The Last Year of Starswirl the Bearded
“Sir!”
My hooves pounded against the floor, striking the wood sharply enough to send echoes around the stone walls of the larger halls. He was not in his chambers and he certainly wasn’t in his study – or, rather, him being there was the entire problem and I really hoped he was also currently elsewhere – which at this time of day meant only the labs at the top of each tower remained, looking out high over the city. The two separate towers, with their long, spiraling staircases. He had not been in the first one.
“Sir! You have to come quick.” I paused at the doorway, still hesitant to enter the labs then, full as they were of instruments that were all twisted glass and magic‐stained iron; not to mention whatever arcane web they were meant to be measuring that day. Besides, I was having some slight trouble catching my breath.
That day did not seem a good day to disturb him: the peaked ceiling was filled with a vast, roiling cloud, dark colors dancing through its heart, beating against the walls of the protective pentagram. His ears fell in annoyance and mine joined them in apology. But this was important, and I said the magic words.
“We have a problem.”
He sighed and the spell twisted in on itself as it sank back into his horn. “Very well then, Clover, let us go see what has thee in such a state.” He walked calmly over, not pausing as his hat and cloak floated from the hook beside me, bells ringing softly.
“I was in the study reading through that book you gave me, and—”
“Oh, good. How dost thou find it? Gold Leaf’s treatise is one of the few exploring earth pony magic, but thou knowst better than I how we unicorns can nought but guess at your tricks.”
“She got a fact or two right, but those appear to be more accident than study. That’s not important just now, though.” I would have stamped my hoof for emphasis, but I did not want to descend the last of the stairs on my ears. “I was there in the study when one of your time gates opened in the ceiling and—”
He groaned. “Thou dost not mean to say a loose scroll or such blew into the fire? Thou knowst how many writings I keep are not easy to come by.”
“I have not yet lit it today. Anyway, well…” We had reached the door and rather than try another explanation, I simply pushed it open and let him distract himself.
Starswirl hung in the air before the fireplace, dangling tail‐tip a couple hooves' span above the floor and slack muzzle nearly brushing the ceiling. Starswirl walked slowly in, eyes fixed on the languidly‐rotating figure. The one’s beard was singed and looked to have been blown every which way; the other’s twitched as he thought.
“Thou hast touched nothing since this— since I arrived? Hmm…” His horn lit and bathed the room in a spell that had become uncomfortably familiar. “I seem to have come back roughly a year’s span this time.” A wisp of magic coalesced from the tip of the other’s horn and floated over. He peered closely at it. “Almost exactly a year, but it resonates almost as though I were only half here. Curious.”
“What's happened, sir? Are you…?”
“Oh, I’m quite dead. Alicorn channels completely burnt out. Almost did not believe that could happen to me, of all ponies. I suppose it is poetic in a way, the mage finishing out in a blaze of magic.”
“But we will try to stop this happening, won't we?”
“Of course! I don't plan to die any time soon if I have anything to say about it. Now, fetch me a bowl.”
“Sir?”
“A bowl! One nearly the size of thy head!”
I eventually found one that seemed as though it would satisfy him: an old fishbowl that had been part of an ill‐fated attempt to create a flameless lantern. He was still pacing circles around himself and casting the occasional diagnostic when I got back, but he broke off long enough to summon a small pile of pebbles into the bowl.
“Leave that somewhere I can see it. I want thee to take one rock each day; so long as I counted correctly, doing so will show us how long I have to solve this. Oh, and no cause for alarm, I took them from one of thine empty beds. Now, how will I react to telekinesis if I am already levitating? I will not get myself up the northern tower otherwise.”
I paused long enough to call back “You may want to use the south one instead – you have less set out there at the moment” before continuing out to the solarium. It’s not that I did not trust him around my plants, but simply that he had… a history of not knowing what were my young flowers and what were weeds.
Besides, they always helped calm me down after long days.
“No, no, no!” The latest set of scrawled notes were swept from his drafting table to join the ones already scattered about the corners of the room, fluttering in the breeze from the glassless window. I had long since taken the precaution of removing the clock and any of his other devices that might not survive a similar meeting with the floor. “No matter what I do, it always comes back to me hanging there watching me fall short! Damn that Nicked Hoof to the ice, I wish I never showed her my work.”
