Twilight impatiently tapped a crystal table in her royal library with her hoof. Strewn about her were piles of books and scrolls whose numbers had overwhelmed and ruined the once-neat piles that Twilight had set them in. The mare pulled another book from her emaciated shelves, skimmed through it, then angrily tossed it over her shoulder. She screamed in frustration and, in her fury, slammed her head into the table accidentally, yiping in pain.
Spike peered around one of the doors. "Everything alright in here, Twilight?" he asked.
"Y-yeah," Twilight grunted as she rubbed her forehead with a hoof. She buried her face in her forelegs on the table afterwards and started muttering something her assistant couldn't understand.
The young dragon stepped in and waved some dust away from his face. "I don't speak mumble. Use your words," he sassed.
"I can't find it..." Twilight lamented.
"Find what?" Spike said impassively as he looked in awe at the plain of books and scrolls before him.
He thought he'd be used to Twilight's treatment of books when she became obsessed with something, and yet here he was.
"The source of magic and life in Equestria!" Twilight suddenly blurted. Spike dropped the books he had picked up from the sudden fright. "Or even the whole world!" The mare ruffled her own mane, clumping her strands together and creating knots. "I've found so many different theories from creatures throughout the decades, but they all contradict each other!" She pulled a book from a tall pile and caused them to fall and bonk Spike on the head. "Sorry," Twilight said with a nervous smile while her assistant rubbed his head and glared at her. "I'm just...so annoyed!" She raised the book she picked up. "This one by Grass Mango claims that magic has always come from the land. That it had permeated the world during its infancy and gave it life."
Spike narrowed his eyes. "That...just says what it is and what it can do. That doesn't explain the source."
"Of course not!" Twilight agreed loudly. "It's just empty trite from somepony trying to sound smart." She tossed the book away and picked another with a red cover from the plains of literature. "This one by Cranberry Jam implies that life came to be on the planet, and when our souls interacted with it, it created primitive forms of magic misunderstood by our ancestors." She tossed it and grabbed another. "Or this one by Truffle Parfum who is supposed to be a renown wizard!" She took on a more distinguished appearance and gentlemarely voice. "Magic has always been around as a natural product of the world. It was merely unrefined at first until it finally mellowed and infused life into the planet. That is why we have such a vast array of--Bah!"
Spike dropped the pile of books he was carrying and looked in disgust at the dust and grime coating his claws. "Sounds like what the others are saying."
Twilight nodded. "Exactly! There's still no mention about where it came from! Something doesn't just come into being out of nowhere." She leaned against a foreleg and sighed.
"Twilight, I think you're starting to obsess over something weird again," Spike said worryingly.
"Wh...am I?!" Twilight shouted.
"Look!" the dragon shouted before Twilight could move from the table. "I-if you want answers, why not ask Princess Luna or Celestia? They've lived a long time? Maybe they know." He looked at the anarchic mess around him and sighed internally. "Plus, their own library has things way older than even them, so maybe you'll get your answers from there?" he suggested with a shrug. "About the source of magic?"
"And life," Twilight grumbled.
"Y-yes. That too," Spike said with a nervous smile.
Twilight pondered the info and then gave Spike a big hug. "Thank you, Spike. I was going crazy! I'll be back soon. Clean up as much as you can, and when I get back I'll help you with the rest."
Twilight had already left when Spike was going to talk to her. "But you're always crazy...And you could've cleaned all this up in seconds with your magic!" he shouted before throwing a book on the pile.
The alicorn was already flying toward Canterlot thanks to her new wings and the improved magic she now possessed. Unfortunately, her body hadn't followed, making it difficult to keep up the cadence. She landed in front of the entrance and leaned against the frame of white bricks holding the doors in place. There were no audiences currently, probably because Twilight had arrived during a break or the princesses were preoccupied with something important. Regardless, the path to the throne room was clear, and this left Twilight all the time she needed to meet with Celestia or Luna.
