Lessons of Celestia: 1 and 2 · 5:31am May 18th, 2012
This is a little writing exercise I came up with. It has two purposes: to perfect Celestia's voice, and to work through some esoteric aspects of my head-canon.
I have no intention of formally posting these on the site. One because I think they are pretty dry, and two because they end up revealing the sort of things I always leave as a mystery in my stories. Nevertheless, I thought somebody might be mildly amused by them.
The Lessons of Celestia
As Recorded by Gem Stein
Lesson 1
First, welcome to the palace. I hope you have managed your move well--I’ve seen how difficult that can be for some.
Let us begin with the matter of address. As my chief advisor, I can’t have you held back by formalities. In private, I am “Celestia” and I hope someday I shall be able to call you “Gem”.
In public, however, I am still “Princess” and “Her Royal Highness”, and you are “Minister Stein”. My subjects are rather insistent upon this point, so I shall not oppose them.
Lesson 2
I am not the most-powerful being in the cosmos. There are beings more powerful than me, beings more powerful than them, and so on, higher and higher. I do not know where it ends. I do not know if it even ends. Luckily for us, most of them have no interest in our affairs whatsoever.
I am not a goddess. Goddesses are as old as the universe, are completely unlimited in their powers, and never change. I was born of a father and mother, grew from a filly into a mare, and only then gained the powers that I wield. As far as magic goes, I differ from you in degree, not in kind.
As the most-powerful being in Equestria, I have attracted the attention of many higher powers, the ones one or two orders of magnitude more powerful than myself. Because of their power, I cannot prevent them from spying on me whenever or wherever they wish. This has the effect of constraining what I can tell you, because there are some secrets of mine that I do not wish them to know. There may come a time when I might tell you a story that has nothing whatsoever to do with what we were talking about. Assuming I haven’t taken leave of my senses, I would advise you to pay special attention to these stories, to work out their true meaning.
Over the coming years I will tell you many secrets, because I would not have requested you for this position if I did not trust you utterly. But there is much I cannot tell you. There are the secrets I do not want overheard, as I have said before. There are secrets that could not be told in a thousand years. And finally, there are secrets that would break your spirit utterly if you were to learn them--if you do not absolutely need to know those, than I will not tell you them. Since I ask you to respect my reasons for not telling you everything you wish to know, I will in turn pledge that I will never, for any reason, ever look inside your heart to learn that which you do not wish to tell me. I learned that lesson in the worst possible way--perhaps I will tell you the tale someday.
