Consolation Sent Down

by Comma Typer

Eternity

Stone chips at stone, etched into runes or letters that will outlast its creator. By Rosas's side, a scroll and a notebook lie under a flagging lantern. Quills and ink are spread out, sketching out the finished message for this memorial:

If you see this, know that I am here. Behold what I have. Tremble. Fall to your knees

"That's gonna take a while."

Rosa whips her head away from work to size up the errant speaker. Variegate sits at the other side of a grayscale cave that has yielded nothing but coal, soot, and sometimes gold from hard-working thralls when they were still alive.

"Indeed, it will," Rosa replies. "It will cement my triumph long after I'm gone."

"I mean..." Variegate tilts her neck, pawing the empty air just below her bald head. She certainly expected a mane's lock or two to caress. "You can't die, Rose, so... uh, not yet, but, um..."

Rosa puffs her cheeks. Her hooves and horn continue the routine: etch, carve, write on stone, with equipment stolen from an ashen backpack, like this engraver. Was from another thrall, so many bite marks on the neck. A trickle of blood had dried up, a mark of tarnished beauty.

"You know, no one else is gonna see that when you're done, Rose."

Irritation pushes Rosa to hiss at her. "If you shut your mouth, you can at least help starve the windigoes." (It shouldn't be possible. They are all dead.)

When she is answered by silence, Rosa slackens her withers and returns to the monumental task; the better part of an hour has already been whittled away. Each finished letter is large enough to be seen by the naked eye from afar, from the far-away mountains over there. If only she had taken lessons from the egotistic or bootlicking sculptors who lived week to week on the whims of bloodthirsty patrons, she could've erected a statue of herself, not meager printed statements.

"What about a walk when you're done with If you see this, Rose?"

She can blast Variegate on the spot, and the engraver in her magic can be a weapon. Both will result in a dead Variegate. The population of the world will be back down to one.

The phylactery, which she strung around her neck on the way home, weighs heavy.

Rosa gives a huff and a nod to hopefully placate the chatty mare. Rosa doesn't bother to look back to check if Variegate is misbehaving.

---

Ghostly manors loom over hills of dust and ashes. Pillars buttress gardens and patios where poisonous flowers and berries thrived; the detritus of leafless bushes are the last living items here and in other front yards.

Rosa points at them for Variegate to follow. "The vampires used to live here. Big mansions, palaces, estates... the suckers." She searches for a piece of history among dozens. Many interesting tidbits can be fished out: A younger vamp defected and returned to Equestria for the sake of "electronic music." Duels were had among the closest thing the bloodsuckers had to nobility (from swords to guns). There's chunks of gossip she used herself to sow division among the fanged ranks until they could do nothing but ally with her to stay off her blackmailing hoof.

Thin white stalks rise from the buds, like spider webs but somehow much more organized yet also much looser. They're a dozen tiny sad spider webs in plant form.

Variegate trots up to a pale stem. "White baneberry," she notes. (First time in a long while that Rosa has heard a hint of unforced happiness from her subjects.) "The berries it produces look like doll's eyes. Every part of is toxic. And fatal. I've only found these... close to Acornage. Never the south-eastern jungles. That would've been fun, though."

Rosa feigns ignorance, pushing past the houses and into the urbaner parts of Magehold, as much as a city in necrosis (look at the stores that droop like tar, the roads wasting away in stone and bones) can have something mundanely urban. The bloated town's lynchpin, its great dark tower, does rise into the heavens, faint shadows casting upon the city's only inhabitants.

"Oh, that used to be a café, right?" chirps Variegate. A yes from Rosa is all it takes to drag her by her hooves inside.

The interior reeks of dust and old coffee scents. Zipped up in neat bags are surely some expired beans. The tables and chairs were turned over; others were missing, maybe stolen like the expensive coffee machines smuggled from more "proper" civilizations. The food display proudly sells mold labeled as baguette, donut, bagel.

The kitchen rattles with the falling of pans and pots and other kitchenware. "Don't mind me!" cries out Variegate. "I've got... oh, the stove still works! I'll boil us some coffee. Only thing that isn't stale here is the 3-in-1 sachet."

It bores Rosa, having to follow Variegate around. Then again, the isolation of the coffeehouse's front-row seats leave her room to question her own actions, actions such as reviving Variegate. Being named Stapled Variegate must've certainly been a toss-up as to her destiny: florist or stationery enthusiast. Rosa didn't prod her on her background when she first met her in Equestria, half a dozen worlds away from the rural village of nowhere that shunned her: it was in Fillydelphia, the city of sisterly love, a place for social-ladder climbers and seekers of the quick buck (or bit). As with many cities, criminal underworlds churn underneath, underlined with the occult. Then Variegate stumbled into her life as a generic flower mar after seeing her cutie mark. Wilted Rose, huh? That sounds unusual... hey, we can go on adventures and hunt for the best flowers! Everyone's jockeying for his and that, but it's the same old sunflowers. If we haul home some exotic specimens for ornaments or what not, we'll be the talk of the town... paint the whole town red with our name! You and me! Rose and... Staples? No, no... Rose and Variegate!

