The Weight of Worlds

by LysanderasD

Curvature: The Weight of Worlds

Curvature: The Weight of Worlds

220 AL

Here was the rub, and it was really quite simple: The relationship had drifted. Tilted off kilter, wobbled like a top teetering on its point.

It wasn’t broken, not really, or that was what Curvature told herself at any rate. It hadn’t collapsed suddenly from any malicious action on either party’s part. No. The simple fact of the matter was that she and Dreamchaser walked different paths, lived different lives. He was a prince… whatever that meant, here, lightyears away from Equestria. And she was a scientist. She had a duty. She had to care about the colony (so did he, said a part of her), and she had to care about the colony more than she cared about her relationship (so did he) because if she didn’t keep them informed they would be in danger.

That was the long and short of it. They were far from home, there was no way to call back, and they had to make do with what they had. The fact that there were suddenly alicorns in the colony actually came as something of a relief. Curvature had been too young at the time to really understand, but as she’d gotten older her parents had tried to explain it to her.

Ponies had studied other star systems for—well, for centuries, and that was a fact. And though Luna painted the skies every night, yes, the stars were still there; she worked with what she had, and she had never claimed, as some believed, that she’d ever created any. No. The stars were; and while they generally remained where they were, she was able to paint the sky anew every night by changing luminosity, density, color—to paint a canvas using existing materials. Recycled art, drawn from reality, from the work of Harmony. It was beautiful, in its way.

But belief is a hard habit to break. Ponies believed Luna created the stars, so when it was observed that, elsewhere, the planets seemed to move around their suns rather than the natural order of things, well, she had no answer, and ponies were stunned. How could Princess Luna not know?

Herd mentality, her father had said. Complacency was the worst and easiest snare. Ponykind was so used to being shepherded that learning to think for themselves out here was frightening. So when Dreamchaser and Stargazer were born, and when the planet’s rotation began to slow as Stargazer looked up to the sun and—across all that distance, as a foal—grabbed it in his corona and gently pulled it down toward the horizon, well, that was just the solar system bending to the way things ought to be. They hadn’t planned on having alicorns. But now they had them, and had to deal with them, and ponies had dealt with alicorns one way and one way only for over a thousand years.

So… princes. They were not brothers, but lifted up onto pedestals as they were, offered reverence, isolated, they had no choice but to become family. And it just didn’t seem right to talk about Prince Dreamchaser as the naggy little colt he used to be, the little adventurous idealist, the one who always coaxed Curvature into tag and hide and seek even as she was preparing her doctoral dissertation on planetary forces and the effects of magic on gravity. The system changed. Why it changed was anypony’s guess. No one thought to wonder; this was, after all, how life had always been. Even before Celestia and Luna, there had been Starswirl and the high mages of Unicornia. The sun moved around the planet. That was how things were.

And so Dreamchaser came to orbit Curvature. Distant. Always present, but always at arms’ length. And then she got her degree, and the Observatory nearly bent over backward for her brains, and now Dreamchaser wasn’t just the prince, he was also one of the ponies keeping the solar system stable. Things changed. Things became the same.

And she thought—for so long, she’d imagined—that he felt the same way. That things had to be this way. That, yes, they were family, even if distant family, but the responsibility was to the colony first and family second. They couldn’t be close, because he was a prince, and he had to focus on making sure the planets didn’t collide and the moons didn’t fall out of orbit.

But then she saw him on that throne, and he was smiling, and calm, and—

She’d always had this image of Princess Luna, though she’d been born long, long after the Lunar Princess’ so-called retirement and had never actually seen the mare. Stories were told, though, of her regality, her natural authority. Stargazer seemed to embody that ideal. And Dreamchaser—

He was still, well, chasing dreams. Still idealist. Still the mediator. Still full of hope, bouncing impatiently on the edge of his seat, waiting for the adventure.

It wasn’t fair. He had so much responsibility shoved onto his shoulders and he’d managed just fine. It was she who’d changed. And she’d missed out on so much because of it. And then she’d snapped, and said those awful things, and he teleported away—

Horizon’s wing gently slapped at her face. It didn’t hurt, but the shock was enough to pull her out of her spiraling thoughts. “Curvature!” he said, desperate, even a little angry. “For Harmony’s sake, come on, snap out of it.”

She blinked. She was seated—somewhere. Back against the wall. Far Horizon seemed to fill her vision, brow knit with concentration and worry, but when he saw her eyes focus, he pulled back with a sigh, straightening his glasses.

