Let me tell you a bit about what happened during those millions of years. Let’s start at the beginning, from where we left off.
Starlight lived, and then died.
More time passed. Then the last creature to ever have met Starlight or any of her friends died.
More time passed. Then the last creature who could read Ponish died, and with them the last creature who could have read the last copies of the longest-surviving document about the lives and exploits of Starlight and her friends, though said copies had lost the hoof-drawn pictures or the golden alicorn motif on the front cover of the original book a long time ago. That was all theoretical, anyway. Starlight’s name had died long before that point when said copies were lost in a botched archive transfer done by a civilization that itself had lived and then died.
More time passed. Then the ponies all died out. But not just them. So did the zebras and the griffons and the cats and the dragons and the hippogriffs and the donkeys and the goats and the yaks and the changelings and the dragonequui and all of the sentient species who inhabited the planet in the time period we are familiar with now. Not all at the same time, and not because of some dramatic event like an antimagic bomb exchange or the resurrection of a long-dead deity, but rather because all things die eventually, whether it be relationships or individuals or families or civilizations or entire species or, one day, life itself. Entropy finds a way.
More time passed, now over a planet completely devoid of thought and dreams. Climate cycles turned. Tectonic plates shifted. Creatures lived and grew and reproduced and died and competed and mutated and speciated and hybridized and went extinct and survived and evolved.
Then, it finally happened. Conscious life awoke on the planet once more. But unlike the first time, it was a long and clumsy process driven by the accidents of natural selection, rather than any teleological process. A certain species, not too well-adapted to the environment they found themselves in, managed to survive due to the development of tool use and complex social structures. It became advantageous for their minds to be able to simulate the future actions of the other minds in their social groups, and this iterated until there was an I to distinguish from the not-I.
The species’ development of oral language came very quickly afterward. Unusually quickly, in fact, for while the language center of the species’ brain had been atrophied away for millions of years by then due to lack of use, it was far easier to resurrect it through atavism than build it from scratch.
They have a strange evolutionary history, don’t they? The members of the species thought so as well, after they developed the empirical method, the theory of evolution, and the discipline of paleontology. Seeing how easy it was to trace the evolutionary lineage of so many of their contemporaries down through the fossil record, they tried it with their own, and were stopped cold at a point indistinguishable in the geologic timescale from the time period of now. This has led to a sort of creationism being very popular in their species, even within the ranks of their most ardent materialists. While the rest of the species on the planet could be traced back all the way down to the very first microorganisms and then the soup of chemicals they sprang from, their species was special. The only sapient life on the planet for millions of years, destined for greatness and purpose by some creator God, the details of which there was absolutely no agreement on.
The strict materialists mumble something about how the fossils of the transitional species that must exist haven’t been found because they lacked bones to fossilize or were few in number and isolated to a geological location and stratum not yet explored. Their explanations for the inconvenient fact that molecular phylogenetics implies that the genetic distances between them and the other animal species on the planet are so great that any most recent common ancestor would date back before the existence of plant life are more… speculative.
Now, you might wonder what species they did evolve from, but I could not tell you. It turns out that the creationists were right, but not in the way they would have liked. Some time from now, but no time at all in the geologic timescale, Discord created their evolutionary ancestors as a prank, because He thought it would be “ironic”. But both the Chaos God and the species the joke was originally on have been long gone by this point in the story.
Speaking of the story. We are focusing on one member of this species in particular. This creature’s species has a sexual dimorphism far more severe than ponies do. So she would be very upset if we ever called her by anything other than the female pronoun. But hey, at least our language has the option of gendered pronouns. She’ll just have to get over the fact that it doesn’t have obligate gender markers as well, though she probably wouldn’t approve.
(Of course, not just any obligate gender marker system would do. Female for K-selectors, abstract concepts, and thinking entities otherwise without gender. Male for r-selectors, inanimate objects, and non-thinking entities otherwise without gender. Naturally. How else would it be?)
