The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

Beginnings And Endings Are Equal

A cold wind blew through Starlight. Not against her. Through her.

She had no eyes to open. It was proof that she didn't exist.

And yet, she could feel the night move on. The moon, which had been high overhead, drifted slowly towards the horizon, the stars rotating in their heavenly pattern along with it. The world passed on around her, time continued to flow, and life moved on. Somewhere far to the south, Sires Hollow would be sleeping, resting the night away with no concept of what had occurred. Equally far to the north, there was Riverfall, where Willow would be resting with her foals, and Maple and Amber might soon be visiting home.

The world went on, and here she was, not here at all. Yet... somehow...

The world wasn't waiting, but it felt like she had a choice.

She could feel her flanks, where a cutie mark with the power to change the world rested. She could feel her ship somewhere in the distance, named after her, her last friend she had just realized she had and wished she could save yet needed to risk to accomplish her goal. But what was her goal? Why had she gone back to fight Gazelle?

She could have trusted her friends to stop him. Or stay safe. Or Gazelle might have kept his word and left them alone, sticking to the Empire and Mistvale and everywhere they weren't in the world. She could say that killing him was a mercy. But the real reason Starlight had gone back, she knew, was that she had taken too much, she was just a filly, and she needed to let it all out, even if her idea of letting it all out caused her to disappear.

Maybe she had wondered what it would be like to not need to worry about anything anymore, if she unraveled completely in the harmony extractor and didn't have to exist to face the next day in a life without her friends. Maybe she had wondered if it would be okay to let Eylista into the lifestream to find a new pony to bother. But she didn't know for sure. All that mattered was that she wasn't here.

Whatever she had wanted, though, Gazelle was gone. Time was passing, and if he wasn't, he would have made it known.

...Something asked Starlight a question.

If she had done what she wanted, what would she do now?

It felt like the world was asking, but that couldn't be. She was the world, a fragment of it, if Honesty was to be believed. So was it something higher than the world? She felt like she was laying on her back. If she had eyes to open, what would she have seen? Could there be something above the flames of harmony, above Tetra and Glimmer and Aegis looking down on her?

She had sworn an oath, her cutie mark reminded her. An oath to make something of her life, to follow her friends' wishes, do what they wanted in Equestria and found a town on Maple's land. A promise to everything she cared about, that even though they had to part, something good could come of it. Wasn't that what she wished to do?

But she was the Immortal Dream. She was Eylista, cursed with a power that could only grant others' wishes, and never her own.

Could that stop her from wishing, though?

Starlight squeezed her eyes harder and wished with everything she had that even if their parting was ordained, that her loneliness was fate, that leaving behind her friends was the only way to save herself, that even if there was a dark future in her visions she had no understanding of how to stop and was now best faced alone... She wished that she could hold onto at least one friend. That she could keep even a single hoofhold, to keep herself from falling. She wished upon a star that she knew could only grant others' wishes, and held it in her mind and cried.

And then she opened her eyes.

Above her, the sky danced with lights, stars, but not just stars. There were cutie marks, floating and free, impossible numbers of them drifting above her head, all colors and shapes and symbols imaginable. They drifted like fireflies, some gently spinning, others bobbing or nudging against her, and several even flitted through dark outlines above her, the remains of a mesh that had once held a harmony comet.

Starlight blinked. The ground beneath her was flat and wooden.

She scrambled to get up, and for a moment, her hooves flailed beneath her, as if her body had been waiting for her permission to exist again and was still in the middle of becoming corporeal. But soon, it worked, and her hooves were beneath her, all her tiredness from the climb and scratches from the battle mystically gone. She was on a pristine wooden surface, and to her sides, she could see railings that were carefully crafted and not at all broken. In one direction, there was the bridge, still standing, almost seeming to glow in her vision. She looked through the open door, too breathless to get up. The light of the setting moon shone through its windshield, not even shattered, illuminating a control panel where a few of the instruments had burst, but most of the levers were intact and in place.

Starlight grabbed the ship and cried. "How are you still here!?"

It couldn't have been possible. She didn't recognize the terrain around her from the battle; it was flatter than a mountain should have been, yet wide and jagged, littered with clean-fractured rock and not a trace of ice or snow. She had connected herself to the harmony extractor, given it everything she had and more, wished for another explosion and surge like the one she made in Ironridge, tried to funnel that all into the engine to use it to ram Gazelle...

She had also wished the ship would survive, covered it in crystal as it prepared to fire. As if that could have done anything. It was a futile gesture when she knew her own wishes were destined to be ignored...

And yet, the ship was still here.

Starlight cried. She didn't know how else to explain it. She didn't know what else to do. She latched onto the ship like it was everything she had, because it was, even if it was a little burnt-out from her surge and wouldn't fly again any time soon. Starlight cried as cutie marks danced around her as if they were thanking her for freeing them, giving her proof that Gazelle was gone. And as she started to get the message, started to realize she had done what she wanted to do purely for her own sake, defeated Gazelle because she wasn't okay with him and made the call to fight him all on her own, as Starlight started to realize it was over and she could close his chapter in her life without any lingering regrets and move on to living a new life without her friends, the moon started to set, and the cutie marks slowly drifted away, down the mountains to where the lifestream flowed freely and they could rejoin with it and be reborn into new lives, free from the troubles of having their home torn away, or whatever fate had driven them to a heretic's execution by Garsheeva.

The last mark vanished from her sight just as the sun started to rise. But it wasn't the only light on the horizon.

To the northwest, just past where the moon had set, a glowing dot appeared in her vision, like a little moving star. But it grew closer, and larger quickly, and soon she saw it for what it was: an airship, Varsidelian in design, yet branded with the colors of the Steel District. And it was heading right for her.

She couldn't move as the ship approached. She sat in the doorway to the bridge, upright and on her haunches, leaning against the doorframe and holding it with both forelegs, her horn tired but not in pain. The ship hummed closer, lower, and she stared at it with big eyes and limp ears until it was low enough that she could reach it with a teleport, hovering directly overhead. A door opened in the side, and a pony jumped.

WHAM!

A sturdy, broad-shouldered yellow stallion straightened up, landing heavily, a greatsword slung across his back that was somehow bigger than he was. "Starlight," Arambai greeted with a nod. "Figures we'd find you here. What happened to the dastard who stole this ship?"

Valey soared into a heavy landing with Shinespark on her back, hitting the deck with a thud and depositing her passenger before bounding closer. "Bananas! Starlight!"

A rope dropped from the ship, and Maple and Amber slid down, the former losing her grip and falling a few feet from the bottom, but catching herself anyway and racing closer. "Starlight! Gazelle stole the ship and Valey said you were moving, and we got so worried-!"

Starlight was smothered in a hug from all of her friends at once, immediately unable to speak.

She could barely even think. Her friends were here, already. She had been in trouble, and they came.

"What even happened here?" Arambai asked, standing at the railing and surveying the landscape as everyone else crowded around Starlight. "It's just a whole field of broken rock and no snow whatsoever! And there are boulders the size of Riverfall... Looks like an entire mountain got destroyed."

"That's not important," Shinespark declared, standing vigilantly. "Where's Gazelle? Starlight, have you seen him?"

"Bananas..." Valey hugged Starlight and seethed. "Apparently no one in Ironridge knew what that goon was up to. He got blown up by the Equestrian border guard right on the edge of the mountains and when Ironridge found him, they thought he was a good guy! So they let him hang out, and we got there and didn't know he was there too, and we barely had time to stretch our legs before he swiped the boat and took off back south again! And then you started moving, and... and..."

"Gazelle is dead," Starlight mumbled into the hug. "I decided to cross the mountains again to come find you. But he found me and we fought and I killed him."

"I can't believe we let you talk us into leaving you alone," Amber whispered, shaking.

Maple was holding too tight for words.

Shinespark surveyed the control panel in the bridge, and then looked up over the wire harmony comet cage. "The extractor had another surge," she commented. "Somehow less damage than the last two times. The students in Kinmari must have done good work." She glanced back at Starlight, stepping closer and sitting down with everyone else. "Did you... hook yourself up to..."

Starlight had a feeling it hadn't just been a good job from the Kinmari ponies. For a tiny moment, she and the ship had been one, and she wished it would survive... "Yes," she answered, pushing everyone just far enough away that they could see her cutie mark. "I'm sorry. It was the only way I could think of."

Maple saw what she was pointing to first, just as wordless as she had been before.

"Heh... Look at that." Amber rubbed her eyes. "How'd you get it? And what's it do?"

"A lot of things," Starlight mumbled. Whatever might have happened to heal the slices on her body or the broken flow of her horn, mentally, she was beyond exhausted.

Valey nodded, taking her hat and setting it on Starlight's head like a blanket. "Yeah... Come on. Let's not stay here where the Equestrians could find us, too. No danger at present, but they shot down Gazelle, so, you know..." She tilted her head at Starlight, folding one ear. "So, you were running across the mountains again. Ready to come home?"

Starlight took a breath. However tired she might have been, it was time to face her future once and for all.

"You're still going to go look for writs," she said. "To try and open the border and get back to Felicity."

Valey nodded. "Yup. That's the plan. But, uhh." She glanced at Maple, and then again at Starlight. "That's not really what you wanna do, is it?"

"But it is what you want to do," Starlight pointed out. "All of you want to get all of us across the border and build our town in Equestria where you can live all together and with me and with Felicity and her foal, and we'll get to build the town ourselves and make it one where we make all the rules instead of having to change another place to be how we want. And we won't have to settle for living with superstitious mares in Riverfall or politics in Ironridge or anything else, and Shinespark will get Equestrian trade to help her home, and everything else! Right?"

"...Hey." Valey sat down. "Yeah. You're right that I wouldn't be extremely cool with just breaking our promise to Felicity and settling down somewhere we don't really like and not trying to get back together again. But, like, what can we do? It's our future, and it's worth fighting for. I just... Bananas... I wish the whole thing with you and Ironflanks in Sires Hollow had worked out. That could'a been perfect. But we'll find a way to make it work. We always do, right?"

