Reward Prefers Risk

Chapters

Hlight Foresetten Plight (Reward Prefers Risk)
Thouth Rijan, Sollastbreken (Your Friend, Sunburst)
Ight unt Ight Glouma (Me and My Shadow)
Inne Alt Naertrin (In Another Age)
Ar Jivel Thral se Stygian (A Wicked Slave to the Deepest Darkness)
Swysti Laef (Turning Page)
Trotten Inne Sollastlaet (Stepping Into Sunlight)
Saek-Orlae Firen (An Ill-Fated Desire)
... (Lost in Translation)
Del Weorld Ama Prijen Ouser Luvji (The World Will Liberate Our Love)

Hlight Foresetten Plight (Reward Prefers Risk)

The obsidian blade on display at the antique shop was inscribed with a familiar Old Ponish phrase: hlight foresetten plight.

Sunburst swept the artifact from its stand with such ferocious excitement he nearly severed the rope of a hanging lantern with the edge of that beautiful dagger. If not for seizing his magical grip at the last moment, his favorite Ponyville antique shop would have gone up in flames.

The shop patron nearest to him – an elderly mare reaching for a delicate teapot – returned her tremulous hoof to the floor and backed into the next aisle. If Sunburst caught her retreat, he showed no indication. He levitated the blade mere inches from his snout, fogging its polished reflective surface with each astonished breath.

It was perhaps the most entrancing vestige of the past he ever had the pleasure of gazing upon. The blade was jagged, three distinct angles bent in its body. Along its center, the Old Ponish declaration that loosely translated to, “Reward Prefers Risk!” was set in embellished blackletter typical of the era. Not a line of the engraving was out of place. Unlike the automation lent to modern Equestrian artisans, ancient smiths conducted this process by horn or hoof. This item resonated with love in its crafting. A swell lifted in Sunburst’s chest.

“Wonderful find. This was delivered only a few days ago, shipped in from a dig site near Hollow Shades,” the shopkeeper informed Sunburst as she unrolled a reel of parchment paper to wrap the blade in. “You sure are lucky nopony else snatched it up.”

“I feel lucky,” Sunburst exclaimed, the giddy jig of his hooves causing the rickety floorboards to creak. He deposited a pouch of bits to the shopkeeper, delighted to deplete them in this single purchase. Beaming, he leaned upon the counter. “I’ve got a few friends in mind who will certainly be thrilled to see thi—”

“That belongs to me!”

A sudden, sonorous bark erupted through the shop, shaking dust from the shelves. Sunburst’s ears flattened, and as he turned, a dark figure was upon him, horn aglow.

It had been more than a year since he saw Stygian. His last, and first, encounter with the petite rangy stallion had been the landmark night of his salvation. At the time, Sunburst couldn’t believe he was a primary witness to an event of modern Equestrian history, much less that he discovered the journal that incited it. The return of the Pillars of Equestria and their secondary defeat of the Pony of Shadows would be a tale read by school foals centuries into the future and Sunburst’s name would be written on those pages.

As the sun set on that momentous occasion, Sunburst had joined the host of legends in Celestia’s court. Stygian was quiet, then. Quiet as he had been the duration of that night, pulled like a silent sliver of soul from the chest of the tenebrous Pony of Shadows. As the Pillars shrouded him in a collective embrace, Stygian smiled in a faint, genteel way that suggested to Sunburst he was content with the promise of their renewed friendship.

Here in the humble antique shop, Stygian appeared on the verge of frenzy. The light from his horn extinguished, revealing his stricken face. His blunt-cut fringe hung in piecey strands over his wide eyes, flashing white as they darted upward, fixated on the counter, hoof outstretched.

“That dagger,” he gasped, as though having run for tireless miles, “belongs to me.”

His chest heaved, rattling the full saddlebags hugging his lithe barrel. They protruded with simple domestic items — a wooden spoon, the cracked rim of a ceramic vessel, a cluster of half-melted candles. All things Sunburst wouldn’t have bat an eye at in his quest for ancient novelty.

“Stygian! It’s good to see you again,” Sunburst said, because despite the strange circumstances, it was true. “I didn't know you were a fellow antiquer.”

Stygian caught his eye in fleeting recognition, before the shopkeeper’s voice interjected to say, “I am sorry, sir. This item is already spoken for.” She tied off her tidy wrapping with a twine bow, offering the dagger to Sunburst with a pointed stare.

“Please. I…” Stygian’s gaze darted between them both, failing to choose who to address. “You don’t understand. That dagger is my property. It cannot be bought; it is not for sale!”

“Oh.” Sunburst frowned, pressing his glasses up. “Sorry. My mistake I suppose. With it being out on the shelf, I was under the impression it was still up for grabs.”

“It never should have been up for grabs.” Stygian's desperate attention focused on the shopkeeper, still out of breath as he delved into an explanation. “My magic is keyed to it. I felt its transport here, to this shop. So whatever proof of magical signature you need, I will give it. I have already bore witness to far less significant belongings of mine being cataloged and shipped to museums and secondhoof marketplaces across Equestria and have been denied their rightful ownership. I entreat you, please, if there is kindness in your heart, I am asking you with all that I am to return this dagger to me.”

The shopkeeper was dumbfounded. Her hoof fumbled to slide the wrapped blade once more in Sunburst's direction. “Sir, the transaction has been made. It is out of my hooves.”

Stygian’s eyes wrenched to Sunburst, lips parted to offer another plea. However, the proffered dagger was already being steadily ensconced in the golden aura of Sunburst's magic. He lifted it to Stygian, who tentatively took it in his own magical grasp.

“I'd be lying if I wasn't a little sad to part with such a beautiful artifact, but it sounds like it was never mine to own.” Sunburst offered a gentle smile. “Paid for in full, but not bought. By which I mean — no need to repay me. If I was hurting for bits, this hobby of mine would not be sustainable!”

Stygian stared at the parcel, as though seeing through the parchment into the heart of the penumbral blade within. Perhaps he was in disbelief that kindness could be given out as freely as this hard-sought item had been given to him. His eyes, wide and mournful, lifted to Sunburst. There was a cut of dark gray beneath them.

“Thank you, Sunburst,” he said, leaving Sunburst momentarily uplifted to know he recalled his name. “I am moved by your kindness. You have given me something of immense value, and that should not go without compensation. I don't know if I have enough in bits to match the cost you paid. I can offer you what I’ve collected in my previous shopping.” He gestured to his full saddlebags. “Though I do not know if any of these items will be of the same value to you, seeing as they are mere necessities.”

Sunburst shook his head. “Oh, no need.” He beckoned Stygian to trot with him to the shop door so the next patron could check out. “I’m sort of at a loss for what I could ask you for. If anything, it’s been good to see you, Stygian. You showing up here today brought to mind that I haven’t seen you since…”

“The night of the Shadow’s undoing,” Stygian said with sharp gravity. “You played a role in my absolution. I have not forgotten that.”

“Er — indeed.” Sunburst rubbed his foreleg, ruffling the spot where his pale sock met the rest of his gamboge coat. “Here’s an idea: how about we get together and catch up sometime?” His eyes drifted in thought. “I live here in Ponyville now. I’m actually the vice principal at the School of Friendship, believe it or not! Oh — have you ever visited?”

Sometime during the course of Sunburst's ramble, Stygian had produced a parchment and quill, jotting a quick note. He rolled it primly, levitating it to Sunburst. “My address,” he stated. “I invite you to join me at my residence so I can prepare you a meal. It’s the least I can do. Come by as you will. My days, most often, are empty.”

“Oh!” Sunburst once again sputtered. “Will do! Thank you, Stygian.”

“It is I who will continue to thank you.” Stygian turned his gaze up at Sunburst. His expression wavered as a sigh wracked his small frame, affected as though by some deep malaise. “You have a good heart.”

Departing the shop, he turned the wrapped blade in his magical grasp in a slow rotation, reuniting with the inclination of its weight. An abrupt lassitude overtook his posture once he believed he was out of sight, his head dropping below his withers. But Sunburst saw this change in him as he went.

He unrolled the scroll. Stygian’s residence was just outside Ponyville, near the edge of town based on the street name.

At least, that’s how it translated. The address was current, but written in Old Ponish.

108 Vut Vieg — establa tryn senen ulf Uld Ekwostria

(108 Woodland Way — the house that looks like it’s from Old Equestria)

Stygian remembered Sunburst was fluent.

Thouth Rijan, Sollastbreken (Your Friend, Sunburst)

“You’ll never guess who I ran into while antiquing yesterday.”

Across the patio table of their favorite Ponyville cafe, Starlight’s ears pricked, her mouth filled by a bite of sandwich. She smiled presumptuously and swallowed. “Was it Star Swirl? I bet it was Star Swirl. You’ve got that classic ‘Awestruck Sunburst’ look.”

“You’re not far off, but no.” He raised his snout and sipped his lemonade, coyly letting the anticipation build, before placing both hooves on the table to lean in. “It was Stygian.”

“No kidding.” Starlight lowered her sandwich to her plate. “That’s funny. I actually read his most recent book not too long ago: Me and My Shadow.” Something in her expression quivered, like she was holding back a grimace.

Sunburst raised an eyebrow at her. “Now you’ve got that ‘Starlight-Trying-Not-to-Offend-Somepony' look.”

“Well…” She drew out the word. “His book was… it wasn’t what I was expecting, having actually met him.”

“Really? How so?”

“It was… melodramatic. And somehow boring at the same time. Almost like a work of pulp fiction, though I thought it would be more of an autobiography. And believe me, I’m sure there are ponies out there who would eat it up. Trixie sure got a kick out of it.” Starlight affectionately rolled her eyes. “But, if I’m being honest, I felt let down. When I first learned about him, Stygian was somepony I resonated with. And despite having published no less than three books, I feel like I learned nothing about him! Nothing of substance, at least.”

Starlight crossed her hooves, ripping a bite from her sandwich and scattering an errant dandelion petal from between the slices of bread. It fell on the collar of her headmare uniform and Sunburst’s eyes absently fixated on it. His mind kicked into a whirlwind, attempting to match the harried stallion he saw at the antique shop with whatever histrionic depiction lurked in his books.

Drawing a conclusion, he perked up. “Well, he’s invited me to his place for a meal. Maybe I can ask him about his books while I’m there.”

Starlight blinked. “He invited you over? What brought that on?”

Granules of sugar spun at the bottom of Sunburst’s lemonade. He added two cubes from the dish on the table, never satisfied by the sweetness of the standard recipe. “I found something that belonged to him at the shop and returned it. An old dagger from around a thousand years ago, smithed in a pristine obsidian-colored metal with flawless engraving.”

“My, aren’t we wistful?” Starlight giggled, noting the dreamy undercurrent of his words. She folded her hooves beneath her chin. “It was a really cool dagger wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Sunburst sighed with a faraway grin.

“Well, that was seriously nice of both of you.” Starlight reached to cuff Sunburst’s shoulder. “But he’d better not replace me for our weekly lunch dates!”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Sunburst exclaimed. Then, he chuckled. “As though Trixie isn’t already doing her best to replace me on your side of things.”

Starlight scoffed indulgently. “Oh come on, Sunburst. You know how it is with marefriends. And Trixie. You know how it is with Trixie.”

She laughed in wry recognition, but Sunburst knew the resounding tenderness her sardonic remark belied. An easy smile rose to his face, captivated by the gleam in her violet eyes as she thought of her beloved. It was a gift to see Starlight smile.

When Sunburst learned of the sordid village Starlight built in the decades of separation between their shared foalhood and the present, a chasm of guilt burrowed through the center of his heart. He had paced through hours of mental wounding, finding it easy to blame himself for the vindictive ideology she constructed. All that time he spent toiling in his studies, only to flunk out while his dearest friend suffered. If he stayed, things would have been different. A part of him was convinced. If only Starlight had the steadiness of his companionship, he could have stood between her and her anger.

If he stayed, neither he nor she would have been the other’s answer.

As a colt, his mother used to say, “Starlight is going to make such a darling daughter-in-law one day.” Stellar Flare had a plan for everything, and at a point in Sunburst’s history, that included a series of scrolls on the occasion of her son’s wedding to his childhood friend. This of course was before his application to Celestia’s school was returned with a royal seal of approval. And long before Stellar Flare came to understand that a daughter-in-law would never be a part of how she designed her son's future. Despite their occasional friction, Sunburst could never fully express his gratitude at his mother’s acceptance. Her only vexation came from the countless scrolls she would now have to amend from future wife to future husband — whoever that nebulous stallion could be. Sunburst never saw that far ahead.

