Dear Princess Celestia,
I had a moment of vertigo today. I was looking at the snow, and I thought—the first snow of the season, already? Can the year have passed by that quickly? The last Hearth's Warming felt like it was only yesterday, and now it's sneaking up again night by night. And I thought, faintly: for the common creature, they run out. Eventually there's a last Hearth's Warming Eve, a last Hearts and Hooves Day, a last Summer Sun Celebration—and if a creature is wise or lucky, it might be a peaceful, happy one.
But for the rarefied sort, you and I... what if there isn't? I saw that, I think, just for a moment, that infinite regression. What's a thousand years? Barely anything. But a thousand thousand? Are we striding forward at a snail's crawl into geologic time? Picture yourself, Princess, one day when the continents have shifted, when mountains have fallen and risen, when even the exceptionally static pony society you prefer has changed so far that if you saw it now you wouldn't recognize it.
I thought of the archeologists and antiquarians. Will I be able to walk among them one day, in long ages when rivers have changed their courses and mountains have fallen, and watch them excavate places I once lived? How much will I even remember of these days, when a thousand generations have passed? I might find myself looking at the ancient ruin of a thing that was once my own royal chamber and find myself knowing less about it than the mortal scholars specialized in my own history.
Of course, in your case it's a bit easier. Maintaining a consistent chronology into those endless ages will, at least, be simple: you'll just have to keep track of how the newly-built doorways get wider over time to let you fit.
Yours in overthinking it,
Queen ChrysalisP.S. Do give my laudations to Princess Luna for the success of her little surprise appearance at Ponyville's Nightmare Night festivities. From what I understand, the townsfolk quite enjoyed the shock of 'Nightmare Moon' showing up near the end of the night.
That was quite the build up to a fat joke. Chrisy's snark seems to only get sharper with time.
by the time celly gets to her she is going to hug or strangle her
Wow. That started out really philosophical, sad, nostalgic, and heartwarming...only to lead into another "Celestia is fat" joke. You know, I can't help but think that by the time they actually meet in pony, Celestia will have learned to ignore the barbs and judge Chrysalis for the rest of what she says and see her as a compassionate, thoughtful, caring ruler who just wants what's best for everyone but has issues expressing herself.
...boy will she be in for a shocker! :P
A nice short chapter overall, and that's a very interesting thought for Chrysalis to have there. Kinda wanna see her talking about it with Luna, actually. Would be interesting to hear her perspective on it, considering she was flung 1000 years into her future and is looking at all the things from her old life that the archaeologists are picking over.
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Just as Celestia's pillows gets larger with time?
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What I find most sad for Luna is the fact that she wasn't only banished, she was completly forgotten by the ponies she once ruled, even as a fairytail, ponies only knew about the worst side of her. And if you add that all of this started because the ponies ignored her night, I must have been completly crushing for her when she found out.
Ah, existential musings and a "ur fat" joke. The perfect way to start the day.
nice work
Me thinks Chrysi is trying to tell Tia that Luna is having a rough time. Tia lived and changed with the times. Luna didnt get that chance. And worst of all, she was forgotten. Her own sister wrote her out of Equestria's history books. Relagated to disregarded childrens tale.
And a fat joke. Because it wouldnt be Chrysalis if the snark wasnt there.
looks like Queen Chrysalis had a small existential crisis
I love how this chapter started by pointing out the temporal anomalies presented in the show, then becoming deeply philosophical and ended up with Celestia being roasted.
Great work!
Oceans rise, empires fall. Next to Celestia they all look small.
I'm just waiting for them to meet in person. Celestia might be one of the only beings in Equestria both socially skilled and audacious enough to comfortably counter-roast Chrysalis, and it could end anywhere between war and romance. Probably a little of both.
It will not: she'll collapse into black hole to that time.
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I suspect it would be both, a loving strangulation or just a stale cake in the face.
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This is comment is a dream cok me true! Lol
I didn’t understand anything that she was talking about.
No matter how hard Chrysyi tries to play a big trick on Celestia, she can never surpass GLaDOS in this matter.
:D
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in short she was talking about her, and Celestia, and Luna's immortality, and how they will watch things slowly change into brand new things from how they had membered and that with times passing they may just forget how somethings were, or how somethings looked
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Oh ok, but I don’t think chrysalis has to worry about that.
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Have you ever revisited something - a place, a game, a movie, doesn't really matter what - and realized you'd forgotten something about it?
Now think about that over a hundred years. You move away from a city you lived in, and a hundred years later, you come back. Everything's changed in your absence, of course, and your memories are fuzzy with time, so you can't quite remember the name of that one coffee shop you liked that's now gone anyway, and they've changed some of the roads so you keep getting lost because some old vague memory insists that you go left here instead of right even though that's a dead end.
Now think about that over a thousand years.
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I don’t think I’ve experienced that, but that’s gotta suck.
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¿Por qué no los dos?
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Probably
This was a surprisingly deep philosphical chapter!
It was good though ^^
10484815 It's at least semi-canonical that Changeling Queens are functionally immortal, just like alicorns.
Hey everyone, this chapter holds new meaning for me.
I recieved a response on a comment i made over a year ago. I dont remember my comment. The jokes and references i made, made no sense to me. I had forgotten the context of that day.
This was just 1 year ago. What would that be like for 1000 years?
Really makes you think.
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Oh
What snark!
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Here’s an example from me. I don’t live in my hometown anymore, but my sister does so I still visit sometimes. In the last twenty years (including the decade since I moved away):
There’s a Kohl’s, a Target, an IKEA. A factory was torn down and the space is now a Woodmans, a Meijers, and the new “city center” which has the city hall, library, urgent care, apartments and shops. The old library/city hall was replaced by a second building for the high school. There’s an industrial park and there’s suburbs where there used to be farms. There’s a new middle school and a skatepark, a new police station, a new post office. The Blockbuster was replaced by a mattress store, then a pizza place, then a Noodles and Company. The porn store and the tattoo places that were on “the edge of town” are now “in the middle of town”. Everything that didn’t replace something else was built on what used to be farmland.
And like I said, that’s twenty years.
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When you brought up the porn store I actually laughed. But, I think I get what your saying.
Got to love this version of best Bugwaifu
Funny you should write such a thing, as the other day my attention wandered to read about the Late Bronze Age Collapse, and poking about Wikipedia led me to look up some long-forgotten and ill-understood states. Elam, for instance, is something referenced in Sumerian tablets, but we know precious little about it, other than it was a neighbor to the Mesopotamian states like Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria. The Bronze Age Collapse itself is an example of how little we really understand vast, vast tracts of history, and have lost and forgotten so much. From where did the Sea Peoples come? Were they the cause, or a symptom of the problem that did cause the Collapse? Why did every city from Greece to Canaan get leveled? What happened in those fifty years that upended everything, killing almost every eastern Mediterranean civ and bringing Egypt and Assyria to their knees? Thanks to the passage of millennia we may never know.
So bughorse has some interesting musings. Maybe she should take up cuneiform writing on clay tablets.
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Thanks for clearing that up.
I love the format and thought put into this! There's a coherent plot, but you have to kind of look for it to notice everything. It's great!
Fantastic