In the later summers of her golden waning years, Maud Pie decided to embark on a pilgrimage. It was a small pilgrimage that would not last a day. Her cave of crystal waterfalls was left behind in favor of the dirt back roads and sheer serpent-filled cliffs that snaked all around it in crusty pebble-laden paths. These had only been traversed ever by the most rugged and fearless of Earth ponies and it was with a strange association that these paths led only to the simple town that seemed for better or for worse to always be the center of every major event in recent Equestria history.
Not that such a fact crossed Maud’s mind. The road was flat but surrounded by the sloping green hills and fields, as timeless as infinity, as resistant as the hardest diamond. She was sure that the wind that tussled through her coat was the same wind that had welcomed her all those years ago. Steadfast and stubborn, as much of the land and history as any sedimentary icon Maud had come across. That was the wind to Maud: the airborne equivalent of rock. It was the same now as it was then and it would be the same in the future.
Such was the nature of things.
Her hooves carried her far in an hour’s time. Now the hills sloped less and arced down into far flatter plains that stretched boundless into the horizon. Green and dark. Far-reaching and still simple. It was the earth and she could feel its ancient age spreading up through her body. The old spirit of the land, Gaia herself perhaps, mother to all. A myth in another time. But Maud smiled as she remembered one old aventure told by one old family member that had revealed to Equestria that deity’s eternal presence.
No thing was to be hidden forever, so long as Pinkie had been around to hear it. The old party-pink mare now cooped up against her will in Grassy Groves Retirement Home and still as energetic as ever. Timeless like the wind and the rock. Did the endless past and present run through her veins as did blood and Earth pony magic? Maybe.
The grey ashen cloak hiked over a still sturdy frame and she came down the least of the hills and as she did so the cloak billowed out like permanent smoke from the abandoned smokestacks of the southern region. Echoes of a fireplace, a hearth still burning from then ‘til now. She did not stop as the hill became developed ground that had in other lives past once been the dirt back roads that called to a time of less excitement and still paradoxically more so. About rose the homes of Ponyville. They were taller than the hay-roofed ones in Pinkie’s prime. Built sturdier, too. Word was they could survive a monster attack much easier so the town did not need to repair so many homes as often. From them rang foals’ voices as they dashed about the black streets and stiff shrubbery.
Maud paused for a moment. The sun was bright and high in the sky and in that moment her stoic exterior broke and her neutral lips frowned just deep enough to show her displeasure. She pulled her hood up to block the sun and continued walking down the path and nopony paid her any mind. Just as most never had. Yet another constant from way back when.
She took the main road and headed down it and she reflected on its blackness and looked about her and around, all that had once been so simple and rustic now was modified with the modern inventions of electrical manner that rolled off the assembly line in mass quantity to be shipped all over Equestria. In the span of not even one pony life these changes had come and almost overwhelmingly so and it had struck just as hard as any other sudden and prophesied foe from those times and perhaps it was a miracle or a feat of adaptive learning on their species’ part that no city or town had fallen to that emerging technology. Around Maud was the testimony to that case. This was Ponyville and yet not and all that had once been green and treen were now an unbiased mixture of that and another world and time entirely.
Perhaps if she had been younger she would have been concerned. She saw on some of those hills a great oak left unchanged and beneath it a group of activists and their audience were extrapolating on the dangers of this newness and the sanctity of nature and keeping things as they had been, in harmonic business, and all those ponies had to do was vote for this one specific move to turn back time and set things right. As if it were that simple.
If she had been younger she might have joined them and might have even voted but Maud was an old mare and even her bones could not be more than broken brittle beneath the sludge that was politics. So she continued on.
At the end of the path rose as ever before the gleaming Castle of Friendship. It was the only other building there that had not gone through some significant change, the other being Sugarcube Corner. Like an automated dictionary her mind rattled off certain words to describe it. Crystalline. Royal. Iridescent. Compound. More and less, beautiful words, words that had been gifted to her by that which this pilgrimage was for.
Maud stopped. She raised her hoof and knocked twice then stood back and waited. A little time passed and then a faint pinkish glow encapsulated the door and it was pulled open.
“Oh. Hello, Maud.”
“Hello, Princess Twilight. Is Starlight in?” She knew the answer that was to come because she had already heard it before and evidently so did Twilight because the smile that crossed her face was strained and tired and worn.
“Yes, she is. You can go on up.”
Princess Twilight. Aging gracefully thanks to her alicorn magic. She maintained that strained smile as Maud stepped inside but she could not hold it very long.
“How is she?” Maud asked quietly.
