This story is a sequel to The Fusion
Starlight Glimmer was abducted by her future self and returned with the knowledge of things to come. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine. In fact, if Starlight can’t change the course of events there won’t be any future. And that’s not the hardest part. She has to explain this to Twilight Sparkle and convince her to help.
Written for A Thousand Words III Contest.
Featured June 28-30, 2024.
It may be a bit of a stretch to categorize this as horror for the contest, but given my other entries it was that or wait until next year. And with it being part of a mini-series, waiting wouldn't work.
Thanks to Airy Words and Nines for proofreading, and PopMediaVagabond for editing.
Chapters (1)
So, there's probably a question to be asked about the impact on Starlight's identity/personality by having these memories of alternate futures and apocalypses repeatedly inserted in her. To what extent is she still Starlight, age 20-something, versus Starlight age 1000 due to her future self's memories, versus Starlight age 1000 if we add together all the previous 17-odd timelines she's lived through and now inherited the memories of? For her sake I hope she doesn't remember every bit of the next several centuries in too much detail, or else she could find herself getting very bored and very detached from reliving the same events for the dozenth time.
In any case, as I was wondering about in the previous story, and as Twilight called out here, there's another question about why Equestria is encountering so many world-ending (or at least civilization-as-we-know-it ending) in such a short time span, after having over a thousand years of relative peace? Does not bode well if it's taken 17 or so iterations to get to another 1000 years without their nation collapsing. Makes you think that someone or something is trying to force a particular outcome, and that things may eventually hit a point where it decides to stop being subtle.
At the end of the day Starlight and company have little choice, besides just laying down and accepting death, but this whole situation feels very precarious the more iterations they have to go through (what if Starlight has an accident and dies before being able to time travel in one iteration? What if the number of disasters they have to prevent start become too much to manage, or preventing them have conflicting requirements?). Maybe it is all just bad luck, but at some point they may have to start looking into deeper causes here.
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Perhaps The Fates have simply decided it's time, but Starlight, being Starlight, isn't going to give up without a fight.
And yes, if there's an event that prevents Starlight from initiating another loop, then The Fates win.
She’s groundhog millennia-ing the long way ‘round. Fascinating!
As to the other’s question, a thousand years is enough for dozens of apocalyi. Just look at how many Twilight and friends stopped in just ten years.