The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

The Machine Named God

"Your Majesty." Every last Equestrian guard who had traveled to Kinmari from the border bowed, assembled in formation.

"Rise." Princess Celestia looked over them from the end of their double-row formation, investigation on her face. Her eyes slowly scanned them with a neutral look, and then she nodded. "I have been somewhat informed of the situation. It is a grave breach of protocol to aid foreigners without Writs of Harmonic Sanction in remaining south of the border. However, I understand that you followed your hearts and your options were few. I would speak with all of you individually later, but that can fill the time on our return to Canterlot. For now, take heart and be at ease."

Her gaze shifted to Shinespark and the others, assembled nearby, and she left the guards, stepping closer. "It is for you, however, that I came this far."

Shinespark bowed, the sound stone at her side, and her friends followed suit. "Princess, on behalf of the fallen city of Ironridge and the fallen nation of the Griffon Empire, my friends and I humbly request asylum south of your border."

Celestia scanned them as well. "That is not a request I can grant lightly," she finally said. "The border has been sealed for nearly a millennium, and for many reasons. At the same time, due to your circumstances, it would be most foolish of me to turn you loose beyond my sight in the northern world, and you have all clearly suffered much on your travels. Let us find somewhere more private. This will require great discussion. President Kinmari?"

The president, standing by as well with a cabal of fanfare ponies, nodded. "Please, follow me."

---

Their trek ended in an executive meeting room high up in the administration building, with panoramic windows looking out over the western sea. Shinespark noted the walls around the entry doors were a little thicker than they needed to be... Soundproofing, most likely. Apparently Sosan executives weren't the only ones who did that to their offices.

"Hmm. This will do." Princess Celestia appraised the room with a quick pulse of her horn that blanketed everything in soft yellow, then nodded, taking a chair near the end of the table, but not the biggest one at the end itself. "Would any of you like to begin?"

Shinespark glanced uncertainly at her position. "Are you sure you want to sit there...?"

Celestia glanced down. "If you are referring to my size, this chair will manage. But you are the leader of a foreign nation, are you not? I have no intention of this being a trial, my little ponies. You entered my lands with a powerful enough relic to earn my attention, and I would have this meeting conducted as equals."

Everyone blinked at each other. "Relic?" Amber asked. "You mean that thing you took away?"

Princess Celestia nodded. "Indeed."

"Hey, so..." Valey's voice crackled out of the sound stone. "What was that thing, and why was it so bad?"

Celestia glanced at the stone with interest. "That is an interesting communication device. I don't believe I've seen technology like it before. Have we met?"

"She's with us," Shinespark immediately said. "On the ship."

Celestia looked slightly concerned. "I hope you are able to talk with the expectation of privacy. The legends of the Aegis are ones I do not wish to put any closer to curious, scientific hooves than necessary."

"Holed up behind a noisy engine and smothered in a blanket. Pretty sure no one can even get here without shadow sneaking."

The princess's lips twitched. "A sarosian. Interesting. Regardless, you were asking?"

"What it was that you took away," Shinespark said for her. "And why it necessitated leaving us in such a dangerous situation. The brood beasts showed up shortly after you left, smashed my ship and nearly killed us all."

Celestia visibly winced. "An act for which I am indebted to all of you. However, there are times when I must put the safety of my populace as a whole over that of individual ponies. It is a hard truth of being a ruler, one I suspect you may be familiar with yourselves. Fortunately, with your lives still intact, it may not be too late to make amends. As for the creation I took into custody, I believe it to be a weapon from times that were mythical when I was young, and now extinct in the memory of the world."

Amber nodded. "Yeah, we've seen it fight."

"You have?" Celestia's eyes widened in equal parts suspicion and alarm.

Amber looked around at everyone. "I'm not sure how conscious the rest of you were, but it defended us against the monster that attacked the Empire and chased us over the border. It used up months' worth of fuel for our airship in one or two attacks. If it had fought for more than a few seconds, it would have probably outclassed that thing even harder than she outclassed us. And she was strong enough to take out Garsheeva."

Celestia looked at her curiously. "Ah. Your airship's fuel... I recall we had a discussion about this." Her face fell. "I was already certain this was the real Aegis, but that knowledge does nothing to dissuade my suspicions. If you have built an engine capable of flight using this as a power source, I would imagine you are already familiar with how it works."

Shinespark uncertainly nodded. "The engine was mostly my father's design, though I contributed a lot in research and construction."

