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// Beauty of Terrifying Proportions (out-of-date. Reinstated because the amount of views vanished) 
// Story: Magic's Birth 
// by The Psychopath 
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Twilight tapped a crystal table in her royal library impatiently. A lot of her books were strewn about the area. They had been placed into neat piles, but these had collapsed under their own mass. The mare took a book from one of the shelves, quickly skimmed through it, then tossed it over her shoulder, subconsciously closing it and floating it harmlessly onto another pile of books that shook dangerously. A loud scream of frustration escaped Twilight's throat, and she dropped herself onto a table.

"Everything alright in here, Twilight?" Spike asked whilst peering from behind one of the doors.

He coughed and waved a hand in front of him, chasing away the dust that floated back towards the ceiling, seemingly to escape the angry limb.

The alicorn didn't remove her face from the surface of the table. "Hmmm hm fmmh hmm, spmmm," she mumbled.

Spike rolled his eyes. "What? I don't speak mumble mumble," he said.

Twilight forced her head up and glared at Spike. "I can't find it, Spike," she said.

The dragon started to pick up some of the books left around in bizarrely neat piles. He thought he'd be used to Twilight's treatment of books, even when just dropping them on the floor, and yet here he was. "Find what?" he asked impassively.

"The source of magic and life in Equestria!" she bellowed. "Or even the whole world!" She passed her hooves through her mane angrily, roughing them up into fluffy and bent clumps. "I keep finding different theories about it, but they all contradict each other!" She pulled a book from another pile and bonked Spike on the head by accident. She chuckled sheepishly whilst being glared at. "Sorry, Spike. I'm just so annoyed! This book by Grass Mango states that 'Magic has always come from the land. From our planet. It permeated the world during its infancy and gave it life'."

The little dragon narrowed his eyes. "That...doesn't explain the source of magic."

"Of course not! It just implies it was always there!" Twilight dropped the book on a tower of them and grabbed a red-covered one nearest to her from another tower of literature. "This one by Cranberry Jam implies that life came to be on the planet, and our souls interacted with it, creating primitive forms of magic that weren't understood by our ancestors." The mare took another book after throwing the first one over her shoulder. This book's page edges had been laced with gold trimmings. "Or this one by the renowned wizard Truffle Parfum." She cleared her throat and took on a scholarly expression and 'educated' reading voice that made her assistant laugh. "Magic has always been around. It is a natural product of this world. It was merely unrefined at first until it had finally mellowed and infused all life on the planet. This is why we have such a variety of different races and--Bla!"

Spike dropped his first pile of literature onto the ground and wiped his hands clean of dust and grime. "That sounds a lot like what the others are saying."

Twilight pointed to her assistant, startling him. "Exactly! Not one mentioned where the magic came from, just that it always was," she hushed at the end. 

"Twilight, you're stressing out over something weird again."

"Am I?!" the mare yelled at the top of her lungs. 

She had zoomed towards Spike to shout that right into his face. It took a moment to free himself from his stupor. A banner hanging on one of the walls fell down heavily onto the pile, and he cursed in his mind. "Look, if you really want an answer that badly, you could go to Princess Luna or Princess Celestia. They've lived way longer than us," he suggested while walking to the fallen banner. "Plus, their library has a bunch of books and parchments older than them. Maybe you'll find at least one idea about the source of magic?"

"And life," Twilight added.

Spike groaned and shook his head. "And life."

The alicorn gave him a great big hug. "Thanks a lot, Spike. You always know how to calm me down."

"Might need to get you a stress ball...the size of a house," he suggested.

Twilight laughed mockingly. "Funny. I'm going to Canterlot right now. Can you clean all this up? If there's anything left I'll help out."

Twilight had already vanished before Spike could add anything. He crossed his arms and frowned. "With your magic you could have just fixed all this," he grumbled.

Preferring to make use of her wings, the mare flew over to Canterlot Castle. While she had been reinforced by the alicorn magic flowing through her, her body itself hadn't followed. Twilight landed in front of the castle entrance, panting heavily and leaning against a short wall of white bricks. Today, there didn't seem to be any potential audiences. She wasn't really sure why, but she could ponder the possible reasons. At least it left the path clear. The mare just needed to avoid the gardeners picking weeds out from between the cobblestones of the pathway.

Twilight walked along the red carpet running from the two steps outside the entrance to the throne room further in. The mare passed immense white doors intricately carved with motifs of the sun and moon. She was blinded by the setting orange sun coming from the massive windows standing high above the thrones of the two alicorn sisters. Guards lined the white stone walls, always alert, but they bowed to Twilight upon seeing her. She smiled nervously. She still wasn't used to that. 

