Eternity.
I do not know how I feel about the word, even after all this time, but I have awoken in this dead city and it presents itself to me, its simple concept still a torment to me. It makes me think upon the past that stretches behind me, this word, and I think and I see it has haunted me since I was thirteen and a prodigy, the prodigy, marked by destiny, when I saw it in an old spellbook, in the old library. The binding caught my eye and evoked childishly romantic thoughts of the legendary past, and I took it to a table by the great windows and I sat with the warmth of the sun on my back, flipping the heavy, musty pages, studying it. I cannot, for the life of me remember much about the book, but I do remember the three pages in it that directly concerned eternity. It was the tale of a mage, a unicorn of times perhaps before Celestia who sought to live forever, for fear of oblivion, and his vain struggle, which eventually destroyed him. I believe the book intended to give to its readers the obvious cautionary moral but all it gave me then was an introduction to eternity. Being a prodigy, I already knew the word, but this story made it resonate inside me and it made me think, about death and eternity and the evanescence of all things for the first time. Of course, these are poor thoughts for a child, even one as quick and precocious as I was, and Celestia tried hard, in that subtle guiding way of hers, to make me forget about it, and I quickly did, distracted by the vastness of the world and the learning allowed by that vastness, and my own untapped potential, but it lay dormant in my mind as a disease might rest in my veins, waiting to raise up again and take me into its grip.
Am I weeping? I do not think so. I do not know. I should not think of the past. It brings in me that sadness, that nostalgia, and even when my mind is clear my body falls victim to the old sorrows stored in my flesh and bone and then there is nothing for it but to think those thoughts that never leave me. I have thought them so many times and yet they remain. Thoughts do not wear out, I suppose.
I will lie here, then, in the midst of these toppled bookshelves and the dust that was once the knowledge of generations and I will weep and think the thoughts because I can no longer do anything else.
It is such a tragedy that halcyon days should not last forever and that memory cannot be lived and that time itself passes with its disturbing steadiness. That is the essence of it all, and I long to be young again and feel once again the joy of all my life before me, with friends by my side. I long for the impossible, for time to give itself fully to a moment of my joy, to spend in those precious years the eternity it has carelessly wasted upon every stage of my life, instead of those which mattered. I want my age, the age of harmony, to return, and last forever.
Yet these are selfish thoughts, for there are cycles here. From my lifetime, to the next, to the next, and so on till the sun burns out and takes with it the moon and this world, and we all have our days upon the green fields and those days pass and then one is returned to the unborn and memory swallowed and more are placed upon the land. At least, that is the way I suppose I usually think of it, and it is comforting in a way.
Now, though, I have this feeling, this thought, that returns to me from the distant past and it says that I am trapped in this idea of the river of time flowing forward to some distant waterfall at the end of everything when it does not flow at all but instead sits frozen and eternal, solid, no more real at one point than another. Do you understand? Do you understand what I mean? There is no present, and past and future are just like east and west. I feel it sometimes, and the future comes to me as if it was the past and I seem to be… combining the experiences of a great many selves spread through time itself.
Ah, it is hard to explain, even to myself. Once, when this city lived, I might have spoken of it to my pupils and in discussing gained a greater understanding. They were prodigies, surpassing me, surpassing the entire world, making this city what it was in its heyday, a place of learning and erudition unrivaled by all the beacons of civilization that have ever blazed up. We thought it an eternal city, half in some higher plane of pure knowledge and thought. Yet I have learned that not even thoughts are eternal, and certainly brick and mortar, however enchanted, will go to dust someday, by the will of time or something else.
Hm. I say that thoughts are not eternal, but what I mean is that somehow, worshipping knowledge and cogitation we forgot just where it resides. What is a thought with no one to think it? What is a fact with no one to know it? Perhaps it is waiting to be rediscovered again, but will it be? If it is not, if all the thinkers are utterly disintegrated into the fabrics of oblivion, what then for that thought?
Now, you do not need to listen to me speak forever, though I could. Let me tell you this story. It is a beautiful one, one that continues, one of those cycles, and I and others have been blessed to live it and feel it and now more shall follow. The cycle continues, despite my focus on the past. I am not trying to slow it down, of course. I would not wish it to stop, I simply must hold on to the past. The memories are what remains once the spotlight has moved on and they cause me great pain but they are worth holding onto still, for what is there but memory, in the end?
