Chapter Twenty One
Escape
In this chapter, it is discovered
that the Balance of Nature
lies on the point of a sword.
September 13th, 1014
Twilight Town, Beneath the Labyrinthine Stairs,
and beyond what is known
It was the sun-forsaken aurocks skull that did it. It had become a symbol of the town. It was not only a heraldically decorative charge that adorned banners and was carved into roof beams and such. It was also a not-so-subtle message. This thing made the mistake of attacking us, and look what happened to it.
Somepony had chiseled the ragged neck down smooth and permanently mounted it on a tall, decoratively carved pole just in front of the Tower of Harmony,[1] our town's only other significant landmark.
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[1] Yes, it was pretty. Yes it was tall. But it really was only a large-scale thaumic waveguide. Turning it into a tourist attraction seemed nonsensical to me, but once Buzzy got an idea into her head, there was practically no stopping her. She was a mare of few passions, but immense determination.
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Without the roiling internal energy of the aurocks to power them, the horns were inert and harmless… unless they drew mana from some other source. Say, for instance, a huge thaumic waveguide powered by a gigantic charge of dark magic.
I may have been under considerable "influence" at the time, but it didn't turn me into an utter moron. I ran magic through the waveguide to test it at each step of the construction and there was never a glint from the horns, a quarter furlong away.
But the night of the farewell party, things were different. The townsfolk had decorated the meadow below the tower with banners, flags, streamers, and lanterns, all hung from poles put up for the occasion. Between the poles, they'd draped long strings of tinsel to reflect and sparkle in the lantern light, and there were dozens of strands of it looped over the aurocks horns.
Manufactured goods were very rare in the Forgotten Lands. There weren't any party supply stores to buy real tinsel from, so the ponies had made their own from wire mill scrap. Brass shavings, hung from brass wire to bear the weight. Conductive brass wire.
If I hadn't been in such a hurry to get back to normal and return to my friends, I might have noticed. As it was, I only figured it out much later.
The population of Twilight Town seemed to have doubled for the event, and the party started getting raucous as evening came on.
The King of the Forgotten Lands made an appearance, in a costume that would have made Rarity faint,[2] and was very entertaining. The mad old earth pony proposed to me at one point, though I don't remember if that was before or after he condemned me to the Pit of Despair. I informed the king that I was already spoken for, in both cases. He allowed as how I was a lucky mare, and awarded me a medal that looked suspiciously like a chunk of quartz tied up with an old bit of ribbon.
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[2] Whether from joy or horror, I really don't know. I don't have any fashion sense, but I know wildly extravagant when I see it.
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I contented myself with one small glass of Buzzy's metheglyn as the moon rose. I made personal goodbyes with the few people I had become close to: ponies, zebras, griffons, a young kirin, an old burro, and even the weird little diamond dog who was so good at finding veins of copper.
I clasped the Amulet of Night and the Gem of Remembrance around my neck and made my public farewell to the good folk of the Undiscovered West in a short speech. They cheered me, and there were many cries of "Don't go!" I had to clear my throat a few times and my eyes watered a bit, no doubt because of the smoke from the bonfires.
The crowd parted as I approached the finished Tower of Harmony. Ao and Ajo followed slightly behind me, to either side.
I lit my horn and eased my power into the input portal of the waveguide. The Tower glowed and began its job with a low hum as the dark magic flowed out of me and split into two halves. Crystalline sections induced identical harmonics in each stream of mana, matching the crests of one to the troughs of the other, and the final big crystal at the top of the Tower recombined them, canceling out the dark power and leaving behind nothing more than harmless light and sound.
But those waveforms were enough to induce a mana current through the tinsel wires webbing the meadow behind me. That current would have been harmless as well, if those brass wires hadn't been wound around the aurocks's horns. As it was, the current fed into the crystal until it reached critical density and then a twin blast of lightning erupted from the tips of the horns.
The lightning might have crackled into the sky without hurting anypony if there hadn't been a highly charged structure nearby to attract it. Millions of volts danced along the brass rods and struts of the tower, melting the thinner bits and causing the smaller crystals to explode. It was exactly the sort of event that a sane pony does anything to avoid when working with high-energy magic.
The catastrophic feedback caused by the disrupted mana stream blew away most of the eastern side of the tower, and made my magic spin wildly out of control for a few critical seconds before I could stop it. The sudden jolt felt like the aurocks had kicked me in the horn.
The party guests began screaming and running. It was understandable. Only Ao and Ajo stayed by my side.
And then came the whumph of displaced air from behind me followed by a horribly familiar voice.
"Well, well, well. There you are, Sparky! I was wondering where you'd got to. Can't say I like the new look. Goths are soooo gloomy."
