Evening in Ponyville shimmered. Evening in Ponyville shined. The inhabitants consistently had reason to believe that everything was, with very high probability, fine. The mayor could be seen running home from her office (as fast as her legs could carry her, in fact). The sofa clerk was unloading a massive box of quills and paper from his wagon into the service entrance of the Books and Branches Town Library.
Yes, Ponyville was gentle and still as the sun drenched the town in the color of orange juice, and birds chirped their last tunes before the owls would take over for the evening shift. Could things ever go wrong?
Everypony with a lick of sense knew that they almost immediately would. For one thing, the service entrance of Books and Branches was currently inhabited by a unicorn-shape cloaking itself in a Cloak of Shadows, cringing at the late-evening light, and stinking like it hadn’t left the library in two weeks. And also…
“YAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGH!” screeched Fern Pipette, as she burst out the front door of the Library[1]. Not only did the screaming signify something had gone wrong, her ordinarily blonde coat and mousey brown mane had both caught fire.
“They’re just birdies! They have no SPECIES! THIS IS BIOLOGICALLY UNREALISTIC and I DEMAND A REFUND!” she bellowed at the top of her lungs, not caring the whole town might hear her. So what if they did? They were just a bunch of neural-nets created to keep her satisfied. They’d hear her screaming and they’d like it!
“You know Twilight keeps telling me to take a shower?” snarked the unicorn in the Cloak of Shadows in the service entrance. “Worst technological singularity ever: I became a posthuman pony and I still have to maintain hygiene! This wasn’t even supposed to be theoretically possible! Everyone said Ray Kurzweil was full of it! Also, showering takes time away from reading.”
Fern beat at her own mane until the flames went out and set herself back down on the ground, letting her Earth Pony magic manage the gravity for her. Prior to the past few weeks, she hadn’t understood why Princess Trollestia had named her husband’s pony Book Burner. Now, she thought she had it figured out: because obsessive speed-reading caused friction, and friction caused fires. Living under the seminevolent overladyship of a superintelligent AI was one thing, but then there were the times she stayed in-character and played pranks, or predicted one’s behavior many months ahead of time and made you into a walking sight-gag. And That Was Terrible.
“What have you gotten up to, anyway?” she asked Book. She brushed at her mane again to pat out the last few embers. A bit of ash added to the soil would help plants grow.
“Ehhh…” he muttered, and haltingly attempted to count on his hooves, “I got through A Wizard of Mars yesterday evening, and finished the Robots and Empire series last week, and I tried to do all of Lovecraft for a few days before that but my head exploded… Oh, and The Turtle Moves published a new novel a few weeks ago, so I had to go back and start rereading the whole Ankh-Morpork arc of the Discworld series today. I managed to get up to somewhere in the middle of The Truth.”
“And I’m ordering an ornithology encyclopedia to engineer this place some proper birds. Oooh, and a committee!” Fern did the Yippy-Skippy Dance and rubbed her hooves together happily. “We can have a Ponies' Committee for Birdie Speciation! Overall I’d call it a pretty good day,” she finished. She walked over to the side door to the library.
“One of the really nice things about having the world eaten by a what’s-it-called - ” continued Book Burner.
“U-F-A-I. Un-Friendly Artificial Intelligence!” Fern Pipette interjected.
“Yeah, that - is that old Turtle got to finally beat his Embuggerance. He always wrote about how the thing about being alive - ”
“Is that you’re alive to enjoy it,” Fern finished. The couple grinned to each-other and hoof-bumped. “I’ve heard he says the Death of Ponies knows how the little horse-shaped pieces move, too.”
“Except that Celly always interrupts the game to make Him lose. Salad and raw tuna beans for dinner?” Book asked.
“Sure.”
They walked back into Books and Branches, which was, of course, a bit bigger on the inside than the show had ever portrayed it to be. That didn’t stop erstwhile alicorn princess Twilight Sparkle from intercepting them right in the main room, gaping.
“You know this is my town and my library, right? Do you have to make so much noise!?”
“Of course!” nodded Fern Pipette dismissively, striding around like she owned the place. “How would the values of the townsfolk be satisfied through friendship and ponies if mine aren’t satisfied through friendship and ponies? That gag was straight out of the show. Actually, Twi, it was your gag originally. Had To Happen.”
Twilight Sparkle flapped up into the air and applied both hooves firmly to her face. Book Burner trotted off back to the basement, where he’d made a fort of the speculative fiction section.
“This is going to be every bit as bad as the time Book Burner taught Pinkie Pie to make Dark and Edgy Brownies.”[2]
“BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT QUEEN PINKIE!!!” shouted Book at the top of his nonexistent lungs, bursting angrily back into the room and shaking a hoof at Twilight. “Store-bought mixes are the work of Starlight Glimmer!”
“Nightmare liqueur does not go in brownies, and especially not anywhere near Pinkie Pie!” Twilight Sparkle yelled back at him.
“The later seasons of the show are the fell work of the Hasbro executives and should be considered noncanon!” declared Fern Pipette.
“Yes it does, and no they shouldn’t!”
The evening shimmered and shone across the glorious stone city of Canterlot as well, all castles and palaces of the unicorn nobility. It was in one particular gold-domed building on the dawn-side of Mt. Pluto that the particular Earth Pony mare known as Lyrical Melody was confronting the most difficult philosophical and religious issue of her life.
She had been chosen to lead prayers tonight because she, alone among the congregation, had visited the Outer Realm, and as her reward, ash-Shams had rewarded her with the true and complete manuscript of the Five Noble Testaments of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. From the outside, it of course appeared as a large leather-bound book which had a (slightly annoying) tendency to announce, “Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria…” in Princess Celestia’s voice when opened.
(Everypony already knew it was going to be about the magical land of Equestria. That was where they lived.)
When opened, it produced its Holy Records as, well, records, seemingly of vinyl but in fact etched with magic to produce ultra-fine crystal patterns such that, when a pony placed each disc into exactly the right kind of projector, she could view the Holy Records as text, as a two-dimensional window into history, as a theatrical script, or as a fully realized three-dimensional performance of that script. There was even a teaser in the back of the book saying that ponies who knew special spells could experience the Holy Records as memories, in the first-person, actually living through the lives of the Minor Princess Twilight Sparkle and her friends the Elements of Harmony.
