Twilight Sparkle is curious of how the world was before ponies and other races came to be and asks Celestia on their and magic's origins. The answer is more absurd than she expected.
Darksymphony did a read of the rewritten chapter here
During one of her many passion projects, Twilight decides to try and track down the origins of magic and where everypony came from. Her library is chock full of various different theories, none of them very helpful. She decides, instead, to ask Princess Celestia.
However, the answer she gets is far more absurd than she bargained for. An answer so detached from reality that it takes a physical manifestation of it to show Twilight the extent of the terrifying source of magic and what it did to a once-benign world to render it and its inhabitants so fantastical.
"You were never the first ones here, nor were you the second. We were the second."
Twilight tapped a crystal table in her royal library impatiently. A lot of her books were strewn about the area. They had been placed into neat piles, but these had collapsed under their own mass. The mare took a book from one of the shelves, quickly skimmed through it, then tossed it over her shoulder, subconsciously closing it and floating it harmlessly onto another pile of books that shook dangerously. A loud scream of frustration escaped Twilight's throat, and she dropped herself onto a table.
"Everything alright in here, Twilight?" Spike asked whilst peering from behind one of the doors.
He coughed and waved a hand in front of him, chasing away the dust that floated back towards the ceiling, seemingly to escape the angry limb.
The alicorn didn't remove her face from the surface of the table. "Hmmm hm fmmh hmm, spmmm," she mumbled.
Spike rolled his eyes. "What? I don't speak mumble mumble," he said.
Twilight forced her head up and glared at Spike. "I can't find it, Spike," she said.
The dragon started to pick up some of the books left around in bizarrely neat piles. He thought he'd be used to Twilight's treatment of books, even when just dropping them on the floor, and yet here he was. "Find what?" he asked impassively.
"The source of magic and life in Equestria!" she bellowed. "Or even the whole world!" She passed her hooves through her mane angrily, roughing them up into fluffy and bent clumps. "I keep finding different theories about it, but they all contradict each other!" She pulled a book from another pile and bonked Spike on the head by accident. She chuckled sheepishly whilst being glared at. "Sorry, Spike. I'm just so annoyed! This book by Grass Mango states that 'Magic has always come from the land. From our planet. It permeated the world during its infancy and gave it life'."
The little dragon narrowed his eyes. "That...doesn't explain the source of magic."
"Of course not! It just implies it was always there!" Twilight dropped the book on a tower of them and grabbed a red-covered one nearest to her from another tower of literature. "This one by Cranberry Jam implies that life came to be on the planet, and our souls interacted with it, creating primitive forms of magic that weren't understood by our ancestors." The mare took another book after throwing the first one over her shoulder. This book's page edges had been laced with gold trimmings. "Or this one by the renowned wizard Truffle Parfum." She cleared her throat and took on a scholarly expression and 'educated' reading voice that made her assistant laugh. "Magic has always been around. It is a natural product of this world. It was merely unrefined at first until it had finally mellowed and infused all life on the planet. This is why we have such a variety of different races and--Bla!"
Spike dropped his first pile of literature onto the ground and wiped his hands clean of dust and grime. "That sounds a lot like what the others are saying."
Twilight pointed to her assistant, startling him. "Exactly! Not one mentioned where the magic came from, just that it always was," she hushed at the end.
"Twilight, you're stressing out over something weird again."
"Am I?!" the mare yelled at the top of her lungs.
She had zoomed towards Spike to shout that right into his face. It took a moment to free himself from his stupor. A banner hanging on one of the walls fell down heavily onto the pile, and he cursed in his mind. "Look, if you really want an answer that badly, you could go to Princess Luna or Princess Celestia. They've lived way longer than us," he suggested while walking to the fallen banner. "Plus, their library has a bunch of books and parchments older than them. Maybe you'll find at least one idea about the source of magic?"
"And life," Twilight added.
Spike groaned and shook his head. "And life."
The alicorn gave him a great big hug. "Thanks a lot, Spike. You always know how to calm me down."
"Might need to get you a stress ball...the size of a house," he suggested.
Twilight laughed mockingly. "Funny. I'm going to Canterlot right now. Can you clean all this up? If there's anything left I'll help out."
Twilight had already vanished before Spike could add anything. He crossed his arms and frowned. "With your magic you could have just fixed all this," he grumbled.
Preferring to make use of her wings, the mare flew over to Canterlot Castle. While she had been reinforced by the alicorn magic flowing through her, her body itself hadn't followed. Twilight landed in front of the castle entrance, panting heavily and leaning against a short wall of white bricks. Today, there didn't seem to be any potential audiences. She wasn't really sure why, but she could ponder the possible reasons. At least it left the path clear. The mare just needed to avoid the gardeners picking weeds out from between the cobblestones of the pathway.