But that’s what made friendship with Starlight so easy. Their future followed no set path. While other pairs of colts and fillies were compelled to practice rote adolescent love confessions at the Sire’s Hollow town square fountain, Sunburst and Starlight could battle through round after round of Dragon Pit, the tension of romance never pressing its way between them. But like Stellar, ponies made comments. They remarked on how adorable the both of them were together, and with each instance, Sunburst and Starlight went through the same tired motions of reconfirming to one another that their bond wasn’t destined for love in the amorous sense.

They used to share a bed at sleepovers. At some point, they stopped. Lest an unbidden proof reveal itself like a contagion only proximity could summon.

A few months ago, when Starlight introduced Trixie as her partner, Sunburst was elated. But he was also relieved. All that dodging of misunderstood expectations was tangibly over. Each of Starlight’s friends received her and Trixie with such uncomplicated warmth that Sunburst carried some of it home with him.

The present was a kind place to live. As much as he loved the beauty that existed in Equestrian history, he wasn’t ignorant to its ugliness. Centuries ago, there were roles mares and stallions weren’t socially permitted to deviate from. Chief among them involved partnering solely to ensure childbirth, an ancient idea enforced during the brutal eras of society that did not guarantee a foal’s longevity. The Old Ponish word stalluvji — a term denoting a stallion who was a lover of stallions — was, in most historical texts, derogatory. It was synonymous with weakness, and (more cruelly) selfishness in spite of one’s duty to procreate.

But love endured. Strong and selfless. One of Sunburst’s prized gems from his antiquing endeavors was a humble fragment of scroll, framed and hanging in his vice principal office. It was fragile, and evidently ripped from a larger body of writing, yet the words written upon it were loud.

Inne alt naertrin, del weorld ama prijen ouser luvji.

(In another age, the world will be kind to our love.)

Sunburst had no certain way of knowing if this was a declaration made by a stallion who loved stallions, or a mare who loved mares. There was also the arguable possibility that it was written by a woefully repressed pony about the tribulations against their paramour of the opposite sex.

However, it revealed something in the translation. The Old Ponish word ‘prijen’ did not evoke mere goodwill. It was more accurately translated to the kindness of emancipation, that of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberation.’

In another age, the world will liberate our love. Sunburst knew viscerally the hooves that wrote that line.

If Stellar Flare ever hoped for Sunburst to envision a future plan involving marriage, he had only one. If Starlight and Trixie wedded, he’d like to give them a copy of that framed scroll as a gift.

All this tumbled through Sunburst’s mind, long after Starlight had ceased her blithe grinning. An abrupt bop on his nose jolted him back to the moment, back to the restaurant patio, back to the easy present.

“Still with me?” Starlight laughed.

“Where else would I be?” Sunburst cracked a smile, sipping his lemonade and shaking his mane. “Say, would you mind lending me your copies of Stygian’s books? I’ll see if I can get them all read before my visit. Just so I have something to talk with him about.”

“I only have the last one, Me and My Shadow. I’m sure you could find a library that carries the first two, but they’re not all that riveting. One is more of a practical guide to Stygian’s method for combat strategy, and the other was an account of the monsters the Pillars fought. Only the most recent one is personal. If you can call it that.”

“I see,” Sunburst murmured. “I’ll take your recommendation, then.”

Starlight slid her hoof across the table, resting it over Sunburst’s. “If he’s open to it, I’d like to see him again, too.” She smiled, and it was full of meaning. “Let him know that he has friends in Ponyville.”

—

…With a hoof upon my heart, I spoke with fierce conviction. “Foul monster. How dare you seek to corrupt my heroic spirit? Do you not know who I am? A student of Star Swirl the Bearded will not fall prey to your banal temptations!” Yet the loathsome beast was in possession of a silver tongue. The Shadow spoke to me with a voice like no other. I was drawn into its embrace like that of a lover. Yet, lo! Deception was soon to follow!...

…It erupted from the Well of Shade with a mighty roar. The terrible black cloud of its body crashed over me and I swooned, overtaken by its wickedness. Oh, Star Swirl. Forgive me! For I have fallen to a wretched evil and fear my true self has been lost, scattered in jagged pieces to the Darkness…

…I was pulled from the black heart of the Shadow and plummeted to the cold stone floor, falling as though for an eternity. Perhaps that was indeed true. I had been falling forever, further into darkness throughout my time in Limbo. But now, I was finally reached by the light!...

…“Oh Star Swirl, my dearest friend and teacher, how could I have forsaken you so? My envy and pride made me seek such cruel relief from my woes. I never should have gone astray.”...

…Star Swirl’s beatific voice washed over me. “I absolve you, Stygian. You have been foolish, but you are not beneath redemption. A villain no longer, I see you have apologized and atoned for your wrongdoings.”

Sunburst snapped the book closed, running a hoof down his face and knocking his glasses from his snout. They clattered to the desk as he groaned.

“Melodramatic was an understatement, Starlight,” he groused.

Sunburst reclaimed his glasses and turned the book to its front cover. Stygian and the Pony of Shadows were pressed back-to-back in dramatic parallel. It was rendered in a clean graphic style typical of modern books, but was a gross mismatch with the bloated prose within.

Having read vastly more than the average pony, Sunburst was all too familiar with the style Me and My Shadow was attempting to evoke. A significant number of modern Equestrian authors automatically assumed if a tale was old, its writing ought to be overblown. It was a weak attempt to summon the idea of antiquity, a place in time where everypony, no matter their station, was eloquent, formal, and stodgy to the point of farce. And tales of villainy? They suffered the greatest from this perversion of language.

Too often, this came from the misbelief that Old Ponish was a florid tongue, so its translation must be as well. In reality, it was beautiful in its brevity. Many Old Ponish words were exact conjunctions. Ponies of that era spoke and wrote in short sentences. There was a rawness, an honesty to the language that often made it difficult to translate to New Ponish, which was rife with synonyms and slang. Any formality in the speech of Stygian and the Pillars came from seeking an exactness in their New Ponish phrasing, unfamiliar as they were with colloquialisms. Sunburst gave them due credit for their ability to speak it with such ease.

“Maybe Stygian is just a poor self-translator?” Sunburst murmured aloud, circling a brief trot around his study. “Or, he read a lot of modern historical fiction for inspiration and tried to emulate the style?”

Sunburst could work himself into a rut if left to his thoughts. He hopped back upon his desk stool and unrolled a sheet of parchment, penning a brief letter.

Stygian,

Ight skrippen tul thakka eptur vyr thouth ollen tul thouth establa. Ight ama fro junkt thouth grazen eftardag, tieth gestrin ebbenung.

Storlaet gibten ight thouth nawi bouk. Dunen ight highken. Ight ama likhen naven maror ymb.

(Stygian,

I am writing to thank you once again for your invitation to your home. I would be happy to join you to eat tomorrow, an hour before sunset.

Starlight lent me your new book. It made me think. I would like to know more about it.)

The tip of Sunburst’s quill hovered below that last line, debating his signature (not merely because his name translated humorously to ‘Sunbreak’ in Old Ponish). He thought about the last words Starlight said to him at the cafe and their gentle power.

He signed the letter.

Thouth rijan,
Sollastbreken

(Your friend,
Sunburst)

Ight unt Ight Glouma (Me and My Shadow)

Stygian’s home was an anachronistic paradox. Tucked on the border of Ponyville and the Everfree Forest, it had been designed to resemble a common thatched house of Old Equestria. However, the materials used to construct it were notably fresh. The mortar between the masonry was bright white, unblemished by lime and oyster shells as a truly ancient structure would have been. It brought to mind a foal wearing the clothes of his grandfather.

Sunburst gave a quick rap on the door, before stepping back to adjust himself. He took care to brush his mane and oil the tassel of his beard that morning; his cloak was laundered the night before. Stygian ought to be shown the best version of him, not the one streaked with sweat and dust below Hollow Shades as he watched history be made, or the one who rolled out of bed to go antiquing on his day off, mane in its typical snarl.

Stygian didn’t come to the door right away. A muffled call rang out from within, “A moment, please!” This was followed by the clatter of dishware and a brusque trot of hooves.

Then, the door parted, and Stygian was staring up at Sunburst. A smudge of flour crossed the bridge of his long, pointed snout.

“Good evening,” he said, offering a shallow bow — an old manner of greeting. “You’ll have to forgive me. Dinner is still being prepared.”

“I don’t mind!” Sunburst followed Stygian inside. “Do you need a hoof?”

“No, do not trouble yourself. I just haven’t prepared a meal for anypony but myself in…” Stygian’s hooves dragged and he shook his withers. “I misjudged the time it would take.”

Particles spun in a warm shaft of sunlight from the west window. Flour, most likely, as Stygian rose on his hind legs to thump a broad ball of dough onto the white-dusted countertop. Something rich and herbed suffused the air and Sunburst followed his nose to the sight of a simmering cauldron over a cherry-red hearth. The stew within was a lovely shade of deep orange.

“The bread will bake in under an hour and the stew is thickening,” Stygian said, his voice catching with a grunt as he began to knead. “Please, have a drink while you wait.”

A frosted bottle of pale cordial was prepared at the table. Sunburst poured himself a cup and blinked rapidly as he sipped, surprised by the complex flavor. “This is delicious! What’s in it?”

“Pressed elderflower, lemon, rosemary, and honey. We drank it hot in the winter months to fend off congestion.” Stygian’s gaze flicked over his shoulder with a faint smile. “And cold in the summer as a treat.”

Sunburst was struck. Such a mundane bit of knowledge, yet it unveiled a rich narrative. Nothing like this had appeared in Stygian’s book.

His eyes traced a cursory path around the kitchen. It was sparse, bereft of decor or creature comforts. Sunburst took note of a wooden spoon hanging from the rack supporting the pot of stew. It was familiar to the one he caught sight of in Stygian’s saddlebag, newly bought at whatever other antique store he had sprinted from.

The obsidian dagger itself was on display above the fireplace. Its jagged blade pointed downward, held aloft above Stygian’s bent neck.

“I fear, however, that this bread will be a poor replication of what I once enjoyed.” Stygian began to speak again. “The wheat of this new world is pale and lacks fiber. And I cannot afford quality stone-milled grain. Funny how what was once a common staple is now elevated to such a status.”

“Indeed!” Sunburst raised his hoof. “The practice of bleaching flour came into effect about a hundred years ago as standards of culinary safety increased. Old Equestrian wheat and barley were far more fibrous, yet took greater effort to harvest and mill, and still do. Er — but you already know that of course.”

Stygian chuckled, his eyes remaining on his kneading. That may have been the first time Sunburst heard him laugh. It was raspy, like an untuned instrument.

“Come to think of it, my hometown has a bakery that specializes in ancient grain products.” Sunburst stroked his beard in thought. “I… sadly can’t attest to the quality, but maybe you’d like them.”

“I will consider it,” Stygian replied without turning.

There was a harsh focus in the way Stygian worked. His brow was creased as his hooves pressed and rolled the dough, the sinuous muscle of his forelegs contracting under his flat gray coat. At his temples, his mane was darkened with sweat. A bead of moisture rolled from his forehead but dissipated once it reached his cheek, Stygian’s horn letting off a brief flash. Sunburst realized in faint amazement that he magicked the sweat away before it could risk dropping into the dough.

It was warm inside, a combined heat from the low beams of the late summer sun and the toasty hearth. Sunburst was tempted to shake off his heavy, star-studded robe. Despite the labor of baking, Stygian still wore his dusty brown cloak. It looked to be made of burlap, or similarly scratchy fabric that caught on the coat. Ponies of his era rarely denuded themselves fully unless they were in close company. But perhaps his reason went deeper. This article of clothing escaped Limbo along with him, untouched by time.

“I appreciated the letter.” Stygian’s voice guided Sunburst’s attention. “Your Old Ponish is nearly flawless.”

“Oh. Why, thank you.” Sunburst’s posture rose. “If only I was half as good at spellcasting as I am at translating old documents. My Old Ponish fluency is one of my proudest skills. It took what felt like eons of research to perfect. I appreciated the way you wrote your address, too. I don’t remember the last time I could exchange writing with somepony who knows the language. Much less somepony authentically raised on it!”

