The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

A Lonely Interlude

"I did it!" Starlight chirped, eyes baggy and voice raw. "All of Goldoa and the second tournament round in one sitting. Ta-daaa..."

"And you look horrible," Twilight frankly announced. "Is this the longest you've talked in a single sitting so far?" She glanced out the library sitting room's window, where faint traces of dawn were already appearing on the Ponyville horizon.

"Maybe?" Starlight tried to raise her ears, and they drooped all on their own as another strand of her mane sprang into unkempt disarray. "I hope you don't have questions, because I-I think I need to..." She interrupted herself with a yawn, then pitched forward on her couch, out like a light.

Twilight chuckled, crawling out from beneath Rainbow's own snoring form, then brushing herself off and wrapping both of her friends in telekinesis to carry them somewhere comfortable. Tomorrow was going to be a day off, for sure.

---

Starlight cracked her eyes open three times throughout the day, each time deciding she didn't want to get up and start talking again bad enough to go through the trouble of actually doing it and falling back asleep instead. The final time, when her stomach forbade her from ignoring it any longer and rolling over didn't help, it was well past dark out, no traces of sunset on the horizon, and she kept her eyes closed as she brushed her mane, still wishing she could get back to sleep.

She followed her nose through the castle's circular hallways, the scent of syrup and waffles leading her onward. Breakfast at however late she had slept? She was down for that. Before she could reach the second-floor dining room, the sounds of Rainbow and Twilight arguing met her ears.

"Yeah, and I still think you're pulling my leg. Starlight wouldn't kill off Puddles! That's just uncool."

"I'm telling you what I heard, Rainbow! And it's not a story Starlight is making up or can change at will! These are events that actually happened to her!"

Starlight stuck her head around the corner. "Girls?"

"Starlight!" Rainbow and Twilight sighed in identical relief, both pointing a hoof at each other. "I was trying to recap what you covered after Rainbow nodded off-"

"Twilight says you killed Puddles," Rainbow interrupted with a worried gaze. "Also, you sound like a frog."

"No, that's not what I said." Twilight sagely shook her head before nodding. "And yes, you do sound like a frog. No offense, Starlight, but by princess fiat we're waiting until tomorrow to continue."

"Starliiight..."

"Okay, hold up! Hold up." Starlight waved a forehoof blearily, more interested in the waffles on the table than either of her friends. "What's going on? Sorry, I'm half asleep. What time is it?"

Twilight cleared her throat and glanced at Rainbow, who sat back, meekly giving her permission to speak. "It's two in the morning. You've been asleep for..." She did a bit of mental math. "Eighteen hours? Or maybe closer to twenty. Rainbow and I have been up for a while now."

"Almost the whole day." Rainbow yawned. "Breakfast for dinner, and all that. Spike thought it might finally lure you out. But c'mon, Starlight, just tell me what happened to Puddles!" Her ears pressed back. "Twilight says you said she died!"

Starlight took a step back. "Well, she... got put back to normal. Maple checked with her stored harmony, and there wasn't any reaction. The windigo is gone."

Rainbow's lip wobbled, then she sighed. "Rats. Sorry for doubting you, Twi."

"All forgiven, Rainbow Dash." Twilight smiled and patted her on the back. "You know I take stories like these very seriously. Anyway, Starlight! Spike made waffles!"

A draconic thumbs-up poked out from around a corner. "Glad to help!"

"Thanks, Spike." Starlight planted her face against a plate, serving herself with telekinesis and nearly overturning the syrup atop her mess, humming as she ate. "Very good!"

"Awesome." Spike wandered properly into the room wearing two oven mitts the size of his head. "So did I hear something about a break from storytelling for a day?"

Twilight glanced at Starlight in concern as she ate, then nodded. "I think we all could use a full sun cycle or two to refresh ourselves after that. Nothing more until the day after today. Today being once the sun comes up."

Spike strolled off, an arm held out to the side in a friendly salute. "Sweet. No offense, but your sleep schedules are crazy, and the two of you aren't the quietest audience. Crashing with friends is cool and all, but I'm starting to miss my own bed. Speaking of which..."

"Good night, Spike!" Starlight broke her feast to call.

"...So wait, that's like... two million hours from now, as opposed to one million hours from now?" Rainbow Dash frowned. "Or am I mathing wrong?"

"Two million." Twilight nodded, pretending to take Rainbow's egregious abuse of numbers in stride. "And to be honest, I'm going to need it, because after all that, I have questions." Her gaze intensified.