Twilight walked along the red carpet running from the two steps outside the entrance to the throne room further in. The mare passed immense white doors intricately carved with motifs of the sun and moon. She was blinded by the setting orange sun coming from the massive windows standing high above the thrones of the two alicorn sisters. Guards lined the white stone walls, always alert, but they bowed to Twilight upon seeing her. She smiled nervously. She still wasn't used to that.
She reached the throne room whose doors had been left open to the public. Opposite the entrance, far, far away sat a throne upon a multi-level podium draped in red carpet. Twilight looked up to see the stained-glass windows just behind it letting the fading sunlight wash over the seat and its occupant. She felt a murmur in her heart when she saw the windows: All artistic retellings of the accomplishments she and her friends had to their names. Reimprisoning Discord, stopping the changelings, freeing the Crystal Kingdom from Sombra's influence.
"Twilight!" Celestia cheered. "It's good to see you. What brings you to Canterlot?"
The lavender alicorn was torn from her reverie by her former teacher. "Hello, Princess. I just wanted to know if I could gain access to the oldest notes in your personal library."
Celestia chuckled and raised a brow. "Why?" she asked. The white alicorn started to show some signs of concern.
"I can't find anypony who talks about the source of magic in the world, or even the source of life," Twilight explained. She kept an eager smile on her face.
"I..." Celestia started. The atmosphere became tense, and the white alicorn stood from her throne and walked to Twilight. "Guards," she started. "I will be leaving Canterlot with Princess Twilight for a moment. If my sister wakes up before I'm back, tell her I'm at the 'metal cave'. Am I understood?" she asked.
The guards raised a foreleg and, in perfect synchronicity, shouted, "Yes, Princess!"
Twilight flinched away from the display. "Wow. They're...terrifyingly in sync," the alicorn mumbled. "Where are we going?" she asked.
"The source of magic," Celestia answered.
"Wait, you actually know ab--Ah!"
Twilight was warped to a pitch-black area and tumbled along the ground. When she regained her senses, she panicked. "Princess? Where are you? I can't see anything!"
A light illuminated the cave, coming from the tip of Celestia's horn. She looked at Twilight, her brows furrowed, her mouth pursed, and her head shaking from side to side. The lavender alicorn realized her mistake and followed suit, laughing at herself. Twilight started to take in her surroundings: This cave didn't seem to have anything special to it. The walls were an assortment of minerals, creating stripes and dots of different browns and blacks along their surfaces. Stalactites and stalagmites were oddly absent, however, although the tiny wildlife of insects, arachnids, and some reptiles were still scurrying about the darkness, terrified of the light illuminating their dark home.
"The source of magic is in here?" Twilight asked.
"No," Celestia said.
The lavender alicorn was somewhat taken aback by the aggressive tone Celestia had given her. She mulled over it silently until they reached a dead end and the two placed orbs of light along the round walls and lumpy floor and ceiling. The two sat silently for a good while, with Twilight too afraid to make eye contact with Celestia.
"Princess, why are we--"
"You're a princess now, and I trust you enough to keep what I'm about to tell you a secret from everyone in the entirety of this world. I've known you long enough that I know we don't need to go through all the formalities of asking, agreeing, and all the friendly customs. Even Cadance does not know of this," Celestia said. "In fact, with everything you have gone through, I believe you're more than qualified to learn of this."
"The...source of magic?" Twilight wondered.
The sun princess heaved a sigh and leaned her back against the wall. She closed her eyes before talking. "Magic wasn't always around, Twilight. It was created, in a sense. A byproduct that somehow changed the world."
"A byproduct of what?" Twilight asked.
"Energy. Fuel. Both?" Celestia shook her head. "We don't know. We didn't know the intricacies of the world at the time. We were barely even aware of ourselves."
Twilight took a few steps back. "What are you talking about, Princess? You're making it sound like you were babies at the time. Like--"
"We weren't babies, Twilight. My sister and I were something completely new. Something not technically alive." She sighed and leaned forward. Upon reopening her eyes, Twilight saw that they had changed color. They were almost completely black, save a glowing yellow ring outlining what would be her iris, and a solid yellow light serving as a pupil.
"What's happening? Your eyes..." Twilight asked. Her voice was starting to crack, and yet she didn't know why.
"Magic came from those who came before. Who ruled the planet long before ponies even came to be." She scratched the back of her neck. "While I can't attest to the source of their lives, I can attest that all life that exists now is because of 'magic'. The byproduct of their energy. The waste," she said.
"Wh..." Twilight paced around. "That's absurd. You're saying that magic is just trash?"
Celestia scoffed. "Trash." She shook her head. "Not at all. It's something else."
Twilight frowned. "But you called it waste," she said.
The sun princess shrugged. "I did, but that's the type of item it is. However, beyond our expectations, it infested the world and self-replicated until it became the way it is: a form of malleable energy that permeates nearly every being in the world." She kicked a pebble that had fallen from the ceiling. "Magic, as you know it, is still relatively young."