“Not well,” Twilight confessed. “Still bedridden.”
“I see.”
“I’m sure she’d love to see you again.”
“Thank you.”
Twilight let her be and so with a set heart Maud began to climb. The steps reverberated throughout like there were hundreds of hooves stomping and she could picture a hundred different phantom ponies stomping up the stairs alongside her like the four-legged echoes of a different and busier past, all in the search for a forbidden knowledge to stop the irreversible so as to only delay the inevitable for just a moment longer. That was a past she knew she was beginning to forget. The crystal walls reflected that idea for as she passed them her reflection scarcely was left behind and it would not appear on those walls as if it was a ghost of her past unwilling to be met by her present and older self. So long as she moved, it would move and if she stopped it would not allowed itself to be seen. And Maud found this odd for what kind of past feared the present when the future was as unknown and as daunting if not more so? But then she realized that the present was the past’s future and so it had a right to be scared.
And these thoughts on time and all were hers but they had been planted in her head years ago by one unicorn who had dabbled in time more than any other had.
Maud reached the top where there stretched a long corridor of Babylonian purple and she began to walk down it. She did so in sure steps and did not stop once for she knew time was of the essence and the essence was fading. She found the door she was looking for and opened it gently and stepped inside to behold the source.
There was a machine carted there. Clean and white. It beeped every now and then and on it rose lines that were in the rhythm of a heartbeat. There was a heavy blanketed bed and there under the covers lay a deeply sick pony. Her coat was starting to fade to the color of Maud’s. Her mane was frazzled and thin and there were dark splotches in the highlights where none had any right to be. Her eyes were open. They were the only things bright now of her.
Maud closed the door behind and said, “Hello, Starlight.”
Starlight smiled weakly but did not say anything.
Maud trotted over and did so delicately. She came close to the bed. It smelled of ammonia and hospitals and the machine beeped as if saying what else did you expect. Maud raised a hoof and pointed to a wrinkle that crossed Starlight’s brow. “This line tells me you’re nearing one hundred years old. But you don’t look a day over sixty.”
Starlight chuckled. It was like hearing the wind in Ghastly Gorge being forced out of a tube. “Oh, Maud, you always know just what to say.”
I have had to say this four times now. Maud thought this but did not say anything.
Starlight turned to face her. Her face was ghastly and paling but still she managed a smile. “I don’t suppose… there’s a rock out there that could help me?”
Four times. “I’m looking into it.”
“Oh, that’s good…” Starlight blinked slowly and for a moment Maud thought she had gone somewhere into her mind from which she would not return for a while. “I’m glad you came to visit, Maud. It’s been ages since we last talked, I think.”
Maud nodded. “Yes. Ages.”
“How have you been?”
Maud talked about her life for the fourth time. About her geological work for the fourth time. About her home and what she had been up to and how she now found Ponyville since it had been ushered into the electronic age. All for the fourth time. Her responses were calculated and practiced and she knew everything Starlight was going to ask and how she would react to what Maud was saying.
A cruel joke. It had to be. But it was what it was and labeling it did nothing and so Maud did not say this or think it any more.
Soon Starlight’s voice began to grow softer. She was growing tired. Tired every time. “You should rest,” Maud said. The words meant nothing.
Starlight nodded. Maud began trotting away. She counted her steps. One, two, three, four. Then: “Maud?”
Maud stopped. “Yes?”
“Promise to come back soon?”
This was the cruelest joke and she had heard it enough times to know the punchline and still it felt like someone had taken a pickaxe to her heart and beaten it until nothing remained but the blinking red memories of a time before the now.
“I promise,” Maud said. It meant nothing now.
She closed the door and did not see Starlight’s smile as she left but as she came down the crystal staircase and wished Twilight goodbye she knew that whatever cruel joke this was, she would go along with it and it would not matter how many times she would have to repeat herself to the bedridden mare because at least for that moment of repetition she would see her friend as she should have been, able to smile and converse, not failing to remember the other visits beforehand and while there was no joy in this endeavor it was now a constant of Maud’s life and so she thought it could bring her comfort. But of course comfort is temporary and in the upheavals of the mind and the universe it would not last. So she would treasure that.
Her head was bowed as she left Ponyville again and she knew that she would be back the next day and the next after traveling the same roads and seeing and saying the same things and this she resolved would not bother her. Not in forever. Not in fivever, which was more than four.
She had reassured herself of this for the fourth time counting. Not that it mattered then or now. The path would become the present and then the future would be no longer and she would confront all of this again the next day until all was at an end finally.
