On the Significance of the Stars
"A pleasure to see you back here, princess."
"The pleasure's all mine." Twilight Sparkle smiled at the night guard as his horn glowed, and the door was unlocked. Beyond the gate of iron bars waited the Star Swirl the Bearded wing, the most secure part of the Canterlot Archives and repository of the most dangerous and volatile knowledge in all of Equestria. Wards against teleportation, invisibility, wall-walking and even basic telekinesis were imbued into every stone of the wing, with the only way in being an unlocking spell that only the guards were authorized to even think about. In this one corner of Canterlot, the princesses had to answer to their guards.
That didn't stop Twilight from brainstorming various ways to duplicate the spell or cheat the system. Purely as an academic exercise, of course.
"Feel free to call if you need anything," the guard told her, and the princess snapped out of her thoughts of treasonous conspiracy long enough to nod and smile at the guard once more. With the pleasantries now out of the way, Twilight all but barreled into the secure wing. It took less than ten of her great leaping steps to bring her to the hourglass at the center of the room. She stood there for a few minutes, simply drinking in the musty air and perking up at the smell of moldering paper. She could hardly imagine what sort of potent spells were hidden in these neglected tomes, what valuable magical insight she might have gone her whole life without knowing. In the crowded darkness of very early morning, Twilight Sparkle waited for the right moment with bated breath.
It was scarcely a minute before the sun rose, its beams shining through the endless motes of dust and illuminating books and scrolls that had gone untouched for decades, perhaps even centuries. Twilight reared up on her hind legs, fluffed her wings up and whinnied, her eyes dancing over the endless possibilities and trying to settle on just one direction to charge in.
As fate would have it, as the sun rose behind the indecisive alicorn, its rays shone through the hourglass and the princess's wings. A single ray of sunshine pierced the persistent shadows, and Twilight's gaze was immediately drawn to the tome it illuminated. The moment she saw it, she reached out with her magic and brought the dusty book across the room towards her.
Twilight Sparkle had a rich internal dictionary, which went well with her endless internal monologues. She had been planning for the use of most of the words in that dictionary today, with every adjective from 'impressive' to 'pointless' lined up and waiting to be applied to whatever book or scroll fell into the questing bookworm's hooves. The only one she hadn't been expecting to use in some capacity was, well, 'unexpected'.
Most details of the book were the sort of thing Twilight had been expecting in the Star Swirl the Bearded wing. The binding was snakeskin, expertly crafted but obviously ancient. The pages looked cracked and torn at first glance, and what little color there had been on the cover was now almost completely flaked off. Half of the ancient pigment was now floating in the air, increasing the dust density to levels bordering on hazardous in some corners of the room. But there was one detail about the book that came out of left field for the princess, and that was the cover itself. Though the colors were all but gone, the gold leaf outlining the shapes still clung to the snakeskin, and that showed Twilight all she needed to see.
The design on the cover was the princess Twilight Sparkle's cutie mark, a six-pointed star on top of a six-pointed star, and surrounded by five other stars. A small patch of violet pigment still clung to one of the points of the largest star, leaving no doubt in Twilight's mind. Instead, it raised questions, questions she could not help but ask aloud to herself.
"What is a book with my cutie mark on it doing in the Star Swirl the Bearded wing? And for that matter, how is it so old?" She tried to blow off a bit of the dust, but stopped her breath when the last of the color started to tremor and shake itself loose. "This can't be one of my old schoolbooks, can it? I can't have been gone for this long." As if to emphasize her point, a spider's corpse slipped out from between the book's pages. Twilight watched as it fluttered to the ground, as though expecting it to explode in a shower of magical sparkles.
Unable to wonder without answer any longer, Twilight finally opened the book, easing back the cover as delicately as possible for fear it might break off. The first flimsy page was almost bare, except for a small, horn-written title.
