Cards of Finality

by SwordTune

Chapter One

Time

A clock would tick on and on and on, endlessly, if there was enough power to keep it running. I have a pocket watch -beautiful piece of work from the Griffon Kingdom ages ago, I wish you could see it- that moves its arms because of the tension in its springs. Other clocks nowadays tick by on batteries, and carry much more power with them than a spring.

I spent time watching them, how they moved with the cadence of time. The touch of the softwood rims on the battery powered clock, the smell of cold brass, the gentle burn as moonlight reflected down my sight, made me wonder at the craft behind making clocks.

A pocket watch maker in the first century of the Two Sisters spent a year creating a watch for both the Princesses. A gift in reverance of their power. In the spring and summer, the Princess of the Sun's watch was made, adorned with gemstone flowers, silver and gold trim, and a complex heart. The heart was a set of gears, ticking and when wound in complete order.

A silver watch, for the Princess of Nights, made in the fall and winter. It seemed like he captured leaves in the moment they fell from the trees and put them onto the edge of the watch face. They danced and flowed, eternally trapped in time, while years ticked by around them. The watches worked for a century until the parts began to wear. But the watch maker was not eternal like his devices.

He created the watches, and with their springs and power, they lived on their own. He needed not touch a single gear. What pride he felt, as a creator of such a masterpiece. Is that what it would be like, to be the Almighty?

Many cultures through Equestria's history have had stories, all different, but sharing the same reverence for the power of creation. Some pointed to the Crystal Heart, other to the Tree of Harmony, and some even to the Princesses themselves. Ponies worshiped these idols -they still do, wouldn't you agree?- and sought many things. Salvation, purpose, guidance.

They ask why there is evil in the world, when we have idols of love and goodness. Chefs do not devour their own meals, artists to not purchase their own paintings, and our watch makers to not tamper with the tick tock tick tock.

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Faith

The three races put faith into the Two Sisters when they rose to power. They did not know what they would be getting, and many of them doubted things would change for the better, but nevertheless they had faith.

Do you think they will bring peace? I once asked. "I do not know," was the usual answer.

When Caller Weaver first heard the Tree of Harmony call to him, he thought himself insane. His whole life he had prayed to nothing, but then he had a whisper. He could pilgrimage, but he did not know where to go. He could tell his friends, but what would be the point? It was just a whisper.

You must begin it.

Finally, after ten days and ten nights of confusion where he heard the voice over and over and repeating the same commands of beginning, Caller Weaver established the first tradition of his faith and pilgrimaged to the top of the highest mountain in the Crystal Empire.

Outside the magic of the city, the cold storm battered him, chilling his skin and bones, and all the while he doubted he was even climbing to anything.

With him in his basket he carried alms he had collected that day, a generous gift with enough hay to last him three days.

Seek out Harmony

First, Caller Weaver fasted for a week while meditating. Sometimes he heard a voice he did not think was the Tree's, other times he'd hear bits of words uttered, an incomplete thought given breath.

You

Here

should find truth?

and, tranquility

After that week, he ate a day's worth of food and looked out over the horizon from the top of the mountain and thought to himself, which he had become an expert in by that point, about how beautiful the snow was when the sunrise shined its first light onto the snow to make the sharp edges of ice and snowflakes sparkle like the night sky.

He repeated this, fasting week after week with a day of relief. Until all the food was gone. And the voices too, had stopped. Why had the words of Harmony left him, he wondered. The first week the commands were clear, the voice in his head as real as the shouting of merchants in the sprawling market.

And by the end of the month, he felt his doubts confirmed. The Tree of Harmony had not spoken to him, he was a lone pony. He wanted a holy life, helping how he could and getting help from those around him.

He had truly believed he would have answers for why he felt the way he did--blindly living to his own doctrine regardless of what he saw. He knew he was a poor stallion, but he always believed he was rich in companions, and rich in faith. He wrote that on that mountain, he believed to be rich in madness.

Voices speaking that others did not hear, hearing words that only gave answers to his questions, questions he had secretly felt he had the answer to. He must have been mad, he thought. He didn't hear the voice of his faith. He only formed a voice that would confirm what he believed.

