When Twilight Sparkle conducts an experiment with a surprising result she wasn't quite prepared for, what could a single flower do to her entire view of the world? [Featured in the RCL!]
Twilight Sparkle conducts an experiment and succeeds in obtaining an unusual flower with some intriguing properties.
What it could teach her, however, might prove to be more than she bargained for. She finds herself having to face surprising—and maybe frightening—new possibilities about the universe. How does it work? What is 'real', exactly? And why are these suddenly such uncomfortable and challenging questions for her?
Pre-reading and editing for this story was done by Grand Moff Pony, The Dobermans, SIGAWESOME, Reese, Georg, LCranston, and Equestria Daily pre-readers 63.546 and Slorg. Many thanks to all of them for helping this get where it is!
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
– Niels Bohr
Princess Twilight Sparkle walked toward the pond with slow, deliberate steps. When she arrived at its edge, she stopped and stood still in the lush grass, watching how the glass-smooth surface reflected a perfect inverted image of everything around. It was like a giant misplaced mirror set into the landscape of the surrounding meadow.
The water was so incredibly motionless and crystal clear that she felt a disconcerting sense of unrealness settling in after staring at it for a few seconds. Like the slow-building urge to scratch an itch, she began feeling a growing temptation to reach out and stomp it with a hoof so that she could break the impossible perfection of it. She wanted to hear a splash and feel the wetness and convince herself by seeing the spreading concentric ripples that this was ordinary liquid and nothing more, that the ordering of the world was still intact and the rules that describe it were still hard and fast—that they were still real, even here.
She didn't. Instead, she shook her head, then took a couple steps back and focused. There was a more important purpose here, she reminded herself, a better experiment to show what she hoped to find.
Twilight narrowed her eyes and concentrated while she looked out across the water. For a few seconds, the stillness of the reflections on the pond remained unbroken. Then, almost imperceptibly at first, tiny ripples began to distort that mirror image in perfect radiating circles, caused by small buds on thin green stalks that were breaking through the surface. While she watched, the stalks thickened and grew, climbing eagerly toward the sunlight in the clear blue sky overhead, while leaves like lilypads unfurled and floated in place around them. The waves became more pronounced in the disturbed water, and complex patterns of interference formed where the ripples expanded outward and hit each other.
As time passed, the prodigious growth of stems and foliage slowed and came to a gradual stop. Those ripples dissipated while the pond became smooth again... although Twilight knew they would never entirely vanish. Once set in motion, the water could never be the same as it was.
"A lot of things might never be the same after this," she whispered to herself, although she barely heard it.
The bud atop each stalk swelled and grew. The green petioles surrounding them opened, revealing perfectly black shapes within. Over the course of minutes, the shapes bloomed outward into petals and unfurled into perfectly black flowers.
Twilight relaxed her focus and watched for a while from the shore. The flowers waited on their stems sticking out above the water, motionless, with a presence that seemed completely natural. If she hadn’t just watched them grow, it would have been easy for her to assume they’d always been here.
It struck her that they were almost idyllically beautiful where they were, in fact. For a brief moment she thought about just leaving them alone. She could call off the plan and just sit here awhile enjoying the calm, letting this peaceful scene remain untouched. Maybe it would be better that way...
No. That wouldn't answer any of the questions. It had to be done.
After shaking off her hesitation, she reached out with her magic to grasp the nearest flower. She pulled upward, gently at first but then ramping with increasing force as she encountered resistance. It felt anchored to the bottom of the pond, and her horn began glowing more brightly as she pulled harder. With a sudden feeling of something snapping, roots yielded and broke free. The entire plant shot up to hover above the water, making a loud splash as it cleared the surface. New waves, much larger than before, radiated from that spot. The disturbance to the mud below stirred up a plume of dark silt that began spreading through the crystal water like a cloud of obscuring ink.
For a fraction of a second, Twilight manifested a magical force field along a two dimensional plane six inches below the flower she was holding up. The field, far sharper-edged than even the finest razor could ever be, passed through the stem and sliced it with a perfect molecule-fine clean cut.
There was a sudden feeling that she was holding less weight in her telekinetic magic, and the lower part of the plant dropped back into the water, splashing again. It made more waves that spread the cloudy mud further. A sudden sting of remorse for killing it, and for degrading the tranquility and clarity of such a beautiful pond, shot through her. She wondered why she hadn't thought to just cut off the flower in the first place instead of just crudely yanking up the whole plant.
But what was done was done, so she made herself push regret aside. She had the part that interested her, the only thing that mattered here. Keep the bigger picture in mind, she told herself. All the rest of this was, after all, a disposable means to that end. Very soon, this would be gone and it wouldn't matter.
The question of how far the limits of that disposability reached was troubling, though. How was this different from...?
She shook her head, admonishing herself not to be silly and sentimental. Of course it was different. It couldn't possibly be the same. This experiment would merely verify that obvious fact... or, at least, falsify some of the most troubling hypotheses...
Keeping the flower held tight in her magical grasp, Twilight spread her wings and took flight. There was nothing immediately around the pond, just grassy meadows and gently rolling hills, but she knew what direction to head in, and before too long she started to see stands of tall trees. She recognized them as the Whitetail Woods and found herself overflying Fluttershy's cottage. The orderly rows of Sweet Apple Acres' orchards weren't far off from there. Clusters of homes and shops that marked the edges of Ponyville came into sight. Her home, the crystal tree of her palace, was visible shortly after that.
Upon arriving, she hovered outside one of the palace windows and opened it easily with magic. They all had thaumic shielding in addition to their physical locks to prevent just this kind of easy intrusion, she knew, but that was no issue to overcome here under these circumstances where control was hers to exert.
She flew in and landed in the familiar hallway leading to her bedroom. Small tapping sounds of her hooves against the hard floor echoed in her ears while she walked, seeming loud by contrast to the otherwise complete silence, and she was acutely conscious of the dark flower she carried next to her, floating in a soft purple glow of magic.
When she opened the bedroom door with a gentle push, it didn't make any noise. She took a few steps in and looked around. Everything was just like she remembered leaving it, ready for what she'd planned.
Broken seal indicator taped between the door and the frame?
Well, I just broke it here, of course, but presumably it should show as intact later if this works, so check.
Thaumometric readout still printing uninterrupted?
Check.
Sensors all in place?
Check.
It occurred to her to wonder why she was even doing this mental checklist. She wasn't really here, so it wasn't actually verifying anything that mattered. It did make her feel better, though, to have the security blanket of familiar habit and procedure.
Alarm units set? Temperature monitoring? Remote trip cameras?
Check, check, check.
Ready to take the last step?
...Do I really want to know what I might know after this?
She hesitated.
...Check...
