“Really? I thought you were the pizza I ordered.”

I must admit I wasn’t expecting my first visitors to be… these guys. Twilight wanting to interrogate me? Maybe. Celestia wanting to kill me without Twilight’s knowledge? More likely. A succubus and three changelings? Nope, definitely not.

Despite that, here they are in Tartarus and looking at me - the mare in the back visibly scared, the drone standing in front of me and looking upwards at my chin with the expression of someone thinking hard about something, and the queen-tier mare with grey stripes giving me a stern look.

The succubus feels kinda familiar, although I can’t place her. She, though, is staring at me with jaw dropped and some kind of dawning realization in her eyes.

Wait, I’m stupid. How many succubi have I met in my life? Only one. Now here’s a puzzle even I should have no trouble solving. So… what was her name?

“Comfort, was it?” I ask, looking at the gold-maned, reddish pink demoness, “Didn’t you have different mane last time?”

“You are the mysterious Flow they’re all so puzzled by?” Comfort turns her head to the changelings, “He, really?”

“That’s not what Flow looked like,” the zebra-like changeling shakes her head, “But the eyes...” she looks right at me.

“I don’t have the istrium mask with me, sorry. It disintegrated while I was floating in the void, or when Twilight shot me here. I can’t exactly recall. The last hours of the real world are a bit of a blur,” I shrug and smirk as I return the stare, looking deep into the colors swirling in her eyes, “And I’d appreciate if you stopped trying to hypnotize me. I’m pretty sure I was a changeling at some point even though I can barely recall it.”

She frowns and her eyes stabilize on light pink color.

“You...” repeats Comfort, still slowly shaking her head.

“Yeah yeah, me me,” I roll my eyes, “Do you want to come in? I’ve been asleep since Twilight teleported me here so I’m still a bit stiff,” I yawn and stretch my wings.

“I know you!” exclaims the drone who’s been silent until now. I completely missed the glowing pink runes on his forelegs and chest on the first glance. Scream’s artificial body like I used to have? That means the drone would have to be almost as old as I am since Scream has been dead for some two hundred and fifty years, give or take. In my defense, I was dead for most of the time, “You’re a statue!” he points at me accusingly.

What?

“I… think the minotaurs still have a statue of me in Rift, that’s true. Unless Celestia obliterated them after they helped me with summoning the Herald.”

“That’s what we’re here-” the striped changeling tries to get a word in edge-wise but gets interrupted by the drone.

“No, a small statuette mister Cromach used to have a long time ago! Bronze alicorn, sapphire eyes, gold and platinum mane-” the drone stops itself, “Well, your mane and tail are a lot whiter and greyer, but I can still see the resemblance.”

I close my eyes, chuckle to myself, and say:

“Come in. I don’t have any love to eat here but there are some cushions for you to sit on. This place isn’t exactly made for visits,” I walk back into the apartment, sit down on the bed and point to the couch by the opposite wall. The whole place is basically a one-and-a-half rooms, so the opposite wall still means we’d be able to touch each other if we stretched a bit.

To my surprise, the drone jumps up on my bed as well, much to the puzzled glances of the others, before curling up into a ball. I stretch my back on the bed, taking care not to kick the small changeling off.

“So? Did the royals send you to interrogate me or what?”

From the drone’s and Comfort’s original reactions I doubt that’s the case but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

“I’m Gem and my father is the king of Brauheim and the boss of the northern changeling hive,” says the striped mare. Heh, zeeb-ling.

Oh…

“Well then, if you’re here to take revenge on me then I’m sorry to disappoint you but that’s not going to happen. Tartarus rules.”

“We’re not here for that!” objects the small ball of chitin lying by my hind legs, “We just want to know what really happened and why you ate the sun and stars and ask if you’d give those back… or at least the sun. Most creatures are starving and freezing these days. I’m Three, by the way.”

I can’t stop myself from snickering.

“Let’s start with the easy part - no, I can’t bring back the sun, the stars, nor the rest of the universe. This planet was all I was able to save from the void,” I sigh, “No… this planet was all I wanted to save. Well, both.”

“But if you’re so powerful that you can destroy everything, can’t you create something? A big heat lamp or anything really?” pleads Three, now sitting upright and poking my leg.

“My power is… complicated. I admit that if I had as much raw energy as I needed to- as I needed before, I could probably remake the sun in some magical form,” I shrug, “That presumes me having the faintest idea how to do that and quite likely massacring the rest of Zebrica’s population. I can’t help you with recovery, I can only destroy.”

“I was there when Celestia incinerated warlord Stern’s zebra army. I would have died if Prominence wasn’t there. All the skills and knowledge I gathered over the centuries would have been gone in an instant,” says Gem in a forcefully controlled tone, Why did you order Seven to mess up the targeting of Celestia’s tactical spell strike?”

“For the same reason Mistake joined Stern and started the zebra campaign for me. Because I needed as many zebras to suffer and to die as possible,” I say simply. There’s no need to explain anything. I’m the irredeemable criminal here.

“Why?” Three now looks about to cry as he climbs on my barrel and stares straight at me. Of course, the need to explain begins with them actually asking for a reason, “Why would you hurt and kill so many? There were such big numbers that I can’t even count to!”

“Where do I even start?” I look away. Looking at hurt Three is worse than nuking a happy, crippled puppy, “Simply put, I needed a lot of power to summon the Herald and make sure that nothing, no matter what, could stop the void rift from spreading.”

“Once again, why?” asks Gem this time.

