Dear Princess,

Dear reader,

It would be a natural progress to begin without preamble; it would be an easier narrative to jump to the conclusion. Instead, dear reader, I hope you will follow my journey as you would any simpler letter. Of all the lessons of friendship, this may ultimately be the most important.

Each wall has five shelves; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms:

First:         The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Ponies, the imperfect librarians, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and stalls for the librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the pony, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible horn scrawls with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.

Second:       The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my mother has seen and recanted to me as a filly was made up entirely of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says "Oh time thy pyramids".

This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose libraryponies repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's horn or hoof... They admit that the ancient alicorn inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)

In the fullness of time, whose contours may yet yield truth,

TWILIGHT SPARKLE