Chapter 12: A Robust Universe
"It's not that bad," Celestia said, looking comfortingly at Twilight where she lay upon the floor, forehooves over her own head.
"Oh, that is truly a relief," commented Luna. "For it did sound, to mine own innocent and wondering ears, as if thou didst arm one of the mightiest and maddest mages in Equestria, who wishes the worst sort of harm upon the Realm in general and our dear friend Twilight Sparkle in particular, with spells which can warp the very fabric of space and time as a foal might make mud-pies. And that would seem, to mine own untutored sense of strategic consequence, to be very bad indeed!"
"To begin with," said Celestia, casting Luna a very annoyed look, "Starlight Glimmer did not have an unlimited amount of time to study those spells. I first showed her the Spell of Destiny -- the one which you finally completed and cast to become an Alicorn. She wanted to understand more of the concepts underlying the spell -- so I let her have access to the Restricted wing of the Library. You've seen most of what's in there. And I brought out his notes from his secret library -- the one in the crystal caverns beneath this very palace. I let Starlight copy some of them."
"Actually, that is a relief," Twilight said, perking up a bit. She put her forehooves back onto the floor and sat up straight. "That means she only has those spells she either memorized, or was able to copy and take with her when she left your tutelage."
"Exactly," said Celestia. "Secondly, Starlight Glimmer did not understand everything she read. She was brilliant, yes, but she did not have as much experience or knowledge of the greater Multiverse as do you, Twilight. I never showed her the Pool of Truth, nor did she visit any other worldlines when she was my student. She is not as strongly linked to her Concept as you are to yours. Thirdly, the main line of inquiry she pursued was that which led her to craft the Spell of Sameness -- and, when she started casting an early version of it on inadequately-consenting test subjects, the Night Watch learned what she was doing -- at which point I discharged her, and hence she no longer had access to Starswirl's writings."
"That would have been some twenty years ago, though," said Twilight. "Wouldn't it?"
Celestia nodded. "And therein lies the principal danger," she said. "Starlight Glimmer has had two decades to pursue her researches. We know that she spent the last several years preoccupied with her commune, but even during that time she might have had some free time to develop her other magics. And what did she do between 1483, when I dismissed her, and 1498, when she made her first recruits to her commune? During those fifteen years, the Night Watch could not find her."
Twilight nodded. "She's really good at anti-scrying spells. When she wants to hide, I'd imagine she's almost impossible to find." She felt a sinking sensation as she considered the implications of what she'd just said -- the chances were that, when Starlight Glimmer did strike, she'd achieve at least strategic surprise.
Then, she had a cheerful thought:
"But the Map can find her!" Twilight exclaimed. "It found her before! That's how we got to her village in the first place. The Map sent us, and it saw right through her scryshields!"
"Your Map is an expression of the Harmony," Celestia said, "which is the combined destinies of all life on this planet. There is a particular hope in that, which I shall return to in good time. It probably sent you there because something she was doing was about to reach some critical threshhold, threatening some sort of phase transition to a less benign moiric state. You arrived just in time to prevent her from doing whatever thing she might otherwise have done."
"What do you suppose was that?" Twilight wondered, rubbing her own chin with one hoof.
"It is impossible to say," Celestia said. "Indeed, I am far from certain that even Starlight knows the answer to that question. "Starlight Glimmer has great power, and considerable knowledge, but little understanding. This, sadly, makes her more dangerous -- she may attempt conjurations a wiser mage might avoid."
"Do you have any idea what she will try to do now?" Twilight asked.
"The most powerful and dangerous of the magics which I believe she learned from Starswirl, whose power would attract her and whose danger she might refuse to recognize, are of course the temporal magics." Celestia looked soberly at Twilight. "It is indeed fortunate that even Starwirl was unable, given that a Unicorn would have to power the spell from her own internal magic, to devise a spell that could send the caster back more than a week, and for more than a short time --"
"-- and only once," added Twilight. She noticed a certain look of discomfort on Celestia's face, and asked, "Wait, it does only work once, doesn't it?"
