Timescales

Chapters

Part 1: Neurochemical
Part 2: Biographical
Part 3: Geologic

Part 1: Neurochemical

A photon strikes a protein in a receptor cell in the front of a retina. The protein folds, and changes shape, igniting a chain reaction. Enzymes are released. Neurotransmitters are transmitted. By this receptor cells and others. Enough for their ganglion cell to respond.

Sodium gates open. Depolarization occurs. Potential increases. A threshold is reached.

The neuron fires.

A signal is sent down along its axon. She is joined by millions of her sisters, all heading towards the same place. The visual cortex of a brain. There, the work begins, pooling these signals into the components of an image.

The consciousness that inhabits the same brain as this visual cortex calls herself Starlight Glimmer. She is not aware of this image. She never gets the full raw feed. At the maximum, maybe, the 0.3% of her visual field that is the focus of her pupils at any one time. The rest is filled in by a guessing game occurring deeper in her brain through the process of pattern-matching. What she sees at any one time is a world of hallucinations and fantasies merely suggested by the reality in front of her.

But that is if she can focus on just what she sees. That does not even consider the emotional connections. The higher associations. The ones that make her see more than the pattern of the toppings on a Sugarcube Corner cupcake, but rather a reflection of the smile on the pony who created it. The ones that make her see more than a grin that is just too wide to be genuine, but rather reminders of the sins she has committed.

The ones that make her see more than the glimmering cerulean eyes of a certain gray earth pony, but rather an entire world.

The consciousness is an idle poet, composing useless love sonnets on the bank of a river in the mid-afternoon. The consciousness is a parasitic, unemployed layabout.

The visual cortex has a job.

Many jobs, but it is now doing one of its most important ones. The visual cortex detects movement. Of large objects. Towards it.

If upper management could see what the visual cortex was seeing now, she would think of words like “rockfall” and “mortal danger” and “100% certainty”. But the visual cortex does not waste time with such things. Not only is the visual cortex mute and illiterate, but the visual cortex cannot think. If it could, it wouldn’t be as efficient.

The visual cortex relays its message to its coworker. The autopilot. The autopilot, too, has a job. Far too important and time-sensitive to be able to afford even informing upper management. To process information and make decisions in a fraction of a second, much quicker than upper management could ever do. It doesn’t know what a rock even is, but the moment it saw that image it would know that if its body stays in place for even a second longer, it will die.

Thankfully, unlike the consciousness, the autopilot is capable. Capable of executing complex instructions that are, perhaps ironically, too information-dense to be understood by the consciousness named Starlight Glimmer, who always takes the credit for its work anyway. After all, she would tell herself, she spent years as a filly learning the basics of that teleportation spell, and years afterward polishing the technique.

But could she tell you how it worked? How the dense bundle of fibers forming the cranial nerve (XIIIu) running from her brainstem to the projection of keratin on her forehead had one end rooted in the secular world of ionic gradients and electron flows, and the other in the ever-flowing stream of magical energy that permeated every cubic centimeter of her planet? How unlike the thaumamotor neurons of the pegasi and earth ponies, these were capable of interventions far more refined than the crude telekinetic force projection that was so useful for both flight and fight?

Well, to be fair, neither could the autopilot. But at least the autopilot knew the correct firing patterns, trained into it by those years of practice that the consciousness directed. The consciousness herself had never learned a thing.

This is how it would go in the best case. The information reaches the autopilot in time. The decision is made. The spell is cast. Starlight Glimmer finds herself teleported to safety in a crackling flash of magical energy. Her consciousness becomes aware of what happened only after the fact, panting heavily as the panic of the cortisol and adrenaline hits her.

The gray earth pony shouts her name in a panic, then realizes what happened, and that everything’s fine. She pats the chunk of basalt in her frock reassuringly, glad that such an innocent being would not have to witness something so horrible. Then she realizes that only Starlight Glimmer could have survived something like that. She realizes that that is perhaps why, subconsciously, she had let her go first when exploring this unknown cave tunnel, something she would never do with anypony else. Because, in the back of her mind, Starlight isn’t like anypony else.

She goes back on her decision to make her interest in the unicorn known much more explicitly than what should have been needed on this, their dozenth or so date. She goes back on her interest in the unicorn at all. In unicorns at all. Clearly, something isn’t right here, in this imbalance of power. That is all this incident means for her.

Starlight Glimmer is also under a misconception. She had come close to death many times before, after all, in her adventures both against and for the sake of Twilight Sparkle and her friends. But this is by far the closest time. But if she realizes this, if mortal creatures realize in general how fragile their lives truly are, they would never get anything done due to being paralyzed by fear. Her mind works as it should, irrationally dismisses the incident as no big deal, and quickly forgets about it.

This is what happens in the timeline you know. It is a tragedy in the sense that any budding romance cut short is. But you already know this story. You know that at least one of these two ponies manages to find true love before she dies, so if it’s a tragedy, it’s not too bad of one.

That is not the tragedy we are telling today. We are in a different timeline, where things went another way. This is what happens here.

The information does not reach the autopilot in time. It is far too late. The barbarians have already breached the walls. The hollow matrix of calcium that makes up a unicorn’s skull is no match for its tougher and much more massive distant cousins. The consciousness is never aware of any danger. There is simply no time, even if she were not preoccupied with her own interior thoughts. In this case mostly revolving around the previously mentioned gray earth pony, somewhere a few dozen paces behind her.

One moment, she is there. The other, she is not. Everything she is, was, and would be, destroyed forever in an instant, never to return.

The procedural routine of how to play a guitar with hooves. The memories of a village of ponies enslaved. The complicated gratitude towards a princess, now a friend, who was once a sworn enemy. And most tragic of all, what she felt towards that gray earth pony whose panicked cries she would never hear. The world in her cerulean blue eyes that she would never see again.

A year passed.

Part 2: Biographical

After not receiving an answer for such a long time, most ponies would have gotten nervous or uncomfortable or both. They might have made an inquiry or an inquiring noise to break the tension.

But Maud Pie wasn’t like most ponies. She was used to the darkness of caves, so the dim burn of the candles was practically a floodlight. She was used to discomfort, so the awkward kneeling position that wasn’t natural for anypony didn’t bother her. And she was used to her marefriend being a bit strange sometimes. She could have waited a long time.

But Starlight continued to not speak. Starlight continued to not do anything but stare at her, wide-eyed. So Maud knew she would have to say more words, because this was always meant to be the catalyst for a difficult conversation.

“I know we haven’t been officially dating for very long.” Maud said, holding her pose. “But we know each other so well after what we lived through together this past year. And I count us starting from our first date here.”

Starlight looked around to let herself realize that it was here. The flickering candlelight reflecting off of their faces reproduced themselves a hundredfold in the facets of the cut gems embedded in the walls. A thousand lights in a thousand mirrors. But she didn’t have to remind herself of the Oracle’s words to know that this was the moment. She would have to tell Maud. She would have to tell Maud everything and she hated every bit of it.