Princess Celestia hummed. "What you are doing is using souls as a power source. The world we live in is a one where thoughts and emotions themselves carry a magical power to physically sculpt reality. A pegasus wills their body to fly, and it does so, despite the mechanics of their wings being unsuited to producing sufficient lift themselves. For all of us, our bodies are bridges between our minds and the world... tools that have the capacity to use our wills and change things around us. It is possible to create machines, as well, that act in the same capacity as our bodies to allow our souls to change the world, though sometimes in ways our bodies are not built for. It is not usual for a unicorn to fly, for example, yet here your airship is." She looked around the room. "I trust you may well be aware of much of this, but want to ensure we are on the same page."

Everyone nodded at varying speeds.

"Which leads me to wonder," Celestia continued, "what it is that powered your ship. Mortals are finite, as is the strength of their souls. And while such strength can be increased through life experiences, personal growth and strength of conviction, none of you could possibly lift such a vessel on your own."

"Crystal palaces, like the one Garsheeva lived in," Shinespark said. "They have crystal trees at the bottom, with harmonic flames. We use processed windigo hearts from Yakyakistan to bottle the flame, and then use that to power our ship."

Celestia nodded. "So then, my little pony, you are using the soul of the world to power your ship."

Everyone stared. "That sounds... dire," Felicity commented.

"It's worth noting that we figured this out largely by accident," Gerardo added. "I doubt I speak for myself alone when I say we found out that it worked at a time we needed it far too much to question it."

Celestia hummed. "You worry about the consequences of engaging the world thusly using windigo hearts. That alone speaks greatly to your favor. Many who could discover such a vast power source would think first and foremost of its applications."

"We've had..." Shinespark winced. "Run-ins with ponies who think that way."

"Are these fears founded, then?" Felicity asked. "I don't suppose this does have dire consequences..."

"For the world? No." Princess Celestia shook her head. "If you truly wish to dive into things, imagine a soul as a circular flow, with its turning as the power that lets you change the world. When that flow is intact and healthy, so too are your mind and emotions. Allow it to stagnate, and you will stagnate too. Trauma and certain negative emotions that are difficult to overcome can act as obstacles to the flow, just as a pony can cling to denial or grief and prevent themselves from moving forward. Windigo hearts are formed from concentrated wrath, the rage born of unmet, unjust desires. Using one to bottle some of the world's flow is both metaphorically and metaphysically equivalent to holding a grudge that won't let go. But at the size the world is, you could leave a single heart filled forever, and it would be like the grudge you hold against a foalhood friend who borrowed your favorite toy decades ago without asking, yet you are still close to today. Something so trivial, neither of you would think it is worth the time resolving."

Shinespark stared at her in interest. "So the lifestream is the world's flow. And the reason my ship runs out of power instead of being infinite like it was designed to is because the power comes from releasing the captive flow and allowing it to resume moving."

"Yes. And the lifestream is a portion of the world's flow." Celestia nodded. "You sound as though you have been talking to my scientists. They are confounded by the mystery of how it appears discontinuous, like a river that appears and disappears through invisible sources, and may take decades to discover that this is because it is but a small section of a greater whole. This is because the lifestream represents hope and the will to exist, and life consists of far more than merely this."

"Well..." Felicity looked around. "That answers a few worries that honestly weren't even on my mind. Did we get sidetracked somewhere?"

"I am answering whatever you have to ask," Princess Celestia replied. "But we were originally talking about the Aegis, and the harmonic mechanisms used to power both it and your ship."

Shinespark's eyes glazed over. "Before we return to that. If one happened to have an unusually high harmonic potential... What would it mean?"

"At what magnitude and what age?" Celestia asked. "I assume you refer to yourself."

Shinespark took a breath. "Many dozens of times what a normal pony should have. One in millions."

"Then it would likely mean there are forces at play interfering with your readings that go beyond the strength of your own soul." Celestia regarded her, wings shifting gently. "Garsheeva, for instance, has a line of ponies who follow her such as Meltdown, whom she has given modified cutie marks capable of drawing extra power from the world and using it to augment their functions to strengths far beyond what the bearer's soul could provide. In essence, they partially share a cutie mark with the world, borrowing trace amounts of the strength of its soul in addition to their own. I would not be surprised if it is possible for similar phenomena to occur in other ways as well. After all, the world itself is the source of life and cutie marks alike. It has never been observed, but it could well be within its power to do this on its own."

