She stood on the hill overlooking Ponyville, looking at nothing at all. None of it, neither mansion nor cottage, stood out to her. One thing only drew her eyes—the long gray building at the northeast edge of town.
She stood, hating the wings and legs that would not move, and hating the deeper dread buried within that kept them frozen. She knew she needed to go. She needed to be with them. Still, she couldn’t force herself to move, not even as the sun began crumbling into the horizon, dutifully tracking on the path she had set it to follow for hours without her help.
The silence was broken by the beat of soft, enormous wings. Twilight turned, hurriedly smoothing the emotion she had been wearing openly behind a practiced, stoic expression, but she froze in shock as she recognized the last pony she had expected to see.
“C… Celestia?”
The former princess of the sun folded her wings, stepped forward across the grass, and nodded her head in a solemn greeting.
“I thought you might be here,” Celestia said, nuzzling Twilight’s cheek briefly as she came alongside her.
Twilight blinked in confusion, hoping it hid her tears as she worked to blink them away as well. “You thought… but, why? And why are you here?” Celestia looked, Twilight was surprised to see, somehow smaller than she remembered, almost impossibly so; hardly different from a normal Pegasus or Unicorn. It took her a moment to realize it was only a result of her own skewed perspective. She had been accustomed for decades to seeing Celestia clad all in gold, and to looking up to her from far below. It felt strange, almost uncanny, to see her so truly eye to eye.
Had it really been so long since they last met?
“Spike wrote to me,” Celestia said. “I asked him to, many years ago, whenever he thought this time had come.” She looked down over Ponyville, and somehow Twilight could tell her gaze had settled in exactly the same place as she herself had been staring only moments ago. “The struggle is over, isn’t it. Now they’re only waiting.”
Twilight felt the clench of panic in her heart at the words, spoken so gently, too gently to hold such impossible weight. It was suddenly hard to breathe again, and she turned away. But somehow, she could still feel Celestia’s eyes on her. “I know, Twilight.”
“I…” she broke off, unable to continue. In the moment of silence, her former teacher stepped closer, then laid a hoof on her shoulder and a wing over her back.
“I know.”
Twilight wanted to let the feelings go; she wanted to lean into Celestia, like she had many times so long ago, and let herself be vulnerable again. Instead, she took a long, slow breath, as though she could force the pain to lie as still and calm as the air. This was not the time or place. She had a role to fulfill, and she wanted to project the strength she knew the others would expect to see in her, the strength she wanted to have for them when she joined them down below. She wanted to have the strength she was used to seeing from the pony beside her now, tenderly holding her at her side.
“You can talk to me,” Celestia said, her voice soft and low and kind. “Right now, there’s just the two of us. You can say anything you’re hurting to say. I know what it is to wear the mask for everyone else… but you don’t have to wear it for me, Twilight.”
It was exactly what she had been desperate for someone, anyone, to tell her for days. Weeks. Even so, she still resisted. She almost denied her. But before she could fully rally herself, before she even quite had an idea of what to say, the words escaped in a strangled rush.
“…I’m not ready.”
And the dam broke.
Her chest heaved, then convulsed painfully, and her head was suddenly forced down by the enormous pressure within. It was as though something greater even than the weight of the realm had settled over her, and nothing she could do was enough to bear it. Restrained sobs choked her and tore at her throat even as she continued to try and subdue them back into silence. “I’m not ready, Celestia.”
“No one ever is, Twilight,” Celestia said. Through the gentleness, Twilight was surprised to hear something of her own voice in Celestia’s—the quaver of pain. Somehow, it gave her back just a little bit of the calm she so desperately wanted.
“But I’m supposed to be,” she said, hating how young she sounded to herself. She clenched her teeth in a sudden scowl, trying once more to force the unsteadiness and rippling pain back down where it had come from, to bottle it up good and tight. “I should be. I’ve known this day was coming, I’ve always known the price… I’ve had time to prepare, is what I’m trying to say.”
