//------------------------------// // Valey Believed In You // Story: The Olden World // by Czar_Yoshi //------------------------------// Starlight's entire body felt like cracked porcelain. "Hey!" Fluffy said, her interest suddenly stolen from the fancy bathroom mirror. "You laughed a little! You are having fun after all?" So it hadn't just been in her head. Starlight felt like she had been teetering on a cliff, then suddenly dived off, but snagged a rear hoof on a root a foot below the edge and was dangling, not quite falling but even further from where she had once been. Every instinct screamed at her to claw her way up, get back to safety. Was she chickening out? What was she chickening out of? Something had broken inside her, but was still hanging together by a thread, and she no longer knew if she wanted to save it or wanted it gone. She could barely even breathe. "Starlight?" Fluffy tilted her head, confused. "You're doing that thing where you get lost in thought again." More than anything, Starlight wanted to enjoy her life and be a normal filly again. But was this really what it came to? Was this the source of why she was so unhappy all the time, because she held herself to too high of a standard and was too afraid of doing something wrong? It was her old parents' room, something they weren't even around to own anymore. That she shouldn't be here was a laughable idea. And, in fact, if that had really been wrong, she knew perfectly well she wouldn't have been here at all. Because that wasn't the issue. The issue was Memory Starlight and her naughty little thrill bouncing around and reveling in infiltrating a forbidden sanctuary. Starlight had messed up before, but outright enjoying things she wasn't supposed to? It didn't matter how important the room was, it mattered that she felt like she shouldn't be there and was on the edge of enjoying it precisely because of that. And this was what she would have done, long ago, before Sunburst and everything else had happened. This wasn't her reveling in something because she was mad at the world, or was upset and taking it out. This was just what she would have done, uninhibited and carefree. It was who she was, under all her troubles. It was what she would be if she didn't try, day and night, to be better. "Starlight..." Fluffy waved in her face to get her attention. "You don't look okay..." Starlight's face cracked again. What did she do? She heard herself laugh. She could do it. She knew she could. And she had seen what it took: not caring and letting go, just for a single second. For a single second, that rush her memory self was constantly living in had been real, not a memory. It was within her reach, not a distant star she could do nothing but wish for. And all it took was not caring about the consequences of her actions, even though she had been shown explicitly what those could be. Where was the way forward? How could this be? Did taking risks and being happy and messing around and making mistakes and following her wants and trusting her feelings, be they good or bad, have to go hoof in hoof? They couldn't, but it sounded like something a wise pony could say. Happiness and sadness had to go hoof in hoof... but this wasn't just a question of ordinary sadness! Starlight knew all about being unhappy! This was about the safety of the future of the world, and as much as Starlight's life had been bad to her, as tempting as it felt to lash out at the world, actually trying to do it tore like hooks at her mind. She couldn't let herself do that. Maybe an ordinary filly could make mistakes and get carried away and have it all be okay if they did something they knew was wrong on purpose because they wanted to, but she was far more powerful than that. Her actions had consequences. And if happiness and sadness went hoof in hoof, why didn't she get a little of what she wanted in her life to go along with the bad? It was a dumb mantra, anyway. And that was all there was to it. "Starlight!" Fluffy snapped, unable to get a response. "What's wrong? Even you don't zone out this hard!" Starlight sank to the clean, rose-tile floor, hid her head under her forelegs and squeezed her eyes shut, wishing it could be any way else. But the hard truth, harder than the floor she huddled against, was that she couldn't enjoy her life because she didn't trust herself to enjoy her life because she was too well-acquainted with the consequences of doing what she wanted instead of what was right, because she was fallible and so strong that those consequences would be monumental compared to the ones for most others. "...I'm going to go get your mother," Fluffy said urgently, opening the door and scurrying out. "Stay right there, okay!?" That foalnapping and sojourn in Stanza's dungeon and Glimmer and the Nightmare Modules weren't the real reason everything had started going wrong for her, sapping her determination little by little and cutting off any attempt she could have made to grow past the loss of Sunburst and into a new family and world. It was those gray visions. Like a transplanted sapling that had been watered with salt water, those were what had cost her all of her confidence in herself. Before then, in Ironridge and Riverfall, hadn't she trusted herself, if no one else? That was the whole reason she left Sires Hollow to begin with. Crossing the mountains, looking for a new home when her old one wasn't good enough... it was because she herself was the only pony she trusted. Valey sometimes tried to cheer her up about how she was the one who stood up to Herman, convincing Valey to go back and fight. She