So anyway, she. Similar enough to us to be able to talk about eyes and sight and ears and hearing, since those abilities are so useful they evolved in her species as well, independently of how they did in ours. So did her equivalent of a voicebox, though again, independently, which means that attempting to transcribe the sounds that make up her name in an alphabet meant to represent the sounds made by a pony voicebox would be very silly.
So let’s just call her Grasping Hand, and let’s call the one next to her Moving Finger, since that is what we would get if we translated the meanings of their names literally into our tongue. Their mindset is similar enough to ours that we could say that they are “adults” with “jobs” and “apartments” and the idea you get wouldn’t be too far off from how they see it. We could even describe their relationship with each other: “friends” and “coworkers”. At the archives of a “natural history museum”, specifically, though that one translates a little less cleanly. “Budget cuts”, however, translates more perfectly than any of the other terms I’ve put in quotes here so far.
“Really, Graspy?” sighed Moving Finger, though instead of exhaling air like us she expressed the emotion by snapping her third and fourth fingers repeatedly. “You’ve been staring at that thing all week!” She had dreaded seeing the now all-too-familiar image of two pony fossils as found in their original configuration, side by side.
“Yeah…” Grasping Hand agreed, not taking her eyes off the screen. “But not all week…”
“Are you thinking of changing specialties?” Moving Finger asked rhetorically, knowing it takes more than a week of staring at pony fossils to make one an equinologist.
“Oh, no. I like my dragons.” The dracologist still didn’t turn to face her friend. “Hey, did you know our species might have been contemporaries after all? Recent paper with new evidence that the permineralization rate of dragon bones varied more greatly than previously thought due to their original material makeup.”
Moving Finger didn’t want to bring up their perennial argument about how everyone who wasn’t a dracologist had already accepted that explanation of the Draconic Paradox long ago, due to the indirect evidence all pointing towards the same thing. No, it was her friend’s sudden obsession with her species that she wanted to get to the bottom of.
“Look, I just…” Moving Finger sighed again. “At first you were really into this whole ‘interdisciplinary’ thing and I really liked talking to you so much about my ponies, but ever since you saw this in the archives… It’s like you’re less interested in the cool science and more in just this one thing in particular? I mean, I love ponies but I don’t think I’ve ever studied any single fossil this hard. I mean, maybe ‘study’ is the wrong word for you, but—”
“Yeah, it’s the wrong word.” Grasping Hand admitted. “I’m just looking at it. I just… I can’t describe it. It’s just this feeling I get. Like they might have known each other. Something about that.”
“Well, yeah, we sometimes do get pony fossils that are entangled with one another in a way that might indicate they died together…” Moving Finger said. “But the geometry here doesn’t show that. They could have been contemporaries, they could have died millennia apart from each other. They’re just next to each other, is all.”
“Yeah, but…” Grasping Hand sighed. “The one on the right. It almost looks like she’s reaching out towards the one on the left.”
“The unicorna?” Moving Finger corrected, cringing at the unscientific tone of ‘the one on the right’. The horn core jutting out from the center of its skull was a perfect specimen. “I mean, I guess. But again, the outstretched foreleg doesn’t even break the plane of the body of the terra. Completely consistent with the terra and the unicorna just dying separately and their bodies ending up next to each other.”
The terra, of course, was distinguished from the unicorna by its lack of horn core. It was distinguished from the pegasa by its lack of a third pair of spindly limbs used to, according to competing theories, provide an ornamental decoration to attract mates or a way to feel the ground as it walked.
“I mean… they didn’t have to die at the same time to have known each other. Like… like…” Grasping Hand sounded nervous, dreading admitting her real thoughts. “Like, what if they were pair-bonded? The terra died first, and the unicorna made sure to die next to the terra’s body, or be buried there. Or—”
Moving Finger could not help but burst out into laughter, though her species’ version of laughter was spontaneously and uncontrollably clapping their hands.
