Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria...
Smart Cookie, Clover the Clever, and Private Pansy had united the three pony tribes under a unified banner - or rather, would have done, had they been able to come up with an actual banner to unify them under.
As it stood, they had to settle for unifying them under a common cause: friendship, harmony, and, it must be noted, survival. Their newfound friendship had driven off - if not outright destroyed - the Windigoes plaguing the three pony tribes, freeing thousands of ponies from their icy fates and restoring the ability of the three tribes to regulate the weather, grow crops, and, not at all least, continue the necessary cycle of night and day.
Several months later, Clover the Clever's mentor, Star Swirl the Bearded, returned to the world. Surprisingly, he was not alone. He was accompanied by two ponies no one had ever seen before. He introduced them to the assembled ponies as Celestia and Luna. It would be weeks before the two ponies - magical Alicorns who possessed the powers of all three pony tribes - would step forward to offer their services in controlling the sun and moon. It would be years before they would be crowned Princesses of the land of Equestria.
It would be centuries before the consequences of their adventure were felt.
The first of these consequences was the arrival of an entirely new creature. It called itself a draconequus and went by the name Discord. The princesses had recognized the creature, and they knew exactly what to do to defeat it.
Where they obtained the Elements of Harmony, nopony knew. After using the Elements, however, they resolved to keep them close at hoof in the event they were needed again.
That event occurred just a few years later, when the seeds of madness planted in the younger Alicorn by Discord took root, turning her into Nightmare Moon. Heartfelt pleas meant nothing to the dark alicorn. A raging battle tore apart the Castle of the Two Pony Sisters. With tear-filled eyes, the elder had been forced to call upon the powers of the Elements of Harmony for a third time.
After that, though she remained a steadfast and noble ruler of her little ponies, Celestia could not feel a connection with the Elements any longer. She wasn't sure what it was. Had there been a limit to the number of uses the Elements could be put to? Had her need to banish her own sister broken the link when it broke her heart?
If the truth were told, she found it hard to care. She knew, somehow, that when the Elements of Harmony were needed again, ponies would rise to meet the challenge.
Those ponies, it happened, would arise a thousand years later. And it was after those ponies had risen to face challenge after challenge, and they, too, had been forced to set aside the Elements of Harmony, that the greatest champion ever known to ponykind would make himself known once again.
That story, however, does not begin in Equestria.
There are a number* of dimensional axes making up the sum total of reality**. There are the usual four: length, breadth, height***, and time. There are, of course, others, as well. Probability is one. Negotiability, notability, inscrutability, and others with names that are, in most known languages, unpronounceable fill out the list.
* The actual number is open to debate. Some say six. Some say thirteen. Some say forty-two. Some say the number itself is unknowable.
** And, in fact, unreality and everything in between.
*** These terms are, of course, meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Suffice to say one allows length, two allow for area, and three allow for volume, but the names are interchangeable.
If one were to plot the location of Equestria and its homeworld on the axes of Negotiability and Probability, then draw a line through the origin point of those two axes, one would, with some fiddling about among the spatial and temporal axes, eventually come across Great A'Tuin.
Great A'Tuin drifts through the celestial void. Massive, crater-pocked flippers propel him* through space from point A to point B, albeit along a meandering path that could take anywhere from millennia to several millennia.
The time of great Cold having passed, its thoughts have turned, once again, to the Weight. With glacial slowness, tremendous thoughts trickle along neurons roughly the length of nations, one to another, and each thought is of the Weight.
Though not as tremendous as Great A'Tuin himself, the Weight is enormous. The Weight consists, in part, of the four great World Elephants: Tubul, Jerakeen, Berilia, and Great T'Phon. It also consists of the Disc.
* The actual gender of Great A'Tuin is unknown. Due to the fact that the Hatching of Great A'Tuin's Eggs took place in recent history, many speculate that it is in fact a female of the species Chelonia Galactica. Until such time as a successful expedition can be launched to accurately gauge Great A'Tuin's sex, however, many stubbornly refer to it as male.
The Disc is about ten thousand miles in diameter. At the Rim, it is roughly thirty miles thick, but the closer one gets to the center, the thicker it (generally) gets. The thickness of the Disc varies greatly, however: it is covered largely by oceans, but also by four major landmasses and quite a large number of much smaller ones. These four continents (and assorted islands, archipelagos, and other landmasses) are practically infested with life, both sapient and nonsapient.
Among those lifeforms counted as sapient* are Rincewind, Eskarina Smith, and the Librarian, and it is in conversation between those three that the story of Equestria's greatest hero truly begins.
Eskarina had just explained to Rincewind that all of Reality was about to have been unravelled.**
Rincewind had, after a brief discussion, reacted to this with his characteristic grace and stoicism.
"Where does he think he's going?" Eskarina muttered.
"Ook," said the Librarian***, who either did not grasp the concept of rhetorical questions, or, more likely, did not care to.
* Allowances must be made in the case of Rincewind, who many argue is more a collection of reflexes and panicked sarcasm than a sapient being.
** One of the problems with time is in properly describing it. Multiple treatises have (will have) been written on multiple worlds. Cause and effect are frequently, though not always, chronologically linked, and this can lead to a misconception that time flows in a specific direction, or at all.
*** Owing to an incident with a powerful burst of magic some years ago, the Librarian is, and has been for some time, an orang-utan. He has since resisted all efforts to change him back.
There are those on the Disc who can be said to be afraid of nothing. Rincewind had always been quite proud to exclude himself from their numbers. There is simply so much on the Disc (and well beyond it) to be afraid of, he reasoned, it would be ingratitude not to avail himself of every opportunity to be terrified.
So it was with no small amount of shock and dismay that Rincewind fled headlong from the grounds of Unseen University only to discover that there was Nothing to be afraid of. Rather a lot of it, in fact.
Rincewind pivoted on his heels and fled from it, back into the University, past the library (and the Librarian, whose "ook" went unanswered, and, indeed, unheeded), up one of the innumerable flights of stairs, into a small, shabby room occupied solely by a ratty cot, a disconsolate Luggage, and a lopsided wardrobe, the latter of which he clambered into and shut behind him.
Eskarina and the Librarian would find him there several minutes later, trembling, hugging his knobby knees, rocking back and forth, and muttering to himself darkly.
Author's Note
Here it is, the not-very-long-at-all-awaited sequel to The Wizzard and the Pony. Originally, the universe-threatening peril was not intended, but when I got around to writing the Apocrylogue of the aforementioned story, it occurred to me that if I left that one loose plot thread dangling, the potential for disaster was enormous.
Well, we couldn't have that, now, could we?
Of course we could. It's a Rincewind story, after all.
The title is blatantly cribbed from Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series, with A Wizard Abroad being the fourth book in the series.
Bonus internets for whoever correctly identifies the source of the peril.
