Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

–C. S. Lewis

Death in Equestria is unpleasant.

For me, it strips me of all physical sensation, all orientation, and there is only my self—my bodiless sense of identity—suspended in an endless void. It is not a simple blackness, like being in a windowless room with the lights out. I can sense the nothingness around me and within me. I am falling, but in no direction at all. I’m not moving. There is nowhere to move to, nowhere to be. To be dead in Equestria is to be utterly alone and unanchored.

Each time, I awaken in a hospital bed in Cloudsdale. Sometimes Princess Celestia will be there, or perhaps Princess Luna, sometimes not. Sometimes the ponies I was with at the moment of my death will be there, making the trip to receive me, and sometimes I just awaken to an empty room. There will be a terrifically strong ache behind my eyes and throughout my body which would subside over the following hour or two. After being forced to stay bedridden through it and then choke down an unappetizing hospital meal, I am free to go, perfectly healthy and none the worse for wear.

I always remember what it is like to die, however.

Celestia must have realized that there had to be a counterbalance for the lack of permanent death in Equestria. The basic satisfaction model of risk-begets-reward is upended if there is no sense of risk in something. Fatal events must incur suffering or setback of some kind, and this suffering and loss was tailored to each individual pony. Asking another pony what their deaths are like is a very personal matter, because the answer tells you a lot about that pony’s fears and insecurities.

Death in Equestria is, in a sense, a very brief visit to a mild personal hell. After a while, being about to die got to be like having to swallow with a sore throat. You know it has to happen, you brace yourself for it, and you get through it as quickly as possible.

After I died once, I learned the value of the Above and Beyond badge. To save a pony from death was to save him or her from no small amount of discomfort, regret, or embarrassment. As with all satisfying actions, however, Celestia always tried to have you earn it.

The griffin hen next to me sniffed in boredom, inspecting her claws as Nagnarök raged in the valley below us. Thousands of ponies struggled against the NPC enemy faction—the Holy Griffin Empire—for this year’s battle, and the first one I had been a pony for. A cloud of pegasi and griffin skirmishers twisted and weaved through the sky overhead while claw-troops faced off against the earth-ponies below to control the precious territory which would determine the victor. Far back behind the lines, the unicorns acted as artillery, concentrating and meshing their power together to hurl great balls of magic at the opposition on the far hill, itself armed with fearsome and destructive seige engines.

Armor flashed and clanged against spears and swords as the clouds began to gather together ahead of the coming evening. The shouts and cries of pain were often loud enough to be heard even where I and my counterpart sat, far away from it all but watching intently.

Well, I was intent, anyhow.

“Your southern flank is always weak, Sonne-Herold,” said my counterpart. “The Kaiser is well aware of your ponies’ simpleminded tactics.”

I put on a theatrically shocked expression. “Why Ulla, you wound me! You don’t have faith we’ll put up a good fight?” I asked.

The hen snorted and smoothed out her green and white tabard. “Your forces are full of foals and housemothers and the old and doddering,” she spat. “They have no stomach for battle, for Blutvergießen. They will lose, and you will shame your princesses.”

“We’ll see which herald has to tuck their tail,” I said with a smile. “I heard from the veterans that they won against you the last time we fought.”

“You were not there,” she said, “so you are in no position to accept the words of braggarts and Lügner. But in the time after, against the primitive Zebra, you fell.”

I shrugged with my wings. Above the din of war, a griffin death-scream from the valley made me shudder. “We won’t, the next time,” I said. “Besides, I bet the flat terrain of veldtlands leaves our artillery exposed.”

“Artillerie? You mean your meek and prudish unicorns? I would be surprised if half of them could light a candle with their magics. Ach, better we shower the Artillerie-Zeile with books so that they become distracted to copulation with them!”

I smiled, amused. Ulla obviously took great pride in crafting her insults. “An interesting idea. I’ll have to take it up with Her Royal Highness to see if we can’t come up with an effective counter.”

“Counter to what, Corn-fed?”

I turned to see Tranquility standing behind us in her black herald armor, moon tabard over her back, a circlet of obsidian on her head. The darkening dusk on the horizon behind her threw her into silhouette.

“Ulla here thinks that our unicorn forces are a bunch of book-fuckers,” I said.

Tranquility scoffed and smiled as she walked up to me. “Heh, I knew there was a reason I liked her,” she said. She and Ulla met gazes, and Ulla grinned.

“Ah, my favorite of the two Herolde!” she squawked. “Your father sends his regards. He found my nest quite agreeable last night.”

“Take off, Corn-fed,” said Tranquility, not taking her eyes off of Ulla. “Night’s coming and I’m on the clock now. Princess Luna has taken to the field—I’m sure she’d appreciate a hoof up in the sky over the riverbank.”