I am watching the first of the six, another incarnation of myself, of the prototype which I and others follow. She is beautiful, fairer than I was, I think, but similarly studious and disciplined, and she is moving through the sky, in a strange machine of metal, towards that town which still stands after all these years. But she is not thinking of the rich history of that little town, of the pupils and heroes and friends that came before her, of the days lived by so many on those green hills. Instead, she is thinking of the story she has seen in the books written before her time (well, they are not truly books anymore, but such distinctions are not over-riding), a tale of two regal princesses who sat at the crown of this world, during the brightest of golden ages, after the defeat of chaos, and of a wicked king and many other devils. They were sisters, these princesses, and one spoke with a voice that commanded the sun, bringing it into the sky to mark the coming of day and bringing it down to make way for the moon her sister raised. Yet that solar princess, she grew arrogant, seeing how her ponies loved her day, and so one day she refused to lower the sun, keeping the sun at an eternal zenith. The land cracked and burned under the intensity of her megalomania, her subjects begged their beloved monarch to lower her sun and let the moon rise, but she had become a creature of flame and wrath and pride, called ‘The Nova’ by those who once were her subjects, and so, as a last recourse, the Princess of the Night, who had pleaded with her sister to stop before it was too late, was forced to use ancient magic, the most ancient magic, the Elements of Harmony, to banish her sister to the very burning core of the sun. And then that princess, who had borne so much, took up both the sun and the moon, and assumed the duties of the single monarch of the land, and she guided it through a thousand years of peace.
I know the story well and I know what will happen because this old universe does not change its ways, just its playing pieces. But while the universe loves its unchanging cycles, and its silent canopy stands as it has always stood, this earth has changed so much. Time is wicked. These glimmering spires it has raised, these statues of myself that it has rusted away into nothingness, these bones it has quickened and then desiccated. Time has touched all things but the two. All things but the sisters. All things but her. She is what remains, with all this past and all this future in her heart, imprisoned though she might be and I still love her despite what I have learned she is, and she still loves me. We lived as sisters once, until she played her part and took on the flame as herself, and consigned me to this place by her actions.
But now she will return. The stars work as they always do, but this time, on the longest night of the year, a new thing will be done before ‘The Nova’ (I am still uncomfortable with that name, but it is part of the cycle) returns. They are sending out a probe, a thing of scientific magic, into the skies themselves and beyond, to see what lies in the void, and their princess has allowed it finally after many refusals. The young one, the incarnation of myself, is going to Ponyville to oversee this launch and the celebration, though she does not want to, because, like me, she studied the histories, and she knows that this story is more than the legend the people think it is. She has seen the return of the terrible, all-consuming flame, and she wished to prepare and tried desperately to warn her beloved mentor, the Princess Luna, of the coming catastrophe, but Luna brushed aside her concerns, and furthermore told this pupil that she must learn to pull her head from the musty libraries in the lower levels of the Capitol, and go out and make some real friends and the pupil acceded, thankfully, and even now she arrives in Ponyville, with its towering research facility rising like a great bone from the earth into the sky, dead-white and bare, stretching beyond the clouds.
She docks her airship (that is their word, not mine), and then, with her familiar in tow, a creature of flesh and magic and metal (as she is, as they all are now), takes to the streets to explore this town she has never visited but is bound to by destiny. In those streets, though she does not realize it, she will meet the best friends she will ever have, and I can barely keep watching, as my eyes fill with tears again and my mind fills with memories of a day so similar to this, but so long ago now.
I wish, with a living emotion that has endured every attempt I have ever made to tame it for countless ages, that somewhere in time, somewhere in that frozen river, that moment exists and continues to exist, preserved and suspended. I do not want to watch this girl, living the life that was once mine, but what can I do? To stop watching and record the passage of these cycles, that would be the end. What else do I have? I have remained, for the sake of memory and histories. If I cannot even bear to observe them, then what am I but a broken camera?
I am surprised at myself. I am not normally this weak, but it truly has been a long time. I do not wish to continue.
Why should I continue? You know this story already, and so do I. Harmony always prevails in the end, and though the details may dance about, they are of no true concern. She meets them, those five dreamers and artists and warriors that will stand beside her and face the darkness as a unified light and they each show her themselves in full, unreservedly, and at first she feels shock to see these bare souls before her but in them she will find the purest currents of the world, the harmony that rests at the center of all meaning that we have, and they will move from being crazy strangers to rediscovered pieces of her soul. I have lived this. I know how the story ends, and more than that, I know the details, I know the specifics, I have known this day was coming for a long, long time and I have seen it rehearsed again and again.
But I will still tell it. There is something within me, something implacable that must see the story told. It is, I think, what keeps me here, or at least part of it.
The sun rises and the princess begins her speech and then vanishes, and her student feels true panic. The mechanical eye scries and twists about in the socket but there is only blinding, white light, and hope seems lost. But! The six will band together for the first time in that chaos, under the unremitting sun, and the adventure begins. This time, there is not a forest that they journey through but a maze of mage-warped metal, the secret facility above the clouds, at the top of the spire, and as they ascend, towards the mad queen’s domain, they face perils, monsters and machines and strange illusions in the winding corridors, and they reach the highest point of the spire, and there face her, The Nova, and in the end the harmony will wash out the pain and darkness and burning wrath of another 1000 years, and the golden age will begin, with the weeping princesses and the six reborn.