In spite of her efforts, her voice shook, and it was all she could do to crush the roiling tide of her emotions and keep talking. “I have lived this moment in my mind a thousand times, and a thousand times over again. I’ve seen it happen, over and over… on nights when the clouds cover the sky, and it seems like there’s no end to the darkness, and always, there in the heart of it, there was this day. I see them, lying there, watching me, and I can’t do anything. I’ve seen it over and over again, and I’m still not ready. I don’t…”
She drove her hoof into the soft earth and felt it cave beneath her, the sod buckling and tearing beneath her strength—strength that she would have, in that moment, given away in an instant to go back to any moment, any moment at all. Just to have more time. Or to not be here. She wasn’t sure which.
“…I don’t want to say goodbye.”
Celestia said nothing, only tightened her hold with her wing.
“Why, Celestia? Why am I still not ready?”
“Because you’ve asked too much of yourself,” Celestia answered quietly. “That’s why I’m here. You’ve reached another marker in your journey, one you could never have been prepared to face. Not in the way you’re imagining.”
“I’m not ready to do this. And I don’t want to. I can’t.” Twilight shook her head, and her lips pulled apart to bare her teeth in a grimace of pain beyond the shape of words. She pulled herself out from Celestia’s wing and strode away, unable to look at her teacher, so strong and quiet there behind her. “I don’t want to, I can’t!”
She tore a long, grating gasp from the air and held it, aching to release the scream that she refused to give in to. Instead, she let the air out in a ragged breath, and when she spoke again, her words were barely a whisper.
“I don’t… I don’t know if I can.”
Once again, Celestia came alongside and held her with her wing, refusing to let Twilight distance herself. “I know, Twilight.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Twilight felt her body tremble, as though her very muscles were trying to hold back what was in her mind and heart, and the pressure was simply too great. “I don’t… I don’t want to. Part of me just desperately wants to… go away somewhere, and wait. Wait until someone tells me that… that it’s over. And I won’t have to do anything.” She released the words before she could stop herself. She stood in shock, almost unable to believe what she had said, that she had allowed herself to say it. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You can choose that,” Celestia said quietly. “I mean that—without qualification, without judgment.”
“No!” Twilight said, almost a snarl. She looked at her old teacher aghast. “How could you even suggest that?”
“Why not?” Somehow, Celestia managed to ask without any intonation. Her voice was perfectly, openly neutral. “Let me try to explain, as best I can. I do believe you are strong enough to face this, together with her. And I believe, with everything boiled down to its most essential elements, that you want it that way as well. But I am not here to help you make one choice or another; to tell you that something is right or wrong. I only want to help you through whatever choice you make. And it may well be that the right thing, for you today, is not to face this directly. It may sadden her, but there is a cold truth at the heart of this—you will be the one to carry forward the pain of this day, not her. And you can choose… indeed, you have the right to choose what that pain will be, or try to. But she… soon, she will be free of all her pain.”
“I can’t accept that,” Twilight said through gritted teeth. “I can’t… after all we’ve been through… Yes, I know what you’re saying. And maybe if things were different between us… between any of us… maybe I could accept letting things pass me by like that. But I can’t let her face this alone to make it easier on myself. That’s not the right choice for me. I don’t think I could live with myself.”
“Then, as I suspected, you will do the impossible. As you have so many times before now.”
Celestia turned her eyes from Twilight, straightening up and looking down over the town with her as she spoke. “You will go to her, and you will walk in her final steps. Until she must continue on, where you no longer can.” Without turning her head, Celestia glanced back to Twilight and gave her a small, encouraging smile. “That is who you are, Twilight. You are someone who will always be there to help the ones who need you. To help see their journey through. Even when it costs you so much.”
“But how can I, Celestia? How can I go down and stand there and… just watch while she—and while I won’t… I’ll never…”
She shook her head again, clenching her teeth furiously. “I’ve always wondered… and hated myself every time I’ve wondered… who would be first. Whether it might make a difference… whether it might somehow be a little easier to say goodbye to one or another. As if that could even be possible. And it’s not right—it’s not right to think that. Still. I waited, and I wondered… But it was never her. In all the times I wondered, it was never her! Even when the medicine stopped—”
Twilight fell silent, unable to speak another word. The anguish had boiled its way back up into her throat, and had cut off her voice completely. She took a moment, and a few unsteady breaths, to regain her composure.
