A small filly rushed out through the grass of the seemingly endless prairie. The grass tickled her feet and legs, and she could smell the scent of the nightblooming sawgrass blowing in the warm summer breeze. Above her, stretching from horizon to horizon, was the infinite and eternal blackness of the Equestria sky. She could see the two spherical voids above her; at this time of year, they seemed so impossibly large.

“Hurry up, Dad!” she called to the stallion behind her.

“Hold on, Epicenter!” he called back. “I’m old!”

Epicenter laughed and continued to run through the field. In the distance, she could see the lights of her village. The only ponies for hundreds of miles lived there. All that surrounded them was the emptiness and freedom of the Equestria frontier.

“We’re almost there!” she cried. In the distance, she could see their destination: a place where the flatness and slow undulations of the grassland gave way to something far sharper and more angular, like a hill that had long ago gotten separated from the mountains in the distance and ended up alone and isolated.

The Fallen Angel, however, was no hill, nor was it a rock. It was made of rusted and broken metal that had in centuries past become overgrown with sod and moss, a piece of technology at least four times larger than even the biggest buildings in the village. Epicenter had come here hundreds of times before, whenever she had free time, since the day her father had shown it to her.

She never got tired of seeing it. The ponies in the village said different things about where it had come from. Some say it had fallen during the Incurse War, while others said that it had sat in the soil far longer, for centuries or perhaps even millennia. All agreed that it was not of Equestria, and that it had come from Beyond long ago.

Epicenter had been one of the few brave enough to explore the inside. Mostly, it was a system of hexagonal channels far larger than any adult pony leading between various rooms of strange and decrepit equipment. The shard of whatever this ship had been went far deeper than the outside surface indicated, extending so far under the soil that Epicenter had never even made it all the way to the bottom.
There was nothing useful inside, but that did not matter. What mattered was that those halls had been used by travelers from another world, that they had used it to cross the void from places where no pony had ever gone.

The back of the Angel was long and sloped, and Epicenter climbed up it easily, bounding upward to where the metal plating emerged and flattened. There were cliffs on every side, dropping down past extensions of rusted metal that emerged from the rear and sides. Now a hundred feet into the air, the whole of the prairie seemed to stretch out below her, the grass slowly waving as the light wind blew it in tremendous waves, its silvery surface flickering and glinting in the dim light of the horizon.

Eventually, Penultimate, her father, managed to climb the slope as well. When he reached the top, he gently set down the telescope he was carrying. He was not old, but he seemed somewhat tired. Farm life had been hard on his body, but he still managed to smile.

“Look, Dad!” cried Epicenter, jumping up and down with excitement. “I can see everything! It’s like I’m the Princess of the world!”

“Well, you sure are my little princess,” he said, messing up her mane. “But if you think this is high, maybe one day I’ll take you to the mountains out there.”

Epicenter gasped. “Really?”

“Sure. Been out there once myself.” He pointed toward the nearest of the mountains, which was still barely a bump on the horizon. “Mount Redhoof. Climbed up to the top. I could see the village from the top.”

“No way!”

“Sure could! And I tell you what, the atmosphere was so thin and so high at the top that I felt like I could reach up and touch the sky itself.”

“Wow, said Epicenter, looking out at those mountains, and then up at the sky.

Penultimate set up the telescope. “Here,” he said, throwing something small to Epicenter.

She caught it and realized that it was a small hologram projector. “What is this?”

“I borrowed it from the library. Open it.”

Epicenter dexterously opened the control system on the hologram and activated its contents. It hummed in her hoof, and then projected multi-colored light outward around them, forming a dome over their position.

When she saw what it had done, Epicenter gasped. They were surrounded by light: a projection of Luna’s night sky.

“This is…it’s so beautiful,” she said, looking at the tiny stars, the ones she had learned from all the books. Had memorized their names and shapes since practically foalhood, but she had never thought that she would ever see them. For the first time, she saw the constellations as they were meant to be seen, and the haze of the milky way, and of course the best part: the glowing, luminous crescent moon.