“Happy second anniversary.”

Starlight’s attention snapped back to Maud. Then to the ring she was holding up to her, with a setting of the most beautiful graymerald she had ever seen. Then to Maud again. She tried to squeak out a response.

“I…” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I— I want to say yes. But I can’t.” Another painfully awkward moment of silence passed, the pain itself being visible on Starlight’s face. “I have something to confess. I… I…—”

“You’re from the future. ” Maud said with no inflection in her voice. She put the ring away and sat down. “You replaced the Starlight that died under those rocks the moment you came here.“

“I— what!?” A million questions ran through Starlight’s mind, and to her horror she chose the worst one to ask first.

“How did you know?”

Maud answered in her monotone. “When the rockfall happened. There was a moment when I saw two of you. One collapsing under the falling rocks, the other on top.”

Starlight winced. She had thought she had timed that perfectly.

“It was only a moment. It would have been easy enough to dismiss it as a false memory from the trauma. But then you started doing strange things. Like the time you yelled at that small child at Twilight’s School of Friendship.”

“Yeah, I…” Starlight rubbed her neck with her hoof nervously. “That must have seemed weird at first.”

“We just thought you became evil again. Or the rocks hit your head harder than we thought. Until we found her letters to Tirek.”

Starlight frowned as she remembered what it took to convince Octavia the guidance counselor to look into it, and the trouble she had to rescue her from afterward.

“So… that’s when you knew?”

“That’s when I suspected.” Maud said. “Then I went back to that tunnel and found your body underneath the rock pile. That’s when I knew.”

Starlight backed up to cover her mouth with her hooves in horror, tears welling in her eyes.

“That— I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think—” Starlight sobbed out, “You must think I’m a monster!”

“No.” Maud said. “I did say I blocked off that tunnel forever. I can understand wanting to think your secret would stay buried. But I can get around it. I do it every lunaversary when I can, to leave a flower.” Starlight put her hooves down, frowning. Maud continued. “If you want, I can show you the next time I go. I made a really nice rock grave for your body. With pretty stones that I think you would have liked.“

“I—” Starlight didn’t know what to say. She tried to think through the timeline. “That must have been just before you went on that research trip. When you left Boulder at Pinkie’s.” What she didn’t say was that Pinkie petsitting Boulder became Starlight petsitting Boulder half the time.

“Yes.” Maud said. “I needed time to really be alone, to grieve. And think. Why you would come back in time to take your own place. Why you had the right memories of earlier that day. You must have been from the timeline where you survived the rockfall.”

Starlight cast her eyes to the ground.

“I am.”

“And if you’d come back to an earlier point and rescued yourself, some other Maud would live in a world with two Starlights, and I would have none.”

“Yeah, that…” Starlight paused. “That’s right. When Princess Twilight Sparkle found this timeline spurring out from ours, it’s… hard to explain, but the moment was frozen. I— this Starlight was already a goner, and if we picked another point to send me to, this timeline would have continued, and this Starlight would have died anyway.” Starlight was confused. “But all that was based on a lot of top secret time travel spell research, how could you possibly know that?“

“I didn’t.” Maud said flatly. “I just knew something like that had to be true. The Starlight I knew wouldn’t just let somepony die if she could stop it, even if it was just a past version of herself.”

Starlight wasn’t sure if she could agree with Maud’s high assessment of herself.

“But I—” Starlight paused. “It was still wrong to not tell—”

“Of course it was.” Maud agreed. “It’s still wrong. I want you to tell everypony the truth, even if it will hurt them a lot. But I didn’t tell anypony either, even after I found the body.”

“That’s not the same…”

“Maybe. But I knew you wouldn’t do all this for no reason. I knew you came back for something important. Then it was obvious what it was. The Oracle. The mission to the Zebra Lands.”

Starlight nodded hesitantly.

“The rest of us thought it was really strange how Princess Celestia chose us instead of Twilight and her friends. But you never seemed to be confused or hesitant about it.“

“Yeah.” Starlight admitted. “Princess Twilight Sparkle and I planned it back in my timeline.” Though in truth, nearly all of it was Princess Twilight Sparkle explaining the plan to Starlight.

“Do you still not want to talk about what the Oracle said to you?”

Starlight was silent. Maud continued.

“You were really upset. Then after your meeting with Princess Celestia… She seemed sad, but not worried. She seemed sad for you, specifically.“

Starlight was still silent.

“My guess is that something happens in the future that threatens your Equestria. Princess Celestia wasn’t worried since She could prevent it now, but it was too late for your world. That’s why you were so sad, and why you didn’t go back after your mission was done.”

“No, that… that’s not it.” Starlight’s voice was filled with dread. “My world’s fine. I just can’t go back until the timeline catches up, so I have to stay here until then, stay here through…”

Starlight was barely holding herself together.

“I just— We tried everything— I wanted to— I wanted to say— I wanted to tell— I just didn’t know how— I’m so, so, so sorry—”

“Starlight.” Maud interrupted, worried. “You’re not making any sense.”

“You’re dying, Maud!” Starlight burst out, surprising herself. She covered her mouth with her hooves again.

Maud blinked, confused. “I feel fine.”

“Of course!” Starlight squeaked out. “And you will, for another two years or so… Then it…”

Starlight didn’t seem to want to finish the sentence.

“What’s wrong with me?” Maud asked.

“It’s a…” Starlight tried to pull herself together. “It’s a prion disease. At some point you ingested something that mimicked a protein your body uses to maintain the cells of your thaumamotor nerves. But it was shaped wrong, and it spread, slowly accumulating in your thaumamotor system until… Until the symptoms started showing. You suddenly started getting so weak, you couldn’t break even the softest of rocks anymore with your hoof. Then you started walking funny. Then you couldn’t walk at all. Then…”

Starlight stopped, pained.

“We did everything. Princess Twilight Sparkle pulled together a team of the best scientists in Equestria, stopping a whole bunch of other research projects just to focus on this. Sunburst and I spent so many sleepless nights, learning more about it than either of us ever wanted to know. Memorizing all those new words. But we never got anywhere close to a cure.”

Maud was listening with that same expressionless look on her face she always did. Starlight continued.

“Then, a few moons after the… your… funeral, Princess Twilight Sparkle told me what She found in the Royal Archives. A time travel spell, but one where we could choose between different spurs to go back to. Not far back enough to before when you first got the disease, but far back enough to get to the Zebra Lands in time to ask the Oracle.”

“Oh.” Maud realized. “So you asked Her if there was a cure. And She said no. That’s why you were so upset.”

Starlight nodded silently, her eyes fixed on Maud’s expression. It was still expressionless.

“So it wasn’t your world ending.”