“There you are. Thank Celestia. You were muttering to yourself…”

“What happened?” she asked. “No,” she added. “Don’t—don’t answer that. I remember. Where is Dreamchaser?” Then, “Where are we?” Curvature looked around.

But no, she knew this room. At least, she had an idea of what this room was. The most important ponies had lived closest to the Captain’s quarters. This might even have been his hab. It was certainly fancier than the room she remembered traveling in. More space. Of course, it was empty, now, save for the messaging crystal embedded on the wall.

“Green Tea called for a recess,” Horizon explained. “Stargazer was livid, but between me and Green Tea I think we got him covered for now. Dreamchaser’s probably in his quarters. It’s only been a few minutes—the attendant left to check.”

Her ears flicked, then flattened. “I… right.”

After a moment, she added, “...Thanks. For standing up for me. For getting between me and Stargazer.”

Several expressions rushed across his face. He blushed, looking momentarily surprised before coughing and shaking his head. “Curvature,” he asked, “what the hell happened in there? I know you’ve got a temper, but you just spoke out to a prince! And your cousin!”

“I know.”

“I thought you might be able to talk sense into him, not scare him. What is wrong with you?”

“I know.”

There was a pause. Curvature rubbed at her face for a moment, but Horizon gently moved her hooves aside, pulling a kerchief from his vest and rubbing at her cheeks, not roughly, but—a delicate touch he was not.

“Oof. Hey,” she complained.

“Sorry, just…” He pulled back, putting the kerchief away. “You were crying.” For once, the pegasus looked abashed. “Seriously, Curvature, what happened? I’m worried. And not even angry-worried, just… worried.”

She took a deep breath, trying to meet his eyes, which were, behind the lenses he wore, the softest she’d ever seen them. But she couldn’t hold his gaze, turning her head to the side and staring at the matte white of the door-side corner.

“I… It’s complicated.” When, in the corner of her eye, Horizon looked to be about to protest, she raised a hoof. “I’m trying, okay? I’m trying. It’s… I guess I’ve just come to a lot of realizations about myself, and under the pressure, I… snapped. At him. Because I thought he could take it.”

“Clearly not,” Horizon muttered dryly.

“Obviously,” she replied in the same tone. “Look, I… He’s my family. I should have treated him like family. Instead I treated him like…”

Another quiet pause.

“I treated him like a prince, and I expected a prince,” she said. “Or… what I was told to expect, what everypony from Equus Prime expected. Alicorns are a certain way. Dignified. Regal. But Dream… Dream’s a gentle soul. And I should have known he’d still be a gentle soul.”

Horizon sat back on his haunches, fluffing his wings. One hoof rose to take off his glasses, and he pulled the kerchief back out of his vest to try and clean them, paying no mind to the tear stains. “So what we have here,” he said finally, “is a failure to communicate.”

“I’m not a diplomat, Horizon,” she said weakly. “I’m not. I’m a scientist. I’m not good with ponies. I’m good with numbers, and models, and projections. Those are controllable, those are easy. Ponies are… complicated, unpredictable, irrational.” She scoffed. “As I so keenly demonstrated.”

She took a deep breath. “I… need to give him what he deserves.”

“And what does he deserve?” Horizon asked, putting his glasses back on his snout.

She closed her eyes. Here, elsewhere in this ship, she’d grown up with him, at least for a while. At least until actual structures were set up for the colony. They were both only children, and so they bonded—like siblings. She wasn’t just his cousin. She was his big sister. He looked up to her, tried to pattern himself off of her, even though he knew he wasn’t as smart, even though he had wings and a horn and she didn’t. Sitting on that throne, he still wanted to be just like her.

She thought about the throne room. How the tension between Dreamchaser and Stargazer had been almost tangible. The constant muttering. The admonishments. Dreamchaser and Stargazer had had to think of themselves as siblings, but Stargazer wasn’t his brother, not really, and he resented being put on that spot. So when the chance came for Dreamchaser to have a sibling again, a real sibling, a sister, the sister he’d grown up with, of course he’d take it, of course he’d try to appeal to her, to promise he could do better—

Her eyes opened. “I’m giving him his family back,” she said. “Starting with me.”

---

The princes’ quarters were on the same deck of the ship, though some distance from the so-called throne room. Their rooms were next to each other, but different and distinct as the alicorns themselves. Like their guards, one door stood red and gold with the burning, stylized eye-shaped sun; the other silver and lavender, emblazoned with the winged galaxy. There were guards outside each, two per door, and all four eyed Curvature with suspicion as she approached.

