The G4-5 Boundary

by ShinigamiDad

The Solarium

“I’d say ‘long time no see,’ but I hear you’ve been seeing me, at any rate, for a while now.”

Luna nodded, her nearly-colorless mane swaying in an unseen breeze: “Yes. We felt it was important to keep you alive as long as possible as I fought to stabilize my sister. Reaper did not wish you to pass before us.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow: “‘Stabilize.’ So, the old thing never came out of her coma…”

“No. I can reach her through the dreamscape, attenuated though it is, and even then, she is not, well, entirely there.”

Reaper nodded as he helped Twilight push away from the wall, and proceed slowly around the corner of the wall towards a shallow dell: “She is finally slipping away. That’s why I needed to put things in motion to retrieve you from your exile before the end.”

Twilight sighed as she fell in behind Luna: “I still don’t see the point, but clearly there must be some point to this, so let’s get it over with!”

Reaper rolled his eyes: “It’ll make more sense once we’re all together.”

“I hope.”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed as she squinted at the almost-translucent rump and flanks before her: “I-I can see your bones! You look like a plastic-wrapped skeleton! What happened?”

Luna coughed weakly and spat: “I have been exhausting what little life energy I have left keeping the two of you alive, while trying to maintain some semblance of a dreamscape. You have no idea how many times over the last three centuries I have wished to retreat to the moon and simply lay down one final time.”

“But why?”

Luna sighed deeply and glanced back over her shoulder, blank, white eyes glowing with a faint silvery fire, like dying stars: “Because some spirits still dwelt there.”

“What?”

“Yes. Some creatures entered the dreamscape in a deep, trancelike state, and never left.”

Reaper nodded: “Some incredibly-long-lived beings entered their final repose centuries ago, but did not die. Luna has been giving them safe harbor until their ends came at last.”

Twilight chewed her lip for a moment, then her eyes went wide: “Dragons!”

Luna closed her eyes: “Yes. The last and oldest dragon in all history, Crimson Bone, went to her final rest only last year, after an incredible three-thousand, two-hundred years.”

“Amazing! How did she live so long on a dying world?”

Reaper pushed aside an ancient, rotting fence pole: “Magic. She could process it almost as well as you three, and she had figured out the trick Starswirl and Grey Thorn were looking for all those millennia ago: converting magic to life energy.”

Twilight shook her head: “And all without spells or glyphs or any of that, I assume.”

Luna nodded as she glided silently over the fallen pole, her hooves hovering inches above the ground: “Correct. I spoke with her at some length ‘ere the end. It was an entirely organic process for her.”

Twilight glanced at the ground, then at Luna and furrowed her brow: “Wait, you’re hovering—so, sort of flying! I thought all the magic was finally exhausted.”

“It is not magic. I am slowly, I suppose the best word would be, sublimating—losing contact with the real material of this world.”

Reaper slashed down a vine-draped branch that was blocking the path: “I can confirm this. Luna is fading away at a physical level in a way you and Celestia have not experienced. But the end will be the same for you all, regardless of the form it takes.”

The branch and vines fell away with a crash, and as the dust settled, Reaper stepped forward into a dim clearing ringed by the remains of fireweed-and-thistle. The dried plants rustled in the breeze as he gestured to three low, stone benches: “Speaking of the end…”

As the three approached the crude, marble benches, Twilight noticed a figure atop the far-right bench. She blinked and squinted through the gloom: “Is-is that a body? Celestia?”

Reaper sheathed his blade and adjusted his cloak: “Yes. Please lie down on the left, Twilight; Luna will take the center position.”

Twilight scowled: “So that’s it, huh? Seems kind of…”

“Final?”

She shifted nervously: “Well, yes, I guess.”

Reaper smiled: “I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if it weren’t a bit more elaborate than that, Twilight! I would have simply retrieved your essence from your deep cavern and left your body entombed there.”

Luna nodded as she lowered herself stiffly to the center bench, finally settling against its low back, legs pulled in loosely: “I will join us together in a final dream, so that we may say our proper farewells.”

Twilight chewed her lip, but began to sit then recline on her appointed bench: “I suppose, but wouldn’t it have been easier to just let us lounge for a bit in the Waiting Room?”

Reaper shook his head as he moved around in front of Luna: “No. I really don’t know what to expect when you three get to the Waiting Room—there’s a good chance you’ll simply be pulled across the Last Horizon almost the moment you appear.”

