As one of the few ponies allowed access to Princess Celestia's private study, standing on the rich, exotic Saddle Arabian rugs of the place never failed to make Twilight Sparkle feel both incredibly privileged and humble all at the same time. On one side of the room sat a desk, heavy and solid and incredibly old, carved of dark oak and piled high with paperwork that Twilight's brain itched to organize. Though, she'd learned better than to try it after the minor scolding she'd gotten the last time she'd tried to "help."
Not all of Twilight's private lessons were about magic. Princess Celestia believed that a well-rounded education was critical to a pony's development. This is why Twilight's studies included mathematics, history, language and philosophy, as well as magical learning. All of this suited her just fine. She soaked up the knowledge like a sponge that could never be filled and always wanted more.
Today's conversation was sparked by an off-hoof comment Twilight had made about a fellow student—of the School for Gifted Unicorns, not of Princess Celestia—that she'd seen sitting under a tree and reading a book of short stories, rather than studying for an upcoming test. Twilight had discovered, right at that very moment, that she had a very distinct opinion on such obviously non-scholastic activities, which lead to a short conversation with her mentor, which, in turn, led to the following statement:
“I agree that it’s fun,” Twilight Sparkle said with the unshakable conviction of the young. “But when you get right down to it, fiction doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Princess Celestia didn’t reply, at first. She set her teacup back in its saucer and merely looked down at her student, which of course meant that Twilight had to desperately try and fill the silence that followed.
“I mean, it’s not like non-fiction. That’s all fact-based. Facts have to be more important than stories.” As the Princess continued looking down at her with an expressionless face, Twilight felt her confidence sagging, her body following suit with a slight lowering of her head and ears. “Uh… don’t they?”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Princess Celestia said eventually. “Though, I seem to recall your fondness for those Daring Do novels.”
Twilight blushed and shuffled a hoof across the floor. Trust the Princess to know of her one guilty pleasure. “Well, yes. But only when there aren't any tests coming up! They’re very exciting, though not always factually accurate.”
“Hmm… I see.”
For a horrible moment, Twilight thought she’d disappointed her teacher. Then Celestia offered up a bright smile.
“I was wondering if you would do a small favor for me, Twilight.”
That was enough to get Twilight to straighten back to her full height, an answering smile on her face. “Anything, Princess!”
“I would like you to go down to the Royal Library and find a book for me.”
“Of course! Right away, Princess. What’s it called?”
“Ah, you see, that’s the thing.” Princess Celestia’s smile turned sly and her eyes twinkled. “It doesn’t have a title, but you will know it when you see it.”
~~*~~
The Royal Library of Canterlot was the largest in Equestria by far. It was also Twilight’s favorite place to be, with rows and rows of books everywhere she looked, stacked nearly all the way to the vaulted ceiling towering high overhead. The uppermost books were reachable by unicorn magic, the occasional pegasus librarian, or rolling ladders attached to the shelves themselves.
There were so many books that Twilight would never be able to read them all, even if she’d had a hundred lifetimes in which to do it. This was a bittersweet truth that Twilight had come to accept, though that was hardly going to stop her from trying.
As always, the Royal Librarians moved in near-silence about the place. It was a busy day, today, Twilight saw as she entered. Many patrons sat around the various tables, poring over the books in front of them. The silent shuffle of pages being turned spoke of knowledge being learned. It was something that never failed to warm Twilight’s heart.
In the center of the reception room was a desk of black walnut that had a solidity to it that would make many a mountain envious, and had stood in that exact spot since the library had been built. Sometimes it seemed to Twilight as if the entire library existed merely to provide context for that desk, which had a sort of gravity that seemed to pull at her as she walked towards it.
The mare that sat behind the desk had much the same impact, for all that she was tiny and withered, her mane grey and her legs which trembled when she stood. Spring Rose had been the Head Librarian since long before Twilight’s own parents had been born, and the weight of her presence impressed itself upon everypony who dared to enter her domain.
