Starlight's first instinct upon opening her eyes was to launch as many sense heightening spell matrixes on herself as she could think of, which, as hindsight told her, was her first mistake.
A butterfly landing on a dandelion two feet away from her echoed. Every drop of moisture on every blade of grass under her felt unique. Minuscule gusts of wind from the clawed hand being frantically swept over her slammed across her muzzle like jackhammers. The fading smell of leftover sulfur burrowed into her nose and began burning away at it. Saliva uncomfortably pooled on her tongue. The world was suddenly larger.
And still she saw nothing but the afterimage of the firework's final flash, even now fading to nothingness.
She had to physically restrain herself from slamming optic optimization spells directly into her face like a hydraulic press, and taking a breath to calm herself, she eased up on the other spells, returning her awareness to a murmur. Still in shock, it took a few minutes to recognize the murmur as belonging to a crowd beginning to surround her, the same crowd that had cheered her performance, but was drawn to it as a familiar voice rose above the rest, crying out in a tone carrying the distraught of a soul begging for a life that isn't their own.
"STARLIGHT! Damn it, move, STARLIGHT!"
The voice pained her to hear. It was sorrowful, and no emotion came harder to her to comprehend than secondhand sorrow, especially when it was about her. She had spent such a large portion of her life in a loveless pit of isolation, despite what she convinced herself, that the idea she took up space in other ponies' heads- and furthermore, that they enjoyed that space, and maybe even fought to keep it- was still alien to her.
"I'm here." She calmly responded, not moving her head towards the new sound, continuing to stare up into where she knew the sky was.
"Starlight! Are you okay?"
"I'm perfectly fine. I think I might just lay here for a few... Hours. Does that sound good?"
"Starlight, you're hurt. We have to get you to Twi-"
"I'll go in a bit. Just give me... A few minutes, okay?"
The voice quieted down, and its owner dropped on her knees to the grass besides her, looking down at her. She reached up, feeling around the void until she hit fur and began stroking it.
And the voice said, "I'm here for you."
And she said, "I know. I wasn't worried. You always are."
She scooched over to her left, feeling her head brush against more fur, and nuzzled into its warmth, taking solace in the sole fact that someone offered it, before promptly passing out.
Even after seven full years spent living in Ponyville, Starlight still couldn’t get over the size of its one and only hospital.
She had been drifting in and out of consciousness for quite a while after the flash, and during one of those lapses had been reasonably moved into a hospital bed. She seemed much more stable now, but only now, late into the night. As much as she strained her hearing, she could find no sign of life nearby but the gentle rustling of trees in the night breeze outside.
Everything was still nothing. Logic told her the world still existed, but she had been denied her primary means of exploring that world. Even hours later, her sight still remained absent.
In the first hour, she had been afraid, calling out to her friends, nurses, anyone who might be able to help her see again. Those calls died quickly, as she realized her isolation. The second hour, she was bored, itching for something to fill the time besides the soft blankets, running through anything she could, sentences and numbers and worlds that existed only in the privacy of her own head, something she felt much more privy to without her sight.
Without sight to rely on, her other senses probed out, and none further than the thaums of her horn. She reached out like a parent convincing her child to run a useless task for her, simply because if they had been left alone in the kitchen, they would've pursued the cookie jar with a deathly vigour.
And yet, she still felt the twinge at the tip of her skull, the remaining drops of magic not exercised in gauging the depths of the pool she rested at the bottom of. It begged her, just short of bullying her, demanding she give into the instincts she had honed since childhood.
Every injury. Every trip. Every cut. Every bruise.
To every inconvenience, no matter how minor or major, her solution had always been the same. Retie blood vessels, repair tendons, rejuvenate dead skin cells, reform muscles, all through the magic sense she had been learning for decades.
The instinct nagged at her, like an itch on her very bone.
Her eyes burned.
She needed an out.
She needed an out right now, or she wouldn't be able to stop herself.
Her horn lit, and she retreated to the only sanctuary she had left, a realm she could barely understand, yet could dip in and out of at will by now.
She forcibly generated melatonin, and fell asleep in an instant.
In the void of sleep, Starlight remained lucid.
She had to think her situation through. Even in darkness, logic and reason would always prevail. She just had to be rational. And the first part of that was bringing light to herself.
