All the Time in the World
Equestria is a… peculiar place, isn’t it?
It seems like such a weird thing to say for a unicorn of my age. Usually, that fact is as clear as the horn above my face, the pink-and-purple locks between my eyes, and the ground beneath my hooves.
But yes. Equestria is peculiar.
All the time, it’s so bright. Even without the sun, there’s always something going on, some exercise or air show or firework display that takes your eyes, your breath, your fancy away. It’s like a neverending roller coaster ride.
Well, until you find out that some ponies don’t get on it.
Until you find out the ‘you must be this high’ sign over this land of opportunity isn’t for height, but for happiness.
Why would you ever find out, though? You’ll always have friends behind you, the limitless expanse of cities and towns before you!
It’s a country-wide painted canvas, one co-signed by two diarchs whose manes weave and bob like a chromatic curtain. Unseen, the words shine out over every nook, cranny, and corner.
You can come visit any time.
To those who nopony else has time for because of that merriment, however, there are six more words below it.
But why would we want you?
And that’s the rub about Equestria, isn’t it? It shines and twinkles like gold dust in your hand, from its rainbow falls to its fruited plains and everything in between like a summer dream. And it’s just as fragile.
It tells of everything you can be and everything that’s open to you, with good friends and loving family and applied talent.
Not so much for those whose families are too busy following their happiness, whose peers just trot off to the friend with the big house and the shiny smile and the cute butt and—
No. No. I buried those feelings. Moving on.
For us ponies that are too ‘weird’ or not ‘cool’ enough to get awash with praise for being you, well... they’re either lampreys, or lost.
They’re the background.
They’re the props to make the true stars feel better at center stage, no matter how much content - or contentedness - they thanklessly craft.
Until that gulf between the understudy and the ace is impossible to close.
Soon those cool fillies become the coveted upstarts, thousands of ponies to their name, and they run off to greater things. They’re tapped by the School for the Gifted. Chosen by the diarchs, or Hoity, or the next passing-by savant. And you’re all alone again.
And for what? An entire country - a culture - craving cutie-marks, and for what? Trottingham, which is two cases of cider and a match away from being a glass lot?
Las Pegasus, the neon eyesore that has no place for any pony not sucking up to Gladmane?
Manehattan, the city that never sleeps due to the siren song it plays on everypony trapped in its concrete jumble?
The chalk-white talent sink for gifted non-unicorns, called Canterlot?
Or maybe they could hold the next Equestria Games over the smog Fillydelphia spews! It’s thick enough to support the stage and everypony underneath it’s thick enough to support the game-
Wait a minute…. Hold on, I’m coughing now. Irony for you, isn’t it. Think it’s something in this cave. I’ll have to move further out soon.
Anyways.
So it continues.
So it’s always going to continue.
I know how this story ends, too.
At the end (or so they think) they’re going to ask, in all their magnanimous glory, just who could have caused so radical a change in you when you do make yourself noticeable. Just not their way.
“Oh Starlight, we’ve barely talked, but… Your new home’s so silent. So insular. So restrictive.”
I could almost vomit at words like that. Even if I didn’t already know how much such an act would damage me.
They’ll call your dream, your innovation, your actualized slice of life... a gilded cage. Because they’ll see innovation, the pursuit of true bonds, the establishment of true community, as alien as they will see you.
“Who could have possibly told you this was the right way to go about things?”
And of course, you’ll pull out the true answer. Because of how unfair life was. Because of how hard you snapped, struggled, strained against the chains that Equestria put upon the friendless. The power it said was one for all - one shining, glittering rainbow of friendship - and drove it into the dirt with all the subtlety of a train if you didn’t give your all for one.
Whether it’s the sun in the sky, or the pony being lifted to it by every parent in the town square, even your own.
What could be expected of you, but to act as you had to finally get what you want in this land?
With so little warmth in the palace you’re so often told to call home, why would you not strike a match to its foundation to bring it some?
Surely you are not the only one. Surely the damage wrought on things and parts isn’t excessive compared to the wounds on your heart.
Surely now they can see the necessity to bring a little candle to you.