Shinespark glanced down at her own flanks.

"...If I may," Celestia said. "I am pleased to see you have recovered enough to indulge curiosity."

"It took some doing," Shinespark sighed.

"You can say that again," Felicity complained in agreement.

"Regardless." Celestia shook her head. "To bring this long story to a close, Aegis is a machine that acts in this capacity, using the strength of a soul to power itself. All ponies have limits, as in my analogy of flying unicorns earlier. Ways to utilize harmony, and the scale at which they can use it, for which they are made and in which they are bound. Aegis is designed to have no such limits. Any amount of power that could exist within the bounds of reality, according to inscriptions, it can wield. An omnipotent, mechanical body with neither will nor soul of its own... a metal god. It took part in a great battle that destroyed the last world to exist before this one. But the true reason it is dangerous is not because of its power. It is because it can be given this power with the same ease as your own machines: from your testimony, I suspect you've seen it power itself already with windigo hearts. And as it lacks a will of its own, whoever controls it needs only to find a suitable power source, and they could become omnipotent themselves."

She made eye contact with each and every last creature in the room. "We spoke at length last time we met about your dead friend, and why I could not bring her back. I would not be telling you this if I did not wholeheartedly believe that you have improved and can overcome the temptation to seek out ways to defy the natural order of the world... but this is what Aegis is. As simply as you have hijacked the will of the world for your own ends, though benign as powering an airship, the wrong master could tie together their intentions, Aegis's body, and the strength of the world's soul to become God. Not a goddess that governs continents like myself and Garsheeva, but an unparalleled figure capable of so much that they could rewrite the structure of reality and forge the world into whatever image they desired. This is why I had to seal Aegis away."

"Well, that's a discomforting thought." Felicity shivered. "Much as I have an extensive beef with my own personal circumstances and a whole lot of things in the world, that sounds rather extreme..."

"You said it was fighting a battle when it destroyed the last world," Amber whispered. "If it's really that strong, what was it fighting?"

Celestia sighed. "Another figure that is equally mythical, yet I know much less about. I am afraid I will be unable to indulge your curiosity this time, as all I possess is speculation."

"So, uh, hate to interrupt," Valey cut in, speaking up for the first time in a while. "But that dead-as-a-doornail friend you were just praising everyone for being over? Speaking."

Comments

[Phoenix Kitten]

Valey: All the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the chest.

[Oberth Effect]

Lore dump!

So if I’m understanding this right, wills/souls have the an innate power to cause change, but require a body/machine to channel that power in a way that actually affects the world. In addition, the amount of change is limited both by what the body/machine supports and by the strength of the soul. Aegis is different because it has no limits on what its controlling soul can do and because it allows one soul to provide the direction while using an arbitrary soul(s) as its power source. Is that right?

Kind of worrying what Glimmer could have pulled off with Aegis, then. Seems the main sticking point would have been getting enough power for him. I’m also curious how he ended up in Mistvale for such a long period.

Wait, if Aegis has no will nor soul of its own, why did it seem to have a rudimentary personality when it spoke to Starlight when Starlight was messing with the generator under Grandbell? Or was that Glimmer’s will? “I’m helping” doesn’t seem very Glimmer-ish, though. I think I remember Goimmer talking about Aegis as if he had a will of his own, although with her you never know.

A stronger hint that Shinespark’s cutie mark isn’t totally natural, although “given by the world’s will” could be argued to be as natural as it gets.

I wonder how much Celestia is regretting talking about Aegis now that Valey revealed herself, although they should have the defense that they didn’t explicitly set out to revive Valey, from what I remember. That is going to be interesting to explain at least, if they choose to do that. Celestial probably won’t be happy to learn that Glimmer seems to have control over Aegis, either.

[alamais]

derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/8/9/954264.png
This should be interesting.

Also hmm...this all makes me wonder how Discord fits into the picture, and how he stacks up against things like Aegis and Mythical Ancient Being Who Destroyed The Olden World By Fighting With Aegis¹.

.

1. MABWDTOWBFWA

[ZanyZapper]

10016252
I'm trying to figure out if there's any way that Discord is Aegis. I doubt it, but it would be an interesting twist. Most likely that's too much of a stretch. I can't think of a plausible way that would work with canon. But I'm not very creative either.

[Venlinelle]

Aegis fought in the War of Wrath. Got it.

Valey gets to meet Celestia! I love when my favorite characters interact.