Starlight wanted to but did not say that what the Oracle told her meant that her world was ending. Just not in the way Maud had thought. But she didn’t, because this wasn’t about her.

“So, two more years?” Maud asked.

Starlight frowned. She expected Maud’s reaction to be subdued, but not this much. “Three years. The first symptoms start in about two.”

Maud looked away. She was silent for a bit, thinking to herself. She turned back, still without betraying any emotion.

“It could be worse. How did I get it?”

Starlight sighed, pained. “Certain magical rocks contain the prion you got sometimes, but they’re rare, and you only find them in exotic places. They can only really be introduced into your body by ingestion. And with all your research trips, and the way you…” Starlight couldn’t finish.

Maud chuckled lightly, which was a strange reaction. Not the least because it was so rare to hear Maud chuckle.

“Growing up on the farm, there were times I didn’t want to eat my rocks at dinner. The texture just bothered me sometimes. My mom always made sure that if I didn’t eat my rocks, I wouldn’t get any rock candy for dessert. But I never liked rock candy anyway.”

She smiled, another rarity.

“Then I started my rocktorate. My advisor thought it was really great that I grew up on a rock farm and was used to eating rocks. Said that rocktologists had gotten soft over the years, less into rocks and more into paper. Even writing up research guidelines that discouraged eating unknown rocks on expeditions. Even though that’s still the best way to determine the alkali content on the spot.”

She looked at Starlight.

“Both of them said the same thing. ‘Eating a rock never killed anypony.’ Well, I showed them.”

Starlight didn’t say anything. Maud continued.

“That was a joke, by the way. You were supposed to laugh.”

“Oh, Maud… I—” Starlight frowned. “I can’t really laugh right now…”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. It’s not a very good set so far. I’m really dying on stage.”

That got a short laugh, followed by a guilty frown.

“I—” Starlight started.

“Don’t.” Maud interrupted. “Never apologize for laughing when I’m trying to get you to laugh. I’ve always loved your laugh.”

It was far from the first time Maud had said that to her, but Starlight’s heart still melted.

“I just don’t understand how you can be so…” Starlight searched for the words. “I don’t know. If I were you I would be sad and angry and— “

“I am sad about it.” Maud confirmed. “But I’m not angry. What would I be angry against?”

“Oh, I don’t know! The world? Rocks?” Starlight realized how self-indulgent what she would say sounded, but said it anyway. “Me?… I could have told you all this a year ago. You could have at least known what the stakes are. You could have had another year of… preparing…“

Maud looked at her.

“Would it make you feel better if I told you that had I known, I wouldn’t have spent my time any differently?”

“Maud… You really shouldn’t be trying to make me feel better right now…” Tears welled up in her eyes again. “You should be… focusing on you.”

“I’m doing all I can about that.” Maud insisted. “I try not to get upset or sad about things I can’t control. This is one of them.”

Maud turned to look down the tunnel, which if she went down far enough, she would see a branch closed off by caution tape and a warning written in her own hoofwriting. She spoke.

“In a way, I've always been jealous of the other Starlight. She was here one moment, gone the next. No time to realize it. In the world inside her mind, the one that’s now gone forever, she never died. That’s the closest we ever get to immortality.“

Starlight dreaded that she could not give Maud even that. The disease would make its progression known and clear for moons before finally taking her.

“Of course I’m sad. Three years isn’t enough. There will still be so much more I’d want to learn about rocks. So much more time I’d want to spend with the ponies I love.” She turned to look at Starlight meaningfully. “But three hundred years wouldn’t be enough, either. I’d say the exact same thing.” She blinked. “I’ll have to take some comfort in that.”

Starlight still didn’t know what to say. Why wasn’t she saying anything?

“What was my life like? The other me? The one you knew. Before she died.”

“Oh!” Starlight lit up. She could at least talk about this, and memorialize the Maud she knew. “She was amazing. Because she was you, and you’re amazing. She… She didn’t go on any grand adventure like we did. She kept living where you do now, just outside Ponyville. Researching rocks. Spending time with her friends, like Trixie, and Sunburst, and… me. Sometimes she’d do a stand-up set that nopony would understand. Sometimes she’d visit her family back at the farm. Sometimes she’d go on research trips. Always with Boulder.”

“Sounds like a nice life.” Maud sounded content.

“It was!” Starlight agreed sadly. “She also had a coltfriend. Mudbriar. He was… strange. But in a way similar to how you’re strange. You two really understood each other. You…” Starlight frowned. “You never met him in this timeline, because of how everything changed. I…” Starlight cast her gaze down. “I sometimes feel like I stole you from him.”

“I’m not a suitcase, Starlight.” Maud said. “I can’t be stolen from anypony. I’ve never even heard of Mudbriar before right now, and that’s okay. And it’s not like I didn’t find a partner who understood me.”

Starlight again didn’t know how to react. Maud sighed internally.

“What happened to Boulder?”

“Mudbriar adopted him. It was really sweet. He gets along great with his new sibling, Twiggy.” Starlight smiled.

“I’m sure he does.” Maud smiled. She took Boulder out of her frock and looked at him for a while. Then she looked at Starlight.

“Boulder says he wants you to adopt him when I die.”

A lump formed in Starlight’s throat on hearing that definitive “when”.

“Of course! I will—” Starlight suppressed a sob. “Boulder will live the best life a chunk of basalt ever could!” Starlight meant it. She had tears in her eyes.

Instead of responding, Maud looked at Boulder some more. Then she smiled.

“He believes you.”

Maud put Boulder away and looked at Starlight again, who was wiping away her tears.

“Tell me about my funeral.”

“Oh, it…” Starlight kept trying to suppress a sob. “It was a beautiful day. I-I hated that, actually. The sky had no right to be so happy on a day like that. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask the local weather team to change it.“

“I’m glad it was a nice day.” Maud said. Starlight teared up. Of course she would say that.

“We were all there. Me, Trixie, Sunburst, your family… I’ve never seen Pinkie so sad. Marble was so angry at the world. Limestone didn’t talk for weeks after.”

Maud looked more pained by those words than anything else she had heard so far.

“Mudbriar gave the eulogy. Which I assumed would be disastrous but—” Starlight sobbed. “He really was moving, in his own way. He really did love you.” Starlight paused. “Or… her. The other you.”

“Time travel is confusing, isn’t it?”

Starlight smiled and nodded sadly at that. “Then we laid you to rest in the bog, just like your will said, because—”

“It provides an aquatic, anoxic environment full of high-mineral sediment without being exposed to seismic activity and thus is most conducive to intact fossil formation.” Maud supplied.

“Yes! Exactly.” Starlight laugh-sobbed at Maud being so herself. “Then Pinkie played a traditional yak funeral dirge on the yovidaphone. But all I could think of was how glad I was for you, that you finally got to become what you loved the most.”

“Oh.” Maud blinked. “That’s disappointing.”