A red carpet with velvet trims went from the entrance straight to the throne room, making it very convenient for visitors or audience members to find their way. There were doors left and right that were carved with intricate motifs of the sun and moon, but the blinding orange light of a setting sun coming from windows overhead hurt the alicorn's eyes. Adding to the stress of her vision being obstructed, she still wasn't used to the guards lining the walls bowing to her whenever she passed, throwing her off every time she visited the castle.
When she finally reached the massive wooden doors that depicted Luna and Celestia with their respective celestial bodies overhead and reaching for each other, Twilight was met with an even brighter light that might as well have scooped her eyes out. Now she understood why no pony was coming at this time. She had to look to the side and felt a tug at her heart when she viewed the stained glass depicting the exploits of her and her friends. Nightmare Moon, Discord, the changeling invasion. Were things always like that for every generation?
"Twilight!" Celestia shouted. "It's so good to see you! I wasn't expecting a visit. You should have sent a message."
"I'm sorry about that, Princess," Twilight said as she struggled to move far enough that she would be in direct sunlight. "I just feel like it's an emergency and I need access to the oldest documents in your personal library.
Celestia tilted her head. "All of a sudden? Is there a new threat looking to harm Equestria?"
The young alicorn shook her head. "Nothing so severe, Princess. I'm just trying to find information on the source of magic and life in the world, but the only thing I can find are theories by ponies that act like they know more than they do, and everything that is said always loops back to each other." She stomped her hood on the ground. "It's frustrating!"
"Well, I could indeed give you access to the library," the mare thought.
"I also thought that maybe you could tell me everything you knew."
Celestia scoffed. "I'm not that old, Twilight."
"But surely you've seen things that ponies today can only dream of. You must know about something!"
The white alicorn shrugged. "I'm sorry, Twilight, but I can't help you with much."
The lavender pony scratched her head. "I mean, I've found a few mentioning something about metal and their composition being lightyears ahead of our forging techniques now." Celestia visibly jolted and stared at Twilight with wide eyes, something the guards took notice of. "I didn't think much of it, but I found a few theories talking about flying metal, but we have trains and pegasi that can fly large chariots. Could've been meteors?" Twilight continued to ramble as Celestia became stiff. "I thought it was completely absurd. What does metal have to do with the source of magic? I mean, the composition is interesting, but--"
"Twilight," Celestia interrupted her.
"S-sorry, Princess," Twilight chuckled. "I guess I've just been trying to piece together everything since the spell I used that remade me into an alicorn." Celestia jolted once again, causing the guards to shift forward somewhat. "It was...weird," Twilight continued. "Like I could feel the age of the world we were in and that something else was residing in there. I've used that feeling to create several simple spells, but I haven't been able to pinpoint that feeling since..."
"Twilight!" Celestia bellowed. She glared at the guards and waved them away. When the doors finally slammed shut, Celestia spoke once again. "That spell was indeed to get you to become an alicorn by recognizing the value of magic and the individuals beyond a mark, something rulers have forgotten in the past, but you..." She slouched against her throne and started laughing uncontrollably. "You're the first pony to have actually connected with the true purpose of the spell. I can't believe it!"
Twilight started worrying as she saw her mentor falling into hysterics. "What are you talking about?" Twilight asked.
Celestia jumped off her throne and wrapped a wing around her former student. "Do you truly want to know the origin of magic?" the alicorn asked.
"I do...?" Twilight hesitated.
"Then relax yourself," Celestia suggested as her horn began glowing extremely bright.
"What do you mean by th-aaaaah!" When Twilight finally regained her senses, she found that she could only see darkness. "Princess! Princess Celestia! Where are you?! I can't see!" A bright light formed in the cave, coming from the white alicorn's horn. Twilight saw the grimace the princess was sporting and shrank away with a growing blush. "Ha ha...oops..."
Celestia shook her head as she turned and moved down what appeared to be a cave. Letting the blood rush from her face, Twilight tried to sense anything from the cave walls, but there was nothing. She only managed to detect several colorful minerals sticking out, creating striations and dots along the walls. While there was a strange absence of stalactites and stalagmites, the usual fauna of cave-borne creepy crawlies scampered about in a bid to avoid the light.