“It’s a reeeally long story, and these days even I don’t recall all of it,” I sigh, “What do you know about gods?”

“There are three of them-”

“Wrong!” I snicker. You have to take fun wherever you can find it, “There were three of them. I destroyed all of them. Completely. There are no gods anymore.” when I turn my head towards the couch, I see Gem and Comfort staring at me with jaws dropped and the last silent changeling raising a foreleg, “Yes, quiet buggo?”

“I’m Thirteen, sir,” she says with hesitation, “What’s a god? Is that like an alicorn? I’m sorry, I’m not even two years old and I didn’t have much access to the hive mind before we came here.”

“In purely technical terms, gods were the avatars of the primal forces of reality - creation, destruction, and change. Discord for creation, chaos, and life. Nightmare for destruction, order, and entropy. Harmony for change, potential, and magic. These three had nearly absolute power over their aspects and at first they were fighting each other. After an indeterminate amount of time, these avatars gained more and more sentience and eventually were able to stop the all-consuming, reality-wide conflict and agree on creating a proper battleground - this planet. Their pact also meant they wouldn’t fight directly, as it would only keep obliterating everything over and over. Instead, they would compete in certain ways.”

“How do you know that?” asks Comfort, “I’m a damn demon, as close to divinity as an alicorn, and I have never even heard or read a mention of this.”

“My special talent is energy manipulation. Divinity is energy, magic is energy, souls are energy, all different kinds with different, let’s say, density and attributes. Divinity, unlike the others, isn’t possible to ‘destroy’ and it keeps the flavor and imprint of its user forever unless purified. That means memories, personality, and experiences as well,” I explain.

“Does that mean you have some memories of one of the gods?” asks Comfort, blinking in shock at the magnitude of potential knowledge.

“No, I have all the memories of all three gods.”

“That’s impossible,” she says immediately.

“Yep. That’s why I don’t have access to them all the time. With all that happened to me through my life, a fragment of my mind gained self-awareness and eventually a body.”

“Mistake...” Gem breathes out.

“Yes, how do you-”

“We tried to kill him to prevent the need for the tactical spell strike in Zebrica.”

“Ooooh, that was you,” I look at them.

“No, from all of us here, I was the only one there. How do you not know that if Mistake is part of your mind? Prominence synchronizes with Celestia whenever they’re close unless they have some personal information they want to keep to themselves.”

“I haven’t had the opportunity. Everything I did had to be done in secret up until the end. Anyway, Mistake has the ability to access that knowledge and use magic while I can only use my divine power.”

“Not trying to burst your secrecy bubble here, but everyone in charge knew about you gathering the seal keys to release the Herald for a looong time,” Gem raises an eyebrow, “No one had any idea how to find or stop you, though.”

“Heh, you think I was worried about alicorns and your agents?” I snicker, “Let me remind you that even before the tactical strike, I had the power to kick the ass of Luna, the leader of the paladins, and Luna’s son after obliterating an elite mixed force of creatures.”

“But they stopped you in the end!” Gem stands up, glaring at me, “Celestia, Twilight, Luna, Cadance and their unicorns. They killed you! I saw you disappear after taking an enchanted bolt through the brain. Right before Mistake and Seven released the Herald.”

Does it really matter? Not anymore, I guess. Nightmare is gone so I may as well share.

“When I saw...” I take a deep breath, “When I saw Cro and Heavy join all of you trying to stop me, I just… for a moment, I just… concluded that you deserved everything that was coming your way. After all I did to save you, you still prefered a stable cage rather than freedom.”

“No offense, but I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Gem, “And I’m pretty sure out of all of us here I know the most about the state of the world.”

“State of mortals maybe,” I shrug, “This all comes back to the history of the gods. You see, once their infighting ended and they decided on playing games using the board that was this planet, at that time still just a mostly molten core with some solid matter around, they needed pawns and they created the first three alicorns based on their own aspects with a portion of their own divinity. That’s why the primal three were far more powerful than anyone who came after them… with the exception of me. Faust, the alicorn of Life was the first one and in a rather short time her immense divinity stabilized the planet into a paradise for life of all sorts. Of course, Discord wasn’t done creating, so in addition to her there came other creatures now known only from ancient legends. Very few of those survived ‘the game’, though, because Nightmare copied Discord’s design. Original creation wasn’t her aspect, obviously. She did want to win in the end, though, so she gave her own alicorn more of her divinity than Discord had given Faust. Thus, Void was born, and here’s basically where things started going wrong. Nightmare may have given Void her power, but just like Faust, their personalities weren’t a copy of the gods’. And so, while Void’s ultimate mission was supposed to be destroying Faust, he first hunted down Discord’s more dangerous creatures which is why the vast majority of Discord’s insane ideas are now just purely mythical. During that time, he grew to admire Faust’s creations which were more peaceful, more organized, and while she tended to keep away from him, she couldn’t stop him from entering the garden of paradise her part of the planet became. Besides, Discord’s wild creations interfered with her own experiments.”

“And Harmony? From what you’ve described of the gods, it doesn’t feel to me like one would stay out of ‘the game’ as you called it,” Thirteen interrupts me.

I look at Three currently lying on my barrel with eyes closed.

“I think I’m boring your little friend here. I’m not much of a narrator.”

“I’m listening!” objects Three, opening one eye, “Story time is the best time.”

“Yeah,” Gem nods, “He does that every time when I come back from the surface to the hive. Well, he did while we still had a hive.”