Ao gasped. "The Deceiver!"
I turned slowly, still trying to grapple with the sudden destruction of all my hopes, and saw Discord. "You!" I hissed.
It must have been the horribly out of balance magic that had caught his attention. He hadn't caused the disaster, but at that moment, in my fractured state of mind, I couldn't believe that it was a coincidence. My best chance to get my friends, my lover, and my sanity back had just toppled into ruin, and there was Discord, grinning.
"Save us, Majesty! Please! Kill him! Please! Please!" Ao begged me in a terrified whisper.
"How rude! Some ponies!" Discord rolled his eyes. "Or… whatever."
I shook all over and my muzzle wrinkled up in an almost painful rictus, my jaw opening wide. I think I tried to speak, but the only sound that came out of my mouth was a bestial snarl of rage.
Discord's eyes widened and he lost his grin. "Now, now, Twilight," he began, raising his mismatched arms in a condescending "calm down" gesture. "Everypony's been worried about… ack!"
The counter-rotating helical shields I wrapped the draconequus in would have torn apart a normal, mortal creature. I pounced on him like a manticore on a stray sheep, crushing him and the shields into the soft turf, lining up the forces so that there was only one small channel open in front of his head. I used every ounce of my magical strength to rip his chaos magic out of him and breathed it in with one long, intoxicating breath.
"Twi—Twilight," he gasped in horror. "What… why…."
I dispelled the shields but kept him pinned beneath me. I could feel his heart hammering in his chest. I could see the blood pulsing beneath the skin of his long neck. I could hear the surging hiss of it. I could almost taste it. I wanted to taste it.
My jaws quivered as I forced them shut and lifted my head away from his throat. "You thought this was funny? You think you've won?" I growled. "Well, I can build it again! And this time, I'll feed your magic into it as well as Rushwa's poison. Harmonized to nothing. Dispersed into randomized heat and light. Gone forever! Won't that be fun?"
"Won? I—I don't understand! I…"
"And unless you're very, very good in the meantime, I'll feed you to the Yateveo. You'll love it! A plant that eats ponies! How wacky is that?" I was leaning forward again, having the most incredibly difficult time restraining myself from sinking my fangs into him. "I'm sure Fluttershy will get over it. I'll buy her a canary or something."
It was about then that he got it. He understood that I wasn't kidding and that I might kill him as casually as I might swat a fly.
"She might get over me," Discord said in a suddenly calm and eerily serious voice, "but she'll never get over what you did to her. Applejack and Pinkie Pie, too. They're devastated. When they realize you can't undo it, they'll hate you, Twilight. They'll hate you every second of their immortal lives."
The only reason I didn't tear his throat out in that instant was that I had to know what in Tartarus he was babbling about. "EXPLAIN!"
"What's the one thing Applejack values more than anything else?" he said in a rush. "More than wealth or friends or her own life?"
I didn't reply. I didn't want to be drawn into playing his game. But it was already too late. The first mental domino teetered and fell.
Family. That's what meant more than anything else to AJ.
And, ultimately, family meant foals.
But the crystal engine would always keep her in perfect condition, exactly as she had been when it made the connection to the gem in her head. Exactly.
I knew how Pinkie was with the Cake twins. How could she not want to have her own little ones someday?
And Fluttershy? The most nurturing pony I knew?
Discord probably saw each and every drop of the dominoes in my expression, twisted though it was.
I took a step back. "I—I'll undo it! I'll restructure the crystal engine…"
"Celestia tried that, Twilight! Even she couldn't do it. She won't allow the destruction of the engine, and there's no other way that your friends…"
"Allow? ALLOW? IF SHE TRIES TO STOP ME, I'LL TEAR HER APART!"
He cringed away from me, crossing his arms over his throat and face in an instinctive urge to protect himself. "You can't do that!" he gasped.
He almost overplayed it there. If I had been calmer, I'm sure I would have been instantly suspicious. But all that went through my mind then was a storm of fear and regret that manifested as blind rage.
"He has no power, now," I said to Ao and Ajo. "Tie him up, and don't listen to anything he says. If he refuses to shut up, feed him to the tree."
Ajo was still on his knees, head down and shaking, and Ao was too frightened to reply, but she bowed low to show her acquiescence.
I gathered my power, formed a single, monstrous vortex that would take me all the way to the skull of the great dead dragon… exactly where Discord hoped I would go.
= = =
"Twilight?"
I appeared in the spot where Nebula had been downed and found myself in a small camp of Royal Equestrian Guards. They all leaped to their hooves, but it wasn't one of them who had called out. No, I recognized the voice, and it was someone I didn't want to see right then.