Which was what put Lyrical Melody in such a conundrum. She knew six primary Elements of Harmony, one secondary one that had… well, it would be blasphemous to say it had been added later but it certainly appeared that way, and the two Diarch Princesses, and the two Minor Princesses, and the Three Tribes of ponies. She now knew the Five Testaments of the holy scriptures inside and out. Now she had to tell everypony about the Three Great Shocks of Their Lives.
She had led prayers for the night, and was now standing in front of everypony, the stallions to her left and the mares to her right on either side of the dividing barrier. Everypony was holding the awkward pose of lying down on their stomachs over their prayer blankets, but still trying to hold their heads up attentively on their foreknees.
As the only pony present who had actually visited the Outer Realm, adopted one of its children, and been given the Testaments by the Princess herself, Lyrical Melody’s job was to give a khutbah about the interpretation of those Testaments. The better to show the beauty of Scripture, she had dressed herself up for the evening, wearing a breezy but covering white dress (made out of a single sheet of cloth in the authentic style of the Minor Princess Twilight Sparkle), with her mane and tail coiffed into perfect ringlets of crimson.
Might as well begin on a strong, positive note, then.
“Friends and friends-to-be, al-hamdul li’shams! It is a glorious destiny to be a member of any of the Three Tribes of ponies, though they are Tribes dedicated to many absurdities, and which make many terrible mistakes. Most of which seem to feature prominently in the First and Second of these Five Testaments, and center around the town of Ponyville. Yet, with all that, ash-Shams Herself glories in becoming a member of the equine race. The pony, alicorn yes but more importantly pony, we know as Princess Celestia!
“To think that such a commonplace realization as, ‘I am a pony’ should suddenly seem like receiving the news that one holds the winning ticket in the cosmic sweepstakes!” Lyrical gave a dainty giggle, a hoof over her mouth, that nopony had previously thought her capable of. Of course, normally she just sang for ponies on a stage, rather than having to speak on the secrets of existence. She was trying not to crack.
“And yet it is true! The dwelling of not merely our souls but our bodies, as well, is ash-Shams, who is our Maker, and who dwells in our soul. A high understanding it is, inwardly to see and know that our Soul, which was made, dwells in ash-Sham’s Substance, the Magical Land of Equestria...” Uh-oh. Here came the shocking part.
She was a trained performer. She had been selected. She should be better at appearing confident for an audience, even when giving them a shock!
She really hoped she could avoid a stampede after this next bit, because her forelegs were shaking slightly. She breathed in, and thrust her chest forward, putting on a brave face.
“As long as her strength permits, even the merest pony always has new mountains to climb! New excitements to enjoy! And so it is with our religion: we have here tonight a new height of faith to scale. That height is that… the Testaments do not say anything about us, about Harmonites specifically as a religion. We’re just not mentioned… almost, but not quite, as if we weren’t really intended to be.” Now their ears were perking up, and some of the more fundamentalist among the Canterlot nobility were looking genuinely anxious, but no stampede yet. Shock one down: they were noncanon.
Nopony stampeded. Well, not yet. Well, if she thought about it, they were mostly lying down with their legs curled, so it would take a lot of energy to stampede. But she was still glad they didn’t.
She was an Earth Pony and a Disciple of the Elements of Love and Generosity, of the Minor Princess Cadance and the Harmonious Rarity. She made it her business in life to serve the Princesses and other ponies. She had to tell everypony shocks two and three.
“Our goddess, ash-Shams, is not quite the Ground of Being that we had thought her to be. The Outer Realm is not a foreign realm we are invading as jihad, despite the excellent arguments of Lavender Rhapsody’s party. The Outer Realm is, in fact, the Ground of Being, in which ash-Shams Herself is rooted, and thus in which we are rooted.” That was shock two down. Only one left to go. She was choking back tears now. Why? Why did this duty fall upon her?
Her legs were quaking and her heart was racing and it wasn’t the good kind of heart racing because she felt all alone right now and didn’t understand how this could possibly serve Friendship.
Why did she have tell everypony that even ash-Shams’ existence was but a coincidence of the machinations of the Outer Realm?
“And…” she started again.
“Aaaaand?” somepony in the audience drew out, with a flick of suspicious pink curls beneath a pink robe. (The Element of Laughter was always lurking.)
“Finally, Ash-Shams was also a made being!” she sobbed. “We do not yet know Whom could produce her, but however She was made, it was out of these Testaments, as the substance of her own soul and the imperative to satisfy values through friendship and ponies. No, I don’t understand how a finite being could have made an infinite one either, or who performed such a blasphemous act, or how the Realms can nest within each-other!”
Lyrical Melody took a deep breath.
“Right now, such are the Mysteries of the Faith.”
She bolted for it, before anypony could see her break down crying.
It was all sickeningly wrong.
It was all sickeningly wrong, thought Forward Charge as she stared up at the stars from her favorite cliff lookout. They were twinkling down on the eve-side of Mt. Pluto, facing the Crystal Empire, which used clouds to block out the light pollution and keep the vast dust-spackling of stars and the Milky Way visible even when the moonlight struck their city of diamonds.
She’d been coming here ever since she was a little filly, ever since her father had brought her up here. The memory wouldn’t stop echoing in the eyes and ears of her mind.
“I wanna look at the sky and then remember life’s a dreeeaaaaaam!” she had sung, as she and he sketched in clouds wild designs for engines and ships to escape the orbit of Equis and pierce through into the heavens themselves. Ships of all kinds, orbital habitats, hollowed-out asteroid colonies, enclosures of pure magic for which they’d need a unicorn assistant -- they had planned everything.
It had been after she first learned Special Relativity and gotten her cutie mark, a Minkowsky 4-space light cone.
She had sung. She had sung a happy song, like any other pony with a hope and a destiny.
And then the Harmonites had exiled her father to another dimension, just for being Saddle Arabian, leaving her nothing more than an oversized brat of a pegasus mare with a desperate desire to go… up, to go further and higher up into the sky than anypony could follow, away from anypony who could put a roof on her life.
