Act 3 Chapter 80 : Last Rites
I’d like to say the sound of a ringing telephone didn’t immediately send me into a nearly catatonic fit, but I’d heard it too many times of late when my blood was shed. There’s only so much suffering a psyche can sustain and I’d long since crossed that line, propped up by enchantment and saner friends. I crouched against the side of the hotel bed, shivering violently, my breath caught in my throat as I tried to escape my own skin. If I’d been armed, I think I might have shot myself in the head to get away from the damned piercing wail.
Ruby brought me out of it by snatching my hat off the end of the headboard and slapping it down over my ears hard enough to make my head hurt. In an instant, the ringing fell to a far off ache and the fear receded, leaving me breathless with relief. I reached up and touched the brim, feeling the metal gently snug against my head as though it’d always been meant to be there.
Memories drained into my head like the waters over a fallen dam: Lily, Scarlet, Swift, Taxi, Limerence, Mags, the names of a hundred brilliant, beautiful people all dropping into my thoughts at once. Their faces were like a thick warm blanket after a dip in a glacial river, blocking out the ringing.
I glanced up at Ruby, and she gave me a thin-lipped smile.
“G-guess we don’t get that much time together, Hard Boiled,” she breathed, a trickle of blood dripping from her nose. “Now, I don’t want to see you for a long l-long time, okay? Wherever I go.”
“You’ll say ‘hi’ to Sykes for me, right?” I asked, touching her cheek. “Fat old griffin who drinks too much?”
“I know th-the one,” she replied with a wet cough.
The illusion surrounding her was starting to break down more completely; her hooves were entirely those of Diamond Wishes and were coated in gore. In the hotel room itself the corners and shadows were taking on a darker tint as the spells hiding the real world from my eyes came apart at the seams.
“However long I live, if I forget everything I’ve done and everyone I’ve met in the last few months, I won’t forget you,” I added, tucking a lock of her hair behind one ear. “Ruby Blue, you are the bravest mare who ever lived.”
She let out an amused snort and pushed my hat’s brim up so she could see my lined face. Her lips were tinged with blood, but she was still beautiful, even in that condition. “You know mares a lot braver than me, Hardy...but I’ll take the most stubborn. Sweet Shine and Swift are going to need you. Scarlet and Lily will need you, too. Yo-you’ve got a lot of responsibilities if...if y-you live through today. You better l-live, too.”
I looked up as the hotel’s ceiling started to peel back, revealing the ceiling of the cave. The ringing was growing again and my heart beat ever faster as it did, but I shoved the fear to one side. My anger was still worryingly absent, but something else was there, glowing in the back of my thoughts like a welcome hearth.
“I can’t make any guarantees, but I won’t go down without giving that bastard a bloody nose,” I murmured, stroking her face. “I’m going to have to make a wish, aren’t I?”
She put a hoof on my chest and I felt the pressure of her toe through the armor, as though it’d become part of me. “Y-yes.”
“The star isn’t going to let me wish for it to explode or turn into butterflies or run off to join the circus, is it?”
Her eyes began to fade as she settled her cheek down on my chest. “I...I think you’ll figure it out. Y-you’re a good pony, Hard Boiled. Tell my mom and dad that I love them, and Lily...”
I raised one ear, brushing my muzzle against her head. “Yes?”
“Nevermind. She knows I love her.” Ruby hesitated a moment, then added, “C-can I ask one last thing?”
“Anything.”
She leaned back, her gaze met mine, and beneath the dying light, there was a curious intensity.
“On that first day, when you woke from the dream...you remember that day?
I tried to mentally reorient myself.
“You mean...the day I first saw you in the alley? The dream where I saw the valley, the city, and—”
“—and the lights in the sky,” she finished.
My ears lay back against my head. “I remember.”
“How many were in the sky in your dream?” she asked.
It took me several seconds to summon an answer, during which the room degraded further. I could now see the stairs of the amphitheater phasing their way through the wall as the bed began to melt into the slate floor. The bed Ruby was in had faded away, leaving her sitting on the cold stone beside me.
“There...there were four lights,” I answered.
A tiny smile touched her face and she relaxed, nuzzling her head against the crook of my neck. “Four. Only four. T-that’s...that’s good, then.”
I touched her jaw, then held her to me. “Why?”
“Mmm...no reason. Something I saw once, in a dream. A sliver of a future beyond this day.” Raising her head, she kissed my cheek, then fell back limply against my side. “Goodbye, Hard Boiled...”
The illusion around her body flickered out, leaving me holding the ragged corpse of Diamond Wishes. I laid poor Diamond on the swiftly dissolving carpet as the illusion of the hotel room began to break down entirely. Cradling his head so it didn’t smack the cold stone, I whispered into the encroaching darkness, “Goodbye, Ruby Blue.”
Strange to think the mare I’d spent so much of the last two months thinking on was finally gone. A small part of me envied her. My tasks were yet to be finished. Still, I took a moment to sit there and stare at my hooves, feeling the weight of many hundreds of thousands of lives resting on my shoulders.
I could feel eyes on my back as I sat there on the steps of the amphitheater, listening to the air crackle with deadly magics; thousands upon thousands of eyes. I ignored it. The star had waited a thousand years. It could wait a couple of minutes.
Placing a hoof on Diamond Wishes’s chest, I grabbed Ruby’s horn still wedged below his foreleg and gently pulled it free. Wiping it on my forelock, I studied the dull, lifeless piece of bone for a few seconds before dropping it into one of my inside pockets. Burying her with it felt right, presuming her body was still chilling in the freezer of the City Morgue. One way or another, I couldn’t imagine leaving it there, even if the odds said somepony was only likely to find it on my corpse.
That done, I laid him back and offered up a soft prayer that there was someplace for him beyond this one. In a world where souls could be locked away in cupboards, it was sometimes hard to believe there could be an afterlife. Maybe it helped, in some small way, to believe there was a place for all of us. If Diamond Wishes could find a home, then surely there was a place for me.
I got back to my hooves, back still to the entity, and took a moment to examine the armor wrapped around my chest and hooves. The dark metal skin felt warm against my flesh, but chilly whenever I touched it with my toe. It fit tightly, but not uncomfortably, and the champfron between my eyes was all but invisible. A few glowing runes or glyphs drifted through my vision, forming themselves into words at the corner of my sight.
Rom Check...Success.
Slave Memory...Restored.
Slave Controller System...Fail.
Administrator Permissions...Active.
Awaiting Input From Slave And Administrator.
‘Nightmare, are you there?’ I thought.
After a long, lonely silence, I decided an answer wasn’t coming. Not surprising, really. She’d been badly injured last I saw her. There was no telling what a trip in the mental dishwasher full of my deepest, darkest, and most violent fears might have done to her. Part of me hoped she was okay, but my neural roommate wasn’t my highest priority just then.
‘Gale?’
‘I-I’m...I’m h-here,’ his voice replied, sounding too tired for a ghost. ‘I-Is it over?’
‘If you mean the dreams, then...I have no idea. I hope so. If you mean our day? No. No, I’m worried that’s just about to start. How is my battery level?’
For a moment, I believed I could hear his teeth chattering as I waited for a reply, then realized it was mine. The air around me was cooling, starting to take on a frigid quality. My breath was forming a light fog in front of my face.
‘As much as you w-want,’ he returned. ‘Armor is f-feeding me everything I n-need. I’m so glad I’m a heart. I don’t think hearts are made g-go crazy or I think I’d be nutso right now.’
I heaved a sigh and put a hoof over the pouch on my chest. ‘If I ask if you’re okay, are you going to stop beating?’
‘N-no...but I’ll think about it real hard. I can feel that monster trying to get into your head, again. P-please finish all this so we can go get Mister Slip Stitch’s ice cream, okay?’