"Is there where magic comes from?" Twilight asked her former mentor.
"No," Celestia said flatly.
Taken aback by the sudden response, Twilight kept quiet for the rest of the walk until they reached a dead end in which the two beings scattered orbs of light everywhere. Curious, Twilight looked around, trying to see if she could find anything out of the ordinary, which she didn't. It was as plain and simple a cave as it could get.
Twilight frowned the longer the two sat silently in this dead end and finally spoke to break the monotony. "Princess, why are we--"
"You felt the core purpose of the spell you used to become an alicorn. This means you felt the true nature of magic. Even Cadance did not feel what you felt." She looked to the side. "Although her alicornhood came from something else, so I suppose it wouldn't work, and Starswirl helped us to concoct this spell while we added to it without his knowledge."
"What?"
Celestia heaved a sigh and leaned against the rocky walls. She closed her eyes and grimaced slightly, as though she were reminiscing of something unpleasant. "Magic...wasn't always around, Twilight. At least, not in the sense you are aware of. It's a byproduct that somehow changed the world."
"A byproduct of what?" Twilight asked.
The white alicorn shrugged. "Fuel. Energy. Both? We don't know. We didn't know the intricacies of the world at the time, and I'm afraid the chance is lost for us." She passed a hoof through her mane. "We were barely even aware of ourselves."
Twilight took a few steps back as she parsed Celestia's words. "What are you talking about, Princess? It sounds like you were babies at the time, so h--"
"We weren't babies, Twilight," Celestia interjected. "My sister and I were something completely new. Something fully foreign to you. Something not technically alive." She exhaled and leaned forward, opening her eyes.
Twilight noticed that the alicorn's eyes had changed color. They were now solid black with a glowing yellow ring serving as the iris and a solid yellow light acting as the pupil.
"Wh-what? What's happening? Your eyes," she said with a cracking voice.
"What you call 'magic' came from those who came before. The ones who ruled the planet before ponies, minotaurs, changelings...Before any of that came to be." Celestia scratched the back of her neck. "While I can't attest to the source of their lives, the source of ours is because of 'magic': the byproduct of their energy. The waste," she explained.
"N..." Twilight paced around, horrified. "But that can't be. You're saying our magic is just trash?"
Celestia giggled. "Of course not. It's something else."
Twilight looked indignated. "But you just called it waste."
Celestia shrugged with a smile. "I did, but that's basically what it is on the surface. I'm not sure how, but it manifested into some kind of new form, self-replicated, and became as it is: a form of malleable energy that permeates nearly every being in the world." She casually kicked aside a small pebble that fell from the ceiling. "Magic is still relatively young, actually. It still wasn't fully as it was when we found the world as it is now."
Twilight choked on her words several times before she managed to get the words out. "Okay? Does that mean the world is y-You said 'as I know it'," she suddenly realized. "What does that mean, exactly?"
Celestia chuckled. "How old am I, Twilight?"
"A little over a thousand years old," Twilight was quick to reply.
"Now now, Twilight. Flattery is pointless here," Celestia chastized. "Feel free to increase."
"Uuuh...A few thousand?"
"More."
Twilight gawked. "M-many, thousand?"
"More," Celestia repeated.
The alicorn's smile increased with each suggestion and her continued immobility. However, this game was annoying an already stressed-out former unicorn.
"How much?! I'm sorry for being rude, but that is extremely aggravating, Princess!" Twilight said angrily.
"I know," Celestia said under her breath. "I'm several millions of years old."
Twilight's faced flushed of all emotion, and she stared, wide-eyed, at her teacher. "What."
Celestia nodded. "That's right. I'm not exactly sure on how old, but my sister and I are indeed in that age range." She walked around the dead-end and deployed her wings. "And this is where we awoke."
"You...awoke?" Twilight looked around. "You were asleep somehow?"
"In a sense." Celestia sat down and took a moment. "We lived in a world where lights and buildings reached far beyond the skies into the dark." The princess' magic started seeping out of her in her reminiscing and warped, unfocused images of her speech were appearing on the walls. Twilight felt her heart skip a beat when she realized her eyes were glowing brighter and brighter and her face was becoming more obscuring in darkness somehow. "Machines flew through the sky, clean and quiet, numbering in the thousands. Those who lived back then were impossibly advanced to the Equestria we live in now."