“Celestia?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she frowns, “Boss is helping the dwarves migrate through underground tunnels under all of Equestria, hoping they’ll find abandoned dwarf cities. Now, Thirteen asked you a question.”

“Alright, alright,” I smirk at the ceiling, “You’re right, Harmony didn’t stay out of the conflict. The final of the three primal alicorns was Magnus, the primal alicorn of Magic. The only one of the three who is still alive.”

“I thought Twilight was the alicorn of Magic,” comments Gem.

“She is. Magnus has relinquished his divinity ages ago so that heroes, villains, and everyone else would stop hunting him. In short, he found a way to become so insignificant in the eyes of the gods that he escaped their game, by which I mean he became too boring a piece to play with. He is still truly immortal, not aging I mean, the only creature ever to do such a feat using magic. No blood magic sacrifices for temporarily increased lifespan, just true immortality as most understand it. Anyway, out of all the three primals, Magnus had the best insight into the developing minds of the gods, especially Harmony’s, and he foresaw what his creator would do. His first clue was that he’d been endowed with significantly less divine power than the other primals and he wondered why. He grew suspicious that Harmony wasn’t intending to play the game but keep his power to attack the other players themselves.”

“You know, out of the three gods, Harmony does sound the friendliest,” says Thirteen.

“The name only shows how most species that appeared and disappeared since the creation of Equus completely misunderstood Harmony’s nature. You think Discord was insane? Try being a god obsessed with potential and perfection rather than one just creating random shit that pops into his mind, no matter how dangerous it may be to his previous experiments,” I chuckle, “No, Harmony was the one who started everything. I was the one who was finally able to stop it, standing on a pile of corpses reaching up to the sky. Metaphorically speaking,” I hum to myself in thought, “Although three hundred millions zebras, properly stacked… nevermind. You see, Harmony’s aspect meant that just like Magnus, his personality developed faster than that of its siblings. He assumed that in order to achieve his true potential, his perfection, he needed all the divine power to himself. That’s what nearly no one knew and that’s what almost ended everything I was trying to do - if you find a way to destroy a god, their control over their aspect wanes and can be easily taken over by the remaining two. Over time, Harmony did find a way to do so, but his attempts were thwarted by Magnus who knew that as soon as Harmony would win, he would immediately absorb Magnus again.”

“How could an alicorn stop a god?” asks Gem. I turn my head to her with a deadpan expression until I realize she can’t have any idea what it was that I did.

“Magnus was able to persuade Void and Faust that their existence was on the line and in turn they warned Discord and Nightmare who began observing Harmony in more detail. Eventually, they did figure out that Harmony was making a weapon capable of destroying the other two by purifying their divinity into its natural state as raw force. That weapon is something you might have heard of because of its name and the fact that during my original lifetime it still existed - The Elements of Harmony.”

“I thought those destroyed evil,” says Comfort.

“Yeah, sure. That’s exactly why they’ve always been used only on targets possessing divinity,” I sneer, “So, before Harmony could use the Elements, Discord and Nightmare joined forces, pushing Harmony out of the entirety of reality and into the void. Not Void the alicorn with capital V, but void as the vast sea of uncertainty from which realities originate and to which they return. Their objective wasn’t to destroy Harmony entirely but rather make sure that he would return at some point in distant future, weak enough to be controllable. However, the amount of divine power it took to do so was crippling to the other two gods. Discord was left locked in his physical body and while the extent of his power remained similar, the area of effect where he could use it shrunk immensely. Nightmare lost much more, so much power that even her physical body dissipated, and her only way to interact with the world was to possess creatures vulnerable to control.”

“Nightmare Moon,” breathes out Comfort.

“One of many,” I nod, “Still, Luna was probably one of her stronger victims, yes. So, what happened next? With so much divinity left unusable by the remaining gods, part naturally gravitated to the three primals and part would remain to infuse creatures that would come, either through now running natural evolution or the alicorns’ direct creations. This brought forth many many more alicorns of major and minor aspects. Alicorn of Stuck Drawers was a thing for some time, I believe. More powerful than you’d expect.”

“How did we get from that point to universe being gone?” asks Comfort.

“Through few billion years, several big events, and the concept of alicorn insanity,” I smirk, “Let’s start with the one you’re obviously opening your mouth about. Alicorn insanity, in simple terms, is a state of mind where a sufficiently powerful alicorn starts using their divine power to further their aspect or desire. For Void, it was that he saw suffering everywhere and started treating it with his divine power which basically wiped out some seventy to ninety percent of sentient living creatures on the planet. His point of view was that he was basically ending suffering and pain out of mercy. Do you know Scream, the previous alicorn of Lust?”

Thirteen shakes her head.

“Yep,” Comfort nods, obviously.

“She helped boss make me this body!” Three waves his glowing foreleg in the air.

Score one for me.

“She did have involvements with our hive,” admits Gem.

“Well, her period of insanity was quite heavily responsible for repopulating the planet. You know, better living through endless fuckery.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad...” comments Comfort.

“No one did any farming, culture, or any progress other than humping like rabbits. Alicorn insanity is bad in all cases. Faust’s, in essence, brought an end to alicorn civilization when she started seeing any opposition to her creation of life as something to be erased without thinking about the cycle of life and death. I think Nightmare had something to do with it. She brought the alicorn of… War, I guess? My memories are a bit blurry here. Anyway, so she brought several alicorns with her to kill Void, which worked out about as poorly as you’d imagine.”

“Void killed her?”