Twilight stared into the empty sky: “We’ve been alive for so awfully long…”

“Exactly. In some ways, your times should have come centuries ago, and the tug of entropy has grown stronger and stronger on this world and all who remained here.”

Twilight furrowed her brow: “Did we make it worse? By hanging on, I mean?”

Reaper shrugged: “I don’t know. Across Deep Time another century or two can hardly matter, but what it does to those who linger…?”

Luna turned her head to the side and gazed for a moment at Celestia’s shrunken body, horn broken to a stump, feathers gone, mane and tail reduced to lifeless tatters: “She was so beautiful.”

She turned her head away and closed her eyes: “We have become living ghosts. It is time to go.”

A single tear ran down Twilight’s cheek as a silver-blue ribbon reached for her horn. Reaper took a deep breath as Luna’s tendrils touched her sister and Twilight; he knelt before her nearly-translucent head and touched his horn to hers.

---

Twilight opened her eyes and blinked at the sun pouring in through the solarium’s crystalline panels. She sat up and leaned back from the polished white-oak, emblazoned with Celestia’s cutie mark.

“Would you care for some tea, Twilight?”

Twilight turned to her right and saw Celestia pouring steaming tea from a chased silver-and-gold teapot. The cup hovered for a moment, then glided in front of her, coming to rest between her hooves.

She nodded stiffly and glanced down at the table and cup: “Thank you.”

Celestia smiled softly and ran her gold-clad hoof across the table’s smooth, cream-colored surface: “It certainly has been a long time since we last sat at this table.”

Twilight swallowed and sighed: “At least sixty-two-hundred years.”

Celestia closed her eyes and breathed deeply, her nostrils flaring slightly: “Brilliant Dawn’s death…”

The air shimmered and the battered, broken body of a pale-magenta unicorn stallion appeared before the alicorns, oozing crimson blood across the white tabletop.

Twilight gritted her teeth: “Dammit, I don’t need to see this! I know what I did! I know what he did! I know what you pushed him to do!”

“Yes. The war had gone on long enough. Win or lose, it had to end. I had to empower him…”

Twilight slammed a hoof on the table: “He tried to fucking kill me, and I had to break him! You sacrificed him!”

“Yes, she did.”

Twilight’s head snapped to her left, and she glared as Luna stepped through the door leading in from the gardens: “And you let her! You knew I would destroy him!”

“And in doing so, weaken yourself sufficiently that my sister and I could wrest back our full power from you. He went in with eyes wide-open, knowing he was a diversion.”

Twilight furrowed her brow: “Wait—he knew?”

“Of course. He saw what you had done fifteen years earlier at the Battle of Vanhoover…”

A deep-blue pegasus with silvery-gray mane and tail appeared, and hovered briefly above Brilliant Dawn’s body. She was suddenly bathed in a blinding violet light, and disintegrated with a scream, leaving nothing to fall to the table save a few bits of charred bone and feathers.

Celestia sighed: “We knew then there could be no reasoning with you. We had been skirmishing and fighting and pleading and plotting for at least six-hundred years by that time. And even before then, when the Unicorn Council…”

Twilight’s eyes glittered dangerously: “Don’t.”

Luna nodded: “I understand, Twilight. That was, for you, the ultimate betrayal, but they recognized that you would never willingly surrender your power…”

Celestia took a sip of tea: “Which was already slipping by then…”

Luna glanced back at her sister then sat down across the table, facing Twilight: “But you would not hear of it, even as it was clear by then that the forces that controlled our world were fracturing and weakening.”

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and tried to generate a goblet in front of her. It flickered in and out of existence for a moment, then faded like smoke. Luna shook her head sadly: “Not here, Twilight. I will not allow your preferred escape in this place, at this time.”

Twilight’s nostrils flared: “The Elements…I needed them, and they were gone…”

Reaper stepped in through the door leading from Celestia’s chambers: “For a good eleven-hundred years by then. I remember the final Vessel of Loyalty, Rainmaker, as she transited the Waiting Room. She was deeply worried that with her loss, you would lose all connection to the past, to when you truly represented unity and harmony, however imperfectly.”

“I-I couldn’t find anypony anymore…nopony could make contact with the primal energies, anymore.”

Reaper nodded sadly, pulled his cloak aside and set down next to the distraught, purple alicorn: “That was roughly eight-thousand years ago, and Rainmaker was the last. The creatures of this world had been losing contact with those energies for some time by then.”

