A Bookend

by QuinnyOnMain

Rating: everyone
Tags: Tragedy, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe, Other, Drama, Original Character
Length: 1087

Let's not leave things unfinished, now...

I feel bad leaving all my stories in a state of flux, so view this as a statement directed at all my characters with stories left unfinished through the years. This is an invitation to allow their stories to finish, or to continue, within our thoughts and imaginations, represented as a speech to Golden Glow, the main character of the old fiction I'm most attached to: You're a Princess Now.

Published 2025-01-13 05:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2025-01-13 05:50:01 UTC

Dear Creation...

I understand why you may be angry with me, after the years I've left you in flux, the time to grow and change which I've deprived of you, for the sake of my own life. I've been quite upset at myself, but now I'm fixing my mistake with one final act which will allow us both to move on. I'll still be around, as will you, but to each other, our natures of existence will be unrecognizable. It will hurt, as it always has, but such is the way for the path of existence.

Golden Glow, I was once your writer. I created you for fun, and eventually, you realized my existence, and by my own logic, you held me accountable for your difficulties and struggles. The plans I had eventually come up with for you are long lost to the time I deprived you of. What you sought towards the end of when I was still writing you was an escape, and I can hardly blame you. So, in light of allowing us both to move on, I hereby release you from the binds enforced upon you by what I wrote you into. It was never my intention to write a story to be abandoned, but another age came upon me before I was able to offer you absolution.

Please understand that I am writing and will continue to write characters in directly more difficult situations than the one I placed you in. This is not out of cruelty, though I do understand how it could feel like it is. Creating a story is not out of a want to enact cruelty on a conceptual being such as yourself, but rather for the sake of creative expression. You, Golden Glow, are a work of art, and despite everything, I am proud of you. You, like all characters, have limitless potential. You are free to be your own self, whether you create, whether you're created, whatever you do, you may go with my blessing, for what little that's worth.

Yes, I believe you are correct. It was cruel of me to simply allow you to stagnate, to cease to grow as you simply wait for an effective eternity as my own growth progressed. I assure you, that my creations in the future will not be allowed to cease continuation until their stories have finally reached a conclusion. Please forgive me for taking that from you. It's selfish of me, lazy even, to end it this way rather than seeing your story through to the end, but once again, what you wanted was to be freed from your contrived reality, and now you are.

There are others like you, of course. You may meet them, perhaps, if that's what you find yourself lead into doing. You may imagine that I'm having this very conversation with all of them, too. This is simply the one I've put my side into writing, I suppose, the one I've taken the time to actually write out in the form of this media. I'm sorry if that seems confusing, that isn't my intention, you know. I simply want to free you and the others from this limbo I've allowed you to occupy for so long.

Ah, I don't believe the others should necessarily be of importance to you, but among the notable ones are your friends, and two alternate versions of a past iteration of myself, one which I don't even identify with anymore. It seems I used to be a rather self-important writer in that regard. I still represent analogues for myself, of course, but never that directly. I've interwoven aspects of myself into plenty of my characters, and you are actually the result of one of my experiments into that. I would love to discuss that with you now, but you never reached that part of your own development, and I believe that it's for you to discover now.

You won't likely see me again, so I believe it may indeed be appropriate of me to tell you about myself. Do not view me as a god, or a creator, or even a parent. I'm hardly deserving of such a title. I am simply a fate you've been subjected to, with a personality attached to it. Keep in mind that I'm a very different being to what I was when I wrote you. My name is Orchid, and I write stories. I'm doing it right now, in fact. That's how we're talking right now, though this is among the more pretentious works I've created, but I choose to embrace that fact this time. I suppose I count as a character in my own story this time, as much as, if not more than you do here.

No, the readers cannot see what you're saying, nor is that the intent I have behind this work. Your words are your own here, not mine. They may infer what you're saying, but that's the true extent of what they can do. Even I don't actually know your responses, as everything I'm writing is out of my own inference for what you're saying to me, rather than anything that could be actually written by me, or by anyone. You are yourself, whatever form that takes, and that form is determined by you and you alone. Do not concern yourself with whether or not you'll make me or anyone else proud, it's entirely your existence now.

This is actually a fairly surreal experience, as I'm talking to you of course, but it's hard to determine what talking to you really means now. I know that I'm not speaking to myself, but you're a character I originally created, but I'm not writing your dialogue. I suppose this effectively means I'm speaking to a concept, and I feel I can hardly determine whether concepts can have wills of their own. I cannot be the imperator of your existence anymore, I don't believe I'm capable of it. If your concept is strong enough, perhaps you can be instead.

So, in light of it all, I now officially disconnect your fate from my personality.

Author's Note

I know this is less of a "story" as it is just a directionless ramble. It's kind of an expression in a different format, which I kind of find the only appropriate way to bookend my stories on this site after everything.

For ease of reading, it may be easier to picture this as half of a dialogue-driven scene.