Time of Death

by Starscribe

ALTERNATE ENDING

It wasn’t just the Elements of Harmony who prepared for the worst that morning. In a country as peaceful as Equestria, the looming death of so many was news that spread. The morning came exactly on schedule, along with scheduled rain in most large cities to commemorate those who died. There was just one problem.

Pinkie Pie didn’t expect anything to happen. She watched from the other side of the screen as Fluttershy extracted her cockatrice from its cage—the monster itself just an outline. Her whole family was all still there, watching. Pinkie had already cried herself dry, so she just sat there, feeling cold.

“Go on,” she heard Fluttershy whisper. “Change her back. You’ve been so helpful, Mr. Cockatrice… just this one last spell, and we’ll head right home. Won’t that be nice?”

Pinkie didn’t understand the animal’s chittering reply. She watched her sister, grayer and more motionless than usual. She’d been frozen that way for a few hours now… long enough that the sun was shining through the window. This is it, she thought. Twilight said she won’t be able to change back. Dirge’s curse would follow her.

Maud took a breath.

Everypony in the room stopped what they were doing. Her mother dropped her glass, her sister Marble stopped sobbing. Everyone turned, giving Maud their full attention. Had it been her imagination?

Pinkie wanted to walk up to her, but knew that wasn’t allowed. She didn’t want to be turned into a statue, she’d already tried that once. It hadn’t been fun last time. Maud’s dress fell limply against her body, no longer a stony part of the carving that looked exactly like her sister. She blinked, her eyes reflecting the light of the sun on her face.

“Maud!” Pinkie exclaimed, her mane returning to its energetic self in less than a second. “You’re alive!”

Her sister took a long time to speak. She looked around, eyes moving now. Pinkie hadn’t been wrong.

“It worked,” Fluttershy said, replacing the blanket on the cage and pushing the screen down. Her tone had changed, from bleak and hopeless to curious, interested. “It shouldn’t have worked…”

“Oh,” Maud said, lifting one hoof and holding it up to inspect. “That was nice, Fluttershy. We’ll have to do that again sometime.”

Then they buried her with hugs.

There was a funeral scheduled in Canterlot that day—had been for months. It had been such an important affair for Equestria that Celestia herself had overseen it. It was meant to be her last gift to the ponies she couldn’t help. But nopony was dead, and so the mourning had to be retasked into something else. Pinkie Pie wasn’t even upset she hadn’t been able to organize the party.

They were all there—all the ponies Dirge had meant to kill, and one griffin. Each of them looked a little weary, or more than a little hung over. Pinkie didn’t even know how Gilda and Rainbow Dash had gotten back so fast from griffon lands that they could attend. Maybe Discord had brought them.

* * *

Twilight had never seen Discord smugger. He paraded around the party to the adulation of everypony who saw him. It seemed to Twilight that the draconequus had finally found something he enjoyed at least as much as Fluttershy’s friendship. And he’d won even more of that too, for saving her awful younger brother.

Twilight herself felt barely alive, and despite the joy of the occasion she found it hard to celebrate. She had done the magical research of decades in a single year, without help. She’d worn herself to the bone, worked hard enough that her mane had started turning gray, yet her research hadn’t been enough. In the end, it was Discord who saved all their lives.

“You could have told me what you were up to,” Twilight said, when they were eating together at the high table beside Celestia, Luna, and Cadance. “If I’d known what you were looking for…” She glanced over the table, where those who lived now celebrated with their loved ones.

“What, and deprive them of this moment?” Discord gestured to his pasta, which danced through the air in front of him, taking the general shape of a pony. “That would be a crime Twilight. Imagine how happy they are now. Those ponies went out, and did everything they ever wanted in their lives. They lived. Now they’ll see every day as a gift! What few days I’ve given them, anyway. They’re still mortal.”

“Funny,” she grumbled, not eating. She hadn’t felt hungry for a long time.

“How did you do it?” Celestia asked. “Temporal inevitability spells were some of my earliest magic. I know how they work. Dirge’s curse would not have been distracted until all six of them were dead.”

