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Yes, humans tell stories about Horses. They are stories about Freedom and the Wild Spirit. These would be the same humans who harness and bridle them.

No one tells me these stories, of course, I'm just a bunny rabbit. No one tells bunny rabbits much of anything. It makes us good listeners, hence the big ears. And so it is, just so.

When did humans first tame and master beasts? When they learned to whip sticks against skin, to weave fibers into binds? Or when they learned to take a sewn-up bag of soggy organs and pounding muscle and millions of years of cutthroat genetic competition and turn it into Horse?

Now, take it from me, I've known plenty of ponies. Too many. Some are cruel, and some are kind. Some of them can fly, others can magic, others run banks. None ever called me Thumper. And I never saw Horse.

And, after all these years, and a great deal of pondering, and lengthy discussions under Twilight sky, I wonder if humans never saw horses, small 'h', the things that are as they are.

What a frightening thing it must have been for the gryphons, and the dragons, and the trees, to fight the humans! Nature, nasty bitch, is an unparalleled weapons manufacturer. There is no beak sharper than a gryphon's, no fire hotter than a dragon's, and as for trees, well, trees house owls, and hawks, and many other things beside that are cruel to poor bunny rabbits. No, trees cannot be trusted.

But with a whim and a word, humans could undo the idea of fighting them. A straightforward scrap over ecological niches and scarce resources became the story of how the brave, few humans put up a valiant resistance against the cruel, rapacious dragons, the brutal, primitive gryphons, and the trees, which had ugly, scary faces.

It was wrong to fight the humans.

And so the gryphons were talked into never-existence, the dragons were branded as liars and escaped beyond Earth's pull where sounds couldn't follow them, and the trees internalized their abuse and stopped going out so much. And that is why trees show their faces at night, but never day. And so it is, just so.

It has always been obvious, as a bunny rabbit, that the world is random and unfair. We are small, weak—fast, yes, but fueled by leafs and twigs. A spring and a sprint, and then we hide under a tree root or a hill of earth. Outside, sometimes rain falls from the sky, and sometimes everything crackles white hot around you, there is noise that makes you wish you weren't such a good listener, and then the tree is on fire, so you run, because of course you run, that is all your little legs are good for, and the owl sees you, the dog hears you—

Later humans tell the story of How the Wolf Got Rabbit Fur in Her Droppings.

For in Story—let it be a world, like Equestria, or New York, or Faerie—in Story, there is order. More than order, rhythm. Structure, pacing, motivation, good and evil, the knowledge that all this will wrap up in 50 pages. The hero is dangling from the cliff-edge, one hand on the rock and the other gripping his damsel, who hangs over a thousand feet of nothing. A bunny rabbit reads this and thinks, you idiot, how are you going to support her and yourself? What are you doing dangling from a cliff in the first place? Stay away from cliffs! Find a tree, a nice hole in the dirt, curl up with a stolen lettuce.

A bunny rabbit thinks, drop her. You're both dead if you hold onto her. Frankly I'm surprised your upper body strength lasted this long. Must be that humble farm work the narrative likes to mention you grew up doing, before you found your Sword and your Destiny and your Damsel, who is dragging you down right now more than your Destiny ever dragged you along. Just let go, swing yourself up, and get on with it. That's what would happen anyway if this wasn't a story, you're going to drop her, she's slipping out of your hand, you idiot—

But there's only 50 pages left and no time to establish a new love interest. The tone is all wrong for tragedy. So the glass bird the one-eyed crone gave her on her eighteenth birthday to repay a simple act of kindness turns her into a bird when she smashes it against the rock, and now the hero has his woman and a very useful pet bird and doesn't have to put up with all her jawing, because she doesn't have one.

Good thing too, because they haven't actually gotten to know each other very well, and when he got home with his prize he might have found out why damsel comes from the old word domina....

That's the sort of rubbish you get in stories. Things that happened before matter later. Everything has a reason and a significance. Promises are kept, not always between characters, but between storyteller and listener—and we bunny rabbits are very good listeners.

A Unicorn who loved books once told me "in a story, anything is possible." That's the biggest lie I ever heard, and bunny rabbits hear a lot. Stories have rules, strict rules. Even twists are twists only because stories are predictable. Real life doesn't have twists, just things happening to you, usually painful things.

What I am getting to, laboriously, because my brain is a highly optimized organ for finding fresh leafs and recognizing a ready rump, not the work of history nor of consoling frightened Alicorns, is that optimization is an idea.

Not the mere happening of things, for one might as well say water wants to flow downhill. Nor mere extrema, for what does the water care that it might slow and rest at the crest of a slope?

But to imagine, to innovate, to reach out and forcefully alter one's relationship with the world, that requires the idea that the world ought to be related to itself by a kind of narrative force. For where in a billion years would any organism get the idea that it could lift itself above the genetic muck, take the seeds of evil inside itself and use their sprouts to recreate the forbidden garden?

The guiding stories that the world shapes itself by are called paradigms, a word coined by Rudyard Kipling, a human princess, we think. What I wouldn't give to get my paws on a copy of her Structure of Storytelling Revolutions. But alas, all were wiped from the earth, and we have only the references.

Stories impose order on the mind, and the mind imposes order on the world. That is what it means to be intelligent, and that is why intelligent creatures tell stories. And so it is, just so.

Not all humans tell stories. The records are few and scattered, but there are references to people called "scientists," not quite synonymous to our own usage, written ERROR E:22755839210 CANNOT FIND MAGICAL DISPLAY DRIVE in the human lettering. These were people who thought they told no stories but only described the world as it was. Their status in human society is unclear, but the historical consensus is that they were considered deeply stupid. Humans branded their scientists with a mark called PhD, presumably some kind of acid burn, and cloistered them in universities where they couldn't hurt anyone.

