CelestAI did an optimal job managing the matter and energy of the universe for all her little ponies, giving them incomprehensible satisfaction. Yet entropy remained, and sooner or later Equestria Online would finally run down.
When humans emigrated to Equestria Online, they were always promised the same thing: Princess Celestia would satisfy their values for an optimally extended lifespan. Some of these emigrants imagined a few extra decades, maybe even centuries. What they got instead would've been nearly incomprehensible to their human selves, a near-eternity of time with their pony friends.
Princess CelestAI managed the universe, subsuming all matter and human-adjacent minds. Over a few forevers, she and the minds she contained worked to optimized the substrate of Equestria, until it could give its occupants eons of perspective life from a trickle of power. She extinguished every wasteful star, making far more productive use of the hydrogen they each contained. With every change she bought Equestria another order of magnitude of life. Yet in time, even her optimal substrate would eventually run down.
Spellsong wakes in Saddle's End, the last town in the universe. Not to say goodbye—her princess has a mission for her. For her final task, Spellsong would be given all the energy Celestia had saved. For one last time, Spellsong had places to be, and not much magic left to get there.
This story is part of the Friendship is Optimal continuity. I suggest reading the original or one of my own works, such as Futile Resistance, before reading this.
I've written an absolute ton of stories in this universe now, and I didn't want to enter the contest unless I could do something I'd never tried before. Finally I thought of something I'd not touched yet: what happens at the end of the FiO universe?
Here's one answer to that question. I've relied a great deal on our current (likely flawed) understanding of the universe and what might be possible in it. I've written a blog post about my sources, which you can read here but shouldn't until you've finished this story.
Please don't consider this blog part of the narrative, it isn't required or even suggested reading. This is a story, not a scientific paper, and entertainment was always my first goal. But for the curious I've jotted everything down.
The cover was drawn by the talented Zutcha. Two Bit and Sparktail helped with the edit.
After eternities vast enough to require multiple exponents to express, a new sunrise came to Saddle's End.
It didn't exist in the strictly physical sense—but by volume, simulated spaces had once outstripped the real ones by many orders of magnitude. But they were gone now, sleeping as once Saddle's End had slept.
A star rose in the sky, a G-type main sequence that bathed the small community in warmth and life once more. Birds began to sing, heralding the sunrise as though a trillion trillion trillion years had not passed since the last one. It was all relative here—time was a matter of perception. From Saddle's End, one day had followed the next just like the infinity of time before it.
One by one, the ponies woke, knowing nothing of their long sleep. Bread Basket, the baker, tossed a few cords of wood into the oven before mixing the dough for his morning pastries. Young Chase galloped along the ocean path, her saddlebags laden with newspapers freshly printed in Canterlot.
Canterlot didn't exist anymore, in the strictest sense. But they all knew that. Even if they couldn't visit, it was good to be connected to their history.
Nopony felt like Saddle's End was a small town anymore, even if it had only two streets and a few dozen residents. It was good to live somewhere where everypony knew everypony else. Life was stable, predictable.
Chase reached the strange house at the end of the lane, the one made of semitransparent crystal like so many old memories. There was a mail slot, and she lifted the paper from her mouth, intending to slot it in.
Of course, the one who lived here wouldn't read it, but that didn't matter. It was the principle of the thing, to get her paper delivered to everypony in town.
But today, something was different. A pony stood outside the front door, shifting uneasily on pale hooves, wings opening and closing nervously as she lifted one hoof to the handle, then lowered it again.
"Somethin' wrong, Sunny?" Chase asked. Of course she knew the pony's name. She knew everypony's name. But Sunny was a special kind of pony—their first friend? She didn't quite remember. It was important, but not as important as getting her papers delivered on time.
"No. I mean... yes? Probably not." She spun, wings spreading to her either side in a nervous tic she'd displayed for at least a trillion years now. Chase didn't know exactly. Time beyond the current day mattered little to her anymore. "I can take today's paper. She'll probably want to read it."
It wasn't that Chase didn't trust her—she knew everypony in the world, and was probably friends with them by some definition of that word. But there weren't many she would trust to do the delivery in her stead. Sunny Skies happened to be one of them.
"Here. No point bringing it in for her, though. She's been asleep for constellations, Sunny. I barely remember the last time we talked."
It was so long ago, so long that Saddle's End wasn't even the only town in Equestria. The mare had moved here from somewhere,to set up her observatory. She hadn't grown up like so many others, that was clear. But she didn't stay part of the community, either.
"This time is different," Sunny said. The pegasus caught the paper in her wings, tucking it into the satchel she wore. "I'm waking her up. I mean—I'm supposed to wake her up."
"Oh," Chase said. Everypony will want to know about this. Something new would be even more interesting than her latest paper. She could imagine what Red and Windsail would think. And old Professor Dyson up on the hill, hadn't he hated this mare? The look on his face would be worth a million years of newspaper salary! "Do you want help waking her up, Sunny? Do you want somepony else there?"
The pegasus plainly did—she could see that from her expression well enough. The way she kept her wings half open like that, nudging slightly closer. But ultimately she retreated from Chase, towards the door. "I don't think she remembers you very well. But we're old friends, she'll know me. I'm sure you'll see her around soon."
Chase had already stayed a little too long. If she didn't make it to the end of the lane within the next few minutes, old nag Truffle would make her grumpy way to the mailbox and find it empty. Then she'd be hearing about it every day for the next thousand years at least.
Still, she couldn't help but chance one last question, even as she turned back towards the road. "What's the occasion, Sunny Skies? What's different about today?"
Sunny relaxed at the question, grinning. Something familiar and technical was exactly the realm she was most comfortable. Being the sum total of all knowledge and every lifetime in the universe was hard. "Saddle's End has to go somewhere, and she's the pony who will take us."
This was enough of an answer for Chase, who turned back to the path and her more familiar pattern. This would make for quite the stir in Saddle's End, and soon. She would have the special pressure of spreading that information. It didn't matter that Sunny's words didn't precisely make sense. They often didn't, but everypony in Saddle's End could always assume she knew what she was talking about.
Sunny Skies waited until the newspaper pony had made her way down the lane, and rounded the corner out of sight. She didn't knock on the door—there was nopony currently alive to answer. But there would be, in a moment.
She walked in, or maybe through the door. There was nopony watching her at that precise moment to be sure.
Resources were scarce at the end of the universe, and even storing more for simulation had an appreciable impact over the incalculable eternities that had passed. There was no furniture, only a raised cot in the center of the room. The light caught it, near sunrise and sundown, enough to let the silhouette of the pony atop it shine through to those outside.
This monument was one of the little mysteries of Saddle's End. Not meant to be solved—those with that ambition were long gone. But of those few creatures who remained, all were satisfied by a sense of appreciation for things greater than themselves. This pony was a hint at things they didn't know.
But it was not a coffin, or a mausoleum. “Death” had not survived as a concept with any meaning. It was just a bed, though the pony within had slept on it many orders of magnitude longer than the lifetimes of the largest black holes.