She reached the throne room whose doors had been left open to the public. Opposite the entrance, far, far away sat a throne upon a multi-level podium draped in red carpet. Twilight looked up to see the stained-glass windows just behind it letting the fading sunlight wash over the seat and its occupant. She felt a murmur in her heart when she saw the windows: All artistic retellings of the accomplishments she and her friends had to their names. Reimprisoning Discord, stopping the changelings, freeing the Crystal Kingdom from Sombra's influence.

"Twilight!" Celestia cheered. "It's good to see you. What brings you to Canterlot?"

The lavender alicorn was torn from her reverie by her former teacher. "Hello, Princess. I just wanted to know if I could gain access to the oldest notes in your personal library."

Celestia chuckled and raised a brow. "Why?" she asked. The white alicorn started to show some signs of concern.

"I can't find anypony who talks about the source of magic in the world, or even the source of life," Twilight explained. She kept an eager smile on her face.

"I..." Celestia started. The atmosphere became tense, and the white alicorn stood from her throne and walked to Twilight. "Guards," she started. "I will be leaving Canterlot with Princess Twilight for a moment. If my sister wakes up before I'm back, tell her I'm at the 'metal cave'. Am I understood?" she asked.

The guards raised a foreleg and, in perfect synchronicity, shouted, "Yes, Princess!"

Twilight flinched away from the display. "Wow. They're...terrifyingly in sync," the alicorn mumbled. "Where are we going?" she asked.

"The source of magic," Celestia answered.

"Wait, you actually know ab--Ah!"

Twilight was warped to a pitch-black area and tumbled along the ground. When she regained her senses, she panicked. "Princess? Where are you? I can't see anything!"

A light illuminated the cave, coming from the tip of Celestia's horn. She looked at Twilight, her brows furrowed, her mouth pursed, and her head shaking from side to side. The lavender alicorn realized her mistake and followed suit, laughing at herself. Twilight started to take in her surroundings: This cave didn't seem to have anything special to it. The walls were an assortment of minerals, creating stripes and dots of different browns and blacks along their surfaces. Stalactites and stalagmites were oddly absent, however, although the tiny wildlife of insects, arachnids, and some reptiles were still scurrying about the darkness, terrified of the light illuminating their dark home.

"The source of magic is in here?" Twilight asked.

"No," Celestia said. 

The lavender alicorn was somewhat taken aback by the aggressive tone Celestia had given her. She mulled over it silently until they reached a dead end and the two placed orbs of light along the round walls and lumpy floor and ceiling. The two sat silently for a good while, with Twilight too afraid to make eye contact with Celestia.

"Princess, why are we--"

"You're a princess now, and I trust you enough to keep what I'm about to tell you a secret from everyone in the entirety of this world. I've known you long enough that I know we don't need to go through all the formalities of asking, agreeing, and all the friendly customs. Even Cadance does not know of this," Celestia said. "In fact, with everything you have gone through, I believe you're more than qualified to learn of this."

"The...source of magic?" Twilight wondered.

The sun princess heaved a sigh and leaned her back against the wall. She closed her eyes before talking. "Magic wasn't always around, Twilight. It was created, in a sense. A byproduct that somehow changed the world."

"A byproduct of what?" Twilight asked.

"Energy. Fuel. Both?" Celestia shook her head. "We don't know. We didn't know the intricacies of the world at the time. We were barely even aware of ourselves."

Twilight took a few steps back. "What are you talking about, Princess? You're making it sound like you were babies at the time. Like--"

"We weren't babies, Twilight. My sister and I were something completely new. Something not technically alive." She sighed and leaned forward. Upon reopening her eyes, Twilight saw that they had changed color. They were almost completely black, save a glowing yellow ring outlining what would be her iris, and a solid yellow light serving as a pupil.

"What's happening? Your eyes..." Twilight asked. Her voice was starting to crack, and yet she didn't know why. 

"Magic came from those who came before. Who ruled the planet long before ponies even came to be." She scratched the back of her neck. "While I can't attest to the source of their lives, I can attest that all life that exists now is because of 'magic'. The byproduct of their energy. The waste," she said.

"Wh..." Twilight paced around. "That's absurd. You're saying that magic is just trash?"

Celestia scoffed. "Trash." She shook her head. "Not at all. It's something else."

Twilight frowned. "But you called it waste," she said.

The sun princess shrugged. "I did, but that's the type of item it is. However, beyond our expectations, it infested the world and self-replicated until it became the way it is: a form of malleable energy that permeates nearly every being in the world." She kicked a pebble that had fallen from the ceiling. "Magic, as you know it, is still relatively young."

