I am.
Or am I?
It’s said that all things that are will cease to be. So does the fact that I will always be mean that I am not?
I fear that I may be slowly going insane. I’ve seen many of my nation’s best therapists. But alas, they are all mortal, and they all have no understanding of what it means to have to live forever. Some ponies think that eternal life would be wonderful. Thankfully, the majority know better. Unfortunately, none know just how painful it is to continue, every day, with no end in sight.
The only other who bears my pain is my dear sister Luna. Sometimes, we share our sorrows. She almost always handles it better than I. Though she is “younger”, she is surprisingly wise, and occasionally utters a phrase of such depth that I think about it for days. Perhaps, that is what a thousand years alone does to a pony.
But for the same thousand years, I, too, was alone. There was no pony I could relate to. No pony whom I could truly talk to, and who could understand even the tiniest facet of me. Even the most brilliant of scholars could not fathom the world as I see it.
My world, above all, is one of change. Mortal ponies may claim to understand change, and maybe they do, in some superficial sense. I, however, am privy to the true sense of change, beyond the scope of years and decades and centuries.
There’s something disconcerting, even after millennia, about watching everything one does crumble before oneself. One would think that I’d have stopped caring by now, but that is not so.
I’ve seen many souls perish. Nearly all of these deaths affect me to some degree. However, nothing is more painful to me than when a Faithful Student becomes, like the rest of the world, nothing more than a stone marker in a courtyard. Perhaps this is because they represent how nothing I do will ever last, for change is the way of my world.
Ponies are apparently quite fascinated with the idea of eternal life. That was why my sister and I were given the throne about eight thousand years ago. And although we were tried to tell them that ponies who understood what it meant to be mortal would be better-suited and more sympathetic as rulers, they would here none of it.
Sometimes, I feel that I’m just a figurehead, a glorified statue that ponies trust to resist change and keep their precious world stable at all costs. After all, I am Celestia the great, the wise, the everlasting, the unchanging. But there is a secret that few are privy to. Although my sister and I may be immortal, we are by no means without origin. We have not always existed, and we have not always known that we would live forever.
Luna tells me that I should have gotten over the idea of immortality in over eight thousand years of existence. I ask her if she has.
She says no.
I don’t feel well, but it is almost time for a meeting with the urban planning council of Fillydelphia. I’m almost tempted to just skip it, since I know that in the blink of an eye, even the greatest cities would turn to dust.
But I rise, smile—
—and continue to be.