They think I cannot hear them, you know. They do their best to hide their fear when in my presence, of course, but down below, in the apparent privacy of their homes, they do not think to stifle their sobs or refrain from cursing my name. They wonder why I would be so cruel to my own subjects.
The fools do not see the threats right beneath their very muzzles, the enemies that surround us on all sides. They know not how close their fragile harmony is to being utterly annihilated, for they have not seen what I have seen with my own eyes.
They know not of the keening wails of the windigos that pace restlessly, ravenously, in the North, waiting for the slightest chance to envelop the Empire in their frigid hatred.
They know not of the covetous gaze of the Conqueror across the sea, lusting for the day that Equestria is caught within his grasping talons.
They know not of the ancient evil that slumbers deep within the earth – the dark presence that lies beneath the very castle itself, the sleeping nightmare that whispers in my dreams, whispers of the destruction of all things pure and good...
I must have strength. Strength of will to do not what is right, but what is necessary.
The ranks of my army must swell. Every crystal pony must be ready to fight – ready to kill – when the time comes that they must protect their Empire. Those who cannot fight must build up our fortifications, must toil until the Empire is impenetrable from any attack. Those useless to us – the infirm, the destitute, the vagabonds – must be purged from our nation, for they would only drag us down.
But should that not be enough to protect us? I must harness the power of the enemy for my own ends. The abomination dreaming beneath the castle is powerful enough to destroy us all with but an errant thought... Surely, it would not miss a little of that power. By dint of careful study – with crystal and steel, with spirals and right angles – I have learned ways to channel that dark power for my own purposes. It has corrupted my body, but I must take care that it does not corrupt my mind. I must have my wits about me if I am to protect my subjects...
The Princesses of Equestria do not approve of my methods. But I cannot afford the luxury that Celestia does, to be praised instead of cursed, loved instead of feared. Surely the Princesses are wise enough to realize that if my kingdom falls, theirs will soon follow. My subjects suffer only so that theirs do not.
I must have strength.
And if that makes me a monster? If my soul is the price I pay for the security of my Empire, and of all of Equestria...
Applejack and Twilight stopped on their way to Sweet Apple Acres for Applejack to get the mail. She paused a moment longer after noticing the royal seal on a letter, opening it on the spot.
She frowned at the letter. “Another tax hike?! We just had one last year!”
Twilight read the short notice over AJ’s shoulder. “It’s only a little.”
“A little of my money, goin’ to that big ol’ castle.”
"It’s going to the Crystal Empire though.” Twilight smiled. “Princess Celestia wanted to give the ponies there some help, since they were imprisoned for years.”
“That’s right nice of Princess Celestia to be doin’ with my money,” Applejack huffed.
“I know, Twilight. I was there,” Applejack said, patiently. “But nopony asked me if I wanted to help them.”
“Well, you should want to help them.” Twilight pointed out.
“That ain’t the point.” Applejack explained. “The point is that Princess Celestia’s never been out here on a hot day, buckin’ trees. And she’s never stood at a market stall ‘till her hooves ached, or plowed a field ‘till she was sore all over.”
“What does that have to do with this?”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “I do all that. Doin’ those things is how I make money, so I can keep my farm runnin’, my family fed, and send Apple Bloom to school. I know just how much time and sweat goes into makin’ a bit. Don’t it seem that I oughta decide if I wanna give some to the crystal ponies?”
Twilight stared at Applejack. “I never thought you’d be so selfish, Applejack.”
Applejack’s jaw dropped. “I am not selfish! Maybe I do wanna help the crystal ponies! But if I do, I’d like to decide how much I’m helpin’ ‘em, and what I’m helpin’ ‘em do. If somepony was passin’ ‘round a hat to help ‘em set up farms and stores, that’s one thing. But if they’re usin’ the money buildin’ fancy new stadiums for the Equestria Games, maybe I don’t wanna do that. My own town don’t got stadiums, and I already did what I could to help ‘em.”
Twilight frowned. “You don’t trust Princess Celestia to spend the money well?”
Applejack shook her head. “When Princess Celestia comes down here, works on this farm, and makes an honest day’s livin’, I’ll trust her to spend the money she earns just like anypony else. But as long as all she’s gotta do is sign a paper to get my money, why would I trust her to think like I do ‘bout how to spend it?”
“Well, you’re going to have to,” Twilight said, as if that settled that.
Applejack glared at the letter. “I know it. That don’t mean I’ll like it. What a pony earns oughta be their own.”
