The Nature of Prophecy

by Rubidium

Rating: everyone
Tags: Princess Celestia, Drama, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Starswirl the Bearded
Length: 1464

Starswirl's apprentice catches a glimpse of the future.

The Crystal Heart is said to reveal the destinies of ponies who look in it. For Starswirl the bearded, it's but one of a long string of research subjects, soon to be forgotten. For his student, it's somewhat more.

Expanded from an entry in The Writeoff Association's 'Hounded' contest.
Cover art by GroaningGreyAgony.

Published 2025-01-20 22:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2025-01-20 22:00:00 UTC

Chapter 1

After several minutes of staring in silence, Starswirl pronounced the heart "moderately clever", and wandered off. That was how it went with him: he spent weeks or months tracking down some artifact or spell, then promptly lost interest nearly as soon as he began his studies. His current obsession was prophecy, and on this latest journey we had already observed a yak bone-burning ritual (“trivial”), a pegasus ornithomancer (“effective enough, but hardly prophetic”), and a unicorn astrologer (“disappointing”). He had not said why, despite these and other failures, he remained convinced that true prophecy was possible.

I stayed behind. There was no particular hurry - Starswirl would spend the next several hours updating his notes, and the most I’d get from interrupting him was a snappish comment or two. Besides, “moderately clever” was a rare treat. I could usually figure out how the moderately clever artifacts worked, and unlike the trivial ones the puzzle tended to be worth solving.

The Crystal Heart was a solid gemstone, slightly larger than my head, which floated in its place of prominence in the central plaza. By day, it caught the light, illuminating each of the twelve main thoroughfares of the city in turn as the sun made its journey across the sky. We had arrived in the evening, and the heart only glowed faintly.

To my magical senses, it was the most complicated artifact ever to gain the title of “moderately clever”. Tendrils of magic, far more than I could count, flowed through it in every planar direction, passing through the streets and buildings of the kingdom in like measure, and mingled with each other within it in a baffling tangle. Even Star Swirl couldn’t figure out such magic so quickly, so I set it from my mind. If the crystal had some prophetic mechanism, it would surely lie elsewhere.

Yet I could identify no other magic in the heart, and it seemed strange to suppose that any would exist. Magic had a tendency towards self-refinement; artifacts could be constructed with multiple aspects, but over time they would settle on some essential nature, and the heart was ancient enough that it surely had done so.

Suppose there was nothing to the heart beyond some element of trickery? I had once met a fortune teller who, having been revealed as a fraud, saw no reason to conceal the secret of her trade. "The art of fortune telling," she had told me, "lies in saying what the customer already knows."

What was the nature of the heart? To see and reflect the feelings of ponies. Put that way, the mechanism was obvious.

Better yet, it was testable. I looked into the crystal.

She was beautiful, not like ponies are beautiful but like storms are beautiful, an amalgam of earth and sky and aether, standing more than twice the height of the tallest pony I had ever met. Her horn glowed impossibly brightly - had I seen her in person and not merely in a vision, I think I would have been struck blind - and the world seemed to warp around her as she struck at some darkness-shrouded creature I couldn’t clearly see. She was not the most awful creature I had ever seen - the world contains many great and terrible things, and as Starswirl’s student I had seen more than most. But those great and terrible things did not ordinarily wear my face.

I suspected then that I knew the reason for Starswirl’s interest in prophecy; I would have given my horn to understand the vision. I settled into a comfortable position, determined to analyze the heart as thoroughly as possible before leaving.

I must at some point have fallen asleep, for I woke to the light of the crystal heart, made brilliant by the rising sun. I hurried to the western gate, not entirely certain Star-Swirl would not leave without me. He had never said why he took me on as his student, and I was perpetually wary of reaching the limits of his patience, which he never had in great quantity.

Fortunately, in this instance my fears were ill-founded. I met him at the gate, and the three of us set out for a reindeer settlement whose location was known to Starswirl.

The tundra surrounding the Crystal Kingdom is cold and empty, with nothing but blank snow as far as the eye can see in any direction. Even the kingdom fell from view after a time, though I could not say how many leagues it took, and then there was nothing to do but to endure the glare of sunlight on snow.

It was then that Star Swirl asked, as was his habit, whether I had been able to solve the puzzle of the Crystal Heart.

"I have no adequate explanation," I replied. "The heart seems to me genuinely miraculous."

He gave me a disappointed look. “The Crystal Heart,” he said, “draws on, amplifies, and reflects the feelings of the ponies of the Crystal Kingdom; separately, it produces prophecies. Unify those effects.”

The trouble with being the student to a great wizard, I reflected, was that he all too readily assumed I was an idiot. "You think the heart does to thoughts what it does to feelings, yes? Ponies make ordinary predictions in the ordinary course of thinking about their lives, and it reflects those predictions to the viewer, perhaps in some way filtering for consistency."

He nodded. "It is not so difficult a puzzle, you see, once you take the effort to actually think it through."

"I did consider that explanation," I replied, "and I rejected it. The heart gave me a prophecy, and nopony in the Kingdom has any cause to give thought to my future."

It was not often I managed to surprise him, and though the greater portion of me was still concerned with the vision, some part still took satisfaction in it. "Describe it."

"A chimera of the Equestrian tribes, with my face, fought a figure I couldn't see clearly enough to identify."

"A metaphor, perhaps."

It was oddly sloppy reasoning; I was unsure what to make of it. "The ordinary predictions of ordinary ponies do not couch themselves in metaphor."

"No, they do not." He chewed at his beard, and we spent some time walking in silence, save for the crunch of snow beneath our hooves.

"My reputation," he said at last, "is exaggerated enough in Canterlot, and stories grow stranger in the telling. Perhaps some pony of the kingdom saw us and thought, 'the traveling companions of Star Swirl must be no mortal ponies; they shall someday shed their flesh and take on stranger forms', and this wild fancy was taken up by the heart for lack of alternatives?"

"Perhaps," I replied. The vision had seemed much too real to be an idle fancy, but I supposed it was the nature of a clever deception to remain compelling even after its trick was revealed.

We found no settlement, only a lone reindeer. "Turn back," he said. "You will not find what you seek." At this Starswirl laughed, as if the reindeer had said something tremendously amusing, and began the journey south.

Thereafter, he never again made mention to me of prophecy or any related field of magic.

For my own part, I continued the research. On three further occasions I saw the vision: in a clear pond beneath the stars, I saw that I would go to the confrontation armed, though I knew not the weapon; in the flames of a dragon's breath, I saw that the site of the battle would be of my choosing, though I knew not the hour; in the dream-haze of noble laurel, I saw that I would shed tears, though I knew not the reason. And however greedily I grasped at these details, they were as water to a starving mare, for in no vision did I learn either the nature of my enemy or of my future form, and however much I endeavored to convince myself otherwise, I could not believe that they were more than tricks, revealing only what I already knew or could guess.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as genuine prophecy; whatever proof Starswirl thought he had once discovered he didn’t share with me before his disappearance, and he was never so infallible as his reputation later suggested. In any case, every prophecy I have personally encountered was a more ordinary sort of prediction, revealing nothing that a sufficiently clever pony could not figure out on her own.

I therefore know for a fact that my sister’s betrayal was perfectly foreseeable, and that the thousand years we now spend apart can only be blamed on my own incompetence.