Starlight slowly shook her head. "We never do. We always run away and move on somewhere else in the end. Riverfall, Ironridge, the Empire, Kinmari... Sometimes we want to, and sometimes we have to, but we always just keep going."

"I wanna say it's what we're good at," Amber reassured. "But you look a little too tired for that to ring true..."

"It is what we're good at," Starlight said. "It's what I'm good at." She glanced down at her cutie mark. "My special talent is not giving up. I can get back on my hooves after anything and always stay determined. But who cares if it doesn't make me happy? It just hurts more and more each time I use it because the further I go, the further I see that I still can go. I could go on forever, and the next day is always doable, but I get more and more tired every time. I know I could go back to Ironridge and go on an adventure to find the Writs of Harmonic Sanction, and I know it feels like there's an ending somewhere we're all looking for, but it's so much farther and I'm so tired."

Maple touched her shoulder. "You still want to stay in Sires Hollow, then?"

"I..." Starlight took a breath. She just wanted to rest.

"No. I want us all to start our town together, and live happily ever after!" She glared up in determination at her friends, though the expression died quickly. "But I'll never be able to live happily with anything if I can't learn to live without some of the things I feel like I need. If I can't live in Sires Hollow without trying to do everything in my power to make my life better... How can I do it in our town?"

Maple hugged her. "I wish I was a good enough parent to show you."

"You..." Starlight took a breath. "You are. I'm sorry when I said you felt more like a little sister to me. You've tried a lot..."

"Don't be sorry," Maple announced, shaking her head. "It was you saying that that made me realize there was more I needed to be doing for you. And I'll still try my best, no matter where you go, but..." Her ears fell. "Are you sure you have to leave? Is that really what you want? You came all the way out here, you've gone back and forth..."

"I know." Starlight nodded. "It's my destiny to go back and forth. I can't find a balance between hurting myself by trying too hard to get what I need and hurting myself by trying too hard to be content without it. It's who I am. I can't help it. And no one believes there's a balance to be found." Her mind drifted to the Flame of Honesty, to everything it told her about the world...

"Oh yeah?" Valey raised a confident eyebrow. "And who says there isn't? I believe in you, kiddo."

Starlight sniffled.

"Same," Amber asserted, throwing a foreleg over Valey's shoulders. "No one believes there's a balance to be found? We do. And when's anyone else saying something was impossible stopped you?"

Starlight started to cry. "If I go back to Sires Hollow... I know I won't stay there forever. I know it. I know I'll run away again one day and move on in the world and keep looking for what I need to make the life I want to have! But I also know that if I don't go, I'll keep running forever unless I stop someday, and it's never going to feel perfect, and right now... at least I'll have Fluffy and Fishy and... at least I won't have nothing. And you'll know where I am, so..."

"Hey." Valey gave her a reassuring nod. "If this is what you really wanna do? Like, really want? We're gonna set a world record in writ hunting, just for you. Maybe you don't have the strength to spare, dragging yourself onward and paying the price, but you know what? We do. I've been feeling great about myself ever since Kinmari, like... Bananas, I don't even know how to describe it. And you should have seen Sparky's face at the progress Ironridge has made while we were gone. So don't you worry, kiddo. You might have to stop, but we've got a lot of miles left in us, and we'll fly them for you."

"Though that might take some adjustments of our plans," Shinespark added. "This ship won't be an overnight job to fix. We'll have to think hard about how to get it back to Ironridge if we want to fly on with it instead of making do with another vessel. And I'd rather not leave it here in the mountains..."

"Actually..." Starlight sniffed, looking up. "Can you leave it with me?"

Shinespark and Arambai gave her odd looks.

"It's like a friend to me," Starlight said. "It's been protecting me all these months. Maybe none of you can stay with me, but they won't need a Writ of Harmonic Sanction for a boat. And..." She remembered how it had felt to sit at the controls, like she was more familiar with them than she could have been, almost like Amber's cutie mark of boat knowledge had guided her with it. She remembered how she could use the harmony extractor now without disappearing... "I might be able to fix it myself somehow, too."

"Dunno how you're gonna manage that," Arambai rumbled. "Shinespark? What do you think?"

Shinespark stared at the boat and swallowed. "We... do have other ships now. And it could be a goodbye present. Something that means a lot to me." She looked back at Starlight. "I'll want to see this ship again, you hear? You had better take care of it. And it's proof that we'll be back."

"Here we go again, hmm?" Maple sniffled. "Starlight, you really want to do this? I'm sure we could find some other way..."

Starlight shook her head. "I... met Glimmer. In the mountains. The other me."

Arambai raised a thick eyebrow. "Other you?"

Starlight nodded, trusting her friends would fill him in on the flight north. "She's not from the future after all. She doesn't know anything about my visions. She was lying. Which means I know nothing about them, and... it's still my job to prevent them." She wiped her nose on her foreleg. "But even if I don't know what causes them, I do know how strong I am... I know it could be me if I don't take care of myself. I don't know if that is it for sure, but I know it's important. I have to... do what's best for me... so I'll still be able to live happily with everyone when the time comes."

"Aww bananas." Valey shook her head. "Kiddo... Starlight... Bananas. I don't want you to have that sort of stuff on your shoulders."

"But I do," Starlight said, and there was nothing Valey could do to change it. "I remembered what the Honesty flame said, too. I know just how powerful I am now. If I wanted to, I think I could destroy the world. And I don't... I really, really don't. But I have to keep not wanting to. And that means not getting so tired that I lose hope and hate everything like Gazelle... He was so close to me, except he went the other way at the end. So I have to take care of myself. And... And don't worry. If I do leave Sires Hollow again, I promise I'll remember our dream together. Maybe I'll go find the place on that land title deed, and start building something on my own while I wait for you. Or I'll go find Felicity, or..."

"You know what?" Valey announced, straightening up. "This isn't like the other day. You feel different, Starlight. Maybe it's the cutie mark, maybe it's Gazelle, maybe it's just having had time to think... but it doesn't really feel like we'd be abandoning you in your darkest hour anymore. Doesn't feel like you're telling us to leave you and save ourselves, you know? It feels like you have hope for yourself."

"My special talent is having hope for others," Starlight said. "But... I wish I could have hope for myself, too."

Maple held her closer. "So this is goodbye for good, then. You... really think going south will be better for you."

"I know it will hurt." Starlight folded her ears. "A lot. But I have to. I have to take care of myself, and that means trying to settle down, even if I know I'll fail and go looking for a way to finish our dreams again. I have to take care of myself because I know what I can do if I don't."

Shinespark nodded. "Then take the ship. That's my gift. But I promise you, while you're doing whatever you need to in Sires Hollow, we'll be doing everything we can to get those writs. And once we have them? Two is all it'll take, one for Valey to hunt you down with and one for you? She can still smell you. We'll have her come get you and Felicity and her foal."

"Yeah." Valey gritted her teeth in a pained, determined grin. "You got that, kiddo? You do what you need to for yourself, but the moment I have a good ship, I'm taking Birdo and hitting the skies for Yakyakistan."

Amber nodded up at the ship above them, the one they had all flown in on. "Gerardo is staying up there to pilot, but he says hello too, by the way."

Starlight swallowed. She almost expected her friends to try to talk her out of it, but this was really it.

"And, uh." Valey sat down. "I've got a gift for you, too."

Starlight looked up, but Valey just reached out and patted the hat she had set on her head. "That's yours now. Keep it."

"Your hat?" She folded her ears. "But this is yours."

"Yeah, well..." Valey shrugged. "That's what makes it special. But it's not just a hat, either. It's my ultimate weapon."

Starlight thought back to a long, long time ago, when Valey had battled Neon Nova in the Blueleaf generator. It had hardly been anything approaching a fair fight, but she did remember the stallion stealing the hat at one point, only for a banana peel to fall out and temporarily blind him... It was almost a funny image, looking back. She pulled the hat off and checked it just to make sure there weren't any of those left over.

Valey just stood there with a grin, asking if she liked it.

"Well..." Starlight scrunched her eyes shut, then straightened up, reaching around to see if she was still bonded to the black sword. "I have something for you, too."

She was, and it came. There were no runes around her barrel; she had wished them away when she used the shadow cloak to hide from Gazelle, and they had obliged. But the sword appeared, back to its normal appearance, a tiny copy of her cutie mark shimmering in its hilt.

"Huh," Arambai said, looking at the floating weapon. "Weird. Reminds me of Herman's axe... Stuff like this is supposed to be impossible."

Starlight held the sword by her side and looked at Valey. "Um... I have a thing to do... It might be uncomfortable."

Valey eyed the sword dubiously. "You know what that thing does to bats, right?"

Starlight nodded. She needed it to be something that could not be a sword... Closing her eyes and concentrating, she willed it to transform into a stick again, decorated like a staff. A magic wand. This would work. Pointing it at Valey's pendant, she activated the Star Module.

Valey's eyes widened as a beam of energy reached forth and her pendant began to glow. "Woah! What the-!?"

"It's okay," Starlight assured. "I got you stuck in this pendant. Now I'm going to put you back together."

No one could move as the moon glass pulsed, a little light drawing forth, a red sigil made from triangles within triangles. For an instant, Valey's body went rigid, and then in a wash of green flames, she was a shell again.

"Valey...!" Amber's eyes widened in fear.

Starlight kept her that way for less than a second, floating the cutie mark back into Valey's body proper where it belonged. There was one last flash, and with an identical transformation, Valey was back, looking vaguely drunken and dazed.

"Bananas... What the..." She swayed, unsteady on her hooves.

Starlight dropped the staff, reached out with her telekinesis and unclipped the pendant, it and its empty moon glass falling away from her friend's neck. Nothing happened.

"Valey, are you alright?" Shinespark was at her side in an instant, holding her up, and Amber was there too.

"Yeah, I..." Valey looked down at the pendant, then rubbed a hoof against her neck where it had been. "Buh?"