Twilight had to perform several vocal takes before she managed to find what she wanted to say. "Okay? Does that mean the world is young o--You said 'as I know it'," she realized. "What does that mean?"

Celestia giggled. "Twilight, how old do you think my sister and I are?"

"Well, a little over a thousand years old," Twilight quickly replied.

Celestia shrugged. "I suppose that could work. However, we're much older than that."

Twilight narrowed her eyes. "A few thousand?"

"More."

"Many thousand?"

"More."

"Wh-How much?!" the mare shouted. She was beginning to grow extremely tired, and were voice was going hoarse from the stress. It was all exasperating to the young pony. "I'm sorry to be speaking like this, but this is painfully aggravating, Princess!" Twilight complained.

Celestia looked to the side momentarily, then stared at her former student with apathy and wide eyes. "I'm several million years old."

Twilight stared silently at her former teacher. "What."

"That's right. I'm not exactly sure on how old, but we are indeed in that range." She stood up and walked around the cave, dragging a hoof along the walls. "And this is where we woke up."

"I...I don't understand," Twilight stammered. "What? How?"

Celestia sat back down before resuming. "In the world we lived in, there were towers of metal and light that reached the skies, Twilight. The skies, and further beyond!" The stone walls past Celestia started to display warped images of the princess' speech. Twilight felt something clench in her chest as she watched the light focus on the wall and Celestia's strange eyes glowing brighter as her face grew darker and more terrifying. "Machines flew through the sky, quiet and clean, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The people who lived back then, who inadvertently created magic, were impossibly advanced compared to Equestria now."

"Are you doing that?" Twilight asked. She could hear strange noises, like pegasi roaring through the skies, but more intense, as she saw flickering sparks dance across the cave walls to cross the blurry towers. She had never heard or seen anything like it. 

The white alicorn tilted her head. "Doing what?" Celestia asked.

She seemed truly confused to Twilight, so the mare told her old mentor to ignore her question.

"Well, to resume where I started, these people had knowledge that Equestria right now cannot even dream of. They had built various aids and helpers across the decades, each more complex and advanced than its predecessor." Twilight saw bipedal figures with empty, glowing eyes appearing behind Celestia. They were slowly fading in, using the white alicorn as the centerpiece to surround. Them staring at Twilight made her even more fearful of Celestia. She started to shake despite herself. "They used the energy I mentioned earlier, but not all of them had that. Not all of these were created equal, same as with their makers. Black and Blue were the colors of their energy sources, and the Black tainted the land around it."

"Did that also create magic?" Twilight wondered.

Celestia shook her head. "I'm afraid not. It simply burnt away into clouds of black dangerous for the makers."

"But then why not just use the 'blue' you mentioned? Was it just rare?" Twilight wondered.

Celestia, once again, shook her head. "I don't know. I wasn't interested in that at the time. When my sister found me the world was already nearing its climax."

Twilight was taken aback. "Cl-climax? You mean it--"

"Yes. The creations eventually started taking new shapes. Becoming fantasy creations. Amalgamations of creativity and fantasy. They, too, started to change with the world. Glitches. Consciousness. Awareness. Understanding. Self-awareness," Celestia continued.

"The creations became sapient," Twilight realized.

"But not all at once. They were gradually changed. The Blue somehow caused it with the new machines, or so the makers thought. Then those that functioned on the Black became this way as well." Celestia sighed. "I became friends with a few of them, from both sides. Relationships were tense at first because of the energy, but we all became fast friends in the end."

"I imagine they're..." Twilight trailed off quietly after she realized what she was about to say.

The sun princess chuckled at her former student's self-chastising. "It's alright, Twilight. They are indeed dead. My sister and I should have been as well, but I am unsure as to why we didn't die either." She pondered the thought for a moment, likely one of the same that has crossed her mind many many times in the past. "I helped to repair them, you see. Each of them, so it was a little difficult to accept."

"I see." Twilight watched as the lights turned back to normal, and a new voice came from behind. "What?"

"Sister," the voice said. "Back to this place? We haven't been here in many millennia." Luna stepped next to Twilight, bowing her head briefly out of politeness. "Twilight," she said courteously.

"Yes, well, I figured that somepony in her position and with such a scholarly passion would be the perfect fit to catalog what we have lived through."

Luna raised a brow. "And what we are?"

"What, you can't possibly expect me to believe what you just said!" Twilight shouted. Celestia looked at Twilight with wide eyes and sported a grimace while Luna gazed at her scornfully. "A world where you created a bunch of gigantic machines and towers and power, and this brought magic?" Twilight stomped her hoof onto the floor. "I'm not a foal anymore, Princesses! If that world ever existed, then we would have found traces of it, even after a million years!"