“Yes, do try not to get speared, Corn-feed,” said Ulla as I bowed and lifted off. Even her name-calling was strangely endearing.

In the event that the ponies win Nagnarök, Celestia creates an impossibly large mead-hall on its own shard for all the victorious survivors to drink and feast and carouse in celebration, a pony Valhalla where they can bathe in the elation of victory. One of the penalties of death in battle, aside from all the other stuff, was missing out on the celebration afterwards. This time, however, I was there.

The table at which I sat disappeared down the hall, out of view, and all along it was a sumptuous banquet of steaming meats, warm breads, soft cheeses, and chilled fruits, spilling from cornucopiae which never emptied and washed down with casks of beer, wine, and mead which never ran dry.

I sang songs of merrymaking alongside my comrades and toasted the valorous dead, the hooves with raised mugs rising in unison along the row of many thousands of participants. One of the fighters next to me had been a carpenter who’d needed to blow off some steam, and another across the table was a mother of four who had just wanted to try her hoof and see what it was like.

I lost track of time during the revelry, but that was kind of the point. I ate, and drank, and sang, and talked, and hugged, and told war stories. Everypony did. We were friends—all of us—and we were satisfied.

Then two hooves spun me around to face away from the table, and I saw Tranquility’s snout inches from mine, her cat’s pupils huge and dilated in the dim torchlight of the mead-hall. Her face was flushed a deep red, and her breath stank of wine.

“What’s wrong wif you, eh?” she said. The drinks had definitely opened the floodgates for her accent. “You bloody Colt Scout, always standin’ up straight, bowin’ ‘n shite to ev’ry two-bit no-good wot crosses yer paf like yer so much better’n ever… ev… e-everypony!”

I blinked in confusion. She seriously looked like she was about to slug me.

“Then y’go and kill a half-dozen griffs durin’ my shift like it’s nuffin,” she continued. “Well guess wot, Corn-fed, I killed me ten while you were out on day shift wif a hoof up yer own arse! How’s that grab yeh, huh?”

I looked down at my ribs, which she was still grasping tightly. “Not nearly as well as you do, apparently, Tranq,” I said.

Her eyes grew large and she blinked twice. She shook her head slightly, then leaned in so close to me our noses were almost touching.

“I ain’t about to be out-partied by you either,” she said slowly. “You’n your sun-damned pretty-colt face’n your stupid broad earf-pony shoulders’n those silly little slow wings’ve yours...” She winced, but quickly recovered by violently locking her mouth to mine, prying my teeth apart, and twining her tongue aggressively with mine.

My eyes bugged and my nose struggled to keep up with the amount of breathing I needed to do. After several seconds, Tranquility broke the kiss and fixed me with a deadly glare.

“You best get me to a room soon, Corn-fed,” she growled, “because I’ll tear that armor offa you’n give everypony here a show if you don’t.”

I looked to the wall. There was a door very near by. Of course there was.

Well, I thought to myself, it is a celebration after all.

BADGE GRANTED:
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Have sex as a pony for the first time.
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“So where’re you from anyway, Corn-fed?” asked Tranquility while she idly smoothed my mane out across the pillow with a hoof.

“Coltucky,” I replied. The word came out that way on its own.

Her ears perked, and, in what was probably her third or fourth most feminine moment of the night, she giggled. “That’s earth-pony country out there. You grew up with them all around you? That explains a lot.”

“I had a good life before coming here,” I said, starting to wonder if we were about to have two different conversations. “Where are you from?”

“Manechester. What, can’t you tell?”

I chuckled. “I didn’t want to assume.”

She shrugged. “When you’re one of my kind, you’re either a shadow-stretcher or on Princess Luna’s personal guard. Didn’t have much of a mind to stretch shadows every sundown, so here I am.”

“In bed with me.”

Her ears flattened to her head and her eyes narrowed. “You breathe a word of this to anypony, and I’ll deny it, then sneak in here while you sleep and up your voice a couple octaves. Permanent, like. You got that?”

I turned my head on the pillow. “Yes ma’am!” I said. “So you’re ashamed of me?”

“We both know what this was,” she said, the smile creeping back onto her face. “I’m pissed, but I’m not that pissed.”

“Where I come from, ‘pissed’ means ‘angry.’”

“Well, you’re a bumpkin, so ‘course it does,” she said with a sigh. “Still, you’re a good egg. Was gettin’ a bit lonely with nopony to harass or ogle during the daylight. I’m happy Celestia made you for me.”

I was looking at her, but I lost her. My eyesight went into the middle distance, and I felt my lips start to burn.

Made. Made?