Starlight stepped forward and hugged her, burying her face in the exposed fur that was matted from so long with the pendant. "I put you back together," she sniffed. "That's my goodbye gift."

"Yeah, how the...?" Valey scratched her head and stared.

"Does somebody want to explain to me what just happened?" Arambai asked with a raised eyebrow.

"I don't even know myself," Valey mumbled. "Starlight?"

Starlight shrugged. "I told you. I... know what I can do now. It would take a long time to explain, but I'm very strong."

"Which we already knew," Maple whispered, picking up the pendant and looking at her reflection in its golden plating. "Maybe we should focus on what really matters in the time that we have."

"Yeah." Amber nodded. "Like how you're going to get back home. Isn't it a long way still to Sires Hollow?"

Starlight glanced at her flank, and then at all of her friends', seeing their cutie marks all intact and there. "My cutie mark is..." She swallowed. "It's a cutie mark in doing what you wanted. So it can do everything yours can." She looked at Shinespark, and hovered a foot off the ground to prove it. "So I can fly."

Shinespark gaped. Arambai's jaw hit the floor. Valey just chuckled. "Figures."

"I almost wonder if I had a little bit of its powers before it appeared, and I never knew it," Starlight murmured. "I was always better than I should have been at dodging your things you threw at me for training..."

"Heh..." Valey rubbed the back of her bare head. "Cheater."

"Well, that's a gift to remember me by," Maple whispered in awe.

"Heh. You got mine too?" Amber gave Starlight a shoulder-bump, now that she was the perfect height to do it. "All these superhero marks and Maple's cool storage, and then me with my boat skills? Sounds like you've got at least one that's practical for a profession."

Starlight nodded, pondering and wondering how her life had really reached the point where her friends didn't even ask questions about a power like this... and then Valey tapped her with the pendant. "Yo," she said. "If you're making it so I don't need this anymore? One more memento from me."

The golden links rustled slightly in her hooves, and Starlight stared at the empty stone still embedded in it. The tip of her moon glass sword, the very last piece that still existed... She felt a connection to it still, almost as though it would still respond if she tried to lift it with her horn without being moon glassed. She tapped it with a hoof, curious. If it was empty...

It tinkled against her. She felt the first hints of a sticky, grabbing sensation, and then her cutie mark pulsed, and it bounced away. It didn't seem she would be activating Nightmare Module emulation mode again any time soon.

Starlight pocketed the pendant, keeping it safe. She wasn't sure what it would be like to pocket moon glass, yet somehow, it felt like nothing at all.

"Looks like you really do have our cutie mark powers," Maple chuckled. That gave Starlight one last idea.

"And... I have another present," she said, shuddering. "For all of you."

Could she really do this?

Everyone looked, and Starlight looked back. She took a deep breath, focusing on all their hopes for her, and her hopes for them, and her hopes for herself and her determination to overcome her circumstances and lead a better life in Equestria. She remembered the way their last goodbye had felt, bitter and tearstained with Maple pleading for it not to end like that. Starlight focused on her thoughts for all of them, for Fluffy, for her ship and the friends she could still make in life, for the town she would found in all of their names, for anything and everything that had ever been worth celebrating in her life... and she looked at her friends and smiled.

---

"That's it," Starlight Glimmer said, sitting on a couch in the Crystal Empire with her mane limp and ragged from the recounting, utterly exhausted. "The end."

"Um." Rainbow swallowed. "Wow."

"So what happened?" Twilight whispered. "What happened after you said goodbye? How did you wind up...?"

Starlight shrugged, emotionally rolled over from recounting her experiences in Sires Hollow and the Aldenfold. "The only way it could have gone wrong. They never returned."

Everyone stared.

"I went back to Sires Hollow," Starlight said. "It didn't take long at all until my wanderlust set in and I couldn't be happy there anymore. I tried my best, I really did, but it was barely a week before I flew back into the mountains to look for the Dream. I went out there regularly, working on it little by little each time. A few months after my friends left, a trade caravan came by, and they had the materials I was missing to jury-rig the last fix I needed to make it fly. It turns out with my cutie mark, the harmony extractor doesn't make me disappear anymore..." She shrugged. "And Eylista can easily provide enough power to keep it in the air. So I left."

Everyone listened, and Starlight continued. "First, I went back to Kinmari. Felicity was still pregnant when I got there, and I stayed until her foal was born. I talked to my friends one more time on the sound stone... Shinespark was in Ironridge when I called. She said Valey and Gerardo and Maple and Amber had kept their word and flown off to Yakyakistan, and she hadn't heard back yet. And that's all I know."

"What happened to Felicity?" Twilight whispered.

Starlight shook her head. "She didn't have a good time, but she and her sphinx both survived, at least for the first few days. I didn't stick around for too long, and don't know what happened to them after that. Shinespark got it through to me that for all everyone's bragging and aggressive planning, it's a two-month round trip from Ironridge to Infinite Glacier at the Dream's speed, and they were slower, and that was even if they did nothing there and came back immediately. So, I... went on my way and wandered. I decided to go look for Sunburst next, and hid that I had an airship and a cutie mark of my power. I wound up getting myself an education... Still had a lot of Empire gold left to pay for it. Equestria and the Empire use the same currency system, after all. While I did that, I wound up studying systems of governance along with magic. I wanted to learn some spells the normal way, rather than relying on my natural powers, just to feel like I earned them like a normal pony. But I was exposed to some ideas, and combined them with my own, and slowly started putting together a system I thought would be perfect for the whole world to work by, daydreaming of changing everything through scribbles in the margins of notebooks..."

She put her head in her hooves and sighed. "You want to know what happened to me? What finally pushed me over the edge into being a dictator?"

No one had the heart to say yes.

"Nothing," Starlight said. "There was no final edge. It was just a long, slow slide, of going years and years without hearing a thing from my friends. There reached a point where I was offered a scholarship to go back to Kinmari for a research program... You know, the normal way ponies get there, instead of having a hand-me-down airship or flying cross-continent on their own. And I turned it down because I was too afraid to see if Felicity would still be there, or if she knew what had happened to my friends, or... or anything. I turned that scholarship down. By the time I finished college, I suspect I was a year or three younger than everyone else in my class. They still thought I was a prodigy, even though I stuck to the things I learned and never showed anyone what I was really capable of. That was about eight years after my trip to the north, and I still had heard nothing."

"Well, why didn't you go back?" Rainbow frowned, throwing her hooves in the air. "Can't you just fly across the mountains whenever you want? You had a ship."

"I told you." Starlight winced quietly. "I made the decision... to stay here... until my friends came for me. To trust them to do their part and set boundaries for myself and not break them, and rely on my friends rather than fighting or breaking things to change my own fate."

Twilight's eyes softened. "So that's why you never tried to change your own history while we were time traveling."

"One of the reasons," Starlight mumbled. "But either way, I made our town. I must have been nineteen or twenty when I flew out to look for it, done with school and with no other calling to follow in the world. My friends never came back, but I still wanted to... fulfill my promise to them, even if they couldn't keep their side. Maybe I made a mess of things, maybe I was too extreme, maybe I was too jaded, but I tried. And I held onto that for several years like I had forgotten how to let go, and then..."

"We showed up," Rainbow said.

Starlight nodded. "You showed up. I thought it was my big moment. I thought I was happy there, that this was my avenue to recruit an alicorn and make the whole world look more like what I wanted so I could finally rest easy. I was too jaded to see the situation for what it was, which side I was really on. I thought you were a dumb group of friends who thought sticking together was the way to solve anything."

Twilight shrank. "When we were in the past, you asked me how the future of Equestria could depend on one group of friends."

"I did," Starlight whispered, mane limp. "When, for me, it depended on exactly the opposite. On me saying goodbye."

"Yeah, well, that's balderdash." Rainbow sprang to her hooves, glancing at Cadance, who had been quiet throughout the discussion. "We got those Writs of Harmonic Sanction, right? Where's the one for Starlight? Tell my job I'm taking a yearlong vacation, let's go back to the north and fix that!"

Twilight tugged her gently back down with telekinesis, still staring hollowly into the distance. "I don't think we can."

"What do you mean, you don't think we can!?" Rainbow gave her an incredulous look. "You heard her! She misses her friends, and that's a garbage reason to have to say goodbye! What's stopping us from just flying up there and going, hey, princess powers, where are these ponies?"

Twilight shook her head. "If it was a matter of physical ability, Starlight could have found them herself long ago, or never let them go in the first place."

Rainbow Dash stared. "So what? That was years ago! Maybe they thought they had a deal to see each other back then, but what a real friend would do after this much time is go check on them and see if they need help!"

Twilight sighed. "I have to admit, I want to too. And I don't think I can stop you if you want to go yourself. But weren't you paying attention to what the flame told Starlight in her memory? I think we're the kind of friends it told her to look for. We've used the Elements countless times to protect the world, and yet we still live here in more or less day to day peace. Right?" She shrugged. "And the pressure usually only gets to us when something really big is happening, which, right now, it isn't. While something could have happened to Starlight's friends, maybe gathering that many writs just is a task that takes decades."

"Uh huh." Rainbow curled her lip. "What about the one Yakyakistan owed them? Valey could have taken that and come right back to find Starlight and let her know they were okay. You think she wouldn't have done that if it turned out it was going to take a lot longer than planned?"

Twilight wilted.

"Twilight gets it," Starlight murmured from the corner, beyond drained and exhausted. "Look at me. Do I look like I'm ready to go running off on another adventure to the land that took so much out of me? For the first time in my entire life, I have a legitimate hope that I'm somewhere where I belong, and... my friends aren't somewhere hanging barely on and waiting for me to save them after all these years. I want to go home. To Ponyville. And live, for a change."

Twilight nodded firmly. "And maybe one day, we will go back. I'd like to go there with you, at least. But that day will not be today. You've been through so much, and... I think I understand what Princess Celestia was trying to tell me, now, when I asked her earlier why the rest of the world sounded so messed up in your story and she said she kept this pocket of harmony so that ponies like us who have the power to change things could remember and be shown the way the world is supposed to be."