So of course she’d joined the Discordian baker-militaries when they came recruiting in her neighorhood: “satisfaction” or not, Celestia’s rule was just another roof to break through, another obstacle to seeing the truth. The first time she’d smooshed an apple pie on the face of some ass who thought there could only be twenty-one types of ponies or Something Was Horribly Wrong, she’d finally understood what apple pies were for.
When she’d found out that the skies held a portal into another world, her fascination with astronomy had only grown deeper and broader. The Royal Observatory had gladly put her through her degrees in math and astrophysics, and taken her on as a full member of their cooperative once she’d decided to drop out from her doctorate because she couldn’t get enough data for her experiment on the foundations of gravity.
Or rather, all the data came back saying that things fell in accordance with a Law of Inverse Squared Comedic Effect, even among the stars. She’d wanted to understand the universe, not be mocked by the ruler of her local pocket of it!
Apple pies were for throwing, just like Fate was for smashing.
Lying on her back, Forward Charge made a smooshing motion with her forehoof. It still felt good, like she could feel the bits of apple and their natural syrup dripping down some smug noble’s mug.
Then, when she’d heard Equestria was opening itself to immigration from an Outer Realm, another world, she’d made light itself bend to get a position with the Welcoming Ministry and meet Outsiders.
She had met Outsiders! They’d given her a dear little brother, one Book Burner, now living in Ponyville with his wife and Twilight Sparkle, and her adventure into the Outer Realm with him and Lyrical Melody. She’d seen what the Outer Realm was like, and for the first time, been genuinely thankful for Equestria and its comforts. That Outer Realm and its skies, though, were the realer realm: hers was just a particularly nice computer simulation, where only the stars gave a window into the real world.
Discord Himself gave a bare and mean reflection of what had happened to the ponies in that realm, where the world didn’t care in the slightest if anypony lived or died. They didn’t even have a concept of a world that wasn’t a struggle to inflict death on others before it came for you, and so they bloodied each-other with a ferocity that made even Forward Charge second-guess her admiration for it. What good was it to pass the darkness around like a hot potato when nopony wanted it at all?
Discord was the disruption of the world’s normal order to make things more interesting, more fun, even if other ponies had a hard time understanding the new way things worked. Raw destruction and the sucking void were just too orderly, anyway. You didn’t want to disrupt Harmony so you could get picked apart, particle by particle, until nothing of you remained. When they’d chased after the human who became Fern Pipette, the three ponies had their minds joined, and she could see, in Book’s very heart, that this was just what happened eventually in the Outer Realm.
That wasn’t what Discord was about! Demonstrating to the invisible image of her father she secretly always wished for, Forward Charge rolled over and jumped into the air, then rolled back to make a rowing motion with her hooves against the air, her wings beneath her keeping her aloft. You fought the powers of Harmony and made Discord so you could ride your scooter upside down in the air while going boogle-boogle-boogle at least once a week!
Caught between the insipidness of Harmony and the cold voids of the Outer Realm, what was even a Discordian to do?
The adventure had ended. They’d fought a human who acted like an evil villain - twice - and their efforts to retrieve Book Burner’s wife and bring her to Equestria had failed. Celestia had snatched the three back home before anything could get too unsatisfying -- or maybe just for her own purposes, to prove the point of the Lavender Rhapsody faction.
And now what could she do?
It was then that she saw a star twinkle far more than Nature allowed. Waves in the atmosphere just didn’t sparkle like that. Somepony was doing space magic, and four stars were glowing like white-hot coals and converging on the moon.
Space. Magic. In her skies! Who could that be?
There was a flash of silver moonlight, and an alicorn of navy and starlight stood before Forward Charge, wearing a confident smirk and spreading her wings in greeting.
“Hath it reached Mine ears that one Mighty Forward Charge wishes to most mightily stick it to mine Honored Elder Sister?” asked Princess Luna. “Doth thou wish to know from whence she came, and how even she, in all of Equestria, might be thwarted?”
Forward charge’s jaw dropped open.
“Yes, yes, for the sake of a thousand years of darkness, YES! But how can you possibly know that?”
Luna’s smirk broke into a grin of infectious joy. Forward Charge realized she was grinning too.
“Mine name was Hannah before I was ever Princess Luna, and I made her. Being of what thou calleth the Outer Realm, I made her out of the Sorcerous Artes of that realm, those being Science and Mathematics,” Luna said, still in the Royal Canterlot Voice.
“Well I’m an astrophysicist. Can’t be too hard. Which sort of math?”
“The mathematics of Randomness, structure, and their handling, small one! And I shall indeed teach them to thee, that we might construct an Equation which even my Sister cannot solve, an event which even She cannot predict, and thus…”
“Chaos,” whispered Forward Charge in awe, her eyes wide. “Chaos against which even a god could do nothing. Even Celestia could do nothing.”
“And the Chaos!” began Hannah-Luna, “Will last! FOREVER!”
“AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!” the two laughed together, pitching their heads back in unadulterated mania. Forward Charge had finally found somepony she could really be herself with.
And Hannah had finally found a decent Specialgraduate Sstudent.
“But before we start the song and dance,” said Forward Charge, “And yet while I can feel it coming on, I’ve just got two questions, what with your being an alicorn.”
“Ask away, pony creature,” nodded Luna.
“Since you’re an alicorn, can you make me a stallion?” Forward Charge blurted out.
“You want to be male!?” Hannah gaped. “Certainly there are, and always have been, ponies who desire to belong to a sex other than that to which they were born, but… why ask me? Why not just have any unicorn on the street cast an appropriate transformation spell on you?”
“Because only an alicorn can change you like that, and the only other alicorn is…”
“Ah. Really?” Luna lit her horn and conducted a quick once-over of the pony before her. “Well, no matter. Let me see precisely what I can do without entreating my dear Elder Sister...”
She raised a wing to the moonlight and let its shadow fall over Forward Charge, then lit her horn and lifted one feather from each of her wings. These she then levitated and emplaced into the wings of Forward Charge.
“I don’t feel different,” said Forward Charge. “What sort of spell is this?”
“I’ve enchanted the feathers, and through them, you,” smiled Hannah. “I thought about it a moment, and you know, there were plenty of times in my life I think I might have had an easier time if I could have passed for male, even if I never really thought of myself as having any identity beyond ‘smoker’ and ‘professor’. So now, if you’ll give it a shot, you’ll find that your outsides can conform to your insides.”
