Dialectic

by Broken Phalanx

Antithesis

The cottage is what a generous soul might call ‘cosy’, and an honest one would declare ‘tiny’. And yet, it was home for hundreds of years.

I rub my muzzle against the aged mortar, and breathe in the scent of centuries past.

Most of them, to be fair, smelled abysmal.

I trot back a few steps, look upwards at the caving roof, and sigh; a thousand years at least, and not a single renovation to my name. No architectural beauty, no majesty of art and function, just a dinky little shack to work and survive within. I can almost feel the disappointment my family would’ve surely had pressing down upon me.

A month has passed since the penta-umvirate, and three weeks since I’ve last seen another pony; I wouldn’t be surprised if I am being avoided.

I pop open the cap of my bottle of orange juice and guzzle from it, looking for all the world like an Alicorn hobo; admittedly, not too far from the truth at the moment.

That said, being a self-exiled pariah comes with certain perks. Like, purely as a matter of course, drinking from a bottle of orange juice in public whilst wearing a ratty bathrobe. I’m… still not quite certain where I got said bathrobe, but that is purely a matter of speculation.

I doff the robe a moment later and teleport to the nearest river to bathe.

‘This is all just mindless nonsense to keep yourself from thinking of the future,’ mutters George the daemon. The voice has been nagging me, harassing me, shaming me to the best of its mediocre ability.

“Bingo,” I reply to the voice in my head, or at least I try to; being underwater, the closest I can come up with is, “Gurgle gurgle”.

I surface a moment later and simply… float along. It almost feels nice, being guided along by something as passively powerful as a river-current; why resist the inevitable, after all?

Goodness knows nopony else does.

And at that bitterness the world seems to grow just a mite more muted, just a touch dimmer and less vibrant.

I know the Royal sisters, at least, are looking for me; experiencing such disasters as Nightmare Moon have left them rather trigger-happy in spying the same developments in others. Though, I can’t help but chuckle at the idea of ‘Nightmare Name’, calling the things he dislikes hurtful things.

What a silly world I live.

My laughter stops when I remember it won’t be silly for too much longer.

‘You can still do something,’ the daemon George whispers in my head. ‘Nothing is written that cannot be erased.’

“Real sage advice, that,” I grumble sarcastically, but I still find myself pondering.

Antithesis. Special Talent: Inversion, whatever that means; it’s inexact, always inexact, but it seems she takes the right and makes it wrong, takes the light and makes it dark. She will come into her own soon enough, perhaps a few years, and then Equestria will fall.

We cannot act, for royals do not do such things. So deems the ruling body of Equestria, it seems.

I ruffle my wings and let a few sparks dance off my horn; I am one of them, in body if not in soul. I am lumped with the mighty and yet I am weak. What’s the point of being a Prince if it shackles you, traps you into a miserable fate?

I suspect it has something to do with my ascension; no philosophical insight into the nature of the world, no marvelous display of magic, no primal necessity being fulfilled. Just a trick deemed too useful to lose and a raw transference of power.

Huh.

Nothing kept me like this, nothing but the ill thought out machinations of a pair of immature princesses empowering me. I am a Prince by circumstance.

And circumstances change.

***

There is a trick to using enough energy to burn out of this form; I am no wizard, and the spells I know, excluding teleportation, are more cantrips than anything else. And it isn’t enough to simply become exhausted; there’s an element of extraction needed for something like that to even remotely work. In the end, without Twilight’s scientific mind to aid me, I scrape together what little knowledge I have and hope it is sufficient.

To explain the crude process as simply as possible, the idea is to teleport myself into two seperate places simultainiously; the matter of me (along with the flimsy remnants of my original magic) to one destination, and the... rest... to another. If it succeeds, hey, I can move forward with my plan.

If it fails, well, at least there’s nopony around to traumatize. And in six years, what was already fated to happen, will.

I begin to charge my magic.

***

The deed is done. My lungs burn, my eyes bleed, and I’m heaving red chunks of something that feel almost meaty against my tongue, but I’m alive for the moment.

I stumble off in search of a tool.

***

I try to make it gentle. But I need to strike twice just to be sure.

***

The trial is quick and I am a monster. That, nopony disputes. Not even myself.

***

The blanket is as soft as a hemp pillow, the cell as dark as a starless sky. I will not be here long; whatever I did is borderline irreparable, and the princesses didn’t even deign to visit the trial.

Occasionally there are night-terrors. I long for them; nightmares are more common.

At times I find myself pondering that perhaps Antithesis, inversion of magic and will that she was, had somehow twisted even my visions of her. That is to say, perhaps what I saw was the result of inversion, a grand illusion birthed by the manipulation of prophecy to see that which shall not be…

These are the thoughts I find myself thinking, even as formless things itch and scratch from the shadows. They whisper at times, foul and hateful things that have never know the caress of a warm summer breeze or the playful shove of winter’s bite.

I almost wish I still heard George at times. But no. George is gone, and Name Rater remains.

I hug the blankets closer. It’s cold tonight.

I’m so alone.

Author's Note:

You can probably guess how I feel about the ending of Antithesis at this point, but this is by no means an attack upon the author or his work; rather, this is essentially a sustained counterpoint to the portrayal of 'imprisoning/killing of the dangerous' as a good thing.

Utilitarianism is a funny thing, and while I disagree with it, I'm not going to betray the spirit of the philosophy in these epilogues. Remember, this is, to me, merely the most dire possibility.