The Twelve
Twilight Sparkle stood in a small room with a domed ceiling, surrounded by a ring-shaped table. The appearance of the room transfixed her for a moment: although everything looked normal, the walls and table and floor and dome were all infused with the sparkly sheen of Quifons—a word she'd forgotten moments ago, but could now remember with full clarity.
I'm here, she instinctively knew. I'm in Quifons.
There were twelve seats with eleven occupants. In front of each seat set a nameplate. Starting with the chair she was facing, and moving in clockwise order, Twilight quietly read each of them to herself.
Ghost
Queen of Hope
This chair was empty.
Star
King of Time
In this chair sat a unicorn colt with a bushy beard. He wore an oversized hat with bells on it which distinctly reminded Twilight of Star Swirl the Bearded.
Celie
Queen of Light
This pink alicorn filly was clearly Princess Celestia, based on Twilight's earlier flashbacks.
Somber
King of Control
A gray crystal colt with red eyes and flowing black mane and tail sat in this chair. He looked irritated to be here, and apart from being crystal rather than a unicorn, bore a close resemblance to King Sombra.
Theia
Queen of Place
In this chair sat a brown earth pony filly with a poofy green mane and tail.
Chaos
King of noYESmaybeisNot!!!11!1one1
Here sat a very young male hippogriff with feathers of every possible hue and tone.
Harmony
Queen of Truth
A bluish-white earth pony filly sat in this chair. Her eyes glowed, slowly cycling through every color of the rainbow.
Nightmare
King of Desire
In this chair sat a black unicorn colt with a purple mane and tail.
Lulu
Queen of Beauty
Here sat Princess Luna. Unlike the others present, her body itself seemed to flow with Quifons. It was breathtaking to behold, even though her mane and tail were otherwise short and bland.
Shadow
King of Void
A pegasus colt with coat, mane, and feathers of shifting chromatic grays occupied this seat.
Amore
Queen of Love
A very young Princess Cadance sat here, as a pegasus.
Twilight did a double-take. Princess Cadance is one of the Twelve?
Scorprek
King of Spirit
Here sat an unusually large, red-hued crystal pony colt.
The assembled herd spoke in Old Ponish, which Twilight was able to translate with middling accuracy.
"We are all here, are we not?" said Lulu.
Amore cleared her throat noisily. "Eleven of the Twelve, which is (translation uncertain)," she said, in Cadance's unmistakable voice.
"Why leave a place for Ghost?" said Nightmare. "It's not like she'll come."
"I sense a presence," said Harmony. "She may be here as we speak."
"I sense it as well," said Chaos. "But it may be something I (translation uncertain)." Chaos's voice sounded vaguely similar to Discord's, Twilight noted.
"What if it isn't her?" said Amore.
Shadow pursed his lips. "Then perhaps we need a larger number than Twelve."
"Impossible," said Lulu. "You cannot just make up new numbers."
"Nothing's impossible," said Nightmare.
"Twelve-two?" suggested Theia.
"Three'n'ten," countered Harmony. "But it doesn't matter. Nopony knows when Ghost will first appear."
Celie sighed. "We should begin before Chaos gets bored."
"You are too late," said Chaos, performing a headstand in his chair.
"The matter at hoof is the error we have made trying to prevent boredom," said Star, drawing everypony's eyes. "Chaos continues to grow in bad ways."
"Sorry about that," said Chaos, grinning in a way that didn't match his apology.
"My food is fun, but necessitates work," said Theia. "Nightmare and Shadow created sleep, which is fun but inhibits work. Things are becoming more complicated things."
"And our Dolt creations are too stupid to be useful," said Shadow. "We need something that isn't stupid like a Dolt."
"We need citizens to do work," said Somber. "We need to force some of them to do the work for the others."
"Who would want to be forced?" said Harmony.
"Who cares what a citizen wants?" said Somber.
"We can't force anyspirit to do anything," said Scorprek. "But maybe we can trick them to force one another."
"Temporarily," said Star. "We can make them not-citizens. Grow some of them up large, into smarter Dolts, and make them work for the others."