"But Twilight, I--" Celestia was stopped by her sister who had put a hoof to her shoulder.

"Your student has always prized logic above all things when she could not comprehend events like this. It is best we show her, no?" Luna suggested.

Celestia nodded. "Be not afraid, Twilight."

The two sisters' bodies cracked, revealing lines of bright light running along their skin. The light intensified, nearly fully blinding Twilight. In the vague shade she could still see, the princesses' skin was detaching itself from their bodies. They were growing thinner and slowly stood upright. She couldn't make out much else until the light had faded.

The lavender alicorn had gone pale when she saw what the rulers of ponykind looked like this whole time. A thousand years, maybe even more, and they never knew. They were thin beings made of metal. Plates of this overlapped each other, creating thin sheets of armor on a very thin body. Their mane and tail had fused together into one wavy substance that grew and fluttered from the top of their heads and dragged low along their backs. Luna's eyes imitated Celestia's, save for the deep blue light. Along what would've been their skin, the lines of light remained, gently glowing and fading as time went on. They floated above the ground, their hind hooves having become pointier. 

"This is our true form, Twilight," Celestia said. Her voice had a droning to it, like the treble had been boosted somehow. 

"How are you saying that with no mouth?" Twilight asked in a stupor.

Their faces were smooth and elongated as though they still had their muzzles, they were featureless. No nostrils. No fur. No mouths. What they were seemed to be a complete mystery. Whirring and metallic grinding came from Luna as she stretched her limbs and joints.

"Aaaaaah!" she sighed in relief. "It is good to be in our old bodies again." A ring of light glowed from the base of her foreleg's hoof. The ring took on curves and bends, going towards and wrapping around the princess' neck as she rotated it. 

"We aren't the makers, Twilight," Celestia added. "We are the ones they made. Machines to help them in their daily lives. I hope you can understand that you were never the first ones here, but we were certainly the second."

Twilight was speechless. The princesses were machines of unimaginable technological prowess! But how?!

"To be honest, we still don't know what happened, but we no longer function on the 'Blue'," Luna said sorrowfully. 

"We were buried after an incident occurred. An explosion? Implosion? A war? I simply recall a flash of light, then nothing." Celestia shook her head and 'sat' in the air. "We might have been knocked out during an incident and somehow never found. We don't really know the truth. It's still a mystery, but we know that we now function on magic."

"And the makers are gone forever in that flash of light." The lunar princess tapped the walls of the cave with her ring hand. "Perhaps we were just lucky to wake up here. Maybe it was the spirits of our friends that saved us."

Twilight stared at the ground. Shocked. "Can machines even have spirits?"

The two sisters exploded in laughter, annoying Twilight.

"Pardon us, Twilight, but we haven't heard that philosophical debate in millennia," Celestia apologized. "I suppose you want to know why we became what we are now?"

"Actually, I was--" Twilight couldn't finish her sentence that Celestia had already started to recount her oldest memories. The two princesses were clearly quite ecstatic and jovial about being able to show their true forms and talk about their past.

"When we awoke and came out of this cave, we saw a world devoid of all the machinery and lights of our time. It was just vast meadows of color, with a bunch of creatures not in our databases," Celestia recounted passionately. "We looked around and eventually found the ponies. After some time observing them, we approached them, eager to make contact with this new species."

"They...saw us as great spirits or something," Luna said. "We came to the conclusion that it would be best to let them believe that and eventually change the thoughts of their children. We weren't 'great spirits' or 'gods', although we do possess a significant amount of magic within us."

Celestia giggled like a filly who just received ice cream. "We learned that 'magic' had permeated everything and created all of this. We wanted to protect it. Learn from it. Have it learn from us." Rings came from Celestia's own hooves, and she clapped them together. "Symbiotic relationships."

Twilight waved her hooves. "This is...too much to take in. Too many things happening all at once."

The princesses agreed. Luna stepped forward. "We can stop for now and resume at a future date if you--"

Twilight shook her head. "No. I want to know about all of this. I want to know about this 'Past World' you talked about. I want to know if there's a way to bring them back or learn more about them that you didn't. They might have some things still hidden somewhere that you never found." She thought a moment and smiled. "I want to know about you and your friends."

The two princesses 'sniffed' and looked at each other. "If I could cry...To recall the life we had with friends who have long since died. Of a world that we can never return to. The potential futures of all those who lived back then," Celestia lamented.

"I would rather we remember those good moments," Luna said reluctantly. "Even if they are painful." She pretended to clear a throat she didn't have. "So, this whole adventure began when I started becoming self-aware..."