Discord shrugged. As he did, his magic ripped the little noodle pony he’d made in the air in half, saucy guts spilling everywhere. “You’re a wise and intelligent ruler, Princess. I think we will both be happier if you don’t learn the answer to that.”

Celestia opened her mouth to protest, then shut it without having said anything. She looked down at the small plate of yellow cake in front of her, looking suddenly disgusted. “I see.” The other princesses did the same.

“What?” Twilight asked. “You’re all just going to let him… get away with that? After the year we had?”

“Yes,” Luna said, her voice firm. “You should as well, Twilight Sparkle. It is better that way.”

The party went well into the night. Twilight Sparkle spent time with each of the ponies who had suffered, who except for Zephyr were all extremely grateful for her efforts (even if they hadn’t amounted to anything). She was happy to learn that Discord had been right in at least one respect—several of them had used the time before their death to become better ponies. Coco had a whole company running now, Gilda had seen the world, Trixie had… well Trixie was almost as awful as ever.

But that wasn’t satisfying to her. He said he was looking for rare ingredients for a time spell, she thought. And Celestia said the magic wouldn’t stop until it killed its targets. So, what did he do?

Maybe she would’ve been better off if she’d left well enough alone. But Twilight Sparkle was a nosy Alicorn. She wouldn’t have been an Alicorn otherwise.

Twilight invited Discord for tea one afternoon about a week after the day that ponies should’ve died. He arrived looking exactly as smug as he had at the party. Perhaps moreso.

She didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “I need to know what you did,” she said, her voice low and urgent. Her castle was still an absolute mess from her research. She’d taken the time to try and heal her own body, but hadn’t finished yet. Her mane still looked uneven, and her body was still skeletal and shrunken. She had a lot of eating and sleep to catch up on.

“Oh?” Discord said. “Didn’t our dear friend Celestia suggest you shouldn’t ask about that? Don’t you trust her?”

“Trusting her is one thing,” Twilight began. “But I studied this problem for an entire year. I read the works of ponies I didn’t even know existed. There shouldn’t have been a way through this. Alicorn magic wasn’t powerful enough, time magic couldn’t do it without causing a paradox, no shield was strong enough… what did you do?”

“You don’t want to know,” Discord said again, his tone low and dangerous. “You ponies live in your pretend world of peace and friendship, ignorant of the harsh realities of existence. Just… enjoy the result! Take joy in the families that weren’t broken. Isn’t that enough?”

“For them, yes,” she said. “They don’t have to know. And… if it will make you willing to explain, then I swear not to tell either. It can just be between us. Forever.”

“Oh, I like this,” Discord said, though his expression remained grim. “A private little secret, just between you and me! I will remember this, Twilight. You don’t have any conception just what forever means, but you will.”

She grunted with annoyance. “Okay, so… what did you do?” She flicked her tail behind her, at the chalkboards packed with thousands of discarded spells. Everything in every Equestrian library on the curse Dirge had used. Each one of them told the same story: inevitability.

“Well, you’re right about the curse. Celestia was too. Dirge’s spell had already been cast. Exactly one week ago, the wave of lethal magic came through at his sanctum and flooded the world. It would travel any distance until it found and killed each of the six people he kidnapped. Nothing could stop it, or confuse it, or protect the victims.”

“Okay…” Twilight said. “So how are they still alive? Big Mac was here with Applejack only a few hours ago, and I could tell he’s still alive. He’s not undead, so you didn’t use that morbid solution.” Twilight had considered that. But of course, if she was willing to abandon all her principles and try to reanimate the corpses of her dead friends, why stop there? That had seemed too extreme a path to explore.

Discord smiled, the same sort of wicked smile she had seen from him every time he did something awful. “Oh, I didn’t. That wasn’t what you asked me to do, Twilight. You asked for my help saving your friends. That’s what I did… I saved them.”

“How?” she asked again, a little annoyance in her voice. “You didn’t bring them back from the dead, you didn’t stop the spell from killing them. So, what happened?”