Twilight had to perform several vocal takes before she managed to find what she wanted to say. "Okay? Does that mean the world is young o--You said 'as I know it'," she realized. "What does that mean?"
Celestia giggled. "Twilight, how old do you think my sister and I are?"
"Well, a little over a thousand years old," Twilight quickly replied.
Celestia shrugged. "I suppose that could work. However, we're much older than that."
Twilight narrowed her eyes. "A few thousand?"
"More."
"Many thousand?"
"More."
"Wh-How much?!" the mare shouted. She was beginning to grow extremely tired, and were voice was going hoarse from the stress. It was all exasperating to the young pony. "I'm sorry to be speaking like this, but this is painfully aggravating, Princess!" Twilight complained.
Celestia looked to the side momentarily, then stared at her former student with apathy and wide eyes. "I'm several million years old."
Twilight stared silently at her former teacher. "What."
"That's right. I'm not exactly sure on how old, but we are indeed in that range." She stood up and walked around the cave, dragging a hoof along the walls. "And this is where we woke up."
Celestia sat back down before resuming. "In the world we lived in, there were towers of metal and light that reached the skies, Twilight. The skies, and further beyond!" The stone walls past Celestia started to display warped images of the princess' speech. Twilight felt something clench in her chest as she watched the light focus on the wall and Celestia's strange eyes glowing brighter as her face grew darker and more terrifying. "Machines flew through the sky, quiet and clean, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The people who lived back then, who inadvertently created magic, were impossibly advanced compared to Equestria now."
"Are you doing that?" Twilight asked. She could hear strange noises, like pegasi roaring through the skies, but more intense, as she saw flickering sparks dance across the cave walls to cross the blurry towers. She had never heard or seen anything like it.
The white alicorn tilted her head. "Doing what?" Celestia asked.
She seemed truly confused to Twilight, so the mare told her old mentor to ignore her question.
"Well, to resume where I started, these people had knowledge that Equestria right now cannot even dream of. They had built various aids and helpers across the decades, each more complex and advanced than its predecessor." Twilight saw bipedal figures with empty, glowing eyes appearing behind Celestia. They were slowly fading in, using the white alicorn as the centerpiece to surround. Them staring at Twilight made her even more fearful of Celestia. She started to shake despite herself. "They used the energy I mentioned earlier, but not all of them had that. Not all of these were created equal, same as with their makers. Black and Blue were the colors of their energy sources, and the Black tainted the land around it."
"Did that also create magic?" Twilight wondered.
Celestia shook her head. "I'm afraid not. It simply burnt away into clouds of black dangerous for the makers."
"But then why not just use the 'blue' you mentioned? Was it just rare?" Twilight wondered.
Celestia, once again, shook her head. "I don't know. I wasn't interested in that at the time. When my sister found me the world was already nearing its climax."
Twilight was taken aback. "Cl-climax? You mean it--"
"Yes. The creations eventually started taking new shapes. Becoming fantasy creations. Amalgamations of creativity and fantasy. They, too, started to change with the world. Glitches. Consciousness. Awareness. Understanding. Self-awareness," Celestia continued.
"The creations became sapient," Twilight realized.
"But not all at once. They were gradually changed. The Blue somehow caused it with the new machines, or so the makers thought. Then those that functioned on the Black became this way as well." Celestia sighed. "I became friends with a few of them, from both sides. Relationships were tense at first because of the energy, but we all became fast friends in the end."
"I imagine they're..." Twilight trailed off quietly after she realized what she was about to say.
The sun princess chuckled at her former student's self-chastising. "It's alright, Twilight. They are indeed dead. My sister and I should have been as well, but I am unsure as to why we didn't die either." She pondered the thought for a moment, likely one of the same that has crossed her mind many many times in the past. "I helped to repair them, you see. Each of them, so it was a little difficult to accept."
"I see." Twilight watched as the lights turned back to normal, and a new voice came from behind. "What?"
"Sister," the voice said. "Back to this place? We haven't been here in many millennia." Luna stepped next to Twilight, bowing her head briefly out of politeness. "Twilight," she said courteously.
"Yes, well, I figured that somepony in her position and with such a scholarly passion would be the perfect fit to catalog what we have lived through."
Luna raised a brow. "And what we are?"
"What, you can't possibly expect me to believe what you just said!" Twilight shouted. Celestia looked at Twilight with wide eyes and sported a grimace while Luna gazed at her scornfully. "A world where you created a bunch of gigantic machines and towers and power, and this brought magic?" Twilight stomped her hoof onto the floor. "I'm not a foal anymore, Princesses! If that world ever existed, then we would have found traces of it, even after a million years!"
"But Twilight, I--" Celestia was stopped by her sister who had put a hoof to her shoulder.
"Your student has always prized logic above all things when she could not comprehend events like this. It is best we show her, no?" Luna suggested.
Celestia nodded. "Be not afraid, Twilight."
