As Long as the Earth's Orbit

Chapters

Prolegomena
Formation and Argument
Either/Or
Body
Trough
Wanderlust
Rendezvous at Farpoint
Sonder
Galaxy-Rise
Waning

Prolegomena

Dear Rarity,

I am aware of the irony in this situation. I, out of all of the creatures on Equus, am having trouble sending a letter. I am perhaps the most letter-writingest pony in Equestria’s long history aside from Crabapple Hoofson himself! I almost included Highland’s biography of him on your scroll tablet but decided against it. You already had so many books! But you’d like him. Well, no, you’d actually probably loathe him, but in a fun and relaxing way!

What I’m trying to say is that I miss you already, and when you hopefully will be reading this (if I remember to tell you to read it at the right time!) you will be on the space elevator already. Not even in space yet! But it feels already like you are a million miles away, and I cannot help but be sad, even if by my reckoning of time you will not be leaving until tomorrow.

So I will miss you terribly. But I cannot help but be proud of you. I was shocked when you spoke up in council. I had been scrambling over who to send to Frontier, and there you were. I know you will be able to do far better in your task then I could ever hope to. The ponies of Frontier need to know we have not forgotten them, and they need our guidance now that we’ve spotted the first ghostly suggestions of movement among the stars.

I confess, decades of fiction come crawling out of the shadows of my youth to haunt me. Will these ghosts be merely radar pings, flocks of birds that confuse the radio waves? Or something worse? Or perhaps better! I do not know what I am expecting. I fear for you. But I also know that you are brave, and resourceful, and above all the mare I trust most in all of the universe.

My fervent wish is that you will arrive, and the presence of Our Royal Consort will be enough to assuage their worries and galvanize the population into action.

Luckily, with time dilation, for you it will only be a few weeks of transit either way and a month with the colonists. For myself, of course, It will be a year until I see you again.

I love you. I love you more than I can express. My words—and you know, Rarity, how many I have to talk forever on every subject—fail me only here, when it comes to expressing just how much I love you. We say that a pony completes us not because we were un-formed or empty or needed completing, but because we do not have the words to explain the way in which wholeness can be perfected further into entirely new dimensions.

Please don’t be too much of a bother for poor Colonel Hardtrot, would you? I know you think he is a bit dull, but I promise you he has hidden depths! And he plays a mean game of chess. You should ask him about it sometime.

You should be able to receive longwave between jumps. I’ve notified the ship’s captain to signal by ansible when you are becalmed. We shall not be out of touch at all! Not truly. That is what I say to myself. But I can see you rolling your eyes at me, love, and my silliness. But if to all the world I am Princess of Equestria, to you let me be a silly mare who will miss her wife. Even the stars must be allowed their loneliness from time to time.

Yours,

Twilight

Formation and Argument

My dearest Twilight,

Having read your latest letter, I feel compelled to report to you that the esteemed colonel is a chess fiend and that I am rather cross that you have shackled me with a stallion with nothing to do but badger me over security and defeat me in a game I only like to play with you! But I suppose he is not quite as dull as I remember. I almost feel as if I am learning something here and there. He is a sweet sort, oddly.

Is it odd that I wish I could say I was bored and languishing here pining for our home in Canterlot? I do miss it. I miss you terribly. But as I write to you under the warmth of an alien sun, overlooking the summery hills of Frontier, I cannot help but feel invigorated. What brave new worlds, with such ponies on them! The apples brought all the way from Apple family farms grow well here, and Pegasi are learning to navigate a new sky. The weather completely regulates itself on this planet. Isn’t that fascinating? Of course, the pegasi do shape it for the good of their farms and towns, but still! I toured their training ground the other day with Governor Clockworth. A burly pegasus jawed my ear off, but after a while I found myself fascinated by what he had to say. He says Equestria was once like this world, a “wild” world, you could say. But that calamity and magical mishap and history had worn down many of its edges. It is hard for me to imagine, and I’m sitting in the midst of it!

I long for home. And I long to be with you. But things are going well. I confess that I did not think I would get on well with rough farmers at the edge of Equestrian space, but they are friendly and generous sorts. I respect that. I admire the way they look out for each other. This world is what you said you wanted, a future where ponies lived with each other, and not merely near each other. Communal harmony without and internal harmony within. Oh, it’s not perfect. I know that. But I cannot help but begin to feel that utopia may not be about being perfect.

