The gentlest little kitten chirp tickles my chest, and I'm wide-awake, blinking at the bedroom ceiling and not sure I actually closed my eyes after lying down.
After one uncertain instant, I make myself draw in a breath full of the darkness, all sweet and serene with the slightly salty tang of Luna heading home from the dreamscape after a night's work well done. So it's a pre-dawn darkness. And since I went to bed just after midnight, I must've gotten some sleep. And that means a new day's beginning.
I leap up, flap across the room, flare my horn, grab the eastern balcony's doors, and fling them open.
Though fling's the wrong word since the doors open inward. Pull them open, I could say, I suppose, but that's not nearly dramatic enough for the occasion. Because it's morning. And that means it's time to get this party started.
Flinging myself out onto the balcony—see?—I perch on the crystal parapet, my every sense fixed on the horizon, that kitten tickle still wriggling inside me. It always gets me grinning, that feeling, one of the best things about my ascension, actually: I don't have to be in charge of the sun, but it knows me now, has a connection to me, can reach out and poke me at random times during the day, and I can poke it back, too. It's like being an aunt, the way I've got this bundle of joy in my life that I'm not at all responsible for...
So I send a little tickle in the sun's direction. The whole sky giggles soundlessly, then exactly on schedule, it pulses with a wail of power that would shatter every window in Equestria if it wasn't aimed very specifically at one pair of ears. All I ever catch is the shadowiest wisp of that psychic shriek, but it makes me resolve each morning never to have a heavenly body of my own. Not in the immediate future, at any rate.
Still, Celestia's presence is right there, nuzzling the little darling till it coos and burbles and starts rising nicely and easily, the blackness fading to a gray that blossoms into blue. Behind me, I can almost hear the rustle of Luna tucking the moon in for the day, its bright but dusty face cute and yawning and cuddling to sleep. I whisper, "Sleep tight," and sense it giving me a little wave, still shy around me even after all the years I spent mapping its surface as a filly.
And yes, I don't need to stand here watching the night go down and the day come up every single morning. "What's the point?" some ponies might ask. "It's not like you have to worry about it, not like you're monitoring it, not like it's your job."
This gets me grinning even more widely. Because I don't have a job.
I stretch and stomp and shake my wings, leap off the balcony into the cool dawn air, coast and glide and bank toward downtown, the scent of Sugar Cube Corner's fresh cinnamon rolls an absolute magnet.
Pinkie knows, of course, and is tying a bright purple ribbon around a pink cardboard box when I step through the front door, the usual stream of early morning customers nodding to me around their cups of coffee or tea or cocoa. None of them steps aside to let me cut the line any more at least, and I inch forward along with the rest, all of us soaking in the time and the place and the steadily strengthening beats of our hearts.
At the counter, Pinkie moves like an acrobat, not everywhere at once but exactly where she needs to be when she needs to be there. "Morning, Twi!" she chirps after ringing up Time Turner's apple fritter. She stretches sideways a bit farther than a pony should be able to stretch and grabs the box. "Got your order all ready!"
Since it's our ritual, I say, "Pinkie, I didn't place my order yet."
And when Pinkie grins, it curls across her entire body. "Three frosted cinnamon rolls, one with a sprinkling of garnet!" She spins the box on the tip of a hoof. "'Cause breakfast's the most party-rific meal of the day!"
Even just a year ago, her use of the word 'party-rific' would've summoned a comment of some sort from me. But now, I simply float several bits across the counter toward her. "And lunch and dinner?"
"Them, too!" She slams the box down without smashing it somehow and bats the bits into the cash register.
"Thanks, Pinkie." Wrapping my hornglow around the box, I turn for the door.
"And don't forget to brush after!" I look back to see her rubbing a glazed donut stick across her pearly whites. "Toothpaste's an important part of every balanced meal!"
I have so much I still need to learn from her.
With the pink box floating in front of me like some stickless sort of carrot, I meander homeward. The market's setting up in the town square, so I stop to chat with Applejack. I ask about Granny Smith, she asks about Starlight Glimmer; I ask about Apple Bloom, she asks about Spike; I ask how things are going around the Acres, she asks how things are going around the castle.
Is it the same conversation we have every morning or every afternoon or every evening or whenever our paths happen to cross during the day? To an outside observer listening, it might seem to be, but I would respectfully disagree. In the same way that toothpaste is an important part of every meal, talking with AJ's an important part of every talk with Pinkie Pie and vice versa. Yes, maybe the specific words I exchange with Applejack that particular morning flicker away as soon as I leave her to her cart and her baskets and her call of, "Get'cher farm-fresh apples here, folks!" Maybe I can't recall exactly how many times she said "sugar cube" in the past five minutes or how often she gave that low, rumbling chuckle of hers.