“Let me teach you a lesson about chaos,” Discord said. Everything on the table lifted into the air—the teacups, the uneaten scones. The tablecloth. “Look down, deep down…” The sugar bowl dumped its cubes into the air, which began to spin in front of her. “And everything is chaos. The rules you ponies love just don’t make sense! Every moment, there are a billion billion different chances for things to go different. Maybe the proton spins right, maybe left.” He snapped his claws, and some of the cubes started to glow, flashing irregularly. “Every time this happens…” An identical copy of their table appeared beside them, complete in every way. Except, of course, that the chairs were empty. Only, the floating remnants of the tea were in a slightly different configuration. “This happens many times, and we are unaware. Unaware that our lives are merely one of innumerable, identical copies of ourselves, divided and subdivided and duplicated until the end of time.”

“O-okay.” Twilight wasn’t sure of how true any of this was. Discord understood chaos, but it seemed more than a little hard to believe. Twilight knew of one alternate world, where Canterlot was a school and ponies were strange creatures that walked on two legs. But that was the only one she’d ever visited. “So how does that help you save our friends?”

“Easy,” Discord said. “I went searching for ingredients. I brought them to the old sanctum, so they’d be right where the curse was looking when it arrived. Cleaned up the mess afterwards, and…” He snapped his claws again. The other table vanished, and everything floating through the air abruptly fell to the ground. Cups and plates shattered, tea splashed everywhere. But Twilight didn’t care.

“You weren’t brewing a potion with those ingredients…” she muttered. “Or making a time spell.”

“Nope. No time spells involved, only space. More dimensions than you’re used to, but there’s really nothing to it. Just picture flatland, then look up. Then do it a few more times and you’re there. But that’s a lesson for another day. Besides… a potion simply wouldn’t have helped. My plan wouldn’t have worked if they weren’t alive when the curse arrived.”

Twilight now had some idea why Celestia hadn’t questioned Discord further. In his own way, he’d done exactly the same thing as Dirge. Only maybe it was worse, since he didn’t even care about the ponies he’d brought. Even now, he didn’t look the least bit upset that he’d condemned five ponies and one griffon to die.

“Y-you…” she stammered, pointing with one hoof. “You did…”

He rose to his feet, backing away from her. “You see now why Celestia didn’t ask questions? The universe is a brutal and uncaring place, Twilight Sparkle.” He pointed out the window with one claw. “It’s the responsibility of us here in ours to make it better. If it’s any consolation, I was doing humanitarian service out there. I kept searching until I found ingredients who wanted to be dead. I just… brought them somewhere they could die for a good cause.” He leaned out the window, watching as Applejack and Big Mac made their way down the road in front of the castle, carrying their empty carts after the day’s sale. “You wouldn’t want to see the places I took them from.”

Twilight almost argued with him, fury boiling in her veins. Instead, she just nodded. “I guess it’s… our secret.”

“Forever,” Discord repeated. “I’m good for my word, Princess Twilight. I look forward to see if yours counts for anything.” He vanished in a flash, leaving Twilight feeling unhappier than she’d been moments before.

Yet as she watched Applejack pass by, giving her brother a brief reflexive hug every few minutes as they walked away, Twilight realized the pony she was most horrified with was herself.

Not that she hadn’t been able to find another cure—Celestia had prepared her for that over a year ago. It was, rather, that she wasn’t angry at Discord.

What kind of pony did that make her?

Author's Note:

So this is a non-canon alternate ending to this story. One that takes things in a bit of a different direction while hopefully still sticking to the character of the bleak journey we've had so far.

Comments

[Goldstrike]

Out of the two endings for this series I like this one more. It gives a happy ending as well as a dark twist. I say BRILLIANT!

[Goldfur]

Sneaky and morbid at the same time. A worthy alternate ending.

[Mother3Forever]

8314358
As far as I'm concerned, this is the actual ending. It's darker, and reeks of Creepypasta.... I like that.

...Also, I cried uncontrollably when Maud died, but that has nothing to do with this I swear! *Shifty eyes*

Hell, you should change the last two chapters titles to say..."Bad End" and "Good End?" Just to drive home the whole "Not sure how to feel" reaction that Twilight had.

