Ageless, or Celestia Plays Dice With the Universe

by Cynewulf

Rating: teen
Tags: Princess Celestia, Slice of Life, Twilight Sparkle, Princess Luna, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Princess Cadance, Romance
Length: 51882

The prospect of Twilight being possibly ageless like she and her sister are unnerves Celestia, and she wants to know why.

Being an alicorn is wonderful... except when it isn't. There are plenty of things that put a damper on limitless vistas of possibility afforded by such a long life: Court, mortal needs and expectations, the occasional decade of ennui.

And the dreams, of course. Agelessness comes with its own special kind of dreaming. Celestia finds that her own "Inner Court" is a bit too literal, and it--and she--are troubled at the prospect of a near-immortal Twilight Sparkle.

If only she could articulate exactly why that was.

art by spectralunicorn

Part of the Monophysite Quartet, which also includes Celestia Isn't Real, Have You Considered My Servant, Twilight?, and The Esoteric Rites of Darkness. All four stories have a common origin point in an old story idea I called "Monophysite" and touch on who or what Celestia really is in some way. They are otherwise unrelated.

Published 2016-04-19 08:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2016-05-23 23:16:49 UTC

II. Nothingness Haunts Being

Consider Celestia sleeping. She does not sleep as mortals sleep. She sleeps as only Alicorns can.

Celestia stood before the tribunal. She did not cringe. In this, as in all things, she wore a careful mask of regal indifference, of a cool and impenetrable calm.

Noonday sneered at her. Dawn simply waited impassively. Dusk smiled warmly.

“What’s the case, Noony?” Dusk asked. Her voice was Celestia’s, but twisted in ways Celestia would never have adopted. Her voice was sensual--warm, yes, but beyond merely warm--inviting.

“This court has several cases before it,” Dawn said before Noon could respond. “Moving beyond the facts regarding the Schism--”

“We could never leave it behind,” Noon said, grinding her teeth. Her voice was raw. If Dusk was like pillow talk and Dawn like the crisp correctness of science itself, Noon’s voice was heat. Every time she spoke the court around them all seemed to waver, as if it might burst into flame. “We should never forget! We should have--”

Dusk reached over and stroked Noon’s hoof. Noonday was silenced, but she glowered.

Dawn simply waited and then continued. “As it stands, this court has heard oral arguments regarding that manner many times. Specifically, we have replayed that particular proceeding…” she glanced down at her notes. “One hundred, forty seven thousand, six--”

“Plenty of times,” Dusk said with a gentle smile. “Don’t you think?”

“I think plenty of things. I was not asked to think, but to inform. The docket before this court concerns the matter of one Twilight Sparkle. I merely wished to put our current proceeding in its proper context.”

“I know you did.”

Noonday’s blinding-hot gaze settled on Dusk. “Are you quite done? I believe the counsel is going to mewl at us for awhile.”

Celestia knew that this was her cue. She took a deep breath and spoke. “May it please the court?”

Noonday snorted. “Proceed, husk.”

Celestia had heard worse spoken of her before, and did not feel the wound. “I speak on behalf of myself today in regards to the special circumstances surrounding my former student and current friend, Twilight Sparkle--”

Dusk chuckled indulgently. “She’s so wonderful. I know we’re proud of her.”

“Her progress is astounding,” Dawn agreed.

Noonday’s eyes did not leave Celestia. “She is neurotic mess given the world on a silver plate, offered apotheosis in return for trinkets! The old failures will simply be multiplied in her.”

“--and today on behalf of myself I will prove to this court that it should rule in favor of a cautious middle course.” Celestia swallowed. Noonday’s eyes had unsettled her for a thousand years. It had been different, before. But the Inner Court was a part of who and what she was. “The experiments we perform on Twilight will mostly be of a cursory nature, and it will really be more important to familiarize her with what we already know then to hope for an expansion of knowledge. This court will be reminded of the ascension of Cadance, and that the walls of her spirit were as firm and as unscaleable as any mortal pony’s. This court will also remember the effects of her examination upon Cadance.”

“Poor dear…” Dusk sighed. “Oh, I wish I didn’t.”

“It was inevitable,” Dawn said. “Counsel, would you speculate for us as to the long-reaching effects of Cadance’s own apotheosis? We refer, of course, to the revelations of her own examination.”

“Agelessness sits poorly on the spirit of the unhappy and the happy alike,” Celestia said. In truth, the things that Cadance had learned that night with Celestia had left her a sobbing ruin for two days. But in the end, hadn’t she taken it well? In the short run, yes, it had left her heartbroken and confused. In the long run? “Cadance broke through the malaise rather easily, which surprised this Court at the time.”

“Cadance was well-adjusted, optimistic, and an eternal idealist,” Noonday said in her hot, harsh voice. It reminded Celestia of fangs and burning bodies. Mostly, it reminded her of war.

It should. Noonday wore her own armor--not the simple things she wore nowadays in ceremony but her true armor. The armor of the God Empress. Nightmare Moon’s attempt to copy it had been a base parody of the power it held simply by existing. When worn? Ponies revered her now, but in the ancient days she had been a god, and for good reason. Even if she loathed it.

“You loved it,” Noonday said. “You know they were right. The fields of slaughter proved it, false face. But my question goes ahead: Cadance was well-adjusted. Our student is a neurotic mess with far too much faith in your false gestalt face. She does not have the natural defenses that Cadance has. What do you say to this?”

Celestia pursed her lips. Dawn looked at her with a flat stare over half-rimmed glasses, as if bored. Dusk smiled encouragingly, voluptuous as always. The Noonday warrior wanted blood. Her own, technically.

“I say that to call Twilight ‘nuerotic’ is not only insulting but inaccurate,” Celestia began slowly. “Twilight is given to nervousness. She is high-strung. This court--”

“Has held her in the middle of her pathetic panic attacks,” Noonday cut in.

“At last count, the record shows that we held her ourselves during or after eleven in her ten years of tutelage, and once since she was a journeymare,” Dawn supplied.

“--is well aware of just how prone she is to overreaction and self-defeating behaviors. One could argue the same of myself--”

“Your denial does you no good, Celestia,” Dusk said with sadness, her beautiful, soulful eyes themselves a blessing.

“--but Twilight has proven to be more than capable of self-improvement and self-evaluation. When offered help by myself or Cadance, Twilight learned to control her rising panic and I know that this court is proud of her efforts.”

“Do not speak for me, Great Lie,” seethed Noonday. “No shadows stand before my eyes, and I see through your silvertongue. Twilight Sparkle is dangerous.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, Celestia,” Dusk said. “But not for the reasons you think.”

Dawn: “There are several possibilities.”

And Dusk leaned in. “The Inner Court should adjourn--Luna is coming to speak with you before dawn, and we want to have tea ready. Even the warrior likes tea,” she added with a laugh.

Celestia found herself upon her bed. Her chest felt tight, and she took a long, shaky breath before rising.

When Luna arrived exactly five minutes after Celestia’s waking, she found her older sister sitting on the balcony with tea for two set out perfectly. There were even scones. It was ridiculous, but Celestia had said many times that old age took so much away that she was allowed her frivolities.

Luna sat without a greeting. The tea smelled nice, at least.

“It’s a lovely night,” Celestia said, her voice soft.

“Yes, it is.”

“I must thank you. The sun is riding me hard, and I was spared it’s quest for the night by your timely intervention.”

“Why am I not surprised to hear you say that, dearest sister?” Luna asked, and with a heavy sigh took the cup allotted her and poured tea. She stared down at it. “I prefer coffee.”

“Coffee is terrible.”

“Tea is pretense with added water.”

Celestia smirked, but did not turn. “That was a blow well struck. You should remember that one.”

“I do not keep score as much, these days.” A pause. “Mostly because it is so boring to be yet again reminded how woefully lacking you are. I enjoy the advantage. It pleases me more to imagine you might one day outdo me in wit.”

“Now you’re overselling it. Never overexert yourself,” Celestia chided without an ounce of real emotion.

“Sister, I know how this conversation will proceed, but love compels me. Will you not speak of the trials?”

“I am not sure what to speak of.”

Luna bit her lip and considered her avenue of attack. “I was… not with you, when our…” Her hesitation was nauseating, but hard to overcome. “Our niece. I was not present for her trial, and so I confess that I may yet be ignorant. I was under the impression that it was harmless.”

“Oh, physically? It is completely harmless. A tickle,” Celestia added with another smirk. “Cadance cried for two days straight. I remember the difficulty of covering for her--she’d torn one of Shining Armor’s letters to shreds in her panic. The poor colt leapt to the obvious conclusion when she did not write him back.”

Luna’s brow furrowed. “I believe I am missing something.”

“You are. Ascension is…” Celestia swallowed. “I am ashamed,” she said, her voice suddenly small. “I want to make this about Twilight, but it is about me.” She shuddered, and when Luna tried to prompt her, she would say no more.

Author's Note

Chapter title is from Sartre but he's dead so no one cares which book

IV. A Mare is What She Wills Herself to Be

Another letter, on the same nightstand, on top of the first:

To my dearest, silliest, and sunniest of Aunts:

I would like to say firstly that I am very, very happy to hear from you. I’m sure you’ve thought of some of the same things I have--in fact, after I wrote that I read your letter again, and you did mention my own reaction. I wanted to talk about that first, if that’s alright.

I was distraught. You remember how I was. All I could think about was… that I had changed into something I didn’t understand. I hadn’t chosen this. I hadn’t wanted it. The idea of being a princess had been so amazing, and then to suddenly realize… the dreams, really. The Blessing of our kind, that was what really did it. I thought I was going to lose my mind, I honestly did. Shining was only a crush then, someone I barely knew. We sat side by side in math class, and that was it. I cheated off of his homework like basically all the time and I babysat his sister. But then I started wondering what it would be like to become friends with him and then what if we fell in love, and then I just stayed the same and he got older and older and…

I know I was a bit of a burden on you. In my own defense, I was a child. I was thirteen.

As soon as I heard the news, I talked to my seneschal and had my Imperial duties carefully apportioned to various advisors and trusted ponies for some time. I have a week and a half starting the day of Twilight’s “trial”. I will be there for her. I know you will be too, but we both know that you’ve only been on one side of it. It’s been this way for you so long that you can’t really understand the beginning. And that’s okay. Together, we will love Twilight and love will do its best.

I’ve been thinking since I got your letter about a dream I once had. When Auntie Luna and I were still a bit awkward around each other--she was shy and I was a little too eager to help her feel part of our little family again--I asked her if she could give me dreams again. Real dreams. She asked, and I explained that I missed them dearly. I think she was touched. (Perhaps you should do the same, dearest Aunt.) She rarely crafts them. Per my request, occasionally without much warning I will dream as I did once before. Of course, a few months before my wedding, I had a nightmare. (Luna had already magicked me a long and panicky apology by the time I woke up. Apparently she has trouble entering my normal dreams if they are too intense.)

I had lived a thousand years, and was unmarried. Nopony remembered Shining Armor at all. The earliest they could remember was some stallion I had never heard of only two hundred years before. I kept trying to find some sign of him, some trace of him… and then with horror I myself found I could only remember his name.

I woke up. I didn’t read Aunt Luna’s letter for about an hour because I was too busy bawling my eyes out. The idea that a pony could be only a name, and nothing more, to somepony who had loved them. That was the only moment I truly, truly hated my immortality. I never told you, because for a few hours I hated you very much. But the manner of my ascension… I know it wasn’t your doing. It was wrong, and because I never told you, I was never able to apologize. I wanted to do that. I’m sorry, Celestia.

It was the other dreams that helped, in the end. Curious, isn’t it? Because they all knew Shiny. They loved him. I realized all of me would, and even if nopony else remembered, the Court of Love would always remember.

I read your letter many times, and I wanted to say that once again… You have two faces. The first face is the cool and collected Celestia, mother to all ponykind, gracious and warm as the sun on a bright day. The Sun is decency and order, always the same and always on time, never changing as far as ponies know. And that’s you.The other is… well. I’m always happy to remind you that it is the sun which drives all of Equestria mad in the end. As you and I know full well, the bright sunlight in spring is what brings heat on, and nothing is farther from decency or order as estrus season in ponylands. But that’s you. One face is calm and the other face has much more in common with Twilight than I think you’d care to admit, and both of them are equally you. Your letter is a mess. I can tell everytime you start to really get honest you would revert back to Princess Celestia until you felt too uncomfortable or you slipped up and became Merely Celestia.

(Shining is reading over my shoulder. Or was. He was distinctly uncomfortable with me talking about his old boss, The Princess of Equestria And God Empress of Ponykind, experiencing heat. I sweetly and lovingly informed him that I was not talking about Princess Celestia. I was writing a letter to Aunt Celestia, and that if he didn’t stop eavesdropping I would start discussing Twilight’s own natural and healthy functionality with you and he scurried off to do Very Important Things. I do so love him.)

All of this to say, that whether you intended it to be or not, your letter has been received as a request for an audience. The Court of Love has officially added you to the docket. I am sure that Luna can aid you in finding your way there, oh, around ten tonight? I’ll be waiting. Tell Luna no spoilers! She’s so bad about that. She ruined Kitkat and the Midnight Hour for me last month and I will never forgive her for all of eternity. Or until she finally reads Headlong.

I joke because I’m also afraid. I love you both very much. I hope you’ll visit tonight.

With Love,

Cadance

“No spoilers?” Luna parroted. Her face was the perfect picture of scorn, a raised eyebrow and wrinkled nose. “Honestly, for a being whose domain is Love itself, our niece is intolerable.”

Celestia smiled wanly. Luna had come to see her before bed. It was nine of the clock. Or it had been, last she checked. Outside, her view of the night sky and the ancient city below were equally beautiful. Celestia loved Canterlot, even if it sometimes seemed a little overwhelming. Here, at least, time moved slower. As much as the part of her that was still young and bright hated to admit it, she did find some solace in dull pomp and circumstance because it was predictable and didn’t throw a poor mare for a loop every few decades.

“I take it that you have visited her in her own Court.” Celestia bit her bottom lip.

“Aye, I have,” Luna replied with a nod.

“Is it as… confusing as yours?”

“Mine is not confusing. Well, not really confusing. I think it is only you that is so dull or self-flagellant.”

Celestia flushed. “That’s a bit on the nose, Luna.”

And Luna leaned in. “It was a bit gentle, really. You enjoy pain, Celestia.”

“I am not going to give you room for a vulgar jest, but I am also not going to dignify that with a real response.”

“I am not sure it is something I could even joke about anymore,” her sister replied with a frown. “Perhaps, a year ago I might have. In my few visits I have seen enough to be deeply concerned. I… heard Dawn mention how many times after--”

“Please don’t,” Celestia said quickly.

Luna sighed, and then smiled. She scooted closer and kissed Celestia on the forehead, beneath her horn. “Perhaps in a decade we shall not be apologizing so much to one another.”

“I hope so.”

“I love you. Cadance also loves you. You really are not alone. I am proud of what you made of your sorrow in the world beyond. Do not think for a moment that I am not proud of it because I am horrified of what you made of yourself. Do not take from me the righteous burden of my crime.”

Celestia whined. “I feel like I’ve become a sputtering, gibbering fool. Somewhere between Twilight’s… I mean… somewhere between then and now, I feel that I’ve broken.”

“I think it is perhaps more than that,” Luna said. “Several things, in fact, and Twilight is the catalyst. For all my concern… This is a good thing. You have been sore sick, sister mine, and walking on broken legs. I am shocked you lasted as long as you did wearing the mask after I returned.”

“I don’t have a mask.”

“Wear the mask that grins and lies, Fear,” Luna said.

Celestia wanted to twist away in horror, but found that she could not. Luna was intertwined with her now. There was a moment of blind panic, and then crashing calm. This was no repeat of the past. Luna had not seized one of her aspects.“F-for a moment…”

“It is only I. The Moon does not rule me and I do not rule it. I am sorry if I startled you.”

“I’m sorry I…”

“Apologies are wearisome,” Luna said and shook her head. She seemed to ponder, and then chuckled. “Besides, it’s not a full moon tonight.”

Celestia groaned and her sister laughed.

Luna nuzzled her chastely. “I will take you with me to the Court of the Moon. We will entertain you until your, ahem, audience.” She tried to say it with a straight face, but they both fell to giggles at the idea of being summoned by such a young mare.

“I confess that I am unsure of the identity of this reflection,” Celestia said over tea. The others worked, directing faceless legionary ponies in the construction of a mighty citadel fit for a god. Luna herself idly sketched on the plans for the city that she would fill with ponies so that she might be surrounded with love.

Luna looked up and around. Only one other Luna was there: the silent one. The younger sister smiled and cleared her throat. “Reflection, tell my sister your name and introduce yourself. Wherein did I learn war?”

“In the sphere of Sulva I learned war,” the reflection replied. Celestia looked her over as the no-longer silent shadow stood. She was Luna, but not Luna. Taller, more regal. She was Celestia’s height and held herself as Celestia could never bring herself to--this was a creature that understood its superiority in such a way that it had no need to assert it or even to care about it.

She wondered if this is what Luna might have become had their places been reversed. A silent watchpony, a laconic sentinel against all dark things.

Her grey eyes bored into Celestia’s. “Hail, Sulva,” the older princess said at last. Sulva nodded.

“You are wondering what I am.”

“Well, yes.” Celestia sipped at her tea. “But it would be rude to ask.”

“Rudeness is a thing for those who care to take offense. I do not. The New Moon is a perversion of me. I am the Moon itself, the surface where once ponies lived in harmony. When you were sent on your own trial in the ancient days to claim the sun, Luna was left adrift on the moon’s surface. You know the story.”

Celestia swallowed. “Yes.”

“I am the sum of all of those experiences. I am the last line of defense. I prevent all other breaking. I am the implacable enemy of fear.”

“You must hold me in rather low regard.”

“You are not fear. You are only afraid. It is your weakness I would see you rescued from,” said Sulva roughly. “How could I destroy what Luna loves most in creation?”

Celestia felt herself warm. “A bit on the nose,” she said with a crooked smile.

“She’s where I get it from,” Luna said absently, not looking up from her plans.

“Is it… is it time, yet?”

Luna looked up and blinked. “Hm. Not quite. A few more minutes. Enjoy your tea. I’ll have you there presently. I’ll even warn you before you look like a foal in front of sweet Cadance. Perhaps she will be kinder than I.”

“That is highly unlikely,” Celestia groused.

Cadance hadn’t laughed. This had been a bit distressing, even if she were thankful for it in the tiny part of her that had any dignity left. Celestia did not mind being laughed at, normally, not when she was in on the joke. Even being laughed at for her failing stung less than silence--Luna’s mirth whenever she happened to stumble spectacularly had nothing to do with malice, after all, and she usually joined in.

Even malicious laughter was better than silence for Celestia. Silence was the absolute worst thing, and the next worst was like it: nervous fretting.

The fact that she was carried along by multiple Cadance’s slightly made up for her entrance, if only a little. The fact that they were mothering her actually helped immensely. Celestia was used to being the maternal figure--it was nice to have that load off.

“How is she, Matron?” Cadance’s voice asked. All of the voices were hers.

“She will be fine. Luna didn’t warn us about this. I can’t believe she wouldn’t come with her to help her move from dream to dream!”

“Aw, but she’s so cute when she’s sleepy,” said another and then she giggled, which set them all to giggling, until at last one voice corralled them.

“Okay, okay. C’mon, ladies, don’t crowd her. Oh, and I see you. Yes, you. No cuddling. This is my aunt, you know. Matron, you can stay.”

Light was coming back. Celestia could see the ceiling… and a pony she almost didn’t recognize. She blinked. She blinked again.

Celestia gasped. “Oh, stars, Cadance! You’re… old.”

Cadance--or whoever it was--laughed. “Hello, auntie. That’s a rude thing to say to a mare, but I’ll let you off. You would say that I am not Cadance, but an aspect of her. She calls me matron, and a matron I am. Are you feeling well?”

“Yes,” Celestia murmured, feeling further ridiculous. “I’m quite fine. If you could help me up…?”

Matron nodded and together they rose. Celestia looked about herself, taking in the Inner Courts of Love on shaky legs.

What was it like? She had not had any real expectations, and yet still she was surprised. Cadance’s dreaming was soft, that was the first impression. The edges, the lights, the smells… everything was softer here. She stood shakily in some palace, perhaps borrowed from a book or from the whims of her niece. Fluted pillars held up a high vaulted cieling, and everywhere she found pillows ponies chatting whilst reclined. Wine, food, and song were there in abundance. Yet it did not feel decadent so much as it felt… intimate.

She realized suddenly with a shock that she saw only a few Cadances. The rest were ponies she did not recognize, and they were not faceless. She looked at the Cadances, trying to find the one who was the core.

“They have faces,” she said, blinking.

“Yes.” Cadance smiled. “Love would not abide a faceless shadow. They are all my memories, all the ponies I love. The Empire is outside, and I think if I went far enough I would find Canterlot.” She stepped forward. “I’m glad you came. I’m sorry that it was rough.”

“It’s alright.” Celestia nodded gratefully to the older Cadance--Matron. “I am honored to be invited.”

Cadance cocked her head to the side, and then seemed to understand. “Aunt Luna mentioned that you were more private about your dream. I’ve never felt that way. Shining knows. I told him all about it.”

Celestia blinked. Again. “You did?”

“Of course,” she replied with easy grace and a wide smile. “We’re married, silly.”

Celestia swallowed. “Ah. Yes. Right.”

Cadance looked at her for a moment, and then turned. “Well, since you’re here… I should introduce you. You’ve met Matron. These are the four loves: Eros, who needs no introduction--”

“Not that I wouldn’t mind one,” purred Eros.

“Storge--” Cadance said, but was interrupted as from the fold of Cadances smiling at her a foal emerged. A little colt with Cadance’s coloring gleefully bounded forth and hugged her, shouting excited little greetings.

Celestia wondered if she was the only alicorn not to have at least one childlike aspect. Maybe Luna was right. Maybe I am boring.

She cleared her throat, but returned the small embrace. “Hello, little one. You have an interesting name.” She looked up at the aspect who approached. “It’s ancient. That’s old Pegas.”

“Glad you noticed, Tia,” said the one who came to her. The aspect of Cadance nuzzled her, and Celestia tried to hide her shock. Outside of the Full Moon, Luna’s aspects were never so physical. “I’m Philos. I’m the part of Cadance that likes being your friend, as well, without the Aunt part.” She smiled and then mussed Storge’s mane.

“Agape is my name,” said the last. This was Cadance ascended--didn’t she already do that?--Cadance a little taller with all the regality and steel in her that Celestia had tried to teach. This was a mare that could destroy cities and yet chose instead to be gentle as a pony would in villages of ants.

“I am honored to meet you all,” Celestia said.

“Good luck gettin’ this kid off of you,” Philos said with an easy grin. She yawned and used her magic to summon pillows. “Might as well sit. We’re gonna be here for a while.”

Without any word from Cadance, the various aspects of the Court of Love had moved to surround her slowly. They sat around her, expectantly, as Cadance cleared her throat. “Well, I guess it’s about time we jumped into this. Your letter was… confusing,” she began with a frown. “Is it Twilight that worries you? Or is it yourself that is the problem? I have my own thoughts, but… it’s important that I hear yours.”

“Twilight is not the problem,” Celestia said. “Except she is.”

“That’s clear as mud,” Philos said and then chuckled.

“I mean…” Celestia sighed. “It’s…”

“Confusing?” offered the colt who was still snuggled up to her.

“Yes,” Celestia said. “Yes, that.”

“Well… why aren’t you happy to have Twilight around?”

There was the question. The damnable question she could not answer without…

“It’s not that,” Celestia said. “It’s not that I don’t want her around. I love Twilight. I genuinely love her. She is a wonderful pony and my friend. I watched her grow into a fine young mare. I could not be prouder of her. Time and time again she has wrestled with her own faults, which is more than most ponies even attempt.”

“But…” continued the foal. Celestia frowned at him.

“But I worry. I’ve been worrying a thousand years. It’s a hard habit to break.”

“But you were alone then,” Cadance said. “You have your sister. You have me… and you have Twilight.”

“I could bring up lots of things, Cadance. I could talk about… her flaws. And it would hurt, but I could do it. I’m afraid to even speak of them because I don’t want you or my sister to misunderstand how I feel.” Celestia idly attempted to fix the colt’s mane and he squirmed. “But I’m no fool. The real problem is myself.”

“You tend to blame yourself when you shouldn’t,” Matron said.

“Far too often,” Agape agreed, and her voice rung in Celestia’s ears.

“Luna and I have an old game. Back and forth, a longstanding argument over what makes life as an ageless one worth it. The problem of dying and… not dying.”

Cadance pursed her lips. “I need more than that.”

“I know, I know.”

“But… may I ask you something?”

“Yes, and if it’s about Twilight, the answer is yes.”

“I thought so,” Cadance said, and then tensed. “Is… that makes this more confusing, though. Shouldn’t you be happy? You’ll never… lose her.”

Celestia winced. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so flippant.”

“When Shiny lives on, I’ll always have him,” Cadance said softly. “But you will always have her, I think, and in a way more tangible. Do you worry she will reject you after this? Or perhaps that she will think you were behind it all in order to…” She sighed. “Maneuver her into being your consort or something?”

Celestia gave her a wan smile. “Well, no, I hadn’t been quite as worried about that until just this moment.”

“Sorry,” Cadance said with a sheepish smile.

“I have had lovers who were former students before,” Celestia began. “Several, spaced over the centuries. I obviously waited for them to not be students, but it has not been the end of the world. And I loved them all, and remember them all today. They kept me grounded. They kept me… sane, I think. Their lives were so short, so fleeting, and I could love them despite the difference between us because death made them so urgent for love.”

“You think love requires death?” asked Cadance.

“I thought so.”

“That’s a bit bleak, Auntie.”

“More than a bit bleak,” Agape said. “It’s positively dark. I am not sure I can agree with that, Celestia.”

“Luna doesn’t either.” Celestia looked down at the colt. She loved children. She always had. Perhaps the dreams of others accommodated her? Unlikely. “And I know it’s bleak. But… but to me it made my short and frenetic time with them all the more meaningful. I had thought of Twilight perhaps joining them one day. I saw signs. The way she looked at me, the way she talked to me and what she didn’t say… I confess I was looking forward to seeing her first stumbling attempts at courtship. I was eager to see what a mortal pony would do for the first time in a decade. And then…”

“And then?”

“Luna was returned to me. Twilight Sparkle delivered her. The world became a much stranger place. Discord returned--and now he stays. I… I think I rushed into this,” Celestia said, feeling inordinately stupid for perhaps the first time in centuries. “I think she rushed into this, as well, but I should have known better than to dangle secrets in front of Twilight Sparkle and expect her to be calm.”

Cadance giggled. “She is a bit overeager, yes. She was that way as a filly, too.”

Celestia smiled, and then looked around at all of the Cadances. “Perhaps I should start from the beginning.”

Author's Note

It's Sartre again but no one cares

I don't even care

At least he wasn't a nazi like Heidegger

V. I played Dice with the Universe

Celestia's Oration, given in halting softness in the Court of Love:

I am not in love with Twilight Sparkle--but I am excited about the potential for it. When you linger on through the centuries, you too will begin to see life less and less from the ground level. When I’ve tried to explain this to my little ponies, they inevitably worry that I see them less as ponies and more as some sort of experiment or toy, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Mothers have understood me the best--the joy they have regarding the possible future of their foals is the closest to what I feel.

I am not in love with Twilight Sparkle, but I had considered it a possibility. I was fond of her. When I first met her, I knew almost immediately that with effort and luck she had the potential to be the first archmage in a century. I was delighted, and then I discovered that she was an excitable, happy foal who loved learning--so unlike her surly predecessor!--and who smiled so brightly.

It was during her time as my student that I saw three things which worried me and one which left me curious. She kept her energy but lost some of her warmth. She was prone to anxiety and worry to an unusual degree. And, most worryingly, she idolized me. The last stung a bit, in the long run, but I soldiered on.

And I noticed also that she had begun to look at me in a different way. Young Twilight had a crush.

To be honest, I was relieved. That fillyhood crush was what kept her from becoming an automaton. We were very casually affectionate, even if Twilight was always nervous in her eagerness to appear like what she expected me to demand. I made sure she felt appreciated and loved outside of the walls of her family, and her crush faded a bit as crushes do.

Whether it was arrogant or not, I thought that we would cross paths on the roads of love when she had grown out of my tutelage. And then I realized that she was not simply archmage material. She was the first and final candidate. She was the one to whom apotheosis could be given after a thousand years of waiting. I was ecstatic.

I was foolish in my excitement.

At last I sent her the incomplete spell, Starswirl’s great final fugue. At last, she won her own glory from the universe itself.

My aspects worry over the making of a potential new near-immortal for practical reasons. But I myself worry for wholly personal ones. I do worry she will be unhappy, specifically with me. Whatever form her Inner Court will take, I fret over how she will handle living severally, always and ever accompanied.

But mostly? Mostly I’m afraid of having a friend forever. Or a lover.

My entire life, I have outlived every friend and lover. I have become accustomed to being alone even when I am not alone. As cruel as it has sounded to many along the long march of years, I have become accustomed to letting to, an expert on grieving on the go. Their quick lives helped me to feel that I myself was living, caught up in their change. I could love because their mortal urgency was fertile ground for it. Without some sort of ending, without a view of death, what was to push a pony towards the enormity of intimacy? Time? Casually drifting into one another?

In the context of a lifetime--what we have is not a lifetime--I could make sense of love. I could make sense of companionship. But the difficulties of keeping a friendship strong and alive for forty years pale in comparison to the idea of being followed for all of time by somepony else.

A lifetime of seventy or eighty years and you’ll not exhaust a pony’s self, but you will exhaust what it is you can find through the walls of their spirit. When that is done? What comes after? What do you… do? What do you talk about? Luna and I are different. The relationship is a priori.

Where once I fondly and idly wondered that Twilight and I might have a rendezvous before some disputed barricade of love now I fear it. I worry if we are even simply friends in the hereafter! Does time spoil that? I don’t know! I’ve never…

I’ve never had a friend who could keep up with me. That sounds so awful. I’ve never had a friend who was an equal on her own four legs, and not because I took off my crown to stand beside her. Does that make me petty? Does it make me arrogant?

Does it make me lonely?

I was so caught up in possibilities that seem so dim and distant now. Of association that went on forever--that is what I dreamed of, and that is what I wanted. To have Twilight forever, if she would have me, in one way or another. We would fly together with Luna and yourself, Cadance, inwards and upwards forever. I thought it would be perfect. So I acted. I sent her the spell. I didn’t even write a more thorough warning with it. I just… I just acted, like a lovesick filly eager to picked up for a date. And now all I can think about is the fallout. What happens if we separate? If it doesn’t work? A heated word or three and I will suffer for a few years, but with Twilight I will suffer and pine for centuries. Will we become so tied together that we become entirely different?

