Time
All wrong.
Fluttershy listened to the stranger’s—no, Twilight Sparkle’s—story: every discovery, every hardship, every rewritten history.
And every murder.
Twilight continued as the the familiar emerged from the Everfree Forest, its tower of lightning crackling against moonlight.
“This battle’s purpose is to test the efficacy of my devices. As such, I have ensured all confounding variables were removed.”
An ominous sense filled Fluttershy. “What variables?”
“In prior attempts, the unanticipated transformation of one or another hunter spoiled the experiment.”
“You mean Rainbow. And Rarity. And…Applejack.” Fluttershy’s teeth ground together. “You mean you killed my friends.”
“They were my friends, too!”
Fluttershy startled. A plea began, but Twilight’s cold glare kept her quiet.
“Yes, I am to blame for the destruction of their constructs. But I will ensure their return.” Twilight gave Fluttershy a softer look. “Do you think me callous?”
Fluttershy swallowed hard and nodded.
The muscles of Twilight’s wiry frame slackened. Her ears drooped over her eyes. “Understand that I have faced countless cruel dilemmas and, denied a perfect solution, used my ability to explore every option. When I could, though, I showed all possible charity.” Twilight perked up. “Do you recall the baby dragon I mentioned, Spike?”
“Yes.”
“I saved his race some nine hundred years ago. Shortly after Kyubey made a hunter out of a changeling—”
“What’s a changeling?”
Twilight sighed. “A race whose hunger for love drove them to horrible acts against Equestria, although they once reformed with the rule of a compassionate king. In this reset, Kyubey found them before they united under a single leader. The race’s various tribes eagerly wished annihilation upon each other, eventually extinguishing their race.
“Afterward, I discovered that Kyubey had moved across the sea and approached the Dragon Lands. They have many of the same vices changelings had, and I knew that Kyubey could wreak havoc upon their race as well. So I prevented any rendezvous.” Twilight smiled slyly.
“How?”
“I ensured Kyubey first encountered…” Twilight blinked. The smile vanished. “Kyubey met a griffon first.”
“What’s a griffon?”
Another sigh. “Never mind.”
The familiar had moved into the valley in front of them. Fluttershy watched it crawl along, howling and twisting in the distance. Barren earth trailed behind it. Fluttershy tried to imagine the spells the unicorn—no, she remembered, the alicorn—could summon to fight it. However, no matter how much she focused, she only thought of death: the ponies killed, the races made extinct, the lives that never were. Her own inevitable demise felt near.
The sky turned riotous, trails of color carving through the air, as the pegasi of the Ponyville Air Guard Reserve flew overhead. Each pony aimed for the familiar.
“Finally fulfilling their thousand-year-old mission, again,” Twilight muttered.
Black orbs shot from the familiar. Ponies at the front of the massive Air Guard formation dove at them and then banked away, taunting the orbs to follow. Soon colors and void braided together into a frothing halo around the familiar. For some reason, the familiar’s lightning seemed to get brighter.
“They’ve been led to believe it’s a simulated volcano,” Twilight said. “It bears no resemblance to the authentic phenomena, but who among them would suspect a ruse? A century has passed since the last volcano erupted.”
A hint of the sly smile returned. She knew more than she was letting on.
High overhead, a second wave of pegasi appeared and inched towards the familiar with slow, heavy flaps. Each clutched metal cylinders against their bellies. Fluttershy’s wings ached in empathy as she recalled the bombs’ weight.
The frontmost ponies tipped into a rapid dive. Just before they reached the familiar’s height, each pony released their bomb and pitched upwards, completing a perfect divebomb.
Vivid flashes erupted beneath the halo, followed a split second later by thundering booms. The familiar staggered amidst the blasts, but it remained standing after the last of the bombers dropped her cargo and veered away.
“It didn’t work,” Fluttershy whimpered.
“Bombardment is not intended to cause harm. The objective is to soften the ground and distract the familiar.”
“Distract it from what?”
“The moon.”
Fluttershy’s muzzle tilted up. She hadn’t realized how much darker it was until she saw that where the moon should have been, only a tiny sliver of gray hung.
“What is that?” Fluttershy quailed.
“A crescent moon.”
“A what moon?” The moon was a constant circle, gleaming so brilliantly every night that ponies socialized from dusk to dawn, read books by moonbeam, and sought refuge from it for sleep.
“It remains a surprise to me,” Twilight said, as if commenting on an early snow, “how few ponies recognize the abnormality of the moon’s lack of—”
She said a word that Fluttershy thought was faces, which made her laugh in that absurd moment. No, the moon didn’t have faces, it had the silhouettes of the Twin Sisters of the Moon. But as Twilight continued, unspooling more archaic words like eclipse, tide, and month, Fluttershy realized that the word had been phases. The moon was supposed to have phases.
