“I’ve hoped there’s more,” the Princess mused, “This is such a beautiful land. Maybe for a while it seems perfect.”
Spike lay with his forelegs dangling from the balcony. He looked off at the sun, and it wasn’t setting yet, but it would be soon. Give it an hour.
His Princess stood by, her lavender coat glinting in the sun’s sidelight. This wasn’t Princess Celestia. It was Princess Twilight. She looked no older than the day she was crowned. Twilight Sparkle, Spike reminisced. Twi’. There’s nobody to call her that now.
Spike was big and lanky. His fearsome claws were leaden gray and his tail curled and ended with a barb. His eyes were dark emerald, no longer the verdant lime that the princess fondly recalled.
But Dragons grow slower than ponies die. Spike was still adolescent, in his late teens, with plenty of life ahead of him. Almost as much as Twilight had.
“It is perfect," he said. "It just doesn’t last.”
Twilight looked at him and away. She could feel it slipping. Everything was slipping, slipping from her grasp. Spike was slipping away. Her friends had fallen away to somewhere where she couldn’t follow, and she never would be able to follow. They went behind a door to which it seemed everyone except she had a key. They went to a reunion where she wasn’t invited.
There was so much she wanted to say to Spike before he flew away and left her alone. She’d wanted to say so much to Princess Celestia, and Luna too. There was time but not words. Time made each and every final journey across the seas the same whether she was on the boat or not. It was still the end every time. She still died every time. She just got another chance she didn’t want.
“Doesn’t that make it not perfect?" she asked. "But what is perfection without imperfection?”
Some things were still so hard to understand. She’d studied the Magic of Friendship, and all her friends were gone. She didn’t study the anti-magic of death. Maybe she should have.
“Where do you draw the line?” her voice frayed like a cut wire.
The dragon regarded her, a little bit more aloof than he once was. A little bit less sympathetic. Or maybe he just ignored the questions he didn’t have answers to. Did Spike often do that? She hadn’t spent much time with him of recent. Perhaps he’d always asked her the questions. They’d been so close. But they were interwoven in a tapestry that was destined to lose some strings, and not others. It couldn’t be as tight again. All the replacing made it weak.
“I guess at death.” The dragon stood, stretched, theorized. “Imperfect perfection is great so long as it lasts. Perfect perfection isn’t much use to anyone. It’s too bright to see. And eternal imperfect perfection would be ideal. But I guess only alicorns are granted that. Or are you supposed to achieve perfect perfection? Are you supposed to be around and alone so long you forget who you are? Like a light—a really old light, and you look at it and wonder about if there are spots, like on the sun. Because you’ve seen pictures with flames and lava but only ever seen light.”
“What do you think the ratio of questions to answers is in our world?” the Princess asked. They looked into each other’s eyes, and held the gaze for the first time that afternoon. Maybe several afternoons.
“That depends on how many questions you ask," he said, "and how many you answer.”
Their eyes gazed, Twilight’s with tears, Spike’s with necessary ignorance, and then he nodded, and she fought tears that were already streaming down her cheeks, and gulped.
He said goodbye. She whimpered.
And he was gone.
She watched him flap into the darkness. Long pauses had stretched between their words. There could have been so much more said. But they thought more and spoke less, a cruel lesson that time teaches, and thus strips the youth from those that should have been young forever.
He would be back. In a lifetime or so, he’d soar over the horizon again. But it wouldn’t be the same. It already wasn’t the same. He was a dragon, she a princess. Anyone could see they weren’t family. They would never be again.
Maybe, when he comes back, it won’t be so tense anymore. All of our friends will be long dead; the wounds inflicted by their passing will be scars, cherishable memories of our lives together. I won’t care so much about metaphysics and where they went; I’ll be happy in my garden of roses growing from skulls.
It hurt to ask if Princess Celestia had felt the same way. It had always felt as if she were part of their lives, not a relic of a long dead past. But she must have felt that way, she had friends in the past too, and she must have surreptitiously concealed them from view, hiding her scars beneath a flowing rainbow mane and royal smile. Twilight would have to learn to do the same.
She walked through the dim hall. A few janitors were finishing up cleaning from the funeral. Sweetie Bell’s funeral marked ten years since her sister had died; six since Fluttershy. Fluttershy lived longest out of the five. They’d once been six. But that all changed when Twilight was given wings and Rarity wasn’t, when Pinkie and Applejack were still earth ponies and Rainbow and Fluttershy still only had wings. When Twilight was made more than a bearer of an element of harmony, being transformed in an apotheosis that bound her to a life of sadness.
Celestia departed the night after Fluttershy’s funeral. She'd spoken to Twilight in her room.
“I have helped a small nation in my time so far," she said. "There are many to be helped.”
She turned to her desk, looking as if for things to pack. But she wouldn’t bring anything. Nothing but her memories. She couldn’t bring trinkets for all her little ponies. She turned sadly from the pictures on the desk, and looked at Twilight with the prelude of tears shimmering in the corners of her eyes.
There was a picture of Rarity wearing Applejack’s cowpony hat, with Applejack standing by looking exasperated, in a simple wood frame. In the next frame, Dashie gives Fluttershy a tight one forehoofed hug, a blatant wink on her mischievous features, the butter-yellow pegasus happily embarrassed. Rarity and Fluttershy smile from a spa’s tub. Pinkie and Dashie laugh joyfully after an unportrayed prank. Twilight stands in the center of a group shot, her only position in the gallery.
“It’s not harder than I imagined it to be,” said Princess Celestia. “I knew. But now it’s real…so real.”
She had more to leave behind than anyone. She had lived among these ponies for so long. But it was time. Her sister would only tarry shortly before making her own way across the sky to distant lands. The duty of an alicorn is her burden. It is her curse and her service.
Twilight was alone now, and as the sun withdrew below the horizon, she felt it so very much.
“I thought that with immortality, and being a goddess, metaphysics would be a cinch,” she said. “Like something I’d really know and not just have read in a book.”
One never suspects a goddess of ignorance. But for Twilight, when she really had no one left, the weight of all the things she didn’t know slammed her like a hoofball to the chest.
She supposed that she should know everything about everything, like Celestia had always seemed to. Twilight fondly recalled that her mentor used to advise a farmer on methods for controlling pests and on irrigation, and when he was satisfied, a printer on the subtle aesthetics of kerning and leading.
But then, Twilight mused, I could perhaps do the same. She had read enough on all those subjects. The only subject she felt unconfident in was one that Celestia had rarely spoken of—call it metaphysics or transcendence, spirituality; Celestia seemed only to exercise power in the corporeal world. Maybe Twilight already knew as much as her teacher, and it still wasn’t enough. She didn’t know where her friends had gone in their passing, nor what magic of friendship lingered past the days of their deaths.
She resolved to find out—though the answer might be far away or undiscovered. She had time, and she needed answers.
