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// XIX. Abandonment 
// Story: Memoirs of a Magic Earth Pony 
// by The Lunar Samurai 
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	That night was one of the most difficult nights of my life. As I rifled through those pages, trying so desperately to absorb what I could about magic, I came to the realization that my knowledge was nonexistent. Despite knowing full well that I was to pursue magic, I didn’t have a single idea on where to start. Even the book that was meant to be the most basic of introductions still flew over my head at a dizzying height. 	It was as though I were pursuing a life that I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
That’s when I realized how hopeless my situation truly was. I wasn’t ready to embark into this brave new world of magic, instead I was simply joining in on a pursuit that I knew nothing about. As I sat there, flipping through the mangled pages of that library book, I began to doubt everything that I had believed.
You’re destined to live in misery. The thought began to ring through my mind as I started focusing on every problem that I would never overcome. This life, this world that I so desperately wanted to enter was not only foreign, but now barred from me. I had been ordered to stay out of the union, the one place where I truly belonged. I yearned to join the classes on magic, to study with the greatest professors of my time to learn the secrets of the world. I wanted to be somepony that I wasn’t, and I was realizing that I would never become that pony.
I scanned to the end of the book and read the final conclusion.
This book has laid down many of the most basic principals of common magic. With this knowledge, you should be able to tackle the beginnings of magical theory with a basic understanding about the current thoughts on magic and its employment.
That was it. Nothing more than another open door in a hallway that I had been banned from. I couldn’t even begin to look into magic for myself, because I didn’t even know the basics. This small statement shook me to my core. I wanted to learn, but I was slowly realizing that what the Council had told me was completely true. I was on a plane lower than the unicorns, and their lifestyles were simply unattainable from my perspective. I had no reason to believe that I was going to be able to pursue anything more than a simple life in farming, but I wanted to so desperately.
But what about your cutie mark? What about your destiny? My mind began to urge me to consider the life that I had been so sure of earlier, but it only served to mock me more. This was something I wasn’t able to attain and I was realizing that simple fact.
“Your place is not here.” The words of the Council rang in my ears. This statement, this thought that I truly could not achieve what I wanted, was something that becoming my reality. I had no reason to believe that my life was to be any different than that of the other earth ponies around me. I had deceived myself into thinking that I was somepony special, that I had something that my peers did not. Well, I wasn’t wrong, I had stupidity. I was stupid enough to believe that I could somehow become great, that I would somehow be able to stand with the unicorns as an equal, but I quickly realized that the dream was just that, a dream. I would never become somepony who would break the boundaries of this world, to push the society that had assaulted me to my core. I had been, for all intents and purposes, defeated. This life, it was one that I couldn’t pursue.
That realization was what finally snuffed out my hope. Without that I had nothing. The false images of a future in magic in my mind 	vanished, and with that, so did my sense of being.
Part of me died that night, a part that I have never found several decades later. This wasn’t something that I wanted to lose, but as I discovered that the world had cheated me out of my one true desire, my view of the world changed. I let that hope go as I stared at that candle with tears streaming down my face. I let it fly away, never to truly be seen again. If I had one wish in life, it would be to regain that hope. For without it, I grew cold.
I took the book that sat before me, the one that had served as such an inspiration so long ago, and pushed it to the floor. I felt nothing as it bounced on the tile, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. My future, as much as I despised it, lay in cereal production. I reached to the shelf once more, removed my Agriculture 101 book, and began to fill my mind with the statistics and data on crop rotation, fertilization, and environmental stasis. This was my life now. I was to be a tender of the land. Nothing more, nothing less.