I’m having ideas! A dangerous profession. They are still ruminating. Perhaps when I return I’ll have them sorted for you. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

We shall be casting off in a few days. The observatory has been finished, and the Colonel and his guards will be staying behind to ensure that Frontier is safe… but I have a feeling it would be safe either way. We’ve not seen hide nor hair of any otherworldly visitors. A pity, really. I should have liked to see them. Honestly! New sorts of creatures, could you even imagine? I’m sure it's all very interesting to the science types and the scholars, but for me, I find myself enamored of the idea of an entire new constellation of culture! Entire genealogies of art and fashion completely separate from all of our own! If there are no aliens out here in the stars I shall simply have to go far enough until I return one myself.

Always and forever yours,

Rarity

Either/Or

Twilight paces back and forth, murmuring fretfully. Her mane, longer now than ever before, is unkempt. Her feathers itch. They are out of sorts. Her regalia, the gorget and the crown at least, were cast hastily and wearily on the divan. Her golden greaves and hoofboots clank on the ancient stone floors.

Rarity sits enraptured in the chase lounge she brought from Ponyville to rest in their sitting room. The hologram projection before her shows the creatures from beyond the stars as they land. The Talmans, so the Equestrian press is calling them.

“I have to see them.”

“You’re seeing them now,” Twilight said. She was not brusque. Just focused.

Rarity nods at her indulgently.

“Yes, I know. I meant in person.”

That brought Twilight up short.

“In person?”

“Yes. In the flesh, so it were.”

“But you'd… you’d, ah.”

“Darling. Come here. Stop pacing.”

“I’m sorry,” Twilight said. She cleared her throat and came to sit beside Rarity.

“It’s quite alright. But you are going to wake the poor attendant outside. And no, don’t go scold him. It’s two in the morning and he’s not supposed to be up. I know what you are going to say. I know you so well. But… Even so.”

“Even though it will be another year?” Twilight says.

And Rarity’s heart feels… not broken, no, but torn. The year was hard, but it was not miserable. They wrote frequently. She heard Twilight’s voice through ansible wave and read her letters. And they had had a few years here in the palace after.

She thinks of the veranda and the view of the hills on Frontier, her meandering thoughts in the hot summer sun. The way a sudden gust pulled at her voluminous hat and how as she paused her letter to catch it, she found herself looking out at the horizon and wishing something would arrive. If the thought of going was a wound, then the thought of what might yet be beyond the horizon had become a wound as well. It was an old wound, a cold wound, a deep wound. A yearning for ever more complexity and discovery, a yearning that until this earliest of mornings she had quietly been content to never have fulfilled.

“I have to,” she says softly.

“Why?”

“Because all my life I have wanted to know, Twilight. You read books. I made things with my magic and my hooves. But we both learned, and we both explored. I have reached the end of where I can explore with my craft. I reached it years ago. But… here? I have lived and breathed art my entire life, and before me is an entire universe of art. A whole new collection of feelings and actions and thoughts and struggles and agonies that we call a culture. And I have to know more. I have to experience it like I chased after every one I came across here.”

Twilight swallows. She nuzzles Rarity.

“I think I understand. I think.”

“I can only try to explain,” Rarity said, and lifted the Princess’s chin for a kiss.

“What is love but trying to understand?” Twilight said with a smile.

Body

Dearest Twilight,

I am happy you’ve had time to look over the texts I sent you. I’ve been pondering your reaction—I am ready to come home more than ever.

What you said in your last letter a week ago is still ringing with me. If we, like these new alien friends, had told our stories not in straight lines but in sort of “clusters” of ideas, how might we have developed? It’s hard to even get your mind around, isn’t it? That you could tell stories not simply out of mere chronological order, but also in some sort of, I don’t know, thematic order? But I don’t think it would have really changed us. And I don’t think we could have done so.

The more time I spend out here, love, the more I think we are the way we are, ponies I mean, because of how we are. I mean our physical forms. Not that we cannot transcend these things! Our technology and the advancement of magic are in a way expanding and possibly transcending those limits here and there. But think about it.

