It was a cold autumn evening, a gentle breeze blowing through the holes in the old moss covered walls, both those left by long since shattered windows and those from where a block of stone had been moved by either the weather or by some animal. The old princess was in the middle of one of the larger rooms, surprisingly left mostly intact despite the age and lack of maintenance. Only a small chunk of the roof had fallen to the ground, creating a pile of rubble in a corner of the room. The tall alicorn stood still, her long and nebulous mane and tail seemingly moving on their own independently from the present wind. She was staring at the remains of what had once been a throne, giving her back to the hole where the doors had used to be, her eyes seemingly unfocused and distant.
A sudden sound from outside the chamber caused her to snap out of her thoughts. The burst of a teleportation spell followed by the sound of leaves cracking under hooves, soon replaced by the muffled clicking of someone walking on the mossy stone floor, the rhythmical pattern of steps being the one she had learned to recognize as her student's. She chose not to turn around.
"I'm impressed. I did not believe it would have been so easy to find me," she said, still staring at the throne.
"I didn't really find you," the smaller pony replied, walking closer to her teacher. "I asked Luna where she thought you might have gone, she said lately you always come here when you think nopony's looking."
"I'm going to have a talk with her about spying on others. And about giving out personal information like this, it's very impolite," the princess replied, still keeping her gaze still.
"Says the one who disappeared in the middle of a party," the younger pony said, walking up to the side of her teacher. "In the middle of your party, might I add. If you wanted to play hide and seek you could have asked. Although I suggest you get better at it than this if you want to try, don't think we'll let you win just because you're a princess and it's your birthday."
The joke drew a chuckle from the alicorn's lips, and she finally turned her head to meet her student's staring eyes. "You'd be surprised, I used to be a great player when I was younger."
"How many generations ago would that be? sixty? seventy?" the smaller pony asked in a semi-serious tone, putting one of her hooves under her chin in a purpusefully exaggerated gesture.
The alicorn put a hoof around her student's neck, ruffling her streaked purple mane in a playful manner before pulling her closer. "Another remark about my age and I'm sending you to the moon, understood?"
"Sure, like you'd ever actually do that to somepony," the young one said with a roll of her eyes.
"I've done it plenty of times, dear. We just decided to conveniently leave it out of the records."
The two stared at each other for a couple of seconds, then they both burst out laughing. After a few moments the laughter died down, and the princess turned her head back towards the broken throne, her eyes going back to that same unfocused look.
Her student looked up at her. "Something wrong?" she asked in a slightly preoccupied tone.
"No, I was just... remembering, that's all. This used to be different. There were ponies in this castle, working here, living here. Now it's just a bunch of ruins."
"I've read about it. It's said that it was the most beutiful palace in all of Equestria."
"It was. I was there, I saw it. I lived that time, and I saw it come to an end."
"Do you miss it?"
"Yes. But it's not that. Everything else has changed, and I'm still here. It's hard knowing that the world you belonged to doesn't exist anymore, but I like what we have now. It's just..."
"What is it? I-It's okay if you don't want to talk about it, I'm just curious. I... I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked, I-" she was cut off by her teacher's wing wrapping around her.
"Nothing to be sorry about." Silence hung in the air for a few seconds. Somewhere inside the alicorn's mind, as her eyes drifted between her pupil and the remains of the throne room, she decided it was time to share the burden weighing on her heart, maybe more out of a selfish desire for relief than to satisfy the other's curiosity. "It's just that... I'm scared."
The younger one wanted to reply, but stopped herself when she noticed a tear running down the alicorn's cheek.
"I love everything we have now. The new castle, the ponies, the city, and..." she paused, another tear going down her face, "I don't want to lose it again. I don't want to say goodbye to everything again. And there's nothing I can do. And everyday it gets harder to love something when you know you'll live to see it in ruins."
They both said nothing. "Thanks," spoke the princess after a while, her voice slightly cracking, "let's go home now. I think they might be starting to worry."
The younger pony flared up her horn with a teleportation spell, but was interrupted by the other putting a hoof to her head.
"Can we... walk outside first? Sorry, I just wanna see the city one last time."
Her student silently nodded. And so princess Twilight Sparkle and her student walked out of the castle and into the abandoned streets of the place once known as Canterlot, the hundreds of years old purple alicorn giving one last look to the town she had used to call home before teleporting them both away to her new castle in the city of Avallop.
Princess Celestia was slowly sipping her tea on the balcony of her room, looking over the city as the ponies returned home from the celebrations.
"How do you do it?" came Twilight's voice from behind her.
Celestia remained silent.
"How do you go on knowing everything is going to end up the same? How do you manage to start over when you already know it's not going to last?"
The golden aura of Celestia's magic slowly levitated her cup to the small table in the middle of the balcony. "I don't."
"What?"
The white alicorn gave a low sigh. "You've got to understand, Twilight, it's not a matter of choice. You can try as much as you want, but time isn't a river you can stop. The past gets dragged behind, and we don't have the luxury of choosing to stay back with it. It doesn't matter what you do, things are going to change. We carry on because forward is the only way we can go. Take it from someone who tried, nothing good comes from attempting to go back and live in the past."
"It's hard. Watching the ruins of the past and knowing that's what the future holds for what we have now."
The older princess turned to her once student and motioned her to come closer. They sat side by side, Celestia's wide wing covering Twilight's body, their manes melting into each other while flowing in the autumn night's cold air as both princesses watched over the city.
"It's a matter of perspective, Twilight. Yes, one day these streets too will be empty. But that's because we'll have moved on. Ruins aren't there to remind us of something that is no longer. They are there to remind us that that's where we came from, that we have what we have because of what we had. They exist because we moved on to something else. You can't chase the past, or you'll only end up wasting the present. Remember, always, that what is now is the way it is thanks to what happened in the past, that the past still lives through the present. Remember, Twilight, that your memories will never give you more than what you already have, no matter how hard you look, remember that the present is the only new thing the past can give us, and you should never refuse to take it, because if you live in the past you'll find nothing else but sadness at the thought of what is no more."
Twilight said nothing, and so they waited there, on the balcony of the castle, looking over the city, under the endless immortal skies that would one day see this kingdom, like all before it, lie in ruins.