In her mind, Twilight called up the form of the spell she'd felt during the... incident. At the time, just seeing it, feeling it, had left her burning with curiosity. It was strange new magic she'd never encountered. What was it trying to do, exactly? Testing it out for herself would settle what had really been happening, and in spite of whatever misgivings she had, that thought excited her.
The magical pattern grew, readying itself in her horn with the tingling feeling of a nascent spell. There was one last moment of hesitation, standing near her bed, before she targeted a spot a little bit in front of her in the open air. She gave the pattern a push, executing the casting, and her horn flared to life.
The spell felt like a scalpel slicing a slit through a sheet of paper—slicing through a paper wall that was all around her, unperceived until that moment when her magic made contact with it. Holding the spell active, she found she was able to grab the edges of the slit and pull it open into a hole with an outline that shimmered in faint multihued scintillations of light. She looked into it and saw nothing different, just the same room, but there was a strange sense of elsewhere, something beyond that paper wall... and it was disconnected, like there was suddenly a dead zone that her magic couldn't pass through.
It reminded her of when she was a little filly, the first time she'd looked out through a thaumically-shielded window and tried to use telekinetic magic to move something on the other side of it. Nothing happened, despite her best efforts and the certainty that she was doing it right, and she'd discovered after a moment of confusion that an odd numbing sensation was flooding through her horn. It was a feeling like reaching out into an infinite expanse of empty space and finding nothing there she could grasp or feel, no feedback to tell her anything. It wasn’t pleasant. That first time it happened, she’d almost panicked from a sense of disorientation, vertigo from feeling lost in what seemed like a directionless pure void.
Twilight shook her head and dismissed the stray recollection.
The flower. That's the point here. Don't forget that.
She refocused and floated it through the opening, pushing from behind as far as she could until her telekinetic magic was cut off when it moved into the space behind the hole. No longer supported in the air at that point, the flower dropped down and vanished out of sight—where it ended up, only time would tell.
With the task done, she relaxed and released the spell. When it wasn't held open, the hole collapsed back into a slit, then the slit merged back together and sealed up like it had never existed. That perception of the boundaries of the paper wall disappeared. The sense of elsewhere was gone.
Twilight turned and quickly exited the room. There wasn't anything left to do but wait and see what results, if any, were wrought. In the meantime, she could release control now and let whatever would happen, happen. She wouldn't be stuck here too much longer... or at least it wouldn't feel too long, anyway.
These things were funny like that. Time was pliable, and it was often hard to tell here that it was really even passing at all, but nonetheless it somehow moved forward in fuzzy ill-defined chunks easily enough when it was convenient.
She looked forward to the alarm clock going off soon so she could find out if the night's work had accomplished anything or not.
"Hello... Equus to Twilight..." Spike waved his arms in front of her face. "Come in, Twilight. Where are you right now?"
"I'm here, Spike," Twilight responded quickly in a sharp tone of voice, silencing him. She turned away and took a breath, then let it out again slowly. It was a good question, she couldn't help but admit—one she found herself feeling increasingly helpless to answer in recent days. Maybe that's why it rubbed her the wrong way, the frightening sense that it was slipping out of her grasp.
Where were they, really?
A guest room. The Royal Palace. The City of Canterlot. Equestria. Equus. The solar system. Spiral arm of the home galaxy. Local cluster. Galactic supercluster. The universe.
She furrowed her eyes and gave the floor a tiny stomp with one forehoof. Was any of that—
"Yeah? Well, it sure doesn't seem like it." Spike's voice broke into her distracted thoughts and they fell apart, crumbling like a sandcastle in a heavy wave. "I really think those delegates at the last panel ended up feeling ignored, and you know how griffons are."
"I..." Twilight sighed and looked down at the rich burgundy carpet of her guest room. "You're right, Spike. I'm sorry. That could have gone better."
"I'll say," Spike mumbled. "I'm gonna be seeing those glares in my nightmares for a while."
Twilight cringed on the inside at the mention of anything to do with dreams, but fought not to let it show in her outward demeanor. He was right. She really had to get on the ball and set these distractions aside.
"Look, I'll get my head back in the game and run damage control at the next event," Twilight said. "I know this conference is important, I just..."
"You just what?"
Twilight clenched her jaw and felt her stomach twist inside of her, a familiar knot of worry she'd been getting closely acquainted with lately.
I just found out something I was really hoping I wouldn't. I just discovered that maybe none of this matters, and maybe nothing is what it seems like, and maybe we're not even really here!
She wanted to explode with all of these things, but kept it inside. What good would it do, yelling all this nonsense at poor Spike, when he was just trying to help?
No, he didn't deserve it. It wasn't him... it was her own fault. She was sorry she'd ever found that pond, sorry she'd ever tried the spell, and sorry she'd ever seen what she'd seen.
That flower.
That lousy flower. It wouldn't even wilt, even though she'd had it for almost a week. It made no sense. If it would at least wilt like a normal flower, it could almost seem like it might be...
Real...
"Nevermind." Twilight shook her head. She cleared her throat. "It's fine. I just... It's fine."
"Is there anything you want to talk about?" Spike asked. His face slackened and the ridge of scales on his brows knitted closer together while looked into Twilight's eyes, as if he was trying to find something. "It seems like you've been distracted for days."
"No," Twilight said. "Thank you, though."
"C'mon." Spike smiled at Twilight with his best disarming grin. "We've been besties since the day I hatched. You know you can tell me anything."
"Oh, I know that." Twilight smiled back and gave Spike a brief hug. "It's just that I'm not even sure myself. It's sweet of you, but I really wouldn't know what to say."
"Alright. I guess I understand. You gonna be alright at least for the rest of the conference, though?" Spike asked. "I don't know how much more I can take of their arrogance… or their breath."
"I'll manage," Twilight said. She started pacing around the room, only half-conscious that she was doing it. "How long until the next event?"
Spike unrolled a sheet of parchment and consulted it. "Next up is the thing about inspection standards for merchandise crossing borders. That sounds exciting, right?" He rolled his eyes, then glanced at the clock. "We've got like half an hour 'til then."
"Perfect." Twilight's eyes lit up. After the long morning of nonstop meetings and panels, she welcomed this desperately needed break. Maybe it would be just enough time to do something useful.
"Spike, take a letter, please."
"Uhh... but... Princess Celestia's right here at the conference," he said. "Couldn't you just talk to her in person between events or something?"
"No..." Twilight shook her head. "I mean, a letter to Princess Luna."
"Thank you so much for joining me for tea, Twilight." Princess Luna lifted a simple but beautiful mirror-polished silver kettle and poured into two equally beautiful delicate white china teacups. "It's somewhat rare that I have the chance to properly have tea at all, let alone to have the pleasure of company."
