Lyra's World

I don’t know how long I was staring into the pool. The unicorn reflected there was beautiful – more beautiful than any unicorn I’d ever seen before. Her face was thin and graceful, with a long, gently spiraling horn ending in a sharp point, and cute little tufts of fur on her chin and ears. Her eyes were small but bright, and her nostrils… I’ve never really looked at a pony’s nostrils before. I mean, they’re supposed to be gross and full of snot. These, though – these nostrils were amazing. I wanted to kiss them, but I couldn’t, because it was only a reflection in a shallow pond, with only the occasional tiny ripple.

The sun rose. The sun set. It might have done that multiple times. I could hear birds and squirrels in the background, and occasionally feel a breeze, but none of it seemed important enough to break me from my trance.

Suddenly, there were a series of splashes, and the image shattered as a small rock skipped off the surface of the pond and hit me right in the knee.

“Ow! Ow ow ow!” I closed my eyes and lifted my leg out of the water.

“Woah!” came a hushed voice from the far end of the pond. “You’re a unicorn, right?”

I opened my eyes and looked at the strange creature on the far bank. It looked a lot like a baby dragon, like Spike – a bit younger, more like Spike when he first came to Ponyville. Very short, no muzzle to speak of, and stubby little arms and legs. This dragon had shaggy brown hair, instead of Spike’s green spines, and its scales were a paler shade of brown. Between the brown theme and the rock-breath, I took a guess. “And you’re an earth dragon?”

“What?”

I made my way across the pond towards it. “You breathed rocks at me instead of fire.”

It shook its head. “I just picked the rock up off the ground.”

“So you do breathe fire?” I asked, standing on the shore.

The little dragon backed away from me as I approached. “I’m just a girl!”

“Don’t be scared,” I said. “I’m not mad that you hit me with a rock. You broke me out of a trance. I was stuck staring at my own reflection. Can you believe how pretty I am?”

“Um…” she said. “You are kind of pretty. I really like your mane.”

“Thanks!” I said, grinning. “So… um…” I wasn’t really sure where to go from here. “I guess I owe you one.”

“One what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t really have anything with me, but the timeless place inside me was still there, ready to cut all the corners I could want with my magic. “One wish?”

“I wish for infinity more wishes!” she said, grinning eagerly for the first time.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I can grant that by just following you around, granting whatever wishes you want, forever?”

“Really?” the little dragon asked.

I smiled. “Sure, I’ve got nothing better to do.”

The dragon rubbed her fore-claws together. I noticed the actual claw-points were very blunt – better for digging in the dirt, maybe? “Then… I wish for infinity dollars!”

“What’s a dollar?”

“How do you not know what a dollar is?” she asked. “It’s, um, it’s money.”

“Infinite money. Got it,” I said. I reached inside myself, and prepared for a deluge of gold coins, or gems, or whatever horrible disaster would come from such a silly wish. But since I didn’t want everything to explode again, I changed the wish to ‘endless money’. She was only a baby dragon, so that would probably be enough.

There was a small ‘pop’, and a tiny, glittery square of metal or ceramic or something appeared in midair, and landed at the dragon’s feet.

“Oh cool,” she said, picking it up. “Look! It has my name on it and everything!” Apparently, her name was ‘Phoebe’. Why can’t dragons ever have normal names? “Let’s go try it out!”

With that, she ran off into the forest. Only she had a baby dragon’s stubby little legs, so I could keep up with her at a modest trot.

===

It turned out that the little glittery metal thing was a ‘credit card’, which was basically a reusable cheque. The shopkeepers used an enchanted thingie to check that the account had enough money to cover whatever the baby dragon wanted to buy, and the card I’d given her made it always say ‘yes, there’s plenty of money’.

So, we were basically stealing. I would have felt bad about it, but I’d created the entire universe, so all of the money belonged to me anyway.

On the other hoof, when we left the covered marketplace, the entire city guard was waiting for us. The door was surrounded by a semicircle of flashing carriages being used as a barricade, with the guards themselves taking cover behind their carriages, the little planters for trees and bushes, and other low barriers. They were pointing things at us that I assumed were weapons – they had a hole in the end, and a trigger, and looked a lot like unloaded crossbows without arms.

None of them were older than adolescent drakes, which kind of made sense – adult dragons are solitary and go off to live in caves and sleep on their hoards, but the less psychotic adolescents sometimes move into pony cities and live a few normal pony lives before they outgrow that phase. Not that we were in a pony city – there were nothing but earth dragons, as far as the eye could see.

Yes, I know, I’m obsessed with dragons. Apparently, I’d created a whole world of them.

Phoebe squeaked and hid behind me, terrified. I levitated the massive bag of candy she’d bought closer to her, but that wasn’t enough to distract her from the attention.

One of the guards had a bullhorn. “Alien monster, step away from the child!”

“She’s not dangerous!” Phoebe shouted back. “Haven’t you ever seen a unicorn before?”

There was a pause, then the guard with the bullhorn said, “There’s no such thing as unicorns!”

“Are too!” I said, grinning.

He replied, “I don’t know what you are, monster, but I’m not letting you hurt that child!”

“I wish you’d all just go away and leave me alone!” Phoebe shouted.

I reached inside for the timelessness, and smirked. “Your wish is my –“

Aaand everything exploded again. Except for me and Phoebe. And the candy.

There wasn’t a lot of fire, or light – it was more of a giant wave of force, starting a few feet from my hooves and getting larger and stronger as it expanded. The glass doors on the building behind us shattered, followed by the walls, the structural beams, and the roof peeling back and flying off in large, flat chunks like it was made out of paper. The flashy carriages were launched into the air, metal and glass crumpling as they flipped end over end, bouncing off the other carriages parked in the large lot in front of the market, some of them bursting into flames.

The guards were torn to pieces. They didn’t even have time to scream before heads and limbs went flying back, shattered torsos splattering in cones of blood and gore behind where they’d been kneeling. The bystanders weren’t so lucky – most of them were far enough away not to be instantly killed, but their bones were shattered and their skin stripped, and they writhed on the ground, some of them torn clean in half, screaming and wailing in agony…

“Oops,” I said, turning to look at Phoebe, who was staring with eyes wide and empty. “I think you need to be more specific next time.”

She whimpered.

“Well, okay,” I said. “By the strictest sense of the word, nopony ever needs to do anything, but everypony has a default standard of living they want to maintain, or some sort of moral code they don’t want to violate, and those put constraints on our actions. So if, for example, you don’t want to kill anypony, you need to specify that you want them to leave in one piece.” There was another explosion behind us, as something flammable in the ruined marketplace went up in flames. “Otherwise it’s far too easy to grant your wish by making everything explode.”

“So you’re an evil genie?” she asked, looking scared.

“What? No!” I said, grinning madly. “I’m a unicorn.”

She glared at me.

“So what should we do next?” I asked, levitating her up onto my back. She was tiny enough to ride me – even smaller than Spike compared to Twilight, although from how big everything else looked next to her, it was probably that I was larger and not that she was really smaller. She reflexively grabbed onto my mane with her tiny claws, and I started picking my way through the field of destruction. “You’ve still got infinity wishes.”