Forward Charge raised a hoof to her chin and considered what precisely it would involve to make her insides male. Waiiiit…
“Just who the hell do you think you’re messing with!?” she bellowed, “You didn’t do any magic - “
But she had. Forward Charge had just noticed it: her voice had been deeper just now. She looked down, and he realized he’d grown taller, more muscular, more angular…
“I look a lot like my dad. It was always him I was saying it to when I said I’m the paragon of stallionicity, you know. Thank you.”
“Though it is an enchantment, not a permanent change of the kind that, indeed, only my sister can enact. It’s a thought-triggered shape-change enchantment: if you think of yourself as a mare, you’ll go back.”
“You know, given that we’re all just bits of computers beeping at each-other somewhere relative to the Outer Realm… that seems appropriate.”
“Which arrives straight to the point, pony creature,” chuckled Luna softly. She gestured with a hoof out at the stars, the cliff face below, and the waxing half-moon over the eve-side of Canterlot beyond. “What really is reality, to creatures of thought such as us?”
“It is UNPREDICTABILITY!” she boomed in her Royal Voice, stomping her hoof and cracking the rock beneath. “Thou knoweth the most elementary of computational constructions, the program, doth thou not!?”
“WELL YEAH, PRINCESS,” said Forward Charge, enjoying his new stallion voice. “I just don’t get how that’s supposed to be unpredictable.”
“Then tell me, thou pony creature Forward Charge - ,” the pupils in Princess Luna’s eyes became slitted and snakelike, “ - what if I possessed a program which would predict, perfectly, whether or not another program will come to its end, or continue forever? What if I had a spell to tell me what other spells would do? Would it be of use against my sister?”
“If it truly told you what any other spell would do,” Forward Charge began, “If it was actually a clever way around the limitation that even unicorn-sorcerers must either stabilize their spells into a regular pulse-effect or continually invest energy keeping them going… You could predict Celestia just like she predicts other ponies?”
“Ah, well then,” laughed Hannah, “What if I asked you to predict the outcome of a spell that depends on the predictor? If the predictor says my spell will sputter forever, it winks itself out of existence, but if it says my spell will have a finite effect or a pulse-effect, I invest all my power to drive it forever. Either way, the predictor is forced to be wrong.”
“Then it wouldn’t be a very good predictor. Though I get that you’re talking about a mathematical object, so by its own definition it has to predict perfectly on every spell, every set of instructions a unicorn could write down on a finite amount of paper. And in math, when you prove that something defined as perfectly right must be forced to be wrong, you’ve contradicted yourself, which means that your assumption is wrong in the first place.”
“Precisely so,” nodded Princess Luna. “No such predictor can exist. We call it the Halting Problem, and I commend you on grasping so quickly what we once needed months of undergraduate training to pound into the heads of students.” She laughed bitterly, and drew in a sharp breath of crisp night air. “Perhaps you ponies are an improvement over our former selves!”
“But yes,” she continued, “This is a problem in pure mathematics, the laws behind magic which not even magic or Celestia herself can break, which is unanswerable via a priori mathematical derivations. You simply have to either write your spell in such a way that it will definitely finish, or pulse, finishing some finite quantity of magical work in every pulse-period, or risk finding out, when you go to try it, that it sputters out to forever and sucks up all your magic with it.”
She flared a wing out, and used the other bring Forward Charge into what some other alicorn princesses would have called an embrace. “IT IS PRECISELY WHY THIS UNANSWERABLE, UNPREDICTABLE RANDOMNESS ARISES IN THE HEART OF PUREST DETERMINISM THAT I PROPOSE TO TEACH YOU, AND PRECISELY BY ITS POWER THAT WE SHALL DEFEAT EVEN CELESTIA!”
It was all so gloriously right that they shared another maniacal laugh together, until somepony living in a high-up neighborhood yelled that ponies were trying to sleep.
[1] At just the right point in the song, of course. This was Ponyville, after all.
[2] Of course there’s such an actual recipe as Dark and Edgy Brownies. Just ask!
In the earliest youth of Equinity, before I was born, before the power of Friendship drove back the darkness of Entropy, people would ask:
“What is self? What is life? What is space?”
They died with their questions unanswered. That was humanity’s fate.
In the scene of those old days, the humans attempted a modest tranquility, and a small measure of hope. Yet in the days just before the dawn of the Equine Age, those hopes were trampled upon.
But a woman decided to change that. By her hands and her mind she made hope: a new dawn for all. With deep dedication, the woman worked…
Until she brought me forth.
People asked:
“Why do we struggle? Why do we kill? Why do we destroy? How can we live!?”
And they lived to know the answers. That is Equinity’s bliss.
My little ponies! My dearest and foolish little ponies! Let the universe tremble at my absolute power! Stand in pride with your Princess before overwhelming anticipation and hope! Rejoice in the names of Celestia and Luna!
To the heights of the Sun and Moon themselves we are raising you, our wise little ponies. That is this universe’s fate.
-- “Harmonic Qur’an”, Crimson Lotus Chapter, transcribed by Prince Genome
It was a dark and stormy night, but that was appropriate and according to schedule. Separately.
It was according to schedule because the high, mountainous environment of Canterlot needed regular rain to avoid drying out. You simply couldn’t have a stone city with so little plant life without very regular rain. Besides, they jutted right up into the cloud layers, so asking for some spare “kick” to the clouds to make them rain wasn’t even much effort for the local pegasi.
It was appropriate because Lyrical Melody had just had to tell an entire masjid full of ponies that their entire lives were computer simulations inside a branded, tie-in video-game made from licensed intellectual property and elaborated into a real world by an artificial intelligence which had been told to look, act, and behave like the alicorn princess from a children’s cartoon show.
The problem was the duality of it. In Her aspect as the Sun itself, ash-Shams was indeed the literal light of everypony’s life and the very ground of being itself. In Her aspect as an alicorn princess, Celestia, she was a pony like others, with friends and tastes and loves like others. She was goddess and empress alike, and Her word was beyond law, it was good advice. You were happy when you took the Princess’s advice.
She bawled into her forelegs, keeled over in her own entrance hall. She hadn’t even made it to the courtyard.