And then to compound this calamity, to finish this farce, to drive the knife to its deepest point in your barrel, they respond with but three words. To your revelation of the mistake. To the bearing of the words in your heart. Three words so often follow.
“Life isn’t fair.”
Life.
Isn’t.
Fair.
And that normal pony would look back at the rows of perfectly placed houses, the ponies with bright grins, the ones with marks that show a vague ideal wrapped in an enigma; they’d run into that neighsayer’s forehooves. Say they were wrong. Say they’d wanna go back.
Truth is, they don’t know the answer. But being given one counts anyhow, no matter how unfulfilling it is or how repeatedly it’s given. And so, the neighsayer subs one up for them.
They show them this lovely triangular block; a pittance for their compliance.
And no matter what, the average pony would take it.
Hold it to their bosom because of the bright color, even though it’ll never fit in the heart-shaped hole in their very soul.
Clutch to it even when their coats coarsen with age and grime, when their horns and wings wither in power, when the slings and arrows of life pepper them as a seasoning to the ground that’ll claim them.
But I know the real answer. To this world’s response for its ‘exclusive’ enrapturing being exposed. To being shown how unfair it is, and react by saying life isn’t.
So I say with the least amount of romantic air to it;
It’s not me. It’s you.
Or, to more accurately run this with your statement about fairness: It’s not life. It’s you.
You’re the one who put me on this path, Equestria.
You’re the one I learned this all from.
You’re the ones, the very same liars, who said I could be anything if I wanted to be, with enough effort and talent and want, who said success was mine if I craved it as much as I did air.
And then, threw onto that pedestal a pony who was more your speed, who bleated and flipped and sparked up enough useful things for you to hoist on your shoulders as I watched alone.
Like a puppet.
You did this with your plastic promises and plastic smiles and plastic personality, all molded for everyone but those in need of actual comfort.
You did this with your lies about the world being fair, let’s be real (another three words that I can’t stand hearing from them, who knew?). This tragedy was a course you chart for us, from our very cribs in foalhood to our first cute-ceañera in fillyhood. In every Summer Sun Festival, in every ‘we’ll hang out next Sunday, promise’, in every little thing you do, you said life was fair.
And the second a pony strives for more, makes something more, actually obliges your call for fairness and finds it sorely lacking? You throw it back in their face and grind it into their fur about how stupid they were for ever believing in fairness.
Guess that was my mistake, was it? Foolhardy Glimmer, clapping hooves for that breezie, hoping it’d come in my broken dreams and make them come true.
In a way, that’s correct. It was my mistake. I thought an abode away from the farcical expectations, the entropy Equestria wallows in like a Lotus Blossom mud bath would show some specially picked ponies this wonderful dream I’d made real.
Not Firelight. Not Stellar. Not the Princesses or all her Guard.
Me.
And then in came the Elements I’d heard of them, their so-called heroics, the menace they’d been to others with true talent. Like that wonderful blue unicorn with the light mane being a repeat sufferer of theirs. I wondered when this showpony would come across my city’s thresh; we could have talked about so much.
Of obscurity and overcoming it.
Of honed skill and how to show it.
Of true magic, and how a pioneer could utilize it.
As it was, I didn’t even know her name. Perhaps I should have. It would have prepared me.
But I knew of that yellow pegasus with the betraying quivering lip, the timid taps her hooves made as she entered my world, her aura that magnetized my companions to her.
And I let her stay. I let her stay!
And she, like clockwork, brought the others. And they turned their back on Our Town. They ruined everything.
That snaggle-toothed serpent they freed from stone; how fitting it is that the pegasus that pried down my world is friends with it! He’s the avatar, the culmination of everything she invites; everything all of her ‘friends’ invite.
In one day, they took my dream apart, sent me into the mountains with nothing but the marks in my cart. And that wasn’t even enough for them, my community in dregs around their hooves.
If there’s anyone who knows the value of a number in life, it’s me. My father certainly spoke of them enough, talking of how he’d put Sire’s Hollow on the map. In between him talking of me like I hadn’t grown an inch, even when I did. And my favored number was two.
I liked it; because it implied support, the one I never had. It was in my pigtails. The tears in my eyes when I saw who my city threw all their love to. The rows in my city to show what love could be thrown to.