"A-are you doing that?" Twilight asked as she looked at the images.
She could hear strange noises, like pegasi flying through the sky, but far more intense and aggressive. She saw sparks dancing across the walls past blurry towers illuminating the sky around them with lights and color.
"Doing what?" Celestia asked.
"Never mind," Twilight sighed.
The white alicorn nodded. "Well, to return to where I was, these people possessed knowledge Equestrians can't even dream of. They had built various helpers and machinery to aid them across the decades, each more complex and advanced than its predecessor." Twilight witnessed bipedal figures with empty, glowing eyes slowly fading in behind Celestia who served as their centerpiece. Their staring at Twilight made her even more fearful of her teacher and found herself shaking despite herself. "They used the energy I mentioned earlier, but not all were created equal, same as with the makers. Black and Blue were the colors of the energy, but the Black tainted the land around it."
"Did that also create magic?"
Celestia shook her head. "I'm unsure. All I'm sure is that it burnt into clouds of black dangerous to the makers."
"Then why not just use the other color? Was it rare?" Twilight wondered.
Celestia shook her head once again. "I'm not fully sure, and I wasn't interested at the time, so I didn't look deeper into it. I just know that they weren't able to access it." She shivered in place. "That, and I wouldn't have had time anyways since my sister found me at the climax of the world."
"Cl...climax?" Twilight stuttered. She raised a hoof toward her former teacher. "Y-you mean--"
Celestia nodded. "Yes. The creations of the makers started taking new shapes and becoming more fantasy and fantastical in appearance. Amalgamations of the creative minds of the time. They, too, started to change the world. Glitches. Consciousness. Self-awareness. Understanding," she continued.
Twilight looked down, her eyes wide in realization. "They...went beyond sentience and became sapient...!"
"Not all at once, though. They were gradually changed. Some of the makers thought it was the blue that caused it, but those in the black were like this as well." She smiled, reminiscing of good times. "Tensions were high at first because of the energy we used, but we quickly became fast friends."
"I imagine they're all..." Twilight trailed off quietly.
Celestia chuckled and patted her former student on the head. "It's alright, Twilight. They are indeed dead and have been for quite some, although I am unsure why the same didn't happen to my sister and I. We were together for a long time," Celestia said. "It was very difficult to accept, but I've had millions of years to cope with their loss."
"I see. I'm sorry you had to go through that," Twilight said melancholically. She spun around after she heard another voice. "What? I think somepony followed us."
"Calm down, Twilight. It's alright," Celestia reassured her.
"Sister! Back to this place? We haven't been here in a very long time," the voice said. Luna stepped into the light, next to a surprised Twilight and bowed her head briefly. "Twilight," she greeted courteously.
"She felt the essence of magic in the spell that turned her into an alicorn," Celestia explained to her sister.
Luna looked at Celestia and then at Twilight with wide eyes. "Really? Finally! That spell never worked for the longest time!" She almost dropped to the floor in relief. "Finally somepony we can share our history with. Our true history."
The lavender alicorn looked between both ponies in rapid succession. "You can't expect me to believe any of that!" she yelled. Celestia looked at her, grinning from ear-to-ear while Luna glared at the young pony scornfully. "Where where a bunch of giant machines and space towers brought magic?!" Twilight stomped her hoof and stood up tall in front of the princesses. "I'm not a foal anymore, Princess Celestia. If that world ever existed then we would have found concrete evidence of it."
"What about the metal pieces you mentioned in the throne room?" Celestia asked.
Twilight waved that away. "Tectonic shifting and mineral fusion happens all the time. It's not new, and, otherwise, it could have come from space."
"Twilight has always prized logic above all things for what she could not comprehend." She looked at her sister with a raised brow. "Best to show her instead of trying to convince her with words, no?"