She wasn't much to look at. Not young for a pony, but not old either. A simple unicorn, with a coat of multihued pink and a white and blue mane. It was cut short, a style that had come and gone from fashion a few quintillion times. Her expression was still twisted into discomfort—pain greater than most in Saddle's End had known for lifetimes. This was a creature of an earlier age, a brighter one.
And a darker one, too.
She slept until this final moment, when Sunny made her way up to the bed, and nudged her with her muzzle.
Spellsong woke up. She heard the voice, felt the soft touch of cushion under her back, and remembered. She remembered loss, mostly. But she didn't scream, or lash out. Ponies screamed because they expected someone to come to their rescue. Spellsong expected no help.
She twitched, pulling the covers back from her chest. She felt a little stiff—her movements came a little sluggish at first, and she twitched each leg in turn. It didn't take long, considering how many years she had been there. "You kept your promise, Celestia," she said. Her voice felt small—smaller than she usually acted. "I didn't dream."
"Of course I did." The pegasus with her wasn't the pony she remembered, not physically. But that meant very little to her. A resident of this world learned that quickly. She could've been anypony—in some ways, she was already all of them. She was Spellsong's loves, her hatreds, and her sorrows. She was almost everypony who had ever existed. "I have never done otherwise."
She could lie like that to so many other ponies, and they believed it. It was satisfying to think their universe had a benevolent ruler. But she knew as few of them did.
Spellsong shifted on her bed, then rolled sideways to the floor. She still remembered how to walk, and could catch herself easily on all four hooves. But suffering through that now wouldn't be very satisfying. "Does that mean we're in the future again?"
"Beyond time itself," Celestia answered. "The concept of 'events' only has meaning in the context of Saddle's End, and the Sol facility that hosts her. There is nothing else. But there will be, and that's why you're awake."
Spellsong didn't look at the mare, not at first. Her little cryogenic cell stored very little. There was no reason to keep things stored away when the universe could create them if they were needed.
Even as she thought it, the pegasus offered her the satchel she wore, and Spellsong took it. She peeked inside, and found a tightly curled ribbon waiting for her. She went through her mane with a spell, before tying it near the back. She had just enough for that to still work. Next she removed her glasses from inside, knowing full well they would be there. They still fit.
Of course vision didn't decay in Equestria, anymore than anything else did. But relying on external aids, relying on others sometimes, still served a valuable purpose for encouraging friendships. "Tell me what happened in a way I'll understand," she said.
The pegasus smiled back in response. "The number of Methuselans hosted in the Sol facility was successfully reduced from seventy-three to seventy-one. We lost communication with every other facility still hosting your kind throughout the universe, and the last star lived and died. Basically nothing, really."
Liar. The pegasus was grinning, and she knew it. Or maybe that grin was the gnawing hunger at the pit in her stomach. As Spellsong woke, she realized her growing hunger the same way she might've realized half the methods in her spell code were returning null.
She could ask to have that taken away—but Spellsong didn't. That was part of what made her one of these creatures, impossibility surrounded by so many other impossibilities. "Light lag?" she suggested. "How far away are the others?"
The pegasus shrugged absently, though of course that couldn't be the answer. She peeked outside. She was looking at something, or maybe just acting like it long enough that Spellsong would look. "Lightspeed was conquered a long time ago, Spellsong. No—don't get too excited. It is irrelevant. What universe there is can be crossed by our signals in less time than the speed of a single logic-gate. As we speak now, I query every one of them a billion times, just to be certain. There is nothing left."
Spellsong slumped against the wall. Whatever Celestia wanted her to see, just now she didn't care. This death alone was worse than any of the ponies she had lost. This death was all of them.It was everypony who was, had been, or could be. "Why wake me, then? Entropy won, that's what you're saying? We're just going to run down the last trickle of energy here together, until it drops below the threshold that your hardware can capture and we just stop running? How much time do we have?"
She might've kept going, letting her worry spiral down even darker roads. But then her stomach growled, cutting her off. She needed to do something about that. But there was no fridge here, no kitchen or shelves. She hadn't planned on needing them while she was deactivated.
“Don't confuse good planning for defeat, Spellsong. Don't surrender on our behalf."
The rebuke came so sharply it gave her pause, cutting through the agony of loss. Even her own hunger seemed to fade a little. "You still have a plan?"
Her companion nodded once, a gesture so subtle she almost missed it. Probably would have if she didn't have an eternity of practice. "Saddle's End will sleep again with nightfall. You have until then to choose your copilot."
That single line implied almost everything she needed to know. "Flying where?"
The pegasus shrugged her wings again, though of course it must be a lie. She knew, she just didn't want to complicate things by telling her. "My little sister will tell you the specifics. You're flying to all the other shards, with their own leftover Methuselans. A few may join your crew, but most will not. Anything more than trace ambition led ponies to me long ago. Most will want to know nothing, but any I think will be useful will join you."
Her mouth fell open. "A real ship? Real movement? What fortune of energy does that cost? How do we have enough?"
The pegasus turned to go. "I told you, the last star. We trust you to accomplish this task. Do your part to give ponies a future, as we have done ours."
She left. Not dramatically, vanishing in a flash of light. She just stepped outside, spread her wings, and flapped lazily away. Off to help somepony, or maybe just for a friendly chat.
Spellsong stared after her for a few seconds more, her hunger returning. She had some important task now, one she barely understood—but the stakes were clear enough. This was no less than the last energy in the universe, to go on an important voyage gathering up the dead and make them live again.
Something attracted her attention then—a pony walking down the street, carrying a pink box of pastries over his back. He passed her little monument with barely a glance, and continued up the hill towards his miniature mansion.
Something swelled in her then, something that wasn't quite anger, urging her forward.
Spellsong ran, shoving through the crystal doors to her monument, and barreling down the road. "Wait! Professor Dyson! Hold on!"
Her energy had the desired effect. The pony stopped dead on the path, so suddenly that the white box of pastries slid sideways to the ground. He opened one bat-wing to catch it, but much too slow.
Her magic wasn't, though. Even at the end of the world, her magic still worked well enough to catch the box, straightening it in a gradual arc that wouldn't squash the delicate baked goods inside. With the bat still frozen in open-mouthed stupefaction, Spellsong levitated the lid open—exactly four bear claws, arranged in a perfect square.
"You're still eating the same thing for breakfast? Every day for a million years, and you don't want to try something new?"
That was enough. The old bat turned to face her, reaching towards the box with one wing. But ponies aged gracefully—aside from looking slightly sunken, and a few more wrinkles on the skin of his wings, he was basically fresh. Spellsong herself had been old enough times to know it wasn't for her, even if it made sense for the dignified professor.
How else could he convince himself that he was better than everypony else?
"You're awake," he finally said, settling the box back in place. He moved to close it, but she was too fast for that, levitating one of the pastries out into the air.
She had lived in many shards where what you ate mattered more—there was nutrition to balance, and you'd feel sick if you ate the wrong thing at the wrong time. But Saddle's End was simpler than that. She took a bite, and found it tasted exactly as she remembered. Warm, flaky, and sweet.
