Somewhere in the Sands of Time

by The Lunar Samurai

Rating: everyone
Tags: Alternate Universe, Sad
Length: 1069

Starswirl the Bearded reflects on his rather ordinary life with rather extraordinary happenings.

On his death bed, Starswirl the Bearded reflects on his rather ordinary life with rather extraordinary happenings.

This is to establish some of my own headcanon about Starswirl's life.

Note: This story is being explored in depth in Memoirs of a Magic Earth Pony. Give it a read!

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2013-10-27 19:50:02 UTC

The Story

I do not know where my extensive magical studies will take equestria. As I lie on this bed I can feel my life slowly fading from my body, but I am not worried. My time, just like everypony before me, has come. I refuse to fight it, I refuse to believe that I should manipulate nature to bend to my wishes. No, I do not want to live longer than I have. It has been a long journey, full of adventures that I could never have dreamed of, let alone experienced myself. Those ponies who stuck by my side as I achieved the impossible and beyond. If it was not for them, I would not have come as far as I have. This is my memoir.

As a child, I never would have believed that I would rewrite the laws and practices of magic. Being an earth pony, I always assumed that magic was isolated to those who were born into the race of Unicorns. I believed that lie wholeheartedly until I was a stallion sitting in on an advanced magic class in the university. The teacher was not a unicorn, but his magical practices were phenomenal. I addressed him afterward to discover that anypony can perform magic in their mind. At first I did not believe him, but that night I followed that suggestion and began performing magic through mind experimentations.

Those experimentations lead me to a world that I could never have imagined. It was a wonderful new world that I could take with me wherever I went. I quickly began to study magic for myself, coming across many new spells and incantations. That was when I discovered a book on theoretical magic that was too impractical, improbable, dangerous, and time consuming for unicorns to perform, but I could. I quickly put myself into my studies, learning everything I could about the extremely advanced theories, perfecting them in the world in my mind. It was soon after when I perfected the basis for teleportation, materialization, heavy matter manipulation, inter-dimensional portals and rifts, and one of my most famous, the amniomorphic spell.

Later on in life I dedicated my work to teaching. I had written several dozen books on the matter, but my publications received negative criticism on the basis of immoral practices and implications, particularly with dematerialization. I continued to publish, hoping that one day my works would be found to be useful and valid, but that never happened until that fateful day a young unicorn came to my door. She was gifted in magic, and had read all of my books. I took her in as my apprentice and began to see all the theory I had created come to life. She followed all of the spells with ease, and was quickly bringing the two of us into the spotlight. My books almost immediately became famous after ponies realized that I had some merit to my theories. It was a shock to me, I had become one of the highest authorities on magical theory and practices. I quickly streamlined the typical methods of magic, effectively rewriting the levitation spell along with many others.

Everything was perfect, until that day. The most tragic event to happen to somepony usually occurs at the height of their life. During one of my assistant's attempts to understand a new spell for gravitational manipulation she herself was torn apart by the ultra-dense mass that had formed before her. I mourned her death for nearly a decade, vowing to never enter that realm that had caused the only assistant I had to be destroyed. I cursed the day I had discovered that secret realm in my mind and destroyed at least a dozen books that contained even more outlandish theories on time manipulation and even destiny transposition. The media demonized me, accusing me that I was the one who killed my assistant out of rage. I did not defend myself, as I believed it. My imagination grew weak from alienation, like an old building collapsing beneath its own weight, so my world did also.

By the time I decided to begin pursuing my studies once more, I was incapable of anything more mind intensive than a simple levitation spell. I was devastated. There was so much I wished to accomplish, but now time was my enemy. My life was beginning to fade, and I knew it. I decided to exile myself, spending the rest of my life perfecting the magic that I had always loved. It was my calling, my vocation, my life, and I was not going to sit idly by and let slip away like an early morning fog. In my exile I developed spells so powerful I refused to ever give them to anypony. Their raw power was enough to modify the orbits of the planets, and one could even manipulate history itself. I wrote those books in code and hid them deep within the cave system underneath my residence in exile. I wished for my magic to be only used for good, and never for evil, but these spells were used to put theories to practice and to understand the true power of magic.

In my final days I wrote one more book, The Memoirs of a Magic Earth Pony. It shocked nearly everypony, as most had assumed I was deceased. It chronicled what was most important to me in life, rather than another technical book about magic. So much of my life was spent in theoretical endeavours and isolation. I never married, hardly ever socialized, but built up the world to a new level of magical power, but somehow, I was still empty. I finally concluded that my life, however scientifically fruitful it may have been, was not a model life. I lived for science, I died alone. I have penned this last writing of mine on the back of one of my first manuscripts that detailed the world which I was beginning to develop at that time. All I have is a past, my future is only minutes long. Looking back I can only hope for one thing, that my life be viewed as ordinary and plain, but my work be held in the highest regard. I placed so much effort into my studies that it would be a shame to have let my work be lost somewhere in the sands of time.