Caller Weaver, the most influential religious leader in the Crystal Empire's early history, stood atop the mountain and contemplated suicide. He had lost his mind and heard the voices, and it was a matter of time before he descended deeper into his madness. He absolved himself of fear, and accepted it would be easy to step off the zenith.

Then he found his answer. Just as it says in his memoirs, he heard a voice behind him. Young, gentle, and divine. But also familiar.

"What are you doing? Just... come back to the market, the others are still praying." Hammer Heart told him. She had followed him, and found him at his lowest moment.

He writes that later he contemplated why it was her. Hammer Heart cared little for his directionless faith, and there were others who saw him as a sage and certainly would have joined his journey. But when he returned to the market square, he found his answer.

They had an unwavering faith in him, a kind of fanatical faith, and believed with absolute certainty that he would return, enlightened. For Caller Weaver, he was not so sure. Was it an act of a higher power that drew Hammer Heart when he needed, or a coincidence of extreme convenience?

Despite continuing to lead the faithful crystal ponies, he himself was steeped in doubt.

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Trees

We live in a tree.

The last major pandemic ended forty years years before you, and long before you quit this world for the other. A mutation of a common griffon virus transformed an annual nuisance for the feathered felines into a national panic with scars that linger.

A griffon by the name of Nestley visited Manehattan thirty years ago for a business trip. He was intent on getting into the pillow manufacturing market. Without his knowledge, however, his body bred a weapon nature would use to exact pain upon just over one million souls.

It took only five minutes after some random point mutation on a lucky virus to spread. Nestley hailed a taxi, and spoke to the driver on the way to his first meeting. He paid, reluctantly of course, in bits. Bits he had held for some time in his claws. Claws that were inevitably infectious, because anti-bacterial gel does not kill a virus.

It took sixty hours for the bit virus to infiltrate its host. He drove and ate and spoke with no symptoms that day. In an hour he drove dozens of ponies from street to street. By the end of his day forty-seven ponies had successfully carried on the plague. In twelve hours each of those ponies transmitted their virus to their families.

Twenty of them had fillies and colts who went to school. Twenty-nine young ponies needed only half a day to spread the virus to nearly a hundred others, who then returned the virus to their families. Over two hundred infected became one thousand the next day. Little less than a week later symptoms began to occur.

It took less than two weeks to put Manehattan in a panic. By the end of the month two riots had turned Sixth Street into a cracked an broken ruin, all for vaccines and antibiotics. There was no actual treatment, but fear speaks louder than reason.

Quarantine efforts were labelled "too harsh" too late. A complete travel ban was put in place the same day a pony in Fillydelphia coughed at a train station. Sixteen hours before that, some foal, named Pepper Jack or Roquefort or something like that, at a park up in Cloudsdale touched every piece of the playground with mucus covered wings.

The joyful hubris of a foal spread the griffon virus to thirty percent of the Cloudsdale weather workers in thirteen days ; by then Manehattan had been in a state of emergency for five days, with makeshift hospitals starting up in empty schools and on the streets. This was only about six weeks in, give or take.

It would take ages to trace every branch of a tree.

When Cloudsdale Rainworks shut down it was seven weeks in. The first casualty was a pegasus who coughed blood out on the streets until he rolled over and died. Panic rippled from the majestic flying city across every grass and pebble in Equestria. Riots and fighting peaked like never before.

Ponies with shared interests started linking with each other; reporters from half-destroyed newspaper companies, police officers, conspiracy theorists -they all had their own version to tell. Ponies turned on each other.

The poor blamed the rich for withholding vaccines they did not have. The rich feared the infectious masses would encroach on their safety in isolation. Doctors who relocated to Canterlot were labelled cowards, and it stained the trust between physicians and patients during the pandemic.

It took half a year. Many survivors developed a rudimentary immunity, while a working vaccine was finally synthesized by scientists and doctors hoof-picked by Celestia to work safely in the royal palace.

1,200,000 deceased from a virus that got lucky and took the path of griffon, cab driver, parent, filly, school, city, cities, Equestria. Inexperience weather workers left the weather management industry a wreck for the winter season.