More precisely, it was someone who I didn't want to see me.
"Twilight, is that you?"
The unicorn guards wisely didn't light their horns, but one of them said, "Spike, send the message, now!"
"Are you alright, Twilight? Please, look at me!"
Reluctantly, I did. "Yes, Spike. It's me, but I'll be better soon, I promise you."
"Spike!" hissed the guard who had spoken before.
Spike fumbled something out of the pouch he had slung over one shoulder. It was a scroll. He held it up in front of his mouth and took a deep breath. I watched him, silent and unmoving.
Spike hesitated, and then breathed out. It was a slow exhale and brought no fire with it. He held out the scroll to me. "It just says, 'Twilight is here.' I was supposed to send it if we saw you, but…"
"Spike!" shouted the guard.
I slapped him with the back of my wing and he went tumbling into the sand, his chamfron flying off and half burying itself in a drift.
"The next pony to interrupt, dies," I said quietly.
Spike's eyes were huge and his pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. "Please don't hurt anypony, Twilight!"
I nodded slightly, indicating that I understood what he said to me. If he took it for agreement, that was convenient.
Spike turned the scroll over and over in his claws, nearly dropping it once. "What do I do, Twilight? Celestia won't banish you to the moon or anything, will she?"
"I'm here to fix the problem, Spike. I'm here to make my friends happy again. Send the scroll if you want to. Celestia won't get it for at least a day, and by then it will be all over." I would have hugged him then, but I assumed that being wrapped in my huge black wings wouldn't have been much comfort to him.
"But…" He bit at his lower lip. "Do you still… are you still…"
"Do what you think is right, Spike. You may be wrong… disastrously wrong…" I broke off as a harsh laugh bubbled up from my throat, but managed to cut it off before it went on too long. "Do what you think is best."
"It'll be over by tomorrow? And everything will be back to normal?"
"It will be over very soon, yes," I said.
He stood for a while, his gaze on the sand, and then nodded. He looked up at the waiting guards with a sheepish expression, and tore the scroll to shreds. "It was specially enchanted to travel instantly," he said over the outraged gasps of the guards. "But I'm your number one assistant, and I trust you, Twilight."
I smiled, remembered to keep my lips covering my teeth. "Wait for me here. I will be back soon."
= = =
The Stairs were foal's play. I scanned and manipulated each group of sigils almost as fast as I could walk down the flights, slowly blinking to let the translocation magic take effect at each landing.
It was the engine that presented the real problem. I hadn't planned on destroying it. I could simply remove the crystal sun that acted as the power conduit and, as the stored mana was consumed, it would fall below the critical threshold necessary to maintain the links to the raptor crystals. I wondered why Celestia hadn't seen such an obvious solution until I caught sight of the engine.
The sun was enclosed in a cage of crystal branches. It looked as if a tree had grown up around the twin points of the conduit's contacts. They channeled not only power, but complex and ever-changing spell matrices. Breaking through them to remove the sun would cause a catastrophic failure in the system rather than a smooth discharge of power.
It would only last a moment, but in that time a thousand exchanges of corrupted template information could travel the links to the raptor crystals. I shuddered at the horrific possibilities that went through my mind.
Had Celestia done it, or had it sprung from the judgmental Tree of Harmony? It didn't matter. All that mattered was that I needed to find an answer. Soon.
An object-specific teleport would have been the solution if the spell could transport magically charged artifacts. There were dozens of times it would have saved untold trouble… if it weren't an impossible fantasy. I began groping for another solution.
I needed to cut the power. Stop the input and the output would take care of itself. But what fed the energy into the engine's input conduit was the Wheel of the World. And that was...
I snorted in anger and stamped the floor. Beyond me? Was that really true? I was powerful! I was brilliant! The Wheel was a mere magical construct for all its size and energy.
I opened my magical sight and stared down at the mechanism of the planet. Cycles within cycles, the simplicity of the circle multiplied and interwoven until each trace of energy became a complex, meandering dance of arcane power.
If I had weeks to study and plan, I might have been able to isolate the stream that fed the crystal engine and stopped its flow. But the Royal Guards surely had other ways of alerting Celestia, and my time was limited.
So I stopped the world.
It was my Fail-Safe spell that did it. The Wheel of the World had been modified long ago. Cycles had been stopped, redirected, and added by the Royal Sisters. The mechanism wasn't pristine. It wasn't pure. All those changes were flaws that gave my spell something to latch onto.
I used the Wheel itself to feed power into the spell, and so, just as it began to function, it stopped its own power source. Nothing changed. I hadn't intended that it should. The spell died before it could have any effect, but for the barest fraction of an instant, the Wheel stopped turning.