“He killed all of them, I think. Faust was in charge of the alicorn city… or city state. I’m not sure, Void’s memories weren’t too extensive on that. After her death, the alicorns voted certain two sisters to be in charge and Void was exiled. They were too afraid of him to try to kill him. They didn’t know of him working closely with Scream and Magnus so the two of them were his eyes and ears in case of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Void knew that at some point, Harmony would come back and the other two would want to flex their recovering power again. That’s where he started working towards a plan that would destroy the gods and make sure that no mortal or semi-mortal creature would be a pawn to be snuffed out or toyed with whenever one of the gods was bored. That’s where I come to play.”

“I thought you were about as old as me and Three,” Gem raises an eyebrow.

“You’re from the invasion of Canterlot from what I know, right?”

“Around that time, yes. Comfort here is-”

“Older,” the succubus shrugs.

“Then I’m just a little bit older, yes,” I admit, “I’m leaving out a LOT of history here or we’d be here for months. Celestia eventually persuaded Scream that Void was a threat and lured him to Tartarus where he was locked until I got involved. By sheer luck, I got hit with a curse that drains the life of a target and once they die, it summons a Tartarus demon into the world. I guess it can target someone from the Silent Circle, because it bound Void to me. We got to know each other a bit, but short time later I got killed. Scream resurrected me into an artificial body similar to Three’s. See those glowing runes? Those bind his soul to it. She used me for her plot to get Void out of Tartarus permanently and take bloody revenge on Celestia by killing all her subjects in front of her. The chain of events she started led to the rise of king Sombra in the north and without me killing him for good he would have run over Equestria.”

“You know...” says Gem slowly, “Prominence told me what happened after the void rift devoured everything and closed and you reappeared in the camp surrounded by Twilight’s forces. Cromach dragged you back from the rift, both of you bleeding and shredded, and when Twilight shot you into Tartarus he swore to destroy everything Twilight and Celestia have ever loved before teleporting who knows where.”

I sigh but can’t stop a smile.

“Yeah. In her blindness, Twilight recreated the exact situation when Void was imprisoned and Scream almost caused a full pony genocide.”

“In her defense, Celestia wanted you dead.”

“Screw Celestia. Most of this is her fault anyway,” I roll my eyes, “The oldest alicorn without suffering from insanity they say. I’m pretty sure that her overprotectiveness and her black and white world-view are her insanity. Just like Faust’s, really.”

“Alright, so do I understand it right that with Void’s help, you somehow destroyed the gods?” asks Gem.

“That is the most possible simplified view of what happened, yes.”

“So you’re a big hero and no one knows?” asks Three, looking at me now with a wide-eyed stare.

“Almost no one knows what the original problem was. I doubt even the royal alicorns have any idea what was hanging above them. To everyone, I’m just a mass murderer on an unimaginable and unprecedented scale,” I boop Three’s nose. For some reason, his stubby horn lights up with faint teal glow that gradually fades, “And I’m no hero. I didn’t do it for anyone else but myself, my family, Choke- Joy, and Cromach. You see, while I was working with Void to stop Scream’s plan, I crossed Nightmare’s path and survived. She became interested in someone with my power as a pawn. When she wasn’t able to turn me into a heartless emo like she did with Luna before, mostly because I already… eh, nevermind. Simply put, she realized she couldn’t make me do her bidding, she wanted to destroy me and almost succeeded. However, my power didn’t go unnoticed by Harmony slowly returning from the void and stretching his tentacles back into our reality. That was my… second or third resurrection. You lose count eventually. Harmony wanted someone who would fight Nightmare and weaken her while planning his return. Having figured parts of that out, Cromach, Heavy Hoof, and I reformed the Order of the Silver Sun to fight such a threat.”

“How do you fight a god anyway?” asks Comfort.

“While they were still split into three, it wasn’t so difficult although it did seem like that at the time,” my bitter smile only grows, “While they were split, all I had to do was to destroy their body, but how do you destroy such condensed divinity?”

“By using the Elements of Harmony?” Thirteen asks with a raised hoof.

“Do you think Harmony would make a weapon that would hurt him?”

“Sorry,” she withers.

“No, you were right,” I correct myself and she looks back up at me, “The Elements only worked against Discord and Nightmare, gradually weakening them throughout history as mortals used them against the two gods or their creations. But by the time Silver Sun got involved, the Elements had been destroyed. No, the first time I fought an proper unnatural being I used the Blades of Balance, two swords crafted by Starswirl the Bearded a long time ago with the help of minotaurs in the north.”

“I don’t know much about divinity,” comments Gem, “But how can a mortal material harm something indestructible? If we’re talking about creatures ‘made’ of divine power. I’m a top-notch alchemist and even basic magic is pretty resilient against mundane materials.”

“That’s because you don’t beat a divine creature over the head with those. The swords were able to break reality itself and open small rifts into the void. Why? Because they were made of istrium, a strange crystal that forms in places where rifts opened and closed before. Istrium is like… scabs healing over wounds but for reality itself. Starswirl figured out a way to forge those crystals into metal but before Nightmare could make him reveal the secret to her, he hid it and forged two swords - the Blades. They were effective against magic, minor amounts of divinity, and normal materials.”

“Minor amounts?”

I nod.

“The secret was that there were supposed to be three swords to form the kind of rift required to shred and absorb that kind of dense divinity forming the gods. We didn’t know that when Harmony really returned to the world and I had to fight him in the valley where there’s now the Barrier.”

“The birthplace of the Corrupted?” asks Gem, “What do they have to do with Harmony?”