We are ponies. You are an alicorn, and I am a unicorn. We are physical creatures, and we are imbued with magic—and magic is borne out of our living processes. Physical creatures, in linear time, in three dimensions, physically built to walk on four legs and to breathe oxygen, with eyes meant to see in a certain narrow band of colors, with tongues and teeth and stomach meant mostly for vegetation but capable of standing meat if needs or taste must. Herd animals, adapted to close communal social living.

How else could our stories have been but linear or didactic? Herds of ponies used narrative to explain to each other what was dangerous or not, what was delicious or not, etc. We did not need or want complexities until later.

At least, that’s how I feel.

I envy, in certain moments, primitive ponykind. To live in the warmth of the herd, to experience every moment as a kind of mute, stupid joy. I think that what I actually want when I look at a painting is really to feel that feeling. And I cannot! It is very frustrating. Do you know what I mean?

I miss you. I have no duties before we leave. I originally scheduled a few days for leisure before the month long voyage home but now I am dying of boredom and ennui. As soon as I am not stealing moments away from important diplomatic business to decipher new alien works, as soon as I actually have time, I am here, writing you this letter on a beach under a new sun.

Perhaps I should bring a cat with me, if I go out again.

Dearest Rarity,

I am not so sure that we’re bound by physical bodies in exactly the way you describe. For one, ponies have been altering their bodies for a long time. It’s true! Think about it. When we say “altering” we usually think of prosthetics (older than you think!) but whenever we pierce our ears, that is modifying the body. Horseshoes, clothes, hats! Fashion is body modification. You told me once that we could change ourselves in changing our appearance. Do you still think that? I think so! I know you’ve seen a lot and felt a lot and I suppose know a lot by now, but surely you still think that we can become fully ourselves and more with or without the body to match us.

I have a few hundred books in my personal library at this point. I have access to thousands upon thousands more counting what's left in Celestia's old palace, in the university library, and in the endless public libraries I find myself being invited to open or dedicate or do signings at. I asked Spike once to see if he could use some of my old notes to guess how many I've read and how many I still have to read. He gave up after his notes on my notes spilled out of the room.

What I guess I mean to say is that I've seen more books than I know what to do with, and some of them are experimental. Did you read that Fresh Leaves novel I snuck into your travel pack? He's always impressed me with how hard he's worked to take advantage of the fact that what he's writing is "a book". You ask me how our stories could have developed in a way that isn't linear or didactic, and I wonder if we've even explored the limits of those two forms - and here you are, finding new friends who will teach us new ways to speak!

I'm almost jealous. But my jealousy is tempered by loneliness. I miss you too, Rarity. Maybe if you take a cat on your next journey, I can magic us up something to make communicating across the void a bit easier. Or maybe I'll just convince Starlight to take my place for a few years while disguised and work a quick shapeshift on myself.

Or maybe soon, when we're both less busy, you can take me along to speak to all our new friends yourself.

All my love and more.

Dearest Twilight,

You know, it doesn’t feel like nineteen years of traveling back and forth. It feels like it’s only been two or maybe three at best. My subjective chronometer says it will be three years next week, actually. I just checked.

I’m in transit now. I’ll post this at the next stop. I felt oddly inspired.

When I came home, you were radiant. Your new golden armor shone as it caught the sunlight on the promenade. Your eyes seemed so much deeper, so much darker. Your mane is longer now. Sometimes I think I see the night sky overcoming the day—or maybe the other way around?—and maybe that is not some optical illusion. Maybe you’ll have a starry mane like Luna did, one day. I would love to see that. And perhaps I will, now.

You had changed, but you hadn’t really changed.

You were the same. For a moment, I think it terrified me. As the doors opened and the ramp led down I swallowed such terror! What if you had changed! What if you were distant, distracted? What if the bubbly silly bookworm I met so long ago was gone? I am beginning to come to terms with my own extended life span. I knew intellectually what it would mean. But now I must also contend with change, and now I actually understand what it means. No being born to die in five score years understands what change actually means. Trapped in the amber of a single age’s ideology and historicity. But I am going to feel true change if I keep doing this.

