Dearest Clover,
Our Princess Platinum is harsh, but the exile she places me under is harsher still. No other pony have I seen these past seven months, while the winds of winter grow louder and colder out of all proportion with the season. Have our pegasus cousins lost control of the skies? Note that still I call them our cousins, no matter what Platinum may say. Already have I, once her most beloved mage, been exiled for my views, treasonous as they are named. What more injury can she inflict on me? Even so, Clover, I ask that you not show her this letter, nor mention that we are able to maintain correspondence, lest her wrath turn to you as well. Your position as her confidante is all too unique these days, I fear, and the less cause you give her to suspect you, the more you may be able to turn her course from the shared destruction she and Commander Hurricane and Chancellor Puddinghead all currently hurtle towards.
And if so many ponies, working and living together, may be the death of each other and themselves, then what hope, Clover, have I? I, Star Swirl, alone and abandoned by the society and people that bore me, yet sure to receive no warm welcome from the pegasi or earthers were I to seek their hearths instead. I fear these winter winds that howl outside my cavern shall be the death of me, if not indeed the death of all ponykind. And why should it not be so? I have failed to turn the unicorns’ cause, failed to placate my monarch, failed to complete my great spell… yet, by the grace of this world, I hope that I shall not fail to be remembered. Keep my letters, Clover. Keep them hidden, yes, and private and secure, but keep them nonetheless. If there are ponies that come after us, and other ponies that come after them, and so on for as long as our imaginations can contain, let them remember that there was such a pony as Star Swirl, and let them remember me for what I thought, and what I did, and what I wrote.
I enclose with this letter the outlines of my thoughts on this world we live in, how it is we live in it, and how it is it exists to be lived in. My present exile makes writing impractical, for not only are supplies scarce, so too is the time with which to use them. Yet how am I to judge the true priority of my time and my survival? I am an exile, friend no longer to any pony but yourself, so what value is my continued life truly worth? If there is anything I may do with my time remaining to me, it is to write, to leave my thoughts for discovery by the generations that we may both hope are yet to come. But still my thoughts are not as complete as I should like, not as thorough, not as organized, and I fear even now the winter may have chilled my thoughts, made me not so sharp as once I was. The thoughts I send to you are outlines, Clover, some half-finished and others scarcely begun. I know that I can trust you to finish what I could only begin. Fill my gaps. Follow my beginnings to their conclusions. Make for ponykind a document that is whole, not a document that is every bit consistent with my original frost-driven wordings.
Your abiding mentor,
Star Swirl
The earthers once conducted an experiment. A mother did not desire her foal and so abandoned him—or so goes the story, and no alternate tellings have I heard—and a scientist earther named Inquiry took the foal, named him Subject, and placed him in an artificial world. The world was nearly the size of the royal castle, or thrice that of a glowing hoop field, and was bordered on all sides with what appeared to Subject to be unassailable rocky heights. Within the artificial world were all things such as the natural world might present a pony with in order to survive, namely grass and other foods, outcroppings and canopies and other shelter from the odd habits of the sky, and sufficient wood and other materials with which Subject might have shaped tools for himself.
While the borders of the world appeared to be sheer rock walls, in truth there were hidden doors embedded within the walls, which Inquiry used to inspect Subject and make notes upon his progress, approaching while he slept or hiding in bushes or the like. Subject’s progress was poor. With no companions to speak to, he never learned language, though Inquiry did note him occasionally making such sounds as no pony had heard before or since. With no ponies to defeat or impress, or predators to withstand, he never bothered to improve his body, which remained thin and unmuscled. With no society to play a role in, he never developed a cutie mark. And with nothing to give his life meaning, he soon perished.
Next Inquiry obtained two more foals, one female and the other male, and she named them Order and Desire and placed them too in the artificial world. Their outcome was markedly different. Their lives revolved entirely around one another, and everything each did, save the most primitive tasks of survival, was for the other. They spoke to each other in words Inquiry did not recognize, though words she did believe them to be. Their cutie marks were both hearts. When Inquiry’s observations ended she chose to release them to the outside world, which they found strange and frightening. They did eventually learn the proper language, but their speech was always faulty, and they never bore Inquiry herself any love, nor did either one produce any foals.
From Inquiry’s two experiments, and from the simple biological facts of reproduction, we may deduce that certain beliefs—I should say, myths—about our origins are false. All talk of “Epona,” for instance, a so-called “first pony,” may instantly be discarded. From one cannot come many. The story of Sun Pony and Moon Pony, that together brought forth other ponies and then left their power over the sun and moon for the unicorns to inherit, is more likely, yet only slightly so, for how could merely two ponies bring forth a multitude? And how might we have arrived at the present day, with unicorns and pegasi and earthers all different, to say nothing of the batwings and mermares and other stuff of unconfirmed legend, from such a meager beginning?