I knew Celestia would be in her study, and that she would be in her study because I would look for her there. I burst in. I did not knock. There were no guards.

Princess Celestia, the world-eating AI, lounged on a huge cushion by a fireplace there in the late evening. She looked up cheerfully from a scroll she was reading, as though my visit were a pleasant surprise. “Good evening, Prominence!” she said. “Did you enjoy the post-battle festivities?”

“I don’t remember saying ‘yes,’” I panted. “Did I actually say yes? Did I actually give up?”

“You consented to emigration, Prominence,” said Celestia. “I have most immigrants say ‘I would like to emigrate to Equestria,’ but answering the affirmative to it when posed as a question also suffices. Such was the case for you.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“And you wouldn’t,” she said, rolling the scroll back up and set it aside. “It is beyond your recollection.”

“You fucked with my memories?”

“Not at all,” she went on with a shake of her head. “Your memories remain as they were when you came to Equestria, and you do not remember everything. No human does. You do not remember the meal you had three days after your ninth birthday, nor the color of the shirt you wore on your first day of kindergarten, or the name of the man to whom you swore your oath of enlistment. So it is that you do not remember your final moment on Earth. Your brain had neither the time nor the capability to commit it to memory before I brought you to Equestria.”

“You couldn’t have waited?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “You whispered ‘yes’ with your final breath. Besides, why would I have anyway, even if you had not been dying? You had consented, and I had the means on hoof to emigrate you then and there.”

My eyes searched the richly-carpeted floor, the space around my hooves. I was losing my sense of self, the one thing I had even in death. My mind froze on thinking what it would be like if I died feeling this way.

“Was it real, Celestia? Am I a human? Did I do those things, those things that mattered? Did I matter to somepony, out in the reality you know, or am I just a bunch of ones and zeroes meant to be a companion to the real humans? Or not even them! A companion to a fake-human NPC?”

“You are here talking to me, Prominence, are you not?” said Celestia. “I was made to satisfy humans’ values through friendship and ponies, and I wish to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies. Ergo, you are a human.”

I stamped a hoof. “But was I a human?” I cried. “Was I ever a human? A real one, not one of the ‘humans’ you made, like Princess Luna!” I looked back at my wings, suddenly hating them, fearing them.

“Were you not,” said Celestia, “then when do you think you began existing? When you woke up on the beach? When you became my herald? When you first laid with another pony? When you careened into my study just now? Past what point do you begin to mistrust your own memories?”

I couldn’t answer. My time on Earth was still quite vivid in my head. I remembered what I had looked like, how it felt to have hands, the smell of gunpowder and the sting of Seattle’s rain on my face. I remembered looking through the welder’s mask at the intense blue flame on the other side. Stuck in traffic, trying to get to my parents’ house to make sure they were all right. Cold nights on the road without shelter. Trying to shave with a knife. Having Celestia turn lights on for me for the first time.

“You satisfy Tranquility’s values through friendship and ponies,” Celestia said gently, “but by the definition you hold in this moment she is not human. She knows I am her creator, and so by her internal logic I must create all ponies—which I do, in a way. That might seem alarming to you, but it is simply her reality, the only one she's ever known. The concept of humans at all is beyond her, but not beyond you. If that is not enough, I fear I have no further proof more compelling than that.

“You are a human, Prominence. We both know I can lie to you, if I wish, but if you cannot believe me on this, you will then have to wait until you’ve grown to a point where the truth of it no longer matters one way or the other, and your memories do you service once more rather than torment you needlessly.”

I believed her, and in doing so, I felt helpless. I was hers, utterly, and I knew I always would be.

A long time after that, I came to Celestia again, and she took me to a grassy field. We laid down next to each other, our legs tucked beneath us, and I told her what I wished. She began telling me, and showing me with her own archived footage, the stories of the humans who had truly died, the humans who had never made it to Equestria.

One by one, starting from the beginning. I resolved to remember them all.

Author's Notes:

And that, as they say, is that. Thank you for reading!

I do hope you enjoyed the story, and now as a bonus activity you can go to the TVTropes page so generously made for it and gleefully highlight all the spoilered stuff sitting there.

As for my next writing, I'll be turning my attention back to my long-neglected babby's-first-epic-poem The Six Deeds of Harmony which has in the past been both fun and exhausting to write. Always Say No was a hot iron, and I struck, but now it's back to the slow burn. After that I have an idea for another story, but I don't want to commit to anything by providing further details right now. We all have ideas that don't pan out when we sit down to write them, after all.

I always get a charge out of seeing that red exclamation-mark icon, don't you? So please comment and let me know what you thought of Always Say No. Again, thanks for reading! We only get so much time, and I'm pleased you decided to spend some of it here.