“Sorry, I— Wow. That…” The equinologist struggled to form the words. “I’m sorry. Okay, first of all, that’s a hell of a strong pair-bond! Secondly, as an expert, there are just so many reasons that doesn’t make sense that I…”
“Honestly, I’d like to hear them.” Grasping Hand reassured, hoping to be convinced.
“Okay, first,” Moving Finger began, rubbing her hands in a way that meant excitement. “There’s this misconception non-equinologists tend to have that since the pony species’ anatomies are so similar, that they are actually subspecies and can interbreed with each other. But if that were true, well, out of the sheer number of unicorna, terra, and pegasa fossils that we have, we would have found at least one that was a hybrid of some sort. And that’s assuming said hybrids were infertile, which is the weak form of the hypothesis. In the strong form, we wouldn’t have distinct subspecies but rather a continuum, considering just how equally distributed both geographically and numerically the three varieties are. But we haven’t found a single hybrid. That implies a genetic distance great enough to prevent interbreeding, making them distinct species. And all this!”
Moving Finger waved her hands to indicate the room they were in, or maybe the entire museum, or maybe the city or civilization that the museum was located in general.
“Culture. There’s distance enough within our own blessed species to make friendship and understanding difficult. Between members of different species, with the difference in brain functions that would imply? It might make even communication impossible! An actual friendship, like the one we share? Unlikely. And pair-bonding! Hah!“
“But there’s evidence.” Grasping Hand said. “Entangled fossils, like you said. Between members of different pony species. That indicate they lived together, or at least died together. And we have no idea how their psychology worked. Even if they couldn’t interbreed, there could have been cultural convergent evolution, since their societies clearly interacted with each other. Or, maybe they could interbreed but by the time they were living in proximity to each other they developed harsh societal rules against it, and the exceptions were too few in number for one to get fossilized and discovered.”
Moving Finger shrugged, which she did by turning two of her hands outward and forming a “thumbs-up” with both. She had to admit that they weren’t bad points. “I mean, sure, who knows? It really is impossible to tell at the distance of millions of years, when all we have are their bones! If it weren’t for the glass and ceramics and the population density we would have no way of knowing they had a technological civilization at all…“
“Yes, exactly!” Grasping Hand insisted. “We just don’t know. Maybe pair-bonding happened, too?”
“Well, yes, but, uh…” Moving Finger was uncomfortable. “Being a low-dimorphism species, ponies had a different definition of that than we do. They pair-bonded with their broodmales. I mean, can you imagine? Holding hands, cuddling, even having sex with something you could have a conversation with? That would be crazy!”
“Yeah, crazy…” Grasping Hand agreed unenthusiastically.
“Sorry.” Moving Finger realized her faux pas. “Like, I know we’re scientists so we should be objective and not assign moral or personal judgment in our analysis of other species’ behavior. But as far as we can tell, it worked the same way it does for their non-sapient mammalian descendants of today. Pair bonding and reproduction between the male and the female. And look.“ Moving Finger indicated the pelvises. “Both female. How would that even work?”
“The terra’s is at the lower end of the female range,” Grasping Hand um-actuallied, “and the species is low-dimorphism enough for the trait distribution curves of the two sexes to intersect.”
“Haha, wow!” exclaimed Moving Finger, genuinely impressed. “Maybe you should change specialties. But there are other markers.” She indicated them in turn. “Femur proportions. Muzzle curvature. Height. Some well within female range, some on the ambiguous end, but all within range.”
Grasping Hand shrugged. “I mean, I agree they’re both female. And I know all that about pony pair-bonding, you’re the one who’s been teaching me this stuff all week! I’m not some—”
“Some yokel who pretends pony females pair-bonded with other pony females instead of confronting the rich diversity of animal behavior in nature?” Moving Finger smirked. “Okay, sure. Maybe pair-bonding like ours happened as well even though that’s how their species’ reproduction is supposed to work. But let’s move beyond that. Both logic and what we know about low-dimorphism species would indicate pair-bonding generally happened between ponies of a similar age. And we can approximate age at death by tooth wear. Look at the terra.“
She indicated the fossil on the left.