The two sisters' bodies cracked, revealing lines of bright light running along their skin. The light intensified, nearly fully blinding Twilight. In the vague shade she could still see the princesses' skin was detaching itself from their bodies. They were growing thinner and slowly stood upright. She couldn't make out much else until the light had faded.
The lavender alicorn had gone pale when she saw what the rulers of ponykind looked like this whole time. A thousand years, maybe even more, and they never knew. They were thin beings made of metal. Plates of this overlapped each other, creating thin sheets of armor on a very thin body. Their mane and tail had fused together into one wavy substance that grew and fluttered from the top of their heads and dragged low along their backs. Luna's eyes imitated Celestia's, save for the deep blue light. Along what would've been their skin, the lines of light remained, gently glowing and fading as time went on. They floated above the ground, their hind hooves having become pointed.
"This is what we really look like," Celestia said. Her voice had a droning to it like the treble had been boosted.
Confused, Twilight looked around frantically to try and find Celestia's mouth, but failed. "...How are you saying that with no mouth?"
Their faces were smooth and elongated as though they still had their muzzles, they were featureless. No nostrils. No fur. No mouths. What they were seemed to be a complete mystery. Whirring and metallic grinding came from Luna as she stretched her limbs and joints.
"It's good to be in our bodies again." A ring of light emerged from her foreleg's hoof and bent into the approximate shape of a five-digit hand that she used to readjust her neck.
"We aren't the Makers, Twilight," Celestia said. "We are the ones they made. Machines meant to help them in their everyday lives." She leaned closer, giving a frightened pony a closer view of her mechanical eyes. "You weren't the first nor were you the second."
"We were the second," Luna added.
Twilight was stunned. The princesses were machines of such advanced technology, but how was that possible that they still existed after so long?
"We don't know how we came to be in here. We just know that we were buried after we saw a flash of light," Luna continued. "Explosion? Implosion?" She shrugged. "Whatever the case is, we now function on magic and no longer the blue."
"And the Makers all disappeared in a flash of light. No one left..." Celestia lamented. "Perhaps the spirits of our friends helped us to get here after their passing."
Twilight raised a brow and pursed her lips. "Wait, can machines even have spirits?"
The sisters exploded in laughter, annoying Twilight.
"Please excuse us, Twilight. We haven't heard that philosophical debate in so long," Celestia apologized. "I suppose now you want to know how we became as we are now."
"Actually, I was--" Twilight couldn't continue that Celestia had already started recounting old memories.
"When we awoke in this cave, we saw a world devoid of machinery. Of buildings. Of blue energy."
"Of Makers and friends," Luna interjected.
"It was just a vast meadow of colors with a bunch of creatures we had never seen before," Celestia continued. "We looked around and eventually found ponies whom we observed and then contacted."
"They...saw us as great spirits or something..." Luna said. She was visibly disturbed. "We came to the conclusion to let them believe that and eventually teach their children differently. We aren't gods not 'great spirits' despite the amount of magic within us."
Celestia giggled. "We learned that this 'magic' had permeated everything and created all of this new world," she said as she spread her arms out. "We wanted to protect it. Learn from it. Teach it. Help it grow."
"We didn't want to lose it as we did our original world," Luna said.
Twilight waved her hooves and fell on her rear. "Hold on! This so much to take in!"
"Well, we can stop for now and resume later if you--" Celestia started.
The lavender alicorn shook her head. "No. I just want to know about this 'Past World' of yours. The more I hear the better equipped I'll be to process the information about it. There might even be a way to bring back that age," she pondered. "Or bring some of it back. Might even have pieces of it still intact somewhere that you're not aware of, but without knowing how it is or what it is like, I won't know what to look for," Twilight explained.
The two princesses 'jolted' and stabilized. "If I could cry in this form...to recall old friends in a life long past...Of a world forever lost to us and the potential futures it carried...," Celestia lamented.
"Let's remember the fond moments instead of focusing on the negatives, sister," Luna said in her best attempt to reassure Celestia. "Even if the memories are painful, we still have them, and they're proof of what came before." She pretended to clear her throat and looked directly at Twilight. "Everything began when I was activated in the home of my Makers for the first time..."