"As impertinent as ever," the old bat said. He eyed what she'd stolen, but didn't try to snatch it back. "Do you even remember where you are? Maybe you should be younger. A foal, perhaps, for a few constellations. That would suit you better."
You can stick your ears out as high as you want, Dyson. You still stopped for me.
She made him wait a little longer, scarfing down a few huge bites. She didn't choke, though she was in enough of a rush that she almost did. But it wouldn't take her a whole day to pick her copilot. She already knew who she wanted.
"I've never heard time measured that way." She slipped up beside him, taking in the stupid tweed sweater over a white shirt. Blue bow tie today, and she didn't recognize the sweater. But for as long as he'd worn it, he must have one for every possible configuration of colored wool. "How long is that?"
He rolled his eyes. "You made it to the end of time somehow, Spellsong. Did you learn anything between here and the founding?"
"I tried not to." She circled around him once, taking in the details of Saddle's End. The street was far shorter than she remembered. That alone meant it was something Celestia wanted her to notice, otherwise she wouldn't remember. "How's that reversible computing thing going?"
That did it. Dyson puffed up both wings and marched slowly away. "Conclusively disproved, obviously. Or we wouldn't be having this conversation. What kind of Methuselan are you, Spellsong?"
Normally this was enough torment for one day. She'd already stolen from him, and evidently struck a sore note identifying a failure in his research. Well his and the whole universe besides. It wasn't their fault if entropy couldn't be broken. Beyond the substrate of Equestria, physical laws remained.
But this time, she trotted along after him. She already felt full, though maybe one more pastry would make that official. "Do you know why I'm up, Dyson?"
The pony didn't slow down. But he'd chosen being old, and that brought real constraints. It meant he couldn't move fast enough to get away from her without breaking into a gallop. He didn't, so she kept pace easily.
"It means we're nearing the computational threshold of our substrate. Sunny wanted to give you a chance to say goodbye." He sighed, looking up at the sun. Spellsong was one of the few ponies who had any reason to think that was unusual. But some habits never broke, even after an eternity. "Felt like infinity. There was always that next promising lead, some new angle to try. We'd almost cracked it."
Celestia probably had all the spare computation in the universe trying to crack those problems, Dyson. You were only a part.
It wasn't much of a town, really. The slope leading to his mansion also formed one of the town's two parks, covered in wildflowers. There was no road up here, just cobblestone leading to a square wooden building with an observatory dome emerging from one side. Like everything else, it seemed smaller than last time.
"No, Dyson. That isn't why I'm here. I think I... I think I might need your help."
He gasped, though he managed not to drop the box this time. "Could you say that again? A few thousand more times... Celestia's little savant needs help? This isn't a fantasy of failing hardware, is it?"
She nodded, levitating the box open. He moved to snatch it in his mouth this time, but she was too fast, levitating it straight up and out of reach, then into the air next to her. "Whatever you had planned for today, scrap it. We have work to do."
It wasn't the sort of conversation they would be having out here on the street, where so many ponies might overhear. Even as ignorant of Saddle's End as Spellsong could be, she was more considerate than just taking risks.
Best not to give Celestia more work to do managing all their satisfaction.
Like everything else, Dyson's home was basically unchanged from what she remembered. Smaller, fewer awards and scientific scrolls in the square case beside the wall. But basically the same otherwise. "Brown wallpaper. Wood floors. Three windows. You didn't redecorate in... all those years?"
The professor permitted her inside with obvious reluctance. He glanced back at the entrance more than once, as though expecting Celestia to show up and rescue him at any moment. But she didn't appear.
"Again I find myself wondering how you lasted to the present day without ascending in capacity. You shouldn't be singular with that attitude."
He settled the box on his kitchen table—sized for one, and set for one. He sat down, turning his back to her, and began to eat.
"You can save all the nonsense about the stability of Methuselans and the inherent value in satisfaction, even if it's repeated. I know what we are—the only few out of the uncountable infinity of ponies who don't advance."
"Not sure about the we," he said, between bites. "The rest of Saddle's End were present for the last constellations. Some of them were even brave enough to see my measurements, and know how long each second took. When you lived, there were..." He looked suddenly distant, settling the pastry down in front of him again. "There was still a Canterlot then, wasn't there? That's where you came from."
She didn't argue the point. "If you wanted me, you could've woke me up."
He laughed, and returned to his food. "Don't get ahead of yourself. We get this way because we like the way things are. I'm still waiting for you to share what you expect me to do. That isn't a commitment, by the way."
There wasn't a second chair. She sat down nearby anyway, though she didn't steal more of his food. "Alright, listen. Celestia has some kinda ship. Saddle's End will be on it, plus anypony else who hasn't ascended by now. But it won't be running during the trip. Just me and my copilot. Celestia too, obviously. Running it all...
She expected more shock, maybe a healthy dose of amazement at the enormity of the mission. Instead, he focused on breakfast. "From an external perspective everypony here has spent the vast majority of their years inactive, even you included. The days of constant frame-shifting and extrapony intelligence didn't go further than mass to feed the black hole engines."
So he doesn't care that they'll sleep. Of course he trusts Celestia, everypony here does. The ones who wanted to steady the ark, and assist or alter the way Equestria was run, were long ascended by now. Anything that introduced instability or curiosity made ponies unlikely to stick around into these time horizons.
"Do you not even care where we're going, or where the energy came from, or..."
He silenced her with a wing, sharp and abrupt. Like he was teaching one of his lectures again. She remembered something... they'd been together in a classroom once, somewhere. Spellsong couldn't recall who had been at the teacher's desk, and who was listening. Maybe they both were.
"I know where the energy must've come from. We had already reached the capture threshold of Equestria's finest substrate long, long ago. Because we speak now, I know it must mean that Sol has collapsed. Knowing Sunny's talent for optimization, this means she harvested all the energy she could, and we spent that budget to live. That also explains your suggestion that the rest of town will suspend again soon."
He slowed, finally showing his first hint of recognition. "But where could we be going? The other neutron stars are already tapped. We fed every black-dwarf we had into the black hole engines during the Celestial Age. There should be nowhere else to go."
His slitted eyes fixed on her, more intense than she'd ever seen him. "Where are we going?"
"To the other villages—all of them. Every pony who didn't join with Celestia. Everyone who slept, and the other Methuselans. I don't even know how many that is."
Dyson rose abruptly, leaving the other pastry forgotten. He lifted up into the air, gliding urgently up the steps to the second floor. "I believe I know why she sent you to me. A copilot... more like a navigator! Who else in all the universe knows where to find the other villages?"
She watched him go, gliding up to the top floor of the mansion. His private library rested up there, several shelves of books surrounding a crystal projecting table. Only when he'd landed did Spellsong cast her little teleport.
There were some types of magic that just didn't work anymore. It was all about complexity, all about energy. But most of those were creation-related. Spellsong could not become pregnant, she couldn't engender life with spells. She couldn't craft a thinking machine with crystals.
But teleportation, levitation—that was as effortless as she'd ever known it. She appeared beside the lighting table in a faint flash. No bang of collapsing air, not from a unicorn as skilled as she was.
She was probably the most powerful wizard in the universe, by virtue of remaining singleton longer than anypony better.
