I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. — Percy Shelley
“Twilight.”
Twilight slowly opened her cloudy right eye and tried to focus on the blurry, brownish shape standing above her. She opened her mouth to speak, but coughed weakly instead.
Reaper knelt beside the pale, wizened, violet mare and watched her ribs rise and fall for a moment: “Time to go, Princess.”
Twilight slowly, carefully rolled off her side, and tucked her frail, trembling legs up underneath her. She swallowed hard as she tried to force herself up off the dusty, cracked floor.
“H-help…”
Reaper stood and wrapped a flickering band of pale, crimson magic around her shrunken ribs, lifting gently as he rose from the floor at her side.
Twilight glared: “No fair.”
Reaper grinned as he dissolved the magic band, and reached out a hoof to steady Twilight: “I know, but you three lost the ability some time ago to glean the last vestiges of this world’s magic. I figured I’d make use of the lingering crumbs one last time.”
Twilight smiled and tottered unsteadily through the crumbling throne room, picking her way around slabs of shattered marble: “Well, it’s much appreciated. I really miss my magic…”
She peered blearily through the gloom, brightened only by a pale sliver of watery moonlight and the dim glow of Reaper’s horn: “Where are we going? Why bother taking me anywhere, to be honest?”
Reaper shoved aside a fallen column, and helped his shuffling companion down a sloping avenue toward distant a park, now covered in dead grass, rotting logs and crumbling vines.
“I need all three of you in the same place to do this right.”
Twilight squinted at the rubble and desiccated vegetation: “How did I end up back in what’s left of Canterlot? I haven’t been here in centuries! How long have I been here?”
Reaper smiled sadly: “I’m not really surprised you don’t remember. I helped move you here from your catacombs some nine years ago. The old throne room ruins seemed cave-like enough, that with a bit of modification, moving your food stash, and tapping your last liquor reserves, I was able to settle you in without you even really being aware.”
Twilight chuckled: “Speaking of—is there any booze left? I think it might help me with this last voyage.”
Reaper reached into his cloak with a flickering band of magic and pulled out an ancient flask. He removed the stopper and held the neck to Twilight’s lips. She sipped noisily, and ran her tongue over her lips, sucking away the last drops. Reaper’s magic faltered, and the flask fell to the ground.
Twilight glanced sadly at it: “I want to pick it up, but it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”
“Not really, but I can get it if—”
“No. Leave it.”
Reaper nodded as he helped Twilight skirt a gaping chasm that split the boulevard: “Careful—it’s not much further now, but I had to plot the least-broken route I could find. Unfortunately, this added some distance…”
Twilight gritted her teeth and fanned her wings as she stumbled forward, her unshod hooves striking the fractured pavement with a dull thud.
“I-I still don’t understand. How did I survive these last, what, nine years, you said?”
“I sensed the end was coming, and retrieved you over the course of several days, from the deep catacombs. You were, essentially, in a fugue state—almost catatonic—by then. I don’t think you’d eaten anything of note for weeks.”
Twilight furrowed her wrinkled brow, and chewed her parched lower lip: “Why didn’t you just phase me and do it in one jump?”
“You wouldn’t have survived; the attempt would have dissolved the bond between your flesh and essence. I had to phase under you, slowly re-solidify, and hoist you onto my back as I rose up through the ground.”
“I had dreams…about moving…”
“That would make sense.”
“And of Luna.”
“That makes sense, too. She helped care for you off and on over these last few years, feeding you, keeping you in a dream state.”
Twilight stopped and raised an eyebrow: “Luna? I’m surprised she didn’t just let me die in my sleep!”
Reaper shook his head and nudged the reluctant alicorn forward: “Luna made peace with your shared histories long ago…”
Twilight let out a brief, harsh laugh as she stumbled on: “'Peace' my ass! She wanted me as dead as—what was Nightmare Moon’s expression?— 'The Bitch' did!”
Reaper smiled grimly: “Which bitch? That name would have fit you well, too…”
Twilight sighed heavily, and picked her way around an impromptu, unmarked cairn, set in the middle of the path: “After all these years, I finally understand Nightmare Moon better.”
Reaper raised an eyebrow: “Like you understood Grey Thorn?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“That’s always been your weakness, Twilight—the need to control, to master, to organize, no matter the cost. You start out with the best of intentions, but…”
Twilight stalled again as her eyes closed: “Take it too far. I know.”
She looked back over her shoulder at the pile of rocks, its marker long since tumbled and faded: “I don’t think I can do this. Just drop me here next to this grave. Nopony’s ever going to know where or even that I died, anyway…”
“That’s likely true, at least the specifics, but I believe there will be echoes of the three of you that carry on into this world’s next epoch.”
Twilight swayed, then returned to a slow, stiff plod: “What ‘next epoch?’ What do you know?”
“Just vague outlines of a new world, layered on the dust and ash and bones of this one.”