The pause before it began to turn again was just long enough for me to shatter the crystal cage of branches surrounding the sun, and snatch it out of the power conduit.
Unfortunately, it was also more than long enough to disrupt the prison buried at the heart of the world.
The cavern of the crystal engine faded away, and I was standing in a soft void that I had only seen once before.
"Twilight Sparkle."
The voice was not loud. It was not quiet, it was not harsh, it was not kindly; it was inevitable. It was terrifying.
I turned to face the Red Queen.
= = =
=
Step 1: finish dispersing the dark magic making you insane
Step 2: come up with a plan to deal with your friends' objection to immortality
Do not do these steps out of order!
Even though I saw that coming, it's no less terrifying. Not sure how twilight's going to get out of this one.
Uh oh spaghetti-o.
7060040
I'm so excited! With that little bit of foreshadowing from Discord though... please don't turn this into "Celestia planned this all along." I love Celestia, don't get me wrong, as a whole and the way you write her too, but I hate it when fans make her able to plan and predict literally everything. It's just so cheap.
Seems pretty interesting. I'll be watching!
That's what, three major external sources of magic she's juiced up on now, on top of her own? Might as well try and make it four.
Pulling the plug without also undoing the brain surgery might be a wee problem as well.
7060060
This one doesn't have many moving parts, I don't think. They want to confront Twilight. If you tell Twilight about a problem with her friends, she will want to fix it. They set up a tripwire (Spike and the instant parchment) at the place she'd have to go if she wanted to fix it. Alas, they used a tripwire with divided loyalties.
That's how I've read it, anyway. I haven't gotten any more future chapters to pre-read yet, so I'm not operating with any more information.
7060060
Trust me!
7060140
Your cavalier attitude toward messing with Forces Beyond Comprehension™ is quite delightful and refreshing!
Absolutely delightful.
This is epic.
Never before has there been such a mix of "Ha ha ha!" and "No no no!".
...Well. Dear me. I'm glad Twilight Town wasn't destroyed, at least, as I was afraid of, but... oh dear. :D
I had the sudden thought "I wish Vimbert were still around" because he really liked sky pirates, and I bet he would have liked this fic. :B
7060700
*sigh* Craaaaaaaaap!
This suddenly reminded me of "Injustice - gods among us" with the problem they suddenly have, I have a hard time coming up with a believable solution.
So Dark Twi here has to expend more and more energy to fix the problems her problem fixes did not fix as well as stay ahead of the newly released Red Queen's machinations?
I guess you could say she has found herself in a Red Queen's Race...
In terms of oversights, this sits somewhere between "mild" and "incalculably regrettable".
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/11/15/1023020.gif
7060981
7061063 Yup! A lot like that!
holy...
shit...
I'm a huge nerd, so I can't help but see Star Trek connections in everything Discord says. So naturally, my mind immediately jumped to the Deep Space Nine episode "Q-Less:"
Coincidentally, Q gets knocked on his butt in that episode just about as dramatically as Discord did in this chapter.
7061194 Poor Discord! Nobody's ever glad to see him!
7060040
Step 3: Profit!
Oooooo shit, i did not expect that ending. Kudos to you, good sir/maam/other.
7061324
7061442 Thank you!
And... literally a "sir":
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15337940/Armor_by_iisaw.jpg
Twilight... Are you really that blind? They're still stuck as alicorns and you done fucked up everything else.
7061460 Hey, it is THE internet, it is best to cover all possibilities.
Oh, so I guess the End of Equestria is not just a far away place... Well, R.I.P. Equestria.
That point, Twilight, where, having reached the bottom of the hole and kept digging and having bored through the planetary core and out the other side, you manage to find a whole other hole to dig into on the new planet directly below you...
7061480 It was pretty clear from what Twilight's original plan was supposed to do, the alicorn transformation was meant to be a short-term thing, which reverts quickly. No one was expecting the Tree of Harmony to intervene and fix things so that the transformation became continuous.
Seen one way, if the the Tree and its harmony power is an outgrowth of what the Princesses did, then it suggests that the intelligence which drives the engine seized the potential the Tree of Harmony gave it to influence the world. Adding a handful of immortal ponies to the mix would be seized just as quickly, for the same reason. Except... This suggests that the Harmony element in the world is both opportunistic, and ultimately amoral, because the best interests of the ponies in question are not being served by simply adding them to the pile of options at the world intelligence's virtual fingertips.
