Senescence

by Kavidun

Starship Prologue

My name is Ivyshine, and I'm the last mortal pony left. I live in a hospital bed, and I'm kinda a celebrity. I've lived a thousand years, but I'm coming to an end. I'm finally dying.

Mortality is a strange concept to wrap your head around. What comes after death? Fuck knows. There's certainly no god, or heaven. Or if there is, he lives outside of what we know of the universe. Any old pony tales about immortality stemmed from the stories of the alicorns. Many ponies doubt the alicorns ever lived. They did, I saw them. But then they died. Just like everypony would, death is the natural order of life.

But death isn't a thing anymore. At least, not in the way you'd know it. There's suffering, oh god, there's suffering. Take the mare in the bed next to me. Her name's Evangelic, and she's the only one besides me and... him... that can remember what Equestria was like. And she has the curse of immortality. For my age, I've done pretty well. I still have all my organs. My blood is untainted. But she is trapped. If she wasn't locked to life, she would have died a hundred years ago. Her blood was drained years ago, and her only fluid now is a thin, watery substance that fuels her. She's bedridden, and can barely move. She has to speak with a telepathic collar... Her life is hell. She despises me, and I don't blame her. I can escape any time. She's trapped.

Being the last mortal pony comes with fame. Ponies come from all over the universe to see me, to see my face and hear my stories. The hospital wing tried to move me into my own separate bay, but I adamantly refused. I am not a museum piece, I am a pony. If people want to hear my stories, so be it. Of course, Evangelic can't stand to hear it. She gets visitors too, but much, much rarer than me. She wishes she could tell her stories of the old world. But my clock is ticking. Ponies want to talk to me first, they'd have all of eternity to talk to her once I died.

Ever since immortality became the norm, some ponies have tried to kill themselves, some out of desperation, some out of curiosity, some out of experimentation. Take... his... hunter. The one tracking him down. His name's Neutron. A scientist by name and a scientist by nature, he wanted to investigate immortality. He shot himself into a star, to see if he would survive. A week later, a ball of iron floated out, with intense amounts of energy pulsing from it. The ball of iron was put in a signal reader and, well, it was Neutron. His colleagues built him a mech suit, and now he's pioneering the development of cybernetic ponies. Evangelic was offered the first test run. She declined. She said it would spit in the face of the two sisters to take away the pony forms we have in their image.

I should stop dancing around who I'm referring to by pronoun only. His name is Duskdawn. He's the oldest immortal, and he's the one that caused immortality to begin with. At first, he was worshipped. Called a hero for making it so ponies never have to die. But then... ponies never had to die. Overcrowding became rampant. Life on Equestria became hell. War broke out between those two were immortal and those who were not. The mortals lost, obviously. And the old planet was sealed off, launched into a blackhole, as punishment for what they had done.

In the beginning of the new, it was just myself, Duskdawn, and Evangelic. Those two fucked a *lot* to repopulate. Myself? I'm not attracted to scruffy pegasi that try to force immortality on me, thank you very much. But in my sleep one night, Duskdawn tranquilised me and harvested my eggs. Grew ponies with some scientific, artificial method that I'm not intellectual enough to comment on. I still have that scar. It's my only lasting injury, and I despise him for it.

And since everypony besides me is a direct decendent of Duskdawn, everypony besides me is immortal. A thousand years later, the population is at several million spread amongst various stations and planets, and there's no sign of slowing down any time soon. Considering culture had to be re-established, Duskdawn abused the opportunity to make incest, rape and promiscuity the norm. At first he justified it by saying the population needed to grow, but once the culture began it was very difficult to stop. Most ponies nowadays just accept it.

So why is he being tracked down? He was forced to run. One day, about a hundred years ago, he and Evangelic had a fight. She thought he was becoming a dictator, called him evil for his crimes against ponykind, and confronted and questioned his decision to seal away the old world. He beat her into oblivion. He's half the reason she's bedridden. Before falling into a coma for fifty years, her final action was to release the archive of information they had stored on the old world.

Suddenly everypony knew about the Equestria of before, of the beauty, of the peace, of the kindness, of the love. Of the princess of friendship, and the sisters of the sun and moon. And ponies were not happy about the deception.

October 16th 404. I remember the date clearly. Duskdawn's ship was blown up by a rebel group of over a thousand angry ponies. Of course, he survived. He's an immortal. He flew off into space, and he hasn't been seen since. Many ponies want him to be brought to some form of justice for his crimes. Some say he should be launched into Equestria. That's where we throw a lot of our most evil criminals. God only knows what life is like down there after being abandoned for so long by us. Others say he should be publicly tortured for all eternity, but the issue with that is the fact he'd inevitably escape. I myself? I feel we should leave him alone. I think being distant from his own sick idea of paradise is punishment enough.

So as I was saying, I'm finally dying. I have cancer, inoperable. An undramatic way to die after so long, for sure, but I love it. It feels so perfectly fitting to die in such a real, mortal way as my own cells turning against me. And as such, I decided to record my story for future reference. For anyone who wished to visit me, and hear me speak, these are my stories, these are my musings.

Before I die, I hope to have told you how immortality came to be. I hope to tell you the truth, and the beauty, of my old home, Equestria. I hope to tell you the story of my life, and of my death. I hope to tell you what death feels like, and I hope to tell you what mortality truly is.

This is the story of my senescence.