“Oh, right!” Starlight realized. “She’s not so great at it now, but by then she really was good at the yovidaphone, er, will be—”

“No.” Maud interrupted. “It’s disappointing that you’ve known me for so long but still don’t know what a fossil is.”

“What?” Starlight blinked.

Maud explained. “No part of a fossil is composed of the original material of the body. The flesh rots away almost instantly, of course. But even though bones are the rocks that live in our bodies, their calcium, too, will break down over enough time. They just happen to last long enough for minerals to form and fill in the holes within the structure. The bones are just a cast. What replaces them is the fossil.”

Maud paused for a moment.

“It will be like that with us. I’ll be gone soon, but you’ll live for a long time after that. The hole I leave behind will be filled. But it will be filled in a way that you can tell I was there from the shape, even if no part of me actually exists anymore.” She blinked. “But I guess then you’ll die too, and even that shape will be gone. This isn’t a very good analogy.”

“Maud, I…” Starlight tried to say something. “I will never let that hole be filled.”

“I hope you do. But if you don’t, I hope it’s not for my sake. I won’t exist anymore.”

Starlight said nothing. Maud could see it. Starlight sinking back into her own silence and guilt and sadness. She hated it whenever she saw it. She saw it a lot. She said something.

“There are upsides to this, you know.”

“Really?” Starlight asked, cautious.

“Yes.” Maud said. “I won’t have to keep a budget past my funeral. I can really run wild with my expenses. Maybe even buy a new rock pick.“

Starlight chuckled at that and immediately regretted it, then immediately regretted her regret, remembering what Maud had said earlier.

“There’s also this paper title I want to get past the editors at the Acta Rocktologica. They always refused, saying a rock pun had no place in their publication, no matter how good it was. But if it’s going to be the definitive capstone of my illustrious research career, I might be able to convince them.”

“I’m sure it will be the best rocktology paper anypony’s ever written.”

Maud knew that Starlight had no way of being able to tell that, but truly believed it anyway. Maud appreciated that. She smiled at her, which made Starlight take notice.

“There’s one more. Even the awful Starlight Glimmer wouldn’t be so villainous as to dismiss the marriage proposal of a dying mare without a second thought.“

Starlight took a second to process it.

“Wait, you’re still thinking of…”

“Not like I intended. I have one condition to add. But yes.”

Starlight frowned.

“After all this? How could…” Starlight paused, swallowing her words. She didn’t want to be self-indulgent again and ask How could you not hate me? Instead, she said,

“How could you just go on with this? How could you look at me the same way?“

Maud didn’t answer her directly.

“Do you know that we’re rising right now?”

Starlight was taken aback by the non-sequitur.

“N-no?”

Maud began infodumping. “Twenty thousand years ago, most of the land of Equestria was underneath a glacier. Half the continent was. It was huge.” Maud spread her forelegs as if to indicate the massive size. “And heavy. It pressed down on the land underneath for thousands of years.”

She planted her forelegs on the ground and bent forward, as if to demonstrate. Starlight couldn’t help but smile at the uncharacteristic animation.

“Then the climate shifted and got warmer. The glaciers melted. The pressure was gone. The land began to rise.”

She slowly stood up, straightening her forelegs.

“It’s called isostatic rebound. It’s pretty weak here, since we were not too deep into the glacier. Maybe a hoofnail every century. The effects are stronger up north, like in Whinnyapolis.”

She looked at Starlight.

“But it’s happening. It’s one of the fastest, too. Cycles last only for millennia. The plate tectonics that created the Crystal Mountains and the Ghastly Gorge play out over millions of years. Entire species will live and die before they even notice. Including ours.”

She looked at Starlight.

“It should make my life feel small. How even if I lived as long as an alicorn, I would never get to personally witness what I study. But I choose to let it comfort me instead. Whenever I feel like I’m in the presence and mercy of a powerful being whose world I will never understand, I remind myself that even they can’t stop the continents from drifting.“

Starlight took a second to realize what she meant.

“Is that how you see me?”

“You almost destroyed Equestria with the power of your magic once.”

Starlight cringed. She had done that, hadn’t she?

“Nopony should have that much power.” The unicorn said. “Nopony deserves it. Especially me.”

“No, you don’t.” Maud agreed. “But you have it. So much of it that it makes your name wrong.” Starlight was taken aback as Maud took her hoof in hers. “You are not starlight, but the star that produces it. I can feel it. All the power coursing underneath your skin. And you use it to do what? Try to save me. Maybe I shouldn’t but I can’t help but find that romantic.”

Starlight looked at her with a pained expression. Maud didn’t seem to be affected.

“I choose to focus on that, and not on the time travel or the lies or your past of enslaving villages and inadvertently causing genocides because I choose to be happy with you. But you don’t, do you?”

Maud sighed, and let go of her hoof. “Starlight. This is important. It’s what made dating you the most difficult. But it’s also why there’s a last upside to all of this. If things hadn’t happened exactly the way it did, we wouldn’t have happened. Would we?”

Maud’s rare use of emphasis got her to take notice. Starlight was silent.

“You pushed me away for moons. After everything we were going through together in the Zebra Lands. You only kissed me the day after you met the Oracle.”

Starlight considered it her greatest moment of weakness. The worst thing she had ever done.

“I thought it was because you were sad about your world. That made me sad, that that is what it took. But now, I know that wasn’t it. It was worse. Worse than even pity for a dying mare.”

Maud knew her too well.

“You only did it because you thought it wouldn’t make you happy.”

It was true. It was because Maud had become a poisoned chalice for her to drink. Every kiss and caress coming with an aftertaste of future betrayal and pain.

It was worse than that. It was true about everything in her life. It was why she had let the first Maud slip away after that rockfall. The rockfall didn’t matter. She would never have allowed herself to accept a relationship with somepony so obviously compatible with her.

For the exact same reasons, it’s why she had let Trixie slip away, though she took more years than Maud did to realize it and try to move on.

It’s why she accepted becoming Headmare for Twilight’s school. A lifetime of running someone else’s pet project. A project she had started her involvement in due to a sense of obligation more than anything. A job she could do well, find satisfaction in, and never be happy doing. It was perfect.

It’s why she did the evil things she had done, despite knowing that they were wrong. Because that way, the whole world would see who she was. Not as a supervillain, but as somepony who didn’t deserve happiness.

It’s why had the Oracle given her the cure, and she had saved Maud, she would have then kept pushing her away until she slipped away, too.

“I don’t understand.” Starlight would have been in tears, but she felt somehow too sad for them. “If you felt this way, why would you want more of me?”

“Because once in a while, you would mess up. You would let yourself be happy. I would have to work hard to make it happen, and it would only last a moment. But that made everything worth it. And maybe that’s not healthy. But that’s how I feel.”

