So very tired.

        Twilight Sparkle ensnared the vacuum flask in the magenta aura of her magical field and levitated it toward her; even with its insulating properties, the coffee inside had long since gone cold, but she downed the remaining liquid in one messy gulp all the same. Any thoughts that she might have entertained of leaving the basement temporarily to prepare a fresh batch were banished instantly – along with her feelings of drowsiness – when one of the five tanks arrayed before her started to gurgle.

        The tanks were bed-sized sarcophagi, and the flashing green lights that blinked in an irregular pattern and black chassis gave them more than a passing resemblance to Changeling cocoons; the five of them together took up almost all of the standing space in the basement, and what little room remained was dominated by banks of complicated-looking machinery, a dais adorned with strange ornaments, wires, and the various power sources that Twilight had cobbled together to keep all of it running for twenty-six hours a day.

        Everything was bathed in an eerie verdigris light that cast daunting shadows. Twilight barely even noticed it these days, having become so inured to the conditions in which she slaved interminably. Weeks ago, when this little odyssey had first begun to take shape, Spike had suggested installing a window, but she had refused. She didn't care for the sunlight so much.

        A pair of weary mulberry eyes scrutinised the dials and gauges which displayed constantly updating feedback concerning the status of the contents of the tanks; right now, they were all indicating that there was an imbalance in the flow of mana from the six glittering jewels on the dais to the things in the cocoons. Twilight felt her muzzle tighten into a frown. “Again? You're supposed to automatically compensate for that, stupid machine.” Her horn ignited, and she made a series of deft adjustments to a number of switches, levers and buttons.

        Soon, the gurgling sound from the tank faded and Twilight breathed a sigh of relief; sitting on her haunches, she cast an eye at the one non-mechanical thing in the room and she felt a faint smile creeping on to her lips. As much as she trusted the machinery – most of it had been of her own invention, after all – she couldn't leave it alone when it still acted like this from time to time. Spike, asleep in his little basket perched protectively next to one particular tank, helped as best he could. Twilight softly stroked the barbs atop his head, causing him to stir. As invaluable as his assistance was, providing her with the opportunity to take much needed rest breaks, his two stubby claws just couldn't do all of the things that four legs and telekinesis could.

        He didn't possess her unwavering determination either.

        “Twilight?” a familiar, kindly voice said.

        “I'm awake!” Startled, Twilight lifted her head up and caught sight of something shimmering and diaphanous flowing through the air in front of her. I must be dreaming. After rubbing the hooves of her forelegs together, she pressed the friction-warmed pads over her eyes. The heat did little to relieve her pervading sense of tiredness, but it did at least ease the heaviness of her eyelids somewhat. “Princess Celestia?” she said, the surprise at seeing her former mentor writ large across her face. Surprise quickly turned to suspicion, however. “What are you doing here? I thought I'd made it clear after last time-”

        Celestia held up a hoof to cut her off and Twilight quickly stopped talking. “I'm not here to argue with you, Twilight,” she said, sounding tired herself. “I had hoped that I might be able to talk you out of-” an elegant, golden horseshoe swept the basement and its contents “-all this, but seeing the progress that you've made since we last spoke … it would be an exercise in futility now, wouldn't it?”

        “It would've been futile, anyway,” replied Twilight; lacking the energy for a proper display of anger, she merely settled for a quiet, indignant snort, steam jetting forth from her nostrils as she did so. “They're my friends. I can't just abandon them.”

        “Twilight-”

        “-Don't, okay?” Twilight turned away from her former mentor – once upon a time, they'd had a bond that was as close as mother and daughter, but now … now she wasn't sure what they were – and scanned each of the tanks in turn. Each one contained, well, there was no other way of putting it: each one contained a blob. A shapeless lump of a substance that very much resembled clay undulating in a container filled with a viscous fluid. The blobs bore only the most superficial resemblance to ponies; two of them displayed growths on their sides that might've, if you squinted hard enough, resembled wings, while another was in the process of developing a thin protuberance at the apex of what couldn't even be described as a head. It was just another, slightly smaller blob that happened to be attached to a larger blob. “Everything you wanted to say to me, you said it already at the funeral.”

