It's just a wooden spoon, they'd say.

There was something to being a wooden spoon that most ponies would never come to appreciate. Every time that Granny Smith decided to use hers for a new batch of zap apple jam or Mrs. Cake utilized hers for a new tray of sugary muffins, the ladle would convince itself that it had purpose, that it had meaning. Why else would it see so much use? It was a being of will, wrought from the minds of the gods themselves to invariably discover its fate as the hero of baked goods and fresh pancakes. At least, that’s what it told itself.

Of course, the truth would eventually come crashing down on it. No matter how vividly it would imagine that it was the thing making those delicious foods, it would inevitably realize that it was just a spoon, forever doomed to be used and abused at its owner’s discretion. It had no more say in what it cooked than a rock had a say on which riverbed it would be placed in.

Some ponies were less caring. While a mare like Granny Smith prided herself in using the same family ladle for generations, other ponies like Twilight Sparkle didn’t mind letting her assistant light yet another one on fire at the slightest cough.

“Ah, Twilight! What do I do?!”

“Calm down, Spike! It’s just a kitchen fire.”

And like that, the lavender mare would smother the flame, her distinct magics doing their work as intended. To her, a burning ladle was little more than an everyday occurrence, a small bill tacked on at the end of every month that came as the price of raising an infant dragon.

To the spoon, however, it was agony. The fire would lace up and down its length, and its mind would cry out to every god and deity it’d ever known. The great gods of the kitchen could hear it scream, they certainly didn’t show it. What eternal being could be so cruel as to create it immobile, doomed to suffer at the hands of ponies that wouldn’t ever care what they did with it? Tyranny, it would call it.

The wooden spoons led very different lives, built very different memories off of experiences that couldn’t be more separate of one another. And yet, regardless of all that, they were just as inevitably entombed in the weight of their own destinies, trapped forever in a path towards cooking that they could never escape from.

So here’s the thing about destiny: freewill and destiny are incompatible, two disparate ideals that mixed about as well as oil and water, always touching, never quite becoming whole. The ponies that said otherwise were either fools or didn’t understand what those words really meant. To say that a pony could find freewill in their own destiny would be like saying that a train was free to move itself any way it chose on the rigid rails it’d been consigned to.

And so it was for the wooden spoon. Try as it might, the spoon could do little for itself. How could it move when it had no muscles? How could it cry out for help when it had no mouth? How could it reason with its tormentors when it didn’t have a brain to reason with? At the end of the day, the spoon would realize that changing its fate was impossible, and with that it would accept its destiny as little more than a tool, used once and thrown out the door later.

It's just a wooden spoon, after all.