"That," replied Celestia, "is an oversimplification. The truth is, that with enough energy and skill, a mage can do much, much more." She took a long deep breath in and out. "Starswirl and I were interested in codifying versions of temporal magic which could be cast safely by any powerful mage. The truth about temporal magic is more complex -- and dangerous."
"Dangerous?" asked Twilight in some alarm. "To whom?"
"To the caster. To her foes. To third parties. To the timestream." Celestia sighed. "But, mostly, to the caster." She gazed at Twilight searchingly. "Twilight Sparkle, I am about to teach you some truly dangerous things about the nature of the Universe, and I charge you to use this knowledge carefully and wisely."
"Of course, Beloved Teacher!" Twilight replied, almost indignantly. "I would never let you down!"
"You are, of course, familiar with the concept of Paradox, with something being both true and untrue at the same spacetime and in the same manner," Celestia siad. Any Universe is, essentially, realized information, like the printing in a book, and Paradox may be seen as ink spilled over the page, ruining it and rendering it unreadable. Because all the Universe is connected, unchecked Paradox will spread, until it destroys the Universe. That is the worst possible consequence of unwise time travel."
Twilight once again felt almost faint, as if the structure of existence were in truth unraveling beneath her.
"However, Paradox is constantly generated by natural processes," Celestia said. "Indeed, time travel is itself a natural process, since no magic, no technology, no matter how subtle or advanced, can accomplish anything truly unnatural. And yet the Universe does not cease to exist: thus providing a literal 'existence proof' that something or things must damp out Paradox. How to explain the seeming Paradox of the absence of Paradox?" Her voice was light and lilting now; Twilight could tell that Celestia was getting into her lecture, enjoying it as she had when she had given Twilight daily lessons.
"The greatest suppressors of Paradox are, as you know, ourselves, Twilight Sparkle. Or, to be more precise, our Cosmic Selves. The earliest Cosmic Concepts were produced by the nascent Universe to protect itself from the threat of Paradox. This is a natural process: Universes descend from earlier Universes which were able to survive and reproduce, and Paradox is like disease. The Cosmic Concepts of a Universe are a key component of its immune system, an immune system which allows it to survive the micro-predation which else would eat it alive.
"The Cosmic Selves of my Sister and myself were born in the very early Universe," Celestia explained, "as antigravity expanded spacetime faster than light and strained simple causality. I, to control and embody the strong force, which mediates nuclear processes, most importantly Fusion; she, to control and embody Gravity, which is dark and invisible, yet in sufficient strength can twist spacetime. Yet, we were not born ex nihilo, we evolved from contests between associations of simpler nodes, systems which handled those forces before we appeared, and which still handle those forces most of the time, in routine matters.
"Now as you also know, Twilight, the way in which time travel is especially productive of Paradox is as follows. If a time traveler travels back within her own personal event horizon, she can alter events in such a way that she should have perceived this alteration as already existing in her own past. It is -- perhaps frighteningly -- easy to find an event which in simple causality should be inconsistent with the world which produced her. The classic expression of this is the "Grandmother Paradox" -- traveling back in time and doing something which prevents one of one's own parents from being born, hence preventing oneself being born -- but if one were never born, how did one exist in order to prevent one's parents from being born?
"That paradox, of course, was first formulated in the Age of Wonders, by Ponies who had just discovered General Relativity but did not yet grasp the full implications of Quantum Mechanics. For of course, its solution is simple: when one prevents the birth of what would be oneself in the future, one is not altering one's own worldline, but rather splitting off a new worldline, in which one will not be born -- but one was already born in one's original worldline. Hence, there is no true Paradox in this situation.
"Nor is there in what the Universe does all the time -- for every time a particle interaction occurs, all possible interactions occur, in a shower of virtual particles which -- from the point of view of any particular Universe -- mostly vanish in an instant after their creation. The influence that they have in shaping the total interaction was the great discovery of Dr. Sweetie Finemare, the brilliant mother of my former incarnation, who showed how to represent the effects of such effects in Finemare Diagrams." Love and pride shone in Celestia's eyes. "The mathematics, of course, are more complex, but we shall not discuss this at present.