"Thank you for the invitation," Twilight replied from across the table. In spite of her smile, she couldn’t help fidgeting while she glanced down at a box on the ground next to her chair for a split second. Suddenly self-conscious of what she was doing, she returned her attention to her hostess as quickly as she could. "I've been looking forward to it."
The palace gardens were always a comfortable place for Twilight, spacious but bordered by hedges trained into living walls that ensured privacy. The round garden table that they sat at, wrought iron with a frosted glass top, was situated under an octagonal pavilion of partly translucent cloth. It blocked most of the sun's heat, but let enough light through to avoid casting a hard shadow and instead bathed everything beneath in an inviting gentle glow. Beds of many different kinds of flowers splashed the landscaping with color and perfumed the soft breeze with a gentle, pleasant scent.
"It means a great deal to me that you've expressed interest and made the time for this," Luna said. "I very much enjoy this section of the gardens. I take any chance I can find to spend time in them, and I thought it might be nice to share the opportunity with a friend, as well." She added two cubes of sugar and a squeeze of juice from a small slice of lemon to her tea and stirred with a silver spoon. "I had also hoped it would be a good place for us to discuss what has been on your mind. You mentioned in your letter last week that you were hoping for a chance for us to speak in an informal setting, yes?"
"Oh." Twilight levitated two cubes of sugar and gently dropped them into her cup. "Yes. Well. That's... umm... I was just wondering how you're doing. Especially after the... recent... you know..." She trailed off.
"Ahh, I see." Luna nodded. She thought for a moment. "I am… much better than before. It may seem strange to say, but the creature nearly escaping from the dream was perhaps something I needed—a wake-up call, to use an ironic turn of phrase. It forced me to confront certain issues and make realizations. There are far healthier ways of addressing my regrets and learning how to accept myself, and I understand that now."
"Good." Twilight's voice was upbeat while she stirred her tea. "I'm happy to hear that something positive came from it."
"I find myself in debt to you and your friends a second time," Luna said. "I could not have overcome such a thing without you."
"It's just what we do." Twilight looked away to hide a small flattered smile. She couldn't help self-consciously fluttering her wings against her sides for a brief moment.
"Indeed." Luna turned her eyes toward a small but ornate multi-tiered serving cart next to the table. She levitated a triangular half of a small cucumber sandwich off the top tray. "Not only myself, but all of Equestria has often been in debt to all of you. Sometimes I worry that perhaps we do too little to make it known how truly appreciated you are." She took a bite of the sandwich while it hovered in midair, then set the rest of it down on a small plate on the table in front of her.
"Oh, no, I don't think any of us wants special treatment," Twilight said. "On the contrary, I would be more worried that spoiling us with privileges would disconnect us from just being normal ponies. If that happens, we might lose touch with the ability to be embodiments of the Elements we're supposed to bear."
"Hmmm." Luna nodded slowly. "A pity that we cannot honor you and your friends in a grand fashion, then, but perhaps that is for the best."
"I think so," Twilight agreed.
"And if I may return your concern, how are you doing?" Luna asked. "I understand that not every aspect of adjusting to life as an alicorn or a princess has been easy for you. I sympathize, for it is a rather abrupt change from what you must have been accustomed to before. The border delineation conference last week was quite trying, so I hear. Is there any difficulty you face that I may help with?"
"Not particularly as far as the princess thing." Twilight shook her head. "Some parts have been tough, but I think I'm coming around and figuring out how to make it all manageable. The conference was... I mean, the thing that's really been getting to me lately is more... about something else."
"Oh? What would that be?"
"I..." Twilight started to raise one forehoof, and hesitated. "I don't know if I should even ask about it, honestly."
Luna leaned forward in her seat. Her face was soft and friendly but her eyes were piercing while she looked at Twilight. "That is surely a sign that you should ask, for how will you know until you do?"
"Alright." Twilight paused and took a shallow breath, searching for words. "It's just... I'm confused. I feel like I don't understand something, no matter how I try. Or... no, that’s not quite honest. Maybe it's worse: maybe I do understand, but I'm afraid of the answer."
Luna raised a brow. "Surely it must be a very great quandary to be so challenging to my sister's greatest student. What is it?"
Twilight Sparkle tilted her head up and met Luna's eyes, looking into them intensely. There was only one question she could imagine that would get directly to the heart of the issue, and there was nothing to do but go for it... regardless of how crazy she knew it might sound.
"Is any of this real?"
For a moment the two of them just stared at each other. Silence was heavy in the garden air.
What am I even saying?
Twilight felt a nervous tension creeping through all her muscles. She became aware that her heart was beating faster, the familiar rapid but shallow pulse that came with anxiety.
Am… am I just making a fool of myself by asking something so strange, or...?
Luna, however, was much calmer, seeming unperturbed by the question. She raised her cup, getting ready to take a sip of tea. "Is any of what real?" she asked.
"This." Twilight lifted a foreleg and waved her hoof in a broad arc at everything around them. "All of... this!"
"I'm not quite sure what you mean." Princess Luna gave Twilight a look with no particularly readable expression in it. "I assure you, the royal gardens are no mere conjured illusion." She set down her teacup and her face took on a faint but kind smile.
"I mean, the entire world," Twilight said. Her eyes darted around, taking in the surroundings frantically. "All of it. This planet, space, time... us... everything."
"I suppose it depends on how one defines 'real'." Luna wrinkled her muzzle in thought as she tilted her gaze upward for a moment, pondering. "In the common everyday sense of it, however, I think it qualifies."
Twilight flattened her ears as she stared into her teacup and watched the liquid inside. What exactly had she been hoping to hear, anyway?
Her stomach felt like a thousand butterflies trapped inside were trying their best to escape.
Luna glanced down again at Twilight. She tilted her head slightly and knitted her brow. "What brings you to ask such a question?"
"Because I'm not so sure anymore," Twilight said in a small voice. Her eyes stayed locked on her teacup. "I haven't been for a little while now."
There was some faint ambient music of distant birds singing sweet songs as if they were celebrating that it was such a fine afternoon. Otherwise the garden was silent while Luna sat and patiently waited for elaboration.
"It was the Tantabus," Twilight said, barely above a whisper. "I'm sorry to bring it up again..."
"Do not worry about me, Twilight." Luna shook her head. "Please, continue."
"How could it have been trying to reach the... real world... if it existed only as part of a dream?" Twilight asked, and finally looked up at Luna again. "I've been researching this. Every line of investigation indicates that dreams are phenomena in a pony's head, and not real things, and that they're specific to individual ponies because there's nothing external about them. They're strictly imaginary, and imagination as a direct experience is limited to one pony. Present company excepted, of course."
"Indeed." Luna nodded.
