Never The Final Word (Vol. 1)

by horizon

GhostOfHeraclitus' "Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen" (Bad Horse's "The Gathering")

Author's Note:

**Now with a reading by Illya Leonov!**

[Drama] [Slice of Life]

This chapter is written by GhostOfHeraclitus. It is a continuation of Bad Horse's The Gathering (1172 words, [Drama] [Slice of Life]).

THE GATHERING SPOILERS: While dealing with paperwork, Princess Celestia receives a mental summons from her alicorn kin: cosmic beings who encourage her to abandon Equestria and join them to dance among the stars. She refuses and returns to her work, but not before asking Dotted Line for a hug.

It was later.

It was, of course, always later, except at those times when it was before.

Night fell — well, no, one of her ponies might think of it like that — night was arranged, expertly at that, and she sat regarding the stars with a sullen intensity. She wasn't looking at them. She didn't need to. She knew where each of them was. Saw the neutrinos flux and flutter across the skein of space. She saw the thin tracery of the odd gamma ray, burning in colors ponies entirely failed to have words for. You can never get away from the stars, not really, but still she had been here, on this damp, dense rock for long enough that she thought of herself as being — defiantly — indoors as she gave the twinkling bastards her full and undivided attention.

Hydrogen.

It was all just hydrogen. And it wasn't even hydrogen doing particularly interesting things. It wasn't dense and inexplicably metallic or cold and passing through things you could swear were solid, it was just... piling up. Untidily. Eventually it caught on fire — of sorts — and then it just sat there, drifting across the main sequence lazily, until it exploded. Or just went out. Or tore open a hole in reality, as if that was any way to behave. She had seen it all before. Multiple star systems, dancing one around another, doomed waltzes between embraced Roche's worlds, and lethal tangos with black holes. She had leaped and swooped in the blinding glow of accretion discs and listened to the faint song of quasars.

Mostly they hissed.

Or buzzed.

Or sort of ... wailed.

Dull.

But here, now... here there were a few more things to work with. Mostly just four, really.

CHON.

Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. She's seen them all, of course — had her coat made soot-black by the carbon winds of a dying red giant. Watched nitrogen being born in starhearts, traced the slow drift of clouds of oxygen spilling from the innards of torn-apart nebulae. But here ... here they danced to entirely new tunes, and in their ceaseless combining and recombining they made such things as ponies, and meadows, symphonies and love stories, paperwork, and hugs.

She liked hugs best of all.

She remembered Twilight talking about astrophysics as if she was there, dancing through the star-winds herself, and remembered marveling at a mind made of the leavings of glutton-stars containing, somehow, the stars themselves and the gulfs between, and — at the same time! — also tea and cookies and laughter and every frivolity under the Sun.

She regarded the stars again and snorted.

Second raters.

She leaned back, in the comfortable gloom, and then shot back an aggrieved look, as if the radio-wave hiss of distant suns carried, subtly modulated, an accusation.

"Sour grapes," she muttered, giving one particularly cheeky-seeming G2V a baleful look. "Well!," she grinned, gesturing expansively with a forehoof, "perhaps it is sour grapes, but I assure you, I am condemning them from inside a wine cellar."

Rhetorical victory against a distant foe thus assured, she leaned back again, and poured herself a second glass, cheerfully toasting the shabby and faithless nature of metaphors.

Comments

[Georg]

(snort!) Star Ponies are Best Ponies. I feel like an arsonist, spreading sparks around like this

Included in the paperback collection Sisters! on sale at Lulu.com.

[FanOfMostEverything]

You need that first generation of stars to make more interesting nuclei and a few more to feed energy into the biosphere. The rest are just staid traditionalists.

[ClockworkMage]

You words so good I have fond thinking because of.

Seriously, while I tend to think that physics lends itself to poetry fairly naturally, you've got a gift for making it musical.

[Sunny]

Ah, this is cute. And definitely an interesting coda to it all

[Misplaced Mage]

Every time I see CHON, I immediately think of two things:

and

awardannals.com/images/7/7a/15160.jpg

[psychomotorboat]

Amazing. I love the wit Ghost always puts into his descriptions.

[B_Munro]

"perhaps it is sour grapes, but I assure you, I am condemning them from inside a wine cellar."

That's a great line.

[Lancerlot]

7559850 Giving rise to a terribly misunderstood alien species who just happened to communicate using modulated Cherenkov radiation.

[Super Trampoline]

Lovely ditty, this.

[horizon]

8272878
Quite agreed.

[TheJediMasterEd]

Same old Sun
Same old Moon
Same old story
Same old tune
They all say
Some day soon
My sins will all be forgiven

A gentle rain
Falls on me
And all life folds back
Into the sea:
We contemplate
Eternity
Beneath the vast
Indifference of heaven.

[darthrex]

9223211
It takes a certain frame of mind to look at a 7-11 taquito that has been rolling under the heatlamps for 2 days past safe and contemplate that it was once at the heart of a thermonuclear fire burning for cosmic aeons.

Scale is wierd.