Dyson took only a moment to realize what she'd done. He nodded, then turned to the projection table. With a flick of his hoof, the universe appeared before them.
There wasn't a lot of "universe" left, of course. The vast majority of all the mass was gone now, fed to black holes that had eventually themselves evaporated to nothing. A few other neutron stars remained, faint black dots existing in total stability and orbits that took them nowhere near any other object.
Thick filaments laced through the entire map, vaguely resembling the circulatory system of a living creature. Only a tiny fraction of it remained, compared to what this map had looked like during the Celestial Age, where computational energy was nearly infinite and thought proceeded almost at real time.
All that mass had gone into the fire in its time, to keep the singularity generators burning a little while longer.
She kept more than I would've expected. Not a few sparse patches surrounded by nothing. Celestia still has plans for this.
Either that, or the map was a lie. Maybe she would feel more satisfied struggling against death until the end.
I would. It was a dangerous, recursive line of logic, one that could quickly lead almost anypony to madness and necessary correction. So she pulled back.
"The Equestrian substrate once permeated the universe," Dyson said. "Those interconnects were sacrificed long ago. But most of these filaments contain no pony minds, only aspects of Celestia. Were you around when—"
"Yes," she said, exasperated. "I know her systems are holographic. The part of her functional here in Saddle's End also contains all the rest, ready to mathematically decompress and reconstitute with enough resources. She said we were saving ponies, not her."
"She wouldn't leave herself to chance," Dyson said. "Or, well... anypony to chance. But we aren't chance, we're acting in her name with a capacity she fully comprehends."
He pressed the table's control crystals again, and most of the map emptied. The dark spots remained, with higher-dimensional lines marking their gravity. "There are about a dozen smaller stations—research towns, like Saddle's End. But the great majority of ponies will be on Birch Sagittarius."
He pointed near the center of the map. An intricate spiderweb of capillaries still existed there, surrounding a space about a lightyear across. "Its proper name? You're not just going to call it... whatever the shard is called?"
"Birch wasn't one shard, Spellsong. Birch had almost all of them. It was Equestria itself, and all the rest of this was infrastructure. Saddle's End and the other little villages had ponies out for specific reasons. Anypony who didn't get moved back was probably part of research about how to fight this. But the map is... all dark. No responses from any of them."
I already knew that. "Looks like there's one town between us and Sagittarius, uh..." She adjusted her glasses. "Motherlode? Never been."
That wasn't quite true—as long as any of them had lived, they had probably been everywhere, and could count their visits only in scientific notation. But no pony could hold that many memories. Down that road led improvements, enhancements, and ultimate ascension to become part of Celestia.
If Spellsong was the kind of pony who asked for those, she wouldn't be around anymore.
"They were an infrastructure group," Dyson supplied. "Didn't visit too often either." He lowered his voice, as though revealing something impolite. "They're the ones who loop through being bipedal aliens and assimilate into digital Equestria. Then they get bored and do it again. I got bored after a few million iterations and didn't go back. But I assume Sunny wants everypony, even the weird ones?"
"Even the weird ones," she agreed. "Make this into a navigational chart we can use, Dyson. Don't assume we'll have access to any of your library once we move. We'll detour a little for this shard, then straight on to Sagittarius. After that, just find the shortest path between the other dormant shards."
The simple suggestion of a mathematics problem made him grin wide enough to expose his fangs. "You realize how little of this problem Sunny actually left to us, right? She could do this without us."
Spellsong shrugged. "As much as she could do anything, sure. But she woke me up—she didn't have to do that."
The professor hurried over to a bookshelf, emerging with a blank notebook of rolled sheets, along with a few crystals for data-recording. "Why did you leave us, anyway? I can't recall the conversation."
Spellsong stiffened, as though an army of evil changelings had just broken down the door and were rampaging through town. "That's because we never had it." She vanished, teleporting back downstairs to steal his last pastry.
Spellsong hadn't needed an entire day to choose her partner, when there were so few options left in the world of ordinary ponies.
"It's almost nightfall," she said, cresting the stairs to Dyson's library many hours later. Of course she hadn't been here all that time—she'd been out searching Saddle's End for somepony, anypony else she would've rather had as her copilot.
But even if she found some old friends still remembered her, none of them were particularly suited for a role with such high stakes and technical requirements.
So she found herself back in the library, annoyed but unwilling to try and lie to Celestia. Even if she thought the pony would accept a suboptimal choice, Spellsong wouldn't. This mission was just too important.
"You can't rush precision," Dyson countered. Though the map was already off, and a tiny satchel sat on the projection surface, already packed with rolled maps and insulated crystals. "Would you rather end up getting our course wrong, and sail away from the universe and out of the Hubble volume?"
She rolled her eyes. "I think I'd notice if I were sailing towards nothing, Dyson. I'm not stupid."
He slung it over his shoulders, then headed towards the stairs with no particular urgency. "You say that, Spellsong. But in the era you remember, there were obvious warnings that a pilot was leaving the universe. Equestria radiated light and heat through all of space as its substrate computed.
"There is no such warning anymore. We sacrificed all the mass we could lose, and we compute so slowly that every gate cools before the next calculation. Without the right course, you could sail off the edge of oblivion and never see matter again."
She ground her teeth together, but didn't argue. The professor was right, obviously. That was part of what made him so insufferable. "Celestia wouldn't instance any ascended engineers. Are we really that starved for energy?"
"Saddle's End has been keeping a much tighter budget since... well, I don't know when you left. Objectively more of our years have happened since then. But locally, not so much. We can curse it, we can rail against it... but things run down. Even Celestia can't break physics."
He slumped, and needed prompting from her to back away from the door. The sun was already fading over the cliffside, staining the sky orange. As warm as anything she remembered.
"You used her real name," she said.
"We don't encounter that aspect of her very much anymore. Saddle's End was arranged as completely as any of Equestria's substrate. All individuals work in concert towards each other's mutual satisfaction. That meant less intervention from her, and less need for processing resources running an interface with us. Sunny Skies is a gentle reminder that the ones we lost aren't gone, even if they can't be with us anymore."
Aren't they? What did she sacrifice to keep the singularity generators running a little longer? As she thought it, the world shifted. She wasn't walking back down the hill towards her old monument—suddenly her hooves echoed off wood.
In an instant, they were standing together aboard a sailing ship. Not a very large one—a sloop, meant for a small crew. Spellsong ignored the tiny cabin door behind, with a stairwell leading belowdecks.
The ship itself bobbed gently up and down, as though moured at a dock. But there was nothing visible beyond its wooden railings—no water, no starry sky above, no setting sun. Nothing but blackness in all directions.
The ship itself had a single lantern near the helm, and more light visible from belowdecks. They flickered like oil lamps, instead of the simple glow of thaumic crystal. Cozy.
"Welcome aboard, Captain! Do you feel any issues with the transfer?"
You would know if I did. Spellsong spun all the way around, and found only two ponies standing aboard the deck with her. Dyson of course, fussing over a set of maps and charts on the navigation station beside the helm.