“So, this isn’t the end of our world?”
“Well, it is for you. And what’s to come, shaped by countless centuries before a new, enobled being arises, will erase all but the faintest traces—both good and bad.”
Twilight shook her head, causing her long, ragged, brittle mane to cover her face: “So just let me drop here. It won’t matter, and I don’t want those two to be the last things I see!”
Reaper took a deep breath: “It matters. In my way, I am this world’s last, eternal, steward. When all others fall to the side, in millennia past or in those to come, I endure. This world is all-but-drained of magic, and I want to ensure that at least some shadow of its mightiest beings persists.”
Twilight coughed and wheezed as a sudden gust of wind stirred the dust: “Wh-why?”
Reaper steered his charge off the path, down a shallow draw that had once been a decorative streambed: “Myths, legends, the ancient unknown. These are important to culture and civilization.”
Twilight rolled her eyes as she wobbled across the uneven surface: “I really doubt our ‘legends’ are worth preserving. It all fell apart so badly…”
“It was ugly, to be sure, but this is not my idea, alone. The Sisters agree that even a hint of the good that was once here—”
“And the bad! Just let it all be! Let the ghosts rest, let the new world start with a clean slate! Maybe they won’t screw it up like…like…”
Twilight choked back a sob and leaned wearily against a sagging limestone wall.
“They were wrong to come back. I was wrong to push back so hard, so arrogantly. The damn unicorns were wrong to pick sides…”
Reaper smiled grimly: “You mean the wrong side.”
Twilight angrily dashed away a tear: “They were both the ‘wrong’ side!”
“That’s not what you said then.”
Twilight spat: “Of course that’s not what I said at the time! But we all were wrong! And wresting that power back…it…”
“Took years to recover from. And nothing was ever truly the same again.”
Twilight frowned, blinked and looked around the corner of the wall: “Hello, Luna.”
“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.
Celestia stood unsteadily and blinked in the flat light, turning a circle, looking for some landmark on the featureless gray plain of the Waiting Room. A dark shape caught her eye, and she walked slowly towards it.
Luna rolled from her side, sat up and watched her sister move closer as her eyes fought to find their focus. She waved a hoof: “Come this way, Celestia!”
The snow-white alicorn nodded and increased her pace, nearly stumbling over Twilight’s prone form. She jerked to a stop: “Twilight! I didn’t see you there!”
Twilight rolled to her back for a moment before flopping left, and hauling herself to her hooves with a groan: “Well, that answers one question, anyway…”
Luna fanned her wings, stood and walked toward the other two Princesses: “What question is that, Twilight?”
She pointed off to her right: “Whether I’d be sent to Tartarus immediately, or stop here first…”
“As for the first question, I assumed the answer was ‘no.’ I was rather unsure as to the second part, myself.”
The three alicorns turned around as one as Reaper approached them from behind. Three low sofas appeared before them; Reaper gestured for the mares to sit.
Twilight reclined and eyed Reaper warily: “Why, ‘no?’ I’m pretty sure I’ve earned a spot next to Grey Thorn.”
The air filled with the scent of burnt flesh and blood for a moment; Reaper waved his hoof to dissipate the odors, and smiled: “For one, no creature has ever been sent to the very bottom of Tartarus since Grey Thorn, so the odds on you being the next were vanishingly small.”
He sat on the bench next to the downcast alicorn: “And second, though you certainly did tarnish your legacy late in life—”
He glanced from face to face to face and raised an eyebrow: “—you all did, to some degree—that was clearly weighed against the millennia of good you performed, often quite selflessly, for this world.”
Celestia shook her head: “Again, the question we have all wondered: weighed by whom?”
Reaper shrugged: “Same answer I gave you thousands of years ago: I don’t know. I know there is some force, some field, some energy, some consciousness, some something, but I still have only the vaguest sense of its outlines. Maybe after another eon…”
Luna cocked her head to one side: “Perhaps we three will learn the answer before you!”
Reaper chuckled: “That wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest! I can’t cross that Last Horizon, so I don’t really know what fate or the Cosmos or whatever has in store for you, or for anypony.”
Celestia furrowed her brow: “And you never will? Sitting in this place, it suddenly all feels so, well, eternal!”
Reaper nodded: “I never will. It is my fate, and those of my peers, to endure until the Cosmos itself grinds to a halt, and Entropy reduces everything to a perfect zero.”
Twilight shook her head: “And then what?”
Reaper smiled sadly: “Still the same old question, even after thousands of years, Twilight?”
“Yes. Even we ‘Immortals’ are now dead, and it still doesn’t make sense!”
Reaper stood and pointed his sword to the distant, unknowable boundary just beyond sight: “Time to go see if your answers are there.”
Twilight sighed and rose from the couch: “Just like the Pit…”
Reaper chuckled: “You’re dark, even for this place, Princess! I can assure you what lies beyond is not the oblivion of the Pit, otherwise this place would not exist. Even Tartarus is not the Pit.”