"How does the Universe choose which virtual interaction to realize?" Celestia asked. "It chooses all of them, simultaneously, but we only see the one chosen for our Universe; the others exist in other Universes in the Multiverse. Were that the whole of it, though, the Multiverse would not be composed of discrete worldlines, but rather smeared in a tangle in which there would be no identities -- not of Universes nor of those who dwelt within them.
"That was as far as the Age of Wonders took the understanding of the Many-Worlds Quantum Model, for they had not the tools to perceive the larger structure. They were in the position of Bronze Age astronomers who had somehow grasped the concept of the evolution of star systems, but understood neither gravity nor resonant effects. To them, the Heavens would logically have been but a confusion, with no organizing principles -- they would have gratefully run back to simpler models of planets pushed around by alicorns ... not realizing the problems of even those ..." Celestia said in a dark aside, and Luna grinned wryly, though Twilight could not see the joke.
"How is chaos avoided?" Celestia asked rhetorically. "Why, because any given Universe has a ... coherence, an inertia. Barring the application of either considerable energy, beyond that producible by any individual Unicorn or even Incarnate Alicorn; or the very skillful choice of cusp to change, any split in worldlines will quickly and naturally heal. In other words, the worldlines do split at every particle interactions, but they almost instantly merge again. That is what generates the shower of virtual particles Sundreamer and Moondreamer's mother noticed, and that is what generates the solution and mutual annihilation of the vast majority of such particles.
"This inertia is also why the mere probability of time travel being discovered by sapient beings in a Universe does not destroy it."
"Destroy it?" Twilight gasped in horror, her mouth hanging open. "Why would this --" She considered, imagined a Universe with multiple factions of beings, each trying to change the timestream in their own favor. They would be journeying back to eras in which their opposition was less capable than themselves. They would, by and large, succeed in effecting changes, in many different directions, again and again and again. Repeated temporal changes would make existence unstable downtime from any of these changes, destroying the Universe in a personal sense, but ... "Do you mean more than the fact that, at some point in the future, time travel would change things so we never were born?"
"She is keen," Luna commented to Celestia.
"I knew that, she has after all been my prize student," replied Celestia, perhaps a bit smugly. Then, to Twilight. "Yes, my most Faithful Former Student. A Universe as a whole possesses ontological 'substance', its 'reality,' so to speak. This substance, when being an analogue of mass, generates ontological inertia -- it is why things continue to be from moment to moment, why causality operates smoothly, essentially as a vector force. Just as changing the vector of an object possessing mass requires energy, so too does changing the ontological vector of an object possessing ontological mass require ontological energy. This --"
"-- resists changes by time travelers!" Twilight crowed. "That means that it's not that easy to change the past!" Her heart soared with the joy of new intellectual discovery.
"Exactly," said Celestia, smiling at Twilight's enthusiasm. "What normally happens when somepony tries to change the past is that they instead move onto a parallel world track, a new worldline. The Multiverse attempts to conserve ontological energy, so normally this new worldline is one which will re-merge with the main worldline as soon as possible. The micro-scale quantum principle of only observable differences mattering applies at the macro-scale as well, though its manifestations can be very different. Your friend, Pinkie Pie, uses this last principle herself, quite frequently, to enable her reality-warping.
"But --" Celestia's expression sobered, "--this is not always possible. There are points on any worldline -- 'cusps,' they are sometimes termed -- where small changes can have very large effects. For instance, the fight you two made against the Night Shadow at our old castle was such a cusp -- had things gone differently, the Nightmare might have triumphed, or Luna might have died, and either of those outcomes would have had very large effects in the future, not only to we three Ponies, but to Equestria and indeed the whole Earth. That is an obvious cusp -- others are more subtle.
"In the case of a cusp change," Celestia continued, "the new worldline must completely separate. However, as ontological energy is conserved, what happens is that the ontological energy of the new worldline is usually but a tiny fraction of that of the original worldline. It is less real than the original Universe. The degree of reality depends in part on the amount of ontological energy applied by the time traveler, and in part on the specific way it is applied -- to what cusp, and how skillfully. Cusps are crucial points, they are places where a sort of ontological leverage exists, of which a skilled time traveler can take advantage to shift significant amounts of ontological energy into the new Universe."