Stygian offered a faint smile and dropped his forehooves to the floor. They wobbled as he trotted across the kitchen, no doubt sore from the kneading. His intently crafted loaf, shaped and scored, entered the clay oven set in the wall.

“In your letter, you mentioned my books,” Stygian remarked as he struck a match.

Sunburst swallowed a gulp of cordial. “I did. Starlight — you remember my friend Starlight, right?”

“I remember Starlight. She stepped into the Shadow and spoke to me. She’s very brave.”

“She is.” Sunburst set aside his glass. “Anyway, she loaned me your book. Me and My Shadow. I found it to be, well…” He sucked his teeth. “The storytelling, the prose, it… it wasn’t what I expected, if I’m being honest. It didn’t sound like you.”

A slow scent of rising dough accompanied the herbal redolence of the stew. Stygian didn’t react to Sunburst’s potentially inflammatory statement, moving to brush off the counter with a rag.

“That’s because it didn’t come from me,” he said.

“Huh?”

Sunburst had difficulty keeping still, and keeping quiet, as Stygian finished his cleaning and came to join him at the table. “I sold the story to another author. A ghostwriter, she was called, who allowed the work to still bear my name. It’s provided me with a humble, yet habitable, income.”

Slowly, Sunburst’s jaw fell open. “Stygian! You are a legendary figure of Equestrian history!” He fixed his glasses, shaken loose from his exclamation. “There are ponies who would pay you so much more than a ‘humble, habitable income’ to know the true story of the stallion who was once the Pony of Shadows.”

Stygian’s chin was low as he poured himself a drink, his eyes partly curtained by his fringe. “The true story is what they got.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you.”

Stygian flinched, but Sunburst continued, “And if that’s what you intended, why not write the book yourself?”

“In essence, I did." Stygian's pitch rose, as though seeking supplication. "I wrote a detailed outline of my history and sent it to the author. She was given the rights to embellish the story as she saw fit and match the standards of today’s literature.” A strain crept into his voice that the honey in the cordial couldn’t remedy. “Which is something I am not capable of. While I may be able to engage in spoken conversation with ease, my written New Ponish leaves much to be desired. The outline itself I wrote in Old Ponish. It’s what I know. The author informed me she hired a translator.”

He took a slow sip and then a slow breath. “Besides, I was a strategist. My writing is practical. If it is of any comfort to you, my first two publications were largely my own words. The ghostwriter just aided in filling the gaps.”

Sunburst’s thoughts spun. While he was lost in their tempest, Stygian took the opportunity to slip from the table and give the stew pot a stir. The conversation hung unfinished as the bread baked to a golden brown and the stew was served in a pair of old ceramic bowls.

Like the cordial, the stew was ambrosial. It was a sweet potato base with complex, yet precise seasoning, not too light or heavy. Sunburst's first gulps were so greedy he narrowly avoided dribbling it onto his coiffed beard. With a plaintive twinge to his voice, he said, “Your cooking is incredible.”

“Thank you." Stygian delicately sipped from a spoon. “I've worked hard to find ways of joining simple elements to form a greater whole.”

“You… you make delicious stew,” Sunburst murmured. His hooves thumped on the table. “This drink is so flavorful and has its own history. You bake your own bread at home! You collect antiques. There is so much more to you than that overly dramatic book about just another Equestrian villain!”

Stygian’s head jerked to attention. Beneath his low brows, his vivid azure eyes were piercing.

“Indeed, you are right. I am not just another Equestrian villain. But that is the path I chose a millennium ago. That is how I am known. Do you believe I’d offer any value to the ponies of this modern land to characterize myself as a paltry domestic who prepares meals and tracks down lost remnants from a home that no longer exists?” He paused. “Or that they would regard a stallion of that description favorably?”

“Is allowing yourself to be stereotyped any better?” Sunburst’s hoof curled against his chest. “I’m just trying to understand. If not for wealth, then what? Being a famous author no matter the personal cost?”

“I don’t care for renown! My dreams of heroism have long passed,” Stygian insisted. “And no, I have no need for extravagant wealth. I merely want…” A shuddering sigh wracked him. “I merely want to exist. That bedamned book has allowed me to do so.”

His head fell. A bead of moisture rolled under his chin and, this time, was not intervened upon as it dropped into the bowl. Stygian pushed it away.

Sunburst reached across the table, but hesitated, halted by the knowledge that the cultural mores of physical contact were different now than the time of Old Equestria. And regardless, Stygian was too far from him to make easy contact with his shoulder.

Instead, he said, “You have friends in Ponyville, Stygian. Why have you been out here, all alone?”

Stygian was taken aback. “I… it’s what I’m familiar with.”

“Not always though, right? What about the Pillars?”

“My time with them feels like another life. In many ways, it was.” He turned to the window, the sharp outline of his profile illuminated by gold. The wash of evening drew out a freshness in his weary features, time releasing its uncertain hold on him for the briefest moment. “And I must admit, inviting you here… I was not certain you would agree.”

Sunburst’s ears drooped, his brow creased in sympathy. “I did, though, didn’t I?”

“You did.” Stygian pulled his attention back as though with a painful effort. “And I can’t express my gratitude enough. At the time, it felt like a great risk.”

“Well, it often takes a risk to be rewarded. Hlight foresetten plight.” Sunburst rested his chin on his hoof. “Something tells me you’re familiar with that phrase.”

“Yes. Reward prefers risk.” Behind his eyes, Stygian went elsewhere. At the far wall, hung the dagger, poised above Stygian’s head where he sat. The silence dragged a beat too long to be comfortable.

He sniffed, reawakening. “Though, the way you describe the meaning of that invocation is not all that it suggests. It is less about the reward one attains at the end of a tribulation. The risk itself is the reward. The idea is that against any peril, you exhibit your fearlessness, your unwillingness to be compromised by cowardice. And you are rewarded through demonstrating your strength. That’s how my father spoke of it.”

“I’ve… always said it loses something in the translation,” Sunburst murmured in agreement as his mind wandered.

Stygian’s father was the first mention of a family member he offered. Any allusions to his past in Me and My Shadow were vague. Sunburst learned little more than the general culture of the town Stygian grew up in, but there was no information on his family. The book began in the period of his young adulthood, traveling the land. That starting point suggested to Sunburst he left home far behind.

Daring in his desire for knowledge, Sunburst took a risk of his own and said, “That reminds me — you mentioned that dagger from the antique shop was important to you.” His eyes settled on its dark shape across the room.

“As are all of my possessions. At least, those that I have been able to retrieve. They bring me peace in this unfamiliar time, as though I’m not so out of place here as I believe.”

“But the dagger — you ran across Equestria trying to find it! Even I wouldn’t do that for just any old thing.” Sunburst’s heart began to thump with the same excitement he first felt upon beholding the unique relic. “Did you personally wield it in your travels with the Pillars?” He gasped. “Did you ever slay a monster with it?”

Stygian’s eyes went wide. His chair scraped across the floor as he abruptly pushed it out from under him. He levitated his near-full bowl of stew to the fireplace and upended it. “Your curiosity is admirable, Sunburst. Befitting a scholar.” From the hiss in his voice, Stygian was speaking through a clenched jaw. “You read my book. You know no such events took place.”

Sunburst did nothing to restrain the grunt of frustration that left him. “That’s the point I’ve been trying to get across! I could have read Star Swirl’s journal and your book back to back and I would have ended up with the same information between them. But you’re here; I’m speaking to you. I don’t have to wonder about the past because you’ve brought it to the present. And I have a convincing hunch you have a lot to offer.”

He abandoned the sumptuous meal to pace across the kitchen floor. Stygian startled and whirled to face him. Though impassioned, Sunburst wasn’t angry. He stopped at a conversational distance, wearing an expression of sincerity.

He brought himself into the slightest crouch, eye level with Stygian now. “I don’t want to know the tale of the Pony of Shadows. I want to know the tale of Stygian.”

Stygian had taken a step back, his short tail bobbing perilously over the fire. His face was haggard and defeated. “That… is not a happy tale.”

Sunburst’s voice was firm, but kind. “It doesn’t have to be. I’ve read plenty of unhappy tales and do you know what they tell me? Even in the most painful of circumstances, love and friendship survived.” The words from the torn scroll in his office were held in his mind’s eye, an invocation. “I look to them often for inspiration when I feel like I’m out of place. You could offer that to somepony, too. I know you already did for Starlight.”

Cultural divide be damned, Sunburst did what came natural to him. He drew close to Stygian and gave a soft, comforting pat to his shoulder. Stygian flinched, but accepted it. Sunburst felt the sharp scapula under his cloak and the light brush of Stygian’s horn against his sternum as his head hung below Sunburst’s chest. He smelled like the herbs from his cooking. He was warm and real.

As they parted, Sunburst asked, “Don’t you want to be known?”

A vindictive edge had manifested in the lineaments of Stygian’s expression. “That is a dangerous thing to be.”

Sunburst took a steadying breath, raising to an inspired posture. “What if I helped you write another book?” he blurted. “A total revision of Me and My Shadow. We can call it: Stygian’s True Story! — working title! Whatever you write down, I can translate with ease. Or, I could interview you! Equestria will finally know your autobiography, beyond the Pony of Shadows, beyond the legend of the Pillars. Something you can truly call your own! What do you think?”

A log in the hearth popped like a breaking bone. Stygian’s hind legs were bent into a shallow crouch, hocks quivering. Nothing in his face was keen to Sunburst’s spiel, his gaze lost to the middle distance.

Finally, he sputtered, “No.”

Stygian sidestepped out from under Sunburst’s looming presence. “You make a generous offer, but it is not one I can accept. I hope you can forgive that. I have nothing else to share with the world.” He turned his back, facing the rough stone wall. “You were wrong.”

A sudden knot caught in Sunburst’s throat. He closed his eyes, steadying.

“Okay,” he said.

Thereafter, Sunburst readied to depart, the heavy weight of unrewarded hope hanging in his chest.

He paused in the doorway. “Thank you for dinner. It really was amazing.” He paused again. “I’ll see you sometime again soon?”

“I hope so,” Stygian said in a clipped way, as though that was an outcome he had no agency over.

And that was how the night ended. Sunburst returned home. He thought too much. And in the guttering candlelight of his bedroom, he read through Me and My Shadow one last time, as though familiarity with its ostentatious words might reveal a hidden truth.

A certain passage vexed him.

The Shadow spoke to me with a voice like no other. I was drawn into its embrace like that of a lover.

Sunburst gnawed his hoofnail until a sliver broke free. A knot was lodged between his stomach and his heart.

He considered asking Stygian about this line. He should have. But he wasn’t that brave.

The knowledge of the ghostwriter further confounded his resolve. She could have added that phrasing for any reason. Romanticized language was her apparent forte.

The translator may have stretched their interpretation. Yet, what was imbued in Stygian’s original outline to evoke the idea of the Shadow as a paramour? Old Ponish only had one word for lover.

What had been lost in translation? What could be found?

Inne Alt Naertrin (In Another Age)

The tedium of Sunburst’s administrative work was grounding. Time passed like a steady trot and he lost himself in sheafs of paperwork, hunched behind his desk at the School of Friendship. Last night’s rupture was behind him. Stygian’s world-weary face would leave his mind if he put enough words in front of his eyes.

As vice-principal, he didn’t take many appointments. Students sought Starlight or Trixie before even considering him. And so, when Sandbar entered his office that afternoon, Sunburst did nothing to hide his surprise.

“Hey, Sunburst,” he said in his usual languid way. “Hope you’re not busy.”

Papers scattered from the desk as Sunburst sat up. “Only a little!” He laughed while depositing a hastily assembled stack of parchment to the floor with his magic. “What can I do for you, Sandbar?”

His student took a seat before the desk, tapping a hoof to his chin. “Well, I’ve got a potential friendship problem. I was hoping you could give me some advice.”

Sunburst’s ear flicked. “Friendship problem, huh? What’s going on?”

Sandbar was as unguarded as ever as he began. “So, Gallus and I are coltfriends now — creaturefriends? Still figuring that part out. Anyway, I was wondering—”

“Oh!” Sunburst shot up, his hooves planted on his desk. “That’s great news! How long have the two of you been together?”

