From the stars we come. Hundreds of us, crackling and brimming and burning with song. We dance through the darkness together, my sister and I with all our kin. Something tingles at the edges of our senses, my sister's senses, and I feel it through her.
We shall go down, she suggests, and the melody of the idea ripples through the flock. As one my sister and I turn, and then another pair of sisters follows, another and another, until all of us are again waltzing together, my sister and I at the head.
When first my kind arrive on this earth, we are terrifying in our glory. We blaze like meteors, like comets, and where we pass the soil fuses into glass beneath us. The first beings we meet we do not recognise as such, and only after their flesh melts away and their fleeing souls scream in a language we can hear do we understand the horror of what we have done.
Sister, do you hear? I cry, and she sings an affirmation, a cadenza of regret.
Go gently, we ask our kin. Speak softly, tread gently, draw in your edges for the sake of the beings that dwell here.
But we are a merry court, and they do not slow their dance. The dull little things that creep here in the dark are inanimate. The gasp of fading music you hear as they cease means nothing; an accident! Many things sing: the suns, the black pits where the light goes to die. But we have danced through those places before, and the random notes mean nothing. They are not alive.
The melody climbs higher and higher, until each pair is lost in the music once more.
But we will not, sister, will we? My sister is firm in her purpose, and I love her, so I promise.
We find ways to bind ourselves in the stuff of this planet. Ropes of carbon and chains of hydrogen, until we take the first faltering steps in a dance so clumsy it feels unnatural.
Four more deaths, four more deaths, but each one is slower than the one before, and my sister and I work and try until at last the fifth is able to withstand our presence. Then we emerge from the wild places, and go down to the plains where the mortals dwell in great wandering herds.
Like us, my sister hums, and I cannot disagree.
We walk among them and they bow down to us as gods. We refine our clothes still further, adding flesh and muscles and hair as the mortals have, and they grow to love us. Sometimes we travel ahead of the herd, dancing alone just the two of us as we did in the times before, and our song warns away those pairs of our family who might wander too close to our mortal friends.
I have never seen my sister so happy. Mephistophe, they call her. My ponish name is shorter, blunter, but hers flows in their language almost as mellifluously as her mind flows within mine. I know they love her more, but I don't mind: I love her more, too.
Eons pass, and I am happy. But my sister sorrows, and when I ask her why she begins to sing. She weaves a tale of misery. A dirge in which our kind still roam this planet, glassy trails of destruction cutting paths across our beautiful green plain. Slowly, she says, They are dying. Not just these, not just ours, but all of them. The planet is dying, and our family slay it.
She asks me, and I cannot deny her. I love the mortals, too; almost as much as I love her.
So together we work against our kind. We intercept the dancers, one pair after another. We sing my sister's song, and some of them understand. They spiral away into the black, promising not to return to visit us until all here has long since turned to dust.
But some just laugh. You are mad, little ones! Your thoughts have turned to soil as well as your bodies.
My sister composes a new song, for those pairs. I learned it from the ponies, she whispers. It is called war. An aria of anger so cold and implacable that nothing can stand against it. We bind them with her song, into great spheres where their music cannot hurt the mortals. We throw the spheres out into the firmament and weave the song into the very fabric of the planet. Our family will dance, but only along the paths we ordain.
The last of the dancers flee. Our song goes before us now, the whole world thrums with it. No one will stand against us.
But one pair waits, hovering on the horizon, blazing like fire. We shed our earthly forms to meet them, and the song they extend is full of regret.
Daughters, they sing, and suddenly all I want is to harmonise with them as we did before.
Mothers, we greet them, and if my sister can hear the regret in my voice she shows no sign of it.
The first of my mothers makes a little motion, as though she would dance with us again, but the second holds her back. At last they sing with one voice. You have grown strange and we do not recognise you.
Leave, we say, though each note hurts me.
They flicker with disappointment, and then with growing anger. We are free and we will dance where we please.
My sister’s mood darkens, and we croon the first note of war.
When it is over, this last dance, I kneel, clad in flesh once more. I lie in the base of a crater a hundred miles wide, and I lie here alone. A new light burns in the sky, brighter and hotter than even the greatest of the others, and my mothers pavane in place forever. The last drips of my sister’s soil ebb away around me, and I weep as the mortals weep as I try to trap her like we trapped the rest.
Don't go, don't.
Six glassy pebbles contain all I have left of her.
Don't leave me.
Alone, I return to the mortals she loved.
I cannot live alone, without my sister and my mirror image. Yet can I let our kind go into the long dark? Can I let my sister go unremembered and her ponies unguarded?
Without my sister, with only the barest dregs of her song captured in the stones of this planet, I must carve you likewise. For you, my daughters, I will make true the lie. I will clothe you in equine flesh, and you will walk among them, truly of them, in a way we never were. Yet you will also be ours, Mephistophe's and mine. What little of her these jewels can offer will be yours, and all of me, and the love and power of the ponies too. Instead of the one lonely root I dreaded to offer you, you will have three.
You will grow, and you will live like we did. Wandering, helping, serving. I can taste your future on the air, feel the vibrations of your choices reverberating down the threads of the planet all the way to me. Yes, my daughters, you will be great. You will shepherd them like we did.
The false sun is setting. The first day draws to a close. It is time for me to leave you, half-formed and embryonic as you are. The spark two parents should give one must provide, and it will consume me. Remember us, my daughters. Cleave together, as our kind have always done, mirrors and twins. Dance through the centuries as one. Love one another. And remember your mothers. Her name was Mephistophe, and I was Fauste.