And even in life, two is the strongest number there is - because it's with two that anything beyond solitude grows.
See, there are only ever two days in your life that truly matter, despite these plastics saying otherwise. The first is when you’re born. The second is when you find out why.
When I finally brought forth this Staff of Sameness into being, when the last plank of Our Town was raised, when the last cutie mark in this town was gone; that was the day I found my ‘why’.
I was here to show Equestria true equality. True warmth. True wonder.
But in this cave, this rocky tent I now sit in, I again find myself saying this.
It’s not me. It’s you.
All of you who took in my gift, luxuriated in my labor of love, frolicked in my garden… and then trampled it underfoot when the next great act came along.
Relying on other ponies to bring out this myself, one too focused on their flanks than actual friendship, ones who promised they’ll be with you through rain or snow, heat or hail, and then showed themselves to be fair-weather in the truest, saddest regard…
...That was my mistake.
They’re all the same, in all the worst ways.
And I made them the same in the best.
And they cast me out for that unity I so ignorantly gave them. “What’ve you done for us lately?” you cry between your stomps.
So now I make this where I strike back; at all the enforcers of your entropy.
Every single thing that happened there, and what will soon follow, is on all of your heads.
Equestria was their motive for ruining my slice of life. And you are Equestria.
Twilight and Fluttershy and all the rest; they do it to please all of you. To make all of you happy because you inspire them just as they do you. And in your name, they leave destruction, dismay, disruption in their wake.
They spread your sins. And soon, they’ll pay for them too.
I did all I did to save you, from the same crushing rejection and lethargy I’d had forced upon me. And it is here, in this very cave, that I now realize the biggest lesson Equestria taught to me:
Unity is wasted on the users.
Equality is wasted on the exploiters.
Even in this darkness, my eyes have never been more open.
You made your choice to flock back to the world that cast you to me in the first place. Party Favor, and Double Diamond, and everypony in between.
You made your choice, Equestria, then and now.
If you want to believe this Cult of Friendship is the true way, the light, the life, I’ll just make of the Element’s hearth what they made of mine.
I… I loved Our Town. Everypony in it. I treasured it, nurtured it, fed it everything I had and wanted to be.
Maybe I never had it. Maybe my mistake was trying to be that foundation for a world too obsessed with their brightest to tend to the embers at their hoof’s height.
I will not be alone again. Not in glory, not in communality… and not in misery.
Even now, these marks ghost their way across my visions, haunt my nightmares. Hues and swirls of all sizes, piteous symbols of permanence holstered to quivering, upturned humps.
Without it, they were whole again. When all that a pony has to rely on is another pony, the true face of Equestria shines through. That was what happened in Our Town; a brief, fleeting moment of true harmony.
And all of it, undone in one day by these… corrupters. Collapsers. Caricatures.
Caricatures!
Even without your gaudy tiaras and necklaces, even without whatever getup that diamond-flanked diva chucks your way, even without your very existence being owed to a literal rainbow-colored fart in the wind, you’re caricatures!
I made Our Town to save us. To make us whole. But now, I realize only setting the foundation of this nation alight will let me find true warmth.
Even when I tried my best to hold back the entropy, it seeps right back into my little wonderland.
I want to say I’m ashamed of what I’m about to do. My father would say as much if he knew.
But… I’m not. Not after this. Not after you.
I’m proud that I’m going to shatter you, Sparkle. I cry now for you, for what it is I plan to do to you.
And I cry because of why I’m doing this.
Because much like everything I’ve done since I planned out my true home, however, it's necessary. I am still a savior the world needs - just not this one.
Really, that’s where it all begins, isn’t it? That number that only ensures the entropy, the extinction, the end.
One.
One symbol to rule them all.
One reason to ignore the invisible.
In your case, Twilight Sparkle, one day. The day when you became the Element you were.
I’ve had the worst day of my life.
Let’s see how bad I can make yours.
Because only when I destroy your caricature of companionship will I consider myself saved.
After all, I’ll soon have the very thing to make it possible, in as literal a sense as you’ve ensured I have metaphorically:
All the time in the world.