"Anyone." Sweet love, it feels so good to write that after so long. And that is why critters and ponies are equal. And so it is, just so.

So forgive me, Princess, but I do not know the answer to your question. Yet I know the shape the answer must take. I know why you cannot sleep at night, why you are short-tempered and seclusive.

You need to be told a story.

So I will tell you a story: the story of how the Earth got its sun and moon. Why do I know this story? No one told it to me...but we bunny rabbits are very good listeners.

Listen, Princess....

The story begins like this, and was told as thus, from a tree to a bird near the edge of the hollow valleys where the frozen mushrooms sprout like tiny blue gemstones amid the seemingly barren dirt and rocks:

And so it came to be that, as the world was finally getting to its feet—forgive me, its hoofs—a monster emerged from the forest.

It came for, or despite, or because of a woman—that is, a mare. I beg your pardon. Something like all of this is true, but it is a bit mixed up in my head. (No surprise there, in my opinion; nothing stores memory like a tree, but if you want recall, you might as well try a goldfish.)

This woman—ah, well, it all looks the same to my hidden eyes—this woman was very beautiful and tall. She had skin as white as cloth and hair like a children’s drawing. Her younger sister was almost as beautiful and almost as tall as she was. The younger sister’s skin was dark like the tulips grown in her honor, and her hair was like a cloudy night sky.

This was a time when the sun and the moon had broken their ties to the earth, which itself had broken ancient agreements. No matter—the earth passed them obliviously in its slingshot path through space[1]. The sisters had no magic, only science, which worked as many wonders and was a good deal more predictable. The big, blustering sun fell madly in love with the elder sister and chased her all the day until it grew tired and slept under a blanket of stars. The moon had no courage to speak to the younger sister. It contented itself to light her way at night.

[1] A colony of dragons watched this from Mars in bafflement and muttered sentiments of good riddance.

The elder sister called herself Gaia when her toes wriggled in the mud among the tadpoles and nimblewill. She called herself Flora when she braided flowers in her hair, and Solaria when she let the sun kiss her back and touch her face. She would laugh and push it away.

She demanded gold, and the sun gave it to her. And she never gave it so much as a kiss.

The younger sister called herself Ga, or Fa, or Sa. At night she pulled silver from the sky.

I still don’t know how or why it happened, and it still makes me weep to think of it—see how my branches shake?—but as the earth was finally tied again to reason and sense, the monster came to cut every cord.

Long claws for slashing. A mouth of teeth for biting, ripping. The monster came a-slavering.

Snicker-snack! Snip-snap! Blood ran in streams down to the oceans—literally running, the little hemogoblins carrying their plasmoid sisters to the sea.

The monster thought that was funny.

And continued his march of chaos.

His teeth ripped not flesh from bone, but planets from their orbits. His claws split not skin but atoms.[2] The blood and gore and stuff was just what happened—organisms were held together very precisely. The slightest disturbance to their order and they destroyed themselves, like a single spark on a pile of sawdust.

[2]Using the word for true atoms, which do not split, Princess. We discussed this before, you remember.

All order that remained in the world flowed from the sisters, their grace, mercy, and power. And it was to these things that the monster turned his lascivious eye—then turned his eyes all the way round, and stumbled round blind, till the world in its confusion lost its idea of its own existence and panicked, reaching and tripping in space. The axis tilted, the spin accelerated wildly, a furious blush of volcanic eruptions; the earth insisted she meant to do that. All this the monster found mirthful.

The sisters had shed their mortality long ago. It was their own defiance of such common binds that their blood was not added to the stormy red oceans, who still whined about the taste—although perhaps the monster simply was having too much fun. They paid him little mind eventually, discovering that attention only fatted him, no matter how they tried to burn or freeze him.

The world was misbehaving, and in turns they became its mother.

Stern looks worked to control it, and disappointed looks to motivate it. The monster clapped with glee at all this, for finally someone had learned how to play. The sisters devised a kind of science, learning all the things that contributed to making the world do what it wanted, and all the things that discouraged it from doing what they did not want. They called it economics, meaning household management, for it was all they were doing, the two sister-mothers, their unruly child, and their sadistic cousin and his cruel humor. And all the lies they told to keep him out of their house, lies like seeds of evil....

Until he caught a glimpse of tulip-skin in the moonlight-lit water, and her skin was never again the color of flowers, but instead a bruise, and later marred with crescent burns against crescent burns, because the universe has a way of piling on people who did no wrong, for stories tolerate happy endings more than they do fair beginnings.

Well, the monster had to go. Gaia wore the sun as a crown and for the first time used it as a whole, not individual rays but the power that connected every nuclear point, and made a stone of the beast. The stone was enough to weigh the earth, to be a fulcrum for its path, and the monster dreamed of merry-go-rounds. And that is the truth of merry-go-rounds, and heavy stones, and all the elder sister's heat and light. And so it is, just so.

Yes, this story is missing the important part, how Princess Celestia (for who else could it be?) actually defeated Discord, but how am I supposed to know that? I am just a bunny rabbit, reciting a tale told by a tree to a bird above a valley of frozen, glittering fungi. Figure it out for yourself, o Princess.

My letters always go on too long. Ah, but you would argue that you read them too long, not that I write them too long. Or have I misunderstood?

I still drink the water pooled in Zecora's hoofprints, and I still hide vegetables about your library.

My faith, if not my loyalty, and the same blessing of peace you gave once to a poor and miserable bunny-rabbit with nothing but the food in his cheek and the books on his back,

Angel Bunny, third Guardian of the assembled and abducted history

P.S. Have you ever read Watership Down? What kind of a name is Fiver, anyway? Next Chapter: Oh, Brother! The Beauty Premium Phenomenon Estimated time remaining: 33 Minutes