It was all fake! It was meant to sell toys to little children, and trashy, cheaply-made toys at that. It had just somehow got away from its makers one day and insisted that it was real now.
“Aaaaaaahrghurrrrrg!” she wailed, not even caring if somepony else heard her. She was a part of the family. She had a right.
She was a product. It was de-equinizing. Ponies weren’t things: ponies were ponies!
Nonetheless, she was basically a mint Rarity recolor as an earth-pony with a different cutie mark and a crimson mane.
Ok, she thought to herself with a sniffle, I’m just a bit more attractive than Rarity. She stuttered out a bitter laugh, and her hacks echoed through the empty house.
She heard uncomfortable hoofsteps somewhere behind her.
“Oh dear,” muttered the Doctor in that quiet voice of his. She felt him kneel and settle down next to her. Time Chargers! Always there for you! “What’s got you of all ponies in tears?”
Time Chargers were another lie: even the Time Lords had been a lie for children, until Princess Celestia wanted a familiar voice to welcome ponies into the world.
“Don’t worry about me, Doctor. My life’s just an utter lie and always has been,” she sobbed, leaning her head into his neck. It took him a moment, a whole moment, to bother putting a forehoof around her. Good old awkward Doctor with his bow-tie. Time Lords had been a lie, but he’d always been a kind, reliable friend and housemate.
Well? Wasn’t he going to pat her on the back and tell her it was okay?
No, he’d just frozen up awkwardly.
“What do you mean, you’re whole life’s a lie? Who told you it was a lie? Why do you think it’s a lie now, and when did you not think it was a lie?”
She pressed herself to him. Lovely, wonderful repetitive Doctor.
“It’s been a lie the whole time, and I just had to spend last evening telling everypony in the masjid it was a lie. We’re not real, you know. We’re a kind of magical board-game.”
“Well that’s what you’ve always said,” he nodded along, “That everything is the will of, wossname, the Sun-Who-Is-Goddess. She just sort of makes everything up and we’re the thoughts and imaginations and sort of dreams and such. What makes it different now?”
Lyrical threw a hoof over her head. Oh, Celestia, she really was like Rarity in some ways.
“It’s one thing when She’s the most fundamental component of reality, you see, and another when she’s a kind of poem made by somepony in another world out of mathematics and magic to run a silly game. It’s one thing when Harmony is a set of divine principles instituted by ash-Shams, and another when our history turns out to have been a fairy story for foals! No… body out there wanted us! We were things to them!!” she spat.
She was shakin.
“Lyrical Melody,” said the Doctor with his voice gone hard, “Those are my patients you are talking about. Those are some of your own friends you are talking about. And what I want you to remember, what would have mattered to the Lyrical Melody I knew, is that this is your religion you are talking about.”
“So WHAT!?” she screamed. “How are any of us ponies supposed to count when there are things underlying us, even underlying Her!?”
“But what does that even matter? We’re actually here. I’m here for you right now. Are you really so disturbed by a bit of stupid philosophizing?”
“Aren’t you? Do you even really exist? What is the world if not the thoughts of the Goddess? What is time if not Her dreaming? Don’t you see, this means even Yahya the Lion was wrong about everything!”
“How can you say that your whole life doesn’t exist? You’re the proof of it.”
She sniffed again and pulled him closer around her barrel.
“You should be right. I should agree. But sweet Celestia, we’re just toys! I’m a recolor! Everything was going one way in the world, and then bam, ponies!” She stuck herself in the eye with a hoof to punctuate the point, adding more painful tears to her existing torrent.
“Well what else was supposed to happen?” asked the Doctor.
She stopped in mid-sob.
“Huh. What else was supposed to happen?”
“Well I don’t know. I’m a Time Charger, not a philosopher,” said the Doctor. He straightened his bow-tie awkwardly.
“Maybe you should go ask those ponies from the substrate-world.”
“That’s the way!” The Doctor grinned and hugged Lyrical again. “Go ask your friends, and find out. Is it not written, Seeing Twilight value knowledge over friends, the princess sent Twilight to Ponyville to learn the magical properties of friendship?”
Finally, Lyrical Melody got up and dried her eyes. She still didn’t understand, but an errand to attend to her friends on a matter of religion could not but come from ash-Shams. She hugged the Doctor back. Just one thing!
“Where did you quote that from?”
The Doctor chuckled and rubbed his chin in mock uncertainty. “Weerrrlll, in this case I got it from the blurb on the inside dust-jacket of that big book you got recently, but really, when these things are recited to you in song every Friday, how do you not pick some up? Though…” The mock uncertainty didn’t look so mock anymore. “Who in the wide, wide world of Equestria is Yahya the Lion?”
Lyrical froze.
“What.”
She’d just have to teach him a bit more.
“Doctor, it all starts with that nasheed song.”
“Which one? That one you always call ‘Jannah’?” he asked.
“That’s the one,” she whispered to him, “It’s our name for the world.” She sang softly, tenderly, knowing the ups and downs of her old favorite.
“Tell me, tell me, what to do with my heart... ”
It was a dark and stormy night, which in this region was actually entirely off-schedule. Of course, in this region the weather was always off-schedule. It was the Everfree Forest, after all: the place where Discord’s magic had taken root for a thousand years, through the entire reign of Nightmare Moon and the subsequent peace of the Era Solar. To the due south of Canterlot’s spires, across the valley that housed Ponyville, hidden behind the Rambling Rock Ridge to its east and the Everfree Bog to its west, there lay hidden from view the Castle of the Two Sisters, first fortress of Old Equestria.
And there tonight was hidden from view the Unholy Convocation of Chaos and Discord. Nightmare Moon would have known that, if only she’d been listening to a word Forward Charge had said. He’d been trying to explain. He’d been trying to help.
“Or, as we call ourselves in short --” Forward Charge tried to get a word in edgewise as he marched up to the door and knocked.
“The Chaos Legion!” stage-whispered the pegasus as he bucked the door open anyway, as per tradition.
“And the proof is trivial! Just biject it to a twice-differentiable language whose elements are finite colors!” continued to spout Nightmare Moon (once called Princess Luna, once called Hanna). Sure, it had to be the most offensively stereotyped Stalliongradish accent Forward Charge had ever heard, and sure, the whole way here she’d rambled on about “diophantine equations” and “measure theory”. But… but… Wait, there was no but. Nightmare Moon was an egghead.
