And then Twilight Sparkle wasn't

by Equimorto

She really wishes she'd thought of it sooner

Pinkie happily bounced from one twisted spire of pentadimensional paintings to the next, while the sky below them swirled in a jagged maelstrom of sugar and letters. "Hey, Twilight!" she called to her friend, a couple centuries to her not-left. "How's it going?"

Twilight gave an annoyed grunt from her twelfth nostril, as forty-two percent of her eyes looked in Pinkie's cross-dimensional direction. "No better or worse than the last time you asked," the essence of Magic made flesh and unmade breathed into the fabric of reality around them. "And that was just ten minutes from now!"

The annoyance in Twilight's words shook the hypercube of honey-flavoured marshmallows Pinkie had lazily set her corporeal form on, and the avatar of Happiness had to wrench herself away from it and into a fold of time, as the structure exploded in a sidewards shower of meteoric glitter.

"I think you just created life on that planet!" the pink nebula of energy exclaimed, pointing a tentacle a universe and a star's lifetime behind them. "I wonder what kind of cakes they will come up with!" She began to fantasise, stars exploding in her mane as she let herself drift aimless in the storm of harmony around them.

Twilight shook her many heads. "Pinkie..." Shaking her heads again, in the opposite direction, to undo all the changes her previous motion had wrought upon realities unnumbered, the once and future mare extended one of her appendages across the infinite dimensions it existed in, over unending stretches of empty space and frozen time, to reach her notes and scribble indecipherable quantum lines of knowledge on them.

"Oh! Oh!" Pinkie fell back upwards, a grin on her face broader than the whole of creation. "I know what we can do. Let's play How Many Seconds in Eternity!" The chimes of her excitement harmonized through aeons uncounted, and every civilization ever to manifest a possibility of existence in the waving weave and time saw its greatest poets and artists sewn into their history where the sound crossed it, like lightning splitting the sky.

Twilight kept up her note-taking in every direction of time, as the pattern of her inscription grew ever more complex and vast with each subsequent split in probability, all of its realities collapsed onto one single set of multifaceted consequences. The result was a sight chaotic and meaningless to mortal eyes, but not to Twilight's all-encompassing atemporal vision.

"There's a universe large as a planet, denser than the densest of black holes," Pinkie began to recite, as she bounced around the curves of space and time. The ripples of her motions started life in as many solar systems as there ever were atoms in her old body through her entire life, yet also brought end to just as many through the relentless waves of all-consuming entropy.

"It's heavier than our universe as much as a star is heavier than a planet orbiting it, and time around it so slow it may as well be frozen," she continued. She seemed strangely cheerful, insofar as her hyperdimensional form let one discern. Insofar as her antilogical nature allowed such a being to be cheerful. It was more like a complex pattern of interwoven timelines and facets of potential realities manifest within her in that situation.

"Every time our universe collapses back in on itself to being its cycle of existence anew, a single atom is released from the hyperdense planet-sized universe," the timeless amalgam of metaphysical constructs and fundamental rules of creation that had once been and yet was and would be a pink pony went on. Her bouncing around had led her full circle around Twilight, back to the moment she'd started.

Pinkie stood still and firm, stark like a beacon across every reality. "And when the last atom has been released and the universe has disappeared, the first second of eternity will have passed," she declared, and the weight of her statement toppled galaxy-spanning empires and brought an end to beings so ancient they had witnessed the stars first give light and at last fade out.

Despite herself, Twilight experienced the closest thing the manifestation of Logic and Harmony itself beyond the boundaries of matter and energy could feel to a genuine smile. It was still closer to a living carbon-based creature's equivalent of one than what a hate-ridden soul could muster, a fact that both saddened and delighted her a great deal. "That sounds like a very long time, Pinkie."

The other shrugged, and forgetfulness was born. "So, how's it going there?" Out of the nothingness, she willed a crease into the fabric of existence, and twisted it on itself at angles beyond the limits of dimensions until it folded away and a bubble of non-existence came to be inside the outside the two manifested themselves in.

"No better or worse than the next time you'll ask." Twilight seemed to pause, looking everywhere but at the bubbling colourless void of rage and hate burning in times beyond time and spaces beyond space. Something had come from it, a lacerating cry from its innermost depths that echoed through the pillars of creation. But she wouldn't give it any acknowledgement.

Pinkie contemplated the waves that shook the roots of existence, absent-mindedly filling her bubble of nothing with swirling galaxies of sentient cotton candy. "Do you think we should address that at some point?" she asked, her tone hesitant. Then she let go of the question, and threw a single long look at the raven's nest beyond the hole.