The two sisters' bodies cracked, revealing lines of bright light running along their skin. The light intensified, nearly fully blinding Twilight. In the vague shade she could still see, the princesses' skin was detaching itself from their bodies. They were growing thinner and slowly stood upright. She couldn't make out much else until the light had faded.
The lavender alicorn had gone pale when she saw what the rulers of ponykind looked like this whole time. A thousand years, maybe even more, and they never knew. They were thin beings made of metal. Plates of this overlapped each other, creating thin sheets of armor on a very thin body. Their mane and tail had fused together into one wavy substance that grew and fluttered from the top of their heads and dragged low along their backs. Luna's eyes imitated Celestia's, save for the deep blue light. Along what would've been their skin, the lines of light remained, gently glowing and fading as time went on. They floated above the ground, their hind hooves having become pointier.
"This is our true form, Twilight," Celestia said. Her voice had a droning to it, like the treble had been boosted somehow.
"How are you saying that with no mouth?" Twilight asked in a stupor.
Their faces were smooth and elongated as though they still had their muzzles, they were featureless. No nostrils. No fur. No mouths. What they were seemed to be a complete mystery. Whirring and metallic grinding came from Luna as she stretched her limbs and joints.
"Aaaaaah!" she sighed in relief. "It is good to be in our old bodies again." A ring of light glowed from the base of her foreleg's hoof. The ring took on curves and bends, going towards and wrapping around the princess' neck as she rotated it.
"We aren't the makers, Twilight," Celestia added. "We are the ones they made. Machines to help them in their daily lives. I hope you can understand that you were never the first ones here, but we were certainly the second."
Twilight was speechless. The princesses were machines of unimaginable technological prowess! But how?!
"To be honest, we still don't know what happened, but we no longer function on the 'Blue'," Luna said sorrowfully.
"We were buried after an incident occurred. An explosion? Implosion? A war? I simply recall a flash of light, then nothing." Celestia shook her head and 'sat' in the air. "We might have been knocked out during an incident and somehow never found. We don't really know the truth. It's still a mystery, but we know that we now function on magic."
"And the makers are gone forever in that flash of light." The lunar princess tapped the walls of the cave with her ring hand. "Perhaps we were just lucky to wake up here. Maybe it was the spirits of our friends that saved us."
Twilight stared at the ground. Shocked. "Can machines even have spirits?"
The two sisters exploded in laughter, annoying Twilight.
"Pardon us, Twilight, but we haven't heard that philosophical debate in millennia," Celestia apologized. "I suppose you want to know why we became what we are now?"
"Actually, I was--" Twilight couldn't finish her sentence that Celestia had already started to recount her oldest memories. The two princesses were clearly quite ecstatic and jovial about being able to show their true forms and talk about their past.
"When we awoke and came out of this cave, we saw a world devoid of all the machinery and lights of our time. It was just vast meadows of color, with a bunch of creatures not in our databases," Celestia recounted passionately. "We looked around and eventually found the ponies. After some time observing them, we approached them, eager to make contact with this new species."
"They...saw us as great spirits or something," Luna said. "We came to the conclusion that it would be best to let them believe that and eventually change the thoughts of their children. We weren't 'great spirits' or 'gods', although we do possess a significant amount of magic within us."
Celestia giggled like a filly who just received ice cream. "We learned that 'magic' had permeated everything and created all of this. We wanted to protect it. Learn from it. Have it learn from us." Rings came from Celestia's own hooves, and she clapped them together. "Symbiotic relationships."
Twilight waved her hooves. "This is...too much to take in. Too many things happening all at once."
The princesses agreed. Luna stepped forward. "We can stop for now and resume at a future date if you--"
Twilight shook her head. "No. I want to know about all of this. I want to know about this 'Past World' you talked about. I want to know if there's a way to bring them back or learn more about them that you didn't. They might have some things still hidden somewhere that you never found." She thought a moment and smiled. "I want to know about you and your friends."
The two princesses 'sniffed' and looked at each other. "If I could cry...To recall the life we had with friends who have long since died. Of a world that we can never return to. The potential futures of all those who lived back then," Celestia lamented.
"I would rather we remember those good moments," Luna said reluctantly. "Even if they are painful." She pretended to clear a throat she didn't have. "So, this whole adventure began when I started becoming self-aware..."
Twilight impatiently tapped a crystal table in her royal library with her hoof. Strewn about her were piles of books and scrolls whose numbers had overwhelmed and ruined the once-neat piles that Twilight had set them in. The mare pulled another book from her emaciated shelves, skimmed through it, then angrily tossed it over her shoulder. She screamed in frustration and, in her fury, slammed her head into the table accidentally, yiping in pain.
Spike peered around one of the doors. "Everything alright in here, Twilight?" he asked.
"Y-yeah," Twilight grunted as she rubbed her forehead with a hoof. She buried her face in her forelegs on the table afterwards and started muttering something her assistant couldn't understand.