Sandbar chuckled. “About a few weeks?” He scratched the back of his head. “Not super long. That’s why I thought it was a good idea to come now.”

“I see.” A cold, ill worry settled in Sunburst's gut. “Everything all right between you?”

“Oh, of course! He’s great.” A drowsy grin crossed Sandbar’s face as he leaned back in his seat. “Nah, see, I just don’t want us being together to change our dynamic with the rest of our friends. We’re all so good as the six of us, you know? None of us have ever had a partner before, in or out of the group. Well, I guess except for that time Yona and I went to the Amity Ball together. But it wasn’t super serious. Not like me and Gallus.”

“Right. Any problems so far?”

“No, actually. I’m really thankful. Maybe a little teasing from Smolder, but that’s nothing new. We still all hang out. Gallus and I just spend more time one-on-one.” Again, a sweet smile rose to Sandbar's face.

Now at ease, Sunburst replied, “It sounds like you’re doing just fine. Being prone to overthinking myself, I know how easy it can be to wonder oneself into worry. I suppose my only advice would be to keep up communication, just so everycreature understands when to expect to get together as a group, as opposed to times when you and Gallus only want each other’s company.” He paused, chuckling. “Funny enough, I’m going through something similar myself with Starlight and Trixie. Which brings to mind — I admit I’m a little surprised you came to me first, rather than either of them.”

Sandbar shrugged. “I dunno. Just felt right. Starlight and Trixie are great and all, but it’s nice to have another stallion to talk to. Plus, I just felt like you’d get it, you know?” He paused, a rare cast of hesitancy in his demeanor. “I mean, have you ever had a relationship with a coltfriend that caused any friendship problems before?”

Sunburst blinked. “I… can’t say I have.”

Sandbar frowned. “Ah, sorry if I read you wrong.”

“You didn’t!” Sunburst reached his hoof out, his barrel colliding with the desk and rattling a cup of pencils and quills. He winced. “I’ve liked stallions since before I got my cutie mark. No mistake there. I just…” Heat rose under his robe's collar. “I’ve never had a long-term relationship like you were describing.”

Of course, there had been numerous infatuations and tender moments shared between him and a few peers during his own school days. But nothing lasted. Sunburst knew he bore that responsibility, always withdrawing, reasoning his studies were more captivating than commitment. Yet a part of him wondered if Stellar Flare’s rigid plans and ordered aspirations ruined him for a life where he settled down for forever with a partner. Thinking about that for too long became painful and was often remedied, like all else, with his nose between the pages of another book.

After a brief pause, Sandbar offered him a congenial smile. “Well, I hope you do one day. I know it gets harder when you’re old.”

The hairs on Sunburst’s nape shot up. “I’m only thirty-two!”

“That’s still like…” Sandbar held up his hooves, counting one, then two, “a lot of years older than me!”

Sunburst rolled his eyes. “In any case… if you don’t mind me asking, what clued you in that I like stallions?” It wasn’t something he disclosed to his students. And these days, all his friends were mares. He hadn’t been so much as seen with another stallion since the other day at the antique shop. The relief in Stygian’s face had been rewarding. Sunburst rubbed his temple in an attempt to banish him.

Sandbar brightened, pointing above Sunburst’s head. “It was actually that piece of paper you’ve got hanging on your wall.”

Inne alt naertrin, del weorld ama prijen ouser luvji. The small yet mighty passage of writing hung just behind his desk, blending in with a host of other frames and wall decor — many of which had been gifted by friends. Sunburst gazed up at it, then twisted his head back to Sandbar. “You can read Old Ponish?”

“Not really,” Sandbar laughed. “We studied it in history class a little, back when Twilight was teaching here. One time I was delivering something to your office and I saw it and recognized the word for ‘love.’ And I thought, ‘Huh, wonder what it says.’ So I wrote down the words and used an Old Ponish dictionary from the library to translate them.” He smiled at Sunburst, guileless. “I like the message. It’s cool.”

Sunburst pressed his hoof to his mouth, staring for a moment too long at Sandbar. How young and bright-eyed he was; his only care in the world was whether his friends and partner would be able to equitably distribute their wealth of fondness for one another’s company. Sunburst envisioned the stallion who wrote the passage hanging on his wall, how he might appear were he to step through time into the room at this moment. If only he could have witnessed the open expression of this young stallion’s love and known how right he was.

“Sunburst?” Sandbar leaned in. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, dropping his hoof. “That message is pretty cool, isn’t it.”

—

A letter was waiting for Sunburst when he returned home that evening. Stygian’s name was written on the envelope in a swirling script. Sunburst tore it open so fast he nearly wrested its contents asunder.

Sollastbreken,

Ight gibten korrekt sorg. Ight sorg vyr del wakaft ight skawen nokta gestrin unt wysan presum. Ight houpa ight mag am worthig a thouth fargbitenaft, jev thouth boda.

Dae oum wovul ama soa prescaesan. Thouth wurdi boda korrekt ab ight oum naer koufen haeren thar. Dae omfaldvul skrippen vysi wurdi thet naegal thar fore thouth.

Ight gepren slaken med thouth ight firen naer losan. Ight naer vaere farfaelen tryg med ponisi, ab medut thouth vahten, ight luzen halta inne. Ight naeg gestrin, ight naeg nuha. Thouth hathen goth hjort.

Ight firen koufen thouth naegung. Ight treost thouth med ight talla. Mag wier metha unt naeg? Ight likhen junkten thouth establa, jev thouth hathen. Ight haefta feraft ight establa dunen varg.

Thouth rijan,
Stygian

(Sunburst,

I offer a sincere apology. I am shamed by the cowardice I showed the previous night and wish to atone. I hope I may be worthy of your forgiveness, should you grant it.

It was discomforting to be seen so exactly. Your words rang true but I was not prepared to hear them. It is easier to write these words than it would have been to speak them to your face.

I recognized an ease in your presence I do not want to lose. I don't always feel safe with other ponies, but even as you challenged me, I saw the care behind it. I said it before and say it now. You have a good heart.

I would like to accept your offer. I entrust my story to you. May we meet to discuss it? I would prefer to join you at your residence, if you will have me. I need distance from my home for this task.

Your friend,
Stygian)

Partway through the letter, Sunburst’s hooves galvanized into a cheerful dance. There was a crisp elegance to Stygian’s Old Ponish and Sunburst was entranced to be reading his original script. His golden magical aura shimmered around the edges of the letter with a featherlight touch, as though he were holding a priceless treasure.

It was set with tidy gentleness on the open space of his desk. Sunburst twisted the cap from a fresh ink pot and hastily scribed his return message.

Stygian,

Fargibten es naer gennaed, i’southe naer vyr farfaeleni. Ight kounen ama wythrpony, dunung ight mednadaft a. Ab ight fro naven thouth tryg med ight.

Thouth southe hathen werth unt worthig ama gaelen es thouth naven. Ight ussen alfen gibten voske.

(Stygian,

No forgiveness is needed, especially not for expressing tender feelings. I can be a challenging pony, a fact I’m well aware of. But I’m glad to know you feel safe with me.

Your story is valuable and deserves to be told as you know it. I’ll merely help give it a voice.)

Sunburst paused here. He twined the quill feather around his beard. Deliberately, he included a word for ‘story’ that could translate variably. ‘Halla’ meant ‘narrative’ or ‘message.’ But Sunburst chose ‘southe’ — ‘truth.’

Your truth is valuable. A discreet gesture. Sunburst considered another.

Weir kounen metha bigh ight Lornafum se Rijanaft vargfum berzen vys varg. Ight establa eskritar es naer luzen moj nuha!

(We can meet at my School of Friendship office to begin this project. My home study is not a pretty sight at the moment!)

Which was true. He closed the letter with:

Ight fro ama luzen thouth eptur.

Thouth rijan,
Sollastbreken

(I’m glad to be seeing you again.

Your friend,
Sunburst)

Ar Jivel Thral se Stygian (A Wicked Slave to the Deepest Darkness)

“Are you comfortable with a spoken interview?” Sunburst traced the gilt spines on his office library shelf. “I swear I’ve got a spell for recording speech in here somewhere.”

Stygian had taken a seat on the same stool Sandbar perched upon the day prior. His slender forelegs were pressed tight together, neck tipped back, as though attempting to balance an invisible object on the tip of his nose. “Perhaps… we could forgo the aid of a spell. It sounds like a bit of intriguing new magic, but I’d feel comforted to only preserve my words in writing.”

“Not a problem! You talk, and I’ll write.” Sunburst took a formal position behind his desk. A supply of fresh parchment enough to bind a full book was at the ready, his quill hovering above.

Stygian didn’t speak. His tendinous throat quivered with an abrupt swallow. His eyes landed anywhere but on Sunburst.

The office was a modest size, but the shallow depth of space behind Stygian appeared to expand. His gaunt, gray figure was pronounced in this room bedecked in shades of pedagogic pale, like a stick of charcoal left in a box of pastels. The ticking clock was strident. Under Stygian’s cloak, his narrow chest bobbed with rapid breaths.

Sunburst set down his quill. “Is there anything I can do to help you feel more at ease?”

Stygian’s eyes squeezed shut. “In your letter, you spoke of writing my truth. What does that entail?” Sunburst opened his mouth to respond, but Stygian continued, “This is still my book. I decide what it contains.”

“Of course you do.” Sunburst’s ears lay flat. “Stygian, I can’t force you to disclose anything you don’t want to. I can’t force you to do any of this. Nopony can.”

“I want to.” He massaged the side of his neck, below his jaw. “It feels necessary.”

“All right.” The quill lifted in a golden nimbus. “How would you like to start?”

Stygian began from a place of stilted formality. He described the name and location of his village of origin, its general air and populous, and date of birth, like dry recitations from a history book. As Sunburst copied this, he snorted under his breath.

Stygian paused, lifting a hoof to his chest. “Is something amusing?”

“You just sound like one of my professors back at Celestia’s school.” Sunburst suppressed a giggle.

Stygian sighed. “I’m sorry. I struggled with this the first time around. When I lived, we were not thinking about whether those who would go on to live after us would take any interest in our personal lives. Writing about oneself was kept to the form of journaling. The information within was practical, offering wisdom on subjects of magic and monsters to the next age. That is why Star Swirl filled many such tomes.”

Sunburst recalled the day he pried the lid off that fated barrel to uncover the sediment-crusted book within. He never imagined who it would reward Equestria with. He smiled. “I’m glad he did. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here in this room with me.”

Stygian’s chin jerked upward; his ears tilted forward. His lips parted, but stalled with a pensive pause. “How would you begin the tale of your life, Sunburst?”

Sunburst was charmed by the enunciation of his name. There was an airy sibilance to Stygian’s voice which caused each consonant to be struck precisely. This was bolstered by his Old Ponish accent, a lilt that was easy to mistake as Trottish. But Sunburst’s ear was keen to the subtle differences.

“I’d probably start with my foalhood.” Sunburst twisted the quill in his magic at a rhythmic pace, the plumy feather swirling. “Not just the name of my hometown, but personal stories. Like, for example, my parents divorced when I was a colt and I was raised by my mom. Ponies are usually interested in facts like that. They imply ideas about your life. Though, not all of them are exactly favorable. Like how much I resent the suggestion that my mom's ‘overbearing personality’ had a negative effect on how I turned out.” He clicked his tongue. “My mom is a character in her own right. She’d require at least several chapters to cover her role in my life. And she would probably love that.”

With no gradual buildup, Stygian said, “My mother died as I was born.”

The twirling feather halted. “Oh.” Sunburst lowered the quill tip to the paper, his glasses sliding below his line of sight. Stygian blurred.

But, he continued. “I never knew what she looked like. No photography then, and only nobles commissioned familial art. But I knew her name. Hweit Storra. You would refer to her as Bright Star.”

In careful script, Sunburst wrote down both her Old and New Ponish name.

“My father kept her possessions in a chest in the room they once shared. I was forbidden from entering. But there was a time I transgressed. Inside the chest, I discovered many things, yet one caught me in the heart. It was a shawl, woven with lamb's wool. It had been my father’s wedding gift to her. It smelled like sweet herb and something warm that I ought to have had a name for. It smelled like her.”

Stygian rose a tremulous hoof to his cheek. “Each night, I slept with it pressed under my nose. Until, it ceased to smell like anything.” His lips parted, drawing in a breath at the memory, a millennium behind him.

