The Best of All Possible Worlds
Chapter 30
The group reached Stalliongrad the next day.
Quickstep and her family left to return to Trottingham, the earth mare having resigned her Council post regardless of anything Celestia could say to dissuade her (or the fact that the Princess’s healing had left the ebullient Twinkletoes cleared of her asthma and healthier than she had ever been in her entire life).
The Princess announced that there would be a meeting the next day of all of the griffon nobles in Equestria, so that they might decide what they would do in the wake of Sky Shock’s revelations. She made sure to emphasize that the terms of her offer of sanctuary still stood regardless of what they decided, and that they would be allowed to make the decision to stay or return individually.
After making this announcement, the Princess dismissed her guard and walked out of the town.
~ ~ ~
When an hour had passed without her return, Voltaire convinced the Council and Guard to wait while he set out to find her.
Eventually, he spotted her sitting atop a small hillock, staring out into space.
He approached her at a leisurely walk, then sat down cross-legged beside her and looked out over the clover in the same direction she was. He loved the fact that she let him do this, that she wasn’t hung up over who stood or bowed or kowtowed in her presence, especially in private. She knew he respected her, and that was enough.
Neither spoke for a few minutes.
“Pff!” Voltaire heard. He turned his head, in time to see the Princess making the sound again as she tried to blow a strand of her shimmering hair out of the way, to no effect.
“You know, that used to work once,” she told him gently, rising to her hooves.
Voltaire said nothing, merely looking up at her.
“Do you think you’d ever like to meet your God, Voltaire?” she asked.
Voltaire shook his head wistfully. “I suspect that my God would be pretty surprised to see me. He’s a pretty stand-off sort, I imagine, and very clever with natural machinery, but with not much tolerance for thinking creatures. Have you ever watched a salt crystal grow? Such perfect harmony. I think my God created the universe to be His crystal garden. The fact that the same laws of the universe that create a salt crystal also allow life to exist was probably completely unintended. As long as we don’t mess things up too badly, He’ll just keep pretending that we don’t exist.”
“I suppose that is a good enough argument as any to keep your sodium intake down,” commented Celestia with an amused grin before thinking of grimmer matters. “Well unfortunately for ponies, they actually got to meet a real god once. His name was Discord, and He was bored.
“The Three Tribes had only just united into a single nation when He struck. At His whim, ponies were transformed into tortured shapes, or turned against their cutie marks to attack each other for His amusement. Random lives would be forced to run backwards, just to demonstrate to the others just how pointless mortality really was. Heroes were forced to be villains, and wise men were made fools. Starswirl the Bearded tried to stand up to Him. He...he was tortured for centuries, before he finally managed to escape. Escape...or commit suicide. Since he never returned, there is no way to tell for sure. The ponies fell into despair.”
Voltaire stared at her in shock. For weeks now, he had toyed with the idea that this world might be the perfect world that Leibniz had mistakenly claimed his own was. The fact that its inhabitants weren’t killing each other over their impossible-to-verify guesses about the nature of God was a good part of it. And here was a moment when the matter was settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Here is your God...and He despises every last one of you.
“This torment lasted,” the Princess continued, her voice heavy with sympathy, “for...well, nopony can possibly tell how long. Discord sped Sun and Moon through the sky at random. Lifespans were in general lengthened, for the mad god grew fond of certain individuals so He could sustain His fun at their expense forever. Luna and I afterwards called the length of His rule a hundred years when it came time to fix the calendar, but it was probably closer to a couple thousand.
“One of His favorite victims was Starswirl’s student, Clover the Clever.”
Voltaire noticed that she clipped the sounds of this character’s name, like every instant spent saying it was an instant wasted.
“Clover faithfully served Discord as His adviser, all while plotting His overthrow. In his daughters, I and my sister Luna, Clover had the most powerful pegasus and unicorn that had ever been born. But this wasn’t enough.
“Through use of the forbidden amniomorphic spell, he shaped us into something more, something transcending unicorn, pegasus or earth pony.”
“He made you into what you are today,” said Voltaire.
“Exactly,” replied Celestia, reaching up a hoof to manipulate the unearthly substance of her mane with trepidation. “Discord might have had infinite power, but He had a mind, a personality, that could be manipulated like any other, and obscure rules that He had no choice but to obey. My father kept that god fooled, while he put us two through a grueling course to develop the physical and magical strength we would need. When Discord got too close to discovering our true nature, Father sacrificed Mother to distract Him.”
Voltaire’s mouth gaped. “Surely she sacrificed herself for the lives of her children,” he gently corrected.
