The years passed. Long, long years. And unlike my first life, the memory of my new body was incredible.
During that very first week directly after my birth, I was kept in that same room and fussed over by the older nurse and a few other mares. An older stallion dressed as a doctor came and gave me what I presumed was a physical since he poked and prodded me. He seemed surprised at a few things, but since I still couldn’t speak the language I couldn’t even guess what he was surprised about. I did, however, recognize a thumbs up symbol when the worried older mare nurse asked something. She looked relieved at whatever the doctor then replied with.
I spent most of that week in the bed, and it was a lot of the same thing. Feeding from a bottle, being burped, being bathed, sleeping and being changed was all I really knew. And it gave me time to work through my feelings on the matter. Early in that week, and probably on day two, I finally completely accepted that this really wasn’t some fever dream and that I was really in this new world. That was one of the longest crying sessions I’d ever had. I’d just lost everything I’d worked to accomplish and had somehow been reborn in a world that my sister and I were both fans of. Me to a lesser extent, sure, but I still called myself a brony. The nurse comforted me as best she could, but it took a while for me to cry out a lot of my emotions until I was exhausted. Being in an infant body made me susceptible to exhausting myself very fast, and thinking seemed to cause most of my naps.
At the end of the first week, I was taken out of the room where I was staying and taken out into a large room which was filled with young anthro ponies ranging from preschool to twelve or thirteen, at least that was my guess. Ponies from each tribe of each color scheme gathered around and looked at me. The fillies were all over me, cooing and talking to me with that same strange language, while the colts mostly pretended to not find me cute.
I admit, I acted as cute as I could, eyes wide in wonder, although the wonder part wasn’t hard to fake since I was still in wonder at what was going on. In that first visit, I noticed that some of the foals had markings on their clothes. It seemed to vary from pony to pony. Some had them on their left or right chest, some on their hips, and some on their backs. I happened to glance one of them, a younger stallion, remove a jacket only for the symbol to vanish from the chest portion of his shirt to only reappear on the t-shirt underneath. Some of the other foals, mostly younger ones, didn’t have these marks, which I guessed were cutie marks. As I thought about that, it made a lot of sense. For an anthro version of ponies, walking around naked wouldn’t really be feasible, especially since the older mares that I’d seen had human-like breasts and I’d noticed that, unlike normal horses or ponies, I didn’t have a sheath for my own unmentionables.
After the first week, I woke up at one time feeling incredibly warm, warmer than normal. Once the mare nurse came for my feeding, she looked alarmed and put me in a warm bath while she told another nurse something. A while later that same doctor stallion came back and looked me over, then told the nurse a few things, gave her a piece of paper and left.
After that, the nurse gave me some foul tasting liquid, but I endured it because I really didn’t want to die of some childhood malady. In a few days, my fever went down and I was feeling much better. She seemed surprised when I readily drank that nasty medicine, but there were advantages of being a child with an adult’s brain.
After that first week and after the fever was all gone, I would be placed in a large play area with children’s toys, all stuffed animals. From my new playpen, which I would be in for a few hours at a time before I would inevitably pass out from exhaustion, I could see the entire room. Seeing it from the angle I was now at made it look impossibly big. There was a bed in the corner, a desk in another corner, the same fireplace and painting, and a door to the right of the desk. Across from the desk, there were two rectangular windows that were covered with light brown shades.
As for the toys I was given to play with, there were six, all stuffed animals. There was a pegasus pony, a dragon, a cow, a bull, a sheep and even a griffon. All of them were anthropomorphic. I was especially fascinated by the anthro versions of farm animals. The cow was dressed in a pair of blue overalls with yellow buttons holding the straps in place as well as a white t-shirt over it. The bull was dressed in just blue jeans and boots, and nothing else. In its hand was sewn a pitchfork. The sheep was obviously female since she wore a pink dress. The griffon, which had a similar color scheme to Gilda but was male, was wearing a pair of brown shorts and a somewhat torn gray t-shirt, although I guessed it was torn from being played with. The dragon was a male and only dressed in a pair of black shorts and held a spear in its hand which had been sewn on like the pitchfork had been to the bull. And finally, the pony, which was a mare, had light blue fur, dark green and purple striped mane and tail and had three reeds as a cutie mark sewn onto the sides of her red dress.