“My father was enraged when he discovered this. Not merely for my trespass, but because a colt should not pitifully hold tight to his mother’s affects. I was perhaps ten at the time and far too old to demonstrate such weakness. At least, so he claimed.”

Sunburst kept writing, his jaw tense, hoping his silence may continue to coax him.

“This was not the first time my father laid his hooves upon me. It would not be the last. What I did next was reckless, I admit to that. A local wizard sold me a spellbook. The bits I traded, I stole from my father. I was never a remarkable spellcaster. Not then, or now. Certainly not one who could traverse the veil of death. But that is what I attempted.

“I exhumed Bright Star’s grave. The sight of her bones will never leave my memory. Nor will their unwillingness to be filled with her long departed soul. My attempts at necromancy all failed.

“My father found me lying in the hole I dug, curled beside her. I cannot tell you the number of invectives he cast down on me. Thouth ar jivel thral se stygian. That, I remember with clarity.”

‘You are a wicked slave to the deepest darkness.’ Sunburst’s mouth was dry.

“That was the day I received my cutie mark.” Stygian swallowed. “And my name as well. As was tradition, then.”

All this, Stygian said in distant, flat tones. Sunburst pressed his glasses to his eyes again, banishing the image of the little gray colt shivering at the bottom of a pit of turned dark earth, his mother’s ribcage casting a claw of shadows over him.

“I’m sorry,” left Sunburst’s mouth like a hoof had been driven into his gut. He set aside the quill, nearly spilling the inkpot.

Stygian blinked; his pupils contracted. “I have disturbed you.”

“No — I mean — I am. But that isn’t a bad thing!” Sunburst crossed out from behind the barrier of the desk, coming to stand before Stygian. “Do you want to take a break?”

“Do you?” Stygian looked up at him. “This story is old. It doesn’t hurt me anymore.”

“It’s okay if it does.”

An oppressive silence came down upon them. The clock ticked.

“Would you like to take a walk around the school with me?” Sunburst asked outright. “The students aren’t supposed to leave their rooms after curfew, not that all of them uphold that rule. The library is closed though, and I go there when I need to clear my mind. Which may seem ironic, since it holds so much thought provoking material.” He took a deep breath. “But the space is calming.”

Stygian came down from the stool. “I’ll take you at your word.”

Before they left, Sunburst caught Stygian pause. Hoof raised in a half-step, Stygian’s head turned to observe something behind Sunburst’s desk. His eyes moved laterally, reading with perfect fluency.

Sunburst willed him to say something, any remark on the scroll fragment, whether in solidarity — or derision. His heart squeezed. An answer would be enough.

Stygian didn’t offer one. He followed Sunburst toward the door. He was quiet.

—

Past sundown, the silence of the library was voidlike. There was no rustle of turning academic texts or gentle tick of hooves and claws across the tile floor. Only a pair of steps rang out, eliciting a faint echo. Above, the second floor curtains studded with stars were a washed-out mimicry of the night sky outside.

Sunburst lit a single sconce so as not to disturb the atmosphere. A little ball of light appeared at the tip of Stygian’s horn. It streaked through the dim space as his head pivoted before the shelves.

“You have an incredible collection here.” Undisguised awe was in those words. “I could spend hours, no, days in this library!”

“Well, you now have a connection at the school if you ever want to visit!” Sunburst laughed, the tension in his chest easing at the way Stygian had brightened. Stygian trotted alongside a long spanning shelf, mouth agape with a grin curling at his lips.

“Is your love of books what inspired you to write?” Sunburst asked, following behind at a slow pace. “Or, rather, present yourself as a writer?”

Stygian turned, smile fading. The light from his horn spotlighted his face in the murky room, as though it were floating free of his body. “In essence, yes. In my time as a strategist, I wrote often, a demand of the work. With that skill no longer needed in this world, it was a fitting secondary option. Besides, writers spend most of their days alone.”

Sunburst frowned, catching up. He walked in step with Stygian. “There are so many possibilities beyond that, though. If you’re not entirely happy with being a ‘writer,’ well, what about a teacher? A researcher?”

“Two things I considered.” Stygian ran his hoof along the ornate spine of an older work. “The reality of me being accepted into either profession? Dreadfully small. Each position requires immense trust. I don’t begrudge ponies who aren’t ready to offer me that.”

Sunburst didn’t give up. “If you don’t mind me asking, what does your cutie mark represent?”

This got his abrupt attention. Stygian closed the light of his horn, dimming the immediate area. Sunburst squinted.

“My talent lies in being a scholar,” Stygian said simply. “In discovering what is yet to be known. That’s how I interpreted it. As did my father. He was a blacksmith with an anvil mark. And he was always disappointed I did not attain a mark representing a more… rugged affinity.”

At that detail, a fleeting wonder crossed Sunburst’s mind. Was it Stygian’s father who crafted the dagger?

Sunburst didn’t linger there, offering a stiff frown. “Well, who was he to argue with destiny?”

Stygian stared ahead. “A very stubborn pony who bent the world to his will just as easily as he bent iron.”

Sunburst tried not to linger here, either. Instead, he asked, “Could I see it?”

Stygian’s eyes flicked. “See what?”

“Your cutie mark.” Sunburst lifted his cloak, revealing his sparkling sun mark for emphasis.

Stygian took a step back, his short tail swishing to wrap over his flank. “I’d rather not. I know this is yet another subject of change in this time, but cutie marks were revealed with great discretion in my era.”

“I know,” Sunburst sighed. “That’s all right. I got excited thinking about how its description might make for a compelling detail in the book. But as I said, nopony can force you.”

It was unclear what prompted Stygian’s change of heart. But he began to dither, muttering in fits and starts, “I… well…” Finally, he said. “Over here, where there’s light from the window. I’ll show you.”

Stygian crossed the floor to hop onto the plush window seat bench. Sunburst joined him. They cast a pair of long, twin shadows on the floor, breaking up the squares of cold blue light cast between the broad window panes.

Sunburst did not expect a shy undressing from the stallion opposite him. Stygian’s horn glowed azure and the thin loop at his throat came unbound. He pulled the cloak over his head, ruffling his bobbed mane, and deposited it to the floor. Bathed in the pale moonlight, the revelation of his body was stark. His lowest ribs pressed tight under his hide, shadows pronounced beneath them. His flank was smooth, an unblemished gray coat — absent of a mark.

“You’re—” Sunburst’s sentence did not begin. There were so few kind words to use. To utter ‘blank flank’ felt vicious here.

Nonetheless, Stygian supplied, “Yes, I am unmarked. But that was not always the case.” He cupped a hoof over the bare place on his body, bereft of its iconography of purpose. “I did not deceive you when I told my story. When I rose from my mother’s grave, I bore the mark of a blank, unrolled scroll and black feather quill. It had no other identifying characteristics, none at least that I can remember. That event defined me as a scholar.”

“What happened to them?” Sunburst asked gently, yet could not prevent the slight echo of his voice. “Your marks, I mean?”

“They disappeared after I departed Limbo. Perhaps the Shadow took them.” Stygian brushed the fur backward from the grain, revealing a part of pallid skin beneath. “As far as I know, the Pillars retained their marks. All of them, whole. I did not reveal my condition to any of them.”

It was a frank contradiction, a blank flank on the body of a grown stallion. Like a foal wearing the clothes of his grandfather — the same image evoked by Stygian’s home. His lissome, hungry build let off a slight tremble, as though desperate to be concealed once more by his cloak. Sunburst beheld him anyway. That gray coat was silver under the light of the moon. The Old Ponish word for ‘gray’ was synonymous with ‘venerable’ for the way one's mane frosted with age, but Sunburst always connected that dual translation to the precious metal.

Stygian shifted as the silence prolonged, tucking his tail close to his haunches. He looked at Sunburst with his woebegone azure eyes, trying to tease out an explanation for his scrutiny. A sharp indentation was pressed between his brows as though by a sculptor. Quickly, his nerve broke along with his stare and he inclined his head toward the window, assuming a curiosity about whatever lay out in the school grounds. This exposed a view of his slender neck and Sunburst saw something he had yet to notice.

A fine, silvery line of bald flesh ran across Stygian’s throat. The mark was just below his jaw, a few inches in length, and imperceptible in most lighting. Sunburst imagined all the Pillars had scars from their questing. It wasn’t unusual for Stygian to bear some of his own.

“Sorry. I was lost in thought,” Sunburst said, consciously. He pulled himself a fraction closer to Stygian, feeling the anxious warmth radiating from him.

“And what was the nature of those thoughts?” Stygian asked, the corners of his lips creasing.

“That you experienced something very unfair. But realistic for what you went through.” Sunburst met his eyes. “I’m not sure if you know this, but in the last century, ponies have extensively studied the mind and its connection to the body. There are accounts of this absent cutie mark phenomenon happening to other ponies. After a traumatic event, one’s marks might recede. As far as I read - and I read a lot on the subject - it isn’t permanent.”

Tension left Stygian in waves. “Oh,” he breathed. “That’s reassuring.”

“And—” Sunburst’s eagerness grew— “here’s another neat trick I learned.” He lifted the hem of his starry cloak, rummaging in the pocket to retrieve a wrapped candy. “Trixie keeps these in her counseling office for the students. She says if you’re feeling detached, a strong flavor can perk you back up!”

Stygian took the candy in his magic, and Sunburst cautioned with good humor, “I’d be careful with it though. Knowing Trixie, it could very likely have an enchantment on it.”

Unconcerned, Stygian unwrapped the vivid green hard candy and slipped it between his lips. An almost instantaneous paroxysm took hold of him. His lips pulled back to reveal clenched teeth, his eyes rolled upward, and it appeared, for a moment, that his soul had departed heavenward into Celestia’s divine firmament.

“Is it good?” Sunburst asked nervously.

Stygian spat the candy onto his hoof. “It bathed my tongue in acid!” he sputtered, and at Sunburst’s worried gawking, amended, “Figuratively! It’s like biting into a thousand lemons. I’ve never tasted anything so sour.” Stygian blinked, eyes watering. He chuffed out a laugh. “And I suppose it succeeded in banishing my detachment, along with a few taste buds.”

Stygian shook his head and Sunburst giggled. There was something rewarding in seeing him emote with his whole face, free of malaise. Sunburst said, “You look good like this.”

The openness in Stygian’s face closed off. He blinked, placing the candy back in its wrapper. “What do you mean?”

Sunburst scraped the plush cover of the window seat. “I mean, just as you are. Without your cloak. You look good.”

The aforementioned article of clothing was enveloped in Stygian’s blue aura. He lifted it before him, preparing to don it once again. “I look unhealthy.” His eyes were downcast. “I am unmarked. I am a nonsense.”

An exasperated laugh left Sunburst. “You are not! You’re… Stygian. To me, you’re a pony who looks — who looks like my friend.”

The shimmering blue magic released its hold. The cloak crumpled to the bench.

Sunburst cleared his throat. “Let me tell you something.” He unclasped his wizard’s robe and held it between them. “I love this robe. I bought it for myself the day before I left for Celestia’s school, thinking if I looked the part of a great wizard, I was sure to become one. It was far too big on me then, and I had to grow into it, but it was one of the first things that was truly mine. I wear it today with pride… but also a little guilt. Sometimes, I like that it hides my cutie mark.”

“Why?” Stygian murmured. He gestured to Sunburst’s side. “You’re… complete.”

“I wouldn’t use that word to describe myself.” He kicked a hind hoof off the bench, dragging it back and forth along the floor. “My cutie mark unintentionally caused my dearest friend a lot of hurt. It’s not to blame, of course. I had no control over the moment it appeared. But sometimes, I feel more relaxed when it’s hidden, knowing it can't ever do any more accidental damage.”

Appearing to process this, Stygian ran his hoof along the robe’s turquoise sunflare clasp. “Your candor is admirable. I’m sorry you too are burdened by guilt. I would never guess somepony like you…”

Stygian went quiet. Sunburst perceived, from the minute dart of Stygian’s eyes, that he was being studied, from the tips of his ears to the trailing ends of his unevenly cut tail. He drew his hind hoof back underneath him, closing his posture. “What is it?”

Stygian averted his gaze. “Just lost in thought.”

Sunburst showed a wry grin. “And the nature of your thoughts?”

