Star side up...

I wonder if that’s how she made the choice…

Oh, sorry. I was referring to the new look briefly sported by the unit of Equestrian currency, the bit. It used to be that on one side of the coin, you had a horseshoe, and on the other, the Sun. But after Princess Luna returned, the Royal Mint produced a new run of coins in her honour. Of course, some wag would always crack a joke about saying ‘Moon side up’, so people began naming the flipside ‘Star side up’ instead, when they called the toss.

When Luna rebelled a second time, they recalled them all. Some say those coins were melted down and used to make the stoppers on a special batch of flasks for the ponification serum. Others claim, with just as much conviction, that the ‘liberated’ metal went into gilding the prison bars for Queen Celestia’s gulags, sprouting up like mushrooms all over the Crystal Empire.

Little decisions, little changes that mean all the world.

What if Twilight Sparkle came to my party? What if Lyra never went scuba-diving?

I knew Lyra when we were both fillies, you see. She often resorted to a coin-toss when she couldn’t make up her mind, that poor, dear, sweet scatterbrain. Shoe side up, Sunny side up, Star side up…

It’s seldom, though, that you get to see what rested on the turn of that coin. Like how when you hold the coin, you can’t tell if you’ve got a Sun or Star mark until you actually turn it over in your hooves and see the obverse face of it with your own eyes.

We got that chance, rare as it was. If Lyra Heartstrings actually did toss a bit to decide whether she’d practice for an audition in Canterlot or go frolicking about in the sea, then we know full well what rested on the tiny currents of air, convections of dust and minute aberrations in local gravity that affected which side it landed upon.

Hoof-side up, Lyra stayed home in Ponyville that week, and nothing much of note happened. She carried on in her own absent-minded, goofy way, unnoticed by history except as a charming local eccentric. Such is the Equestria we’re about to visit; a small nation aspiring to nothing more than peace and prosperity.

Star-side up, Lyra skived off and went diving. And somehow, this crazy little mare made a million-to-one archeological discovery that set our Equestria on an entirely different course. The nation suddenly had a purpose, a quest, and swelled and grew in pursuit of that quest…

Imagine, if it were true, that the whole war with mankind rested on Lyra’s coin toss?

Billions of lives, all determined by the fall of a coin.

Star side up… star side up.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Author's Notes:

Hello all. We hope you're intrigued by this new addition to the Spectrum canon, another holiday special in the vein of last year's Joy to the Worlds.

As with Joy, this started out as a one-shot, with the goal of publishing it in time for Christmas. As the story grew however, we realised it was too grand in scale and concept to compress into a single chapter, and so it developed into a multi-part piece, exploring ideas of faith and hope, and what value these concepts hold in a time of war...