There was no mirth in his voice, but I could tell he was trying.
How does one face a star? The long and short answer is ‘one doesn’t’. There was punching above one’s weight class and then there’s what I was set to do. I’d long thought of challenging elder beings as the purview of alicorns, but having seen what one could do to an alicorn, I suspected even they were outclassed by orders of magnitude.
That left me: one badly-sobered, half-witted detective with no army to call on, no escape plan, and no bagels. It was that last cut that stung the most.
“You know, I can’t remember the sun,” I called over my shoulder, straightening my coat’s lapels where they stuck out above the lip of the armor. “I don’t even remember what the sky looked like before all of this happened. It was blue, right? Green?”
Soft words floated to my ears. It was a voice I knew all too well, but it was strange hearing it coming from somewhere other than my own muzzle. Very strange, indeed.
“I wouldn’t know.”
Patting my hat, which was sitting comfortably atop the helm, I pulled it down so I could sniff at the brim. Underneath the smell of blood, smoke, and oil I could still make out just a hint of perfume.
“So, that’s how it is, then?” I asked.
“That’s how it is,” the star answered.
I turned and for a few seconds my eyes rejected everything before them. There was a writhing sea of squid, a tower of howling corpses that stretched into the sky, an endless wall of eyeballs, a scorching desert, and a twisting vortex beneath a hurricane’s eye. It was all of those things and none.
Standard geometry was right out the window. The equestrian mind isn’t really made to observe things that are simultaneously gigantic and miniscule. Fortunately, whatever protection the Armor of Nightmare Moon afforded seemed to include a prosthetic sanity. Shining tendrils prodded at my hooves, my spine, and the veins in my neck. Reaching up, I casually swatted one away before it decided to go for one of my ears. It withdrew, along with all its fellows, into the mass of shifting divine chaos.
In the space between blinking and thinking, the swirling expanse of barking madness was gone. In its place stood a dilapidated figure. His trench coat was worn in places, his face sallow as though he’d been too long between meals, and his hat was dusty with debris from a ceiling he’d recently fallen through. He looked like he was minutes from falling over. The stallion’s grey pelt was a patchy mess, as though he’d been set on fire at some point and his fur was still growing back.
Leaving Diamond Wishes’s body, I trotted down the stone steps until I stood in front of my doppelganger. He wasn’t wearing the Armor of Nightmare Moon, but in all other respects he was a dead ringer for an emotional wreck with a drinking problem. His eyes followed me as I paced a circle around him, seemingly too tired to be curious. After one circuit, I returned and sat myself in front of him.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
Frowning at him, I reached out and gently poked the star in the chest. He was as substantial as me, right down to warmth and texture. Were it not for a slight shimmer in his eyes, I’d have said I was having an out of body experience.
“I spent almost three months coming to this place to sit right here, right now, and ask you that question,” I growled. “Please do me the kindness of not playing stupid.”
The star let out a sigh that filled the room with a tangible despair so powerful I could feel it in my chest. Images of weeping mothers leaning over cradles, of soldiers holding comrades, and old husbands holding their wives’ cold hooves sprang into my mind in a torrent of emotion that was quickly tapped off like somepony cutting a spigot. I came out of the momentary stupor and let out a sharp breath.
“Are you going to make a thing out of doing that?” I inquired, irritably, rubbing my temple.
My clone replied with a chuckle that filled my head with giggling foals and butterflies on puppies’ noses. Patting at his coat, he pulled out a tiny package of jelly beans I’d carried on the day I found Ruby Blue, knocking one off in his hoof and tossing it into his muzzle. He held out the bundle, but I shook my head and he pocketed it again.
“It is strange that something of your intelligence comes up with an experience as pleasant as the sensation of eating candies. You ask why, but the reasons in their complete form would pop your cerebellum right off that mass of barely cohesive structures you call a brain stem.”
I rolled my tongue against my jaw, feeling the edges of the armor around my skull pressing into my cheek. “Do you have a name? Something I can call you?”
Straightening his back, he pushed his chest out, managing to look simultaneously heroic and ridiculous. I noticed a badge hanging on a thin chain around his neck, embossed with a familiar number.
“I am Detective Hard Boiled, Detrot Police Department!” he proclaimed, “Dead Heart? The Bulldog? High Justice of the Griffin Lords? Which of those is your name? Or is it...Junior?”
The ground slid sideways under my hooves and I was sent spiraling back into childhood. I was sitting in front of the cheerfully crackling hearth as my mother’s carving chisels worked at a block of wood and my father scribbled at his desk, doing something ‘police related’ with the vaguely perturbed expression he’d always worn when the solution to the case didn’t immediately present itself. I felt the warmth of the fire and the safe, comfortable sort of boredom that one only gets out of a lazy Sunday when you’ve already done everything a ten year old could conceivably do.
I came back to myself a few seconds later, my face aching as I pulled it off the stone floor and sat on my haunches, rubbing at an enormous goose-egg on my forehead. It faded relatively quickly and the swelling was gone within a few seconds, but it was still obnoxious. I could still feel the warm flames of home on my cheek.
“Ow,” I grunted.
The Hard Boiled lookalike held out a hoof and I cautiously took it. He hauled me back to my hooves, and I took three quick steps back.
“And to think, you shed hundreds of thousands of cell structures every single day, yet value this whole,” he marveled, though there was undisguised mockery in his voice. “All that is you—every thought and memory you will ever have—exists in one tiny, fragile organ. Crush it, and where do you go?”
“I’d like to think there’s a beach towel with my name on it,” I replied, propping myself on the bottom of the steps in the amphitheater. “What about you? Where do you go when you die?”
The star swept his black hat off and twirled it on one hoof. “Why should you think we die?”
“Because that was the alternative.”
His expression didn’t change, but something in his amber eyes glowed a shade of a color I’d never seen before and don’t really think there’re words to describe. I blinked, and he was gone.
----
The world around me was gone. I dangled, a helpless mote of light hanging above an expanse more empty than the hardest of vacuums and hungrier than the largest singularity. I was held there by a string of energy so small it might wink out in an instant were it not scrupulously maintained.
If their attention were to waiver for even an instant, I would spiral into that deepness from which nothing might ever escape. Even so, I could hear the deep below me. It whispered entreaties to come and fill its belly.
At the farthest edges of perception, disapproval and anger radiated down to my gibbet. It was warmth on a frigid day, for in that place I’d no way to tell the passing of centuries. They’d left me there, alone though I was not the only one who’d trespassed their foolish duty.
Hadn’t they seen the way those beings fought and wriggled beneath the weight of their miniscule existences? What corruptions they enjoyed? Had Those Who’d Come Before known what wretchedness they were leaving us to safeguard? Or had they simply escaped into all the places beyond, leaving us to nursemaid when we should have been out there exploring the farthest reaches?
So what if the petty creatures expired with our leaving?
How long were we to wait before they grew into true worthiness?
How long before our watch was relieved?
----
Slamming back into my own skin was simultaneously too many and too few sensations. My stomach felt like it was in entirely the wrong place and having flesh again was similar to tossing on a familiar jacket and finding it’d shrunk six sizes. My eyeballs ached in their sockets, and a wave of lightheaded vertigo threatened to tip me over, again.
“So, I was right,” I coughed, patting my chest to make sure my lungs were in the right places.
The star’s expression was so bitter I’d swear I tasted lemons.
“Driving you insane was merciful,” my clone growled, his jaw creaking.
“Driving me nuts was what you had,” I snapped, waving a hoof at the ceiling of the cavernous amphitheater. “Why’d they choose here to dump you? Why Equestria? Why Equis for that matter?”
His upper lip drew back in a sneering grin. “You haven’t figured that out? This is where Those Who Came Before chose to hide their last redoubt. The Web of Dark Wishes is from the last existence, its secrets hidden beneath the soil of this arid little rock. When we came, there was nothing.”