"So I thought that you being an exception might account for the abilities of the Tantabus. Since it was created in your dreams, it would be part of you, and therefore it might be able to do the things you can, like gain access to different dreams and jump between them. That seemed pretty logical. But then it wanted to reach the outside... the real world. That's a much harder problem. It's a whole different question compared to just slipping between dreams, isn't it?" Twilight’s throat started to feel dry. She took a drink of her tea.
"It is, yes," Luna said.
"But even with the issues that presents, I still thought there might be a way to reconcile it with a reasonable explanation. I supposed that maybe it was just your mind and magical abilities being used forcibly by something unconscious to conjure the creature into existence external to your imagination, here in the waking world."
Luna nodded. "That could be a fairly accurate way of viewing it."
"Essentially, the Tantabus, as part of your own mind, would escape by making you replicate an exact copy of itself with an independent material existence. But it wouldn't be the same Tantabus, per se, it would just be a copy with properties consistent with real world physics and so forth. After that copy was made, the Tantabus in your mind would be perceived by you as having 'escaped', so it would cease to exist in your imagination, and would seamlessly appear to have just walked out of your mind and into the world. Or, at least, that was the only realistic way I could come up with for how this process could have worked."
"Very cleverly reasoned." Luna smiled and levitated her sandwich.
"But... it's not correctly reasoned, is it?" Twilight asked. She couldn't keep a hint of shaking out of her voice. "It wouldn't have been a copy. It would have been the same Tantabus, in a literal sense. Or, I guess the point is more that it could have been. Just the possibility is what matters, and... and it is possible."
"Interesting," Luna said in a measured voice. "How did you reach that conclusion?" She finished off what was left of the cucumber sandwich while she waited for Twilight's response.
"Experimentally," Twilight said. "Because that's me, isn't it? For better or worse I just can't leave these things alone until there's some kind of answer, so I designed an experiment."
"What sort of experiment?" Luna poured herself more tea and levitated a pastry topped with whipped cream and slices of fresh strawberries from one of the lower trays of the cart. She also offered a second one of the same type to Twilight. "Would you like one? These are among the best of the palace chef's creations, in my opinion."
"Oh, thank you." Twilight took over control of the pastry with her own telekinesis and set it on a plate in front of her, next to her cup of tea. "I remember these from when I lived here. They're one my favorites, too." She took a small bite and enjoyed the sweet taste of strawberries that flooded her tongue.
"Anyway," Twilight continued after swallowing, "the idea for the experiment came from what happened in that big collective dream you created. I discovered a lot from that about just how fine a level of control a pony can actually have. I'd read about lucid dreaming before, but I didn't know it could be that refined. Once I realized, though, it was the ideal tool. My first step was to practice until I could reliably control my dreams like that on my own. It took some getting used to, but before too long I was ready."
Twilight took another bite of her pastry. "Once I had enough control of my own dreams, the next step was to create a test subject. It had to be something that I could imagine, but couldn't actually exist as a real object, or at least not with the properties it would have in the dream."
"And what did you choose?" Luna asked. "I do hope you were careful. The things that can be created in dreams can sometimes have certain hazards, as I think has become quite clear in recent experiences."
"That was a concern I had." Twilight nodded. "I didn't create anything that had a mind of its own, of course, or something that could be dangerous. In fact... all I created was a flower."
"Just a flower?"
"A very special one," Twilight said. "But yes, a flower was all I needed. A lotus, to be exact. I mean, actually almost anything would have worked, but, well... I dreamed of a pond, and it was the first totally harmless thing that came to mind, so I made lotus flowers grow out of the water."
"But lotus flowers exist in the waking world, do they not?" Luna asked.
"Not like these." Twilight shook her head. "They had a certain attribute that can never exist in lotus flowers grown in this world. I made sure of that."
"I see." Luna drank more of her tea.
"So I picked one of these lotus flowers, and I took it with me," Twilight continued. "It was tricky, but based on some ideas I had from what I saw the Tantabus trying to do, I developed a way that I thought might let me bring something out." She took a drink of tea and paused. "So I tried it to see what would happen."
"And?"
Twilight levitated the box on the ground next to her chair upward into the air, then set it on the table. "And it worked."
Twilight opened the lid. Inside there was a single flower, and she lifted it out: a lotus with petals of purest, deepest imaginable black. They were so black that the flower wasn't visible as an object merely colored black; the petals were the very absence of light itself, perfectly dark silhouetted holes in space in which nothing could be seen.
As Luna stared at the flower, her eyes opened slightly wider in a restrained but unmistakable display of surprise. "I must say, this is extraordinary." She watched as Twilight slowly turned the flower in the air. The stem, sepals, stamens, and seed head were all normal, aside from being ringed in those sheerest black petals.
"Each petal is a perfect blackbody," Twilight said. "That's what I made special about it. They absorb all the light that hits them and reflect nothing. I checked with a high-precision light meter to be sure. They emit some infrared, but once you subtract out the blackbody distribution spectrum for room temperature, there's nothing left. Essentially, they're invisible. All you can see is the shape in space where they block light."
"Something that should not exist, because a perfect blackbody is an idealization, never a real thing," Luna said. "This is an impossible flower, so it would seem."
"Exactly." Twilight set the lotus down on the table, next to the tea kettle. She was struck by the eerie way that the impenetrable darkness of it contrasted with the light that played off the polished silver on the white frosted glass.
"Still, how can you rule out what you first suspected to be the case about the Tantabus?" Luna asked. "That this was not simply conjured by yourself unconsciously as a consequence of having dreamed it?"
"Because I used a thaumometer to take a continuous reading of my bedroom," Twilight said. "There was no significant magical activity the whole time I was sleeping that could possibly account for enough energy to conjure something like this into existence. The only plausible conclusion I'm left with is that it came from somewhere else without using magic to create it locally, and the only place that somewhere could have been was my dream, because the room was sealed with indicator tape and intrusion detectors. I certainly didn't go anywhere."
Luna sat and said nothing. She just stared at the black lotus flower and tilted her head at a very slight angle with one eye a little more open than the other.
"There are only two possibilities," Twilight continued. "Either dreams are entirely real new places created spontaneously by ponies with no effort and nothing more than thoughts, which seems extremely unlikely given the incredibly unfeasible amount of energy it would take to manufacture whole worlds like that on demand and then project your own consciousness into them... or transferring physical material from a dream into this 'real world' turned out to be possible because the two are fundamentally no different in nature. They're both just phenomenological illusions with interchangeable frames of perspective. Meaning, this is all just one big dream of some sort."
Luna was still studying the flower. "That does seem to make sense, I would be forced to admit," she said, with a small nod.
