Momento Mori

Holding the letter in her magic was harder than it should have been. But, then again, tonight was not a normal night. Her hooves shook, her stomach turned, and her throat was as dry as the desert that surrounded Appaloosa. She needed to be calm. With as much care as she could muster in her shocked state, she laid the letter from Princess Celestia down on the bed beside her and looked away.

The room was dark and the hour was late. She’d been about to turn in for the night, satisfied with the day’s progress on her latest inquiry into geologic magic. Filled with happy thoughts, she’d come up to bed, careful not to wake Spike. The letter had been waiting for her on her pillow.

Twilight was older, and in the dark room she could feel that added maturity come to her aid. Her heart rate slowed, as did her breathing. This letter was different.

It read:

Dear Twilight,

You and I have cherished our time together as teacher and faithful student. Even after you graduated with flying colors from my school, we were still those things to one another. I value that connection so highly, and before I begin I want you to know that, if I didn’t think that this was perhaps the best hope we have, I wouldn’t even contemplate it. If it weren’t needful, then this letter would never have been written.

But Twilight, there is something I cannot ignore. Something terrible around the bend. It is so vital that we avoid, vital enough to the safety of Equestria and you and all your friends that I will risk your affection to stave it off.

Twilight, there is one last lesson. The Last Lesson of the Laws of Magic itself. I know that you’ve heard whispers of it, but nothing substantial. As a young mare you once wrote me on it, and I told you to forget it and consider it an old and silly ritual. Do you remember?

But there is one last test, my faithful student. If you do not choose this test, then it will not be thrust upon you. I will not love you less, and you will always be my favorite pupil. I will never, ever speak of it again, even if you wish to know what it entailed years from now. If you do choose this test, know that it will mean suffering. You will suffer, and it will be perhaps the worst moments of your life, however long it takes. In the end, though, you will have learned The Last Law.

Oh Twilight, as I flew away from Ponyville that night after you’d bewitched the town into desiring that silly doll of yours, I knew in my heart that this letter would have to be written, and that you would be in need of this dreadful examination. (Twilight, please hear that this is not some long overdue punishment. I think you learned your lesson then… to some extent). Twilight, you are the closest I’ve had to a foal since… a long time. That is a tale for another day, but I say that to say this: if I didn’t think that this was imperative, I wouldn’t ask it of you. I’ve learned my lesson. I cannot ignore the otherwise inevitable. You must choose this test or I must find some other way, for once I tried to let Luna work out her own heart with no intervention and the world almost fell into darkness.

I must now be frank with you: I possess a magic that is both secret and burdensome. This magic of mine, old and eccentric in its design, can see all Time Inscrutable itself as you might see the halls of the palace at night with half the lamps. Imagine many hallways, and at the end of each is a door that is well lit. Between you and that door the torches flicker alive and not erratically. The landscape seems to change. That’s a rather awful explanation, but it is literally impossible for me to explain it to you better with words. I can see ends of things and ponies, but the ways to those ends are hard to navigate, and the timelines are hard to keep intact. This magic is what saved me from Luna, though in my foolishness I convinced myself that Luna would surely make the right choices and we would enter into the best of timelines. I was wrong then. I cannot be passive like that anymore. Not again.

And that is why I give you this choice. I will not rape your self-determination, but also I must do something. Equestria is to be safeguarded. This test is the best of all possible ways to do that, the most sure. The scroll is enchanted. Speak your answer.

It was scrawl near the end, as if the burden of the message weighed on the magic of the Princess. She hadn’t even signed her name in her haste.

Twilight took a deep breath. She told herself that she was Twilight Sparkle, Second to Archmage Magic Bolt (and almost certainly his heir apparent). Equestria needed her, and she was willing to suffer whatever hard training the princess had for her.

“Princess? I will accept your training.”

She stood. The tone and the timing of the letter seemed to suggest that all this was to start immediately and if so, she intended to be ready—

Vertigo. The world swam before her. Her head pounded and horn suddenly felt sore as if she’d impaled granite. “Must’ve stood up too fast…” she closed her eyes and tried to steady herself.

When she opened her eyes, the wall before her was no longer obscured by darkness.

Instead, it was obscured by blood, painted in horrible, eldritch signs and symbols. Blood ran from the walls. Somepony had smeared it into shapes that Twilight had never even imagined in her worse nightmares. Candles lit the room, casting menacing shadows on the walls that seemed alive, that seemed to feed on the atmosphere of dark abomination.

Twilight tried to scream, but nothing happened. Her throat refused to obey her. She tried to close her eyes or turn away, but her eyes would not yield. She tried to move but she was completely paralyzed. There was no escape from the sight before her, or the now strong smell of death. She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t. She didn’t move at all.