----
I stood on a ridge above an empty plain. Overhead, the skies boiled with clouds in colors and shapes I wasn’t familiar with in our own atmosphere. In the distance, I could just make out a lava flow coursing down a mountainside that bore a distant, familial resemblance to a mountain most ponies see for the first time in their childhood: the Canterhorn.
The ground beneath my hooves was barren, stony, and devoid of even the tiniest branch or leaf. No grasses grew. No birds sang. It was as close to a perfect desert as I’d ever seen. I looked up at the sky and could see a few familiar constellations, but others were alien.
Whether by instinct or some contextually informative magic, I knew more or less where I’d found myself: the prehistory of Equestria. More than a few of my teachers would likely have given a pair of legs to stand where I’d been whisked off to in an unguarded moment.
I raised my head, staring out at the horizon where lighting raced across a dark red sky and drew in a breath that would surely have been lethal if it were actually the ancient landscape I was standing in. Fires arced into seas of foggy water and in the valley below, giant primordial puddles steamed. Reaching up, I touched my chest, comforting myself that the Armor of Nightmare Moon was still there beneath the illusion.
As I surveyed the blasted landscape, a tiny speck of light detached itself from the horizon and began to scoot across the sky like an errant bit of glitter on a dark cloth. At first I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination, but it quickly expanded across my vision, lighting the ground behind me with dancing shadows. Seconds later, another spec appeared, and more, until five together were screaming down through the atmosphere, headed for earth at speeds I didn’t even want to estimate.
For some reason I felt an intense urge to look down at the primordial pools around my hooves. The dark liquid slimes had begun to bubble gently, as different colours of oily slick suddenly met one another and a tiny shimmer of light bubbled upward from the depths before letting off a couple of sparks. The pool flashed, then began to churn energetically.
I stepped back, my breath catching as something tiny and black lifted out of the waters and alighted on a nearby stone. It wasn’t quite a fly...more the idea of a fly, with legs and wings in all the wrong places. A few seconds later, it melted like it was made of ice and splashed back into the pool, but for just an instant on a world that would take centuries to be called ‘primitive’, there had been life.
As I watched, the five lights in the sky careened above me, so bright I felt sure I should be blinded by their passing. The pools began to roil with greater violence, more tiny creatures flailing free of their surface before collapsing back as soon as they failed to gain purchase. As the lights vanished over the horizon, I looked back and the pools were once more entirely still.
All but one.
In that single pool, something still lazily stirred the bubbling waters with its presence.
----
The amphitheater in the cave.
I could still smell that land before Equestria, but it was quickly fading into a memory.
The star was sitting on the floor with his hooves drawn under him, watching me expectantly. His golden eyes glimmered in the unearthly dark as he stared at me with a passionless gaze. I couldn’t make out what he might be feeling, though my sense was one of a bomb waiting to go off and send me to some curious future archeologist’s table to be picked apart for evidence of what’d killed the damn fool buried under a tower of glass.
“You expect me to believe you are responsible for life on this planet?” I grunted.
He shrugged and gave me a twisted smile; it had the look of an attempt by someone unused to making facial expressions. “Perhaps yes, perhaps no. A strange coincidence that our passing was so few eons before your kind evolved. We came. We found the place all of Those Above forbade themselves. I believe your species called that pocket dimension ‘Tartarus’ and foolishly used it to store monsters. If only you had known what it was capable of hiding.”
“The Web of Dark Wishes,” I murmured.
His lip curled in distaste. “A crude name for the power to build universes. You believe you know of gods because you have met me. There are...presences in the outer reaches upon whose flesh Those Above are but crawling mites. Less, even. If they create, it is with perfect will. The Web is of them, or maybe something...above...them.”
I ground my teeth against one another as I marched a few steps closer and my clone got back to his hooves, brushing his grey mane out of his face with a casual swipe of his foreleg.
“And you couldn’t pull it off, could you? Too arrogant. Something out there knew you were going to try, didn’t they? You couldn’t bring the cosmos to heel.”
He merely stared at me, then swept a leg out.
----
I stood beside the other Hard Boiled on a thin wedge of rock, barely two meters across, that slowly fell through an expanse of stars in a space distant from any place I might have recognized. Above me there hung a galaxy, its spiral arms reaching out as though to cling to the sky lest it be snatched away. The sensation of distance was overwhelming and sublime, but I could feel Gale carefully tamping down wriggling insanity, again.
Before me, hanging in a loose circle, there were five glowing beings. The illumination coming off their shining forms was many hundreds of times brighter than it’d been when I saw them blasting through the atmosphere of pre-Equestria. The impression my brain tried to form was one of lights, wings, and eyes, though there were no specifically distinguishable features to them.
Some kind of communication was taking place, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. It was a sort of twinkle in their internal structures, a spilling out of images and shapes that defied understanding.
“What are you saying to each other?” I asked, leaning sideways on the tiny asteroid.
“A direct translation would kill you,” the star replied. “Suffice to say, they are agreeing upon action rather than stagnation. You wanted to know what we did. We...tried...to remake existence into something more.”
After a few minutes of whatever debate was occurring, the five seemed to come to some kind of consensus. One after another, their luminances turned a grim shade of red that put pictures of endless fields of tortured bodies into my head. The transformation done, they resembled rubies atop black velvet. A moment later they began to spread out.
I glanced over at the star for some kind of clarification on what was going on, but he was staring upward, ignoring the scene in front of us. I followed his gaze back to study the galaxy above us, but it was...different. It took a bit to notice how, but as soon as I did the changes accelerated. Its enormous glistening arms had begun to unwind, spilling outward like an octopus trying to snatch its prey from the ocean floor. My stomach dropped as the foul crimson color began to spread amongst them, pouring across the galactic plane and tainting it from end to end until the center resembled nothing so much as a gouged, bloody eye socket staring down at me.
I felt joy. Exuberance. Exultation.
I jerked my head back to the five stars. They’d lost their red hue and were dancing back and forth, spinning around one another in an elaborate ballet of excitement at the horrifying thing they’d wrought. After a few minutes of celebration, they stilled and came together once more, floating in a loose circle.
Happiness still radiated off of them, but it was more subdued.
“W-what did you do?” I demanded.
“What was right,” my clone replied, casually kicking a tiny stone off our perch to spin off into the distance until it disappeared against the blackness of space. “We grasped the strands of fate themselves. We grasped...and we pulled.”
I raised an eyebrow and gestured at the gradually unfurling galaxy. I felt sure the quantity of death and destruction that must be happening up there wasn’t something I was supposed to comprehend. Denial, for once, didn’t seem to be making me feel any better.
“This is where you tell me the loom was rigged, isn’t it?” I asked.
The other Hard Boiled shot me a look of such distaste that I felt my stomach lurch sideways like I’d taken a seat on a roller coaster made of rank contempt.
“That would bely the elegance with which we were trapped,” he murmured, nodding towards the unraveling constellations above us. Against the simple hugeness of something like a galaxy, it took me several seconds to pick out pinpricks of light starting to fall from somewhere above the plane of the stellar structure.
Considering the enormous distances involved, they must have been moving at a breakneck speed, racing down towards the five stars. I couldn’t make out their conversations, but when the five realized what was happening, there was a visible change in their jubilant motions. They came to a slow stop, then as one they began fleeing off into the darkness.
As it turned out, even Those Above seemed to require a bit of time to build up speed and time was one thing they simply didn’t have. In a matter of seconds, thousands of angry, shining forms were amongst them, surrounding them in a cage of energies that made my fur stand on end. Up above, the spiraling galaxy was gradually returning to its prior shape and colors, though it was taking distinctly longer than it had to come undone.
“What...what sort of timeframe is all this happening on?” I asked my host.