Starlight gulped down a glass of water. "I can answer if the answers are short. Might try not to overdo it after yesterday..."

"Yeah..." Rainbow licked her lips.

"First of all..." Twilight leaned forward. "The Nightmare Modules are data? Like instructions that you could write down? And your body, and batponies', are capable of processing these to produce magical effects beyond your normal capabilities?"

Starlight nodded. "All correct."

Rainbow frowned. "Twilight, aren't you missing the forest for the trees there? Who cares how it works? It's Nightmare Moon's magic, right!? Does it at all bother you that Starlight can just... use that?"

"Nightmare Moon didn't make Starlight, Rainbow." Twilight shook her head. "And she didn't make batponies, either. There are well-documented records in the Royal Canterlot Archive that batponies existed for years prior to Luna's fall. Why do you think Celestia would have let them keep living in Equestria if they were nothing more than weapons created to help with Nightmare Moon's conquest?"

Rainbow looked sideways at her for a moment. "...So?"

"So however they work isn't intrinsically evil," Twilight continued. "There are ways to design things that are clearly immoral down to the very concept, and the Nightmare Modules themselves or obsidian may have something to do with that, but you can't blame the platform they run on. That's just science. If anything, I'm fascinated that Starlight found a way to interface with her body's magical functionality like that. It's always been well-documented that equine life exists with both a biological and magical component, and while pony biology is relatively well-understood, arcane science has barely scraped the surface of how the magic of life works. I can barely contain myself when we're talking about this!" She finished with an eager grin, tapping her hooves slightly.

"...What?" Rainbow blinked.

Twilight sighed. "I wish I could have been there to tell you this in your past, Starlight. It sounds like wondering about it caused you and your friends a lot of heartache. You know more about this now, though, right?"

Starlight swallowed and wiped her chin off with a telekinetic napkin, taking a big drink. "I know a lot more than I did then," she answered after a breath. "The biggest thing I learned was that there was nothing special about the questions we were asking. That's what philosophers do as their entire job. We just... sometimes had the magical means to get answers to our questions." She nodded to Rainbow. "And it's okay to be bothered by me using Nightmare Modules. I know I was."

Rainbow Dash slowly tapped the table. "Okaaay... So run that by me once again. The Nightmare Modules are like instructions, so even if Nightmare Moon left instructions to do evil stuff, that doesn't mean the thing reading the instructions is bad. Right?"

Twilight beamed. "Precisely!" She tapped her forehooves happily. "Which is why Starlight was able to still use the one from the boat when she was in Gyre, even though she destroyed it. Right?"

"Right." Starlight nodded. "I got rid of the physical copy, but that was just a crystal designed to store information. My body remembered what was in it. It still does, if I wanted to use those again..." She momentarily looked pained. "My current relationship with Nightmare Modules is kind of complex."

"I can imagine." Twilight nodded sympathetically. "Still. All this is making me wish there were more batponies in Ponyville I could talk with, though the ethics of studying them would probably be too complex. But, being an earth pony town..."

"Yeah." Rainbow took a bite of her own waffles, chewing loudly. "They really like just living together, or something. Some towns have weather divisions that are entirely batponies."

Twilight glanced over to her and nodded. "It's extremely rare to see sustained small populations of them, yes. There are a large number of them in Canterlot, too. Batponies have to live together in large numbers to have a sustainable society because they always breed true. It's one of the interesting things about the race. With most ponies, say you have a pegasus and a unicorn, their foals could be pegasi or unicorns or maybe even an earth pony if the parents have earth pony genes in their bloodlines. But a batpony will always give or have foals of the same type as their partner. The historical impact of it is actually fascinating, because it means batponies living in larger mixed societies have to take extra care to stick together, or else their population will die out. In fact, you haven't mentioned this in the story, Starlight, but I'd bet it's the real reason Garsheeva and the Night Mother both forbid batponies and other creatures from having relationships. They're probably trying to preserve the Empire's batpony population."

Starlight's eyes widened slightly. "You knew that? I mean..." She gave an interested smile. "That'll be something fun to keep in mind, then. Don't forget you said that, and don't forget my friends and I don't know that at our point in the story."

"Wait, really?" Rainbow gave Twilight a critical look. "So, hold on, like... does that apply to alicorns too?"

Twilight blinked, slowly taking a breath and looking down at herself. "I never considered that before..."

