Ponywatching

by ThunderTempest

Prompt #475-Literally Everything Is A Lie

One of the first things they teach you in any magic school is the phrase ‘Magic is the forcing of your will on reality.’ Most ponies mostly ignore this. I wasn’t most ponies, so I didn’t. Of course, I’ve never been to magic school either, but that’s not the point. I took it to mean that with enough magic, you could literally do anything. Of course, that’s not entirely true. The innate magic of Equestria is deep and unflexible, and likes to keep certain things constant. Like the air, or gravity.

My mother, I guess, was the one to convince me otherwise, though perhaps not intentionally. She was also the first to try and keep me in line. In one of our little magic sessions, she told me that my magic operated on a different scale than a normal pony’s. Rather than simple, localised effects, my magic defaulted to wide-ranging, massive events. And this, she explained, was because my magic knew something instinctively: Reality itself is a lie. And once I realized that, well.

Everything became much, much simpler. If I wanted popcorn, all I had to do was concentrate enough, and it would appear. If I wanted to reverse gravity, focus, and it happened. If I wanted to erase my mother from existence, a thought was all it took.

With enough magic, you can do almost anything, but the effects are never permanent. It takes a special kind of magic to make permanent changes to the world, or a willingness to go down the wonderfully dark path of ‘dark’ magic. To me, there is no dark or evil to magic, there’s just magic. Magic is just power, and what matters is what you do with it.

Reality is a lie. That phrase freed me. It unleashed me. It created me. It took me some time to understand it, but if it’s one thing I have never lacked, it’s time. The knowledge that I could twist and distort reality like any other physical matter I could touch was profound, even though I’m hardly one to discuss the full effects of it. It drove me insane, but I will counter your incoming arguments with this: how many ponies have ever forced pure and simple creativity on the world? Answer: none. They’re all too boring and practical for that.

Most ponies will look at my work and call it ‘Chaos’. They call me troublemaker, villain. And they have blinders on to everything good I have ever done, no matter how unintentional it may have been at the time. The seasons? My work. The phases of the moon? Me. And so on, really. More than one pony has been inspired by me whenever I manage to get loose from the prison that Harmony puts me in. Really, they’re so ungrateful.

Author's Note:

Written for Prompt #475-“A Tale As Old As Time”
The Prompt: The story starts when your protagonist is told by a parent that everything has been a lie. Another character is an alchemist who is determined to settle an old score.

Comments

[Themaskedferret]

Very interesting.

[Malandy]

Mother's a Life Alchemist?