Some ponies think that I am a master chess player, and they are right. I am fantastic at chess. Their mistake is thinking that my skill extends to the real world. In some ways, it does. Live long enough and you’ll see most everything at least once. You can predict the future with just enough accuracy to appear all-knowing and all-wise, and even if you wished to, nothing will dissuade your little ponies from believing this. But you won’t want to dissuade them. Why would you? It’s useful, and it helps them feel safer.

The truth is that I’ve always played dice with the universe.

Every elaborate plan, every trap for pony and beast, ever carefully controlled conversation… no chess. Only dice. They roll in my head day in and day out. Like any gambler I am playing against the fabric of creation as much as I am the mare across the way. I can look into a pony’s eyes and see more of their soul than their spouses can see in a decade, and yet I can still be fooled. Other minds do not work like we expect. No pony is predictable in the way we think.

I rolled the dice and they came up apotheosis. I have what I wanted. Twilight is delighted with her newly earned duties and eager to fulfill a new mission. I rolled the dice and they came up redemption and Luna was given to me. Now I roll the dice and wait. If she is not ageless, as seems more and more unlikely, then the way I have lived will continue, more or less. If she is… if she is than my dice come up snake eyes and I shall have to find a new way to live, because I do not think I could ever ignore her, student or lover or friend, and she will never, ever leave.

Author's Note

thanks, Eisenstein

VI. We the Fatherless, Lords in High Towers

Celestia walked in the gardens. The sun still hung in the sky, but in the back of her head she heard it like she did every day, saying--I am going, I am going--and without much effort on her part she kept it slowly falling in the sky.

In truth, the sun moved on its own. But the pace crawled, and ponies were not made for days that lasted weeks. Celestia rode the sun, and it rode her. She was the regulator of its light and heat, and in return it was the prod that kept her moving through an endless life.

Near endless, anyhow.

Luna was not with her. Cadance would be arriving in a few hours, if all went well, and then they would all have dinner together. It would be nice to have the family all in one place, as it were. Except for Twilight.

She cringed.

It had occurred to her when she had woken up this morning that after all of her tossing and turning, all her angst and waffling, that if Twilight somehow turned out to not be ageless… she had no idea what that would mean.

Which, of course, was par for the course. Questions of meaning concerning Twilight had become murkier than they had once been. More difficult to answer. Impossible, more like.

She thought, and decided that it didn’t matter in some ways. Twilight would be one of them, even if she aged and died a normal, mortal death. She would eat with her fellow princesses and share in their sorrows. Twilight would be privy to all they were privy to.

Because she was an alicorn, even if then there would be alicorns and alicorns, and Celestia could not bear to thrust her back below when she had breached and found sunlight and air.

It had been a long time since Celestia had really dwelled on a pony’s mortality before. Of course, she was always aware of it--old and young, they all passed--but she rarely dwelled upon the differences. Why should she? There was nothing she could do, and it only served to hurt her and drive them away. She had so little time to touch their lives, and the urgency of their going drove out her worry. She enjoyed ponies as they arrived, and as they passed before her.

Like she enjoyed the gardens, strolling through, as things came into view and then passed. It was worth noting that most of her thoughts on mortality over the centuries had taken place in these gardens, or in gardens like them. She wasn’t sure if it was just that gardens were picturesque and inviting in a contemplative way, or if she just associated them with death for some reason. Celestia hoped the former. Associating gardens with death was odd, even for her.

Her day had proceeded with an almost obscene normality. Rising early to corall the sun onto its proper course, breakfast with a sleepy Luna, and then the normal activities of court. Court was… well, enjoyable, though she was loathe to admit it. Celestia liked the satisfied feeling of getting something done, even if it was only a small something. She genuinely loved the morning meetings with her seneschal to discuss the day’s docket, watching him go on and on as she sipped at her tea. She heard it all, of course. Or, rather, Dawn heard it all and catalogued every bit of it.

Court was Court--the Outer Court, as she and Luna referred to it with a knowing smile. Petitioners made up her morning, and then the assembly before and after lunch, and then tea with the Royal Archivist. Celestia was sad to see Vellum go, but he was getting too old to do his duties and he’d made his decision. Still, she treasured the time they had to chat.

Perhaps that had been what had prompted her morbid thoughts. She had grown used to the signs of mortal decay--he had ten years left, she guessed. Perhaps twelve. No fewer than eight. Regardless, in a proverbial blink, he would be gone.

She made a sharp turn and listened to the sound of her own hoof falls.

She felt a tingling at the base of her skull, and then heard a voice in her ear like a whisper. Sister, I have some time before my work begins. Wouldst my company be of any use?

I would love to spend a few quiet moments together, Celestia sent back after recovering from her short, initial shock. The old lines of communication were not totally foreign to her, but she had not spoken directly to another’s mind in… oh, before Luna, it had been almost a century.

Celestia waited silently, admiring the only thing nearby that seemed to hold her eye. It was a statue of… who, again?

Before she could ponder the little burst of shame in her belly, Luna had arrived on tenebrous wings. She smiled, and they shared an embrace and a quick nuzzle before Celestia gestured down the path.

They did not need to talk. They would talk, obviously, but in a very real way it was not strictly necessary. “Did you sleep well, Luna?” Celestia asked, first to break the silence underneath the ambient afternoon.

“As much can be expected,” Luna replied, shaking her head. “Even after so many years, you still do not quite understand.” She softened the words with a smile. “But that’s alright. It is… different.”

“I recall that you used to do battle in the aether,” Celestia said with a hum. “At least a few times you barged into my dream to rest after some strenuous battle. Dusk loved when you did that. Noon was furious.”

“And Boringlestia was boring.”

“I am rather boring, aren’t I? I was just noticing that the other day.”

Luna’s eyes slid over to her for a brief second. “If you meant that, I might be concerned that my teasing had gone too far,” she replied lightly. “Dawn is boring, but Dusk is nice. They balance out. Noonday is a bitch, so you’re more--”

Celestia snorted. “Thank you, Luna, you always know how to lighten my mood.”

“You seemed to be in good spirits without me.”

Celestia blinked. “You know, I am. How odd.”

“It’s almost as if the world will not end with one purple alicorn,” Luna said.

“Almost. She’ll be here soon. Cadance will be here sooner. I was thinking about having dinner together, actually. It’s a bit like having the family together again.”

It was Luna’s turn to snort with amusement. “She’s your niece, not mine! Learning one another has truly been a delight, even if our first steps were unsure. ‘Tis why I am not as worried as you, dear sister, about the potential of yon Twilight. She would also be a delight to teach the dance.”

Celestia saw herself, suddenly, sitting with Twilight in the Solarium. How many lessons had they taken there, or mornings spent in comfortable silence with books laid out before them? But Twilight was no longer a foal but grown and come into her own, an alicorn in the company of alicorns. And there was Cadance, beside her, writing--there was Luna, yawning, her face settling into a smile…

“Yes, it would be a dance,” Celestia said distantly.

“How was the Court of Love?” Luna asked. “I was near to fainting this bright morn, and hesitated to ask, ‘lest you escape me when I dropped my face into my plate to snore.”

Celestia snickered. “Oh, Luna, I would have have been able to tuck you in again.”

“You never did that.”

“Oh, I did a few times.”

“Ugh.”

Celestia giggled. She couldn’t help it--the laughter simply flowed out of her. Despite everything, it had been a satisfying day, and she was in good spirits. Perhaps this too was her panic, like the warmth before hypothermia finishes its work.

Or maybe it had just been a good day, and she had begun to make peace with herself.

Probably not. The sisters walked on.

“You know, Cadance mentioned you had restored her old dreaming to her,” Celestia said with practiced casual air.

Luna’s ears twitched. “She did. I confess that I was so… unsure of her, then. A part of me felt as if I had been replaced. Yet even when I realized that your heart still held room for me, there was suddenly a pony who claimed kinship with me whom I knew not. I was cast into a lingering dismay. When she inquired after my work in the Aether, I realized that I had wronged her.”

“It was good that you realized that early,” Celestia said. “She is a wonderful mare.”

“And I am proud to call her niece. Though I do wonder--will she always call us thus?”

“What else would she call us?”

“I had thought… with time…” Luna’s ears folded back. “Perhaps was foolish of me, but I had a passing fancy she might one day call us sister. ‘Twould be a new thing to be a big sister.”

Celestia blinked. She smiled.

She moved closer and hugged Luna fiercely. “You’ll make me feel old,” she said with a high whine that dissolved into laughter. “I have thought of that too, truth be told. With time, perhaps.”

“Learn anything else in the Court of Love?” Luna asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, this and that,” Celestia shot back, but the smirk with which she answered failed. “I left with much to think about, and a few firm words from my niece regarding being honest with myself. I was… I was actually wanting to speak with you before dinner, regarding a small favor.”

“For thee, half our principality,” Luna said.

“I was wondering if you might return my… my old normal dreams to me.”

Luna watched her. She held up a hoof and they stopped in the hedge garden.

“I am overjoyed,” Luna began slowly. “I cannot hope to express the joy that wells within me at these words… but of what sort? I could give you natural dreams, like Cadance. I could strive to deliver to you only pleasant dreams... “

Celestia watched her sister piece together her own words with curiosity. Watching ponies think had become a past time for her.

“You aren’t trying to escape your Court for too long, are you?” Luna asked at last. “That can be dangerous.”

“No. No, I know must go back to be at peace. But sometimes... “ Celestia shrugged.

Luna hugged her. “Consider it done. I shall deliver to you the dreams you have deserved and been without.”

Dinner was a small affair, but it was large in her heart.

It was just the three of them--Cadance, Luna, and herself. The royal dining chamber went unused, and they had instead retired to Celestia’s personal quarters to eat on her impressive balcony. There was no talk of the oncoming, looming day. There was talk of Twilight, but never once did they lapse into an uncomfortable, worried silence.

Celestia recognized the mood, of course. She had led the armies of a nascent empire into the fires of war many times when the world was younger. Before that, she had traveled the world with Luna as vagrant adventurers, singing before their little campfire and braving a bright new world.

So she knew what it felt like to be on the eve of battle and be glad. Some ponies had prepared by grooming each other, others by eating large meals. Some by naps. Alicorns prepared with a bottle of sweet red wine shared among family, apparently.

Celestia had found that, blessedly, alcohol still had its way with the alicorn’s physiology. Sure, she needed much more of the stuff to achieve the same effect--but that was from simple body mass. No, an Alicorn could certainly be drunk.

She was mildly drunk.

But in a fun way, and not in a terrible way. She was very certain of this. She was just so… so happy. Her niece and her sister in one place, here together, and all of her worries banished for a little while. Dusk was cooing in her ear that she could just hug them forever. Noon was disgusted. Dawn admitted that it was pleasant but worried any time she was not completely and utterly in control.

And Celestia? Celestia thought less and less that she was in control of anything in the way Dawn demanded.

The three alicorns giggled over some inane bit of palace gossip that was forgotten almost as soon as it had been presented. But it was memories of Twilight that had brought the greatest laughs. Twilight had come up naturally, and somehow they had talked of her without a drop of angst. It was hard to angst when Cadance was describing in detail every embarrassing thing a young Twilight had ever done.

“Oh, I should tell you about Lulu when we were in Caliborn,” Celestia said breathlessly, only to find herself shushed.

“Sister,” Luna hissed, “thou made to us an oath most solemn regarding the harrowing events of that day!”

“Oh, Auntie, now I have to know.”

“No, you pink devils are all against me. Young niece, why wouldst thee turn against your beloved Luna, when my sister sits as such a target for your arrows?” Luna waved an unstable leg at her. “Shouldn’t you check for chinks in the armor of her love?”

Cadance had an instant reaction. Her head snapped back around to find Celestia. Her whole body tensed, as if waiting for her aunt to explode in fury.

Celestia’s Court was torn. Noonday was furious--how dare the traitor speak of her private affairs! The Dawn was embarrassed. The Dusk was always up for chatting about Twilight. And Celestia herself? Celestia snorted with laughter.

If anyone could drag her feelings into the open, certainly Luna had the right. Not that she would let her little sister off easy after this, oh no. She would make the most of tonight, and let the coming day be damned.

Cadance had taken to Celestia’s lessons on reading ponies almost frighteningly well. She understood immediately. No, more than that, she stood up on only slightly wobbly legs and put her hooves together. She tried her best impression of a much younger Twilight’s best manipulatively importunate face and donned her former favorite filly’s persona. “Oh, princess!” she said.

And of course Celestia could almost imagine it. She giggled.

Luna drained her glass. It had not been on its last legs. “Mayhaps the maiden will come traipsing to your room, sister, hoping that you might teach her the ways of alicorns.”

“Oh, goodness, if only she’d been here when she needed to learn how to preen!”

Celestia felt her face flush--was that the alcohol?--and thought about it. “I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t have made a move,” she said, shaking her head. “Twilight should be approached with words. She likes words.”

“Ugh, she used to read under her covers until four in the morning,” Cadance groused.

“Oh, I like that idea. Night time is good for reading with candles,” Luna said and then giggled.

“But what would you have said, hm?” Cadance leaned in again. She did the Twilight impression. “Princess… what is being an alicorn like?”

Celestia wanted to laugh but Cadance had stepped right off the cliff. She had thought of this before. She smiled, stood, and made a sweeping gesture. “You would mock me, Cadance of Cloudsdale, but I tell you the truth: you have stumbled upon the most sacred of symposiums, and you will have a speech worthy of them!”

Luna sat up straighter. “Oh, are we to the speeches now? Bravo!”

Celestia cleared her throat, and then she began.

Author's Note

For she sees that even wise mares die...

But a mare in her pomp will not endure;
She is like the beasts that perish.

VII. The Weight of Glory: The Boast of Celestia

Celestia, standing proud and trembling, the wine working its work as she will soon work her own. The moon is high in the sky, the stars are beautiful, and this is a true symposium. Luna loved the wild and beautiful clashing of brilliant and violent minds among the savage warrior poets of the ancient pegasi, and it was she who maneuvered the little family thusly.

Every symposium began--traditionally--with a raid of some sort. The food must be acquired, not merely bought. Then comes the eating, then the drinking and eating, and then the speeches. They skipped the final carnal acts these days, usually, outside of comfortable company. Luna was sore on that point, but it was for the best.

And what speeches. Be not fooled--they were boasts. The long lists of pride in the mouths of the hotblooded knights of the air, that they had done such and fought such, that they were strong on the wing and that their legs bore the weight of all time with gladness.

Attend to Celestia, who with as much gravitas as she can muster addresses the crowd that tries not to giggle. Luna finds wine somewhere in Celestia’s apartments and brings it forth to refill her own goblet and to quietly and lovingly bully a usually more moderate Cadance into continuing the joy of their sodden companionship. It’s a tradition, after all. Cadance of Cloudsdale finds that she can’t argue with that.

Twilight Sparkle, my dearest and most beloved of students, I have seen things you would not believe.

The great Solar fleet moored over Ghastly Gorge in the savage dawn! Grand battleships in their colorful displays, pennants streaming in a grateful wind… I’ve seen the greatest sunrise of all of recorded history, and the glory of those before ever a unicorn lifted a quill to write down his pedestrian day for posterity. I have seen every sunrise for thousands of years, and can recall them all for you--were I gifted as my sister, could paint them from memory and you would weep at their glory!

Twilight Sparkle, most beloved student and friend, I have seen things stranger still.

I have seen the edges of the maps. I have, myself, expanded those edges. I walked in strange vales which see no sunlight, and in blasted heaths which know no moon. Thousands of years leaves one with more time than mortal minds can ken, and in that time I have walked all the measures of all musics, and heard the song whistle in the tall grass in the western steppes. I stood before the walls of morning and have paid respects to the tragedy of the walls of night.

Have you even in your dreams seen the Far Shore, at the end of the Earth? Have you set out across it, till the waves became the shining numinous Field of Arbol? For I and my sister have, and one day Cadance shall. And one day you shall. You ask me what it means to be what I and my sister are, and I tell you that it means to see those things which normal ponies can not comprehend and to know your place among them--small, yes, but to know all of the measures of the music.

Oh, and what songs you will hear, in the blind infinities. And what songs you will hear, years and years to come, here on earth!

I have walked the nine paths of Malhuer and sang all fourteen verses of the Lay of Bell-Toris before the crag where he supposedly first composed them as he hid. Two thousand years of wandering and I have trod upon every single inch of the world and found it always new and always fresh.

Joy wants eternity, Twilight Sparkle, most beautiful of my students!

To be an alicorn is to know this. You live for the endless lack of repition. And let me be clear, I have found no repetition! Nothing is the same, whatever they say! It all spirals, it all flows! Nothing remains constant. Perhaps not even I do.

I have read every book you hold dear, Twilight, because I had the Time. I have spoken to every single noteworthy individual of the last millennium, because Time could find no holds for its claws in me. For every friend, for every joy that time has torn from me, I have found a dozen more. For every great loss I have suffered, I have overcome because Time could not keep me from it.

And the greatest secret is that I have done only what you will do, and what my little ponies do every day.

But I? I have done it so long that to me Time has become less of the villain in the shadows and something of a friendly enemy. I have met it, and it is mine. It’s assaults have backfired. Every attack upon my person I have learned to transmute into further glory.

That is but a taste of what it means to be an alicorn, Twilight. You shall continue, and death and darkness and all things bent from the truth shall learn also to fear you, even come late as you are.

Author's Note

In his book In Parenthesis, David Jones has Greatcoat Dai, that doomed Welsh soldier of the Empire, give a speech. It is an obvious and almost hamfisted echo of the great boasts of Celtic legend, but it becomes something more. The first time I read it I had to go back and read it three more times because what started as merely bluster becomes transmuted into a stunning boast of all mankind against all other breaking. It is Christ and Cuchulain together in a bloody melange before Dai himself joins the ranks of Humanity's dead in the forests of World War I.

It was a good book.

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”

That's from C. S. Lewis' "The Weight of Glory" which was delivered in the Oxford University Church one June night in 1941. It's probably the heart of the whole damn thing for me. I should read it again some time.

VIII. The Last Enemy That Shall Be Defeated: Luna's Boast

Cadance clapped happily, down another glass and a half of sweet red. Her face was flushed with life, her eyes neither dim nor alert, her smile wide as could be without a shadow about it.

“Bravo!” she said, and laughed when Celestia bowed. Quickly, she tried and failed to assume her Twilight impression. “Oh wow, Princess!”

Celestia snickered, and then sat back down with a content sigh. “Oh, it’s horrible, but surely there’s no malice and ribbing a mare we all love.”

“Some of us more than others,” Cadance said lightly.

“Hark! The young pink scoundrel wishes accuses one of us, Tia! Needs be we must all prove our devotion to the youngest of our sisters.” Luna had partaken in far too much alcohol, but that was normal. Celestia wasn’t sure if the fact that this was a rather mild bender should concern her or not. She would think about it in the morning. At least it didn’t get in the way of her duties.

One of the benefits of unicorn magic was the ability to zap away intoxication. Thank the ever-shining stars for Starswirl, she thought. He had gotten a lot of use out of that spell, and so had she. Clover hadn’t. She hadn’t approved of carousing, or of most anything that she couldn’t confine to lists. She had been a lot like Twilight Sparkle, actually, if Twilight had been severe and a bit less forgiving. Regardless, Luna would be fine for when the sun and moon needed to trade places.

“And how, Lulu, do you propose we prove to said wastrel that we are so devoted?” Celestia asked, resting her head on a single hoof. Her own goblet, which had been used rather gracelessly as a prop in her grand boast, was quite empty. She wondered if she should fill it.

Luna filled it because she was herself, and while much had changed, that had not. There was a reason one of the oldest ordinances of Cloudsdale was that Luna was no longer allowed to be the Symposiarch of any gathering within the city limits. Idly, she wondered if anypony even knew that anymore.

“You always forgot to add water,” Celestia murmured as she looked into the goblet Luna had pulled up from her ancient treasure vaults. “Always.”

“Ugh,” Luna responded with what was obviously a very graceful and regal tone. “I blame the unicorns for that ridiculous tradition. Just because they could not hold their spirits--”

“Wine isn’t a spirit,” Cadance said, giggling.

“Regardless!”

“Yes, yes, I’ve literally heard this one a thousand times, Lulu,” Celestia said with a smile.

“Bah, old mare. It is my turn!”

Cadance sat up straighter. “Wait, so we all have to do one?”

Both sisters looked to each other and shared what could only be described as a predatory smile.

“Absolutely,” they said as one.

Luna stands, and demands attention:

Twilight of Ponyville, I will echo my most excellent and most boring sibling: I have seen things you would not believe.

If she can boast of the triumph of long life and its sundry glories, then I must craft for you--far off in in your newfound citadel--an image of that which she leaves out. If the sun knows victory and shies from darkness I cannot blame it. But the night has glories also, and in that darkness into which you must also peer there are things of worth.

I have seen the fields of a thousand battles, and heard the shrill horn cries of marching millions. I was there when the city of Mylae was burned in the night, fighting in the streets. I have felt the blood in my ageless, enduring body sing such a song that would chill your own blood, that would strike fear in the heart of my sister’s most iron-wrought warriors in this peaceful age.

I have traversed the lonely dark places where no pony has trod but myself. I alone know what it is to be so utterly alone that the mind unravels itself in madness, and have seen the light beyond madness.

The tragedy of the walls of night? Aye, but what beauty is there in that tragedy? Plenty. If my sister spoke to you the glory of her building, then I will boast in the failing of things and the glory therein!

You have danced and sang and loved immortals already. You have been fooled by time and space, and have judged them and yourself by the outer wrappings. But soon, you will learn the truth: that all of our little ponies share in our fate. In their dying, you will find yourself bereft. But in their dying they will pass through the serpentine twists of death into a place we cannot yet follow, and they will have victory.

For in all breaking there is an inviolate sense of further triumph. That is the lesson I impart to you, Twilight of Ponyville.

For I have seen the cities that burned, and how those fires lapped like tongues at the works of honest pony hearts. I have seen the day after demolition, when the smoke lingers heavy in the air, and the faces of the damned--hollow, aye, and without the hope that was meant to be an unquenchable fire in their breasts! I myself have destroyed life with magic and with my hammer and with orders signed in my name.

The tragedy that I have seen is overcome. You will feel all things deeply, be a part of them intensely. No time will tear you from the horror of death and the folly of mares. No amount of living will ever dull the agony of despair in the hearts of your comrades and even of strangers. Their fear will scourge you and their jealousy will wound you--their neglect will drive you to the ends of the world and their love will keep you alive.

You will see lives fail. You will feel the hearts around you break under the wheel of time. Helpless, you shall witness cities crumble and decay, and in time perhaps you too will stand upon a battlefield. Like I did at Maldon you will wail and lose dear ones--friends or lovers, parents, siblings, grandchildren--to the blades of vile ponies or even worse things. You will see the darkest corners of every sort of heart. Witness, now, what you think is evil and imagine what you will see in three centuries at least of the world’s moving. Twenty winters are you, but when you are forty the evil in the world doubles, and when you have seen three hundred it will mount until you will have seen everything that can be done, that can be ruined under the sun or the moon.

And then you shall see five hundred, and you will see things then that you would not believe.

My boast begins in that I have seen all and passed through, but my sermon begins with: you too shall overcome. You too shall see these things and unlike me, you shall not fall to the sickness that is unto death. The greatest enemy, the last enemy of our kind, is death itself. The illusion of non-existence.

What is it to be an alicorn? I boast alone in this: that even as generations were ground into dust, we have preserved them in our hearts for eternity, and beyond us they live yet still in the fabric of the universe. In our long living, we shall redeem them by loving life until everything is ash, or until we fall.

And you will be with us.

IX. But the Greatest of These is Love: Cadance's Counsel and Twilight's Thoughts

Cadance stood and cleared her throat. The sisters grinned and scooted closer together. They shared a short giggle while Cadance glared at them. If Luna was mostly immune to sisterly glares, both sisters together were absolutely untouchable to one’s coming from their niece.

Cadance snorted. “I don’t know… how you to manage to be so…” she waved her hoof. “Articulate.”

“Practice,” Celestia said.

“We’re simply better,” Luna offered helpfully.

“Old mares,” grumbled Cadance. She set the goblet down. “I guess it’s my turn.”

“Oh yes, tell us what you know of near-immortality,” said Luna with a grin. Celestia noticed, but did not mention, that she had shed her illusion. Her fangs were visible. Was she comfortable here, with Cadance seeing? Was it the effect of drink? She was sober enough to care but not enough to find out.

Cadance frowned, and hummed softly as she looked away. “Well… I suppose I would say this:

“Twilight, I don’t know much about being an alicorn. I only have a few years head start on it…

But what I do know about is love, so I suppose I should talk about that, right?

Don’t roll your eyes quite yet.

I think it’s important to talk about. Because, after all, it was in no small part thanks to the friendships you made along the way that you even became an alicorn in the first place! And that’s love, though I know you don’t call it that as much among yourselves. We use words like companion or friend, but don’t be fooled by language. Language is kinda dumb sometimes.

I don’t know a lot about living for a long time, and I’m only starting to figure out what being… what being what we are really means. But I can still tell you this: never, ever let go.

Don’t get so caught up in the day to day grind, paperwork and new responsibilities, that you forget what made you worthy of it all. Don’t lose sight of the friends you made along the way. Never, ever stop reaching out to touch the lives of others. You can’t be friends with the entire world, Twilight, but you can try. And beyond that?

Give love in all of its forms a chance, Twilight--or, really, I could say this to anyone. I have said it to many ponies! Love is… scary. Even when it’s just making a new friend. It’s exciting, but sometimes it is scary.

There’s lots to worry about. What if you say just the wrong thing? What if they look you up and down, and decide that you’re a fake? You’re a phony, not worth their time. What if they lead you on and use you to get something?

Love, in each and every form, is a risk. Just because you’re an alicorn now doesn’t mean that love has really changed. If anything, the risk is greater… but perhaps too the rewards are greater.

Yeah, live for long enough and you’ll know everything--you’ll see everything. All sorts of experiences. You’ll fight battles and win and lose and roll as many dice as you want or can. I can be a little flippant about that because I’m not entirely sober! Mostly? But also because I can’t comprehend that yet, and you can’t either.

But what you and I can comprehend, just maybe, is Love. Love is a well that never runs dry. It never fails. We do, sometimes, but it is never broken or used up. Where ponies fail, love endures like… like adamantine. No matter how smart you get, or how powerful you get, or even how old you get, if you lose track of love none of it will be worth anything.

Celestia smiled, but her heart twisted.

Luna, on the other hoof, seemed inordinately pleased. She stamped her hoof against the balcony. “Excellent! Bravo, and well said, Cadance.”

Cadance flushed and bowed. “I know it wasn’t quite as grand as yours, aunts.”

Luna shook her head. “Nonsense, ‘twas what it needed to be.”

They traded banter back and forth. Celestia was quiet, smiling faintly at Cadance before looking back over the gardens and the city beyond. Her thoughts flitted by like birds startled out of their nests. She imagined Twilight Sparkle, walking through those gardens below. She imagined herself, walking beside Twilight. Her royal regalia in the grass, her countenance bright, sharing some joke with Twilight, and delighting as her friend laughed.

Friend.

Her hazed and inebriated mind was free from the Inner Court at last. Dawn’s calculation, Noonday’s fearful anger, Dusk’s merry foolishness… they all fell away and left only Celestia, mere Celestia, simply herself. And in her fogged mind’s eye she saw not the teacher and the student but only herself and only Twilight, sharing the thousand thousand tiny moments that coalesced into eternity. What would it be like? What would those lips, moving now with wit and dripping with honey, taste like ages hence? What lights would dance in those eyes? Her lovers had been many, her friends without numbering. All of the ways that ponies could meet and look through the iron walls of the soul into another’s heart she had witnessed and experienced.

She was so tired. So very, very tired of so very many things. Only by chasing what the light showed her had she retained herself. Only by chasing with laughter and falling into love, one way or another.

Celestia bit her lip. For all that she had seen and overcome, she was not without her flaws. Somewhere, she had always known Cadance’s lesson. Her exhortations were, after all, more cleverly constructed than they appeared on the surface. She had mirrored some of Celestia’s own words over the years.

Patient. Kind. Keeping no record of wrongs and rejoicing in truth. She’d said love was all of those things, and Cadance had learned. It was a strange and altogether new experience to be taught the thing you yourself had taught.

And the princess that shepherded the sun took a shuddering, rattling breath. Had not love pushed her towards all of the things she had boasted of, love that never ended, for the world and those who lived in it? And now, when she felt the stirring of the world-love focus itself again in the person of a single pony, she had… what? Refused it? No, she had just sidestepped it. Averted her eyes and walked quickly by with a meandering whistled tune.

If she were honest with herself, Celestia felt a bit like a hypocrite. Just a bit. She’d been called out in love, yes, but it did not ease the sting. Her sister had prodded her, bothered her, cajoled her… but it was young Cadance who had called her to task.

She was being a coward.

Celestia sniffed, and saw still Twilight and herself in the gardens, lying in the soft grass. She felt somepony touch her, and startled. Luna was beside her, and Cadance came to block her vision.

“Au… Celestia?”

Cadance’s voice was uncertain, clouded by drink but still possessed of all of that mare’s natural kindness. Celestia wondered what was wrong with her eyes, that Cadance seemed to swim before her.

Luna’s embrace was fierce, as if she might banish her sister’s worries by force. “Tia, what is wrong? You… you left us for a moment.”

Celestia opened her mouth to speak, and found that she could not. How curious. What was happening to her?

“I’m so sorry… I went too far, didn’t I?” Cadance was fretting. Why? Her words had been lovely and true. “I shouldn’t push you too hard, I know… I know you have a lot on your mind… I didn’t think you would react this way.”

“Tia,” her sister said, picking up where the young alicorn fell to silence and worry, “what has happened? I do not remember you to be given to despondency when we shared wine together.”

Oh. She was crying. Celestia coughed, hiccuped, and then felt incredibly stupid. “I’m sorry, I… I get that way when I drink alone, actually,” she said, swerving to avoid the obvious as always. “I just… I got a bit too emotional, there.”

“Celestia… We really should talk about Twilight. And you.” Cadance sat in front of her unhappily, hesitating a moment before leaning into nuzzle her aunt. “You’ve been agonizing over this for weeks. Aunt Luna’s pestered you, and I’ve tried to give you advice…”

“We just wish you to be happy,” Luna said.

Celestia nodded. She felt weak. “I know. I know. I just… I’m sorry. It just hit me all of a sudden, I was thinking about how she will be here tomorrow and I’ll have to… to make sure, and then I don’t know what to do.”

“But you will,” Cadance said firmly. “I know you will, auntie. If not right now, then soon. You have…” Time went unspoken. “You’ll have her here to talk to. You always told me you believed in the power of--”

“Conversation,” choked Celestia.

“How boring of you,” Luna said in her ear, and Celestia tried to laugh but mostly coughed.

