Chapters Introductions, and a quick background
What if everything could be seen beforehand? More importantly; what if you could determine exactly when it was going to happen.
Through my studies in some of the golden age of magic I discovered a spell lost long before Celestia and Luna brought peace to our land. This spell was created by a mare, if I guessed correctly. Her first name is written down, but her last name has faded and can not be fully read.
Her first name was Winter. There are no records of a mare named Winter, nor of a stallion of the same name. Whoever he or she was, I’ll identify the spell’s author as a she for simplicity, she was brilliant.
This spell has the ability to allow the casting unicorn to see whatever part of their future they want to see. I mean any time, from a second ahead to the moment just before their death. Everything can be known to them. I know this because I’ve seen my entire life, before I have lived it.
Granted, it can change, and much of it does change based on the observation of it. If you like it, most times it happens. If you don’t like it about half of the time it changes, and with that change the entireity of what is to happen afterwards.
Maybe that is why the author wasn’t written down in history; because the results of their spell change making it look like it’s a fake, a simple guess of the universe.
But it is even more than that. It is the ability to see your future before it even happens, a way to see your actions before they are even done, a way to change your every move to have an outcome that you desire, granted not everything can be changed.
For example the first time I tried the spell I did it so I could see what was to happen to me that night. I saw myself sitting at home, the same place and the same way I always do. But there was something else; I had flowers on my end table. Flowers, which I didn’t have anywhere, nor did I even think of getting flowers that day.
I went home and shrugged it off, thinking that it was like fortune telling or any other future guessing game. I believed myself completely. I decided to not buy any flowers, not to pick any or attempt to gain possession of them.
That night I was going through a scroll from one of my co-workers regarding another spell, this one for giving any non pegasus pony wings. Around half way though reading it I got a knock on my door.
I got flowers. The exact same ones I saw, but I tried the spell again, and this time I saw that the flowers in a different position then last time, the flowers were now on a table near my bookcase. I decided that was good enough for me, so I set them there.
That could have easily been a coincidence, so I tried again, this time I set my sights on my visit that I planned to the royal library. I didn’t focus on the events, or what I was doing, but instead on the ponies around me, the weather, the stuff that I couldn’t easily modify without changing everyponies plans.
I saw two white guards protecting the entrance and the wing that I intended on visiting was guarded by two black guards. The ponies that were visiting the wing were all alone, as in not accompanied by another pony. They were all doing their own studies, alone.
I know this sounds like a bunch of luck, or even lies, but it looked like, and had the same elements, as the vision I had.
Now I don’t believe in the magic you can not easily prove, and with a spell that has differing effectiveness based on how you react to it. Every other ponies reactions will be the same unless you give them the knowledge of what will happen.
There is one issue with the spell, for what I can tell, some parts of the timeline are set in stone. They can not be modified, removed, or passed over. No matter how much you attempt to change it. The magic may have a failsafe built in to keep everything running smoothly, or there may be something larger running Equestria. Possibly larger than Celestia and Luna.
I don’t know where this will take me, nor if I should really pursue it further but I have full intent on figuring out who this Winter pony is, and why the spell has been lost for such a long time in a very commonly read section of the royal library.
don't get ahead of yourself
Again I decided to experiment with the spell, this time I went even deeper into my future. To be exact I went around ten years ahead. Now I certainly don’t want to mess up anything that was meant to be, but this spell must be understood.
The exact time I planned for, it may have been different, was ten years to the second. I got to watch myself wake up, but I wasn’t alone.
I had a husband, and as I let myself watch I got to see my house, my family and everything else that before, and possibly after, was to happen.
I was happy, as was my family. It was a weekend and I got to watch as we (I shall identify the same with current me as I shall with future me) spent the morning walking through a forest, enjoying the bright day.
In a way I now I don’t want to continue this research, mainly because of this insight into my future. I don’t want to change the future in ways that I don’t know, nor do I want to see something that I love, and have it torn away from me.
But to aid all of Equestria through my research is more important than myself.
For the first time I reported my study to one of my co-workers. She thought it was a fun trick and that it was nothing more then a good thing to do for entertainment. I begged her to try the spell and see what happens with her, to see if I wasn’t just seeing coincidences. She said that she would get around to it when she had the time, but that there was a new spell that was currently being pieced together from years of research and that she was requested to help out, and was late as is.
Finding another unicorn to try this spell is hard, because it requires a pony who’s special talent is magic. The spell specifically required that. With what Winter has written down so far in this spell, I think she knew more then what history has written her down as.
Another test I did was to do the spell three times rapidly, in an attempt to see the effect that it has. I selected a time an hour in the future. The first time I saw that I was going through the private scroll case in the back room of the royal library, of which I have access. The second time I saw me doing the same, this time instead of going through the bottom rack, as I was in the first vision, I was going through the top rack. This is easily due to the change in time from the first spell to the second spell. After that I decided to attempt the final time, but before that I decided to not go through the scrolls, but instead to sit at my desk and to translate a spell that was in an old dialect. That time I again saw myself going through the scrolls. This puzzled me so I decided to shrug off Winter’s spell, as I now call it, and go and start translating.
Obviously the spell was just for fun, and not really worth the effort to understand. I figured it must be based on your hearts desire, and on other things going on within your sub-concious mind.
I must have just been too willing to believe. Or maybe I was too willing to give up.
Within the hour I was going through the scrolls. I was requested (ordered) to hunt down a spell in relation to the one that my co-worker was working on.
Forgive me for not giving names, I figure anypony that I will write down as believing, or disagreeing with this spell and its effects don’t want me to be complaining about them. It also gives a good distance from bias, in case anypony reading this disagrees with the pony’s other statements, making the reader biased.
I want to know who this Winter pony was. Was she a unicorn, as I highly believe, or was she an earth pony or pegasus? Where did she study? What was her big breakthrough with this spell, as in what makes it tick? And why is this spell not known, other than to myself?
I looked again ten years ahead. Again I saw the same family that I had before, and the same happiness that I had when I saw it the first time I had again. I spent more time watching then last time. I nearly was late to work because of the spell.
I believe I’ve started to piece the reasons for some future events changing and others not. If it is observed it can change, otherwise it doesn’t. It’s like knowing exactly what something is before seeing it, and after seeing it you don’t know what it will be. It’s like the opposite of observation.
This makes me wonder as to what happens if every unicorn could do this spell, what would happen? Would the timeline of this entire world shift and warp whenever somepony decided to witness the future? Am I modifying the future in ways I don’t even know?
In a way what if time isn’t even a part of the world that we know? What if we made time up to make sense of a world that is even more odd then what we could imagine?
I decided to pursue the name Winter in the same area of the library that I discovered her future spell in. There was nothing related to this spell, nor was there any spell with the name Winter on it with the same hoofwriting as the one that I’m researching.
It’s as if Winter was made up, a pseudonym perhaps? I haven’t connected the hoofwriting to any other common authors in the collection, so she wasn’t well known. To be honest the idea that Winter is a she is also up in the air now, but I will still identify Winter as female.
This project has taken more time then what was originally planned. I have an unlimited time for any research project, so long as it gives results. I hope for both my job and my sanity, that this makes sense in the end.
I’ve also started to watch myself ten years in the future at night as well. It’s a mixture of pleasure and discomfort at the same time, the comfort coming from knowing a happy future, and the discomfort knowing that at any time I may make a mistake and change it all.
So far though my life in the future is the same, at least in the few times I’ve watched it. I admit I’ve spent close to the whole evening today watching the future. I try to tell myself that I will break it if I watch too much of it, or the wrong time, but I don’t want to stop.