“He created them. You see, I died again while stopping his return. Scream died as well in plotting a scheme that involved all of us and from what your king told me, even your hive. She hastened Harmony’s return so that it would happen when we were strongest and knew where it would be. And yet, it ended the way it ended. Void died, Scream died, I died, we failed to destroy Harmony completely. I barely even pushed him back into the void, and even in his vastly weakened state he figured out a way to affect the world again by forming the Corrupted whose only reason to exist was to wipe out all ponies.”

“Only ponies?” asks Gem, “I have a lot of experience with hostile Corrupted and they aren’t picky, really.”

“They were created as a mindless plague that converts and absorbs biomass. By definition that’s not too picky. Ponies were just the intended target,” I shrug.

“Wait, why are they so completely screwed over by heights then?”

Aaand here it comes.

“Well, Harmony modeled some parts of Corrupted after those who defeated him, namely me, and I’m absolutely terrified of heights. I get paralyzing vertigo. Amplify that and you get Corrupted exploding in the air. Stupid reason but I never said the gods were smart. With their power, they rarely had to be when dealing with mortals.”

“That’s so dumb,” comments Comfort in disbelief.

“Do I have to repeat myself?” I ask, “No? Good. Scream assumed her gambit would result in her death. She played everyone - mortals and gods, enemies and allies. You changelings might think you’re schemers but Scream was the one above all, capable of planning on the time scale of eons. She chose her successor - Joy who was my lover, a batpony previously known as Choking Darkness, don’t laugh, and who got killed by my- by Harmony’s cultists. Same happened to Heavy Hoof whose soul Void, when he realized what Scream wanted to do, bound to his pocket dimension - the Final Sanctuary. The plan was that somehow, with enough power and time, Cromach, Joy, Heavy, and the remaining divinity of the alicorn of Death would result in my resurrection even after being hit with the full force of Harmony’s purifying divinity.”

“I was wondering how you’re back here as an alicorn when you were so certain that Harmony’s whole schtick was the ability to destroy even the other gods,” Gem nods.

“I used to be the alicorn of Hope and Despair, a rather strange combination of aspects brought on by me surviving being hit by the divine powers of all three gods at certain points in time. That’s what Harmony purified and took away. However, with Void’s end, there remained the empty throne of the alicorn of Death, and Void was adamant that I would be his best successor. As it turned out, he was right and here I am.”

“And that’s why you needed to orchestrate the massacre in Zebrica to gain amount of power unparalelled by anyone ever before. Even necromancers with few souls make normal unicorn wizards tremble,” Gem smiles victoriously.

“Bingo! Care to guess why?”

“Well… at no point of your story did you say how exactly you defeated one of the gods, so… to fight them straight on?”

“Excellent guess. Wrong, but excellent nonetheless,” I snicker when Gem grumbles something to herself, “So, Joy tried to bring me back with necromancy by forming a mass suicide cult. They eventually succeeded in one of their rituals thanks to Void’s divinity waiting for me as well. That was… three years ago, give or take. I missed the whole onset of corruption and murderous Corrupted. I won’t bother you with the details of what I did after my return. The only things that need to be said are that I reunited with Cromach and Joy, forged the third Blade of Balance based on Starswirl’s design, and once again got noticed by Harmony and Nightmare. With all three swords, I was able to finally destroy Harmony and Discord.”

“Couldn’t someone just do it with magic before? You know, since all it took was to make a void rift,” asks Gem, “We closed void rifts before so the method of opening them can’t be that unknown.”

“The right kind of rift. Harmony got kicked out by a normal rift twice and came back. The way the swords were made created a rift that could shred and disperse divinity all over the void, which would mean death for anything from the normal universe, even the gods.”

“So you destroyed Discord and Harmony. What happened to Nightmare?” asks Thirteen.

“She became a full god, something that has never happened before. Even she had no idea what it really meant. She attacked the Silver Sun base in Manehattan to kill me, worried that if I was allowed to exist, I might figure out a way to kill her too. And so we fought her, Cromach, Joy, Mistake and I,” I shake my head, “We did nothing. Absolutely nothing. She broke the swords with a thought, she obliterated Mistake’s physical form, and from what I saw she killed both Cromach and Joy. Thankfully, I was wrong and she only made it look like that to be able to torment both me and them one final time. Afterwards, she used her chaotic power to turn Cromach into… a draconequus and did something to Joy that corrupted her so hard she lost her mind. From what I gathered, Cromach was able to gain some degree of control of that power and-”

“And I brought Vertradict to our hive where he, with Cromach’s help, restored Joy’s mind enough so that she could take herself, Cromach, and Three away to some pocket dimension connected to you… or Mistake,” Gem finishes that part of the story, “What I want to know is why I did it?”

I blink in confusion.

“I lost you there. If there’s something I know less about than you do then it’s mind control. You are the only one who knows why you did what you did.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Gem shakes her head, “Every little bit of information I gathered while you were searching for the keys to the Herald’s seal pointed to you being a ruthless murderer set on releasing something capable of destroying the universe so to prevent that, after you disappeared when the alicorns united to destroy you, all I had to do was nothing. The princesses, unicorns, and Cromach might have defeated the Herald eventually. So why, when I overheard Cromach and Heavy catching and questioning Desert Shade, did I feel that everything everyone was trying to stop was wrong, that she was the good guy in this even though she blackmailed my hive and was working for you? You told us your story, but why the Herald, why is the universe gone, why did I CAUSE THAT!?” Gem bares her fangs in the end in completely uncharacteristic outburst.