She summed up her every will, and with a great force indestructible, yet still indestructibly something, she created a dream. She took every detail of her town could remember, and reconstructed it from the ground up.
Reality was an oil painting.
She could see, but through a kaleidoscope. Colors blended and mixed, grass seemed to melt under the steps she took, and the very sky swam with shifting shades of robins egg blue.
Every inch of the dream she created was hoof crafted by her, but nothing could keep the painting from running and chipping. Even as she watched, even as she tried to repair and save it, she only succeeded in pooling together the melting ice cream in her hooves, unable to keep it from slipping to the ground below. As she squinted at it, struggling to remember what the real world looked like, an empty space beside her was suddenly filled.
"It's always a beautiful thing, every time I see it happen."
Someone was beside her as if they had always been, and perhaps they had. Even as The Princess of the Night sat on the painted grass, she still towered over her companion, exuding the power and authority a creature of her status did with every breath.
"I don't understand. What's happening? I thought I could save... This, at least." Starlight stammered her way through her reasoning.
Luna nodded solemnly, turning to watch the almost unnoticeably draining color in Starlight's eyes.
"I'm afraid you cannot save this sense, little one. You create dreams from what you know, and the sight you know has been fading since this afternoon."
"But I can still remember it. I can still remember what it was like to see. I can remember the sunlight filtered through leaves, and the dripping of water from the drain pipe outside Sugarcube, and... the, and the rabbits. The rabbits that were always in the grass around my friend's- sorry, Fluttershy's cottage."
As she spoke, more and more of the world changed frantically around her. Trees sprouted ex nihlo, houses were built from the ground up; yet every tree and every house was incomplete, broken, a shadow of an idea of what they might be. No straight lines existed, their colors drifted impossibly out of their boundaries, falling drab like water washing over them. Luna smiled softly.
"But for how long? Can you still remember every detail of the smiles of each of your friends? It seems they smile every day; they were always fresh in your minds. Can you recall the exact shade of blue the sky was? Can you recall exactly the texture of the rising crust of the bread baked at Sugarcube?"
Starlights head whipped back and forth, everything she looked at snapping back into focus as soon as she looked at it, only to melt even worse, as if all of her power was exerted into maintaining it for only a second at a time. Even her own sight was drifting, and if she looked left fast enough, she could see her own cheek for just a second before she remembered where she was supposed to look from. She began to panic, the world breathing with her, shaking and rocking the 3D objects contained inside, only wearing them down further.
"No, I can't forget all of this. I can't lose this."
"Starlight."
"I can cure this. I can cure anything. I have optic spells already, all I need to do is repair my corneas, fiddle with the color rods..."
"Starlight, little one."
"It's all just physical decay. I can fix that, I can pull it back."
"Starlight, pay attention."
She tried to force herself into looking at Luna, but she didn't turn her head; the world span, shaking before steadying itself with her in center frame.
The eyes of a goddess peered through her, framed by galaxies and stars, dying and being born in an endless cycle, a window into the universe as it really mattered, the only way reality could be fairly and rightfully viewed, from unfathomable trillions of lightyears away from it, able to see every detail vanish but the simple lifespans of the wholes that inhabited it. Somewhere, an uninteresting flick of light buried under all of this, a body lay sleeping in a hospital bed.
"You cannot save this sense. No spells exist, nor will ever exist to remedy a death like this."
"You don't know that...."
"Nothing can be truly known of the future, but of this I am nearly certain. Starlight, look at your dream."
Both turned back to the faux world around them, Starlight suddenly feeling very small.
"Watch it decay. It is just a physical decay, is it not? It still exists; logic and reason tell you this, and with those weapons, you may be able to see it. Listen to the water drip from the drain pipe, and the impact it makes in the ground, subtle as it is. Smell the freshly baked bread, and realize how long its been trying to make itself known, truly known. Feel the grass and the rabbits, their every hair and blade, and take solace in the fact that both can live and breathe and exist independently. And what of their smiles? You know when they'll smile, what elicits them for each. They're your friends; Maybe you can't see them, but you can still sense the pure, raw emotion that forces them to bubble out. Look without your eyes, little one, and appreciate what you could not before. You don't need spells for this, do you?"
Starlight thought, and she felt. The dream was still solid; only its face was vanishing, chipping. In front of her, she saw Trixie, and she thought of what made her smile.