Fluttershy watched the sliver—the crescent—shrink. Stars grew brighter and multiplied a million-fold. Where missing parts of the moon should have been, stars were drifting to the side and vanishing. New stars seemed to emerge from the edge to replace them.
Dizziness made Fluttershy drop her muzzle into her front hooves and cover her eyes.
“They had to enlarge it, as well,” Twilight continued. “Far fewer stars are visible as a result, so even most constellations of antiquity are unrecognizable. A necessary loss.”
A rattle of pops filled the air. Fluttershy unearthed herself to see six red flares crossing each other. The halo, which had become turbulent, dissipated. Jets of color darted away from the familiar in every direction. Orbs dogged them.
“At this point, Pinkie or Applejack would transform,” Twilight said. She rose to her four legs, and the staff hovered nearby. A nervous energy streamed off of her. “With heinous effect.”
The moon disappeared completely. In the incredible darkness that swallowed them, Fluttershy asked, “What do you mean, ‘they’ had to enlarge it?”
“Celestia and Luna. Their spirits have spent centuries fashioning the moon into a mirror.”
Something like a dawn brightened side of the sky. The light coalesced into a fiery snake arcing through the stars, its tip aimed for where the moon had been.
“A mirror for what?” Fluttershy asked.
Twilight flinched, and Fluttershy felt a sudden chill as the heat shield surrounded them.
“Celestia’s strongest spell,” Twilight said. “Nova.”
Pulses of light billowed into a tower hurtling through the familiar. Arctic air screamed past Fluttershy and tore at her mane. The earth quaked, rippling the flaming trees into nothingness. Grass turned yellow, then gray, then into powder. Fluttershy blinked ash out of her eyes and coughed it from her mouth as the beam of sunlight devastated everything around them.
Beside her, Twilight seemed ready to prance.
Ground under the familiar took up its own ruddy glow as dirt, soil, and stone melted. Gooey bubbles formed. With each burst, the familiar sank, first by paces, then in shuddering plunges.
The pillar of light waned, delivering one last flash before winking out entirely. Lava submerged the familiar, but its tendrils stretched out of the pool and grasped at the pit’s smoldering edges.
Twilight’s horn sparked, and her teeth clenched. Something heavy shook, producing a bassy grinding sound. With a grunt, her horn flashed, and the shaking became a distant avalanche’s echo. The familiar’s tendrils slipped away. Lava funneled and disappeared, leaving behind a glowing hole.
Twilight’s cloak whipped away, revealing vast wings like two sky blue scythes. “I have work inside. You may accompany me if that is your druthers. The heat shield will follow.”
“Inside of what?”
A grin crept onto Twilight’s face as she took Fluttershy’s hoof. She seemed about to say something, but she turned away and sprang into the air, carrying Fluttershy into the pit.
They plunged hoof-in-hoof through a tunnel glowing red, surrounded by droplets and sparks of molten rock. Beneath them, rushing towards them, crags ringed a distant yellow beacon. Fluttershy’s heart raced as the crags yawned and swallowed them.
At first, all Fluttershy understood was that she’d fallen, and still fell, into a cavern. Browns, greys, and sparse beige patches surrounded her. A tiny yellow light hovered above the floor. Despite its small size, it shone so brightly that she couldn’t look directly at it. Air rushed past her, but neither the light nor the floor seemed to get any closer. She looked up to the narrowing craggy hole, and realized that the ceiling spanned an incredible distance. Her gaze followed the nearly perfect flatness at the hole to a gentle curve that had to be dozens, or hundreds, of miles away, and then swept across the entire expanse of the space she and Twilight had entered. No cavern could be this large.
Inside of what Fluttershy had asked.
Inside of the world.
“This is my ultimate contingency,” Twilight said. “The portal below leads to a point just above the sun’s photosphere. If I am unable to defeat the familiar with a strike to its weakness, I shall instead drive it through that portal. Our sun’s immense gravity will thwart its escape.”
Fluttershy noticed that the familiar had dropped far beneath them. Distance shrank it to a black smudge.
Twilight turned her face to the light as if oblivious to its intensity. “Portals like this will allow me to locate the world of Kyubey’s creators. Rather than allow their predation of Equestria, I can strike them preemptively.” She looked back to Fluttershy. The wind rushing through her coat and mane gave her a manic look. “If one constructs a portal above the surface of a planet, and places the other end of the portal within the interior of a star, the results are catastrophic for the planet. Imagine that unleashed on Kyubey’s world.”
Fluttershy couldn’t look at her. Even for someone like Kyubey, what she said was horribly cruel.