Not enough rain, poorly timed snow, and too many clouds to handle became a nightmare for farmers when spring came about and they had to wait a month for the weather ponies to finally control the mess they were dealt.

That left Equestria's market with less produce and smaller crops. The recession was as much a symptom of the virus as much as coughing and dying was.

We live in a tree.

The branches can either bear fruit, or its leaves can contract disease. Don't say there is no choice, that outbreaks are inevitable. I know you better and you won't let it stand. The outbreak is beyond control for there will always be mutation; the pandemic is a choice. Either allow anthracnose to swallow up your tree from leaf to trunk or trim it before the sickness even touches the branch.

What if, all those years ago, Equestria had spent more on its information? What if the public and private sectors worked closely together even before the crisis, and kept regular updates on the vaccine?

What if doctors around Manehattan, and across Equestria, could communicate cases instantaneously, or fast enough, and recognize the first signs of a new disease? Equestria's branches are constantly growing.

This world is more and more connected every day, and you can either let that be a conduit for destruction as the country did forty years ago, or take hold of it and prepare a path to stay protected.

Unity under struggle is harmony.

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Zero

Starswirl the Bearded once studied light. He was a brilliant wizard, and had learned many things even outside the realm of magic. At one point, exactly when doesn't really matter, he began to understand the idea of relativity, using that fact about the natural world to know what effects his magic would have. He once studied light, and, finding that the results confounded him, began to rework his understanding.

For a time he studied science exclusively, developing techniques he used personally that wouldn't be rediscovered and introduced to the scientific community hundreds of years later. He found a tiny particle, a photon he called it, and observed its behavior with math and magic. He once wrote that he learned to create photons as well, using only the smallest amount of magic possible to create the amount of energy possible.

Light speed was the limit, he concluded. The mathematics revealed to him why; any object with mass gains mass -and thus inertia as well- as it approaches light speed, and for any object with mass to reach light speed would require an infinite amount of energy.

He did not revisit his investigations until much later, when the thought returned to him in a dream he could not remember. What would it be like to travel near light speed, he wondered, and returned to his math. He worked hard, but try as he might it seemed the answer eluded him. For a time. He fell asleep one afternoon, and saw visions of the answer before him.

In his diary he wrote what he saw:

"A figure of a stallion, whose body was fluid, able to bend appeared to me in my sleep. I wasn't sure what else was happening in my mind, it was all a blur to me, but in my sleep I solved the answer to the problem. I had the numbers, but until now I did not know what they were for. I can now imagine time and space as a fabric, one which can warp to the whim of gravity."

He went on to solve the mathematics. Time and space was able to bend, and at light speed, that's what they did.

He wrote:

"If I were to place myself upon a boat and sail around the world near the speed of light, lifetimes could pass by without my knowing. But what of the photon? If I could talk to a piece of light, what would its perception of time and space be compared to ours?"

Light wouldn't, he concluded.

That is, it wouldn't have a perception of time and space. Take his example, and imagine the boat. A day on the boat could mean year outside, when you're going slow. When you're faster, you could shorten the time. An hour could be a decade. And when you're even faster, a second could mean you've missed the birth and death of your grandchildren.

Starswirl thought on this, and realized you could measure less time on the boat and still measure more time outside of it. And, in agreement with his math, he realized that at the speed of light, the impossible happens. Zero time on the boat could equal all time outside of it. Zero equals infinity.

And as time and space are linked, the same holds true for space. To a light particle, nothing happens. There is no space to move in, and no time to experience. A photon experiences the beginning of time to the end of time before it can feel the passage of a single second.

Starswirl finally wrote his conclusion, answering what a photon would say to him in a conversation:

"In the morning, if I were to greet a photon that had just arrived from the Sun and say 'What a quick trip, you traveled one astronomical unit in about eight minutes!' the photon would be confused, and reply, 'What do you mean? I thought I traveled no distance in no time.'"

Everything is relative. We know nothing.

Comments

[firesnake47]

Well, then. Talking relativity are we? I thought this was a fanfiction, not a science lesson! In all seriousness, though, great thus far. You're really bending my mind now! Are you a scientist in real life or something?