I used these toys to my advantage. I wasn’t sure if it was because my soul or consciousness had been shoved into a younger body, but I played with them and at the same time pretended they were saying things while trying to regain my ability to speak English.
I lost track of time while I was doing this, spouting nonsense when there was someone watching me, but whenever they left, I would slip into my rapidly reforming English skills. I even had names for each of them. The dragon was named Magma Storm, the griffon was Gilligan, the cow/holstaur was Annabelle, the bull was named Apollo, the sheep was named Fluffy, and the pony was named Daisy Reeds due to the cutie mark.
In order to retrain myself and to keep my mind entertained out of fear that I might forget who I was in my past life, I created a little show in my head called The Six Amigos and pretended that each of these toys were real people who lived in a house in Canterlot. As I regained the ability to speak proper English over the course of the next few months, each of the characters in my made up show developed characteristics of their own. I did use more mature themes in my make believe show as an extra means of keeping my memory intact.
Apollo was one of the heads of the household. I based him a lot on Iron Will, even imitating him whenever I created dialogue for him. He was a stubborn bastard who worked in the fields on the edge of Canterlot (I’d made up a few things about the city since I didn’t know anything about the actual layout of Canterlot aside from that painting). He was a hard worker and felt strongly about being the provider for his two lovers and his friends.
Annabelle was a loving and responsible holstaur who tended to be one of the only ones in the household who could calm Apollo down. She worked at a dairy factory, ironically enough. In order to make it a bit less weird for me, I invented a job for her where she would actually be in control of milking actual cows and preparing their milk for the creation of cheese and ice cream. I had no idea how things worked in the real world, but even the thought of holstaurs being attached to udder machines or even just milking themselves was a bit off-putting. However, I had to reason that if that was the case, it was a different world, so different rules applied.
Fluffy was the youngest individual in the house, and thus was not only the goofball but was always getting into trouble. She worked in a textile factory where she would create and sew blankets and create pillows using the wool from her body and the body of other sheep. Despite this, as time went on, she became a bit more mature. She still loved pulling pranks, but had learned, from the various episodes of my imaginary show, that certain pranks weren’t okay. She loved Apollo and Annabelle very much, however, and was pretty loyal to them. She was also the only other being in the house who could talk Apollo down.
Magma Storm was a miner who worked in the underground mines in Canterlot. The pay was excellent and that meant that he lived in the master bedroom of the house since he could afford to pay for it, but his job was also incredibly dangerous. He and Apollo would have shouting matches a lot of the time about minor things, but in the end they were both respectful of each other and were friends.
Gilligan was actually a part of the Canterlot Weather Team and was responsible for making sure the weather around the city was maintained. He was a bit timid and had a little bit of a stutter, but that never stopped him. There would be times when he got teased for his stutter, but Daisy Fields would always stand up for him if she saw him being picked on because of it. He was using the Weather Team as a means to pay for college tuition so he could become a professor at Canterlot University. He also had feelings for Daisy.
Daisy Fields was a reporter for Canterlot Daily News, a fictional smaller startup newspapers in Canterlot. She was a bit of a gossip and loved hearing the latest paydirt on someone, she slowly learned to better control herself as time went on. She was also somehow completely oblivious to the feelings of her griffon friend and I had fun coming up with scenarios where some sort of romantic gesture or incident would be something she’d play off as being friends or something like that.
During the time I spent in that office, I also began to secretly practice using my magic. I did remember that in the episode where Pinkie Pie babysat the Cake twins how Twilight and Rarity explained that unicorn foals would have magical mishaps, and the latter half of the episode showed how that was the case. However, since I had the self control of a full grown adult, I felt fairly confident I could learn quickly enough.
How wrong I was.
The first time I tried to use my magic, my horn glowed and two beams shot out of my hands up to the ceiling, creating two burn marks in the ceiling. The nurse was alarmed, but didn’t look too surprised. She said some soothing words to me before putting me to bed. I held back a lot the next time, and only managed to create a fizzle of sparks coming from my hand which burned through a small portion of the blanket. Fortunately, I managed to hide it from the nurse so she didn’t discover it until much later, and even then I suspected she thought the burn came from the fire since my play area was near the fireplace. She moved me away from the fire after that.
