• Published 12th Apr 2015
  • 1,665 Views, 34 Comments

Friends Forever - Ryvaken



Everypony knows alicorns live forever. Everypony knows they have to say goodbye to everypony else. Everypony is wrong.

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Harmony

One by one, six in all, they answered life with who they were.

One by one, they resolved to face the challenge and experience the wonder.

One by one they are Magic, Honesty, Generosity, Kindness, Laughter, and Loyalty.

One by one they are knowledge, stability, dignity, hope, joy, and duty.

Together they are Harmony.

Together, they are friends.

Eternity doesn't stand a chance.

Author's Note:

I made this little story basically to voice my headcanon. It's relevant to a number of story ideas I've had and discarded, and others I'm actually writing. Even so, there was never a good place in those plots to directly address the matter. There's not much of a story here, but I wanted to get it down anyway.

Comments ( 19 )

wonderful story. THough I don't see why Dash couldn't retire after a normal length career

5856836 There are a bunch of reasons. The simplest is that she can't understand the idea of quitting.

More complex? Well, when would she retire? When she got bored of it? When she had a worthy successor? After five years? When she invented some new stunt? That's an impossible choice.

More complex still? What would she do after retiring? Join a weather team again? And what about her successor? Given (in Dash's mind, if nowhere else) that she was more awesome than anypony, then her successor would never be able to say that she earned her rank. Dash would have just given it to her.

We can keep going. Say she's not a Wonderbolt and never will be. She can still develop stunts, be a daredevil. She'll just be a solo act, an independent. Maybe get a gig with the Wonderbolts every few years as a guest flier. And that's something she'd never need to give up, without hurting anypony. Not a perfect solution, but it's something she could explore. She has time.

This story came from a lot of what-if-then-why thinking.

So much nicer than the normal -- Oh Noes, Eternity... This one was far more realistic in my eyes, including Dash not wanting to set the impossible bar.

That was touching.

5910374 Rainbow's was the one I had most clear in my head. Fluttershy was the hardest, she came too close to Applejack's and I wanted each one to be different.

This drabble feeds into two or three stories sitting around incomplete that I am working on. Part of the reason I kept this so vague is to not run into problems with them. I've never actually tried writing something short before, over the past few years everything I've tried my hand at writing has turned into some epic thing. I wanted to experiment with something short and complete.

I like this. Hopefully I can look forward to more from you in the future.

Have a fav, an upvote and a follow, you earned them.

5910374 Well, he has written longer before. I just hope he doesn't keep making the one world squelch the visibility of the other world's heroes talents. Seriously, if the original writer had the adults be useless, and the child heroes are as competent as they are, the children really ought to shine. I've mostly only that against his making the adults be more competent than usual, though. Differences are interesting, and he's made somewhat good on his word in that story.

5911868 This is just the kind of stuff I've come to expect from you, and I semi-regularly re-read your Nano-HP crosses. Umm, you know about the Unicorn at Hogwarts? Maaan... I want to write an omake like that where Nanoha does similarly to Twilight when the troll shows up...

6158612 Most of those "useless adults" are teachers. I am a teacher. I find the stereotype mildly offensive. Beyond that, a crossover of any kind needs to shave down the number of characters in order to prevent character overload.

I've toyed with the ideas of such crosses but...meh. They all deviate to fairly predictable directions. Also MLP already runs near capacity for characters so overload is inevitable unless you cross with something you can slash to a bare minimum of main characters or split the story into separate threads.

6159020 Well, in any case, it's helpful to only have a few mains that you focus on. But a battle between Nanoha and the troll would have still rocked.

Have you ever read The Dragon King's Temple? it's an ATLA cross with SG1. Zuko, Toph, Janet, and Sam were the main mains for that. Both sets of guys got equal opportunity awesome, mostly, and everyone was necessary for a good ending. The recurring character, Heather Dyne, also got her moments. It really works for being epic, but not as big a time eater as something like Fall of the Sith. It also kept the focus on the leads, with a few deviations. It was just right with it's focus divisions. Now I need to go re-read that. After Vulpine...

Also, I kinda feel what you're saying. My dad was a teacher, and I've wanted to be a teacher. That said.... I hope Gil Graham is as under equipped to deal with a basilisk as he was in the first installation. Maybe the whole thing will be ended early, and you'll provide our young heroes another chance to be awesome. *Shrugs.*

I was sort of on the fence for AJ, Rarity and Fluttershy's chapters (mainly Rarity) but Pinkie and Dashie's were very good indeed.
Another for the Favourites shelf.

...over the past few years everything I've tried my hand at writing has turned into some epic thing.

I understand this problem very well, I'm outlining something at the moment and backstory and subplots just seem to breed.

Also, some of the comments seem to suggest other stories by you exist but I only find two listed ?

6367338 Not here. Not for pony.

That username... could you be the one who was working on the Lyrical Witch series? If so, I'm glad to see you're at least still writing!

Regardless, this piece was enjoyable. It really punches above is weight class in terms of saying a lot with without getting too wordy.