Unless, in the end, Twilight has been a pawn all this time. And the point was an attempt by the World Intelligence to get rid of the Red Queen, who was mucking up the works all this time. If that's true, then Twilight may discover that they've all been pawns of a much scarier opponent than they thought. After all, what would it be like to play chess against an intelligence running the whole world? :)
7061848
No, it's pretty obvious that Twilight's original plan was for the alicornification of her friends to be permanent. True, she didn't expect the off switch to be made so hard to get to by the crystal branches, but she still wasn't planning on ever actually using the off switch until her moment of realization this chapter.
7061480
Where do you get that they're still stuck as alicorns? Twilight successfully removed the power source before she got taken away, and the Red Queen being free wouldn't change that.
...well, I guess on the bright side she's got something to burn all that dark magic on now?
7061994
Well, if you payed attention, Discord already said it was impossible to change them back. Besides, she removed the sun, but it never said anything worked. I'm simply assuming by the lack of viable information suggesting otherwise, that there are still five new alicorns running around with a bone to pick with one Nightmare Sparkles.
7062137
Discord was almost certainly not thinking of Twilight being so reckless as to stop the magic of the planet itself (or perhaps her even being capable of it); if Twilight had not done so, then it would have likely indeed been impossible. She removed the only object powering the system she created to permanently keep them in physical stasis, so all logic points to it working. It's not like she would have gotten any feedback at this point, considering how quickly she was confronted by the Red Queen after she did it.
7061835
7061957
Whoa, dude! But, yeah, sorta like that.
7062137
7062155
Loving the discussion! All will be revealed, I promise!
7062041
Food[1] fight!!!
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[1] And by "food" I mean "insanely powerful, amoral alicorn."
Ahh...my plan of letting you get 5 or 6 chapters ahead so I wouldn't be caught by a cliffhanger has totally backfired! Great writing as always. Can't wait for more!
Hmm. Here's a thought. Discord wanted Twilight to take his magic to the World Engine. (Shades of the old War Planets CGI in that statement in my mind... :) )
Anyway, Discord wanted Twilight to go there. I'll come back to this shortly. The crystal tree has somehow imprisoned the power source for Twilight's new spell, and is thus forcing Twilight to take direct and drastic action. The only way she can that won't hurt her friends is to engineer a reset on the World Engine. An act which will also set the Red Queen free, but in the process, undo the systemic damage the Pony Sisters caused to the Engine when they modified it for their own purposes.
All of this came about after Twilight winds up in close proximity to Nightmare Moon and the Red Queen. And it's obvious that NMM had nothing but warm fuzzies for the Titan-esque creature of total destruction she was at least peripherally related to. So what if NMM and the Red Queen conspired to set RQ free? True, NMM never counted on being stuck inside a piece of jewelry, but it still had the desired effect. As long as she was capable of influencing Twilight, she could make the alicorn carry out the master plan of freeing RQ. This is made possible by first making Twilight panic over the thought of losing her friends, then suppressing her common sense so that she makes ever more irrational decisions about how to protect them. Ultimately, this leads to the World Engine. Especially if NMM is prompting Twilight from the background.
NMM, prompting Twilight, sets up a situation whereby her friends are "protected" by the World Engine. But once Twilight's basic common sense reasserts itself, she'll panic and try to undo what she did. This will require briefly resetting the Engine, freeing RQ. If this is the plan, then up to this point, it's gone off like clockwork. RQ and NMM have gotten everything they wanted.
But... Remember Discord? Why did he want his power taken to that location? Why did he even choose to be involved in all this, if he knew this was going to happen?
What if Discord is in fact an agent of the World Engine?
What if the Engine either created Discord or empowered a less-advanced creature a long time ago to be its agent in Equestria. Discord's goal is to introduce the randomizing "X" factor in the situation, which will make it impossible for RQ and NMM to control the outcome. The World Engine is no fonder of RQ or NMM than anyone else is. Especially if the Elements of Harmony are its gift to Equestria and a way it tries to help the people who live there. It would be adamantly against RQ/NMM, and would want to put the boots to them for the last time. The trick is how to do that?
Enter the personification of random chance. The one thing the ultra-control-freak Red Queen can't handle. And by infusing that power inside Twilight Sparkle, the World Engine has given her the tool to set things right and put the boots to NMM and RQ, by ensuring that the power Twilight needs to win just happens to be right there with her when she will need it most.
If this is even close to what's going on, it would be truly epic. :)
7062155
But you also have to think of how much bad luck she's been having.
7063041
NMM is dead. Twilight has her power and power-hungry dark corruption, but not the Nightmare.
oh shit man
Hmm, so...
Celestia (Harmony) => Peace, Stagnation
Red Queen (Competition) => Conflict, Progress
I think this series is about Twilight's discovery that Harmony isn't all good. Both Celestia and the Red Queen are well-intentioned extremists holding fast to diametrically opposed dogmata.