The young dragon stepped in and waved some dust away from his face. "I don't speak mumble. Use your words," he sassed.
"I can't find it..." Twilight lamented.
"Find what?" Spike said impassively as he looked in awe at the plain of books and scrolls before him.
He thought he'd be used to Twilight's treatment of books when she became obsessed with something, and yet here he was.
"The source of magic and life in Equestria!" Twilight suddenly blurted. Spike dropped the books he had picked up from the sudden fright. "Or even the whole world!" The mare ruffled her own mane, clumping her strands together and creating knots. "I've found so many different theories from creatures throughout the decades, but they all contradict each other!" She pulled a book from a tall pile and caused them to fall and bonk Spike on the head. "Sorry," Twilight said with a nervous smile while her assistant rubbed his head and glared at her. "I'm just...so annoyed!" She raised the book she picked up. "This one by Grass Mango claims that magic has always come from the land. That it had permeated the world during its infancy and gave it life."
Spike narrowed his eyes. "That...just says what it is and what it can do. That doesn't explain the source."
"Of course not!" Twilight agreed loudly. "It's just empty trite from somepony trying to sound smart." She tossed the book away and picked another with a red cover from the plains of literature. "This one by Cranberry Jam implies that life came to be on the planet, and when our souls interacted with it, it created primitive forms of magic misunderstood by our ancestors." She tossed it and grabbed another. "Or this one by Truffle Parfum who is supposed to be a renown wizard!" She took on a more distinguished appearance and gentlemarely voice. "Magic has always been around as a natural product of the world. It was merely unrefined at first until it finally mellowed and infused life into the planet. That is why we have such a vast array of--Bah!"
Spike dropped the pile of books he was carrying and looked in disgust at the dust and grime coating his claws. "Sounds like what the others are saying."
Twilight nodded. "Exactly! There's still no mention about where it came from! Something doesn't just come into being out of nowhere." She leaned against a foreleg and sighed.
"Twilight, I think you're starting to obsess over something weird again," Spike said worryingly.
"Wh...am I?!" Twilight shouted.
"Look!" the dragon shouted before Twilight could move from the table. "I-if you want answers, why not ask Princess Luna or Celestia? They've lived a long time? Maybe they know." He looked at the anarchic mess around him and sighed internally. "Plus, their own library has things way older than even them, so maybe you'll get your answers from there?" he suggested with a shrug. "About the source of magic?"
"And life," Twilight grumbled.
"Y-yes. That too," Spike said with a nervous smile.
Twilight pondered the info and then gave Spike a big hug. "Thank you, Spike. I was going crazy! I'll be back soon. Clean up as much as you can, and when I get back I'll help you with the rest."
Twilight had already left when Spike was going to talk to her. "But you're always crazy...And you could've cleaned all this up in seconds with your magic!" he shouted before throwing a book on the pile.
The alicorn was already flying toward Canterlot thanks to her new wings and the improved magic she now possessed. Unfortunately, her body hadn't followed, making it difficult to keep up the cadence. She landed in front of the entrance and leaned against the frame of white bricks holding the doors in place. There were no audiences currently, probably because Twilight had arrived during a break or the princesses were preoccupied with something important. Regardless, the path to the throne room was clear, and this left Twilight all the time she needed to meet with Celestia or Luna.
A red carpet with velvet trims went from the entrance straight to the throne room, making it very convenient for visitors or audience members to find their way. There were doors left and right that were carved with intricate motifs of the sun and moon, but the blinding orange light of a setting sun coming from windows overhead hurt the alicorn's eyes. Adding to the stress of her vision being obstructed, she still wasn't used to the guards lining the walls bowing to her whenever she passed, throwing her off every time she visited the castle.
When she finally reached the massive wooden doors that depicted Luna and Celestia with their respective celestial bodies overhead and reaching for each other, Twilight was met with an even brighter light that might as well have scooped her eyes out. Now she understood why no pony was coming at this time. She had to look to the side and felt a tug at her heart when she viewed the stained glass depicting the exploits of her and her friends. Nightmare Moon, Discord, the changeling invasion. Were things always like that for every generation?
"Twilight!" Celestia shouted. "It's so good to see you! I wasn't expecting a visit. You should have sent a message."
"I'm sorry about that, Princess," Twilight said as she struggled to move far enough that she would be in direct sunlight. "I just feel like it's an emergency and I need access to the oldest documents in your personal library.
Celestia tilted her head. "All of a sudden? Is there a new threat looking to harm Equestria?"
The young alicorn shook her head. "Nothing so severe, Princess. I'm just trying to find information on the source of magic and life in the world, but the only thing I can find are theories by ponies that act like they know more than they do, and everything that is said always loops back to each other." She stomped her hood on the ground. "It's frustrating!"
"Well, I could indeed give you access to the library," the mare thought.
"I also thought that maybe you could tell me everything you knew."