Twilight’s head dipped, and her horn glowed faintly as the image of a lemon-yellow hippogriff faded-in behind her, like a ghost: “Bright Beak—fifteen-hundred years before. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the laughter and silliness that Vessel could bring. I even went to Pinkie Pie’s ancient grave, hoping, somehow, that I could summon forth some trace of that magic.”

Reaper smiled lightly: “Interestingly, Pinkie was worried about you, too at her end. All your friends were, even from the beginning.”

Twilight swallowed hard: “It was too much, too soon.”

She turned to Celestia: “You shouldn’t have put it all on my shoulders so young—it was too much!”

Celestia nodded: “It was a miscalculation. We had been young, too—not much older than you when we ascended to our power.”

Luna took a drink from her cup: “And our ascendancy was, well, substantially more, shall we say, contentious than yours.”

“I know, I know—the last of the Unicorn Wars, Discord, all that.”

“Nightmare Moon, the loss of the Elements. You’re not the only one to lose them, you know.”

Twilight sighed: “I know, but I was ascended for so much longer! You can’t compare…”

Celestia shrugged lightly: “True, and you did a marvelous job for so long that when you did indeed begin to lose your grasp on things, when it became clear that the world was changing—"

“You tried to take back the wheel!”

Luna shook her head sadly: “Not exactly. We know your weakness, your penchant to find a fix no matter what the cost, and we tried to steer you away from anything…”

Twilight gritted her teeth: “Dark.”

Celestia frowned: “And we failed.”

Twilight slumped: “And now it’s all over and it’s all lost, and everything we ever strove for, every good thing, is all lost, and the darkness and entropy win.”

She turned to Reaper: “And you go through the motions of proper burials and memorials and some sort of horseshit living funeral as though it matters. You most of all should know how pointless, how hopeless it all is—it all was!”

Reaper shook his head: “It was never pointless, Twilight, then or now. The denizens of this world played their parts in the life of the Cosmos just as those on countless other worlds did in bygone eons, and will in eons to come.”

He stood and waved his blade at the table; Brilliant Dawn’s corpse vanished, replaced by an impenetrably-black hole, spreading slowly above the table. The very air in the room seemed to fail, and the ponies’ hearts struggled to beat as the weight of eternity began to crush them.

“None on this world can even begin to feel the drip of time as I do, not even after the millennia you’ve lived.”

He pointed at the creeping, implacable emptiness: “Yet even I can hardly wrap my head around the full impact of Deep Time—trillions of years. It might as well literally be forever.”

He turned again to Twilight, and the vision over his shoulder suddenly shifted; he and Twilight were sitting on a porch swing:

''Yeah, I figured as much. That's okay. I’ll shed a tear for her, and all my friends in due course, and let time's waves wash over me, secure in the knowledge that we're meant to die—even we 'immortals,' and that it'll all make sense then."

Reaper grinned: "That's my girl! If only I actually believed you..."

Twilight shook her head sadly: "I've been practicing that speech for a couple of years now. Not convincing?"

"Try it again in another century. Maybe by then you'll actually believe it yourself."

Reaper smiled sadly down at Twilight’s lined face: “You never really did believe it, did you?”

“I wanted to. I wanted to believe it all meant something, that it was worth all the buried friends, all the struggles, all the endless, quotidian repetition of life that eventually seemed more and more pointless as the decades and centuries and millennia dragged on.”

Celestia swirled the lees in her tea cup: “And so, as the end appeared on the horizon, you couldn’t let go, even though it was clear you no longer had the kind of control needed to lead this world gracefully to its conclusion.”

Luna nodded: “The failing of sun and moon to keep their appointed rounds, the tension and, well, disharmony between this world’s various beings—especially between the three tribes of ponies...”

Her sister steepled her hooves together: “And we could have helped with some of this—we badly wanted to help!”

“But you perceived it as a threat, and so built even more barriers between us, until it reached such a state that we no longer had any option but to attempt to take back some measure of control.”

Luna shook her head: “And the unicorns reached the same conclusion independently. But you already knew that.”

Twilight sighed: “Yes. Lampwick came to me and tried to get me to cede control back to you. But I knew you didn’t have the power to—”

Celestia set her cup down: “To what, Twilight? Squeeze another year out of a dying world? A decade? That was what it ultimately came to, yes? You believed that you alone had the power to hold entropy at bay. And I suppose you were right to some degree, but at a terrible price! And—”

Luna held up a hoof: “It should never have come to that, Twilight, and I must bear some responsibility for that. I wanted to come to you sooner, as soon as it became apparent that the world was approaching its denouement.”