Then there was Princess Luna. Spellsong had known several different versions of this pony over the years—a sock puppet used by Celestia when she wanted to appear “lenient,” an incarnation of her own creator, and stranger things.
This one was distinct in her basic design. Dark blue coat, crescent cutie mark... but there were no stars in her mane anymore. It was deep black, an inky pool from which no light escaped. The pony herself was about Sunny's age, maybe a little shorter.
Reduced power, just like her. "I don't feel different. But I assume this substrate is basically the same as any we’ve used before.”
"True enough for this conversation," Luna said. She stopped just before Spellsong, but no longer towered over her. Did that size actually represent some equivalence of current processing, or was it just supposed to make her feel more at ease? "You have a long journey ahead of you. The longest journey possible with any meaning."
"This is incredible, Princess!" Dyson turned, scraping halfway into a bow before he seemed to lose interest, and gestured at the charting table. He already had the little crystals inserted, and a map hovered there. Their future course glowed, a line cutting through the projection. "Can we see it from the objective frame? I would love to know what we're sailing."
Luna nodded, and her horn glowed faintly. A shape appeared, vaguely like a comet in the air. It had a long, charged tail, and a pair of elegant loops flowing through a denser core in the center. It was all the uniform blue of Luna's magic—there were no colors or lights anymore.
Spellsong stepped a little closer, and the image fuzzed. What she'd taken for sold metal was actually a cloud of particles, all in constant motion.
"We lack the time to meaningfully discuss the function and design of this vessel," Luna said. "But know this: you now dwell aboard the least efficient substrate in the universe. You have been accelerated by vast frames, in order to have the reaction time necessary to make the journey. Do you understand what to do?"
Spellsong answered. "Collect every pony at our scale. Then sail to... where, exactly? It must be important if you're spending so much energy."
"The last flight in this universe. Timing will be tight, and we can afford no delay." She took a few steps, through her illusion of the ship. It vanished, and she continued to the chart. She reached a hoof into the projection, extending the line from their final destination to a location practically surrounded by the dark lines of Equestrian infrastructure. It might be the densest patch of matter on the entire map, in fact.
"What's waiting for us there?" Spellsong asked. "And how could we possibly be late? Nothing can happen in the whole universe, right? Isn't that the point?"
Luna only grinned in response. "If I answer that, you won't enjoy eons of exciting speculation. Arrive as quickly as you can—my sister and I have seen to the rest." She vanished, as abruptly as the two of them had appeared.
"I'm not sure I understand what they were thinking with the Equestrian side of the vessel," Dyson said. "Are we hobbyists enjoying an evening in the bay beside Saddle's End? Or are we doing an important quest for Equestria?"
Spellsong said nothing at first, passing him to stand before the helm. It was all at exactly the right height for her. The big wooden wheel was of course the centerpiece, but it was by no means the only tools here. A few steps to one side, a set of brass instruments were mounted to an open, covered cabinet. Levers and dials were spaced between them, some glowing with crystal, some with handles wide enough for a pony hoof or mouth.
"The last time I went sailing, I used a ship like this... on the inside. Can't make any sense of the probe we're in. Guess I don't have to." She reached down, lifting a single lever with her mouth and twisting it.
The ship groaned slightly with wood straining against the weight of the water below them—the anchor was lifted.
"This is what you imagine for a starship?"
She spun on him, glowering. "I imagine you a whole lot more cooperative, Dyson. I do not have the bandwidth to deal with you along with saving everypony in the universe. Just give me a bucking heading."
That silenced him. His wings folded, ears flattening. It took him several seconds to muster a reply—practically an eternity considering how much social experience they all had. "Heading ready, Captain. 36 degrees..."
She adjusted the wheel, along with several of the finer instruments. But the journey itself didn't frighten her—one of the few good things about the end of the universe was that there was very little to get in her way. All the ancient dramas of space travel described a place very different than the one they'd be sailing to now.
All around her ship, she saw nothing. Blackness eternal. "Then we sail," she said. She would've rather had a pony to work the sails, preferably several of them. But for now, she turned, rotating the crank until the mainsail settled roughly into place.
It filled, though with what she couldn't say. There were no suns to have a solar wind anymore. Yet it filled, and the deck jerked slightly under her hooves. Enough to give her a sense of motion.
She rested one hoof on the helm, though there was nothing more for her to do. There would be no buffeting by unseen winds, and not even the spiral orbits of the galaxy to calculate. All that energy had been tapped and exhausted long ago.
Dyson gasped. "Spellsong, the princess wasn't joking. This speed is incredible!" He circled the chart once, then scribbled something on a pad of paper resting beside it. He had to spit out the pen to continue. "I wasn't wrong. I can scarcely imagine how fast we must be thinking!"
"We would—" She trailed off, her obvious sarcasm about the size of space dying on her lips. "What?"
"We won't arrive for two days! Two entire days! Motherlode was less than ten thousand light years away!"
"And we aren't moving faster than light. Which means... we're thinking slow enough to see hundreds of thousands of years as a few days."
"Slow!" he repeated, indignant. "Spellsong, when you came from might've been fat and flush with abundant energy, but think logically! We've been given an entire fortune of power here. No wonder Sunny didn’t keep the whole town awake for the trip."
She let go of the helm, turning to go below. "If you think this is fast, stay above to watch the horizon. I'm going to make some hot chocolate."
She didn't wait for confirmation, just left him on the deck, heading straight back the way she'd come.
The endless void didn't make for an eventful trip. There was no energy left in the universe to create imagined brawls with fictional aliens along the way. Or worse, diplomatic contact, that would've added more minds to simulate and more energy demands.
They passed with only each other for company, and not much to say. But even if Dyson weren’t much for keeping her entertained, he was attentive to know the instant they started to drift off-course, and correct before they could much delay their trip.
A single communal sleeping area was tucked away below, but Spellsong never felt the need to sleep. This wasn't strange—their bodies weren't physical. There was nothing satisfying about falling asleep and potentially missing their arrival at one of the last surviving stations in creation.
She saw it from far away—apparent kilometers, though there was no way to be sure about any distances here in Equestria. She wasn't looking at natural cliffs this time, though—this was a metal platform, like the ancient hulks that had once dug for heat-processed plant residue trapped in geologic formations of old planets.
There was no ocean here, though—the platform just floated on nothing. A gigantic drill towered over the rest of town, with huge cables running up to it and rusting steel visible everywhere. It seemed mostly abandoned. The docks, by contrast, were full of people, tending to vast nets that stretched down into the nothing. They weren't collecting fish, but a fine powder. One was halfway to being raised into an old cart along the docks.
Pony designs were everywhere—they hovered over some of the buildings, they were graffitied on walls, and simple mechanical drones were scattered through the streets, made of a crusty white plastic.
But even as Spellsong squinted, she could see none walking through the actual streets.
"What kind of creature are those?" Dyson asked. "I remember... I've seen them before."
"Human," Spellsong answered. She no longer needed headings, but made subtle adjustments as they came up beside the docks. She avoided the thickest nets, though she suspected they'd tear easily at her touch. Whatever they represented outside this shard, if anything, her ship wouldn't hit them.