In all honesty, Twilight was more than a little intimidated by her. But that was as it should be, as far as she was concerned. It seemed fitting that something as precious as a treasure trove of books would have such a fierce guardian protecting it. The young unicorn moved to the front of the desk and waited patiently until Spring Rose deigned to take notice of her.
“Yes?!” the librarian snapped, though quietly since this was a library. She adjusted her thick half-moon glasses with a shaky hoof and peered down at Twilight through them. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, her voice becoming just a touch less hostile. “More studies?”
“No, ma’am,” Twilight said, quickly adding, “Princess Celestia sent me to find a book.”
“Hmm… Well, you know where the card catalogue is,” Spring Rose replied, then turned her attention back to whatever it had been that she’d been reading before she’d been interrupted. After a minute or two of Twilight standing awkwardly in front of her desk, she let out a long-suffering sigh and looked back up. “Yes, yes, what is it? I haven’t got all day.”
“Um… I don’t actually know the title,” Twilight confessed. “The Princess told me I’d know it when I saw it.”
Spring Rose snorted as her horn lit up, lifting her glasses and dropping them down on her chest to dangle on their beaded chains. “Celestia is playing games again, I see,” she muttered.
Twilight flinched at the tone of that statement. “I guess so,” she replied.
It was somewhat noteworthy to Twilight that Spring Rose never called the Princess by her title. It was always just “Celestia”. Except that one time—and Twilight cringed at the memory—she had called the Princess ”young lady."
Oddly enough, Princess Celestia hadn’t seemed to mind. In fact, she’d smiled at the cranky old Head Librarian as if she’d just been offered a slice of cake. Twilight had no idea what to make of it.
“Those saddlebags have anything to do with it?” Spring Rose asked, nodding at the packs on Twilight’s back.
“Yes. She told me to keep them closed until I absolutely needed them.”
The Head Librarian made a “tsk” sound. “So, it’s to be that game, is it? I’d better get the lantern for you.”
With a sigh, Spring Rose pushed herself out of her chair and began rummaging around under the massive black desk. A few moments later, she popped back up with a crystal lantern suspended in her magic field. Twilight recognized the type of lantern—a quick burst of magic would keep it glowing with a bright, white light for hours. Naturally, no oil lanterns were allowed in the library. Bringing any sort of flame into the presence of so many books would bring the Head Librarian’s wrath down on you before you could blink.
“Take this,” Spring Rose said, floating the lantern over the wide expanse of desk that separated the her from the mere mortals who dared to invade her space. “You’ll find the book you’re looking for towards the back of the library.”
“Towards the back?” Twilight repeated, looking in that direction. The stacks stretched out as far as the eye could see, and then some. If you looked far enough back, the shadows swallowed the space between shelves, hiding the books in inky darkness. “Um… how far back?”
“However far back it is, of course,” Spring Rose snapped quietly in reply. “It’s simple: if you haven’t found it yet, you haven’t gone far enough. So, keep looking until you do.”
“Thank you,” Twilight said, even though the old librarian had hardly been of any help at all. She was glad for the lantern, though. It was brighter than horn-light by far.
“Child, wait,” Spring Rose said. Twilight hesitated and looked back at the Head Librarian, who was scowling at nothing in particular. Eventually, the old mare gave herself a shake and said to Twilight, “Be careful, and keep your wits about you. Things can get strange when you get far back in the stacks.”
The advice confused Twilight, but she said “Thank you, I’ll keep that in mind.” Then, lantern hovering in front of her, she marched off between the nearest set of shelves.
~~*~~
“This is ridiculous,” Twilight muttered a considerable amount of time later.
When she’d first gotten started, she was careful to examine every book she passed to see if it had a title. The first book she’d come across without a title on the spine had caused a spark of excitement that lasted until she had levitated the book down and saw the title written across the front of it.
