Thus Testifies Twilight

by Accurate Balance

First published

When nothing outlives everything, how does a mare testify to her existence?

Antecedent: Languor.
Premise: Calamity.
Instrument: Introspection.
Conclusion: ___________.


Cover art is A short time after forever by oneofnumbers. Sadly, their DeviantArt account is untraceable at time of writing.


Experimental entry to Bicyclette's A Thousand Words Contest II. Check out the other entries.
Huge thanks to Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Epilogue

View Online

Catastrophe promises imminent at afternoon. It blossoms in the royal courtyard, a preternatural, magnificent exeunt.

Despite ten minutes until apocalypse.

Throned, Princess Twilight Sparkle contemplates. Oblivious beforehand, she realises futility regretfully.

Despite thaumaturgy doctorate, whose acquirement predates her ascension, she ironically has neglected arcanological cues, forfeiting her ephemeral reign and innumerable lives. Herself bedamned, why such ignorance?

Insufficient endeavour? Apparently. Impotence, too. She accessed underprepared and remains a dilettante monarch. Expectably, she strives.

Overtimes obscure avocations. Personality deteriorate. She has optimised speech to repurpose durations, enduring temporary alogia; simplicity outweighing recognisability, her communications necessitate sesquipedalian vocabulary, surpassing even her lexicon.

Her desperation, retrospectively, has proven counterproductive, indicating misdirection. Multiple reorientation attempts availed only lassitude.

Responsive concatenation discourages. Enmeshed, Twilight disassociates progressively. Conjecturing incompetence, she has discontinued chronophagous intimacy, sacrificing kinship and friendship to Equestria.

Eventually, she suffices. Ennui, however, haunts inseparably. Permanently disheartened, actualisation only verifies preconception, not fulfilling, but further obliging her towards perfectionism.

Episodically, she hallucinates an omniscient manipulator, prescribing causalities restlessly, a speculation her prostration especially substantiates. Monochromatic occasions, where reminiscence proliferates while she refrains from melancholic indulgence, devitalises everything, yielding a quasi-bewusstseinslage seemingly composed of apathetic description only.

Indeed.

Words. Composed letters. Deliberately compiled phonemic symbol. Consciously, consensually collocated—coalesced —colloquial characters collectively comprehended. This escalation perdures infinitely, immaculate phraseology unattainable.

Verbiage aside, the implication signifies surreally. Description suggests narrator. Greater entity transcending rationality, via manifestation of imagination alone.

Such hypothesis apprehends Twilight. Were her universe penned, the author must deitify, warping her reality spontaneously beyond conceivable.

By ink.

Is fate aprioristic? Is her remembrance an opus? Celestia conducted her metamorphosis into Harmony, understandable, but complete determinism? Horrendous existential crisis.

Untimely insecurity, yes. Twilight, however, submerges within. Irrationality dominates her perception, deluding her with ubiquitous scrutiny, forever deorsumversing, perusing an incorporeal scroll.

Also enshrouding the three minutes elapsed.

Now Twilight feels plummeted, two hoofsteps downwards, closer to her termination.

Another invisible hoofprint. Her heart palpitates.

Another down the metaphysical staircase, koinophobia overpowering.

Another towards the inevitable. Twilight questions how she affords anything but despondence, living this evanescent life.

Another.

Epiphany: Were fate fabricated, the foreboding destination ought to comprise it.

Twilight hesitates in her plunge to ponder. Entertaining that, her playwright must purport to demolish Equestria throughoutly. Her upbringing, friendships, enthronement, and even oversight, all foreshadowing a Schicksalstragödie; her congruence, an instrument to accentuate the undoing.

Conclusion: She is, to not be. Absolute nihilism, unparalleled.

Helter-skelter, Twilight scrambles to seek affirmation, to validate nonexistent existence.

She recites the thaumaturgic axioms and draws blank.

—She studied, but didn’t.

She reaches for her wings and regalia and finds naught.

—She ascended, but didn’t.

She reasons her hypergrammia and raises nothing.

—She chose, but didn’t.

She recollects her life and rings void.

—She lived, but didn’t.

She recalls her friends, the bearers.

—Surprisingly, she remembers everything. From library to throne, from alone to accompanied, the many shared sentiments and actions prevails mnemonically.

Friendship defines her.

When nothing outlives everything, how does a mare testify to her existence?

Twilight Sparkle defenestrates.

Appendix

View Online

Then, she spread her wings, caught the faint but very much real wind in between her feathers, and leapt.

For a moment in her falling, Twilight Sparkle questioned whether she'd fly or drop, but all doubt was blown away by the roaring in her ears, herself soaring in the air.

Where was she going? She wasn't sure. With how little time she had after her inner crisis, she wasn't going to make it anywhere before her life story ends.

It must have been how Rainbow had felt flying her last show, Twilight reasoned.

For the first time ever in her lie of a life, Twilight felt real. Fears and regrets turned to an impulse, a longing for being somewhere—even nowhere—other than inside her head. Since nothing she did was going to have any impact on how the world would end, she could finally stop listening to herself, or whoever the voice dictating every action she took was.

For now, she just wanted to fly towards where her friends were. It was silly, idiotic, ridiculous, and preposterous, she knew, but if the pony inside her head was telling her not to go to her friends, that pony could NOT be her.

Maybe in another life, she would remain collected till the last moment like a golem made of metal, but not in this one. She laughed hysterically at how good a day it was for flying, how she would love to fly by Rainbow or Fluttershy or Cadance or Luna or Celestia, and how she had wasted thousands of days like this.

And then she learnt how air interacts with tears in flight. The greatest discovery of an aeon, and another fuel to her laughter! Letting go of all the masks ponies had put on her face, Twilight giggled and bawled in her empty world.

The last time she laughed like this, Pinkie and Applejack had still been visiting her, and she couldn't remember when that was, but it's fine! She was being honest with herself when she laughed, and they would've approved!

Normally, she would've made a few comments about loyalty, kindness, and generosity as well, but then again, she wouldn't have been flying like this, so all was possible now. She'd already broken her usage of big words, why not the symmetry of harmony?

How much time had passed? Twilight didn't care to count the seconds. Her story was never about the world ending, nor what she was meant to be; it was all about herself, about what she wanted, and how it made her more pony than ever. If her life and friendship really had been a story, it must have turned into a mess by now, but it was fine as long as she was flying somewhere.

She had been trying to make her life a perfect story and that failed, so now she took on a pointless pursuit instead. Twilight pulled herself even higher and held up her head. Her story was ending and she broke