And then suddenly, she did. Her body moved of its own accord, her lips moved to the dictates of another master. Her voice spoke words not her own:

“I’m sorry, love… but you made a mistake, didn’t you? A mistake of birth as well as a mistake of trust.”

This voice was hers, but it was older by far. Twilight, even in the depths of horror a scientist, guessed it was maybe ten years. She would’ve whimpered a tiny prayer of thanks to Celestia if she could’ve spoken, as the eyes of this body that was no longer hers looked down and away from all the drawings on the walls and floor.

But no, there was no escape here. She was sitting with her hooves before her. Idly, the thing which wore her physical self like a well-tailored dress looked down at the hooves which should’ve been hers. They were soaked in blood,somepony else’s and perhaps her own. All over them were carved and tattooed spirals and shapes like the ones on the walls and floor. Some of these were fresh, cut only moments before and done in a hurry.

Twilight was scared to death. This had to be a nightmare: It was only logical. Forty hours of work in two days was finally catching up to her, and she had simply tripped when she rose to stand hitting her head and knocking herself unconscious.It all made sense. It was the only way she could explain any of this.

Had she been in control of her eyes they would’ve been crying. Sobs echoed in the immaterial spaces of her mind. This was all so wrong.

“Oh my darling… but you put up such a brief struggle. I’m a little disappointed in you, really. You were so brave when you lived, and I suppose coming here and trying to ‘reason with me’ was brave, but it is such a boring sort of brave. But, the deed is done, and you and I are never to be separated while my abode stands. I needed your particular... assets.”

This speech shook Twilight severely; these were her words, the way she would have spoken them. Yes, the voice was deeper, and the the tone full of malice she did not feel in herself, but it was her inflection. This Other really was her. She was riding inside her own mind. This must be the future. It was a terrible thought. She felt sick.

“All I needed was a bit of that pegasi magic... and you brought it, didn’t you? It was in your blood.”

It was in your blood. If she had had a body, the Passenger would have shivered in dread. What did she mean? Yes, the Passenger understood part of what she’d heard. It was a part of the basics of physiology: each of the three races had their own species of magic flowing in their blood. What Twilight was slow to grasp wasn’t really beyond her. Rather, it was something she simply denied. The Passenger wished not to twist her mind into the paths that led to the conclusions she knew would await.

However she might try to ignore them, she knew what the symbols adorning her walls were. Future Twilight had painted alchemaic configurations foreign to her, but not so foreign as to be totally unintelligible. She vaguely recognized some of the twists... could understand that something was being transmuted or used up. That they were painted in blood only served to illustrate the disturbing nature of the sacrifice.

What had she sacrificed?

Twilight could only think of one pony offhoof, but she refused to accept what she feared was true. She had no time to dwell on it, however, as the Future Twilight began to think; her thoughts felt like fire and blood. The passenger would’ve shivered. She came alone into my tower, but she did not come alone to Ponyville. Magic’s failed me, burned out. They’ll be here soon if they saw the flash.

Future Twilight tried to stand but discovered she could not. The release of such a great flood of thaumaturgic energy had wracked her body, ripping fur from her hooves and torso and sucking the vitality from her bones and sinews. She was all but crippled.

As Future Twilight’s thoughts whirled in the immaterial place behind her eyes, the Passenger felt herself unable to maintain separation. She tried to fight it. She didn’t want to be a part of what she saw, but it was too late. She and her future were one.

Twilight, two in one now, knew what was coming. She was defenseless. The weapons of gunpowder she’d toyed with so long ago were both unwieldy and down in the deep storage below the tower. The Zebraic knife she’d used to kill Rainbow Dash—Separation, a trapped passenger screaming silently: NO OH NO CELESTIA NO I WANT TO GO BACK NO GODS NO—was shattered, unable to stand up to the fury of the ritual that the Dark God Tirac required of her. The empty, cold wound on her soul she knew was his curse on her, his wrath at her failure. Perhaps she’d underestimated, miscalculated, in her plans to do to him what she’d tried to do to Celestia.

Before her, a dark spiral scrawled in the door began to glow. It was a proximity alarm, and she knew her time was even shorter than she’d guessed. The Canterlot guards she’d no doubt brought with her as an escort no doubt had already penetrated her carefully constructed perimeter. She cursed her ill luck. It had been foolish and sentimental on her part, letting Rainbow in too quickly. She’d simply sent all of her traps and cleverly layered hexes to sleep. Now, with no magic, she could not wake them up again. They had her.