Twilight sincerely doubted that Celestia had sent her down to retrieve A Brief History of Voles.
That hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm much, and she had returned to the task at hoof with nearly the same vigor as before. Then came the second book with no title on the spine, then the third, fourth, and so on. Each of these books had been taken down and examined, only to be put back on the shelf when she discovered the title on the front cover.
Twilight lost count of the number of books with blank spines somewhere around two hundred and thirty-seven. For a while, she had amused herself with counting the books in each shelf and keeping a running tally of the non-blank and blank-spined books in order to calculate the probable number of each that the next set of shelves might be holding. She’d had to abandon that pursuit, though, when she’d come across three full rows of ancient Saddle Arabian poetry, none of which had titles printed on their spines, thus skewing her calculations and taking all the fun out of the game.
Darned statistical anomalies.
The lack of any windows or any other way of telling time left Twilight uncertain of how long she’d been at this task, but it felt like at least several hours. She was tired and hoofsore, and she was covered with dust and cobwebs. The musty, papery smell of books was so firmly lodged in her sinuses that she was sure she’d be smelling it for weeks. On top of that, she was starting to get hungry and incredibly thirsty. Twilight’s enthusiasm had abandoned her several rows back, and she eventually found herself slouching through the aisles while only glancing at the shelves.
Twilight was more miserable than she’d ever been, though that was by the standards of an upper middle-class Canterlot unicorn who was also the personal student of Princess Celestia.
The only light was coming from her little crystal lantern, surrounding Twilight in a bubble of bright light beyond which the shadows deepened quickly. She had the vague impression of the shelves on either side of her stretching off into the distance with no end in sight.
The library can’t be this long, can it? Twilight wondered. She’d been walking in a straight line this whole time. Some quick calculation based on an estimate of time walked told her that she’d covered the length of Canterlot Castle itself and a considerable distance beyond. That, clearly, was impossible, which meant that she hadn’t been here nearly as long as she’d thought she’d been.
Twilight let out a disgruntled huff and sat down on the dusty stone beneath her. “It has to be here somewhere,” she reasoned. “Princess Celestia wouldn’t send me down her if it wasn’t. Would she?”
A shiver passed down Twilight’s spine at the thought. Would the Princess do something like that? It occurred to her that she didn’t really know. Maybe all of this was some sort of punishment. Or maybe it was a test, and she was failing it. Twilight wasn’t sure which would be worse.
The test, she decided after a moment of consideration. Definitely the test.
In any case, this was getting to be too much. It was time to head back, Twilight decided as she got back to her hooves. She’d get something to eat and drink, clean off the dust and cobwebs, and try again.
Maybe she could get more answers out of Spring Rose. The Head Librarian seemed to know something about this, after all. Twilight would march up to her desk, firmly get the librarian’s attention… and then meekly and politely ask for directions, because even in her imagination, Spring Rose was a force to be reckoned with.
It was with that mindset that she turned and began following her own dusty hoofprints back the way she’d come, levitating her little crystal lantern before her as she went. And everything was going as well as could be expected, until the aisle in front of her suddenly made a left turn that definitely didn’t remember being there before.
Twilight stared at the unexpected corner in blank confusion. She looked down and saw her hoofprints in the dust coming around the corner. But there hadn’t been a corner, had there? She’d walked straight this entire time.
Hadn’t she?
After a few minutes, she shook herself. A burst of nervous laughter bubbled up out of her chest. “Aisles don’t just move, Twilight,” she told herself. Of course they didn’t. She must have made this turn without realizing it. It was obvious. She’d been in a funk, dwelling on her misery and walking forward without paying much attention, and had simply turned when the aisle did.
At least nopony was around to see her so out of sorts. With little laugh at her absent-mindedness, she moved forward, breaking into a quick trot. The sooner she got out of here, the better, she thought, which was the first time in her life that Twilight Sparkle had thought anything of the sort when in a library.
