Lyra's World

“Dad. Dad!” the little earth dragon screamed, as she ran towards one of the houses along the quaint residential street. It looked just like all the other houses to me, although I could tell that there was actually more variety in the houses than in the ones in Ponyville – they were all different shapes and sizes and colors, but none of them had any decorations or flourishes, which made the entire experience sort of like staring at a pile of trash. Yes, a shelf of dragon figurines has more objective uniformity, but the unordered chaos in the trash pile adds nothing, and every piece of trash ends up just looking like a piece of trash. Somepony needed to teach these dragons how to carve little hearts and stars into their trim.

“Phoebe! You’re okay!” said a large earth dragon, opening the door and grabbing her up in his claws. When I say ‘large’, I do not mean adult. He was still an adolescent, like all the guards, but he was very… heavy. If he’d had wings, I would have questioned whether he could fly, but none of the earth dragons seemed to have wings, so the point was moot.

There was a sudden flash of pain, and a moment of darkness, as the sniper shot me in the temple again. Just like the dozen times before, I was fully healed in a manner of seconds, the pain fading away with a rush of endorphins and sending little shivers all through my body.

“You need to come inside!” the large earth dragon said. “There’s a monster wandering the streets! They called in the national guard!”

I stepped around the pile of bone and brains that had just recently been my head, and approached the house. “Hi, Mister Phoebe’s dad,” I said. “I’m not a monster. I’m a unicorn!”

A large hole appeared in the wall next to us, and for a second I thought the sniper had missed completely, before I felt the blood running down my forelegs, and dripping from my chest and belly. Pain from my shattered ribs started to build into a white-hot agony, and I wobbled on my feet as blood started to pool in my throat, before whatever it was that was pretending to be my flesh and blood rallied and healed me again. I coughed a few times, getting the blood out of my windpipe. And closed my eyes at the rush of pleasure, as the endorphins failed to keep up with the sudden lack of pain.

When I opened them again, he was staring at me.

“Don’t worry. Apparently I can’t be killed,” I said. “It’s kind of reckless for them to be shooting at me when I’m so close to their own people though.”

“Maybe you should leave?” he said, shoving Phoebe back into the house.

“But Phoebe still has infinity wishes!” There was a wet gush as my guts splattered across my hind legs, and the little cement walkway beneath me, and I sat down heavily as my hips stopped being able to support my weight. Even after I healed, that left me sitting on a pile of warm, sticky intestines, and I squirmed a little as the wet guts slid over my crotch. This was not a good time to suddenly have an orgasm. I was talking to my friend’s dad. “I’m definitely not leaving until she at least gets them to stop shooting me.”

Phoebe tried to reply, but there was something noisy overhead, and I cocked my ears forwards trying to make out what she was saying over the noise. “WHAT?”

“I SAID WHY DON’T YOU WISH FOR IT YOURSELF!” she shouted back.

“I DON’T WANT IT TO BE MY FAULT WHEN THEY EXPLODE!” I said. “I DON’T LIKE KILLING!” It was starting to get windy, and even louder.

Phoebe’s dad took a step back, a foreclaw on her shoulder trying to pull her back into the house, but she stood her ground and shouted in my face, “THEN WHY DID YOU KILL THEM?!”

“IT WAS YOUR WISH!” I shouted, then lit my horn and tried to think of a spell to reduce the wind. The only thing I could think of was Woodwinds, and while that made the deafening roar into something a little more musical, it was still deafening, and if anything, the noise was louder.

“BUT YOU’RE THE ONE WHO GRANTED IT!” Phoebe shouted.

I only half-heard it, though, concentrating on my spell. Woodwinds was mostly automatic, but you were supposed to be able to change the type of music. Could you also change the volume? I concentrated on making it as quiet as possible – and it worked! The wind died down, my mane settling against my neck in all its windblown glory.

The only remaining noise was a gentle warbling of a reed flute, syncopating itself to the still-deafening roar of an engine, that if anything was getting even louder. I turned to look, and saw that not all the noise had been from the wind. There was a small single-propeller airship, sort of like Pinkie Pie’s Griffonchaser, although it looked like it had multiple dragons in it. The one in charge of flying it looked panicked, as the spinning blades didn’t seem to be getting as much lift as he expected and the whole thing was plummeting to the ground at a really unsafe speed. Worse, something that he’d tried had managed to tilt the thing over on its side, so it was the big propeller blades that hit the ground first.

