Unknown

I knew no identity. I knew no self. I knew no peers. I knew the world, however. I knew the small ones. I helped them grow, to know themselves, to mold their world, and to know peace. This was my debt to them from the thrice repelled approach of those I feared and their strange children. I watched the shrouded place for the strange ones and again I discovered their approach. I had no recourse that I could pursue. I did, actually, have a single thread that reached through the eye of a needle created by the greatest of the small ones. This eye looked out upon a different place that existed in no other direction than through its beholding and I could see too the sky it saw.

At the end of this thread passing through the eye was a connection to Those-Of-The-Kind-One which was anchored by a singular ancient act of harmony he had done for the small ones. I delayed calling out through this thread, foolishly. I could see from these lands that Those-Of-The-Kind-One were becoming very clever, but I knew they could destroy as easily as the strange ones. I remembered later the wisdom of one of the small ones. A small chance is always better than no chance, she had said to me, and I knew this was true.

I realized, to my alarm, that I had deliberated upon the merits of this action for far too long. I hastily sent a pulse of will into the eye to anchor its needle upon the bedrock of the void and sent a thought along the thread to seek out and pull those with great kindness and great strength. I could only hope that those it caught could follow the pull.

A great period passed and the clock ticked away, the candle burned to its base and I did everything I could to strengthen the small ones. I did not know if my call would be answered and I wouldn’t know until the echo on the thread told me. Then the thought on the thread returned, thinking of satisfaction. It said it was being followed closely by those who could answer the call. How would they answer, it did not know, but it had hope. It appeared that a great burden was lifted from my form, but it did not leave me for long.

I saw through the eye of the needle the close approach of only a single individual who knew not of the call nor the hoped-for answer, and that one stopped just short of the eye and did other things. There were two others, but they had missed the mark to a degree too great. I panicked and lashed out to avoid failure at the final instant of the final moment. I did not know if I could ever do enough to overcome this series of mistakes, but I would do everything within my power to prevent the end.

Sierra Sky

I was on the verge of hyperventilating. Never could I have imagined doing something so risky and stupid. I had just betrayed my closest friend. A friend that was also royalty! The self-accusations from within led to other thoughts trying to justify what I had done. How dare she even think about risking herself when so many ponies are going to need her soon!? The only future ahead of me was a procession of pain, pain, pain, and then a grave.

I was born with a disease that made my body age very quickly. Apparently, it was a disease from my mother’s lineage. Certain couples would see a quarter of their foals age quickly and die shortly after entering adulthood. No surprise that it was a noble unicorn family that had become inbred, but my father was an earth pony who knew little of his family tree. Maybe they were distant relatives already, but it didn’t matter now.

The doctors at the Palace Hospital were technically there to help in case royalty or other palace staff were hurt, but that was rare. So Former Princess Celestia proclaimed that the very most in need in the nation would be treated when possible at her personal hospital. That meant desperate cases. These days Princess Twilight Sparkle ran things and had brought her niece, Princess Flurry Heart, to the hospital on one of her visits. She seemed to be on imperfect terms with her aunt when they arrived at my room. I was reading a book one day when I heard a knock on my door. I called out, “Come in.” I did not expect to see either princess at the time. Princess Twilight stuck to a schedule. Princess Flurry lived far to the north and was not in the habit of visiting me back then.

“Hello, Sierra Sky, I’m sorry if we are disturbing you at all, we’ll go if we are, but I was wondering if you were willing to answer a personal question while Flurry Heart is here. It’s a question that maybe I should not ask, so I want to emphasize that you can choose not to answer. Is this acceptable, Sierra?” the princess asked me.

“I’m good with that. Go ahead.” I replied. I noticed that Princess Flurry Heart did not seem comfortable herself.

“If you could be cured today, what would you want to do?” Princess Twilight asked me.

I was silent and lost in my thoughts for a moment, but as the Princess of Hard-Hitting Questions was about to speak, I interrupted to say, “I’ll answer, I am just collecting my thoughts.”