With some simple trial and error, I found the sweet spot for controlling objects around me with telekinesis. And with that, I learned something unusual. I’d seen the nurse use her own magic, but with her she didn’t need to use her hands to channel said power. In fact, I saw other unicorns using their own magic with only their horns. Since I had only a handful of examples of magic, I wasn’t entirely sure if I was write to hypothesize, but it appeared my magic casting ability was unique or just less common than the average unicorn. I could use magic easily enough, but whenever I tried to use my horn only, it never worked, so I had to make do with my hands.
After about a month, they moved me out of that room and into a smaller room with a window, a door, a desk with a lamp and chair, a vent at the bottom of the wall where warm air came out, a large mirror, a closet which was closed and empty currently, and a crib. The toys came with me as did the play area. It was here that I began to suspect that I was either in some kind of hospital or in an orphanage. I also began to suspect that the feeling of loss mere moments after my birth had to do with the death of my mother. Seeing as I hadn’t breastfed yet, it made sense. Despite not even having seen her face, I was deeply saddened by this revelation and used that sadness for one of the more serious episodes of my fictional sitcom, where Gilligan’s mother passes away and he recedes into himself only for the five others to set up a very respectful (and in some cases, funny) wake for the older griffon woman. It helped me grieve in my own way.
The temperature began warming up as time went on and the sun began shining through the window more and more, leading me to conclude that my birthday must have been in the winter or early spring months at some point. Over the course of the days and weeks, I managed to reclaim my complete ability to speak English. Not only that, but I gained a full set of teeth, including incisors. I was surprised when, after my last teeth came in, the older nurse began feeding me with more solid foods. I was a bit reluctant at first, especially since the first meal she brought me was a few strands of dry hay. However, when I tasted them, I was pleasantly surprised by how good they really tasted. They had a unique earthy taste and the crunch they made was incredibly satisfying.
It didn’t take me very long to be weened off of milk and formula and put on more solid foods. While that was going on, I had actually nearly retrained my body only to relieve myself when I wanted it to. I still had to use the diapers since I had no means of using the toilets, but I was fairly confident that once I took my first steps and mastered walking in this new body I would be able to start using a toilet with ease relatively quickly.
Once I had all my teeth and was eating solid foods, I began to start trying to learn the language of this world. The nurse who was in charge of me noticed my interest in the books that were on the small bookshelf in her office and began sitting me on her lap before bed and reading me children’s stories. It started off with easy enough words to decipher since the book was just one identifying assorted objects, colors and other commonly used words. The written language itself was written in a rather more flowing script than English and sounded melodic to the ears of someone like me.
I used my new child’s brain to my advantage, paying very close attention to the words and letters and the sounds associated with them. I managed to lift a pencil and a few sheets of paper from the desk of the nurse with my magic and hide them in one of my toys one evening. I grabbed the objects with my magic and stuffed them into the fluff of Apollo, the biggest stuffed toy, through a small hole in the back which revealed the inner stuffing but small enough that my nurse didn’t notice when she carried me and my toys to my room that night. I would practice writing by the light of the moon that shown into my bedroom before I would have to hide the paper and pencil under my bed before passing out.
More time passed, and soon the weather began growing cooler again. Rain began falling and the heater would clank to life. By this time, they finally began putting me in a main room with other foals my age. I was fascinated by them all and not only spent time studying them, but interacted with them, playing with them as best as I could. Some of the pegasi were, indeed, flying around the room while the unicorns were using their magic everywhere. The earth ponies were strong even by baby standards and played with sturdier toys than the rest of us.
But I saw something I didn’t expect: a lone filly with batlike wings, fanged teeth and slitted eyes. She was a dark green with a black mane with a silver streak running through it. One of her eyes was almost always covered with her long mane, and from this I saw she had heterochromia, one yellow and one blue eye. It also seemed none of the other ponies seemed to want to play with her. They would take one look at the little filly and cry. I later picked up that she was something called a eutherian pony. Feeling sorry for her, and more or less curious about the eutherian filly since she always seemed to play in the darkest corner of the room, I would crawl over to her and try and play with her. The first time I did, she hissed at me and I saw a forked tongue, but I persisted, and soon she warmed up to me. It got to the point where she would visibly brighten up when she saw me crawling towards her.