She got up, stepping toward Starlight, and offered a hoof, helping her up. "We can make a difference in the world, but we'll only hurt ourselves if we try to do it all at once. Right? And right now, the biggest difference we can make, Rainbow and Cadance and I, is by offering you the place you need most to rest and get back on your hooves."

"Thank you..." Starlight slumped against her into a loose, limp hug. "That's why I told this whole story. So that you would understand. You get it."

"But..." Rainbow let her hoof fall. "Someday. Fine. Someday, I wanna go and see Ironridge for myself, though, you hear?"

Cadance chuckled, laying on her back in a reclining chair and massaging her growing foal but slowly getting to her hooves. "It sounds like a nice dream for the future. But this sounds like a thing for the three of you, going back to the north or going to Ponyville and relaxing. I have some family and princess duties to attend to, or else I'd love to stay and talk more..." Her eyes shadowed. "But mostly sleep. Good night."

Rainbow Dash looked around as Cadance left, Starlight still hanging limply against Twilight. "So, uhh..."

"Let's go home," Twilight agreed, helping to steady Starlight. "We've got long lives ahead of us. No one can say where our adventures will lead us next, but for now, we should make the most of the time we have to go home and continue living."

Rainbow shot her one last, pleading glare. "But we're at least gonna ask Celestia if she ever followed up by going back to Ironridge to look for them, right?"

Twilight giggled. "Of course."

Starlight managed to stand on her own, her legs strengthened a little by the prospect of going home. "I guess things worked out happily in the end..."

"That's what we do," Twilight reassured.

"If you want to see it..." Starlight hesitated. "The Immortal Dream is moored in the canyon in the Everfree near your Tree of Harmony right now. I sat in the entrance room of the crystal palace for solace, sometimes, when I was feeling lost these last few months... I could never work up the courage to visit the flame at the bottom, though. I guess I knew, deep down, that I had gone astray. We could visit both of those..."

"Only if you want to." Twilight shook her head. "I wouldn't say no, myself..." She couldn't suppress a tiny, eager giggle, but quickly blushed to hide it. "Obviously. But I get the impression you want to live a little more mundane for a change."

Starlight nodded hesitantly. "I do want to do something to thank you, though."

Rainbow squinted, eyeing her critically. "You, uhh... You have something in mind, don't you? Something you're not sure if it's a good idea to say."

Starlight sighed. "Am I really that transparent?"

"What is it?" Twilight asked politely, stepping back to give her some space.

Starlight shook her head. "It's nothing. It's... It's probably nothing anymore. Or maybe it's not. I don't even know. I don't want to get involved in the north again."

Both mares stared curiously at her.

"...Fine." Starlight took a deep breath. "Twilight... I wouldn't give this to anyone else... but here."

She held a hoof to herself and unpocketed a worn beret, perfectly matching her description of Valey's.

"Oh, Starlight." Twilight's face softened. "That's yours. It's a nice gesture, but-"

Starlight cut her off with a shake of her head. "It's not a gesture. Valey wasn't kidding when she said this was her ultimate weapon."

Twilight's gaze became a little more concerned.

With a shimmer of teal, Starlight rotated the beret in her aura until it was directly facing the duo, the little crystal chip Valey had sewn to the front as a homemade insignia glinting and sparkling from her light. "Do you remember what this is?" Starlight asked.

"Valey's beret?" Rainbow tilted her head. "I mean, I was curious how it would look on me, but..."

Twilight squinted. "Are you talking about the crystal? It looks sort of conspicuous, and I recall you describing it once, but no, you never said what it meant."

"I did," Starlight replied, "long enough ago that you've probably completely forgotten. I don't even remember if Rainbow Dash was listening when I mentioned it. But this chip is a memory device containing an audio recording from Yakyakistan."

Twilight's lips slowly, slowly pursed in surprise.

"Do you remember Fire?" Starlight asked. "The crystal unicorn who was present in the skyport? She gave this to Valey and I as we were casting off from Ironridge. She said it's a recording containing a full, unabridged explanation of Yakyakistan's activities during the forty years between Blazing Rain's war and when the windigoes were unleashed on Ironridge. I've never listened to it, but I can't imagine the information inside is anything short of nation-shaking, if it pertains to why they would have revived monsters that almost froze over the world two thousand years ago."

"Oh," Twilight said.

"You don't think that's kinda..." Rainbow rubbed the back of her head. "Important?"

"It is important." Starlight nodded. "Or, at least, it was. This was the better part of two decades ago, and I don't know that anything more has come out of Yakyakistan since then. It wasn't information they were counting on being public. It was just an explanation so someone would know. Fire felt they weren't worthy to be trusted with it after what they did to Ironridge."

Twilight had already taken the beret in her aura, magic shimmering around the crystal. "This has an unusual structure," she remarked. "It's not uniform at all. Is there some kind of physical data encoding going on? It doesn't seem to be enchanted..."

Starlight nodded. "It's a standard-format crystal memory card for a machine known as a KarmaTech Thirty-Four. This is why Valey was trying to fix the ship's terminal while we were on the Arc Manta going to the crystal palace... She wanted to have it available to read the contents of this chip in case discussions with Princess Celestia went south and there was any knowledge about Yakyakistan she could possibly use as leverage. I don't know if she actually listened to it, but... there you have it."

Rainbow gawked. "That thing? I knew something was up with that!"

"And you still have one on your ship," Twilight said, tilting her head. "But why give this to me? I thought you wanted us not to go off to the north again. Isn't a thing like this... you know... begging to be the start of a new adventure?"

Starlight shrugged. "First, it's many years out of date. I don't know how relevant it will be anymore. Second, you don't have to use my ship's terminal. I figured you would be someone who might enjoy trying to figure out how to decode it on your own. You could learn a lot about northern technology from it if you wanted, I'd bet. But mostly..." She let out a deep breath. "It's a way of saying I trust you. To... stay home with me even if you want to go running off after my friends... Face it. If I'm wrong and this does make you want to go back there, the chip will just be an excuse. I can see what you really want. And I would want it too, if I could let myself."

Twilight nodded solemnly in acknowledgement. "And one day, you will be able to. I swear it as the Princess of Friendship."

"But not today." Starlight looked up at the exit to the room.

"Yeah... Point taken." Rainbow shrugged in disappointment. "So, save-the-world party in Ponyville? Did you ever figure out what was up with those spooky visions? We don't have a bad future still to avert, do we? Or did that get sorted somehow?"

Starlight hesitated. "That's... another story. But you do remember there was an older Valey in the very first vision. So, I suppose, if we've left each other behind?"

Twilight bit her lip.

"And..." Starlight nodded. "There's one other thing, too."

---

A shimmer of midnight blue clouded an open desert sky, nothing moving except for the wind and the tumbleweeds.

It was a rocky desert, the kind where clay was plentiful, without much sand to be seen. Once, it could have been fertile had the rains willed it, but those were days of the distant past. And then a wooden ship hull hovered close overhead, and with a thump, four hooves landed.

Starlight Glimmer stood in the desert and surveyed the land, a bandanna tied into her mane to keep out the heat. She had grown into her adult proportions, with wider shoulders and a rounder barrel and larger legs, but still stood a few inches shy of being fully grown. Her mane and tail were longer, things she actually took care of now that she had spent years living in society and surrounded by ponies who weren't her close friends.

Her horn pulsed, sending out a massive, paper-thin field of telekinesis and dragging it across the ground to get an idea of the lay of the land. In her teeth, she held a homemade map, still not quite having kicked her foalhood habit of avoiding magic as much as possible. She stared down at the map, took a few steps, and found herself at the top of a ridge, looking down into a valley.

It was natural and sheltered, sloping earth around it protecting it from the winds and making her wonder if it would be a little more hospitable to growing food and crops. To the east, a dry riverbed ran, providing drainage and preventing the valley from turning into a flood zone. Far in the distance, she could see a faint, ramshackle shack: a train station, built out to the middle of nowhere, the end of its line and looking like it hadn't been visited in centuries.

Funny. Whoever had built the rails must have known there was something out here, and yet no one but her had ever come. But she had an airship, so she wouldn't need to take the train.

She jumped into the valley and rolled down the sheer, sloping edge, never having lost her athletic edge from fighting so long ago. She had college sports programs to thank for the practice, though she made a point of only practicing with teams, never actually joining up like they wanted her to. That wasn't her future, and she knew it.

Starlight easily regained her balance, landing on her hooves at the end of the drop, and strolled forward, the sun beating down on her lilac back as she applied her imagination to the field. A bulwark of raised earth in the middle, creating a platform to build on that any mountain floods would go around... Perfect. She'd need to plan the village tightly to maximize space efficiency, because she would probably be moving all the earth herself... A single street, how about, with houses lining both sides. Brilliant.

Her gaze turned northward, to the mountains. The Aldenfold seemed to skip foothills here, ramping straight up into snowy, mountainous peaks after a single wall of low, dusty hills. At least water wouldn't be a problem, since they could climb the mountains and melt snow. For that matter, the snow was so close to the desert... She suspected there was something magical about the area that allowed it to fall here. Like the magic that had once affected the weather in Ironridge, creating an unnaturally warm cauldron of air for the Earth District.

Just more proof that she had found the right place.

Starlight lit her horn and flew, approaching the mountains. Already, she could see a myriad of paths and tunnels and caves. If these became as impassable as the rest of the Aldenfold, it wouldn't be for a while. But that was good for her, since caves provided useful building opportunities, like storage. Or she could use them like Icereach for shelter to grow food...

She thought about what Icereach cuisine must actually taste like. What did you even grow in caves, mushrooms? You could make mushroom soup, mushroom stew, mushroom sandwiches... mushroom muffins...

Hopefully the local ingredient supply would turn out to have more possibilities than that.