But I learn something vital every time I talk with her. Without AJ, there'd be no party. And right now, that party's in full swing.
Down the street, up the steps, down the hall, into the kitchen, and I'm just untying the purple ribbon from the box when Starlight drags herself in. We were working till midnight extrapolating magical valence vectors across multidimensional constructs, and a goal-oriented pony such as her sometimes finds that sort of theoretical research a little tedious. The cinnamon roll perks her right up, though, and when Spike comes shuffling through the door not many minutes later, the garnet sprinkles prove to be exactly what he needs to banish his blinking and yawning.
I bustle around brewing coffee, chopping fruit, and mixing muesli, but when I slide their bowls and cups in front of them, Spike arches an eyeridge at me. "You okay, Twilight?"
"Spike?" I take a seat on the other side of the kitchen counter with my own bowl, the cinnamon roll oozing proudly over the top, and cup settled in front of me. "I've never been better."
Somehow, Spike manages to arch his eyeridge to an even sharper point, but Starlight nudges him in the ribs. "When there's a free breakfast involved, I've found it doesn't pay to ask too many questions." Light wavers around her horn, and she digs her spoon in.
"I dunno." Spike sniffs his bowl. "You weren't here the time Twilight tried to boil water and burned it."
Starlight's eyes go wide, her lips closing around the spoon.
"In my defense," I say, taking a big scoop of oats, banana slices, and cinnamon frosting, "it was magical water and magical fire."
"Well, yeah, but—" Picking up a chunk of something from his bowl, Spike holds it close to one eye and squints. "Burning water, Twilight."
A few tentative crunches reach my ears from Starlight, her jaw moving and a thoughtful expression on her face. "Nothing burned here," she says after swallowing. A sip of her cup, and she nods. "Good and strong: just the way I like it."
Spike's still got about half a frown pulling at him, but he wraps his tongue around the grain he's holding. Chewing for a bit, he shrugs, then drinks the whole bowl down. I'm a little concerned about the spoon, but I relax when I notice it lying on the counter beside his cup. He swigs that down next, smacks his lips, and says, "Okay! What's up for today?"
Starlight and I take a little longer to finish breakfast. I do the dishes and brush my teeth while they take care of their regular ablutions—I love that word!—then we're out onto the streets of Ponyville for the morning session.
After all, friendship at its core is wild, dynamic, growing and changing, a thing you have to actively look for. I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't be the Princess of Friendship solely by sitting in a crystal-encrusted throne room any more than I could really understand friendship till Celestia booted me ever so gently out of Canterlot Tower. Like they say: when the party won't come to you, you've got to go to the party.
So instead of a court situation like Celestia's settling into right now and Luna will be calling into session twelve hours from now with the gleaming splendor of Canterlot Tower surrounding them, the morning session is all meet and greet, conversational, sometimes just as simple as a smile and a wave. I've got no normal route, no regular pattern I follow—in fact, the first thing on my list for these sessions is, "Don't make a list." Which is kind of a paradox, but the second thing on that list is, "Be more accepting of paradoxes." So I've got it covered.
That morning, the three of us find a lot of slowly simmering happiness and even some full-boil joy. But there's also some burning, some shouts and crying that we do our best to transform into pouts and sighing—and not just because of the rhyme, though that does help when a situation calls for a musical number.
But the primary lesson I've had to learn is that I can't solve ponies' friendship problems for them. I can help them dig into the problem, can help them put it into a larger context, can help them step back and take a breath, but the rest is up to them. Starlight's gotten really good at the sort of gentle persuasion this calls for: as she says, it's as close to mind control as she lets herself get anymore. And Spike's always been an expert at cutting through a pony's blustering self-righteousness with a straightforward question like, "But you still want to be friends, right?"
We make a good team, in other words.
The hours fly by, and since we're just down the street from Carousel Boutique when the clock tower rings noon, we stop in to see if Rarity's free for lunch. "Not as such, I'm afraid," she says, pursing her lips. "You're all welcome to come in and join us, however, as long as you don't mind chipmunks."
Well, we have to come in after that, and Rarity leads us back to her parlor where Fluttershy's sitting at the table. So is Opalescence, though she's sitting on the table and is watching Fluttershy quite intently. I'm about to ask what's going on, but then I notice the odd way Fluttershy's mane is rustling. Catching my breath, I have to grin at the five or six chipmunks who start peeking out from various places along her head and neck.
"I'm babysitting," Fluttershy says with that gentle laugh of hers, "while Mr. and Mrs. Chipmunk enlarge the hollow part of their tree."
