//------------------------------// // Unchain Utopia [Scrapped] [Unfinished] // Story: Missing Pages & Scrawled Footnotes // by Ice Star //------------------------------// When Starlight Glimmer had entranced ponies with the idea that they only had chains to lose, Double Diamond hadn’t known she would be right. As with all of the times that Starlight Glimmer was right, Double Diamond eventually wished she had never been. Starlight Glimmer had only ever been right in the worst ways possible. The chains she spoke of were not imprisonment, but the tethers that united him with his soul — and once that had been severed, the rest of him went too.  She tried crooning to him more than the others, with lies thick upon her tongue. Starlight Glimmer had whispered a radicalism that was unheard of in the goddess-ruled kingdom of Equestria — precisely because said ideals were illegal. What Starlight gave them was equality, in all the worst ways, all at the cost of themselves. Double Diamond had lost years of his life at Starlight’s doing, her glorification of labor and unity leaving nothing that ever innovated himself. Her anti-monarchy and blasphemies against a world with living gods had made it traumatic to re-enter a world with one. Her robbing of his magic made thrusting him back into a world teeming with magic frightening — almost as frightening as the scars a magic-less existence had wracked him with, if the doctor’s visits, therapy, and health issues he and the others now had to endure meant anything. Starlight Glimmer screeched for a world without self and to live without magic in a universe that could not be without magic any more than it could be without atoms. She demanded ponies bow to one another without question instead of to the divine, as though that were an appropriate social order.  Starlight Glimmer stalked Double Diamond’s nightmares, all the point he had them while awake. She was a witch without magic, a dark goddess without godhood, and a monster with fangs nopony could see. And he was going to have to live the rest of his life with her hoofprints in his head. But... Party Favor had known her too. Party Favor was willing to walk every step of the road to recovery with Double Diamond, and for that, Double Diamond could only hope that one day they would be able to walk down an aisle together, forever.  …