“I think I’ve loved her all along,” Celestia said. “I keep trying to find some way around it. I’ve been so detached and philosophical about the whole thing. I just… talked and talked and talked. I made it something to debate over in my Inner Court, for heaven’s sake, as if it weren’t a question of love or even about a real pony but just…”

Luna nuzzled her. “Come to my court, tonight. Will you, Tia? Do say yes. I would not hand you over to that vile panel.”

“I’ve been gone too long,” Celestia whined.

“You can afford another night,” Luan said firmly. “I would know.”

Twilight Sparkle, Princess newly-minted, could not sleep.

Her letter to Celestia had been so cheerful, and the response had been… well, no, to call it flat was so unfair. It had seemed a little rushed, and Twilight wondered briefly if she could prolong her stay a day or so and perhaps assist her former mentor with some of the burden of rule. True, she didn’t have anywhere near the authority to do much of anything Celestia did. But she could definitely do paperwork, and she could at least be moral support.

Yawning, she sat up in bed. Maybe somewhere along the way, she had learned how to fret and worry and overload on work from Celestia. Probably. It was pretty efficient in the short run, at least. Until she ran out of coffee and woke up after passing out on the stairs after a seventy-eight hour straight work period.

Spike was still sore about it.

All in all, she was happy and excited about her trip in the morning. It had been months since she had been able to go back to Canterlot. Two months. Well, forty-nine days. But it had been even longer since she stayed more than a single night.

She was happy. She just… was something else, too.

It felt like she saw less and less of Celestia these days. Since her coronation… no, it made sense. Twilight was a rational pony. She wasn’t coldly logical at every single point, no, but she did take solace in a bit of detachment. Celestia was running a country with a burgeoning economy and a changing culture. She had a lot on her plate. Those times when their paths had crossed, Twilight and her teacher had shared again the old warmth freely. Over and over, it had been a kind of miracle that no amount of separation had made frail that connection.

But the letters had slowed down. Partially, this was Twilight’s fault and she knew that on a purely intellectual level. But at the same time, the slowing of word had wounded her. She missed the warm feeling that made every letter from Celestia so utterly unique.

The last letter she’d received before this week, before the quick answer to her inquiries, had been two weeks before. Celestia had written her, offering thanks for helping look over a long proposal by some of the assembly ponies. She’d wanted another pair of eyes, and Twilight had felt so honored.

And there had been, of course, the second page. That most holy, wonderful second page. There was always that second missive, for a year now, where Celestia would write anew and simply be Mere Celestia, the regalia and the titles burned away like dross so that only the value shone beneath. Tales of minutia, of palace maids and her sister enjoying the jokester’s gambit. She had read that letter twenty-six times. The second missive before it had been a little shorter, and she’d read that one forty-six times.

There were so few of them. Far too few.

More and more Twilight began to wonder if she was in over her head. She thought this as she rose and left her room behind for the darkened halls of her high castle.

Tomorrow, she would be the subject of her teacher’s thaumic and scientific inquiry, and as much as she was painfully aware of the various ways that could be taken, she was excited. Paperwork and correspondence were one thing, but this was really and truly a chance to work side by side.

When she’d been younger, Twilight had spent a lot of time side by side with Celestia. When she had been working to master fine, precise telekinetics, Celestia had sat down beside her and leaned in. As the young Twilight had worked, Celestia’s smooth, warm voice had guided her. Encouraged her. When at last she had completed the exercise flawlessly, it had felt as if they had been victorious together.

She was older. Advanced alchemy, her worst subject and yet still she prospered. Celestia was on the other side of the workbench, not merely watching but contributing. Their voices were tight, muffled by masks, taking on the cadences of mares in the forges of their craft. There had been no conversation, no sharing of self, and yet in those moments as together they feverishly worked at the Four Transformations of Magnum Opus, guiding the solution through the four stages of his greatest and final work.

Twilight missed being a student, but she could take some solace in that the true mage, the true scientist, was a student forever and always of the world. What she really missed was Celestia.

Her hoofsteps echoed softly in the long, darkened corridors. Hallways were made for talking, she decided in that moment. Without words they were just far too empty. Not for the first time, she thought about hiring a real staff just to know there were living, thinking beings in the building beside herself and Glimmer and Spike. A high castle is a lonely one, that was Twilight’s verdict.

She could easily delay her return a few days. Celestia was certainly busy, but she always stopped her working by sundown this time of year, when spring was giving way to summer. Twilight would worm her way into whatever niche she could, help her friend, and then by that labor they would earn their evenings together.

The thought made her smile. She wondered if Celestia would be interested in walking in the gardens.

Author's Note

Wait long enough, live long enough
you'll be an imposter, a hypocrite
soon enough, you don't need a lifetime to be
vile, and you need only a few moments to be
the truest thing--a liar who lied
to themselves

X. A Game of Chess

Celestia was not panicking.

She was nervous, yes, but she was not panicking. If anything, she was handling the morning with amazing calm. And yes, it was a bit irregular to dismiss her seneschal, announce that court would be postponed for a brief respite, and leave her worried staff with cases to be handled on her behalf or shifted to the jurisdiction of the high court. Luna had covered for her, but sleep claimed even its own patron, and Cadance’s authority was limited.

It was also irregular to singlehoofedly grant a foreign ruler wide lattitude and then go into hiding in one’s own bedroom, but rule long enough and ponies tend to just go along with the flow of history.

But she was allowed some irregularities. Age. Time. A list of achievements longer than the great roles of genealogy the dragons kept furrowed away beneath the earth.

They did not buy her peace.

She sipped at her tea, waiting for lunch to be brought up. Twilight’s train had already arrived. She’d recieved a notice from a guard she’d positioned at the train station in New Canterlot ten minutes before and then waited long enough to brew a cup of tea before informing the kitchens that they should prepare lunch for two, brought to her quarters.

Cadance had offered to be there, but made herself clear: Celestia could not continue this way. Twilight was a wonderfully smart mare, and she would detect something wrong in her former teacher’s mannerisms in a heartbeat.

Also it was as close to a date as Celestia’s heart could take, and Cadance had been sure to say so. Her aunt’s mortified fury had been worth it, one hoped.

Celestia sighed. Her own worry was ridiculous. Twilight was a grown mare. She was mature, thoughtful, and intelligent. If anypony could come to terms with her own Inner Court and the prospect of such a long life, it would be Twilight. And if there was any mare who would be worth spending such a long time with, it would be her as well.

She could, of course, feel Twilight’s passive magic. She was close enough enough now, with the added strength of ascension making the task even easier. Somewhere below her hooves, heading up.

She thought about timing it so that she had a cup for Twilight at the most perfect moment, but didn’t.

In her head, her aspects warred. Dawn fretted, frayed and constructing arguments and plans. Noonday was wordless. Dusk pleaded with Celestia to talk to Twilight and not try to hide.

Twilight was down the hall now.

She swallowed. Perhaps she could put this behind her. Was now really the best time? Was it really proper to bring this up at such a tumlutuous--

Twilight knocked on her door. “Prin--” she burst into light giggles. “Sorry! I’m here, Celestia. Can I come in?”

Oh. Of course, she’d sent the guards down the hall. She swallowed again. “Yes, do come in. You’re right on time.”

She walked in. Celestia’s heart was in her throat, and it was ridiculous. Why should she feel this way? She had seen Twilight grow up. She had been her teacher, her mentor, her sovereign, her friend. Why should she now fear those hoofsteps or find a sweet anxiety in that smile? But she did.

*

Twilight bathed in the glow of the sun--or well, of Celestia, but same thing. Right? She thought so, and the idea made her want to laugh.

Celestia had tea on, of course she did. Tea had been a great solace to her over the years, and Twilight herself had found some solace in that fact. There was something steadying about it. Something that was eternal--there was always going to be Celestia and tea--but also not eternal, for it was consumed and then gone. The universal remained even as the contingent vanished.

Of course she approached her mentor as Celestia rose and greeted her now with a hug and a quick nuzzle to back up her words. Her heart burst with happiness. She felt younger, all of a sudden.

Celestia looked down at her, as if surprised. Twilight flushed. “Sorry, I’m just excited! I’ve been cooped up in my castle for far too long.”

Celestia smiled at her. “Very understandable. I confess that I too have been busy as of late. Lunch should arrive shortly. Would you care to sit with me until then?”

Twilight kept smiling. “Always.”

*

“So they’ve been exchanging letters,” Twilight said with a wide grin. “I didn’t catch on at first, but I really do thing he and Glimmer are, you know. ‘Talking’.”

“Talking? Well, yes, I suppose letters would--”

Twilight laughed. “Sorry, ‘talking’ as in easing into a relationship. It’s probably way too soon to know for sure. It’s only been a few months! But she’s almost as excited about those letters as I am for yours.”

Twilight continued, but Celestia lost track. She blinked, shocked. Had Twilight just... ? No, certainly not. Twilight was many things, but subtlety was not her game. If she had meant anything by that admission, had it been an admission at all, her attempts to cover it would have given her away.

“...anyhow,” Twilight said, finishing, “I’m excited to see Glimmer really reaching out to ponies again without trying to control them. She’s a little nervous about interacting with new ponies one on one, because who knows what they’ll do, right? But she’s getting there.” Twilight sighed happily. Lunch had been wonderful, but she always felt so lazy right after. Celestia remembered that clearly--ever since she’d been a filly, Twilight had struggled to stay awake right after lunch.

Twilight yawned, and Celestia suppressed her mirth.

“Some things never change,” she teased.

Twilight raised an eyebrow at her. “What?”

“When you were younger you used to nap after lunch. Every day, for years.”

“Not every day.”

“Every single day.” Celestia tapped her temple. “My memory is impeccable.”

Twilight chuckled. “Is it? You know, I have this memory of when I was a filly…”

“Is this about--”

“And there I was, bright and happy and ready to learn--”

“--oh, Twilight, you can’t hold this over my head forever--”

“--and I remembered you’d told me to wait for you in the solarium… so I waited there for like two hours…”

Celestia groaned. “I didn’t mean to,” she said, her voice petulant. “I ended up being waylaid by a party of assembly ponies and it was rather serious. I tried to get my guard to collect you…”

Twilight’s ears twitched. “You did?”

Celestia, flushed, nodded. “I asked one of my retinue to collect you and bring you to my study. I even told her to make sure you were well furnished with books and company! She was… new. Very new. It may have been her first day. She’d been briefed on you, of course, but she misunderstood.”

“Misunderstood?” Twilight frowned, her brow furrowing. “What do you… Oh. Oh, no, did she--?”

“Search high and low through the school? Yes. She was a little frayed and panicked by the time I caught up to her. Poor girl, she was terribly sorry. I didn’t have the heart to chastise her, really, and I made promise not to give her punishment detail.” Celestia hummed. “Actually, Aegis admitted that it was a lapse in his briefing of new guards. Do you remember Amethyst?”

Twilight’s face lit up. “My first minder!”

“Your… pardon?”

Twilight chuckled. “Minder. That’s what I called the guards that were with me. I mean, yeah, they kept their distance and they never were a bother, but I was always aware of them.”

“Ah,” said Celestia, who suddenly felt a little self-conscious about how easily she forgot the presence of guards nowadays. “Well, she was the one who couldn’t find you.”

Twilight blinked, and then suppressed another chuckle. “Oh, Amethyst… she was the first and the best. I think it was because she had a little sister only a few years older than I was that she was so fun. Whatever happened to her?”

Celestia sighed softly. “Her tour was up. Tea?” Twilight nodded, and Celestia sat still as her magic worked around them. “She did ask me to stay, you know. She wanted to stay with you. I was tempted… but I knew it would absolutely wreck her career. We had a long conversation, perhaps the first long conversation I have had with one of my guards in… oh, a long time.”

“Really? I feel kind of bad that I lost track of her.” Twilight pursed her lips. “I should write her or something, you think? Or has too much time passed. I didn’t know she was so attached to me. I guess I was a kid, after all.”

“Oh, she adored you,” Celestia all but sang. “Trust me. She made me promise to give her updates. She was the third recipient.”

“The… what?”

“Oh, of your reports! Luna is the second.”

“You sent her my reports?” Twilight blinked at her, bewildered. She then blinked at the tea that quite litterally magically found its way to the table before her. “Wait, how many ponies read those? I mean, I don’t mind that much, but now I’m curious.”

Celestia hummed, tapping her chin with a hoof thankfully free of her regalia. “Well… myself. Luna. Colonel Amethyst--oh, she’s a colonel now, by the way--and your mother.” She paused, and hummed. “Well, your father too, but usually I send it to her. Your father is a little disorganized, Twilight. Cadance… oh! And Discord has read at least a few.”

Twilight paled slightly. “Oh. Well… I probably would have, um… tried to be a bit more…”

“Articulate?”

“Something like that.”

“Luna is a big fan,” Celestia assured her, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “So is Discord, but don’t tease him about it. It’s a sore spot.”

“It would explain that snide comment about my hoofwriting. Er, hornwriting. Whatever.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence after that, tea and and the lightest breeze. Celestia was happily surprised at just how comfortable she was, actually. Considering how her morning had been spent. And the week before it. And also the state of her Inner Court.

The Court was, of course, never silent. While she was sober, at least, they were never silent. They quarrelled, as much with each other as with Celestia. That was to say, they attempted to quarrel with her, but Celestia did not join their fight. Noon could sarcastically bite heels. Dawn could nervously calculate outcomes. Dusk could whine and pout.

But Celestia was enjoying the company of her all-time favorite student, and the pony she found she most wanted to be with in that very moment.

*

Twilight was relaxed, and that was a strange thing.

Okay, she admitted it. She was high strung! But it wasn’t like she never relaxed. She knew how to take a “chill pill” as Rainbow so aptly put it. Twilight had enjoyed many long, relaxing nights curled in the most delectable of beanbag chairs. She was, in fact, a connoisseur of beanbag chairs. She had run through half a dozen while living in Ponyville. They were scientifically the greatest possible form of chair.

She would know. She’d tested it.

But the point was that relaxation wasn’t something she associated with visiting the palace since she’d left, or with serious thaumaturgic study. Those things she associated with focus. Frenetic energy and focus.

But all of her eager jumpiness was gone. She’d just had lunch and tea, and really there was nothing in Celestia’s manner to suggest anything other than that would ever happen.

For a split second, she had been disappointed. Hadn’t she come here to work, to study? And yet, as soon as that feeling had come it had passed. Because hadn’t she also just been lamenting the slowness of the written word? Wasn’t this like a dozen letters from Celestia?

“I’m surprised I haven’t seen Cadance or Luna. Well, maybe not Luna. She’s probably asleep,” Twilight said, smiling aimlessly. “Is she here yet?”

Celestia grumbled over the board. “She had… affairs to arrange this morning.” More grumbling. “I shouldn’t have taught you to play Go.”

“I would have learned regardless.”

“Yes, but with my tutelage, you have become a monster.” She looked up. Her eyes narrowed. “You play correspondance with Ironclad, don’t you?”

“The general?” Twilight managed to look shocked. “He must be far too busy to play games.”

“I recognize his tactics in you. He has corrupted you. Chess, I assume.”

“Yes, since I was a filly,” Twilight replied with a little smile that could only be called smug. “We wrap up a single game a month, now. I sent him a dragonfire talisman I made myself for his birthday after I moved to Ponyville.”

Celestia beamed at her for a moment, before looking grumpily at the board and placing a piece. “That was thoughtful of you, Twilight.”

“I also play with Rarity and Pinkie, of all ponies. Pinkie’s a grandmaster, did you know? I sure didn’t. She’s a nightmare to play.” Twilight made her move.

They’d played chess when she had been small. Well, checkers at first. Celestia had insisted for perhaps centuries that games of strategy were a healthy part of a young mage’s training. Twilight happened to agree. A much younger Twilight had mostly just enjoyed playing checkers.

“You know, I find that I am less surprised than you sound by that fact. Pinkie is a rather intelligent mare.” Celestia considered for a moment, and the silence lingered until she had placed another white stone. “Her mind simply moves in ways you don’t expect.”

Twilight could count on her hooves how many times she had beat Celestia at chess. So four times, basically. Spike was better with that metaphor. He could count to like, eight?

The fact that she suddenly couldn’t remember how many claws Spike had floored her long enough for Celestia to poke her. Specifically, Celestia poking her muzzle. Twilight blinked and looked at it, going crosseyed for a moment.

“You spaced out,” Celestia said flatly.

They stayed like that for another moment, and then almost simultaneously, they laughed. They kept laughing, until Twilight felt she couldn’t laugh anymore.

*

Cadance sighed as she read through another report.

It had probably been too much to hope for that this vacation would be, well, a vacation. Here she was, sorting through what Celestia needed to look at and what could be given to her anxious staff.

And they were anxious. Celestia had taken breaks before, of course. The longest had been a few months, decades ago. And at these times, she’d left the day to day mundanities of government to fine ponies, specially picked. She usually also left them with suitable warning of her leave.

So it was understandable that they had been anxious. Celestia had quietly complained that ponies seemed to fret like headless chickens whenever she so much as blinked a time too many, but the Princess of Love and Empress of the Free North saw things a bit differently.

She could feel these ponies’ love for their ruler. She wasn’t just the distant princess to them, whatever Celestia might think. Their fretting… yes, she conceded she could see why Celestia was frustrated with it, felt like it was a bit much for a mare who could take care of herself, thank you.

She spared them all a glance. The seneschal had taken over quite admirably, organizing the various pages and sending them scurrying to and fro from Celestia’s office to various assemblyponies.

That was a kind of love, she thought. Other ponies might use words like duty, and she supposed they weren’t wrong to use that word. They’d been concerned at first, but then determined. If Celestia felt like she needed to step away, they would make sure she had something to come back to. They didn’t feel abandoned. If anything, her absence seemed only to make them more determined.

Underneath her mild annoyance and her less-than-mild wariness, Cadance couldn’t help but be happy. Whether or not she knew it, Celestia was in good hooves with ponies who saw her, the Mere Celestia, underneath the regalia, and still loved her all the same.

Her thoughts, when she could spare them, turned ever to Twilight and to her aunt. She was worried, but not overly worried.

Love, like hope, springs eternal. Celestia had said that one day, almost out of the blue. She’d been younger. One thing Cadance shared with her former favorite filly was the Solarium, the glorified reading room where she’d spent some of her happiest and quietest moments.

She’d been working through the Symposium of System Builder, and finding it vile. She’d stopped, laid flat on her back, and groaned. Celestia had peeked over the edge of whatever voluminous mountain of boredom she’d been reading at the time with a single raised eyebrow. It was the Raised Eyebrow of Impending Explanation, and it demanded an answer.

She smiled, and remembered--

“He’s so dumb,” a younger Cadance groused at the ceiling, which of course could not answer her.

“System Builder? And what great insight led you to that?” asked Celestia, with a grin. She set her book down. Bad sign. Cadance would have to explain herself now.

“Love,” she said. “I mean, yeah, maybe it’s a bit too early to cash in my chips on that one but… love is definitely not a disease.”

Celestia only grinned wider. “Oh? And the grip of Eros does not seem a bit like a sickness to you?”

Cadance huffed. No, it still didn’t.

Oh, she understood the angle the old stallion had. Elevated heart rate, knots of worry, lack of focus. She got it. She did! But it had always felt like the whole line of argument had been nothing more than lonely old bachelors who had never felt love for anything but themselves to her.

Love was more than just getting a little hot and sweaty around a pretty pony. It was so much more. Love wasn’t just a point in time, like a spike on a seismograph, it was… it was something that lasted. It continued.

Maybe she was biased, but she didn’t share some of Celestia’s concerns. Yes, it would be hard if she were to court Twilight. It would be hard with anypony, as equals. Love was hard. Sky was blue, et cetra, et cetra, world without end.

In her moderately-expert opinion, Celestia’s fear was warranted but exaggerated, and she hoped fiercely that she would see that. Love, circumscribed by death? She didn’t believe that for a second. Love never failed, even when ponies did--if Celestia had forgotten it, Cadance sure as Tartarus hadn’t.

Author's Note

alt. title: Freedom's Possibility is to be Able

the funny thing is they aren't playing chess

XI. Instead of an Absolute Beginning, a Leap

Celestia greeted her niece warmly. She also did it with a sheepish smile.

“Thank you,” she said softly when a tired Cadance nuzzled her.

“Mrghgh,” responded Cadance with the totality of her royal eloquence.

It was a little after four in the afternoon. Twilight and Celestia had spent the day in the gardens and in the hallways and in the solarium, enjoying a rare chance to relax in each other’s company. Cadance had finished her ad-hoc duties by one, but then retired for a nap. Celestia wasn’t surprised, honestly. They all wanted to be rested for tonight.

Luna would be up shortly. Her sleeping schedule was strange. Most ponies slept and lived in long continuous blocks, but the Princess of the Night had taken to sleeping in small pockets of time. Celestia found it baffling, honestly, and Luna had only taken it up since her return. It was a silly experiment. She was sure her sister would return to normal eventually.

Yet, at the same time, it was nice to see Luna trying new things. It made her feel a little warmer, a little happier.

Twilight stepped forward, her wings fluttering slightly. “Cadance!”

Cadance, stepping back from Celestia, seemed to regain all of her expended energy in a heartbeat. With a huge smile, she giggled and hop-skipped forward. “Twilight!”

And then, of course, they did that ridiculous little ritual that Celestia found to be both endearing and faintly horrifying. She had no idea where or when that had come to be. Obviously, it had been a massive failure on her part to prevent the second youngest princess from infecting the seriousness of the youngest. She could see it now. In hundreds of years, when Celestia was senile and unable to rule, the ponies of Equestria would revolt under the utterly ludicrous regime of the Sunshine Ladybug Diarchs.

The saddest thing was that it would be only the third stupidest reason for the fall of a civilization she had witnessed.

Twilight and Cadance seemed happy enough, though.

“Now that I’m here, are we meeting Aunt Luna there or are we waking her up?” Cadance asked. “Because, if we’re waking her up, I’d like to be prepared in advance. She yells.”

“She yells?” Twilight asked.

“She yells.”

“She does tend to, ah, vocalize her displeasure at being awoken rather forcefully,” Celestia admitted.

“She also throws things.”

Twilight shook her head. “Now I know you’re lying. Lu-- Princess Luna wouldn’t throw things at you. I mean, that would be…”

“Barbaric? Violent?” Cadance supplied.

“Effective,” Celestia said. They both looked at her. She smiled. “She’s accurate, as well. Extremely so. Luna used to favor javelins, as I recall.” Celestia hummed, chasing the rabbit of memory down its winding burrow. “You know… I should really ask her if one of her old spear-throwers survived in the Sanctum. I forgot all about those--she might enjoy reviving the sport as a challenge.”

It took a few seconds for Twilight to finally respond. Celestia looked down to see those violet eyes boring into her own. “Sanctum? As in… preserved historical artifacts. From the past. As in, physical history.”

“Er… yes,” Celestia said, confused.

Twilight stopped walking. Her eyes were wide.

Celestia knew this look.

It was the worst possible look to see on the face of Twilight Sparkle. She had first seen that face when Twilight had been eight, the fateful day she had discovered that she could finally understand the thaumic phenomenology of a basic teleportation spell. Celestia hadn’t known the Look then. She had just accepted it as normal, mortal excitement--any studious foal eager to learn magic might have that look. But no, not Twilight Sparkle. This was The Look, the one categorized in with all of her other looks but distinct from them all, just like Celestia had organized her own plaster-like smiles in ranks of repressed fury or amusement.

“Twilight, I am not letting you rifle through my sister’s private possessions,” she said flatly. “No, not even for science and/or historical purposes.”

Twilight whimpered. “Can I ask her? Come on, all of that delicious knowledge…”

Cadance glanced between them. “She’s going to start drooling.”

Celestia rolled her eyes and they continued on with a mildly put-out Twilight Sparkle. “It’s not really that important, Twilight. Honest. I’m sure anything in there of worth to scholars, Luna would be happy to share with you. She is your friend after all. Most of the things in her Sanctum are private and personal.”

“I guess,” Twilight said. She sighed. “I mean, as exciting as the idea of uncovering a trove of ancient artifacts is… I guess I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of what it actually was. Just what it would mean to me, and not what it probably means to her. I mean, now it kind of feels like digging through the content’s of the dead mare’s pockets. Invasive.”

Celestia thought about the long gallery of pictures beneath the mountain, each painted by herself, as she learned over centuries to capture the likenesses, as she failed over and over. She thought about how she’d given up and had photos taken, how she would try over and over again to capture the thousand likenesses, knowing each copy was a diversion farther from the shore of the original.

“It could be,” she said stiffly. They walked in silence for a moment, and then Celestia spoke again. “To answer the earlier question… we are meeting Luna.”

“Oh,” Cadance said. Her tone was light. Celestia had taught her well.

Twilight’s cheer had returned. Celestia wasn’t sure how that made her feel. She had envied that oblivious, forward-looking part of Twilight since she’d first gotten to know her. Little Twilight had made her ignorance into a kind of strength, focusing her attention into white-hot pursuit of the narrow band of that which she did know. While her cohort had slowed down as they saw the world unfolding around them, adrift on the ocean of relationship and identity, Twilight had gone by like a pegasus on the hunt.

Not that her focus hadn’t been without its… problems.

There was a part of Celestia that almost missed Twilight’s question because it felt a bit resentful. It was Noonday, Celestia thought, but in fact it was not entirely Noonday. She had learned her lesson about blaming the Aspects for her own feelings a long, long time ago. Noonday did not move her emotions so much as reflect and second them.

“So… I forgot to ask earlier. Where are we going?”

Celestia looked down at Twilight again, and assumed Smile Nine--neither rage nor amusement but repressed thought. “An older chamber. You’ve not seen it. Nor heard of it, I suspect, unless somepony has learned how to circumvent wards that should be far beyond the skill of anypony I’ve heard of in, oh, a few centuries.” Her smile became more genuine. “Well, not counting yourself, Twilight. I think if you’d tried your hoof at it, the wards would have been your favorite challenge.”

“I doubt I could have broken them,” Twilight said, still smiling, still cheerful. “I mean, you were the one making them.”

“I think you certainly could have, given time,” Celestia replied softly. “Still may,” she said, only to herself.

It was odd where the mind wondered. Celestia found that she daydreamed often. Even before Luna’s exile left her bereft of that higher, more knowing companionship, she had daydreamed all the time. So it was no surprise when she could almost picture Twilight sitting at Celestia’s writing desk, hunched over a mountain of scrolls, filled with that mixture of frustration and joy which marked her every endeavour. Celestia herself on the other side, reading and sipping from a suspended cup of tea. Hours spent this way as Luna shepherded the warm night, in the sacred silence of their shared esteem.

She felt suddenly that talking would be better than thinking. “It’s a very old chamber. In fact, it’s only one part of an entire complex of rooms deep within the mountain’s heart. It has been a very long time since anypony but the three of us have entered. Well, Cadance, Luna, and myself. And with you, it shall be four. The last pony to enter any of that place and not be an alicorn was my husband, Prism.”

“How long ago was that?” Twilight asked.

“I’m surprised you don’t know of the top of your head.” She said it smiling, but Celestia caught what both no doubt assumed Twilight did not--she was just as nervous as Celestia.

The halls led them at last to a solitary door, unassuming and unguarded. Unassuming mostly in that it was absolutely unadorned, and if one were not paying attention, it could be missed entirely. The door itself was massive. Yet, it was almost seamless there as if the walls continued.

Celestia strode before it and placed her hoof upon the door. “It was over a century, Twilight. One hundred and fourteen years.” She let her hoof fall, and then touched the wards with her magic as gently as she could manage.

The door trembled and then vanished. While Twilight sat back, shocked, and Cadance hesitated, Celestia walked forward into the darkness beyond the false front.

“The day I first met you, I thought you might be like him,” she said, softly.

Celestia liked the sanctum, actually. Those few who knew of its existence generally assumed that she found the ancient chambers sad, or that they brought forth unpleasant memories. They misunderstood her solemnity for sorrow. It was, to be fair, an easy mistake to make. Most ponies read what was on the outside and thought they understood what bubbled beneath.

It was a mistake that Celestia was more than willing to forgive them for, and to be honest she found it refreshing. Ponies tended towards honesty, in her long experience. An open and straightforward race, willing to wear their hearts on their proverbial sleeves. Throughout the long ages, ponies had changed only a little in all of the ways that truly mattered.

But Celestia liked the sanctum. It wasn’t showy or adorned in the way that the chambers above were. No art hung from the walls and no music echoed here. It was an austere place, and she simply adjusted her own behavior accordingly.

As they walked deeper into the heart of the mountain, Celestia gently prodded the runic marks she knew by memory in the walls, and the darkness retreated bit by bit. “Luna likes it a bit darker than I do,” she said quietly for Twilight’s benefit. “This passage and the rooms at the other end are older than most all of Canterlot. We dug them with magic when the city was just a castle.”

“What was that like, auntie?” Cadance whispered.

“Canterlot, you mean?” Celestia kept her voice level. Some memories were useful. They centered the self in something unimportant to the moment. “It was the fort proper, a few artisans near the walls… some terraced farms. There was a village halfway around the mountain in the pass that is still there. Canterlot was not much of a city until around the time Luna and… well, until such a time as Everfree was lost.”

“I would have loved to see it,” Twilight said.

Celestia smiled. “I doubt it. If you had been with us at that time, in our shoes, I believe you would have wished to keep moving until we could have found a proper library or academy.”

“Even I like adventure from time to time.”

Celestia kept smiling.

“We shared these chambers, she and I, but in the beginning ‘twas mostly hers.” Celestia’s voice echoed in the hall, and she knew that Cadance felt what she felt--the looming. “A forge for her to work at her craft, in the safety of the mountain. We added room by room, some for her, some for myself, but most of them for the two of us to share. They became our sanctum. We were less used to rule, you see. We’d always been free to come and go as we pleased.”

“Never tied down, but never quite at home,” Cadance said.

“Yes. So to go from such a life of adventure and vagrancy to being rulers expected to rule was daunting. We would come here to get away from it for a time, here and there. I came less and less as I began to adjust to that life, as I began to enjoy it. Luna came more and more…”

“As she felt more isolated,” Twilight said. “She’s back now.”

Celestia wanted to smile, but found it harder to do so as they neared the antechamber. Butterflies in her stomach were the least of her problems. It was just like Twilight Sparkle to catch on only at the end, and then to make up for her slowness with feeling in her own singular way.

“Yes, she is, isn’t she? And I have you to thank.”

The antechamber had it’s own door, one smaller than that above. Celestia activated it in much the same way.

The chamber inside was sparse, but Luna had somehow managed to move a cloud down to rest on as she read in the surprisingly bright space. She looked up and greeted the newcomers with a sigh as she shut her book with slightly too much force.

“Thank you for arriving at long last, slugabeds,” she growled.

Celestia rolled her eyes. “Honestly, we’re on time.”