“She was still so full of life…” she finally said, quiet and steady to avoid bringing the pain too close. “She spent the entire day at the festival with all of us just last week. You could barely tell... Just… why, Celestia? Why does it have to be her?”
She shut her eyes, hot tears finally breaking free, and her shoulders heaved as her breath shook uncontrollably. Once again, she asked, “Why does it have to be her?”
Celestia didn’t answer, and Twilight realized she didn’t want her to answer. She didn’t want any vague comforts or tired, meaningless words. In some exhausted, beaten part of her mind, she managed to rationalize that Celestia probably knew she didn’t want that. Instead, Celestia only held her, and let her lean into her when it felt like her legs were going to give out.
“How is it…” Twilight asked when she had gotten her breath under control for another moment, “that after everything I’ve learned, and all the things I’ve seen… How can it be, in the end… that I really just want everything to stay the same?”
“Because we’re not really all that different, Twilight,” Celestia said, “from all the ponies around us. Despite the obvious things that everyone fixates on and labels: Our bodies, our connections to the elemental powers… our fixed place in the maelstrom of time… yet, in all the ways that matter, we’re not that different at all. Like them, we meet others, we experience things, find moments of joy, form bonds… we fall in love… and when time moves forward, and bonds weaken, and break, we grieve at their passing. This is a moment that would have come to you no matter what other courses your life might have taken. Whether you became like Cadence and Luna and me, or whether your journey led you elsewhere.”
Celestia let out a deep sigh and pulled Twilight a little closer to her. “Like everyone else, we fear the unknown that lies ahead. We fear what kind of world could exist without what has become familiar. We fear we won’t want that world—That nothing will be there for us that can fill the emptiness left by what was… what will never be again. And just like them, we are powerless to stop it. Not even we, who are eternal, can spend eternity in the precious and ephemeral moment.”
Celestia raised her head and gazed out at the horizon, directly at the thin, flaming thread of sunlight that remained at the world’s edge. “I have watched so many fade away, my most dear friend. Over the centuries since I made my choice—to remain and wait instead of accepting a most terrible farewell—I instead said goodbye to so many other friends; and loves; and wonderful, cherished ponies. And not all of those goodbyes were for death. It was a strange lesson… that growing apart, losing touch… the ponies I failed along the way… that those goodbyes could be somehow even more painful. But before any of that, there was a hill for me, too … A hill just like this one, long, long ago, from which I could see the cottage where my first true friend was breathing her last.”
Twilight couldn’t help but snap to attention just a little. She had never heard Celestia speak of a first friend. “Who?”
“Her name was Chloris. When I met her, she tended to gardens all around the mountain village that would one day grow to become Canterlot. You’ve read how most villages in Equestria were rather bleak places in those days—dour necessity and ponies worn to the bone by bitter labor. But her home and everything surrounding it bloomed with gardens that would’ve been the envy of empires. In time, she built the first public botanical gardens in Equestria, and she designed and tended the palace grounds, when they were built.
“And she was… waspish, I suppose you could say,” Celestia added with a laugh. “I’m not sure she knew how to communicate with ponies in a way that wasn’t bitterly acerbic. But she cared, deeply, and somehow that always showed through. Maybe it was that smile of hers. Maybe it was the way she always seemed to be so completely sure everyone was better than they themselves thought they were. I’m not certain, even now. And I almost… almost… didn’t go down to her, at the end. So… I had a feeling this day would come for you, too. And I couldn’t prepare you. But I could make sure you didn’t face it alone.”
“And… how did you do it?” Twilight asked. “How did you keep going to them, over and over, just to watch as they left forever?”
Celestia smiled, the saddest smile Twilight had ever seen her give. “Dear Twilight. You will ever be the seeker of solutions. But… I’m afraid there are no words of wisdom. There’s no secret knowledge or mental trick or bargain beyond the veil. There is only what you have always done, in every challenge you have faced: Be there, and endure. It’s that easy. And that hard. One of the hardest things, perhaps, you will ever do.”