"Yes. The grown-ups can take turns being a Dolt," said Scorprek.
Harmony furrowed her brow. "And why would they want to do this?"
"It's different. Maybe something about being a Dolt could be fun," said Scorprek.
Lulu huffed. "Work is not fun, and being a Dolt is not fun."
"Then make something the opposite of fun," said Nightmare.
"Oh, I would love to try that! I shall call it 'Pain'," said Chaos.
"The opposite of fun is boredom," said Shadow.
"No," said Celie. "Boredom is no fun, not the opposite of fun. Work is mostly boredom, with a (translation uncertain) of fun."
"How will the opposite of fun help anyspirit do anything?" asked Theia.
"They become a Dolt, or else they feel this Pain. Work may be no fun, but it will be more fun than that which is its opposite," said Shadow.
Lulu shook her head. "It could be made natural, but anything like Pain is (translation uncertain) with Quifons."
Celie took a deep breath. "Then we need something that is Not Quifons."
"Impossible," said several of the Twelve in unison.
"(Translation uncertain)," said Amore.
"How?" asked Nightmare.
"I will make something that is Not Quifons. It will be a Place apart," said Theia.
"Out of what?" asked Somber.
Theia smiled. "Out of Me."
"I do not like the idea of this Pain. What happens when Pain is out of control? When it (translation uncertain) a spirit?" asked Star.
"A return to the (translation uncertain) of Quifons, (translation uncertain). That's how a Dolt shall become a foal again," said Nightmare.
"This plan is (translation uncertain). It'll never work," said Amore.
"I like it," said Chaos. "It's weird."
"It would solve the problem of increasing complexity, at the cost of increasing complexity," Celie pointed out. "It's a (translation uncertain)."
"But we should try it," said Somber.
"What if we cannot go back?" asked Amore.
"Then we'll figure something out," said Scorprek, dismissively waving a hoof.
"I have nothing further to say. We can only learn by doing. Those in favor?" asked Somber.
"Ghost abstains. If the presence is her, she doesn't have the ability to (translation uncertain) decide," said Harmony.
"Harmony is correct about Ghost. It is related to Time," said Star.
"Warp or woof?" asked Lulu.
"Both," said Star.
"I still don't understand the difference," said Shadow.
Scorprek shrugged. "It is (translation uncertain) for now. Let us vote," he said, standing up. Everypony else stood up as well.
Every King raised his hoof or claws, and every Queen did not: six to five.
"The Decision is made," said Celie, clopping her hooves together once.
Twilight Sparkle woke on her bed, staring up at a draconequus floating above her.
"Ahh!" she shouted, then covered her mouth with her hooves.
"Quiet," hissed Discord, "or you'll wake that scaly rodent of yours."
"His name is Spike, and he's not a... wait, why am I even arguing this," said Twilight, sitting up. Night had already fallen and the candlestick on her table had burned low. "Oh no. Is it midnight already?"
"I'm afraid so. That must have been quite the trip," said Discord. "You had your high-beams on when I arrived. I pondered reading a book by your eyelights, but you woke up almost immediately after the Moon reached its zenith."
"That's crazy. The vision only lasted a few minutes," said Twilight. She tilted the bottle, noting only one serving of the concoction appeared to remain.
"Then you were in Quifons," said Discord. "Time passes differently then."
"You mean there, don't... wait, is Quifons a time rather than a place?"
"A little of column A, a little of column B," said Discord, spinning around under the canopy of Twilight's bed before floating downward into a chair. "Tsk, Tsk, Twilight. Here you promised your friends that your investigation wouldn't harm Quifons, and yet you've already been a tourist!"
Twilight looked left and right with her eyes, thinking. "I have to stop using the potion," she said.
"Brilliant deduction!" teased Discord. "Out of curiosity, may I ask what you witnessed this time?"
"I saw..." Twilight began, then shut her muzzle. "No. I'll tell you, but I want answers first."