When Stygian summoned the courage to look at him again, his wet eyes were wide and filled with fear, pupils dilated like the space between stars. He spoke his next words as though they foretold his ruination.

“You look good like this, too.”

Swysti Laef (Turning Page)

Stygian disappeared after the night at the library. He left Sunburst with the departing promise he would compose and mail him the continuation of his story.

Sunburst's following days of administrative work were not enough to quiet his mind. In the interim, it was easy to believe Stygian would never contact him again. Sunburst prodded him to reveal too much. That was grounds enough for Stygian to abandon this project. The punishing idea was a constant refrain, throbbing through Sunburst’s head like a migraine.

After a mere two days, Sunburst received a parcel. Inside were ten pages of manuscript and a letter.

Sollastbreken,

Bidde thita vysi wordi ama thouth lefan ponisi wysan raeten thar. Skrippen ight eptur kwen wier haefta eptur metha.

Thouth rijan,
Stygian

(Sunburst,

Please translate these words as you believe ponies would wish to read them. Write to me when we should next meet.

Your friend,
Stygian)

Sunburst’s relieved sigh nearly blew the manuscript clean off his desk.

—

Anvilhorn parented no differently than he smithed. A hammer always in hoof, all things appeared to him as a bent sheet of metal to be straightened.

Around the age of five, he first took me into his workshop. “Look here,” he said, showing me the unfinished blade of a sword yet to be set upon its pommel. “What is wrong with it?”

I, of course, did not know. This was a new world to me. Many of Anvilhorn’s lessons were demonstrative, but expectant. I often wondered, did other colts spring into the world with an innate knowledge of smithing, or combat, or any of the other skills my father thought imperative of me to possess? If so, why were those inborn secrets absent in me?

“This blade has a fatal flaw,” Anvilhorn told me. His voice was like a forging clang. “It was not heated to its correct temperature and now the metal is brittle.”

Bringing his hammer high, he struck downward, severing the sword in half like a beheading executioner. “Imagine striking your opponent with this faulty blade. Should they be wearing armor, it would have cracked in two instantly. Your death soon to follow.”

My father chose an ironic metaphor that day. Indeed, the metal wasn’t heated sufficiently and would not bend to the hammer that beat it. If he wished to inculcate a lesson about weakness, I took away a different message: steady warmth was required for something beautiful to be made.

“I’m having some difficulty with this passage.”

Stygian lay beside Sunburst on the plush office rug, pages spread before them like a corona. Gnawing his lip, Stygian levitated the concerning stack of pages Sunburst’s way.

Sunburst reviewed them, then lifted an eyebrow in Stygian’s direction. “The part about your father?”

“You’ve written it as though his lesson to me that day was not valuable.” Stygian tucked his forelegs beneath his barrel, concealed under his burlap cloak.

“Well…” Sunburst pressed his glasses up. “I know a few things about ancient smithing practices. That part about warming the metal is a true fact, and I thought it made for an interesting counter-metaphor!”

“Why would one be needed?” Stygian’s nose pointed toward the floor. “His example was clear. And true. Weakness is death.”

Sunburst set down the pages. “I'm sorry if I'm presumptuous in saying this, but I know how this story ends. And it isn’t in death. It's hopeful and uplifting, and I felt some early foreshadowing would give the reader an idea of where it's headed.”

“Where is it headed?” Stygian echoed. His head turned to Sunburst, ears tipped backward. They appeared large on his angular skull, like a stag.

“You tell me.” Sunburst stroked his beard. “Me and My Shadow ended with you being saved. Maybe this version can go past that.”

Stygian never gave a clear answer for how he envisioned the conclusion.

—

Sunburst was used to immediate answers. The scholarly texts he devoured rarely forestalled any significant information. This was not the case with the pages of manuscript Stygian continued to send him.

Patience may not have been Sunburst’s particular virtue. But he had a good cause for getting to know it better.

The process continued at a steady course across the span of a month. After classes let out at the School of Friendship, Sunburst sat down to translate. In the days that followed, Stygian sent more pages, and by the weekend they met at his office to discuss the prose.

Throughout this time, neither brought up the night in the library or the framed scroll fragment hovering above in perpetuity.

Sunburst's ire for Anvilhorn grew each time he wrote his name. He never knew he could feel such present hatred for a pony who was dust in the ground.

I spent several years of my colthood assisting Anvilhorn in his smithy. My grandfather had been an izernkrafter, and his father before him. Anvilhorn brought his trade to the village he intended to build a family in. He never expected the loss that would follow.

“My wife is gone and the world appears blighted. You owe a debt for the life you stole from her,” he told me. “You will learn to wield the hammer but I will teach you fortitude.”

I did not learn to wield the hammer. Neither my young magic or tiny forelegs ever successfully lifted it. For each time I failed, Anvilhorn sent me to collect a switch from the kindling. If I cried, I was to hold a live coal between the tender soles of my hooves until it extinguished.

A tremulous blue aura enveloped the page. “The descriptions here are accurate,” Stygian’s voice murmured from behind it.

“Well, that’s good. But, I’m sorry they are,” Sunburst said. He found himself apologizing often, always uttered after another disclosure of Anvilhorn’s corporal punishments.

“We could leave it out.” The page lowered from Stygian's face, revealing his somber gaze. “All that has to do with my father. It wasn't included in my previous book.”

Sunburst shook his head. “I’m not saying sorry because I didn’t want to know these things, or that I believe they should be redacted. I’m saying it because… because somepony ought to.”

Stygian smiled, yet his brow creased in consternation. “Just like Star Swirl. It seems only in this age can ponies bear to apologize to me.” He blinked. “That was bitter of me. I'm sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize, yourself! Especially for being angry. In your circumstances, anypony would have the right to be.”

Stygian tilted his head, expression softening. “Your understanding is truly boundless. But my anger unnerves me. It nearly destroyed me, and the ponies I care about. Feeling it has never felt safe.”

“Well, you’ve been angry in front of me, and here I am, perfectly un-destroyed!” Sunburst declared. He was rewarded with a soft chuckle from Stygian.

On impulse, Sunburst asked, “How are your hooves?”

Stygian raised a puzzled brow. “My hooves?”

“After what I translated from that last passage, I meant to ask you about it.” Sunburst pressed his glasses up, seeing him clearly. “You know, the coals.”

“Oh.” From his prone position on the floor, Stygian lifted a foreleg and massaged his pastern. There was a visible patch absent of hairs below his fetlock. “The soreness comes and goes. I’ve suffered many injuries throughout my life. These are but a distant memory.”

“You did a lot of traveling across Equestria, though. On hoof. I can’t imagine that was easy.”

A slow smile came to Stygian’s face, offset by the deep gray under his eyes. “No, not always.”

They cycled through many conversations like this. A pained remark from Stygian. A gentle response from Sunburst. Gradually, Stygian’s ears were tended to with messages of compassion, never again to be clouted by unforgiving, punitive demands.

And on one occasion, following this tender labor, Stygian sighed with tremendous relief, and said, “You’re a good listener, Sunburst.”

This struck him. “I’m really not.”

Stygian’s bobbed mane tossed with a disbelieving chuckle. “You’re just being humble.”

Sunburst shook his head. “I’m distractible. And sometimes, inconsiderate. If you told that to any of my other friends, they would laugh and laugh.”

It was difficult to meet Stygian’s eyes when he admitted, “You’re just easy to listen to.”

—

After this initial month of work, Stygian's foalhood encompassed the first five chapters, terminating with the story of his cutie mark — and the unsuccessful resurrection of Bright Star. This was richer already than anything in Me and My Shadow.

“Your journeys with the Pillars must come next, right?” Sunburst asked as they prepared to depart for the night. He tapped the edges of the collected manuscript on his desk, sliding them into his saddlebag. “And, the moment you met Star Swirl?”

“That’s soon, yes,” Stygian sighed. He had little to pack up, save for a now empty bottle. Once filled with lemonade, they shared it throughout their revision process. Stygian prepared it to the exact sweetness Sunburst preferred. “But… something else comes just before that.”

Sunburst’s hoof hovered over the clasp of his saddlebag. “And that is?”

The ticking clock filled the room as it so often did when Stygian lapsed into silence. His eyes were trained on the wall behind Sunburst’s desk.

“I was to be wedded.”

The saddlebag thumped to the desk. “Oh. Stygian. I didn’t—”

“It never came to be.” Stygian’s hoof was raised. It dropped, rubbing up and down his foreleg. “You seem… unnerved by my potential marriage.”

“Oh, w–well,” Sunburst’s breath hitched, “it’s just due to my knowledge of the past. I know not every union then prioritized… love.”

Stygian’s chin bobbed in a slow nod. “More than any book today could tell. But — I felt it was relevant. In fact, it contributed to the start of my questing.”

His shoulders rose and fell beneath his cloak and he set down his belongings. Anticipating the forthcoming tale, Sunburst pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment and his quill.

“When I was young, a filly in my village was my dearest friend. Swysti Laef — Turning Page. She was a bright scholar. Her mother was an apothecary and Turning was expected to learn the trade. She, of course, wanted to be a wizard, like her father, who traveled the land and was never at home. But… mares did not become expert spellcasters, then. Not without great struggle…”

Sunburst’s quill captured his words, matching the pace of his speech.

…I gave Turning the book I stole. She loved it. She was always trying to expand her collection, and kept them under her bed where her mother couldn’t find them. She was the first pony I told about what I attempted with Bright Star. I trusted her like no other.

Once, we were hiding under my blankets, laughing and reading together by the light of our horns. That’s when Anvilhorn returned from the smithy. I didn’t hear him coming until he had wrenched the cover from us, exposed like a deadly secret. I was chastised for bringing a filly into my room, unchaperoned. She was chastised for reading an arcana. Yet despite his initial ire, I knew how my father looked when he formed an idea that pleased him.

Turning’s mother was glad to know her daughter had been sneaking out of her home to be with a colt, rather than chasing after knowledge. How foolish she was. Anvilhorn offered her a marriage tithe and she accepted. I was to wed Turning. Both of us were sixteen, then.

The tip of the quill paused, seeping a steady bleed of ink where it should have dotted a punctuation. Sunburst exhaled a stiff breath and turned his ears toward Stygian’s continuing voice.

“Neither of us wanted this…”

“Did anypony ever know?” Sunburst interjected.

Stygian’s forelegs were quivering. “You can imagine the consequences, can’t you? If I were to have told my father I did not want to wed a mare, a mere coal between my hooves would have been a blessing.”

He volunteered no further elaboration, other than, “We were given no choice.”

...We went through the motions of our engagement. Until we wedded, Turning and I were forbidden to be alone in one another's company. Our nights of reading together were gone. When we were in the same room, she was too miserable to speak, her mother always watching over her shoulder as she cooked meals for me. Turning could shear a rock into a gem with her magic. And she was using it to turn a spoon in a pot.

I was to offer her a bridal gift, as was customary. I chose Bright Star’s shawl. If anypony was to own it, it should be her, not my father, not locked away cold in a chest until the end of his days. The shawl blended into her cream coat, too similar to her colors. I should have given her a book. I should have given her… freedom. So, that’s what I did.

Sunburst’s head rose. A canny glint was in Stygian’s eyes.

“I slipped a letter inside the shawl’s lining. That, I suppose, was the day I became a strategist.”

…Leaving our village was perilous. The land was rife with Windigos and dangerous creatures. A trio of sirens was encroaching on neighboring towns. But news had reached us on many occasions of a burgeoning hero — a great wizard, who fought for what was right. I believed if Turning and I found him, he would shelter us. We both had much to offer in the ways of our knowledge. Our lives would be ours to own.

Anvilhorn was enthused by my intention to set out in search of a legendary unicorn hero. He was tantalized by the renown it would afford our family. And on the night I packed to leave, he gave me the first and only gift he ever offered.

“It was the dagger you returned to me.”

Sunburst's immersion lifted. He paused, eyes adjusting as they rose from the paper to Stygian.

“I had wondered,” Sunburst murmured. Regaining energy, he babbled, “By which I mean, it possessed many hallmarks of your era! And given your attachment to it, and your father being a smith, I put the pieces together!”

Stygian smiled, though it was forced. “Your observations are as keen as ever.” His eyes turned upward. “When my father gave it to me, he said, ‘Take this blade and use it to kill a monster. Do not come home unless you do.’”