never could have done that when he was letting her walk away, if she didn't trust what she was capable of. Would she? Her mind drifted to the first vision, her reward for sacrificing herself saving Ironridge from windigoes. The first of two whole visions that were ruining her life with fear for the future, one where she had seen an ashen, empty plane and heaps of dead batpony shells and an older, injured Valey who knew her full name, panting and victorious against them all. The first thing she had wondered, she remembered, was whether that had been a vision of the inside of Maple's cutie mark. Or if she had really been dead, and it was a glimpse into the afterlife. Or if it was a warning, a helpful hint that could give her the edge in preventing something and saving the world, not ruining it. The flame hadn't told her. It had asked her to forget about it. In fact, Valey in that vision had talked like she believed in her. Like Starlight was still fighting against whatever that world had become, and she had her back. When she thought about it, there was nothing in either of the visions that suggested that world was her fault at all. She hadn't lost faith in herself from seeing the first one, and hadn't remotely even suspected it was her fault. She was confused, sure, and worried, but it sat as a mystery in her mind along with all the others, countless things she had wondered on her adventure like what Yakyakistan was doing and who was motivated to do what in Ironridge and who would help or hurt them in the Empire. She hadn't been told this was her fault and there was nothing she could do until... Until she met Glimmer. The only one who knew everything about her visions. The only one who refused to tell her. The only one who said it was her fault, and there was nothing she needed to do to prevent it except give up and let go and stop trying, resigning herself to her lot in life. The only one who she fully trusted, because she looked exactly like her and seemed to know everything about her, and said she was on her side. Because once upon a time, the one Starlight trusted most had been herself. Starlight Glimmer's horn burst into a violent overglow, a sparking cone of energy arcing high over her head and sending faint plasmatic arcs across her fur, the light crashing against the tile walls in waves like a reflection off the disturbed surface of a lake. Her teeth set themselves in a grimace of fury and betrayal; she had a name to pin this all on and point her horn at and discharge her feelings and end it all. Wasn't she sitting here, contemplating willfully lashing out at the world for giving her such a raw deal? Wasn't that precisely the kind of behavior that could one day lead to her taking too much out on the world, leaving it in the ruin she had foreseen? The inevitable end of holding herself to such a standard, with a mindset she knew wouldn't pay off, be it now or in fifteen years? No, it wasn't! Because in her first vision, Valey had said she believed in her, implying she was still a good pony who was fighting to help the world and she wasn't some villain who needed to be stopped! The world she could create if she snapped would be a whole lot worse, because she would be on the wrong side. And now she had a potential warning about a future she didn't know anything about how to stop at all. Starlight could have destroyed the bathroom. She probably could have destroyed the whole house in anger, if she surged with everything she had bottled up over the last six months. She wanted to destroy Glimmer, the worst thing to ever happen to her beyond even her loss of Sunburst, and she wanted to scream, shattering the air like she could shatter the rest of the world around her. All that pain, wasted. All that worry about what she could do, and she was only dangerous because she was wound up, and that because she didn't trust herself. It was a destructive circle, clear as day. She had to get out, but where was the answer? What was safe anymore? She wanted to fire, to explode, to ignore the headache it would cause and let all of her emotions out all through her horn, all at once. She wanted revenge. She wanted to break something. But slowly, Starlight took a breath, and then another, and little by little the roaring aura around her horn calmed and shrank, until it was nothing more than a candlelight she could use at night to read by. Because she wasn't a monster and she didn't destroy worlds, no matter how much someone tried to convince her that she did. And she wasn't one because she didn't want to be. It might not be perfect, but all she had to do to be a pony who didn't destroy the world was do what she wanted, because that was something she definitely didn't want. She took a final breath, and her horn went out. There wasn't a headache. She hadn't lashed out with her powers. This was her house, and it couldn't be collateral damage from her anger, and she was strong enough to control herself and not hurt things that didn't deserve it. She was still mad at Glimmer, of course, blisteringly so, for every bit of misdirection she had been fed about those stupid visions. But she herself was a good pony who really had been trustworthy all this time. Her life wasn't great, but she didn't have to resort to blaming the world for something merely a pony in it had done. She could do this. She started to cry. Maple arrived not a moment later. "Starlight!?" she asked, huffing from running up the stairs. "Your friend said you weren't alright. What's wrong? Are you overwhelmed here again?" "N-No," Starlight bawled, crying for her lost energy and lost time