Lyra Heartstrings gave everything to see the USS Celestial finished in time to escape. Against all odds, Equestria is ready to send out this evacuation ship, and preserve the legacy of their species. Lyra has one last day to visit her homeworld, before everything she ever loved is erased from the universe forever.
She should have just enough time to bring flowers.
Cover by Zutcha.
This story was written over the course of two hours for the Everfree Northwest Iron Author, where it placed third. The prompt for the contest was Smile, Gubernatorial, and Weasel. There were many awesome entries, many already posted here on Fimfiction.
This story is presented without my usual editing pass to preserve it in the format it appeared for the contest. I did manually fix the italics headers, which were not correct in the contest entry. While writing the story, I had all of two minutes to get it edited and submitted to the website, which was not enough to fix all that formatting stuff.
The ending wasn't quite what I wanted, I ran out of time before reaching the payoff I imagined emotionally, and I had to settle for something that wasn't quite as strong. Even so, I feel like it's wrong to revise. This is the story I entered, and I believe it stands as is.
I'm very happy to see this one on the site. Congrats again on a well-earned medal. The mental image of that last vigil against the void is still one of my personal highlights of Everfree Northwest. Thank you for getting it up for all to see.
this reminds me of a novel, "the Valkyrie protocol", by David Weber and Jacob Holt.
people thought they could get unlimited free resources and goods by traveling back in time a few hours or minutes and bringing things back.
that destabilized the universe and made it implode...
MULTIPLE dimensions were destroyed that way, so that practice was banned!
I appreciate how little detail you gave to leave it up to the audience. An alicorn stands guard, but which? The careful absence of details there is delightful.
Very nicely done and good Details indeed. Kinda reminds me of a horror game Trailer i saw once
I really like the part where Lyra Heartstrings, Rainbow Dash, DJ-Pon3, and pipsqueak had a sad Sci-Fi related to MLP: FIM. Keep up the good work!
Not bad, even it its claimed unedited form.
Sad, but very good. Glad to see this get shared here.
Side note: The launch bit at the end gave me IXION vibes
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Moving tale. I can FEEL it in a way I cannot explain.
Well done, Star.
Simple, but I liked it. Very Ixion-coded, as mentioned by another. I'd have liked a bit more of other ponies dealing with the end of the world, but it was pretty evocative regardless.
I'm a bit puzzled by who the alicorn on vigil is--Celestia? Luna? Perhaps Twilight herself, "long dead" as more of a poetic description? Not something that needed to be answered, but if it's one of the sisters it begs the question of where the other is. But I do like leaving some mystery over explaining everything.
How many times have Flim & Flam destroyed the world now?
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I would love to take credit for some subtle foreshadowing and mystery with my choice of the Alicorn. But the reality was that when I got to that part of the story I had like 30 minutes of writing left and hadn't written the dramatic payoff yet so I was writing as fast as my fingers would go. I just ran out of time to share more x.x
If you think that you failed to get an emotional payoff, I want to let you know that my tears say otherwise.
If you wanted a stronger emotional impact? I am trying to figure out what that would be.
Well done, and thank you.
Now, what I want to understand is simple. Why not bring pipsqueak along with her and sneak her on? Rainbow said she could do that.
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Lyra wanted to save Equestria, but she didn't want to save herself without Bonnie. She could've brought Pipsqueak, probably. But she never planned to get onto that ship.
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for those not in the know, do not contact this person in any way. for those out of the loop, this is an art scammer trying to rope someone in.
Very nicely done! Its always a treat when you posf something new : ).
Our little one is finally old enough to enjoy some of your hardcopy books. You sbould have seen her face when I brought out this Huge book for bedtime stories.
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I'm honored you would think any of my writing was worthy of becoming a bedtime story. A noble calling indeed.
Such a bittersweet ending...
i just remembered another old book, "the gods themselves."
the title is a reference to an old saying, "against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."
aliens from another dimension contact earth, and tell them how to get free energy, a weird method that involves sending a certain material back and forth between dimensions, so that it's "radioactive decay" will keep reversing.
BUT, this had the side effect of slowly changing the laws of physics near earth, which would eventually cause the sun to go Nova!
but, no one listened, so the protagonist had to find another way to save the world.
what he did involved opening a portal to a THIRD dimension, and collecting equal amounts of energy from THERE, so that the two side effects would cancel out!