She trotted down the definitely very straight aisle for a few minutes, and had managed to put her previous unease behind her. At least, until she came across an intersection of two different aisles, which stopped her cold in her tracks.
Here was another feature that she didn’t remember. She looked to her left and then to her right, her face a perfect study of confusion as she stared into the darkness. More shelves with more books stretched as far as she could see, which wasn’t very far at all.
“They really need to get more light back here,” Twilight muttered peevishly. Obviously, that was how she’d missed seeing this. It was simply too dark. She hurried through the intersection, head down and her ears plastered firmly down on her head.
The intersection fell into the darkness behind her, and nothing came rushing out of the darkness at her. Not that Twilight had expected it to. In fact, her only reason for her frequent glances back over her shoulder was just to confirm that she’d been completely right about the lack of horrific monsters in the darkness.
She began to walk a little bit faster.
More time passed with nothing happening, and eventually Twilight began to relax a little. The hallway hadn’t turned again, and there hadn’t been any more mystery intersections. All she had to do was follow the hoofprints she’d left in the dust on the way in and she’d be home free.
She frowned as something about that thought struck her as strange.
With a mounting feeling of unease, she looked down at the floor. She experienced a feeling akin to waking up as her rationalizations blew away in an instant. Twilight realized three things in rapid succession:
The first was that the thick coat of dust on the floor in front of her was completely undisturbed. She was no longer retracing her steps.
The second was that the books on the shelves looked extremely strange and unfamiliar, with hugely oversized covers made of metal, or wood, or other materials she couldn’t recognize..
The third was that she was lost in a library that was illogically huge and couldn’t have possibly existed underneath the city of Canterlot. With the distance she’d walked today, this section of the library would have had to be suspended in midair at least a half-mile off of the east side of Mount Canter.
“Okay, Twilight,” she said to herself.”There’s no need to panic. There’s a logical explanation to this. Obviously, the logical thing to do is to turn and go back the way I came until I find something familiar.”
Twilight nodded to herself, glad to have worked that out. Suiting words to action, she turned on her back hoof and trotted back the way she’d just come, lantern held up in front of her to light the way.
It was a good plan. Unfortunately for Twilight, it didn’t seem to be working. The library changed even further, incorporating some strange curves, ramps and even some stairs that definitely hadn’t been there before. All of this made Twilight even more desperate to get back to something familiar. She’d even be happy with that mystery intersection that had so confused her earlier.
Eventually, all that trotting caught up with her. Twilight was a student, not an athlete. She stumbled to a halt with her chest heaving and her legs wobbling. She sat down hard on the dusty floor, feeling small and lost and alone, as well as thirsty beyond anything she’d ever experienced before. She was almost ready to start crying when she remembered the saddlebags she’d been wearing this whole time.
Celestia had told her not to open them unless she had no other choice. Well, Twilight decided, being lost in an impossible library probably met that qualification. Her horn lit up and opened the left saddlebag.
A round metal object glinted at her in the light of her lantern. Curious, Twilight levitated it out, staring at it in blank confusion for a long moment before she realized what it was: a canteen. She twisted the cap off with a raspy cry of joy.
The first few gulps of water tasted better than anything she’d ever tasted before. After a few seconds of drinking heavily, it occurred to her that she’d be better off rationing the water. She had no idea how long she’d be here, after all. With a sigh of regret, she screwed the cap back on and slid the canteen back into her bag.
It was amazing how much improved her mood was after just a little bit of water. It was with a much more optimistic frame of mind that Twilight opened the right bag of her saddlebags, revealing something yellow inside. With a frown, Twilight levitated the contents out.
“Well, I suppose this will help with being hungry,” Twilight said to herself, “but why would Celestia make such a big deal about a bunch of bananas?”
It was a perplexing question, indeed, and one that Twilight would have dearly loved to have had more time to contemplate, but her musings were interrupted by the sound of something shifting in the darkness before her.
