Penance

by Bicyclette

Sweetie Belle

It had been so many years since the last time someone new had arrived that Starlight briefly wondered if she was hallucinating that bright, white ball of magical light that spiraled out of the unchanging portal that hung forever inaccessible above them.

(But of course, in the Void, hallucinations did not exist, and their minds received whatever passed for stimula directly, without the filter of the subconscious deciding what to see and not see. Twilight had told her once that It was the thing that she noticed and was distressed by the most in the time she spent back out in the Void.)

She nudged Sunset, who looked up as well, as the ball of light resolved into a tumbling body that thankfully landed at the “edge” of the void where Starlight and Sunset spent their endless time, in the space where no bodies lay. It was always so much more awkward to calm the arrival down and explain what was going on when they found themselves entangled in a pile of warm corpses.

Feeling an excitement that she had not felt in many years, Starlight got up to join Sunset as she raced to greet the new arrival, who was very curiously dressed in what could only be described as an astronaut suit. Even more curiously, unlike pretty much every other previous arrival who spent their first few moments in the Void disoriented and panicked, the new arrival immediately found their bearings, put a gloved hand on the featureless white expanse that was the ground, and got themselves up to look directly at Sunset and Starlight. Though their face could not be seen from behind the reflective bubble of the suit’s visor, the body language of the friendly and excited wave they gave was unmistakable.

The rich tenor of a woman’s voice could be heard, if a bit muffled through the suit.

“Sunset Shimmer! Oh, you’re still alive! I knew I’d find you here! Tell me, is the air safe to breathe? Are there any native diseases I have to worry about?”

Sunset and Starlight shared a quick glance before Sunset answered.

“If you’re asking if it’s okay to take that thing off, then yeah, you’ll be perfectly fine! I’m more sure of that than anything.”

“That’s great!” the woman said, as she reached behind her helmet with a gloved hand. A hissing noise and a pop followed, before the helmet came off to reveal the beaming face of a middle-aged woman with skin of pale white and a short, curly buzzcut of purple and pink. She took a deep, experimental breath through the nose, breathing out through her mouth.

“Oh wow, it doesn’t smell like anything in here!” She took another deep breath for good measure. “Or, uh, look like anything,” she said as her neck swiveled around to take in the sights, or the lack thereof. As her eyes swept the field of bodies, she paused on one of them for a brief moment, a frown flashing on her face, before looking back at Sunset to beam at her again.

“Oh, I have so many questions! But they can wait for now, because it’s just so wonderful to see you! I mean, I hope it isn’t too awkward to just ask this, but, can I give you a hug?”

This wasn’t too surprising to Starlight. New arrivals, after all, tended to be people who did not like Her Cinematic Majesty very much, and thus had correspondingly warm feelings for her most hated enemy that they grew up watching vilified on stage and screen. That trust and admiration also tended to make the process of getting them to accept their new life and fate much easier. And so it was all too expected for Sunset to reply with that kind voice she always used for times like this:

“Of course you can.”

It took a second for the woman to figure out what to do with the helmet tucked under her arm, but once she put it on the ground she rushed forward with the excitement of a young girl, wrapping Sunset in her exosuited embrace. It was an odd sight to be sure, as Sunset still looked like the teenager she had been when she entered the portal decades ago, and the woman was bent down to hug Sunset at the waist in a way that seemed tighter and more familiar than even the most parasocial of relationships.

“You don’t recognize who I am, do you?” she said, her embrace still holding her face tight against Sunset’s stomach.

“Ah, I’m afraid I don’t,” Sunset said, as kindly as possible. “I mean, I’ve been here a very long time”

“You have,” the woman responded, sniffling all the while. She let go of her hug just enough to look at Sunset in the eyes, with tears in hers. “I’m Sweetie Belle.”

As Starlight watched their emotional embrace, all she could do was think. This Sweetie Belle, of course, would have no reason to know who she was. But she sort of knew her Sweetie Belle, over in Equestria. As Rarity’s sister, of course. Sort of. If that had been the Sweetie Belle that had come through the portal, would she have been so emotional about seeing Starlight?

Her ruminations were only stopped by Sweetie Belle turning to her and speaking.

“Oh, and I don’t want to be rude by ignoring you!”

She half-got out of her hug with Sunset and turned toward Starlight, a genuine smile on her face, with none of the discomfort or polite anxiety that pretty much every newcomer had first had when looking at her half-pony, half-human form.

“I was just so excited to see Sunset because I knew her so many years ago. I mean, we were a couple of years apart, but we did go to the same high school! But I’m so very glad to see you, too, alive in this place. You’re Starlight Glimmer, aren’t you?”

It took a second for Starlight to process this. More than a few seconds, as her jaw hung open, before she could manage a “Wait, what? How?”