Starlight landed in front of a cave deeper in the mountains, one at the end of a long ice bridge that gave her a good feeling for reasons she couldn't quite place. The first thing she needed to find, if this was truly the place she owned, courtesy of her mother's last gift, was the Tree of Harmony.

Her horn flattened the darkness, effortlessly lighting the interior of the cave. Ever since getting her cutie mark, she had never again been faced with her foalhood trouble of headaches and limited power. After that, her horn just got tired like a normal unicorn, like trying to exhale when your lungs were already empty, and she had never managed to push it to a point that took more than two days to fully recover. Yet still, she had trained, spent many long days at school learning to increase her magical stamina, and now the task of lighting her way in the dark, once so daunting on her very first journey through the Aldenfold, was accomplished without even thinking.

Starlight drifted through the caves, occasionally shooting the walls and leaving tiny crystals so she would have a trail to follow back to the surface. She floated through cross sections, dove to the bottoms of underground ravines, chased the floor of the world and always went down, her heartrate increasing when the walls became luminous enough to see by, traces of energy sluggishly making their way to the surface. Starlight dove, searching lower and even lower, an eagerness in her step as she squeezed through cracks so tight they scraped both sides of her barrel and soared down chasms that would have exhausted any rope supply she could carry.

And then, just when her control on the first crystals she had planted was beginning to wane, their forms existing too far away for even her practiced, improved horn to keep ahold of, she drifted around a wall and found herself face to face with a wall of crystal.

"A crystal palace," she breathed, taken so far into the past by her location she was surprised when she didn't sound like a filly. "Maple... I found it..."

Starlight put her hoof to the crystals and used her horn to control them, and they shifted obediently, creating a way for her to step inside.

The inside of the palace was chalky, covered in the same residue she had seen at Ironridge and south of Kinmari. No one had been here but her, it seemed... This place was hers. A faint voice called to her from outside her comprehension, welcoming her and calling her deeper. Starlight shakily obliged.

Should she really be here? She had left her friends and the north and all of its magic behind, abandoned its role in her life, never used her cutie mark when others were looking and held it sacred as a reminder of her friends. Did this equate to going back?

No. She was keeping her promise, doing what she had always said she would, living out her friends' dreams even though they had never returned to do so themselves.

Even the brief acknowledgement of the fact caused her to tremble. Starlight slumped to the chalky floor, suppressing a long-restrained sob.

There, there... Don't cry. This is a place for happy times, not mourning. Haven't you made a big accomplishment, just getting here?

Starlight could feel the flame, farther down beneath her. She kicked into a run, foregoing flight, jumping down stairs that were so chalky they were closer to ramps with ridges. If she didn't, she might second-guess herself, turn back... Eight whole years since she had left her friends. Just as long as she had lived between the meteor strike and first meeting them. Those adventures had been half her life ago, and here, at long last, she was daring to face them again.

What would she see? What would she find? Had her choices over the past decade changed the future? Would she be met with more grayness and warnings, trying to call her back into action to protect and save the world, or else scare her away from harming it? She skidded into the map table room, its perfect sigil catching her eyes... The last one she had seen was in the Honesty palace, in a memory she magically remembered and still wasn't sure sat properly in her head. It had been disrupted and disturbed, a jagged distortion where the Aldenfold scrunched two continents together. But this flame had none of that.

Was it showing her a lie, hiding from what the world was? She didn't see any missing dots from the two flames she had been told no longer burned in their palaces, either.

Or maybe it was showing her what it wanted the world to be.

Come here!

Starlight ran into the spiral staircase, dashing along the walls, lower and lower until she reached the tree room, a great crystal-walled chasm over a sea of darkness, the ether of the lifestream itself. Starlight charged out onto a bridge connecting the wall to the great crystalline trunk rising from the lifestream, the core of the palace, the heart in which the Flame of Harmony burned. She ran, breathless, harder than she had charged since her adventures eight years ago, dashed through the twisted, knotted entrance between the tree's crystal walls, skidded into the brazier room, and leaped, touching the flame, unable to hide from her future any longer. What was it? Had it changed? Was it worth it? Was it over?

...Her hoof touched the pedestal, welcoming fire coiling around her like a hoofshake. No static clawed at her vision. No grayness rose to claim her. It was over.

"It's over," Starlight panted, staring into the brazier in awe, draped like a doll over its edge. "I did it. It all counted for something after all..."

Why the long face? Aren't you happy?

"I..." Starlight was happy. It was hard to realize, almost hard to accept, but she was. A rush of memories cascaded through her brain, of Valey's fear that she came from moon glass, of Starlight's own fear that she could destroy the world, of each and every one of her friends and their own worries, and all those stacked up next to her own. Her days in Kinmari swam through Starlight's conscience, her crippling fear of herself even as her friends unwound and shed their troubles and worries, and she remembered each and every time Glimmer had told her that the future wasn't safe for her to know.

All of it came down to this.

All of it came to this crystal palace right here, half her meaningful life later, where she touched a harmonic flame and the future was changed. No vision arrived to warn her. She had done it.

"I did it!" Starlight rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

Hooray for you!

"I did it... It was enough..." Starlight started to cry. "Who are you?" she asked, looking back at the flame. "Which one...?"

I am Laughter, the flame informed her. And you deserve to celebrate.

A key turned somewhere in her chest, and Starlight tipped back her head and laughed.

---

"So that's how it is," Twilight said, nodding as Starlight finished the coda to her story. "I'm... so proud of you."

"Proud of me?" Starlight blinked, just a little bit more drained after the last epilogue to her tale. "Why?"

"I don't know." Twilight shrugged. "It's hard to articulate. But hearing that, it just felt like I needed to say it."

Starlight nodded. "Well, thanks."

"For everything, I guess," Twilight added, not ready to let it drop. "But..." She ran out of words to say, glancing towards the exit. "Well. Shall we go home?"

"Home." Starlight sniffed. "Thanks, Twilight. Let's... Let's go home."

Comments

[Czar_Yoshi]

Ahem.

BOOOOOOYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a pleasure writing for you.

Stay tuned for a blog announcing what I'll be doing next within the next few days. Until then, Czar out.

[Boopers]

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cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/216476255644549120/365466302325850112/nosmol.png

[Phoenix Kitten]

I stopped playing Ori to read this, just so you know.

And here.. we see how her journey came to a close, not with a bang in the end, but a whimper.
We have a sequel hook though.

Never More Reincarnation

I won’t forget those days that I spent with everyone precious to me,
Never more, will I be alone even in the darkness
I will find it, that precious thing that I lost
Never more, because I’m sure your voice will guide me
If I get on the train now, I have the feeling I won’t see you again
Never more, will you have to give the troubled me a little push
I will believe in that smile of yours, in our bond
Never more, for even when we are apart, your heart will be with me

0.

[Frodo]

What a ride it's been. Congratulations on the finished book, Czar. I can't wait to see what you come up with next 👀

[Oberth Effect]

The last mark vanished from her sight just as the sun started to rise.

i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/690/624/c9d.jpeg

It's been a wonderful ride. Thank you for writing this magnificent story!

----

It was a futile gesture when she knew her own wishes were destined to be ignored...

And yet, the ship was still here.

Perhaps the ship itself wished to survive?

Starlight kept her that way for less than a second, floating the cutie mark back into Valey's body proper where it belonged. There was one last flash, and with an identical transformation, Valey was back, looking vaguely drunken and dazed.

Liquid joy right there.

and she looked at her friends and smiled.

I'm not crying, you're crying!

Got a pretty bad feeling about what happened to Starlight's friends... But that's a mystery for another time.

Still not entirely sure how Starlight ended up deciding that taking cutie marks was a good idea, to be honest. I definitely feel bad for her, though. Going month after month, year after year, without hearing anything, with hope steadily dwindling away...

How did Starlight know what Valey wanted to do with the memory chip? Did she just figure it out after inspecting the chip herself?

A beautiful ending, with plenty of dangling plot threads to pick up if/when the sequel is released.

[Goodrock]

Wow, I don't really know how to articulate my words to express myself, I'll try though. Its been an adventure of awesome proportions and I'm kind of sad that The Olden World has come to a close. Even though I'm sad it's over; I have absolutely zero regrets; the long nights, the anticipation, the nail biting, all worth! I don't really know what the future has planned, but if I'm not to cliched to say when one door closes another one opens.

[alamais]

i.imgur.com/0mKXcg1.gif
Congrats on 1,000 straight days of horsewordery. You've certainly lived up to—if not surpassed—your inspiration.

"Thanks, Twilight. Let's... Let's go home."

West Virginaaaa~ Mountain Mamaaaaa...wait, no.

I'm actually pondering rewatching S5 onward with this version of Glim in mind, to see if/how she fits and how it changes the perspective.

Also, whatever happened to keep her friends from coming back, I'll just assume it was Jamjars' and Glimbots' fault. At least, until you write otherwise. >:V

[Daedrik]

Hooray the big one thousand chapters and got on the two million leader board in the process goo- no wonderful job

[Boopers]

It is over.
Congratulations, Czar! This is one crazy achievement! You did it!
What a ride. Thank you for allowing us all to tag along with the Immortal Dream! I'm gonna miss this story a lot and I will never forget all those awesome places you took us. I'll gladly visit this world of yours once again anytime!
Go rest now, have a really great vacation!
🦇

[Pluie]

Damn, what a ride it has been. Thanks for everything, Czar.

[Imploding Colon]

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[Ariel Schnee]

Yay!^)^ You reached one-thousand chapters now!^_^ That's something nobody's ever done on this site before!^_^

Here. Have some fireworks. They can be really pretty.^_^

https://giphy.com/explore/fireworks

^_^

[Phoenix Kitten]

10127166
You might want to check the date on the 1000th chapter of Appledashery first.

[KMCA]

A satisfyingly unsatisfying ending to a wonderful fic... time to update it and start rereading it. (this one will take awhile)

10127038
Totally Jamjars fault. She probably went to find her and got knocked up, telling others that Starlight didn't want them so they'd rally around her an her foal.

After all, if Starlight wanted them she was never more than a trip to Kinmari away from getting in touch.

