My last paper. Permit me to forgo its abstract; the elucidation of a creature’s total loss and devastation should not be truncated or summarized.
They’re gone. They’re dead. No amount of wishing will bring them back.
In every language, there exist stories about the last member of a once proud race. Through some schism, his species met its glorious downfall; and now here he is, the last representative of them, trying to impart to the world some lingering nobility which he can attempt to draw only from his heritage, since he has none for him himself.
I can’t claim that I’m the apotheosis of my race. We had the ability to change into anything, to suit any purpose—but now . . . now I can’t change. I don’t know why I lost the ability, nor do I know how to get it back . . .
Yes, I am the last one. I’m their representative. Except I’m no hero, no savior. Nor am I its destroyer. The earth purged us away of its own accord, and I am that race’s dregs. I’m the persistent stain of that history the world has otherwise forgotten. They vanished and left only a cripple, a mockery in the image of them but broken in every way, who can’t even summon the magic that gave his ancestors their name.
So what is a changeling, if he is unable to change?
Nature creates the plants and the animals of the world and destroys them at her leisure with her whimsical erraticism, and somewhere along the line she breathed life into the first creature of my species. And we, in our arrogance, thought that we had replaced her, that now we were the destroyers of plants and animals. But, no, we had been a plaything of hers all this time; she created us, gave us arrogance, and then destroyed us with it.
Who am I? I . . . I don’t know. I went by many names throughout the course of my life, some I’ve liked more than others, but they were all just like the rest of me . . . a facade, nothing else.
But those I’ve wronged . . . they, their faces, and their names, stand out definitively.
Be they enumerated:
The first, they who greeted me first, they who were of the stuff of mountains, yet taller, stronger, and more purposeful. They appeared to me out of the clouds; and I, in my ignorance, had taken them for stones. For how could I ever comprehend them? How could I have been able to understand the prospect of moving nature through one’s own effort, rather than through subversion, through avoiding the elements lest they strike me down? We were superior in one aspect only: in being abject, in slinking through the mud, to suck the nutrients from the foundations of the skyscrapers.
The second, Corporal Foil, of Their Majesty’s Royal Guard. You were the embodiment of everything that I desired in a student: brilliant, eager, discerning, and questioning. Questioning, of course! Not taking your teacher at his word, confirming everything for yourself, forming your own concepts even though mindlessly repeating memorized lessons would have still earned you praise. When I’d met you in Canterlot, when it was my time to be silent and yours to talk, the same thought would occur to me: “A shame, a shame; would that you were a changeling! But, if you must be as you are, if only you did not suspect me in addition to suspecting my lessons”—but no! It would not have been possible to have one but not the other, to be able to question your teacher’s lessons but turning a blind eye on the integrity of the teacher himself. And even, in your way, you managed to protect your race against the perfidiousness of mine with your eagerness, which made me look once more at science and my teaching of it not as routine indoctrination, not as a career, but as a passion, as a purpose in itself, more important than any other reason that had brought me to your city. By teaching you, I felt again that emotion I’d been pursuing in vain for years, which I’d first experienced when I discovered science as a young stallion, a desire to discover, to expand my mind. I must confess to you, here, that it was you who forced me to realize that it was not the betterment of my family that gave me pleasure but my own knowledge and growth. It was my failure as a teacher and my inability to accept it that killed you, my student—I turned your train, a machine harnessing deadly nature into a powerful and productive tool of creation, back to the earth, back to those destructive elements; I killed you and those you were protecting, because I could not, in my envy, stand to let you exist as beings better than I could ever be. Never again will I have a student such as you, Foil, for never again will I teach—I’m afraid that what I have to teach will be the ugly, integral part of me that has now been exposed, which is inextricable from who I am and where I come from, and which should end with me, never again to be seen; I will drown it at the conclusion of this paper lest it surface again, lest it destroy any more trains, any more souls.
The third, my Elision. You gave me comfort in the midst of hostility. What was the source of that comfort? At the time, I thought it was a taste of back home. I thought I was being prudent, sacrificing short-term comfort for long-term prosperity by leaving you. But I now realize that by in so doing, I was pursuing a falseness and had left behind the genuine with you: Love! For you had given me love, loved stripped bare of pretenses, love for who I was, and not for any titles or praises from others. In that one moment I lay with you, I truly had nothing more to desire, for you had fed me and offered to endlessly, with love that was free and gladly given in full knowledge, if only I would love you back. I wanted to, Elision; the rational scientist, not the primal changeling, wanted to stay! The former thought with his brain, the latter with his stomach; and the former was the one, I learned too late, who could actually feed himself forever. My promise to you, Elision, that I would return . . . do you hear them as empty words and ascribe to them no value or reliability because of the creature that uttered it? It would be just, yes; it would be just to disavow me, and I welcome it upon myself.
The fourth, my brother sailor. I didn’t even learn your name! You realized this all before I did, and gave your life so that I may realize it too. You learned to love another and to be loved, long before I’d even dug myself out of the rubble of Canterlot. Why you were there upon that unhappy and unfortunate ship, I don’t know, but I know that you weren’t going home. You’d known how to find peace; you’d found it and were at last content. You achieved happiness with a new life, with new goals, with a new creature—and I’d taken it away to support my evasions. I can’t evade now; any pleasure or happiness I may feel in life will be plagued with the knowledge that it was at the expense of yours. If I had been in my rightful place—that is, with the cannonball around my neck, you on the ship, and me beneath the water and thunder—I would have had this realization on my own, in those last few minutes of life, except I would’ve seen the end as just and proper, and this would have given me comfort. What did you think of in that moment, before the wave came down upon you? I remember your face, its lack of fear. That face is a testament to what was possible to me, to you, to us—but we gave it up, gave it up for false love, false nourishment, and false justifications.
These four, along with countless others, I used, destroyed, and lost to further whims which I see now as truly vacuous and empty. I can never get them back, for it was I and what composes me fundamentally that repelled them. My only redemption can be one of the scientist, to understand the flaw in my methodology before renouncing that which brought it into being.