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Golden_Vision
TheNumber25
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From One to Another
He proudly took his last breath, and his horn glowed for the last time. The spell circle surrounding him was grand and elaborate in ways too subtle for even the greatest of its creator’s peers, for Starswirl had no true peers--only detractors, and worshippers.
“From one to another; another to one...”
An incantation that he had drafted and rewritten a hundred, a thousand, a million times. Dozens of layers of complexity compressed into a single perfect ritual: the most beautiful, masterful failure of a spell that there had ever been. It was the first spell of its kind, and the last spell that he would ever cast.
“... A mark of one’s destiny singled out, alone, fulfilled!”
The spell circle pulsed once, and then the magic in the old wizard’s soul burst free of its shell, shattering his body, his mind, and his life into a spray of glittering moments.
He was dying, but he had all the time in the world to watch as, one by one, each of his moments came to an end.
Princess Celestia’s voice shocked Starswirl from his book-reading trance, and he snapped his eyes to attention. Both of his teachers stood before him, shading half of the library’s study in warm daylight and the other half in heathery dusk.
He answered the question in a huff. “They did so much, but they figured out so little! How can that be? There have been so many failures to isolate ‘destiny’ that you would think they would find something by sheer process of elimination, but--”
He thumped his hoof onto the book where it lay open on the stand. Both Celestia and Luna winced with sympathy for the book’s yellowed pages, but Starswirl pretended not to notice.
“Like right here--Archmage Meteorite, third century--he said that destiny magic is probably bigger than just something that guides names and cutie marks--that it probably has something to do with the flow of time, not time like just seconds and hours, I mean time--like history itself, all the movements of the world! But nobody knows if that’s true, or what it means if it is!”
“Then it seems to me that you have begun to understand one of the most important lessons of all,” Luna said. Her stern voice belied the faint smile crossing her face. “Some journeys can never end, no matter how hard we strive to find the destination.”
“I know.” Starswirl drummed his hooves restlessly against the floor as he turned his eyes back to the book and turned the page with his magic. “We have to keep studying and keep learning. Forever.”
And then his face split into a smile to rival Celestia’s mane in radiance. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
A beautiful mare has been waiting for him.
She approaches him, touches him,
and finally he turns.
Cold eyes that were made to count and measure
melt to water when they fall upon
her.
It had been a very good night of work, and Starswirl’s workspace was piled high with books and scrolls, to the point that a pile of discarded scrap paper had started to accumulate beneath the desk.
New connections had arisen between texts that Starswirl had thought to be exhausted. He had written notes for three new channeling elements and procedures for his next practical session. He had even stumbled upon an entirely new text written by the great Comet Tail.
So of course it was inevitable that such a good night of work would be interrupted eventually.
“It’s late. Won’t you come to bed?”
The voice was soft, sweet, and absolutely infuriating. After only a few years of married life, Starswirl had already learned to dread that question. It was never the first one that she asked--usually it was the third. The fourth was always “Should I wait for you or not?”
On most nights, Starswirl would have been content to wait until the fourth question, to which the answer was “No, that’s all right.” Tonight, though, there was something in his Bluebelle’s voice that tempted Starswirl away from his work...
He didn’t turn, but he slid his book away. “What time is it, exactly?”
“Late enough.” There was the trace of an edge to her words--not a plea, but not a demand either. “Come to bed?”
He felt the weight of her hoof as it came to a rest on his shoulder. He sighed as he felt the touch of her breath against his neck. The sensation was decidedly unwelcome, not despite but because it was so pleasant.
“Don’t you think you’ve earned a rest?”
He considered telling her no, that tonight’s work was too important to be interrupted, but the script had already been derailed, and there was no going back now. Not when the closeness of her body was consuming his mind, blocking out thoughts of anything but her smell, her soft fur...
He turned, and felt the heat of her eyes as they locked with his own.
In Starswirl’s mind
there are a million theories,
a thousand libraries,
and a hundred lifetimes.
There is no space for anything
in Starswirl’s mind
except for his single attempt
to grasp the infinite.
Noise invaded Starswirl’s study with the force of a tidal wave. It started with the slam of the front door, then built to a muted rolling of hoofbeats approaching from the hallway...
Starswirl grit his teeth just before the noise exploded to its climax. The room’s rickety old doorknob rattled sharply, and a skull-piercing rush of voices flooded in through the open door.
“Hey, Starswirl! Been a while! How’s the spellcrafting going? Geez, look at this place! Can’t even move without--” The voice was at least eight decibels too loud and three shades too sharp for Starswirl to handle at that moment, so he cut his friend off with a raised hoof and a snapped order:
“Do not touch anything. And get to the point. I’m busy.”