Twilight’s grip tightened. “I have the capacity to obliterate the familiar and Kyubey’s creators. I’ll reset again and keep Applejack, Rarity, Rainbow, and Pinkie alive. I’ll ensure Equestria’s security forever. I can fulfill all my promises at last. Does that not excite you?”
Fluttershy shook her head sullenly. How could anypony be excited by what Twilight was saying? Her promises were more killing, destruction, and suffering. The world already had too much.
Twilight had lived a completely different life, though, in a completely different Equestria, and she had thrown it away. For this.
“Perhaps the magnitude of my devices shocks the senses.” Twilight trembled and squeezed Fluttershy’s foreleg. “Watch. You will understand the necessity of every component to this attack.”
She released Fluttershy, who braked instinctively. With a glance back, Twilight tucked in her wings in and shot towards the familiar. Her form shrank, leaving Fluttershy alone.
“You need to stop her,” Kyubey’s voice said.
She almost lost control hearing him suddenly return.
“My creators’ universal immortality project is in serious danger. I’ve warned them about her plans, but she can rewind and ambush them. However, you can stop her with a wish. You can help my creators save the universe from entropic death.”
“Save the universe. You mean make more witches.”
“That’s correct.”
Spurs burst from the familiar as Twilight dove near it. She swerved around them.
“How many?” Fluttershy asked. “How much more suffering do you need?”
“Well, every witch experiences suffering, and each witch can only reverse a limited amount of entropy. Entropy is always increasing, so to allow the universe to continue infinitely, my creators’ project requires an infinite number of witches, and therefore, infinite suffering.” He hesitated, or maybe it was just her imagination. “The benefits of universal immortality outweigh even infinite costs, though.”
Spur after spur raked past Twilight, each one coming closer than the last to landing. She was slowing down after only a few minutes. Maybe she’d been rewinding, and it’d been longer for her.
“Are your creators going to suffer, too?”
“No. They don’t experience emotion, and therefore cannot suffer. However, please don’t mistake that for selfishness. My creators would have willingly destroyed their own world if it achieved universal immortality.”
Twilight put distance between her and the familiar. Its barbs withdrew, and its shape became circular. Tiny lines sprang from its sides, stretching out to each side of the world’s interior.
“Oh, no.” Fluttershy felt deflated. “It’s grabbing onto the sides. It’ll pull itself back out.”
“I don’t think that’s what it’s doing.”
Rumbles like a hammered bell filled the air. The din rattled her from every direction. More of the familiar’s tendrils shot out and splayed across the rock. Far away, where one of the first tendrils had landed, dust floated up.
No, not dust, her frame of reference was wrong. The motes she saw had to be the size of mountains. They weren’t floating up, either, they were falling towards the center. Other places where the tendrils had landed start to crumble. Soon the dust specks grew larger and gained color, grassy greens and icy whites. Star-strewn black showed through widening holes.
Fluttershy could only watch the lethargic implosion. “Every creature on the surface must be so terrified.”
“Your planet is caving in. You need to make a wish before Twilight realizes her experiment has failed and resets again. If you want to save your planet, and my creators’ project, you have to wish she never existed.”
Fluttershy knew the rules: wishing away Twilight would make a paradox, and that would lead to a familiar. She’d just trade suffering for suffering. Why was her only choice so terrible?
Cracks began to careen across the inner surface of the planet. Noise amplified. At any second, Twilight could reset and free Fluttershy of what she had to do, but the dot kept moving. Maybe she was thinking about new ways to blow up Kyubey’s world.
The picture of it came to Fluttershy’s mind. A world of Kyubeys and their shadowy masters rationally accepting their fate as the ground collapsed beneath them, hurling them into a portal that had eaten their planet from the inside out.
Devoid of emotion, they had no reason to fear death, like Kyubey said.
Their only concern had been immortality, like Kyubey said.
Only as the picture lingered did Fluttershy realize it was all wrong.
“Kyubey, I’ll make a wish.”
Explaining wouldn’t help. Kyubey and his creators wouldn’t believe her until they saw it for themselves.
“I wish I could be with every hunter who ever lived or will live,” she said, “just before they turn into a witch.”
Princess Twilight Sparkle could remember every moment since these ponies had met her. Every peril and triumph, every bout of anger and lesson learned, every prank and laugh, and every tearful moment of quiet. She clung to these memories as she soared through the dark night sky above the raging familiar.
Unicorn blasts and dragon fire poured into the familiar’s side. Lightning from pegasi and munitions from hippogriffs sizzled through the air. Luna darted between them, summoning shields and bolts to dispatch black orbs. Earth ponies flinging boulders and griffons screeching battlecries pummeled the familiar’s tendrils, keeping it trapped in the ditch Maud had dug. Even Thorax’s band of changeling rebels fought, shapeshifting into whatever form needed reinforcements.