There were those moments, when Starlight smiled in a way that was lived-in and not at least partially covering up her own guilt and pain. When a caress or a kiss was what Starlight had wanted, and not just done because Starlight thought Maud would like it. Most of all there were the moments just after waking up, still too disoriented to realize who she was and what she had done, when she looked at the sleeping form of the earth mare and felt a fleeting sense of peace.

“But I’m not a martyr.” Maud said. “I proposed to you because I didn’t mind that deal. On the timescale of a lifetime, it didn’t matter. But if I only have two to three years, I don’t want to spend so much of it working so hard.“

She fixed Starlight with a serious look.

“I’m going to propose to you again. But this is what I’m really asking. Will you let yourself be happy with me? If any part of you doubts that you can, please say no. Please.”

Of course, Starlight knew what this was. It was another poisoned chalice. Every moment of happiness she felt for the next three years wouldn’t just be an ephemeral moment, blowing away in the breeze. Every ounce of joy would be added to a balance to be paid in full in regret starting from the moment when the symptoms start showing, past the point when Maud’s body is laid down in the bog for a second time, and beyond. Every stolen pleasure another layer on the built-up glacier pressing down on the land, the resulting isostatic rebound of pain unstoppable, and continuing to expand long after the last trace of the glacier had melted away.

She knew that Maud must know this. She was glad. It meant that Maud was finally doing something just for herself. Demanding more of her than the other way around. Starlight would let herself be happy. This would make Maud happy. Then Maud would die. Then the happiness would destroy her. Maud and Starlight would both get what they deserved. The perfect plan.

Maud proposed. Starlight gave her answer.

Three years later, she gave a beautiful eulogy at a somber ceremony on the edge of a bog.

A few moons after that, the bridge to her original timeline, the future of the one we know, opened back up. She crossed over, and told her friends and Princess Twilight Sparkle about everything that happened. About how there was never anything anypony could have done to save Maud after all. About how Starlight had tried her best to make Maud’s last years as happy as possible. It wasn’t just words. She had objects to give as well.

A poster advertising a sold-out run of a Las Pegasus magic show. A tome translating the fundamentals of Zebra potionology to the Equestrian thaumaturgical system. Happily received by a mare and a stallion who had both traded in their old careers for new ones, and had added parenthood to it besides.

An old piece of paper, creased and wrinkled from years of use. Distinctly written on in two phases: A checklist of goals and activities written in a very precise hoof, with a scattering of neat X’s. Said X’s overwhelmingly outnumbered by a preponderance of sloppily-scribbled checks, as well as new checked-off items added to the list in that same messy script, all the way down the page and onto the back. Mudbriar gave a rare smile as he read it.

Then an abstruse cipher of black and white squares densely filling several pages. An answer to an equally abstruse series of logical predicates that both Starlight and the Zebra translator had struggled through for hours at the Oracle. The way Princess Twilight Sparkle’s face looked as She scanned through them… “Scanned” really seemed to be the right word, rather than “read”. But whatever She was doing, Starlight felt a gruesome chill as She did it. As if she had just gotten a taste of what Maud had felt. Of being in the presence and mercy of a powerful being whose world she would never understand.

She comforted herself as Maud did. Even Princess Twilight Sparkle could not stop the continents from drifting. One last gift from her dearly departed wife.

But no, not quite the last one. The real last gift was this. Yes, Starlight did feel all of the pain that she had expected from Maud’s death. All of it and more, and the pain, unlike the happiness, never stopped. But she didn’t feel regret. Not in the slightest bit. It was as if something was built in those years that transcended mere happiness and sadness. Something that was more important, that she would be able to carry for the rest of her days.

So the proposal was not, after all, another poisoned chalice. Maud had not been greedy even once in the time she had known her. And the gift was one that she could never repay, because the giver was dead. She would have to live with that.

She had a second round of goodbyes with all of her friends and family. She crossed back over the bridge to her new home. The portal between timelines shut behind her, never to be opened again.

She could have stayed in her original timeline, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t know how the rest of her life would go. But she knew how she wanted it to end, and for that she needed to be in the timeline with her Maud. The timeline where she had found happiness, lost it, and gained something even more precious.

Millions of years passed.

Part 3: Geologic

Let me tell you a bit about what happened during those millions of years. Let’s start at the beginning, from where we left off.

Starlight lived, and then died.

More time passed. Then the last creature to ever have met Starlight or any of her friends died.

More time passed. Then the last creature who could read Ponish died, and with them the last creature who could have read the last copies of the longest-surviving document about the lives and exploits of Starlight and her friends, though said copies had lost the hoof-drawn pictures or the golden alicorn motif on the front cover of the original book a long time ago. That was all theoretical, anyway. Starlight’s name had died long before that point when said copies were lost in a botched archive transfer done by a civilization that itself had lived and then died.

More time passed. Then the ponies all died out. But not just them. So did the zebras and the griffons and the cats and the dragons and the hippogriffs and the donkeys and the goats and the yaks and the changelings and the dragonequui and all of the sentient species who inhabited the planet in the time period we are familiar with now. Not all at the same time, and not because of some dramatic event like an antimagic bomb exchange or the resurrection of a long-dead deity, but rather because all things die eventually, whether it be relationships or individuals or families or civilizations or entire species or, one day, life itself. Entropy finds a way.

More time passed, now over a planet completely devoid of thought and dreams. Climate cycles turned. Tectonic plates shifted. Creatures lived and grew and reproduced and died and competed and mutated and speciated and hybridized and went extinct and survived and evolved.

Then, it finally happened. Conscious life awoke on the planet once more. But unlike the first time, it was a long and clumsy process driven by the accidents of natural selection, rather than any teleological process. A certain species, not too well-adapted to the environment they found themselves in, managed to survive due to the development of tool use and complex social structures. It became advantageous for their minds to be able to simulate the future actions of the other minds in their social groups, and this iterated until there was an I to distinguish from the not-I.

The species’ development of oral language came very quickly afterward. Unusually quickly, in fact, for while the language center of the species’ brain had been atrophied away for millions of years by then due to lack of use, it was far easier to resurrect it through atavism than build it from scratch.

They have a strange evolutionary history, don’t they? The members of the species thought so as well, after they developed the empirical method, the theory of evolution, and the discipline of paleontology. Seeing how easy it was to trace the evolutionary lineage of so many of their contemporaries down through the fossil record, they tried it with their own, and were stopped cold at a point indistinguishable in the geologic timescale from the time period of now. This has led to a sort of creationism being very popular in their species, even within the ranks of their most ardent materialists. While the rest of the species on the planet could be traced back all the way down to the very first microorganisms and then the soup of chemicals they sprang from, their species was special. The only sapient life on the planet for millions of years, destined for greatness and purpose by some creator God, the details of which there was absolutely no agreement on.