She shot to her hooves, staring warily into the shadows with the bunch of bananas held out before her like an extremely ineffective shield.
A dark shape swelled, and Twilight’s eyes locked onto it. She took a cautious step back, lighting her horn in preparation as the shape flowed along near the top of the bookshelf on her left side.
“Hello?” Twilight called uncertainly, her heart surging like she’d just sprinted up several flights of stairs. “Can… can you understand me?”
The shadow stopped, then fell suddenly to the floor like a bag of wet laundry. It shuffled forward, slowly becoming more distinct as it approached the bright light of Twilight’s lantern.
The first thing she noticed was that the creature was very hairy, and extremely orange. The second was that it was a biped, though it augmented the use of its stumpy back legs by knuckling its way forward using its incredibly long arms.
Its face was hairless, though surrounded by lanky ginger hair going down to its shoulders. Its beady black eyes were set back behind a large, dome-shaped muzzle.
Twilight frowned at it, confused. She had read many zoology books, naturally. The creature before her, or at least one like it, had been described in The Creatures of the Zebracan Rainforests.
“What’s a giant monkey doing in the librar—eep!”
The creature rushed at her with a shocking suddenness. Twilight’s magic went out, dropping the bananas and her crystal lantern as she huddled on the dusty floor, her forelegs over her head and her eyes screwed tightly shut.
I’m dead! Twilight thought as she curled in on herself. I’m so dead! I’m dead, it’s going to eat me, that’s so unfair, why is there a wild animal in the library? Somepony should lose their job over this!
After a minute or so of not being mauled by the orange-haired primate, Twilight lowered her forelegs from her head and risked cracking an eye open.
“Nrk!” she managed to say.
The primate’s face was directly in front of her. It was smiling—or, rather, it was showing its teeth, which might not have been the same thing. It leaned back and, with glacial slowness, reached up with one arm and extended a hand towards her. All fingers folded back except for the first one, which the creature waggled back and forth in front of Twilight’s face.
“Ook,” it said in a tone that brooked no argument.
“Uh… Okay?”
The creature nodded, appearing satisfied. “Ook.”
It stood, reaching out to latch on to one of the nearby shelves with an arm that appeared at least as long as the rest of its body and hauled itself up with enviable ease. After a moment of looking, it pulled a single book from the shelf and dropped back down to the floor with more grace than its potato-sack of a body should have been capable of.
It flipped the book open to a certain page and passed it over to Twilight, who took it in the glow of her magic. The page contained an illustration of a creature very similar to the one before her. Twilight quickly scanned the accompanying text.
“Oh, I see,” she said. “You’re an orangutan, right?”
“Ook.”
“That means you’re an ape, and not a mon—”
“Eek!”
Twilight shrank back as the ape’s lips pulled back from its teeth. Once again, the hand came up in front of her face and waggled that single index finger back and forth in front of her muzzle.
“—and not that other thing, which I will do my best to never mention again in your presence,” Twilight finished quickly.
“Ook,” the orangutan said. One of his long arms unfolded like the boom of a crane. He reached out and patted her on the head just behind her horn, doing so with a deceptive gentleness which still managed to make Twilight’s head bob up and down like an apple in a tub of water. The arms looked scrawny compared to their overall length, but the casual strength he was displaying made Twilight intensely glad that she had somehow wound up on his good side.
“Right,” Twilight said. She picked up the crystal lantern from where it had rolled, grateful that the light hadn’t gone out. She looked at her unexpected companion out of the corner of her eye, trying to study it without obviously staring at it.
The orangutan was sitting on the floor and looking towards the ceiling, his long arms folded behind his head. It seemed perfectly content, though every once in a while his eyes flickered towards the bananas still on the floor. Twilight made a deductive leap.
“Um… would you like a banana? You can have a couple if you—” Twilight broke off as one hairy arm shot towards the bunch and snagged a two of the bananas. “I guess that’s a yes?”