Horns sounded. Twilight summoned her heat shield and shaped it into a funnel pointed at the familiar. Seconds later, Celestia’s Flare roared to life, pinning the familiar with a blazing spear. Harrowing shrieks echoed from hill to hill while Twilight hovered, scanning the center of the spell’s effect.
There. Even amid the second sun’s inferno, the exposed weakness shone bright. Twilight clutched her staff and dove into the fire.
Orange jets streaked across her heat shield as she buried into the beam. Cool wind buffeted her mane and hat. Her telekinesis cut into the air molecules to create a less resistant path forward, and her glide steadied.
Flare’s brilliance faded, leaving only the familiar’s blazing weakness…and revealing the tendril rushing at her.
It caught her before she could react, but a unicorn’s turquoise shield protected her. The tendril’s force swung her to the ground, an impact delivered in clattering bones. The tendril pulled away and slammed her again, driving the protective bubble halfway into the dirt.
Squeals rang out. The tendril snapped away, and five faces appeared over the lip of the crater. These were the ponies who had first come to her aid a decade ago, when Canterlot had to be freed from Discord’s chaos. Since that desperate day, they had risen to Equestria’s defense without fail; all they asked was that she reach out her hoof.
Hoof met hoof in six pairs, and Twilight felt harmony pour into her once more. They rose together, surrounded by a rainbow helix, to face the familiar. Its black tendrils circled around the gap in its void-filled armor, closing off its exposed weakness.
Then the rainbow helix telescoped into and through it, propelling them forward. Twilight drew her friends together, wrapped her heat shield around them, and drove her staff in front. The dying star of the weakness bloomed in front.
Her staff merely shuddered, an ancient oak falling through paper ribbons, as they crashed through. Howls turned to whimpers, blinding light faded, swirling blackness unraveled, and shimmering cascades winked away. Twilight glided through the remnants, her staff burnt black, braking only to slow the ground’s approach. Creatures were cheering when they landed.
Green flares started, each one a signal from a unit reporting no casualties. First from Celestia’s and Luna’s small but robust force, then from Thorax’s changeling rebels, then the hippogriffs, griffons, dragons, and finally from Ponyville’s enormous contingent. At last, she turned around to see Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Starlight Glimmer grinning at her.
Everypony except Fluttershy.
Tears came to her eyes in the quiet. “We’re all accounted for,” she said, and this world’s Elements of Harmony rushed to embrace her.
Years passed. Each race had faced countless familiars for over a thousand years, but the one defeated at Ponyville proved to be the last. With their end, so too ended the order of hunters, heroic creatures who sought out the mysterious white alien Kyubey and devoted their lives to defeating familiars. Each one accepted that they, like the first hunter Stygian, would disappear into a flash of light at the end of their lives. Only Twilight knew that they should have transformed when their psychic energy ran out. She accepted she might never learn exactly what stopped them.
With familiars gone and Kyubey’s scheme in shambles, Twilight returned to finding Fluttershy. She had obsessed over genealogies, gleefully tracking the births of Shining Armor, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and Starlight Glimmer. However, when Fluttershy’s parents bore only a single child, Zephyr Breeze, Twilight feared that she had prevented Fluttershy’s conception with some misstep. Before she could reset to fix it, though, archaeologists uncovered the Tree of Harmony under the Everfree Forest. Among its branches, a single crystal butterfly still grew.
Equestria’s Element of Kindness would come. It was destiny. So Twilight would wait for Fluttershy.
* * * * *
Decades passed. Twilight had mentored ponies all her life, including the young Princesses Celestia and Luna, Shining Armor, Cadance (who was a pegasus now), Sunset Shimmer, and Flurry Heart (a unicorn, but still the daughter of Cadance and Shiny). After the Elements of Harmony returned Discord to his statue, she counted them among her protégés as well. Twilight relished watching each of her protégés grow beyond what they’d been in her prior life, but loathed knowing that she’d also see their end. She attended all of their funerals, although she strained to maintain her stoic regal appearance. Then Flurry Heart passed away at 92 years old, and Twilight bawled at the eulogy.
Afterward, Luna visited her in the safety of Canterlot Castle. “You may want to consider a sabbatical soon,” the youngest princess said. “Over the past week, I’ve prevented a number of…terrible dreams from afflicting you.”
“Oh, thanks. What kind of dreams were they?
“In the dreams you…” Luna seemed to shrink. “Labyrinths ran rampant through Equestria. Their denizens were like familiars, but somehow far more sinister. Your friends became hunters to fight them, but… Kyubey frequently appeared, though rarely near you. You machinated against him, tore him to pieces, all the while ignoring your friends’ distress. You even… They all died because...” Her pleading eyes caught Twilight’s. “My dame, I beg your forgiveness for this burden.”