Maybe in my fear I am also excited.

You were the sun, and I was a rogue comet captured in your orbit. You towered over me, more than you already did, and I wanted nothing more than to bury myself in your regal fur. Beneath your eyes like nebulae was the same goofy, guileless grin I have loved for two scores (subjective time) of years.

I was quite a shocking sight, wasn’t I? You were so taken with my mane! How can you never change and yet still not be predictable at the strangest times? I had expected my new augmetics to be the interesting bit, but no, it's the mane! Have no fear, I’m sure the coiffed mane will return. I had wanted to try something different. Maybe I’ll keep doing it!

I was thinking about your letter. You are right. I would hide my true thoughts, were I younger and less bold, by saying worrying about cutting my mane had weighed on my mind but in truth… I do believe that, emotionally. About the Body, I mean. That our bodies do not confine us. We are modifying ourselves, in body and mind, all the time. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I begin to think that I’ve ignored the Realness of the body. Does that make sense? Sometimes, in Canterlot, I would see a model wear a new piece and just feel… not repulsed, that’s not the word. It’s too harsh. I would feel repelled. Passively, lightly. Incongruence not out of purpose and will but out of ignorance, I suppose I would call the phenomenon. Some designs felt… I was about to write “unnatural” but the word unnatural is a bit useless, anyway. What is natural? It’s such a charged word, it has more to do with delusions of hierarchy than art or beauty or any of the things in this world I care about—Let me suggest a word instead. When I think of one. Accidental will work for now. The lack of intention, the wasting of such an opportunity! It would offend me quietly. We can move beyond our body, but we cannot escape it yet! We should change and move by bringing it along with us. To be embodied is not a burden but a joy! To change ourselves and our bodies with impunity and boldness is good! But I want to do this, I want us all to do this, out of an abundance of joy. I want it to matter to us, each and every one. To be an opportunity not just for expression but for becoming. I think I am talking myself in circles, Twilight. Maybe I’ll get it right at some point.

We have not spoken about appointing a new diplomat. I think we both know that… that I cannot be still forever. I was starting to grow mad in our perfect palace on a perfect world. As I told you once, a lifetime ago almost in “real” time: I crave drama! Action! Intrigue! To move and move and move forever, to find something new every day and to throw everything I can at a wall and find the things that stick and work them to death. I’m even making clothes again! It’s been a decade. I’m delighted. I feel alive.

I was so worried we would be distant, and yet I felt closer to you than I had in years.

May I suggest a toast, then?

Rarity

Trough

Twilight, whom I love more than the stars,

Forgive me for being maudlin. It’s nine years my time, and one hundred and fifty for you. We’re getting better at these engines, so they tell me. I notice we make less stops, at least.

I haven’t been back home in eight months, and I crave you more than words can express. The brief trip we took together, before duty dragged me out to the edge of civilized space, was bittersweet. Blissful, yes, but short. Too short.

I want to kiss your lips, I long to feel your warmth. I want to stare into those eyes like galaxies again, and tease you about how your hair is becoming a literal twilight in motion. I want to read books in our study on my ratty old chaise lounge I can’t quite seem to get rid of—I want you to fail at cooking for me at least once, even though you know the staff will not be used to your attempts and have a fit. I want to hear you reading to me again. I look out the window into the swirling chaos that we make of space at full speed and I think, Rarity, what you would not give for Twilight to be here now reading to you to be “unbeaten by the rain, unbeaten by the wind, bested by neither cold nor summer heat” while you pour her tea with a bit of honey, the way she likes it on rainy nights.

Oh Rarity, lost Rarity, cursed to move. To move forever and never to stop, to hunger forever for a new sunrise. Joy is exhausting, Twilight. Joy is so exhausting. It wrings out every ounce of love from me, or it tries, every ounce of passion. It hollows me out of fire. Or it tries. And I feel like it succeeds. It has not—I am writing you, aren’t?—but it feels so.

I cannot regret my choice to be your hoof amongst the stars. From world to world, I bring the light of Equestria’s princess and the grace of her blessing. I have forgiven the indolent, encouraged the defeated, humbled the proud. I want so badly to keep doing this. I admit that vanity moves me as much as duty or faith in the cause of expansion. But above all other motivations, even above vanity, which I know must shock you, is curiosity.