Sunburst copied his words, slow and orderly, but he didn't look away from Stygian.

Stygian's throat flexed with a stiff swallow. “To this day, I regret telling him my plan. I should have gathered everything I had and ran with Turning. But I was afraid. I was afraid, like a foal is afraid of phantoms, that he would follow me. And by telling him… I was given my one chance to see how his face looked when he was proud of me.”

Sunburst's quill stopped moving. “And what did he look like?”

Stygian's gaze was low. “Like he was looking at somepony else. A colt who was not me.”

The quill continued its rapid scratching, syncopated with Sunburst's breathing that had become loud in his ears.

...I know it was him who told Turning's mother my plan. It must have led her into suspicion. Because on the eve of my exodus from that little village, when I arrived at her home, Turning was gone.

Mere hours prior, a carriage arrived for her. Her mother sent for it. Turning was delivered to a school for fillies to be educated in the art of healing and etiquette and all the qualities becoming of a mare. I was told she would come home a proper bride by the time I returned from questing.

I should have chased wherever that carriage traveled. I should have broken into the school where she was held. I should have damned the risks. I should have, I should have, I should have…

Sunburst looked up. The rug was twisted beneath Stygian's hoof. His shoulders were a pair of sharp peaks above his hanging head.

“It’s easy to be a champion over monsters,” he said. “But against our neighbors, we rarely become heroes.”

Stygian didn't hear Sunburst's quill cease writing and slump to the desk. He didn't see Sunburst cross the floor to sweep him into a firm hug. When it happened, a faint cry of surprise left him, as though squeezed from his lungs by the white-socked hooves enclosed across his back.

“That's the hardest battle a pony can face,” Sunburst said, his chin on Stygian's shoulder. “But — it's won through living! Living and being — that's heroic enough.”

“I like to think she won.” Stygian's voice was faint, his muzzle pressed into Sunburst's neck. “I like to think her education didn’t change her. That her ambitious heart beat back against her tutors and she became a great wizard. Because — she was not so easily defeated. She was my friend and she couldn't be defeated!”

Stygian's body jerked rhythmically with the hitching of his breath. Without warning, his hooves thrust forward. Sunburst toppled backward as Stygian wrenched free of him.

“You shouldn't see me in this state!” he shouted. His eyes were wet and he threw a hoof across his face. “I didn't expect — I've told this story before, why is…” Stygian pulled his hoof free, staring at it in disbelief, his cheeks darkened by rolling tears. “I don't know what to do with all of this hurt.”

“You can cry!” Sunburst said. He crouched, meeting Stygian's eyes. “You just let yourself cry.”

So, Stygian cried. For what seemed like the first time in an era, he wept in the open presence of another. His sadness was made honest in accordance with that direct, accepting permission. Sunburst pulled him into another close embrace, steady as Stygian’s tears soddened the collar of his robe. Sunburst held onto his quivering back, running hot with exertion, until he stopped shaking.

Stygian was saying something, a phrase repeated, the words muffled where his wet snout pressed into Sunburst’s coat. But Sunburst caught it on the last iteration as Stygian collapsed wholly into him.

“I never imagined it would feel this good.”

Trotten Inne Sollastlaet (Stepping Into Sunlight)

Vi utskrippken metha Stor Swysti del Genthaft?

(How to describe meeting Star Swirl the Bearded?)

Ight biltha oum gylek trotten inne sollastlaet del unthe tieth. Dunung wier vythe foalasi, ab naernaven eftar alt. Dunung wier messen jev dae oum klefen eveg wier, nakounen nanavaft wier gennaven vys glouma gestrin.

Del sollast es stor. Usatien thouth majenaft, Sollastbreken.

(I imagine it was much like stepping into sunlight for the first time. Something we all experience as foals, but forget with age. Something we would miss if it was ripped away from us, unable to recall we had known this darkness before.

The sun is a star. Use your creativity here, Sunburst.)

Sunburst’s creativity was indisposed.

A sudden stuckness arrested him as he pored over these new pages of manuscript. Alone in his home study, candle wax pooling in chambersticks around his desk, he was bereft of Stygian’s responding voice to all the questions he wanted to ask aloud.

It was discomforting, verging on this time in Stygian’s life where he believed he was entering into a new and permanent happiness. Stygian may not know how this book would end, but both he and Sunburst knew the conclusion to his beyond a decade-long chapter with Star Swirl.

Sunburst was swift in jotting down the translations of Stygian's Old Ponish.

Star Swirl the Bearded was a venerable stallion. He was also the first stallion to show me kindness…

I never imagined a pony could be equal parts wise and mighty. He was my inspiration…

I thought of Anvilhorn. Not often, but I thought of him. Would he dare describe Star Swirl as weak for being a scholar? Star Swirl could not wield a sword, but I saw him fell trees with his magic…

Star Swirl and I spent many hours in conversation. He showed me how to map the stars. The world turned, and I always knew where I was. At all times, I was content in his…

Sunburst’s neck prickled. He read the line again.

Vaere, ight oum halenkalm nythra hert hight luzkounaft.

It was evident Stygian intended to conclude with ‘I was content in his warm presence.’ And yet, the translation was uncertain.

In Old Ponish, ‘hight’ was equivalent to New Ponish’s ‘warm’ or ‘hot.’ It could be situated in many contexts: temperature, tenderness, anger, liveliness — or the quality of being attractive.

‘At all times, I was content in his attractive presence.’

Sunburst reached for his mug of tea that accompanied him throughout this long night of translating. He gulped the remainder of its contents, the dregs rough in his throat.

A portrait of Star Swirl the Bearded used to hang in Sunburst’s dorm room at Celestia’s school. He was the apotheosis of unicornhood. You wanted to step into his hoofprints, or if failing that, walk in step beside him. At least, that’s the attitude with which ponies hung his posters.

When Star Swirl was presumed dead, he was everything and nothing. He was lionized and crassly joked about. His image was spoken to in hushed reverence and scribbled over with overlarge glasses and rude iconography. Time made him an object.

In his real and breathing presence, Sunburst did not step into his hoofprints. He barely matched his stride. Yet being near him in those slim hours leading up to the Pony of Shadow’s defeat, he was absorbed by Star Swirl’s force of will. He saw in him what Stygian beheld for so many wondering years. A powerful, older unicorn stallion who intoned unwavering commands, uniting his friends against a common enemy — an attractive presence indeed.

But not a kind one. His star was not a sun. It was distant and searing, a pinprick in the vacuum of space.

Sunburst wrote that down.

He rose from his desk stool, crossing the floor on legs that had grown stiff from hours of sitting. He trotted to his bedroom, finding the oval brass mirror from one of his rewarding antiquing excursions. Sunburst and his reflection came within an uneasy distance of one another.

So many unicorn stallions of his generation grew out their beards and donned celestial cloaks. It was the unspoken uniform of Celestia's school, inspired by the stallionity Star Swirl represented. One who was wise, to conquer accusations of frailty, austere to conquer accusations of emotionality, and magically vigorous, to conquer accusations of impotence.

Sunburst was learned, but not wise. He was pedantic, but not austere. And he was vigorous only in his ability to speak for hours on subjects of his immense interest.

His coloration was vivid and lacked mystique. He was all soft edges under his hide. His beard never filled in past the end of his chin. How ironic to ever picture himself as an esteemed wizard.

‘You look good like this.’

Stygian had, after all, said this when his robe was removed.

—

“What did you like the most about Star Swirl?”

Stygian’s eyes were swiveling back and forth at a steady pace, reading over Sunburst’s recent translations as though entranced. He blinked, lifting his head. “Sorry, what was it you asked?”

Sunburst swallowed. He could rescind the question. He didn’t. “Just asking what qualities you admired in Star Swirl, that’s all. Er — in case there was anything you forgot in your notes.” A shrinking press of his glasses followed.

There was a gentle rustling as Stygian turned over the page before him, as though to eliminate distraction. His tail flicked, the bobbed bristles striking the plush rug.

“Admired, in the past tense, is accurate.” A heavy sigh rattled him. Stygian turned his doleful eyes on Sunburst. “Because when I think of him now, all of it once was, yet no longer is. Star Swirl was kind. He was a mentor. He was…” Slowly, Stygian’s ears lowered. “Somepony who had been in the world far longer than I who looked upon me as though I were valuable. That is what I hoped to convey in my notes.”

Stygian must have been on the cusp of eighteen when he met Star Swirl, stumbling into his own adulthood while Star Swirl wore his as effortlessly as his impressive beard. Across that chasm of time, the old unicorn somehow saw past its distance and beheld the young stallion on the other side as though he were special.

Throughout Stygian's description, Sunburst held his gaze. “I think I can understand that feeling.”

“However…” Stygian’s jaw trembled, judging the direction of his words. “Star Swirl is not the only stallion who has been exceptionally kind to me.”

Sunburst’s heart was pumping as though having run for miles. He was sitting perfectly still.

Stygian cleared his throat. “Of course — there was Rockhoof, and he was like a brother. Patient and protective to all who knew him. Flash, too, was a true companion, always spirited for friendly competition, though much of it was expressed through jocular taunts. In any case,” he exclaimed, an octave above his usual dulcet tones, “if your curiosity has been satisfied, I really should put forth my best effort to finish reading these pages before the day comes to a close!” He chuckled, the untuned instrument of his laugh sounding as though it popped a string.

“Right!” Sunburst agreed. He pulled a page to himself, wrinkling it beneath his hoof, before shaking his head and jerking it into the air with his magic. “I’ll just make a quick note of what you said! About Star Swirl! And the other Pillars, of course…”

After a prolonged few minutes of awkward reading, there was a perfunctory knock at the door, which swung open before Sunburst could offer his invitation. “Hey Sunburst!” Starlight trotted inside, already changed out of her headmare attire. “Ready to go—?” She halted, blinked, and cheered, “Stygian!”

She hurried to meet him, bending to nuzzle his ear, which left him awed. “I didn’t know you’d still be here! Sunburst told me he’s really been enjoying working on your new biography with you.” She pressed a hoof to her chest. “I am also very eager to read it when it releases, but no rush, of course! Translation takes time and all that!”

Stygian stared at her with wide, rounded eyes, as though he perfected the quintessential look of bemusement a pony could hope to express. “Why, thank you. I’m flattered,” he said with a little smile.

Starlight grinned before turning to Sunburst. “Anyway, sorry for interrupting. I thought you both would have wrapped up by now.” She fixed him with a pointed stare.

“By now?” Sunburst tilted his head. “What do you mean— Oh, sweet Celestia!” He clapped a hoof to his forehead. “The Ponyville Autumn Equinox Festival! That’s tonight!”

Stygian’s head tilted to follow Sunburst’s frenzied scramble around the office, collecting papers and shuffling them toward his desk. “Sorry, Starlight. I didn’t forget! I just got so engrossed in my work,” Sunburst panted.

“Forgive me, as well.” Stygian got to his hooves, looking between them. “I wasn’t aware you had a prior engagement.”

He moved toward the door, but Starlight crossed his path. “Stygian, you should come with us! Maud and Mudbriar will be meeting us there, and I’m going with Trixie, so Sunburst can… he’ll need somepony to talk to!”

Sunburst’s head darted up from behind his desk. “It’s not like I won’t talk with the four of you!”

“I am glad to know the Autumn Equinox is still a celebrated event,” Stygian remarked. A tender sadness shaped his expression. “The Pillars and I used to join with the towns we helped as they ushered in the harvest season with food, music, and merriment. I assume that is all still done as well?”

“Of course! It wouldn’t be a festival otherwise.” Starlight laughed. “There’s going to be local vendors, too. One of which is an — ahem — antique tent somepony really wanted to see!”

“I’m done! I’m ready!” Sunburst hustled out from behind his desk, adjusting his robe with his magic. He came up beside Stygian, resting a light hoof on his shoulder. “I’d love for you to come as well. Only if you want to, of course!”

Stygian chuckled. “It sounds lovely.”

“That’s good! Because, we surely have earned a break.” Sunburst sighed. “You and I have spent a lot of time cooped up here lately.” In the last month, his eyes were fatigued from beholding nothing other than the interior of his school office and his own study. Both of which were suffused with the stuffy air of academic rigor, as though his written words themselves drifted about the room like dust.

