A Sacred Place
I felt lonely.
It was a strange feeling. I had never felt lonely before. What right had I to feel lonely? I had the love and adoration of creatures all over the world, and they had never given me reason to feel lonely. But as I watched pairs of lovers come and go in the night, ponies walking together in the fields, kissing, smiling, making love under the moonlight, I felt inescapably like I was missing something vital, something I couldn't name.
I looked at my reflection in a puddle. It was a medley of parts many different animals. A head of a pony adorned with an antler of a stag and a horn of a goat. A lion's paw on one arm and an eagle's claw on the other. A snake-like body ending in the tail of a dragon. I smacked the reflection out of the water. Who could love a body like this? Rabbits mated with rabbits; wolves mated with wolves; ponies mated with ponies; wherever I looked, creatures mated with creatures who looked like them. But there was not a creature in the world who looked like me. As much as they loved me, it was only at a distance. There was no one who would love me intimately.
It was then that my companion flew down on me from behind.
“Hey, dope!” she said. “I'd almost think you were a willow tree, standing there and drooping all still. What are you moping around for, anyway?”
“What do you want?” I said. “Leave me alone.”
“Come on, I'm just teasing. What's the matter? I've never known you to be sad.”
“It's nothing. I'm just thinking, that's all.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It's nothing. It's just … I'm thinking about how I belong in the world.”
“How you belong in the world?”
“Yeah …”
“Do you have any doubt that you belong in this world?”
“I don't know … I was just thinking. I said it was nothing.”
She got quiet for a moment and looked around us, cooking something in her head that I couldn't begin to guess. She seemed to get an idea.
“I know how to cheer you up. Let's have a race!”
“Why would a race cheer me up?” I said.
“Because we’re racing to the top of that mountain.” She pointed to the tallest mountain she could spot on the horizon. Even making a steady climb from where we were, to reach that spot seemed a daunting task.
“All the way up there?” I said.
“Yeah! Let's do it!”
“I don't know if I want to …”
“Don't be like that. You'll like it, I promise.”
I watched her hover jovially in the air. I pictured myself backing away from this challenge, leaving my companion to go lay in a grassy meadow somewhere and stew in my loneliness, and I realized I couldn't do it. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be flying with her to the top of the tallest mountain on the horizon.
“… All right,” I said.
“Yes! Go!” She took off as fast as she could.
“Hey, wait!” I chased her.
It took all the flying might I could muster to keep up with her. I managed to catch up, and almost overtook her a few times, but whenever I got close, she sped up just a little and pulled ahead of me. I was already starting to ache when we arrived at the mountain and began the steeper climb up its face, and by the time we reached the top, I was struggling just to keep myself airborne. My companion reached down from her perch and pulled me up, sweating and panting.
“You gonna be all right?” she said with a smile.
“I think so,” I said through gasps of breath.
“Well, you made it.” She pointed out into the distance. “Look.”
From where we sat, we could see the entire plains region below, stretching from the mountains to the sea. Every inch of it teemed with life. Flocks of birds crossed the skies even lower than we; packs of wolves prowled on the grasslands; each leaf was crossed with veins of its own unique pattern, and below them, millions of worms and insects and microbes worked to make the soil itself fertile. Through it all, pony tribes filled the land from end to end.
I had seen them all below, but only from my seat on the mountaintop did I see how they all came together to form such a perfect community. Everywhere I looked, everything was where it needed to be. Everything was in harmony.
I found myself with tears rolling down my cheeks. “It’s beautiful,” was all I could say.
“On the ground, it's easy to think of life as a great number of individuals. But when you see it from way up here, you realize it's all one burning energy, a great fire of life. That's because nothing lives without affecting, or being affected by, all the others. Every creature in the world, from the eagle to the lion to the goat to the stag to the pony, is part of that one great fire.”
She turned to me and took my lion's paw and eagle's claw.
“That's how you belong in this world. You show us the great oneness and togetherness of all life. In you, a great many creatures come together to form one, compound individual, just like the world itself … and if you ask me, I've never seen anything more beautiful.”
Then, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Just a peck, it was—over in an instant—but all the same, I was stupefied while she leaned back and giggled softly. She took off from the mountaintop and was gone before I could say another word.
I watched her fly into the clouds, and I smiled. I didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t know what would happen, but I knew from that moment that she and I would always be close to each other, no matter what happened. Even when she became Princess Celestia, even when she began to lead the ponies in their quest to conquer the world, even when she and I became the greatest enemies, I would never be far off from her, and she would never be far from me.
