A dim sun with a goddess on low
A dim sun with a goddess on low
She had made it through the shield spell. What little pain she could still feel burned through her as it licked her melted body, it seemed that even magic saw her as all but an intruder now. A cough racked what was left of her lungs as she spat up blood and what looked like a pink gunk that had once been a cloud. She was dying, the only thing keeping her alive was her Alicorn durability.
She couldn't say the same for her soul, inside she might as well have been dead. She could still see her sister's lifeless eyes, she could still taste that pink necrophagic magic that had killed her. She coughed again, what bile that could raise out of stomach did so as she thought back to the ponies she saw melted into the streets of Canterlot. She pushed forward, not stopping to think on such things for too long, or she wouldn't live long enough to enact her plan.
She willed her failing body forward, passing by ponies bodies, some hanging from ceiling lights, eyes dead as they stared away into nothingness hints of long gone fear still in them, Others were laying in puddles of their own blood, having shot themselves in the head after the omega protocol locked them in the control tower.
She entered one of the staircases that lead to the control room, she hated to walk past her little ponies without doing anything, but she could not stop to mourn with the little time she had, she was already losing time for each step she took up the stairs, her weak body making each step feel as high as a mountain.
She made her way through the seasonal chambers before arriving at the entrance to the control room, a door was all that stood in her way. She moved forward to open it and her legs gave away beneath her, a cough sounding through the room.
Celestia had no more energy to stand but with a determination only the gods could muster, she pulled herself forward and past the door, she could not fail again not for a third time. she had failed to prevent this war, to keep all this death from coming upon her little ponies, she failed to protect her little ponies from the mega spells and missiles that rained down upon her nation. She watched as all of her little ponies died coughing up their own blood and bodies as her little sister died in her hooves. She would not fail a third time, even if it was to just save one of her subjects she would die to do so.
She finally crawled her way into the pod, taking the extra helmet that laid next to it on a lab table she put it on. There was no reason for her to use the control pod; it could not sustain an already dead mare, but she could upload her mind into the Crusader mainframe and from there she could help her little ponies.
Her mother used to tell her that the grass was always greener on the other side and wondered what it was like to die, would it hurt, Would she feel anything as a part of her very soul was ripped from her so that she may live on as a machine.
She gave off a very light smile knowing that this would be the very last time she could ever do so, Thinking of Luna, Twilight and her friends, of the time that they had when the world was so much better. There was a painful jolt and her world was dark.
She didn't know what she expected but surely it was not this, to be swimming in a sea of code and floating panels as camera feeds danced about showing the destruction of the once great ponies. But now was not the time to think about such things. She danced around the code almost as if she lived in it for her entire life, until she found what she was looking for: The single pony project weather control.
Only she could not access it.
A single error message laid before her [ERROR: HARD LINE BETWEEN SPP CONTROL POD AND CRUSADER MAINFRAME CUT: CONNECTION ERROR]
Celestia stopped in horror, she couldn't fail, not after everything that she had done, she thought for only a moment as she flipped through the cameras, hoping that her pony self was still alive, maybe she could do something, but alas by the time she pulled the camera up on control room, her body had stopped breathing.
She screamed, her own voice surprising her as it came out over the PA system, it only lasted a second before she started once more, screaming at the dead pony, herself, to get up, to finish the job she could not. She begged and pleaded, the grief of her very soul pouring out as she grieved the death of millions dead, and dying ponies.
She screamed at her own failures as anger burned through her like wildfire, static filling the screen as she raged against the very code keeping her an observer of the world around her, and when she had no more anger to throw, no more worlds to shout, she simply cried.
Yet for all the power she might have once held, the screams of the computerized goddess could never hope to wake the dead. Her body laid there with a smile still on her muzzle. That smiling Celestia, would never know the pain of the failure, that this computerized one would endure for all time. At that moment Celestia could have cried a million more tears.
She had failed for the third time, she thought back on what her mother had said, and she saw that the grass was just as brown here, as it was out there. She could only hope that the traitorous Pegasi that stalked the outer walls of the tower would learn that with time.