Discord rolled his eyes three hundred and sixty degrees around in his head. "Oh, please. I'm trying to help you learn more. Leaving me in the dark isn't exactly a sensible bargaining chip," he said, punctuating it with a sigh. "I have my suspicions, anyway. You're moving backwards through time in Celie's memories, so... the Twelve, perhaps?"
Twilight nodded. "I know who they are now, more or less. How in Equestria is Princess Cadence a member of the Twelve? She's not even twice my age!"
"She's older than she looks," said Discord. "Or she was, at any rate. Amore is much younger today than she was a thousand years ago."
"That makes no sense. No, wait, that's not the right way to think about this... I mean: I don't understand."
"Good girl, and of course you don't. I haven't explained anything yet," he said, wearing a grumpy expression. "Ugh, this is going to take forever, even with you. Let's get the big lesson out of the way, shall we?"
Discord snapped his talons, and in a flash he and Twilight had appeared in the Throne Room.
"Oh good! You've already opened up the first set of wings," he said. "This will be easier than I thought."
"First set? There are more?"
"Check out the bases of the thrones," said Discord, and Twilight lowered her head. "Not now! On your own time. I need you to help me up here. Have you fiddled with the controls at all?"
"The slider on Quifons, but not the one on Tartarus that appears as you move backwards through time," she said. "I only discovered the sliders yesterday afternoon, and didn't have one of my unicorn friends available to assist me. Can you activate them?"
"Naturally," said Discord, grabbing the Quifons slider with a claw tip and teasing it backwards through time by a few years. "Though I'm prohibited from touching both of them simultaneously, just like you. Harmony always had an annoying sense of humor."
"Harmony. Is that what happened to her? She became the Tree, didn't she?"
"At least you're quick. Now where do you want me to hold the warp?"
"The warp... the warp of time?"
"Yes. I have the warp control, and the woof is right there on Tartarus."
Twilight grabbed the woof slider with her magic. "Alright, I've got it. But how can time have two components?"
"Simple. Time is two-dimensional, Twilight." A sly grin crossed Discord's face. "I certainly hope that little fact is blowing your mind. It's so rare I get to share it."
The broken look on Twilight Sparkle's face made Discord's smile linger. "That... that's incredible." She blinked a few times, then looked over to his talons. "Move it back by about a thousand years. Keep going until the Tree of Harmony disappears from the Everfree."
"As you wish, your pushiness," said Discord, moving the slider slightly further.
Twilight's slider lengthened a little. Starting at the rightmost edge, she began to slide it slowly to the left. First, the Tree reappeared. Then the Map began to zoom in—but everywhere at once.
"Equestria is shrinking," she stated the obvious. She stopped the slider at the far side and let go. "This is the history the Pillar Bearers remember, except that... the Tree is still here and supposedly they created it?"
"Limbo can have that kind of effect on a pony's mind," said Discord. "Their memories are all woofed-up, even Star's. Pity, that. He was once the brightest among us."
"Our history books coincide with a static Equestria and a recent Tree. The other side of the woof axis shows a shrunken Equestria and an older Tree. Which one is the correct version of history?"
Discord sighed and released the slider, snapping the Map back to the present. "Two dimensions, Twilight. Use that oversized brain of yours."
"They're... both true?"
"You have no idea how much I want to set off loud alarm bells and whistles right now," said Discord, smiling more broadly than his face. "But our meeting needs to remain a secret. Celie would murder me if she knew I were revealing this to you."
"Come on. She can't harm you. She couldn't even stop you when you broke free from your stone prison," said Twilight.
"You don't understand the full extent of her powers, Twilight," said Discord. "There's a big difference between 'couldn't' and 'wouldn't'. Do you really think your idol is as useless as a wooden frying pan? Always falling apart the moment a challenger to Equestria rises?"
"But s-she... I, I..." Twilight stammered, suddenly gripped with an aching pain in her stomach.