Twilight rested a hoof on Luna’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, it’s not a burden at all. At least I didn’t have to sleep through all that, right?” She chuckled, which felt so good. “Thank you, again, for stopping my nightmares.”
Luna’s ears flicked back in a quizzical expression. “What is a nightmare?” asked the pony who never had been, and never would be, Nightmare Moon.
* * * * *
Centuries passed. Twilight accepted an invitation to study draconic culture up close, and Dragon Lord Ember offered the aid of executive assistant, a snarky purple and green drake named Obelisk. Twilight called him Spike for short. After returning to Equestria, she tried to write to them both regularly, but they fell out of touch.
Celestia left to explore the stars, leaving Luna as the monarch of Equestria. A few hundred years later, Luna cast a spell to put the sun and moon in motion on their own and also departed. Although there were some efforts for Twilight to renounce her abdication, Equestria eventually converted to a form of democracy one of her former protégés had invented. She wrote to congratulate him. His great-granddaughter replied, thanking her for her thoughts and providing the location of the graveyard in which he had been buried.
Twilight didn’t mentor anyone else.
* * * * *
Millennia passed. Equestria underwent changes and convulsions, each leaving it less recognizable. Debates began about when the realm had fallen. Twilight joined in these debates to argue to any academic who would listen that Equestria had never fallen, although it had certainly adapted. She traveled to a succession of increasingly marvellous buildings and, despite her struggles with the shifts in language, made her point in a comprehensive presentation of Equestria’s history.
Her last presentation garnered a tepid response. She later learned that she’d been asked to discuss the origins of the myth of Equestria, a land which existed only in foals’ imaginations…and, apparently, in the addled mind of one old nag.
She stopped accepting invitations to public events.
* * * * *
Epochs passed. Stars scattered, mountains crumbled, and seas swelled. Twilight thought that sunlight had become a little more red, although her calculations showed the sun hadn’t aged enough for that.
Intelligent races evolved in fascinating ways. A tribe of shaggy bipeds, distant cousins of earth ponies, helped her meditate to the chimes of ice crystals. Mages with goat-like dexterity, descended from unicorns, hunted gems with her in mountain retreats. Leathery-winged relatives of pegasi taught her echolocation while she spelunked in winding caves.
She encountered a race of enormous hairless creatures who strode through a gentle valley on six legs thicker than her entire body. Thanks to necks that stretched out fifteen paces, they fed on melon-sized fruit growing from towering trees. They were so strange that Twilight supposed they might be from another world. However, when one of them guffawed and winked at her, she wondered if she’d discovered a distant branch of the Apple family tree.
During her visit with the massive creatures, Twilight grew fatigued and ran a persistent fever. Those symptoms she could ignore, but when nightmares came, she sought out one of the creatures’ healers. The healer told her, in a pidgin they’d developed over a few weeks, that he believed the enchanted hood she wore might be causing hallucinations. The hood let her see, so the enchantment needed to be fixed, but their tribe had no experience with spells. She would have to leave their valley to find help.
Her stay with them had been brief, but Twilight wanted to thank them for their hospitality before she left. For other tribes, she had translated her notes of their culture and history to leave behind, but her stay with the giants had been only a few weeks. Even if she understood their language, she had only a few paltry notes. Instead, she asked that her hosts gather all their tribe in a natural amphitheater to listen to a true account that no creature had heard before. Around sunset, the last of them took their seats. Their bulbous eyes trained on her, and they listened as she spoke through a translator.
“There was once a realm named Equestria, home to earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns, alicorns, and many others. Tonight, I will tell you this realm’s history and its protectors: Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Spike, Starlight Glimmer…” She swallowed. “And Fluttershy.”
* * * * *
She endured fever and lightheadedness through daybreak, when she finished her tale before any mention of Kyubey or labyrinths. The giants seemed to listen with rapt attention, but she left the valley wracked with doubt. Had she been translated accurately? Would they remember well enough? How long would the story of Equestria pass down to future generations? Still, she trudged away through morning.
By midday, waking nightmares haunted her every step. In one breath, she would smother a sleeping pony to scare Rainbow Dash from becoming a hunter. In another, she’d light a mansion aflame, despite know that Applejack was trapped inside. In a third, she built automatons of Moon Dancer and Starlight to hide their deaths. She shook away each nightmare.
Then the visions turned to Fluttershy.
Twilight let them wash over her. Swarms of bees told her about Fluttershy; a circus and a warning; a confrontation in the forest, another in a cathedral of strings; finally, she fell with Fluttershy from unimaginable heights, somehow through the world, and—
“My creators need to know what you wished for.”