“Let’s think this through, sir. Now that she has given you her own findings, you can figure out what would fail before you go trying it yourself.” He grumbled, but stopped glaring murderously at his still‐floating, preserved corpse. “I suppose you can’t simply go back to before you set out on the trail to… him, once you figure out what that is, and turn yourself from it?”
He sighed. “I had hoped thou wouldst understand. Thou dost agree, at the least, that were I to travel back now ’twould be because of the knowledge of my own death? Good, now let us say for the sake of the argument that whatever leads here happened recently and not so long ago as when my mark appeared. Anything I do to change events from that point will only happen because I went back along my timeline, correct? That includes keeping myself from dying, and since I would only have gone back because I died, that means if I do stop my death, doing so would stem from that same reason. Thou art still following the logic?”
“I believe so. But I don’t see where the issue lies.”
“The only reason I would live would be because I once died, and as that nag proved, the loop would eventually close itself. Nothing would change! Something in the new time will send my body back here, or I will return to stop myself from going back, or something else will close the loop and I always die!”
His horn flashed and the offensive calculations burst into flame. I had become rather good at sweeping things into hearths in the time I had lived with the wizard.
“I wonder what happens if you try not going back in time.” The musing was more for myself, but when I noticed his glare I quickly explained: “I only meant— back home, I could have kept growing daisies if I wanted, but all our fields were small and surrounded by trees. Um… they were shaded most of the day and the daisies prefer to be in the sun. They did still grow well enough if we helped them along, but it was always a lot of work. Switching to clover meant that we didn’t need to take so much time babying along something that grew worse. Making tax the next couple years was… interesting, but we got through fine in the end. Anyway, it was just small thought I had, that the solution might not be doing what is familiar or safe.”
“If I do not change my past, though, what would I be changing?” I shrugged, but he had gotten lost within his own mind once more. “The future? How, when all my paths lead to this? I can not change my path without changing my past, and that is simply the problem restated…”
“Listen, sir, this is as warm as it’s been for some time and I’ve already straightened the study. I am going out to spend the afternoon with some actual equine company.” He wouldn't hear me now, but my words might lodge between his ears to be listened to later. “If you can pull yourself away from books and theory, you should do the same. I might even be able to introduce you to some of the friends I’ve been able to make, if they are also free. Just… at least take a walk later. Nopony should be cooped up on a day like this.”
He was still muttering about marks and changes when I turned tail and began the long climb down the tower and into the world.
The sun was nearly setting when the thee of us left the tavern where we had taken dinner. Icy Drift had somehow worked a shift off‐duty from guarding the Lord's family, and had brought his marefriend along; he had mentioned that she was a unicorn, but failed to tell me that her pale lilac coat and indigo mane were only slightly more blue than my own off‐white and pink. I was, of course, going to tease him to no end the next time it was only the two of us.
The hulking unicorn was certainly begging for some form of payback. “I say this is a fine night for starwatching. Thou shouldst go back to ask that pretty little mare thou hadst in thine eye all meal, Clover, if she hath plans yet, and then we make our ways to the manor lake for a spot of fun.”
“Ice!” Silver threw her shoulder into his, and he made an act of stumbling back, both laughing.
“I joke, I joke. In all seriousness, however, the lake would match your beauty, my little Silver, and it is long since thou and I have had such a chance to talk, Clover.”
I was not so drunk as to think that was wise. “Art thou mad? ’Tis past time the gates close, for one, and much as we would then have time to talk, I have no desire to spend the night in a cell with thee! Thou however—” I swept a playful bow toward Silver “—couldst mayhap make such a stay worthwhile.”
She giggled, raising a hoof to her muzzle and murmuring about not hearing that often.
Icy Drift, on the other hoof, only seemed all the more enthusiastic. “Nay! For thou wouldst not be unescorted through the grounds. The only of their majesties who wander the gardens this late is the Lady Platinum, and I have it on the best authority we shall not encounter her there tonight.” Something in his manner for the last sentence sounded as if it were meant as a joke. “Even should tonight go badly, nothing more will happen than that the captain will yell at me, and that you may wish to avoid public appearances at the manor for the coming month. Come, I wish to make the sunset. Nowhere are they better than the lake, save perhaps thy wizard's towers. On that topic, what are you up to, there on the hill? We have not been treated to as spectacular light shows of late.”
