Twilight Sparkle and the Stupid Original Pony

I held my peace rather than expound yet another impossible tale. Too much of what seemed ‘impossible’ was simple reality. I could tell the background about my father some other time. If my theory about this planet held true I might even – well, no point getting ahead of myself.

As the sky grew darker I took Isha’s hand to pull her away from the firelight. I led her beyond the embankment protecting the fire and camp site.

“It’s about time. This, you gotta see.”

On the horizon opposite from Hoof’s last roseate glow, a great waxing crescent had risen, easily twice the apparent size of Terra’s moon, brilliant against the encroaching twilight.

“What a moon!” she gasped. “Incredible!”

“That’s no moon.”

I paused to admire the sensuous arc of argent light.

“This is a binary planet: the barycentre is in free space between the two bodies. Keep watching.”

As our eyes adjusted to the the darkness away from the ring of firelight, the glow of great vibrant cities became visible in the shadowed surface between the horns of the crescent.

Isha tightened her grip on my hand.

“That’s not a Terran colony,” she stated the obvious fact.

The sprawl of lights twinkling on the sister planet looked nothing like cities constructed by Terrans.

“Hey mom!” Gloam called to me from the fireside “If you two are busy ogling the aliens imma finish off the marshmallows!”

“Fuck the marshmallows,” Isha whispered, her voice subdued with awe.

“One more, Gloam, and then close up the bag and get some rest!” I said, and then turned to Isha again. “They have agriculture, a highway system, electricity, A.M. radio. There’s no neutron flux; they seem to be pre-atomic. Bear hasn’t been able to find video on any of their signals so we don’t know what they look like. But they do broadcast music.”

Low music started playing from one of the nearby security nodes, courtesy of the ever contextually solicitous Bear. The audio quality was improved from the last time I heard one of their transmissions – the pay off for the time spent installing the new antenna array today. Not quite amelodic, the sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard on either of the two other worlds I’d been to. Isha’s expression told me that she was as captivated by it as I had been the first, and indeed every, time I heard it. The tonal structures did not evolve the way a lifetime, or many lifetimes, of human music had taught our ears to anticipate. Unguessable instruments, strings and winds of quizzical parameters, flat here, rich with awesome timbres there, mellow percussive notes, each element wielded with virtuoso mastery obeying inhuman sensibilities. But this was no cacophony, there were patterns and an even rhythm that we could pick out, a weaving pulse which informed the slow sultry tempo.

The pale light made the night magical, silvered the ground mist flowing around our feet.

“May I have this dance?” I murmured, already teetering on an irrecoverable brink.

In reply Isha stepped close, pulled me to her. The warmth of her bare skin against mine contrasted deliciously with the cool air of early evening. I rested my cheek on her breast. I could hear her pulse in my ear, feel it pounding in her flat belly pressed against mine.

She slid her hand down until it rested on my hip, her long fingers gentle and firm in their caress. I gasped involuntarily, but mirrored her action. My other hand slipped down from her shoulder.

We swayed together in the mystic planetlight as alien notes flowed into the thickening evening around us. A being beyond any possible scrutiny now sang; it could have been wooing a lover or mourning a broken heart but the unknown vocables insinuating with the riversong of gentle music seduced us into the otherworldliness of the cryptic night.

“Will we be zipping our sleeping bags together tonight?” asked Isha, at last putting words to a heat and magnetism we had never dared to mention.

“Yes, yes we will, yes.”

I said it.

Oh, Celestia, Gaia, whoever is listening I said it, I said it, and the night twisted around us.

Isha sighed and laughed and whispered my name as our dance wound onward.

May Twilight forgive me I beg in Celestia’s name, I pleaded silently, forgive me and don’t let Isha see these tears.

The music drew to a close and another alien song was plying the thin gap of aether between two worlds. We adjusted our step to the new tune. Before this song ended, Gloam had crawled into her sleeping bag shouted a goodnight from the other side of the berm surrounding the firepit and shelter. With my daughter asleep by the fire, Isha and I were the only human consciousnesses for light years in any direction.

Steadily the crescent planet looming so portentously in the night sky sailed towards the zenith. The mist deepened and the night grew cooler, casting the warm glow of physical contact into sharper relief. Song after song serenaded us with unknown rhythms and registers echoing from the majestic orb dominating the heavens as we swept gracefully through the sea of silver mist writhing across the ground. Though we turned slowly in our shared embrace I was dizzy as if we spiraled in a mad careen. We had shifted our bodies, now our breasts were pressed together like interlocking puzzle pieces, Isha’s hands on my hips pulling me tight to her, her thigh firmly against my groin pressing, stirring, awakening. A feeling I had not known, had not permitted myself to succumb to in years, was building within me, a pressure, a hunger, a need deep in the fiery pit somewhere below my heart. My knees were growing weak, my hands trembled upon the fullness they held and my breath fluttered in my lungs as if it were lost. This wasn’t the mindless animal urge which had vainly and blindly driven me to seek satiation in Leon’s arms. If Twilight was unable to return to claim me as her prize after all these years, Isha would be my companion and, broken as I was, I would know love.

But there was no need to hurry. We had all the time in the world: we had a whole world.

A single grain of sand had opened the door to so much more than an empty planet.

Ready at last to lose myself in the fullness of her kiss, I raised my lips in surrender that tasted a little of despair.

Isha was looking at something behind me.

“A shooting star,” she said, “what perfect timing. I wish—”

I loosened my hold on her and turned to look, fingers trailing across her body as I shifted, unwilling to break contact even for a second. She pointed at a glint of light detached from the virgin starfield above us. I sighed with taut anticipation, already half knowing what Isha would wish, already fully knowing that the consummation thereof would certainly come before dawn.

Silently, a second point separated from the moving spark, growing brighter by the second.

“Oh, were you expecting a starship?” she asked as the fine hairs on my arms stood on end.

The descending shuttle was already visibly larger and clearly outshone the mothership in low orbit.

“Bear! We have company!” I yelled “Ohshitohshitohshit…”

Beneath the actinic glare of reentry, the kiss was stolen from us.