"Think of it as being as a force multiplier in battle," interjected Luna, "like unto a key pass at which a small force can hold back a whole army, or a vulnerable crossing where troops attempting to ford a river can do little to defend themselves, and may be bombarded and suffer heavy losses from even a few well-sited cannons."
Twilight nodded. "I think I have the idea," she said.
"But," said Celestia, "the Universe attempts to resist such changes. In addition to the brute force of ontological inertia, there are more subtle forces which favor those attempting to protect the timestream in many ways. You see, our Cosmic Selves are but the upper part of a vast hierarchy, or ecology -- the two concepts are much the same thing on a Universal scale -- which Universes have evolved in their ontological defense. The hierarchy extends all the way up to the Father and Mother of our Cosmic Selves -- and all the way down through Helpers such as Wisedreamer, through spirits of increasingly-lesser intelligence and power, and all the way down to near-mindless creatures such as the Langoliers, which consume and recycle ontological substance which might otherwise be wasted.
"One such entity is the Tree of Harmony," explained Celestia. "It is ... think of it as the Earth's incarnation of the Concept of Harmony. Every planet with life above a certain level of complexity grows such a Tree in time, though those generated by very alien worlds may look very different from what we think of as a Tree, and -- as you may have noticed -- the Tree of Harmony is only very roughly tree-like in its general stucture. It is very powerful in certain ways, and intimately connected to the timestream, from which it derives its nutriment in some rather obscure and complex ways. The Tree helps organize the local timestream and recruits other life forms as mobile agents to protect it against damage. It is not itself mobile, save as a plant may be through vegetative growth, though unlike most organic plants, it can grow its extensions through hyperdimensional portals to emerge far from its main mass."
"My Castle," said Twilight. "It's part of the Tree. And the Map is a means by which it communicates with us."
"Just so," said Celestia. "It is highly intelligent, but in different ways to us, who are incarnate as animal life. Our Cosmic Selves can converse with its Cosmic Self directly, but the necessary mental modules were not included in either our incarnate selves or its. It thinks by position and holistic implication rather than in conscious conception and linear communication; it has as much difficulty understanding us as we do it. But it can sense disharmony, especially when that disharmony threatens the time stream, and it can act in various manners, such as producing Fruit and giving them to mobile agents who will use them appropriately to achieve compatible ends."
"The Age of Discord," Twilight said. "The Elements of Harmony. Discord triggered a defensive response. You were its mobile agents. Both of you."
"Yes," affirmed Celestia. "I could have warned poor Dissy that if he continued on that path, he was bound to provoke other powerful beings against him, ones who cared about his well-being less than did my Sister and I. He was fortunate that the Tree chose us as the Element Bearers, rather than other mages to whom he would not have been dear and special. The Tree wanted to discarnate him and drive his spirit back to the Cosmic Level: we imposed our will on the Elements just enough that he was merely petrified.
"This would, incidentally, be a bad subject to discuss with Discord -- he probably realizes that we did our best to avoid harming him, but he does not like to admit that anything can overpower him, and he might be inclined to dramatic displays of his independence and power if you raised the issue. Dissy," Celestia sighed in exasperation, "strange as he is, can sometimes be like any other stallion."
"More like unto a squalling little colt," grumbled Luna.
"Aren't they all," said Celestia, fondly smiling. "Perhaps it is a good thing that in this Age your stallion is actually a --"
"We should return to the main topic, Sister," said Luna quickly.
"Yes," agreed Twilight with equal haste. "I agree!"