The confusion and determination to figure out how a trick worked. The riled cheer of a mass, all eyes focused on her, hooked to her movements like they would change their lives forever. Being looked up to, cared for and loved with a love she had never been given in childhood.
Starlight Glimmer.
Even her presence brought a smile to Trixie's face.
She was always smiling, wasn't she?
Starlight had never noticed it, or at least never realized what it meant.
She was beautiful enough in the girl's eyes that even simply existing near Trixie brought a smile to her.
Starlight smiled.
"You are seeing something, are you not?" The kindly voice spoke into her ears, even as her facade smudged.
"I am. I... I think I'd like to wake up now, princess."
"Then you shall. Awake yourself, little one, and see the world."
The next few weeks slid by like butter down sandpaper. Her friends visited her often, though she requested they do it one by one; not out of discontent or discomfort, but to drink them in like wine, learning them like she never had before.
Twilight would come in to read her books, talking at length about the braille she was learning, and how she had begun converting her books. While nice, this brought little interest to Starlight, and the conversation would always inevitably turn to one of the books she had read before losing her sight, which was always a delight. They would argue passionately about whether Don Quixote should have returned home, or the meaning of Poe's orangutan.
Fluttershy seemed to understand her pain, and didn't trust herself enough to attempt to remedy it with levity like her friends. Instead, she would barely talk at all; she would bring a rabbit, or a bird, or a squirrel, and simply rest it in Starlight's lap, sitting by as she ran her hooves through their fur or along their scales or skin. They were always so docile in her presence; so long as the pegasus was near, she could hold them for as long as she desired. It helped her remember, to recall what they looked like, and to appreciate the touch Luna had told her of.
Rarity was much the same; in her first few visits she had been reluctant to wear anything. It had almost disappointed Starlight, until she realized why. From then on, she had encouraged Rarity to wear as much as she could on her visits; it was her job and passion, and anything she considered good enough to wear to see Starlight must be the most beautiful creation she could conceive of.
Pinkie was a talker, and wasn't keen to stop. She talked about whatever brought her fancy, starting as soon as they were alone and she could offer up the candy or pastry she had smuggled in, and continuing until it was time for her to leave. Starlight picked up quickly on when to interject, how to match her energy, and they began to sidle into the same wavelength more often with every meeting. She was smarter than others gave her credit for; she seemed to understand the world a lot better than most, too.
"It just feels like things have been changing so much, and not even very recently! Like, back when we all first met each other it was 'Fight this evil bug!' and 'Save the world from eternal night!' and now it seems everyone's always sad all the time, and saying stuff like 'I forgive you' over and over again. I miss the old days, when wacky and uncharacteristic things would happen, like people would suddenly be big for no reason, or ponies made of bread would suddenly show up in random houses."
"People are getting older, Pinkie."
"I knoooow that, silly, but does everything have to have a moral and a deeper message all the time? Can't we just take solace in frivolity?"
"The world's not always like that."
"I know, and it's mean like that. But things aren't as bad as they really look, and I know they're going to get better. We deserve a laugh, to distract ourselves a little."
Starlight smiled, turning to her voice with her milky white eyes.
"You think so?"
"We've stuck through things this long, haven't we? I think if we stick through it a little longer, the world will repay our kindness. It's really nice, when you get to know it."
Trixie never showed up.
Each night, Starlight's dream's vision became blurrier, more of the world's polish chipped away. She never dreamed of anything but Ponyville now, making sure she'd know it inside and out by the time she left her hospital room. She patrolled the paths, sensing each one she had never stepped foot on before and steering away, vowing to add it to the repertoire when she could walk free again.
The town was one of geometric shapes stripped of texture now. If she could see it, she would probably find the emptiness eerie; but then again, by definition, it was invisible wasn't it? The point was to teach herself to navigate a world the existence of which had suddenly become harder to prove at all. Only a blob of senses could be observed by an outsider; but those senses were still in the same place as they had always been, and it was with this she built her new point of view. She forced rationality from the blob, wrenching out reason from the broth of panic and uncertainty every night, and little by little, it paid off. She practiced waking up in her very room each night, leaving the hospital, and doing what she wanted to do first when she was given that chance for real.