He turned his head far enough to glare at the three ponies who’d just barged into the room. Airshow, Redwood, and Quartz were standing just inside his doorway, their hooves perilously close to the discarded stacks of notes carpeting the cramped room’s floor.
Airshow--the oblivious fool--still wore a stupid-looking grin, like a child who had been let out to play. “Bluebelle told us you would be in here, and we all wanted to take you out for--”
At that, Starswirl’s jaw tightened even further. “Belle let you in? Pah! I told her I would be busy until at least eight!”
There was a beat of silence, and Starswirl took the opportunity to turn away from the three and back to his desk.
“...She knew that, Starswirl. It’s almost midnight.”
It had taken Starswirl an infuriatingly long time to find his place on the scroll that he had been reading, so when Airshow’s voice rang out again, it took a tremendous willpower to reply verbally instead of by throwing the inkwell toward the door.
“Well, tell Belle that I’m still busy. And tell her to listen to what I tell her next time! And close the door behind you!”
A very old stallion proudly took his last breath and ignited his horn for the last time. He stood at the center of the most powerful spell circle ever created by ponykind, the culmination of all of Starswirl’s years as a spell-weaver--in other words, the single product of his entire life ever since he recieved his cutie mark. The destiny spell that he had dreamed of inventing for so long was finally complete, and it was perfect in every single way: it was Starswirl’s ultimate, perfect failure.
Not a failed spell, no: Starswirl the Bearded, personal student of Celestia and Luna, had created the world’s greatest, and first, failure spell.
Starswirl knew both everything and nothing about the ritual that he was about to perform. The spell circle would capture the Destiny linked to him, and bring it to life using his own Magic, and then it would infuse his Body, and plunge his entire being into the fabric of the World.
After months of double-checking, Starswirl was certain beyond a possible doubt: the spell would work. Anyone using a spell like this one would immediately find themselves engulfed by the power of Destiny and subjected to its unknowable whims.
And now the journey was finally nearing its destination. It should have been exciting. It was exciting. Except...
Except that Starswirl had learned how to hold Destiny in his hooves, and so he knew that his own Destiny was dead. When he first saw it, it had been a glorious golden river, vibrant and full. But the deeper he sank into his studies, the more it dwindled, and now it was barely a trickle. It seemed that despite all of Starswirl’s acclaim and accomplishments, his great and mysterious future now belonged to somepony else.
And what kind of place could the World give the scattered essence of a broken old student who no longer had a Destiny to be shaped by?
With a bitter flicker of pride, Starswirl wondered what name the scholars and historians would give this spell if they ever unearthed his notes. Would they understand his writings, or would they dismiss his entire life’s work as the scribblings of a lunatic?
Any well-trained ritualist would cringe at the asymmetrical, haphazard design covering the floor, but Starswirl was beyond needing symmetry and patterns. To Starswirl, his spell circle took the shape of was a symbol of power that could not have been more perfect if it had been etched by Destiny itself: a crooked six-pointed star encircled by five smaller stars.
The spell circle beneath Starswirl’s hooves thrummed with anticipation. It was time.
“From one to another; another to one...”
Do not search too hard for things you have lost,
for a lost item is something that you once held,
and to find something already known to you is to find nothing.
Our days of searching should be spent
on things that we have not yet found.
Do not chase dreams with too much zeal,
for a dream is not a beast that can be caught,
nor a treasure that can be plundered.
Even the grandest dream can warp and break
if held too tightly.
All births are violent events, but very few beings are ever privileged to be born in a literal explosion of magic.
The child had slept in its egg for untold ages, only to be awakened in an instant as something from the waking world siezed his heart and pulled him upward. His first sensations as a living being were of being suffused with magic, some of it his own, the rest belonging to something that resonated with his being in a way no other magic ever could.
His scales tingled and shimmered as they were exposed to the air for the first time, but before they could even begin to try, he found himself wrenched upward, and the world became a blur as his body, only seconds old, was changed and twisted and forced to grow and change, and all around him was the crash of chaos--
And then it ended, and he was nothing but an infant, his eyes quickly focusing upon the world around him for the first time.
All around him were living things like himself, furred in a wild spectrum of colors. He glimpsed a purple four-legged creature, hardly larger than himself, and a tiny blink of light as the symbol of a six-pointed star appeared on her haunch.
He stared at the symbol for a long moment. Then the last of the shards of moments winked into nothingness, and the little dragon curled up and fell asleep, as newborn children often do.
“From one to another; another to one...”
An incantation that he had drafted and rewritten a hundred, a thousand, a million times. Dozens of layers of complexity compressed into a single perfect ritual: the most beautiful, masterful failure of a spell that there had ever been. It was the first spell of its kind, and the last spell that he would ever cast.
“... A mark of one’s destiny singled out, alone, fulfilled!”