[Thunder twister]

well, it's been quite the journey - thanks for writing this Czar.

[Summer Script]

And at last we've reached the end. It's been one heck of a ride, but it's finally over.
I found this story a long time ago(I think right around the beginning of the Griffon Empire Arc?) before I had even joined the site proper, and basically breezed through chapter-after-chapter until I finally caught up, and just... Wow. This has been such a wonderful journey, and I'm so happy to have been a part of it. It's sad to see that it inevitably had to end, but it was so worth it, reading this masterpiece. A fantastic story that I can't wait re-read all over again.

1000 Chapters, and 2+ million words. That is something to be proud of, and I can't wait to see what you have in store for us next time! Until then, I hope you have yourself a break. You really deserve it.

But I do have two questions though: Who was Flame Face? I remember that in one of the interludes Starlight name-dropped the true leader of Yakyakistan, but if Starlight stayed in Equestria... Does that mean that she visited Yakyakistan, or visited there at some point? Or am I mis-remembering/this got retconned?

And two: Was it ever properly explained how Starlight could know all of the alternate perspectives that she often spoke from? Such as Gazelle comforting Meltdown after the pirate ship incident, or about Garsheeva sending Gazelle right back over the mountain?

[Zapdroid]

And so ends one of the best fanfics, one of the best books, that I have ever read. Thank you for this amazing title, and for the consistent uploads spanning years. Take some time off, you’ve more than earned it. Bravo!

[Czar_Yoshi]

10127483
Flame Face was indeed the leader of Yakyakistan, and I'm surprised someone remembered that! Sounds like there's a lot more to their story that hasn't yet been told...

Some of what Starlight said could have been extrapolation. Others, she might have learned off-camera during times when there was a lot of storytelling going on, like when everyone was telling their perspectives on Ironridge at the party during Riverfall 2, or when Garsheeva and Meltdown were having a friendly chat with everyone inside the temple core. And who knows if Starlight's past caught up to her anywhere else in the years between her trip to the north and the present?

[ZanyZapper]

Wow. Just wow. I haven't been commenting much here toward the end because I really had not idea what to day. This has been a heck of a journey! Simply fantastic. Looking forward to your upcoming blog post to see what the future holds for Starlight and / or our band of northern adventurers! So many question! What was up with Yakyakistan? How about the tree of harmony there? And ancient Unicornia? Where is Indus? Did any batponies manage to survive other than Felicity and Valey? Does Starlight ever have a long talk with Luna? Did she actually arrive with Eylista, or become "enchanted" with it as a baby? Did Luna send the meteor herself, or was it a result of the banishment spell beginning to weaken, or something else?

Heavens, I could go on and on!

Also, I know I'm a minority here, but I really want to see what happens with Jamjars. Maybe she'll just end up in Riverfall with her mom and siblings, but I can't see her staying put in that case. I always felt kind of bad for her - in a family with an inattentive mother who kept getting pregnant for no good reasons. She really seemed starved for attention, tho (like most such kids, honestly) went about trying to fill that hole in questionable ways. Then ran away with a group of adventurers (including another filly that kept outshining her in every way) but STILL was mostly ignored and left out of things, so not surprising she would get into situations trying to be part of what was going on. It was terrible she used the writ like she did, but she was terrified of losing the closest thing she had to friend, even if Starlight considered her only an acquaintance at best. Makes me wonder, since she had the writ, if she tried to pull a "reverse Starlight" and cross the mountains back to Equestria on her own at some point.

At any rate, bravo bravo bravo and congratulations on completing an excellent fic! I'm just upset I don't have this to look forward to first thing every morning any more!

[radiation_pony]

That ending... It practically demands a sequel, as much as Starlight might deny it the story seems far from over. And now I don't have a reliable chapter to read each night

[Summer Script]

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Long comment ahoy! You've been warned!

Did any batponies manage to survive other than Felicity and Valey?

1) From how I understood it, any/every batpony connected to the Daydream Network or near a Dusk Statue were victim to Crystal's wrath. So basically, every Sarosian in Mistvale and the Griffon Empire were turned into changelings.
The only possible exception would have been Chauncey since he disconnected himself from the Network, and partially mutated himself with the Nightmare Modules. But, well, he's dead... Hopefully.

Luckily, this "should" mean that any Sarosians that were out of her range were unaffected. So in reality, pretty much just the Equestrian Sarosian population(Unless of course there are Sarosians in Ironridge, Varisdel, Yakyakistan, or somewhere else in the North.)

Does Starlight ever have a long talk with Luna?

So far, the answer seems to be no. Or at least not yet. She was still imprisoned during Starlight's adventure, and by the time she was freed, Starlight was doing her "Thing." And I don't recall Starlight and Luna legitimately knowing each other in any of the Interludes.

Now, there might be a chance that at some point during her time back in Equestria, she somehow communicated with Luna/Nightmare Moon(Through her Artifice, perhaps?), but I find that rather unlikely.
If there ever is a sequel to The Olden World (*Crosses Fingers*) maybe we'll have that to look forward to?

Did she actually arrive with Eylista, or become "enchanted" with it as a baby?

The Honesty Tree definitely made it clear that the Immortal Dream, in order to not flow back into the aether, latched onto Starlight since she was the nearest living pony.

Though the question of what it fully did to Starlight remained a bit ambiguous. It modified her body to have elements of Sarosian biology(Makes sense; the race was created with the thing after all) which explains why she could be effected by Moon Glass and use the Nightmare Modules. It also gave her her supercharged magic, and shut off her horn's natural ability to limit her power output(Assuming that doctor from the Griffon Empire was being truthful at the time).

But were those the only changes it made to her? Is she able to create cutie marks whenever she wants now? Does she possess nigh-infinite magic if she maintains a healthy emotional state? Does she have an extended life-span? Can she Shadow-Sneak, but just doesn't know it or how? How will her body react if she's ever properly stabbed with the Indus blade?
Yeah, we know a good portion of the changes that happened to Starlight(Certainly the most important ones), but I doubt we know all of them.

Did Luna send the meteor herself, or was it a result of the banishment spell beginning to weaken, or something else?

Hmm... This is tricky. On one hand, the banishment spell weakening is a good idea, but on the other, it seems unlikely that she could hold onto the Immortal Dream for a millennium and just suddenly drop it for no actual, tangible reason.

Now the wrinkle about Luna throwing the thing away willingly is that she was still Nightmare Moon and hellbent on screwing over Celestia. Enough that when she was banished she took a literal "Weapon of God" with her to the moon. I seriously doubt Nightmare Moon would have intentionally parted with it unless either:

A) Nightmare Moon had no choice but to relinquish it.
Maybe since the Hope Tree was destroyed/powerless she begrudgingly parted with it, hoping it could serve as a good enough substitute? You can't exactly rule a world if there's no world to rule after all.
Or perhaps the Immortal Dream itself somehow escaped her grasp against her will(The Indus blade supposedly can do something similar, why not the Immortal Dream?).
Or of course, Nightmare Moon saw an opportunity to pass the thing onto someone she thought she could manipulate/use in the future, attempting to preemptively make Starlight her own twisted version of Twilight?
Or yes, someone/something forced her to give it up(Celestia, Tetra, or Tetra's opponent?)

B) I strongly doubt this one, but maybe Luna regained just enough sanity in her final years of banishment to have thrown away the Immortal Dream, so that when she did break free as Nightmare Moon, she couldn't use it against Celestia or anyone else.
Considering what Starlight's done with the thing without even knowing she had it, I shudder to think what N.M. would have done to Ponyville if she had it at the time.

Although, this begs the question as to why the meteor was named "Eylista" in the first place.
Is it the true name of the Immortal Dream? Is it simply the name given to whoever is currently wielding the Artifice and nothing more? Was there perhaps something else attached to the meteor besides the Artifice? We know it's related to Indus in some manner, considering the terminal in the "Sword World" called Starlight by that, but what is the connection?

Or did Luna just feel like giving the meteor some random, ominous, super-mysterious nickname at the time because she was bored and feeling whimsical?

Where is Indus?

I'm assuming the original Indus is either obliterated due to the Tetra's battle and is a smoldering ruin somewhere in the world, or by some outside power has been completely removed from/made inaccessible to the world entirely.

The theory that I personally had was that Indus was either an alternate realm itself or stuck in one.
I know The Olden World doesn't follow show canon(I think "The Crystalling" might have happened, but Czar_Yoshi stated that they weren't including anything S6 and beyond), but Limbo and the Dream World both existed in the show, so alternate dimensions are real things in MLP. And Starlight's Obsidian sword simply serves as a pseudo-gateway into it? Or at least a part of it(Remember the "Welcome to Indus" sign, and the possible "ghost" of Sosa?).

But hey! THAT'S JUST A THEORY! A FIMFICTION THEORY!

What was up with Yakyakistan?

THIS! There was so much set up for Yakyakistan, and a lot of it went unanswered(For now, at least)!
What was Herman's real goal? Was he working alone, or under orders? If so, then who was he serving? Did he or any other Yaks know about what Valey's brand really was(Doubt it, but still). Who was Flame Face, and how did Starlight know him/know so much about Yakyakistan as a region and culture? She couldn't have learned it all from Gerardo; she absolutely did not listen to him enough to have done so!

There's still so much we don't know, but we know at least one thing: They were trying to force the magic of the Kindness Tree to fill a windigo heart.

Was this entirely Herman's plan? *Dam explosion flashbacks* NOPE! I'm pretty sure the windigo heart was more likely his "True Mission" with his antics in Ironridge being something he himself likely came up with?
Then again, it's been a LOOOONG time since the Ironridge Arc, so I doubt I'm remembering everything right.

However, assuming that filling the heart was Yakyakistan's real mission all along, we're left wondering why? My theories:

A) Power.
They needed a massive amount of harmony magic for something. For what, I'm uncertain.
Maybe something is wrong over their in their land? We know they're not exactly subtle when it comes to dangerous actions/experiments, and from the Kinmari Arc we know that messing with the world's aether is NOT a good idea! But what if Yakyakistan did, and they needed the Harmony to fix it?