Celestia scoffed. "I'm not that old, Twilight."
"But surely you've seen things that ponies today can only dream of. You must know about something!"
The white alicorn shrugged. "I'm sorry, Twilight, but I can't help you with much."
The lavender pony scratched her head. "I mean, I've found a few mentioning something about metal and their composition being lightyears ahead of our forging techniques now." Celestia visibly jolted and stared at Twilight with wide eyes, something the guards took notice of. "I didn't think much of it, but I found a few theories talking about flying metal, but we have trains and pegasi that can fly large chariots. Could've been meteors?" Twilight continued to ramble as Celestia became stiff. "I thought it was completely absurd. What does metal have to do with the source of magic? I mean, the composition is interesting, but--"
"Twilight," Celestia interrupted her.
"S-sorry, Princess," Twilight chuckled. "I guess I've just been trying to piece together everything since the spell I used that remade me into an alicorn." Celestia jolted once again, causing the guards to shift forward somewhat. "It was...weird," Twilight continued. "Like I could feel the age of the world we were in and that something else was residing in there. I've used that feeling to create several simple spells, but I haven't been able to pinpoint that feeling since..."
"Twilight!" Celestia bellowed. She glared at the guards and waved them away. When the doors finally slammed shut, Celestia spoke once again. "That spell was indeed to get you to become an alicorn by recognizing the value of magic and the individuals beyond a mark, something rulers have forgotten in the past, but you..." She slouched against her throne and started laughing uncontrollably. "You're the first pony to have actually connected with the true purpose of the spell. I can't believe it!"
Twilight started worrying as she saw her mentor falling into hysterics. "What are you talking about?" Twilight asked.
Celestia jumped off her throne and wrapped a wing around her former student. "Do you truly want to know the origin of magic?" the alicorn asked.
"I do...?" Twilight hesitated.
"Then relax yourself," Celestia suggested as her horn began glowing extremely bright.
"What do you mean by th-aaaaah!" When Twilight finally regained her senses, she found that she could only see darkness. "Princess! Princess Celestia! Where are you?! I can't see!" A bright light formed in the cave, coming from the white alicorn's horn. Twilight saw the grimace the princess was sporting and shrank away with a growing blush. "Ha ha...oops..."
Celestia shook her head as she turned and moved down what appeared to be a cave. Letting the blood rush from her face, Twilight tried to sense anything from the cave walls, but there was nothing. She only managed to detect several colorful minerals sticking out, creating striations and dots along the walls. While there was a strange absence of stalactites and stalagmites, the usual fauna of cave-borne creepy crawlies scampered about in a bid to avoid the light.
"Is there where magic comes from?" Twilight asked her former mentor.
"No," Celestia said flatly.
Taken aback by the sudden response, Twilight kept quiet for the rest of the walk until they reached a dead end in which the two beings scattered orbs of light everywhere. Curious, Twilight looked around, trying to see if she could find anything out of the ordinary, which she didn't. It was as plain and simple a cave as it could get.
Twilight frowned the longer the two sat silently in this dead end and finally spoke to break the monotony. "Princess, why are we--"
"You felt the core purpose of the spell you used to become an alicorn. This means you felt the true nature of magic. Even Cadance did not feel what you felt." She looked to the side. "Although her alicornhood came from something else, so I suppose it wouldn't work, and Starswirl helped us to concoct this spell while we added to it without his knowledge."
"What?"
Celestia heaved a sigh and leaned against the rocky walls. She closed her eyes and grimaced slightly, as though she were reminiscing of something unpleasant. "Magic...wasn't always around, Twilight. At least, not in the sense you are aware of. It's a byproduct that somehow changed the world."
"A byproduct of what?" Twilight asked.
The white alicorn shrugged. "Fuel. Energy. Both? We don't know. We didn't know the intricacies of the world at the time, and I'm afraid the chance is lost for us." She passed a hoof through her mane. "We were barely even aware of ourselves."
Twilight took a few steps back as she parsed Celestia's words. "What are you talking about, Princess? It sounds like you were babies at the time, so h--"
"We weren't babies, Twilight," Celestia interjected. "My sister and I were something completely new. Something fully foreign to you. Something not technically alive." She exhaled and leaned forward, opening her eyes.
Twilight noticed that the alicorn's eyes had changed color. They were now solid black with a glowing yellow ring serving as the iris and a solid yellow light acting as the pupil.
"Wh-what? What's happening? Your eyes," she said with a cracking voice.
"What you call 'magic' came from those who came before. The ones who ruled the planet before ponies, minotaurs, changelings...Before any of that came to be." Celestia scratched the back of her neck. "While I can't attest to the source of their lives, the source of ours is because of 'magic': the byproduct of their energy. The waste," she explained.
"N..." Twilight paced around, horrified. "But that can't be. You're saying our magic is just trash?"
Twilight looked indignated. "But you just called it waste."