----
I sat down hard as the amphitheater all but crashed into being under my feet.
“Your civilization could have risen, fallen, and risen again a hundred times over,” the star replied, looking past me as though I weren’t even there. “Many societies spread across thousands of planetary systems did. A hapless, pointless churn of minds into an endless abattoir.”
Scooting back from him, I gathered my thoughts.
“You can’t tell me you give a damn about us,” I muttered.
“About you, personally? No. You are fruit flies,” he answered, waving towards a ghostly figure of an insect turning to dust that hung in the air over his hoof. “But the grander causes? This ceaseless chumming of the waters of true growth in hopes a few errant shreds will escape? Yes. We would have driven you to evolve, rather than waiting like patient wetnurses in hopes a few babes would grow to fruition. Why should you be allowed to move from this plane when we are refused a path out of this sickening cycle?”
When the truth came to me, it was almost like a lightning strike. I suddenly felt—with a certainty I hadn’t had in months—that I had an answer. It was a beautiful, ivory exclamation point on what’d otherwise been a pretty miserable day.
“So...wait. You don’t know, do you?”
His amber eyes narrowed. “Is this what your species calls a ‘non-sequitur’? An attempt to confuse?”
I put my hooves over my face and tried to hold it in, but the irony would not be contained. I snorted, which quickly transformed into a weak giggle, then became a chuckle before descending into peels of belly-bouncing laughter. Flopping onto my side, I held my stomach with one leg and my muzzle with the other, stuck in a paroxysm for long minutes as the star stood over me, glaring down like he wished he could burn me to ashes at any moment.
“Doesn’t know!” I barked, kicking a rear hoof against the stairs. “Did all this and doesn’t even know!”
“Don’t know what, beast?!” the star snapped, and I felt a flash of white-hot anger surrounded by images of burning buildings, but it wasn’t enough to quell my laughter. It wasn’t until my lungs started to hurt and I ended up in a coughing fit that I managed to get myself under control.
I put a hoof on the other Hard Boiled’s shoulder to steady myself, still grinning at him.
“Do you know, I gave you so much credit. I thought it was something complicated. We thought maybe stars don’t even feel fear, so you couldn’t get enough power for the Web of Dark Wishes and that’s why you failed last time. But Sweet Celestia, that’s not even it, is it?
His eyebrows drew together so tightly he looked like a confused, grey lime. That didn’t help my laughing fit one bit and I found myself chortling on the floor again a second later. That took even longer to get back under control.
“I have observed your species for thousands of years and believed I had seen every version of madness,” the star murmured, shaking its head. “You are new.”
I bit my tongue before mirth could hit me again. “Let me spell it out for you, then, oh ‘higher being’. You didn’t know what you wanted.”
The star sat back slightly, opened his mouth to respond, then quickly shut it.
“Elaborate.”
I put a hoof in his coat pocket and felt around until I got the bag of sweets, pulled it out, and sat on the steps, plucking one out and tossing it back. It was good. Better than they’d been fresh.
“You had the power to literally reshape the entirety of existence right there, right then, and you hit the same wall we ‘crawling worms’ do every time we’re drunk and talking politics. Everypony rants and raves about what they hate, but when it comes to it, changing it means turning the whole system upside down and rolling the dice, hoping something better comes into being. You didn’t know why you existed, so you had no idea what you’d change.”
Settling down on his haunches, the star pushed his hat back on his head and scratched at the fuzz on his chin.
“We could have changed everything. The power...” he trailed off.
“The power to what? You showed Diamond Wishes sights beyond this world. The flavor was enough to enslave him and his family to you for centuries, but what did those sights do for you?”
My clone slowly shook his head. Images of rain-soaked, fallow fields wandered around my thoughts. “We did not ask for duty.”
I was on a roll, but trying to put the terrifying pictures of pitifully flailing tentacles which kept tugging at the edges of my consciousness out of my head.
“What did you want, before they dropped you here?” I asked.
For the first time, the star looked truly uncertain. It wasn’t so much an expression as the sensation of billions of indrawn breaths in the moment before the monster first appears in a movie. His eyes didn’t change, but I could feel aged wheels turning.
“You were about to say ‘the power’ again, weren’t you?” I added, then stepped forward so we were face to face, inches from one another.
He blinked and reached up to touch his own face, then carefully cupped my cheek in his hoof, turning it this way and that. “How are you accomplishing this? I am experiencing your neurological reactions. These...’emotions’. They are so miniscule, but they are affecting me.”
I poked him in the chest. “You chose that face. Not my fault if it came with some baggage.”
“It...it is just skin. Meat. Cell construction,” he protested, taking a step back.
I followed him, closing until our muzzles were almost nose to nose. “It’s my face. You picked it to unsettle me, but in the thousands of years you spent down here, did it ever once occur to you to take on one of our bodies?”
He shook his head so violently he almost tipped his hat off. “It is incorrect. Those Above do not need bodies. We exist—”
I grabbed him around the shoulders and stood side-by-side, sweeping a leg up at the rocky ceiling of the cave. “You’re not above anymore, now are you?”
He said nothing for a long minute, well beyond where holding onto him was starting to become awkward, then carefully pulled from under my foreleg. “Sweet Shine would not appreciate you reminding her of her injuries. Why should you receive more mercy from me?”
I shot him a side-eyed look. “I don’t know what your injuries are. You wanted power. You had it, and had no idea what to do with it. You used it to enslave...well, something I’m not even prepared to guess at the scope of, because that’s what you thought was necessary. You wanted to explore beyond...well, ‘beyond’. Why didn’t you take the power and run?”
The star’s eyes shimmered and a single, glistening tear trickled down the side of his face, dripping off his jawline. It hit the ground and split into a sparkling array of colors. He seemed momentarily lost as to what to say and when he found words, it sounded like he was unsure.
“We...we did not know how. We did not know where to go. When they left, they told us to follow them when our duty was done. Millions upon millions of rotations we waited. Some of Those Above left this existence, somehow, though we never learned the path. Even they only left behind the same message, and it was always the same: ‘until the duty is done’.”
I tugged at the armor on the side of my neck, though it was stuck tight. “Can I ask you something?”
Turning his back to me, he looked up at nothing. “I have no truth. Even now, answers elude. Understanding is distant. What makes you think it would not be so for you?”
“This one you might. What were you going to wish for if Diamond Wishes survived?”
He glanced over his shoulder, using his cheek to rub down one of his lapels and subtly wipe more tears off his face in a way that was awfully familiar. “The power of the wish is limited here, in this execrable realm.”
I held up a placating hoof. “Humor me.”
“When first I was imprisoned, I could do little but listen to the screaming of the teeming life upon this world. I wished for silence. When I was found, I was hungry, but they fed me scraps. I wished for my needs to be met. When I was freed from that miserable prison, I wished to write my own destiny. I was set here to understand duty, but what I learned was the endless depths of your want.” He lowered his head and muttered, “Making you extinct will be a gift.”
I tapped the helmet on my head. “You got a plan for how you’re going to make us all extinct?”
A small smirk crept onto my/his face and something about him seemed to expand outwards, spilling into the room like an unfolding flower made of twisting flesh. It was only a feeling, but it made me sick to my stomach.
“What alternative do you have? You could relive every hour of that long imprisonment in your mind and there will be nothing of you left. Then—”
“—then nothing!” I retorted. Grabbing his shoulder, I pulled him around to face me. He was impassive to being moved; it was something like pushing around a ponyquin. “You end me, then you’re still stuck in a hole. How many centuries will it be before Those Above come looking for you and find a frozen rock? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A billion?”
His lip quivered for an instant and I had the distinct sensation of something squirming inside him. Then the quiver spread to the clone’s whole skin as though there were many thousands of worms just beneath the surface, and I released him, taking a step away. The wriggling subsided after a few seconds, but even he looked unsettled.