“Princess Twilight told me!” she replied, and before Starlight could process that Sweetie asked, “I’m sorry, but do you do hugs?”

“Oh, uh, sure!” Starlight replied, and was immediately answered with a hug that felt just as strong and genuine as the one Sweetie Belle gave to Sunset had seemed. It was so tight that when Sweetie let her go, Starlight instinctively took in a breath that she did not even need.

With a hand on both of their shoulders, Sweetie gave them a solemn look.

“She’s just so sorry, you know. She tried everything she could, she really did, but she couldn’t figure out a way to get you home. She wanted me to tell both of you that personally.”

A pall of silence fell between the three of them as this was digested. Starlight’s guts twisted at the thought of Twilight, her Twilight, wasting years of her life trying to save her, wasting even more of her anguish on the pony she had already gone through so much to rescue from herself. All because of her stupid decision to go through a portal she probably wasn’t even supposed to touch. Because of what, she was bored and curious? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

And she looked at Sunset, who seemed lost in her own emotions, tears streaking silently down her face, and she felt all the worse for only thinking about herself in this moment.
“Thank you so much for telling us that, Sweetie Belle,” Sunset said. “I’m sure Twilight tried her very best.”

Sweetie Belle smiled. “She did. She really did. She loved you both, and never stopped missing you.”

Starlight’s guts twisted further at that, and Sunset and Sweetie both gave her a compassionate squeeze, Sunset giving her that silent look that said she knew Starlight might be spiraling right now, and that Sunset would be here for her, and that Starlight deserved all the love that was given to her, and none of her self-hatred.

It was Sweetie Belle who broke the silence, much to Starlight’s relief.

“Ah, I guess I kinda buried the lede there, huh? There’s just, like, a lot of stuff I need to tell you about what’s going on on the other side of the portal, you know? And I guess I should start with what you’ve probably guessed by now.”

She took in a breath that she still didn’t know she didn’t need to take before continuing.

“Juniper Montage is dead.”

---

Juniper Montage was dead. And there was so much more to tell.

Juniper Montage was dead, and the old order fell. The ultimate power of her magic was the only backstop holding the regime built around maintaining her place in society together, and without it, it crumbled without a fight. The magical artifacts that had been the only threats to her power were freed to be studied and used, and contact was made with the universe of magical ponies from whence they came.

The news was not good. What some had long suspected in secret had turned out to be true, and the stars of the night sky going out truly were the stars going out, as the Equestrian magic that had been allowed to run rampant through this universe for so long began to crumble its physical laws from the inside. Its ultimate fate was nothing less than its destruction into entropy within the span of a few months, if nothing was done about it. With the artifacts that they had combined with the knowledge of Princess Twilight Sparkle and her researchers, the humans could stave this off for a little bit, but on the order of months and years if they were lucky. Equestria was not an option, as sending even a single human through would destroy their universe in its current weakened state.

But Equestrian magic would not destroy an Equestrian artifact. So there was one option left. The only option that humanity had.

Without Juniper Montage, the people that had been banished into the Mirror could not be gotten out. But pushing another human in was a much simpler task that Twilight had figured out pretty easily. And from the structure of the artifact, it was known that it worked as a portal to somewhere, though with the trip being one-way, there would be no way to tell just what awaited. Another universe? Another world? The surface of the sun? Oblivion?

But they were facing oblivion anyway.

Sweetie Belle was just the first, and it was a fitting honor. She was the longest-serving member of the Resistance, and the one that had been the closest to the first seven humans to be banished to the mirror. It was her duty to make first contact with whoever was surviving on the other side, and help prepare whatever society existed there for what was to come.

Because once she was through, she could not send any message back, because nothing went back through the portal. If what awaited her on the other side was a torture pit staffed by demons, she could not warn the humans that were already planned to go in after her. If the world on the other side was a place humans could barely survive, limited in carrying capacity, she could not tell the rest to limit the number that came through, no matter how many would be then fated to starve to death. Or worse.

Those unknowns did mean that not every resident of the doomed universe was willing to brave the portal that the former tyrant of the world had been banishing people to for decades. But still. There were a lot of people who were willing to risk the unknown in the face of an inevitable known.

And risk it they did. The first waves were manageable, and small, equipped with the same vacuum-sealed environmental suits that Sweetie Belle had on when she had come through the portal. Like her, they had been selected and trained to expect a wide variety of different circumstances that the world on the other side of a magical portal could be in, and it was much easier to get them to understand how the Void worked than the average person.

But the waves didn’t stop. The protective suits became cruder, then flimsier, then homemade, DIY. Then the new arrivals stopped having suits entirely, and just came in with the clothes they had on their back. And the trickle turned into a stream, and the stream turned into a torrent.