Who says that the only way to bring down establishments is through chaos and destruction? While I’ve never quite liked government, or the ponies that I associate with, I do believe that I provide an essential service to my cause. If we are going to provide true liberation for all ponies, we must first bring down those who restrict those beneath them.
I don’t really fault my contemporaries though. They have their hearts in the right place. Bring down the government, establish a rule of the ponies where all are truly equal before them, I think perhaps they are going around it in the wrong way. Picketing, riots. Those are only temporary measures, while the majority of the country thinks that we are a radical extremist group. The real way to bring equality is to all is to strike the aristocracy at their heart, sway their minds to be sympathetic with our cause so that they can be used as an asset, an ally rather than an opponent.
I often go through the streets of Canterlot, looking at the beggars and other homeless ponies. My heart cries for them, for justice. It is the establishment that causes this poverty, a system that takes from those with little and gives to those with too much. I was convinced the moment I picked up a book written by Stal Marx. His views on how government were radical, but revolutionary. A place where all ponies are created equal, paid the same, work the same, with nopony over any other.
I have already been in a similar situation, so I know this can work. My job, orchestra player, is set up in the same way. And if they hadn’t treated all appliers equally I would have been shunted back out onto the streets again. But I needed to convince the aristocracy, or at least those who had influence, to help me and my group’s cause. A common government allowing for all ponies to be equal. Only then, could those ponies on the streets be helped.
Because if you look at it objectively, there is only one true way to look at things. Whether they're an earth pony, pegasus, unicorn, or alicorn, they’re all ponies. They all deserve to be treated equally, no matter who their parents were or where they are in the government. Equal wages, equal living arrangements, equal society. That is my dream, and I will never give up on it.
Celestia reached out from her balcony with her divine magic, stirring the cosmos and bringing the dawn forth for the... millionth time? Billionth? Trillionth? In truth she had lost count long ago. Most ponies, she knew, thought of her immortality as a curse or at best a mixed blessing.
They were wrong. Living forever was amazing.
She didn’t have the heart to tell them that all the tragic plays and epic works of literature they had written about her (or thinly-veiled copies of her) were starting from a flawed premise. That she wasn’t perpetually on the edge of buckling under a thousand lifetimes of accumulated stress or contemplating boredom-induced suicide.
At a social gathering a few centuries ago, a pony with a knack for mathematics had been seated next to her. He was nervous, as her subjects often were in her presence, and imbibed a somewhat imprudent amount of wine to settle his nerves. Halfway through his third glass he’d turned to her and very earnestly explained how every time a deck of cards was randomly shuffled it was overwhelmingly likely that the configuration it ended up in had never existed at any time throughout history. There were more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there were stars in Luna’s sky.
That had stuck with her. Infinite possibilities in just fifty two little slips of paper. And she had an entire kingdom. How could she ever get bored with that?
Did she sometimes resent the responsibilities of being the Princess of Equestria? Sure, but that wasn’t an immortal thing. Mortals felt the stress of their jobs all the time, even jobs they loved. Plus being immortal meant that she could, on the spur of the moment, hand the crown off to her equally-qualified sister and spend the odd decade or so sailing the Maribbean as ‘Celestia, Queen of the Pirates’ without regrets. Hypothetically. On a completely unrelated note, she reminded herself to renew the Official State Secret classification on the name of the island where a sizable portion of the Equestrian treasury was still buried.
There had been pain and hard times. Countless generations of ponies she’d seen be born, grow up, age and die. She felt the sting of that loss, but only because of how sharply it contrasted with the lifetimes full of incredible joy she’d been privileged to share with them. There was ample love in her heart for every new soul that touched hers, and even after all this time her little ponies were still finding new ways to surprise her. As for the ones that had passed on, well, as long as she remembered them how could she say they were really gone? As long as she remembered them, she could share her greatest blessing with them. That of eternal life.
I’ve always dreamed of what can be, rather than what is.
When I was young, I was never satisfied with what I saw. There was a stark difference between the real world and the world that I could see. The real world, in all its beauty, could never match up to the world I could envision inside my head. I would imagine amazing seas, flowing with the bleeding red of the sunset. I would think of mountains not as stoic giants, but soil that had risen up of its own accord, and that kept reaching for the unreachable heavens.
More than that, I could see the infinite ways it could become better. And all just with the simplest things. I see the threads that flow through this world, and I laugh at just how easy it is to intertwine them with the utopia that I saw.
I guess that was always the difference between me and others. They were more pragmatic; they never chose to push the boundaries of our world as they knew it. They said it was already perfect.