The spell circle pulsed once, and then the magic in the old wizard’s soul burst free of its shell, shattering his body, his mind, and his life into a spray of glittering moments.
He was dying, but he had all the time in the world to watch as, one by one, each of his moments came to an end.
A young star sits beneath the sun and the moon.
Daylight warms him, nighttime soothes him,
but his mind and his eyes are swallowed
by the words on a page.
Daylight warms him, nighttime soothes him,
but his mind and his eyes are swallowed
by the words on a page.
“And what did you learn today, my faithful student?”
He looks up, and sees them. His smile glows
and his eyes shine.
and his eyes shine.
Princess Celestia’s voice shocked Starswirl from his book-reading trance, and he snapped his eyes to attention. Both of his teachers stood before him, shading half of the library’s study in warm daylight and the other half in heathery dusk.
He answered the question in a huff. “They did so much, but they figured out so little! How can that be? There have been so many failures to isolate ‘destiny’ that you would think they would find something by sheer process of elimination, but--”
He thumped his hoof onto the book where it lay open on the stand. Both Celestia and Luna winced with sympathy for the book’s yellowed pages, but Starswirl pretended not to notice.
“Like right here--Archmage Meteorite, third century--he said that destiny magic is probably bigger than just something that guides names and cutie marks--that it probably has something to do with the flow of time, not time like just seconds and hours, I mean time--like history itself, all the movements of the world! But nobody knows if that’s true, or what it means if it is!”
“Then it seems to me that you have begun to understand one of the most important lessons of all,” Luna said. Her stern voice belied the faint smile crossing her face. “Some journeys can never end, no matter how hard we strive to find the destination.”
“I know.” Starswirl drummed his hooves restlessly against the floor as he turned his eyes back to the book and turned the page with his magic. “We have to keep studying and keep learning. Forever.”
And then his face split into a smile to rival Celestia’s mane in radiance. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
A beautiful mare has been waiting for him.
She approaches him, touches him,
and finally he turns.
Cold eyes that were made to count and measure
melt to water when they fall upon
her.
The heat of their bodies
staves off her doubt and her fear.
staves off her doubt and her fear.
It had been a very good night of work, and Starswirl’s workspace was piled high with books and scrolls, to the point that a pile of discarded scrap paper had started to accumulate beneath the desk.
New connections had arisen between texts that Starswirl had thought to be exhausted. He had written notes for three new channeling elements and procedures for his next practical session. He had even stumbled upon an entirely new text written by the great Comet Tail.
So of course it was inevitable that such a good night of work would be interrupted eventually.
“It’s late. Won’t you come to bed?”
The voice was soft, sweet, and absolutely infuriating. After only a few years of married life, Starswirl had already learned to dread that question. It was never the first one that she asked--usually it was the third. The fourth was always “Should I wait for you or not?”
On most nights, Starswirl would have been content to wait until the fourth question, to which the answer was “No, that’s all right.” Tonight, though, there was something in his Bluebelle’s voice that tempted Starswirl away from his work...
He didn’t turn, but he slid his book away. “What time is it, exactly?”
“Late enough.” There was the trace of an edge to her words--not a plea, but not a demand either. “Come to bed?”
He felt the weight of her hoof as it came to a rest on his shoulder. He sighed as he felt the touch of her breath against his neck. The sensation was decidedly unwelcome, not despite but because it was so pleasant.
“Don’t you think you’ve earned a rest?”
He considered telling her no, that tonight’s work was too important to be interrupted, but the script had already been derailed, and there was no going back now. Not when the closeness of her body was consuming his mind, blocking out thoughts of anything but her smell, her soft fur...
He turned, and felt the heat of her eyes as they locked with his own.
In Starswirl’s mind
there are a million theories,
a thousand libraries,
and a hundred lifetimes.
There is no space for anything
in Starswirl’s mind
except for his single attempt
to grasp the infinite.
Noise invaded Starswirl’s study with the force of a tidal wave. It started with the slam of the front door, then built to a muted rolling of hoofbeats approaching from the hallway...
Starswirl grit his teeth just before the noise exploded to its climax. The room’s rickety old doorknob rattled sharply, and a skull-piercing rush of voices flooded in through the open door.
“Hey, Starswirl! Been a while! How’s the spellcrafting going? Geez, look at this place! Can’t even move without--” The voice was at least eight decibels too loud and three shades too sharp for Starswirl to handle at that moment, so he cut his friend off with a raised hoof and a snapped order:
“Do not touch anything. And get to the point. I’m busy.”
He turned his head far enough to glare at the three ponies who’d just barged into the room. Airshow, Redwood, and Quartz were standing just inside his doorway, their hooves perilously close to the discarded stacks of notes carpeting the cramped room’s floor.