I wonder if we'll see Twilight champion the Red Queen before she finds some middle ground for herself. Right now Twilight has all of Luna's traits that Harmony did not tolerate, so teaching her should be right up the Red Queen's alley. Also, it was the Red Queen's magic which made Twilight immortal; could have been intentional.
So far, the only information we have on her is Twilight's impression of her power as well as stories from her daughters, which paint a monster. Said daughters also thoroughly sanitized history. I question how monstrous the Red Queen is, really; she's at least capable of loving her daughters.
Both Celestia and the Red Queen have in common that they are concerned more with ponies as a collective instead of individuals. I think Twilight thinks differently; perhaps that's her way to a third option.
(Took a while until I found a good word for the Red Queen's doctrine.)
7066307 I'm not sure 'conflict' is the correct assessment of the Red Queen.
She strikes me more of a 'God DOES play dice with the Universe' kind of being.
What I mean by this is -
Consider our world. If there is a God, He or She has rarely been involved in the development of the modern world. For the most part, things have been free to evolve and make their own decisions, for better or worse. A dominant species appeared and started changing things up significantly, and introduced many great and evil things. We've been to the moon. We've invented nukes - and used them on each other. We're looking in to gene therapy, and the keys to building our own humans from scratch are nearly within our grasp. It's fair to say that the last couple thousands of years of the worlds history has been dominated by human decision making, not a God's. Yes, one could argue that God played His chips thousands of years ago, or pushes a wheel here and there, but there is no omnipresent being that all humans can agree is the One True God.
Contrast with Equestria, where not only do ponies have more than one God, but ponies can go and meet them, and those gods take an active interest in the well being of their citizens. Consider what our world would look like if our Celestia/Luna/Twilight equivalent were walking around town, living in your city. Out doing your shopping? Oh hey, you just bumped into God who was jogging around the park. "Hey Anon, how are you?" "Oh, uh, fine, almighty Creator. How many laps are you doing today?" "All of them!" "Ah of course. Well. Um...I'll be going. Have a great day!" "You too," commanded God. Or Celestia. Hmm.
Celestia appears to be more of a controlling figure - ponies are free to do as they please, within certain constrained bounds, e.g, don't be evil. The Red Queen also has constrained bounds, but those are defined by physics. Whereas Celestia might say "All is fair in love and war", The Red Queen might ask "What is fair?" Whereas Celestia and Luna have clearly defined ideas of good and evil, these may be alien concepts to TRQ.
In essence, TRQ is a force of creation. Life always finds a way, although it is not always beautiful, or by our standards, good. Concepts such as the elements of harmony probably don't exist under TRQ. In our prehistoric times, concepts such as kindness, generosity, laughter probably didn't exist, or were seen as signs of weakness. In a desperate struggle for survival, abstract concepts such as mercy and honor would be the first things to go.
iisaw has another fanfic up which depicts an ages-old Twilight Sparkle who likely has been learning from The Red Queen. I'm wondering if this is where we are headed.
7066468
I haven't read your reply yet, but I updated my comment a lot; I'll stop amending it now and you might want to reread it.
7066468
Somehow I think that the eternal, stable society that is the ideal of Harmony would be abhorrent to TRQ; an unchanging universe is a dead universe.
7066537
7066468
You guys are awesome!
7066468
I think our images of TRQ fundamentally differ. I believe TRQ is less an abstract force and actually has an origin in a multiversal society.
I have the impression of the loving, but harsh mother, who wants her children to grow to surpass her. She presumably raised Celestia and Luna after she ascended them from mortal stock. She didn't do so constantly wearing a mask. She had secrets, but was not a liar. She's more powerful than the sisters combined, but not inconceivably so. Her achievements in creation are also a result of her knowledge and the time she had to work with; Celestia is lacking in all three.
The mortal ponies are a means of optimization, an applied genetic algorithm with the goal of producing interesting ascension candidates and recycling the chaff. TRQ wasn't interested in impressing any particular morality on them; only the ascended matter, and she would have more than a mortal lifetime to shape them further.
When her daughters managed to surprise and imprison her, they became the success of the entire project. Maybe she didn't care much about what her daughters did with the mortals or the world afterwards, though she knew her daughters would eventually want to ascend children of their own. I imagine she was delighted when Celestia produced Twilight, who herself is on a path to surpass Celestia.