"Not only does it make sense, it seems downright likely," Twilight said. "It's scary how much a lot of things we don't know suddenly fall into place in a hypothesis with that kind of explanatory power about them. Magic, for example. Philosophers and scientists have been struggling for centuries with why we're in a universe that seems to have laws of physics that are always constant, except when magic comes along and decides they can just be ignored. It never made reconcilable sense in a universe that's real, but this offers a very simple explanation... and the simplest explanation... well, it's usually drastically more likely to be true than a more convoluted one."
"I must also agree with that," Luna said.
"Although..." Twilight wavered. "I... suppose magic could just be some kind of exceptional force that's unconstrained by normal laws of interaction... I could still be wrong..."
"Perhaps. But, truth be told... I do not think you are," Luna said hesitantly.
"I don't think so either, not after seeing this." Twilight shook her head. She couldn't keep an edge of fear out of her voice. "It just leaves the question... whose dream are we in?"
Luna finally broke her gaze from the lotus and stared off instead at the more colorful multitudes of flowers in the surrounding garden. "Perhaps not a matter of who is dreaming, but what is dreaming," she said slowly.
"...What do you mean, 'what'?" Twilight's eyes opened wide in surprise. A 'what' was a confusing possibility that it had never occurred to her to consider.
Luna was silent for a little while, staring off into the distance before she started speaking. "Imagine a machine made to be a model of something in our universe,” she finally began. “Let us say... perhaps... a machine that tracks the positions of the planets relative to one another as they orbit over time. We could make such a machine with a simple hoof-crank that spins a gear, which in turn spins other gears of various sizes, and by changing the size and shape and number of teeth of all these different gears, they could be made to rotate in different proportions and then spin dials that tell us the positions of those planets. Such a machine would be simple to make once we understand the mathematics behind how to design the gears, would it not? And it creates information representative of an attribute about something, or several pieces of information about several somethings, yes?"
"Of course," Twilight said. "I have an orrery exactly like that. I use it to help me with observations on astronomy nights."
"As do I." Luna nodded. "And as does my sister. Very finely precise machines, as tracking the best course for the sun and the moon on a given day is quite vital. So we know this can be done."
"Alright," Twilight agreed, her curiosity keenly piqued to know where Luna was going with this.
"Now, further imagine a machine that builds on this simple simulation by naturally adding more parts to track more information. Suppose it were desired to track the rotation of each planet. This would then allow us to know where a given point on the surface of any planet would be at any given time in the future, for example. Each piece of information we add can interact with the other information already there. The sheer volume of facts we can discern as a result would, as we keep adding to it, explode exponentially."
"But that doesn't work forever," Twilight said. "A machine like that reaches a limit because it just gets too complex. There's always little inaccuracies, and they would build on each other with every interaction. Eventually the whole thing would fall apart into unrealistic nonsense."
"If we were to keep trying to make ever more sophisticated abstractions of entire planets, yes," Luna agreed. "But what if this machine didn't try to abstract on grand scales? What if it created all its information by only simulating the most very basic interactions that only need a few simple parts and a few simple rules?"
"How... how could it show you a detailed model of things like planets, then?" Twilight asked. Her ears twitched in a split-second flash of motion before they snapped back to face forward again toward Luna.
"What are planets?" Luna leaned back in her chair and shrugged. "Are they really anything complete by themselves? Or are they made up of collections of parts?"
Twilight thought about it. "Well, parts, I suppose," she said. "Rocks, minerals, metals, gases, liquids..."
"And what are those parts made of?" Luna probed further. "More parts, perhaps? Each rock could be broken into smaller rocks, and each of those into more rocks that are smaller still. The sea can be divided down into nothing but so many drops of water. And air is many different gasses that can be separated. Where does it end?"
"You mean, where can you not get smaller...?" Twilight mumbled the question to herself and rubbed her chin with one hoof. A few seconds later the answer came to her with a swiftness that made her feel like a figurative light had suddenly switched on over her head. "Atoms," she said. Her eyes widened. "Or... the stuff that makes atoms. Smaller particles. And maybe the even smaller particles that make those."
"And are those things really so complicated?" Luna asked.
"No!" Twilight said. "No, not at all. They have spin and charge, maybe mass, and maybe a few other things. Not that much, though, really. And there would just need to be a few simple rules for what they do around other particles. Then from there, everything more complicated just happens by itself naturally as a consequence once they start interacting. You could have perfect accuracy, more or less, because of how simple it could be on that lowest level. It would be so... easy..." She was briefly stunned by an overwhelming mental rush of possibilities she suddenly saw.
"Yes." Luna nodded. "And we, too, are made of those same parts, those particles and atoms. It is only the effect of how they are arranged that makes us what and who we believe we are on larger scales, as individual living things."
"Right." Twilight thought for a few seconds. "And... we couldn't tell because consciousness isn't separate from that, is it? It's just a phenomenon that happens because of how neurons interact. It's caused by information. It is information, just in certain patterns. It doesn't really matter where that information comes from, only that it's there. After all, nopony can really prove that they're not just a brain being kept alive in a jar somewhere and fed signals, can they?"
"Philosophers have faced that question for a long time and have found, as you say, that no satisfactory refutation is forthcoming," Luna said. "There is, however, some suggestion against it by applying the principle that you pointed out, that the simplest explanation should be the one we most favor. Brains kept alive in jars and fed elaborate signals is much more complicated than seems likely. And more to the point, for a simulation, it is unnecessary—there would be no real reason that a brain need exist at all outside of this machine's dream. The neurons themselves would arise from the interaction of information within."
"Right," Twilight said. "That would be both the simplest and the most consistent with what we seem to experience. If some machine was producing all this information and letting it interact, and the consciousness we have ended up arising out of nothing more than those interactions, then... from our perspective it looks exactly like a real world, and what would the difference be? "
"Perhaps nothing," Luna said with a shrug. "In a sufficiently excellent simulation, there could be no way to tell from within that it is a simulation at all. If you were in fact nothing more than part of a dream, you might never know it."
"But... could it even be possible to make a machine like that?" Twilight pondered. "We can't do it. We're not even close!"
"I would dare say that it does not matter what we can do," Luna said. "It would only matter what the makers of the machine can do, and that, we would have no way of knowing."
"I guess that's true," Twilight said. "But for that matter, would somepony—or something, maybe they're nothing like ponies—actually do it, even if they could?"
"I find no reason to suppose they would not." Luna shook her head. "If we could build such an advanced machine and perform such simulations ourselves, would we not do it? It would be too valuable for us to ignore, I believe. There are many questions it could answer. I suspect many such machines would be built and many universes simulated so that we may watch what the dreams of the machine reveal."
"So you think that if it can be done, it's inevitable that it will be done," Twilight said.
"Most likely." Luna nodded.
"Then is this universe we live in just one of those simulations in progress right now? Because if you're right it seems like there could be a good chance it's already happened."
"That is a distinct possibility, yes" Luna agreed.