Twilight stared down at the long gray building. Her eyes finally seemed to have gone dry, though they stung in the crisp evening air. She didn’t feel better so much as… spent. “It… never felt real… back then. Back when everyone had gone home, and I was trying to figure out how to sleep with these stupid things crowding my bed…” she surprised herself by giving a short, dry laugh and shuffled her wings on her back. “Even on that first night, I realized that, if I really had become like you… I might outlive them. But it seemed so far away. It was something that would happen to somepony else. We all had so many years ahead of us. So many chances. So much time to spend together.” Her face fell, and she blinked, as though it had only just occurred to her when she added, “There was really no time at all.”
“Which is another thing we will always have in common with all other life. I’ve been told so many times over the years that they expect we have some special, altered sense of time’s passing… and who I am to say, maybe for you it will be different. But for me, it still all goes so quickly. I find, over and over, I get settled into a routine and just live out the days, like everyone else. It’s such an effort to look out far to the horizon. Yet even so, I still believe the value in looking to that distance is limited. Life is happening now, all around us. We miss so much of it; it seems a shame to miss even more looking down over it all from a mountaintop.”
“…Are you really one to talk about mountaintops?” Twilight asked, jerking her head towards Canterlot with a shaky, wry grin.
“I was speaking metaphorically,” Celestia said, affecting an air of indignant primness. Twilight felt glad she could laugh in response; a real, honest laugh, however soft.
For a few moments, they simply sat together, and Twilight felt her breathing grow steady as the pain receded to a small whisper. Not gone, nor even lessened, merely settled into the space Celestia had helped her make for it. Then, Twilight bit her lip as a thought occurred to her.
“Um… Celestia…”
“Ask your questions, my friend. I am here tonight for you.”
Even so, Twilight hesitated, unsure how to put the feeling into words. Part of her wondered if she wanted to hear the answer, on this of all days. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about this… about me, right now. This isn’t about me. This is about her, and them.”
“Twilight. There is not a ‘wrong’ way to experience grief, or treat the wounds it inflicts. And you cannot care for your friend if you do not care for yourself.”
Twilight blinked, then gave Celestia a quick, mock glare. “Isn’t that a little cruel, Celestia? Quoting my own letters back at me?”
“I have found it an effective strategy in the past.”
Twilight laughed again, but it turned dry and brittle, crumbling into nothing, when she returned to the question that had stopped her.
“Have you ever felt… that you couldn’t do it anymore? After so many deaths, has it ever gotten to be so much that you… that you didn’t want to meet anyone else? So you wouldn’t have to keep losing them over and over again?”
“Hmm. You really have heard some stories over the years,” Celestia said, not unkindly. “And I can certainly understand how it might seem that way, especially right now. From where you now stand, it looks like a bleak future… full of so many partings that you wonder how I carry them all. Perhaps you wonder if I’ve lost count.”
Twilight waited, not wanting to ask, but knowing that indeed, that tactless question was exactly what she had begun to wonder in recent weeks.
“At times like this, yes. I do feel like I can’t do it anymore,” Celestia said. “I have even learned to recognize the days when such moods will come upon me… when the sun is setting on the things I have grown to cherish… And I wonder if I will allow myself, or force myself, to go through it again. If, perhaps, this last sunset is the final time.”
“But you don’t keep feeling that way.”
“No.”
“So then…” she swallowed, feeling her sorrow begin to creep up on her again. “Everyone you ever meet going away… is that really something you can get used to? Does it just get easier?”
For several seconds, Celestia mused over her answer, chewing just barely at the edge of her lip. “No,” she finally said, almost a whisper. “And I thought it would, or maybe I hoped it would, when the second century began rolling into the third. I really did. But when generation after generation passed, and all those friendships became special in their own ways… No, it does not ever get any easier.”
“Then… why?” Twilight looked down at the grass, into the moist, black soil she could see lying beneath it. Near her left hoof, a miniscule ladybug was trundling mindlessly along, like a little live coal in the depths of a dead furnace. “Why do you keep starting the cycle over?”