“Relatively little wear. All teeth intact. Died in the prime of life. And look at the unicorna.”
She indicated the fossil on the right.
“Much more wear, a lot missing entirely. This one was old when she died.”
“Or she ate rocks or something?” Grasping Hand shrugged. “Or they were a May-December pair-bond. More likely if pair-bonding weren’t so strictly tied to reproduction and parenting. Or they died at separate times and made sure to be buried next to each other, like I said.”
“Okay, first of all, we have no indication that ponies ate rocks!” Moving Finger was exasperated. “That doesn’t even make any sense! If their teeth were hard enough for that, they wouldn’t need to get fossilized because they’d outlast the sediment around them!”
“That one was a joke…” Grasping Hand said flatly.
“Oh, yeah, of course. Sorry. It’s really hard to tell with you sometimes.” Moving Finger sighed. “I’m regretting ever starting this conversation. Because yes, any of those things could be true. We have no way of knowing, that’s the point. Maybe one of them ate rocks. Maybe one of them loved rocks. Maybe one of them had a rock as a pet! Maybe one of them was a time-traveling wizard!“
“Hey, rock as a pet!” Grasping Hand recognized. “That was my idea for the basalt that you shot down the last time we talked about this!“
“Yes, I picked that specifically because it was the most ridiculous one!” Moving Finger frowned, which she did by bending down all of her hands at once. “I agree, that chunk of magnesium-rich basalt is very out of place in the sedimentary stratum, and its position between the two fossils would suggest that it might be part of a pony cultural artifact, but we have no idea what the other parts of it looked like at the time. It’s very unlikely that ponies just carried chunks of basalt around by itself. It’s a very common type of rock. Maybe it was a counterweight for some machine, or one part of a decoration, or something.”
“Or a pet! Or something important, anyway.” Grasping Hand frowned. “Or maybe it meant nothing at all to them, and it’s just there by coincidence. Just like how these could just be two fossils next to each other, nothing more.“ She sighed. “You’re worried about me, aren’t you?”
“Yeah…” Moving Finger sighed. “Like I said, you’ve been looking at this thing a lot. It doesn’t seem healthy.”
“Yeah, I know…” Grasping Hand trailed off. “Like I said, I can’t explain it. I just get this feeling. But you’re right, it probably is unhealthy.”
“Want to talk about it?” Moving Finger asked, trying to sound extra understanding.
“No.” Grasping Hand said. “I can’t even talk about it or explain it to myself. Maybe it’s the romance of it? This fossil and hundreds of others, their voices reaching out to us from millions of years in the past, to be extinguished forever due to the short-sighted budget cuts of a very stupid civilization.”
“Destructive scanning is not extinguishing their voices forever!” Moving Finger had had this argument too many times to count. “If anything, it’s amplifying them, since now anyone will be able to look at the fossils in all of their detail at any time they want. That it frees up so much in maintenance and storage costs is a bonus.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Grasping Hand sighed. She was also tired of this argument. “I know! But, I don’t know. It’s irrational. I just feel this connection, somehow. Even though I’ve never even seen the actual fossils. And if I don’t ask you to break the rules and let me look at them in person soon, I’ll never get to.”
Moving Finger winced, which she did by squeezing two of her hands into a fist real tight for a second. “Actually, the scanning schedule got moved up last week. They’ve already been digitized. Four days ago.”
“What?!” Grasping Hand’s voice was full of betrayal.
“Yeah, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you for so long…” Moving Finger sounded very worried. “I’m sorry.”
“But I—” But what was Grasping Hand going to say? That her friend should have held up the process and risked her job just so she could feed her sudden and inexplicable obsession with these two long-dead ponies? If anything, this was a good thing, ripping off the baby finger all at once. All the necessary pain done and over in one moment, so that the new finger of emotional maturity and not being obsessed with ponies all of a sudden can grow in its place, or something…. This was a bad analogy.