On the Significance of the Stars
An essay by Star Swirl the Bearded
Already, the mystery of the cover was seeming far more mundane. It was an arrangement of stars, a constellation that had fallen out of favor with Luna and was no longer seen in the night sky. It was the only explanation for why Twilight had never seen it when stargazing.
It didn't explain why she hadn't seen it in any astronomy textbooks, but the prospect of reading one of Star Swirl's personal essays was too tantalizing for the princess to pursue the mystery of the cover. Instead, she turned the page, and started reading the faded words.
Most ponies don't see the stars as anything special. They're the backdrop of the night, little more than fireflies. If anypony were to associate the stars above us with magic, their thoughts would most likely turn to Princess Luna and her breathtaking night skies. They certainly wouldn't think that those stars were more homeland to ponykind than any part of Equus.
Not even a paragraph in, and already Twilight was confused. That was the intoxicating thing about Star Swirl's writings, though; if it didn't boggle your mind within the first few sentences, it was an academic rip-off.
Don't be so surprised, dear reader. Haven't you ever wondered about how much we stand out on this planet? Every race that isn't at least vaguely equine is barbaric, insanely pragmatic, or some kind of horrible monster. Equestria is the most fertile land in our entire world, and sometimes it seems like ours is the only land that is not an untamed wasteland. Who is it that does not fit the pattern here?
Despite how alien the idea was, Twilight couldn't fault the logic on display. She would need more than a few short phrases to convince her, though, so she read on.
I noticed this pattern for myself not too long ago. I haven't bothered broaching the subject to my students, of course. Too many wizards ruins a spell, as I always say. No, instead I pressed on alone, travelling to distant lands and asking those who would listen if they remembered a time with no ponies. I found my answer with a mighty red dragon, his hoard so high it took me three days to scale it. He told me of a star that fell from the heavens, then cracked open and spilled out ponies of every form, from the humble earth pony to the resplendent crystal equines. Normally, of course, I would dismiss this as a creation myth, but a dragon as old as this one has no reason to lie about the origins of his favorite meal. Myself excluded, of course, on account of how difficult it is to get beard hair out of one's teeth.
Twilight chuckled a little, still surprised by the great mage's casual approach to mortal danger. Had she been in the wizard's hooves at the summit of that dragon's hoard, she would have been shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
But despite my source's credibility, I could not be certain. The word of an ancient dragon pales in comparison to a total lack of evidence, after all. There had to be something else, something to shed light on where we came from, if from anywhere at all. And while I could not find any creature or ancient library older than the dragon, I did find an alternative.
I traveled to the reclusive jungles of Zanzebra, where one can find potionmasters and alchemists that put me to shame. What a zebra can do with a few ground-up flowers, why, it rivals any enchantment I could conjure up. And that is because the zebra race, more than any other I have met, understands where power over others begins; the mind.
When I braved the jungle this time, I found a dazzle of zebras slaving away over a memory potion, capable of showing one the memories of those who came before them. They had made the usual breathtaking advances I expected of their kind, but as it was, the potion only allowed you to go back five generations in your family. Thoughts of my Alien Equine Theory came pouring back, and I dedicated the next few months of my life to improving the formula.
Twilight Sparkle turned the page, unveiling a complex diagram of the memory potion with scribbled notes about ingredients and improvements. Time and neglect had taken their toll on the drawing, and just the turning of the page seemed to have smudged quite a bit of the ink, but the central details were all there. Memory dawned on Twilight as she looked at the shape of the bottle, the designs on the handle, and a few barely decipherable notes on color; this was the same potion Zecora had given her during the Plunder Vine Incident. On the next page, the essay that had quickly become a series of anecdotes continued.
After much study and experimentation, along with a few tragic mishaps, we were able to perfect the memory potion. Now, instead of tapping into family genetics, it could let you experience memories from anypony of your species across a massive expanse of history. Rather than concoct different potions for the different species, I instead mixed in a magivorous protein that would feed off of a creature's specific brand of magic and change the formula to suit that species. Even a stray hair is enough to trigger the change, so a pegasus need not feel pressure to sacrifice a feather for magical stirring purposes.