[Winter Quill]

Oh, the way Discord solved the problem made me like this ending just a bit more. Just the idea of finding willing ingredients... That could be a story in and of itself.

Funny enough, I think that makes this ending the darker one.

[RetMotiv]

I kind of expected the alternative ending where everyone lives to be out of place and not fitting for the story or worse than the original. I shouldn't have doubted you.
This is really good, probably as good as the original and I can't bring myself to decide which one is better.

[Yami Vizzini]

Yet as she watched Applejack pass by, giving her brother a brief reflexive hug every few minutes as they walked away, Twilight realized the pony she was most horrified with was herself.
Not that she hadn’t been able to find another cure—Celestia had prepared her for that over a year ago. It was, rather, that she wasn’t angry at Discord.
What kind of pony did that make her?

It makes you a pony who doesn't want her friends to suffer. Screw this forced drama and Discord trying to claim the moral high ground.
...Seriously though, nice and creepy. Equivalent exchange really is the only way to go sometimes. And covering both outcomes was about the best way to handle this.

[Lithl]

Wait, if I understand this correctly, Discord saved everyone by offering up alternatives (who were willing to die)? But I thought Dirge's spell couldn't be tricked or evaded?

[Alkarasu]

8314716
So it wasn't tricked or evaded. It had to kill six particular beings at a particular spot of time. It did. It's like with the computer - it does exactly what you tell it to do, but it's not always what you actually want it to do.

[mastermenthe]

the loophole is that he did indeed sacrifice Coco and Zephyr and Trixie and Maud and the other two, but but Discord's ingredients were alternate universe versions of the six target ponies that acted as his sacrifices.

This loophole worked because, as Twilight explained in Trixie's chapter, the spell was not cast by Dirge ON the target ponies, the spell was cast on TIME with Dirge's list of target ponies as the end recipients.

The magic was necromantic and so it could distinguish between the souls of its named targets and other ponies, but alternative universal duplicants would ALSO have the same name on their soul, and all Discord had to do was make sure the magic hit them first because it could only work once since it was linking the target's death to the caster's death, and since Dirge only died once, the spell could only operate once across the list of targets.

Also note that Twilight explicitly never stated that she found no Solution to the Spell's Effect, only that she found no Cure for the curse itself.

[Lithl]

8314842
Okay, alternate universe versions of the doomed ponies would make sense, but that's not clear to me from the chapter. Perhaps Discord's talk about additional spatial dimensions is meant to convey that, but extra spatial dimensions doesn't mean parallel universes. Climbing the spatial dimensions takes you from point to line to square to cube to tesseract and beyond, not from cube to alternate cube.

[FluttermacFan]

This just creeped me out... Is it bad that I want the original and alternate endings to be true? THEY'RE BOTH SO GOOD! But I honestly preference this. Happy with a dark twist.

[Alkarasu]

8316886
They can both be true at the same time. Discord is no Element of Honesty, no one but him knows where he really got his "ingredients" from. Could be the reality from the first ending.

[Lightwavers]

I like this ending better. The implications are terrifying though. There's confirmation that Discord has access to all (or at least, a large amount) of the other alternate universes, a large amount of which have terrible things going on. And he has reality warping powers, but doesn't fix it.

He doesn't fix it. This is the most terrifying part of this ending, because it implies that ponies really are just short-livid playthings to him. He accepts that everyone he knows is going to die, including Fluttershy. Bring this to its logical conclusion: he doesn't really care about friendship. He's just waiting for the bearers to die off. And he's much darker than in canon.

[Biker_Dash]

Damn... the level of feels...

[fanreader999999]

Interesting...? The writing is strong but the characters are so forced it comes across as 'let's force the Mane 6 to cry cause puppy kicking or something '.

That said the alternate ending is awful. Twilight is so out of character she is pretty much an OC character.

[PaulAsaran]

You can has review!