A tiny smile broke out on Sunset Shimmer’s face as she walked up to Canterlot High School; it had been years since she graduated and went on to the next stage of her life, and hundreds of memories began flooding back. Although most of them were less than pleasant and reminded her of her dark past, a select few were of her friends, reminding her that she did not need to hold onto the anger she had been for so long.
When a low hum reverberated throughout the area, she turned back to look at the statue in front of the school: the portal had opened. She went to place a hand on its base, and instead of resting on it like it normally would, it simply disappeared. After walking through, she found herself in a wide and empty field, a warm summer breeze blowing over her new fur.
“Sunset!” a familiar voice exclaimed before hugging her.
“Hey, Twilight,” she smiled, returning the hug. “How have you been?”
“It’s been going really well.” Using her magic, she levitated a small bouquet of flowers in between them. “I have this, by the way. Why did you ask me to bring it?”
With a wave of her hoof to dismiss Twilight, she took the bundle of flowers in her own magic. “I’ll explain soon enough. But I’m doing quite well, thanks for asking. As are all of our friends in the human world. Some of them like Rainbow Dash and Twilight are busy pretty much all the time, but we manage to get together once a year. We actually got together a few nights ago, as a matter of fact. It was great to see all of them again. How about you?”
“Most of us are still in Ponyville,” she said gleefully, “so we get to see each other a lot. This world’s Rainbow Dash is also really busy with the Wonderbolts and Rarity has a lot of business trips she has to make, but other than that most of us are still here.”
“It’s good to finally have friends,” Sunset sighed, a great weight being removed from her chest. “You don’t know how long I went without anybody close to me, anybody I could talk to.”
“I was like you, once,” she replied. “Maybe that’s why we found each other.”
“I like to think that’s it,” she beamed. “I know it’s taken a while, but I feel like I can confide with you in almost anything now.”
“Sunset?”
“Yes?”
Twilight surveyed the plain that they were in. “Would you mind telling me why you had me bring the mirror all the way out here?”
“It’s best if I tell you about that first,” she answered, point to a small graveyard with crumbling walls in front of them.
“It’s a graveyard,” Twilight pointed out. “Does it mean something to you?”
“It does,” she confirmed. When they approached the crumbling walls, she stepped over the wrought iron gate that had long since fallen off its hinges and had weeds and flowers covering nearly the entirety of it.
“You must know somepony buried here,” she guessed quietly. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It was a long time ago,” she reminisced. “It took me a while, but I got over it. It wasn’t easy, but I did.” Upon reaching two headstones side-by-side, she stopped and looked at them. “I’ve never been back here, you know.”
“Really?” Twilight walked up next to her. “Who is it you know buried here?”
She gestured to the headstones in front of them, one of which was weathered to the point of illegibility. “My parents.”
“Your parents?” she echoed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, Twilight,” she shook her head. “My father died surrounded by the ponies he loved the most in this world, and my mother died of natural causes at an old age; they died the way everypony wants to. They left behind happy lives full of children, grandchildren, and friends. I like to think that they died with no regrets.”
Twilight read the headstone on the right, though had to do a double-take upon trying to do so. “Sunset, it’s...written in ancient unicorn runes.”
“Of course.” She lay the the bouquet in front of the headstone and closed her eyes before beginning to whisper to herself.
Attempting to remember her lessons in ancient unicorn runes as best she could, Twilight strained herself to read the grave in front of her. “‘Here lies in death’...hm, don’t know those words. ‘She lived a’...something ‘life, 34 E.Q. to 89 E.Q.’.” Tilting her head, she read it again, only to get the same translation as before. “Sunset?”
“Yes?” she responded, opening her eyes and looking at Twilight.
“Why does it say 34 E.Q. on there?” she asked, pointing at it. “That would mean whoever is buried here was born thirty four years after the unification of Equestria, which was thousands of years ago.”
“It’s my mother’s grave, and that was her date of birth, yes.”
“But that would…” Twilight paused, then looked up at Sunset. “How old are you?”
“Two thousand and ninety-one years old,” she replied. “Why?”
“You’re…” Twilight attempted to find words to express her shock, but was incapable of doing so.
“You’re surprised?” Sunset asked. “You didn’t know?”
“No,” she shook her head.
“Well...how old did you think I was?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Maybe five, ten years older than me? Weren’t you Princess Celestia’s student right before me?”
“Not ‘right’ before you, but yes, you were the pony that followed in my hoofsteps as her student.”
“I just have so many questions,” Twilight proclaimed. “So this grave is written in ancient unicorn runes, does that mean that’s what you grew up speaking?”