They snapped off like twigs, and one of them went hurtling right in my direction. It slammed into my side, slicing me in half lengthwise and sending the bit with my head on it spinning into the neighbor’s lawn. As I bounced and rolled through the grass, I could see the cabin of the Griffonchaser crumple and burst into flames, bits flying everywhere, embedding themselves in trees and houses.

“Okay, that one was my fault,” I said, clambering to my feet as soon as I had lungs again. The sniper shot me in the chest, and he must have been using a crossbow with some crazy draw because I felt the bolt tearing through my entire body, shredding my rear end and splattering most of my organs against the house behind me. I looked down at the relatively tiny entrance wound, and back at the ragged mess where my hind legs used to be, and toppled to the ground.

Then stood up a second later. “QUIT DOING THAT!” I shouted in the general direction where the sniper had to be. Another moment of pain and darkness said that he’d responded with another head shot.

===

I cleaned myself up a bit before proceeding into Phoebe’s house, carefully stepping over the severed lower half of a unicorn since I didn’t want to undo all my work and track bloody hoofprints all over her carpet. The inside was messy and cluttered, a lot like my room, only everything was weird and dragon-themed. I found Phoebe and her family huddled in the basement – it was actually the first place I looked, since she hadn’t seemed completely stupid and the older dragons seemed to like throwing around really dangerous weapons.

The earth dragons didn’t cower as I came in, but I could tell they wanted to. They watched me warily.

“I didn’t grant the wish,” I said. “I didn’t grant any of the wishes. There’s a bit of timelessness inside me.”

“Timelessness?” the father asked.

“That’s what I call it,” I said. “It’s… like… time passing is what lets a world happen. If you have things, but no time, all you have is a description of a static scene. The less time you have, the more simplistic the description gets, until eventually all you have is the idea of something happening, frozen and unchanging and not actually happening at all. But it turns out that that’s powerful – if you want something to happen in a real world, you have to have the power to do it, and know how to do it, and then actually go through all the steps to do it. But if the world is frozen and simplistic, then simply saying what you want to do is just as good as all of that.

“So since I have some of that nothingness inside me, I can feed it simple ideas. Since it’s sitting where my magic is supposed to be, I can pull those ideas out of it using my horn, and throw them into the real world, where they fill back up with time and all the details get filled in automatically. And then boom! It happens.” I paused. “Literally boom. Most wishes seem to get granted as explosions.”

“What have you tried wishing for?” he asked.

“First, I wished for light,” I said. “That didn’t explode, but I got a sun instead of a light spell. Then I wished for gravity, which was apparently a mistake since I was floating in midair before that. Then, after the sun set, I wished for stars, and BANG! Instant universe. Full of earth dragons, apparently.”

“Earth… dragons?” the other adolescent in the family asked.

“That’s what she calls us,” Phoebe said. “I told her we didn’t breathe fire.”

“No, you told me you didn’t breathe rocks,” I said.

“We’re not dragons,” the big dragon said.

I snorted. “I think I’ve seen enough dragons to recognize a dragon when I see one.”

“We’re not dragons,” Phoebe said. “We’re people.”

“That’s a generic term,” I said. “Because the only people here are dragons. What would aliens from another world call you?”

“Um…” Phoebe frowned. “Earthlings?”

I shrugged. “Close enough.”

“Wait, did you say you created the universe?” the heavyset dragon asked. “What have you been doing for the last trillion years?”

“It was the day before yesterday,” I said.

“The universe wasn’t created yesterday,” he insisted. “I can remember last week.”

“Those memories could be fake?” the other adolescent suggested. “It isn’t actually possible to prove that anything we sense or remember is real.”

“Why would they be fake?” I asked. “The universe was created with an explosion, and I was right in the middle of it. I wasn’t blown to the edge of the space, so why would I be blown to the edge of the time? This is the center of the universe, not the edge.”

“Ha! I told you!” the smaller adolescent said. “I told you god created the universe with a past. He – she – doesn’t have to go around burying dinosaur bones by hand, she just creates something with a past, because without a past it would be less perfect.”

“Oh come on! You’re not actually believing any of this, are you?” the heavier one asked.

“Hello!” the smaller one said. “Unicorn!”

Phoebe’s father rolled his eyes. “Just because there’s one impossible thing doesn’t make every other impossible thing true.”

The small one smirked. “It means you don’t know what you’re talking about when you insist things are impossible.”

The large one threw up his claws. “And that’s a classic ad hominem attack!”

I felt something tug at my tail. It was Phoebe. “We’d better go,” she said. “They’ll be arguing for hours.”