This story is a sequel to Through the Well of Pirene
Pirene stretched and emerged from her cave, shaking off the heaviness of her long slumber like a raiment. The fields of her home were saturated in sunlight, and her children played and laughed and sang in the light, their green eyes bright. Of them, one trotted forward to nuzzle at her, her mane thickly curled and black. "Hello, Mother."
"Good morning, Aurora. How are things going with Daphne and her friends?"
"I haven't checked the Well in a bit," she admitted, twitching her tail. "Our umpteenth-great granddaughter is probably in trouble, though."
"Let's have a look, then, shall we? It's been far too long."
With that, the two of them settled near the Well, and watched what visions poured from it, the stories, struggles, sorrows, and triumphs of nine and a half worlds that flowed like water, like imagination.
These are those tales.
More Pirene! Colour me excited!
Glad to see this get a proper posting. Hopefully the other blog stories will follow. Keep the the great work!
This is great! It's Christmas in April baby!
Very happy to see your snippets get a proper story to call home. Thank you for providing one.
8122915
Plus some unique ones.
>Pirene Shorts
But she's wearing Pirene pants.
8122923
Wait until tomorrow, too :D
8123578
So, Amelia finally grew up. Took her long enough.
8123594
She went from age eight to "a lot" in the course of a couple days. She grew up pretty fast, all things considered, and will never have that childhood ever again. The Amelia you see here is the Amelia you see at the end of the main story.
It really took her no time at all to grow up, and that's something she'll never, ever get back.
It's great to see you're still writing about this universe, in blog snippets or otherwise. I really did fall in love with this universe you've created, so I'm excited to see what other stories you still have up your sleeve to share with us.
I also find it neat that you're re-using the old cover art from the main story for this one, now.
8124297
It was the only proper choice :D
Glad to see you cleaned this up and published it. :D
8124566
Me too!
Plus, new one and more coming!
I definitely feel like I'm missing a few pieces here. Given the timeframe, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Still, a great way to find one's Legend.
8124669
Yes, I deliberately left pieces dangling. They may get tied up by later stuff, they might not!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Not all better. But, you know. A bit nicer.
8124669 I mean, I lot seems like you can infer it. There's bit unsaid, certainly, but nothing in this I quite feel as odd (Beyond the fact that it seems every alicorn is out to breed as much as possible, if I parsed all that right)
8126899
8124669
Hahaha, not exactly, but Luna and Celestia have stopped holding themselves back as eternal virgins quite as much.
8126966 'Eternal virgins'?
Those poor horses. Now I'm kind of laughing here imagining them as like all great and powerful and yet timid as hell around the bedroom with whoever they end up in lesbians with.
8127155
Hahaha :D
8127164 See?! Now that the idea is planted in your head you can't escape it.
Like you end up with Fluttershy x Celestia and it becomes the one situation where Fluttershy is the more whatever-word-it-is. Experienced, I guess.
8127172
I hope I get to show Fluttershy's daughter Silver Bells, sometime.
She inherited her mother's hypnotism, but not her timidity.
8127179 See?! That just proves my point! Every. Single. Alicorn. Is breeding mad!
8127192
Twilight, Rainbow, Amelia, Morgan, and Pinkie all remain childless for the foreseeable future ^_^
Lessee, alicorns from Pirene who eventually have kids in my notes...
Celestia (Caelia and another). Luna (Asteria). Leit/Marcus (Fire Wheel). Daphne (Asphodel). Fluttershy (Silver Bells). Applejack (a couple). Rarity (Jasper). Naomi (so many!) Delilah/Aaron (William/Hestia).
8127210 Isn't there also Luna's unnamed who gets croaked in this, or did I read that wrong? It seemed like it was.
And I mean Amelia/Morgan not doing it makes sense, as does Rainbow, so really there's only 2 there that fit in the 'Will whelp soon' category and I'd count 'The vast majority went baby crazy' as close enough
oaaahh! I couldn't believe it when I saw this in my message box!
more tales from one of my favorite stories on fimfiction :-)
Not to be flippant, but I feel this. I have zero idea what anything happening or anyone in this piece is supposed to be. Is this a spinoff of Manehattan Nights?
8151427
There's a school for alicorns in Canterlot and it has a door that only alicorns can open.
A mortal filly becomes obsessed with it and her obsession ignites her alicorn spark, admitting her to the school.
It takes place forty years after the original novel, when there are enough alicorns that Celestia needed to set a school up.
~
I admit, I should have posted this one later, because many of the characters and situations here haven't really been introduced yet. I also could have telegraphed the time period better.
It's a sign of how much the setting is embedded into me (and my sister, who helped) that I didn't really see how it would leave others behind at first.
8151427
What I'll probably end up doing is pushing this one back when/if I write more, including the stories that introduce these characters.
8151458
Yeah, it definitely needs more buildup. Adding in more stories ahead of it is definitely a good way to help mitigate that. Until then, I will take this as a cautionary tale about having too many alicorns: kids will start trying to brain themselves if they think it'll turn them into one. And when everypony's an alicorn? No one will be. :V
8151479
Mortality is a curse~
O________O
8151501 Immortality is also a curse...if they're allowed to breed.
8158313
Historically (in Pirene), when everyone was a god, they bred but rarely, and death-from-accident-or-violence kept their numbers down (and if they hadn't, they could have left the Nine Worlds and found more land.) 'Twere mortals that proliferated, once the curse stripped the gods' children of their divinity.