Twilight meanwhile watched the question Pinkie had let go of fall down into the skies of chaotic energy around them, where it was torn apart and reduced to its basic components. And then an idea struck her, brighter than the light of every star in the universe combined as it shined from her heads like a halo. Quickly she retreated her appendage back from the distant aeons she had cast it through, her movements rippling through and reshaping multiverses.

"I should have thought of this sooner," the purple amalgam of cosmic anomalies chided herself, as she folded and twisted timelines together. Empty universes slithered from her form and sparks of nothing shot out around her as the whole of creation began to pivot and collapse onto her core, shifting in segmented shards that realigned themselves to exclude the centre of their motion.

Supernovae the size of atoms imploded as they tumbled upwards along the twisting ladder of times, and universes melded together as their matter broke down into boundless seas of harmonies and energy. The future fell like rain across the infinitely small fragments of the web that made up reality, as the consciousnesses of beings whose thought and will shaped the flow of causality seeped in through the cracks. Time burned and force shattered, and the spiralling weave of events bent over itself and filled its own gaps. Dimensions existing in the folds and pockets between each other were turned inside out, layers of reality superimposed over one another clashed and fused in a shower of sparks, souls that were never born danced through halls that never would be, and the mute cackling of undone conjectures resounded through the whole of everything.

And then Twilight Sparkle wasn't.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Fascinating as it is to watch Elemental Ladies of Magic and Laughter have their usual friendly patter, I can't decipher how exactly Twilight's solution works. Still fun stuff, though.

[TimeLord11]

Fun cosmic stuff. At least Twilight has company over the eons.

[Anon E Moose]

10159163
I think Twilight unmade herself (and possibly all realities possible, impossible, imaginable, and unimaginable) just so she wouldn't have to listen to Pinkie anymore.

[Eroraf86]

My only objection here is that the universe, as far as we can tell, is not cyclical in nature. No crunches or bounces here, only a googol years of ever-increasing darkness and entropy, evermore diluted by an ever-accelerating expansion of spacetime, until only fundamental particles and anemic photons remain.

And that still sounds preferable to a forced eternity with Pinkie Pie.

[B_Munro]

10159327

Our universe [1], sure, but some cosmologies theorize an essentially infinite number of universes, some of which may have the right setup for cyclical behavior. (Possibly an infinite number: there are differently sized infinities, as Georg Kantor could have told you, before he had his mental breakdown).

[1] Which, the whole "no magic" thing indicates, is not Equestria's universe

[B_Munro]

10159163
It's April 1st: today least of all days do stories have to make sense.

[Eroraf86]

10159371
Alternate universes I grant you, but even a super-critical closed universe won't bounce forever. Entropy increases enormously with each bounce, resulting in asymptotically lengthened cycles and an eventual non-contracting fate.

[Leo1811]

I have no idea what I just read

[Shilic]

I think the MOST logical conclusion I could come up with for... whatever this is, is that this is the result of the two of them doing several times past the healthy limit of LSD, and now Twilight is hallucinating several multiverses at once. Pinkie, on the other hand, is perfectly fine, because Pinkie Pie.

[Kodiologist]

Twilight gave an annoyed grunt from her twelfth nostril

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Twilight, and the Word was "D'oh!".

[jimerjam]

Q!

[Zubric]

Uh what ?

[Waterwindearthfire]

That was something.

I'm still trying to figure out what I've read. But I am glad nonetheless.

[Lemonshrike Catworthy]

So... Did she reach through time and delete herself so this mess never happened?
Isn't that exactly how it doesn't work?

[Draco Dei]

If she unmade herself at the end, I think this should have the "Suicide/Self-Harm" tag?

[Saix]

"No better or worse than the next time you'll ask." Twilight seemed to pause, looking everywhere but at the bubbling colourless void of rage and hate burning in times beyond time and spaces beyond space. Something had come from it, a lacerating cry from its innermost depths that echoed through the pillars of creation. But she wouldn't give it any acknowledgement.

Pinkie contemplated the waves that shook the roots of existence, absent-mindedly filling her bubble of nothing with swirling galaxies of sentient cotton candy. "Do you think we should address that at some point?" she asked, her tone hesitant. Then she let go of the question, and threw a single long look at the raven's nest beyond the hole.

Oh dear......

Nice variation on the Shepherd's Boy monologue by the way.