"Very well," assented Celestia. "The last point I will cover is the Temporal Fugue. This happens when a time traveler repeatedly crosses her own worldline, generally to concentrate her force -- including ontological energy -- upon a single point in the timestream, the object being to appear slightly earlier than the foe and strike before the foe has struck. This is often done in battle between two Time Warriors. It is a powerful but dangerous technique -- both to she who attempts it and her enemies, and to the world on which she attempts the technique. The concentration of energy can overpower and defeat a foe; it can lash back and destroy the unskillful wielder; it can tear loose a new stable worldline -- but the spillover of ontological into more conventional forms of energy can also create massive and unpredictable devastation. It can turn a living planet into a wasteland. It is not a technique I would recommend to the novice."
"I know something about how to fight in such wise," said Luna, "and my Cosmic Self knows still more. There was a cyborg warrior called the Bronze Steed who was, or is -- with time-traveling beings Equestrian does not have adequate words to describe their present state -- a master of this form of combat; one of my other incarnations knew him well. My present incarnation does not know enough about such forms of combat that I would attempt them lightly, nor consider it wise to tutor thee, Twilight, in any but defenses against the tactic. A training error could cause destruction untold to this world on which we both stand."
"Fortunately," said Celestia, "the devastation is far more likely to be suffered by new worldlines flaked off by the combat, than to the original worldline in which it started."
Twilight was horrified at the implications. "What about the many versions of innocents who would find themselves on the worldlines being devastated?"
"Usually, civilizations which have advanced to the point of discovering such powerful offensive temporal techniques also develop defenses against them," explained Luna. "The required technology is some centuries beyond the Age of Wonders. The World Which Was Lost had such capabilities, which was why the Cosmic Concepts could not instantly destroy it. But yes ... the suffering can be terrible. Which is why we urge thee, if thou dost find thyself in a situation where a Temporal Fugue develops, to try to break out of the pattern instead of going for the victory in that encounter."
"How do you --" asked Twilight.
"I shall show thee, another time," promised Luna. "There are areas directly devastated by the Cataclysm where the risk to sapient life of a single or double crossing should be acceptably small, though this world is too small and crowded to attempt more."
"You make this sound like sunfire bomb testing," said Twilight.
"It's considerably more dangerous than that," said Celestia. She made what was probably meant to be a reassuring smile. "Don't worry -- Luna knows what she is doing where all forms of combat are concerned."
Luna nodded. "You will be in capable hooves."
Twilight felt uneasy about this, but she did not wish to insult either Celestia or Luna by displaying too much doubt on this topic.
"Now, back to the theory," said Celestia. "Like all other forms of energy, ontological energy suffers from efficiency losses when converted or reconverted: ordered energy states are reduced to thermal noise, in the ontological equivalent of entropy. This is one of the reasons splitting off new worldlines is dangerous, and repeated time-looping as in a Temporal Fugue is even more dangerous; it is possible to erode the spacetime substrate and crack the continuum."
"This is never a good idea," Celestia continued, "It is an even worse idea when there exists powerful and hostile beings who are actively searching for such flaws through which they can enter our reality."
"The Night Shadows," breathed Twilight Sparkle.
"Just so," said Luna. "Once, they could touch this Universe only with great difficulty and the application of considerable power on our side to open the way for them. Now, they seep through freely. It was because of the ill-considered use of reality-negation weapons, which are essentially amplified versions of the Temporal Fugue."
"Who used such weapons?" Twilight asked.
"I did," said Luna, her face grim. "Or to be precise, my Cosmic Self did, in concert with the other Concepts. When we destroyed the World That Was Lost, Pinkie's original world, a thousand years ago and sideways in time from the worldline in which we now dwell. There seemed no other solution -- the build-up of Paradox was approaching a critical level which might have caused the collapse of the whole worldline in any case. But ... we may have been too hasty. The Paradise Entity had been staving off the collapse for millennia -- if we had leagued with instead of against it -- perhaps we might have stopped the collapse, and kept out the Night Shadows. We did not know -- I did not know -- so much that I know all too well now." She looked sadly at Twilight. "I did not ken any of this, at the time. I did not know thee yet ... I had not yet been Moondreamer ... if I had, I might not have ..."