"And what about sphinxes?" Rainbow continued, shrugging. "Since they're basically the alicorns of the Griffon Empire, or something. What happens if one of you gets it on with a batpony?"

"I'd have to ask Celestia." Twilight stared, thinking. "Or Luna. If she made batponies, she'd almost definitely know. But I know I asked Cadance when she told me she was pregnant, and alicorn reproduction definitely isn't something that's been extensively-"

"Girls?" Starlight raised an eyebrow, silencing them both. "You could also ask me. Or settle for not knowing, because if neither of you know what happens when someone tries a potentially very exploitable method of ensuring your bloodline remains the proper race to stay in power, it might make the story a lot more interesting."

Twilight instantly shushed Rainbow with a hoof to the muzzle, even though she was the one who had been talking.

Starlight chuckled, and Rainbow broke away to rub her neck. "Yeah... heh heh..." The pegasus kicked in her chair behind her. "You know, it's two in the morning, sounds like a good excuse for me to go to bed before I ask anything more. Don't want Twilight getting on my case for spoilers."

Twilight looked ready to throw a waffle at her. "Spoilers are serious! You have to preserve the story's artistic integrity!"

Rainbow ran away laughing, her prismatic tail waving behind her, and Starlight settled back into her seat with a sigh. "You girls are fun to watch, you know?" she said, temporarily ignoring her food. "Whatever you've gone through with multiple times saving the world, it doesn't stop you from enjoying your lives and teasing each other and... Have I ever mentioned how glad I am to be here?"

"Maybe once or twice." Twilight smiled gently, scooting her chair around so she was sitting by Starlight's side. "Still hungry?"

"Definitely." Starlight bit off another half of a waffle, chewing with abandon.

Twilight waited a few minutes until the sounds of Rainbow leaving had thoroughly died away, then spoke again in a lower voice. "There's actually some questions I had for you that might be a little more sensitive," she murmured. "I know I was telling Rainbow earlier that your word is law on what actually happened, but..."

Starlight tilted her head. "Oh? Ask."

Twilight gulped. "I'm wondering about how true some of this is. Not whether it actually happened, but who it happened to. Specifically, whether Starlight the filly in the story actually existed at all. I think..."

Starlight blinked, looking quizzically at her.

Twilight sighed. "Either you're the world's best actor right there, or I'm wrong, but... I think you're Jamjars."

"Huh?" Starlight's ears fell.

"Maybe not all the time, but let me explain." Twilight paused, gathering herself. "It's just... There's so much difference between the filly you tell yourself as being and who you were when I first met you in your village to the northeast. I don't know, maybe you could be one truly horrible, life-altering event away from giving up and going it on your own, but... you found your family. You knew what it was. You were loved and cared about and felt that, and wouldn't have been left with a twisted idea of justice and equality. Even if something hurt you or took all that away, you'd have felt it before. And I could try to reconcile it, but there's another actor on the stage who just... fits so much more."

Starlight stayed impassive, listening.

"Jamjars," Twilight went on. "She tries so hard and does so much, and clearly has her heart in the right place most of the time. But she's kind of weird and awkward, which I empathize with, and seems to drive ponies away. Having early crushes she doesn't know what to do with, being too forceful with others, being bad at explaining what she's doing and never able to trust or let her guard down... It's lonesome. You don't talk a lot about her, either. Even less-important characters like Slipstream appear more than she does, even though she does just as much as some of the protagonists."

She swallowed. "I'm just thinking about a filly who was on her own because she was just a little different, while surrounded by magical prodigies and amazing fighters who had such tight bonds of friendship, and... it could be so, so easy for a filly like that to give up on them and leave. It wouldn't take anything at all to push her over the edge, just a realization that she could. And she would go and start a village where being different doesn't mean you have to get left out, and... you know?"

Starlight shook slightly.

"It's only been on the edge of my mind for a while," Twilight admitted. "The thing that made me curious enough to ask... I remember something you said to me, when we were fighting in the mountains outside your village. I copied a spell you used almost instantly, and you said it took years of studying magic to learn that spell. Well, there was a conversation you were having with Jamjars around the time Amber came back, and she said exactly the same thing to you."

Starlight was still for a while... and then gave a long, heavy sigh. "I was the natural prodigy to Jamjars' hard work and effort. You're right, looking back on it. I... Sorry, Twilight. I wasn't Jamjars, no, but... some of the things you said comparing us are touching on some old wounds I was expecting to have a lot more time bracing myself for talking about."