Epicenter looked to her father, who was still assembling the legs for the telescope, and then up at the sky again.

“It’s so…so beautiful,” she said. “Is this…did the whole sky really once look like this?”

“It did,” said Penultimate. “Back a long, long time ago. Before even Thebe was born. Luna spent her life painting the sky, making it beautiful for us ponies.”

“But what happened?”

Penultimate sighed. “She got old,” he said. “No pony lives forever. When Luna left us, nopony maintained the sky. The stars fell, one by one, until they were all gone.”

“Can anypony put them back?”

Her father chuckled. “No, Epi. Even if a pony were powerful enough to do so, it takes a special talent. I’m sure Thebe could, if she wanted to, but her sky would be nowhere near as beautiful as Lunas was.” He peered into the eyepiece of the telescope, gently twisting the focus knob. “Such a clear night,” he said. “Look. I’ve focused in on a firmament colony.”

“Really?” said Epicenter, deactivating her hologram and sending the sky back to its eternal blackness. She rushed over and looked through the telescope. Her eye took a moment to focus, and then she indeed saw what her father had: a series of lights and strange buildings far above, linked into the firmament itself.

“Oh wow,” she said, focusing in on the structures, trying to see if she could find any ponies. She took her eye away and looked up at her father, who was once again smiling. “The ponies that live up there are so lucky!” She put her eye back to the telescope, moving it ever so slightly to try to see the rest of the area, and she found what she was looking for. Almost all modern firmament settlements were located near the ancient ones, the ones that were built with strange gray material that never rusted and never aged- -the ruins of some great pony civilization that must have existed so long before Equestria.

“Have you ever been up there?” she asked her father.

“No. No I haven’t. They don’t let just anypony up there, you know. There’d be no crops for me to tend up in the sky.”

“I wish I was a Pegasus,” she said. “Then I could fly up there myself.”

Penultimate laughed softly. “Even Pegasi can’t go that high,” he said. “Only one that ever could was Rainbow Dash, if the old legends are true.”

Epicenter moved the telescope further to the left, until she came to the edge of the hole where the sun had once been. The sky itself was black, but it was a different kind of black than that hole. The firmament had a sort of grayness, even a texture, like a big soap bubble. The blackness that was through those holes, though, was so much deeper.

She focused the telescope, scanning the darkness. The night was especially clear, but even then, it was rare to catch a glimpse of anything beyond those holes. She had only ever managed to do it once, when she had seen a distant light, a planet or star in the far distance- -and she had been looking ever since.

“Can I take a look?” asked her father.

“Sure.” Epicenter stepped back, and Penultimate put his eye against the eyepiece, focusing the telescope with expert precision.

“You know,” he said. “Your grandfather told me a story once.”

Epicenter rolled her eyes. She had grown tired of hearing the re-telling of her grandfather’s old stories, but she knew that once her father started one, he would just keep going until he finished it.

“What did he say?” she sighed.

“Did you know that he fought in the Incuse War?”

Epicenter’s eyes widened. “N- -no,” she said, wracking her brain trying to remember if he had ever spoken about it, but she had been barely old enough to talk when her grandfather had died. “I didn’t.”

“Sure was,” said Penultimate. “He didn’t like to talk about it much. Almost never told a single thing about it. It was an Incurse weapon that took his back legs. The war…it was hard on him. But there was one story he always told, just one.”

“What?” Epicenter leaned in, and looked up at her father in expectation.

“Don’t know if it’s true or not, Epi, but he said that he once spoke to in Incurse.”

Epicenter gasped. She did not really know what the Incurse War had been, not with any specifics. She knew that it had been a long time ago, and that a lot of ponies had died in it. Nopony knew what the Incurse were, though, and nopony had ever spoken to one- -or even seen one. Epicenter had always imagined them as terrifying monsters of some kind, like the hayreapers that were sometimes found wandering the distances around the village fields.

“He- -he talked to one?” she said, in awe.

“He did. Except it wasn’t like the other Incurse. The Incurse…they came from the others side, from the Beyond. Nopony knows why. But my dad, your granddad, he said that they weren’t all evil. That the one he met was a good Incurse. That it was his friend.”