She stumbled hearing Kyubey’s voice. Her jaw slammed on the ground, and something crumpled by her ear. The world turned to blobs of light and dull color.
“According to their models, a hunter that exhausts its psychic energy must undergo metamorphosis, producing a much stronger entity. This has never been observed.” The voice drew nearer. “My creators now know that you are from an alternate history. You must have wished to stop hunters from transforming and then used a spell to return to the distant past. That explains the familiars.”
Kyubey had listened to her story to the valley giants, invaded that pristine moment. She swung her forelegs at a white oval but connected with nothing.
“Harvesting psychic energy from a familiar is not efficient enough to reverse entropy, but it’s been sufficient to sustain you. Until now. Your demise is imminent.”
Snarling, she shoved herself up to her hooves. Her telekinesis snatched at the ground around her. Snaps of rock ripping apart filled the air.
”Please tell me what you wished for. My creators will find a way to undo it for the sake of the universal immortality project.”
She couldn’t die like this, being lied to by Kyubey. She had to wait for Fluttershy. The hourglass sprang to her mind. If she could rewind…
And then, at her back, she felt another’s feathers.
“Who are you?” Kyubey asked.
Yellow wings surrounded Twilight. She sagged into an embrace from a pink mane hovering above a shadow.
“I knew you’d arrive if I waited,” Twilight whispered.
A titter, three chiming notes, answered her. “Actually, I never left.”
Fluttershy’s voice creaked like an old nag’s. Panic gripped Twilight, and she reached up to Fluttershy’s face. She felt flaps of skin, a threadbare mane, a rounded muzzle…and a placid smile.
“You’re so old!” Twilight moaned. “When were you born? I’ll go back before then, get Equestria ready for you—”
Twilight allowed her hooves to drop. Ferocious heat came from the shadow near Fluttershy’s neckline. Not a shadow; Fluttershy wore a Soul Gem on the verge of breaking.
“No, no, no, there aren’t familiars anymore—”
“And there aren’t any witches.”
“You’re not supposed to know about…” Twilight gasped as the epiphany struck her. “It was your wish! You beat Kyubey!”
Fluttershy stiffened. “No, I didn’t have to beat him. He and his creators would never have gotten what they wanted. That’s why they suffered so much.”
“Suffer?” Twilight barked out a laugh. “Kyubey can’t suffer. It doesn’t even have feelings.”
“I think that makes it worse. He and his creators can’t savor what’s fleeting or mourn what’s lost. They don’t fear death, so they don’t know how to bravely accept that nothing lasts forever. All they know is how to spread their suffering.” With every word, Fluttershy relaxed a little. “They can’t feel any of that, but maybe my wish will help them put an end to their project sooner.”
“So you did wish to mess up their technology.” Twilight squeezed her amazing, clever, world-saving friend.
“Not exactly. I wished that I could be with every hunter who ever lived or will live just before they turned into a witch…so I could do this.”
The heat and brightness intensified. Twilight’s tears boiled off her cheeks. She realized she hadn’t watched hunters vanish in flashes of light; she’d watched Fluttershy incinerate them.
“We’re the last two hunters,” Fluttershy said. “With everyone else, I’ve had to hold back. Not with you.”
Twilight nuzzled into Fluttershy’s chest as she understood her friend’s meaning. The smell of char choked her. “You can’t go now. You’re Equestria’s Element of Kindness—”
“And Equestria is gone.”
“It’s just changed…” Twilight suppressed the sore memories of distant arguments. “It lives on in stories, at least.”
“Every story has an end. Even the stories we tell ourselves.”
The fire between them became smothering, but Twilight shivered.
“This isn’t fair,” Twilight said. “You deserve a life! You deserve to be with your friends!”
“I’ve had a life, a good life even. One devoted to helping others in their most painful moment and making sure it doesn’t become even worse. And I have friends. I’m so glad to be with you now. Being alone at the end must be so awful.”
Fluttershy’s voice faltered. Her forelegs slackened.
Ash crumbled from Twilight’s coat. They were the last hunters, the last Elements of Harmony, the last subjects of Equestria. The last ponies. In seconds they’d live on only in stories, the eternal stream of heroes who saved the world from villains great and wily. Immortal by word and dream. But the greatest hero of all, Fluttershy…
No one except Twilight even knew she existed.
“Then you deserve to be remembered.”
The heat shield surged out. Cold rushed over her.
“I’ll start again, from as far back as I can. I’ll tell every creature about the Elements of Harmony, and I promise they’ll remember you. They’ll remember all of us. Forever.”
“Don’t—”
“I can’t wait to see you again.”