“You’re not supposed to be here, citizen,” said the guard closest to her, one of Dreamchaser’s. “These quarters belong to Their Highnesses.”

Behind her, she heard Horizon suck air in through his teeth. “Does it have to be right now?” he whispered.

Curvature stood her ground. “My name is Curvature. I’m here to speak with my cousin Dreamchaser.”

This time it was one of the somniant guards that reacted. “You will address him as Prince Dreamchaser—and in any case, His Highness is not seeing guests at the moment.” She tapped on the door to demonstrate, which let out a discordant beep. The sound of a locked door.

“He’ll want to see me.” Curvature stared daggers at the mare.

But the somniant guards weren’t easily intimidated. “His Highness is not receiving guests at this time. Please leave.”

She grit her teeth—then let out a long, slow breath. “I—alright, different approach. Just ask him. Please, just ask him. It’s—” She hesitated. “Tell him—Tell him that I’m sorry… for everything. And that I’d like to catch up with him. If he wants.”

The other somniant guard, this one a stallion, carefully raised a hoof to his ear. His compatriot shot him a dirty look, but he spoke into the communicator on his fetlock all the same. “Your Highness, there’s a Curvature…?”

Almost immediately, the door slid open with an acquiescing, pleasant hum. The guards blinked, with the mare in particular looking abashed. “I… Right this way, then, please.”

“I’ll stay out here,” Horizon said. “I… It’s not my business. But… Good luck, Curvature.”

She took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The somniant guard didn’t have a chance to follow. The door slid shut behind Curvature and she heard the quiet hiss of the door lock engaging.

The room was dark. Painted in the same deep blue of the rest of the somniant prince’s regalia, but more than that it was dark—the lights were dim, and painting everything in a faintly eerie glow. She stood in the long hallway at the entrance to the luxurious hab, and swallowed.

“Dream…?” she called out.

Only one door opened, at the end of the entry hall. She obediently followed, carefully putting one hoof in front of the other in the blue-tinted darkness, until she reached the door and turned in. If she remembered this part of the ship right, this would have been the master bedroom for the luxury habs, and…

The first thing she saw was the orrery. Unlike the one that hung in the Space Agency, this one was a hologram, spinning slowly, suspended from the ceiling like a chandelier, glowing faintly in a dim goldish color. The lighting wasn’t any better in here, but the extra illumination from the orrery tinted things a little closer to true white light and made the shadows a little less leery.

Dreamchaser was on the bed. She had often wondered how he slept, or how a prince was supposed to sleep. She expected something grand and luxurious, but Dreamchaser’s room struck her as strangely spartan. The bed was sized up, probably a queen size originally but now a king size, presumably designed so that Dreamchaser would grow into it. As it was, he still looked a little small on it by himself. He was lying belly-down, hooves gripping around his pillow and comforter and bunchign them up near his head. Only one eye was visible, which was looking at her uncertainly. He said nothing.

She shifted from one side to the other. “I… Hey.”

When she waited, he still gave her nothing.

“Can I join you?”

No answer wasn’t a no, per se. So she trotted over, underneath the orrery, and climbed up onto the bed so she was sitting next to him. One of her hooves reached out and settled on his shoulder, and he didn’t protest.

“So,” she started, still feeling awkward. What happened to the fire that she’d had outside the door? Now she was here and she didn’t know what to say. At least in the throne room she’d had her documents. What should she say? Agh, but sometimes the simplest thing is the right thing. “I’m… sorry.”

Finally he stirred, turning his head to the side and resting it on the pillow. From there, he looked down at her, blinking rapidly, eye still slightly teary.

“I had…” Curvature continued. “No, that’s not fair. Not just me. All of us have this. But right now it’s about me, okay? I had… expectations of you. Expectations that have been placed on you. Ponies… fall into habit, right? We take the easiest path. And we just… I think we just fell back into our own ways, ways that aren’t fair to you or to Stargazer. And we’re going to change that, I promise. And it’s going to start with me.”

Finally, the alicorn sat up. She kept her hoof on his back, lightly rubbing between the bases of his wings. “I… thought that it was more important that we weren’t family first. I thought that we needed to talk about the colony, and that there wasn’t any room for us to be friends, or for us to be… you know.” One hind leg, still hanging off the edge of the bed, kicked awkwardly. “We were so close when we were foals. But then we grew up, and I thought, well, responsibility comes first. And it’s not like I shouldn’t be responsible, but…”

She looked up at the orrery.