Twilight picked up another pastry and took a bite. It was as delicious as the one before, but she barely noticed. While she chewed, she lifted the tea kettle and poured herself another cup, adding sugar and stirring in silent thought while she watched the cubes dissolve and vanish into the liquid.
"And you knew, didn't you?" Twilight set down her spoon on the edge of the saucer under her teacup. She looked up to meet Luna's eyes. "You already knew all of this. You had it figured out a long time ago, you must have. That's why you're not surprised and it's how you knew exactly the way to lead me through to this conclusion, isn't it?"
"I... perhaps... 'conclusion' may be too strong a thing to say about this idea." Luna cleared her throat. "It is not my intention to mislead, and if I have, I am sorry. I have long known of the possibility of it, as has Celestia—but that it is all it has ever been, one possibility among many. It could never be said to be something we could have knowledge of in a scientific sense, since a conjecture like this cannot be proven or disproven in a meaningful way."
Luna paused and gathered her thoughts before continuing. "But I can say this: you have come further on the question than my sister and I ever have. While I do not know if anything will ever prove it with certainty, what you were able to accomplish"—she pointed at the black flower—"lends the strongest support yet to at least the credibility of the idea."
"But if you and Celestia both realized you had reason to suspect... haven't you told anypony?" Twilight asked. "I mean, this is the first I'm ever hearing about it. Hasn't anypony else worked on the hypothesis? I would have thought this would be important!"
"Please believe me, we have discussed it, and it has not been ignored purposefully." Luna sounded apologetic. "There have been some few who have arrived at the idea of this possibility just as we have. My sister and I have always encouraged them to pursue whatever further investigation they choose. But no matter how much we invite inquiry, we also cannot force it on anypony unwilling... and most who explore this notion seem to conclude at the end only that they do not want to spend a great deal of time being concerned with it."
"Why not?" Twilight demanded. "Don't ponies deserve to know?"
"I have often wondered myself why more is not forthcoming, but after some thought I feel that most who have realized this possibility have had to consider what good would be served by convincing many other ponies of it," Luna said. "I certainly have, and my sister even more so. Even Starswirl, a pony whose entire life was characterized by the thirst for knowledge, decided there was little to truly gain when it came to hypothetical questions of this sort."
"But..." Twilight felt frustration building inside. "How could nopony even want to find out?!"
"What I have understood is that for most ponies there would generally be one of two possibilities that can result," Luna said. "The first is that it might change nothing for them. This is still the world we must all live in, real to us regardless of how 'real' it is in an ultimate sense, and we still value what we value and love who we love. It is all we have, and it is wisest to make the most and the best of it that we can."
"And the second?" Twilight asked.
"The second... is as dark as this flower." Luna sighed, and Twilight noticed a look of sadness cross her face. "It might worsen a pony's outlook and take away a great many things they care deeply about. If there is no reality to this world, then it becomes difficult for some ponies to understand why they should love other ponies or value anything they feel is nothing but an illusion. It would destroy much of the joy in their lives to feel that everyone and everything they once held dear is now lost to being no more than a mere phantasm in a dream. Can you imagine anything more heartbreaking than to believe it was all nothing?"
"No, I suppose not." Twilight stared at the flower on the table. It was a strange thing, she thought, how such worrisome weight could ride on deceptively delicate petals. "So you think most ponies are better off not knowing?"
"That is part of the conundrum in itself, is it not?" Luna asked. "Nopony truly knows at all. It is merely a possibility that cannot be shown to be true or false. At best it would be inconsequential, at worst, harmful... and for those ponies it did harm to, what good could come of it? Shrouding all their life in doubt and despair, hurting them for something we cannot even be sure of?"
"I guess that's a good point," Twilight admitted. "But even so, once you know something is possible, it still raises questions that we should think about. If this is all true, what happens to us? What can we do about it?"
"Do about it?" Luna looked at Twilight curiously. "What is there to do?"
"Well... there's issues like... what happens if they just turn off the machine?" Twilight's voice carried a small undertone of alarm. "What if it breaks? What if... I don't know, what if anything happens to it at all? Where does that leave us?"
"In no different a position than we were always in." Luna shrugged. "If such a machine stopped working, would we even be able to comprehend it? Or would we simply cease in that instant? How do we know this does not already happen, for that matter? Perhaps this machine starts, then stops for a while, frozen in its state, and then starts again later where it left off. We could never tell. The passage of time appears seamless to us, for it is a product of our perceptions, and we cannot perceive during those interruptions when the machine is inactive."
Twilight nodded slightly, but said nothing.
"Perhaps more along the lines of your concerns... all of us die someday," Luna said softly. "You know that. We all know that. But ponies should not let that fear rule their lives."
"No." Twilight shook her head. "Of course not."
"On top of which, it could be debatable whether such a sudden halt could even be rightly called 'death'," Luna continued. "It would be a cessation, certainly, but when we think of death, we think of sadness. In death, we leave behind our mortal remains and the void of our absence for others to cope with. We leave behind loved ones who mourn. By comparison, this would be extraordinarily easy. There would be no pain, no sadness, no bodies, nopony left behind to miss us. We would all simply... stop, and vanish, in an incomprehensible instant."
"It would be like we never existed," Twilight whispered. Her face took on a grave expression.
"That would not be how I see it." Luna looked at Twilight with a gentle smile.
Neither of them spoke until Twilight's anxiousness broke down, bit by bit, and she finally felt herself starting to smile back. "Alright. So how would you see it?"
"I see it thus: I could have had nothing, but instead, I had a chance to exist, and to live," Luna said. "I had my triumphs and made my mistakes and I would like to believe that I learned from them all. I tasted the depths of bitterness and sorrow of loneliness, but also the sweetness and the joy of coming home at last to a warm welcome from a sister who never stopped loving me even when I was a thousand years wayward and lost."
Luna stood up and started walking slowly around the table towards Twilight. "I know what it is to have enemies and to hate them... but also what it is to grow beyond that, and instead to have friends, and to love them. That contrast makes it all the sweeter." Standing in front of Twilight, Luna lifted up a front leg and laid it around her withers, pulling her into a hug. Twilight stood up and wrapped her front legs around Luna and leaned the side of her head against Luna's neck.
"I am very happy that we are friends, Twilight," Luna said. "It means a great deal to me."
"Me too." Twilight closed her eyes and settled into the embrace.
"And when I feel things like that friendship, I know that nopony can tell me that it all amounts to nothing, or that it never existed," Luna said. "Quite the opposite, my existence has been rich and beautiful to me. The circumstances of how it came about do not change that, they are merely incidental. What is 'real'? Real is what you make of it. Nothing more and nothing less, for each of us, no matter where we exist."
Luna draped a wing around Twilight's back. The two of them held each other quietly for a little while.