Starlight is looking back and forth between Opalescence and the little furry faces popping around in Fluttershy's hair. "Umm, maybe somewhere else would've been a better place to take them?"
"Oh, no." Fluttershy gestures to her charges. "They insisted."
Rarity's eyes are practically glowing. "It turns out the little darlings are Opal's fan club!"
As if on cue, the half dozen chipmunks come scurrying down Fluttershy's foreleg onto the table with tiny scrolls clenched in their teeth. They scamper one by one up to Opalescence, unroll their scrolls, and set down these little drawings they've made of her.
Opalescence doesn't smile—I don't know that I've ever seen a cat smile—but she does look enormously pleased with herself. Reaching out a paw, she pats each chipmunk on the head, and while I've never seen a chipmunk smile before, I certainly see them smiling now.
At this point, Rarity comes trotting in with the most gorgeous sandwich platter gliding through the air ahead of her. Since it's our ritual, I say, "Rarity, you didn't have to—"
But that's as far as I ever get, Rarity brushing all objections aside with a toss of her perfect mane. "You're my guests," she says. "And the day I don't have luncheon prepared when guests stop by at noontime is the day I stop breathing."
Spike's already shoveled down three sandwiches with the blissful expression he only gets when he's in a room with Rarity. The chipmunks offer Opalescence bits of their sandwiches, but she sticks with the bowl of milk Rarity set down for her. Every time she laps daintily at it, the youngsters squeak and jump around; once their sandwiches are gone, they vanish back into Fluttershy's mane where the rustling sounds make me suspect that more artwork will soon be forthcoming.
We eat and chat and laugh, Starlight joining in more this time than she did the last time, and that's the greatest party favor of all. Celestia taught me the way I needed to be taught: loaded up with information, then dispatched into a do-or-die situation where that information could serve as fuel to power the solution. But Starlight's experiences call for a different approach, and when I see it working like this, I'm happy to put another check mark on my 'teacher-student' list.
Because of course I have a list for that. I mean, let's be realistic here!
Then we're saying thanks, making plans for later in the week, bidding our farewells, and heading back to the castle for the afternoon session.
These tend toward the formal: fancy-dress parties can be fun, too, after all. Besides, we have ponies from out of town who come here looking for answers, and it's just polite to set up regular office hours so they can make their plans around train schedules and all.
The girls have standing invitations to sit in on these sessions whenever they've got the time, and this afternoon, flinging open the big doors to the map room fifteen minutes before the session's start time—since those doors do open inward—we find Rainbow Dash sprawled across her throne, her snores making the place sound like it's full of bees.
Spike scowls at her and heads in to start the process of poking her awake while Starlight and I set up the velvet rope and the little podium Spike uses as his check-in station. He always takes care of all the paperwork for the ponies standing in line, then Starlight leads them in one by one, and the group of us listens to whatever it is they want to tell us.
Sometimes, that's all a pony needs, too. A little venting, and the pony blinks, smiles, says thanks, and trots off with high-stepping hooves. Other times, it takes a few questions to turn the pony's thoughts toward a solution, and once in a while, we've got to do some serious digging to get to the roots. But if it's a big problem, well, the map tells us about those, and it's not very often that I have to put on my grouchy face to go show some monster or other how we party here in Equestria. So these sessions at the castle are mostly friendship tune-ups rather than full friendship overhauls.
Of course, when Rainbow's in town, the whole thing can turn pretty quickly into an autograph session, but we've got a small crowd today anyway. "Yep, yep, yep," Rainbow says after the last of our clients has gone off with a smile on her face and a signed photo in her saddlebag. "Bolts're off this week, so I figured I'd see what trouble I could cause around here."
Which kicks the party up another couple notches, and suppertime sees the eight of us gathered in the castle dining room after Fluttershy's delivered her chipmunks safely home to their parents. We parade up to the rooftop deck to toast the sunset and the moonrise, then it's back downstairs for slices of the incredible chocolate cake Pinkie brought along. AJ has cider, of course, which Rainbow's more than happy to help her with while the rest of us settle in around the library's fireplace to hear the news Rarity picked up during her latest trips to Canterlot and Manehattan.
Spike's curled up asleep in his beanbag chair by the time everypony's heading home, so Starlight and I float him to his room and tuck him into bed. In the hallway outside, I nod toward the library. "So! Ready for more valence vectors?"
She stares at me. "Are you serious?"
"Well?" I shrug. "They won't extrapolate themselves."
Her mouth goes sideways. "What is it with you today? I mean, working till midnight last night, then up this morning before either me or Spike, going full-tilt all day, having the whole crowd in for dinner, then wanting to hit the books again?" She cocks her head. "You sure you're okay?"