The strict materialists mumble something about how the fossils of the transitional species that must exist haven’t been found because they lacked bones to fossilize or were few in number and isolated to a geological location and stratum not yet explored. Their explanations for the inconvenient fact that molecular phylogenetics implies that the genetic distances between them and the other animal species on the planet are so great that any most recent common ancestor would date back before the existence of plant life are more… speculative.

Now, you might wonder what species they did evolve from, but I could not tell you. It turns out that the creationists were right, but not in the way they would have liked. Some time from now, but no time at all in the geologic timescale, Discord created their evolutionary ancestors as a prank, because He thought it would be “ironic”. But both the Chaos God and the species the joke was originally on have been long gone by this point in the story.

Speaking of the story. We are focusing on one member of this species in particular. This creature’s species has a sexual dimorphism far more severe than ponies do. So she would be very upset if we ever called her by anything other than the female pronoun. But hey, at least our language has the option of gendered pronouns. She’ll just have to get over the fact that it doesn’t have obligate gender markers as well, though she probably wouldn’t approve.

(Of course, not just any obligate gender marker system would do. Female for K-selectors, abstract concepts, and thinking entities otherwise without gender. Male for r-selectors, inanimate objects, and non-thinking entities otherwise without gender. Naturally. How else would it be?)

So anyway, she. Similar enough to us to be able to talk about eyes and sight and ears and hearing, since those abilities are so useful they evolved in her species as well, independently of how they did in ours. So did her equivalent of a voicebox, though again, independently, which means that attempting to transcribe the sounds that make up her name in an alphabet meant to represent the sounds made by a pony voicebox would be very silly.

So let’s just call her Grasping Hand, and let’s call the one next to her Moving Finger, since that is what we would get if we translated the meanings of their names literally into our tongue. Their mindset is similar enough to ours that we could say that they are “adults” with “jobs” and “apartments” and the idea you get wouldn’t be too far off from how they see it. We could even describe their relationship with each other: “friends” and “coworkers”. At the archives of a “natural history museum”, specifically, though that one translates a little less cleanly. “Budget cuts”, however, translates more perfectly than any of the other terms I’ve put in quotes here so far.

“Really, Graspy?” sighed Moving Finger, though instead of exhaling air like us she expressed the emotion by snapping her third and fourth fingers repeatedly. “You’ve been staring at that thing all week!” She had dreaded seeing the now all-too-familiar image of two pony fossils as found in their original configuration, side by side.

“Yeah…” Grasping Hand agreed, not taking her eyes off the screen. “But not all week…”

“Are you thinking of changing specialties?” Moving Finger asked rhetorically, knowing it takes more than a week of staring at pony fossils to make one an equinologist.

“Oh, no. I like my dragons.” The dracologist still didn’t turn to face her friend. “Hey, did you know our species might have been contemporaries after all? Recent paper with new evidence that the permineralization rate of dragon bones varied more greatly than previously thought due to their original material makeup.”

Moving Finger didn’t want to bring up their perennial argument about how everyone who wasn’t a dracologist had already accepted that explanation of the Draconic Paradox long ago, due to the indirect evidence all pointing towards the same thing. No, it was her friend’s sudden obsession with her species that she wanted to get to the bottom of.

“Look, I just…” Moving Finger sighed again. “At first you were really into this whole ‘interdisciplinary’ thing and I really liked talking to you so much about my ponies, but ever since you saw this in the archives… It’s like you’re less interested in the cool science and more in just this one thing in particular? I mean, I love ponies but I don’t think I’ve ever studied any single fossil this hard. I mean, maybe ‘study’ is the wrong word for you, but—”

“Yeah, it’s the wrong word.” Grasping Hand admitted. “I’m just looking at it. I just… I can’t describe it. It’s just this feeling I get. Like they might have known each other. Something about that.”

“Well, yeah, we sometimes do get pony fossils that are entangled with one another in a way that might indicate they died together…” Moving Finger said. “But the geometry here doesn’t show that. They could have been contemporaries, they could have died millennia apart from each other. They’re just next to each other, is all.”

“Yeah, but…” Grasping Hand sighed. “The one on the right. It almost looks like she’s reaching out towards the one on the left.”

“The unicorna?” Moving Finger corrected, cringing at the unscientific tone of ‘the one on the right’. The horn core jutting out from the center of its skull was a perfect specimen. “I mean, I guess. But again, the outstretched foreleg doesn’t even break the plane of the body of the terra. Completely consistent with the terra and the unicorna just dying separately and their bodies ending up next to each other.”

The terra, of course, was distinguished from the unicorna by its lack of horn core. It was distinguished from the pegasa by its lack of a third pair of spindly limbs used to, according to competing theories, provide an ornamental decoration to attract mates or a way to feel the ground as it walked.

“I mean… they didn’t have to die at the same time to have known each other. Like… like…” Grasping Hand sounded nervous, dreading admitting her real thoughts. “Like, what if they were pair-bonded? The terra died first, and the unicorna made sure to die next to the terra’s body, or be buried there. Or—”

Moving Finger could not help but burst out into laughter, though her species’ version of laughter was spontaneously and uncontrollably clapping their hands.

“Sorry, I— Wow. That…” The equinologist struggled to form the words. “I’m sorry. Okay, first of all, that’s a hell of a strong pair-bond! Secondly, as an expert, there are just so many reasons that doesn’t make sense that I…”

“Honestly, I’d like to hear them.” Grasping Hand reassured, hoping to be convinced.

“Okay, first,” Moving Finger began, rubbing her hands in a way that meant excitement. “There’s this misconception non-equinologists tend to have that since the pony species’ anatomies are so similar, that they are actually subspecies and can interbreed with each other. But if that were true, well, out of the sheer number of unicorna, terra, and pegasa fossils that we have, we would have found at least one that was a hybrid of some sort. And that’s assuming said hybrids were infertile, which is the weak form of the hypothesis. In the strong form, we wouldn’t have distinct subspecies but rather a continuum, considering just how equally distributed both geographically and numerically the three varieties are. But we haven’t found a single hybrid. That implies a genetic distance great enough to prevent interbreeding, making them distinct species. And all this!”

Moving Finger waved her hands to indicate the room they were in, or maybe the entire museum, or maybe the city or civilization that the museum was located in general.

“Culture. There’s distance enough within our own blessed species to make friendship and understanding difficult. Between members of different species, with the difference in brain functions that would imply? It might make even communication impossible! An actual friendship, like the one we share? Unlikely. And pair-bonding! Hah!“

“But there’s evidence.” Grasping Hand said. “Entangled fossils, like you said. Between members of different pony species. That indicate they lived together, or at least died together. And we have no idea how their psychology worked. Even if they couldn’t interbreed, there could have been cultural convergent evolution, since their societies clearly interacted with each other. Or, maybe they could interbreed but by the time they were living in proximity to each other they developed harsh societal rules against it, and the exceptions were too few in number for one to get fossilized and discovered.”

