Lyra's World

It was dark, and there was water below me. I knew this, although I couldn’t actually see or feel anything. It was like how in a dream you can talk to someone and instead of them moving their lips and tongue and shaping the buzz from their vocal chords into a recognizable voice, it sort of skips all of that and just goes straight to them saying ‘hey, Lyra, do you want to try out a new spell?’

I was pretty sure that wasn’t what had happened. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, but that possibility didn’t ring true. I felt like I had a purpose in being here – a vital task to perform that I couldn’t remember.

Not that I was gripped by amnesia, or anything of the sort. Aside from the immediate past, which was a blur, I remembered everything! I remembered the last time I’d felt an effect like this, and knew what it meant. I was stuck in timeless space, and nothing was ever going to happen again. Once, that had been my worst nightmare, although maybe it was more of a nightmare squared since it was the worst nightmare of a version of me already trapped in a nightmare. I’d managed to escape that time, by having a friend kill me before the timelessness fully set in, but it didn’t feel like there was enough reality here to do anything at all. I’d just be stuck like this forever with nothing but dark and water.

The good news was that while this scared me, the fear was as perfunctory and lacking in detail as everything else.

Then, I realized that I was thinking. The ponies I’d seen trapped in timeless space hadn’t been thinking, because that was sort of like doing something and you can’t do anything without time. I had to be somewhere where a little time was leaking in and making things happen, in a half-assed fashion. Which meant things could happen.

I couldn’t feel my horn, or my magical reserve, but since I was in a state where things just happened without worrying about all the little things that would have to happen to cause them, I skipped every step except for the last one, where my horn lit up with light.

And there was light. It was yellow. The dark waters stretched below me, scattered reflections winking in an out like a sea of stars – I could see. And since the waters weren’t still, there was wind. Acknowledging the wind, I felt it rippling across my fur. And there was fur. Since I had fur, I must have a body, hanging there in the middle of black nothingness above an ocean. And since I was above it, there must be a direction that was down, which meant gravity.

Gravity was probably a mistake.

===

I pulled myself out of the water, onto the shore. Apparently, there was land. I’d probably created it by mistake, while searching for it. The light I’d made hadn’t stayed attached to my horn like it should have; instead it was still hanging overhead in the sky, like a tiny sun. I giggled a bit at the thought of controlling a sun – it was made by my magic, so I controlled it, right? I pointed my horn at it, and wiggled around, and sure enough it followed. I threw my head down, casting it below the horizon, and suddenly it was dark again, because there wasn’t any moon or stars.

“There should at least be stars,” I croaked, my voice hoarse and cracked, as if I hadn’t spoken in a million years. I didn’t know how to make stars – creating them on the tip of my horn, one at a time, and then throwing them up into the sky would take ages – so I did what every filly tries to do before they learn their first spell, and just closed my eyes and wished for stars.

This doesn’t actually work. Only this time, it did. Inside me, where my magical reserve should have been, was a sea of dark timelessness where all the details of how magic was supposed to work were absent, and just like when I’d created the sun, I felt the not-quite-magic skip over all the intervening details, and jump straight to ‘let there be stars’.

And then everything exploded.