"Stop blaming yourself!" said Celestia sharply. "I am also to blame for that, fight on the other side though I did. Had I not wished to enjoy my incarnation as Star-Catcher in the World of Paradise, I might have retained enough knowledge and power to aid the Paradise Entity, help it prevent the build-up of Paradox. Instead, I laughed and sang and danced and ate too much cake, while doom was rushing fast upon all of us. And the allocation of blame is now irrelevant, Luna, especially as regards our Cosmic Selves and former Incarnations. We, who live here and now, must prevent the Paradox that threatens this world, now. Time enough to discuss larger blames when we are both on the Cosmic Level."
"True," said Luna, smiling slightly. "There is an Eternity of Time, on the Cosmic Level."
Twilight had listened to this exchange semi-comprehendingly. Some of this referred to events of which the Sisters had told her before, but she was worried that they were discussing the destruction of a worldline due to Paradox, considering the context and nature of her own foe; furthermore, she was not sure what Luna would not have done had this not happened before she was Moondreamer. And, in any case, hadn't Luna been Moondreamer in the Age of Wonders, which was before the Lost Age of Paradise? There was something she was missing about the sequence of causality on the Cosmic Level.
"In any case, Twilight," said Celestia, "what you must always keep in mind if you must defend the timestream against a mad warlock is that the Universe is on your side."
Luna nodded. "It shall help thee in ways which may be subtle and seem weak but shall often prove decisive, if thou hast the wit and heart to grasp hold of the chances that it gives unto thee." She smiled at Twilight. "And I have full faith in thee, dear friend, that if anypony has both wit and heart, it is thee."
"You may believe that you are on your own," Celestia warned Twilight. "Starlight may pull you into the timestream, possibly into another worldline -- and, though we will try to aid you, we may not be able to find you in time. We cannot maneuver in the timestream nearly as well in our Incarnate forms as we can when Cosmic."
"We shall endeavor to aid thee," said Luna, "be certain of that! But what aid we may send may be indirect or late-arriving."
"Use your own Concept," advised Celestia. "Or allied ones, if you can find them. Even those not yet Ascended may sense their connection to you and aid you in subtle ways, often not even realizing what they are doing."
"Never lose hope," said Luna. "Thou art an Alicorn, and a Princess of Equestria, and thou shall never be a helpless victim."
"And remember, the Harmony itself will aid you," added Celestia. "It has chosen you as one of its special agents in this Age; that is the meaning of your Castle. It can perceive across the worldlines, much like Pinkie Pie, though it is less able to communicate what it knows. It will sense any attempt to split off worldlines as Disharmony, and wish to heal the rupture and restore as much energy to the main worldline as possible."
"Above all, be of good cheer," said Luna. "The timestream is harder to damage than Starlight Glimmer imagines. She lacks the Cosmic perspective. We know that the force of Fate is weighed on thy side."
"Always remember," said Celestia, smiling warmly at her Most Faithful Former Student, "that we have the great good fortune to live in a robust Universe."
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Talking heads galore!
My new favorite explanation for the Wasteland world is that it's what's left after Celestia went Nightmare.
But unchecked Paradox works too... though in that case, I'd be surprised the world itself was left.
since no magic, no technology, no matter how subtle or advanced, can accomplish anything truly unnatural.
Which makes Diamond Tiara's Nightmare in the pony pov verse infinitely more dangerous, since she is the DEFINITION of unnatural!
It is less real than the original Universe.
Poor Zecora. I think find it amazingly cruel that Zecora had to basically give up her entire existence to help Twilight, and she was the only equine in those altered world lines who truly and sincerely helped her.
Langoliers
In other words Pony POV-Maud Pie/Entropy's pets.
The Tree helps organize the local timestream and recruits other life forms as mobile agents to protect it against damage
I worry about how much EMPATHY it has, or is just a mechanism for sustaining balance, rather than caring about the suffering of the individuals, caring only for the group... rather like Glimmer herself.