        “You may have heard my words, Twilight,” Celestia said, her tone was quiet, patient, but there was a definite edge to it, “but whether or not you've grasped their meaning, I'm not so sure. Everything-”

        “-Has its time, everything passes,” said Twilight thickly, making a dismissive sound in the back of her throat. “I heard you. I understood you. And you know what? If it had been their time, I could accept that. If they had lived to an old age and died happily, surrounded by friends and family, I could've accepted that, too.” She rounded on Celestia, rage fuelling her words. “If they had died defending Equestria, even that I could've eventually lived with.” She shook her head slowly. “But that didn't happen, did it? They died in a stupid, pointless accident. That, I cannot accept.”

        “Accepting death, whether you agree with the manner of it or not, is a fundamental part of life,” Celestia said, attempting to approach her former student. “Especially as an alicorn.”

        “Not if there's an alternative,” replied Twilight, backing away. “I've discovered an alternative.”

        Celestia set her jaw, regarding Twilight with an uneasy look. “Nopony should have the power over life and death, Twilight. Not even you.”

        “And yet,” Twilight said, “I have that power, thanks to you. At least, I do for my fellow Element Bearers.”

        “Thanks to me?” Celestia asked, confusion clouding her pristine features.

        “You took me on as your student,” Twilight said, her eyes flashing, “you prepared me, groomed me, to succeed you as bearer of the Elements of Harmony. You made me an alicorn princess.”

        “Not for this,” said Celestia. “Everything I have done has been to ensure that you are ready for the great role you still have to play in Equestrian affairs.”

        “Why can't I do both?” asked Twilight, some of her old fillylike impetuousness creeping into her tone as she shot a glower at Celestia.

        Changing tacks, realising that she wasn't about to succeed in out-thinking Twilight, Celestia joined her former student beside one of the tanks – silently grateful for the fact that she didn't try to escape her approach this time – and said, “You do know that it won't be them, right? Not really.” Her eyes were drawn to one of the blobs just as it twitched and thrashed in its bath. It became a little bit more defined, a little bit more ponylike. It took on a yellow colouration, and its vestigial wings seemed more … feathery. “Extracting their spirits from the Elements in the Tree of Harmony and using this machinery to build new bodies for them will restore their physical forms, yes, but their memories, their very consciousnesses, will not be the same.”

        Twilight smiled. It was not a pretty sight to behold in the mossy glow of the cocoons. It was the last thing that prey saw just before a carnivore devoured them. “I've thought of that, too.”

        “Of course you have,” Celestia said, quietly enough that Twilight couldn't hear her. She watched her former student disappear from the basement through a ragged hole into an adjoining antechamber; the shape of the hole in the wall suggested to her that it had been knocked through in a hurry by an amateur, and Celestia couldn't help wondering why. The Castle of Friendship was hardly short of space after all. Belatedly, the answer occurred to her: Twilight did not want to leave the tanks unattended for any length of time, thus she'd simply decided to cut through into the next room so that she wouldn't have to. She probably had her bed, workshop, kitchen and bathroom in there.

        “How do you feel about this, I wonder?” she asked of the sleeping dragon when she heard his shallow breathing. “Do you do it out of fealty to her, or-” she examined the tank Spike was lying under, taking in the pale white blob with its basal horn “-for the chance to see your love again?”

        Spike's only reply was to stretch and twist himself into a more comfortable sleeping position, yawning loudly, whilst reasserting his clutch on a tiny unicorn plushie wrapped up in his arms.

        “What were you saying?” asked Twilight, narrowing her eyes at Celestia as she padded back into the basement, a complex apparatus hovering in mid-air in front of her, surrounded by a sparkling purple glow. It appeared to be nothing more than a headset with a snaking tangle of wires dangling from it.

        “Nothing,” replied Celestia quickly, regarding the device with interest. “What is this contraption?”

        By way of an answer, Twilight placed the headset over her skull; numerous thin metal filaments pressed against her scalp, and she uttered a small grunt of pain as they pierced her soft skin. Once she had it securely fastened, Twilight began wiring the trailing cables into an outlet in the machinery that monitored the tanks. After a few moments, a screen lit up with a burst of static. Celestia made to ask a question, but Twilight held up a hoof. “Wait. Watch.”

        Celestia did so.

        The static on the screen soon cleared and resolved itself into a fuzzy but viewable image; she recognised it at once as Canterlot Castle, only … it seemed so much taller than normal. It took Celestia a moment to realise that she was seeing it from Twilight's perspective. More specifically, Twilight as a filly.