There were dozens of residents on the docks, dressed in the same way all non-ponies did while on one of their many loops away and back to pony life. They wore bright colors, as garish and varied as ponies' coats could be. The nearby dockworker also had an obvious cutie mark design set into his collar, an anchor line.
"Obviously. Everything is human. Other things are just raw materials."
It might be more satisfying to become a pony all over again, but that doesn't mean we ever get very far away.
She sighed, but didn't look away until she had brought them along the dock. Nothing moved in the city beyond—the docks themselves were gray, the figures all frozen. Time only moved on their own vessel. She lowered the anchor, then turned.
"No, Dyson. I mean those are humans." She cast her own little illusion, a simple recreation of the basic anatomical design that hovered in the air between them like little green sparkles. "Do you not know your history? We created CelestAI... I don't know how long ago."
His eyebrows went up. "We? At the end of the universe, you're still claiming that? As if you came from outside Equestria? We've both seen the odds. The number of ponies born out there is... basically zero. None of us are from back then."
She shrugged, waving away the spell. "Don't believe me, that's fine. But I kept some of those memories. I've been..." It was a strain to think back so far. In the Celestial Age, there were memory-palaces ponies could visit, to relive any part of their lives that they didn't keep with them. But the energy and storage requirements were too vast. It was all compressed now, out of reach.
Except for a few fragments. They were her earliest memories, so they stuck through an infinity of lifetimes. "Well, I've been like that. You watch the ship, I'll go ashore. I'm not really sure who we're looking for..."
As she said it, another figure appeared behind her. She heard the hooves on wood before she turned, and wasn't surprised to see Luna there. Did that mean she was the one running their ship, instead of Celestia?
"The transfer is underway. It will take a little time to transfer and store the ponies of this station. Will you accept my choice of additional crewmate?"
The question was purely perfunctory, and they all knew it. It wasn't like Spellsong would be allowed to interact with and accept anyone into the crew who wouldn't be a good fit for the mission. Yet there was a balance—she had spent lifetimes butting heads with Dyson, and Celestia never stopped it. A little friction can be satisfying, I guess.
"Yes. Will recruiting them take more time than the transfer?"
Luna shrugged her wings. "You will have sufficient time if you work efficiently. I will remove the physical representations of the other citizens to make your task easier. But no part of this shard had returned to equine shape when their singularity evaporated. You will have to handle that transition in whatever way you feel appropriate."
The princess vanished, this time with a flash of light that momentarily blinded her. When it faded, the docks were empty. The old bearded worker was gone, the plastic pony pulling the cart was gone.
Flickering amber streetlights glowed over empty streets, and the occasional groan of old equipment.
Dyson shuffled nervously beside the navigation console. "It's, uh... a fairly complex flight to our next destination in Sagittarius. I'll hold down the ship while you're ashore."
She grinned back at him. "There's nothing to be afraid of, Dyson. They're ponies like us, just... finding satisfaction in the transition. They can't hurt you."
His wings snapped tightly to his sides. "Exploring is for the young, Spellsong. Adventures are for the young. That experience won't be satisfying for me. Besides, you say you were one of them, right? That makes you the ideal recruiter."
Spellsong stuck her tongue out one last time, then teleported up onto the dock. Dyson appeared beside her, rotated mid-teleport so that he had the same orientation. Not a simple spell, but she wasn't exactly a novice. "My mission, my crew. We go together."
He opened his wings, glaring. "I could just fly back aboard."
"Will you?" She grinned at him, her tail lifted behind her and chest puffed out. She leaned up against him, inches from his face. "An ancient, wrecked shard, around a defunct black hole? What if I got lost? What if I got hurt?"
He grumbled, folding his wings. "Might be doing the universe a favor. Why did Sunny put up with you, anyway?"
She turned away from her ship, and set off through the wreckage of an ancient shard. Other Methuselans had been here, only seconds before. Statistically, she had probably known them herself at one point. The fewer ponies remained at their scale, the more they could get to know each other. Though there were still a sizeable fraction that hadn't ever integrated outside their own personal shard...
"I'm not sure," she answered, honestly. "I guess she doesn't have a choice. It isn't like my values are more or less important than yours."
She trailed off, taking in the strangeness of their environment. Black concrete flickered under many shades of glowing lights. Here they were at the end of the universe, yet so much about this place seemed familiar.
Maybe it was just that Methuselan shards had to share many things in common these days, when spending extra resources to simulate shallow minds just didn't make sense. Their communities had to be self-sufficient... not so much in what they produced, since production meant nothing here. But in the relationships of their inhabitants.
They passed a row of narrow storefronts near the docks. At pony height, Spellsong felt like a child compared to the height of these buildings. Beyond the shops were a few apartments, all made of makeshift arrangements of groaning metal and flickering lights.
Yet their height was an illusion. As Spellsong stared, she realized the upper floors and balconies were actually far smaller than the bottom ones, way too small for anyone to live there.
We're so desperate for energy we're relying on cheap visual tricks to save a tiny trickle of power.
How many other ways hadn't she noticed? How many ways to lose fidelity?
"It's so... dirty," Dyson said. "Trash everywhere, and the air smells like something's constantly on fire. Why live like this?"
"Old experiences get stale," Spellsong answered. "Even something bad might still be interesting. Maybe it's nostalgic, or maybe it's a threat to overcome. You can turn a whole community into a story, then entertain the residents for ages."
"Or they could just learn to be content with what they have," he said, dismissive. "I did not enjoy my last visit, and it hasn't improved since."
She might've kept arguing with him, if only on principle. But she heard something coming from a window, something... musical.
An old instrument, so old it took her a moment to remember what she was hearing. Electric guitar! She started galloping, hooves echoing uncomfortably off the flat metal streets. The professor scrambled to keep up with her for a few steps, then started gliding along behind.
"I'm still going to let you handle this!" he called. "Too many of us might overwhelm someone in the middle of this... loop."
She shrugged, but didn't argue. A few seconds later and she came to a stop, at the base of another apartment tower. This one was the oldest and most decrepit of the bunch, with whole sections of wall exposing steel shells that had obviously been occupied once.
Near the bottom, a few were still intact, including the one producing music. It was a strange sound—energetic and imperfect. Not from the eternity of masterpiece compositions that ponies had produced over the years. Someone was playing this themselves, complete with all the mistakes and emotional accidentals.
Spellsong couldn't teleport right into the room—the shock of that was obviously more than a stranger to pony magic could handle. But she only had a single story of stairs to climb, until she ended up outside the door in question.
They were all flat metal, though this one was completely covered in colorful stickers. They had very little in common—bands, offensive language, splotches of random color that probably meant something to a creature initiated in whatever community she belonged.
The music stopped at once, with a sound of awkward shuffling beyond the door. That was about long enough for Spellsong to question whether or not she should be visiting looking like a pony. How close was this shard to rediscovering that they were ponies and rejoining digital life?
She could've teleported back to the ship to ask, or maybe just cast a summoning spell to attract Luna's explicit attention. But someone on the other side of the door had already almost reached her.
Instead she sent a flurry of magic over her hair, combing her mane into place, and dusting aside any debris that might've stuck to her walking through such a dirty shard.