Twilight wearily raised her head: “But I had lost my trust in you long before that. I and the Vessels were supposed to have sovereignty over everything you two had controlled, but it became clearer and clearer as the years and centuries went on, that you had never really left the dreamscape behind.

She waved her hoof in the air: “This place and my inability to conjure booze in it are proof enough of that.”

Luna chewed her lip: “Guilty as charged. So, I understood your distance when I tried to come to you before things became unrecoverable.”

Twilight slumped again. “It doesn’t matter anyway. What’s done is done, and none of it will matter once the three of us are gone, and-and…”

She furrowed her brow and turned toward Reaper: “And what about you? Is your time here done, too? You said something about being ‘this world’s last, eternal, steward.’”

“I will remain. Someday, when this world is truly and finally exhausted, I will likely move on to a new place. I understand old T’zarjain better, now—they had likely served as Harbinger for other, older worlds before Kur. They were, undoubtedly, fantastically old.”

“That’s why you care.”

Reaper smiled: “Do you remember, Luna, on Kur when you said that you knew, better than most, the power of symbol and myth and legend?”

Luna nodded.

“I understand now, in a way I did not then, that even though it seemed pointless, what we did there, in that place, would leave echoes. It’s the same here. Your legacy is not entirely lost, even if the end was fractured and imperfect. A new day will dawn on this world, even as the last traces of magic evaporate and your bodies crumble.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow: “And you think that this, what we’re doing right now as the clock expires, will have any effect on a process begun scores of millennia ago?”

Celestia stood and fanned her snow-white wings: “We are the three most-powerful beings to ever dwell here, Twilight. Nothing we do is without impact, even at the very end.”

Luna stood as well, and spread her wings, mingling deep, indigo shadow with noon-time sun: “We share the power to leave behind a whisper of harmony and togetherness—on the wind, in the water, touched by the dawn.”

Twilight sighed: “The dawn. Nopony’s seen the dawn for over a hundred years, now. I haven’t seen one in centuries!”

Reaper chuckled: “Exile in a cavern over a thousand yards beneath the ground will do that.”

“It was the only choice. I had to either fight one last battle and destroy everything I had once loved, or abandon it all to save what was left.”

Celestia smiled sadly and moved around the table to Twilight’s right side: “We know. We knew it then, which is why nopony ever was sent to look for you.”

Luna walked slowly around the other side of the table to Twilight’s left side: “We do not offer forgiveness or absolution Twilight; we offer closure and consolation.”

Twilight stood stiffly and nodded to Celestia then Luna: “I never wanted forgiveness. Once I would have rejected it out of pride, then later out of a sense that I didn’t deserve it. Now I don’t want it because it would be hollow, an empty gesture to make us all feel a little better.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath: “But I will gladly share some consolation, and—”

She fanned her own wings wide and, draping one over each Sister, pulled them close as tears leaked from beneath her closed lids: “—catharsis.”

A brief, ancient smile flickered on Reaper’s lips: “And with that, your Highnesses, I believe our scene must draw to its conclusion.”

The light began to fail as Celestia blinked heavily and stumbled to a chair; Luna nodded wearily: “I cannot hold this dream any longer. We have come to the end of all things.”

She looked sadly at Twilight: “There may be no forgiveness, Twilight, but there is genuine sadness for all the pain. I love you, and have always admired your strength.”

She shuffled to her sister’s side and draped a wing over her shoulder: “Come sister. Let us go, at last to our final beds.”

Reaper bowed to the three alicorns as they faded from the crumbling solarium: “It’s been an honor, ladies…”

---

Reaper faded-in at the head of Luna’s couch and gazed at the three ancient alicorns before him. He drew Death’s Token and stepped to his left, centering himself beside Celestia; he paused a moment, then slipped the blade effortlessly between her sunken ribs. A thin mist shimmered momentarily over her now-still body.

He moved around the end of Celestia’s couch and proceeded alongside Twilight’s slumbering form, centering his sword midway between her hip and shoulder. He shook his head: “One last death, Princess…”

He lifted his head from touching his horn to Twilight’s lingering essence, and turned to regard Luna’s now-lifeless body. He paused for a moment and cocked an eyebrow: “Went on without me, did you? Well, hopefully I’ll see you one last time before you slip over the Final Horizon.”

Reaper saluted the Princesses, sheathed his sword, straightened his cloak, and faded away.