They were silent. Soon enough, I answered, but in a slow and halting manner. “I would go home and live with Dad. I would go to school. Find my cutiemark, eat good food, fly every... every day, maybe paint. I would help other ponies if I thought I could help. Then I would be happy.” My voice was going to pieces by the end of that. Maybe I should not have answered.

Princess Twilight thanked me and left with Princess Flurry Heart. I realized later that I felt a little better in the aftermath like my book said would happen. Princess Flurry Heart returned by herself the next day. I had no idea how to get a conversation off the ground. I knew she was a couple of years younger than me, but I had no idea why she was here.

After a pause, she said, “I wanted to...I was,” she took another breath as if to give herself time to think, “I feel the need to apologize to you. Aunt Twilight brought me here to make a point because I was being dumb. She even apologized to me because I think your answer hit harder than she hoped. Now she feels guilty about using you against me and I feel guilty that she felt the need to do it at all.”

She seemed to have run out of steam, but I was left a little confused about which point she wanted to make. “And… what do you want to apologize for, exactly?”

She opened her mouth several times. Then she got her words out. “I was born healthy, and powerful. I am a princess. Everything has gone my way but I have had no purpose and it’s made me… moody, I suppose. And here you are, with so little but you seem more… whole, I guess. I’m not sure.”

I said to her, “You can have all of the forgiveness from me that you can handle, but I think the one that you should be asking forgiveness from is yourself.”

Flurry was quiet. Her eyes went unfocused as if she was looking through the wall behind me. This carried on for a moment until she returned her attention to me and said, “Maybe you’re right. How did you...?”

I lifted the book I was reading for her to see. “This is what I was reading yesterday, I would say I was in the right frame of mind.”

Flurry angled her head to read the cover. “Philosophies of Happiness, by Lemon Thoughts.” She returned her gaze to mine. She said, “You are definitely one who takes after Twilight. My mother tried to get me to read this book a few times. Maybe I’ll finally do it.”

I dog-eared the page I was on and I hoofed it over to her. She took it in a foreleg but kept her eyes on me. She said, “I get that you want me to read it, but I am a princess. I could get five hundred of these if I really wanted to.”

I smiled and replied, “This way you have to come back when you’re done.”

I suppose she was touched by the gesture because I think she started to get teary-eyed. She said, “I suppose you’re right. I need to go, but you’ll see me again.” And so I did. Many, many times. For years.

Then there was today.

I was on my hooves in front of the mirror. I was actually quite tall for a pony, but I think that was due to the previous year of my treatments. The doctors had tried giving me growth hormones to attempt to delay the march of the disease. It helped, but it wasn’t sustainable and they warned about a strong chance that we were running a much higher risk of heart diseases. It didn’t matter too much anyway. My body was failing, weaker than ever. I thought my wings might be shedding feathers faster than they were growing back. My joints hurt, I could feel the wrinkles even if I couldn’t see them. The mirror was actually very kind to me, but I knew the end was near. If anything failed or broke inside of me, it may never be fixed.

Flurry walked in without a knock, as was usual these days. “Hey, Sierra. Ready to go?”

I summoned up some energy, “As can be,” I said. Energy spent.

We left the hospital. Already I was tired, but I valued the time spent with Flurry far more than any amount of useless rest. Luckily the palace lab was not far. It was an addition made by Princess Twilight. Rumor from Flurry was she had tried to get permission for it from Former Princesses Celestia and Luna, who laughed at the question and told her that she was the sole authority over the place.

So as the griffons would say, she ‘went ham’ with the renovations. I had been there a few times before since it hosted several teams of medical scientists trying to solve the problems inside of myself and others.

The nature of the lab changed when the sky started to flash.