“She died begging her husband for mercy,” Celestia coldly insisted. “And by that atrocity, he saved all of Equestria. Everypony knew that Discord was getting tired of this world, and everypony also knew the fate of the hundreds of other worlds He had tired of, as He so liked the looks on our faces when He told us. Given the Hearth’s Warming Eve story, He was setting up the old tribes to hate each other once again, so that the Windigos might finish us off once and for all.”
The human sat there, horrified.
“And so we struck, Luna and I,” the alicorn continued matter-of-factually. “We took Him utterly by surprise and imprisoned Him in stone.”
“You beat a god?” Voltaire asked incredulously.
“We outsmarted a god,” Celestia corrected. “We never could have overpowered Him. Between us we forged the Elements of Harmony, Light and Darkness, and together we used them to defeat Him.”
“Then what happened?” asked Voltaire quickly, to fill the hesitant pause in her narration. He’d spend some other day trying to figure out what the story Celestia was telling him actually meant. For now, he needed to hear as much of it as possible while Celestia was in the mood for sharing her most painful memories with another living soul, because he suspected he would be long dead of old age before the urge to do so ever struck her again.
“We cleaned up Equestria,” said the Princess. “Discord had left several booby traps behind after His defeat. One of them tried to send the Sun hurtling into the void. The unicorns only just managed to prevent this catastrophe. I found that I could easily do what it took all of them to do, and so realized what my cutie mark meant. Luna took over a similar function for the night. The chaos was gradually reversed, and Equestria was brought back to normal, but it was forever changed.”
Princess Celestia gestured at the entire world around them. “Just as with the Sun,” she told the human, “the natural systems of the planet refused to work by themselves. Clouds never formed, seasons refused to turn, and animals remained stuck in a sort of perpetual mental childhood. Luna and I decided that the ponies needed to take over these functions: the pegasi to direct the weather, the earth ponies to help along the natural cycles, and the unicorns to assist where necessary.”
Voltaire thought he saw a look of doubt flit across Celestia’s face, and why not? By this action, as much as by her and her sister taking over the heavenly duties, she imposed her race of ponies upon every other race on the planet, whether they wanted the burden of domination of not. Would the dragons have done better? Or any other magical race of this planet he had not yet learned about? Probably not. And what about humans? From what he had seen so far, the yoke of the ponies was far lighter than the yoke of forced religious and cultural conversions that the Europeans had imposed upon the less-armed tribes of the world in the past couple of centuries. Enlightened by the example of the griffons, Voltaire now recognized that even when Europeans wished to improve the lives of the “savages” instead of conquering them, they were still hurting them, because the goal was always to turn “them” into “us”, to force the foreigners to live like “civilized” human beings, even in the absurd case when the so-called savages were the Chinese, with a civilization thousands of years older than Western Civilization. (To be fair, this “domination through patronizing” problem was a flaw of all humans in power throughout recorded history, including the Chinese. As for the Europeans, they were just the most recent ones to engage in the practice, as well as being the ones whose atrocities resulting from it were best-documented.)
“During this time Father died,” Celestia continued, pulling the councilor out of his reverie. “Luna mourned him deeply—she had no memories of what she used to be before he altered her form. I, on the other hoof, did.”
The Princess looked down sadly at the ground. “She changed after that. Started complaining about the way the other ponies treated her, that she got less respect than I. All very true, but I just dismissed this as the onset of adolescence. It was obvious by now that we were immortal, and so it made sense that she would go through the phases of life slower than the other ponies.” The pony’s face twisted as she proceeded to tear into her own flaws: “I was drunk on power, and dedicated to controlling every detail of the new government of Equestria, something I at the time found far more fascinating than the plight of my own sister. When I refused to switch roles with her, to do anything reasonable in fact to get her the credit she deserved, she began poring through Father’s research, looking for a way to force me to give her what she wanted. And there she discovered a way to summon the Nightmare.”
Celestia stopped suddenly, and looked up at the sky. Voltaire looked to see what she was looking at, and saw nothing special at that patch of sky. He concluded that she wanted to look at the Moon, at the sky object most-closely associated with her sister, but there was nothing to look at. Unlike on Earth, Voltaire could not remember a single time that he saw Equestria’s moon during the daytime hours, or any night when that same body was ever anything but full. Perhaps Celestia lacks the finesse that her sister had with the night sky? he wondered. Perhaps she alone remembers evening glories that this world will never see again?
After several moments, Princess Celestia began to speak once more, this time in the tone of a philosopher. “I’m not sure how to classify that foul spirit. Was the Nightmare a god? Or yet another trap left behind by Discord? Perhaps she could be likened to a disease? Just as a plague will feed so hungrily on a population that it will doom itself by killing all of its carriers, so the Nightmare, feeding on misery, plotted to bring about an eternal night that would forever deprive it of its food source.”