“Yes it was,” she confirmed. “I heard you trying to read it, so I shall help you: ‘Here is the final resting place of Zireael o'Æspe Tarth, mother of two, grandmother of three. She lived a complete life, from 34 E.Q. to 89 E.Q.’.”
“I still have so many questions,” Twilight spoke. “Her name, did it mean anything? It sounded like it was in ancient unicorn, but I didn’t recognize any of it.”
“Swallow of the Aspen Mist,” Sunset responded softly. “Our names were supposed to be something important, something tying us to our destiny. Swallows were said to said to have come from the heavens, and when we died, a flock of them lead us to the afterlife. And we believed that mist was leftover energy from the creation of the world and would seep out of aspen trees, the first things ever created.”
“So what’s the significance of her name?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “We all had ideas on what our own names meant, and often about what others’ names meant. She created the life of not only myself but also my sister, and raised both of us. I always liked to believe her name meant that she could create two lives and guide them better than any other pony I had met.”
“What does your name mean?” Twilight inquired. “And was there any reason it's an Equestrian name, not a Unicorn name?”
“‘Sunset Shimmer’ was the name I took upon moving to Canterlot so I could fit in better,” she explained. “I was born Páiste na Sáwlug Heol: Child of the Dying Sun. ‘Dying Sun’ was how we referred to a sunset, so that is where that part of my name came from. And I missed my mother terribly when I first moved to Canterlot, so when I heard somepony say that the morning sun made the mist shimmer, it reminded me of her name and so I added it so I would never forget her.”
“Why did your parents choose to name you that?”
“I shall never know,” she said blankly. “I think it has to do with the fact that my father died the day I was born.”
“You never knew your father?” Twilight exclaimed. “That’s terrible!”
“It was the only life I knew,” she replied, no hint of emotion in her voice. “But before we learned of the unicorns that controlled the sun and the moon, we believed that when the sun set each night, it died. We would pray for it to be reborn, and I think my name means that my mother prayed for my father to come back from death. Obviously I am only half my father, but I think she knew that was the closest she was going to get.”
“How did you get to Canterlot, then? We’re far away from it, and you didn’t even speak Equestrian at the time!”
“My sister was much older than I was, and so she had already married a stallion in the E.U.P. Guard. When she heard Princess Celestia wanted to take on a unicorn as her personal student, she convinced him to put my name into contention. I was surprised she accepted me, to be honest, because almost all of the other ponies came in with privileged pedigrees filled with the best and brightest minds in magic and impressive schooling at the best academies in Equestria, while I came from an uneducated peasant family and struggled to form even basic sentences in Equestrian. I still don’t know what it was Princess Celestia saw in me, but clearly she was wrong because of how power-hungry I got.”
“She once told me she never regretted taking you as her student,” Twilight comforted. “She said you were one of the brightest minds she had ever seen, and that you quickly surpassed every other pony she was considering to be her student.”
“Being her student was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” Sunset admitted. “Wake up with ideas, talk over breakfast, experiments all morning, analysis all afternoon, tweak parameters during dinner, go to bed excited for what the next day would bring. It was exhilarating, and no two days were quite the same. I was a young mare having serious discussions with wizards old enough to be my grandparents, and they took me as seriously as they took each other. Once I was even able to disprove Clover the Clever, one of the greatest minds Equestria has ever seen. She stormed off in a huff, but just half an hour later came back and praised me for figuring it out.”
“What happened, then? Princess Celestia said you weren’t getting what you wanted as quickly as you had liked, but from the sounds of it you were one of the most respected minds in magic. What else could you have wanted?”
“I got a little too far into my studies,” she confessed after a short pause. “I expected perfect results immediately, and as you know, that’s not how science works. At first it was harmless: cutting corners, sloppy methods, omitting steps that ensured quality results, careful analysis to create the answers I wanted. I went off the deep end rather quickly after that, and it was when I was caught sapping magic from ponies on the street and leaving them there that Celestia finally brought her hoof down. I was brought to trial and sentenced to life in prison.”
“How’d you escape?”
“Put up a fight,” she laughed ever so slightly. “Don’t know why, but they didn’t restrain my hooves before sending me into the courtroom. Almost as soon as the judge finished speaking, I bolted and made my way towards the Mirror because I knew I would be safe there.”
“You were just in high school there when I met you,” Twilight pointed out, curiosity in her voice. “How did you spend 2,000 years in high school without anyone noticing?”