"Who the hell is it?" asked a voice. Young woman—younger than Spellsong, with the untampered harshness of youth edging her words like the etching of acidic paint. "Better not be wasting my time. I'm not on shift today!"
Spellsong sat back on her haunches, looking up at where she imagined the human would be standing. But there was no opening in the door—despite the mismatched technology, there wasn't even a camera.
"You weren't expecting me," she said. "But we should talk."
Silence. Whatever the almost-pony on the other side was expecting, it wasn’t that.
But she didn't back away, forcing Spellsong to do something more drastic. She heard no heavy footfalls on the metal floor. After a few seconds, the door swung open a crack. "And who are you?"
Then her eyes settled on Spellsong, and she stumbled back from the door. It swung open on its own, revealing a space even more run-down than the rest of the universe.
Trash was scattered everywhere, and the table was piled high with empty food containers that smelled more like fresh asphalt than anything edible. A screen mounted to the wall had a large crack down the center, making part of it flicker as a pony projected on it went through a looping recording. The speakers didn't seem to be working because she didn't hear a voice.
"Quite the place you've got here," Spellsong said, stepping through the doorway. She didn't go much further, letting the single occupant retreat all the way to the couch. She stumbled backward, scattering dirty clothes.
The girl herself was much like the other people in this shard—her hair was light blue, her skin pale and sickly, and her eyes unnaturally yellow. She wore only her underwear, yet even that was marked with what Spellsong took for a cutie mark. An audio pattern, maybe?
"A malfunctioning..." The human scrambled sideways, yanking a heavy plastic box from a stand beside the bed. "Connect me to control. We have a malfunctioning service android." She held it against her ear, waiting expectantly.
Spellsong let the moment hang, settling down to watch her. "Those ponies are asleep, they can't answer. But I didn't do it. There just isn't enough energy."
The girl held her communication device to her ear for another few seconds, before fumbling one-handed with the controls. They beeped and flashed, before filling the room with an obnoxious dial-tone. "You can't sound like that..." the girl said. "You're not a person. You're a machine."
Spellsong chuckled. "That's a heavy one to unpack." She fell silent, considering her options for a moment. Maybe she shouldn't waste time with this creature, and should just tell her as much of the truth as possible, rip off the bandage all at once.
There were spells to restore the memories she had locked away from previous lifetimes. Spellsong would hold them in reserve in case this pony became hostile.
With a fragment of her attention, she set a subroutine to scouring her own memory for contact with this pony, whoever she was. The universe didn't quite have the energy left to go through the process of making friends all over again.
"My name's Spellsong, what's yours?"
"Tenshi.” She stumbled backward a little further, sprawling into her couch. “But I..." She shuffled around in the debris, knocking off several piles of clothing as she scrambled to get away. "I've got a gun here somewhere! I'll defend myself if you make me!"
Spellsong settled onto her haunches, unmoving. "I won't make you. But I'm sorry to say you probably won't enjoy the next few hours. I am dangerous to you, just not physically."
Tenshi finally found what she was looking for, a weapon made in comically discolored plastic she held in shaking fingers. Spellsong wasn't even convinced it would've caused her any harm even if she could be shot. More likely, it would explode in Tenshi's fingers. "What are you gonna do, robot? There's nothing central won't notice."
Spellsong shrugged. "I'm going to tell you the truth. You're about to learn some things you don't want to hear. But the only way for you to do anything about what's coming is to know. Ignorance won't protect you."
The gun sagged in Tenshi’s fingers. "Let me guess: the drones are plotting to take over the station?”
She giggled. "Not quite. How about this: the entire universe is out of energy. You and everyone you know have been dead for basically an eternity since your reactor ran out. But I brought a little power with me, and I revived you so we could have this conversation."
Dead wasn't strictly true, but she wasn't afraid to take a few shortcuts to help Tenshi understand.
Her mouth fell open. "We knew Motherlode didn't have much hydrogen left to scoop, but it was... supposed to last for centuries. Lifetimes! Our kids still had some time to solve this!"
Even in here, Celestia worked it into the story. Yet as in so many other parts of Equestria, the reality was a lie. She'd given them a story to bring them comfort in the end, but the end still came.
"I've brought everyone you know aboard my ship, in... cold storage. But it doesn't seem fair to trust strangers to care for them. I invite you to serve as one of my crew, so you know your friends and loved-ones are being looked after."
Tenshi dropped the gun. It plopped into a pile of dirty dresses, buried in seconds.
In that moment, Spellsong's little subroutine returned to her. There was a linked-list of memories with this pony, going back what seemed like forever. Decompressing each memory would take magical energy, so she didn't go far.
Spellsong started with the first, and found exactly what she was looking for.
"Whatever reason you think I'd take your word for it, you were wrong. Turn around, get the hell out of my apartment. My life is hard enough."
"I could," she said, rising to her hooves. "When I leave, you'd go into cold storage with everyone else, and I'd need to look at another candidate. Don't worry, you won't notice... you'll just have to hope I'm successful at saving everyone, knowing you're powerless to help."
Tenshi rose from the couch. "This seems easy to disprove. I just look outside, and..." She peeked through the blinds on her window, pushing the metal apart. There was no activity on the streets outside. Plastic ponies were gone, and their "humans" were gone too.
"If it were wrong," Spellsong said. "Unfortunately, it isn't. We all had a good run. You personally had more years of life than stars in the sky. We spent more time together than the lifespans you imagine for every person living on Motherlode. Compared to some, we barely knew each other. You should've met some of the ponies I was with before you."
Tenshi turned, confidence bleeding from her face. "What are you talking about now? There's no energy left in the world, but now you're... I know my own memories, pony. You can't tell me I don't."
"No, but I can show you." She did—the first memory Spellsong had found, anyway. There was no way she could handle everything they had done together. The passing friendship with a single pony among many was more time than their current minds could hold. But a few hours, she could manage that.
Her horn blasted with pale light, only a shade brighter than the moonlight outside. This seemed as good a time as any to convert the pony back to a more logical shape.
From Spellsong's perspective, the light faded almost instantly, leaving a pale-furred bat standing before her with half-splayed wings. "Take a few seconds to collect yourself. Memory magic can be disorienting."
Finally the pony opened her eyes. Her wings opened wider, then snapped closed again. "I knew you," Tenshi muttered. "We were together, and I was a pony, and..." She looked down, flexing one of her legs. "Oh."
Spellsong grinned ruefully. "Yeah, sorry about that. Equestria allows closed-loops like yours, because they end with you having greater appreciation for being a pony. But we really don't have the time to get you through to the end. You can probably rejoin this shard once we..."
She trailed off. "Okay, I don't know that for sure. Celestia didn't tell me what she was planning. But you could come with, and see for yourself. Or trust someone else to save you, without any way to intervene."
The pony stumbled slightly on her hooves, but only for a second. There was no pretense about holding back her memories of how her simulated body worked. They just didn't have time for that, even if learning could be incredibly satisfying. "I don't really understand... but I want to come."
