Two Birds on a Wire

by Roadie

Side Material: On Ponies and Virtues, or, Friendship is Not, In Fact, Magic

Excerpted from the text of A Study in Memory of Past Events, RY 763 to AE 1, published several hundred years after the beginning of the Third Age of Mankind.

... and while for some time it was thought that there must have been some aspect of that place affecting how ascendant the aspect of the Laurel was within the hearts of its natives, the efforts of Second Shining Bough and the other luminaries who assisted her in examination of its construction definitively confirmed that it was not a trait forced on the inhabitants either magic or inherited biology. The staunchest opponent to this conclusion remained the Fire-aspected unicorn scholar Juala Sparkle, who until late in her life fervently argued the existence of a theretofore un-rediscovered alteration of local reality of similar scope, though not scale, to the Salinan Working.

With the presumption discarded of a fundamentally magical quality to the ascendancy of the Laurel, the heart of peace, within the humors of those people and indeed to the general friendliness of those cultures before resumed contact with the greater population of Creation, academic attention turned to the role played by the guardian-spirit Celestia. It was only some time after the reintegration of those peoples with Creation that the true details of her past became known. Even today, arguments are not uncommon in the coursework of scriptorium halls that would give an ultimately self-sacrificing status to her original position as a secret akuma of She Who Lives In Her Name.

After the death of Many-Hued Astrafel in the days leading up to the First Usurpation, the Pyrian Flame could no longer hold her, but her ghost's continuing attitudes in the years that followed provides a strong argument that her internalization of the Pyrian Flame's principles lasted long after her death, and may well have formed the very basis for the society she shepherded in her thousand-year reign. (Celestia existed as a spirit for somewhat longer than a thousand years, of course, though the generally accepted figures for her actual time of rulership are very close to that number.)

Certainly, the emphasis on peaceful cooperation and harmonious existence among the peoples of her lands, and the ways in which those qualities were subtly but constantly promulgated by the methods of socioeconomic manipulation that Many-Hued Astrafel had innovated in the First Age, provides remarkable insight into what a society guided by the hand of She Who Lives In Her Name but created for the benefit of mortals could be like. Notable is the emphasis of the Laurel over the Horn or Shield—while the Pyrian's Flame greater designs forcibly mold those within them to match the needs of the greater whole, Celestia's era of rulership provides a clear example of an intricately complex society that surpassed even the usual ambitions of She Who Lives In Her Name, designed to channel the needs of the Spear into peaceable pursuits while using the greater brotherhood of the Laurel to balance the Horn and Shield against each other ...

Comments

[fireflutterpony]

Oooh, I'm not the only one to see the potential in a Celestia-Living Flame connection. Though I see a little Cecelyne in her, too.