Celestia shrugged with a smile. "I did, but that's basically what it is on the surface. I'm not sure how, but it manifested into some kind of new form, self-replicated, and became as it is: a form of malleable energy that permeates nearly every being in the world." She casually kicked aside a small pebble that fell from the ceiling. "Magic is still relatively young, actually. It still wasn't fully as it was when we found the world as it is now."
Twilight choked on her words several times before she managed to get the words out. "Okay? Does that mean the world is y-You said 'as I know it'," she suddenly realized. "What does that mean, exactly?"
Celestia chuckled. "How old am I, Twilight?"
"A little over a thousand years old," Twilight was quick to reply.
"Now now, Twilight. Flattery is pointless here," Celestia chastized. "Feel free to increase."
"Uuuh...A few thousand?"
"More."
Twilight gawked. "M-many, thousand?"
"More," Celestia repeated.
The alicorn's smile increased with each suggestion and her continued immobility. However, this game was annoying an already stressed-out former unicorn.
"How much?! I'm sorry for being rude, but that is extremely aggravating, Princess!" Twilight said angrily.
"I know," Celestia said under her breath. "I'm several millions of years old."
Twilight's faced flushed of all emotion, and she stared, wide-eyed, at her teacher. "What."
Celestia nodded. "That's right. I'm not exactly sure on how old, but my sister and I are indeed in that age range." She walked around the dead-end and deployed her wings. "And this is where we awoke."
"You...awoke?" Twilight looked around. "You were asleep somehow?"
"In a sense." Celestia sat down and took a moment. "We lived in a world where lights and buildings reached far beyond the skies into the dark." The princess' magic started seeping out of her in her reminiscing and warped, unfocused images of her speech were appearing on the walls. Twilight felt her heart skip a beat when she realized her eyes were glowing brighter and brighter and her face was becoming more obscuring in darkness somehow. "Machines flew through the sky, clean and quiet, numbering in the thousands. Those who lived back then were impossibly advanced to the Equestria we live in now."
"A-are you doing that?" Twilight asked as she looked at the images.
She could hear strange noises, like pegasi flying through the sky, but far more intense and aggressive. She saw sparks dancing across the walls past blurry towers illuminating the sky around them with lights and color.
"Doing what?" Celestia asked.
"Never mind," Twilight sighed.
The white alicorn nodded. "Well, to return to where I was, these people possessed knowledge Equestrians can't even dream of. They had built various helpers and machinery to aid them across the decades, each more complex and advanced than its predecessor." Twilight witnessed bipedal figures with empty, glowing eyes slowly fading in behind Celestia who served as their centerpiece. Their staring at Twilight made her even more fearful of her teacher and found herself shaking despite herself. "They used the energy I mentioned earlier, but not all were created equal, same as with the makers. Black and Blue were the colors of the energy, but the Black tainted the land around it."
"Did that also create magic?"
Celestia shook her head. "I'm unsure. All I'm sure is that it burnt into clouds of black dangerous to the makers."
"Then why not just use the other color? Was it rare?" Twilight wondered.
Celestia shook her head once again. "I'm not fully sure, and I wasn't interested at the time, so I didn't look deeper into it. I just know that they weren't able to access it." She shivered in place. "That, and I wouldn't have had time anyways since my sister found me at the climax of the world."
"Cl...climax?" Twilight stuttered. She raised a hoof toward her former teacher. "Y-you mean--"
Celestia nodded. "Yes. The creations of the makers started taking new shapes and becoming more fantasy and fantastical in appearance. Amalgamations of the creative minds of the time. They, too, started to change the world. Glitches. Consciousness. Self-awareness. Understanding," she continued.
Twilight looked down, her eyes wide in realization. "They...went beyond sentience and became sapient...!"
"Not all at once, though. They were gradually changed. Some of the makers thought it was the blue that caused it, but those in the black were like this as well." She smiled, reminiscing of good times. "Tensions were high at first because of the energy we used, but we quickly became fast friends."
"I imagine they're all..." Twilight trailed off quietly.
Celestia chuckled and patted her former student on the head. "It's alright, Twilight. They are indeed dead and have been for quite some, although I am unsure why the same didn't happen to my sister and I. We were together for a long time," Celestia said. "It was very difficult to accept, but I've had millions of years to cope with their loss."
"I see. I'm sorry you had to go through that," Twilight said melancholically. She spun around after she heard another voice. "What? I think somepony followed us."
"Sister! Back to this place? We haven't been here in a very long time," the voice said. Luna stepped into the light, next to a surprised Twilight and bowed her head briefly. "Twilight," she greeted courteously.
"She felt the essence of magic in the spell that turned her into an alicorn," Celestia explained to her sister.
Luna looked at Celestia and then at Twilight with wide eyes. "Really? Finally! That spell never worked for the longest time!" She almost dropped to the floor in relief. "Finally somepony we can share our history with. Our true history."