and lost faith in herself and because it so wasn't fair, and because she was farther back than when she started with a whole new warning that could be about the future or could be anything else to solve, and because she was angry at Glimmer for leading her on and angry at herself for getting lead on and angry that Glimmer had saved her and Valey on occasion too and tried to conflict her feelings and make it hard to know what to believe, even though she was sure she had found the truth now. And the truth was that it would have been okay, if only things like this hadn't happened to her. So what if she was powerful? She could use that power for good. Look at Wallace Whitewing! Or Valey, or... or herself, all throughout her time in the north. Living with that power and trusting herself and having friends she trusted to guide her was exactly how she could live her life. That was how she could do this. That was also more or less what Glimmer had told her to do, living a stable life where she cared for herself and wasn't emotionally on the edge of a breakdown all the time. Which made it all the more unfair that Glimmer had told her in such a way that pushed her closer and closer to that brink, her methods running perfectly counter to her words. She had said the truth, or at least something resembling it. It was part of what made Starlight trust her. And she had said it in a way that made it impossible for Starlight to follow through, and lead to exactly what she said she wanted to avoid. Maple picked her up off the floor, sitting on her haunches and holding her close. "What's wrong?" she asked again. "What can I do, Starlight?" Starlight swallowed heavily. What could anyone do except mourn for what was lost and wasted and get up again the next day, and try again? She couldn't get her time back. Any stability she had possessed wouldn't return easily. But the way it would return, she knew, was over time spent living around ponies who cared about her and were well-rooted themselves, and by doing things little by little that she would succeed at, and by messing up too in ways that wouldn't be the end of the world, and seeing that and learning from them. Because that was what normal ponies did, right? And that was what she wanted to be. "Stay here," Starlight said, knowing that it was the right answer. "With me. In t-this town. I just want to be a normal pony..." Maple put a hoof around her and rubbed her back. Starlight was aware Fluffy was watching, far enough away that she probably thought it was a safe distance to indulge her fascination. She couldn't see or hear her. She just knew. Actually, Valey was probably watching as well. She hoped she wasn't causing more of a scene than that, but it might have been too much to hope for. "Can we have some space, please?" Maple called over her shoulder, cementing Starlight's suspicions. It was alright, though. She couldn't see her friends, and the ponies who were here were the least of her concerns. Someone helpfully closed the door, but Maple wasn't satisfied. She put Starlight on her back, trotting through the bathroom's second door that opened directly into the master bedroom, the one where Starlight's parents had once lived and where she had re-hung the curtains upon first returning home. It had a bed, two bedstands, a vanity and a dresser, along with a chair and a writing table and a few spots on the wall with exposed nail heads for pictures to be hung from, but the closet was open and empty and none of the counters or surfaces held any things, and the bed lacked sheets or blankets and hadn't been made. Maple deposited Starlight there anyway, stepping quickly away to close the bedroom door as well before returning and joining her on the edge of the bed. "What is it?" Maple murmured after a minute, not content to sit there when she didn't know what to do. "Is it this house? Or our friends leaving?" "No," Starlight grunted, scrubbing at her eyes. "It's me." Maple calmingly rubbed her ears, waiting for Starlight to explain at her own pace. Starlight wasn't sure if she would leave it without an answer, but she, at least, wanted to give one. She wanted to be known and seen and understood. "I'm scared of myself," she admitted, voice shaking. "I thought that those visions I have at the Trees of Harmony were warnings of the future, and t-the other me told me it would be my fault and there's nothing I can do to stop them but give up, because otherwise I'd strain myself trying too hard to be perfect, and get mad and do it on purpose. But she was lying, because I remembered that in the first one Valey said she believed in me, which means I wasn't bad! But the other me was the reason I was trying so hard in the first place!" She didn't have any other name to think of Glimmer by, but that filly didn't deserve to be called by her own. That was her name, and she had been afraid of the other half of it for too long. "She wasn't on my side at all! That's not what those visions were, but it is what she was trying to do to me! I can't..." Maple listened to it all. "Oh, Starlight," she whispered. "Oh, Starlight..." "I hate her," Starlight sniffed. "And I don't want to have to worry about this anymore. But now I don't know what to do." She felt flattened, like even though a weight had been lifted, it left her at the bottom of a giant crater without the means to climb out. "What d-do I do...?" "That's a question with a long answer," Maple murmured. "But first, you breathe. It'll be alright. You don't have to worry about the future, and all that's in the past, right? Just sit with me and breathe. It'll be alright..."