“I thought what you were carrying was just the weight of worlds. And that’s a lot of weight. An impossible weight. I can’t imagine what that’s like, to have to worry about all of that angular momentum and orbit lines and the effects of gravity. To me, those are just numbers, points of data on a graph, but to you, they’re real, they’re the here and now. And I thought for sure that that was all you had. But you had more than that, because you had all of this responsibility and no outlet.”

She rubbed at her head with her other hoof. “But even Princess Twilight had friends. And I’m sure Princess Luna and Princess Celestia did too, back when they were in charge. We just never saw it. We saw what we wanted. And we tried to shape you into being just like the alicorns back home, without realizing what that meant, without realizing that you’re not the same and we shouldn’t treat you like you are. And we all have to apologize for that. But I have to apologize because I wasn’t giving you what you… what you needed, because I was so blinded by what I thought I needed.

“I thought… to be an adult, to be responsible to the colony, I had to hold you to task. And it’s not that you don’t have a lot on your plate… But… You should have time to be you. Especially now, when you’re still, you know… young. For alicorn standards. I shouldn’t have let my responsibility take our relationship apart. So… I’m sorry, okay?”

Curvature took a deep breath. “So… I don’t know what this means. Going forward. There’s a lot of precedent, even if most of it is just in our… what, our cultural subconscious? We have our biases, our predilections, that we need to overcome. But ponies follow the herd. So if I have to be the one to step out of line to show them the better way… if I have to show them a path away from what we’ve always known… I’ll do it. And I’ll start by being the sister you should have had. Okay? I don’t… We’ll have to figure out what that means. It’s not going to be easy. But I want to try, okay?”

The words finally stopped tumbling out of her mouth, and she gave a hopeful smile up to the alicorn. After a moment, he returned it, wrapping the earth pony in a massive wing and holding her tight to his side.

“Hide and seek?” he asked, only a little bashfully.

---

When she returned home, Tidbits mewled at her petulantly. She knelt and ran a hoof along his fur, and the tabby purred, mollified, if only slightly. “There we go, Bitty Kitty. I’m sorry I left you home all day. I’ll make it up to you, okay?”

She stood. “But first I need to lay down, okay? I had a long day too, Bitty Kitty. Probably longer than yours. And at least you have your automatic food dispenser.”

Tidbits replied with a long trill and a flick of the tail. She gently booped her hoof against his nose, earning another trill as the cat turned and padded away.

Actually, she decided, food sounded better than rest. So she dropped her saddlebags off on the bed and ducked into the kitchen.

In the bag, her terminal vibrated once.

Curvature,

I’m in the process of arranging meetings with relevant councilors and other ponies of note. If I have to drag them in here by their tails, I’ll do it—but I might want your help. And you’ll need to be there anyway.

I know you don’t like meetings and the council has been pretty rough on you in the past, but I think rough is what we need right now. Harmony knows you deserve a go at them for all the times they’ve yelled at you in the past—and you’ve got more than enough reasons to yell.

I thought about what you said, about how we need to shake ourselves out of our habits. We’re on the frontier. I told you as much. And it turns out that a lot of the stuff that worked back on Equus Prime isn’t going to work out here, and we should stop trying to fit alicorns into square shaped holes and such.

It’s gonna be a bumpy road. You know how some of these ponies were noble families back in Equestria, and nobles are famous for nothing if not sticking their heads in the sand. But we need to do this right, and right isn’t the same thing as easy—not by a long shot.

Thanks for the wakeup call. And on the subject of calls, I phoned into the Observatory—looks like things are back on track up in space. In fact, things are lining up better than they ever have. We’ll have some pretty neat planetary alignment coming up in the next few months, and the system looks to be settling into a self-sustaining orbit again.

Whatever you said, it’s like you took the weight of worlds off of Dreamchaser’s shoulders. Literally, too, I guess.

Anyway, business aside… I’m sure we’ll both have headaches after the meeting. You wanna get drinks afterward? Maybe a bite to eat? I’m not a bad chef and I don’t know if you’ve ever had pegasus cuisine.

Give it some thought, huh?

Far Horizon

Author's Note:

Next: Supplement A: On Pony FTL Travel

Thank you to those in the Starpub Discord who were willing to compete. It's nice to finally have this finished.

07/08 - edited to fix misspellings and at least once reference to the wrong prince.