B) Screwing up the Kindness Tree.
We know that the Trees of Harmony in the North are what's powering the enchantments of the Aldenfold, and we know one of them's already screwed up. So what if they were trying to drain the Tree of it's power to bring down the Aldenfold and cross into Equestria?

What would they do that for? Surely, they'd know that Celestia wouldn't be happy with that? Unless they already had an idea as to how to defeat her...? Herman did pretty much intend to level Ironridge so he could turn it over to Yakyakistan as essentially more land, right?(Seriously, I NEED to reread the Ironridge Arc, because I'm just pulling this stuff from memory, and mine sucks! )

C) Indus.
The boxes that Gerardo were transporting contained a massive contraption made of Moon Glass to help force the Tree's power into the Heart, but at the time we were also informed that the Tree's magic was damaging said contraption. What if a side goal of the project was to see or better understand whatever connection that Moon Glass has to Indus, and as a result, take one step closer to finding Indus? If so... Why?

D) Fixing their Tree of Harmony.
We don't learn much about whatever the condition of their Tree is in, but I'm pretty sure it was theirs that was down at the time when the Aldenfold's enchantments were compromised.
The Kindness Tree was perfectly fine, and if the Love Tree hadn't been messed with, the barrier would have held. Knowing that, we could infer that they were intending to drain harmony from the Kindness Tree and use it to hopefully restore their own?
It's a possibility, but I think this is the least likely of the bunch. If they cared about fixing it(Or even could), they likely would have done so long ago since Celestia would have likely pressured them to at least try.

Also, I know I'm a minority here, but I really want to see what happens with Jamjars.

Same. I honestly really wish she had gotten more screen time(Nyala too for that matter) because she was a really interesting character and foil to Starlight. Oh well.
Assuming the others(Valey) didn't pound her into dirt, they likely just ditched her in Riverfall where Jamjars absolutely ran away again. Personally? My bets on where Jamjars ended up are either in Varsidel on account of the stuff that Glimbot(We're all calling her that now, right?) gave her, or doing what you said and trudging back through the Aldenfold to find Starlight and drag her back.

Though I suspect the latter is the canonical one, since in one of the Interludes, Starlight refers to Jamjars as the "Hard work" to her own "Natural Talent." And considering what Jamjars did in the end, that sort of leaves us without a reason for why Starlight would make that comparison(Unless Starlight was just really impressed by Jamjar's camo spells.)

Some of my personal questions include:

1) What were the true origins of the Nightmare Cave that they visited before entering Mistvale? I'm assuming it either has something to do with Nightmare Moon or Tetra's opponent, since that was where The Indus blade began messing with everyone's memories and where Starlight fought the guy and his not-Aegis.

2) Where did Kero go again?

3) Did we ever learn the full story behind Blazing Rain? Like who she was or how she could beat back Yakyakistan's army?

4) Shinespark's horn. Did that ever get repaired, or is she forever the Tempest Shadow of The Olden World? Somehow, I seriously doubt that Arambai would sit back and let her be unable to use magic for the rest of her life; at the very least, he'd probably try to create Braen 2.0 to circumvent the horn issue by drawing the power straight from her cutie mark or something.

5) Glimbot's true purpose; Tetra's motivations; and Tetra's opponent.

6) What happened to the Generosity Tree? I'm assuming Yakyakistan's tree is the Hope Tree, but we know that the Generosity Tree is in Equestria, sooo...
I suppose it could technically be the one from the show. Makes sense; At the time it was without the Elements of Harmony and was fighting off Discord's plant thing. AND trying to keep the Everfree Forest in check, so it definitely would have been weakened enough to be considered "Destroyed."

But I always assumed that Twi's tree was the Magic Tree because duh, of course it would be! But that just raises the question that if the Generosity Tree isn't the Everfree's Tree, and therefore wasn't the one that was critically weakened... Number one: Where is the real Generosity Tree, and number two: What did Celestia do to it?

7) Where's the real Garsheeva? We know she booked it to Mistvale after Crystal happened, and we know Chrysalis eventually crossed the Aldenfold...I think? Is the Changeling Kingdom in Equestria, the North, or somewhere in-between? But Crystal impersonated Garsheeva, and declared the end of the Sphinxes, so... Whoops. That's not something I think Garsheeva expected to come back home to.

8) Meltdown.

9) Did Starlight ever succeed in giving Lyn and Gazelle a chance to reunite?

And 10) What did Celestia's Artifice of Knowledge do?

So yeah. Overall, there are still quite a number of questions left unanswered and potential stories yet to be told. Curse you 1000 chapter limit! If not for you, we'd have likely know more before the story ended!
In all seriousness, lingering questions aside, this story was just too good to not be worth all of it!

[Oberth Effect]

10129644

Lots of good questions! My own comments (and some parroting of Czar's answers):

But, well, [Chauncey]'s dead... Hopefully.

No body, no death

And who knows, that Nightmare Module shield is a really tough thing. Not sure if it would protect against the concussive blast though.

Seems T.E.T.R.A. 4.0 (Starlight/Glimbot) must have patched out the vulnerabilities that made 3.0 (bat ponies) susceptible to Chrysalis.

Luckily, this "should" mean that any Sarosians that were out of her range were unaffected.

Yep, confirmed by Czar on Discord.

The Honesty Tree definitely made it clear that the Immortal Dream, in order to not flow back into the aether, latched onto Starlight since she was the nearest living pony.

It modified her body to have elements of Sarosian biology(Makes sense; the race was created with the thing after all) which explains why she could be effected by Moon Glass and use the Nightmare Modules.

The trees cannot see into the Aldenfold, so all they know is that Starlight returned from the mountains with Caballeron after the meteor fell. No way to know for sure whether Starlight was a regular pony beforehand and modified by the meteor/Immortal Dream, whether she came with the meteor, or something else.

Can she Shadow-Sneak, but just doesn't know it or how?

Makes me wonder if Starlight could hide the same way Glimbot could. Shadow sneaking would be pretty cool though.

It also gave her her supercharged magic, and shut off her horn's natural ability to limit her power output

Glimmer has similar weaknesses and is also a T.E.T.R.A 4.0, so it might be innate to her body, which begs the question of whether her body is her original one or modified.

Does she possess nigh-infinite magic if she maintains a healthy emotional state?

The chapter says that Starlight's horn tires just like that of a normal unicorn. It doesn't say just how powerful she is, but likely she ranks pretty high among unicorns.

Although, this begs the question as to why the meteor was named "Eylista" in the first place.
Is it the true name of the Immortal Dream?

The Tree of Honesty said that the Immortal Dream was also known as Eylista, so I guess it's just two names for the same thing? No real indication as to how long that name had been around.

One other possibility for the existence of the meteor brought up earlier in the story was that it was an ark of sorts, rescuing all those souls from Nightmare Moon. It'd certainly fit the theme of the Immortal Dream granting the hopes and dreams of others.

Also, the Immortal Dream is distinct from the Hope Artifice. The former allows for the actual creation of cutie marks, while the latter is more limited manipulation.

if the Love Tree hadn't been messed with, the barrier would have held.

IIRC it was the generators that were failing in Grandbell, not the tree itself.

Makes sense; At the time it was without the Elements of Harmony and was fighting off Discord's plant thing.

That doesn't quite match "damaged terribly by a mortal experiment mere years ago", though, since it would have been in that state for quite a while. Czar has also said on Discord that the Ponyville tree is Magic, the Yaks' tree is Knowledge, and Hope is to the far south.

What did Celestia's Artifice of Knowledge do?

It allowed her to move the Moon in Luna's absence according to Czar. As for the virtue, apparently there's enough for a whole story there.

You should get on the Discord to ask these questions! Quite a lot of the answers will be "spoilers" based on the questions there, but you have some interesting stuff.

[Summer Script]

10129797
See, a lot of this is why I really need to re-read this story like three more times. I keep mixing up half this stuff.

I'll definitely try out that Discord though; thanks for linking it!

[jours]

Belated ’grats on completing this! Quite a ride it was, indeed.
With the Trees being cryptic nearly to the end, a song comes to mind,

who can live in the future and live in the present and not go crazy? who can sleep with their own destiny and still know the happiness of a beautiful thing? these are the riddles of the trees.

https://youtu.be/JBnnSRcDG48

This chapter is a real gem. I liked those lonely travel chapters in the beginning and it's nice to be reminded of that. We didn't have this for a very very long time.

To be honest, I kinda expected that this story will turn out not unlike Kino no Tabi, or perhaps Mushishi — something I wouldn’t have minded in the slightest. Even made me shelve this for later around the Arambai’s basement chapter.
Speaking of which; no idea where you get the character’s name from (as well as those of the other OCs), but just so you know, there’s a village of Alambai somewhere on the Salair Ridge. (Which gives me a few silly ideas of my own.)
Of characters; I was unable to quite figure out Valey when she was first introduced, finding her annoying, etc. And then — ‘bananas’ — someone who has that as a catchphrase surely can’t be evil! (Which has nothing to do with myself having that same catchphrase. Probably.)

[…], Nyala stood like a shadow on the deck, unnoticed by everyone and staring at Celestia with a faintly haunted expression.

Is Celestia somehow “the third one” Nyala mentioned seeing the mural in the Tree of Honesty’s palace? Though that’d be some thousands of years anachronistic.
Lastly, and though that doesn’t in any way diminish the value of the story (just make my eye twitch),

1. one can be laying eggs, or bricks, and on the grass, too; but when one’s tired, they likely be lying on grass; (I see you’ve been super consistent with this one; wonder if there’s some big reason to that);
2. the idiom is to rein oneself in.

And thanks again for writing!

[Dream Seeker]

After all this, I still don’t feel completely satisfied... I want a happy ending where all the plotlines are finally wrapped up.