Luna left her couch and held out a hoof to Celestia: “Come sister, let us end this journey together, the light and the dark united for all time.”
Celestia took her sister’s sliver-shod hoof and rose, tall and elegant, clad with gold ornaments, shimmering mane drifting once again in an unseen breeze. The two strode purposely toward the unseen terminus, with Twilight and Reaper trailing.
The four approached the Horizon, and suddenly the shattered shell of the Void appeared to their left; Twilight shied away slightly, and Celestia glanced at her, then raised an eyebrow: “This looks like it just appeared here, not thousands of years ago.”
Reaper nodded: “There’s no decay here, no rust, no heat, no oxygen. It’s the perfect place of preservation.”
Luna cocked her head: “Do you still ponder it, study it?”
“I think I figured out all I ever was going to long ago. Now it’s simply my silent, inanimate companion—like an ugly sculpture you can’t get rid of.”
“Can you not force it beyond the Horizon”?
“No. Nothing tangible or solid can go past. What lies beyond is purely a realm of essence, of energy, of spirit, however you choose to define that.”
Celestia nodded: “And have any creatures tried to pass back from beyond?”
“Not that I know of. As you cross that threshold, you simply cease to exist in this plane—no flash, no ‘pop’, no trace. You are simply no longer here.”
Celestia took a deep breath and turned to Luna: “Come then, sister—let us take that final step together!”
Luna smiled and turned to Reaper: “You will remember, always, yes?”
“Until Entropy closes in at last.”
She turned to Twilight: “I hope you find the peace that has long eluded you, Twilight—that you find your answers at last.”
Celestia nodded: “You have both our love, Twilight, and you—”
She bowed slightly to Reaper: “our eternal thanks for your stewardship. Best of luck in whatever new world follows this one!”
Reaper bowed as the Sisters turned away: “Again, ladies, it’s been an honor.”
Twilight closed her eyes as her voice fell to a whisper: “Goodbye…I’m sorry…”
Celestia paused for a moment and glanced back over her shoulder with a sad smile: “I am, too. Farewell, my student…”
With that the two alicorns took a final step forward and vanished.
Twilight sat down next to the ruined Void and wept softly. Reaper sat next to her and listened to Twilight’s anguish for several long minutes. Eventually Twilight’s distress lessened and she raised her head: “I guess I have to go too, now…”
“As do all things that live and breathe, in the end.”
Twilight rose to her hooves and turned to face the featureless, unbounded space before her. She chewed her lip: “Tell me the truth—you pulled some strings, didn’t you? I should have been sent to Tartarus, by all rights.”
Reaper chuckled: “I ‘pulled some strings’ exactly once, long, long ago, Twilight. And to this day, I still don’t really know what happened, or who/what intervened.”
“Okay, but you weigh-in when somepony ‘of interest’ passes on, and…”
“And I had no comment to make to whomever when I reaped you. You paid a terrible price for your misdeeds millennia ago, and I know the scars that left have lingered to this day. I don’t think Tartarus would have any value, either as punishment or as place of reflection. You’ve punished yourself for years, and in your case, self-reflection will likely be best-served wherever the Cosmos sends you next.”
Twilight frowned: “So you held your tongue.”
“Yes.”
Twilight sighed: “Thank you—for everything.”
Reaper bowed slightly, drew his sword and pointed to the left of the wrecked Void: “I will genuinely miss the three of you, Princess, and I look forward to seeing your echoes in the world to come.”
Twilight took a half step forward, paused, raised her wings slightly from her body and looked back over her shoulder: “You really think there will be any trace, so immensely far in the future, on a world drained of magic?”
“Yes—you three possessed such potent, world-spanning magic, that I’m sure it has left a mark that will endure.”
Twilight smiled: “For good and bad…”
She stepped beyond infinity, and ceased to be.
Reaper chuckled as he sheathed Death’s Token: “Always with the last word…”
Reaper phased in at the head of Luna’s low, marble couch, drew his blade and slowly regarded the three bodies before him. His horn glowed faintly and sputtered fitfully as he brought the flat of his shimmering crimson sword down lightly on the head of each reclining alicorn, as though he was anointing them. The glow of his blade and horn died out, and he turned to face the east.
He stepped around the end of Celestia’s final resting place and took a seat on its edge, watching the distant horizon, framed by dead trees and the broken spire of a distant building. A faint glow began to build, bands of pale pink and blue streaking low, tattered, cotton-white clouds with blushes of color.
As the minutes passed, a thin, silver crescent rose above the spreading light, accompanied minutes later by a single, bright, glittering star, below and to the right of the moon’s horn.
Reaper watched as the two now-pale celestial bodies rose above the breaking dawn, golden light washing across the glen. He stood, straightened his cloak, nodded, then turned away from the east, faced south, and walked briskly away, never looking back as the sunrise touched the three, still bodies at last.