Have we talked about how terrible I was with secrets as a foal? Not just at keeping them, because I discovered how perversely delicious gossip was to share early on, but the knowledge that someone else was keeping secrets… It was like a sickness in me. I had to know. I had to know everything. My mind and heart would burn, I would do terrible things, hurt feelings and defy every rule, to find out some tasty and ultimately completely meaningless detail. It took years for me to control. It almost lost me the chance for the Boutique! The mare I rented from originally had set up the shop, and I was just one of her apprentices. The others gossiped and shared designs, but they did not like that our mistress paid me more attention. They kept secrets of their designs and their personal news and everything else. To them, it was a solace, a way of withholding from someone who had everything. But for me it was unbearable. It ate me up.

Even now that I am better, a part of me will never be free of the need to know. I need to see everything with my own eyes, to see it from every angle I can find. The universe is keeping a secret.

But I hate being this way. Sometimes. I do hate it now. Because it has been so long, and you are so, so far away.

Rarity,

I miss you. I miss everything. I wanted this letter to be better but it will not be because today I am a raw, exposed nerve. Coffee doesn’t help. Books won’t help. Work won’t help. I tried convincing Spike to accompany me on an expedition, I set up things while I was away, I even convinced Fluttershy to show up! And she’s been so reluctant to get out of the house these days! Rainbow and Applejack too, age and time be damned.

And I just thought about you. Every night. Every day. In every conversation.

Celestia and Luna are gone.

They left this morning, right after midnight. They kissed my cheek and left, and I felt imbued with something and I’m not sure if that’s just emotions welling up in me or… I don’t know! I don’t know. But they will be back. One day. They said they would return. But now I am truly alone. Please come home.

Wanderlust

Twilight,

The good ponies of Hightower send me home with all of their love. On my ship I carry an outpouring of their love. Foal arts and crafts, paintings, letters, some admittedly distressing flower arrangements. Everything for you.

You are not alone. We are with you, every pony on every world where we tread. And above them all, beyond them all, in a way that only I can be—I too am with you. I am coming home. I will be there before you can miss me even a moment more. I come like a mare out of legend. And when I return you will know for absolute certain how never alone you truly are.

Twilight,

Today I walk on new legs. This is my fifth mission to the Atogha, and I finally gave in to their Master Artificer’s insistence. You did tell me I had your blessing! It was endearing, and a bit heartwarming, when you were so insistent I would not need such a thing! But you also understand. You always do. Perhaps, even after all the things I’ve seen, sometimes I still need a sort of vestigial “permission” to do what I wish. A failing, maybe. A foible, certainly.

I know some thought I took the fashion world of Canterlot by storm, but in truth you were there and you know I did it with a good share of fear and trembling. Methodically, frenetically. I spent sleepless nights away from Ponyville going over every photo, every sketch, every scrap of “intel” as Rainbow Dash so eloquently put it, reading the lay of the land. Canterlot’s upper crust too was a secret to me, then, and my need to know it was all-consuming. It led me to make… some choices which would have been rather bad for me, had I been less lucky. Risks taken that shouldn’t have paid off. But they did!

That feels like an eternity ago. I still do that. I pay attention to the fashions of these new worlds, such as they are. I suppose even if I am not still a tailor and seamstress by trade, I am still a fashionista. I learn a new milieu and insert myself into it, copying it and bringing something of home. The Atogha were impressed by the nano-fiber I had made for the gown, just as you assured me they would be—thank you for that, by and by. Almost half a millenia, for you, and you remain so encouraging. It’s a worthy quality. It’s so endearing I sometimes forget the insane toll of year after year. Isn’t it fascinating how after a while madness seems so normal? Hundreds of years pass! I suppose we talk enough by ansible and write so frequently, and besides that I know you’ve been investing in that holo-whatsit technology the unicorns on Farpoint are so proud of… but I digress. Age!

The way that the gown lit up like a starfield! Truly inspired, if I say so myself. How long has it been since you and I were able to collaborate so directly across time and space? It makes me ache to walk beside you again. The space, the years. Between us a turning as long as the earth’s orbit, and I bear it only by constantly reminding myself that when I return to you I will bring with me so many new experiences and stories.