A few months previous we all learned that the night sky we knew was actually inside a bubble. Well, an ‘icosahedron’ if you bothered to remember the word. Apparently, this was already known, but not by most. Luna’s work, she said, was to recreate the sky as it was before a great barrier was created in an ancient conflict that predated Discord’s reign. That conflict itself left few clues behind as to what the world was like, but we did learn that it was against many creatures like the nightmare that had possessed Luna so long ago. Now everypony was afraid that an army of ‘Nightmare Moons’ was going to descend from the sky one day.

Now that this barrier seemed to be under threat, the lab, and the nation for that matter, became far more dedicated toward martial considerations but I knew that there was little hope at the highest levels, except for this project that Flurry was about to show me.

One room was far larger than all of the others. It was like a hexagonal warehouse, but a magic lab.

“C’mon,” Flurry said. I simply followed her into the middle. There were mages and scientists and guards all over, but Flurry seemed to have the run of the place, and thus, I did too, judging by the fact that the magical wall let me through. I could not see what anypony was working on because there were magical barriers that rose to the ceiling that blurred the interiors and probably controlled movement. I had learned a bit about unicorn magic, but like so many others, I did not pursue much understanding considering that I would never be able to do anything with it even if I was healthy.

We entered the central chamber and found it unoccupied aside from a circular marble platform along with six gems spread equally around, not the elements of harmony, though, and a cart with a neat rack of curved rectangular pieces of metal that were each reinforced on one side and bedazzled on the other with gems connected by lines of colored glitter that might have been just more gems crushed into powder. I liked the interesting patterns created by the angles the powdery lines made together.

“This,” Flurry said, gesturing, “is an AMSTER!”

I did not hear that right. “A hamster?” I asked.

Flurry giggled. “That’s what I said too. No, it’s Twilight’s acronym. It means Ancient Magical Space Transportation… uh, Exploration Rover, I think.”

I furrowed my brow in consideration. “So, it lets a pony… rove? I don’t know if I have ever said that word in my life. Wait, space?”

“I know right!?” Flurry agreed loudly. “Did you ever read any of those stories where ponies would go on adventures into mirror worlds or something like that?”

I nodded once, bringing my attention to her instead of the device.

“Well it turns out that I will be doing exactly that, but in space!” she proclaimed.

I raised my right eyebrow. “You?”

She nodded quickly, bobbing her mane at me. “I will be taking this thing into this other dimension and I will simply activate the spells going down the checklist to find...somepony, somecreature. I’m not sure. Luna and Celestia have had visions about this. I don’t know exactly what we are looking for, but this does.” She lifted a large topaz gem in her magic that I had not noticed was beside the rack on the cart. “This gem is an ancient magical artifact. It can cast a whole bunch of spells and make words appear for you and nopony else. Even a creature with no magic can make it work.”

“Can they,” I said, “and will it be dangerous?”

She shrugged and returned the gem to its resting place. “It depends mostly on this creature I need to get. It’s supposed to be powerful enough that it can help against the nightmares.”

I was not comfortable with how this conversation was going. I wondered if there was something I could do about it. Maybe I could go in her place?

Then we heard a muffled bang and we looked out into the rest of the lab. We saw movement and then a pony stuck his head into the area we were in. “Oh, Princess Flurry Heart,” the stallion said, “I’m glad you’re here. We would be glad if you could lend us your strength for a moment.”

She nodded and hurried off in his direction. Over her shoulder, she said to me, “I’ll be right back.”

I had a plan coming together. A stupid one. I did not know if I really wanted to take advantage of this moment of serendipity or not.

At that very moment, I heard a buzz from the topaz on the cart. I looked at the gem and flinched in surprise. It had words floating above it that were somehow more in focus than anything else. I also realized just how bad my vision was. They seemed to take their color from the gem, but their glow made them appear to be nearly white, like my fur. There was also a line extending between the words and the topaz as if to show they were connected.

Password: Serendipity
Password Accepted.

I realized then that my heartbeat was loud and fast, and how nervous I was. Was all of this in reaction to some floating words? Maybe it was actually about Flurry’s mission. Maybe I was more upset about it than I thought. New text appeared.