As it turned out, this would come back to bite me in the ass. The other children in the large play area would begin babbling at me, some with insults in their childish Equestrian, some even calling me a bat pony lover, if I interpreted their words right. I simply ignored them, but the eutherian filly would break down and cry nearly every time. I would hug the poor filly and comfort her.
The nurses, as kind as they were, either didn’t see the childish bullying because they were too busy or just ignored it for some reason. I began getting a strong sense that these eutherian ponies were not very well liked even as adults since I’d never seen any others in the orphanage save for this one.
As my first year went on, I was involved in a couple of birthdays for the foals in my play group. I noticed that whenever a cake was brought in, the nurse would hand the birthday girl or boy the first piece of the cake before the others getting cake. Then the child would be given small plates of cake to hand out to the rest. I noticed that the eutherian pony was always last, and it always seemed like there was some reluctance on the part of the birthday pony to give it to her, but the nurses always insisted.
Some time after it began snowing outside, the room began being decorated with old looking red and gold garlands and a small tree with lights and miniature stuffed toy ornaments. The nurses began dressing in colorful and more festive getup, and I assumed this meant it was the pony version of Christmas, AKA Hearth’s Warming. Small presents were put under the tree and one particular day we were all given one of the presents. For me, I was given what looked like a couple of different storybooks that looked somewhat more advanced than the ones I’d been getting read up until that point. We were all given small bits of peppermint soft candy to chew on after a festive vegetarian dinner.
Another month passed and I continued discovering new things about my world. My magic practice, which I would do every evening after I was put to bed, was improving substantially. Since I had nothing else to compare myself to, I still concluded that I was just an odd one out for using magic with my hands and horn instead of just my horn. With it, however, I realized that I could cast two different spells at once, or one spell and have the effects be somewhat more powerful.
As for the language, I realized that it was incredibly similar to English in a lot of ways. There were twenty six letters, and as far as I could tell the words as written were identically written in English. To explain further, I wrote down the Equestrian alphabet and placed the English alphabet on top of it once I’d mastered it. Then I wrote down the word BOOK in English and Equestrian. The first letter of the word in Equestrian was the second letter in the Equestrian alphabet same as English, then there were two instances of the fifteenth letter, which matched O precisely, then there was an instance of the eleventh letter, which matched K. Of course, there were a few differences in place, such as a small arch between both Equestrian O’s. I noticed this as an extra mark on other various letter combinations, such as TH like in THE or GH and OU like ROUGH, although for that word there was an arch over the OU and under the GH equivalent.
This made it easier for me to master the written language, but the spoken language was harder since I now had to assign new sounds to the letters and combinations. The vowels were in the same places, but were all the wrong sounds. And there were instances where some words might have been spelled with the exact amount of words as their English equivalents but with an extra syllable in it.
It was just past the new year when there was another birthday celebrated. As I was wondering who it was, I was surprised to find that it was my own. After being given the first slice of the cheap tasting vanilla cake with a candle on it representing the Equestrian version of one, I was given a plate to give out. I immediately headed over to my eutherian friend, who I had come to learn was named Crystal Moon if my interpretation was correct, and handed her the first slice. She was super surprised by this, but looked at me with an expression of gratitude. After I passed out the rest of the cake bits to the other foals with help from the nurses, I walked over to Crystal and the two of us ate together, babbling on in baby talk. Or rather, she talked in baby talk, and I emulated it since I didn’t want to be caught knowing how to speak yet.
It was sometime about a couple weeks after my first birthday where we received an unusual visitor. A few hours before, I was thoroughly washed and put in some really nice looking clothes. Then after being placed in the play room, the nurses paid extra attention to us. Two young looking and well dressed ponies, both unicorns, walked in a few hours later and it all made sense. The nurses were dressing us up in the hopes that the young couple might adopt one of us. However, the moment I saw them, I could sense something off about them. They spoke in one of the poshest accents I had ever heard and were incredibly dismissive of the lead nurse, who was named Sunny Breeze. They looked us over with a scrutinizing eye, practically skipping over the eutherian and me, her because of her being from “…that race of pegasus rejects,” and me because, “What kind of name is Vladímir for a pony? His mother must have been from Stalliongrad.”