The hourglass in Twilight’s mind began to spin, further through the eons than ever before, even as something deep inside her screamed that this was—
All wrong.
“On this first day of autumn, I hereby convoke…”
Nine pairs of eyes drifted up to Twilight from eight creatures she knew well…and one impossible guest. Twilight’s scientists had assured her that its world was scoured clean by starfire and ripped apart by a gravitational portal. Every inhabitant had been annihilated.
And yet, there sat Kyubey.
All so horribly wrong.
“The Aspects of New Equestria,” Twilight said, clacking a gavel. She nodded to a scrawny dragon. “Calcine, could you introduce your guest?”
The dragon stood and scratched her neck apathetically. “Calcine, Aspect of Growth, yadda yadda yadda. So I was flying around trying to find a new mineral deposit, ‘cause us dragons are running low on emeralds ever since Sulphur Gorge went…” Her claws clasped together. “Whoomph. Anyway, I saw this guy in a volcano talking to some magmagators. That was going about as well as you’d expect. I fly down, scare them off, and… You know what? I’ll let him explain.” She dropped back to her chair.
Kyubey rose and surveyed the room. “My creators wanted to make contact with your world sooner. Like you, they fought against persistent familiars.”
Somber expressions spread around the room at the mention of familiars. Even the griffon Gonzo, the Aspect of Fun, lost his normally irrepressible smirk.
“They believed familiars release a kind of energy that could be harnessed to slow entropy,” Kyubey continued. “In theory, entities could be built that released enough of this energy to reverse entropy indefinitely. However, before they could perfect this technology, a wayward portal from your dimension destroyed their planet.”
“A portal from our dimension?” asked the hippogriff Green Eyes, Aspect of Trust. His gaze locked on a changeling across the table. “I do wonder who could be responsible for such an atrocity.”
Cryptic, Aspect of Candor, shrugged. “Unicorns told us to quit messing around with portals, remember? Go bug them for once.”
The unicorn Whisper, Aspect of Listening, wilted from the sudden attention. “I’ll, uhm, ask.”
“To preserve their work,” Kyubey said after they’d quieted, “my creators encoded their research into me and projected me through the portal into this dimension. I can deliver their work and help your races defeat your familiars.”
“And in what ways can you assist against these monsters we resist?” asked the zebra Sestina, Aspect of Adaptability.
“It’s my understanding that only one creature in your world can destroy familiars currently. I can enable others to do this by teaching them to use…” Kyubey’s eyes burned into Twilight. “Interesting. Your language already has the required vocabulary: I can teach them to use a Soul Gem.”
“Pegasi should get Soul Gems first!” barked the pegasus Golden Bounty, Aspect of Sharing.
“Not before earth ponies!” said the earth pony Rocky, Aspect of Patience.
“I can teach as many creatures as you’d like. All they have to do is make a wish.”
Twilight reveled in silence as the discussion continued. On her last reset, she’d returned to a past before Equestria or the Pillars. These eight creatures, reared on Elements of Harmony “fairy tales” that Twilight had told for hundreds of generations, would help her build the perfect version of her world. With the technology Kyubey surrendered to them, she’d find a way to preserve this new world forever.
The arguments wound down. Her telekinesis extended surgically to each of the Aspects, draining depressant neurotransmitters while stimulating norepinephrine, but not to the point of mania, and adding a final kick of adrenaline and dopamine. She released them, confident that she had instilled the fear of death and a hope of immortality.
“Let us put the question to a secret ballot,” she said. “Should New Equestria accept this guest’s aid?”
The final tally was eight to one in favor. Twilight glanced around the table, unable to guess who might be the contrarian. It didn’t matter, she supposed.
“The yeas have it,” she said.
Twilight felt peculiar, like her head was a hot air balloon about to drift away from her neck. She excused herself, passed the gavel to Whisper, and meandered into the Everfree Castle’s stupendous atrium. There, under the watchful eyes of statues and memorials, tears of joy streamed down her cheek.
She’d done it. After all her misery, her planning, her hard work, she’d finally won, she’d finally built a world fit for her friends, and the world that would never know…will never know their absence.
Imagine it: an entire existence woven from filaments of lineage and history, the movements of its every atom compelled like destiny. Myths distill into morals supporting customs enshrined as law. Common goals turn to grand missions binding together ponies into a realm that awaits through millennia of sublime peace the birth of its guardians.
Then they’ll return. All of them. Rainbow, Applejack, Rarity, Pinkie, Spike, Starlight, and Fluttershy, every creature, they’ll all come back. They’ll grow with one another, dispel their loneliness, learn from every adventure, and teach their lessons across the world to never, ever, ever, ever be forgotten.
But they’ll still die.
And die.