“Ran around a bit,” she shrugged. “By the time Celestia figured out where I had gone, it was too late; the portal had closed. I stayed there for a couple years until it opened again and she sent ponies through looking for me. There was a mirror in that world too, so I ran to it and it brought me to a completely new world, different than the human world or the the pony world.”
“So you hid there for 2,000 years?”
“Still ran,” she smiled, happy memories rushing back to her. “They found me there, so I found that world’s mirror and went through it. I decided not to stop in the next world and kept going and found another mirror. After that, it all kind of becomes a blur. I bought a journal in the second world so I could keep track of all the worlds I visited, but I filled all the pages only a few centuries in. And that was with me squeezing up to five worlds a page near the end, too. Eventually I found myself back in the human world and although it was drastically different than I had last seen it, I figured why not go through the Mirror the next time it opened and see if Equestria was no more? Clearly it was still around, so I decided to steal your crown and use it to enslave the students of Canterlot High so I could invade Equestria and take Celestia down.”
“So...you just ran, then? Hundreds of worlds, never looking back?”
“More or less. Some worlds I stayed a long time in, others I merely passed through.”
“That’s…” Twilight simply shook her head, incapable of forming any words. “Stunning. Thinking there was one world beyond ours was crazy enough, but enough to keep a pony running for thousands of years? Just thinking of it fascinates me.”
“It was fascinating to experience, as well,” she confirmed. “I saw worlds like ours, but simply with different creatures. I also saw worlds long consumed by cold and ice, worlds where they could travel across galaxies in a matter of hours, and worlds where the sun remained in a perpetual twilight, never rising and never setting. I’ve fallen in love, and I’ve had my heart broken. Crowds of millions have chanted my name, for both good and bad. And yet after all this time, I know I saw but an insignificant fraction of the worlds that exist.”
Twilight’s ears drooped. “Have you come to say goodbye?” she guessed. “Are you leaving again?”
She shook her head. “Quite the contrary. I’ve decided to stop running, to find a home and stay put. After you stopped me from taking over the school, I got to thinking. My entire life, nearly 22 centuries, was spent in the fear that one day I would be tracked down by my homeland and punished harshly for poor choices I made when I was young. To know that that won’t ever happen is...liberating, I suppose. But it’s a hollow victory, because the one thing that has given my life meaning all this time is simply gone. I looked back, and I realized that although I am the third-longest living thing I’ve ever met only behind Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, I had nothing to show for it. No husband, no children, no friends, no legacy. And I wanted to change that, so I decided to start here. By apologizing to my parents.”
“Apologizing for what?”
She shrugged. “Everything, I suppose. I let them down, I know it. When I was little, my mother would tell me how ecstatic my father was when he learned that he was going to have another foal. The whole village knew my mother was pregnant within an hour of her telling him, because as soon as he heard, he bolted out of our home and told literally everypony he saw that he was going to be a father again.”
“I’m sure he’d be proud of you,” Twilight comforted.
“He didn’t have much. None of us did, the entire village struggled to survive. What little money he had went to my sister because she was engaged and he didn’t want her to struggle like he did and everything else went to my mother, but I did get one thing.” Wiping a tear from her eye, she looked at the tiny bouquet, containing only a few mismatched flowers. “He was an herbalist. You know, knew everything there was to know about plants and such. Floriography fascinated him, and my sister says that before she got her cutie mark, he always tried to get her interested in it in hopes that it would be her special talent. It wasn’t, and when he heard that I was coming, his hopes of having a child that was talented in it were renewed. He left me his manual, along with…” She wiped her eyes as she sniffled. “He had an accident a few days before I was born, and knew he was going to die soon. I never really opened the book until at least a thousand years into my running, what for I don’t even remember. And when I did, a faded, hoof-written note fell out. I opened it up and read it: it was from him. He wrote that despite never meeting me, he loved me deeply and that even if my special talent wasn’t what he hoped it would be, the book was mine and he hoped that he would always have a place in my heart, because I always had a place in his.”
“You were very specific in what flowers I needed to bring,” she noted. “What do they mean?”
“The purple ones are hyacinths. Purple hyacinths mean sadness and asking for forgiveness. That should be self-explanatory; I regret what I did, and apologize for not being a better daughter to both of them. But the next one, the bright orange one, is a tiger lily, which means pride. Everypony I knew when I was little told me only the nicest things about my father, and I can’t recall ever once hearing anypony speak ill of him. My mother encouraged passion in me, and told me that I could do anything I wanted if I only set my mind to it. I’m prideful of my parents, because one of them worked to be the best pony he could be and the other always put her two daughters ahead of herself. It’s similar to the next one, the garlic flower: courage and strength.” She paused. “Not just the courage and strength my mother gave me, though. It’s been thousands of years, literally, since I’ve prayed or ever discussed religion, but I suppose deep down I’m still faithful, or at least open to it. I’m praying for courage and strength, because I’m changing my life, stopping what I’ve done for the great majority the time I’ve been alive. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous and scared, and I suppose I need that now.”