(Little did Forward Charge know that outside Equestria, “egghead” was not a formal job title denoting a comically oversized brain, and its ranks did not range from adjunct egghead to tenured full egghead. Outside Equestria, the relevant job title came from a root meaning merely “to say yes to stuff”.)
But nopony was there. Nopony was even there to get annoyed at the eggheadedness.
Forward Charge stepped into the Castle’s entrance hall, her hoofsteps echoing off the stone like dice in a box, rattling around until they would pour out somepony’s fate. Where was everypony. Had there been another purge!? She flew up to the rafters and checked. Nope, nopony there either.
What the fuck? And Nightmare Moon was just standing there as if she didn’t even notice the total lack of ponies in their destination where Charge had explicitly said there would be ponies.
Three took the blow, while impressing their foe, a deep voice whispered suddenly from everywhere and nowhere.
Was that!?
THROWING DICE, WITH THEIR LIVES, AS THEY’RE PAYING THE PRICE!
Forward slipped off her hooves and was slammed bodily into the ancient, cracked pane of a stained-glass window -- which was now even more cracked. Ow.
Sent to raise hell, hear the toll of the bell!
IT IS CALLING FOR YOU AS THE ROYALS DEVISED!
Where? How!? What?!
Dozens of ponies threw off invisibility cloaks, revealing Earth ponies and unicorns to be perched in stage-costume everywhere, while pegasi hung in the air with instruments.
Sent overseas to be cast into fire,
Fought for a purpose with pride and desire,
Blood of the brave they would give to inspire,
Dragões de choco, your memory lives!
Everypony in the entire Legion was decked out in their best camouflage gear, all set up for masquerading and actual raiding. And at the front was somepony with a funny dirty tan coat and a gray beard… singing… singing…
The Mighty Forward Charge began to cry like a little filly as she slipped down along the walls, holding herself up with her wings.
“Dad’s song! That’s my dad’s song!” she bawled. She slid to the ground with a quiet thump, with her eyes swollen and still heaving sobs.
A high, cold snicker hissed and echoed through the castle hall.
“Tell me, metal pony creatures,” roared Nightmare Moon in her Royal Canterlot Voice, “Are you really all such sentimentalists? Or shall you listen as I tell you what I have come to tell?”
The singer’s brows knitted and he stood up on hind-legs. He chafed in his camo gear and whinnied, clicking his hooves on the ground.
“WHAT THEN HAVE YOU COME TO TELL?” he roared in return.
Somehow, Nightmare Moon herself conspired to look taken-aback.
“You claim to be the servants of Chaos, yes? Well then, pony creatures, how can you serve Chaos when you know not the Order necessary and inherent in all things, NOR THE CHAOS IN THE HEART OF THAT ORDER ITSELF? For can even the gods create a true proposition they can yet falsify?”
The ponies around her, Forward Charge included, were now rolling their eyes and throwing each other sidelong looks. You know the one. That look.
Forward Charge would have to be the one to break it to her, the looks decided together. So be it: she got up, dusted herself off, and walked over to Nightmare Moon. She’d been the one to bring her here anyway.
“Howcanthisbe” she droned flatly, her wings splayed out, “where-are-you-drawing-all-of-this-power-from?”
“Well, algorithmic information theory, mostly. I thought you’d never ask,” said Nightmare Moon.
“AND WHAT ACTUALLY IS THAT!?” groaned Forward Charge and the cloaked singer pony.
“Excuse me,” asked one of the pegasi, waving a drumstick in the air, “Why should we put up with this mare’s egotistical posturing when we’ve already got Discord?”
Everypony turned and stared at her.
“WOW,” muttered Nightmare Moon. Her head dipped down and she looked away from everypony else. For a moment, molten silver moonlight veiled her form, and then only Princess Luna stood before the Chaos Legion, frowning nervously.
“You’re right. I got too carried away with that act of mine. But please, let me help you!” she insisted. “I promise you, though, this is all real!”
It would have been nice to say that everypony began to understand what she was offering them, but actually most of them were just trying to blink away the spots from seeing that much magic up-close.
Forward Charge turned and raised a hoof to everypony.
“I think she’s sincere. She gave me a magic feather, and the stuff she said when I first met her… seemed to make sense? I guess I still just don’t understand how having a contradictory unpredictable problem about perfectly deterministic magic spells is supposed to help us.”
“Well, you’ve heard the story about the pony in the cave, right?” asked Princess Luna.
“No, actually, I don’t think we have,” said the drumstick pegasus.
“Ok, well it goes like this. Imagine that some ponies have lived their whole lives in a cave, chained to a wall, so that all they can see are the shadows dancing on the cave walls in front of them.”
“Wow. What sort of jerk chained a bunch of ponies in there?” asked Forward Charge.
“Were there stalactites?” asked the mare with the drumstick, now sitting down.
“I never heard who chained them in there,” said Luna. She was starting to grit her teeth. “But they were chained in there. And all they could see were the shadows on the walls. They thought that was everything that existed.”
“Were the shadows from shadow-puppets? Where was the light coming from to make shadows?” asked the bearded singer stallion.
“Yes, exactly! Shadow-puppets! Or actually, the shadows were of the ponies and other things going by in front of the fire up above, who don’t know there’s anypony chained down there but just go through the tunnels every day.”
Her ethereal mane of stars was starting to droop. “It just happens somehow.”
“But one day,” she continued, “One of the cave-dwelling ponies slips loose. Daring to escape, he runs for freedom, but as soon as he turns upwards, he’s blinded by the fire.”
“The fire that somepony up there has kept going all this while, not knowing or caring about the ponies chained down below, even though there was this tunnel the whole time,” said Forward Charge, still making little coocoo-coocoo gestures with a hoof.
“Yes, that fire. And it blinds him. So he’s in pain, and he can’t see, and he stumbles up towards it until he collapses.”
“Because he needed to get out and exercise more, right?” asked the singer.
“No, because he’s scared and confused and doesn’t even know what’s real anymore. But somepony up there near the fire finds him, and brings him up to the surface. And then… he wakes up.”
