sure, but now? Now she could live. And if she's worried about accidentally rewriting time, then she's the shortsighted one. The time line has already been altered, and really, that should be considered a good thing. From what we saw, the eventual future can't get much worse. Changing the future could easily make things better.