It’s an Earthpony legend: In ancient times, ponies would find themselves in combat with forces they needed desperately to overcome but couldn’t. Something just…astronomically important to them. Beating a warlord bent on taking their homes or families. Or revenge on a foe that had caused great harm and was sure to cause more if they were not stopped. Or some sort of familial obligation or honor or quest for revenge. The motivation wasn’t important, just the personal need to kill the other creature, and a genuine willingness to give up one’s own life to do it, but that being an impossibility because the target side, for whatever reason, is unbeatable. Too strong or too far away or possessive of too much protection, something that just makes them impossible to approach in a fair fight to the death.
The story says, if the need is genuine, if the willingness to trade ones’ life for the target is real, if the only barrier between this goal and execution is that the target itself is in a different level of power you would never be able to touch normally, the Cheshire may seek you out and steal your target away through time. He brings the target to the halls of Naglfar and steers the great ship back in time to an earlier point in your life, before this need existed. Before you were so dedicated to its destruction. The ship anchors offshore, visible only to your past self, and you have one week to board it. Fail to,and the target is returned through time to the point in the future it was taken from, presumably to continue to wreak whatever havoc it was causing that made you so determined to kill it to begin with. Untouchable.
But if you -do- board, you will face the target in the hold-crypt and the Cheshire will diminish them to the point that they are your physical equal. He will make it “a fair fight.” And you, the past you, the you who has no idea who they are looking at or what this person has done, will have the opportunity to fight them one on one, until only one is standing. Kill them, and they never return to the future. They are removed from time at the exact point the Cheshire took them and interred in Naglfar and your life continues. You leave the ship, and, presumably, the future world is spared the tyranny of whatever it was you killed. They still exist, somewhere, in the time of your past. They will still do all the things that made you want to destroy them to begin with. But at the point you were willing to give up everything to put them in the ground you will, in effect, do exactly that.
But it was the failure that always got me. You’d think that if you failed, you died too. Well it’s true, you can have that outcome. But you don’t -need- to. You can elect to yield, and beg the Cheshire to return you to your own time. And you get sent back, knowing that your one chance to end..whatever that was..is gone. You live. It lives. And at some point in the future you will meet, you will want to trade everything to eliminate them, and nothing will come to help you. Your chance is gone.
Which, when I was a young huffy mare of days gone by, always struck me as a pretty silly drawback. I mean that’s what most people in impossible situations are stuck with -anyway-. At least this person was given the chance. It’s actually a rather generous offer.
But there is a sad, twisted manipulation to it all, on reflection. If you lose, and you are sent back, there is a consuming dread in your life that was absent before. Who -was- that. What could they have possibly done? What sort of person are you, to have wanted that outcome so badly that a magical being from equestria-knows-where pulled you through time to give you a shot at killing? What if that person, whoever it was, goes on to destroy everything you’ve ever loved, and you just have to…wait…and watch it happen? Is it inevitable? Can you find them first? Can you change your path, increase your power, follow rumors and guesses and signs and portents and destroy who knows what to track that foe down and end them -before- they become whatever it was you have no hope of beating? What if your unwillingness to actually fight to the death brings about the deaths of dozens, or hundreds of others? How many tragic events will you witness in your lifetime wondering “was that it? Was that the one I had the chance to stop?” before the shame of it all destroys you? Do you become the monster to fight it?
Would death have been better?
Cirocco and I grew up with troubling firelight stories.
I love life. I celebrate life. I have faced creatures out to kill me numerous times and never wished death on any of them. Defeat, certainly. Maybe even debilitation. But Azl sits in a prison cell when I know from a literal view into his mind that he would have eagerly ripped me apart. Malachite’s mother left me in the snow for over a month, and her child is like a sister to me. Moon took over one of my best friends and tried to take over Equestria with him. She’s up there right now, fine, so far as I know. Forgiven. By both of us, no less.
I didn’t think myself capable of it.
I have a week, as of today. A week, to figure out what has gone wrong, and why the ship with black sails sits on my horizon.
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