“Well. Let me instead ask you a different question. If you had the chance… Would you trade away the moments you had in the past, to erase this present sorrow? If it was possible, would you undo the meeting of your friends, and write a different life for yourself absent them, in order to avoid this cost?”
“…Well, as Princess, I couldn’t possibly,” Twilight said, flashing Celestia a shaky smile. “We’ve established several times over that the cohesion of our friend group was not only beneficial to us, but crucial to the survival of the entire nation, with… almost ludicrous serendipity. So at the very least, as your successor, I couldn’t in any good conscience put everypony at risk for my own sake like that.”
Celestia rolled her eyes in a way that said she knew perfectly well Twilight was not only stalling, but feigning it in a deliberately poor manner to stall further. “We are not speaking as princesses, Twilight. We are speaking as friends. But if you’re going to insist upon being recalcitrant, then simply imagine you could set the terms. You could make it so all of our nation’s trials and threats resolved into roughly the same favorable outcomes. Would you do it?”
“You know I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Twilight glanced over at Celestia, surprised to feel a flash of something almost like irritation. Celestia was gazing back at her with a coy expression, now looking perfectly like the mentor Twilight had grown up with, putting some sly new exercise to her student in the classroom. Twilight was hardly in the mood for it. Was this really the moment for a philosophy quiz, of all things?
The problem was, that sort of approach still worked on her, and they both knew it. Almost by instinct, the analytical part of her mind had already started threading ideas together into an answer, reaching back through all the information it could find and sorting it together before her.
A balloon, disembarked amidst a whirlwind of annoyance and fear, but deeper below, uncertainty and vulnerability, the sense of being alone and unsupported in a strange place; the gestures of welcome; the smiles that had, slowly, broken through the shell she had built.
Shared doubt; joy given; fears conquered. Games. Celebrations.
Regrets, shared to the chirping of crickets and the crackle of a burning log.
The taste of bright, tart ginger in a cold drink, bought and shared on a whim in the scorching heat of a strange city. Quiet nights, looking up at the stars, until the air was too cold to bear. The sharing of a scratchy blanket.
And the fights, yes, even the fights came back to her as something she would trade this moment of grief for in an instant. With a small glimmer of amusement, she realized that in a way, she had made that trade, just the other way around. The memories—no, not even memories—the accumulation of all those moments, experiences they had not only passed through but created, had been woven together second by second until they crystallized, set in time for eternity. They were immovable, unchangeable, irreplaceable, there, even if she could never tread back to them.
The elements and fragments of time they had built together were part of what had become the whole of her, the whole of each of them. And even in the midst of her grief, to Twilight they were more beautiful than anything, in all their adventures, that they had built or changed or wondered at.
Yet still, the recollections only seemed to dig the blade lodged in her heart a little deeper. “I suppose you want me to say, ‘because it was worth it,’ ” Twilight said, and she was still genuinely torn whether she truly felt the answer, or whether she merely thought it was the right one academically. “And in a way, I know it was worth it. If I was given some incredible wish like you’re describing… No, I wouldn’t change it. I would want to do it again, if I could. But that’s just it. I’d want to do everything that’s passed over again, not try to redo it with other ponies. I’d want to be that younger version of myself, the one who hasn’t even imagined… this… yet. It was worth it, but… that doesn’t mean it feels like it was worth it, right now. Right now, it feels…”
“It feels as if the pain is all that exists,” Celestia murmured. “And that it’s all that has ever existed, eclipsing and corrupting the light of those times you don’t want to trade away.”
“Yes. And I don’t know if I can try to just ‘do it again,’ or if I want to. Not like that.”
“So it has been for me. Nearly every time I’ve said goodbye… I thought it would finally, utterly break me. I have thought many times that I wouldn’t be able to try again, carrying the weight of those who have gone.”
Then Celestia smiled, an expression seemed to show as much amusement as a sort of playful annoyance. “And then, as though I haven’t learned to expect it over and over, there has been the meeting of somepony new. Some bright new smile and eyes shining with the wonder and beauty of all the world, striding through the daylight without knowing what awaits them, looking for the place where they belong. Looking for friendship. That’s what ponies misunderstand when they guess how it must be for us, we who stand outside of time. We don’t live carrying its infinite magnitude, with all the loss and grief in perfect clarity, as though it had just happened. As you yourself have already realized, we live in the smallness of now, as it flits from one moment to the next. It is perhaps the most important thing we have in common with other ponies—just as it heals them, time heals us as well.”