I imagine she was less than delighted when Celestia fudged her attempt to change the world and created Harmony, which attempts to fulfill Celestia's desire for an utopia. Unfortunately, as exemplified by Twilight's friends, a stable utopia is rather incompatible with any kind of change, ambition or desire. It is even a danger to the alicorns themselves, according to its effect on Luna. I think it rejected Celestia when she refused to lobotomize her sister and chose to banish her instead, falling short of the ideal. It overextended itself again when it manipulated the desire-drunk Twilight into immortalizing her friends.
Considering the compressed time [1] of the wheel, it's no surprise TRQ's patience has not run out while she was imprisoned. I think the damaged wheel would have freed her eventually, anyway.
I believe TRQ's most pressing concern is protecting her daughters from Harmony. Secondly, keeping Equestria from descending into stagnation. [2] Anyway, Harmony will have to be removed or fixed. To this end, she could recruit Twilight.
Once that is done, now that she's free again, she might want to pick up where she was interrupted, do it all again with a new planet and leave Equestria to her existing daughters. Or if she's not convinced she can leave them, she could start dispensing knowledge to them again. Or both. I think she's far too invested in her daughters and doesn't care about Equestria enough to just take over again; she raised them to face challenges beyond one world.
That said, it's all speculation and we still know too little. All my carefully-tended Epileptic Trees are going to be jossed.
[1]: Was this a means of speeding up her work? Just because she can wait longer, doesn't mean she likes to. But, too fast and she could have missed important events.
[2]: Thirdly, some harsh words for her foolish daughter.
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No spoilers... but you guys are both circling the truth very closely!
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I can pretty much subscribe to this, and I think you have some quite good ideas and a different perspective. I didn't mean to imply that your views are somehow wrong; merely that I took the same things and wanted to see if they fit together in a different light.
I am heavily biased on account of my religious studies; I am interested in the difference between an 'accountable' god and an 'unaccountable' god, and wondered if Celestia and TRQ can represent this. This is a danger of my position - I too easily see "This is the kind of thing I am looking for" and draw incorrect conclusions, such as last time when I anticipated Twilight's actions in Zebrica to have lead to open warfare.
So this is interesting, because it begs the question - what is the difference between TRQ and Discord? What is their relationship? How do they fit in with Harmony/Celestia and Luna?
Chaos is sometimes portrayed as a force of destruction (the opposite of 'order'), and other times as a force of creation ('inspiration'). Sometimes we get a triangular relationship - the opposite of chaos is entropy, and somewhere between those three is order.
In nature, we get something that is a little harder to comprehend, and that is 'equilibrium'. Consider a natural system.
A natural system describes any environment where foreign animals or plants have not been introduced since the last 'equilibrium'. Most nations pre-European settlement were in equilibrium. Let's consider Penguin Island, off the south coast of Victoria, in Australia.
For thousands of years, the only inhabitants had been fairy penguins. During the day time they would feed in the sea, and at night, they would retire to the island. Other animals would encounter the penguins - birds, sea lions, sharks - and sometimes, they would be caught and killed. Predator birds would break eggs or steal the young, but these losses were below the penguins natural birth rate. When too many penguins were born, their food supply couldn't cope, and so penguins started to die off until their numbers no longer threatened their environment.
Over centuries, they evolved so that their birth rate would never threaten the food supply - they would continue to grow at a rate that matched their decline. The food supply would remain constant. The system was in equilibrium.
In the 18th century, foxes were introduced to Australia. It took many years, but eventually, foxes found that they could swim out to penguin island, and kill and eat as many penguins as they wanted to - often, just for fun. The rate of death was so great and in such a short time, that the penguin birth rate was unable to compensate for the deaths, and there were not enough generations in time to simply increase the birth rate. In the space of a single generation, the penguins faced extinction. Left unaided, they would eventually have been wiped out - and a new equilibrium would have formed around this vacuum, mainly that the penguins food supply would now go uneaten, and other systems would then make use of this.
Before this could happen, though, humans noticed the problem they had caused, and decided to try and fix their mistake. They found they had an old friend who would help the penguins in their darkest hour - you can google 'Oddball' to find out the details. Humans had bred a type of dog that was friendly to birds, and this dog species recognized the penguin as a friendly bird to protect. Meanwhile, it saw the fox as it's mortal enemy. The result was immediate - no more penguins died from foxes, period. The population started to recover. The colony was saved.
However, this is not equilibrium. Humans must continue to move the dogs out to the island to guard the penguins. Should humans disappear, the foxes will return. Between then and now, if penguins have not evolved a defensive strategy, they will be doomed.
So, does this story have Discord, Order, Harmony, and TRQ?