Rendezvous at Farpoint

Farpoint Station, a new heart for a new polity. Equus is far behind, not forgotten but no longer the center of things. Alliances are forged, would-be enemies pacified, deals are struck here. Ponies and griffons and zebras and dragons meet new civilizations here. One thousand years have ponies and their friends plied the void between shining stars, and forged bonds of friendship inviolate and lasting. Farpoint is where those ties that bind are tied together.

Twilight and her loving consort walk the great processional to the delight of adoring crowds. Lady Rarity, the envoy of a thousand years of peace, and her wife, the gentle guiding hoof of that peace. Thousands of beings cheer for them, call out to them. This celebration is not only of the peace, but of the mare without whom none could imagine it enduring.

Lady Rarity is as old as the Princess? Asks a young thestral. Her father scoops her up to sit on his back, and he nuzzles her.

Time dilation, he explains. She sailed for a very long time from world to world, returning when she could. Back then, our ships could go very fast, but the time would… it would be different. You would spend a week on your ship, and outside a year or more might pass.

That sounds weird, his daughter says, and he laughs. She waves fiercely at the proceeding duo.

It’s very weird. But we got better at managing it, he explains. The lag, the difference between those times, is not so extreme now. But she travels so much that it hardly matters. She’s a very busy pony.

I’m glad she gets to come home, says the filly.

I am too, says her father.

Rarity blows a kiss to the crowd.

Her hooves shine, chrome and golden filigree. Her legs are as much flesh as machine, now, a choice made for aesthetics but also for practicality as age advances. She has outrun the long calendar-count for so long, and she maintains her solid lead, but not even the avatar of the avant-garde can outrun time forever.

Every inch of both Twilight and her own regalia has been chosen with care to mix the ancient custom and the modern sentiment. The fashions and traditions of the member worlds of the Commonwealth are represented. The fields of Harmony and Frontier, the jungles of Ales IV, the mountain holds of Drugia, the gentle hills of Equus. The laurels they wear are from Hrogathar and Jilugar, gifts of the mercantile lords of the eastern rim. The stars of Twilight’s ethereal mane show the stars of the Commonwealth itself.

Rarity has spent weeks on all of it, coordinating across vast distances, barely stopping until she reached Farpoint.

And then, because with age had come wisdom, she handed all of her notes to Raven, the new Raven, and spent every waking moment with Twilight for the next week.

So much about her has changed. Not just physically—machine and flesh in happy marriage, her horn inlaid with filigree and circuitry—but holistically. The Rarity of Equus had strutted defensively, always aware in the back of her mind that every inch of ground she won in the universe was hard won. But the Rarity of the Galaxy had no one left to prove herself to.

At least, so she told herself. Wasn’t it true, she insisted wordlessly, internally, that there were no more inner circles to gain audience with, and no more snooty socialites to impress? Was she not free of them?

But as she waves to the crowds, on this the thousandth year of ponykind’s reaching for the stars, Rarity knows that no pony truly outruns the ways in which life shapes her.

She has grown enough to understand that this need not be a bad thing. Twilight is still Twilight, after all, and she is the first to insist that this is a wonderful thing. Twilight never entirely left her nervous studious past, even as the anxiety was domesticated into kinder and kinder strains of perfectionism. Rarity never quite left behind growing up on the outside looking in at worlds of glamor and success and beauty.

She’d come up with so many reasons, over the years, why she had taken to this life.

She looked to Twilight, who was already watching her with a smile.

I am glad you are home, Twilight says.

Oh, darling, this isn’t home, is it?

I’d say home is wherever we are, Twilight replied evenly, and Rarity could not dispute her.

Sonder

Dear Rarity,

Sometimes I worry that when you come home you will find me a bit droll. You have changed and grown so much, and yet I feel I barely have moved an inch since I first wore this crown.