“Ook,” the orangutan replied solemnly before peeling a banana and taking a large bite.
Twilight giggled at the sight. Her study of The Creatures of the Zebracan Rainforests had indicated that primates, while definitely clever, weren’t capable of understanding speech. That was obviously untrue, at least in the case of this particular ape. She had half a mind to write a strongly-worded letter to the book’s publishers to tell them to check their facts.
“So, I don’t suppose you can tell me where I can find a book with no title?”
The orangutan looked up at her. “Ook?”
“Well, my teacher is Princess Celestia. She sent me down here to find a book with no title. She said I’d recognize it when I saw it.” Twilight sniffled a little. “Actually, I think sending me down here might have been as a punishment for saying that fiction doesn’t have any real-world value.”
The ape tilted his odd head at her, then heaved himself upright. “Ook,” he said, waving an arm in a gesture clearly meant to indicate that Twilight should follow.
Twilight trailed behind as the creature knuckled his way down the aisle. After a few minutes, they stopped in front of another bookshelf that was nearly indistinguishable from any of the others in this section. Once again, the ape lifted himself easily up the bookshelves, this time grabbing a slender tome with a prehensile back foot. He passed the book up to one of his hands and dropped back to the floor.
“Ook,” the orangutan said simply, holding the book out to Twilight.
The book was in rough shape. Some of the pages seemed to have slipped the bindings and were tucked loosely back in with their peers. Twilight saw that the book did have a title, but the cover was so scuffed and damaged that the words were obscured to the point of illegibility.
Something told her that this was, indeed, the book she’d been looking for. That something was her strong desire to be done with this particular quest and get the heck out of this surreal library.
“Thank you,” Twilight said, gingerly levitating the book into her saddlebag, doing her best to avoid damaging it any further. “I don’t suppose you know how I can get out of here, do you?”
“Ook.” Once again, the ape waved his incredibly long arm. Twilight followed him for a long while, growing confused and concerned at the apparently random turns they were taking along the way. Nothing at all looked familiar… until, suddenly, it did. A change of sorts seemed to come over the air, perhaps a difference in pressure or temperature that was so subtle that Twilight almost didn’t notice it.
Twilight gasped. There was light at the end of the aisle. She was almost out!
“Oh, thank you!” she said, throwing a foreleg around the ape and hugging him tightly. “I was so lost!”
“Ook,” the ape said, patting her on the back.
“Don’t say that!” Twilight protested as she released him. “I really mean it! I was getting so scared, and you really saved me. I’d still be lost back there, if it wasn’t for you!”
The orangutan looked down bashfully and scuffed a foot along the floor. “Ook,” he said with an extremely complicated shrug.
“Well, sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” Twilight noticed that she was still holding the rest of the bananas in her magical field. “Would you like the rest of these? You seem to like them, and you’ve been so kind…”
“Eek!” The orangutan snatched the bunch of bananas and hugged them to his chest. After a moment of consideration, it plucked one of the bananas off and held it towards to Twilight. “Ook.”
“Oh, I couldn’t! Those are a gift for you.”
“Ook!”
“Well, okay. If you insist. Thank you!” Twilight tucked the banana back into her saddlebag. She was pretty hungry, after all.
The orangutan nodded before knuckling one-armed back into the darkness from which it had come, his prize of bananas still clutched to his chest.
“Bye!” Twilight called after it. “Thanks again!”
The orangutan turned back at her shout and held up a single long finger to its lips. It winked, said a quiet “Ook,” and waved farewell.
Twilight watched it go until she couldn’t see it anymore. She sighed, turned, and walked into the light.
~~*~~
“Ah, Twilight! Welcome back.” Princess Celestia was reclined on top of several cushions on her floor with a large pile of correspondence in front of her. She set down her teacup and smiled. “Any difficulty retrieving the book?”