Airshow--the oblivious fool--still wore a stupid-looking grin, like a child who had been let out to play. “Bluebelle told us you would be in here, and we all wanted to take you out for--”
At that, Starswirl’s jaw tightened even further. “Belle let you in? Pah! I told her I would be busy until at least eight!”
There was a beat of silence, and Starswirl took the opportunity to turn away from the three and back to his desk.
“...She knew that, Starswirl. It’s almost midnight.”
It had taken Starswirl an infuriatingly long time to find his place on the scroll that he had been reading, so when Airshow’s voice rang out again, it took a tremendous willpower to reply verbally instead of by throwing the inkwell toward the door.
“Well, tell Belle that I’m still busy. And tell her to listen to what I tell her next time! And close the door behind you!”
Starswirl was a great stallion,
a noble stallion who devoted his life
to the noble cause of higher knowledge.
Starswirl was a great stallion, and
his legacy
was destined to endure the ages.
a noble stallion who devoted his life
to the noble cause of higher knowledge.
Starswirl was a great stallion, and
his legacy
was destined to endure the ages.
A very old stallion proudly took his last breath and ignited his horn for the last time. He stood at the center of the most powerful spell circle ever created by ponykind, the culmination of all of Starswirl’s years as a spell-weaver--in other words, the single product of his entire life ever since he recieved his cutie mark. The destiny spell that he had dreamed of inventing for so long was finally complete, and it was perfect in every single way: it was Starswirl’s ultimate, perfect failure.
Not a failed spell, no: Starswirl the Bearded, personal student of Celestia and Luna, had created the world’s greatest, and first, failure spell.
Starswirl knew both everything and nothing about the ritual that he was about to perform. The spell circle would capture the Destiny linked to him, and bring it to life using his own Magic, and then it would infuse his Body, and plunge his entire being into the fabric of the World.
After months of double-checking, Starswirl was certain beyond a possible doubt: the spell would work. Anyone using a spell like this one would immediately find themselves engulfed by the power of Destiny and subjected to its unknowable whims.
And now the journey was finally nearing its destination. It should have been exciting. It was exciting. Except...
Except that Starswirl had learned how to hold Destiny in his hooves, and so he knew that his own Destiny was dead. When he first saw it, it had been a glorious golden river, vibrant and full. But the deeper he sank into his studies, the more it dwindled, and now it was barely a trickle. It seemed that despite all of Starswirl’s acclaim and accomplishments, his great and mysterious future now belonged to somepony else.
And what kind of place could the World give the scattered essence of a broken old student who no longer had a Destiny to be shaped by?
With a bitter flicker of pride, Starswirl wondered what name the scholars and historians would give this spell if they ever unearthed his notes. Would they understand his writings, or would they dismiss his entire life’s work as the scribblings of a lunatic?
Any well-trained ritualist would cringe at the asymmetrical, haphazard design covering the floor, but Starswirl was beyond needing symmetry and patterns. To Starswirl, his spell circle took the shape of was a symbol of power that could not have been more perfect if it had been etched by Destiny itself: a crooked six-pointed star encircled by five smaller stars.
The spell circle beneath Starswirl’s hooves thrummed with anticipation. It was time.
“From one to another; another to one...”
Do not search too hard for things you have lost,
for a lost item is something that you once held,
and to find something already known to you is to find nothing.
Our days of searching should be spent
on things that we have not yet found.
Do not chase dreams with too much zeal,
for a dream is not a beast that can be caught,
nor a treasure that can be plundered.
Even the grandest dream can warp and break
if held too tightly.
Do not stop walking when a path comes to its end,
for all endings are also beginnings,
and the dark woods are full of trails
waiting to be blazed.
for all endings are also beginnings,
and the dark woods are full of trails
waiting to be blazed.
All births are violent events, but very few beings are ever privileged to be born in a literal explosion of magic.
The child had slept in its egg for untold ages, only to be awakened in an instant as something from the waking world siezed his heart and pulled him upward. His first sensations as a living being were of being suffused with magic, some of it his own, the rest belonging to something that resonated with his being in a way no other magic ever could.
His scales tingled and shimmered as they were exposed to the air for the first time, but before they could even begin to try, he found himself wrenched upward, and the world became a blur as his body, only seconds old, was changed and twisted and forced to grow and change, and all around him was the crash of chaos--
And then it ended, and he was nothing but an infant, his eyes quickly focusing upon the world around him for the first time.
All around him were living things like himself, furred in a wild spectrum of colors. He glimpsed a purple four-legged creature, hardly larger than himself, and a tiny blink of light as the symbol of a six-pointed star appeared on her haunch.
He stared at the symbol for a long moment. Then the last of the shards of moments winked into nothingness, and the little dragon curled up and fell asleep, as newborn children often do.