And die. And die. And die, and die, and die and die anddieanddieanddiediediediedi
Until I make the world all right.
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Well, that was a trip.
What he said. What just happened in this chapter? Was this a happy ending or not? Oh, I'm so confused...
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I’m still nervous about this ending, but it’s meant to be open to interpretation (the story starts with “All wrong.” and ends with “all right” in a context that’s supposed to make you question what that means). It’s also what I’d planned since the beginning (although when I reworked the Chapter 12 outline I seriously considered scrapping it for a bittersweet but unambiguous one). I’ll write up a blog post later with some of my thoughts about the story in general, so I’ll talk more about the ending in that.
Thanks to you both for reading through the whole thing and commenting. I hope y’all enjoyed it, even with the ambiguous ending.
AAAAUGH! Goddammit, Twi. MadokaShy fixed everything, but you just had to Rebellion it all away!
This was a really awesome story! Uh... I wish I had more to say here, but I was too engrossed in reading to take any notes. There were a lot of cool details in the far future scenes that I wish we got to see a little more of. I especially liked the description of the alien Apple Family.
Anyway, congrats on finishing! Excellent work on all of this.
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Thanks! Part of the reason I wrote the ending this way was because I had mixed feelings about Rebellion, and I wanted to try my own approach at the same tone and ideas. I’m not sure I really succeeded here, but I do appreciate Rebellion’s ending a lot more now.
The distant future details were a hoot to research and think about, but I cut most of it for the sake of pacing. For example, in my outline the atmosphere got too thin for Twilight to breathe so she went into space with a bubble of air to wait for Fluttershy; her confrontation with Kyubey involved launching him away at relativistic speed, making him turn pink from the Doppler shift. It would have been cool, but it would have taken a lot of time to explain, and wouldn’t have contributed much to the story. On the other hand, I do wonder if I could have fleshed out some details for world building. In the “Millennia passed” section, describing how the buildings were incredible might have been good. Striking that balance is tough for me.
Thank you again for all your feedback, and I’m really glad you enjoyed Corrigenda.
Holy shit, that was fucking heartwrenching. Well done.
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Thank you! I also really appreciate your comments about the stranger/Homura expy. I’m going to write about them in the follow-up blog post as well, and the feedback helps me understand what worked (and didn’t).
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I think a lot of what tripped me up, reading, was the colors. I have to admit I don't see a lot of point to the color changes, aside from parallels to Luna/NMM. If you want to keep the confusion over whether it's Twilight or Star Swirl, then wouldn't it make more sense to have her go grey? And even with the palette swap, I guessed it was Twilight more or less immediately, so it didn't obfuscate much, and I can't see how you can take any color out of purple and pink to get black and red. (If it is because she's an alicorn, why would blue, pink, black, and red be the colors of magic personified? I don't get it.)
(I also don't get the beard, but my assumption is she just magicked it on for her disguise, a la Spike's mustache.)
Actually, how come her hair doesn't go all wavy? She's lived long than Celestia by the time we meet her, if I haven't got my timeline confused.
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Her color changes were kind of a muddle of different goals. One goal was to suggest that she’s been rewinding and resetting so much in this timeline that she’s much older than she should be (~8,000 years old). I threw in a lot of color changes to depict her as significantly older than Celestia and Luna in the show, and I also imagine her mane going limp from age (sort of the alicorn equivalent of thinning hair). The rewinding/resetting was also why her language was screwy; she loses track of what words have been invented or become obsolete/archaic. However, I couldn’t find a way to make clear that she is significantly more than ~1000 years old without hurting the pacing in the last chapter, so I think that fell flat.
A second goal was to make a red herring to suggest she was Star Swirl. When I started writing, we hadn’t seen Star Swirl in the show, so I thought I had some leeway with his coloration. By the time Shadow Play aired, though, I realized the red herring was a bad idea, so I left her as she was. It wasn’t a good solution to that issue, and if I were to rewrite the whole story, I’d handle Twilight differently.
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Yikes, sorry I missed your question! Everypony has the same cutie mark they did in the show except where it’s specifically called out as different. Fluttershy’s special talent gets addressed (albeit indirectly) in a later chapter.
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I'm curious: what might that personal reason be for you? I'm having trouble myself pinning down why it affected me so.
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I think it’s because of my conflicted feelings about FIM ending. That speech was when I got emotionally invested in the show (I watched the season 1 episodes in order in 2011), so it’s the real start of the series for me. Seven years, going on eight, is a long time to be invested in a cartoon, but there have been enough great episodes these last few seasons to keep me engaged. The show does have to end at some point, and it’s better if it happens while the team behind it has creative energy left. I’m still sorry to see it go, though, and thinking about that speech reminds me of why.