Anon02/27/26, 15:10No.43070837
Picking up where I left off. Apologies for the considerable delay, my words disobeyed me and shaping them was an effort. More soon. Ponepaste here: https://ponepaste.org/11487>The quiet mundanities of Starlight Glimmer's daily life in the crystal castle hung about her in a cloud, something stuffy and gloomy but restorative in its routine, and admittedly somewhat in its gloom
>Between the practice of magic, the study of letters, and the science of friendship, and perhaps above and below it all as well, her major preoccupation was brooding, the subject of which at this particular instance being something her dear friend Pinkie Pie had said
>"Dayum pencil! You got a point! I guess you write!"
>It was probably the funniest thing she'd heard all year, which compelled her to brood (everything did, eventually), and the brooding brought about that cloud of gloom to what would otherwise be a pleasant ray of sunshine, twisted it into a formless haze, still with traces of pleasantry but marked by something wavering and phantasmal
>But she was satisfied, even felt something approaching happiness; instead of a grey, gloomy gloom, her cloud was a midnight blue, a pensive and twinkling gloom, a vast expanse of seminumb potential, something meditative that locked out the senses but couldn't be called meditation, for above all else it remained stuffy and gloomy
>She would brood as easily as any other pony would smile, and as far as she could recall it had always been so; she would brood in times of hardship and times of joy, to endure sickness and in the face of pleasure, every morning when she rose and every night before she slept
>Insecurities and frustrations and anxieties, hopes and dreams and ideals, pain and regret and joy and contentment and weeping and smiling and loving and, in the not so distant past, hating
>All the flavors of life mixed into a single billowing mass, tasted only as a whole, each sensation on its own so rich that without a contradiction it would overwhelm her palate, wrench her stomach, make her eyes burn
>If she wasn't careful, that kind of raw exposure could give her all sorts of ideas, the kind she would often come to regret
>And so she would brood, observing her own life as a foal would observe an anthill, rapt and marveling, savoring every drop, but ultimately an outsider watching an alien world, except even her own head felt alien, overseeing the process of thought and working around the sparks of emotion, sparks that burn to the touch, and she took it for granted that somehow everypony must go on in a similar way, only they could engage the individual flavors that made her sick, and she supposed that must be why things like the power of friendship came so naturally to them and why for so long she, in contrast, had felt compelled to hold it at hoof's length