The lavender alicorn looked between both ponies in rapid succession. "You can't expect me to believe any of that!" she yelled. Celestia looked at her, grinning from ear-to-ear while Luna glared at the young pony scornfully. "Where where a bunch of giant machines and space towers brought magic?!" Twilight stomped her hoof and stood up tall in front of the princesses. "I'm not a foal anymore, Princess Celestia. If that world ever existed then we would have found concrete evidence of it."
"What about the metal pieces you mentioned in the throne room?" Celestia asked.
Twilight waved that away. "Tectonic shifting and mineral fusion happens all the time. It's not new, and, otherwise, it could have come from space."
"Twilight has always prized logic above all things for what she could not comprehend." She looked at her sister with a raised brow. "Best to show her instead of trying to convince her with words, no?"
The two sisters' bodies cracked, revealing lines of bright light running along their skin. The light intensified, nearly fully blinding Twilight. In the vague shade she could still see the princesses' skin was detaching itself from their bodies. They were growing thinner and slowly stood upright. She couldn't make out much else until the light had faded.
The lavender alicorn had gone pale when she saw what the rulers of ponykind looked like this whole time. A thousand years, maybe even more, and they never knew. They were thin beings made of metal. Plates of this overlapped each other, creating thin sheets of armor on a very thin body. Their mane and tail had fused together into one wavy substance that grew and fluttered from the top of their heads and dragged low along their backs. Luna's eyes imitated Celestia's, save for the deep blue light. Along what would've been their skin, the lines of light remained, gently glowing and fading as time went on. They floated above the ground, their hind hooves having become pointed.
"This is what we really look like," Celestia said. Her voice had a droning to it like the treble had been boosted.
Confused, Twilight looked around frantically to try and find Celestia's mouth, but failed. "...How are you saying that with no mouth?"
Their faces were smooth and elongated as though they still had their muzzles, they were featureless. No nostrils. No fur. No mouths. What they were seemed to be a complete mystery. Whirring and metallic grinding came from Luna as she stretched her limbs and joints.
"It's good to be in our bodies again." A ring of light emerged from her foreleg's hoof and bent into the approximate shape of a five-digit hand that she used to readjust her neck.
"We aren't the Makers, Twilight," Celestia said. "We are the ones they made. Machines meant to help them in their everyday lives." She leaned closer, giving a frightened pony a closer view of her mechanical eyes. "You weren't the first nor were you the second."
"We were the second," Luna added.
Twilight was stunned. The princesses were machines of such advanced technology, but how was that possible that they still existed after so long?
"We don't know how we came to be in here. We just know that we were buried after we saw a flash of light," Luna continued. "Explosion? Implosion?" She shrugged. "Whatever the case is, we now function on magic and no longer the blue."
"And the Makers all disappeared in a flash of light. No one left..." Celestia lamented. "Perhaps the spirits of our friends helped us to get here after their passing."
Twilight raised a brow and pursed her lips. "Wait, can machines even have spirits?"
The sisters exploded in laughter, annoying Twilight.
"Please excuse us, Twilight. We haven't heard that philosophical debate in so long," Celestia apologized. "I suppose now you want to know how we became as we are now."
"Actually, I was--" Twilight couldn't continue that Celestia had already started recounting old memories.
"When we awoke in this cave, we saw a world devoid of machinery. Of buildings. Of blue energy."
"Of Makers and friends," Luna interjected.
"It was just a vast meadow of colors with a bunch of creatures we had never seen before," Celestia continued. "We looked around and eventually found ponies whom we observed and then contacted."
"They...saw us as great spirits or something..." Luna said. She was visibly disturbed. "We came to the conclusion to let them believe that and eventually teach their children differently. We aren't gods not 'great spirits' despite the amount of magic within us."
Celestia giggled. "We learned that this 'magic' had permeated everything and created all of this new world," she said as she spread her arms out. "We wanted to protect it. Learn from it. Teach it. Help it grow."
"We didn't want to lose it as we did our original world," Luna said.
Twilight waved her hooves and fell on her rear. "Hold on! This so much to take in!"
"Well, we can stop for now and resume later if you--" Celestia started.
The lavender alicorn shook her head. "No. I just want to know about this 'Past World' of yours. The more I hear the better equipped I'll be to process the information about it. There might even be a way to bring back that age," she pondered. "Or bring some of it back. Might even have pieces of it still intact somewhere that you're not aware of, but without knowing how it is or what it is like, I won't know what to look for," Twilight explained.
The two princesses 'jolted' and stabilized. "If I could cry in this form...to recall old friends in a life long past...Of a world forever lost to us and the potential futures it carried...," Celestia lamented.
"Let's remember the fond moments instead of focusing on the negatives, sister," Luna said in her best attempt to reassure Celestia. "Even if the memories are painful, we still have them, and they're proof of what came before." She pretended to clear her throat and looked directly at Twilight. "Everything began when I was activated in the home of my Makers for the first time..."