After an agonizing half hour of having to endure the two nobles looking over children like they were nothing more than cattle, they picked out one of the young colts who the mother called “…colt of excellent breeding.” It was here that I learned about an unusual tradition in the adoption of children in Equestria. Name changes for foals at being adopted was something that happened. The colt was chosen by both parents and I overheard the name.
The pony who had once been called Blazed Saddles had now been named Jet Set.
Honestly, I felt relieved to see the newly renamed foal leaving since he’d been the worst of Crystal’s tormentors before I’d arrived to begin protecting her. However, I also felt badly for him since, if he was the same unicorn I saw in the show, he grew up to be an incredibly snobby noble.
It was during one of the summer months when I lost my first friend. In the months up to that, a few other pony couples, most of them rich looking nobles but a few looking like they came from out of town (including a young couple who said they were from a town called Ponyshire, which I would later learn was this world's equivalent to Ponyville) came and adopted some of the year old foals. It was near evening when a tired looking young eutherian couple walked in. The foals shied away from them but I was more than fascinated. Their names were Midnight Sun and Nocturne Haven. Sunny showed them directly to Crystal, who I was currently playing with. The two expressed surprise that a unicorn was playing with a eutherian, but they sat and played with us for about half an hour. I realized that, even though they saw the close friendship I was developing with Crystal, they wouldn’t adopt me, and it was confirmed when they told Sunny that they’d adopt Crystal but not me because “…that young unicorn will only be despised worse than we are because we are raising him.”
Poor Crystal was crying hard when she was taken out of the room, reaching out to me in a desperate attempt to get back to me. I had to admit, I too was crying, mostly because I now had no friends.
With her gone, I was alone once again. It shattered my heart to have lost a friend my physical age in this world. Since the other foals my age were still teasing me and excluding me, I began to slowly retreat into myself, continuing to read and learn the language of Equestria as fast as I could. The grammar was practically identical to English, I learned, but as I continued learning, subtle differences began making themselves known but it mostly had to do with certain words having an extra syllable. And those were few and far between and were leftovers from a language predating Modern Equestrian called Middle Equestrian.
Not much changed as the summer of my first year turned to autumn, then winter. My second birthday came and went, and I continued self teaching myself to read, write, and use magic. During one week when the head nurse was gone, I managed to sneak a peak at a magic book for beginners.
It was here that I learned about the way magic worked in this Equestria. The air around me was practically filled with what was known as Static or Stationary Magic, magic that is at rest. I also learned that magic being cast was known as Kinetic or Dynamic Magic. One of the oldest laws of magic were the Three Laws of Magic, which were practically word for word copies of Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.
Rule 1: Magic at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.
Rule 2: Magic in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
Rule 3: For every spell action, there is an equal and opposite magical reaction.
The magic in the air was known by various different names. Mana, æther, ki or élan vital among other names, but they all meant the same thing. In essence, if I was interpreting the book right, it was its own element, like an extra atom in the, presumably, nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere of the planet. Every being on the planet had some form of magic within them in varying amounts, but it seemed that only unicorns and alicorns had the amount needed to utilize the mana in the air to manipulate the world around them with any control. Pegasi and earth ponies had their own level of magic, but they had less control over their abilities than unicorns and alicorns did. This explained why alicorns were so powerful since they had every magical aspect of the three main pony races within them.
The main magical reservoir in a unicorn and alicorn rested in what was commonly referred to as the anima, a portion of the mind and soul of a unicorn and alicorn where magic was channeled through the body and up through the foci, that being the horn. If one wanted to use magic, there were two ways to go about doing it. Visualization was one way.
For example, if a unicorn wanted to do something like transform a rock into a teacup or something all they had to do, just like Starlight had once explained to Trixie in that one episode in Season Seven, was visualize as much about the object as they could and make the magic flow out of their horn to the stone. It was one reason why telekinesis was one of the very first spells learned, mostly due to the fact that visualization for that was as simple as thinking “Hey, I want that toy over here” and casting a spell to surround the toy with their magic.