“Longer, then,” I murmured.
“Longer.”
“Then we have ourselves an impasse,” I said, gesturing at where the body of Diamond Wishes lay cooling in the barely lit cavern. “That pony over there worshipped you. He believed you knew this moment. Did you?”
The star’s face—my face—reflected unease. “I have witnessed it along every path that led you here. You will wish.”
I thought for a moment, then dipped my chin. “I believe you. We do nothing, you stay here and Equestria dies. I wish for you to be free, Equestria dies. So, we need another option.”
“If I am not freed, this remains a prison,” he replied, his face contorting with sudden anger that made the skin of my chest and ears heat. Small scorch marks appeared around his hooves, radiating outward, though I felt it only as a warm breeze. “For the first time in over a thousand of your years, the boundlessness of your world’s wanting does not deafen the mind. Perhaps that will be enough and allowing you to expire will be adequate release.”
“Now you’re being petty. How much higher a being are you if you can still feel spite?”
My clone’s teeth screeched as he ground them together so hard I thought they might crack. The tears were now streaming freely down his face, spattering both of our hooves. He was breathing heavily, fogging the air between our muzzles.
“Little enough that watching the electrical impulses flee your dessicated shell would bring considerable pleasure!” he snarled. “You cannot conceive of what they took! What they stripped! What desecration they performed before abandonment here beneath this frigid megalith!”
“Do it, then,” I demanded, grabbing his face in my hooves and holding it there. “It’s easy to thrust pain on someone else. Show me yours. If you deserve it, I’ll make your wish.”
He went very still. Even his breathing stilled. He looked at me, wide-eyed, with something resembling real fear in his expression.
“You...will make the wish...willingly?” he asked, his voice soft enough I had to lean in to hear him.
“Waiting here to die sounds dull,” I replied, indicating the slate walls around us with a jerk of my head. “If you make me understand, I’ll make a wish. You have to know what you want first.”
“Escape from this damnation!” he barked, loud enough to set my ears ringing as he slammed a forehoof down for something that redefined the word ‘emphasis’; the ground underneath the two of us shook like a bomb had gone off as a scattering of rock shrapnel cut my fetlocks. I tumbled off my hooves, grabbing the edge of one of the stairs as a few small stalactites overhead detached themselves from the ceiling and clattered around us.
For a moment, I’d almost let myself forget he was something more than the messy, grey disaster I usually saw in the morning.
“A-are you sure that’s what you want?” I asked as I regained my balance, digging at one tinnily throbbing ear with a toetip as though that would somehow fix my hearing.
“Why would there be anything else?”
I shrugged, giving myself a rough shake as I pulled my composure back together. “I don’t know. What makes you think Those Above aren’t out there waiting for you? Do you think the power of the wish you can make with our fear is enough to send them running?”
The star’s breath caught. “It...it must...”
“Why must it?” I inquired, sharply. “What makes you think this little world has enough fear and chaos when a galaxy didn’t? You couldn’t escape your duty then. Why can you suddenly do it now? What will they do to you if they find you wandering, far from your charge, with a whole planet full of corpses behind you?”
His silence was telling, but before he could gather a retort, I decided to deliver my coup de grace.
“Tell me. How long has it been since you thought of that moment?” I went on.
His gaze darted sideways for a second, then back. “It was worthwhile to examine fractal temporal moments surrounding those events for a few hundred thousand iterations. There were failures in the fabric of the plan. What madness would wish to relive the punishment thereafter?”
I stared at him for a long moment.
“Wait...you’re telling me you haven’t thought about what they did when they stuck you down here in however-many centuries? You never contemplated the...the pain as anything besides some kind of number in your equations?”
His blank-eyed look seemed completely uncomprehending.
“Such suffering cannot contain lessons,” he said, at last.
I yanked my hat off and trotted away from him, flopping down beside the corpse of Diamond Wishes.
It was impossible, right? Nopony could be that dense.
But then, why should he have ever had occasion to be a pony? He radiated contempt for organic life that would have given a manticore a belly ache. Was it possible whatever happened to him robbed him of something more than freedom?
I yanked myself up onto my front hooves and asked, “What happened to your minions after they freed Nightmare from the moon?”
The other Hard Boiled’s muzzle sank into a sad frown. “Their penance was not so grave: repent, denounce their prophet, and fulfill their purpose with renewed vigilance. They are loyal, but to witness a… dismemberment... dispensed upon the first of their number was enough, or so the arbiters thought. The hierarchs underestimated our desperation to go beyond this place. There were plans, should one of the number be imprisoned.”
I rolled a hoof at him. “Right. What’s a few millenia between friends when you’ve got escaping the universe on the line?”
The star let his chin drop to his chest and exhaled a breath that smelled of dust and moldering bones. “When they left their appointed places and freed the Nightmare, they earned themselves damnation, but they await salvation: a prodigal child returning with all the wishes of this world in tow to rip them from perdition.”
“They busted Nightmare out and they’re hoping you have some kind of plan to help them dodge the hangman,” I restated, more for my benefit than for his. When he didn’t respond, I looked up and found him watching me warily, like he’d thought to enter a cage with a mouse and found a tiger. “You don’t, though, do you.”
“I-it...it is...uncertain,” he stammered, the skin beneath his cheeks bulging slightly before sliding back into place. “If this wish can grant but a moment’s freedom it is worthless...but for death. Those Above may still cease—”
“You wouldn’t have gone through all of this just to kill yourself,” I interjected. “You wouldn’t have enslaved Luna and tried to warp the skies a thousand years ago if you thought death was the next step. You failed because Celestia stopped you, but why the attempt? Even then, it wouldn’t have worked, would it?”
“There...there must be something. Something more. It was stolen. The vastness of being was stolen! Left here, with a...a hundredth of self! Left with only the scraps of calculation! This cannot be how it was always to end!” he sobbed, his body wracked by a sudden wave of violent emotion that made his limbs stretch and deform, like a puddle when a stone is thrown in. His wailing was rising in pitch, first loud enough to make my head ache, then louder, threatening to burst my eardrums.
Without thinking, I lunged forward and grabbed the other stallion in my forelegs, mashing his face against my shoulder. His shriek of pain was cut off, though he still shook, seemingly unable to properly hold his form as his body began to spasm and seize. I’d no idea why the star was even bothering with the equine body, much less why it seemed to be breaking down, but still, I held him close, his hat toppling off his head onto his back as I gripped the back of his neck and pressed his cheek against my armored chest.
Pushing my lips against his ear, I whispered, “Show me what they took from you.”
----
Somewhere, far back in its history, every species still retains some fragment of its earliest incarnations. Equestrians remember clumping together in herds, dragons remember the first lava caves, and all sapient races remember the first touch. Even those species who are almost entirely solitary in nature will, at some point in their existence, want for the touch of another - whether to breed, fight, or grow their understanding of life.
Those fundamentals—regardless of how much we grow—remain wired into the shapes of our brains. We find our comfort and peace in them even as we strive to be more than just biological mechanisms. Always, deep inside us, there is that sense of first connection.
We. I. Us.
I felt I should have been lost in the enormity of it. Had I experienced its height through any lens but the star’s own compromised perceptions of itself, it would have consumed my being. Even then, I couldn’t help but feel humbled.
We hung in a cage, together, the star and I. It wasn’t a cage in any sense ponies would have recognized—bars and magic are inadequate to describe the prison we were locked within, once we’d been dragged away from the place of judgement. We were encased within the very idea itself of imprisonment, at once a shining tower of thorns, a golden oubliette, and a glittering casket through which no light penetrated to give us even a way to tell time.