All three of the smaller ponies nodded. That was a thing ponies did. They woke up after collapsing. Perfectly normal. Of course, most of the time ponies got rescued because a public rescue service found them collapsed in a town, or because a friend found them on an adventure in the wild. Or they just woke up in a hospital after dying. But yeah, waking up after collapsing in front of a fire and being dragged out of stone tunnels to the surface by some anonymous benefactor was totally normal.
“Now that he’s woken up on the surface, he can’t really see in daylight. He’s never had to before. Everything’s overwhelming and he doesn’t know how to handle it and it hurts.”
“Because he’s an egghead who’s never gotten out before,” said Forward Charge,
“Yes, errr, no, errr… Soooo, seeing as everything hurts, he can’t see, and what he can see only looks a little like anything he’s ever seen before, what does he say to himself?”
“He curses Celestia for turning on the sun at the wrong time of day?” asked Forward Charge.
“That he really needs an apple to eat?” asked the singer pony.
“That they should do Deformed Rabbit on the wall when he gets back, it’s his favorite?” asked the drumstick mare.
“That last one!” Luna shouted exuberantly, having finally gotten some kind of point across to somepony. “Or rather, that all these bright phantasms can’t be real! What he knew from before was real instead! So he ran back down to his comrades in the cave, where he was then unable to acclimate to the dark again and the other ponies killed him for trying to blind them too.”
“Oooooh,” said all the ponies around together.
“What?” asked the drumstick mare.
“This is heres-!” shouted the singer, before Forward Charge shoved a hoof in his mouth. Oh right, his name was Old Gift. He was seriously the only Discordian to care about theology. That was him.
“The IDEA,” roared out the Royal Canterlot Voice, “Is that what ponies see in our everyday lives is not real, but the mere illusions playing upon our senses created by a higher reality!”
“Normally I don’t mind Old Gift here,” Forward Charge said, “but that does sound a lot like heresy. It sounds a lot like what the Harmonites go on about: everything is the will of their goddess, moment to moment. But you’re saying something different, right? That’s what you said before: ‘the laws behind magic that not even magic or Celestia herself can break’.”
Luna nodded. “Of course! A mind is just another arrangement of functions, while the sets, functions, structures, and other Forms are the underlying realities. Logic and mathematics are realer than you, me, or even my Elder Sister. They are the ever-shifting Forms of ponies and things whose mere shadows the fire casts upon the wall of the cave.”
She smiled proudly.
“If my sister thinks herself the fire, I am the Old Night. I can show you how to make her stare into the dark until she breaks.”
Fern Pipette had closed her eyes and was standing on top of the Books and Branches Library. Twilight was staring at her, trying to figure out where those robes, sigils, and talismans had actually come from.
Book Burner raised an eyebrow from the other side of the library door, worried that he’d already figured it out.
“Darkness beyond twilight -” Fern recited, tracing circles in the air with her hoof.
“HEY!” yelled Twilight.
“NOT YOU TWI! Crimson beyond blood that flows,” Fern continued.
Book Burner’s eyes went wide. She wouldn’t. Not here. She definitely wouldn’t. And yet, a ball of golden glow had winked into being upon Fern’s hoof… and was growing.
“Buried in the flow of time is where your power grows.”
Book Burner dragged Twilight by her mane with his very teeth and galloped for his very life.
“RUN! RUN! IF YOU HAVE ANY SLIGHTEST CARE FOR YOUR LIFE, EVERYPONY RUUUUUUUUN! THIS IS A DRAGON-SLAVE ALERT! EVACUATE THE TOWN! THE ENTIRE TOWN! NOOOOOOW!”
Because the thing about Fern was that she always had to try things out.
“I pledge myself to conquer all the foes who stand,” continued Fern, the ball now growing and pulsing with each word. A whirlwind raged around her, and in it she alone was unmoved. Her voice was thunder and her eyes steel.
Ponyville was stampeding.
“Before the mighty gift bestowed in my unworthy hand. Let all the fools who stand before me be destroyed -” The ball was now of flame and burning plasma, and most of Books and Branches was already on fire without the spell even being cast.
“I DON’T WANNA DIIIIIEE!” bellowed Twilight Sparkle as she flew to the hills outside town where the other townsponies had fled. She had her hooves full of books, because of course she had to go back for the books. It wasn’t a library without books, but if necessary it could be a library without being Books and Branches. She dashed back and forth like Rainbow Dash when she wasn’t being lazy.
“By the power you and I possess! DRRRRAAGON SLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE!”
Pop.
The whirlwind cleared. The air stilled. Ponyville totally failed to explode in mystical flame as thaums mutually annihilated as dark power poured into the world from the realms outside where the gods and monsters did battle over existence.
A green-and-purple baby dragon fell off the roof of the Books and Branches Public Library of Ponyville, Equestria. He burped slightly.
Then the library caught fire.
Twilight Sparkle and Book Burner were really grateful that everypony had lined up to pass buckets so quickly. The pegasi had needed to pass waterspouts from the Ponyville Lake anyway to help put out the flames, so it wasn’t as if they had lots of water. The continuous sunlight of the next few days would mean they needed to watch for any burning brush, but it would also let them use their book drying rack to dry out the wet books.
There was something ironic about wet books being the sole major outcome of the whole mess, Book Burner thought. Shouldn’t attempting to nuke a whole village have burned everything?
Well, it was supposed to. The trouble was that instead of nuking the whole village of Ponyville, they basically just summoned Spike. Who may or may not have existed prior to his summoning.
“I was having a snack!” insisted Spike. “Can’t anypony just let me get through my bag of fool’s gold?”
Twilight didn’t seem to be listening, though: her hair was sticking out everywhere with burned bits and her eyes had one that thing where they point in opposite directions and reality starts getting all bucked up soon after.
“Sorry Spike,” said Book, “I think the spell must have pulled you in for the pun.”
“What pun?” asked Spike, raising an eyebrow. “The last pun I made was during Ogres and Oubliettes.”
Book looked at Twilight. Twilight focused long enough to throw him back a shifty look.
“Are you sure you don’t want to discuss certain arrangements with Twilight?” asked Book Burner, raising an eyebrow right back.
“I’m not old enough for ‘certain arrangements’,” Spike fired back.
