A Time Before Ponies
Mar. 11th, 2016 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twilightponyWhile I was gone, Moondancer's scroll arrived. This is a really unusual origin story she's been piecing together. She's been hard at work translating the old pony writings and idioms on the gold scrolls into something easier to understand. I think she may have taken liberties in including some modern concepts into the narrative, but then she's been not just reading these gold scrolls, she been living them for months now. So far, it looks like this:
In the time before ponies, there was only rock. The sky was black, no water flowed and all was desolate and freezing cold. In the center of all this stood the Tree.
The Tree had control of all that we call home. Its roots tapped into the endless underground, its branches embraced the bubble of limited sky, it was one with the rock. But rocks are slow and the Tree could feel time passing and it grew bored. It had drawn on power from the depths and built gardens of stone and ice, but that too had grown old and stale. It wanted more. It could feel the presence of other realities, other universes. Some of those realities were frantic with activity. The Tree decided to make a new garden.
Opening up a mirrored rift to another reality, the Tree found something fascinating. Entities that, working together, could extract sustenance from rock, water and air. They moved, lived and died incredibly quickly, but not so quickly that the Tree couldn't appreciate the ebb and flow of their activities. To better appreciate how they worked together and what their motivations were to do so, the Tree took a sample home.
They were delicate, far more delicate than the smooth ice fields, the carved rocky peaks and the combed sand plains the Tree was used to playing with. But the Tree discovered genetics.
As the living things stumbled about under the sparkling lights of their domed habitat, the Tree tinkered with their genes. It learned through trial and error, creating new organisms, making new combinations. All this took time, but time is what the Tree had the most of, and this was fun. While the tree was building better beings in its way, natural selection was acting on serendipitous changes to the genomes, producing creatures that by virtue of unforeseen mutations were better able to navigate this strange new universe's physics and see in the dim light of the Tree's sparkling lights. While they didn't reproduce well, they still out bred their ancestors and became the new fauna and flora in the Tree's habitat. At long last, the Tree's new garden was flourishing.
Drawing up energy from the ground, the Tree set about changing its world. It funneled power through a hole in the sky to light the world and heat the ground. That light was much brighter that what the Tree's garden was used to, but the denizens there adapted quickly. The warmth melted the ice which flowed into the sandy plains and started up a water cycle. The Tree carefully transplanted a pioneer community of rugged plants and was rewarded with green growth that spread all over the land, breaking through the rocks and building the first soils as the old plants died and were replaced. Next the Tree seeded the larger plants, including the big plants that looked like exotic versions of itself, but delicate and ephemeral. When all was ready, the Tree tore down the dome.
Of all the delicate things the Tree had in its garden, the ones that it liked the most were the ponies. It had tinkered long and often with their genes, making them stronger, faster and smarter than the archaic ponies that the Tree had brought here. The prize pony in the Tree's small herd was a white maned mare named Epona. The Tree had unraveled the mechanism by which ponies naturally grow old and die, and in Epona the Tree instituted a work-around, keeping her young. From Epona, the Tree spawned three breeds of pony. Earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi. Like Epona, they were fast, they were smart, and they were perfectly adapted to this new garden in this strange universe. They were also, by nature, social. The Tree built on that to make them natural stewards of the more delicate species. The Tree made them gardeners and rested on its roots to watch the result.
There are more bits and pieces, but that looks like the beginning. It's not as romantic as saying ponies arose from grass that wanted to catch the wind, or from shapes made in the mud by the hooves of passing constellation ponies, or coaxed out of the sea by rabbits.
In the time before ponies, there was only rock. The sky was black, no water flowed and all was desolate and freezing cold. In the center of all this stood the Tree.
The Tree had control of all that we call home. Its roots tapped into the endless underground, its branches embraced the bubble of limited sky, it was one with the rock. But rocks are slow and the Tree could feel time passing and it grew bored. It had drawn on power from the depths and built gardens of stone and ice, but that too had grown old and stale. It wanted more. It could feel the presence of other realities, other universes. Some of those realities were frantic with activity. The Tree decided to make a new garden.
Opening up a mirrored rift to another reality, the Tree found something fascinating. Entities that, working together, could extract sustenance from rock, water and air. They moved, lived and died incredibly quickly, but not so quickly that the Tree couldn't appreciate the ebb and flow of their activities. To better appreciate how they worked together and what their motivations were to do so, the Tree took a sample home.
They were delicate, far more delicate than the smooth ice fields, the carved rocky peaks and the combed sand plains the Tree was used to playing with. But the Tree discovered genetics.
As the living things stumbled about under the sparkling lights of their domed habitat, the Tree tinkered with their genes. It learned through trial and error, creating new organisms, making new combinations. All this took time, but time is what the Tree had the most of, and this was fun. While the tree was building better beings in its way, natural selection was acting on serendipitous changes to the genomes, producing creatures that by virtue of unforeseen mutations were better able to navigate this strange new universe's physics and see in the dim light of the Tree's sparkling lights. While they didn't reproduce well, they still out bred their ancestors and became the new fauna and flora in the Tree's habitat. At long last, the Tree's new garden was flourishing.
Drawing up energy from the ground, the Tree set about changing its world. It funneled power through a hole in the sky to light the world and heat the ground. That light was much brighter that what the Tree's garden was used to, but the denizens there adapted quickly. The warmth melted the ice which flowed into the sandy plains and started up a water cycle. The Tree carefully transplanted a pioneer community of rugged plants and was rewarded with green growth that spread all over the land, breaking through the rocks and building the first soils as the old plants died and were replaced. Next the Tree seeded the larger plants, including the big plants that looked like exotic versions of itself, but delicate and ephemeral. When all was ready, the Tree tore down the dome.
Of all the delicate things the Tree had in its garden, the ones that it liked the most were the ponies. It had tinkered long and often with their genes, making them stronger, faster and smarter than the archaic ponies that the Tree had brought here. The prize pony in the Tree's small herd was a white maned mare named Epona. The Tree had unraveled the mechanism by which ponies naturally grow old and die, and in Epona the Tree instituted a work-around, keeping her young. From Epona, the Tree spawned three breeds of pony. Earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi. Like Epona, they were fast, they were smart, and they were perfectly adapted to this new garden in this strange universe. They were also, by nature, social. The Tree built on that to make them natural stewards of the more delicate species. The Tree made them gardeners and rested on its roots to watch the result.
There are more bits and pieces, but that looks like the beginning. It's not as romantic as saying ponies arose from grass that wanted to catch the wind, or from shapes made in the mud by the hooves of passing constellation ponies, or coaxed out of the sea by rabbits.