But what will happen next?
I must confess, I do not think I will like this golden age. It already reminds me too much of my own. I liked watching the thousand years Luna had to herself more. There were so many lives lived in so many different ways, and so many great stories told, stories of pegasus rebellions, of great hive cities built, of replicated flesh that questions the soul, of black and poisoned rain, of star-crossed lovers, of projects to save the world or to destroy it, and little stories too, stories of all sorts of ponies living their lives, day to day. I would like to see more of the Battleborn who dared to believe in war and pegasine honor in an age of peace, of the Cadenzai, my kin, the protectors and lovers of that glorious empire, of the polluting taint of magics and the efforts of so many to keep the world clean of them, of the metal ponies fighting for the right to be true ponies, and above all, of these little ponies that fill the streets and the world too. But with harmony returned, it will be different. Lives will be lived, yes, and there will be great happenings still. But… to be true, the fault I find is in myself, not in this new age. I think I will be able to maintain not be able this watch much longer, not as I am now. We will see, though. What else is there for me?
At least I will see her again, though I know what will be said and what will be felt. She will tell me that all things have endings and tell me that it is the ending that gives meaning to the story, and I will disagree, and we will debate until it is time for her to go, and then, in a year’s time perhaps she will return and ask me at least to raise myself from this dead city and I may do so, though I do not think so. And she will speak about the endings again, and eternity, and she will say that my kind was never made for eternity and I will ask her if she was made for eternity and she will tell me that even she and her sister are not so made, but they are made for a longer time. She will tell me she does not know what lies beyond, be it oblivion or something else, but that there comes a time for everything. I tell her that I am dedicated to the stories these ponies tell, that I wish to see them through (though it does sometimes seem like I already know how they end) and she asks me if that is worth losing my own story for, losing myself in exchange for immortality and I have no answer to that. She tells me- will tell me- I am become something beyond even her, and I am shedding my mortal self like a cocoon. She loves me, you know. Not as I am now, but the Twilight Sparkle of old times, the one whose life I weep over. She thinks of her pupil, so happy, so full of life, so young, and she knows how I stepped onto this path, but she wants me to stop, she wants me to cede the future to those who will live it.
Perhaps it is not even the desire for more knowledge that keeps me on this path, but a simple fear of death and what lies beyond, for though there is promise of seeing my friends again, there is the also threat of absolute cessation. Am I afraid of it? It is hard to know myself, and sometimes I do not wish to.
Should I just let go? The rest of them did: my sisters, the five other pieces of this soul, they are gone from this world though I tried. I tried so hard to keep them here. Applejack and Fluttershy, they accepted death, and would have not even taken immortality if I could have given it to them, telling me that all years have their winter and their end. The others, well, they wished to stay, not, I think, from fear of death but love of life (though I would not blame them if they did feel fear), but I could still give them nothing. We wept so hard for their passing, as one by one they left this life, until there was only Spike and I left to weep. I can still remember Applejack, last to die, with a contented smile, telling me that the only thing she regretted was living for a few years past her friends, and telling me to remember the only the best of our lives, and I would never run out of memories. She was truly special, but then, they all were, weren’t they? Still, I managed to live past them, though with no small amount of tears, for I had a city then, this city, newly erected, a city of promise and wonder, a southern twin to my sister-in-law’s kingdom, and pupils to mold and subjects to serve and the princesses and Spike. But every year lived adds a weight to the chest that can never be removed, and it is harder and harder to continue beyond loss. Spike died, and his great body became unto the mountains, a noble fate, but one cannot talk with mountains about times past, and then Cadence finally decided to join Shining Armor in the beyond, leaving a mighty empire and a rich line that yet continues, and me even more alone. Then came the new cycle and Celestia became something I have never seen before and hope never to see again, a creature that left nothing in her path but ash, and when I tried to stop her, my city, my beautiful city, it burned beneath her hooves and I could not stop her, and I tried to save what was left but in my pain I could not control my own magic. So, my city sits dead and silent and buried and I am here with it, bearing the consequences of my failure. Luna came to me once, asked me to help her rebuild, and I said “Maybe in a few years. I must rest now, and think upon this. I must think upon all of this.”
She did not return, and I am still thinking.
The moon rises again, and the sun sinks. That is strange symbolism to me, born during her age, but it is no matter. Harmony has been restored. The sun is restored to us, and a new world stretches out before them.
It strikes me that I have been here for a thousand years, fearing death and watching the world and longing for the past and becoming something. And thinking.
I am still thinking.