The Passenger Twilight was now fully separated, in pain and on the verge of madness. She howled and raged. She wanted to go back. She wanted to close her eyes. She wanted Rainbow. She wanted it to have been any other pegasus but her beloved Rainbow whose life had been so dearly spent. She had killed her own marefriend—except now she could see this version of the future and she knew they’d left youth and youthful passion behind, and she knew they’d been married. She’d killed her own mate in the most despicable way imaginable. She could see in her own self’s mind what the ritual had been like, and she knew it had not been quick. Rainbow had cried and mourned before the end, had tried to fight back, even. Twilight’s magic had made the pegasus’ struggle and her pleas all the more futile. The Passenger could see how it had gone. She could see how Rainbow’s wings had been pinned to the floor, how her hooves had been stilled, how the knife had entered her abdomen despite her screaming and begging and tears. The magic had gone through that point and spread like a cancer. Only then did the true work begin...

The litany of horror continued.

She was so consumed in her own grief and horror that she did not even hear the heavy hoofsteps down below in what had once been the public library of Ponyville. Until a good, strong pair of legs kicked her door so hard that it splintered, she noticed nothing of the world that her future self saw.

In the doorway stood an older Rainbow Dash in full military regalia, her eyes red and swollen from crying and a snarl on her face that, for a moment, shocked even the callous Future Twilight. But no, she was too old, this was—

“She was my daughter, you stupid bitch! She was my only daughter! She loved you and you killed her!”

Both Twilights were so shocked that they almost didn’t register the two hooves to the face. Her face gave way under the almost lethal force, her nose breaking. The momentum carried her back against the bed, and she coughed up blood.

Then the older mare was on her, raining down punishing blows and screaming wordlessly. Future Twilight could do nothing but whimper and her passenger did the same. Her body was ruined by magic and force, she tried to wriggle away but she couldn’t. Brigadier Prism Dash, one of the most decorated mares of the Royal Air Guard, would not allow it: this was the beginning of Reckoning. Instead, she put a stop to Twilght’s meager progress and threw her onto the bed, ready to pummel her again.

“Where is my daughter? Where did you put her, you stupid fuck?”

But the air was different. She began to tremble, suddenly aware of her surroundings. She saw the blood that now covered the floor and the walls, the strange and evil patterns that matched the tattooed designs on Twilight’s face and hooves. She began to make the connections at last, the awful connection between the blood and her only child.

She backed up, her eyes widening. Her legs would no longer support her, and her age now showed as she collapsed. But she fell into the blood and she began to blubber in shock, desperately trying to scoot away from the spiraling thing. Twilight could feel the pulsating satisfaction of the sorceries which ensconced her home and made it, in its way, breathe. The necromantic energies of her failed ritual had not failed to feed it and it was glad. She could feel it as well as Prism Dash could.

“Oh…no, no… no, no, no, no… blood. Blood everywhere and oh gods, it’s on me… oh my child, my only… it’s everywhere… Celestia and Luna…” Her voice was hoarse and her rage was gone. The avenger had become nothing more than a frightened foal.

“Oh my child…. I told you she was lost.” Slowly, she tried to retreat out of the room, crying like a baby. “I told you… OH GODS WHAT HAS SHE DONE TO YOU? Can’t you feel it? She’s in the walls! Something is in the walls, all around us, something alive. Oh fuck… guards!” She was at the door now, and those who’d accompanied her stepped around her as she retreated back down the stairs, muttering to herself. Broken.

The next to address her was a gray stallion in gold-painted armor. His eyes were hard and his bassy voice spoke over her as she lay there helpless, the steel resolve of years of dabbling in the darkest secrets temporarily gone.

“Twilight Sparkle, you are charged with the sin of blood magic, and the high crimes of treason, murder, blasphemy, conspiracy to cause destruction, theft most heinous, and finally with the burning of Neighvarro and rape of Ponyville. May your dark master devour you for all time. The Darkness take you.”

“The Darkness take you,” answered the two ponies on either side of him. The first took another step closer.

“You are under arrest. Celestia has ordered that you have no trial and that you be treated as the worst of slime to infest the earth.” He spit on her.

Twilight suffered.

***

The passenger Twilight was almost numbed in her shock as her future self crawled the gauntlet to the place of her death. It was too much. It was all too much. What had she done— no, what would she do? Is this what Princess Celestia had seen?

The skies were rust red and the air smoky, unclean. The landscape between her twisted home and the castle was cursed. She knew it was all her fault. Even where she had had no direct hoof in the doing, it had been her behind it all, prodding the way of history, keeping the Equestrian army from pushing back the invading chimera and wolves. Some of the foulest infestations of monsters had been her own designs released just at the borders. No one had known, but her friends and her former mentor had always suspected. Until recently, she had been the secret Lich-in-training, raising the dead of ruined Ponyville and reveling in the secrets that she had always been forbidden.