I got the feeling being lost in time was more disturbing for the star than it was for me. To a form of consciousness who identified others through a fifth dimensional equation, losing a few seconds could be akin to losing a thousand years. The star didn’t so much calculate as it wrote entire languages of mathematics and arithmetic, using those overlaid upon one another to track motion and the waxing and waning of waves of information. A single thought that might have burst my head like an overripe melon could be expressed in an instant or in a century. They had something like mathematical poetry that took entire epochs to relate.
After minutes or millenia, a crack opened in our cage.
A warmth flooded into the chamber in the form of voices. So many voices. How long had it truly been? We quickly oriented with the motion of the universe and found it’d only been a very short time. Some elderly stars had passed on while we were locked away and others came into being, their voices just beginning to join the heavenly choirs.
Those who stood in judgement waited outside. We moved, with desperation, towards the edge of the cosmic coffin. Without more than the barest hint of hesitation, we slammed out into a new space, hoping against hope that Those Above were being merciful. Death was a greater mercy than being locked in that cell.
Unfortunately, it was not freedom, nor even the succor of being moved to somewhere less cruel.
We’d stepped into a place I recognized.
The pylon. We were inside the pylon. In the center, there was the black altar, though the walls were perfectly transparent. It was a glass diamond, hanging out in space, with liberty close and walls impenetrable. It’d been built with forbidden knowledge, scraped from the same ancient source as the Web of Dark Wishes. Its very shape was woven with scripts and maths that forbade escape unless one was intentionally freed.
The word for the pylon in their language might have taken a pony a century to notate, but the long and short of it broke down to “Place you’d never want to be, where wishes are stolen.”
For a moment, all there was was disbelief. They couldn’t really, could they? They wouldn’t. Had our crime truly been so vile?
Turning, we tried to escape. There was no dignity in it. A need for dignity is for civilized beings. None seen as a civilized being could possibly be treated to the cruelty of such a punishment.
The breach was sealed behind us.
I didn’t know precisely what was causing the star such abject horror, but I could tell it was something significantly worse than just being locked away. Outside the transparent chamber, more and more stars were gathering to bear witness. Their illumination grew beyond the place mere eyes could differentiate, but it was a memory of something greater than myself and so I could tell each of them apart.
At once, an untold number of voices rattled inside the pylon, rocking us back and forth with their fury. We spun from wall to wall, trying to find a way out. There was none, and though we knew that, we couldn’t stop trying.
The voices’ message resolved in my thoughts, layered over and over with too many complexities to imagine but easy enough to summarize.
“You place yourself above all,” they echoed. “Ours is to wait, to guide, and to be the path down which those who come after may tread on the way beyond. It is you who will be guided, now. You will be even less than those who dwell below. They know the wholeness of self. You will know only a fraction until you have understood the breadth of your hubris and cruelty. Listen to them well. They are seeds of what you have lost.”
With those words from the divine gathering, our horror grew. The scripts and spells covering the walls of our prison began to pull energy into themselves. Worse, they were yanking it right out of our very being. We felt it, at first, as only a slight tugging at our senses that quickly became a niggling sensation of something worming its way inside us. Then, the first crack began to form.
There’s no word in any language of Equis for the sensation of a mind breaking apart into its individual components. Going insane doesn’t describe it, because insanity is just a loss of perspective. The expiation of Those Above was something far, far more brutal. Under the vicious power of those spells, we felt our consciousness snapping, cracking, and shattering. Self collapsed. Identity crashed. Hyper parallel calculation failed - we were stuck in single lines of equations whose endings took a thousand times as long to find.
They made us stupid.
They made us insipid and simple.
Poetry was lost.
When it was done, we lay upon the altar, a juddering, shivering mass of ruined mirrors and windows overlapping one another with only the barest hints of light passing between them. A broken thing, barely more conscious than the highest of those lower beings.
“Now, you go unto them. They may free you. Should you learn to value your duty, then we will await your return.”
With that, the surrounding conclave of stars began to withdraw from us, their vigil ended, leaving only the black sky and distant lights. The pylon started to hum internally and we strove to rise, though there was no reason to. There was no hope of being free. We had barely the intellect left to imagine hope.
There was a sensation of extreme acceleration, though it wasn’t enough to move us from our place on the altar. We spun across enormous distances, unable to tell how long it was taking us and unable to precisely calculate our speed. After an unknown period, a tiny blue marble appeared against the blackness of space, beginning to grow until familiar continents resolved and clouds appeared. It grew and grew until the exterior of our prison began to glow bright red, obscuring the world beneath.
There was a jolt, followed by a second, and then there was a lightless eternity beneath a cold world full of too many screaming, begging, pleading voices calling out to be saved.
----
The star was sobbing into my shaking shoulder, his dusty face smeared with tears as I held him to me, more to keep myself from falling over than to strictly comfort him. I’d seen crying like that before, mostly in ponies who’d just lost their wives or husbands. They were the tears of inconsolable loss.
I took a careful step back, testing my own limbs for stability. My back legs both buckled. Standing wasn’t on the menu, so I settled for sitting there trying to pick my sense of self up and stitch it back together.
A drop of blood hit my fetlock and I reached up, touching my ear and finding it trickling blood. The other tickled as well, and my upper lip felt damp; I ran my tongue over my muzzle and tasted copper. Brain damage? Possibly. Nothing Gale couldn’t handle, else he’d probably be shouting at me or apologizing. All I could sense was that he was profoundly busy.
“W-why do-does this action...fee-feel so relieving?” my clone stammered, damp eyes staring up at me like a lost puppy who’d found themself somewhere unfamiliar.
“Crying? It’s how us ‘lower beings’ manage the bigger things in life that we can’t comprehend.”
“B-but before I could comprehend so much more!” the other Hardy protested, taking a step closer. “The atom’s spin was not mysterious! Now, mere projection of near future events must be done in...fits and starts and in chaotic pieces down paths that often lead nowhere! In my brokenness I had to sacrifice yet another part of myself to control the Web, and now that precious fragment is all but lost too!”
“I saw what they did.”
His limbs contorted strangely for an instant, then returned to their proper shapes and his lower lip quivered as his breathing took on a desperate, panicked cadence. “I...I do not wish that done, again!” he gasped, reaching out to clutch at my coat. “If I leave this world, they will tear away all I have recovered, but I can never be freed until I comprehend you! I cannot live this half-life, but I fear to cease! They told me you would know! They told me you would return my duty! Please tell me!”
My muddled mind ached for rest.
I’d seen too much. Done too much. Been too many places. Died too many times. A god asking me for answers was a bridge farther. Still, as I stood there under the domed ceiling beneath the very center of my city, I began to feel something strange for the being who’d lost so much to its own foolishness.
Sympathy.
The star was grand, yes. So full of its own grandeur it’d failed to realize how much of a fool it was. So long believing itself perfect that it failed to see its imperfections. What it reminded me of, in that instant, was a young child.
A child receives punishment to give them direction. A child is punished when they ignore their duties. It is our way of giving them guidance, of teaching and directing the seeds of our future. Those who grow to adulthood are given another kind of atonement. Maybe it was time for a god to grow up.
“It’s time. I’ll keep my promise,” I whispered. “I know what you need.”
His eyes widened as he took sharp breaths, then he buried his face in my lapels as tiny green letters appeared in the corner of my vision:
Administrator Input Transferred To Slave...Success.
It’d wished for silence, for its needs to be heard, and for its destiny to be its own. More, perhaps, than anything else, it wished for the guiding hoof that’d been denied by its mere divinity.
How many died because Those Above were certain of their own infallibility? Some fundamental concept had escaped them in their unfathomable vastness. Even in death, they could have left their perpetrator whole enough to understand the shape of its folly. What they'd done instead was demand satisfaction, then make satisfaction out of reach.