"Oh, for Chaos's sake—she did it for you," said Discord. "You're young, Twilight. You were born twenty-four years ago, by any woof. You aren't going to understand everything in the world in twenty-four years, but Celestia has done everything in her power to strengthen you in that short period of time. There's still a lot you aren't privileged to, and for that you should be thankful."
"I shouldn't be looking into this at all, should I? I don't have any idea what I'm messing with," said Twilight. "I don't understand any of this. Maybe I can't understand it, at least not yet. Multiple correct histories—an entire dimension of them? How does that make any sense at all?"
"Just as warp comes in Past and Future, woof comes in Verity and Reality," said Discord, suddenly dressed in a tweed jacket and holding a bubble pipe. "The right-hoof side of the woof slider is Reality, the more boring of the two. That's the history your silly science and books and memory agree with. The left-hoof side is Verity. You can think of it as the history of history. It represents what history used to look like, which far better explains why the world is the way it is."
"Wait... I think I get it now," said Twilight. "As time moves forward, history itself changes... but why?"
"Because everything changes, Twilight, even change itself. Chaos is the nature of all things, the arrow of Time, the essence of life! History has to change, or the subsequent changes to reality wouldn't make any sense... not that making sense isn't overrated, mind you."
"Changes to reality?" said Twilight, and then she gasped. "Oh no. That's why the stars started moving! They actually started moving!"
"Science itself changed along with the nature of reality. Things became more complex over time, and history adjusted itself accordingly. The alterations to reality are irreversible; such is the nature of Chaos."
"But that would mean that science itself isn't trustworthy. Everything we've ever known could be wrong!" Twilight began to hyperventilate, falling backwards into Pinkie Pie's throne.
"On the contrary," said Discord, with a nervous expression. "Science gets more accurate as time goes on. Increasing complexity means more consistent measurement, ironically enough. But it also means reality is stranger, to compensate."
Twilight took a moment to calm herself, and coughed a few times. "Relativity. Quantum physics. The further we go, the stranger it gets." She closed her eyes and placed a hoof to her temple. "I... I need time to digest all of this, Discord. It's too much for me. It's just too much."
"Believe it or not, I'm sorry," said Discord, and Twilight opened her eyes to see a uncharacteristically sympathetic stare coming from the draconequus. "I knew this would be hard on you, but you are possibly the only pony in Equestria capable of assimilating this knowledge so quickly."
"I appreciate your help, but why? Why are you doing this if you think I'm going to destroy Quifons?" asked Twilight, standing back up on four hooves.
"That would take a while to explain. The short version is that I don't think I can prevent whatever will happen from occurring, and... ugh, I really don't want to say it."
"Say what?"
"Fine! I... trust you," he said, his face turning green and cheeks bulging out as though ready to vomit. Discord shook his head rapidly back to normal. "Whatever happens, I believe the future will be best if you proceed with your eyes open as wide as possible. You have an innocence that the others lack, and you have Equestria's long-term interests at heart—even my interests, moreso than Celie, Lulu, Amore, Star, or the uglier half of Scorprek."
"You don't trust Cadence?"
"I've never understood Amore," said Discord. "But the main problem is she's too close to Celie. Besides, I'm uncertain she even remembers she's one of the Twelve."
"You don't think I should tell her or Lulu—I mean Princess Luna."
Discord shrugged. "It's your call, but I wouldn't dare tell anypony who might share the information with Princess Sunbutt. And under NO circumstance should you reveal you got any of this from me."
"But maybe that's exactly what we should be doing. Get the remaining Twelve together and decide as a team. I know Celestia removed Moondancer's memories, but surely she'd listen to reason if we laid out all the cards."
Discord glowered at Twilight. "Now you listen to me very closely, Twilight. Celie is the only member of the Twelve who hasn't been altered or banished or imprisoned for a lengthy span of time," he said. "She's used to being in control, and she's more powerful than any of her siblings. Celie allowed most of the major attacks on Canterlot to occur in order to train you. Chrysalis isn't one of the Twelve—long story, that one—so she never posed a true threat, and even when Tirek imprisoned her temporarily she had foreknowledge that Harmony would intervene to defeat him. You've never tried to act against Celie's true interests before. Watch yourself."