Twilight was slightly confused by this. Zecora had claimed the potion would only respond to alicorn magic, yet Star Swirl had apparently made the potion to be accessible by anypony. Or perhaps Zecora had said that to make sure it was Twilight that activated it; Celestia knew they wouldn't have gotten anywhere with the plunder vines if Twilight had instead wasted the entire potion looking at the history of Zanzebra. Probably, anyway.
I had done everything I could to make the potion as potent as possible. The more a pony drank, the older the memory they experienced. While the rest of the team was celebrating our accomplishment and indulging in first-hand experiences of their own mythology, I worked feverishly to produce the gallons of memory potion I would need. I had not lost sight of why I had helped them with this potion; Quite the contrary, it had been on my mind every day for those grueling three months. Access to ancestral memory was the key to understanding the origins of ponykind, I could not afford to doubt it. I finally had the tool I needed.
When I at last left the jungle, I paid little heed to the well-wishes or the jubilant festival behind me. My cart was heavy with the key to the past, all twelve gallons of it, and I dared not perform this experiment somewhere where anypony would be concerned for my health. Of course it was dangerous, but danger cannot impede progress. The best it can do is distract progress with a shiny toy for a few minutes.
As soon as I could be reasonably sure the zebras would not find me, I cast my spell and began to drink. As I drank, I slipped in and out of history, the jungle briefly disappearing to be replaced with a temple or battlefield. Moments as recent as the previous Tuesday gave way to bygone ages that even I had believed to be baseless myth. I bore witness to the Crystal Exodus, and stared in awe as the mighty maelstroms of the Unconquered Sea were broken beneath the hooves of the hippocampi. With every legend revealed as truth, I grew more hopeful.
When I started on the final bottle, I opened my eyes and saw darkness. I felt the presence of so many ponies all around me, but I had no idea who any of them were. The only thing I could see was the glow of unicorn magic, brighter even than the magic of the princesses. But for all the power I sensed, the only spell they were casting was telekinesis. Telekinesis the likes of which I have only seen used to govern the stars themselves.
And now at last we return to the matter for which this essay was named. For as I further explored that vision of the distant past, I discovered that these mighty unicorns were not arranging the stars as my student Luna does, but using the stars as a climber might use outcrops of rock. They were on a vessel moving through the vastness of deep space, and using the stars to guide their path.
On the opposite page, there was a picture of the vessel, a nearly-perfect sphere of polished metal. It was surrounded by stylized six-pointed stars, and a jagged tracery denoting unicorn magic was extended between the sphere and the nearest star. Twilight's magic danced over the cracked page in wonder, as she did not trust something as clumsy as her hoof to trace the lines of faded ink. After studying the image thoroughly in search of hidden messages, she turned the page.
When I awoke from that vision, I had never before known such anticipation. The dragon had spoken the truth, and I was now on the cusp of discovering the origins of ponykind. I could only hope that there was enough potion left to glimpse the world from whence we came. I seized the final bottle and drank deeply, until there was not a drop left to drink.
When I next opened my eyes, I was not in Equestria, or indeed anywhere on Equus. I was on a whole other world, and everything from the soil beneath me to the ponies around me assured me of that. Its technology was so advanced that I mistook their science for magic at first, and nowhere was that more evident than at the observatory on whose lawn the potion had dropped me. Within those steel walls, I saw things that nopony of Equestria will believe for the next thousand years. Telescopic lenses that could watch the dance of solar flares with nary a spell in sight, flickering glass that displayed the most intimate details of distant galaxies, and a magnificent machine that poured forth a drink so potent that those who drank of it seemed to almost explode with energy.
As I was only a spectator in this memory, I chose to admire that which needed only be seen to be appreciated. I went to the telescope, hoping to catch a glimpse of some constellations so I could try to chart the stars for this strange world when I woke up. But as I approached, the pony using the telescope shrank back from it in fear. I peered through, and was taken aback at the sight of a purple six-pointed star hanging in the night sky.