"Sorry." Twilight offered her a hoof. "I didn't really expect you'd do something like that while trying to tell a story this long. Just, literary analysis habits and all that..."

"It's fine." Starlight took the hoof, staring at the table with her appetite suddenly gone. "I just... You're right that Jamjars is a more important character than I'm making her out to be. And the reason she looks like me is because... she had a big influence on me later on. It's actually me that looks like her, more accurately. But could we wait to talk about that? Please?" She folded her ears. "It's not relevant to this part of the story."

"Of course," Twilight whispered, bowing her head. "I'm actually amazed you've come this far and told me this much already. For all its moments of triumph, there's a lot of things here that must be very raw to talk about too."

Starlight imperceptibly shrugged. "Sometimes. But it's also good to tell it all to someone, I think. And I trust you to understand. It's your job, after all. Princess of Friendship..."

"Mmm." Twilight didn't look up. "Can I ask another question, then?"

"Go ahead."

"The Nightmare Modules." Twilight nodded. "I know I told Rainbow earlier that even if you can operate something like a machine to do negative or disharmonic things, that only reflects on the operator, not the machine itself. But the way you described being gray from the obsidian made it sound almost pleasant or more normal, and that does concern me, because I met and fought Nightmare Moon and I have a good idea what she was like. Did you ever find out how that worked? What was happening with the way you felt?"

Starlight perked up a little. "I did, actually, and it makes a lot more sense than whatever you're expecting. Shall I explain it now?"

"Go ahead." Twilight turned her chair a little to face her.

Starlight took a breath. "So you know about having friends. Princess of Friendship, like I said. You're probably very familiar with being cared for. Now think and tell me the gladdest you have ever been to think, I have friends."

Twilight shook her head. "I don't even have to think. We're already even talking about it. It's when I was fighting Nightmare Moon and first activated my Element, when I heard my friends coming to back me up and realized what that meant, that I wasn't alone." She smiled in remembrance. "I'm never going to forget that spark."

Starlight nodded in approval. "So when you discovered you had friends who truly cared about you. The first time you really got it."

"Right." Twilight folded her ears in embarrassment. "You can probably imagine before..."

"Back when you were in Canterlot. I looked into your past." Starlight turned away with a little embarrassment of her own. "When I was... you know... Never mind! Anyway, you were lonely, whether you thought you were or not. And then all at once, you realized you had something you were desperately missing, and it was the most wonderful thing imaginable. Does that sound about right?"

"Mhmm." Twilight nodded, twirling a fork on the table as she waited to see where this went.

"Now imagine instead of being a lonely, awkward student discovering you had friends for the first time..." Starlight took a breath. "Imagine you were an immortal alicorn goddess who helped shape an entire continent, and however many hundreds of thousands of ponies there might have been always preferred someone else's dominion and ignored your contributions. Imagine that."

Twilight shivered. "How Luna felt, prior to becoming Nightmare Moon? Believe me, I have."

"That's moon glass." Starlight nodded. "Princess Luna's loneliness. We were talking about objects so thoroughly steeped in emotion, they manage to possess it themselves despite not having souls or being alive? Moon glass is much the same. Emotion so concentrated, it takes on a physical form. This isn't about the cutie marks inside, it's the substance itself: it's Luna's emotions."

Twilight listened reverently, jaw slightly open.

"So when I use it?" Starlight continued. "I become loneliness. When I'm like that, every time anyone shows me affection, it feels like I'm discovering what it is to be cared about for the first time. Imagine the way you felt for your friends on that solstice, only any act of valuing or appreciating you at all made you feel that way. That's how it works. It's as simple as that."

"...Wow." Twilight folded her ears in thought. "So the reason it collects cutie marks and draws them in is that... it just wants someone that badly? Not because it's malicious but because it's alone?"

Starlight hesitated. "...Maybe. Maybe don't draw that conclusion yet. Actually, forget about moon glass because it really is a lot more complex; let me just talk about how I was for a moment. That brightness I saw when I looked at ponies? That was their capacity to care about things, which I could see and desire because I wanted to be cared about. Being gray like that wasn't inherently bad or evil, just... sad."

Twilight bowed her head. "It could be bad, though. Luna might have started lonely, but..."