Welcome, User.
Mission plan: Loaded.
Spells: Charged.
Mana: 99%.
Status: Green.

Ready to launch mission.
Proceed? Yes/No

I read the words while I also became aware that they were not casting shadows from the magical light fixtures above. They were easy enough to interpret. I knew that if I wanted to take this mission away from Flurry, now was the chance, and I dearly wanted to.

Something in that thought must have caused it to think I had chosen the ‘yes’ option. The gem levitated itself off of the cart and floated over the center of the platform.

Please stand here, it displayed to me.

I figured I still had time to change my mind if I wanted to, so I obeyed. Once I hobbled over I turned to see the metal pieces float out of their rack in quick order. Like a ribbon being pulled through the air, they encircled me until the first one found itself following the last one. There were sixteen of them and I realized that the curve of each piece perfectly matched the curve of the circle they made.

Engage transition? Yes/No? It asked by hanging text in front of me, the line extending above me beyond my sight.

I hesitated. I obviously had not thought about this enough and I had never in my life taken a plunge like this without considering my choices deeply. That was exactly what I intended to do until I saw Flurry’s blurred figure approaching from beyond the shield. I froze up, but then I saw that she had been distracted talking to another pony next to her. I didn’t want to face her while in the act so I rushed my choice by mentally declared a loud ‘Yes! Go go go go!’

Engaging, the words said. I lifted into the air with the metal bits and the magic of the amster created a yellow sphere that appeared around me. Then the room went black and my guts twisted.

Then we arrived at the current moment. I was floating, weightless. It reminded me of the days when I would go for my monthly glides out of Canterlot. The staff would fill me with painkillers and escort me to one of the palace’s balconies that overlooked the edge of the primary Canterlot support plate that a good chunk of the city rested upon.

We would jump off, and two other pegasi would guide me on a route down to Lower Canterlot, the river port below. We would take a winding path and sometimes we would shed speed by pulling up until we entered free fall and gradually curved downward with gravity. That was a blissful moment whenever it happened. All the aches from my body complaining about the indignity being weighed down by other body parts just went away.

Soon my racing thoughts calmed, my guts untwisted, and I could focus on the outside. I realized that it wasn’t that the room went dark, but that I was now in another dimension. I could see stars. Somehow, I knew they were different from the ones that Luna would dress the night sky with. I read the words that were now being displayed by the gem. Or perhaps it was best to say the AMSTER was showing them to me, rather than just the topaz? Whatever.

Initiate search for species: ANTHROPOS? Yes/No?

Anth’what? It didn’t matter. I thought the word ‘yes’ and I felt the familiar sensation of a scanning spell poking me everywhere until it passed me by. I was in for a surprisingly long wait.

Four and a half hours later, I was rudely awoken from my nap. I was very confused for a moment until memory returned. I was about to try to get the AMSTER to take me back home when I read its update.

One partial contact return on search for species: ANTHROPOS.
Form match: 87%...
Mind match: 81%...
Physiology match: 0%
WARNING: Search inconclusive. Caution is advised.
Location of partial return available as an option on the destinations list.

I wondered about the numbers. Was this like how changelings were similar to ponies but were very different inside? I knew a changeling named Nervure who visited occasionally when the hospital requested a ‘ling from King Thorax’s hive to perform emotional checkups on the patients. It turned out that his name had nothing to do with nerves.

Maybe this was like a changeling? Changelings weren’t always our friends and I had no way to know whether this creature was dangerous, but if it was, I did not want Flurry Heart to be the one to confront it. So I stretched out my limbs where I floated and figured out how to tell the AMSTER to take me to this ‘contact.’ It gave me a countdown. Two hours and fifteen minutes. I guess it was time for another nap.

It was my last peaceful memory before my first death.

Author's Note

This has been a long time coming since forever. I’m so deep in this forest that I can only see the trees so I definitely need some feedback!