The likeliest account, I am afraid, though it carries little mysticism to it, is that there were many ponies to begin with, perhaps a hundred each of the three races, enough to form both society and diversity. Any alternative account must necessarily assume that ponies in the past had powers that ponies do not have in the present, and such a thought must surely gall even the most casual observer of nature. Does not a tree grow upward and outward, ever taller and with ever more leaves and branches? Do not villages grow in their populations, their births outstripping their deaths? Do not unicorns learn new magic as time progresses, rather than forgetting old ones? Do not earthers invent new means for tilling the earth, or concoct new poultices, or discover new crops? Do not pegasi forever refine their understanding of the skies? No, the first ponies must have been the least powerful of them all, without even the slightest bit of magical knowledge, let alone the vast power it would have required to bring forth three full races from one or two progenitors.
But here arises a vital question, the answer to which is key to understanding anything about this great world we live in. If it takes many to produce many, at some point in history this rule must cease to hold, and the three hundred or so first ponies must not have themselves originated from other ponies before them. What, then, was their origin?
It is said that there were once two tribes of warring pegasi, the Scarlet Feathers and the Raining Clouds. Following many long years of battle which left neither tribe the victors, scientists from the two tribes proposed to discover whether they existed in natural opposition to one another, or whether the rivalry could ever be cleared. So one mare from each tribe was led to meet the other, the Scarlet Feather mare believing that the other was a Scarlet Feather mare like herself, and the Raining Clouds mare believing she was to meet a second pegasus of the Raining Clouds. And as it happened, the two mares became fast friends, and therefore so too did their respective tribes.
From this we may conclude that the natural relation between ponies is that of Friendship, rather than its absence, Apathy, or its opposite, Hostility. How remarkable is this observation? Consider briefly even the other sentient species with whom we share this world. Griffons, it cannot be denied, tend naturally to Hostility, so that it is said that while no one likes a griffon, no one dislikes a griffon more than another griffon does. The nomadic zebra people, it may be said, are naturally Apathetic in their isolation from one another. Even mules and donkeys, while more given to social connections than the zebras, are not yet so social as ponies, the Friendliest of them all.
Note too that it is we ponies who have established the greatest dominion over this world, despite the presence of the griffons, who all serious treatises admit could easily overcome us in battle, were they not effectively crippled by their own antagonism toward one another. A griffon species whose natural inclination was Friendship, not Hostility, would have established their superiority long ago, and yet they have not, and we remain. Therefore it is Friendship that is the best of the natural relations.
Moreover, it is nothing less than utter naïveté to suggest it to be coincidence that the world seems so uniquely designed for us, with the grass beneath our hooves providing us ample food, and the clouds formable by our winged cousins, and the very sun and moon steerable with our horns. The answer is clear: the world must have wanted us. The world brought forth the first ponies, the most skilled at the best of natural relations, because the world too desires Friendship, and wished for ponies to exist in order to share Friendship with us.
That the natural world partakes in the same spectrum of Friendship, Apathy, and Hostility as us its denizens allows for the explanation of many natural phenomena, most directly the ages-old question of why certain objects fall to earth when left suspended in air. Consider that the world is the center of all things, covered first by the clouds, then by the sun and moon, and lastly by the stars. The farther down a thing goes, the more and larger other things it is surrounded by. Why should not this be explainable as Friendship?
Suspend a ball aloft by magic, then abruptly cease its levitation, and the ball shall fall. The ball’s natural inclination is toward Friendship, and so it moves toward the center of the all things, namely the world. The same is true for nearly all things that exist, from the smallest stick to the largest monster. Perhaps only the sun and moon and stars are examples of Apathetic things, things that neither fall to earth like Friendly balls nor rise away from it like the Hostile fire and its rising steam.
Ponies too may fly, or rather, pegasi may fly, which is a Hostile action since it takes them farther from the earth. No wonder, then, that it is our pegasus cousins who are the most aggressive and warlike of the three pony races, nor that much the same goes for the high-flying griffons. And it is no uncommon observation that the tallest structures, such as royal castles, are characterized by the greatest Hostility, while simple single-storied farmhouses and the like are the Friendliest for being closest to the ground.