"And, of course, there are these intensely delicious pastries." Luna grinned and levitated another small piece of confectionery off the tea cart. "It would surely not do to discount them." She popped it in her mouth.
Twilight laughed. "Yeah, they are pretty good."
"Are we agreed, then, that this world we find ourselves in matters, whatever its nature?" Luna asked.
"Yes." Twilight nodded. She slowly let go of Luna and took a step back out of the hug, smiling a little bit. "I guess it really doesn't change anything, does it?"
"No, it does not," Luna said. "Now, understanding that, here is my best advice as your friend: I would not think too extensively on this to the point of it consuming your focus, Twilight. It will lead you down a dangerous path that I know much about. Do not fall into the dangers of self-fulfilling prophecy."
"How do you mean?" Twilight asked.
"If you were worried about losing connection with the Element that you bear, then this is also a way that you may risk it happening. Be cautious that you do not come to view this world as unreal, for if none of this is real, then the Elements are also unreal and there may come a sense that none of it therefore matters. Without that, surely the Elements would be lost to you, and without the bearers of the Elements, surely Equestria and all the ponies in it would suffer."
"I don't want that to happen." Twilight shook her head. "I want my friends and everypony else to be happy. I'll do whatever it takes to ensure that."
"Then in that case, you have found the truth of the matter." Luna said. "The fact that you care about your friends and the ponies of Equestria means that they are real to you in the only way that means anything. Remember this always, and with that love as an anchor to hold you in place against all doubts, you shall have no more difficulty, I think."
"I think I understand," Twilight said. "I mean, of course it's not going to be that easy, you can't just make an idea not affect you. But when I look at it your way, maybe it'll help. Thank you, Luna."
"Helping each other is what friends are for." Luna nuzzled Twilight on the cheek. "You taught me that, Twilight. If you find these thoughts troubling you any further, please, do not hesitate to speak with me about them. I shall always be ready to listen, as a friend."
"I'll remember that," Twilight said. She sat back down at the table. "For now, though, I think... I'd like to talk about other things. I don't want to take up your entire tea time with one silly worry of mine, and you're right, anyway, it would probably do me good not to think too hard about it for a while."
"Very well." Luna nodded with a smile while she walked back around the table and took her own seat once again. "We will move on to topics more pleasant." She lifted the kettle in the air. "More tea, Twilight?"
"Yes." Twilight nodded with renewed enthusiasm. "I'd love some, thanks."
She watched the polished silver kettle gleam and shine with light, reflecting the colors of Luna's magic, the grass, the flowers, and everything else around them in a beautiful kaleidoscope mirror. The lotus with its black petals lay below on the table. The dark holes it made in the world seemed to her, for this moment at least, like they were overcome and made powerless by the presence of so much light and beauty.
There were spheres, moving through the nothingness of a black empty vacuum. They raced in circular orbits, moons around planets, and planets around stars, and many stars scattered about the vast emptiness. Every one of them was held up on a rod, attached to a gear. Every gear was enmeshed with other gears, all connected but somehow not touching. The motion of each one was deterministic based on the motion of all the others, interlocking in an unfathomable machine woven through everything.
Twilight moved in closer to one of the star systems, willing herself toward it through the endless expanse. She approached but discovered that the planet she aimed for wasn't in any one spot. Instead, it was there but not there—everywhere at once but in no particular place. It had an orbit that was exact and perfect but only in a diffuse shell of probability all around the center it circled, just a confusing thin blur of non-definition. The gear attached to it was stuck motionless, teeth aligned to a position on an indicator that showed a spherical locus.
For eons the system floated alone in the dark, until another one just like it drifted along, surrounded by a similar cloud-orbiting planet in no single spot. The two came closer. They bumped into each other. The gears for each planet suddenly snapped over to a new position, a new indicator for a new sort of probability cloud that both now occupied at the same time, sharing the bizarre orbit.
But that doesn't make sense. They should have smashed together and been destroyed. How could...?
Realization dawned on her that the model wasn’t what she thought it was. These weren't planets or star systems. She had the sense of scale almost exactly backwards.
Small. These were small, not large. They were so small that they were individual atoms. She was watching electrons around atomic nuclei. The two of them shared a covalent bond now, and a simple molecule had just been born.
When it happened, the gears didn't turn in smooth motions from one position to another, they instantly snapped into discrete states, the teeth not passing through the space between. They could do this, she saw now, because weren't actually gears, they were really just numbers, quantities. They were counters.
They were information.
That's what all of this was, these electrons, the nuclei they orbited, the particles inside the nuclei, everything around. They weren't here, they were all just information, piles of numbers.
She could see them suddenly, too, now that she knew what she was looking at. They were in a table, a three-dimensional lattice of tiny cubes that filled all of space, and every cube with a number inside it.
The electrons were gone, the atoms had vanished. There was nothing actually there but the simulated representation of them, numbers that changed in complex cascades, creating immense phenomenological effects through the interplay of simple parts with simple rules.
Twilight tried to look down at her own hooves, and found that they were the same substance, or lack of it, nothing but numbers describing probabilities that collapsed into deterministic certainties as she moved her legs and they passed through the lattice of information-space in a wave of trillions of interacting, changing digits. Her entire being was just data in some sort of ever-changing spreadsheet of an entire universe.
It was all there but it was all an illusion, and it felt real because she was inside it and couldn't tell the difference, but she knew...
None of it was real.
It never had been.
Her eyes snapped open. She found herself at her favorite desk in her palace library with her head lying on the pages of a thick book. Lifting herself up and pushing back her mane to get it out of her face, she looked down at the tome. She half expected, and half feared, to see it filled with a mind-numbing vast numerical table that stretched away beyond comprehension. To her relief, she found that it was just the regular printed text that was supposed to be in this volume on advanced theoretical thaumokinetics she'd been reading earlier in the evening. Things seemed solid and real enough again... for now.
The magically powered reading lamp she used at night was still glowing, but it was very dim, the crystal power source nearly drained of energy. It must have been on for hours, because the last thing she recalled about it was that it had been at full brightness on a fresh charge. How long have I been sleeping here? She wondered through the groggy haze of tiredness.
A glance over at the grandfather clock standing against the wall, and a quick light spell to illuminate it, showed that it was just barely past four in the morning.
Twilight was annoyed by that discovery, because she found herself not seeing any good options about what to do now at this hour. It was still dark outside and good little ponies were all getting their much needed rest like she should be, but on the other hoof, going to bed at this point hardly seemed worth it, close as it was to morning—and close as the lingering images of that dream still were. She wasn't about to risk seeing that again right away, not if she could help it.
What she really wanted to do, she decided, was get out of here and clear her head.