I miss writing letters to Princess Celestia. I miss the days in Ponyville after Princess Luna came, when we traded chess moves by mail. I miss my library. I miss my little town life. It was so novel for me then, and I was a bit naive. But I wasn’t wrong, not really. Life was beautiful in Ponyville. I’m told it still is—I admit, I’ve quietly made sure it stays that way for all these years. But I have a feeling that somepony growing up there would be happy even if I hadn’t.

Before Luna, when I was alone aside from Spike, I could not have imagined the ways our world would change in only two decades. I had no way of anticipating that Luna’s return would bring with her the ancient storehouses of knowledge. I had no idea that I would play a part in changing the face of magic so completely that I would not only be sitting on Celestia’s proverbial seat, but that I would also be ushering in an age of travel beyond the stars.

I am not sure if I thought of the future at all then, truly. I thought I did! But it only occurred to me as a kind of distant mirage.

I know you’re with one of the colonies now. I admit, I was surprised that you wanted this, but I know you have your reasons. You seemed so happy as we moved your itinerary to allow you two weeks with the colonists before the next tour of the frontier. As I thought that moment over in my mind the past year, I began to suspect that you know exactly the feeling I am tiptoeing around. Am I right? Do you also dream of sunny streets and late breakfast at Sugar Cube?

Twilight

Dearest Twilight,

Do you ever find yourself arrested by the vastness of things?

Perhaps age is giving me pause, but as I walked off the ramp of my ship this morning I felt… Small. As in, I looked out and saw the city sprawl beyond the spaceport and realized I would need far longer than I had available to see it all. I would need weeks. It was only a million souls, and it was already too massive for a single pony, even one as well-traveled and worldly as yours truly.

I hadn’t felt so small, so a part of something whether I wanted to be or not in a decade or more, my time. Not since I started crossing the stars in your name. (My dear, my love, I wish I could nobly insist it was on your behalf in truth but we both know that I am a glutton for adventure as much as glory! But I promise I bear your name well!) As I reflected on the feeling in the quarters provided to me and the rest of the Equestrian mission here, I turned over the feeling and realized that its intensity was at least in part due to novelty. I haven’t felt anything other than grand and all-seeing and world-wise in decades, my time. And suddenly I was just one single pony again, too small to see even a single world in less than weeks.I was not just confined to terrestrial limits but was contextualized by them.

Tonight my robes, silk from the merchants at Horizon Prime, feel a bit more paltry than previously. The filigree in my legs and the magic that courses through my horn feel a bit more mundane and material. Even the allure of a holonovel is colored by this feeling. I want to say I feel less connected, yet more connected, to this world and all the others. More aware that it is, in fact, a world—more aware now than I have been in so long.

Do you ever feel small, in the whirlwind of affairs on our sacred cradle-world? Do you still remember being a single, small pony?

Rarity

Rarity, too long from home.

How can one not feel small?

The universe is, perhaps, infinite. We haven’t quite proven it yet. But it is functionally so even if it is not precisely so. Specks of dust in the eye of creation. Our planet is a droplet of water on a windowpane.

I feel small every day. It used to scare me. I think my studying was always about banishing the feeling of smallness. I had a good run of it! I cast any inkling of my smallness out of my mind absolutely for years and years. Until at some point, when I wasn’t watching vigil, it snuck back in. I was up to my wings in paperwork and you and all our friends were out living life. I got up, stretched, put on a new pot of coffee, and while it brewed I decided to take your advice and open up the windows and step out on the balcony. Enjoy the fresh air.

And overlooking Canterlot I felt it, years and years of it all at once. I couldn’t stop thinking about how despite the wings and the crown and the height and all of it, all of my work and all of my trials, I was still not much bigger in comparison to my birthplace than I had been when I first met you. I was always going to be just one pony, no matter how important, in a city full of them. One pony with her own day and work and hobbies in a teeming, roiling city full of ponies with their own problems and hurts and agendas and work and hobbies and complicated social lives. How on earth did I know what I was doing? Did I know what I was doing? Did anyone? Could anyone, really?

The mood did not last. I finished my work that night. But I had to stop for half an hour and just sit on my balcony with coffee listening, thinking, trying to recover a sense of wholeness. It was like all of a sudden my whole being collapsed under some unfelt weight. If that is what you feel, then I am not sure what to say. Should I offer consolation? Or should I say what comes to mind first, which is that good—because that feeling changed me, a little bit. I return to it whenever I am tempted to grandiosity or foolishness or rashness. Whenever I become absorbed in my own internal feelings and thoughts, I think about that balcony. Maybe you will do the same, now, between worlds.