But at the same time, I feel like that’s kind of the point. I should trust in these ponies whose journey I’ve been following. That they could make a happily ever after on their own. I don’t have to be there to believe in them.

But it sure would be fun to watch it happen

[NeoNymph]

*Looks at the insane cavalcade of words*

F***....me!!!

[Vibrant lies]

Huh... a 2 million word story... that’ll take a while... *Puts on glasses* Let’s get started

[MagicS]

Alright, so I actually finished this story a while ago. I had taken a break and had a lot to catch up on but mostly I've just been busy with my own things and never gave myself the time to finally comment at the end.

So I do love this story. And it's one of the very few I've read that I've put on my favorites list. I fell in love with the characters and The Olden World gave me many, many, hours of joy and entertainment. That being said I won't deny there's a lot of disappointment I feel towards this ending and essentially the entire second half of the story starting from the Griffon Empire.

Perhaps this is my own fault since even Starlight herself says that the story is more Valey's story than hers and maybe it was never your intention to begin with, but ever since the first interlude I was expecting to see how Starlight becomes the pony that Twilight and her friends meet in Our Town. But frankly I don't think that ever really happens. In fact it seems like the exact opposite is happening and then we get everything glossed over at the very end as the "explanation" and development from filly Starlight into adult Starlight. I was waiting for this to happen through the story and it was my primary motivator for reading it. I love Valey and The Olden World has a great cast of characters but I won't hesitate to say that Starlight was the one I cared about the most.

And as for the Griffon Empire, to put it fairly simply it was confusing. Not just because of the amount of characters, but because of the complexity, the weirdness of Mistvale and everything leading to the Sword switching to Starlight and then her meeting with the Night Mother, the constant locale changes, etc. The biggest issue though was that it was never clear to me who the villains really were or what they were doing and even when we got an explanation I didn't understand why they had been going about things the way they were. Gazelle was clearly an antagonistic character from the start but his motives and goals are so vague and unknown for most of the arc that you don't know if he's actually the villain. When we learned about Chauncey I thought it might be him but then that doesn't happen either. Which leads me to my next problem with the arc: false starts and anti-climaxes. Chauncey's fight with Garsheeva and then Gazelle's attempted assassination of Stormhoof. It feels like the arc is hitting a big climax and then it just... doesn't.

Character's motives and true characters are also too vague. There's nothing wrong with that on its own but there's way too much of it here. And adding to that the story arc felt overly complex with having twists for the sake of having twists. I remember when Gazelle "killed" Senescy and I thought something unexpected happened. But then nope turns out they were all being manipulated and that was the plan all along.

The thing is, when I compare this to other big epics with tons of characters like A Song of Ice and Fire (not Game of Thrones) or Legend of the Galactic Heroes. There's often a ton of complexity in those stories and things can be difficult to follow sometimes, but there's always plenty of clear cut things too and you know what the villains at least want most of the time even if their methods/motives might not always be clear. In The Olden World there's far too little explained, ever. Or it's not explained well enough.

I don't mind not knowing the Yak's reasons for doing what they did in the end, or Arambai's past, or certain other things in the lore of the story left unexplained. But I do feel there were some major hiccups in the story.

And then we got to Kinmari and the last arc, I enjoyed it, I like when a story takes some time to just relax, even considering what it led up to, but there were some issues I had with it too. For one thing why was so much time spent "developing" those griffons and their problems with the monsters and basically everything else that happened before the cast actually got to Kinmari? It felt like a time waster and it didn't really have much to do at all with Valey coming back. And then most of Kinmari too, I wont fault you for world-building since that's one of my favorite things about this story, but most of what happened at Kinmari wasn't interesting and was fairly irrelevant. I can safely say I would've rather had more time spent on the core cast than on the Houses that barely got any development anyways.

I like Starlight's visit to home, no complaints there. And pretty much the entirety of the ending, I enjoyed it even with the other things I've said here that made me kind of disappointed. What happened with Jamjars was pretty great.

Besides that there are just little personal pet peeves I have when it comes to pony fiction that aren't any objective criticisms or anything, like too much advanced technology, Aegis, the world being a big science experiment, ancient super advanced civilizations, etc. etc.

Overall I love this story. But I have no reservations with claiming that Ironridge and the first third of it was the best part and the part I enjoyed the most even with the flaws I mentioned about it back in an earlier comment. Thank you for the experience, this is still by far the longest mlp fanfiction I've read and I don't regret reading it one bit.

[Quinch]

So, I have a question for everyone, albeit a slightly misleading one;

Would this be a story worth reading?

What I mean is... I've looked at it, and I like it quite a bit. However, the part that I looked at was basically the first couple of chapters and what mostly drew me in was the scenery porn; I'm a sucker for narrative and I'll often forgive a bad plot for good writing. But, well, with a four-digit chapter count and words three orders of magnitude more, I'm not sure what I'd be getting into, because I feel tempted to try and make an audiobook version of the story and yes I'm aware of what I just wrote.

So what is it about, really? From glancing at the comments, there seems to be adventure, and exploration and... maybe sci-fi? Opinions seem to be divided somewhat about the quality of the story, especially around various parts {yet there doesn't seem to be consensus, which is a good sign}. Is it, overall, something good?

Would it be, in your opinions, a story worth reading?

[Mini-Joe]

10468702
Yeah definitely read this. If you like adventure, this one really feels like it. A lot of OC, and some really good world building.

[Czar_Yoshi]

10468702
With all things said and done, I'm still proud of this story.

The best single description I can give it is that this story is about the friends of an abnormally powerful, determined and lonely kid wandering across continents in search of a way to be normal. Starlight is the main character on paper, but it's more about the things that happen around her and in her wake: scientific discoveries, financial conspiracies, government attention, societal upheaval, legendary monsters, harmony and the powers that be. The first third of the story is more about the formation of Starlight's friend group, while the rest focuses on their collective nomadic quest, a bunch of ponies with a shared wanderlust and deep sense that the grass is greener on the other side.

As far as quality goes, it's a mixed bag. Technically and grammatically, TOW is very clean, and I doubt anyone would be disappointed by its sentence flow or paragraph structure or stuff like that. I also wrote this story as a true daily - write a chapter and publish it each day, rain or shine, no matter what was going on irl or how much time I had or how much I was feeling in a writing mood. While I was writing it, that had a big benefit of keeping momentum to prevent it from petering out, and gave a bite-size chapter a day for all readers... but it also involved sacrifices, like needing to roll with things even if I later decided I wanted to do something different. I never retconned things or left deliberate plot holes (for a story of its size, TOW is insanely cohesive), but there are a lot of chapters where I started setting up for something and then changed my mind about following through. What this eventually reads like is a very slow-paced form of worldbuilding, where everything has some thought put into it but it takes a while to get to the point and you can never quite tell what's going to be relevant later. With the exception of a few high-stakes moments, it's definitely not a thriller.

Reader feedback-wise, it's somewhat hard to judge as most people who don't care for the story stop reading within the first 100 chapters or so, but judging from the upvote/downvote over time statistics, I didn't botch the ending or the major climaxes, and I'd even hazard a guess that most of my downvotes were from people who didn't like seeing it update every day as the up:down ratio has gone up a decent bit since it finished.

Looking back, the parts I liked most were definitely the world and the characters. I'm very proud of both, and on account of them the story was able to write itself and make good slice-of-life on the days when I wasn't feeling up to doing anything impactful. Overall, I'd say it's worth giving this a try if you're looking for (or feel like you'd enjoy) a slower-paced slice-of-life adventure with a lot of worldbuilding, magitech, scenery, and a mostly-OC cast. It's not as much worth your time if you're looking for a heavily-edited, tightly-paced action story where every scene is there for a reason and nothing deserves the benefit of the doubt.

[Quinch]

10479961
Thanks for the summary, and consider my interest still piqued. So, with that in mind... would you object if I tried to read it as an audiobook?

[Czar_Yoshi]

10480245
I wouldn't object - just make sure to give credit/link to the original story, of course. Good luck, it's going to be a big task.

[Quinch]

10483101
Welp. Here we go.

[Panem et Circenses]

10500369
Vae-lee with the vae sounding like say

[Quinch]

Quick mention about the audiobook project below - if anyone's interested in being a prooflistener, shoot me a PM.

[lordalexander74]

It was an excellent read. Loved the whole thing, kind of a melancholy ending. I'd like to know what happened to Starlights friends... sequel eventually?

[ApTyp]

8253167
oops
Congrats with great work!

[Humanity]

How the hell do you put out 2 million words in 3 years?

[Numinos]

Daymn, what a journey. Thank you.

Also, that stupid sound crystal is there, and we still don't eve know what's in there! That's cruel : )

[PropsValroa]

10896858

It is a really good story, I am 352 chapters in and I highl recommend this story

[Quinch]

10896858
Heh. I figure I'd mention - if you're ever in the mood to rest your eyes, I'm in the process of doing an audiobook version. I'm only about 270 chapters in, tho, so the binging might be a bit limited.

[TheCommunistDog]

10933329
100% Aliens

[StormLuna]

10981430

What I have done with a bulk of my stories is just wait until I finish them entirely to publish them so that I won't feel any kind of need to change course on them due to people's comments. I will say this though, Maple is being a great mom for Starlight.

[StormLuna]

10986283

Thanks for letting me know. With the way it was written and how she was depicted during her first moments in Riverfall (size in particular), I thought she was likely six or seven.

[Sora Flare]

Okay... I've finally read this entire fanfic... And It's a really good one. I liked the setting, the characters, almost everything about it... Almost. Would be nice to know what happened to Starlight's friends after all the years she's spent building Our Town.

If I had to pick my top 3 characters, they'd be Maple, Valey, and Felicity.

[Czar_Yoshi]

10993754
Glad you enjoyed the ride!

As for what happened to Starlight's friends... that's what the sequel is for.

[Quinch]

11098104
Ditto! Although later on, he seems more southernish!

[Czar_Yoshi]

11106897
It's hard to remember your accents for characters when they go a hundred chapters without appearing