The Collapse

by Lightwavers

Epilogue

Cold winds blow across dirt and rock, raising a thin film of dust into the air and forming deposits of sediments into what would eventually be sand dunes. No crickets chirp in the constant night. No animals prowl. No seeds grow.

A faint scent of ozone fills the air, and the tang of electricity settles across the landscape. A dark vortex opens in the air, a rip in reality that devours the moonlight and absorbs ambient light from the area around it. It finishes opening. It was always open. A paradox. Something wrong, something that shouldn’t exist. Reality notices and forces it shut, but not before a rainbow-maned alicorn tumbles out.

Rainbow Dash looked around at the empty area around her. No one. Magic buzzed in her chest, waiting to be used. Even without drawing on it directly, she had no doubt that flying to the nearest settlement wouldn’t be a challenge, even if it was on the other side of the continent.

Try it now, a voice suggested. Celestia. Absorbing the new memories had taken time and effort, but come with understanding. Rainbow could slip into another mode of thought, a pattern that traced another consciousness. She could become Celestia, could mimic the Princess just by thinking a certain way. Memories. Tracing familiar patterns. That was all it was, really. They were still separate, though. She would have to sit down and go through every experience in the older alicorn’s life before she could truly understand everything she had absorbed. For now, she was content to run a simulation of what the Princess would say if she were here.

She looked up at the moon.

It was beautiful. Every pit and scarring on the surface had been the study of countless nights at her balcony with a telescope.

But it would have to go, for now. Rainbow Dash sank into the part of her that was the alicorn, feeling the immense power and connection that came with it. Energy swirled around her, stored in wind and clouds and the earth itself, each bit a distinct but manageable piece of the world. But the world wasn’t her focus. She stretched her awareness up, and up, and up, farther and farther into the cold, empty void of space. Another type of energy radiated in the vacuum, cold vibrating strings of wind. And far above even those was an immense ball of chaos. Strings of energy curled and bent and twisted together, tangling and fighting as they erupted from the surface of the sun.

She pulled at it, the familiar sensation setting her at ease. When she was younger, the task had been exhausting, boring, repetitive. But now it was a time to think.

Still, she wasn’t Celestia. The sun struggled against her control. Another alicorn with more precise control over the machinery of the heavens could’ve torn the ball of energy from her mental grasp with ease.

She persevered. Opening her eyes, she looked up and was greeted by the dawn’s warm rays.

Comments

[Lightwavers]

That's a wrap, folks. I'm most likely not going to go back and edit this. I lost steam a few chapters earlier. Chapter 28 was a prime example of this lack of motivation. I didn't want to leave this story unfinished, but I didn't want to continue either. So that was the compromise. I'm going to be starting up a new multichaptered story sometime in the future, this one with longer chapters and much longer waits between updates—probably a week. That way I'll be able to go over each chapter more.

Bis zum nächsten Mal!

[The trapmaster9]

You are a horrible man, you start one of the best stories I've read in a while, get me into it, even give me one of the best things (alicorn dash!), then stop it their??!!?!?! *sigh* I hope you do a sequel for this amazing story, or even the one where twilight and dash talk after she brings her back from death. I made this profile just to commit here, please consider a sequel.

[EverfreePony]

Hmm... I'm not a fan of open ending and I think many things there should have been explained, but I understand why you did this. Anyway, Thank you was this story. It was an interesting ride.

[Level Dasher]

Huh. Well, that was certainly a ride. There was definitely potential for a more elaborate ending, but I understand if you lost interest. That happens.