"Very well," assented Celestia. "The last point I will cover is the Temporal Fugue. This happens when a time traveler repeatedly crosses her own worldline, generally to concentrate her force -- including ontological energy -- upon a single point in the timestream, the object being to appear slightly earlier than the foe and strike before the foe has struck. This is often done in battle between two Time Warriors. It is a powerful but dangerous technique -- both to she who attempts it and her enemies, and to the world on which she attempts the technique. The concentration of energy can overpower and defeat a foe; it can lash back and destroy the unskillful wielder; it can tear loose a new stable worldline -- but the spillover of ontological into more conventional forms of energy can also create massive and unpredictable devastation. It can turn a living planet into a wasteland. It is not a technique I would recommend to the novice."
So Twilight and Glimmer's fight caused the world to go boom?
This is one of the reasons splitting off new worldlines is dangerous, and repeated time-looping as in a Temporal Fugue is even more dangerous; it is possible to erode the spacetime substrate and crack the continuum."
Endless Loops, wearing down time, like a record played over and over and over.
I still imagine Twinkle Wish came into being as too little too late... if she had into being EARLIER, she could have possibly slowed things down enough to help (since her purpose was to basically limit the wishes to one wish per-pony per-year on the same date (ironically, it's noted IN THE VERY CARTOON that all the ponies' wishes come true RETROACTIVELY, with Twinkle Wish's jingle being sublimely herd when they happened, HOW IS THAT FOR DEPTH IN WHAT IS CONSIDERED THE WEAK LINK IN MLP!?!? Come on dude, I want to hear your opinion on this one!).
Sweetie Belle is now a black magic user in the pony pov verse... but this is NOT evil, and NOT crazy... does that make her a warlock? I'm curious about the term.
It will sense any attempt to split off worldlines as Disharmony,
FOR GOOD OR EVIL.
Amicitia (in the later chapter if you've bothered to read it), of her own saga, (which I wonder if you've read) is now focused on giving this world lines a life of their own and a happy ending so they're not condemned to oblivion.
All of this brings to mind the Last Great Time War on Doctor Who. We don't see much of it, but what we do sounds rather unpleasant. You did mention Gallopfrey last chapter I believe? I'm curious: is the Whoniverse canon to your setting?
Personally, I assumed that the wasteland world was Starlight's baby. Without ponies to make the ecosystem work, the result is mass extinction.
I wonder where Doctor Whooves fits into all of this.
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The basic idea of a lot of it is in canon to my setting, and a subordinate element to the Cosmic Concepts -- a version of which (well, several versions) actually existed in Doctor Who! The Gallopfreyans are an Equinoid race who nearly achieved Ascension but shrank back from it at the crucial moment: they have a highly-advanced technology but have lost a lot of their equinity in the development of an overly-rigid culture -- which they beileve necessary to manage time travel.
In any case, quite a bit of fascinating higher-dimensional temporal mechanics here. A shame Starlight won't be open to a lecture on the subject when she strikes back.
My head hurts…
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In a good way or a bad way?
6725311 it hurts because thaumatology (magic science)
This chapter was a very interesting discussion on the nature of the time-space continuum in your universe, and and I like the way it explained how Starlight Glimmer's actions created so many alternate universes.
Although you already explained that there are many Beings that work to prevent Paradoxes, are there any that would specifically seek to punish Starlight? Considering the amount of damage her actions could have caused, even in Canon, I imagine that there are many Time Guardians, most of which are likely good, that want Glimmer's head on a plate, regardless of her redemption. While I understand if you don't use it, this idea would allow exploration into the consequences of Starlight's temporal manipulations, and let someone create a rare breed of Hero Antagonist.
This is very similar to my concept of reality, of course in my multiverse, I have beings called Eternals. Who represent certain concepts of a multiverse.
Hmm, I wonder where The Narrative (Narrativum) lies in your understanding of the Universe. (Yes, Pratchett.)
it is a powerful force and it's quite prevalent in the world of MLP
Also wow, was this a metaphysical chapter.
Also want to remark upon something you mentioned in the previous chapter;
In my understanding, once Twilight became Magic, she has always been and will be Magic, as that force always exists.
Or more like, Twilight became one of the multiple identities that create the entity of Magic?
Cosmic entities must be screwed over, if they identify with so many...
though, I guess, that's only because we mortals can't understand them in our limited capacity...