The second way, which had practically gone out of style by the modern day, was using incantations. The process for using incantations was definitely slower, but from what I learned it used less magic if done correctly and as such was more powerful. Incantations weren’t used anymore because of their slowness and warm up time and due to the fact that the magical language needed to cast the spells was practically a dead language. Faster spells were the norm in the modern world. The book didn’t tell me anything about the language of magic at all, not even what the letters looked like.
The book did mention, however, a sub-branch of incantations dealing with what it called runic magic circles. The section was brief but informative. Apparently, there was a means to carve a spell into a magic circle using the ancient magic language. The more inner circles of the spell were carved, the stronger the spell became. All a unicorn needed to do was push some of the mana into the words and the spell would take effect. The magic circle would act as a substitute for a unicorn’s anima, drawing the mana from the air and continually casting the spell. These sorts of magical circles drew even less magic from the air.
Despite all of this new information I learned that week, I still had many questions. Where did magic actually come from? Was it a finite resource? Was it replenished somehow? How could I figure out just how much magic I could use? Did my anima grow or was it set from birth? However, despite these questions, I continued practicing in secret, branching out my skill set and trying to learn new spells.
I stayed far away from teleportation, but using a transfiguration spell yielded results. I now had a way to hide my writing utensils and he paper I lifted without needing to be sneaky anymore. I still hid the pencil and paper, which I disguised as random toy blocks, under the bed. The reversion spell was a lot easier, since all it required was for me to blast it with magic, making it change back.
I felt badly for taking advantage of the nurses who had to be busy with other foals. Their distraction gave me ample opportunity to secretly practice controlling my bodily functions, magic, reading, writing and speech. However, I didn’t want to stand out two much and be labeled a prodigy child.
By the time of my third birthday, however, the nurses brought in a chalkboard and began teaching us the Equestrian alphabet, using little songs to help the foals memorize the letters better. They did this for about half an hour each day at first, but eventually they stretched it out a few minutes each time until finally we had an hour each day devoted to learning Equestrian. I kept pace with the others, not getting too far ahead, faking difficulties when they gave us something like crayons to write with. It did give me extra time to review the language.
When spring rolled around, however, that was the first time we were all taken outside. There, I discovered that the building we were living in was a heavily repurposed mansion, old and in desperate need of a new coat of paint, and surrounded on all sides by a large stone wall. There were other older ponies already out there on that warm spring morning, all in their own little cliques and groups of friends. The sun shone high in the morning sky, which illuminated a large snowcapped peak to the left of the front of the house.
And there, nestled snugly in the mountainside, was what could only be Canterlot Palace. Unlike how it was shown in My Little Pony, this palace didn’t have the colors that it had in the show. It did, however, gleam in the sunlight with its whitewashed spires and the flag of Equestria, which was similar to the show. There were twenty four white stars on a sky blue backdrop, and a stylized sun and moon directly in the center. However, there were no representations of Celestia and Luna on the flag anywhere.
With all of us being outside more and more regularly after that, I began putting an effort into some exercise to build up my strength and lose the baby fat. I started by using my new motor skills to run around the property near the stone wall so I wouldn’t get lost. My first day I only managed to get around once before collapsing and panting. The nurses were a bit concerned by it, but not enough to try and stop me at first. As far as they knew, I was just stretching my legs and burning off my childish energy.
However, when I didn’t make any new friends by the end of the summer, that’s when they grew more concerned and tried to subtly push me to making friends. An effort that I didn’t appreciate much but couldn’t say much about without getting strange looks. Despite their efforts to make the other foals my age include me, I was still bullied because they remembered me as being the “Bat pony lover.”
So I kept to myself as the summer turned to autumn. My fourth birthday came and went, and by now I was “talking” just as well as the other foals my age, at least in public. In private, at least to my ears, I was talking more like an adult, albeit with hints of a childish lisp still there due to my still developing body.