“But look! I, uh… I got you something!” Moving Finger interrupted her thoughts, and turned around to grab a large and heavy-looking bag from behind her, audibly struggling to talk while lifting it. “I was really, really not supposed to do this, and maybe it will even be bad for you in the end to indulge you like this, but…“
She presented the object inside to Grasping Hand, who had to use all of her hands to hold it due to its size and weight. It was the chunk of magnesium-rich basalt! Her gaze switched back and forth between her screen and the object in her hands, as if to confirm.
“I… I don’t know what to say…” Grasping Hand’s voice was full of childlike wonder.
“A ‘thank you’ would be nice! But, uh…” Moving Finger looked at her friend worriedly. “I guess I can tell you’re thankful just from how you look right now.”
Completely entranced, is how Grasping Hand looked. The dracologist continued to stare at the rock in her hands, not saying a word.
“Hey, don’t you start talking to that thing now!” Moving Finger warned jokingly. At least, she herself hoped it was jokingly.
Grasping Hand took a second too long to respond. “Oh, yeah, of course! Don’t worry. I’m not crazy or anything.”
Moving Finger wasn’t so sure. She continued to watch Grasping Hand stare at the rock for a few more moments before speaking again.
“Well, uh, I have to get going, actually. There’s a rebuttal I need to write before the end of the day. Another crank got published by this pop-science mag that doesn’t know any better.”
“Another alicorna hoax?” Grasping Hand actually turned to look at her this time.
“Yeah, but at least this one managed to get the parts from the same stratum this time! So I might actually have to look at the damn thing for more than a second.”
“Hey, now who’s the one with the weird obsession?” Grasping Hand laughed. “It’s one article for a ‘fun’ magazine. Nobody’s going to actually be convinced that there was a fourth pony species that happened to have the anatomical properties of the other three. Like, how does that even make sense from an evolutionary perspective?”
Moving Finger would at this point normally go on a rant about how lacking the general public’s knowledge of evolutionary theory was and how any erosion in the integrity of scientific publications, even the less serious ones, could lead to untold troubles for their civilization down the line, but she was instead just glad to see her friend back to her old self. She smiled, waved goodbye, and went on her way.
Grasping Hand stared at the rock for a few more minutes, then turned to look at her screen again. But she found that all of a sudden, that feeling she used to get was no longer there. Now it was just two pony fossils, standing next to each other, nothing more.
(They were, of course, lying down. But Grasping Hand’s language, due to her species’ anatomy, makes no distinction between the verbs for standing and lying down, and the associations of the verb that is used would cause it to map better to our verb of “standing”. I hope you forgive this bit of latitude in translation.)
Grasping Hand took the rock back to her apartment. It was hard to find a place for such an awkwardly-sized thing, especially since she didn’t want it to draw the attention of any guest who might ask her too many questions about what she was keeping this large chunk of otherwise uninteresting rock around for, or worse, where it came from. But she felt it was important.
She would go back to look at the fossil occasionally, through the published digitized scanned copy that she could explore in every microscopic and molecular detail. But somehow seeing more of the detail made it even less magical. Or maybe that wasn’t so surprising. In any case, it soon made her stop looking at or even thinking about the fossil entirely.
Eventually, she also died, and what she had seen would die with her. Sure, the digital image of the fossil would occasionally catch the eye of some bored archivist or graduate student flicking through the catalog, but none would ever see what Grasping Hand had seen. Then the last saved copy of the image itself was lost in a botched archive transfer done by a future iteration of the museum dealing with even steeper budget cuts, and nobody would ever even have the chance to see it, ever again.
That point is where our story ends, temporally. Let’s rewind a bit. It’s not far.
That day when she learned the fossil had already been destructively scanned for days was not, in fact, the very last time she felt that feeling she had gotten.