Luna blinked. “Bah. I’ve been waiting here for you, sister, and that is the only reckoning that counts. I did have time to catch up on yon Twilight’s suggested reading, at least.” There she broke eye contact with Celestia and smiled at Twilight. “I have certainly enjoyed Hoofstone’s book, Twilight.”

Twilight seemed to practically vibrate beside Celestia. “You have? Oh, that’s great! I was a bit concerned you would need more context, but if you’ve enjoyed him I suppose I shouldn’t have worried at all. You really have to write me when you finish!”

“Of course,” Luna said, walking towards them. “Art thou ready, sister mine?”

“As ever,” Celestia breathed.

*

Three alicorns with a single motion looked down towards Twilight. The shortest. The youngest. The newest. The unknown quantity.

She looked back and forth between them, suddenly a little nervous. “I have a feeling that there’s more here than I expected,” she said.

“A bit more, yes,” Cadance said.

“Well…” Twilight fidgeted. “I guess… I mean, I guess we should get started. I read up on the things you sent me, Pr--Celestia. Specifically the Ninth Permutation restructured as a ring. I’m kind of excited to see it, honestly. I worked it out, but…” The calm returned to her voice as she spoke, until even some of her eagerness returned. “I’d love to see how you do it. You used to tell me that all of the best spellcasters are a little idiosyncratic.”

Celestia cracked a smile at her. “I remember saying that. Remember quite a lot of things actually.”

“Well.” Cadance coughed.

“Well. Twilight, would you please stand in the center of the room? I’ll stand before you and I’ll draw the basic outline in a moment. Luna, you’ll see where to go after a moment. Cadance, I’m sure Twilight could show you--” she spared Twilight a grin, “but I’ll include a mark outside the matrix so you know where to stand.”

“I’m not that clueless,” Cadance grumbled.

“You’ve done rather well, it’s true,” Luna said as she moved.

Twilight removed herself to the center of the room and took a deep breath. She watched Luna go to her right, and Cadance meander towards her left. Celestia stood before her. Her face was set in a neutral mask, one that Twilight remembered well.

She saw Celestia then, in flashes of sudden memory, on the other side of that table long ago. Advanced Alchemy. The air humid with water, with sweat that soaked her mane and ran down her face and left salt deposits around her goggles until a shower banished them. The heat in the air as magical flames boiled. The Four Transformations of Magnum Opus, laid out before them, requiring the attention of even one as powerful as Celestia. Notes written in light and sound on four walls all around them, for reference and for assurance. Her nose tickling with the unforgettable odor of limes for reasons beyond ken.

And then she was back. Celestia was drawing the circle around her now, light glowing on the floor. Luna was already waiting, and Cadance shuffled into another position in the corner of her vision. It was harder to see their faces now, with the light from below.

Twilight took a deep breath and relaxed as much as she could. Being nervous--because she was very, very nervous all of a sudden--would only make the work that much harder.

“You seem a bit tense, Twilight,” Cadance said.

Her ear flicked towards the sound. “A little,” Twilight allowed. “Just… unfamiliar place and unknown variables, I guess. It’s not about all of you.”

“It’ll only take a few minutes. And we’ll have learned something new. I did this too, Twiley,” Cadance continued.

“I remember Celestia mentioning that.” Twilight’s breathing was normal. Her head was clear. “What first?”

“Ninth Permutation,” Celestia said with a clipped, focused tone. “Elaborate on it for me, Twilight.”

That wall it took. All of her earlier feeling fell away and Twilight stood straight as she began to recite by rote her old lesson.

“The Ninth Permutation of Starswirl is one of several arrangements of thaumic patterns, represented by Starswirl through numbers. Each of Star Swirl’s permutations was an arrangment of already recognized variables that had before him been catalogued and given runic designations. Most of the Permutations do nothing and are in fact generally fruitless. The Ninth is usually used to scan a pony’s innate thaumic signature to examine it with the naked eye.”

“Correct, as always,” murmured her former teacher. The light intensified and Twilight could no longer see anything of her companions. All around her was white and she shut her eyes.

She heard Celestia’s voice come in bits and pieces. She had never actually been underneath the Ninth herself--she’d only done it twice before, to other ponies. It wasn’t as if the process hurt or was dangerous in any way. Yet, suddenly, with her eyes screwed shut against the agonizing brightness, she felt sympathy for the looks of disorientation she’d seen on those two ponies back in school.

Her body tingled all over. It wasn’t noticeable at first, but the sensation grew and grew until it took all of her willpower not to fall over trying to scratch the itch away. Yet Twilight stood firmly.

She also stood alone in a white void. That had been one of the odd things about the Ninth, she remembered. Starswirl had discovered this combination of runic “building blocks” by random experimentation, going against the wisdom of the day. It was rough and confused and, to be honest, not the most efficient of spells. But so far nopony had ever improved upon it. There were ways to see the same things, but not in the same way. Not with the same clarity, or without piling up too much subjective interference.

What would they find? She could guess. The Ninth was generally used as a diagnostic tool outside of showing students in advanced courses how the old runic system had worked. You saw it in two cases, mostly: the terminally ill and the terminally criminal. Those with severest horn rot or magical corruption or exposure to enough unrestrained wild magic to have contracted full on thaumic poisoning, despite a unicorn’s natural resistance. Or, you know, unicorns who murdered ponies. That was about it.

As she was not a crazed murderer, that left really only one option. Twilight lost her calm very quickly.

The white void still surrounded her. The waves of sound would crash on her ears with snatches of conversation. Why hadn’t they told her something was wrong? Why hadn’t they let her have time to put her affairs in order? How could Celestia do to this to her, to Twilight? To the one who trusted her so much?

Her mind raced. The ascension must have gone wrong somehow. Somewhere along the way Twilight must have… have broken it. She’d failed her test, and Celestia had kept it secret until she could figure out how to undo the changes. All along, Twilight had been an imposter, half of what she appeared to be at best.

It was a testament to her time in Ponyville that she did not immediately spiral into nonsense. Doubt clawed at her, but she stayed standing and she stayed still. No, the princess would tell her. Celestia was… her friend.

What an odd thought.

Why should it be odd? And yet Twilight already knew the answer. Celestia and herself had never been equal, never been on the same level in any way. When Celestia bent down to come closer, Twilight somehow managed to enjoy that closeness even as she put herself down even further. Celestia was never herself. She was something beyond herself, always and forever. An unattainable perfection that sat upon the mountain in solitude in highest loneliness. She was a world itself entire. Twilight was lucky simply to exist in her presence. Twilight, who had made her whole life a desperate and joyful pursuit of the very heart of knowledge… had been let as close as she would ever get in life by the gatekeeper of it.

And yet, Twilight distinctly remembered being booped on the nose earlier in the day. She also remembered Celestia joking with the old captain of the guard. She remembered a time when she didn’t think of Celestia as anything but Teacher and Nice, when she had done her homework on the other end of Celestia’s desk in the evening. The sound of the Sun’s warm laughter at something or other in the pages of a novel. A playful suggestion that if she hurried she might have time to play in the statue garden before their lesson.

Twilight’s breathing was still ragged, but she was winning.

The light vanished, and Twilight felt a little dizzy as it went. Before her, she found a sight more bizarre than any other. Her nonsense and her anxiety and everything else fell away, because here in front of her was a sight that was unsettling enough.

Celestia with a blank stare and nothing to say.

Author's Note

I'm sorry this was later than intended.

XII. Existence Precedes Essence

Celestia let her magic fall, and she was in some way aware of standing with a dim look of shock on her face before a decidedly disheveled looking Twilight Sparkle. But her self, the part that was the Mere Celestia, had been blown off the face of Earth and was somewhere between the Field of Arbol and home.

She sat dumbstruck between the bickering, chattering, frantic Court of the Sun. Dusk held her tightly in a hug, torn between excited speculation in Celestia’s ear and shouting down a raving Noonday. On her other side, Dawn sat much like she did, glasses askew, short pink mane at odds and ends, eyes staring ahead and face slack.

“I really don’t know what to do,” Dawn said at last. She sounded… small. Very small. “I hadn’t really… I was too busy making…”

Noonday seemed further away now, like a gnat in Celestia’s ear. As she faded, Dusk gently tugged Dawn towards them both and sat between Celestia and the part of herself least ready for the intrusion of another mind.

“Wasn’t it beautiful?” she said softly.

“Yes,” Dawn said, breathless.

“Beyond words,” Celestia agreed.

“And we’ll have to talk to her in a moment, you know. You can’t just blank out forever.”

“But… but we haven’t really figured out what to say!” Dawn turned on Dusk, but Dusk’s deceptive grip was firmer than it seemed. Loving, supportive, but firm.

“We’re totally blind.”

Dusk tsked. “Yes, yes you are--Celestia. And yes we are, Dawn. Isn’t that exciting? You like Twilight too, after all. I think this is a beginning.”

“Of what?” the frazzled aspect in her embrace asked.

“No clue! Well, some clue.” Dusk chuckled. Her voice was so warm, so welcoming. Celestia had always felt safe in it. When the Court changed, Dusk remained. “Don’t forget Dawn,” Dusk chided her.

Celestia blinked. “That’s right.” She looked at Dawn, who looked back. “You were different then.”

“We are always one thing or another,” replied the other Celestia before her. She seemed different, and yet the core of the dreaming could put no word on the change.

“One thing or another,” Dusk agreed, squeezing them both. “And we will be made new again. Nothing lasts forever--”

“--Unless it’s made new again.”

Celestia took a deep breath. “I don’t feel the Noonday,” she said softly. “Will she return?”

“If you become something in which she can live, yes.”

“If there is room for her. Or if there is room for her brand of righteousness.”

“But for now,” Dusk concluded, “the Sun is here to tell you what your already know. Say something.”

Celestia cleared her throat.

“Are you alright?” she asked, knowing from a glance that Twilight was not exactly “alright”.

Twilight seemed to sway, her eyes watching something--watching Celestia, probably, but the way her mouth twisted was foreign. Celestia repeated her question, and noticed Cadance close out of the corner of her eye.

“I’m…” Twilight licked her lips. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I just… it’s a bit jarring.”

“Yes, yes it is.”

Celestia hesitated. When Twilight had been a foal, Celestia had tried to keep from coddling her. Love that served only to fulfill the lover’s need was an anathema to her--as much as she had wanted to simply sweep Twilight’s path clean of every conceivable danger, she had stayed her hoof over and over.

Of course she had still been there. When Twilight had cried in the night as a foal during her weekday stays at the palace, Celestia had been on hand to do what any pony would have done. When she’d struggled, Celestia had always been there for the determined to find, ready to remove just a single piece and by doing cause the dam to break.

So for only half a second she found herself wondering--should I hesitate, should I stay back? Will she read into this? Will it make her depend too quickly on me? But the delay was ended as quickly as it had begun, and Celestia reached Twilight before her niece did.

“You look haggard,” she murmured, hugging Twilight briefly and then taking another look at her. “We can let you rest a moment.”

“It’s… okay, I’m pretty shaken.”

“Why? I remember it being a bit uncomfortable, but…” Cadance stood beside her now. Luna had also come close, but not close enough to touch.

“Just sorta psyched myself out,” Twilight said quickly, and waved her hooves. “I will be okay. Just… give me a moment.”

So they did. Cadance baited Twilight into talking for a bit, and Celestia did not move away from her. They stood side by side, the tips of their wings brushing together as Twillight would fidget or laugh.

Celestia and Luna shared a look. A very, very information-laden look.

Celestia at last led Twilight deeper into the complex. She told her, in the best approximation of a tour-guide she could muster, about the great library she had planned to build when Everfree was still the name of the city hidden in the glen. Luna talked about her forge, further down, but not in detail. That was a story for another time.

But when at last they had come to Celestia’s small, well-furnished quarters within the mountain, they reconvened.

Twilight sat not in the middle of them but as a part of the circle. Celestia had been very certain that it should be so, even when the circle had only been three. She believed in symbols. Symbols were the language of the heart, of the mind, and language itself was how ponies created the world around them. Luna preferred to act--that was her language, and Celestia had learned it also. Twilight wrote. Cadance nuzzled and chuckled and joked and smiled. Celestia crafted symbols--she was the most direct, and yet also the least direct.

She hoped Twilight understood before the conversation grew and became what it was always meant to be.

They’d started with the basics.

“So, I have the same potential, quantifiably, as Cadance?” Twilight asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Celestia said, and then sighed. “Cadance, could you please demonstrate a spell of the fourth degree? Any will do.”

Cadance blinked. She took a deep breath, drawing Twilight’s eager attention. The only time her former student had seen Cadance do advanced magic had been in situations of dire need, and so of course she would be eager to see Cadance with time and focus.

One of the books on Celestia’s personal shelves levitated over. It flapped like a bird as it flew, and then it roosted on Twilight’s head.

“I can lift stuff,” Cadance said with glee. “That is still so cool.”

Now it was Twilight that blinked.

“What?”

Celestia suppressed a snort at Twilight’s bafflement. “Cadance was a pegasus, and so her skill with her unicorn magic is weaker than yours. Her skill and knowledge as a pegasus are immense. The other two? Lacking, a bit. You yourself are arch-mage material. But your flying…”

Twilight gave a grunt and scowled. “I’m working on it. It’s not that bad.”

“Just sorta lumpy,” Cadance said with a giggle. “You fly like that book.”

“Well, being a book isn’t so bad.”

“Truly, you fly like an inebriated fledgeling,” Luna said flatly.

Twilight glared at her. “Well…”

Before Luna or her niece could provoke Twilight farther, Celestia waved for silence and composed herself. “Your beginning… aspects, if you will, are where you are most attuned.”

Well-chosen words sailed over Twilight’s head. “But… I saw Cadance do powerful magic. Not flying or farming or endurance or weatherwork or any of that. Raw thaumic surge. Power of the unicorn variety.”

“And I couldn’t explain it to you with numbers or charts,” Cadance said, shaking her head. “I really couldn’t. I can tell you what it feels like. I could explain it in the way that it makes sense to me, but I can’t do most of those things on command. I was joking with you earlier--I can do some advanced magic at will. Teleportation, though you’ll be better at it then I am. Prestidigitation, some of the elemental magics. I’m getting better with earth pony magic as well. I have a box garden,” she said, grinning.

“A box garden.”

“Yup! Well. It’s not really in a box. It’s actually in a corner of the royal gardens. Hidden away so it’s kind of just for me, y’know? I’m growing crystalberries. Also herbs. But mostly crystalberries. They are great for wine.”

“And you promised us a share of the fruits of your labor, when the time comes to drink of thy work,” Luna said. “I am looking forward to it.”

“I’m thinking I’ll name it… Love of the Vine.” Cadance adopted a distant look, as if posing on a stage mid-soliloquy. Luna snickered.

Celestia cleared her throat and three sets of eyes returned to her. “So there is that, Twilight, but things are more complicated than perhaps you yet know. You’ve noticed an increase in your raw magical talent, obviously. But tell me--are you actually better at magic?”

Twilight raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Well, yes, I--” but as Celestia’s smug grin raced across her face, Twilight backpedaled. “Oh. Oh, I know where you’re going.”

“Yes. Raw magical power is useful to a point. Knowing what to do with it is something very different.”

Twilight nodded. “Honestly, I’ve already noticed. I never trained to fight, after all. I knew the basic defensive spells you made us all learn, and I duelled a little when I was younger. Were you planning ahead when you encouraged me to do that? Anyway, I know enough to not be royally screwed, but most of my combat magic is guesswork and improvisation. I’m a scholar, not a warrior.”

“Only one of us seems to be that, so far,” Luna grumbled. “My hammer is lonely.”

“Shush.” Celestia rolled her eyes. “And I could hold my own in tumult and bivuoac same as you. Exactly, Twilight. The way your power will manifest depends quite a bit on the path you yourself choose for it. And don’t sell yourself short just yet. From what I hear, despite your lack of formalized training in that area, you’ve held your own.”

Twilight flushed slightly. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

“Earth pony endurance is another thing you’ll come to understand and appreciate. I’m sure you’ve already noticed.”

“Oh, definitely.”

Twilight looked as if she wanted to take notes, and Celestia tried not to imagine a much younger student with the same eager look. Within her, Dawn watched with worry, continually building up plans of attack that shattered as soon as she touched them again. Dusk simply smiled and luxuriated in the presence of Twilight. Dusk had always loved Twilight, and the amusing juxtaposition of their names had not escaped Celestia for a moment.

The next question happened without fanfare, almost as if it were not so heavy.

“Have you been having strange dreams recently, Twilight?”

Did Twilight notice the way that air in the room seemed thicker than before? Celestia thought not. She thought that this smiling, well-recovered mare before her had not noticed the way that Luna’s expression went flat as a wall or the tiny intake of breath that gave Cadance a way.

“Well… yes, actually.”

Dawn took shuddered.

“What about?” Cadance asked.

“Well…” Twilight frowned, but didn’t seem to be unnerved in anyway by the dreams. Celestia felt that was a good sign. Or, more likely, it was just a sign she had decided to interpret as good. “Well, first off, some of them have seemed like lucid dreaming. As in, I know I’m dreaming when I’m there.”

Luna stirred. “Dreamwalking?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. I couldn’t do something like that,” Twilight said hurriedly, waving her hooves in Luna’s direction with a sheepish look. “Though… I would like to learn. But no, lucid dreaming isn’t like that.”

Humming, Luna considered this. “When I walked the Dreaming before, I found ponies who could wake but could not truly be Awake. I believe this may be what you refer to. Continue.”

“It’s different every time. The connecting threads have been that they’ve all involved… discussion, I suppose you could say. I remember talking a lot.”

“Do you remember what about?” Cadance pressed, leaning forward.

“Not at all.”

Celestia let out a breath. She looked at Luna, and they held each other’s gaze a moment. Luna took over.

“Twilight, would you be opposed to letting one of us ride alongside you when next you dream?” Luna said it casually, almost as if she were bored, letting the words drift over. “Perhaps that might help. Dreams are a part of the mantle.”

“Dreams?”

“Of a fashion,” Celestia said, feeling a little weak. Dusk cooed as she was wont to about how cute Twilight’s court would be, and Dawn lost the edge of her apprehension in speculation. Celestia resisted the urge to avoid the inevitable. “And we will discuss them in a moment. Before that, we need to talk about something very serious.”

“Serious?” Twilight cocked her head to the side. “I thought all of this was serious. I mean, besides the obvious jokes.”

“Well, yes, but those are things that we can only tell you about. We can’t… do anything about them presently,” Celestia began, already floundering.

Why was she so nervous?

“Ah.” Twilight pursed her lips.

“We did the Ninth for a few reasons.” Another stop. “I wanted to make sure…” Another. “Twilight, I’m not entirely sure how best to explain it.”

Twilight seemed more unsettled by Celestia’s hesitation than anything else. “We have time,” she said, her voice slow. Like she was trying to coax a shy filly out from under her legs--and the irony of it made Celestia want to gag--and the true wonder was that even as she said the most perfect and most imperfect thing to say at that juncture, her tone worked. “Whatever it is, I’m sure I can handle it.”

“You are as I am,” Celestia said firmly. “Ageless. And your dreams will probably confirm it, but I’ve seen enough evidence. Ageless. You will not age or expire with time. Blades and fire and armies are about all that will take your life from you now.” She swallowed. “You’ll live forever, more or less.”

Twilight blinked at her.

So she rambled on. “Luna and I are ageless, and when Cadance ascended I also confirmed that she shared our… our gift. Now we’ve done the same with you. But you have all the time in the world, Twilight. All the time.” Celestia worked her mouth, but no sound came. For the first time in so long, she was speechless.

Noon had been her backbone. Her spine. Her steel. She found no seething voice in her ear or echoing in her mind to drive her forward.

“I… I’m immortal? No, you said ageless.”

“Yes. You’ll… you will be around a long time.”

“I’m…”

Cadance scooted over. “It’s a lot to take in, I know.”

“It is.” Twilight still looked at Celestia. Still blinked, as if not comprehending. And perhaps she did not, at that.

“You are… different now. You are not what you once were,” Celestia said. “I am sorry. I’m so sorry.”

That finally broke Twilight free of her strange paralysis. “Sorry?”

The strange uplift of her voice dug into Celestia’s heart. She had spent so much time plotting out this moment, or others like it. So of course she reacted, making strange half-motions as if she might flee from her own sanctum. “I… I can leave, if you wish. I did this, and I led you to this and… and if you wish for Cadance to stay--”

“Whoa, whoa. Wait. Princess.” Twilight coughed. “Celestia.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want you to leave.” When Celestia stopped moving and nodded, she continued. “I just need a moment. You’re saying, firstly, that I’ll… I mean, basically forever unless I fall down like a million stairs or something, right?”

“More or less,” Luna said. “Polearms could also do it, wielded with tenacity. Hurts like Tartarus.”

“Magic you can mostly absorb,” Cadance said. “So I’m told. It still hurts you but… actually killing you with just magic is difficult. You’ll feel it all, but it’s not quite the same.”

“So I’ll outlive everyone, I guess.”

Celestia wilted.

“Yes.”

Twilight sighed. She closed her eyes and hummed.

And for a brief moment, Celestia found herself fleeing into memory again. Twilight, younger but not so young, humming in their old practice room. The runes drawn in light before her on the floor filling most of the room. She sat silently on the other side of it all, waiting and watching. She dared not show a smile or a frown; nothing could pass along her face that would give Twilight a clue.

Her work was imaginative. Her intuition was absolutely breathtaking. Her insight into the nature of things was impeccable. Her attention to detail astonishing. Her organization? More of a matter of idiosyncrasy than logic. Where others shortened and circumscribed, Twilight Sparkle expanded until nothing could hold her and what she brought forth.

Dusk said something softly in her ear about the ruminations of mares in love, and that snapped her back.

Twilight smiled wanly at her. “I’m not sure that really means anything to me.”

“What?”

“Being ageless. I mean, I understand the concept in a purely functional way. I have examples to compare my own mental image to, and I could try and imagine what that be like. But I don’t think it’s… fruitful, I suppose. I don’t have enough data. I can’t really understand that yet.”

“So… you aren’t upset?”

Twilight sighed. “No. I don’t think so.” She hesitated. Celestia hung on that silence. “No. But I’m not exactly thrilled. I just… I don’t know how to take that at all. So I won’t. I can’t understand it. Not in the two minutes since you’ve…”

“I understand,” Cadance said suddenly. “It’s a lot to take in. Truth be told, I was disconsolate after my own interview. With the dreams and the long life and the whole… being something so radically different.”

“But I’m not. Different, I mean. I’m not different in a way that matters.” Twilight stood then, and began to pace. The others widened the circle without being asked and watched her.

She’d always done this, since she was small. Celestia had many memories of a muttering, pacing Twilight. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, ever since the shock wore off.”

“And what have you thought?” Celestia said. For a moment, her fear warred with a tiny spark of a joyful curiosity she had thought had been put behind her when Twilight had sent her last report. What have you learned my student?--that was it. Except Twilight was no longer that, however much she dwelled upon it. She was her own world and her own mare, and now Celestia learned from her equal.

“I am me,” Twilight began. “And I have always been me--it’s not like the old problem of the ship or the axe, where you ask if it’s the same if thing after you’ve replaced all the parts. Ponies don’t work that way. At least, I know I don’t. I haven’t replaced anything. I’ve just changed.

“And I was doing that long before I had wings, you know. I changed when I first got my cutie mark. I changed when I moved into the palace full time. Every time I learned a new spell and mastered it or read a new book, every time I looked through my telescope, every time I did… anything, really. I changed. Ponies are always changing. I am a very different pony in many ways from the Twilight Sparkle that left Canterlot to organize a celebration in Ponyville. Wouldn’t you say?”

Celestia smiled. “I would.”

“And that’s just it. Becoming an alicorn… princess, all of it, is just a continuation of that for me. But all along I was me. There’s no past me or future me. There is only me. I guess you could say that I--and I think ponies in general--are like a ray. Think back to the basics of geometry, the way they introduce it in stages to a foal. A line goes on forever in both directions.A ray has a definite beginning and goes on forever in one direction. That’s what ponies are like. We change! We grow and learn new things. That’s what I am. I am not what I used to be, and I think that’s perfectly fine. I’m not a unicorn anymore. That’s… that’s weird, I’m going to be honest.”

“At least you knew how to use your horn,” Cadance grumbled.

“And you knew how to use your wings,” Twilight said. She flushed. “And you knew how to preen them but I’m going to move on past that statement very quickly! Right! I’m not upset that I’ve changed, is my point.”

Celestia slumped against her chair, not out of defeat but out of relief. Or, at least, it was relief initially. Relief gave way to a feeling of ridiculousness. She had angsted and fretted and Twilight was so… so…

Grown up, Dusk murmured with a smile. Just as she’d been waiting for Celestia to realize all along.

“I think… I think that I have been a fool for some time now,” Celestia said evenly.

“You rolled sixes, more like, sister mine,” Luna told her with a knowing smile. “And do not know what to do with your victory.”

Twilight looked between them. “Do you two do this sort of sibling thing where you leave everyone out of the loop all the time, er, all the time?”

“Yes,” said the other three together.

*

Twilight nervously fidgeted on the bed. She was nervous and hyperalert. Her brain, filled with information and still digesting news beyond the scope of her experience, was overloaded. Everything was intense. She thought she smelled things--lavender, for one--and reminded herself that she wasn’t hallucinating. She was just overreacting and tired and Celestia had lit that candle a trifle nervously only a few minutes before.

The fact that the princess--her princess--was as nervous as she was both comforted her and worried her.

“You’re sure?” Celestia asked, worried for a totally new reason now. “We… we could wait.”

“I want you to be the one that I do this with,” Twilight insisted. “I mean… it’s not… I mean, it isn’t presumptive of me, is it?”

“Not at all,” Celestia said quickly. “Twilight, I’m honored. I’m also impressed and proud of you. You’ve responded to this with nothing but maturity throughout. There’s so much more to be said, and we’ll say it all, but for now: I’m proud of you.”

Twilight felt her cheeks burn, or thought she could. She looked up at Celestia and a stray thought intruded--that she was beautiful in the low light, her eyes like a lighter version of Twilight’s own. She shone even in darkness, murmured something in the back of Twilight’s overworked brain that wasn’t quite so orderly and wouldn’t mind a bit of a fuss now and then.

“Thank you,” Twilight managed.

And Celestia smiled.

And Twilight was for the umpteenth time mortified by how excited she was.

She had to be honest with herself. She had resolved not to practice self-deception if she could help it, and she would not break that oath. She’d had a massive crush on Celestia when she was younger. A certain old poet and Celestia herself had been what had awakened her own awareness as to her preference, for that matter. She had been suitably ashamed later, of course. Shame was one of the more natural things Twilight felt--anxiety was the other big one. Also occasionally panic. All very normal and natural things.

The crush had died. Admiration had taken its place. And then…

No lying. It had returned, only this time attached to a sad but certain knowledge that it was a silly feeling.

And yet here she was, lying in bed, looking up at Celestia, and wondering what a royal wedding with two princesses looked like.

“You seem distracted, Twilight,” Celestia said softly, poking her.

“Ah! I mean, sorry.” Twilight’s ears flattened against her head. “Just… well, distracted. Yeah. That.”

“Second thoughts?”

“No!” She shook her head. “No, I want to do this. I think it’ll be good for me. Also…” She sighed and spoke slowly. “Maybe I’m wrong, but… you’ve seemed more upset than I was. I mean, yeah, I did freak out like twenty minutes after you told me about the whole ageless thing, but only for like, an hour. Or so. But you seemed like you were going to burst. I know that it’s probably silly for me to be saying this to anypony, let alone you, but…”

“But you noticed I was a nervous wreck and you were worried,” Celestia finished for her.

“Yes, basically.”

Celestia sighed. “Scoot over?”

“Um… yeah.”

A few seconds of awkward shuffling. Twilight was still having trouble with her wings.

“Sure you don’t want a bed brought in?” Celestia asked, clearly amused. “You seem to be having trouble.”

“Wings,” grumbled Twilight.

“Of course.”

“I mean… I don’t know. This is kind of awkward, huh? I didn’t really think about that, I was just excited about dreamwalking again.” Actually she had let a whim turn into a fantasy and then realized that she was being motivated by her libido and imagination halfway into the process of relocating to her teacher’s room to retire and then hadn’t known how to bail without hurting Celestia’s feelings or looking like a fool.

“A bit. But it isn’t as if we’re strangers.”

“Yeah.” Twilight smiled. “You’re right.”

“And you’ve had sleepover before, haven’t you? I know you’ve hosted your friends in the library.”

Tactful. She hadn’t mentioned the whole tree in the window part. Celestia was smart that way. “It’s kind of the same, isn’t it? Absolutely the same. Totally the same.”

“I think so.”

“Well.”

They were quiet for a bit.

“I got distracted again,” Twilight said weakly. Celestia shook softly, obviously trying not to laugh, so she pressed on. “You were nervous… Celestia.”

The name was sweet on her tongue and lips. It was like honey. She tried not to think about that because said honey’d mare was about two--maybe three?--hooves away and also it was awkward and Twilight was great at fleeing from awkward situations at high speeds.

At least, she liked to think so.

“I’m glad you’re getting used to calling me by my name. Twilight,” she added, with a titter that died soon. Too soon, in Twilight’s opinion. “I was worried you would be angry with me. I rolled the dice--that is what my sister was referring to. Ponies always talk about me as if I play chess with Equestria, but I’ve always said that I roll dice with the universe. Risk and reward. It’s an old joke between Luna and myself, one of many.”

“I’ll have to start learning them,” Twilight said softly.

Celestia continued on, only a twitch of her ear betraying that she’d heard. “I was worried my gamble, in this case sending you Star Swirl’s spell, had come up ‘snake eyes’ as it were. That you would be angry, or upset, or that you would feel manipulated, or see me as trying to control your life or fate in some sinister way or some other equally painful and ridiculous thing.”

“That’s… a bit of a stretch,” Twilight said after a moment.

“Well yes, I see that now.”

“I mean… I may not be the happiest about it, but I’m not sad or depressed. I don’t know enough to be either, for one.”

“So just wait a few years and then you’ll write a paper about how I’m a tyrant, hm?”

“Hardly.”

“Do make sure to cite sources. I’ll be grading.”

“I’ll have you know I committed the entirety of the handbook to memory,” Twilight said, crossing her hooves. The gesture was a lot less effective when her back was to the bed and her wings were awkwardly fluttering beneath her.

Celestia noticed. “Twilight, lie on your side.”

Twilight shifted. “Like this?”

“There you go. Feel better?”

“My wings do. I used to hate sleeping like this for very long.”

“Things change,” came her old words back at her.

“Apparently. So… we just go to sleep, then? Luna will do everything?”

Celestia nodded in the half-dark. “Yes. Be prepared. I know for myself that the experience can be a shock. I’m curious as to how you adapt. If you keep your wits, you’ll do fine. Explaining beforehand would be pointless. You’ll see why when we cross over.”