“Friend? With an Incurse? How?!”

“Don’t rightfully know. He said it helped him when he was injured, after he got shot down.”

“What did it look like?”

“Huh.” Penultimate separated from the telescope, rubbing his beard. “You know…he never said. Never once, except that it had blank, staring eyes. Like it was dead, or about to be. Maybe that was just because it was dying. I don’t know.”

“What did it say?”

“It told him things,” said Penultimate, putting his eye back to the telescope. “Said things about the Beyond. That’s where they came from, the Incurse. From a planet far, far away. It told him about the planets, and the things out there. Equestria isn’t alone, Epi. From what the Incurse said, there are so many, each one with a different kind of life- -life you wouldn’t even recognize as living even if you did see it.”

“How many?”

“How many planets? Oh, I don’t know. The Incurse didn’t, I don’t think. She was just a soldier. She only knew about the planets that they had passed, and the ones they had fought. But it’s got to be hundreds. Thousands, even. The Beyond is filled with them, Epi. All those critters and creatures out there, waiting for us here on Equestria to join them. Maybe even some on that planet right there.”

“Really?” Epicenter ran toward the telescope as her father backed away. She gingerly looked into the eyepiece, careful not to jostle the telescope too much. Once again, her eye took a moment to focus- -and then she saw it. It was tiny, insignificant, like a tiny crescent speck of dust, but she knew right away that it was real. A planet, or an asteroid, or even a spaceship floating far beyond the firmament.

She stared at it for a long time in awe. Then she stepped back and looked up at her father.

“Someday, I’m going to go there,” she promised him, and herself. “I’m going to fix up the Fallen Angel. I’m going to fly out there, to where the Incurse came from, and I’m going to see that planet. All the planets. I’m going to know what is on each and every one of them, and I’m going to paint Luna’s sky, just like it used to be!”

As she said it, making this promise, this dream that she would someday fly into the void, to know the contents of the Beyond, she felt a strange tingling, as though her mind had opened up, allowing all these new thoughts to flow in. She understood that this was more than a childhood fantasy. This was her purpose, her true goal.

At the same time, she felt an odd sensation on the side of her flank.

Her father’s eyes widened. “Epi, look!”

Epicenter looked down at her flank, and saw what she probably already had known. She had gotten her cutie mark: a large red zero.

The memory played out through Epicenter’s mind like an old film. It felt so much different from her real memories, the ones filled with crystal and death and endless warfare. She could not describe how they felt, not even to herself. They were supposed to be empty; after all, they were false, created when she had no understanding of the true nature of the universe. Yet, somehow, they still felt as though they had weight.

The Incurse, of course, had been lying. Epicenter remembered all the planets, and knew what they really were. Almost all of them were lifeless and dead, their life having died out in the icy void so many millennia ago. The Incurse homeworld itself had been torn apart by a cataclysmic civil war. Epicenter knew the planet’s names and their contents, and knew that there was nothing in this universe that was remotely similar to Equestria. The universe was nearly empty, nearly lifeless, cold, black, and eternal. Only Equestria stood out as a jewel among that icy nothing. It was the only place where there was some semblance of true life, the kind that was compatible, where the population could be repaired successfully.

Her father, of course, was long dead. The other of her kind, the first one, had killed him, and her mother, her siblings- -they were all dead. She understood why that was necessary. They had to die to ensure that she would live, to carry the vector through the population, to ensure that there would be enough workers and resources to complete their goal.

From below, she looked up at the machine before her. It stood miles high, stretching across the entire archipelago chain, stretching upward into the sky. She felt one of her hearts accelerate, because like the others, she knew that it was so close, so very near completion.

Something inside her, though, felt strange. Epicenter was unsure if the others realized it as well, and if it unsettled them as much as it did her. They had destroyed most of Equestria to build this device, and every one of them knew that it was their ultimate goal, their purpose in existence. Despite this, not one of them knew why. None among them knew what it was actually for.