He began trotting away as Silver gave me a bemused look of helplessness, but I didn’t follow them. Instead, I excused myself to crossed the square, over where I had caught sight of Starswirl aimlessly wandering the street. He looked at me as I approached, a poleaxed look across his face.
“Thou wert right, Clover. I change my destiny, I change my future. The time loop breaks. I can live!” He was almost giddy by the end.
“Not tonight, sir. Tonight you take a break. Give that mind of yours a rest. Here, come meet my friends.” They had changed their own course to stand nearby, and I made introductions. His gaze lingered on Silver until she asked about our current project. My glare did nothing to forestall him launching into an extended discussion of the issues he had run into with time and dimensional travel or her small questions prodding him along.
Luckily, he soon left her knowledge behind, and even if he missed her suppressed look of befuddlement, he realized when her participation tapered off. “Thou art no longer with me, then. ’Tis a shame, I wished to hear thy thoughts on Hind Line’s theories. I suppose it can not be helped. Clover, thou wilt surely be joining me for dinner? There are some elements to this solution a second perspective may be of use in working through.”
I sighed. “It is late; I already ate. Even if I had not, we intend to make the most of this night.”
“A shame, though I suppose you do lack the same stake in this matter. Enjoy thy night if that is thy will, and the both of you as well.”
“That’s not— no matter… At least try to laugh a time or two tonight, before you leave the rest of ponykind behind, please, sir?”
With a non-committal grunt from him and a “I wish thee luck” from Silver, we parted, leaving the old wizard to his own mental diversions. Even later, during the dripping run back to the towers before the night froze my mane to my neck, I did not once regret not following his lead.
The bowl of stones emptied slowly but inexorably over the following months, and his mood soured in step with it. The spell‐writing was not progressing as he hoped. I often found myself out of my depth in our discussions, though to anypony else we may as well have been speaking from the start in the tongue of the howling wind or the grunts of the yaks.
“Thou canst see the implications of Unblemished Glade’s theory of the paths of destiny when taken in the context of Clarity’s hypothesis of mark genesis? Were I to replicate those initial conditions, it should allow me to leave my current path for her ‘unmapped thickets of possibility’.”
“But you will still be constrained to within your causal wake, won’t you? What was it that one crystal pony said – ‘For one’s mark is not simply a reflection of her destiny, but her life must also shine its own light before her hooves, and so upon her destiny itself’?”
“Nay, for our purposes the mono‐temporal causality is naught but an evaluative factor. That selfsame passage posits the malleability of destiny and it is on that the magic will work.”
Even so, and despite a measure of initial success, the spell remained half‐finished. He had been able to – theoretically – loosen the bonds between a mark and its bearer, but had been unable to satisfactorily work out a means by which it could then be replaced. As the stones in the bowl reached what could perhaps be called a “double hoof‐full”, he grew restless and began practical testing, hoping to complete it by feel.
And, one day when the bowl had all but emptied, it all fell apart.
He had cleared the pentagram scribed into the center of the south tower, inlaid with various woods and metals that contained rogue magic and neutralized the ambient aetheric ripples. I had taken to standing by during such explorations, though any help I could offer would be limited; we had briefly investigated the potential use of earth magic as an arcane anchor years before, but had been diverted by another project before I had gotten familiar with the necessary techniques. What I could do was take note of any progress or observations he called out to me – reviewing my notes was one of the few times he made no comment on my mouthwriting.
He walked the border, eyes on the infused runes. Then, satisfied, he floated his hat and cloak onto their hook and stepped into the center. I have met other mages since, and, of course, performed a few large workings of my own, but at the time I thought nothing of his particular habit of muttering a mnemonic to himself as he cast. After a few words to the effect of “one to another” and “mark of one’s destiny”, the pillar contained by the pentagram had been filled with an activated aetheric field, and the sparks of light revealing its presence were intertwined with his own aura. He was facing me, but I knew from the previous sessions that the edges of his mark would be becoming amorphous, as if it wanted to lift free from his flank.
“All is proceeding as normal. I plan to start with the weaving technique as two days ago—” in my own opinion, a prettier name than deserved for tying his soul into the aether itself “—and add to it the arcane twist underlying my primary sequence of time spells. Beginning in three… two… one…”
He closed his eyes in concentration and against the increasing glow of his horn. The nature of the light shone by the field changed as well, seeming to thicken and tint red, as a ray of the setting sun through the window of a dusty room. I would have worried for his long‐term health more than I did if the entire exercise was not an attempt to avoid his more immediate death.