And her magic, like an aging dog, became loyal even as it grew sterile. She no longer used spells every day; her power dwindled, yet it stuck in her mind, never straying outside, obeying her commands to sit still. She was in control of herself, and she had never even realized she wasn't before.
Funny how many things she was realizing, without ever leaving her bed.
On her last day, the nurse had run her through her physical therapy one last time, going over the shortcuts she would need to remember for life now. These had always passed quickly for her, but now on her last visit she tried to soak in everything she was told, committing the nurse's voice to memory in case she ever heard it again.
"...You put your herbs at four o clock, and your beverage at one o clock. With that, you can always remember where your food is. Try not to scrape too much with your fork, either."
"That seems reasonable." Starlight listened to herself say.
"You excited to get out into the world? You've been here quite a while."
"I think so. I've been thinking a lot about what Ponyville's gonna be like now, and if I'm honest, I'm still not sure. There haven't been any changes recently, have there?"
"None that would concern your life, I'd say! What are you gonna do now, once you're outside?"
She rolled the question over in her head.
"...I think there's someone I want to see. Friend of mine."
A frown was inherent in the nurse's words. "Aww, they not visit you, hun?"
"They had a reason, I'm sure of it. They tend to be pretty busy."
"Oh, that's the spirit. You know, I'm proud of you for being so optimistic about all of this. It's a lot to handle."
"Yeah? I guess I'm proud of myself too. It's weird to say that; I so rarely am."
She was aware she was likely staring past the nurse, smiling at nothing. She tended to do that a lot lately, when she had a lot on her mind. Before her final performance, she tended to be plagued by thoughts often. None of them had seemed smile worthy.
She wasn't sure she liked the sound of 'final performance'. Yes, she decided, when this was all over, they were going to try again. The both of them. You don't leave half a duo behind.
Starlight walked through the street with her head held high. As she walked, every occurrence, every action, and every passerby jumped out at her. Winona barked at a passing Parasprite. Carrot Top begrudgingly slid a muffin she had brought over to a happy Derpy without putting up a fight. The flower trio chided each other for things that didn't matter.
She felt the eyes fall onto her, but didn't pay them any mind. She had a mission to do.
Thirty steps forward, until she could smell the roses planted outside the corner house by its inhabitants, then hang a right, then onward until she could hear the flowing water from the fountain, then on until the dirt turned to grass beneath her, sixteen steps and take a left.
She stopped. Her hoof rose, and after one final wordless plead, came forward.
It hit wood. Allowing herself a breath, it hit it two more times.
The door opened, and she felt an exhale even as far away from the source as she was.
"Hey, Trixie. How about we go for a walk?"
Grasping onto logic was half of Starlight's life now, in a way it never had before. Logic told her what was where, what to trust, and where it would be. As she continued to live with her blindness, it would serve to feed her more information she had no choice but to rely on. But then again, she supposed it had always been this way; The same thought that humors these concepts is all she can prove exists. She had always been blind, led forward by a chorus of candle holders through the cave of life. Even as one had fallen silent, her path had not stopped.
Still, she let them amuse her every so often.
"Ah, listen to that. Missed it, didn't you? The roar of the crowds, the cacophony of stomps, the static excitement inherent in the air."
"Starlight, nobody's here."
She listened to the wind through the grass, the orchestra of bird calls, and the serenity inherent in the air instead.
"I know. But you do miss it?"
"Trixie thinks she'd like break from it, actually."
Starlight laughed, sitting down on the edge of the wooden stage and letting her legs hang out over the grass.
"What? We stopped mid-show, Trix. The people want- okay, it might not actually sell that well, but still. We'll just start a new one. Where should we go?"
"Trixie doesn't know, Starlight." The response came quick and quiet, spoken into the ground rather than her.
"It's been a while since we've done a Los Pegasus tour, eh? We could throw a new spin, do something fun, call it 'We Are Two Different Pon-"
"Starlight, I don't want to do this."
It came out of nowhere, and devoured all sounds around it. Sound was a delicate ecosystem, as she had found; she thought she had mastered keeping every sound in line, perusable at will, able to pick any from the bunch and instantly identify it, but it seemed even her will was still slave to the limits of her emotions.
"Ah.... What, uh, what don't you want?" Starlight instinctively began turning her head left and right as if searching for something, finally realizing the emptiness in the movement by way of literal emptiness.