I've never been any good at lying, but acting is a skill any pony can learn. I give another shrug. "I like to keep busy."
"Busy?" Her eyes narrow, her horn flares, and three books appear floating in the air beside her. "Do I need to show you the literature about the importance of rest to the balanced psyche? Do I need to detail for you the studies that have demonstrated an unmistakable link between a pony constantly pushing herself beyond her capabilities and a decrease in that that pony's overall positive output?" She taps the books with a hoof. "It's called inefficiency, Twilight, and I don't think it's something you want to fall into."
Letting my eyes widen, I fold my ears, draw a foreleg back till it's tucked against my chest, and catch my lower lip between my teeth. Of course, what I really want to do is leap over and slap a cone-shaped pink party hat between her ears. Because she's not just concerned about me, but she's also expressing that concern using a method she knows I'll understand! This is such a huge breakthrough!
Except that she's still glaring at me. "Well?" she asks.
With a shiver, I sigh and slump. "You're right," I say, a phrase that I know she needs very much to hear from me. "I just—" And since this is something I really feel, it's pretty easy to get my voice to waver when I look up at her. "Princess Celestia ran the whole world, both day and night, for a thousand years! She's trusting me to be the Princess of Friendship, and I...I've got to be the best I can be! I've got to make her proud of me!"
Now it's her eyes widening, her ears going back. "What? Twilight!" She leaps forward, and, yes, Starlight's hugged me before, but this hug is so warm and solid and comforting, it jumps right to the top of the list. "You know Princess Celestia's proud of you! You can see it in her face whenever she looks at you!" She steps back, her smile both soft and stern. "You're doing a terrific job and helping Equestria in ways no other pony could. But you're pushing yourself to the breaking point. You need to relax."
"You're right," I say again, wiping a fetlock across my dry nose. "After all, if the Wonderbolts can take time off..." And then, because I still definitely have issues I'm working through, too, I force myself to ask, "Where's Trixie this week?"
Starlight's smile softens even more. "She's opening her new 'Trixie Conquers the Changelings' show Friday night at the FizzGargle Theater in Whinnyapolis." She gives a little jerk, and I can almost smell the ozone-sharp sizzle of her mind making the connection. "You mean—?"
"I'll see you Monday." I nod toward her door a little farther down the hall.
She practically rears back and scissors her front legs, but she stops herself in mid-whirl to aim a slightly wrinkled brow at me. "Will you be all right?"
It takes some effort, but I think my smile treads the narrow path between too melancholy and too pleased. "I'll get a non-vector-related book from downstairs, go straight to bed, and stay there till a decently late hour tomorrow morning."
I don't make it a Pinkie Promise, but Starlight doesn't seem to notice. "You'd better!" she says, shaking a hoof at me, but the big goofy grin on her snout dissipates any sort of threat. She wraps another quick hug around me, then she's bounding off down the hall.
Which isn't the end of the party: not by a long shot. Because every pony I touched today, I brought a little bit of the party out to them, gave them a piece of it to take with them and spread to every other pony they might've run across. And yes, it's a quiet sort of a party—I'm not Pinkie Pie. But it's a spark, a glow, a sliver of the wonder that's been flowing through me every minute of every hour of every day since these wings sprouted from my sides.
That's why I want to be up extrapolating valence vector. That's why I want to make breakfasts and listen to ponies and watch the sun rise in the morning and the moon rise into the night. The constant dancing swirl of atoms on the one side and stars on the other, it's a party, and I've been given an unending stream of invitations to pass out.
So how can I rest? Even now, my hooves are tapping to the rhythm of Spike's whispery snores, the crackle and flash of Starlight's teleportation spell, the talcum-powder-clean scent of Luna dispersing herself into the dreamscape, the light-as-meringue wisp of flavor in the air that tells me Celestia's in her bedroom pouring herself one more cup of tea.
Which sounds like a really good idea: the tea, I mean. Especially since I'll likely be up past midnight again tonight and up before dawn again tomorrow. It's not like I've got a job, as I believe I mentioned earlier, and in the final analysis, I really have quite a lot of partying to do.
Author's Note
The title:
Comes from Robert Earl Keen's song of the same name. It's not my favorite REK tune—that would be "The Raven and the Coyote" or "Farm Fresh Onions." Or maybe "So I Can Take My Rest" Or maybe "Wild Wind." Or maybe "No Kinda Dancer." Or maybe "Undone." Or maybe "Over the Waterfall." Or maybe—
Anyway, the story he tells in the song "The Road Goes on Forever (And the Party Never Ends)" has nothing to do with the story here. But the title worked.
Mike