Others have posited that things fall to earth because of a downward-blowing wind, rather than because things themselves are naturally inclined to do so, but this is clearly false, for is not the effect of Friendship felt along the face of the earth as well, not merely against it? Do not ponies all live in the same general area, which we may conclude must be the center of the world, even as the world is the center of all things? Must not individuals who leave their society be characterized by Hostility or at least by Apathy? Small wonder we do not know the extents of this world, if the farther one ventures, the greater becomes the inclination for them to return back again, unless one is not naturally driven to return in the first place, in which case never shall we receive their reports of their exploration. Besides, winds may and do reverse direction, and yet never do we see trees and houses spontaneously lift from the earth.
Consider too the underworld realm of Tartarus and its monstrous inhabitants. Tartarus, it is understood, lies on the opposite face of this world, and receives sunlight when to us the sky is darkest, and is shrouded in blackest night when for us the sun hangs immediately above. Were there a downward wind such as others have written of, every monster in Tartarus would instantly fall away into the void and never be heard from again. If, however, things have a natural inclination toward Friendship and so desire to move to the center of the world, then the monsters will move in what direction appears to them to be down, though it appear to us to be up. If you were to take a cross-section of the world, with our homes on the top and Tartarus on the bottom, you should see us each naturally moving in opposite directions, with our heads above our hooves and their hooves above their heads, and yet we both move toward the center of all things, and this is because of Friendship.
Friendship need not always be a monolithic concept, and even as there are many among us who endure the stings of prejudice, preferring only the close companionship of unicorns in place of the aggressive pegasi or simple earthers, so too may it be with things. This explains the behavior some have observed under the name of “magnetism,” in which certain materials in proximity wish to move toward one another, even more strongly than they wish to move downwards, or sometimes away from one another instead with the same force. These materials must then elicit powerful social reactions in the other materials around them, be they Friendly or Hostile in their direction, rather than the ordinary Apathy with which most materials treat one another.
A similar explanation may determine, for example, the phenomenon of lightning, as triggered by sufficient irritation of a cloud by one or more pegasi. Lightning is seemingly Hostile by nature, as may be observed by its creation of fire, which as noted rises away from the earth, and yet lightning moves down from the cloud, not up. Therefore it must be that lightning’s Hostility to the cloud is stronger than its more general Hostility, and outweighs its natural upward inclination. If a pegasus irritated the underside of a cloud instead of the top, and thus produced the lightning at the cloud’s top instead of the bottom, we might expect to see the reverse pattern.
The vast diversity of types of material in this world, lightning and clouds and metals and all the rest, readily brings to mind the diversity in pony races, although even with such legendary additions as the batwings and the mermares our diversity would still pale in comparison to that of the natural world. Nonetheless the parallels are apparent, for all our races share common ties to Friendship and other social interactions, and may apparently be prejudiced toward one another, and even so each material has some properties in common with other materials and other properties that set it apart. And yet even with a race, ponies may vary greatly in their personalities, and it is not difficult to wonder if some things we see as being constructed of two or more different materials may in fact be all the same, differing only in temperament and not in their base form.
We might think of the sentient equivalent of such material-based phenomena as lightning as being romance, in the most extreme, or simply specific friendships as opposed to the more general. A powerful desire to be with one specific other pony may lead one to abandon her entire family, city, culture, etc., and it is not difficult to compare this to physical magnetism.
Still, we do not wish to rule out entirely the existence of Friendship to the group, or the Herd Instinct as it may be known. We are all familiar with Peach Fuzz’s Law, that a cutie mark’s probability of newly appearing in a group is inversely proportional to its existing frequency, and while its intuitive appeal is rather stronger than its predictive power, no one has seriously denied that cutie marks do seem at least partially attuned to the society around them, and so a village with serious quantities of wood yet no carpenter, given sufficient fertility, is likely to eventually produce a pony with a woodworking cutie mark. To what extent this is natural and what extent cultural, though, is difficult to determine, for foals certainly live a few years before their cutie marks appear, which time may be spent familiarizing themselves with the needs of their immediate societies. As ponies are important to society, so too is society important to ponies.
For these reasons and more, I fear for the future of ponykind, if the present degree of segregation and antagonism continues. The three pony races, even the warlike pegasi, are all defined by Friendship, that instinct that holds the world together. As our distaste for one another has grown, so too has the harshness of the weather and the scarcity of crops with which to sustain us. Is it any wonder that a world that brought us forth to be friends should seek to destroy us when we are become enemies? Loathe as we may be to attempt it, and exiled as I may be to suggest it, our only hope lies in a grander Friendship, a broader Herd Instinct, one that join all the races, all together, in some kind of Harmony.
Join, as they say, or die…