Twilight

Galaxy-Rise

The sun never set on the Empire of Grover III. From coast to coast of Griffonia, his mighty claw extended over pony and griffon alike. The minotaurs grudgingly paid him homage, the confederations of Zebrica sent him gifts, and even the ponies of Equestria respected his might. But it was not to be, for his empire was short lived. A scant ten years and then it was all ash in the mouths of his sons and daughters, and worse for everyone else they ruled.

And so, no one said again of a Griffon king that he ruled as long or as wide as the sun roamed. They knew better. That time crushes even empires.

This is no empire, and the suns of a thousand worlds can never crush it. The universe sings, and those who listen can sing with it. A thousand thousand worlds singing in the brightness of a galaxy full of jewel-stars. They sing for Rarity as her ship detaches from the proud frigate and drifts amiably down to earth. It hits orbit like a grandmother taking questing steps downstairs. It lounges over the continents like a cat in a sunbeam. And Rarity sits on its bridge, and hums with the universe.

The center of all things, or at least of the galaxy, was a black hole bigger than the equine mind could comprehend. It was so dense that it annihilated. Its nature bent physics into knots. And it was not alone!

But it is no monster. It is beautiful. It is the ravenous, questing heart of a living galaxy. It wants because it lives. It defies understanding, and yet it invites us to witness it, gravity tugging at all of us. Its love is destructive, but is that its own fault?

Twilight waited on the landing pad attached to her palace in High Canterlot, waiting. Above, somewhere crossing the metallic rings where millions made their homes surrounding Equus, her love was coming home. Her glory was blinding, some days. But ponies could bear it. She was alien, and yet somehow always familiar. As Rarity had proven ever-moving, so Twilight had proved never-moved. She had become the beating, questing heart of her own living world. She invited all, loved all, wanted all. She never stopped searching for new things from the comfort of her own soil. New books, new conferences, new inventions, new magic. Forever up and forever in.

And out there, at last, her wife returning, drawn back in by her immeasurable gravity.

The sun was rising. It would set again, when her love came, in the waning hours of the day.

“She’ll be surprised,” Twilight said to the ponies at her sides.

“It has been far too long. We old mares have to stick together,” Celestia, no longer a princess, added with a smile. Luna laughed.

And Rarity sailed home.

Waning

Twilight my love,

I am growing older.

You will surely laugh at me, and I will deserve it. Please, take your time. I know you are laughing! But after ninety years of my subjective time, I can confess at last that I am getting older.

I’ve lost track of the years outside. I have an axiom-chronometer in my room aboard the Celestia IV. There’s many throughout the ship! It’s not… I don’t want to look at them too closely. I could know to the second what time it is for you, but I do not look.

I lost track at two thousand? Was that it? I’ve lost track of when I’ve lost track.

We’ve asked so many times, you and I, why I did this. And to be honest with you, I think all of the answers were correct, but incomplete. I got the closest when I realized I just wanted the romance of sailing the stars. It’s not complete as an explanation either, but its the most honest answer.

Of all our friends, my love, we are the last. The two of us, eternal and immortal. Well, maybe not the second one.

I’d like to come home.

Twilight

My Rarity,

Come home.

Come home as fast as you can, dock your ship to the one I am sending to your current assignment. Brief your replacement, already picked, and let the Luna’s Charger bring you home faster than you have ever gone. It is my fastest ship. For a hundred years I perfected its design. Its service to ponykind has always been a secondary bonus to the purpose it will finally serve: bringing you home.

Come home to me. Come back to Equus. It has been so long. Ten thousand years, Rarity. A hundred for you. I know you’ve lost track. You’ve told me so many times before. I too grow old, but not as you do.

Did you know that if you cannot be unchanging? All things move. Nothing is constant. I am changed, even though you’ve said so many times I have not. I am so excited to show you how. To learn again to be together forever, all of that, I’m just so excited for it. Please. Come home.

Seeing you soon,

Twilight