Moving Finger shrugged, which she did by turning two of her hands outward and forming a “thumbs-up” with both. She had to admit that they weren’t bad points. “I mean, sure, who knows? It really is impossible to tell at the distance of millions of years, when all we have are their bones! If it weren’t for the glass and ceramics and the population density we would have no way of knowing they had a technological civilization at all…“

“Yes, exactly!” Grasping Hand insisted. “We just don’t know. Maybe pair-bonding happened, too?”

“Well, yes, but, uh…” Moving Finger was uncomfortable. “Being a low-dimorphism species, ponies had a different definition of that than we do. They pair-bonded with their broodmales. I mean, can you imagine? Holding hands, cuddling, even having sex with something you could have a conversation with? That would be crazy!”

“Yeah, crazy…” Grasping Hand agreed unenthusiastically.

“Sorry.” Moving Finger realized her faux pas. “Like, I know we’re scientists so we should be objective and not assign moral or personal judgment in our analysis of other species’ behavior. But as far as we can tell, it worked the same way it does for their non-sapient mammalian descendants of today. Pair bonding and reproduction between the male and the female. And look.“ Moving Finger indicated the pelvises. “Both female. How would that even work?”

“The terra’s is at the lower end of the female range,” Grasping Hand um-actuallied, “and the species is low-dimorphism enough for the trait distribution curves of the two sexes to intersect.”

“Haha, wow!” exclaimed Moving Finger, genuinely impressed. “Maybe you should change specialties. But there are other markers.” She indicated them in turn. “Femur proportions. Muzzle curvature. Height. Some well within female range, some on the ambiguous end, but all within range.”

Grasping Hand shrugged. “I mean, I agree they’re both female. And I know all that about pony pair-bonding, you’re the one who’s been teaching me this stuff all week! I’m not some—”

“Some yokel who pretends pony females pair-bonded with other pony females instead of confronting the rich diversity of animal behavior in nature?” Moving Finger smirked. “Okay, sure. Maybe pair-bonding like ours happened as well even though that’s how their species’ reproduction is supposed to work. But let’s move beyond that. Both logic and what we know about low-dimorphism species would indicate pair-bonding generally happened between ponies of a similar age. And we can approximate age at death by tooth wear. Look at the terra.“

She indicated the fossil on the left.

“Relatively little wear. All teeth intact. Died in the prime of life. And look at the unicorna.”

She indicated the fossil on the right.

“Much more wear, a lot missing entirely. This one was old when she died.”

“Or she ate rocks or something?” Grasping Hand shrugged. “Or they were a May-December pair-bond. More likely if pair-bonding weren’t so strictly tied to reproduction and parenting. Or they died at separate times and made sure to be buried next to each other, like I said.”

“Okay, first of all, we have no indication that ponies ate rocks!” Moving Finger was exasperated. “That doesn’t even make any sense! If their teeth were hard enough for that, they wouldn’t need to get fossilized because they’d outlast the sediment around them!”

“That one was a joke…” Grasping Hand said flatly.

“Oh, yeah, of course. Sorry. It’s really hard to tell with you sometimes.” Moving Finger sighed. “I’m regretting ever starting this conversation. Because yes, any of those things could be true. We have no way of knowing, that’s the point. Maybe one of them ate rocks. Maybe one of them loved rocks. Maybe one of them had a rock as a pet! Maybe one of them was a time-traveling wizard!“

“Hey, rock as a pet!” Grasping Hand recognized. “That was my idea for the basalt that you shot down the last time we talked about this!“

“Yes, I picked that specifically because it was the most ridiculous one!” Moving Finger frowned, which she did by bending down all of her hands at once. “I agree, that chunk of magnesium-rich basalt is very out of place in the sedimentary stratum, and its position between the two fossils would suggest that it might be part of a pony cultural artifact, but we have no idea what the other parts of it looked like at the time. It’s very unlikely that ponies just carried chunks of basalt around by itself. It’s a very common type of rock. Maybe it was a counterweight for some machine, or one part of a decoration, or something.”

“Or a pet! Or something important, anyway.” Grasping Hand frowned. “Or maybe it meant nothing at all to them, and it’s just there by coincidence. Just like how these could just be two fossils next to each other, nothing more.“ She sighed. “You’re worried about me, aren’t you?”

“Yeah…” Moving Finger sighed. “Like I said, you’ve been looking at this thing a lot. It doesn’t seem healthy.”

“Yeah, I know…” Grasping Hand trailed off. “Like I said, I can’t explain it. I just get this feeling. But you’re right, it probably is unhealthy.”

“Want to talk about it?” Moving Finger asked, trying to sound extra understanding.

“No.” Grasping Hand said. “I can’t even talk about it or explain it to myself. Maybe it’s the romance of it? This fossil and hundreds of others, their voices reaching out to us from millions of years in the past, to be extinguished forever due to the short-sighted budget cuts of a very stupid civilization.”

“Destructive scanning is not extinguishing their voices forever!” Moving Finger had had this argument too many times to count. “If anything, it’s amplifying them, since now anyone will be able to look at the fossils in all of their detail at any time they want. That it frees up so much in maintenance and storage costs is a bonus.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Grasping Hand sighed. She was also tired of this argument. “I know! But, I don’t know. It’s irrational. I just feel this connection, somehow. Even though I’ve never even seen the actual fossils. And if I don’t ask you to break the rules and let me look at them in person soon, I’ll never get to.”

Moving Finger winced, which she did by squeezing two of her hands into a fist real tight for a second. “Actually, the scanning schedule got moved up last week. They’ve already been digitized. Four days ago.”

“What?!” Grasping Hand’s voice was full of betrayal.

“Yeah, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you for so long…” Moving Finger sounded very worried. “I’m sorry.”

“But I—” But what was Grasping Hand going to say? That her friend should have held up the process and risked her job just so she could feed her sudden and inexplicable obsession with these two long-dead ponies? If anything, this was a good thing, ripping off the baby finger all at once. All the necessary pain done and over in one moment, so that the new finger of emotional maturity and not being obsessed with ponies all of a sudden can grow in its place, or something…. This was a bad analogy.

“But look! I, uh… I got you something!” Moving Finger interrupted her thoughts, and turned around to grab a large and heavy-looking bag from behind her, audibly struggling to talk while lifting it. “I was really, really not supposed to do this, and maybe it will even be bad for you in the end to indulge you like this, but…“

She presented the object inside to Grasping Hand, who had to use all of her hands to hold it due to its size and weight. It was the chunk of magnesium-rich basalt! Her gaze switched back and forth between her screen and the object in her hands, as if to confirm.

“I… I don’t know what to say…” Grasping Hand’s voice was full of childlike wonder.

“A ‘thank you’ would be nice! But, uh…” Moving Finger looked at her friend worriedly. “I guess I can tell you’re thankful just from how you look right now.”

Completely entranced, is how Grasping Hand looked. The dracologist continued to stare at the rock in her hands, not saying a word.