As I had been growing, however, my appearance began getting closer and closer to that of one of the ponies that had made an appearance in the show, but I continued to dismiss it as being a completely major coincidence, much like how Daring Do looked like a recolored version of Rainbow Dash from the show and how Octavia had a lookalike who played the fiddle. I also reasoned that Blueblood couldn’t have been born yet, considering the fact that I was born in the year 1374 A.F., which stood for After the Founding. I learned from my secret studies that the Summer Sun Celebration had not yet reached its thousandth occurrence. In fact, there were just over a couple decades to go before that fateful celebration arrived, which would make me twenty six at that time.
Something else I learned about the world was that the calendar, while identical to Earth’s own calendar, had vastly different names for months and days of the week. The twelve months were as follows:
1. Bygynneth
2. Laven
3. Wintend
4. Sprende
5. Plantende
6. Summerstar
7. Midsomar
8. Skīven
9. Sumorend
10. Hærfest
11. Forstbyn
12. Enede
As for the days of the week, there were seven each, which were as follows:
1. Sunsday
2. Moonday
3. Platday
4. Hurday
5. Pudday
6. Nerday
7. Endday
I wasn’t entirely sure of the origins of each of these names, so I translated them into English. When I saw the words on the page, a lot of them made sense but some were a bit odd for me to figure out. Not that it mattered much to me, just some information to store away for later when I got access to more books.
The year passed once more, and soon I was five. By that time, I had mastered the language, more or less, and could make educated guesses about the words in Equestrian that I hadn’t seen or heard before. I didn’t know how far ahead I was magic-wise, but I knew I hadn’t learned too much since all I could do was sneak peaks at the magical book. It surprised me that I hadn’t been caught after all this time, but since the orphanage, which I had finally learned was simply named Canterlot Orphanage, seemed understaffed, I managed to get away with a lot.
On the downside, bullying was easier to get away with as well. Fortunately, the examples I saw were few and far between, and mostly directed at me once word got out that I was a so-called eutherian lover. It never got too bad, and since I had an adult mind I could easily ignore it.
It was during my fifth year in Equestria, however, that things took a drastic turn for me.
On the morning of Summerstar 20, 1379, the nurses gathered everyone in my age group. Sunny announced that the group would be going to see the Summer Sun Celebration the very next day, so we would all have to go to bed early. I was just as excited as the other foals, but for a different reason. Since the Summer Sun Celebration took place in Canterlot this year, I’d finally be able to see Princess Celestia in person, even if it would be from a distance. We were all put to bed early that night. Despite my excitement, I had made sure to spend the day wiping myself out, skipping naptime by pretending to sleep so that I could sleep soundly enough to be awake to see the Celebration.
Sunny woke me up about an hour before the sun was to rise. I quickly got up, threw on pants, shoes, a t-shirt and a hoodie. I was practically the first one out the door into the cool first day of summer morning. The stars blazed overhead like diamonds. I impatiently waited for the other groggy foals to come out, some groaning and yawning, but other looking as excited as I felt.
Once we were all gathered, the three nurses who were to be our supervisors for this trip led us to the only other building on the property, which was the stable. Inside was the only horse drawn carriage the orphanage owned as well as a pair of stallion and mare horses. Actual horses, and not anthro versions. They were hitched to the carriage and Sunny drove them down the streets of Canterlot.
Since this was my very first time out of the orphanage, I took the time to look around at the houses and buildings surrounding me. The streets were all clean and made of cobblestone. In the center of the streets was a small carved ditch covered by a metal grate, while the streets curved very slightly upward from that ditch up to the sidewalks. The buildings I saw were all very old fashioned and practically medieval, but still very clean and well maintained. There were a few lamps on the streets themselves, all lit from within with warm yellow light magic. The few roofs I could see were all covered in what looked like red clay tiles with a few others being covered in stone slabs. The roof of the orphanage was covered with the former.
We were driven by Sunny to the palace where we were led to a massive field where I saw a number of chairs sitting in a semicircle facing a raised stage. The chairs themselves were already filling up with ponies. The raised stage at the front had a large golden representation of the sun on a large stand taking center stage. Standing at attention in front of the stage in medieval looking armor and holding horns in their hands stood eight guards, four pegasi and four unicorns. However, unlike in the show, I could tell they were all unique as opposed to the unusual sameness I remembered. There were a few special seats raised above the crowd where I saw nobles sitting and looking at the stage from a vantage point above the crowd.