“There’s one more,” Twilight pointed out. “That little fir branch you had me tie them in. You asked specifically for it, does it mean anything? Or is it important in your faith?”
“Fir means time,” she spoke after a long pause. “The ultimate destroyer. I’ve been blessed with a long life, yes, but no blessing comes without its drawbacks. Nearly everyone I’ve ever interacted with is dead now, taken by the endless progression of time. It’s horrifying to think about, in honesty. Take my mother, for example. She was the brightest light in my life, and I still think I shall never find another mare like her. She had strength and wisdom, beauty and grace, intelligence and imagination. Everything I could ever hope to be. Yet here she lies, in the cold ground, her tombstone faded to near-illegibility and not a soul alive besides myself that even remembers her. Time cares not for us, no matter how great we are. And the more time passes, the less she’s remembered. One day I’ll be gone too, and she’ll become insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. A pony with emotions, issues, family, friends, wants, fears, dreams, quirks, and so much more complexity, snuffed out and never thought of again.”
“You could do something in her honor,” Twilight suggested. “Lots of ponies do it. My mom’s an author, and she dedicates every one of her books to her parents. And before Cadence moved to the Crystal Empire, she lead a charity in her father’s name. Nopony right now may remember her, but you can teach them.”
“A hero only dies once all choose to forget him,” she stated, thinking out loud. “It was a line from my favorite fairy tale growing up.” She gave out an almost unnoticeable laugh. “I never would have put any faith into it when I was younger, but I suppose there’s a little bit of truth in it after all.”
“What do you think you’d like to do for her?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Sunset admitted. “To honor such a wonderful mare who’s been lost to time for so long, what could I even do? I feel as if anything I try would do her memory a disservice, would fail to capture everything she means to me.”
“Tell everyone what she meant to you, then.” Twilight turned her head, looking Sunset straight in the eyes. “Tell them everything you loved about her. She’s inspired you deeply, and I’m sure she’d love it if you inspired others with everything she instilled in you. It must have been hard for her to raise a foal all by herself, so if she knew that you took everything she said to heart and are trying to spread it to others, that would make her extremely proud.”
Sunset stared back at her mother’s grave before closing her eyes. “Thank you, Twilight, for everything. I don’t even know why I came back here, to be honest; my parents have been dead for over two millennia. Nothing I do, nothing I say will make any difference to them.” Her eyes slowly opened. “But at the same time, I feel like this was the right thing to do. Maybe I just needed to get it off my chest, I don’t know. Regardless, thank you. I know it must not be easy to come here with me and to hear a few thousand years of regret come all spilling out at once.”
With a smile, Twilight put a hoof around her friend. “I don’t mind it at all. It’s good that you came back here, because you’re trying to become a better mare.”
“Next place now would probably be Canterlot,” she stated. “I know I hurt Princess Celestia: she believed in me and cared for a me a great deal, so seeing me go off the deep end must have hurt her. Let’s just say there’s a reason a few thousand years separated her first and second students.”
“Will you be able to get back to your world in time?” Twilight worried. “We’re not exactly that close to Canterlot, and it’s late at night right now. Even if we get there quickly, Princess Celestia is a very busy mare. She may not have time to see you immediately.”
Giggling nervously, Sunset turned to Twilight. “Let’s, uh...let’s just say she and my parents aren’t the only ponies here I need to apologize to. Sure most of them are dead, but even just coming to this graveyard helped. I’d imagine it would help with everypony else I’ve ever wronged, too. If I don't get back in time, I'll make sure to visit all of them, then do something to make up for all the harm I caused Equestria so long ago. I told Twilight that I might miss the opportunity to return while it's open right now, so they wouldn't worry about my absence.”
As her horn began glowing a soft purple, Twilight enveloped Sunset in her wing. “You ready to go?” she smiled.
“Please,” Sunset laughed, her own horn lit up by the soft teal light of her magic. “I invented long-range teleportation, literally. Was a funny story, actually. Remind me to tell you sometime.”
With an explosion of light, the two ponies disappeared, leaving a small bouquet as the only visitor in a moonlit cemetery in a long-forgotten corner of Equestria.