“It’s all a bit daunting, put that way.” Twilight shifted slightly under the covers. “Your covers are ridiculous. How do you not smother yourself in these?”

Celestia snickered. “Twilight, I can’t even tell you how ridiculous I find that statement. Or this situation. Or you. I almost wish to frame this moment, were it not for the fact you’d never forgive me.”

“Rarity would murder me for not telling her about the non-existent scuttlebutt. Also, she would probably learn necromancy just to get me back and badger me for equally non-existent scandalous details.”

“I’m sure you could make up some real scorchers, something that would satisfy her.”

“Yes, but… eh.” Twilight shrugged. She yawned. “It’s not the best part of her.”

“Hm.”

“So…”

“So.”

They both smiled at each other, though it was hard to see. “Ready to meet your Court?”

“If nothing else, I’m ready to know what you mean by that.”

“Oh,” Celestia said, and put out the candle. “You’ll see.”

Author's Note

the Court of Amity/concord/friendship/fraternity/harmony

XIII. How can they meet us face to face Until We Have Faces?

Twilight was only half-aware. Half-awake. Around her, reality churned--no, roiled--no, again, even the words for it themselves seemed to move like uneven ground beneath her mind as it struggled to surface. The best she could do was be reminded of her mother stirring a soup with a ladle.

She tried to rise but found that she could feel her legs but in a way she did not understand, as if they were there, yes, but that they weren’t the same somehow.

Any anxiety over this and over her ineffable surroundings was swallowed up in disorientation. So it took Twilight a few moments to register a very important absence. Celestia’s.

But when she did notice that she was, apparently, alone in the riot of sound and sight, she called out. “Celestia? Celestia?” Nothing. “Princess?”

There was no one there to answer her. In the vastness of that unrefined space there was, as far as Twilight knew, only herself. Around her, she saw flashes of things she recognized--her old library, her room at home in Canterlot, Ghastly Gorge, the palace, the hills surrounding Ponyville, the orchards--

“I’m dreaming,” she said softly. But this was not the dream she had expected. But of course it was not what she would expect. She had nothing to go off of, did she? Every time before this one, she had forgotten all that been done or said in this new and strange mode of sleep.

She closed her eyes, but still somehow felt the shifting dream. “Focus,” she told herself. Speaking wasn’t necessary, but it helped. Hearing her own voice made the suddenness of isolation seem less sudden, less severe. And she focused. Celestia had offered to be with her when she slept, and she’d mentioned that her presence would probably trigger an event that was important somehow. They’d dreamwalked, or had planned to with Luna’s help. They’d shared a bed--

--and there it was. Mortification.

She’d slept in the same bed as Celestia. A younger Twilight would have been doing victory dances in the aether. The older, slightly more mature, and just as prone to awkward anxious embarassment Twilight that had finally achieved the impossible dream mostly just felt like dying in a humiliated dream pile.

It had been nice, though, hadn’t it? Awkward? Very. But nice.

It didn’t mean anything. Twilight knew that. Even as she enjoyed the fulfillment of her strange, unwholesome fantasy, she knew that the action had meant nothing. Or, well, not nothing. Honestly, what it had meant was something almost as special--Celestia had left Twilight intrude upon her private sanctum and indulged a half-baked whim in order to put her friend at ease. Celestia cared about her, and while she had always known this it was nice to be reminded in such a way.

But where was Celestia now? Had she not come through? Was there a problem?

Twilight was used to being alone. To be honest, she liked being alone.

But suddenly, she felt unbelievably lonely.

*

Celestia relived all of the old trouble. Lack of sensation, being dead--not really, but feeling as if she were--and then the slow waves of returning feeling. Throughout it all, she remained calm and collected. She would have to put aside the nervous frantic Celestia of the last week and be there for Twilight. She had to help her understand. Cadance had been so disoriented by her own multiplied existence, and the urge to keep Twilight from that same deep confusion was strong.

All of her was determined and focused. She heard nothing… and then began to worry, but not panic. Twilight must share her own disadvantage in regards to Luna’s gift. She would have to find her, calm her, help her walk--

When she opened her eyes she found that she alone. Also, strangely, she was looking down at dirt.

Blinking, Celestia stood up and found herself in a town she had visited more and more over the last two years. Ponyville. The town in the heart of Equestria’s, well, heartland. The navel of the continent. Empty. Nothing moving, and nopony else beside herself.

Well. This was off to a bad start.

Celestia still did not worry overmuch. Luna would assist if she could, and Celestia doubted any harm would come to either of them. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t concerned.

It was wonderful to be in control again, or at least to be able to pretend to be in control again. It was wonderful to be alone with her own thoughts for once.

That was about when she noticed that Dusk and Dawn were utterly silent.

Consider noise. Noise going on forever, more or less, a constant droning in one ear. Or, more likely, imagine that being alone in any sense has never been a concept. That there was no physical way to be alone, that isolation was only accomplished in death.

It had been thus for Celestia for so long that without the presence of Dusk and Dawn her first reaction was to assume that she had died. And so, for roughly a minute, Celestia panicked more than she had panicked before.

But she recovered. Nopony was there to see her agony. Nopony was there to see Celestia quickly lose her mind and then find it again when she heard hoofsteps.

She stopped. Her heart stopped. Faint. Soft. Small. She searched wildly for the source of the noise. Were her aspects here? No, no they couldn’t be. She would have felt them. But how could they be separated? They had never left her, not really. Even when she was intoxicated they were only silent. They didn’t actually leave.

But she saw no source.

It would have to be good enough. She had to find somepony. Any pony at all would do, anything to fill the sudden absence so she could think.

So she did the obvious and most logcial thing. She went to the Library, for there it was before her. Twilight’s old library, still in one piece as it had been the day she arrived.

Celestia paused at the door, briefly wondering if Twilight might be inside. She hoped so. She fervently hoped so. Anypony--yes--but Twilight would be the pony who she would most cling to. Twilight, familiar and welcoming. The aspects did not comment. They did not say anything about this feeling welling up in her that Twilight’s presence was what she wanted most, and that just made it worse.

She took a deep breath, prepared for disappointment, and pushed the door open.

She had expected nothing. She had hoped for Twilight. But she had not, at all, expected to find… Spike. Which, on reflection, wasn’t actually that strange. It was the library, and he was the librarian’s official assistant and also slightly-constant companion.

She stepped in, closed the door, and blinked at him. Spike hummed a little song as he shelved books, as if he was ignoring her.

Was he part of the dream? Had Luna misfired, somehow? Had Luna put her into a dream of her own while Twilight tried to fall asleep? She wasn’t sure. She needed more--

“You know, usually ponies at least say hello when they come in,” Spike said, his tone light. He was smirking as he shelved now.

“Well… I…” Celestia coughed. “Sorry, Spike. I’m a bit out of sorts. Are you…” She sighed. “Are you one of Twilight’s aspects? But you can’t be.”

“Why not?” Spike asked.

“Because you aren’t Twilight,” Celestia said. “The ponies in the Court of Love--the ones that had faces--they weren’t actual aspects. They were memories, I suppose. Or impressions. But none of them addressed me first.”

Spike turned to her. He smiled still, not quite smugly but close. Celestia was caught again in an old line of thought--how odd this little dragon was. She had known many dragons of all shapes and sizes in the long years. Cruel ones, proud ones, wise ones. But only one could she have called cheerful and friendly with a straight-face. Even those she had befriended were gruff on the surface. He was a child unstuck in time and in strange environs. And there he was, smiling at her.

“So you are an aspect,” Celestia murmured. “And Twilight’s dreaming, her Court, will be even more of a shock to me than Cadance’s, I imagine.”

“That’s right.” Spike chuckled.

“Why are you here, if she is not? For that matter… the way you speak is different. It’s odd that you speak of something she knows nothing of. I can accept that Twilight’s Court will be different than mine--that is not so hard after Cadance--but you seem more distinct.”

“You think the Courts don’t have their secrets?” Spike asked.

Celestia frowned. “No.”

“Did you ever ask?”

“I did not. I find, more and more, that I do not like secrets.”

“No mystery?”

Celestia huffed. “Mysteries and secrets are different, young Spike. A mystery is something I can savor. It is not so much kept from me as it is simply not within my knowledge, or in some way beyond my knowledge. A mystery is a beautiful thing. A secret is an artificial thing, kept from me. A secret is a lie.”

Spike cocked his head to the side and hummed. “Maybe.”

“And now I find myself confused. In other Courts, I refer to Aspects by their, well, aspect. What they reflect or what mantle they take on. But I tend to treat them as part of the pony whose dream I am in. But if Twilight’s Court is to be like this, with other ponies, how then shall I address them?” She leaned in, narrowing her eyes. “Are you Spike, or are you a reflection of Spike? Perhaps neither. Who are you?”

“Spike. I am Spike here in as much as you are Celestia here,” Spike said with a little shrug. “You could say that I am a copy or a memory, but it wouldn’t be the truth.”

“But do you share his memory, his personality?”

“I haven’t met him,” the dragon said. “I mean, not personally. I’ve met him through Twilight. I am what Twilight has made me--but that’s not all I am. Harmony works in mysterious ways, to go back to that word. I am Spike, but I am not Spike.”

“How clear of you,” Celestia muttered with a smirk and sat.

“Isn’t it? More than that… Hm. Well, You know how when you meet a pony for the first time, one you don’t know, and you have to figure them out? There’s that short period of awkwardness while you put them together in your head. You rebuild them from scratch, trying to get it right, trying to understand what they are. Who they are. That’s how Twilight thinks about it. When she meets a pony, she scrambles to reconstruct them, knowing full well she’ll get it wrong but knowing she has to try.”

“That sounds like her. Like a model.”

“Kind of.”

“So you are that model.”

“I am Spike, but I’m also Twilight. I’m the place where they meet,” the little dragon said, puffing out his chest in apparent pride. “I’m a bridge. We all are.”

“We?”

“Yeah. There are several, you know. Twilight has lots of friends now. It’s… it’s good. I’m glad she does.” Spike’s proud smile faded. “She used to not.”

“I worried for her.”

“There were parts of her that worried over herself. They were just the quietest parts, the ones that Twilight didn’t listen to. The part of her that knew her isolation was a mistake was not that far removed from the part of her she felt was responsible for all of her anxiety and her…” he waved a claw lazily. “You know.”

“Her attacks. Doubt as a cause of anxiety. To remove the anxiety, remove the doubt.”

“Didn’t work, obviously.”

“Not a bit,” Celestia agreed.

“That’s when she first decided that she loved you, you know.”

Celestia opened her mouth to reply, and then simply stopped.

“C-come again?”

*

Twilight’s steps echoed long in the endless caverns. Everything stretched long, really. Everything felt full of something--silence and sound, silence before her and behind her, sound following her. The library was expansive. No, expansive was not the word. Twilight had always appreciated well-chosen words, and so it was with reluctance that she had named this place, knowing that her name fit even if she cringed at its presumption.

The Endless Library. She had simply thought it large until exploration had not manage to bring her to a wall. A look down a long corridor of laden shelves only showed one where at last the shelves ran perpendicular. Beyond that shelf, a host of other that ran the same way until you were going the same direction again. If there was an end, it was beyond obscured. The vaulted cieling above her suggested an outside, of course. She struggled to conceive of anything being truly the finite end, materially. A wall wasn’t a real end.There must be something beyond the wall. There were windows, at any rate, but she could see nothing through them, and they were so high that all there would be to see was the sky. Light shone through.

Along the way, she had lost track of the time. At first, it had been the repetitious nature of the Library itself which had disoriented her. She had woken at last to find herself not only bereft but lost. Celestia was nowhere to be found. She had called and called, but no answer had come. Navigation was impossible and probably pointless, anyway. The geometry of this place was that of the dream. Who could promise her it would not rearrange itself at a whim, or that she would not see impossibility that would make any hope of finding her way out impossible?

Twilight sighed softly. It was not the heavy sigh of the lost and the frustrated, but the softer sort that only those who have wandered a library for hours really know. There are many things Twilight had learned in the libraries of Canterlot and beyond, and some of them had even been from books. Silence. Patience, of a sort, and to an extent. The way time moves strangely when you can only see the sun through scattered slit-like windows, casting moving lights upon the old floors. How a quiet voice of somepony looking for you after hours can sound like a thundercrash, how it can startle you into rapt attention. The warmth and safety of a un-thought of corner.

It was the books, in the end, which had seduced her from a serious attempt at navigation or even of keeping track of herself.

It had taken her only a few moments of wondering before she’d finally taken one down, marking its place carefully. An older tome, with an artist’s depiction on the cover of the volume’s subject and author, the mule Chickpea. Twilight smirked at his grave frown. She’d read him under Celestia’s guidance and remembered how Celestia had gleefully informed her young charge that she had, in fact, met the verbose and surly constitutionalist of the Earth confederates. She hadn’t read it, but with a warm smile and a warm memory, she had carefully replaced it and moved on.

Every now and then she would take another. System Builder, Clockwork, Faithful Leap, and others. Philosophers and thinkers, all names she knew or loved, and then she moved beyond them. She found treatises in mathematics, and then she found works that had only been names in old books, things long lost. Works that had been only legends to the scholars of her oldest grimoires.

Slowly, bit by bit, she came to a conclusion. The Library was not merely a library bigger than that of the Royal Canterlot Library. It was so much more. This was the library of libraries, the center of Logos, if there was such a thing. She wasn’t sure there was, but she felt like that was right, that it was good to think there might be. To keep one’s options open.

So for a moment, Celestia and her own loneliness fell away and Twilight Sparkle did what she did best. She learned. She found books and she read from them, never finishing but moving on, retaining what she could and blessing what was yet to be read, her eyes bright.

If she kept going, perhaps she would find the center. What would be there? She did not know, but she was eager to know.

*

Celestia swallowed. “Could you… could you repeat that?”

Spike raised a solitary eyebrow, if the almost imperceptible scaley ridge over his eye could be called thus. “That’s when she first decided she loved you, the first time around.” He blinked. “Oh! You’re confused on when, or I should, which time.” He chuckled and then put the last book away tight between its new neighbors. "Tell you what, go to the reading room. It’s right over there. I have to go get the next.”

“The… what?”

Spike just smiled at her, and waved over his shoulder as he trotted off towards the kitchen. She watched him go with bemusement until he stopped at the doorway. He turned and regarded her with a serious expression she had never seen pass the waking Spike’s features. His voice changed. It was deeper, thicker, layered she might have said.. “It’s not a pleasant thing,” he said quietly. That moment is a pleasant moment. The others one were. It was one of a few dark blots on a beautiful manuscript, and I can’t prepare you for it without you compensating and shielding yourself from her reality. But I will tell you that you will not like it.”

He turned before she could answer. “It would be wrong to let you waltz in without knowing that, first.”

Celestia looked where he had gestured. Sighing, she shook her head. What choice did she have, if she wanted to understand? She walked to the homely door on the far side of the central room and pushed it open. A normal room. Comfortable, airy, spacious. A few smaller bookshelves and tables, and Twilight’s omnipresent beanbag in the farthest corner. Seeing it made her roll her eyes.

“Of course,” she grumbled as she crossed the threshold. “Honestly, Twilight, you aren’t a filly anymore, and those things are--”

Everying was horribly wrong.

She wasn’t in the library anymore. She was somewhere--she wasn’t sure where, a bedroom? A dormitory? A hotel?--confused and panicking, as if she’d been dropped into the middle of someone else’s nightmare. Her heart hammered in her throat and in her ears. She saw but failed to connect ideas with image. The skin beneath her coat crawled--no, she wanted to crawl out of it--to esape--to run to--

When she tried to backpedal, she found that her legs refused to obey. Retreat was cut off.

So she crumpled, in an agony she had no understanding of. What was wrong with her? What had done this? Twilight’s dreaming wouldn’t have hurt her. How could she?

And as Celestia began to see in her delerium a traitorous Twilight taken by nightmares painted on the dimly lit wall before her, she heard somepony talking. Fast words. They meant nothing. They were speaking in tongues. She couldn’t follow their conversation, couldn’t see them through the half-opened door, couldn’t…

Couldn’t believe it when she herself almost kicked the door off its hinges in her frantic rush. Another Celestia, herself mirrored perfectly yet changed in ways her scattered mind had trouble keeping up with, was there.

This other Celestia spoke quickly, softly, urgently. She said--Twilight, speak to me, please. What’s wrong? Who did this? What happened? Twilight, Twilight, sh, please, nothing is going to hurt you. Nothing is going to--

And the Celestia being cradled in her own forelegs realized abruptly that she remembered this exact moment already, because it had been something of a traumatic one for her.

She’d been visiting the school grounds to have tea with the Filly’s Dorm housemistress, as she often did. They had chatted of nothing and nopony, and the time had been peaceful and calm. She inquired after several very promising students, and shared her worries over a few less than promising, a few that were lonely or ill-adjusted. She had, of course, inquired after Twilight. A full report the old mare had given her, and Celestia had been eager for every word.

What had been her words? Studious. Industrious. A little high-strung, but charming in a distant sort of way. She works all the time. She’s offered to help a few ponies with work, the old mare said, and I’m glad to say she’s finally at least talking to the others.

Celestia had thought it might be fun to surprise her favorite protege, her soon to be only, and sneaked as only a Princess can full of energy and absurdity, down the halls.

And then she’d run into the filly in the hallway, who had rushed to her. She’d heard somepony crying, and she wasn’t sure who… but suddenly they heard a whimper from the room with the half-open door. Who lives in that room? Celestia had asked.

Twilight, the frightened filly had told her.

Twilight--Celestia’s--whatever and whoever she was in that moment--her shaking had stopped. Her breathing was ragged, her eyes still not quite reporting what they saw totally. The sense of impending doom lingered. And yet she could think again. Or, perhaps it was Twilight who thought.

She felt what it was like to be cradled. No, to be engulfed, really, to be taken in completely. That Celestia covered Twilight with wings more beautiful than any she had ever seen. That Celestia was gentle. That Celestia was warm. The gestalt of Twilight and Celestia began to weep, and they were comforted.

Celestia tried to speak. Her breath betrayed her, but still she tried. “H-how did you… Where did you c-come from?”

“I was nearby,” said the image of herself. “Twilight, you’re safe. You know that, don’t you? I would never let anything happen to you.”

“I k-know.”

“Good. Good. Don’t force yourself to talk just yet.”

But she wanted to. She wanted to thank her. Twilight wanted to say all kinds of things, most of them half-mad. You came for me. When no one else could help, you came for me. Twilight believed her. She believed in those words--I would never let anything happen to you--so fervently that the Celestia along for the ride was speechless.

And then she stumbled into the reading room in a confused heap.

*

Twilight had started finding books that hadn’t even be written yet.

The first one had been a shock. She’d almost dropped the thing, it startled her so badly. But telekinesis was a skill she had perfected, and so Twilight had hung on.

Two years. Only two years between the now and that book. It wasn’t a lot, but if this library had books two years in the future, would kept it from having…

She had tried only one other book in that section--devoted to architecture, as far as she could make out--and found another book from the future. Five years, this time.

She had stopped reading then and kept on, at war with herself.

--You could know everything. You could finally chase forever, search forever just as you always wanted to.

But she had to find Celestia. She had to find out where she was.

Unbidden, her letter only a week before came back to her. It thrust its words on her with such force that she stopped walking.

But I miss the seemingly endless library. Some days, when I was still your student in a much more immediate way, I felt like I could pursue my studies forever. It was like… like magic was a chase, I suppose. And that if I kept reaching out for it, kept running after it…

She had said that, hadn’t she? She’d written it, at any rate.

Where was this place? How had it known exactly what she had been thinking of? Because it was right, really. This was a perfect trap. Where others might quail before mortal danger, Twilight planned. Where others balked, Twilight organized. Where they waffled between the good and the vile, Twilight had always plowed right through and found the Workable. Some ponies, when she’d still lived in the dormitories, had been fond of saying that Twilight had everything except a personality and vices.

They had been completely wrong, of course. Her personality aside, her vice was knowledge, and her magical study. When first she’d been drunk she’d instantly compared it to the euphoria of magic. Everything had been drawn back to that, for awhile. Food, the pleasure of napping, the coolness of her pillow, the warmth of the sun, strong drink, her more basic urges, all good things had gone back to how they were like her endless chase. She’d eschewed the company of others in her frenzy.

Twilight didn’t know if she wanted to keep going anymore. There was no way of knowing what things would lie beyond, waiting to catch her in their deceptive grip. Already, a part of her wondered if it might not be nice to stay here forever.

*

After a few seconds where she lay panting against the wood floor, Celestia heard the sound of somepony clearing their throat.

“Princess? You alright?”

Applejack, her brain told her fuzzily. She knew that voice, with its nice drawl that pulled a smile out of anything that could.

“I… need a moment,” she managed.

“Sure, that ain’t a problem at all. You look like you had a scare.”

“Something like that.”

“Spike let you waltz right into that. Can’t say I like it none, but I understand his reasonin’ a bit. That was when she first loved you.”

“First? And… and loved?” Celestia shut her eyes. She was glad one couldn’t get a real headache in the Aether. “Twilight Sparkle… I mean, I had wondered,” she said. “I had certainly entertained the idea she might have a crush on me when she was younger, but she seemed to grow out of it. I even thought that perhaps with time, we might…” she sighed.

“But your assumption was that right now, she weren’t.”

“More or less.”

“Well, sorry to tell you that you were wrong, Princess. Don’t worry. We all are, eventually.” A pause. “You know, dice are funny things.”

Celestia looked up.

Applejack was sitting in that stupid beanbag chair, with a book between her hooves and a little pair of reading glasses that she watched Celestia over. Her hat was gone, and her hair was down. She chewed on a wheat stalk, and Celestia suddenly found that this was the most strange of the oddities this image presented.

“You look different,” Celestia said with thousands of years of experience and eloquence.

“Yup.”

“That’s… well. I guess that’s actually something I expected, indirectly.”

“Twilight don’t think of AJ like this, not really. I mean, she has. With the hair down, at any rate. Idle curiosity ‘bout how it might look and all. The readin’ is Twilight. The stalk’s--” she took it out and smiled. “--is ‘cause my daddy’s pipe ain’t welcome in a flammable library and she knows AJ’s tryin’ to cut down on it now that Bloom’s getting old enough to want it.”

“Ah.”

“Right, strange me talkin’ like I am and I ain’t her. It’s the lay of the land, really.”

“I’m… gathering that, yes.” Celestia paused, searching through her memories. “The glasses?”

Applejack snickered. “Twilight happens to think that glasses look nice on a mare, and bein’ that I am a little bit of Twilight, I do too.”

Celestia joined in, and found that the emotional upheaval she’d brought over from Twilight’s memory was gone. “So what does Twilight have you reading?”

Applejack set her book aside. “Works and the Days.”

“Good Earth.” Celestia raised an eyebrow. “That’s an odd choice for Twilight. I’d not thought her much for the literature of the faithful of any sort. Though, I suppose if she were to be reading any, Good Earth would be the best. I met him but once, and his memory has not faded.”

Applejack stretched. “Hesiod, actually. And no, I can’t tell you who that is. Twilight hates spoilers. But Twilight don’t know much about Gaia and how the ponies of the earth sing their harvest songs. She don’t know much at all, but she wants to. Applejack was a bit bemused ‘bout it, but she seemed to be happy. Gave Twi a copy of the book and she put it on her list.”

“But you sound as if you know,” Celestia said.

“I do. I am Twi, but I ain’t only Twi.” Applejack shrugged. “I’m the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis. I am the whole package, one ‘n all.”

Celestia pondered this, and then decided that there were other things to focus on. “You said something about… well. Twilight. Her loving me.”

“She does.”

Celestia took a deep breath. “She… She does.”

“Yes.”

“But… but isn’t that a bit sudden?” Celestia asked weakly.

Applejack rolled her eyes. “Only if you’re misunderstandin’. She had always admired you and liked you, but then you barged into her room on the worst night of her life. That hadn’t happened to her before, and she was terrified. It weren’t all at once. She only could say it was the moment afterwards. You’re the one who said--”

Celestia found her mouth moving before her brain did. “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.”

“Exactly.”

“So she does. I was… I was right. I had hoped,” she said, and then stopped herself. “I had wondered.”

“Why’d you come with her?”

“Because I didn’t want her to have to go alone,” Celestia said quickly.

“That all?”

“My own trial was hard. I didn’t know when it would come for her. Ours were…” Celestia sighed. “Luna and I discussed this. She thought if I dreamwalked with Twilight, it might set off her trial and allow me to help her. I was worried.”

“That’s one way of puttin’ it.”

Celestia pursed her lips. “And you would say it another way, Honesty?”

And Applejack just kept an eyebrow raised, looking over her glasses. “Name is Applejack, Princess. And I would.”

“And how would you say it?”

“Sounds like you love her.”

“She’s--” My student. My friend. “Important to me.”

And then there was a new voice. “Then you should tell her, darling.”

Celestia turned just as Rarity and Fluttershy entered the reading room. Rarity was dressed to the nines, resplendent and opulent in a trailing dress. Celestia recognized the design. It was ancient, or might as well have been--the last time she’d seen such a design, House Belle had still held their peerage.

Which… actually made it seem even more appropriate. She wore it well, regardless.

Fluttershy seemed more or less herself. She smiled, but said nothing. It was Rarity who took the lead.

“If you wouldn’t mind a bit more company,” she said, and bowed. “It is good to be in your presence, Your Highness.” And, in a tongue that Celestia had not heard in over a thousand years, added: “Our Court is honored by the advent of the Sun.”

Celestia started. “You… how do you…” She shook her head. “Twilight. But why would you be speaking in High Adunaic? I’m positive Rarity doesn’t know either variety… But Twilight might.”

“Not very well, mind you,” Rarity said lightly. She smiled--it was so like the real Rarity’s smile, but different. Rarity herself was different. She seemed…

“So, if the aspects of Twilight’s court mirror her perception… she sees you as a queen?” Celestia asked. She tried not to chuckle. “It suits you, my fair Rarity.”

“You flatter me. But I do happen to think so.”

So Applejack, smarter than she appears. Rarity, the princess she was meant to be. Fluttershy…

“You’ve been quiet, Fluttershy,” Celestia said.

“Oh, I like to listen. Communication is a lot about listening, you know.”

“That it is.” She looked at them all. “Almost everyone, then.”

“Pinkie and Rainbow will be here in a moment,” Applejack said. “But we were in a discussion, Princess.”

Rarity trotted over to sit by Applejack. “Indeed, we were. You and Twilight. Oh, it really is romantic, I must commend you on that, Your Highness. Jumping in to protect your lover! Oh, it is the stuff of the greatest novels.”

“Hardly,” Celestia said, but she smirked.

“I think it was brave,” Fluttershy said as she walked by to sit at Rarity’s side, farther from Applejack. “I mean… for you to come with her after your experience.”

Celestia froze. “You… Do you know what I saw?”

They all nodded.

“Yes, but let’s get back on task, if you don’t mind. I’m thinkin’ we’ll have plenty of time to talk.” Applejack stood. “We’re sorry, all of us, that you can’t be with her right now. We’re all glad--all of us--that you wanted to. But you can’t. Twilight… Twilight’s gotta make the choice on her own.”

“Her choice?” Celestia tensed. “That sounds ominous.”

“It is, a bit.” Applejack’s features darkened. “It is. The thing ‘bout choice is that it’s always kind of final, y’know? But we got faith in her. We believe in Twilight. She’ll come ‘round.”

“And if she doesn’t?” Celestia asked.

They all looked at each other. They all looked away from her.

“Then this will be the last time you see us,” said Fluttershy.

She tried to look hopeful, but Celestia had a hard time believing it. For not the first time in her long life, Celestia felt absolutely powerless.

*

There were two Twilights.

One of them was entranced. Utterly enthralled. She had looked at the books. Of course she had. Dozens. A hundred, maybe, in all. Science, magic, poetry, literary criticism. Joke books. Joke books a hundred years in the future. She had read every page.

That Twilight was in ecstasy. She could stay here forever. Just the most cursory glances at some of those books had sent her into fits of inspiration. She had found a book on Metaturgic Phenomenology. She had no idea what that was--the book was five hundred years in the future, and just the introduction had left her all but panting with excitement. Seven hundred pages of totally uncharted knowledge. She was Daring Doo at the mouth of a lost city. She was a lover on the threshold.

The other Twilight had gone from lonely to afraid. Celestia was nowhere. Her friends were far away, farther even more than they had been when she had been awake. The Library was empty, as far as she knew.

It was like the old Twilight--but there was no old Twilight, there had only ever been one--had returned in full force. So caught up in the chase that other ponies weren’t just ignored but ceased to exist.

“Celestia?”

Her voice didn’t echo. It died in the stacks.

“Celestia?” Nothing. “Please. I’m…”

She didn’t finish. She kept walking and walking. The books whispered. They didn’t actually whisper, the part of Twilight that insisted on technicality insisted. But they might as well have.

And, anti-climactically, she turned the corner and found herself in a clearing of sorts. A circular emptiness enclosed by rails, shelves in all directions, a skylight above and the light streaming in. She stepped all the way to the rail and looked down.

The Endless Library was truly infinite. She saw nothing but floors and floors. Endless freedom. Infinite wisdom. The song beneath every spiralling thaumaturgic diagram, she could find it. She could hear it.

“It’s all yours, if you’d like.”

Twilight jumped, ears down, legs spreading out and body lowering into a fighting stance. “Where are you? Who are you?”

And there was a light behind her. She turned.

And saw herself.

Twilight fell back on her haunches. “You’re…”

“What you could be.” The Twilight before her was taller. Her eyes flashed with fire. Her wings were light. Everything about her was--

“Perfect,” Twilight breathed.

“Yes. I am the perfection you could achieve. The pinnacle. I am what you should be, Twilight.”

“But… but how? Do I… Will I become you?”

“If you want. You would wield ultimate power. You would know everything you wished, undisturbed in your studies. Before you the world would open like a flower.” The spectral Twilight smiled at last. “Simply stay. Read. Learn.”

“I want to. This place… this place is wonderful.” Twilight sighed. “If only I could… It’s so lonely here.”

The other Twilight cocked her head to the side. “Lonely?”

“Well… yes. Empty.”

“Empty? I assure you it is not. This place has everything you could want.”

“Bookswise? I suppose. What this place represents? Of course. Knowledge, the thing I’ve always wanted. To know. To understand. But where are other ponies? Where is Celestia? My friends?”

The other Twilight’s brow furrowed. Then she made a little “ah” of comprehension. She smiled again, and approached. Her hoof laid on Twilight’s shoulder, she continued.

“Twilight, you are ageless. You will outlast such things. I know that for now, such seems important, but with time? They will run together. It is best you understand that now, at the beginning, and save yourself the heartache of the long years. You were meant for perfection, immortality, to be as Celestia is.”