        “I'm sorry I wasted your time,” a defeated-sounded voice said. Celestia remembered this moment as the day of Twilight's entry examination to the School for Gifted Unicorns. It was just odd to be seeing it from this angle, however.

        Soon, the picture changed to another location, one that she couldn't identify as readily; the proud blue pegasus lounging on a cloud with an insouciant grin was immediately familiar to her, however.

        “Ten seconds flat.”

        Another change. A bubbly pink earth pony reacting in amazement.

        “You must be new in town.”

        And another. A shy yellow pegasus meeting a new face.

        “A baby dragon!”

        Another. An excited orange earth pony doing what she did best.

        “Yee-haw!”

        And one more. A pretty white unicorn putting the finishing touches to some decorations.

        “I'm in the zone, as it were.”

        Memories. It didn't take Celestia long to realise that these were Twilight's memories.. What she was witnessing was her former student's first meetings with her friends. That didn't clear up her confusion, however. “I don't understand,” she said, frowning at the screen.

        “This device-” Twilight tapped the cool metal of the headset with the hoof of her foreleg “-will record the memories of anyone who wears it and save them as a series of electrical impulses in the magnetic storage here. Those impulses can then be downloaded into the minds of my friends. Once they're far enough along in their developmental cycle, that is.”

        Celestia looked at Twilight uncertainly, an obvious problem occurring to her. “But then, they'll only be imbued with your memories of them. Your perceptions of them. Your impression of what they were like as ponies. At best-” she touched Twilight's shoulder tenderly “-all you're going to end up with are poor reproductions that have none of the nuances of the original. It will be like reading a book translated into a different language. You'll lose all of the subtleties that make them who they are. Made them who they were, I mean.”

        “It won't be just my memories going into the mix, though,” Twilight said, shaking free of her former mentor's touch.

        “What?”

        “Everypony in Equestria who knew them well enough will be invited to contribute their remembrances,” said Twilight, taking the headset off and placing it on top of the closest tank. A smile broke out on her face as she examined its progress. Soon. “Friends, family, close acquaintances.”

        “Twilight, you can't really think that they'll support this, can you? They've moved on. Just as you should do.” She knew that Twilight had always been a very determined pony, even as a filly; once she put her mind to something, no matter how dangerous or impractical, she would see it through to the end … no matter how much you tried to persuade her otherwise. That tenacity had seen her through many a crisis. This was different, though. This was a level of obsessiveness that Celestia had never seen before. Even when she'd accidentally afflicted the entire town of Ponyville with the Want It/Need It spell. “Also, you need to think about them-” she gestured to the tanks with their still-developing incipients continuing to grow steadily “-do you really think that they'll be easily, if at all, accepted back into society? They'll be regarded as monsters.”

        “Why? They're friends to all of the ponies out there, too, not just me,” Twilight said protestingly. “They'll be glad to have them back, I'm sure.”

        “They're dead, Twilight,” Celestia said with a note of finality. “Cherish your memories of them and move on, just as the others have done.”

        “I can't,” Twilight replied, tears forming in her eyes as she stroked the tank closest to her. “I'm not ready to give up on them.” She turned to Celestia and, a pleading note entering her tone, said, “If you wish to help me, I'd be grateful for it. The memories of yourself, Luna and Cadance would be invaluable to restoring them. While those of other ponies fade or become corrupted over time, the memories of alicorns are as clear as the day they were made. You would be giving them such an incredible gift, Princess. You would be able to make them more real than my machines, my science, ever could.”

        Celestia was torn and she bit her lower lip softly. That supplicating voice was nearly impossible to ignore or refuse, and Twilight knew it. Had known it from a young age as she'd wrapped her around her little horn. After a moment's hesitation, she finally said, “I cannot support this endeavour, Twilight. I won't stop you from asking Luna and Cadance for their help if you wish, though I suspect that their answers will mirror my own.” Holding her former student close, she continued, “What you are doing is admirable, and I suspect that there are many in Equestria who would endorse it, but there are going to be difficult times ahead for you. And for them.”

        “I know,” Twilight replied, exhaling sharply, hugging Celestia. Tears fell freely as she nuzzled against her former mentor, appreciating the warmth that she radiated. “But as always-” her wet eyes quickly darted to the tanks “-we will face them together. I don't know if you can fully understand, I don't know if anypony can, but this is something that I have to do. They're too important to me. Too important to Equestria. They deserve the chance that they never got the first time around: the chance of a long, happy life.”