I refused to believe that. Instead, I chose to push the limits of reality. I could see the endless possibilities that the world had in store, and I wanted to give it every chance I could to see it grow and flourish. I wanted the world to become a paradise for everypony, and I understood how to do it.
Take, for example, romance. Everypony thinks it’s so hard to find your special somepony...when really, all you need is a simple nudge. A bit of...orderly chaos.
I admit that I may not have been successful. Apparently, my dreams of paradise don’t fit with what others think of as paradise. I was–am–convinced, however, that my way was good, that everypony would come around to it. Surely they would see the utility and sheer beauty of my improvements before long.
There is a deep desire to please ingrained in my very being. I am, despite what everypony else says, mortal. I still have wants and needs, just like other ponies, even Princess Celestia. And...well, with my vision and all, I just never really took stock of what I wanted and what I needed.
What I wanted...I wanted a paradise. A world where everypony didn’t have to worry or fear for their well-beings. I wanted a world where everypony would live in peace, and my improvements would be the catalyst. Discord, the great savior! They would sing my praises to Luna’s stars…
But I guess that’s not what I needed. What I needed was the adulation of the masses, the congratulations of everypony.
I still wish for that. But I never dreamed of accomplishing it with help or acceptance. I was to be a lone wolf, a martyr…but I never dreamed of maybe, there was something that could be that I had overlooked. Maybe...that something was friends.
Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve just... sat down with a daffodil sandwich and a friend, let my mane down a little and just smiled? It feels like it’s been decades although it hasn’t even been ten years since Twilight came to be Ponyville’s live-in librarian. There’s usually not much reason to turn off the poofy mane and the popping out of random places because it’s fun as hay.
But you know, all that’s happened in the last month, the tragic loss of a couple mutual friends, Dash losing Gilda, has made me realize something: laughter isn’t any good if you don’t believe in something deeper. I can’t throw a party and make tears go away for a couple parent ponies who just lost their little foal and are hurting so I can’t really believe in just laughter. But joy? Yup, joy’s something I really believe in.
And not just the sort of explosive joy that I can fire with a party cannon but the really good kind of joy, the little touch of joy you can give back to somepony. Maybe I don’t go insane and bounce all over the place for hours... maybe I do what I’m doing with you, sitting here with a sandwich and talking about the bad times.
Maybe I help you remember what it was like in the very best moments, and you feel happier and you can smile again. Because that’s what joy is to me--something you give to ponies, sometimes with parties and color, sometimes with a kind smile and holding their hoof while they talk.
And have you ever just sat around and thought about joy? Because it’s a really special thing. It’s part of why I can do all those weird things I do, because I’m all about joy. Joy’s one of those things you can’t put in a box and confine in a bunch of rules. Joy appears in the most unexpected places, explodes completely out of nowhere and nothing’s ever the same afterwards. Joy can walk on the ceiling, play eleven instruments at once, pop out of an oven it shouldn’t fit into, and get itchy knees to warn of misfortune.
I love having joy, believing in joy, being joy. I think I make my five closest and best friends better because I’ve got joy.
I’ve had lots of time in Ponyville to explore the magic of friendship with five wonderful unique friends and I’ve noticed something: all five of them believe in a certain thing or a certain collection of things that are central to how they see the world and how they interact with it. I may never send this letter but I think I need to put down on paper what I believe.
I believe in knowledge. I love my books so much because I find so much knowledge in them. Star charts, anatomy, chemistry, how magic works, why we shouldn’t or should use magic, why plants are green and the sky is blue. I love to know things, the wonder of discovery, the challenge of finding just the right fact, just the right figure, for just the right situation. When I come across a legend in a dusty old book, I want to know all about it. Is it true? If it’s true, how true is it? Who was Maredusa? Why would the stars help Nightmare Moon escape? Is there really a plant that has a sense of humor and likes to play jokes on you? Can you counteract unicorn magic with a few leaves and flowers and a bubble bath?
But more than just gaining knowledge is using knowledge. That’s the best part about having knowledge at all, and the best reason to learn. Using knowledge is how I thought of looking for some stones called the Elements of Harmony. It's why I have a new friend and you have your sister back. Using the knowledge that I’d written down for you, all those Friendship Reports, made it possible to defeat Discord and help everypony.