“Because...” I sigh, “I think it was because you are smarter than most of the creatures I’ve met and you’ve still had too many questions. It’s an easy guess because, you know, you’re in Tartarus to ask them,” I absent-mindedly scratch Three’s ear and watch his tongue plop out instantly, “Let me start in Manehattan after Nightmare destroyed the Silver Sun headquarters, destroyed Mistake’s body, and made Joy and Cromach disappear. As I said, I’m an energy manipulator and over time I learned to adapt quickly. Some instinctive part of me realized how the three Blades of Balance worked together and as soon as I felt Nightmare’s power envelop me to finally disintegrate me, I opened a void rift and fell through. Knowing what I know now, I’m exceedingly happy I failed to copy the exact type of the rift that the Blades caused.”

“There are more than one kind of void rift?” asks Gem.

“I told you you needed the right kind of rift to fight the gods. You can customize them to do a lot of things. They can be one-way, they can be smooth portals, or they can be aggressively explosive like the kind all three Blades were meant to do. With my limited knowledge and raw instinct, I made the portal one and it shot me out back into my pocket dimension as a semi-disintegrated lump. Being in the void just rips you apart and the mere milliseconds it took for me to slip through almost dispersed all the divine power protecting me and my body. I needed corruption to fix me up, hence Flow’s look. I’m not sure how I’m going to look if I ever get out - if I’ll look like myself or like Flow. Anyway, while I was recovering, I was sure that Nightmare would appear any moment to finish me off but it didn’t happen.”

“Why? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, if you really killed Discord and Harmony, then Nightmare had control over all the fundamental forces of reality. I think I recall Seven talking about pocket dimension being part of reality, so why couldn’t she find you?”

“I think it was because she was looking in the wrong ‘direction’. It was shortly after I killed the other two and she’d never held that kind of power and knowledge before as well. In the vast amount of memories, it takes Mistake a long time to put together fractions of what already happened so maybe it wasn’t so easy for Nightmare to control this early after her ascension into one true god. We’ll never know anymore, because everything I did since then was to destroy Nightmare. The fact that I’m still alive means I succeeded.”

“How?” asks Comfort, “If someone or something has full control over reality, how do you destroy it?”

“You destroy the entire reality...” Gem breathes out, “But why are we still here then?”

“And so we get to the grand plan,” I smirk, “After I realized that Nightmare probably really didn’t know about me still surviving, Mistake and I worked out a plan while I was recovering that hinged on absolute secrecy and no one on Nightmare’s radar knowing anything she could pull out of their mind. Mistake’s fake motive was that he wanted to gain enough power through necromancy to avenge me. Of course, that would never work because the pain and death he’d cause would always strengthen Nightmare more than him. However, it served the perfect purpose, because it amused Nightmare and kept her eyes on him. Murder, destruction, atrocities, everything he caused was to make her enjoy herself with the spectacle. While we were planning, I realized that I have felt what I felt in the void before, only in smaller amount and that was in presence of a strange black crystals the minotaurs thought gave them a heavy degree of magic resistance.”

“Istrium.”

“Exactly,” I nod, “I had Mistake contact Desert Shade whom I’d given the instructions on how to forge istrium into proper light metal before. Her job was to find a way to gain raw istrium and forge an armor. She couldn’t know why but she trusted Mistake. Desert Shade contacted Bucket, the only creature who could very easily tamper with his own mind and who, since he isn’t too big on dark emotions, already wasn’t too interesting to Nightmare. Plus the second creature who knew the forging methods because he was the one who modeled and crafted the third Blade before. It was Bucket’s idea to get your hive involved because he knew about Cromach’s dealings with you over the centuries. In return for supplying Des with istrium and giving her access to dwarf forges, she offered the dwarves the forging secrets we gained from Starswirl’s journal while we were looking for the third Blade. For herself, she had a full-body, chain catsuit made. For me, it was the mask I was wearing. And for Bucket it was just a lot of raw material that he used to build his central body into which he started locking archives with conversations with Des and everyone involved. Every time we needed to contact him, we had a password that signalled he would need his main body. Being such a high-profile creature in the eyes of the royals, he had to have no idea about what was going on until it was absolutely necessary.”

“So istrium kept you hidden from Nightmare because it’s from the void?” asks Comfort.

“Ohhh, so that’s why dad made me wear istrium necklace and bracelets when I got involved near the end?” adds Gem, giving Comfort a surprised glance.

“You got it in one,” I nod, “Of course, the degree of protection was minor. It basically meant that if you kept a low enough profile to avoid Nightmare’s direct attention, she wouldn’t think of you too much. Bucket was the exception with his body being more istrium than living tissue. My main protection was that when I recovered I started experimenting with slipping through the void as a method of travel. It burned a lot of energy but I got the hang of it. Eventually, I learned to create void rifts as a weapon and keep a semi-permanent rift open around me like a shroud to hide me from Nightmare’s eyes completely. Until she saw me face to face in Manehattan.”

“Oh, Harriet told me about that,” Gem’s eyes open wide, “Cromach was there and some other unicorn too. So that pony that looked like it was made of stars was Nightmare’s body?”

“Yeah. When she didn’t overreact at the time I knew she had no idea that I was still alive and though I was just some void creature who was trying to release an even bigger void creature which would cause immense destruction. To her, that was just one more thing to look forward to. The struggle of her little mortals… her toys,” I growl.

“Then why release the Herald if all the destruction it would cause would just make Nightmare even more powerful?” asks Thirteen who seems too invested in the story to even talk most of the time.