Twilight took a deep breath, but felt her head and shoulders sag. She felt utterly exhausted. And she hadn’t even begun. Her friend was still waiting for her. She still needed her. “So that’s what you’re here to tell me. That since I’m immortal, I really will just keep losing everyone I grow to love and care about, over and over.”
“And,” Celestia admonished, “that you will never do it alone. Even if I should one day be gone too, Twilight, you will find others. Or, if you try to be stubborn about it, others will find you. And they will enrich your life in ways entirely unique and unimaginable to you.”
Celestia both pulled Twilight closer and nudged her with her shoulder, encouraging her to look up again. “If there is one wonderful, wonderful thing I have learned from all these centuries, it is that somehow, I have never loved or been loved by a pony in quite the same way twice. There is richness and depth beyond measure in these relationships, Twilight, and I promise you from experience: If you allow them to keep getting to know the incredible pony you are, they will teach you so many wonderful things in turn. There is not time enough in eternity to get to know them all. Thus do we live surrounded by the fullness of life and companionship. We live to share in the infinite wonder of all those lives, all those experiences, all those little moments where nothing seems special, making them somehow the most special of all. It is that which makes it worth the pain. And the funniest thing is… they really do seem to have ways to keep finding you, just when you don’t know you need them. Maybe by, say, spontaneously and quite destructively hatching and augmenting a dragon inside your brand new academic administration tower.”
Twilight gave a snort of laughter. “That’s… a strangely practical way of looking at it.”
“I thought that might appeal to you,” Celestia said. “Though, it’s very possible that this, too, is something I cannot adequately explain or teach. But I think it is what you will find, when the time comes to experience it.”
“I… I hope you’re right. I’ve been scared that… if my life does span generations, I’ll lose the things that made me… me, up until now. I spent so much of my early life without friendship, that the idea of losing it again… it’s been on my mind a long time. It… it doesn’t make what I have to do now any easier. But still… Thank you, Celestia. For being here.”
“I am here for you anytime you need me, Twilight. And I will always try to help if I can.”
And then suddenly, Twilight felt it—a gentle shift in the invisible weave of the world, like a single thread of spider silk brushed ever so lightly across her shoulder. She shivered, and when she felt Celestia tense next to her, she knew she had felt it too.
“Her time is coming,” Celestia said. “If you are to go to her, it must be now.”
“I… I know.”
“Are you ready?”
Twilight turned back to the town. She knew that if she looked hard enough, she could see the very window where her friend was waiting for her. It was dark and uninviting. Most of the city still hadn’t begun lighting its lamps, even though the shadow of the day’s last moments lay heavy over it.
But she was no stranger to walking into shadow and darkness. It was, she realized with a faint, lovely spark of memory, how it had begun. She had not been alone even in that first, longest night, so distant now that the memory was in danger of becoming blurred and dull. She had been able to go into it because they had gone in together. And now, she knew she could go into this shadow too. Her friend was already there. And so they would do it together again. One more time.
Even if it meant that when she emerged, she would do so just a little bit more alone.
She took a long, steadying breath. “…No. But… I’m going.”
“I understand.” Celestia waited a moment, then asked, “Do you want me to come with you?”
It was there again—the grief, threatening to overwhelm her. But it felt right, somehow, to feel it now. “Yes. I think she’d… I think she’d like to see you, too.”
Celestia nodded and stood, supporting Twilight as she rose after. “Then let us go to her, and write one more chapter together.”
They walked, passing down from the hill and into the borders of Ponyville, in amongst the households and shops, and towards the long gray building. And though they no longer held each other, they did walk the steadier for the other being at their side. As they were lost from sight, the last of the sunlight vanished from the hilltop along with them, fading into the horizon until only the gentle aura of the cool evening remained in the sky.