Once, the bodies of the dreamers and the dead had been arranged in neat little rows, both for their dignity and for the ease in finding a specific dreamer to check in on them if need be. But what was dignity in the face of survival? The field of bodies became a pile that spread and spread across the “floor” until it reached the edges of the Void where the space wrapped around on itself. Then there was nowhere to go but up.

But the people didn’t stop coming.

Starlight and Sunset’s old friends had come out of the dreamlands together when Sweetie Belle arrived, to have a tearful reunion followed by catching up on the decades missed in the lives of their friends and family on the outside. They didn’t go back, not as long as Starlight and Sunset needed them for everything from moving bodies to talking to arrivals to ideas to moral support. That the work was vast, and the fate of the world depended on them once more kept them all going, and made even the awful circumstances of it bearable. Even with years of life in the Void to internalize the fact that their bodies were not really bodies here, it was hard to treat the ever-growing mountain of not-flesh as a floor, despite the fact that none of the sleepers could ever be damaged or even feel pain.

If it was that difficult for them, it is easy to imagine how difficult it must have been for the new arrivals.

And in this chaos, Starlight and her friends worked together beautifully, alongside the denizens of the Void both old and new who had stepped up to help in creating this new world. And in the process, they discovered that it was easier than they had imagined.

Gone was the need to make them forget that they were banished to a pocket universe on the whims of an all-powerful tyrant that nothing could be done against. The tyrant was dead. Gone was the need to make them forget, as awful as it was, the fate of the universe they left behind. They stepped through that portal with hope, after all, of finding themselves in a new world on the other side that they could live in. And Starlight and Sunset were going to give them exactly that.

All they had to do was to remove the memories that happened in the Void, between materializing on a seemingly endless mountain of corpses and agreeing that, yes, they would like to forget that whole experience after all. Very simple.

And the dreamlands gained a new planet.

From the perspective of the new arrivals, they stepped through that portal that no one had any way of knowing what was on the other side of, hoping to find themselves in a new world on the other side that they could live in. And they got exactly that. A new Earth, of lush forests and green hills and blue oceans, and an ever-growing community of the people that had come before them

And the torrent of people became a flood, and new arrivals got buried in each other, and Starlight and her friends had to fish out still-awake people from the pile one by one even as new arrivals kept arriving and screaming in fear, and the work kept going, because the people kept coming.

Until they didn’t.

The last person to arrive was someone who, in a past life, was a Las Pegasus stage magician. His last memories of the dying universe were of being helpless to watch as his husband and all the other people in line behind him disintegrated into nothing before everything flooded with light.

And the work continued for a long time after that. Only a small fraction of people were difficult to convince to enter the dreamlands, but the denominator was large. Plus, they needed to check and double-check and triple-check that every single person in the innumerable pile of bodies below them truly had been put to sleep and were not simply so deep that their screams couldn’t be heard, or stuck in a catatonic state, or whatever else. Forever was a long time, so they had to really, really make sure, which meant that the work continued for a really, really long time.

Until it didn’t.

Eventually, there came a time when every single arrival had been accounted for and settled in the dreamlands, in some form or another, into a life that they wanted to live more than the alternative of the oblivion they escaped or the Void they were in. Enough at least to not reject it in their minds. And within the dreamlands, on that new Earth, they built a society that learned from the mistakes of the world that they had left behind. One that made sure that every last human in it was truly cared for, and could find a place in society to live a fulfilling and meaningful life.

As Starlight observed it, she couldn't help but be reminded of Equestria. An Equestria without cutie marks.

And of course the old residents of the Void, in their dozens, had all at one point in another woken up, as they had been promised they would be if the situation in the Void had changed. The strange circumstances somehow had little effect on the ordinariness of the reunions as they found old friends, relatives, and even fans among the seemingly endless stream of arrivals. They had been kept in the loop through the entire process of creating the new world for the new arrivals, and in the end they all came to a unanimous agreement, despite the vast differences between them that made the old dreamlands so fragmented.

Each of them, out in the Void, held in their heads all their memories of both their time in their dreamlands and the Void and everything that came before either. Each of them wanted to join their stories with this new one that was being collectively written.

And so, one last burst of creativity, as Starlight got to work to give each of her old charges a new chapter in their lives in the dreamland, seamlessly merging them with the collective consensus reality that was being formed by the new arrivals. One by one, they were put back to sleep, from Vignette Valencia and K-Lo, to Micro Chips and Principal Celestia, to…

Applejack and Rarity and Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash and Twilight.

They each said their goodbyes, and made Starlight and Sunset promise to wake them up regularly so they could keep them company when needed. And their old friends were hardly the only ones among the many, many residents of the Void to offer this. And they did.

But of course, there were plenty of times when it was just the two of them, alone.