“While I was recovering, Mistake was using most of his time to comb the divine memories for anything that could help us, anything that made the three gods afraid before. It turned out there were only three things - each other, Void the alicorn, and the void. The void’s presence in the memories was tied the most to the Herald, a creature that Magnus, Void, and Scream sealed eons ago because they were unable to destroy it. They simply didn’t have enough raw power to close the rifts that the Herald could create even if they knew how. Rifts are kinda simple, really. They just suck energy into the void. If you shove enough through, you will close it. The amount depends on the type of rift. The Herald could make such kind that it took so much energy to close that even any of the three divided gods -sorry, two, snce Harmony was sealed away- would lose so much power destroying the Herald entirely that it would leave them vulnerable against the other god.”

“Wait, since Harmony was inside the void itself for so long and got back twice, how can it be so dangerous to them?” ask Thirteen.

“It depends on the kind of rift you go through. Like a difference between going down a water slide and going down a very sharp cheese grater.”

“Ewww...” Three sticks his tongue out.

“Pretty much. When Discord and Nightmare kicked Harmony out of this reality, it wasn’t to destroy him. The three Blades were able to create a rift that scattered divinity far and wide, which was fatal to both Discord and Harmony but Nightmare was too powerful - had too much energy at her disposal to brute force close anything the swords could make and destroy the swords in the meantime.”

“And you guessed that she wouldn’t be able to do that against the Herald since she was afraid of it, right?” Thirteen’s definitely more than engaged now.

“Yeah,” I cough, pause, and poke Three plastered over my barrel like a lazy cat, “Hey, Three, I need a drink. Get down.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get it!” Thirteen jumps up from the couch, “Where is it?”

I point to the kitchen and she rushes off.

“Any questions in the meantime?”

“What do you intend to do now?” asks Comfort, “The succubi don’t particularly need the alicorn of Lust but things were a bit… cleaner under Scream. I’d appreciate having Joy around in some functioning shape.”

“I can’t do anything,” I point to the corner where there stands a pedestal holding a shifting black orb, “This is how Tartarus works. You can’t build a prison strong enough to hold someone like me but if you can limit my power then even a weak dimensional prison is enough. Don’t try to touch it, I don’t want you unconscious on my floor for a week. As far as I know, the only way to remove the orb is to have the gatekeeper’s permission, that’s Twilight these days, so a big no no.”

Thirteen comes back with a glass of water and hands it to me.

“Thanks,” I down the whole thing and she puts the glass on the bedside table I can’t reach without shoving Three off and I can’t bring myself to do that, “Where was I?”

“Nightmare being afraid of the Herald creature thing,” replies Thirteen immediately, pushing herself into the couch space between Comfort and Gem again.

“Well, that’s it, really. If the gods used to be afraid of the Herald, then it would be able to create a type of rift I couldn’t at the time. I simply didn’t have a century or two to experiment in a safe place. I hoped that if I had enough raw power, I could destroy the Herald itself and control the size of the rift. As I was gathering the keys to the Herald’s seal I grew certain I had the skill, I just needed the raw power. That’s where me being the alicorn of Death became useful. Souls are… I don’t know how to explain properly… souls transcend the cycle of life and death in one form or another. Controlling souls is next to impossible for too long. I wish I could tell you more but despite how much I’ve learned in the past two years, and all Void’s memories mixed with mine, I have little to no idea why things work the way they work, just that they do. Out of the three gods, Discord had a soul, albeit a weak one, I think the reason why was his lifetime spent with his pegasus lover. Harmony had it too, probably out of sheer spite. As for Nightmare? I don't know. There is more to soul than just raw power, but in that complexity, they provide unbelievable amount of energy when given freely. All the killing, all the destruction Mistake caused had a secondary purpose and that was to gather as many sympathetic souls as possible. They were the power I used to spread Herald’s rift so wide it was too much even for Nightmare to close. They learned what I was doing and why I did it, and their reckoning would be that I would die in the end. That’s why they refused to protect me after I entered the big rift along with Nightmare.”

“And yet, you’re here...” comments Comfort.

“Trust me, that wasn’t part of the plan. I had no idea that Cromach would enter the void and pull me back right before the rift closed. I don’t even know how he did it. I couldn’t get back, Nightmare couldn’t get back, and yet he did.”

“THE POWER OF LOVE!” exclaims Three with a winning smile.

“I… I don’t even...” I sit halfway up before slumping back with a sigh of utter defeat, “I absolutely despise the fact that you might be right. On the other hoof, divine power does respond to a sufficiently strong wish rather than adhere to complex rules like magic does.”

“How did we survive?” asks Gem.

“Realities are like bubbles- no, like wine skins. The rift opened and the void sucked out everything. All matter and energy, everything. I wasn’t just going for revenge against Nightmare. I wanted a future, if not for me than for everyone- no, I’m lying. I was thinking about Cromach. Only about him ever since I saw him in Manehattan. I couldn’t recruit him because Nightmare would be watching him. I couldn’t even be sure he wasn’t just some Nightmare’s creation, or how much of that or how much of himself he was. I knew that without destroying Nightmare I would never have peace, no one connected to me would ever have peace. She would find us, play her games with us, torture us. My original resurrections happened because I was supposed to a useful tool, first to Scream, then to Discord, and then to Harmony. We were all just toys… we’ve never been anything else. Until now,” I breathe out, “I destroyed everything in our reality including Nightmare. All matter, all energy, everything drained into the void.”

“Then once again - why are we still here?” Gem presses on.