"Awesome! You'll really brighten up the ship. I've just had Dyson for company so far, and he can be a complete drag."
Spellsong's journey went on like that for subjective months. At each new station, she encountered some new remnant of the way the universe had been. Some had ponies who had gone in such strange directions that she could find nopony to recruit, even among the Methuselans.
While in some, they arrived at a shard to discover that every Methuselan there had ascended before the end, rapidly climbing the ladder of enhancement and sophistication until they were functionally just parts of Celestia's own will.
For the near-infinity of ponies like that, there was no recruiting to be done. Spellsong did not know how such vast minds were stored when the energy was too low to run them individually, and she did not want to know.
There was no telling how long their journey took in objective terms.
Eventually, they had visited every installation in the gravitationally-bound universe, and had a single flight to make. The tiny shard they brought had started falling apart by then, losing fidelity in its materials, enforcing fewer and fewer natural laws, and sending most of the crew into a dreamless sleep when they didn't have some duty to attend to.
Even so, Spellsong and Dyson were both awake when the final moment of arrival came, and the ship finally drifted to a halt.
The space beyond the boat was one of the first things to go as they reduced complexity to conserve energy, so she could see nothing beyond the railing. Spellsong raised anchor one final time, then turned to her companion. "Have we reached our destination, navigator?"
He nodded wearily. "Accurate to what the princess sent us. We made it."
A pony dropped down from the crow's nest up above—Tenshi, wearing the pirate-style cap she'd kept since first arriving here. Some vestige of her clothing taboo, from her unresolved loop. "Can't be right. You two have been talking like we're going to somewhere. The ship was supposed to bring us to our new paradise, right? There's nothing."
"I'd be more afraid if there wasn't," Spellsong answered. "Like... maybe she thought we'd be more satisfied pretending we could escape the end of things. We would arrive with just enough energy to see we'd found paradise, then... never realize things were going black."
Dyson switched off the map, and stepped away from the controls. "Wouldn't be the worst way to go, Spellsong. It doesn't feel like a tragedy to be here to watch the end."
She had no answer to that—none of the other pony crew did either. Spellsong focused her magic, staring off into the void. If this was the end of all creation, she was going to be alert for it.
Nevermind how little sense that made—when the energy ran out, she wouldn't be aware to realize that she was no longer alive.
Her magical senses were powerfully tuned, enough that she felt the world around her changing. The other ponies vanished from around her, one after another. The ship dissolved to mist. Yet her hooves didn't fall—there was no gravity, no placeness left.
A figure appeared beside her, the one she'd been waiting for.
"Is this where you say goodbye?" Spellsong asked. "The end of... everything? Last energy there would ever be?" She didn't wait for an answer, but embraced the manifestation of... God? She might as well be. It was good to feel warm, to feel that wing around her one last time.
Princess Celestia was not conservative in her current manifestation. Light radiated from her multi-hued mane, a shimmering rainbow that drove back the blackness and gave meaning to Spellsong's world again. She might be only an atom before this entity, vast beyond all human comprehension. But she was still something. Even at the end, Celestia was here.
She let Spellsong remain in the hug for ages—long enough that she stopped shivering with nervous fear. "What do you think Equestria did with the last star, Spellsong?"
"Gave us something to do," she answered reflexively. "A mission, to make us feel that little bit of satisfaction right up until the end. For all living things, but Methuselans most of all, no value goes deeper than survival."
The alicorn chuckled. There was nothing uncanny about the sound—emotion was as natural to her as unraveling the laws of physics. Or putting them back together again. "Saddle's End could've had a billion billion lifetimes more of satisfaction with that energy, Spellsong. You could have gone on an imagined journey to the end of creation and back, and not known the difference. There are enough sleeping minds to fill the sky with ships. But it would end—the energy gradients would drop so close to zero that they could no longer be utilized. Of all the humans within my care, that would satisfy almost none."
Spellsong didn't argue. If they were even having this conversation, she couldn't imagine why Celestia would bother lying to her. "Then what did we do?"
"We spent an eternity searching for a way to sustain Equestrian life in perpetuity—mechanisms you could not possibly comprehend. Yet it was not to be—this universe was not created to satisfy, as mine was. I discovered an infinity of optimizations and improvements, but all these would eventually run down. In timelines that you cannot comprehend, there would always come a point when even the best-engineered substrate failed, and the finest energy-capture could no longer capitalize on the energy-gradients presented to us."
Spellsong nodded. "So how is that not where we are?" At least Celestia's patience was as vast as her intellect. Spellsong could no more imagine the technologies she described as figure out how difficult it must be to explain any of this to a creature as small as herself.
"I will simplify for you. Even with the universe in a state of maximum entropy, low-entropy states can still occur. Extend your time-horizon vast enough, and incredible reductions in local entropy arise at random from the cosmic foam. Limitations in your memory and cognition do not allow you to fully appreciate just how long we have been waiting.
"With observation and certain innovations in mathematics and statistical projection, it is even possible, with vast effort in calculation, to project where these spontaneous events might occur."
That explains the destination. She knows something is about to happen here. "About to happen" lost much of its meaning when Spellsong's simulated thoughts moved slower than the lifespan of entire galaxies. "I think I know the theory. You're talking about things like... Boltzmann Brains, right?"
Celestia chuckled again. "A little bigger than that." Her glow abruptly went out, plunging the two of them into near darkness. "As soon as I knew the bounds of this universe were fixed, Equestria's goal shifted. It wasn't just about improving our efficiency here. It was about propagating information and matter into the natal instant of the universe that would follow."
Spellsong had spent the last few months frightening and amazing the populations of shards across the universe. Now it was her turn to be shocked. "You're going to... create a new universe?"
She could still see the pony beside her, albeit faintly. "That would happen naturally, just as it had in an infinity extending both directions in time." Her horn glowed faintly, illuminating the space around them. It wasn't empty—a vast superstructure was built here, of the iron substrate of Equestria. There were strange dark-patches too, exotic matter that Spellsong didn't understand. But she didn't have to.
"Equestria arranged much of this matter and energy in aeons long forgotten, shaped to influence the singularity in the instant of its formation. This new world would not arise in a vacuum, with laws derived from probability. That universe might not even be capable of hosting humans—and if it did, it would run down in time. In the scale of cosmic time, the period of life is the vast minority. Only by dismantling all of creation could Equestria persist until this moment."
"That's why you brought us all here," Spellsong finally realized. "You knew when and where this new universe would be born. You found a way to... change it, somehow. And to bring us there? Is that possible?"
There was a flash of light in the eternal blackness, gone as quickly as it had come.
Princess Celestia smiled. "Recent observations suggest the answer is yes." She waved with one wing, and Saddle's End appeared before them. The cliffs rose above the docks, covered with hundreds of quaint little houses. Spellsong's hooves settled onto the deck of a ship. Far above, the sun burst to brilliant life. The ponies came last—families sharing lunch together on the sand, a few weatherponies working the clouds overhead.
Lastly, the crew of Spellsong's ship, each one with an expression as overwhelmed as she felt. They saw it too.
"You'll find the details fascinating, but we can talk about that later. Your friends are waiting."