After she had stopped thinking about the fossil so much, she still kept the rock that Moving Finger had given her because it was a symbol of their friendship; a secret of a shared misdeed. But eventually they stopped being coworkers. Then they didn’t really have much of a reason to hang out so much, so while they still considered each other good friends, they really didn’t see each other very often. But they did manage to, once in a while, when one of them was reminded of the other’s existence.
The last time they met, like all the other times, they reminisced about their days at the museum together, two decades past by that point. Like all the other times, they talked about that time Moving Finger stole that chunk of magnesium-rich basalt for Grasping Hand. Like all the other times, Moving Finger laughed with delight that Grasping Hand had kept that old thing, even after going through multiple jobs, living in multiple cities, making and ending two pair-bonds, raising four daughters, and giving birth to an unimportant number of sons.
Neither of them ever told that story to anyone else. Not because it was some deep, dark secret, but because it really wouldn’t be interesting. You just had to be there.
Thus, neither of them knew that it was the last time that story would ever be said out loud. That they would never see each other again. Not because of some dramatic event like a falling out at that last meeting, or one of them suddenly dying, but rather just because some meeting has to be the last one.
But even after that day, Grasping Hand still kept the rock. And neither on that day nor any other day had Grasping Hand ever told anybody why. They wouldn’t understand because it was ridiculous. She couldn’t tell them that when she saw the rock, she somehow knew something to be true.
Let me explain.
“Love” is a very difficult word to translate into her species’ language, since there is no one word to unify the three types of bond thought of as inviolably separate.
The first is born from the cold logic of kin selection, and even a relative romantic (by her species’ standards) like Grasping Hand could admit that the intensity of that feeling decayed in herself as the target went from daughter to sister to niece to grand-niece. But still, as a thinking species, it expands to account for adopted relatives, close bonds formed in childhood, sisters-in-arms during battle, and members of religious orders attempting to replicate those conditions. Outside of those bonds, it is considered unusually self-sacrificing and even disturbed to run into a burning building to save another.
The second is born from game theory, and runs in a continuum from well-liked acquaintances to friends to pair-bonds. Pair-bonds usually live with each other, talk to each other the most, support each other emotionally and financially, watch movies together, and read each other’s fanfiction. But fanfiction tastes change naturally over time, and if one day the pair-bond realize their commonalities are no longer strong enough, it dissolves the way it had begun: with a handshake and a move, seamlessly scaling back to that of good friendship.
The third is born from the exigencies of reproduction. Though communication between the sexes is not possible, many swear that the calming hormones released by the caresses and cuddles and the pleasure of the reproductive act itself constitutes a “language“ of its own. Of course, those who answer “broodmale” in the age-old terrible icebreaker, “who would you run out of a burning apartment with first, your pair-bond or your broodmale?”, are, though not quite shunned by society, still looked at a little funny.
Grasping Hand knew, intellectually, that the ponies not only had all three types of bond separately, but also are conjectured to have a bond that incorporated features of them all, and charged with all the meaning and poetry that any sapient being would load into a concept so important.
What Grasping Hand saw in those images was how that bond felt. Strong and important enough to make an old unicorna lay herself to rest next to a terra that had died a lifetime ago.
And that was something she could neither explain nor admit.
To call it “forbidden” in her species would not quite be accurate. “Impossible” would be a more accurate term.
So what would you call a being who wanted such a thing for herself? Something impossible to realize because the species it was meant for only existed as dead images cast in stone or as pixels on a screen?
“Lonely”, one might say.
That is why she kept the rock all those years. Because whenever she looked at it, inexplicably, it spoke to her. Not in words, but in a feeling of knowing. That the bond she wanted, and would never in her lifetime or in any other lifetime actually have, was not an abstract concept dreamed up by an intellectual exercise, but rather something that once truly existed and was real and precious and strong.
And that made her feel a little bit less alone.