So it ends.

My quest has finally come to completion. All five of my friends lay dead, their blood on my hooves.

Walking back to Ponyville from the site of Pinkamena's gruesome death, my legs shaking in both inner turmoil and because of the freezing snow, I recalled my long-lost life. My former, solitary existence without friends, before I had ever met these five. Back then, too, I was alone. Yet now I felt something else. All those silly things that ponies used to say, all the foalish stories they told were now coming true. I thought I always knew the difference. Only now did I finally come to truly understand it.

I may have been alone before, but now at last I realised what it meant to be lonely.

I remember the moment, that instant of time in which everything changed. The ignition of the spark of true friendship within my heart on that fateful night. For all my self-entitled arrogance, it was that which made me grow up. The spark enabled me—all of us—to wield the Elements, and purify Nightmare Moon. Back then, I thought it was magic.

Now I see that it was only damnation.

The damnation that was the culmination of the journey Princess Celestia had prepared for me.

From the very beginning, Princess Cadence herself “foalsat” me—keeping an eye on Celestia's investment, no doubt. In this knowledge, it seems to be no coincidence that the sonic rainboom that came to unshackle my hidden magical potential occurred at the exact time it did. I am certain now, that somehow, the lives of all of my friends, as well as my own, were deliberately set up in advance to benefit the machinations of Celestia—to be pawns in her game. All along we had been ensnared by her elaborate web of lies, leading our blind and blunted lives until she pulled upon the strings, tightening the binding and drawing us, complete in our ignorance, towards one another.

My whole life, I realised, with all its hardships and lucky passes had been personally planned out by the Princess of the Sun herself. Everything that has ever happened to me served but one purpose; to further her tyrannous agenda.

By becoming her personal student, I gave up my life just to study in her shadow. I became a willing instrument. Her lonely pawn, meant one day to grow tired of this preordained solitude, to find five others to call friends—to wield the Elements of Harmony and bring Princess Luna back. To make up for her failure.

Yet even then, after such a careful construction, Celestia's plan failed. While her sister's mind may have been restored for a short time, it was the Elements themselves that needed cleansing. She had unwittingly infected my friends and myself with the same curse that Luna suffered, and so she looked for a solution. She called upon me once more, this time from beyond the grave, and asked me to do the unthinkable. And so I did—a testament to her indoctrinating influence and charisma. For all the hatred that I now felt for her, I could only admire her ingenuity.

Before her death, Pinkamena had told me that there was yet one more life to end before my task is fully done. After recounting the events that had led me to this point, I had no question as to who that pony will be.

“Citizens of Ponyville!” My voice-enhancing spell changed my tone into that of a thunderous bellow. “Hear me!”

Curtains were slowly pulled apart in the surrounding windows as frightened townsfolk peeked out from their homes. When I had a sufficient audience, I continued.

“I am to leave your town, never to return. Before I do, however, I must ask for one last favour.”

Doors opened as ponies walked outside to stand before me.

“Bring me your finest carriage, and your strongest stallions to pull it. My eyes are set on Canterlot.”

Their shaking legs took me into the sunrise.

The white walls of Canterlot soon blocked the horizon before us. We—the pulling stallions and I—were stopped before the gates, as I expected we would be, by the guards outside. From within the shaded interior of the carriage, I could see the earther guards question the ponies that had drawn me there, to which they replied only with tired wheezes, mumbling and gibbering from their exhaustion after the long trip. I imagine that even if they had managed to tell the truth, the guards wouldn't have been all too happy about it. To say that the Lavender Unicorn returned to visit Canterlot was, at best, a bad joke to them.

As their little talk escalated into a violent argument, I decided to help out the ones that had so generously taken me to Canterlot. As the door of the carriage slowly opened, their shouts ceased, the guards' heads turning in disbelief towards me. Their expression was, indeed, priceless. I could not savour the moment, of course, for soon they had the tips of their spears only a few inches away from my face. I rolled my eyes, immediately knocking them out of their grasp. The guards were much more open to cooperation when their own weapons were floating in the air and pointed at them.

“Let me in, would you kindly?”

I admit that throwing away some of the guards rushing at me on my way to the palace was amusing, yet I was more than relieved when—after a few broken bones—they decided to just simply let me pass. I walked along the familiar road to reach the Palace of Canterlot, inviting myself in as the guards opened its doors for me, far too afraid at that point to resist.

At least Canterlot was still standing. The knowledge that there was one thing in this world that I managed to save made me feel just a tiny bit less horrible.

Inside the main chamber of the palace, I walked by the gigantic stained glass windows which depicted great Equestrian struggles—and their victorious heroes—of the past. History, it seemed, found a way to run its course again with the smallest possible iteration. Even now, in this strange alternative timeline I saw the very same events depicted as the ones about which I learned in my youth; droughts and plagues unleashed by great evils of lost ages.

Yet something was different. Whereas before one would have seen depictions of numerous dignified ponies—unicorns, more often than not—overcoming hardships and defeating vile beasts, this time it was only one figure appearing on every window. The great white Princess Celestia, the Elements glowing around her like a glorious halo of saints. It was always her, keeping the nation safe using the power of all six Elements combined.

She was not a mere 'princess' any more. She posed as Equestria's one protector. A full-blown god.

It was not long before I reached the depictions of Celestia smiting unicorns, shown to be more like abominable demons rather than simply ponies with horns.

They never even tried to hide this fact of genocide; it was, instead, dumped into ponies' heads from their very youth, straight from the mouth of the great saint herself. Every pony, it seemed, believed with all their heart that the unicorns were nothing but a menace—an unruly and uncontrollable race that rejected the authority of the great leader before being rightfully destroyed.

And there, at the far end of the room and above all the others, greater than any other window, was the monumental depiction of the Lavender Unicorn facing a young Princess Luna. Below it, the enchanted coffins in which she, and now her sister, rested.

I was used to seeing my image exhibited, but never have I beheld myself shown in this light. The amazing window—wide enough to have at least fifteen ponies stand before it with their sides, and even taller than that in its height—was an over-dramatised account of the murder of Luna, more than likely thought up by Celestia to frighten the nation into submission.

In the left half of the window was the glowing image of Princess Luna, lifting her hooves as she opposes her attacker. All around her, black roses bloom as their gently floating petals fill the air. A full Moon glows above the scene as shooting stars fall from the night sky.

To the right is the daemonified portrayal of the Lavender Unicorn. Their rendition of me. My eyes glow in burning red light as I bring down the skies to murder the princess, grinning with my mouth filled with teeth more fitting a wolf than an equine. My sharp horn glows in a similar hellish fire as I trample upon countless skulls and bones of the dead.

This powerful image, I realised, represented not just the murderer of Princess Luna, but the unicorns as a whole. This was the depiction burned into the minds of innocent foals. This is what they are made to see before laying their heads to bed, this is what they are taught at school, and this is what embodies and exemplifies the need for Princess Celestia.

How better to make your nation agree to widespread genocide if not by making them believe that it is, in fact, absolutely necessary? That you, and no other pony, can protect them from the evils of the world that are out there to kill them?

This was not just a message about unicorns. This was righteous propaganda.

Finally taking my eyes off the window above, I looked down at the coffins before me. In one, Princess Luna rested for her thousandth year now. In the other, the freshly murdered Celestia lay in eternal sleep.

Poor Luna.

She was a victim of Celestia's game as much as I was; even her death was used as a simple marketing tool by her own sister in her quest for power.

As I opened the great doors which led to the Crystal Hallway, I entered in the knowledge that Princess Celestia had much to answer for.