Twilight blinked. “As… but Celestia isn’t friendless.”

“Isn’t she?”

“Of course not.” The Princess--the Archmage--grinned victoriously. “She has moved beyond such things. You are her friend, because you would not be as the dust. From the first day she has meant you to be with her forever.”

“With…” Twilight shook her head. “That sounds a bit overboard.”

“Fate tends to sound such. And I would know--for when you are as I you yourself will write it.”

She made a sweeping gesture, and the world around them opened up--the air was split open, and in the voids she saw herself, ruling from a grand city of spires. She saw herself and Celestia--she saw them sitting close--she saw them sharing smiles and conversations that lasted days--she saw them sharing wine in the starry void beyond the ken of ponies.

“Become perfect,” said the Archmage, Twilight ascended. “Stay in the library, and you will have her because you will be worth her.”

“Worth?” Twilight grimaced. “You make it sound like if I don’t become you she'll reject me.”

Twilight stopped, and the Archmage just waited.

Celestia had been encouraging, but had always pushed her. Do better. Be better. Be the most you can be.

Learn everything you can. Excel.

Rise above.

“She might,” Twilight whispered.

It had always been so easy to imagine. That Twilight would fail, and her teacher would abandon her. Because she wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Her tutelage had begun in failure, and it would end with a failure.

“She almost did, you know. After the Smarty Pants incident,” said the Archmage. “Only the promise of what you could be stayed her hoof. Think of every test, all laid out to make sure, to push you towards new heights.”

Twilight swallowed. “Then what am I supposed to?”

“Stay. That is the start. But you must move beyond the small spheres you currently walk in. Move beyond the smallness of sociability. You were put in Ponyville as a test. It was the opening move of the great game. Celestia doesn’t roll dice. She plays chess. And now you must risk--that is what she wants of you.”

“She wants me to just… go back to being a hermit.”

The Archmage rolled her eyes. “Don’t be dramatic. She wants you to grow up, Twilight.”

“I am grown up.” Twilight grit her teeth. “For your information. You’d know, if you were me.”

“Which I am--the promise that made you worth her time.” She drew the last three words out slowly. “Elsewise, why would she have bothered? Especially after… well, you know.” A grin full of teeth. “We both know. So weak. So frail. So easily led down sad and dark roads. You were almost too much trouble, weren’t you?”

“What?”

Another window into a vision.

Twilight, shaking, confused. She’d been nursing her stress for days, trying to outdo herself. She’d been so sure that Celestia would be dissapointed in her attempts. Balancing schoolwork and private study and lessons with Celestia as they grew more intense with helping half the hall with their own work. Balancing until…

“Until you broke,” the Archmage said as the Twilight in the vision began to break down at last. “Until you proved to her that you were a broken vessel. Damaged. Goods.”

“Shut up.”

“I only say what you know. You are worthless to her as you are. You always have been. But you could be better. You could be worth the effort. You could become just as she is.”

“Shut up!”

“Fine. Fine, I’ll go. But you have two choices, Twilight Sparkle of Canterlot--” Twilight winced. Place names were important. And the other her knew that attribution was important. “--you choose the denizens of your Court. Choose yourself and you’ll have her by the by. Choose a multitude and she will grow distant from you, unsure of you. Uncertain. She already is.”

The Archmage made a mockery of a bow, and then she vanished.

Twilight was alone in the library.

XIV. Nothing is Yet In Its True Form

“I don’t suppose I can ask for details?” Celestia said it with a smirk, but her tone wasn’t light enough for joking.

They were in the reading room still, waiting for the final two. Tea had been made, because even in the strangeness of her current environs, some things were actually constant. Whatever certain ponies might say, something were in fact unchanging.

Applejack shook her head. “Sorry, Princess. No can do.”

“Figured.”

“We’ll know presently, at least.” Rarity stirred at her tea with a cup idly. “One way or another.”

“She’ll make the right choice,” Fluttershy added, firmly. Or as firmly as she could manage.

Was the “real” Fluttershy’s voice as musical? Celestia struggled to remember. This version’s voice was divine. Smooth as silk, musical in all the ways that could matter, promising the world. She found she liked it quite a bit. The waking world’s Fluttershy was beautiful, stunning even, but this world’s version was beyond breathtaking. She was staring. Time to look away.

“I hope so,” Celestia said and took a sip. Things in dreams tasted strange, but always tasted of what she wished for. She’d conjured up chocolate tea once. That had been an adventure.

“But I will tell you it ain’t anythin’ like Luna’s,” Applejack said.

Spike had returned, books in hand to shelve again. He looked over his shoulder. “And yet, it is like hers. Just not in the way you fear.”

“Perhaps in the way you should fear,” Rarity muttered into her tea.

“My own was harrowing, but not… active, you could say,” Celestia said. “I had actually planned to tell Twilight eventually. Afterwards, when she was recovered. I thought it might help to have context, I suppose.”

Applejack smiled knowingly at her, and made a little gesture with her hoof, as if mimicking a wheel. It said--go on, go on.

Celestia squirmed a bit. “And perhaps I thought it might make us closer, yes, I admit it.”

“Oh, this is my favorite subject!” Rarity looked up then, her entire manner transformed. The former Lady was gone, the sighing and worried Rarity was gone, and in their place was the Gossip with gleaming eyes. “How do you think of yourself and Twilight? In what terms? Or perhaps, in what terms would you hope to think of yourself? Hm? Please, do tell!”

Celestia looked around. “You said that Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash would be coming, didn’t you? I don’t suppose you can get lost here, can you?”

“Well, you probably could,” Spike said. He had left and come back again with a tray of scones. Celestia was immensely distracted by them. Mostly, she was looking for a distraction. Partially, she was strangely and absurdly touched that Twilight had gotten her favorite teatime snack right.

“We could as well, if we wanted to.” Fluttershy pushed her mane out of her eyes. Her smile was a little stronger now, Celestia saw. “Maybe one day, when Twilight’s trial is over, she will want to do things with us. If she wanted, we could make this world work like the outside one does.”

Celestia’s fishing for distraction finally paid off. “Wait, you act as if the dream could be more than merely a reflection or… introspection.”

“Well, of course,” Rarity broke in with a huff. “Some mares have better things to do than--” she coughed, and then began again. “Yes. Your court could do likewise, if you wished. You could enjoy your old adventures or share them with the Sun. You simply never tried.”

“I… I did so, once. After a fashion. We used to enjoy each other, the Sun and I. At least, I thought we did.”

Fluttershy nodded. “Yes, and you can again.”

“But! First, you have to answer my question, Princess.”

The Sun’s shepherd--and perhaps its friend, as well--fought the intense urge to grimace. “Yes, I should, shouldn’t I?”

They all leaned in.

And she swallowed. “Well… well, honestly, I don’t know.”

A chorus of groans bombarded her. “Aw, don’t hedge the truth,” Applejack said, laying back on her beanbag. “Half a lie is a total one.”

“It isn’t either of those! I am genuinely conflicted.”

Fluttershy coughed. “Well, you like her, don’t you? She’s at least your friend. Right?”

“Of course.”

“Then that’s a good place to start. Twilight also thinks of you as a friend.” She paused, and nibbled on her lower lip as if considering something. “She wishes you would write more. She loves your letters a lot. I mean, she always did, but now she looks forward to them so much more and she reads them over and over and over and I realized this might be embarrassing just now.”

“I’m… honestly touched. I too wish she would write more. I know how busy she’s been. I’m very proud of her for how well she’s taking on her duties, small as they are yet. I wish she would ease into being a princess, go slowly, but her willingness to learn long before more is demanded of her is also refreshing. Cadance was much more reluctant.”

Rarity groaned dramatically. “Yes, yes, that’s all well and good but it’s hardly worth gossiping over. Fluttershy, dear, I’m a mare about my business.” She turned her sharp eyes to her would-be monarch and, to Celestia’s consternation and amusement, licked her lips. “And my business is prying the truth out of you like a miner in a gold mine.”

“Figured truth was my business,” Applejack said mildly from where she lay in repose.

“Yes, but affairs of the heart are mine!”

“If you’re implying that I have romantic intentions towards Twilight, I can’t help but disappoint you,” Celestia said, slowly. Carefully.

It was beginning to be clear to her that the aspects of Twilight’s court, at least, possessed knowledge that was perhaps beyond her. Applejack knew when she waffled or misspoke. Rarity’s grasp of the old language was beyond Twilight’s. She’d said so herself, and Celestia had no trouble believing it. Twilight was studious and delighted in old knowledge, but usually it was more… practical. Was practical the right word?

“Scientific?” Applejack offered.

“Or magical,” Fluttershy said.

Having her own aspects finish her sentences had been somewhat natural. Having her sister’s do so had taken her decades to get used to. Somehow, having Twilight’s do the same effortlessly left her feeling exposed.

“If you want me to go beyond saying that my feelings are complicated, then I will.” Celestia sat straighter. “I’ll try my best to explain myself. To give an account.”

“ ‘s all anypony could ask for, honestly.”

*

Twilight had found a book of history.

Specifically, one dedicated to Celestia herself. She’d read the like before, of course. If she were honest with herself--which was more impossible than it seemed--she’d read them before her feelings about Celestia had changed but had devoured them afterwards. How many hours of her life had Twilight spent trying to uncover the true Celestia? Many, no doubt. Tomes of history and lore, half-remembered and contradictory, and from the refuse she had pulled a few precious scraps of gleaming, golden truth. As best she could tell, at any rate.

She’d found stories of Celestia as a roaring inferno of violence, not causeless and not unfocused but sharp and intentional as a well-thrust lance. There had been brief glimpses of a Celestia bored with the mundane, and of one endlessly enthralled by it. Celestias that dallied with shortlived life, marrying and courting, and of Celestias that devoted themselves to study or governance. Always behind these things there was a sense of purpose. Perhaps Twilight had herself put that purpose there but she did not think so. Celestia was Intention. She created meaning in the shapeless void, and swirled the cosmos around her hooves. If she looked at it with surprise and awe afterwards, it was not that she was caught unawares--she simply reacted to the miracle properly, with the attitude that it deserved.

At first, she had searched for ways to prove herself, or at least to make herself desirable. When she was younger, the idea of catching another pony’s eye had in some ways been so much more simple. Romance happened. It was an automatic facet of one’s life. Inevitable, starting with meaningful glances and a warm feeling around another and then proceeding like wedding-bell clockwork from there. So her project to find what the Princess liked or valued and then emulating that thing had seemed perfect.

Age had taught her otherwise. She supposed in another decade she would think differently again. Perhaps a pony a decade older than she would not think of intimacy as fraught with terror as the current Twilight thought it. Instead of seeing a troubled sea full of worry and agony and genuine gut-fear that older Twilight would see and actually understand.

This particular book of history was a few hundred years in the future in comparison to herself. She’d not caught the author’s name, but whoever they were, she was impressed. The prose was brilliant. The detail was, frankly, astounding. The effort was clear. The pony who had penned this massive volume had all but devoted herself to the subject at hoof.

Twilight assumed the writer was female. Why? She found she often did, when there was no way to know otherwise. Perhaps it was simply because she herself was a mare. Certainly, she didn’t think that there was some sort of rigid differentiation in something as silly as writing style.

Curiosity, Twilight Sparkle’s most valuable and oldest friend, shone brightly and briefly through her malaise. She carefully saved her place and turned the book over.

There, on a nondescript cover, were the words: Sol Invictus, or The Invincible Sun. Huh. Now there was a title. Twilight managed a smirk.

And then it immediately died. By HRM Twilight Sparkle.

She didn’t even read the degrees attached. She almost dropped the book.

“I wrote this,” she said to the empty air. “Me. This…” She started leafing through it again, seeing everything in a new light. “I know her this well. I’ve dared ask these questions. Biographical information, historical commentary, when she started drinking tea. How long did this take me? How long was I… I writing it?”

Only then did it occur to her that she would write this five hundred years in the future. Ageless. Endless. Mostly.

She wanted to read every single page. No, every single word. This was the treasure trove that a young Twilight would have practically drooled over. To know everything about Celestia, to have it all right then and there, had always been her dream.

Twilight sighed and sat, cradling the book.

She wanted to go home. The excitement faded. When she looked down at the cover, she felt a strange sort of shame.

The author--that Twilight, whoever she would be--had put so much effort into this. She had discovered it all by herself, and used her time to build a monument to her mentor. Before, she had been merely impressed by the devotion but now that she knew it for her own Twilight felt it. There was no need for her to imagine that devotion, because she was already inside it.

It was a letter, wasn’t it?

“Yes, it is.”

Twilight jumped, startled again as the Archmage returned. She stood right before Twilight, a frown on her face. “Do try to keep yourself from leaning on the shelves,” she said.

“Sorry.” Twilight straightened. Right. She wouldn't’ want ponies doing that in Ponyville. Well. When she’d had a library, she wouldn’t have wanted that. It was nice to see something familiar in this spectre of her own future.

The Archmage didn’t seem to notice her apology. “It was the great letter, after which no letter was needed. A final climax to all such indirect communication. Nothing ever written by anyone will ever surpass that volume, Twilight. Nopony will ever be able to match its historical depth. Not a single living creature could hope to understand her as you will when you write that book and encapsulate her being in its pages.”

Twilight watched as the Archmage gripped the book with her magic and took it from her younger self’’s embrace. Twilight let it go.

The archmage flipped through the pages with a bored expression. “Every page in of itself could be enough for a student’s report. It is one of your minor works.”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “Minor? How could something I wrote about the Princess be minor?” When she’s so important to me, she didn’t add.

“Because the work you will produce afterwards will be infinitely more valuable. You don’t simply revolutionize magic and the mundane sciences. You invent new ones.”

“That’s good to hear, I think.” Twilight shook her head. “No, it’s wonderful. I want to be happy about it, but… Celestia? Minor?”

The Archmage looked at her with something that would have been annoyance, if much of anything could move across her face except indifference. “Yes. Minor. Of course it must be.”

“Why?”

“Why, you understood her perfectly. What else was there to write on? To research? What was there to explore, really, afterwards?” She made an almost comical little expression of comprehension. “Ah, I forget how young you are. Surely you don’t think anypony could satisfy another for so long?”

Twilight frowned. “I… I mean, I hadn’t thought about it that much.”

“Well, of course not, you’re not even at your first century yet.” The look faded away, replaced by the Archmage’s stoic demeanor.

“These books,” Twilight began, slowly standing up. She gestured at the shelves. “The new and the old. They’re real, aren’t they?”

The Archmage blinked at her. “Of course,” she replied flatly.

“Okay, yes, rhetorical question. But what I’m confused on is who writes them, if they are by me. You imply I wrote a lot of them.”

“There is a whole section that way,” the Archmage said, pointing.

Twilight’s curiosity almost unrooted her. She needed to see. What strange new secrets would she uncover, given world enough and time? “But, for these books, is it you? I mean, is it myself who made whatever decision you’ve asked me to make?”

“Well, of course.”

“Ah.”

Twilight bit her lip. “I don’t suppose you would walk me to that section, would you?”

The ghost of a smile was on the Archmage’s lips. “If you wish.”

*

“The first thing I can say,” Celestia began, “is that I have always been fond of Twilight from the day I met her. She was an eager filly with a bright smile and a thirst for knowledge. A filly after my own heart, really. Though, pity she didn’t have a sunnier name.” Celestia grinned. “It is a bit morbid for the Sun to have a student named Twilight, now that I think of it.”

“Oh, don’t tell her that,” Rarity said.

“I’m sure she already knows.” Celestia waved a hoof. “But I won’t be sidetracked, even by myself. As she grew older, I noticed Twilight’s… crush, you could say. I don’t like the word infatuation, even when it is appropriate. It feels condescending, even mean spirited. Perhaps that is myself projecting. It is certainly possible. But I noticed her feelings.

“And at the time, I was flattered. Of course I was. I am only flesh and blood… yes, of a different sort perhaps, but still I feel and want and appreicate as any pony does. I happen to be one. I was flattered, but I knew it would fade. It’s really rather common. Not just with me, mind you, but with those foals look up to for all sorts of reasons. A young filly having an innocent crush on her teacher is as old as Clover the Clever. And yes, she did in fact have one on Starswirl for a time, before you ask. She told me so.”

“Did she now?” Rarity’s eyes practically sparkled. “Oh, that is lovely.”

“I should tell Twilight that. I don’t suppose telling you is the same, is it?”

“Not exactly,” Applejack piped up. “She doesn’t know all we know.”

Interesting. Celestia filed that away for later.

Beneath her confession, as it were, she was still figuring out Twilight’s Court. The problem of having the Courts, beyond simply living “severally”, was that she and Luna had gone into the whole situation blind. Nopony had been there to help them or explain to them what this new and strange condition was or meant. The Courts themselves had been the only guide, and knowledge had depended on asking the right questions. Apparently, Celestia had not asked enough of the right questions.

“I wondered after some time, as she grew older, if things might change between us. She became interested in mares, and she was as always eager for my company. But at the time, I did not exactly plan or expect anything. I have had many female students who, ah, ‘swung that way’ as I’ve heard it said, and most of them never even thought to court me. On the other hoof, I knew it was certainly possible. I have had relationships with former students before.”

They all sat up at this. “You have?” Fluttershy asked.

Celestia simply nodded. “I’m surprised that Twilight didn’t already know that.”

They all looked at each other.

“I am too, frankly,” Applejack said and shrugged. “Guess she liked thinkin’ she was the first an’ only? Though don’t think Twi would appreciate me sayin’ so.”

“Yes, it does sound a bit…” Rarity waved her hoof around as if that would catch the word. “Naive, perhaps? Vain?”

“Um, I don’t know.” Fluttershy said. “It just sounds normal to me. Ponies like to think they’re special.”

Celestia winced. “Now, I will take a detour here for this: specialness. To not be the first or the only is not to be somehow less ‘special’ or dear to me. Twilight is a special pony. A beautiful, wonderful pony.”

Fluttershy flushed. “Do you think so?”

“Of course,” Celestia said quickly, still moving along. Visions of previous conversations played in her mind, all of them supplying her with her old answers. “But that doesn’t mean she’s the first unicorn I’ve ever considered a relationship with, or the first student. There have been archmages before her. There will be after she is gone. Or, well, I suppose after her…” Celestia shrugged. “You understand the idea, at least.”

“Makes a pony feel mighty small,” proclaimed the agrarian scholar, who had found her wheat stalk again. Why wheat? Celestia was still puzzled over that. It seemed silly, but who was she to judge? “A single grain in a bucket of sand, like.”

“It isn’t meant to. I’ve simply had this conversation too many times. Ponies worry about me, or about what I am or about who I am. They needn’t. At some point or another, almost every lover has asked me about the others. I’ve always tried to be sympathetic, but I also always feel frustrated. I know that it’s hard for me to understand what it is like to be shortlived. I know that it is difficult for me to see the pain that might be caused by the idea that there have been so many, but that doesn’t mean that I can stand in any form the old accusation that my friends and lovers--my loved ones--are just…” she made a little growl. “Just an unending assembly line.”

“W-we didn’t say that,” Fluttershy said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean--”

“None of us did, sug,” Applejack said. “But it’s a sore subject.”

“Because if they think themselves diminished by me, or by the implications of my Self bared to them, what shall I feel in return when they recoil?” Celestia sighed and closed her eyes. “If they think that it is awful to be in the presence of something larger, or something that seems to them to be beyond them in some way, imagine what it is like to be that solitary Thing. To have ponies have trouble believing even the most basic truths about you, that you are in fact a pony. That you have friends. That you love sincerely and miss lost dear ones sincerely and honestly and often. But no, they assign to you coldness because you yourself do not die.”

The others were silent, looking at anything else.

Celestia began again. “I’m sorry. It is indeed a sore subject. Those I have lost, however, are not. You may tell Twilight that,” she added, and they perked up a bit. “I would love to tell her of all my old friends. We’ll have plenty of time. But, to get back to the point.

“I didn’t plan for her to court me, and after awhile I honestly didn’t expect her to. I knew she still felt some way towards me, but she wouldn’t act on it or face it, and I would not make her. Not only did I not have romantic feelings myself that would push me to do so, but I take care not to make the first move. Once again, because ponies don’t see a flesh-and-blood mare courting somepony she loves. They see the Ageless Avatar of the Sun.”

“That is a bit different, when you say it that way,” Rarity allowed.

“A bit, yes. And I didn’t feel anything beyond friendship and a teacher’s fondness until the night that Luna returned.”

They all focused on her then.

“The first night she met all of us,” Fluttershy said. She smiled brightly. “It was the scariest moment, but the best moment.”

“When she most felt lost--”

“--and also the most secure.”

“When she knew she would not be alone--”

“--Even though she was, in fact, alone at that moment.”

Celestia couldn’t keep track of who spoke. It was dizzying to hear them take up each other’s sentences effortlessly, without pause. She looked from face to face, and found them all intent on her. Celestia cleared her throat.

“Yes, the night that Luna returned. Or, should I say, that Twilight returned her to me.”

“You came then, unlooked for, in the eleventh hour,” Rarity said, grinning.

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Does Twilight know the Lays of Bell-Toris?”

“No, she does not,” sang the mare in white, her grin still strong. “But you do. And I do.”

“And I do,” Applejack said.

“I don’t,” murmured Fluttershy.

“And then you fell in love, yes?” Rarity asked, taking up the reins again. “Bit by bit, perhaps? Or, no, perhaps all at once! Struck down by love at the moment of triumph!”

Celestia rolled her eyes. “Hardly. I was an emotional wreck. Luna was an emotional wreck. I was ecstatic and remorseful and working on adrenaline for much of that adventure. I did not exactly have time for grand romantic epiphanies. It was gradual.”

And then of course, just like that, she realized she’d admitted it.

The reaction was swift. Rarity was right up in front of her, manic.

“So you do!”

“What?”

“You are indeed in love with Twilight Sparkle.”

Celestia grimaced. “Well, yes, but let’s not--”

Rarity simply crowed victoriously.

Celestia’s ears folded back against her head. “Please, calm down. Yes, I have romantic feelings for her, but it isn’t as if I’m about to go ask her to court me! Or, well, for me to court her. Whichever. Please stop celebrating.”

“Ha! As if I could.” But Rarity did return to her seat, swaggering all the way. “Really, Your Majesty, was it so hard to say?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Fluttershy asked.

“Because she’s ageless now.”

Three uncomprehending looks.

“Which means… that I am in uncharted territory with her. I’ve never been in any sort of relationship with another ageless pony. My sisterhood with Luna not counting, obviously.”

“Why shouldn’it it?” Applejack asked. “I mean, ain’t the same obviously, but did you get tired of her? You finished with her?”

Celestia frowned. “Of course not. You can’t just use up a pony, or find the end of them. A pony is an everchanging thing, a tiny sliver of eternity.” A pause. “Oh. But there are still... I mean, I have concerns. Several.”

“Jus’ thought you might want to connect those two,” Applejack said with a smug tone and returned to her book. “Also, you might wanna hold on t’ somethin’.”

*

“So… what is life like for me, in your future?” Twilight asked.

Walking with the Archmage was like walking alone, not because the Archmage was in fact herself but because she was stiff, silent, and practically nonexistent. She was more furniture than pony. Which was really a rude thought for her to be having, honestly, but she justified it in that it was true. Not to mention it was probably a bit rude to be so standoffish in the first place. Maybe.

“Challenging,” the Archmage replied. “Busy. I won’t tell you specifics. We don’t like spoilers,” she added. “But mostly you simply wouldn’t understand.”

“Right.” Twilight looked back down at her hooves for a moment. “And… Equestria still has four princesses?”

“Five, technically.”

“Wait, who is the fifth?”

The Archmage looked down at her with a single cold eyebrow.

“Right. Too much detail. But why do you let me read the books?”

“Let you? I hardly have a right to control you here. This is your library.”

“Mine?” Twilight stopped short at that. The Archmage kept walking. “This place is mine?”

“If you wish it to be.”

More silence, and Twilight followed. She had to pick up the pace just to keep up with the Archmage and her long strides. So this is what she would look like. This is what she would… be, she guessed. This stranger.

“And do you like it? Being a princess, I mean.”

The Archmage didn’t look down this time. “It is satisfying.”

“Ah.”

A few more minutes of silence. They reached the section, or at least the Archmage stopped. Twilight looked around, scanning titles. Mathematics, thaumaturgy, history. A few looked like textbooks. She didn’t linger on the titles very long.

“I’m still a bit hazy on what exactly I’m choosing.”

“You are choosing whether to grow up or not.”

But Twilight shook her head. “No. That’s being evasive. What is the actual choice? Not what it means, what it is.”

“Are you so sure they can be seperated?” When Twilight glared at her, she shrugged. “You are choosing whether to have a court or not.”

“A what?”

“In your time, there are four alicorns. Three of them live, to varying degrees, severally. I mean that they live in a fragmented state, their minds intruded upon by the element they are shepherds or guardians of, and so are not alone in their own minds. Celestia rules over the Court of the Sun, and finds it rules also over her. Luna has the Court of the Moon, and they are her companions and her occasional shame. Cadance lounges uselessly with the lounging Court of Love. And you? You will choose your own.”

“But… I mean, why am I doing that here? What do you mean ‘in her own mind’?”

“As in her mind. She exists severally.”

“Alternate personalities?” Twilight reeled. She hadn’t read much about mental disorders, yes, but she knew some of them. “Multiple personalities? Split perso--”

“No. She is not addled. Pay attention.” The Archmage frowned down at her imperiously. “You know Celestia, who is the face, but you do not know the mind. Just as you would construct a singular pony from the fragments of basic desires and higher functions, so too is Celestia made up of the Court. She is in control.”

“And I have one of these?”

“You should not.”

“Why? If Celestia and the others have one, is it really that bad?”

“Not for them, but they are not as you are. You are something new. You can be something greater. Purer. Undivided and singular.” The Archmage stood straighter, prouder. “And you must. For your own good. You will have the choice presently, when the candidates arrive, and then you will make your choice. To strive on without them, or to wait for them to catch up. To move or to dawdle.”

And with that, she turned and continued. Twilight made to follow her, but stopped. She felt dismissed.

When did she become so cold? Twilight didn’t think she talked like this ever.

A lot can change in a thousand years. She thought on what could change in her. She wondered what the pony who had left her had seen and done to be so alien.

*

Celestia didn’t have time to ask--”what?”--she had time only to take a breath and then she was no longer in the library. She was, in fact, falling. The wind howled in her ear, and she was glad, frantically glad, that it was impossible to vomit from vertigo in the Aether.

Her wings caught the air seconds before her mind caught up. She glided by pure instinct. All around her,

“Glad you could make it!”

Celestia looked up in time to see a blue blur angling towards her. She neatly dodged it, and turned to watch the strange shape slow to a crawl in the sky.

“And hello to you too, Rainbow Dash,” Celestia said, rolling her eyes. “As energetic as ever, I see.”

“Yeah! You know it. Besides, it’s an important day. The most important.”

“Oh?”

“Yup.” Rainbow Dash had risen to meet her at eye level. “Today’s the day the eggest of heads makes her choice.”

Celestia looked her over. She was Rainbow Dash, but decidedly different. If Twilight had turned Applejack into a gentlemare-planter, Rarity into a Lady of a House Major, and Fluttershy into a stunning beauty with a bit more courage… she had apparently made Rainbow Dash into…

“Why on earth do you look like that? Where did Twilight even find this armor? Or find the time to think it up?” Celestia asked, bewildered.

Rainbow grinned and did a little loop. “You like it? At first she was all like--Rainbow is a wonderbolt, but then she was all like, she looked great that one time in the Crystal Empire with the jousting. So, you know, she put this together. Except, not on purpose. Her subconcious. Or something.”

“Their official armor doesn’t even look like that. It’s literally thaumic-powered armor painted blue and yellow with flames.”

“I know! Isn’t it awesome?”

“I…” Celestia shook her head. “Yes, Rainbow. It is wonderful. ‘Awesome’ even.”

“It could definitely use more flames,” said Pinkie Pie from her perch on Celestia’s back.

“Well now, that seems a bit--what in the singing nine heavens are you--”

And that was when she bucked Pinkie Pie out of the sky. And then she watched for roughly three seconds in horror as that pinkest of ponies plummeted to her impending death on the indistinct ground below, laughing all the way.

Before she could race down to rescue Pinkie, Rainbow had beat her to it, carrying Pinkie with her as she ascended.

Pinkie giggled. “Sorry ‘bout that, Princess!”

“How did you…” Celestia shook her head. “It isn’t important. I’m sorry I threw you off.”

“You mind carryin’ her, Princess? She’s kind of heavy.” Rainbow said.

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Twilight forgot the strength charms, didn’t she?”

Rainbow grunted. “Completely.”

Chuckling, Celestia held Pinkie in her magic and deposited the giggling mare on her back. “Will that do, Pinkie? It’s not quite safe, but it should be a bit more secure than being carried by Rainbow.”

“It’ll work, Your Superness!” Pinkie hugged to her and laughed again. “Now let’s go!”

“Go?”

“Yeah! Princesses to save, duh.”

“Or something,” Rainbow said. “Anyway. We’re headed to pick up Twilight, Princess. We figured that you should come with. But you have to promise us a few things. That’s why Pinkie is here.”

“Mhm! It’s really important, okay? It’s a Pinkie Pie swear.”

Celestia tried to look back at her, remembered she was, in fact, flying, and then turned back towards Rainbow. “Of course. And that entails…?”

“Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.” she said solemnly as Rainbow pantomimed the motions. Celestia sort of just blinked.

“Ah.”

“Yes. Now you do it.”

“Shouldn’t I know what I’m swearing to first?” she asked weakly.

“Oh yeah.” Pinkie cleared her throat. “Well, you can’t tell Twilight what to do. That’s really kind of it.”

“You can answer any questions she asks,” Rainbow said. “You can’t suggest questions. Only direct answers.”

“And honest ones.”

“Even if you don’t think she’ll like the answer. You have to.”

Celestia frowned. “I confess that I’m a bit worried. I’m not sure what she’ll ask.”

“You don’t have to go,” Rainbow said. “Sorry. If you come with, you gotta take the oath.”

“And if you don’t come with, how are you gonna see my awesome hat?” Pinkie Pie piped up from behind her.

Celestia took a deep breath. “Any question. Any at all?”

“Yup!” they said in unison.

“Will it help her?”

Rainbow shrugged. “We don’t know--and neither does she. Or you. We just know that it’s okay. I don’t give the orders, just follow ‘em. I’m a rookie after all.” Her grin was lopsided. “But, for real, I honestly don’t know either way. It could help a lot. It’s really up to Twilight.”

“Do you trust her?” Pinkie asked. “It’s okay if you don’t. We won’t be offended. Trusting another pony is scary, we know that.”

