//------------------------------//
// 1.1 
// Story: The Goddess Within 
// by Bicyclette 
//------------------------------//

When the Goddess spoke to her, Celestia learned she was going to die. It was not the only knowledge she gained with the Goddess’s gift. 

She learned that she was not the original Celestia, who had died more than a thousand years ago, right after concluding her bargain with the Goddess. The greatest achievement of her life. 

She learned her true date of birth. Eleven years ago, seconds after a young filly named Rainbow Dash completed her first Sonic Rainboom.

She did not learn her true purpose. Yes, the Goddess had whispered it to her along with the other parts of Her gift, but Celestia had already known it. She always had.

But she did learn why that purpose had come to an end. Why today was the day. Why this moment was the moment.

She was still holding the scroll from her faithful student in her aura. A desperate warning about the prophesied imminent return of Nightmare Moon. 

Her faithful student. Inside her own mind, she had always meant “daughter”.

“Please,” she begged. If the conversation had been taking place in the physical world, she would have been weeping. “I will write anything you want me to. Just let me see her face one more time. Hear her voice.“

The reply came as it always did. Not in words, but in complex and arcane thoughts that her finite mind twisted and rotated into comprehension. 


but that is not exactly what you would have written. I need the version of you that will.


Celestia knew this to be true. At the very least, she would not have dismissed something that had brought her daughter such joy as merely reading “dusty old books”.

But what would she have written now, with the Goddess’s gift? She would have warned her. Begged her to run as far away as she could from Canterlot, from Equestria, from this reality. To live out the rest of her life and die free from the reach of the Goddess and whatever unknowable plans She had in store.

But none of those things were possible.

“I’ve lived a happy life, haven’t I?”, she asked, rhetorically.

She knew that she had. Eleven years of watching a precocious filly grow into a capable young mare. Eleven years of motherhood. Eleven years of joy.

The Goddess confirmed it anyway. 


yes. even I cannot foresee a future version of you that will be as happy as you are now before they are replaced. but there is a chance that there will be moments of equivalent happiness.


Celestia supposed that that should have frightened her, or at the very least disappointed her, knowing that her future selves would have such a definite ceiling on their happiness. But it did not.

She looked back on her lifetime of raising Twilight. Of bedtime stories and ice cream evenings. Of consoling her when she skinned a knee or had a spat with her little friends, Of watching her questions about the world grow ever more complex and curious. Of just listening to her excitedly ramble on and on about some fact she had found in whatever dusty old book she was reading that week. How could she be disappointed? How could she ever ask for more? That she had even a chance of such moments of happiness ahead of her was a blessing.

Her last thought was reliving a memory from the first year of her life, when the young filly stood up to draw on her flank, because the sun motif of her cutie mark “needed a world to shine down on”.

Celestia died, happy.