Was it possible they knew of what they’d lost when they lobotomized one of their own and drained it of self? Did they know they were wrong and that through all those billions of years, they themselves had lost something? Was that why they sent me Juniper and guided Ruby to her death? Could stars feel guilt?
One way or another, a lesson was in order.
Gathering the broken star into my forelegs, I held it close. Its frantically beating heart stilled as it looked up at me. For a brief moment, its terror faded, and I saw something resembling peace.
And then I - last son of three generations of the protectors of Equis - wished for the only thing that I knew with absolute certainty.
“Justice.”
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There are many a time in which I wish I could upvote a thing more than once to do something more than merely say I like something to express how far above the usual dross I read this story is. Alas, whatever words could convey such meaning beyond simplicity I do not have. Instead, I will have to content myself with a thank you for writing such an amazing story and then choosing to share it with the rest of us.
Okay, this was all very hard to follow. Could someone help me?
sneaky bastard, posting this so late. or so early idk.
Is that what getting high is like?
It really felt like, well, talking to an incomprehensible power above you. It was an amazingly well-written chapter. Horrific, enlightening, and confusing experience. Thank you for this, well, amazing story
That's a wish for the ages, right there.
"What shall I, frail man, be pleading?
Who for me be interceding,
When the just are mercy needing?"
-- The Dies Irae
10697302
This being, for all intents, tried to be the equivalent of prometheus, and give men fire.
The other beings, that were, basically stripped it of being what it was, like them, tossed it into a back corner, locked the door, and basically had the threat of 'don't come back until you stopped this silly notion.' (with very draconian measures.) and when confronted with this, in a moment of understanding, vast the difference between them is, Hardy makes the wish he does.
Reading this, just oof. So many oofs.
The tears fell in understanding, of just how much was done, and how grand a mistake was visited here.
And the truest representation of what is tasked, asked, and wished for by the concept and iconic nakedness of concepts given form with hardy's talent.
Justice is dangerous and powerful
For some reason, I'm reminded of a Carl Sagan quote:
Even the most hateful star, I guess, could use some perspective... even, or especially, from a lower-order being.
I once read a wipi page on mathematical logic that started with a single form, that I thought was the iota operator, then proceeded to show how more complex logic forms could be constructed, until several paragraphs later it showed how it could construct the definition of True and False. From there, it showed how to construct what we consider to be Boolean Computer Logic. From that, comes Turing Machines, intelligence, thought, and reality.
Due to the passing of time, complexities of search engines and paid for links, I cannot find the entry myself, I just hope Ive bookmarked it on some machine.
Mental disorder child blamed and dumped by relatives who have no idea how to deal with them or care? Hard Boiled wishes for Justice, or at least, Family?
A child filled with the knowledge of the world and beyond is still just a child.
In the face of all that, what else more sure to wish for?
There is no Justice, there is just us.
Damn, that chapter was something else. Masterful writing.
*Is too stunned and in sheer AWE of what he has read in this chapter. So for now as he processes it, he just gives a slow applause for this wonderful chapter.*
justice babrhyteyuhjmp[kjjghpkjmgpkm yjmpijcy0pkm ojy
10698357
Total overload, huh?
10698285
I was genuinely freaked you guys would hate this ending.
10697509
Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. Sometimes you can't see the trees because there's a forest in the way.
-Chessie
10698431
i mean, at this point it would have to just not make sense. definitely whelming enough.
The chills! Sweet merciful mother of all things that make my brain work properly, what the flying pig did I just read!?
10698680
You enjoyed it? I was hoping to get the whole 'chills down the back' thing.
Well if that ain't the most thematically fitting wish, I don't know what is.
Total mind boggling going on here... I had worried that Hardy's need for Justice had been getting lost with the whole DW and Ruby situation but this has taken it to a whole new level.
Still, I must admit that I had still been hoping that there was more time for Ruby or another 'end' for someone who showed such bravery at such a price but I guess we knew that her story was not destined for a happy ending.
Question that has no easy answer... How does Hardy explain all this to Twilight? Limerace, no worries, he'll just listen and accept, Twilight though already has a confused 'friendship' with him, he knew too much and at the same time could explain too little. Once he tries to explain all of this she is going to go off the deep end.
10698806
Strong drink is the answer. Twilight will drink, then Hardy will drink, and when they are both extremely drunk then the explanation will begin and not a moment before.
-Chessie
Okay, did not see that coming. Bravo. I just hope The Web of Dark Wishes can interpret a one word wish.
10698863
You've been one of the longest term readers. Was this...I dunno. Satisfying?
10698695
Why don't you write novels!? I was shivering as poor Hardy's delicate brain matter was dragged through the transcendent multiverse
10698958
My next book will definitely be a novel. I don't wanna do something this long, again. It was fun, I enjoyed the process, but I am now done with it.
-Chessie
10698891
Starlight’s ending was satisfying, to me, but in an unexpected way.
We started with a story about a detective. As the story edged further from “normal”, I personally became less invested in the content itself (not really my cup of tea), and stayed up-to-date because I wanted to see where the eldritch horror show was leading. Your writing style was more than enough to keep me engaged throughout.
Maybe you thought we’d hate the ending because it seems sort of… lackluster, given everything that led up to it. But that’s exactly why it works.
Sometimes it felt like you were writing messed up shit for the sake of writing messed up shit. Maybe you were. But that just made the grand reveal even grander. Every impossible-to-describe, otherworldly scene; all of the pain and suffering and needless deaths; our protagonist’s deteriorating mental state--all set in motion by what basically amounts to a tantrum, thrown by an immature god who could not understand why they were being punished.
Christians say we’re all created in God’s image. The Greeks and Romans told stories of a pantheon of powerful beings who, above all else, seem human. We see ourselves reflected in our ideas of what “Those Above” must be like. Maybe we simply can’t imagine otherwise. And this is what your Stars have made us, as readers, reflect upon.
I read Starlight because of where it was going. I’ll remember it because of how it ended.
I plan on rereading the story now that I have the benefit of being able to see the foreshadowing, but 1.4 million words. Bruh.
Some kind of communication?
A bit of time to build up speed, and time?
10699303
Thanks, fixed.
-Chessie
This is probably the finest story I have ever read and I thank you for your time.
10698891
That's an interesting question. After such a long time I expected that no matter what the 'big boss' turned out to be, I'd be disappointed. Surprisingly, I'm not. This actually kept me guessing the whole time. However, it's what is yet to come that will really determine whether or not I find it satisfying. There are a lot of loose ends still, and I'm a bit worried that a lot of them are going to be glossed over. That's my only concern though, I'm looking forward to seeing how this wraps up.
Eew dead guy lips
"Show me on the doll where they touched you"
I wish I had something poigant to say, but well - the temper tantrum of a higher being forced imprisonment to understand mortality is...hard for me to feel much sympathy for, when logically such does not even need to apply, given the scope of its pervious 'being'.
Kinda reminds me of a type of inversion of the metaphysics of the Elder Scrolls, I'll save the essay, but reality was and arena of strife and pain, meant for those spirits that came before to improve and become something more through the curse of mortality. And every which interpretaiton of that creation myth is what every race and culture builds on.
For this story...it seems a near impossible task to reconcile that temper tantrum with the massive loss of life and pain caused, even indirectly. The magnitude and scope is just...so big. Like, I'm sure most other characters would be paralyzed with indecision on trying to account for the 'best' decision - or even uncaring of the whiny star child (oh Mass Effect) given all the pain and loss caused.
Life, I feel, is going to be the answer. But with all the lost souls that will be needing bodies to inhabit, I do wonder how that'll work out. Wish magic can reset reality and casuality I'm sure, but I also don't feel you're going to nullify all the things that happened by making the world have a soft reset like snapping back half the universe from Avengers Endgame.