The coffee scent is unbearably strong. "Here!" shouts Variegate. She sidles out of the kitchen, a tray of coffee cups balanced on her back.

Rosa levitates the tray onto the dusty surface of her table. Steaming hot second-rate coffee and gobs of barely mixed powder swirl around. They reek of sugar. A vase stands between the two cups.

Variegate gets her own coffee to sip on. "It's something, I guess. I'm sorry I couldn't get any more." She puts it down to fidget with the empty vase. "So, Rose... remember when we went into the thestral jungles far south-east? Heh, talked with bat ponies in the jungles. It was nice meeting them. The nightshades they gave us were nice."

To stay focused for long enough to humor Variegate, Rosa drinks from her cup. Moving her head up to drink lets her feel the phylactery jingle. It's tepid.

"But, you know, it'd be nice if... it's not just me and you, Rose, while you're... uh, waiting, I guess."

Rosa downs her coffee then stands up. It got cold.

---

A house falls into dust, the ensuing storm raging around them doing nothing to their undead eyes. The daring escape wasn't exciting: Rosa had intentionally trapped herself in one of the rooms after seeing the stairs and some floorboards collapse. Just ounces of pain graced her before Variegate shouted for her name and Rosa picked herself up.

"Unironically, a rose looks good on that," Variegate says, tapping Rosa on her dusty gray mane. "A good splash of color for... um, the rest of your body."

The nerve of her gets to Rosa. "Spit it out. What's really on your mind?"

Variegate steps back, concerned. Fearful. "W-well... I was just... helping to pass the time. That whole countdown thing to... you know..." The end of all life.

The nobody-ness smothered her. That wagon of bones taunted her with its spoils and... death couldn't create life, this she'd known. Mad scientists aside, unless she raises a stallion (and undead procreation had been a taboo talking point), it will stay dead. Her neighsayers have already vanished, anyway.

Vanished neighsayers cannot fear.

The plan was simple enough: revive Variegate once more—she died in those southern expeditions with Rosa, hungry and confused by an oleander petal; she was Rosa's first companion, way before her crossing of the sea—and have Variegate see her mighty works (and despair) of forlorn cities in decay and entire towns flushed out.

The resurrected mare first responded with a hug, then shock, then too many questions, then a strange happy malaise. Understandable for one freed from Rosa's mind control after so long, after so many cheap resurrections (oftentimes with bones from other creatures; bits of griffon can be found in her ribs).

She has kept talking. At the statue in Magehold's outskirts, at the manor then café diving deeper, and after the house should come the tower itself, Rosa's base of operations (before her Dread-ward trip, she heard that BASE jumping was a sport for crazies: find a high place to jump from, then jump). The whole talk about countdowns is a lie—time slips from her. Effectively immortal creatures, without real opposition, have the tendency to not think much about the hours passing unless their work counts on precise milliseconds.

Rosa's jaw brushes against her phylactery. It has emitted a warm glow, a faint toasty fire in the soundless chill (Variegate's hoofsteps disturb the atmosphere; Rosa desires peace and quiet). Numerous promises and assurances she's made rush back to her, her faithful semi-fleshy flock obedient to the end.

Variegate fakely coughs. (Rosa only now recognizes that they're at the entrance of the tower; the skid marks of her chariot ride are still visible.) "So, uh... look, I know you, or the old you,not this new you where you're actually some lich monster thing... I-I don't know who hurt you or why you're a... bad pony... I mean, I think I know the why, but I don't know know... or get it get it, you get it?"

Has to go, she has to go. Rosa's necklace is as heavy as the ocean, a balled up clump of soul. She just holds herself together to stop herself from hissing at her. The chamber then the stairs are not too far away, just one marathon up the stairs to end it.

"I... obviously, everyone came after you because you were... uh, wanting to kill everyone. Which is bad... I can't sugarcoat that, but... there's always a reason why ponies do things, right? A-and..." There's a sigh. And a sob. Rosa doesn't look back; the black stairs approach, a few more steps closer. "I know it's awkward, because I tried to stall for time... I think you know that, too. You saw through that, huh? But! But... oh, you poor thing, I should've asked. I should've loved you better... when you said those weird things about corpses and potions, I shouldn't have cringed. They said that a single friend could change the world, but I wasn't that friend..."

Seduction becomes temptation: you just want to hear it, then you just want to look at it, then you just want a taste of it, of an all-consuming what-if.

The steps are a hop away, a hoof already by the door. Variegate's voice has kept following, never growing distant: "That's something the Friendship Journal said... about friendship changing lives. I... you could've changed my life. I mean, you did by... the whole necromancy thingy... but... oh, I should've asked. I shouldn't have brushed your odd stuff as weird and odd... I said that out loud, didn't I?" Other thoughts and contingencies organize themselves, Rosa inwardly screams at herself on why she doesn't just run. "Rose, please... I don't want to die! It was fun being with you... maybe not the usual fun, but I mean it! It was like we were back in Equestria, being friends—"

Rosa empties her horn at the rattle of flesh and bones. A fallen one, another soul banished another time. Magic fast recharges at the base of her horn.