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Hope you don't mind that I chose your second name for Dawn, Dawn Starfall. She's not actually a character in this story, she's just referred to in passing as one of Celestia's students who went loco.
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Yeah. Fluttershy is half-Changeling, hence her amatopathy and amatovory. She bounces back both because she has the love of her little zoological Hive and because of her fundamental personality: she's very hard to break, because she bends like a reed before the storm that fells the mighty oak. Discord knows all about this, and respects her strength in this regard; Starlight Glimmer got to find out about it in the The Cutie Map.
Rarity's dark and troubled past is also described in Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason, which is another canon filler I need to finish. Rarity doesn't see it this way, but it's partially soured her on male Ponies, which is why her strongest emotional attachment is to a Dragon. It's also part of why she insists on being the dominant party in any love affair: she's scared of what will happen to her if she isn't.
I plead guilty for essentially tailoring my Rarity's fanon backstory to give her multiple reasons to prefer Spike to anyone else she's likely to meet. He's male, yet not a Pony, emotionally-younger than her and hence pliable, and already-trained by his sibling relationship with Twilight to be perfectly-happy as the Number One Assistant to somepony he loves. He's also rare in that he's not a Pony, yet is romantically-attracted to Pony females -- most Dragons wouldn't be.
My Rarity is conflicted about her feelings for Spike. She's quite aware that he's emotionally an early-adolescent and that he's not a Pony, and she knows just how strange her attraction toward him is even by Equestrian standards (the Equestrians have an earlier age of consent than do modern Americans, and they're used to dealing with non-Pony sapient races). Rarity is far from conventional, but she does attempt to be respectable.
6782120
Oh good, I'm glad you like my writing style. This is far from the most exciting story I've written -- it's very much an emotional drama, though there is one serious action scene.
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I try to write any of my fiction that isn't in an outright alternate universe as consistent with what we see in the Show -- I just assume that some topics (Rarity's unfortunate early-adolescent seduction, pregnancy and miscarriage, for example) are too sensitive to be discussed on screen. Mind you, Rarity isn't exactly proud of that episode in her life: Fluttershy and Spike are about the only ones aside from her parents to whom she's told the tale. One of the reasons I assume a somewhat-prudish Equestrian culture is because that nicely explains why such matters wouldn't be discussed much in public.
Some of my fanon I invented to explain certain gaps in the show. For instance, Fluttershy's alienation from her family explains why -- uniquely -- there have been no flashbacks to or mentions of her family (even Dashie gets a memory of being held by her father). Applejack's lost love Landscape explains why -- alone of the Mane Six -- she hasn't been shipped with anyone, even in the mild sense of seeming attracted to them. These are of course vulnerable to jossing -- I wouldn't be all that surprised if Show Writes gave Fluttershy a conventionally-loving family because Family Values.
The Reincarnation Romance of which you may or may not know already is extremely improbable in canon, for tons of reasons starting with the fact that Show would never go into an If It's You It's Okay Les Yay Reincarnation Romance between two straight characters (which is my premise). Plus, it is improbable, to the point where I've outright stated that in many alternate Shadow Wars worldlines, it didn't happen. I have been gratfied to notice that on the Show, the two characters whom I put in this romance are at least becoming good friends (even closer friends in the IDW Comics).
Every single story I've written is part of the SWSV, even the alternate universe ones, even the satires on HiE that are Getting Stuck and An Epistolary Legal Consultation Between Princesses (those two are AU entirely because of Charlie Yu's presence).
So, the story is on the update list, but there's no new chapter. What gives?
6862972
I hiccup-published Chapter 13 when I was working on it. I immediately unpublished the chapter, because it's not yet finished. I will probably publish the chapter tonight or tomorrow morning.
6862977
Fair enough. I'll look forward to it, then.
I figured the wasteland world was "It's About Time". Without Twilight to quickly return Cerberus, more escaped from Tartarus. Multiple threats escalated & the devastation spread.
You really suck at explaining time travel.
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I eagerly await your far superior explanation.