But her vast and almost godlike knowledge had required great sacrifice. Neighvarro, its people’s life force channeled into her last great feat when she rose up against Celestia. Her recent murder— sacrifice, she told herself. She felt only coldness. Theirs had been a one-sided love for years at this point. Twilight had wanted pleasure and Rainbow had wanted her bookworm. She would have sneered had she not been so terrified of what rose before her. This was all that filthy pegasus’ fault, somehow. She had ruined the sacrifice. Rainbow Dash had betrayed her by not dying as she should have. Future Twilight damned her.

Passenger Twilight cried somewhere in her future self’s mind, completely broken.

Ponies lined the streets, hurling insults and trash at her. They had added to the caked blood in her fur their own refuse. She smelled of the sewers and her wounds were no doubt infected, filled with filth. The guards had forced her to go under her own power, prodding her with enchanted spears that shocked her whenever she slowed too much for their liking.

But now it was all over. This was the end of the long line.

She tried to raise her head to see what manner of death they’d chosen for her, but the journey to the square had been too much. She simply could not move another inch. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she would die here in the streets. As the angry guards brought their spears to bear, she heard the voice of her monarch.

“Cease. Twilight Sparkle, can you stand?”

There was no answer for such a voice imbued with divine command but straightforward truth. There was only: “No.”

She felt the magic of her former teacher envelope her and Future Twilight shivered. It had been a long time since she had sensed the power of her monarch. It brought memories of her youth to her and for the first time in a long time, she was beginning to feel something she had not since Neighvarro: guilt.

The magic carried her for a few seconds and then she was gently deposited onto a wooden surface, limp like a foal’s plaything. She looked down at the wooden boards and both future and past incarnations of herself felt fear beyond reckoning.

“Twilight Sparkle, are you aware of where you are and why you are here?”

Her mind groaned under the weight of the godhead. This was the Voice of Command, of which the Canterlot voice was merely a shadow. Celestia had not used it in more than a thousand years. All was stillness. The Voice laid heavy on them as much as it did the criminal Twilight.

“You pushed too far, my…” She paused, but only for a fraction of a second. “Twilight Sparkle, we are grieved that you have fallen to such lows and that we did not foresee such a descent earlier. We thought perhaps our warnings to you in the past when you were still our student would be heeded but they were not.”

Future Twilight groaned aloud, her whole body bruised. The passenger trembled like a leaf.

“You have forgotten the laws of our kind and the lessons I taught you. I am so very ashamed, Twilight, that I ever knew you. I regret the day we met, when you were still a filly— still worthy of being called a pony!— more than I have ever regretted anything in my life. LOOK AT ME.”

Future Twilight had no choice. In her state, there was no fighting the compulsion of the Voice of Command. She looked up even though her body cried out in pain.

Celestia stood with terrible regal air, and for the first time Twilight (both of them) understood what it was to be the student of a demi-god and trembled. There would be no escape, no mercy. Those eyes held nothing but what Celestia said they did. For her, Twilight was dead. It was already fact; so it had been written, so it had been done. This whole day’s events were past tense for her, and that was the truth. Her determination was almost a tangible thing. Twilight had been found out. She had stayed judgment for Rainbow Dash, and let the mare try and reason with her wayward love, but she had always known that all roads left led to this.

Her right wing was almost gone, torn to shreds by Twilight’s failed attempt at god-slaying. It was little more than a mangled nub folded against her and covered with armor. A hideous scar crossed her face across one of her eyes. The passenger Twilight felt like she was in a dream. There was no way she could harm Princess Celestia. Not even if she went mad with power, or did all sorts of horrible things in pursuit of her own personal studies into magic… surely this was the very height of impossibility.

But it was fact.

“Do you know the last two rules of magic, Twilight Sparkle? Don’t answer, because you don’t. You were taught one of them and as we can see from the damage you have done to my realm and my beloved little ponies that the lesson did not stick. But I thought the last was obvious. I thought there was no need for you to be told. Everypony, from the foal to the Archmage knows the Last of Laws. You have killed your mate and created unspeakable horrors which will make Ponyville uninhabitable for a millennia. You have forgotten. I WILL REMIND YOU.”

There was no sound but the Princess.

“Magic was a gift from the earliest days so that you might do good. And Twilight, the last lesson that I will ever teach you before I send you down to Hell:

REMEMBER THAT YOU TOO MUST DIE AND MAGIC CANNOT PREVENT THAT AND SHALL NOT.”