Twilight Sparkle stopped reading, and turned to stare at her cutie mark. Rarity would have said it was magenta, but Star Swirl didn't seem the sort of pony to give a cat's whisker about shades of purple. The question of the cover had a new answer now, one that only served to unnerve the princess. A part of her still hungered to know the full story, though, so she turned her gaze back to the pages of the essay.
I followed the panicking scholar, and within no time at all we reached a town square. Descending from the sky there was a winged unicorn, and upon her rump she bore a mark that looked just like the purple star. She was met with fear, and hatred that even I could see was unfounded. As the ponies fled, I saw shock and dismay on the alicorn's face, and I found myself compelled to go and comfort her. But as I put my hoof on her shoulder, I saw in her eyes that she did not feel it. I was only a spectator to ancient history.
Twilight's magic wavered as she began to turn the page, fearing what she might see. Her worst fears were realized, as Star Swirl had drawn the alicorn, and she saw too much of herself in those lines of faded ink.
They ran from her. Wherever she trod, nopony would dare wander. I cursed myself for drinking so much, for I could not awake from this horror nor force time to move faster. I watched as the alicorn was shunned for her very nature, saw her shed tears as those she had once called friends turned their backs on her for changing. Even through the fog of the ages, I could sense the matchless magic within her, and it broke my heart to see that potential untapped.
When I learned why they made that vessel to travel the stars, I very nearly broke. They made it so that they might abandon her. The ponies sealed themselves within an impenetrable sphere of metal, and their strongest unicorns reached out to the stars in the hopes of either pulling themselves up or making the heavens crush their world. The earth withered without the earth ponies, storms raged without the pegasi, and it felt as though the planet itself would rupture with no unicorns to channel the magic. In the end, there was only myself and the alicorn.
I awoke too late, it seems. Even the ancestral memory of a world dying beneath my hooves was enough to shake me to my core, and I can feel something splinter within myself. As I write these words, I feel like I should be crying, but I find I cannot. A pony died alone and crying on an empty world, and part of me refuses to accept that. It is a part of me I did not know existed, and do not yet understand. This deserves some study.
The words ended there, and the next page was utterly blank. Twilight turned the next few pages, certain it did not end there, but after twenty pages it seemed that was all he wrote.
Twilight Sparkle set the book down, and stared at the blank pages. What was she meant to take from that? Was she the reincarnation of that alicorn? Was this simply another of Celestia's elaborate pranks? Whatever it was, it was ancient, and had been all but forgotten in a dusty corner of a heavily guarded wing within an archive that scarcely anypony ever visited. If this were a prank, it was far too elaborate for even the princess to pull off.
After much deliberation, Princess Twilight closed the book, and returned it to its place on the shelf. "I am not that pony," she told the empty room. "I am the Princess of Friendship. My friends didn't leave me when I changed. Everypony I know loves me for who I am. If I am that pony reborn, then I'm her done right."
With that declaration made, Twilight turned and grabbed a random book from across the wing. She would not dwell on the past; she had seen what that could do to a pony. Instead, she dove headlong into an elaborate treatise on the movements of leylines, and was soon thinking of a way to run a city-wide energy grid based off the leys. In the dust behind her, the tale of her ancestor sat, and when Twilight idly flapped her wings about an hour later, it crumbled into dust.
Author's Note
So, funny story. This actually didn't start out as an elaborate parallel to the whole Twilicorn hate scandal. I set out to theorize that stars are the source of unicorn magic, that an abundance of star-themed cutie marks made the ponies of another world believe their world was ending, imply the world ended because all the ponies left, and then prophesy that all the star-themed cutie marks we've seen in the show are indicative of especially powerful mages and this might be the final days of Equus.
I don't know about you, but I think this version is better. Feel free to disagree, hate on it, or just give constructive criticism in the comments below.