“I, uh…” Twilight stopped to consider her answer. What could she say? That the Royal Library had apparently gone crazy all of a sudden? That there was an ape on the loose in there who apparently knew where to find all sorts of books? The Princess would think she was crazy! “Not really.”
The Princess’ eyes twinkled with what Twilight refused to acknowledge was mischief. “No problems at all?”
“Not really,” Twilight said airily. “After all, it’s not like anything all that unusual happens in a library.” She levitated the book out of her saddlebag and floated it over to the Princess, who took it in her own golden aura. While Celestia looked over the book, a loud rumbling in Twilight’s stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten in hours. She levitated her last banana out of the saddlebag, peeled it and took a bite.
Princess Celestia glanced over, her mouth quirking up in a smile. “He left you a banana?”
The question was troubling on so many levels, not the least of which how Princess Celestia knew who “he” was.
“Um. Yes?” Twilight asked warily.
“That means he likes you,” Princess Celestia said. “In any case, this is the right book, but I intended for you to be the one to read it.”
“Oh.” Twilight took the book back, turning it over in her magic. The same scuffed, cloth-bound covers and illegible title greeted her. At some point, some inconsiderate reader had obviously dribbled some liquid on the cover, which was lumpy and misshapen. She flipped it open to see the title page.
“On the Value of Fiction, by T. Prose,” she read out loud. “I guess the book has a title after all?”
Celestia’s soft laughter answered her. “Yes, it does. But saying ‘please retrieve a book that has a badly damaged cover’ lacks a certain mystique.”
Twilight considered the scraggly book in front of her, then frowned up at her teacher and mentor. There was a thought that was bouncing around the back of her mind. It wasn’t something she wanted to ask the Princess, but the question wouldn’t be denied. “I don’t understand. Why make me go through all of this? Weren’t there other places I could find this book? Or one like it?”
Princess Celestia’s smile never faltered. “Why do you think?”
It had been a long and exhausting day, which would go a long way towards explaining why Twilight responded as she did.
“I don’t know, that’s why I asked!” came Twilight’s exasperated near-shout, followed quickly by her shoving a hoof over her mouth.
Rather than having Twilight arrested for shouting at a Princess, or banishing her, or telling her that she was no longer going to be her teacher, Princess Celestia simply chuckled at the outburst.
“I could tell you that nothing worthwhile is ever easy,” the Princess said. “Or, I could tell you that adversity grows character. I could say that the journey is often more important than the destination, which is something many ponies forget.”
Celestia stepped closer to Twilight, enveloping her in one of her massive wings and bringing the unicorn into a warm hug.
“All of those have a certain truth to them. However, the reason I sent you down there, Twilight, was to show you that life can be strange and wonderful, most often when you least expect it to be. When a pony reads a work of fiction, it can remind them of that fact. There is so more to the world than what can seen from somepony's front door. And even the most incredible stories can contain elements of truth to them. Through stories, we can gain more than just facts. We can gain perspective.”
“Oh.” She looked at the book, still hovering in her magical field. It still seemed like a disproportionate amount of effort to go through to get one ragged, tattered book. Though, she had to admit that meeting the orangutan had been nice. “Should I read it now?”
“I’ll leave that up to you,” Princess Celestia replied, releasing Twilight and stepping away with a sigh. “I’m afraid I have quite a bit of reading to do, myself, so I won’t have time for more lessons for a while. You can stay and read here, if you like.”
Twilight’s heart sang at the offer. “I’d like that very much!”
“Then, please, make yourself comfortable. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on the book, especially after all you went through to retrieve it!”
Twilight did so, finding some unoccupied cushions and settling into them with a happy sigh. Her hooves still throbbed a little from her library adventure. It was nice to be off of them.
With the most delicate touch of magic she could manage, she opened the badly damaged book to the first page and read the first sentence. This is what it said:
No story, once told, can ever truly die.