When he next spoke, his voice seemed to ring longer than the lab would normally echo, as if it were carried by a power beyond mere sound. “Weaving appears successful. Proceeding to cast the time component in three… two… one…”
This third spell was not accompanied by as visible a change, but simply a lesser increase in brightness. I noted it anyway.
“The effects are promising. The glowing path has become more distinct, and I now feel as if I could almost step off it; I will study this vision and what it represents in greater detail before attempting so, during the second phase of today's experiment. Increasing the twist to time. The path continues to solidify. I now see shadows flitting alongside it – they appear to be… memories. Events from my life. I do not currently see any I can not place, though under the circumstances I remain unsure whether these are drawn from my own knowledge or if they are generated atemporally from the trail of my current destiny. Behind them, the stars noted in previous attempts appear to have recently been disturbed; what might be described as a wave is spreading from above and some distance away. Casting a personal shield as a precaution.”
The edges of the pillar of light sharpened, hardening into a wall that would repel most physical attacks and even more of any magical force. We held our breaths in the looming pause. Then the shutters of the tower shook as what ponies would now call a windigo's howl blew past. Amazingly, the surface of the shield rippled, and the aura powering it flickered. Starswirl screamed, rising into the air, his eyes flying open to reveal pure magic lying just behind the lids. The sparks of the aetheric field were cast into a flurry, as those that rise from a fire on a windy day, and his beard seemed caught in a gale.
The beleaguered shield walls shattered; the protective enchantments and inlays snapped in a series of acrid flashes. The storm of magic, freed, licked unpredictably from the points of the pentagram, blackening books and scorching swashes into the floor wherever it fell. I pressed myself to the wall, thankful that I had at least been stood along the marginally safer edges, but I was too far from the staircase to escape.
“No!” His voice seemed to rumble from the stones themselves. A single bright light held steady in the midst of the whirling sparks – his horn, but not; rather, it was the aether itself glowing, not simply reflecting the power of a lit aura. The storm tightened around him, spinning faster, with more turbulence, growing brighter as it was pulled away from the last remnants of the pentagram.
I had to cover my eyes with my cannons, but I could still feel a force pulling on something deep inside me, trying to drag my magic into the maelstrom. I could feel a brief moment of calm before it all blew back outward, bright enough that I believed I could see the bones of my legs through my closed eyes. Could feel the world turning in on itself around him, but it was my ears that recognized the sound of one of his time gates opening.
When I finally blinked some measure of sight back into existence, shortly before the thunder of hooves on the stairs announced my would‐be rescuers, all that remained in the pentagram was the track of the cyclone burnt into the wood and overlaid with the six‐pointed star of magic: his mark.
They tell me the five windows of the tower – one above each point of the pentagram – blazed as a lighthouse far beyond the city, as if the beams were carried by magic across the sky. That would easily match with what little we know of the Elements of Harmony, even in such an unformed state. It did not much play into the next years of my life, however. I filled Starswirl’s cloak as best I could, and upon Lady Platinum’s ascension to head of her family, I moved from the old towers to the manor as her advisor, on the basis of our continued friendship and despite the objections of many of her vassals.
But that remains another story, as is my role in the uneasy ceasefire at the jaws of the windigos and in the first gathering of the Bearers.
My life has already been told time and time over in history books and among friends who would never have spoken in my youth. Starswirl’s has already faded into legend, a hero of myths. Such is no less than he deserves, but my memories of him are far more equine, of a pony who recognized a spark of enquiry in a young mare and who opened a world beyond anything she dared to dream.
That is the pony who truly created Equestria.
Author's Note
Happy birthday, SPark!
Since I know some people will wonder, I'm using the Early Modern English distinction of "thou" vs. "you" (at least as I understand it): the first is informal, used for friends and social inferiors, while the second is the polite and/or formal form. I was actually able to play a bit with a certain character's identity through of how she uses them. In both cases, however, "you" is the plural, even if the people you're talking to are a group of your servants.
And, as always, I'd enjoy answering whatever questions anyone may have in the comments, be they about my worldbuilding, some part of the plot you didn't understand, or anything else.