6518233 My original ideas on Lyrical Witch (current length 80,000 words) were shallower than what I started with for this thing. Welcome to irony.

6518967 I don't find that so surprising. Ideas don't need much provocation to take on lives of their own, get jobs, find another idea to settle down with, and have a litany of little ones to raise. I admit I hold out hope you'll come back to it some day.

Wonderful ending. It "told" instead of "showing", but that was PERFECT. "Show don't tell" is only a general rule, and like most of the rules of good writing is made to be broken from time to time (or perhaps even more often than that).

5857297
Ah, and here I thought she would be staying off of the performance circuit entirely, this works better... I actually have a somewhat related fic of my own: Try-Out. (Caution: Has Celestia being a chessmaster and nopony objecting to that.) Such things are also touched on in The Powers of Harmony, although there she does still want to be a Wonderbolt, she just has to be careful about how she goes about it (excellent story-writing, even if I can't approve of some of the (sexual?) morals portrayed).


6367338
Thus the term "Plot Bunny" because they breed like rabbits... although that term may more refer to ideas for DIFFERENT stories? I'm not sure...

6953138 I never really considered this drabble a proper "story." It's a collection of ideas and musings put into a narrative format. I was so fed up with "oh noes, we're living forever and all around us is death!" that I wanted to explore the idea in an optimistic way. Each pony tackles what the idea of "I will not end" means to those around them. Friends, family, customers, dependents, everypony, coworkers.

If you enjoyed it, if it made you think, and by your comments I feel confident you did to both of those, then I call it a success.

But because I like thinking too, I'm going to keep talking. Also, I've had a stressful day. DON'T JUDGE ME! :twilightangry2: (I need a smarty pants doll and/or stroking tail emote)

6952710 I knew from the start that I wanted each chapter to cover distinctly different themes, but I wanted to tie them together. The line at that end was that tie. A few got kinda forced as a result.
6952730 The idea that each new generation of an expanding family can get new land hits a LOT of problems. A family farm, passed down through the generations, is much more sustainable. AJ never passing on breaks that old, reliable, certain model, and the pressure is put on her family, not herself. Unless AJ does something like disown herself from the Apples, but I didn't address that because I can't see AJ even HAVING that thought. She has plenty of options, sure, but right now she's a little pony looking at a long road that ain't goin' where it were yesterday or th' day before. The choice she made to walk that road is the choice to not get overwhelmed by the magnitude of what's going on...which is why there wasn't a mass suicide coming up.
6953103 ...yes. That is exactly what is in that room. Nothing else. At all. Um, ignore the man behind the curtain?
6953109 Fluttershy was the hardest to write. My first draft was just Applejack redux. I reworked it to focus on the idea of fleeting lives of others, something anyone that deals with short lived animals has to deal with. Fluttershy's worked with too many animals for too long to not have put some in a grave. I used her story to redirect the idea of an eternity of graves to an eternity of births.
6953111 Pinkie wrote herself. I'm not sure which interpretation of Pinkie did it. It might have been all of them.
6953116 I loved the episode with Wind Rider; it touched on the same idea I did. When you set a record, you set a goal for someone else. Something for them to stretch for, and grow in the process. Wind Rider didn't see that, he only saw his fame fading. Rainbow, as I've written her, is worried about setting a goal so unreachable that it crushes instead of entices. That instead of inspiring, she defeats. And she can't accept that, no matter how big a thrill it would give her to set those records and bask in the glory. Rainbow's piece was the first one I thought of, and was a big part of my inspiration to write the others, but it's also the least hopeful. That, I'm not satisfied with. Rainbow HAS options, she can fulfill her dreams in other ways, she can be the awesomest mare in the air, but because of the format I chose where each pony's perspective is assumed by the narrator, I can't let Rainbow's journey of self-discovery unfold.

It occasionally niggles at me to turn it into a proper story on its own, I just don't have a good plot to attach to it.

6953904
I have to assume Wind Rider is from an episode I have been to depressed to get around to watching by the time it hit Netflix or whatever? Something in the second half of season 5 then.

Anyway I actually have a plot idea on the drawing board that involves the rest of the Mane Six finding their destinies as Immortals, although none in the same way as Twilight. The title will probablky be something like In Which Twilight Does Not Outlive Her Friends.
Perhaps we could collaborate and fuse our ideas together? No promises, but I think it is worth looking into. PM me if interested?

One by one, six in all, they answered life with who they were.

One by one, they resolved to face the challenge and experience the wonder.

One by one they are Magic, Honesty, Generosity, Kindness, Laughter, and Loyalty.

One by one they are knowledge, stability, dignity, hope, joy, and duty.

Together they are Harmony.

Together, they are friends.

Eternity doesn't stand a chance.

As Friendship never ends.

This is a good one. As short as it is, it doesn't feel rushed or leave you wanting more.
This masterpiece earns a full 10 on the :yay:itude meter, and.....

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Long life to the six, and may wonders never cease.

A magnificent counter to the immortality blues. Glad I finally read it.

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