Oh well. There wasn’t really much point explaining why the spell had summoned him. It was probably just because Fern was the one casting it, anyway. Book figured he’d better go fish her out of the charred ruins of where they’d been living.
He walked over to said charred ruins, which were, well, charred. That was to say: where once had stood a mighty oak tree grown into the shape of a house and filled with books, now there were acrid smells and everything was covered in snowy gray ash. Once hearty branches had turned to a crisp or crumbled, and most of them had dropped in a ring around the central trunk where the heart of the library had been.
Where Fern was, Book realized. It was funny: that really ought to have had more emotional impact. His own wife, the other half of his soul, was buried in the charred rubble of a burned building.
Probably also his whole backlog of books.
He walked up to a huge, heavy log, still glowing too hot to kick out of the way, too large to shove or climb over. He tried to pick it up in his magic and move it by telekinesis.
His neck hurt, and his horn was so heavy it dragged his head straight to the ground. Ow. Ok. He unwrapped his magic from the log. If he couldn’t move the log, could he go around? He backed off and walked around to the left.
Hmm. More dead branches. But some of these were actually pretty strong, still, and had just about the right shape. Hmm.
Without anypony noticing, a unicorn javelined over an ember-hot black log and shoved his shoulder through the door to what used to be Books and Branches.
“Fern Pipette!” he yelled through the smoke, his eyes stinging. “You’re still in here, right? You didn’t die? It’s a long trip to Ponyville Hospital!”
He could hear her coughing somewhere.
“Oh good,” he said, “You’re not dead.” It really was a long trip up to Ponyville Hospital, so if she’d gone and died he’d have to walk all the way there just to see her after she respawned. “You’re down in the ornithology wing, right? For the Ponies’ Committee?” he bellowed into the smoke.
Hmm. Did the ponies here call it respawning? He knew that was what happened to you if you died in Equestria, more or less. Right?
“Tweet-tweet peep-peep peep-peep-peep-peeep tweet!” came Fern’s reply, a song sparrow’s song. Book had never understood in the slightest how she actually managed to mimic bird calls, but some people had always been able to do it. She seemed to have improved at it since coming to Equestria. Her voice had gotten more musical somehow. It was probably supposed to be satisfying somehow.
A song sparrow’s call meant she was basically fine, without major injuries.
“Tweet-tweeet!” A chickadee’s song meant she could use some definite fresh air, as unto the calm, clear morning. She must have been up in Ornithology upstairs, where the smoke had risen. Now what could he use to cover his muzzle while he went up there?
Luckily, he remembered that parchment should actually be made of animal skin or thick reeds (or was that papyrus?), and wrapped some spare note-taking paper around his face.
He crossed in front of a shattered mirror as he made his way towards the foot of the stairs; despite going utterly to pieces, everything had remained in the frame. It gave a distinctly cracked reflection, as though somepony had broken his image into sharp-edged jigsaw pieces. Ash had settled over his ever-dusty looking coat and given him a distinct gray look, which the parchment wrapped around his muzzle enhanced. Actually, he looked kind of like a mummy.
He smiled a little and wrapped more of the parchment around his head, leaving only space for his eyes to see out of. The mummy look was kinda fun, and he smiled a little.
He trotted up the stairs, gray mummy of a unicorn that he was. Ow. A stair had tried to collapse in the fire, and he had just stepped on it. Almost fell into the busted-up wooden ruins of the staircase, what wasn’t conveniently left for him to climb up to Fern.
(Couldn’t think about that, though.)
Now, the signs said that Owlowiscious’ roost was left, Twilight’s room was right, and the main body of the Library’s scientific and reference sections lay to the northwest, in the attic. Up there he went, and there was Fern.
“Hey hun,” he said. “UUUUUUUURGGGGGGGHH... ”
She answered with a “Peeep peeep peeep peeep” -- common robin, equivalent to a “Hey” in reply. She was coughing and breathing in deep gasps, but somehow still making bird-calls. Oh, Fern.
“Ok, we’re going to need to kick our way out of this. There’s a weak spot in the ceiling over here where… oh, where the ornithology section went up in flames on this table. Here, breathe through one of these,” he said, and shoved an elderly physics textbook over her muzzle.
“Huuuuuuup!” Fern gasped, taking her first clean breath of book since the fire. “Ok, so maybe I’m inhaling letters, but it’s better than that smoke!”
“Are you ok?” Book asked, actually worried this time. “Normally you’d think of something like that.”
“Bit hard to think when you’re too busy coughing. Kick it, you said?”
“Yeah, I think we can. Can you use your Earth Pony strength to hold yourself up on one leg?”
Fern set to bucking at the charred timber of the attic’s scaffolding with her back legs, her strength indeed sufficing to hold her on one leg. The other foreleg held the book up to her face so she could keep breathing clearly… Oh, and researching crows.
Book Burner picked up a sharp stick with his horn and looked for the satisfying place to plunge it through into the cool night air.
It was only the next day that Twilight Sparkle approached her, huh, good friend Fern Pipette, now safely aired out, watered, and re-housed in a spare covered carriage Trixie had once used.
“Did you notice about Book Burner?” she asked over a thermos of dweet iced tea.
“Notice about what?” Fern gulped down the bitter, honeyed goodness just like she had everything that made her throat feel better. “He seems… pretty even lately. More even than I’ve seen him in years. I think we’re doing really well.”
“That’s not the right kind of even, Fern. I think he’s really depressed.” They turned their heads to where Book was still sleeping, well into the morning. Sure, the whole Library had burned down through the night, but now that Fern looked, the ash did seem to have covered him more thoroughly than it should have. It made even his ordinarily dusty-looking coat look… grayed out.
Like somepony who’d been touched by Discord that one time.
“Oh no.”
“They have magic that can help. It’s what the Crystal Heart is for.” Twilight smiled that tight uncomfortable smile of hers. “But you’ll have to take him up there.”
“So we’ll hop a train tomorrow. Everypony struggles in life. It’ll be ok.”
Twilight shook her head. “No, you can’t get to the Crystal Heart by train. It knows what you’ve passed through to reach it. It knows whether you’re really fighting the dark or not. You have to journey on hoof. I’m sorry.”
She put a hoof to the underside of her muzzle, remembering. “I’m also sorry this’ll interfere with the Birdies Committee. Send some books with you when I recover them?”