But the best part about knowledge? Anypony can get it and anypony can use it! I don't care who you are; you can know something if you want to and nopony can stop you. Rarity knows about fashion and used that knowledge to make us stunning dresses for the Galloping Gala. Applejack knows about apples and her family’s cider is so good! Pinkie Pie knows about parties and parasprites and you know how that worked out. Fluttershy is so shy but what would we have done without her knowledge of animals, and how to console and help a manticore with a thorn in its paw? Rainbow Dash knows everything about flight and boy, can she fly! She’s so smart with flight that she can sleep all day and still get work done. Now that’s an impressive use of knowledge!
So... that’s it, I guess. Knowledge makes you powerful. Knowledge helps you be happy, helps you help others, and getting knowledge is really fun. I don’t know what I’d do without knowledge, and that’s one bit of knowledge I hope I never have to gain.
Vinyl levitated a loose sheet of paper from the floor with her magic. She watched it as the blue shimmer that laid around it hovered it to the bin on the other side of the room. The mare grinned. She just loved magic. She could be lazy and still get things done.
She scanned her room. There was a pile of paper next to her writing desk that was neatly stacked up in the corner of the room from which the loose sheet had descended. In the back of the room there was a bed. Her fluffed up pillow and consolidated blanket were on top of it. Some of her most famous records were hanging on the wall, all of them cleaned up.
No more dust, just as she liked it. Now her room looked perfectly clean and tidy, and all her possessions were in perfect order. She would never again lose one of her records, not like back in the old days. Vinyl shook her head as she thought back at her old self, the unaware mare that only had fun and never cared about cleaning up her house.
She had always lost all of her things because she had forgotten where she had put it. But she never really cared about it, since it wasn’t too much of a loss. In fact, it was perfectly fine for her to lose something from time to time. It wouldn’t really matter since she had enough money. But then there was that one dreadful day that changed her whole life.
DJ-Pon3 was loose and she had only one thing in her mind; the club. Vinyl wanted to make sure that the ponies had a good time. Her job was wonderful, and she knew that. Most ponies around her age enjoyed going to the club during the weekend, many of them without a partner in their life. Many relationships started in clubs. And who would visit a club without good music? She knew that her job meant more than just a little bit of fun; it could change lives.
She had a new record, new songs, new remixes, a whole new plan. She only needed to go upstairs and get it. Quickly, Vinyl flew up the stairs and entered her room. The record was just on her.... where was the record? She pushed the sheets of paper off of her table, panicking as she noticed that it wasn’t there. Trash was piled up in her whole room. She continued searching, but the whole room turned over and she blacked out as her head connected with the floor.
The sun set in the distance. Lying around in a pile of bottles, Vinyl opened her eyes. Her head hurt. She looked down to find out what she had slipped on. In front of her lay the record that she had been searching for. She slowly pushed herself up and flopped into her bed. Tomorrow she would clean her room.
This is my first letter about friendship, so here we go… Actually, I don’t really know what to say. I have the best friends in the world, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. That’s pretty much it...
…Actually, there is something. Something happened just the other day. You see, there’s this mare I know. I see her every day while I’m clearing the clouds. She’s always zipping back and forth, delivering the mail with a smile. She’s the happiest mare I’ve ever seen. She’s always really clumsy, but that never stops her from smiling.
I was clearing out the clouds like I always do. It was going well, but something was off. It took me a while, but I noticed that that mare wasn’t out flying around like she usually was. I just thought she was taking a day off.
Later that afternoon I decided to go for a walk. It was peaceful for a while, but then I heard something. I froze, straining to identify the sound; it was somepony crying. I glanced around, but couldn’t find who it was coming from.
But then I saw that cheerful mare curled up in a ball on the ground in an alleyway, crying her eyes out. I just stared. I didn’t know what to think of somepony as happy as her crying like that. I looked around. Nopony was even stopping to help her. They just looked at her and kept walking.
I snapped out of it and walked over. I stood in front of her and asked if she was okay. She didn’t say anything and just kept crying. I was worried and put a hoof on her shoulder. Her head shot up and she looked straight at me. It looked like she was really surprised to see somepony there.
Why was she surprised that somepony was worried about her?
When she looked up, there was a big bruise on the side of her face.
I asked her what happened. She still wouldn't tell me. I asked if she was okay and she started crying again. I hugged her to comfort her and, again, she was surprised.
…Why?
Why did nopony help her? I knew not a lot of ponies really liked her, but… she was so alone. Nopony cared about her.
… I know what it feels like to be alone. I didn’t always have the amazing friends I have now.
Being alone is the worst feeling a pony can get.
What I’m trying to say is nopony should ever have to be alone. They should always have somepony to care about them. She didn’t have anypony, but she has me now, and I promise I’ll never let her be alone again.
So, I guess that’s what I learned about friendship, princess.
