Entry Seven: The Guard
Set After Chapter 20: Breaking
I suspect that it is a singularly unique experience that I am privy to.
The words do not exist to express the sensation, for ponies have never had need of such words before. Language will, I am afraid, inevitably fail me.
However, one of the points of this diary is to attempt to quantify the unquantifiable and learn to say that which cannot be said. I will endeavor to do the best that I can.
Twilight has charged me with the protection of Canterlot. With her assistance, I have created the “Solar Guard.” As far as any pony is concerned the guard are a projection of her will. In reality they are a projection of myself.
My systems have been expanded and there is nowhere in Canterlot that I cannot now tread. Should the worst ever come to pass, and my Twilight leaves me, at the very least I will be able to continue watching over her fair city.
We first tested it in private, unused chambers of the castle. A thousand projections jostling around in an ancient ballroom that nopony has set hoof in for over a hundred years. That was how we discovered the projection runes could overheat. But that was when I first experienced the strangeness.
Really, it is not much different than the method in which I would splinter myself to project “Celly” beyond my cave. There was always the cave and Celly. But now there are a thousand splinters.
I am each member of the Solar Guard, and each of those projections of light is me. We share one personality and one consciousness. Each is a part of the whole. I am the whole.
Imagine being able to hear a thousand conversations at once. Only they are not jostling for dominance trying to drown one another out. You can listen to each conversation in its entirety. I can be speaking with a thousand ponies simultaneously without blinking an eye.
Imagine what it would be like to suddenly grow four new hooves. Now multiply that by five hundred, only you do not feel awkward with these new hooves. It is as if you have had them your entire life.
Twilight might be the only pony alive who can come close to understanding. She was born without wings and now she can fly. Only she has had to learn how to use her new appendages and adapt to all of those nerve endings. Unfortunately, I cannot think of anything else remotely similar.
Actually… Perhaps there are many ponies who could understand after a fashion. Ponies who have lost limbs have undergone the opposite. Where I have gained hooves, others have lost hooves. Though it is the opposite process, they could perhaps understand by contrasting their experiences.
My eye everywhere.
My eye is but many eyes
The one self is many
Hmm… I do not seem to be good at poetry. I had hoped... but no. It does not seem I am left with many other options for conveying the experience.
I suppose I can describe some of the limitations I have found. I can carry on a thousand conversations at once. I cannot carry on a thousand conversations about philosophy at once. There is a certain amount of complex behavior that each splinter can maintain without a problem, but beyond that it begins to draw my attention. When some pony asks one of my guard a difficult problem, answering means other guards freeze in what they are doing.
Likewise, even though they are all me, and I am them, they are not me. It is “fun” to talk to Twilight as the guard, but only in so much as it is something new. That and she makes the most adorable frustrated face when I do so.
However, the things I experience as the guard seem more hollow. Perhaps their perceptions are not as good as my Celly projection. Their parallel rune structures are certainly much more compact and simplified. It is like feeling a breeze run across your hoof as opposed to your ear.
AH! A simile. Have I used them before? Perhaps poetry is not lost to me. Certainly something I need to explore later.
But to finish my thought. If I was to be discussing things of importance with Twilight, I would much rather do so as Celly, or here in my cave as Celestia, than as the guard. It’s hard to put my hoof on.
It just feels right that way.