She hardened her resolve for what was to come. “Awakened far too late to the consequences of my inaction, I tried and failed to break the curse, to convince Luna to fight back against the spirit, or to steer her minions away from their suicidal course. It was only when the death toll reached into the thousands that I was finally forced to act. I knew already that the Elements of Harmony could not be used to free her, that they needed both of us, that they were fueled by our love for each other, for our ponies, and for our country, but that could never be re-captured, so I forced them into an instrument of destruction. They instead rebelled against my will and imprisoned Nightmare Moon, Luna...my sister, in the Moon, and then fragmented into six pieces.
“That was seven and a half centuries ago,” she said, dropping her head once more to the ground. “Every night, when I set my Sun and raise her Moon, I am forced to face my failure.” She said this in a low voice, but with a certain intensity.
Voltaire was reminded by her posture of the sacrament of confession, one of the few aspects of modern-day Christianity he admired. Is this the best she can do for forgiveness? he asked himself. Appealing to the judgment of an apostate monkey?
“I pulled away from my ponies,” Celestia said, continuing her self-condemnation. “For a while, I allowed them to rule themselves, while I lay in a cave and tried and failed to end my own life. But in the end they could not, or would not, rule themselves, and they begged me to take over. I’ve been living ever since with a sense of numbness. I’ve tried, I hope, to make my ponies’ lives as pleasant as possible, but I’ve never wanted any of them to be a part of my life. That didn’t stop several of them from forcing themselves into my life, for my eternal benefit. You, Voltaire, in your short time here, have done more for me than generations of Councilors.”
Voltaire stood up then, and put a hand carefully on one of her shoulders. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he told her gently, “but I wrote ‘The Frog Princess’ for Equestria, not for you. Someday you could be the one left for dead in a swamp, after facing off against a re-awakened Discord or who knows what, and when that day comes, you’re going to need a pony, or more likely a whole lot of ponies, able to help you out, with their magic or perhaps with those Elements you talked about.”
Celestia turned to leave, and bid Voltaire to follow her. “I have been thinking along similar lines,” she told him. It feels good to be talking to someone without having to look down upon them, she thought. “Come, there’s probably a lot of worried ponies waiting for me.”
Hmm... Heavy stuff.
Not sure how much I'm going to headcanon, but I certainly enjoy your take on things.
Ummm.... I think you need to fix that capital H...
Enjoyed the story of Discord. Wonderful telling.
"Poured" here should probably be "pored".
Hmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
I can dig it. And, as the authr of a Discord as Freddy fic, even I haven't dropped him to the level of villainy this chapter suggests. WELL DONE.
And thus is revealed Twilight's crossplay hobby.
Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. Throw some fuckin' descriptive phrases in there! Don't tell me what the characters are saying, show me!
The beginning of the chapter was good. I saw expressions, I saw movement. Then Sunbutt got into her speech and BAM! Wall o' dialogue.
Don't be afraid to spruce things up a bit. Embellish. Get that word count up. The dialogue is good, but a reader wants to be able to visualize the characters. Make them stand out from the world they're in.
1765075
Fair enough.
I've added a little more description to this chapter. Nothing to change what happens, just a way to get a little more into these two character's minds.
Now, I don't tend to subscribe to the stereotype in scenes like this, where the listening character starts drawing up mental images of everything he hears. Maybe artists do that, but I'm a writer (and so was Voltaire of course), and that doesn't happen to me--if it happens at all, I come up with the imaginary pictures later, when I've had time to mull the story over for a bit.
Aww, poor Celly.
I need to say though, that is a FASCINATING idea of the history of Equestria, with Discord's reign of chaos being what made it how it is today, and how he was likened to a god, one that hated his people.
It's totally not going into my headcanon -- it seems that everyone has their own personal idea about Celestia and Luna, and it's too dark for the stories I'd want to consider -- but it works really well with your story.
This line does not make much sense to me. Clover sounds like Celestia and Luna's mother, yet I am not sure who their father is. I am guessing Starswirl, but the sentence wording makes sound like Discord.
2489462
No, Clover was their father. I imagine the Hearth's Warming Eve story taking place in a more patriarchal society than present-day Equestria. And the mother is unnamed.
Star Swirl was Clover's mentor.
I've spent too long away from this fic, and now I have the opportunity to read all of it up to its completion!
I liked how in the previous chapters, Celestia had to keep telling Voltaire to, "Skip over the massacre."
Just a bit before this, Celestia said that Discord tortured Starswirl for centuries.