We found our seats and were given hot cider to drink while we waited. I sat next to Sunny near the edge of the right part of the half circle of chairs and sipped quietly on the delicious beverage while we waited. The sky to the east began to grow brighter with a dark blue glow, then lighter and lighter. The closer the time came, the more excited everyone around me became, and I wasn’t immune to it.
Finally, the sun looked like it was about to peak over the horizon, and that was when the eight guards raised their golden horns to their lips and blew an announcement. Another pony stood near the stairs that led up to the stage, then held up a large cone to her lips. “Fillies and gentlecolts,” she began, “Introducing her royal highness, the ruler of Equestria, Princess Celestia Dawn!”
That last name caught me completely by surprise, but I had no time to contemplate it once the princess herself walked onto the stage directly in front of the golden sun structure. And holy shit, she was the very epitome of pony beauty, that was for sure. Much like how I’d seen her in the painting in Sunny’s office, she wore that same white flowing dress with her cutie mark sewn onto her hips. She wore the same gold chain around her waist, the necklace, bracelets and the crown on her head. She could easily have been a model back on Earth had she been human. She had all the curves in all the right places, and her smile was radiant. She was about a head taller than the guards standing there, and her fur almost seemed to shimmer in the pre-dawn morning light and the lamps set up around the stage and the semicircle of chairs.
The crowd went nuts, myself included. I clapped and hollered as she looked out at all of the ponies there. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like she took her time to look into every pony’s eyes for a split second because when she reached me, I was almost positive she looked at me just as she had the others. Once she finished, she held out her hands, silencing the crowd. “Welcome, my little ponies, to the Summer Sun Celebration,” she said. Her voice was melodious, deep, and warm. It wasn’t the same voice as the one I’d heard in the show, but it was almost mesmerizing.
Once again, the crowd cheered, clapping their hands loudly and whooping. I joined in, excited to see just how this version of Celestia would raise the sun. She held up her hand to silence the ponies once more. She spread her wings, which were larger than any I’d seen so far. She pushed off of the ground, raising her larger than normal horn which began to glow. As I watched, I saw her actually begin speaking, but since I was so far away, I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I immediately saw her horn glow brighter as she continued talking in that weird language. She closed her eyes and held up her hands as the sun crested the horizon with its normal faster than normal motion. The large orb of plasma or whatever the sun was here rose until it was directly behind Celestia and the massive golden sun.
The applause that followed was tremendous. So much so, in fact, that one of the raised platforms, which was being held up by wood only, began to sway thanks to a little colt jumping up and down in place. I saw the motion out of the corner of my eye since it was the nearest raised platform to where I was. The family who was on the platform quickly went from a celebratory mood to one of horror as it began falling directly towards the section where I was located.
I acted before anyone else did, reaching up with both of my hands and casting as powerful a telekinesis spell as I could, making the platform slow down, but not stop moving. I grunted at the weight of not only the wood platform but the four ponies inside whose weight they were supporting. I tried my best to stop its movement, but it didn’t work. The weight was crushing, and I knew my efforts were useless. And judging from how one of the younger ponies was positioned, this would only end in tragedy for him. I closed my eyes and pushed with everything I had, but it wasn’t enough.
Just then, the weight was suddenly gone. A hand was immediately on my shoulder, and I opened my eyes. The platform and the four ponies inside were floating in midair now thanks to the efforts of two of the unicorn guards. Four of the pegasi were flying up to grab the now floating ponies and carry them down to safety. Once that was done, the unicorn guards carefully placed the crumbling platform into a pile nearby.
I looked up uncertainly, only to find myself standing next to Princess Celestia herself. She was looking down at me like a mother who was proud of her son for a job well done. “You did well, my little pony,” she said reassuringly. “What is your name?”
“V…Vladímir, Princess,” I said breathlessly.
Her eyes widened a little bit at that, but that was all the reaction I saw from her. She was about to say something, but then she seemed to grow blurry. I felt myself being caught as the world around me went black.