Shorter than I anticipated and it feels forced... but the attitide shown here is exactly what I was hoping to have seen in the main story. Genuine feeling, sorrow, and openness about her numerous crimes, THIS is what I was asking for. I am going to go back and read the main story again. I do not remember her becoming an Alicorn at all. Perhaps I read a really early version where it was not included.
8159224
She always became an alicorn as a result of absorbing Celestia's memories and experience, meaning she feels more comfortable as a sort-of copy of Celestia than she does as her original body. She was a demigoddess before that as a result of contact with the Bridle.
Anymore tales from the Well coming down the pipe?
8358660
One on the horizon, potentially.
8127210 If you don't mind me asking but I never heard about Delilah, Aaron, William, and Hestia before. Have I not read a part of your stories or did I forget something?
8555712
Delilah and Aaron are Daphne's parents, William is her new youngest brother, and Hestia is William after a little change.
These things are meant to be absorbed via osmosis, however - you shouldn't likely remember them.
8556421
Thank you
Okay, I definitely get what's going on here now. Not sure who Phoebe is, though.
8665178
Headmistress of the Alicorn School.
I had more stories planned for her, but those will probably never see the light of day now.
A curse on Pirene, Ananke guards her domain jealously, trespass is always met with misery. If they had simply hidden the bridle, to keep and hold in trust until the rightful bearer emerged, matters would not have gone so badly astray. But no, mortals always have to meddle, and as a result, an entire human lineage had to fight a war with the madness in their blood.
Faugh, never was there such a conduit for disaster as an oracle, and never such a pox on mankind as prophecy.
9148772
A curse on... Pirene? But she's dead.
Humanity's god created the Bridle, in any case.
9148882
Huh, seems rather active for a dead being, perhaps I'm confused. In any case, I'm fairly certain that whoever created the cursed thing, 'Twas she and the Ring goblins that tried to force fate down a certain path. And that is the seed from which all of the troubles grew from, and what gave The Morgwyn it's opportunity. "The end justifies the means" excuses nothing.
9148931
The reason your being overly flowery bothers me is not so much that you're being overdramatic, it's that you're projecting pretty heavily, to the point that it distorts the narrative to force it through that lens.
First of all, Pirene didn't have anything to do with it except in creating a demigod daughter. She never interacted with the Prophecy as an agent. Her death is more of a passing from the mortal earth to a higher plane (literally - she's higher on the tree and cannot physically leave. Her essence has changed. Creating Aurora was relevant to the Prophecy in so much as her line and her soul would become its subject. Pirene becomes involved as it becomes inevitable who will take up the mantle.
There is an argument to be made that the Prophecy made things worse, but in very specific ways.
Consider:
The Prophecy didn't create Aquarius.
There was always going to be one, just as Luna and Celestia together were Pisces. Whoever was Aquarius would be blessed and cursed with the powers of that position. By instituting the Prophecy they successfully guided someone who would use it well - Daphne - when it could have been one of many others.
The Bridle cannot be destroyed. It's dubious as to whether or not Amelia fully contained it, something that might last as long as she's still alive, and for all anyone knows it's floating around in Chaos somewhere. One might argue that finding a way to use its power - even for a cause as noble as uniting the Compact of Harmony with the Arcana in the hands of a benevolent goddess - was flying too close to the sun. Amelia and Daphne would agree with you, but even they will admit that the problem wasn't the power so much as investing it into a single person.
Ultimately, the Bridle was a corrupting thing, a creation of the Adversary who shattered the Age of Gods for his selfish ends in an attempt to elevate humanity as the ultimate race with Dominion over all others. Using it was probably the most foolish part of the Prophecy, where it should have been contained long ago. It caused a spoiler - Amelia, who also possessed the Green Soul - to step in and steal Daphne's destiny like the little Lucifer she is.
Yet, at the same time, it also led to a new era. Amelia embedded a law in the cosmos itself that no one person should ever wiele omnipotent power, and in so doing may have saved it from a far greater threat down the line - when the Adversary returns with all his angels, and the new gods are hard-pressed.
If not for the Prophecy, would the Aquarius who wasn't Daphne be able to stand up to him and usher in a new age defined by peace and harmony?
If the Prophecy had worked as planned, would a benevolent goddess Daphne have been too kind to fight and use her power to protect the world from him?
Won't he be surprised when he arrives and finds that he can't concentrate power to the same degree he did when he seized the Tower of Babel and used its vast power to enhance his own? He's still a true god, and his angels number many, but he'll not be able to snap his fingers and obliterate them, and with the power of Creation distributed among many, no one hero's death can stop them from bringing the fight to his door. In order to win, they'll need to trust each other and make allies from all Nine Worlds, maybe even the Titans, when they realize that by making the chains too tight they caused magic and wonder to flow from the world and by hording them caused mortality in the first place.
Perhaps, Ro, the Prophecy's attempt and failure is the salvation of the world as we know it. Maybe it will lead to a golden era of justice, harmony, prosperity, and love greater than any that came before, one made resilient by having no concentration of power and mutual respect for all races and kinds.
Maybe Amelia is the unintended savior of us all.
9149039
Mea culpa. I've gone and done it again. And after we've already had this discussion. My poor memory has made a fool of me I'm afraid. Again, Mea culpa.
Ah, I'm old, and set in my ways. 'Tis hard to change speech patterns, especially when you keep forgetting your reasons for doing so in the first place. I suppose I've been getting lazy, assuming that one story can be predicted from the patterns of a dozen similar ones. That is, in hindsight, shockingly presumptuous, and rather insulting to your creativity as a writer. In this light my earlier comments are, frankly, embarrassing. For a third, and God grant, final time, mea culpa.