Starlight nodded. "Absolutely. I had friends who cared. If you were scorned like that instead? All that loneliness becomes jealousy. And with the access to the powers it gave you..." She sighed. "I was already used to being alone, of course. I wouldn't have ran away to a mountain range nobody was supposed to survive if I had felt happy and content. So part of the reason the moon glass felt so normal on me was also just that. I was used to it already, just to a lesser extreme."

"I think," Twilight slowly said, "I'm really starting to see why you couldn't stop thinking about this."

"If you want to see how it works, I can show you sometime." Starlight started to get up. "Maybe the next time we take a break. There's a Tree of Harmony connected to this castle, so it would be easy for me to set myself back to normal. If you haven't been inside the tree in the Everfree where you left the Elements, yet, that might be an interesting walk to go see as well. Anyway..."

"Inside it?" Twilight frowned and tilted her head. "You mean further than the place we left the Elements? And you've been down there?"

"Inside it." Starlight pushed in her chair. "After I lost my village, I went down there a few times for solace while I scouted you and planned what I was going to do. All the trees are connected to crystal palaces like the one in Ironridge, if you go far enough below the ground. This castle here is sort of an extension of it. But there's another harmonic flame beneath Ponyville, just like the one in Ironridge. If you haven't seen that, we really should do it sometime when I'm not telling the story."

"Speaking of telling the story..." Twilight yawned. "I have a lot I need to process and sleep on. Again. I hope you're okay with me going to bed and leaving you when you just got up? I could stay up a few more hours..."

Starlight looked at her mostly-finished plate. "You know what? I could do with some time to sift through my own thoughts on all this. A lot of memories stirred up in this process..." She hesitated. "On the other hoof, talking is nice. Why don't you take a turn telling me a story for a while? Anything interesting, about what you've done. How about it?"

"Sounds good..." Twilight finished her yawn, shaking herself slightly and hovering the used dishes into a food elevator to the kitchen. "Let me see. How about the time when there was an autumn storm, and Rarity and Applejack..."

---

"So?" Rainbow Dash loudly flopped on one of Twilight's reading couches, plummeting out of a hover and bouncing contentedly to land on her back. "I'm back! Story time?"

"Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed." Starlight took a sip from a teacup, still treating her throat with care. "Twilight?"

Twilight smiled and shrugged. "Spike's off doing whatever, chores are taken care of and I just had a correspondence with Celestia making sure nothing major is brewing that could distract us in the name of official princess duties. So, tournament two aftermath?"

Starlight put the teacup down and nodded. "I'll skip a bit ahead, if you don't mind, just to speed things up. After the tournament, we made the decision as a group to go back to Izvaldi. We had our own airship back in the air and had discussed things with Wallace and his team, and the plan was made that we'd take Chauncey up on his hospitality before trying to find out what Puddles wanted us to see in the hospital basement. We wanted to do it diplomatically if possible, and properly use our big advantage that Chauncey didn't know we both wanted to snoop around down there. Senescey came with us too; we found out she had passed the second round as well, since she was also a fighter in it. She wanted to help us and find things out for herself, since Puddles said Stanza was connected to Izvaldi and the Night Mother had used her to send me to see that. The tournament's third round wasn't scheduled to start immediately, so we still had a good amount of time..."

Comments

[Mini-Joe]

oh sweet, i love these chapters. so starlight was using the shadow cloak ability to scout them out? thats super cool.

[ZanyZapper]

Ah, I do enjoy these interludes. Glad to hear we're going to get more from Jamjars. Twilight thinking Starlight was actually Jammy was a neat twist. While that hadn't crossed my mind exactly, I have been wondering what is going to twist Glimmy into our lovable little dictator.

[MagicS]

A personal pet peeve of mine when it comes to MLP fics has always been advanced technology and especially computers. So I didn't really care for the way Nightmare Modules talk like some sort of computer program. But that's just a pet peeve of mine and the story is good and entertaining enough where I'm not letting it really bother me. Seems like things are going to really be coming to a head soon in the Griffon Empire, like right around that midway Interlude in Ironridge after Valey and Fire got caught.

[Quinch]

*Especially* since most batponies are born female...

[Quinch]

"And you look horrible," Twilight frankly announced. "Is this the longest you've talked in a single sitting so far?"

In a word? Yes. Book three was a little over nineteen hours - this session was twenty-five and a half.

[Venlinelle]

I’m glad you are (or were) clearly aware of the ominous disparity between the optimism of the story- the quote I mentioned in my previous comments, for example- and what actually happens in the end. It’s comforting that Twilight is as worried as I am.