Twilight sighed and placed a hoof over her face. "Okay, I'll be careful. One more question, though: who is Ghost?"
She removed her hoof, but Discord was already gone.
Twilight Sparkle sat with Princess Cadance at an outdoor cafe in the Crystal Kingdom.
"I keep getting the strangest feeling like I'm being watched," said Twilight.
"Mm-hmm," said Cadance, between sips of tea.
"Wait... this isn't real. I'm dreaming," said Twilight.
"Mm-hmm," said Cadance.
An earthquake shook the cafe, and the sensation jolted Twilight awake.
"Twilight, wake up!" said Spike, jostling her in her bed.
"Wha... Spike? What's going on?" said Twilight, sitting upright and pushing her little assistant away.
"Message from the Crystal Kingdom. I didn't think it could wait," he said.
Then Twilight Sparkle noticed the look on Spike's face. "Oh no. What's wrong?"
"It's Princess Cadance. She's fallen into a coma."
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Ah. Metahistory. A track of the world as it really was rather than the world as it must have been. Good to know it's being recorded somewhere. Meanwhile, the universe continues to complexify to meet the needs of the complexifying universe, as it has since the beginning. And suitably enough, it seems Chaos was the first to break the equine mold. Can't say I'm surprised. At least we now have a roster of the Twelve... though Ghost remains a mystery. Twilight might be her, but that would require some serious time shenanigans at work.
Wonderfully intriguing stuff. I just hope Cadance's coma isn't a sign of Quifons's imminent destruction.
Now here is the question: does time and place like each other or not? I ship spacetime
First-order arithmetic, yay!
Hmm, why is ten special?
Invention of reinforcement learning is proceeding according to plan
It's really weird for them to make such obvious mistakes if they're ones who designed all that stuff. Are they in fact reverse-engineering it from some source that they don't have a good understanding of (their own inner workings for example)?
And now they have negative reinforcement.
How is King different from Queen except for this behaviour?
Naively this should predict woof slider becoming longer at roughly constant rate when moving back in time. But a bit earlier we have:
Is history becoming longer as time passes by at double the rate of time passing?
So, the twelve are children who created adulthood because they were bored? And why did Theia vote against the change if she was offering to become the new place? Are Kings and Queens required to disagree for some reason?
Also, a Dolt = Adult?
Am I a bad for wanting the Moonshipping chapters to go on forever… ? “Screw the mystery, have the girl horses kiss some more. Prophecy can wait!”
I tease, though I find the Twidancer in this superb I appreciated how they worked together to approach the problem too. It’s kinda fun reading this after Twilight’s Secret Journal since I can see the same thematic notes, but approaching it from a different angle.
Sad to see it on hiatus though, I really liked this one with the secret history and metaphysical worldbuilding. I hope you return to it someday.
10744354
Hopefully you know of my SparkleDancer novella, then.
I might return to this someday! Everything I do is on hiatus now, though. I can barely work due to a chronic disease I acquired around ten months ago, so I have little time to write (and not much emotional energy for it, either). I'm off in Summer, so I might be able to do things again in a couple of months.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep teaching come Autumn, but we're well-off enough that we'll be okay.
10744889
Now I do! I’ll get started on it tonight. ~
Though I do hope that you can find some treatment plan that can work on that ME/CFS/Numbness. My heart goes out to you. Big bug hugs
10745012
The numbness isn't much of an issue, it's just a thing. Docs don't know what it is, but don't seem to be concerned after running tests, so I guess I just have numb parts now. Hooray for aging!
10745361
This used to make me laugh a decade ago. It... it gets less funny every year the closer that 4 looms
10745611
I was very bitter at 30, but 40 was like, "meh".
I will never turn 50, though. I refuse.
I hope you're able to come back to this one day
11410903
I do intend to! Things are just very slow for me lately due to disability.
11411033
It's a fic worth waiting for
I have some chronic pain issues (yay for bad family genetics!) so I think I understand, atleast a little bit