In this bit, you dropped the capitalization once for god, referring to Discord, and added it to Celestia's parents. Was this intentional?
Edit: In fact, the capitalization jumped around all through the chapter.
That conflicts with the Hearth's Warming Eve play. In that, the pegasi were already controlling the weather. That's potential problem because it conflicts with the idea that Discord screwed the weather up permanently later, after the tribes unite. You could just say the play is wrong, but I'm just checking if this conflict is intentional or an oversight.
Also, "ground ponies". In the comments for the last chapter you said you were removing that, and it doesn't seem appropriate that Celestia would use it regardless.
This sentence doesn't quite make sense. The last part sounds like a sentence fragment that implies the Chinese were the worst but doesn't say that. It's left as an incomplete thought, a fragment.
Do you mean, "I... did."? Or, "I... don't either."?
Those are some interesting theories, but I prefer something more in line with this:
I think Clover's wife begged for mercy to make it convincing. Hopefully I get at least some hint of an answer to that by the end of this story or in the sequel?
2535714
Wow, a long one! Thanks for the input. Addressing your points one at a time:
* A hundred years: Yeah, you're right, that won't work. I changed it to this:
* Capitalization: I believe I've got all of that precisely right, with Discord's pronouns capitalized every time. It's possible that I did a bad job of phrasing, and you're reading a "he" as Discord when it's actually Clover. For example in the bit you quoted, "my father" is the individual who put Celestia and Luna through a "grueling course". And Mother and Father are being capitalized via the "title used instead of a name" rule of capitalization.
* Discord vs. the Hearth's Warming Eve play: The play's wrong. This is something I never got the chance to show, but the idea of Discord was so fundamentally terrifying to the ponies that Princess Celestia suppressed most of what He did in the histories that were written afterwards, using the play to make it seem that the world He created had been like that before He even arrived. As happens so often with Princess Celestia's actions, you are free to decide whether her actions are justified or not.
* "ground ponies": Yeah, I had to do another sweep and find the handful of times I failed to fix that last time.
* Confusing wording about the Chinese patronage system: Well, I juggled the words around a bit, and came up with this:
* "I...did not": Changed to "I, on the other hoof, did."
* The "Expanding Your Headcanon" video: Nope, not going there. I didn't like the part where NeoZhinzo said that the Elements influenced Twilight to create the new Element of Magic--the realization that her friends were the Elements all along, and that Friendship Is Magic, was the crowning moment of genius for a character defined by her intellect, and I refuse to see that victory diminished even slightly by outside help.
* Clover's wife begged for mercy: Probably. But for this story, we're stuck with Celestia's rather bitter memories. As for another viewpoint showing up in a sequel, so far I haven't come up with a good reason for Luna to tell her version to anybody. And of course Discord's version is completely untrustworthy.
2540163
* "Afterwards": fixed.
* It might seem a bit confusing, but the one time when Voltaire uses uppercase "God" for Discord, he's really thinking about his own God: "Here is your God, and He despises every last one of you."
* "Whose atrocities": fixed.
* Diminishment: The way I heard it, the Elements snuck into her head and actually told her to create the Element of Magic. That was what I objected to. I'm guessing that you heard it as them giving her the power to carry out the ideas she thought of.
* Blueblood. He's really good with words, but he hasn't done anything, that, say, would be normally impossible for his breed.
The kid is now healthier than ever! She had gotten rid of her terrible asthma, yeah... but she IS kinda scarred for life now...
I'm currently rereading your wonderful story, but I noticed something in this chapter that I didn't my first time through: whence Celestia's extended family, the alicorns on the isle that she dried out earlier in the story? My apologies if this question has already been answered somewhere.
3634835
I hadn't even thought about it, as they were just a joke back then, and promptly forgotten about by the time I got to this chapter.
But, if forced to make the two parts fit, I'd do something like this:
Celestia and Luna were the first alicorns, but certainly not the last, because the secret of the amniomorphic spell didn't stay secret for long after Discord's defeat. A whole generation of alicorns were brought into existence, and a few of them stuck around to help Equestria's reconstruction, but by and large, the majority of them were spoiled eternal brats who saw more in common with their own new breed than the breeds they had come from, especially after everypony else they had cared about had died of old age. So they ended up on one France-sized island in the middle of the ocean, telling the same jokes about the inferiority of everypony else to each over and over again for all eternity, and basically never rising above the emotional level of Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara.
Of course as I have needed to mention on multiple occasions, this story was written over the course of Season 2, so nothing that happened to a certain lavender alicorn applies here.
Damn... That was a good wee history lesson right there.
3634877 don’t forget the anomaly that is flurry heart hehe
Voltaire stared at her in shock.
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Fixed.