The fox represents change. We can consider Discord to be a force of change. Change is often frightening, and we often feel threatened by change. Humans usually associate chaos with disorder and evil, since we usually consider 'order' to be good. However, one must ask, "What is good? What is evil?" I often ask people this. Good and evil does not exist in nature. It is something we humans have created as a means of defining the 'right' way to behave. Then I ask, "What is right? What is wrong?" It is not acceptable to say "God is good" or "God is right" because we do not have a concrete definition of God, in the way that we have a concrete definition of, say, math. You need to be able to have a stand alone reason for 'good' and 'right'. Many people respond "Good is helping other people" or "Good is taking care of the environment" and I ask, "Why do you believe this?" It's important to stress that I don't think people are wrong for having a belief. I merely want to know what is at the foundation of that belief, because I myself have had difficult questions asked of me, and reflecting on answers to hard questions with no grade is an interesting exercise that I enjoy. I like to share.
The fox in the story isn't evil. It simply is. From the fox perspective, the penguin exists as a food supply within it's natural system. It can eat many penguins and the fox population will increase. The fox considers this 'good'. That the penguins will become extinct doesn't factor into the decision making because the fox doesn't make decisions. The fact that the fox over-kills is interesting; why did the fox evolve the tendency to spoil it's own food supply? Perhaps because there is such an over-abundance of food, that it can afford to 'play' with some excess. The fox ate all it could, and after it was no longer hungry, enjoyed killing more. In truth, I don't know the answer.
The fox can be considered to represent Discord. It is a force that unbalances equilibrium in a system, possibly to its destruction.
The penguins are living in harmony. They could be considered ponies, in this regard. Their equilibrium is harmony. Discord appears to threaten their harmony. The humans provided guards to protect them. Celestia and Luna could be considered the guards. They protect the penguins, but they are not penguins themselves. The ascension of Twilight to become a guard is interesting. (On an unrelated note, I'm confident Starlight Glimmer will be a princess - one of the reasons her name was changed from Aurora was because Disney has a trademark on 'Princess Aurora' - aside from the fact that she is now a pupil of Twilight's, she has ALSO altered a Starswirl spell, and she has the magical prowess to stand with Alicorns, etc etc). But I digress.
The penguins are living in harmony, under the guards, and the guards are enforcing order.
TRQ could either represent humans in this story, or she could represent the abstract concept 'equilibrium'. If the penguins were wiped out, TRQ would probably accept this, save a few, and restart elsewhere. She would be hoping that the next generation of penguins would avoid the combination of being both tasty and defenceless. Alternatively, if the penguins on their own came to an arrangement that found them natural guards, this would be an acceptable outcome. The point being, TRQ doesn't provide guard dogs, and she doesn't stop the foxes. She lets things go to their natural conclusion because she believes that this will improve the penguins - aka ponies - overall. Some will die. Many will suffer. However, the species becomes stronger for it. How TRQ would act in the face of an existential threat to ponies is unknown.
So we have equilibrium (TRQ), change (Discord), harmony (penguins lifestyle), and order (alicorn guards).
In this scenario, penguins are not growing to fend for themselves. They will never learn how to defeat foxes, unless they start to en-masse become guards themselves. Right now, in MLP, we have had two alicorns appear in a very short time frame (technically three if we include Cadence), and we have several princess precursors available in the immediate future (Radiant Hope, Sunset Shimmer, Starlight Glimmer). After a thousand years, suddenly three new alicorns have appeared, with potentially up to another three soon. That's a lot of alicorns to suddenly appear. As well as directly combating external threats themselves, the alicorns appear to have given ponydom the means to directly fight these threats themselves - the Elements of Harmony. Ah wait, you say, Harmony rejected Celestia, and recently, Twilight. How interesting.
Harmony appears to be a separate force after all, that doesn't answer to the alicorns, even though they presumably created it. A new equilibrium is forming. I have previously written at great length how Discord has a far greater relationship with the Elements than he is letting on about. And if we consider TRQ to desire equilibrium (not harmony), then I start to wonder the obvious question.
Has The Red Queen wrested control of Harmony, as part of her overarching reach towards equilibrium? Or more pertinently, was this an inevitability that Twilight has suddenly brought about?
Ah yes, I have gone off on a random and strange tangent once more. Well, it was an enjoyable thought exercise, but placing this narrow perspective over the story is unlikely to bear fruit. Roll on the next chapter.
By the way, Celestia placed the enchantments on the changeling necklaces six months ago in the current time line. That means we may see it bear fruit...quite soon.
Actually, I want to add that I'm tremendously proud of Spike in this chapter. He may have made a catastrophically poor decision in the short term, but in the long run, his decision to stand by Twilight in her darkest hour is an important lesson for all of the Princesses - Twilight included.
I just hope that none of Twilight's friends were mid-flight when their wings were suddenly cancelled.