A well-practiced silencing spell, often used in late-late nights and early-early morning hours, quieted her hoofsteps on the hard crystal floor so that she could walk through the halls without disturbing Spike. There was no reason for him to have to lose sleep for her nightmares.
The front door of the palace, when she reached it a few moments later, was likewise opened with a sound-suppressing modified version of telekinetic magic. After exiting and closing it again behind herself, she took to the air, flew up to a flat area on the palace roof, and landed there.
The moon was low in the western sky and would soon be ready to set and end the night. It looked huge near the horizon, glowing bright with a pale yellow-orange color. She watched it creeping lower minute by minute, while she took in the cool misty pre-dawn air in a slow, steady rhythm of breaths that calmed her.
After a little while, she heard soft sounds of feathered wings flapping in the air. Twilight turned to look for them, and saw a large dark shape coming in, one with trailing streamers of indigo magic just barely visible against the night sky. They had pinpoint twinkling lights of a field of stars enmeshed in them.
The shape approached the roof and flared its wings, air-braking off forward momentum and dropping down for a delicate, graceful landing on four hooves. Pretty teal colored eyes and a white crescent moon symbol set against a jet black torque were visible now.
"May I join you?" Luna's voice was clear but kept in check, spoken in a soft volume suitable for the early hour.
Twilight was a little taken aback by sudden unannounced arrival and wondered why the Princess of the Night would show up so spontaneously, but after a moment of thought she came to the realization that the reason was fairly obvious.
"You saw?" Twilight asked in a meek voice.
Luna nodded. "I saw." She started walking toward Twilight, stopping a short distance away. The two of them stood facing each other.
"I've read that dream interpretation can be kind of tricky sometimes," Twilight said, not quite able to meet Luna's eye, "but I'm guessing this one was pretty straightforward."
"It... was one of the easier cases lately," Luna said sympathetically, with a wry smile.
"Yeah..." Twilight sighed. "I try not to think too much about it, you know, but sometimes, it still gets to me. Can't help it."
"Is it anything you would like to talk about?" Luna asked.
"No." Twilight shook her head, but abruptly stopped. "Well... actually... yes."
"Oh?" Luna sat down next to Twilight and listened, the two of them side by side on the roof watching the slowly sinking moon.
"I know that it's just a hypothesis." Twilight spoke slowly and softly. "I know that it can't be proven. Being completely logical and completely rational, I know that we can never really know."
Luna nodded.
"But feelings don't work that way, do they?" Twilight asked. "Intellect can't just tell them not to choose, not to exist in one state or another. They don't have superposition or a middle ground, just a razor's edge that fences off the two sides of a question—and emotions and gut feelings are lousy gymnasts. They can't stay balanced on the edge of a razor, they always fall to one side or the other."
"And to what side of the question at hoof do you find your feelings falling?" Luna asked softly. She moved over a little closer to Twilight.
"I find myself believing that it's true," Twilight said. "I can try to pretend to be logical and say I don't feel either way, but that's a lie. When it comes down to it and I'm honest with myself, that's what I really think about the idea that it's all a simulation of some kind. I think it's true."
"And has this been troubling you?" Luna asked.
"Well... yes and no," Twilight said. "It's worse in my head than in my heart. It's surprising because I thought it would be the other way around: I thought my intellect would be more accepting because there's no sense in fighting against what the evidence says, but my emotions would have trouble because of the loss that comes with thinking that things aren't real. Instead... the opposite happened."
"How so?" Luna asked.
"I guess my mind doesn't really know what to think about it or what exactly it means if it's true, and I'm still trying to figure that out," Twilight said. "But my feelings about the things that actually matter to me? Those really didn't change at all. I was worried that what you warned me about might happen, but it never did."
"No?" Luna asked.
"It never made my friends feel unimportant or unreal," Twilight told her. "It never took them away. I didn't let it. If anything, it only made me realize even more how important they are. Things like my flying lessons with Rainbow Dash, and helping Applejack bring in the apple harvest on her farm—and yesterday, I took some time off just to spend with Spike, and I think it might be the first time in a long time that I didn't take having him around for granted. It's something I've really needed, and I didn't realize how much until this happened. In some ways, it's actually made me a better pony."
"I see," Luna said.
"It's just like what you said," Twilight continued. "What is 'real'? It's what you make of it. Nopony can tell me that all the good things I've shared with all the good ponies I've known didn't happen or didn't matter. They're the only things that matter. I realized that I don't care where they happened."
"Then it sounds as if I had nothing to be worried about." Luna smiled and wrapped one wing around Twilight's back. "On the contrary, you’ve done well to make an opportunity for growth out of a crisis."
"Thanks to your good advice," Twilight said, and nodded with a smile. “You were right. Love is an anchor that holds me in place against doubt."
"That is a relief to hear you say," Luna said.
"Sorry if you wasted the trip out here for nothing," Twilight apologized. "I didn't mean to cause a false alarm. I just can't always control what I dream."
"I suppose not." Luna shook her head. "But do not feel sorry. Nopony can. I have no regret, besides. What sort of a friend would be I be if I did not come when I thought you might need help?"
"Thanks," Twilight said. “That means a lot.”
"It is my pleasure," Luna said. "I would be happy to stay a little longer, too, if you would like."
Twilight nodded in silent assent.
The two of them watched the sky for a while, leaning against each other side by side in comfortable silence. Twilight enjoyed the contrast of the chilled air with the warmth radiated by her companion. The night wore on, closer and closer to dawn.
"Not to sound ungrateful, but should you be here, with morning about to start?" Twilight asked eventually. "Don't you and Celestia need to coordinate changing from night to day? I don't want to keep you from anything important..."
"Do not be concerned over that," Luna said. "It was an uneventful night, and there was nothing that demands a turnover in person. All that is required is that I yield the sky and complete the lowering of the moon on time, and that may be done easily enough from anywhere. This is important. My sister will understand."
With those worries alleviated, Twilight enjoyed the quiet of the early morning for a little while longer.
"Hard to think that one flower could lead to so many questions," she mused.
"Indeed." Luna nodded, a slow and somber motion. "Whatever did happen to that lotus?"
"Oh." Twilight shrugged. "I got rid of it after a couple weeks. It was just sitting around collecting dust, so I decided I might as well either put it to use or clear out the clutter. I ran a few destructive tests on it just out of curiosity to try to find out some things I hadn't been able to determine without them. There wasn't much left after it was all done."
"And what was learned?" Luna asked.
"Apparently, it was just an ordinary flower," Twilight said. "As far as I can tell, anyway. I never could figure out what caused the blackbody effect or why it didn't seem to wilt. I doubt I ever will."
"Some dreams do have a tendency to defy being explained," Luna said.
"That they do." Twilight agreed. She studied the moon on the western horizon and smiled, admiring the beauty of its light shining bright against the darkness of the sky. "That they do."