"I don't... I don't want to see you... I mean, I don't want to see you... Like this." Her words strained through a barrier to reach Starlight, who began to tentatively reach back.
"Do you feel like this is your fault?"
"What- of course it's my fault, I don't mean physically, I mean, I don't want to see you... happy. Right now." She shrank back into herself as she realized what she had said. making a feeble recovery.
Starlight turned back for the gesture of it, and immediately heard Trixie sidestep her gaze, and the subtle shifting of fur at her neck as she looked away.
"Trixie, is there something-"
"I thought I had ended your life."
Butterfly wings beat louder than ever before.
"When I found out you were going to survive, I kept thinking that."
"Starlight, that trick- that stupid trick, that I perform in every show to feel better about myself by exerting myself over an audience- that tore your eyes apart. You can't see anything, I can't imagine living in that, that colorless hell. Starlight, I don't want to see you happy. I want to see you furious."
Starlight listened to the blue in Trixie's hair. It was the most beautiful thing she knew.
"I don't think you'll ever be hurt like that again. I don't think dying could hurt you that badly, at the very least then you don't have to care about me anymore- that's one less person who has to think about me. Starlight, I want you to be mad, and you're- well, look at you! You invited me out on a walk! You got out of the hospital- Oh, Celestia, I didn't even see you leaving the hospital. Don't you see, Starlight? I killed you, and you're sitting there, smiling at grass!"
She was screaming now, spitting the words, dislodging them from her throat like foreign intruders, phlegm coughed from her deepest pits and poisoning the air.
Starlight's horn lit- it was only an instant, immediately quenched, but it still happened. Damn her trigger finger; her reliance on magic was something she wanted to purge herself on. Seems some things didn't die easily. Starlight put a hoof over her mouth and glanced away, more comfortable in the gesture now that she knew that Trixie didn't want to see- Wasn't comfortable right now.
"Trixie, why aren't you happy? I'm happy. Things like this don't just pass by, you're right- I've had to choose, and I chose to change into this. That's everything, Trixie. This was just a really, really big thing."
"I'm not happy because- Because I can't just choose to move on after I've been hurt! Because I was angry! Because I got mad, and I chose to-"
The silence between the two of them roared like an Ursa and buzzed like magic flung across an entire town.
"Because I was mad, and if you can forgive the person who destroyed you, how does that make me look?"
"Trixie, nobody thinks about it that way-"
"I do. And for someone who hates themselves, my opinion matters a hell of a lot to me."
Starlight patted the grass by her. Trixie paused, before taking a few cautious steps forward that turned into a canter as she fell into Starlight's hooves, clearly exerting force into not sobbing.
"I'm not great, I'm not powerful, I, I hate myself so much. When you were in the hospital, how long was it? A few weeks? It felt like months."
"Hey, it felt like that to me too, Trixie. But you know what? I don't think powerful is being able to fight, I think powerful is being able to survive. I think you're the most powerful pony I've ever met."
Trixie choked a forced laugh that melted to pitiful sludge in the air. "That's not power, that's luck."
"No, Trixie. Luck is taking a firecracker to the face and only getting blinded. Power is, it's..." She hesitated, but pushed forward, reasoning result over methods. "It's being abandoned, it's being homeless, it's being defeated and slandered, it's thinking your very existence is a mistake, and continuing to live. You had ten thousand chances to end yourself, and ten thousand choices you made brought you here into my hooves. That's power.
Trixie, I'm not mad because I changed after I got hurt. And so did you. We've both made mistakes, and we've fixed them, in the now. Now is the envy of all the dead, all the people who aren't as powerful as you."
"That's an awful lot of people."
"Maybe it is. But you don't know them, do you?"
"I know one of them."
"Well then," Starlight began, drawing Trixie closer. "Let's be powerful together."
The two stared out at the field.
The butterflies calmed down. The silence quieted down. Starlight's magic remained at her hooves obediently.
Trixie stayed beautiful.
Starlight had a sudden image of her aging. Her hair growing, her fur dulling and greying, her eyes beginning to sag and lose color. Her physical and mental power would be stripped clear of her. But by then, by Starlight's own definition, she would be the most powerful pony in the entire world.
And that would be all Starlight saw.