It was then that she was hoisted into the air roughly, the eyes of the mare who’d once loved her as a daughter burning with the deepest of hates. She spoke to the assembled crowd. “Blood magic is infectious. As we now do to Ponyville in the Shadowed Vale we do to Twilight Sparkle, so that the evil that flows in her blood and that is scrawled on her body cannot escape and bring about further ruin.” Now she spoke only for Twilight, but for everyone still to hear. “Twilight, do you know how you cleanse the land from the likes of your works?

“You burn them.”

And then she realized what stood behind the princess. A pyre was there and before she could even scream she found herself tied to it, magic strong beyond belief allowing her no room for protest or escape. Celestia called for the crowd to look away, and then she turned back to her former student.

As the fire ignited the Passenger vanished.

Twilight’s enchantments about her person made her very, very hard to kill. It took an hour.

****

Twilight, screaming, fell back against her bed. Spike jumped up from his bedding, wide eyed and frightened.

“Twilight! What’s wrong? Where—“

But there was no coherent answer. The mare just cried.

Spike was perplexed. He was used to being comforted; he was not used to having to comfort. He had no idea how to handle it. He come over to the side of the bed she’d fallen on and laid a claw on her mane. “Hey, did you have a nightmare?”

It was then that the light came, blinding and white. Spike covered his eyes and Twilight trembled.

Celestia stood before the window and Spike was shocked at just how unsure she looked. He was about to ask what was going on when Twilight spoke up, her voice thick from crying.

“Why? Why tonight?”

Celestia looked down, troubled. “Tomorrow is an important day, is it not? You don’t know, but I do. I looked into every option. If I wait much longer, you discover the books that first lead your research into dubious paths. If I subject you to the truth then… I’ve seen it a dozen times, and it took that long to convince me not to wait. Almost all of them end up with you holding on to some of that material and it all happens in the end anyway. There are… a few endings, Twilight. Time is rather unstable. But sometimes there are a few certainties.”

Twilight was silent. She was spent. She climbed back onto her bed, looking down. A cautious princess timidly stroked her mane. “Twilight? I know that you are upset. But that doesn’t have to be the future.”

“I know.” The voice was small. “How do I face anypony? How do I talk to Rainbow Dash tomorrow? Will anything be the same with us, now that I’ve seen what I’m… oh, Princess…” she groaned and then coughed violently. The crying was getting to her.

The sigh that she gave troubled Spike. It seemed to be old beyond his reckoning. The worried assistant sat in front of his grieving mother figure whilst Celestia laid on the bed beside the trembling Twilight.

“Twilight, I have done this before, going into the future. Before I sent you I went myself so that I would know a little of your suffering. I still love you enough to come here as soon as you were free, don’t I?”

Twilight nodded.

“I do not blame you for what you have not done. What you won’t ever do, I think. Do you understand what you were meant to understand?”

She nodded. “It’s like with my doll… or the tricks I played on those colts when I was small.” Another bout of coughing. “I’m… afraid of my magic. Just a little.”

“Yes. You have a gift Twilight. It is a wonderful thing. I wish that I could show you the amazing, wonderful things that are possible for you without altering the future. I wish I could balance out the worst ending with the best, but you know why I can’t. It may change those good endings. I don’t show you this to warn you away from that talent— Equestria needs it and so do you. I showed you this because you have always run just a bit too far. You have since you were a filly. Do you remember how your mother was always having to keep you out of the road?”

Twilight tried to chuckle but coughed instead. “Yes. I didn’t get that the wagons could squash me like a bug. I was too little.”

“Not that little, but yes.”

“Am I a bad pony, Princess?” The question was timid.

“No, Twilight. No you’re not. You’re one of the best I’ve ever known.” The Princess’ warmth faded. “It’s… the best ponies that make the worst. Do you understand that, my faithful student?”

The title hurt her heart like it had never hurt it before and Twilight felt like another round of bawling. She tried her best to hold the sobs off and nodded.

Celestia continued quietly. “Now that I’ve interfered, I won’t be able to see this timeline clearly anymore. I’m in this timeline now, and I can’t see my own. But… I have faith in you Twilight. I believe in you. Do you still trust me?”

Another nod.

“I’m so very sorry,” her mentor spoke softly and enveloped her with a wing. “I’m so very sorry.”

Princess Celestia contemplated the twists and uncertainties of the sea of time, and the changing realities inside a pony’s heart. She would have to wait. She believed. Celestia thought about how she’d been wrong before and her heart was troubled. She would stay until Twilight slept, and be there for her student. Perhaps it was time for her to come back to Canterlot for a time, with her friends. Thoughts swirled about in her head until day came.

It was a long night.