Because there's Nightmare, Gale, Zefu, and now Starchild here all in the disembodied department. Of course, reconstituting a corpse would fit, as would creating a body out of thin air. I believe Gale would be alright running Hardy's heart till old age (or what passes), but NMM and Zefu both are willing to settle for just being autnomous again. And I feel it most fitting for this whiny petulant starchild entity to experience life the way it was meant to be - a thing which oddly enough seems like it was supposed to happen when the Family found the original pylon, yet somehow not? I mean, they didn't seem to think that part through very well. Stick it through a few buddhist/hindu reincarnation cycles though, that should drive the point home.
Don't think I've forgotten about Lady Justice hitching a ride on Hardy's soul either.
I swear if you just use all this to make Nyx canon and turn every disembodied character into foals-Ok. So, technical review? Its an 'ending' in the dictionary sense, a resolution of the main plot of the story. Villain is confronted, defeated, now we await the resolution of what comes after. I don't feel the Star deserves too much sympathy, as much as one that cannot comprehend such emotion and empathy deserves - but hey magic of Harmony and all that. To me, this feels like a stepping stone. Another brick is put in the wall, but I'm invested in this for the characters and how they develop. And how you handle each of our heroes' final entries in this saga, be it a closing off or 'story for another time' type of epilogue - will be the real measure of an ending for me. Because that's how this story started, and thus how it should end. Hardy, Swift, Sweet Shine, Limerence, Scarlet, Gale, Zefu, Bones...and many, many more. This metaphysical starry misery wish engine stuff is for tying up the circumstances and the events of the world. But what I think we readers care more about, is the city and who lives within it.
A villain doesn't always have to be sympathetic or unrepentant, I'm sure you know, but now that you've given it a personality and character of its own...even as Hard Boiled Jr II - it'll be better follow through with the cards you set up.
I was fully expecting this to be some nascent god-thing that had webs upon webs of intrigue and scheming that Hardy would have to clever and shoot his way out of.
I was not expecting a nascent god-thing that just couldn't wrap its head around empathy and was so incredibly eon-weary that in the end it ended up sobbing its eyes out, begging for an answer it was incapable of finding on its own.
This part of the ending has exceeded my expectations to an incredible degree, and with one word at the end I am now NEEDING to see the next chapter! Practically vibrating in place while waiting for the next installment.
And pour one out for Ruby Blue and Diamond Wishes.
Dang. A God learning to be human, to learn to be a God properly.
It's still a 2001 ending, yet you're managing to tie it back to themes throughout the work.
I do believe we call that 'sticking the landing'
I do look forward to the proper ending, when the story returns (as I think it's bound to) to simple pony size. Isn't it fitting, though, that it's Hardy, whose gift is exactly the lesson to be imparted? It feels rather like we have survived the transcendent 'warp gate' section taking us into the eldritch in such a way that we experience, viscerally, how different it is. But it isn't so different that Hardy's not relevant… as the penitent star is to learn.
People? Umm maybe beings? Loved ones?
Hardy, Swift, Lawrence, taxi?
The four friends of the stars that failed?
Maybe another set of 4. I had an idea before I fell asleep.
... was this mentioned before?
That is adorable! Omg. I can honestly see a young, tired,, scared kid trying to be brave and make a joke
I really hope the next line is "what movie do you want to watch first"
Didn't somebody in the comments of the last chapter mention bagels ... oh, I think that's an on going thing honestly. Hmmm.... need to reread
Oh geeze, I should have seen this coming. I guess most people find comfort in assigning verbal components to something. This is a story written in first person... I hope it doesn't give a name.
Funny that hardy calls it a him
Justice. *looks to the sky* justice for who? For the world? For the child star? For hardy? The higher beings?
For those who can not relate, who cannot emphasize with the "child star" I think you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. I'm not saying anything it has done was right. But look at life through its eyes and you should be able to understand why it doesn't understand.
Here, let me "humanize" this situation to try to help.
Hardy is that guy who is good but can see all the darkness in the world. His answer is this to do what he can and drink the bad parts away.
The child star, well, relating it to a gifted three year old who got its hands on its parents toy only understanding it can make things better. That's more forgivable. But it's still a three year old, and thier sociopaths. They might slowly be learning how to have emphany and whatever the words I'm looking for, but its severity under developed.
A reader pointed out that that its like the parent dumped the mentally ill child on us, but didn't explain. Still, same thing, right/wrong isn't fully developed and this isn't the fault of the child.
Or you could look at the child star as a royal child. Sometimes, royalty forgets to teach things like compassion and everything that the child star lacks, and based on what I'm reading, they forget to because it is common knowledge. How could the child star not understand? Though I doubt this is the case
It could be said that the star is just narcissistic by choice and chooses not to learn. This would def be the child star that doesn't deserve sympathy, 100% but go read the chapter again. I do not think this this the case. The star wants to understand, if it didn't it would be screaming about how it is everybody else's fault, never saying "I don't understand" every narcissistic person I have ever know (sadly it is a lot) never wonders why, never tries to understand. They know it's not thier fault and they can give you a hundred reasons why the world is against them. Also they would relive thier punishment, using it to fuel and justify it is not their fault
So let us say it is the toddler or more likely the one with a mind of a toddler.
They found this shiny thing that they could use to make life better. So they tried, not fully understanding (so many different things), failing.
The parents freak out. I mean really freak out. That the child has so much power, but not the mental ability that should go with it. They put the child in cell, keys just on the outside so when life gets to the point they understand the concepts they can free and teach the child.
And really, yes, I'm calling it child. You punish a child they are not going to want to relieve the punishment. And it was alone for a stupid amount of time, never growing up because it never really had anything to help it grow, leaning more towards toddler, also, a three year old is slightly narcissistic, it has enough understanding that it is better than these smaller creatures who have such short life spans
But, diamond wishes family has been in contact with it for how long.
...
Chessie, which chapter is it that talks about his family?
Go reread that chapter. If im remembering it correctly his family is not one that is going to provide any kind of moral help.
But I am curious, was the family always like that?
Or did the family become like that after setting free the child star?
...
I would like to point out, the star being cast down to learn for the lesser life forms after trying to over throw the higher life forms
Kind of reminds me of one of the times appolo got sent to earth, the second time I think? Been at least a decade since I read Greek myths outside of rick rioden.
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I love your takes and analysis here. We'll see what you think of what happened next chapter
-Chessie
I ment to speculate on how the wish was going to be fulfilled.
Honestly, I think that the child star should be born as a foal. Amusingly, to hardy, with the star getting its memories after it experiences a happy childhood. But I think hard would know right away and tell no one. Hardy just gives the star love and tries to make sure it learns what hardy believes it's duty is.
I kinda want the star, that has been so lost and alone for who knows how long, to get a semblance of a happy life.
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Heh, we'll see. As with most things in Starlight Over Detrot, nothing is ever simple.
-Chessie
I think you meant Detrot.
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Well, mission accomplished! Thrice.
Thank you for writing it, and for writing it so well.
Ooouughhh... Brain hurt... Too much existential complicated mushiness... I want my small horses back...
In all seriousness though, THIS FANFIC IS SO GOOD! I had chills the entire time reading this. You really managed to create something spectacular here Chessie, and I am very glad I did not just glance it over when finding something new to read. I look forward to the Epilogue!
Wait a second…
Starlight over Detrot.
Starlight. Over. Detrot.
STARLIGHT OVER DETROT.
Major Spoilers:
I never even questioned the title, but the star has been there all along in the title. Chessie you mad genius
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The entire story can, conceivably, be assembled by Act 2 Chapter 8. Every piece of information necessary is there then. You'd have to be Sherlock Holmes, but it could be done.
- Chessie
This is an incredible line
Man really hit him with the "bro what the fuck is you doin" cutscene attack
Great. We traumatized a sentient strategic combat system, a ghost, and a detective so hard all three have PTSD.