“You can not be sure about them and still be loyal,” Rainbow said. “At least, I think you can. Twilight isn’t sure about Trixie, you know, but she wouldn’t let a pony lie about her if she knew it was a lie. Okay, bad example. The point is…” Rainbow sighed. “Argh. Trust is confusing. Just sticking with somepony is easier. More emotionally satisfying, at least.”

“Nuh-uh! It’s harder.”

“For you maybe!”

“Dashie, don’t be mean.”

Celestia coughed. “I think I understand what you mean. Making the choice is hard, but following through is a relief. In a way, it makes sense.”

“Yeah! Kinda.”

“I think I’ll go. I trust Twilight, or I want to trust her. If there is a chance my presence would help… I’ll go.”

“You gotta do it!”

“Do what?”

Oh. Yes. The silly ritual. Celestia groaned. “Must I?”

“Absolutely,” they said in unison, sternly if anything.

Celestia sighed, thought of Twilight, and did the absurd ritual.

And then she was somewhere else.

XV. Freedom Succumbs to Dizziness

Twilight swallowed and looked down the row where the Archmage had gone.

For the severalth time in the last twenty-four hours, Twilight found herself at a loss. Severalth, of course, being the best she could do as frankly she’d lost count. Where to begin? She couldn’t really deal with the idea of living for centuries. She couldn’t really deal with understanding having… presences, she supposed, in her head. Being an Alicorn. Writing a book on Celestia so in-depth that to be honest it made her want to cry with its soulful honesty.

It wasn’t as if she couldn’t try to approach these things. She could. But before even beginning, it was obvious that they were bigger than her. Grander. Older.

Much like Celestia herself. If she was honest about it.

Some of what the Archmage had imparted troubled her more than the basic problems. What amounted to--once again, she strove to be honest with herself--a love letter to cap all other love letters was minor? A minor work, at best? One she’d “moved on” from, even. The idea that Celestia had somehow planned this all out, like a grandmaster seeing the game five steps ahead. It was her life the Archmage was more or less talking about. Her whole life, organized like…

Well, like a list.

Huh. Now that was fitting. Horrifying, but fitting. Horrifying mostly in that she was not the one who had written that list. Fitting in that, if she were to ever concieve of her most dearly-held vision of how Twilight Sparkle the Fathful Student went about life, it would be at least related to list-making.

The Arhcmage seemed to suggest she would move beyond Celestia. Or, maybe that it wouldn’t be Celestia she would ever… She shook her head. She had made peace with the fact she would never be able to really approach Celestia romantically. Being her friend was a joy. It was enough. It had to be, really. And she read those letters over and over and memorized every mundane greeting and personal anecdote like scripture carved on her heart as a friend. Obviously.

To be the Archamge must be lonely, she realized suddenly. So, very lonely. The way she acted, the way she talked… it reminded her briefly of Maud, but Maud was merely laconic. A little off-puttingly so at times, yes, but she was still there and engaged in a way the Archmage seemed not to be. The Archmage seemed distant not by choice or because it was her nature, but because there was litterally no other option. She was like Twilight.

That was it. That was what had bothered her.

“She’s like me, if I hadn’t gone to Ponyville. If I’d stayed in my tower.”

Again, the books did not answer. But did they need to? She heard the words roll of her tongue and knew they were true. That was Twilight, lady in her high tower, cut off from the world by her own volition until it wasn’t even a choice anymore but a fact.

Choice. To be alone, and perfect. To be with others, and risk being weighed down.

Honestly, Twilight wasn’t sure what to think of that dichotomy.

She started walking. Whatever and wherever this choice was, she wanted to get it done with. Let it come. She was tired of walking and waiting and talking and--

As she reached the end of the row and looked around her, the scenery changed. She saw, at last, a wall and a door. Her breath caught. There it was. Her exit.

She ran to it, as if at any moment it might vanish. And maybe it would. She picked up the pace. Maybe it would just vanish, wasn’t this place all dreams and illusion anyhow? Who was to say it wouldn’t leave her?

But it didn’t. She tried pulling at it but it wouldn’t budge. Frustrated, she growled and then pushed with her magic and her body all at once and then fell through.

She stumbled into a very different sort of place.

Above her were stars, endless and shining. Below her, the tile of the Endless Library, stretching out until it gave way to nothing. It was as if she’d found the end of the world, but she knew there was no such thing. Right? Wasn’t there?

The Archmage was there, of course. Unmoving. As if she’d expected this and was not in the least bit surprised. Twilight wandered briefly if anything could move her, in both senses of the word.

Wherever she was, it was beautiful. The stars… she had always loved them, ever since her father had first set up her telescope and aimed it out past the great mountain above their home towards the heavens. Here they were impossibly bright, impossibly distinct. She felt she could almost reach out and dare to touch them, maybe if she just rose a few feet on her unsteady wings...

Celestia’s voice broke through her awe like a clocktower bell.

“Twilight?”

Twilight froze. She looked away from the stars, past the Archmage, and saw Her there. Her teacher, her mentor. Her friend. Celestia.

Twilight saw Rainbow Dash and Pinkie on either side of her, but for that first moment she had eyes for only one mare. She was, as always, indescribable. Twilight had tried many times to put words on paper or arrange them in the secret confines of her mind in ways that might do her justice. But Celestia repulsed all attempts to twist words into a conqueror’s hoof. Beautiful? Of course. It was the “of course” that taunted her. As in, of course, but anypony could say that after two seconds. What do you have to show for all the time you’ve had?

They had found each other, but there was a void between them. Twilight understood how fitting it was immediately, she on her ledge and Celestia on her ledge.

She was furious and ecstatic all at once.

The Archamge cleared her throat. “The others will have their chance, and then I will offer a final answer, and then you will choose.”

Twilight glared at her. “What others? How did you get Pinkie and… Oh.”

Blinking, she turned back to find Rainbow carting her pink friend across the void and depositing her on the title with a grunt of exertion. Pinkie recovered immediately and greeted Twilight with a massive hug and a babbled greeting.

The Archmage sighed. “Is that really appropriate, shadow? For this to be even remotely meaningful--”

“--then I should be who I am,” Pinkie said, and released Twilight.

“Hey, Sparks,” Rainbow said. “You like the armor?”

“It’s crazy. You look…” Twilight managed a strained little chuckle. “Okay, you look ridiculous but also sort of cool? It’s a bit much.”

“Hey, you’re the one that made it,” Rainbow said with a shrug. “I like the paintjob. Just not the weight. Mind adding some of the power charms next time?”

“The what?”

Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

Pinkie pronked back to Dash and they stood together. “Nevermind that! We have important stuff to talk about. Well, one important thing. You, Twilight!”

Pinkie turned slightly and gestured to Celestia. Twilight watched her take flight and loved it as she always had.

Celestia stood between the Archmage and the new arrivals. Twilight thought of her sitting at court, petitioners on either side. Except the petitioners were not usually Pinkie in an admittedly well put together old style jester’s costume and Rainbow Dash in what appeared to be enough armor for most of the Guard. She did cut quite a figure, though. Twilight had to admit that.

“Well?” Twilight asked, trying to smile. Pinkie made one wish they could, whatever the circumstances. “First, are you Pinkie? Or are you…”

“Depends,” Pinkie said. Her cheer did not waver. “I’m Pinkie, but I’m also you. I’m what you think and feel about Pinkie, and what you know and have seen of her. I’m also me. It’s not a simple question.”

“So you aren’t a simulcrum.”

“Not exactly.”

“Twilight, we’re basically the same,” Rainbow said. “I mean, yeah, not entirely. Like, Rainbow out there doesn’t know anything about power charms or enchanted armor, but I do. I know a lot. I know a few things you don’t know. But we’re the same pony in the ways that matter.”

“If it helps,” Pinkie cut in, “then you don’t have to think of us as the same. You could think of us as the embodiment of how you feel, maybe? Or just as ponies who happen to look like your friends. Or… or, sort of how you keep the human versions of your friends separate in your head, maybe?”

“Yeah, but she does that with dumb names.”

“Well, you do look kind of crazy.”

“Pinkie, you have the dumbest hat ever, and you think--”

Twilight cleared her throat. “Girls. Please. I’ll just call you Pinkie and Dash, okay? We can sort this out later.”

“Right!” they said in unison, which honestly was unsettling.

“Well… weren’t you supposed to tell me something? And for that matter, Celestia--are you alright? What happened?”

“I couldn’t be here for the first part of your trial, as I was told,” Celestia said. “I’m sorry, Twilight. It was not my choice, I assure you.”

“No, I believe that.”

“As for us,” Pinkie began, “we’re here to convince you that you should pick us. And by us, I mean your friends. Like, Dash and Flutters and Rarity and Applehat and me!”

“And also to get you away from this one,” Rainbow added, nodding towards the Archmage, who watched quietly.

“Well, convince me,” Twilight said with a smile.

“She’s told you that stuff about being ‘perfect’ and stuff, right?” Pinkie drew the word perfect out until it was almost unrecognizable. “I don’t even know where to begin. Twilight, what did you feel when the elements shattered?”

Twilight grimaced. “Well, it wasn’t exactly pleasant. I remember being horrified.”

“Yeah, yeah, but after that.”

“Well, I realized that I had been going about it the wrong way. Treating the Elements of Harmony like they were just another artifact or spell focus is a terrible idea. They will just ignore you. They only have power in the context of our bond. We’re all linked. You, and I, and all of our friends, even before we put them on.”

“You mean like my rainboom, right?” Dash cut in excitedly, but Twilight shook her head.

“No, not that. I mean in how you five all decided to come with me. We hadn’t known each other very long, though some of you were already friends, but you accompanied me into a scary place with no real guarantees anything was going to work out for the better. In that moment, I realized that I trusted you. I didn’t know why. I didn’t have time to really analyze it.”

Twilight laughed softly and looked down at her hooves. “I just knew it was true. Or maybe I knew it could be true, and I wanted it to be true.”

“You defeated Nightmare Moon and you helped Luna come back because you stopped trying to use the world like a machine,” Pinkie said. “You’re a smart pony, Twilight, but smart ponies need friends too.”

“Yeah. Ponies need someone to be loyal to. Someone that they can trust at least a little,” Rainbow said. “Pinkie and I know what’s she said, but listen to me when I tell you that you really won’t be perfect or even better alone.”

“You’ll get more done, maybe, but even that’s kind of doubtful,” Pinkie said.

“And then what will be the point of all the things you do when there’s not a single pony there to appreciate it? You can’t live alone forever! And if you let it all go, one day you’re going to find out that nopony even thinks of you at all. You’re a shadow or a machine they can just slip paperwork to under the door and get it all signed in triplicate.”

“Remember how happy you were, when the Princess let you stay in Ponyville? You thought--”

“--It will be the greatest adventure,” Twilight said softly.

“Yeah! Just like in the book mom read,” Dash said with a grin. “When Rosebud asked Daring what it was going to be like, to go back to her classroom and teach classes instead of have adventures in the field.”

“Dash hates that one.”

“But I don’t,” Rainbow said. “Because I understand it. I saw the way you felt, and I know that you remembered it when you first started living in Ponyville.”

“And she was right. You were right. Wasn’t it an adventure?”

“Still is,” Rainbow said.

“It really has been,” Twilight agreed.

Pinkie stepped forward and took over. “Twilight, do you really think that it’s going to make you smarter or more grown up to be alone? I mean, really, what would you do? Let the Archmage be your guide and she wouldn’t even bother to leave goodbye letters. Just leave Ponyville behind, move into the palace for a few decades and learn the ins and outs of the government. Study magic in seclusion, maybe even work on some of those inventions you have in that notebook you won’t mention to anyone.”

“Because they’re failed designs, Pinkie.”

“You never tried ‘em.”

“Because they won’t work. It’s math--nevermind. They were a whim.”

“That’s what she’ll have you doing, that’s what you will more and more want to do. You won’t talk to Celestia or Luna anymore. Will you keep up your chess games by mail? General Ironclad was so happy that you remembered his birthday. Did you know that his games with you have turned his whole outlook on life around?”

“That seems a bit much.”

“If it weren’t true, it would be a bit too much, you’re right. Except you’re wrong, and it’s true. He was old and lonely. Playing chess with a little lavender filly on his last posting was one of his favorite memories, and then poof! There you were and suddenly that old warhorse had someone to talk to again.”

“I’m… I mean, I didn’t want to assume it meant that much to him,” Twilight said, looking away. “It was just a gift. I was happy that he was happy. He was nice to me when I was homesick.”

“Other ponies are important,” Rainbow said, edging closer. “Like, really important. When you’re going down towards a bad end, other ponies can pull you out of the dive before you crash. When you’re on top of the world, when you’re in the winner’s circle, other ponies are there to share in how awesome it is. It’s amazing, because it doesn’t work like math. If I spread a cake between friends, we get smaller pieces as there are more of us. But happiness doesn’t work that way.”

“Do you remember that old rhyme you found?”

Twilight jerked upright and looked Pinkie in the eye. “Yes.”

“The one you used to think about so much? You translated it and keep it on your desk.”

Twilight swallowed. Celestia was looking at her now, curious.

“The inarticulate sunlight,” Twilight said. She shook her head, trying to deny the way her heart leapt in her chest. “No, it’s dumb. I mean, yeah, I’m interested as to what it means. I’m curious. It ran better in the old language. It’s pretty. But that’s all there is to it.”

Dash cleared her throat and recited:

I have written this hoping you will read it,
Years and years hence or tomorrow.
Past all sorrow, past entropy itself
Past all of the wide and bottomless darkness of space
There is an inarticulate sunlight.

Pinkie hummed. “You wanted to know what was underneath the world, didn’t you? You used to say it like that, but you don’t anymore. You try not to think about it.”

“It’s not a mystery. There is nothing.”

But she thought of her letter and the chase she'd conducted in the halls of Canterlot's Royal Archive. Always chasing the ineffable something in Magic.

“Twilight, how long have we been friends? How long has it been since you and I and all the others learned the truth already? Don’t you feel the rightness of the Elements? You’re thinking about perfection like it’s a grade or a number, silly. But you know it’s not. You know what you've felt and seen with us is closer to that sunlight stuff than anything the Archmage has told you.”

“We don’t have to convince you. I mean, we shouldn’t have to. You already know,” Rainbow said.

“You know that trying to be some kind of isolated genius will only be sad. Does the Archmage seem happy to you? Do you want to be like her? I think you like having friends. I think you like being a pony that can even try to have them. She’s your past, Twi.”

“And we want to be there when you make the future,” Dash said.

“But we also wanted to say something else,” Pinkie said, and her cheer faded a little and she huddled closer to Rainbow. “We couldn’t bring the others because they couldn’t say it and really… really mean it. But Dashie and I could. We think you’ll pick the right choice. If it isn’t us…”

“Then we still believe in you,” Rainbow said. “We really do. We won’t be around to see it, but we know that either way, you’ll do something worth doing. We worry that you’ll do great things and find that they don’t mean anything to you. Pinks and I--”

“--it scares us,” Pinkie said, frowning. “It scares us what might happen to you if you think she’s right. Because maybe you’ll have a productive life, but a happy one?”

“One worth living?”

“And yet Dashie and I can’t deny that we trust you. We love you--we love you as much as you love Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash, whatever they’re doing right now in Ponyville.” Pinkie kicked her hoof, looking away. “What you do is important. But so is who you do it with.”

The Archmage cleared her throat, drawing all eyes to her.

“I have said what could be said. Know only that it is time to put away childish things when you are no longer a child.”

And then she stared at Celestia. And then they all were.

“What do you think I should do?” Twilight asked. “My gut instinct is to choose my friends, but I’m worried that I don’t really understand what I’m choosing here.”

Celestia took a long breath. She sighed. She looked at them all, one by one.

“I won’t tell you what to do,” she said. “You are already a grown mare, Twilight. I promised I wouldn’t press you and I won’t, because it’s your choice to make.”

“May I ask you a question? Or, possibly a few.”

“Of course. Always.”

“Some of the things that the… well, the Archmage said bothered me.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “The archmage?”

“I’ve started calling her that.” Twilight gestured to the older version of herself, and Celestia gave a little “ah” of comprehension. “Did you plan for me to be an alicorn? As in, was that your plan from the beginning?”

“No,” Celestia said quickly. A little too quickly. “Never.”

They watched each other.

Celestia looked down and sighed. “But I did begin to plan for what seemed the likely future. You as the new Archmage. I was never going to push you into something you didn’t want. I just… I thought you would be a good one. I knew that if I gave you the opportunity and the know-how that you could do it.”

“What if I had said one day that I wanted to be a painter? Or that I wanted to do… well, anything that wasn’t basically that?”

“Then I would have told you to do whatever it was,” Celestia said. “Part of me would have been a little disappointed that I’d been wrong.”

Twilight closed her eyes. “Oh.”

“But I would have been more disappointed in myself,” Celestia continued, as if she hadn’t noticed. “Because I had misjudged you, or because perhaps I had wasted time you could have spent working towards another goal. I’m not sure what I would have done, actually. Painting. I’ve never been a good painter, did you know? In all these long years, I’ve never been able to paint with feeling or insight, despite technical skill.” She smiled strangely. “But I would have asked you to keep studying with me, if only because you had great talent and you seemed to genuinely love your studies.”

“I did. Do. I did,” Twilight said. “And you would have found a place for me, then? Somewhere else?”

Celestia cocked her head to the side. “Somewhere else? If you wished. A conservatory, when you were old enough, though there are plenty of wonderful ones in Canterlot.”

So it was true. She would have been alone.

Twilight didn’t know what to say. She tried to imagine it--her whole life, without Celestia. Dismissed and then… what? What would she have done? What would it have been like? To imagine a life without Celestia involved at all…

But Celestia was still talking, absorbed in her own imaginings. “I would have kept looking for an archmage, if you truly wished not to go further in your study of magic. But I would have offered you a place at my school even then. I’ve had the honor of knowing many of Equestria’s finest artists that way.” She was smiling. “I kept up with all of them, of course, as I do just about every student at my school.”

Twilight’s ears perked up. “You write all of them?”

Celestia nodded. “Of course. I have many friends.” Before Twilight could react, her expression softened. “But usually it’s only once or perhaps twice a year. Some more, some write me shorter and shorter missives. I worry that they don’t want to disappoint me, but how could they? I don’t demand they be heroes. Only that they be the ponies they were meant to be, that they decided to be. But none that I write as much as I have written you.”

“I love your letters.”

Twilight paused, her face flushed.

“And I love yours,” Celestia said.

“Would we have been friends if I had wanted to do something else?”

Celestia seemed taken aback. She looked at Twilight as if she had become an alien creature. In that stare, Twilight almost felt as if there was something wrong with her for asking. She shrank from that look.

“Twilight, I--” she hesitated, and looked at Rainbow and Pinkie. They nodded. “Twilight, may I ask you a question before I answer?”

“I… okay.” Her voice sounded small. Tinny, as if carried up from some distant basement through a pipe.

“Do you honestly think that my fondness for you is based solely on your performance or some plan I have?”

Twilight stared holes in the floor. She’d had swore to be honest with herself. Shouldn’t she also be honest with this mare of all others? And yet, she felt cold. Celestia’s voice sounded so…

Hurt.

“I have before.”

“Twilight, I--”

Twilight looked back up, ears back, eyes wide.

“Celestia, I don’t--”

They locked eyes. She read the hurt there. She could see the cogs turning behind those eyes, starting to reevaluate everything. Every meeting, every conversation, every laugh, everything--twisting it into something else. It felt like being erased.

“I was scared,” Twilight said. “I was so scared sometimes. I just wanted to be worthy that I convinced myself… I didn’t… I… Pr--Celestia, I didn’t always think that. It was when I was younger, and when I was worried. I always came back to my senses.”

“Twilight, I knew you were always so worried about my opinion. No matter how much I tried to tell you to relax.” She stopped, as if trying to collect her thoughts.

But Twilight didn’t let her. “Please, please don’t be sad. Please. I was stressed out and asocial. I wasn’t assuming what you think I was. I just didn’t want to lie to you.”

Celestia closed her mouth. Her whole face was sad, and Twilight didn’t know how to fix it.

But she had to try. She had told the truth once, why not continue? “I had a crush on you,” she began. “When I was younger. It made me nervous, because at first I didn’t want you to know. But then it was the same old problem, and I worried that you might be offended because I was just your student and… and I couldn’t talk to you even though you were the pony I trusted most because it was about you, and then Shiny was away at training and I didn’t have any outlet. I felt small and stupid. What was I supposed to think? And even after, that fear that if I didn’t measure up you might send me away, it just kept hanging on. I didn’t want to say anything. I couldn’t!”

She was breathing hard, struggling to keep her words clear. She stomped a hoof against the floor and heard no satisfying clack.

“I didn’t want you to be sad, and I didn’t want you to feel like I didn’t trust you. I’m ashamed I felt that way! I just… I’m just so worried sometimes, about stupid things. Other ponies didn’t have trouble with each other, but I did! You remember how bad I was at connecting with ponies.”

Stars. She was rambling. It wasn’t going anywhere.

She’d always known that something like this would happen. And, in a weird way, she’d been right. She had failed. A lack of trust on her part, that’s what it had been. Instead of trusting that the Celestia who had always been kind to her, who had done nothing but guide her and… and you were thinking of her as a chessmaster, moving pieces. What would you feel like if Rainbow Dash or Fluttershy thought of you that way?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

She wanted to look at Celestia but she didn’t feel like she should. What right did she have now? If love was a gift, hadn’t she just spurned it all along, really? All of her feelings felt foolish now. Love? Or the idea of it? For a brief second she had considered telling her, hadn’t she? Before Celestia had asked that question. She’d thought about it. She’d wanted to.

“Of course I would have been your friend, Twilight,” Celestia said to the mare trying not to cry. “Twilight, please look at me.”

“I’m not sure I should.”

“Don’t. That’s nonsense. You’re a grown mare, and I’ll not have you treat me like something I’m not. Look at me.”

So she did.

“I understand being afraid of what another might say,” she began. “I’m sorry if I did anything to help that worry grow. And yes, it hurts to have it confirmed you felt that way. You were honest with me, when you didn’t have to be, and I won’t dishonor that. Do you understand?”

Twilight nodded.

“I would have been your friend regardless. I was fond of you because you were a bright filly, a happy one, and you were a delight. You grew up and you retained those characteristics. Even when I worried isolation might taint them, those things never died in you. But if you think of you and I and the word ‘worth’ again I will be a bit upset. It’s insulting to you, and it’s a bit insulting to me… and it’s insulting to the happiness we’ve had. Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” she said miserably.

Celestia sighed.

They were all silent then. The aspects looked away. Celestia looked away. Twilight watched her.

But Twilight thought all the while. The Archmage had made that perfection her goal, perhaps at first for Celestia’s favor. To earn it. To be worthy of it. Pinkie was right--she was not happy. She might be “satisfied” but Twilight mostly got the impression that she was cold. That she was lonely. Twilight knew what it was to be lonely. How it would be fine, for awhile. You would be singular and solitary, happy in yourself and your freedom, and then out of the silence it would come for you, that old dragon loneliness. Loneliness was the greatest vice. What couldn’t it twist? What couldn’t it break?

“Are you mad at me?” she asked before she could think twice about it. Stars, she sounded like a child.

“No,” Celestia said quickly. “Just… I’m sorry. I’m a bit frustrated with myself, Twilight.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I would say that you shouldn’t be, but then you would deny it. It’s alright.”

“Celestia, this is a really terrible place for me to be candid, but I’m worried that after all this I’ll never have a time where I will be able to…” Twilight stopped. Where was this coming from? No. Retreat! She needed to retreat, none of this was good campaigning weather. She had a decision to make, right? It could wait--

“I know what you mean. I’ve been having conversations with the other aspects. I was just thinking the same thing.”

“I worry that I might just make you more upset, but I also think it might make… well, help you understand why I was so worried.”

“You don’t have to say.”

Twilight ground her teeth. She took a deep breath. “I think I have to,” she said. “Even if this is the worst way it could have happened. Because after this I don’t think I’ll have the courage and I’m too emotional to be smart and not say it and Celestia I’ve been in love with you for years.”

Celestia just stared at her. Twilight wanted to be roughly four inches tall so she could hide behind the Archmage’s hooves.

“I was afraid because I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, or if that was even okay, and then I was in Ponyville and you were writing letters and I could reread them dozens of times in private and suddenly it felt safer to feel that way and… and…”

“Twilight--”

“I mean, I don’t even know if you swing that way!” Twilight started laughing, but it sounded angry, like a dog barking. “I was too scared to even hint to find out! I couldn’t even go reading or asking around because I was so paranoid someone might want to know why I was asking!”

“Twilight.”

“I’m sorry, I know this is a bad time but I told you about that and now I--”

“Twilight, I’ve felt the same.”

Twilight’s brain simply stopped. Her ears were broken, obviously.

“What?” It wasn't possible. There was no way. None at all.

“I’ve been sorting through my own feelings recently. I’ve… I’ve dated former students before, Twilight. It makes a lot more sense now that you wouldn’t know that.” Once again, neither could look at the other. “I wasn’t sure what to think. You were going to be ageless. At first, the idea excited me! We could… we could have more or less forever to enjoy… But then it happened. I worried. I fretted. I’d rolled my dice and they hadn’t stopped rolling. Because it changed our relationship in a way I’m not sure how to describe. Don’t you feel it?”

“Yes,” was all that Twilight could say. She just... she was terrified to even move, lest she somehow break the moment.

“I have always been a bit of a mess when it came to love,” Celestia said. “If I’m honest, which I think is the order of the day, I can’t say that I have ever succeeded in maintaining my composure in regards to my own romantic feelings. I try, of course. Composure is… sort of my thing, as I think I heard one of the guards say the other week.” Twilight’s eyes flicked over to find Celestia flashing her a sheepish little smile. “But I’ve never handled it as well as Luna did. Luna was the romantic one. I mean, I can be too! It was just… it all seemed so natural for her. Suave and graceful. I mean, I can be those things--”

Twilight hiccuped. Oh. Crying. Dammit. But she also laughed. “I think I get it.”

"You've become such a wonderful mare, Twilight. If it hurts to hear you say that you've worried over what I thought of you, it is only because all the way I have thought the world of you. You were brave and you were loving. Even though friendship was so foreign, you took to your new friends in Ponyville and even thought it was probably frightening you opened yourself up to them. You learned all of their habits and dreams and you learned them and through you, so did I. You are a genius, Twilight Sparkle, and I've met few ponies quite like you in all my years. Star Swirl was close, but where he failed you've succeeded. I'm not talking about his spell. I'm talking about as a pony. Star Swirl died bitter and unfulfilled, wishing he had spent his life on other things. But you surround yourself with new ponies to love. I read every letter you send me and cherish them. I've thought about writing you and telling you how I felt but..."

Twilight wasn't even trying to hide it anymore. The impossibility before her was too much. She just cried, trying to keep the water out of her eyes so she could watch Celestia's lips move and prove it was real. It was really happening.

“Oh, Song, you’re crying. I really should have planned this out better. Please don't--”

“I think this was the best,” Twilight said. “Even if I have no idea what happens now.”

“I’m… unsure myself. You have a decision to make. And then… and then we wake up and I think we have a lot to talk about.”

Twilight winced. “I don’t think ‘we have a lot to talk about’ will ever not sound ominous.”

Celestia tried to chuckle but it was a weak thing.

Twilight composed herself. Everypony else was silent, waiting for her to speak.

And she had to. She couldn’t put it off. She had to make the choice.

She looked to Pinkie and Dash, and watched warring hope and fear in their faces. If she did not choose them, then what? They disappeared? Vanished? She couldn’t do that to them. Honestly, with Celestia here, with the spectre of being good enough gone, what did the Archmage have? What could she offer a Twilight Sparkle with friends throughout the ages? She’d studied and learned in Ponyville surrounded by ponies she knew. The idea that she would be unable to do the same elsewhere was absurd.

Would the Archmage also vanish, if Twilight chose her friends?

That was the problem, wasn’t it? It went beyond the idea of abandoning, of repudiating her younger self. Because that bothered her enough, but it was worse to realize that to leave the Archmage here would… kill her? Would she sleep, beneath Twilight’s mind? Who would be there to wake her? Who would talk to her in her loneliness?

She was Twilight herself, trapped in a body of death. Driven and driving forward. Over the years, would she have thought of the sunlight? That madmare’s scrawl that she’d found repeated, commented on, furiously condemned? Would she keep searching for the mystery? Twilight knew she had and would. But to do it alone--

--to do it alone was pointless. Beyond pointless, tragic. There were more things than what may or may not hide behind the stars. Five ponies had rescued Twilight before she had truly become this vision. But who would rescue the Archmage?

“I won’t leave you alone,” she said. They all looked at her, puzzled. Twilight coughed, and took a shuddering breath. “I choose friends. I choose living together. I won’t try and withdraw because of agelessness or longevity or whatever you want to call it. I grew up when I realized there was more to the world than books, as much as I love them. I choose the court that reflects that, the one where my friends are.”

Pinkie burst into tears and held Rainbow, who flushed and half-heartedly tried to pry her off.

But Twilight wasn’t finished. She turned to the Archmage and extended a hoof.

“But I won’t leave you alone. You deserve friends as much as I. Come with us. Let me show you that there’s more to life than trying to find perfection. You were the me that used to be, and I want to show you especially the me that will be.”

The Archmage recoiled, obviously confused. “What? You can’t choose--”

“I can. You gave me a false dichotomy and then told me to choose my court. I reject your classifications. There is nothing that divides my pursuits, my passions, and even myself with living together and living among ponies. I reject your classifications and your ideas, but I do not reject you. It’s my court, and I will choose it by my actions, and I choose to include you. As long as you’ll have me. Please.”

The Archmage stared at her hoof as she offered it. “I don’t understand,” she said at last. “I thought you would abandon me if you did not choose. Why don’t you? You obviously don’t approve of what I have to offer.”

“I approve of your drive and your dedication. I approve of that quiet pride in your work and your contribution. I approve of what you want to do. You are me, Archmage. I’m you. But I’m already driven and dedicated. It’s you who is behind.”

“I’m not sure they wan--”

“We don’t mind,” Pinkie said quickly. “We’ve not been on the best of terms, Archy, but--”

“Do not call me that,” the older Twilight said, but without much heat.

“Okay! If you come along I’ll find a new name for you. I promise. I’m with Twilight. It’s too sad if you just go back to sleep. And besides… the Court of Amity would be off to a bad start if we didn’t reach out, wouldn’t it?” She grinned. “Please?”

“If Twilight wants you, then I will,” Rainbow added.

And Twilight looked to Celestia. “Remember what I said?”

“I think it was something along the lines of ‘no past me, no future me, they’re all the same me’.”

“Something like that.” Twilight steadied herself and offered her hoof to the Archmage again. “I won’t repudiate the past, and I won’t fear the future. The first doesn’t deserve it and the latter… well, it seems pretty bright to me.”

And the Archmage looked down. She looked up at Celestia. “Is it alright?”

“Of course it is, my Faithful Student," answered Celestia.