“Hey, don’t you start talking to that thing now!” Moving Finger warned jokingly. At least, she herself hoped it was jokingly.

Grasping Hand took a second too long to respond. “Oh, yeah, of course! Don’t worry. I’m not crazy or anything.”

Moving Finger wasn’t so sure. She continued to watch Grasping Hand stare at the rock for a few more moments before speaking again.

“Well, uh, I have to get going, actually. There’s a rebuttal I need to write before the end of the day. Another crank got published by this pop-science mag that doesn’t know any better.”

“Another alicorna hoax?” Grasping Hand actually turned to look at her this time.

“Yeah, but at least this one managed to get the parts from the same stratum this time! So I might actually have to look at the damn thing for more than a second.”

“Hey, now who’s the one with the weird obsession?” Grasping Hand laughed. “It’s one article for a ‘fun’ magazine. Nobody’s going to actually be convinced that there was a fourth pony species that happened to have the anatomical properties of the other three. Like, how does that even make sense from an evolutionary perspective?”

Moving Finger would at this point normally go on a rant about how lacking the general public’s knowledge of evolutionary theory was and how any erosion in the integrity of scientific publications, even the less serious ones, could lead to untold troubles for their civilization down the line, but she was instead just glad to see her friend back to her old self. She smiled, waved goodbye, and went on her way.

Grasping Hand stared at the rock for a few more minutes, then turned to look at her screen again. But she found that all of a sudden, that feeling she used to get was no longer there. Now it was just two pony fossils, standing next to each other, nothing more.

(They were, of course, lying down. But Grasping Hand’s language, due to her species’ anatomy, makes no distinction between the verbs for standing and lying down, and the associations of the verb that is used would cause it to map better to our verb of “standing”. I hope you forgive this bit of latitude in translation.)

Grasping Hand took the rock back to her apartment. It was hard to find a place for such an awkwardly-sized thing, especially since she didn’t want it to draw the attention of any guest who might ask her too many questions about what she was keeping this large chunk of otherwise uninteresting rock around for, or worse, where it came from. But she felt it was important.

She would go back to look at the fossil occasionally, through the published digitized scanned copy that she could explore in every microscopic and molecular detail. But somehow seeing more of the detail made it even less magical. Or maybe that wasn’t so surprising. In any case, it soon made her stop looking at or even thinking about the fossil entirely.

Eventually, she also died, and what she had seen would die with her. Sure, the digital image of the fossil would occasionally catch the eye of some bored archivist or graduate student flicking through the catalog, but none would ever see what Grasping Hand had seen. Then the last saved copy of the image itself was lost in a botched archive transfer done by a future iteration of the museum dealing with even steeper budget cuts, and nobody would ever even have the chance to see it, ever again.

That point is where our story ends, temporally. Let’s rewind a bit. It’s not far.

That day when she learned the fossil had already been destructively scanned for days was not, in fact, the very last time she felt that feeling she had gotten.

After she had stopped thinking about the fossil so much, she still kept the rock that Moving Finger had given her because it was a symbol of their friendship; a secret of a shared misdeed. But eventually they stopped being coworkers. Then they didn’t really have much of a reason to hang out so much, so while they still considered each other good friends, they really didn’t see each other very often. But they did manage to, once in a while, when one of them was reminded of the other’s existence.

The last time they met, like all the other times, they reminisced about their days at the museum together, two decades past by that point. Like all the other times, they talked about that time Moving Finger stole that chunk of magnesium-rich basalt for Grasping Hand. Like all the other times, Moving Finger laughed with delight that Grasping Hand had kept that old thing, even after going through multiple jobs, living in multiple cities, making and ending two pair-bonds, raising four daughters, and giving birth to an unimportant number of sons.

Neither of them ever told that story to anyone else. Not because it was some deep, dark secret, but because it really wouldn’t be interesting. You just had to be there.

Thus, neither of them knew that it was the last time that story would ever be said out loud. That they would never see each other again. Not because of some dramatic event like a falling out at that last meeting, or one of them suddenly dying, but rather just because some meeting has to be the last one.

But even after that day, Grasping Hand still kept the rock. And neither on that day nor any other day had Grasping Hand ever told anybody why. They wouldn’t understand because it was ridiculous. She couldn’t tell them that when she saw the rock, she somehow knew something to be true.

Let me explain.

“Love” is a very difficult word to translate into her species’ language, since there is no one word to unify the three types of bond thought of as inviolably separate.

The first is born from the cold logic of kin selection, and even a relative romantic (by her species’ standards) like Grasping Hand could admit that the intensity of that feeling decayed in herself as the target went from daughter to sister to niece to grand-niece. But still, as a thinking species, it expands to account for adopted relatives, close bonds formed in childhood, sisters-in-arms during battle, and members of religious orders attempting to replicate those conditions. Outside of those bonds, it is considered unusually self-sacrificing and even disturbed to run into a burning building to save another.

The second is born from game theory, and runs in a continuum from well-liked acquaintances to friends to pair-bonds. Pair-bonds usually live with each other, talk to each other the most, support each other emotionally and financially, watch movies together, and read each other’s fanfiction. But fanfiction tastes change naturally over time, and if one day the pair-bond realize their commonalities are no longer strong enough, it dissolves the way it had begun: with a handshake and a move, seamlessly scaling back to that of good friendship.

The third is born from the exigencies of reproduction. Though communication between the sexes is not possible, many swear that the calming hormones released by the caresses and cuddles and the pleasure of the reproductive act itself constitutes a “language“ of its own. Of course, those who answer “broodmale” in the age-old terrible icebreaker, “who would you run out of a burning apartment with first, your pair-bond or your broodmale?”, are, though not quite shunned by society, still looked at a little funny.

Grasping Hand knew, intellectually, that the ponies not only had all three types of bond separately, but also are conjectured to have a bond that incorporated features of them all, and charged with all the meaning and poetry that any sapient being would load into a concept so important.

What Grasping Hand saw in those images was how that bond felt. Strong and important enough to make an old unicorna lay herself to rest next to a terra that had died a lifetime ago.

And that was something she could neither explain nor admit.

To call it “forbidden” in her species would not quite be accurate. “Impossible” would be a more accurate term.

So what would you call a being who wanted such a thing for herself? Something impossible to realize because the species it was meant for only existed as dead images cast in stone or as pixels on a screen?

“Lonely”, one might say.

That is why she kept the rock all those years. Because whenever she looked at it, inexplicably, it spoke to her. Not in words, but in a feeling of knowing. That the bond she wanted, and would never in her lifetime or in any other lifetime actually have, was not an abstract concept dreamed up by an intellectual exercise, but rather something that once truly existed and was real and precious and strong.

And that made her feel a little bit less alone.

Author's Note

Now you may read my Thematic Commentary for this story!

As well as Part 4: Cosmological