The Night Of A Broken Heart

by WanderingPony

Chapter 4: Friendship Is Magic, Electricity Is Inspirational.

Twilight Sparkle...slept. And dreamed, like any mortal creature. Princess Luna's only brush with Twilight's dreaming mind was with Soarnus' insistence on making sure no hidden traumas lay hidden in the alicorn's noggin.

Dream-Twilight was busily re-shelving stacks of books that had tumbled from her dream-library, being assisted by a figment of Star Swirl the Bearded as they organized the scattered subconscious into it's normal alphabetized-and-Dewdrop-Decimal'd system. Perfectly normal.

"She really does get the beard right", mused Luna before withdrawing to leave the mindscape free to unclutter itself.

"Star Swirl" looked at dream-Twilight meaningfully and let the illusion fall, becoming a greying sheep with a pair of eyebrows that mirrored the sweep of his silvered horns, capped at the end with the shimmering metal.

The beard, however did not change a whit, nor his respectful care of each book as he aligned them with the rest.

"I have always said it was ignorance and the fear of knowledge that has been the bane of proper friendships, and I apologize again for the latter- but I fear Luna would take my visit in poor taste. She always has been an impetuous spirit... and we have only so long before you wake. Shall we continue with the lesson?"

Dream-Twilight, who was quite lucid about the whole thing nodded eagerly.

"Before even there was life in this world you call "Equestria", there were spirits. They were without form, for there was none to give them form, but they flowed through everything. The earth, the sky, the sun and moon- small as the smallest speck, large as the reach of the sun, countless in number, nameless without a namer, to be for the sake of being. Spirits of fire consumed, spirits of earth moved for the sake of moving and crackling and crumbling and rising to mountain or falling to pebbles, the seas rolled in their basins and took in the pulls of the tides as the moon did in making the waters wash back and forth below the firmament.

And in time, those elements mixed and clashed and stirred amidst one another, and left something of themselves as they joined- life. Life was new, for it was made of a bit of one spirit and the leftovers of another, a hodge-podge that somehow fit together to make something greater, and then more lives like itself. It took, but it returned as well when it was extinguished and simply became a new voice in the endless song of being. As life grew, so did we.

Suddenly, the spirits were aware of each other, and ourselves as more than simply doing, but that there was "other", and those others "did" as we "did", but different things. Life, by putting pieces of us together and making them into something material had gifted the first spirits with awareness of the place they existed within- by keeping our essences in contact with each other, they could not but know something else was. One after another, we spirits became- still wordless, nameless, but creations unto ourselves. The eldest were what all life seemed to know first and hold dearest- light, and darkness.

Still, we did not have shape, and life grew and ended and changed on the world for a span of time that would make the age of ponies like an eyeblink to the eldest of mares. The waters teemed with life that found it's way upon the land, and grew larger, and larger- amphibian, reptile, bird....and eventually, creatures much like you."

The ram paused to hold a book open, showing a somewhat ponylike creature in size, but four-toed instead of hooved and a face closer akin to a camel than any pony Twilight had seen alive. Shelving it under "E", he continued:

"As more of the sun became bound to living things, it's spirit awoke in turn, knowing as the energies it gave poured into plants, which the beasts ate, and then ate one another, living and dying and feeding, all to sustain themselves on the bit of Sun inside them. And the Moon awoke soon afterwards, for in darkness the world depended on it's reflected brightness even as in light they did the Sun, and the wakeful Sun's light did pour itself upon the Moon so it might watch more of Life with the stony mirror it provided. They were the last of the great spirits to awaken, for the longest of times.

The Sun then did what no spirit had done, or even thought to do. As it gave of itself to Life, it sent a measure of it's awareness, even as it had the Moon without meaning or thought for only a moment, to whatever had stood under the gleam of sun that it had sent forth. That beam landed on a herd of those almost-pony creatures, and for the first time, they knew of themselves. They had a sense of self, and of like, and of other- and a great desire to categorize them, much like your books!

In return for the gift of the Sun, they gave their own- names to everything they saw. As Life's mixing had brought awareness to spirit, so it's namings brought shapes to what was formlessness. Lights and darkness upon what you call the "Astral", and we were Light and Dark the first, Sun and Moon the last, and as many in between as your many-many-many-times ancestors could put gesture, sound, and symbol to!

They learned to use things beyond themselves in ever more complex patterns- tools, language, Life using the world in what would be "civilization". Unknowingly, their self-awareness touched other creatures, and they in turn drew upon the spirit-stuff within them to know as your proto-ponies did- and the first ancestors of many of the races you know today took their places. Ponies, griffins, zebras? More creatures than exist in all the books in your head that have lived and died to allow the ones you know their lines in your library.

And rams, of course. Their ancestors lived on the mountain peaks, and when lightning struck, they drew upon it to begin the long journey to wisdom."

The ancient silverhorn bleated something suspiciously like laughter.

"Eventually, they even managed to get a few of us to join them as Life, but that will have to be when we meet again...."

A book flopped off it's perch as the dream began to waver, like a dish full of gelatin.

"Once you've seen the light."

A *snap* of static tickled the dream-pony's nose, and she blinked...

The dream vanished with the flash of light. Twilight awoke.