The Faithful Student took her hoof and the dream erupted in color.

Author's Note

last installment will be out tomorrow or the next day.

Thank you.

XVI. To Love at all is to be Vulnerable

Ponies were complex. Twilight had accepted this in much the same way she had accepted Pinkie’s strangeness and her premonitions of disaster--by beating her head against the unknowable until she was too dizzy to continue and then conceding in frustration. The world was a big place and it was getting bigger and brighter all the time. Also stranger.

That wasn’t to say that Twilight had just given up her dogged pursuit of truth. Far from it--because the more and more she found her orderly world vision shaken up, the more she found value and deeper fulfilment in her study. A world that was simply a machine could only hold the attention for so long. A world that was a mystery, on the other hand? What more could a true scholar, a true scientist, a true mage ask for beyond a world ripe for the brightening light of study?

She thought about it a lot these days. Until recently, her observations of ponies had mostly been external--watching other ponies, talking to other ponies, taking mental notes on observed behavior. Only after the wings showed up had she really considered turning the lamp of discovery on herself.

It was a slow process. It took dedication and a certain degree of fortitude--not simply to endure what was uncovered but to actually face it. Even the good things needed a bit of will to wrestle with--and she was learning to love it step by step. It felt as if every discovery meant more now that it was hard-won, like planting an outpost in hostile wilds.

So, it was both frustrating and delightful that the best Twilight could do was conclude that ponies were complex. She didn’t understand them and she didn’t quite understand herself half the time. But it was nice to have the opportunity to understand.

None of this went through her mind as she lay still, breathing as quietly as she could. It was in the background, informing the warring emotions within her, but what actually passed through her mind was much simpler.

I’m still in Celestia’s bed. And we both--

Twilight proceeded to quietly panic. Most ponies would be surprised to learn she was capable of this, but when you spent most of your life in out of libraries, quiet panic was actually an essential life skill. In fact, Twilight’s more noisy panic was actually rather pleasant, and an indulgence that her friends would probably never understand. Except Pinkie, who could at least appreciate the joy of noise.

Pinkie in fact commented that this was, to an extent, the case, and that also Twilight should just move already.

The fact that she did this from within Twilight’s head was slightly concerning. Or, it was, after Twilight had realized that she was no longer alone in her own mind and had doubled her still very considerate, quiet panic.

There were others, presently. She was aware of them, and yet didn’t… hear them? It felt as if, one by one, ponies had slid into bed around her, and yet they brought with them no sensation of touch, no bodily warmth. She felt surrounded, a bit crowded, even with the comfortable distance between herself and Celestia. All of it was overwhelming. Twilight could hardly think with all of them talking over each other.

Within her, her six closest friends talked among themselves in a flurry, but one presence was quiet. The Archmage--no, what had Celestia called her? The Faithful Student. She did not join their conversation. Twilight imagined them all huddled together, whispering excitedly, while the Student looked on, not exactly hostile but feeling out of sorts.

Until Pinkie pulled her into their little circle, inviting her to share the excitement. There was plenty to be excited for, after all. The Court’s first day with Twilight.

Also, the whole being-in-bed-with-Celestia thing. Which Twilight realized was still a part of her reality and which she was about to embark upon a third round of panic before their collective voices calmed her.

They spoke with a unified voice, then. It was okay--this, they were saying, is okay. It was good, and today was a good day.

I don’t know how to handle so many of you, Twilight thought. Even with her eyes squeezed shut and her body still, she had found their presence so heavy. Will it always be so disorienting?

No, they promised. It would not be. She would learn to live as the others did, and they would teach her. Step by step, until at last she walked without hesitation, they would show her how to live in a new way. Applejack, there to aid her discernment, Rarity to fortify her in her confusion. Rainbow and Pinkie to pull her back from her worry. Fluttershy to keep the hearth of her spirit warm. Spike to keep her on task.

The dizziness would fade. That was their promise, until only Fluttershy was speaking--could she call it speaking?--in her head. Fluttershy hummed and spoke, alternating her delivery but delivering the same message: wake up, Twilight, and open your eyes. Celestia is awake. Twilight felt a momentary dismay at that. She wasn’t ready! But the Inner Court’s Fluttershy chased the feeling away.

The roar of the Inner Court stirred a bit as she opened her eyes. The sun was slowly peeking into it’s shepherd’s chambers, casting everything in the warm, red half-light of dawn. Celestia’s room was ornate, but not in the way one would expect of a ruler of her stature. It was ornate in that she had chosen to surround her bed with beautiful things, useful things that wore their beauty easily and almost carelessly. The paintings on the far wall were of quiet, pastoral scenes, not unlike Ponyville’s sights. But she did not catalogue the rest.

Instead, her attention was drawn by movement beside her. Twilight dared to look.

Celestia had turned over. Their eyes met. Twilight was sure the surprise on Celestia’s face was mirrored in her own.

“Um. Hi,” Twilight blurted, because that seemed like the best thing to do.

Celestia stared for a second, and Twilight squirmed under her gaze. Then she shook with mirth as she hid her giggles from Twilight with a hoof.

“Hello, Twilight,” she said when the laughter had worn off and a red-faced Twilight had re-emerged from the blankets. “I’m glad to see you awake. How are you feeling?”

Twilight pursed her lips. “Confused. It’s like… being stuffed into a crowded carriage. We’re all going the same direction, but it’s harder to think.”

Celestia nodded. She moved her hoof closer, and then seemed to hesitate.

“We… we should probably talk about this,” Celestia said after both of them had looked at that hoof for a moment. “This being you and I. In my bed, no less.”

“It’s weird.”

“Exceedingly so, yes.”

Twilight took a deep breath, and felt strangely. Applejack was on one side and Rarity on the other. Honesty, said the first; be open, said the second. So she did both.

“I love you,” Twilight said. “I think I have for awhile. I stopped thinking of it that way because I didn’t think I had a shot, I guess. The idea that you might reciprocate that feeling was so good that it felt unrealistic.”

“Do you feel that way now?”

“Mostly, I’m trying to figure out if I’m still dreaming,” Twilight said with an attempt at a smile that fell flat. Impulse took her, and she reached out to touch Celestia’s hoof with her own. They stayed that way.

Celestia smiled. Twilight thought her smile was like the sun. The Inner Court was divided on whether or not this sentiment was silly or not. The Faithful Student in general was not a fan of simile.

“I assure you that this is no dream.” She bit her lip, as if putting words in order.

Was her court commenting? Had they always been considering her?

“But it is as nice as one,” Celestia said at last. “Twilight, I have never had my sister’s unrestrained energy. But we do share a romantic streak, so you may imagine that this is perhaps not how I had imagined things playing out when I said that I love you.”

Twilight’s breath caught. She wanted to say something. She wanted to hear her say those words over and over.

“You do?”

“Yes,” Celestia said. “I love you. And, as absurd as it is to ask this from my own bed, I would like to court you officially.”

“Officially?” Twilight quailed. What did that mean? Court? She had no idea what that entailed, and officially? She had sudden visions of stoic press conferences.

Celestia raised an eyebrow and put on a smirk. “So you would prefer that I merely be your paramour? Twilight, I’m not sure if I’m appalled or impressed at your audacity.”

Twilight flushed. “No, I didn’t mean… ugh.” She rolled her eyes. “I kind of understand dating. It works the same, right? Or… like, I don’t know. Are we marefriends now?”

Celestia was trying not to laugh. It was obvious on her face. Twilight wasn’t sure if that irked her or delighted her. The Court murmured and again found itself more or less split down the middle.

“Well, nopony has asked to court me yet, so--”

“Will you go out with me?” Twilight said it quickly, almost all as one word.

Celestia giggled. “There, that wasn’t so hard.” Then she sighed. “Of course, I’m saying that to myself as much as you. Yes. Yes, I will, Twilight.”

Twilight beamed. Also she forgot to breathe for a few seconds, but that was inconsequential.

“Courting is a bit different from what you’ve seen, I’m sure,” Celestia continued. “Though I daresay it shall be a bit more your, ah, speed.” Another little titter. “I’m an old fashioned nag, really. Remember that.”

“I’ll try,” Twilight said, breathless. “I’m really not sure what to do now.”

And she wasn’t. It had not, in all of her joyful rereading of letters and writing of the same, every occurred to her that this would happen outside of dreams. The court urged a half dozen courses of action, but they kept their voices to whispers within her mind. Her own thoughts still held the field--and most of them were frazzled and concerning Celestia being beautiful and how nice it might be to scoot a little closer.

Celestia smiled. “Breakfast might be a good place to start. The castle staff will have pancakes on hand, just for you. Mead is quite excited. He’s been talking about your visit all week.”

Twilight smiled, distracted for a moment. “Mead! Oh, wow… I still remember my first morning here. I called crepes--”

“Creepies,” Celestia said, and they laughed.

Twilight, lifted by that sound, moved a little closer. “I, um. It’s a bit early for breakfast. I was thinking--”

Celestia cocked an eyebrow at her. “Moving fast? More and more surprises, Madame Sparkle.”

Twilight shook her head, knowing her face was red. “No! Just… just thought I could, um.” She sighed. “Ugh. Talking is hard.”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“It’s kind of awkward to be all the way over here. I wanted to know if I could get closer. I thought it, um, might be nice if we were a bit closer.”

Celestia smiled and Twilight suddenly found herself being pulled into an embrace. She froze, but when the warmth was all around her she found herself relaxing against Celestia. She was soft--she always had been. Twilight nuzzled under her chin and sighed happily.

Celestia hummed. “We have an hour before breakfast. You’ve had a long night. Would you like me to wake you when it’s time?”

“Maybe.” Twilight’s voice was muffled against her teacher--no, she wasn’t that anymore, was she?--against Celestia’s coat. “So, courting?”

“Mm. Well, I would of course expect you to come calling from time to time.”

“I could do that.”

“I’m sure your friend Rarity could help you make yourself presentable,” Celestia said as she began to softly stroke the part of Twilight’s back between her wings, drawing out a little happy groan. “And, of course, I would expect letters. Very important to the whole enterprise, letters.”

“Can definitely do that.”

“Perhaps, if you prove yourself a proper suitor, I’m sure my sister would consent to unsupervised walks in the gardens,” she said and snickered. “Though I am sure she will be merciless to you.”

“Probably can’t handle that, but I’m sure I’ll try.”

Celestia froze, suddenly, and then groaned. “Cadance will be unsufferable for decades.”

Twilight laughed and nuzzled her neck. “Yes, but it won’t be so bad. Cadance is fun.”

“She is an upstart,” groused the princess. “Who will torture me with how right she was with infinite smugness.”

“You could always remind her that Spike was the one that saved the empire if she gets out of hand,” Twilight offered.

“Oh, that’s delightfully evil. I’ll keep that under advisement.”

“Happy to help.”

They were silent after that for a time. Celestia continued to stroke her back. Twilight continued to nuzzle into her shoulder and neck, content. There would be words, here and there, but neither of them felt the need for conversation just yet. Let it wait. Beyond a few soft comments on Twilight’s attempt at preening--poor, but Celestia smugly offered her assistance down the line--and a few happy murmurs, there was nothing.

Twilight carefully dislodged herself and looked up. Celestia’s eyes met her own.

“Think they know already? Luna, at least? I mean, dreams are sort of her thing.”

“Yes, much like composure is mine. I honestly don’t know. We’ll have to see.”

“I just realized I’m going to have to tell my friends. Rarity is going to give birth to a calf in the middle of Ponyville.”

Celestia chortled. “Oh, do break the momentous news carefully. That sounds unpleasant.”

Twilight kept looking, her eyes tracing Celestia’s lips. Hesitantly, she reached up and then stopped halfway.

Celestia made up the distance, and they kissed. It chased all of the thoughts out of Twilight’s head at once. She tasted of paradise.

When they broke away, Celestia was radiant. “It’s a good start,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what you’re like in a few decades.” She laughed and then kissed Twilight again and again, until time seemed soft and malleable, as if Twilight could ignore it forever. And she would.

Celestia was holding her, kissing her, never pushing too much but always pursuing. She felt hot but not unbearably so, caught but in a way she couldn’t help but find perfect.

She found that she agreed. It was as good a start as any.

Author's Note

I'd like to apologize for the delay.

And I'd like to thank you all for coming along for the ride. I've been really surprised at the response and very glad for it. You've all been a delight.

I. A Letter

There is a table beside the grand bed, and on it sits a letter.

Dear Celestia,

It still feels so strange not to write “Princess” before your name! But I remembered this time, and didn’t have to start my letter over.

I really don’t want to gush, but I’m so excited about my visit this weekend! This probably won’t surprise you at all, but there’s a part of me that is nostalgic for when I was just your student, combing the libraries and royal archives of Canterlot. Had I to do it over again, I wouldn’t have isolated myself. But the more I think about those days, I realize that even if I would change parts of my experiences, I wouldn’t throw them away for anything. Sometimes I felt so alive in and among those books in ways that that are harder to capture here in Ponyville.

Don’t get me wrong! I love Ponyville. In truth, it’s strange to think that I used to be a little homesick for Canterlot. There were days when I wondered how anypony could stand living in such a tiny little town. But now? Ponyville is just right, just the perfect size. It’s big enough to have community, but small enough to know your neighbors--and your neighbors are most everypony.

But I miss the seemingly endless library. Some days, when I was still your student in a much more immediate way, I felt like I could pursue my studies forever. It was like… like magic was a chase, I suppose. And that if I kept reaching out for it, kept running after it…

That’s silly, I know. My real point is that I’m so excited to be working together with you on an experiment! It’s like being in school again, and I’m very excited. Spike can roll his eyes all he wants to (he says hello, by the way!) but it’s not every day I get to help push forward the boundaries of science and thaumaturgy simply by being myself! I’m fascinated with what we’ll uncover about the magic that made me an alicorn. I’m not sure what all tests you’re running, though. Any that I can read up on? I’d like to make the experimental process go smoothly, if I can.

And as always, I confess that I’m eager to be of service. I know I’m not really a princess in the same sense as you and Luna and Cadance are, but I still try to take what duties I have seriously. I remember what you told me when I was young: a unicorn’s magic is meant to be a gift to all those around her. I didn’t really get it then, but now I do.

Nightmare Night is soon. Will Luna be coming back? Pinkie practically ambushed me this morning when I went to join Fluttershy and Rarity for lunch, asking if she would grace us with her presence. I figure that she would want to go to a different city this year, but if she is coming, let her know that Pinkie is prepared this year. She’d better bring her A-Game. A game? I’m not sure how to write that. Strange.

That’s all from me, Princess. It’s strange to write you so informally… but it’s really growing on me. Tell Luna that she should really write me back already. She’s been deciding her next move in our chess game for a week now, sheesh.

Your faithful student friend,
Twilight

Author's Note

my comment thread threat to write twilight and Celestia interacting and stuff after TNIP has occurred.

there was no rejoicing.

III. Life can be understood Backwards, but it must be lived Forwards

The summons arrived in the form of a scroll that appears in a sheet of flame. Celestia picked it up, already knowing what it would say. “If I may read the missive?”

“For the record, yes,” Dawn said, her flat voice never wavering.

“Oh, I do so love letters. Please do, Celestia,” Dusk said with a smile. “Don’t they remind you of Twilight?”

Celestia fought a grimace. “Yes. They do remind me of her. The letter says simply, ‘Duck.’”

The Inner Court of the Sun blinked at her. Celestia ducked.

The shimmering, unreal wall of the mock-courtroom shattered and Luna arrived on a silver chariot. She sailed over Celestia’s head and parked herself between her sister and… well, her sister. Here, her mane glowed with pure starlight and her eyes danced with the light of nebulas. Her laughter here had no touch of sorrow in it. She glowed with glory and mystery. “Greetings, apparitions!” she called to the Inner Court.

“Greetings and defiance, traitor,” sneered Noonday. Her greatsword had appeared as well. “What do you want here, thief of light?”

“Only to steal my sister as well, for a bit of palaver,” Luna said.

“This is highly irregular.” Dawn, again, adjusting her glasses.

“I think it’s wonderful. Bold, exciting… you really were always such a good sister,” Dusk said, waving to Luna. Luna bowed with mock formality to the gentler face of Celestia.

Celestia herself had already boarded the chariot. “If you’re quite done, Luna, I would like to get this over with.”

Luna rolled her eyes. “Your endless dream lacks in variety, sister. Also in taste. The sight of you dressed in such plain attire is appalling.”

“It’s functional,” said Dawn flatly. To her credit, her prim librarian’s attire was not the worst thing Celestia had worn.

Luna did not answer. She said something obscene to Noon and then without further ceremony, Celestia found herself in utter darkness. It had been a long time since she had left her own dreams to walk in Luna’s domain. She’d forgotten the sudden drop.

Her mind was like a foal’s drawing in the sand. Someone had stepped in it, or the tide had come, and so the foal had to draw it all again. Only experience kept her from panicking at the utter lack of sensation. It was like being dead. But her vision returned. Her hearing, too, after a moment.

“Tia, dearest mine in sisterhood, I hope you do not think too poorly of me for the amusement I take in your utter helplessness in the dreaming,” Luna said in her right ear.

Celestia felt her ear flick. Sensation. Sensation was good. “I did not make a habit of it while you were gone,” she said.

“Hello, Fear,” said an all too familiar voice from behind her.

Celestia tried to turn, but she could not. Humiliated, she whined for Luna to help her while she tried to remember what having hooves was like again.

“I understand,” her sister said, her voice soothing. “And I sometimes forget that it is harder on others. I wondered if you would come with me. Did you like the chariot?”

“It was ridiculous,” Celestia said. But she said it smiling.

“Good. I enjoy frivolity as much as you do. I too am allowed eccentric behavior.”

They had ignored Luna’s own Court, but Celestia knew her brief respite was coming to an end. Luna had turned her around to face the facets of her sister’s mind.

They stood together in what Celestia saw now was a tent. All of them were gathered around a central table, where a map was laid out. Celestia found herself curious. Luna’s Court changed constantly, the curse-dream as mercurial as the moon which bestowed it. Celestia’s had not changed much since the Schism.

“It changes little because you use it for self-flagellation,” Luna said.

“To punish the self--” began one, a younger Luna.

“--is often to destroy it,” finished her twin, a colt with Luna’s features.

“I forget about the twins,” Celestia answered, rubbing her eyes. “I never understood that.”

“Waxing and Waning,” Luna said. “I find it ideal to think in dialectics. Thesis and antithesis.”

Celestia finally was able to stand on her own hooves again. She took stock of the moon’s burden on her sister. The twins, who regarded her with open curiosity. The Full Moon who was smiling from behind the table, her tail thrashing behind her with excitement. The New Moon, in appearance and attitude exactly the image of the Nightmare. She was, in fact, the Nightmare. The last stood behind the rest, and watched them more than she noticed Celestia.

“To think that you once led armies…” The New Moon--the Nightmare hissed. She bared her fangs. “Weak, like a foal. You grow old and stupid. Perhaps you shouldn’t have stared into the sun.”

Luna murmured at Celestia’s side. “She does have a point. It is actually bad for you.”

Celestia repressed a snort of laughter behind a firm smile. “Hello, Nightmare.”

All of the assorted Luna’s cringed. All but the silent watcher in the back. The Luna beside her, the true Luna, shied away from Celestia’s side slightly. But the Princess reached out and held her close. Luna stopped her slow flight.

The Full Moon left the throng of reflection and approached the sisters. Luna moved in the embrace, trying again to flee. She had fled in fear before, now she fled in panicked shame. But Celestia did not let her go. She was not rough about it. She simply knew that it was better to not let Luna go during the inevitable greetings between herself and the Court of the Moon. Would this be uncomfortable for both of them? Yes. But it was better that Luna not have to question Celestia’s acceptance of her unburdened self.

The Full Moon licked her lips. She was, to be fair, beautiful--much as Dusk was. But where Dusk was a bit silly and always wearing a sunny smile, Full Moon always seemed like a huntress. Celestia saw her fangs as she opened her mouth.

“Hello, fearful little sun. It is wonderful both to see you and to be seen.” She stalked like a jungle cat, passing by Celestia, making sure their flanks touched. She circled, making sure her starry tail passed under Celestia’s chin. Making sure she made herself as blunt as possible. “And to be seen fully,” she purred.

Celestia kept her eyes straight ahead. Luna tried to escape again, but Celestia kept her close. “We promised,” she said softly.

“Yes, but your mind is merely boring,” Luna hissed back at her.

Celestia grinned, surveying the other aspects of the Moon who gazed back with curiosity at the proceeding. All except the shadow behind them, the Luna with flat gray eyes who said and did little. “Aren’t you glad not to be so dull, though? Tell me what you have been doing. You know we need no apologies.”

Luna whimpered. Full Moon--Celestia had renamed her Lust--nuzzled her cheek along Celestia’s filling the princess’ head with the most dizzying scents. The most promising kind, and yet also brought to mind a kind of sensuous violence. But she did not react. She would not humiliate Luna--this interview would end as all the others did.

“Hmm… no apologies? I like it,” purred Lust. “Apology would imply we lay together but once, wouldn’t it? ‘Making it up to me,’ you would say. Do you know what it is like to forget the touch of other ponies? I’m mad with it. The constant presence of other minds. Would you let me be so burdened? You could comfort me. You did so when we were younger.” Her voice was musical.

Celestia still did not look, as Lust nibbled on her withers. “You’ve had your say,” she said.

Full Moon pouted, and then laughed. “Of course, of course… perhaps when yon Twilight Sparkle is introduced to the luxury of our darkest nights you will at last visit us. It is not the conquest I had hoped, but… in war, one takes what one can secure.” She laughed and went back to the table, and Celestia was shocked to find that she was a bit shaken. She would not ask. She would not--

Luna stirred. “Twilight is only my friend,” she said weakly.

“I know.”

But then Luna broke away and shook herself. “There, it is over,” she announced. “We may let off on the unpleasantries, and turn our attention to our real task!”

“And that is?” replied the Sun’s prisoner.

“Ironically… Twilight Sparkle. And you.”

“Of course.”

“You would not speak to me in the waking world--and I do not hold it against you, though it grieves my heart. But you know that here there can be no truth hidden. You need fear no miscommunication.”

Celestia frowned. “It was not mere miscommunication I feared. It is impossible to speak truly when I’m unsure of my own mind, Luna.”

“Indecisive? How unlike you,” said the filly of the twins.

“And yet also how like you,” said the colt.

Celestia looked around. “I am not trying to hide, but tell me--what is this?”

The Full Moon sighed. “Oh, it will be beautiful, my love.”

“A citadel--”

“--and a city” the colt replied, and then shrugged. “But the castle is first.”

“A new world for a new princess,” Luna finished.

Celestia smiled. “It is a noble beginning, then,” she said warmly. “I wish all of you success. I see also that the old legions shall be at your sides, if this martial setting is to be believed.”

“Of course,” Luna said, flashing her fangs. She had forgotten about those during her sister’s long absence. The old magics gone awry, and yet the younger alicorn had never changed herself back. She hid them now only out of worry they would intimidate. “If you are conflicted, then tell your sister of the sides of this contention. I was once a mediator as well.”

“That you were.” Celestia pursed her lips. “I am severally divided, more so than usual with the manner of our shackling to the heavens.” A pause. “Actually, I would say that it mirrors rightly my own three-way parting.”

“Oh, do tell,” Full Moon said, smiling. Waiting for a chance to insert herself into the desires and wishes of a target. Ready to strike.

“Dawn would point out that as Equestria grows, both in population and technology, a new princess makes sense. We… well, mostly I, but you get the point--we have been moving away from purely centralized government. It worked long ago. It was a rougher time, and there was no space for deliberation when invading monsters and hordes were already halfway to Everfree. But the world has moved on. The load will become impossible even for us within a decade. Twilight is the best possible choice for a brave new world.”

“Dawn is the worst part of you,” groaned Luna. “Ugh. At least she isn’t dressed like Clover the Clever anymore.”

“Says the one who wanted Clover the Clever to do such things to her!” purred the Full Moon. “And you like her glasses.”

“She is paradoxically the best and the most boring part of you,” hissed the New Moon, the Nightmare that was. “The only who thinks.”

“For once, we agree,” Celestia said, her tone sour. “To an extent.”

“What else?” prompted the young Waxing--or was it Waning?--Moon.

Celestia thought. Luna had moved towards the table and sat before it with her back straight and her posture far more regal. This was Luna as she had been and would be again--the princess in her element, listening to the problems and the pleas of the subjects she protected. Her countenance was cool. Her eyes focused like a hawk’s. Celestia felt that her sister in that moment could truly sift through the muck of her own inadequacy.

“Well… Noonday has some good points. From the first moment I began to question my decision to give Twilight the final push towards ascendancy, Noonday listed her every flaw for hours. I usually lose in my own Inner Court. The Sun is merciless,” she added, looking down. “But I have not won a single time since she began that line of argument. Twilight is a bit… prone to instability. She does have problems with anxiety and she does have a somewhat skewed view of me as being somehow… perfect. Her passion for organization and knowledge--the same things that will server her well in a brave new world--will also make her prone to micromanagement. She could stifle the new Equestria in the womb, make it stillborn by her overreach. You or might not even understand what is happening until it has already happened.”

“You are only telling--”

“--half the story.”

Celestia spared the twins a look. They had come to sit on either side of their chosen patron. She wondered, not for the first time, if the Moon was kinder than the Sun to its chosen prisoner. Wouldn’t it be… colder? No, she shouldn’t think too literally here.

“The other half I think you can guess at with ease. To be ageless is not to be unchanging, of course, and I…” Celestia closed her mouth.

The problem with speaking is that it was stupid. Words were, really, rather pointless. Communication? Entropic. She would speak and it would be about things that were true, but in speaking she would color the way she herself and her feelings were understood in ways that were true but not accurate.

“I will let that one pass,” Luna said. “If you will tell me what Dusk feels. Or, shall I say, Love.”

“Don’t’ call her that. It demeans our niece,” Celestia replied in what could only be described as a whine. “Or worse, you’ll encourage her.”

“I wouldn’t mind encouraging her,” said the lustful Full Moon from over Luna’s shoulder. When had she arrived there?

Celestia saw that they all crowded around Luna now, like siblings. Her own reflections rarely touched her. Dusk had hugged her before, she supposed. That was a sad thing to realize.

“I do not think she would like you.”

“My impression of Love is that she would like just about anypony on some level,” Luna said with a smirk. “Isn’t she the one that fed you that line you love so much? About keeping no record of wrongs.”

Celestia’s glare did nothing, for this was Luna’s domain and she could not be intimidated. Also, she was mostly immune to sisterly glares in general. All but the worse sort.

Celestia began haltingly. “Dusk… Dusk thinks inappropriate things. She also thinks things that have a point, but that have bothered me since the ascendance of Cadance.”

“Ah, let me guess. Our old discussion come ‘round again, lest it be forgotten.” Luna’s smile was lopsided. “The circle of death.”

“The effect of limitation on things, yes.”

“Let me conjure it up again from the depths of your dull ages: I believe it was that you had last said that mortal joys were made possible by death. I countered that we, too, loved and lived and did not die. I do not remember if you had given me your response.”

“I had not.”

“A pity, I would have enjoyed pondering it whilst in exile.”

“It would be at least some satisfaction,” grumbled Full Moon as she groomed Luna’s mane. It had lost its starry look at some point. Celestia suddenly felt dizzy. Things changed here without warning and without reason, subject to Luna’s whims. This was, even in the sanctity of Celestia’s own internal realm, all of Luna’s demesne.

“Can we please proceed with your petulence? Stop groveling,” growled the New Moon. She prowled behind Luna, never staying in one place for very long.

Celestia squeezed her eyes shut. It was maddening enough to find herself split in the comfort of her own mind. Luna was far more chaotically separated. She had to focus on just her sister as she saw her. “To reiterate, I had expressed the idea that our little ponies are able to love because of the urgency pressed on them by death. In view of death, their actions and decisions have meaning. You countered that ours too have meaning to us, in spite of our seeming endlessness.

“My answer is that this is true because of our connections to those fleeting and beautiful mortal lives. If we were to lose them all, you and I would no doubt be very, very different.” A sudden smirk. “If you thought I was boring now…”

“Ugh.”

“Yes, well. I do not know what Cadance will be like. You and I are sisters, and so we have a dynamic and a bond that is preserved against time. But that dynamic is not the same with her, and she shall be with us forever. Hopefully.”

“Barring war, pestilence, famine, and death,” said the prowling nightmare with a smile.

“Yes, barring those things.”

Luna tapped her chin. “So, essentially, Twilight Sparkle might prove to be more of a bore than you, and we will be stuck with her forever.”

Celestia wasn’t sure if she wanted to feel ashamed or laugh. She did both. “That is not how I would have said it. But you hit the mark even when you seem not to, as you once did. It’s less that she will be boring--I certainly do not think so!--and more that time may reveal her to not be what she appears, or to uncover something in us that she finds abhorrent. What if we find in a decade that Twilight and ourselves, or Cadance and ourselves, are utterly incompatible? If we were all mortal, this would not be insurmountable. We would simply have a falling out--”

“Which is sad enough,” said Full Moon with something other than a sultry tone for the first time.

“--Yes,” Celestia said, a little surprised. She recovered. “But theoretically we would be able to part and time would separate us as it often does and thus mortality would work in our favor. But being that we are long lived…”

“If our love is to fail it will fail forever,” said one of the twins.

“Love’s endeavor, and love’s reward,” intoned the other.

Luna seemed lost in thought. She looked over Celestia’s shoulder, and hummed an old song they both knew from when the world was younger.

“I do not have an easy answer,” she said at last. “My first reaction is of course to say that given world enough and time, we could change into ponies who could live together. We both know that to be ageless is not to be changeless, so we may dispense with that nonsense. At least, that is true in the presence of those who are more intimate with death. But I cannot say that and feel confidant. The worst could happen.”

“The inevitable could happen,” corrected the Nightmare.

“Yes, that,” Luna said, attempting to sound as if it were a joke and failing horribly. Putting off the horrifying with flat statements of boredom had always been Celestia’s game. “At any rate… at any rate, the decision is made.”

“Yes, and now I have no idea what it may mean.”

“No, you do have an idea.” Luna crossed her hooves. “You simply do not want to understand. Can you say this is not the truth? Like a foal who has broken a vase or given a gift he is nervous over, you cannot bear to see that which you have done.”

“I am selfish in this, I know that--”

“Not selfish enough,” groused the Full Moon.

Luna put up a hoof to forestall another round of inevitable self-depreciation. “Write to Cadance. That is what this court will decree to you, Our supplicant. Write to Cadance and bear your heart. Your absolute heart, what you honestly feel, and not the structured argument I know you will want to prepare. Spend several scrolls if you must, and I know you can. Lay the manner out in a way that is more honest.”

Celestia paled.

She nodded, realizing she would have to regardless.

Author's Note

Chapter title is from the journals of Soren Kierkegaard.