Again, definitively, Rosa is alone. The last one.

Everything goes automatic: four legs up the stairs, matching a cadence that isn't necessary thanks to her superequine strength and endurance—life festers, life kills to preserve itself, life fights to preserve itself—mantra after mantra fall in line or into pieces.

A quarter of the way there. It's scary, the long way down traveled by a single misstep. Her breath hitches. Her hooves keep moving, keep reaching, approaching the limit of her capabilities against the weight of the world clumped into her soul. It's her life against the world's, and it asks her to fulfill her sacred obligation: to end herself, the last living virus of strife.

Her legs go numb. Halfway there, now a little more. A fever has been with her since she stepped hoof her in the cursed peninsula. It never brought a migraine nor a bout of vomiting. Her forehead burns, her horn burns: she is hot enough to light a fire under this tower.

She falls—no, she trips. A comfort to give up right now, to pause, reconsider, cradle her phylactery. Her hooves disappear into a permanent spin.

Three-fifths of the way up. The tower narrows, each revolution faster than the previous one. There's a hiccup—dread. The well of souls—she'd never been there herself; she felt it still, with every captured soul, every reanimated being. The residue they left behind implied comings and goings, jostling with others in some unknown space she can never pierce. What they wait for: judgment, peace, reincarnation. Her own Elysium has been pictured as golden wheat fields forever, where the grazing is eternal, where friendship—

Four-fifths. It is numb. The phylactery is an anvil that should've snapped her neck ages ago.

She pants by five-sixths. A visage of Eros doesn't mock her; a smile paints his beak. It's not a vision—he died that way, eyes open, pretending that his vision is as clear as day, the old genocidal hypocrite.

The doors to her chamber are within sight. Worry and shock blend together, stab her in the heart. She is immortal, unkillable. They are nothing to her. Six-sixths.

Seven-sixths: Across the room is the murky sky, clouds blotched in the colors of a useless horizon-stuck sun. Her chambers, her room, are neatly organized (put your affairs in order). Legs ignore everything: she is an automaton, there is but one goal, as the last burning star of the world, and that is to end all life, to finish the Black Crusade. Creature comforts are passed over: her bed, her chairs, her desk, her library of secret tomes and her racks of forbidden ingredients, letters, the possibility of—Variegate—

Balcony.

Mantras and recollections should be kicked into high gear: life is to blame for all strife, life is the cause of all strife. Life cannot solve its own contradictions, not on its own: life must take another. To eat is to kill, to take another's life force to sustain itself. The windigoes were life's representatives, the embodiment of it. An argument today is the seed of murder tomorrow is sowed by life today and how it opens the world to a realm of untold suffering, untold bloodshed—

Not with Eros. A robed claw stayed itself from a divine weapon.

An undead hoof kept insisting on just being there.

The phylactery radiates a summer's worth of warmth. Her heart almost beats.

She shakes the illusions encroaching on her mind, and dips her head past the balcony and its spiked railings.

The long way down lies ahead.

In thoughtless rage, she smashes the phylactery on the railing—forgets that it needs to be opened. Stickiness crawls up her, that of cold sweat.

The phylactery is dented. It pulls itself to her; it is storage, yearning for its owner's (un)caring embrace. A great, blazing fire trapped within fire her, the flame that melted the windigoes and the rest of the living.

It cracks open, locking mechanisms still intact. Darkness cackles out, outlined in gold, the damaged box calling out to her, her soul... to keep her soul safe the next time in one loving embrace—this, too, must die, then she shall die, and there will be rejoicing in her head. Her horn and hoof steady—

Another presence. "Variegate?" She turns around.

There is no one. Her personal chambers are shadowed, dipped in pitch-black. No one in the nothingness to come. Alon—

"Yagh!"

Breathing fast, hard... leans back on the railing, gasping, horn and hoof sore. She has just run a marathon, in the body and in her... heart. Self-preservation is disgusting, so close to the end of the world. She catches her breath again, feeling the life in her lungs, like a lone candle against the pitch-black night.

Behind her is the finish line, a hundred meters to the ground. It is being faithful to the end, to the end that will surpass all ends, to peace everlasting and universal.

Before her, a phylactery that skidded across the floor. She threw it; must be why they've hurt. Before her, five more minutes. At least. She still has control over time, her time. A litany of excuses pops into mind. The soothing calm of... another. It's how asylums go without another, you go mad enough in one place to be able to see everything you desire. Granted, everything will be an illusion by then...

Was Eros under such an illusion? His wicked peace... and Variegate, her egged persistence, her sorry regret...

Rosa bursts with relief and dissatisfaction, ending with a painful whicker. The phylactery is just a short trot away. That, and the tomes and ingredients in her room have done miracles before. An answer lies somewhere to the gaping hesitation in her heart.

"Just... wait," she sputters.

She slides down, lying down, at the precipice of walking or falling. Her chambers beckon, tempt her with a few more minutes and an army of tomes and potions and what-have-you, a great many things to act on when it comes to her inevitable death—and the deaths of those that did not shun her to the very end.

"I... won't die," she wheezes. "Not just yet..."