“After I destroyed the Herald and opened the rift beyond Nightmare’s ability to close it, while she exhausted herself trying to do so I used my souls to kick her influence out of Equus. Then Mistake used a spell to switch this planet with one in a different parallel reality. It was a massive undertaking, but we only needed it to last a few seconds.”

“So you destroyed a completely innocent planet full of our counterparts?” Three gasps.

“I destroyed trillions of planets, wiped out an amount of species you need computers to count. The amount of singular creatures with their dreams and hopes I obliterated is beyond imaginable,“ I shake my head, ”At no point during this story did I say that I was a good guy. This was either supposed to be my final revenge, my final success, or my final rest. So far, one out of three. If someone figures out a way to stop everyone from freezing to death, that’ll be two out of three. If Celestia decides to flip Twilight off and figures out a way to kill me down here - three out of three.”

“Why did you destroy the sun and the moon anyway?” Thirteen is the one to break the stunned silence following my proclamation.

“Well,” I scratch my head, “Miscalculation, really. Kinda miscounted the radius of the sphere we needed to cover, that’s all.”

“Wait, we’re all going to freeze to death because you’re bad at math?!” Gem’s eyes bulge.

“I guess I should have listened to my teachers telling me that that I would eventually need math in real life,” I snicker.

“This isn’t funny!” objects Thirteen.

“At this point, it pretty much is, really,” I shrug.

“Do you really not care about all the zebras you killed?” Three sits up and so do I, staring him down.

“I was in my twenties when I first met Joy and shortly after that Cromach. Imagine no one had ever loved you your entire life, even your family hated each other so much that your parents only tried to use you as a weapon against each other. Then imagine going alone through shit that gets you killed over and over while asking yourself why bother, you will never amount to anything, and no one will ever thank you. And then it gets worse, because saving others has you sacrifice some for ‘the greater good’ and now you’re the fucking villain in the eyes of most who actually know what really happened. Now imagine you actually manage to, against all odds, build some kind of loving relationship with two creatures who for some reason completely unknown to you, because you’ve never felt that before in your life, want to be with you. They stick with you through more and more shit that’s brought on by both the bad guys you defeated and now the good guys you saved but who didn’t like how you did it but are alive now to complain about ONLY BECAUSE YOU DID. And then, when faced with an enemy overwhelming on all levels who kills one of those crazy two you love, FUCKING CELESTIA causes you to be torn apart for almost three hundred years.”

“I’m sorry...” Three hangs his head and backs away during my outburst.

“Oh no, not yet,” I breathe out and give them all a maniacal smile, “You’re missing the final part. Imagine that you come back and save the world again, free everyone from a threat they don’t understand, but your only way is something unimaginably monstrous. You still do it and get punished by the same damn idiots whose rigidity made things so difficult in the first place. And THEN you find out that your lovers are both back together and now they finally know almost the whole truth and they are absolutely livid,” my smile only grows wider, “No, I don’t care. Neither do I really care about the universe and I FELT the wave of death as they all disintegrated. Celestia was in agony and blind rage when her precious little ball of fire disappeared? Don’t make me fucking laugh. I would do everything again without a single apology to finally have the chance to live with Cromach and Joy in peace, to not have my daughter’s family slaughtered by Nightmare just trying to mess with my head. I didn’t even truly care about Void’s plan to free all of you from gods’ rule so that you’d be able to solve and make problems of only your own making,” I breathe out, the situation having gotten just a liiiitle bit heavier, “Now you have your story, whatever little good it did you, and you can leave. I can’t fix anything anymore. I’ve fixed all I could. I can only kill and destroy, and right now that won’t amount to keeping the planet livable.”

With uncomfortable silence descending on my prison, Gem slowly stands up, poking Thirteen and nodding at Comfort and then at the door.

“Three, let’s go,” she says.

The drone is still staring at me, though.

“Even if you can’t help us directly, you know a lot of things, right?” he asks.

I sigh. Why didn’t Twilight just let Celestia kill me? All this could have been avoided. I just can’t say no to an idiot who actually believes there’s some good in me left.

“No, I don’t. Mistake does.”

“And he did that big magic teleporting thing with the planet, right?”

“With the help of me controlling the amount of souls we gathered via the massacre in Zebrica, yes.”

“Would he know how to fix the sun?”

“I...” I furrow my brows, “I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Do you have any idea where he could be?” asks Gem from the door, “Prominence said Celestia always has a vague idea where she is.”

I shake my head.

“I can’t sense him from here, but I had few dreams that he was surrounded by zebras. It looked like a hospital or something. I don’t know.”

“Thank you very much,” says Three politely and nods, “Oh, and one last thing.”

“Void swallow me now please...” I roll my eyes which nonetheless doesn’t discourage him.

“We’re headed off to the Griffon Empire to help miss Harriet get back home. Is there anything we can tell mister Cromach if we meet him?”

After the whole story, he still wants to do something for me?

Closing my eyes, I take a long breath. What is the right thing to do?

“If you meet Cromach tell him to cool down, focus on working on preserving the world, and in due time ask for my release or something. If the world stabilizes, it will be easier. I’m not going anywhere. Of course, if Twilight or Celestia decide to execute me, he has my permission to go full Scream. He’ll know what it means.”

Three nods, walks across the bed to my head, and looks down.

“I’m sorry you had to go through what you did, even though I understood just a tiny bit of your story. I’ve got only one thing but I think you deserve it in the end.”

“I don’t need-”

He hugs my neck and whispers:

“We’ll do our part.”