Stygian himself appeared as stiff as paper. Sunburst envisioned him joyous under the orange harvest moon, galloping across the crunching leaf-litter to point out a recognizable artifact among the antique tent. Breath billowing in the frigid air, eyes bright and curious, tasting fritters and pumpkin pie, a beating heart in the lush present.

Sunburst smiled. “You ought to experience Ponyville on a special night like this.”

—

“You kept me waiting for a full ten minutes!” Trixie, as ever, presented herself with no small amount of camp. She tossed a hoof over her forehead, wilting. “The Sad and Defeated Trixie is heartbroken. Surely by now the fair has closed down. And she wanted so badly to see it with her marefriend.”

“It’s barely even sunset!” Starlight exclaimed as she galloped full tilt at her. Trixie yelped as she was embraced and slammed into a pile of leaves, a flurry of giggles rising from where the pair disappeared. Maud and Mudbriar were beside them, awaiting staid for the arrival of their party near the edge of the school grounds.

Maud asked in her usual flat tone, “Is there something on my dress? You’re staring.”

She was addressing Stygian, whose open-mouthed scrutiny was assessing Maud and her coltfriend. He jerked to look at the leaf-flecked heads of Starlight and Trixie who reemerged with raucous laughter. Sunburst had spent enough time with Stygian to know when a cautious debate was being conducted behind his eyes.

“You’re all good, Maud,” Sunburst filled in. He gestured grandly to Stygian. “This is my friend, Stygian — soon to be publishing his fourth book! I don’t believe you’ve met before. Stygian, this is Maud and Mudbriar.”

“Technically,” Mudbriar’s hoof lifted, “while we may not have met, we do know you.”

“Starlight told us a lot about you.” Maud approached. She sniffed the collar of Stygian’s cloak, her expression unchanged. Stygian quailed, drawing a hoof to his barrel.

“Hm. Limestone,” she remarked. Her long eyelashes descended in a slow blink. “The dust on your cloak. It’s limestone, with traces of calcium carbonate.”

“You have an impressive nose.” Stygian was still darting astonished glances toward the grinning Starlight and Trixie, the latter pulling the former to her hooves. He leaned back on his haunches, brushing his collar. “It’s likely embedded with dust from Hollow Shades that not even the most acerbic soap could wash out. The columns there were usually formed from limestone.” His shoulders rounded. “If you forgive my asking, what has Starlight said of me?”

“All good things, I promise!” Trixie chirped, trotting back into the circle. She shook herself like a dog, ridding her coat of remaining leaf flecks. A twig flew from her mane and Mudbriar followed its path into the bushes as though it were a shooting star.

Starlight was still effervescent as she followed behind. “Like Sunburst told you, you have friends in Ponyville. I’m sure we’ve all said at least once, ‘When is Sunburst going to get you out of his office and properly introduce us to you!’”

Sunburst snorted. “Well here we are, introductions made. I hope that’s not all we’re good for!”

“Of course not.” Trixie came to Starlight’s side, exchanging a roguish glance with her. “You’re good for getting out and living a little.” She gestured at Stygian. “Plus, I can’t wait to see his reaction to trying the spicy fair food.” She snickered, tail snapping behind her as she turned to head off.

Stygian frowned, raising an eyebrow. “Such a fate continues to befall me at your bidding.”

“Don’t let her convince you into anything. Funnel cake seems more to your liking,” Sunburst advised with a nervous chuckle.

As they approached the festival grounds, scents from the delectable fried fair cuisine filled the air. Up ahead, ponies were sizzling morsels of dough in oil and crushing vats of apples underhoof. A mellow amber glow cast between the tree trunks, a melding of the low sun and strings of glass globe lanterns bordering the path to the heart of the revelry.

Mudbriar and Maud made for silent company. Starlight and Trixie walked the path flank-to-flank, their private conversation susurrating just below what was audible. Stygian’s watchful eye remained on them.

“How are you doing?” Sunburst was compelled to ask.

Stygian blinked. “I’m well, thank you.” He smiled quickly, but it waned. “Though, a part of me feels I’m in a dream.”

Sunburst asked, “A good dream, I hope?”

Again, Stygian’s eyes trailed to Starlight and Trixie. “Yes. A good dream.”

Beside him, Sunburst caught Stygian shivering. Neither his meager cloak or lean build could insulate him from the autumn chill.

“They should have hot apple cider at the festival,” Sunburst leaned to tell him. “Since, you looked cold.”

“Yes, well,” Stygian laughed between chattering teeth, “we can’t all be as big and warm as the sun!”

A small sun may as well have manifested in Sunburst’s belly, the way those words affected him. They also made Trixie cackle from up ahead where she was evidently eavesdropping.

Sunburst shook his mane. “Here,” he said, unclasping his wizard robe. Its teal starscape drifted above Stygian to envelope him. It nested over his own threadbare cloak, closing loosely at his chest. “You need it more than I do.” Sunburst smiled.

Stygian’s hoof traced the clasp in silent awe. It then reached to gently grasp Sunburst’s shoulder. “It’s all right for you to be without it?”

From the way Stygian’s observant eyes traveled to Sunburst’s cutie mark, then to Starlight, Sunburst knew he wasn’t fretting over him catching a chill.

“Of course it’s all right.” Sunburst resumed trotting in step with Stygian. The hem of his cloak brushed Stygian’s fetlocks, but otherwise, the robe’s color and character complimented him. Sunburst said, “After all, it suits you.”

Stygian chuckled. “I am no wizard. But… thank you.” His steps became fluid, no longer stilted with chilled jitters. And for a discreet moment, Stygian’s snout inclined to touch the inside of the high collar, his chest rising and falling with a serene breath.

The warm center in Sunburst’s stomach grew.

—

Reaching the festival, their group of six split off into a trio of pairs. Maud flicked her ear in the direction of a gem vendor and Mudbriar wordlessly followed. Starlight and Trixie pranced in the direction of a mare selling corn dogs. And Sunburst set off in the direction of the antique display, Stygian racing behind to keep up.

“We’ll meet you over there!” Starlight promised. “But Trixie said she needs a snack first!”

The antique tent boasted two broad tables, arranged with a melange of curated artifacts adorned in gilt and polished woodgrain. Inside, it smelled strongly of resin and old paper. Sunburst set upon the relics like a starved pony at a lavish buffet.

“Look at this phoenix feather quill!” Sunburst’s questing hoof trembled over the bright carnelian feather resting in its stand, itching to ignore the ‘Please Do Not Touch’ placard below. “Ponies used these to send clandestine messages to one another in war times. It’s said the magic of the phoenix itself is transferred to the words written with this quill. Any message penned with it will ignite and flake off into ash only a few minutes after the letter is opened.”

Beside him, Stygian beamed. “I used one, once! During the Pillar’s rescue of a band of merchants enslaved by Diamond Dogs, I thought of employing a phoenix feather quill to covertly communicate help was on the way. The disappearing messages prevented the Dogs from knowing of our plan to liberate their captives.”

Sunburst’s eyes gleamed in the tent’s lantern light. “Stygian, you’re incredible! What an act of heroism!”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.” Stygian ran his hoof along the packed earth below. “I wasn’t the one who fended off their captors. Nor did I break their shackles.”

“Now who’s being humble.” Sunburst nudged him. “Your role was instrumental.”

Their admiring gazes coursed through the tent with unceasing vigor. Sunburst put forth a dedicated effort to break away from the captivating ancient treasures and periodically check over his shoulder for Starlight and Trixie. As he did so, it wasn’t his friends he noticed.

Visible from the entrance, a colt cupped his snout, whispering to his mother, before jabbing a hoof in Stygian’s direction. He was transfixed as his mother pulled him along, though Sunburst couldn’t discern if this was from admiration, or disquietude. Other passersby’s heads turned as they passed the antique tent, their stares lingering a little too long. Stygian, to his credit, remained ignorant to the gawking. Sunburst moved to block his visibility from the path.

When he turned back, Stygian was standing at the far corner of the tent, staring at a glass display box. Inside was a pretty shawl, expertly crafted with soft, springy animal fiber. It appeared to halo around Stygian's reflection in the clear glass.

Sunburst came to his side. “I always wonder about who these items once belonged to. That's one of the many reasons I love antiques. Each item has a story. In another life, a pony's hooves held it, or,” he inclined his head to the display box, “it kept somepony warm.”

Stygian’s slow breaths left a faint film of condensation on the glass. “I am made to wonder: why was I rewarded with the future — and not any of them?”

Stygian parted his gaze from the shawl in the case. He approached a little equine doll crafted from hay sprigs, twine tying off the ends to form hooves. Stygian touched its round head. “The world has always possessed good ponies. Ponies whose names will never appear in significant texts; ponies whose generational lines will not remember them. All of them had stories to tell. Most of them could have told them better. I think of this, and ask myself, why was I brought here? When I am not a good pony.” Stygian's head fell. “Why is it my story that is allowed to be known?”

Sunburst’s heart twinged. He touched Stygian’s shoulder. "You are a good pony. And your story is valuable.”

“You’ve told me as much,” Stygian murmured. A breathy chuckle left him. “Sometimes, I wonder if your infatuation with the past lends you that unique outlook, a way of seeing things that other ponies do not possess.”

“You’re right. Not everypony thinks the way I do.” He thought in bursts, hooves shaking. “But — minds and hearts can be convinced. Stories taught me that.”

Sunburst glanced at the encased shawl. “Especially stories about ponies who… felt the world was not a place they could live in.”

Stygian pulled tight the edges of his borrowed starry cloak and asked, “What becomes of those ponies?”

“Well, they change the world,” Sunburst said, as though it were easy. “So that those who come after can live in it.”

He was beside Stygian, close enough to gaze down upon the top of his bobbed mane. Strands of early silver shot between the deep teal.

“And, stories aren’t only about the one telling them,” Sunburst continued. “They’re with you, Stygian. Bright Star and Turning Page. And every other pony you cared about whose story I may still have yet to learn.”

He touched his nose to Stygian’s ear and was surprised when a tentative hoof rose to cup his jaw. Sunburst blinked, but closed his eyes as a tremendous sigh left Stygian’s lungs.

The serenity within the tent was broken by foals' laughter. Stygian turned. A raucous pattering of hooves struck the path outside as two colts tussled. One jingled from the bells dangling off his deep blue wizard’s hat. The other growled, his face concealed by a black mask bearing bulging white eyes and the silhouette of a fanged grin, crooked inky cardboard wings tied to his back.

Nightmare Night was fast approaching. These weren’t the only foals in early costume at the festival. They also weren’t the only foals Sunburst glimpsed among the festival goers that were dressed to resemble Star Swirl — or the Pony of Shadows.

With wide eyes, Stygian watched the foals run away.

“The world,” he said, “is a very large thing to change.”

Sunburst supplied a hurried distraction. His horn ignited, magic discreetly slipping into the pocket of his cloak on Stygian’s back. He reached behind Stygian’s ear – Stygian blinking rapidly at his close touch – and withdrew a bit, shining gold in the tent lamplight.

“Sleight of hoof.” Sunburst giggled. “I dabble in close up magic. Anyway, anything you wanted to buy? Whatever you want is on me.”

Stygian’s breath whistled in his throat, not quite a laugh or wheeze. “You continue to amaze me.” He rubbed the side of his neck, then pressed there too long, as though confirming a pulse. His ears were pulled back.

“Sorry, the line was so long! Find anything interesting?”

Starlight pushed into the tent, levitating a half-eaten corn dog. Her sudden appearance made Stygian jump. His jaw clenched, but Sunburst caught the way the ends of his mane quivered; he was shaking.

“We sure did!” Sunburst answered with a chipper effort. “But, you got here just a bit too late. We were actually planning to grab a treat for ourselves.”

He touched Stygian’s shoulder, rubbing in small circles. “How about some of that hot apple cider I mentioned?”

Stygian gave a jerky nod. Behind his eyes, he was elsewhere.

—

A mare sang a languid ballad up on the festival stage, strumming an acoustic guitar. Ponies swayed below her in pairs, hooves around necks. Dusk was settling, and the glow from the strung globes lent warmth to the blue atmosphere.

Beside a crackling fire pit, Sunburst sat in the grass around a table with his friends, listening to the music. Maud was turning a smooth lump of red jasper between her hooves, Mudbriar still as a log beside her. Trixie leaned back into Starlight’s lap with a self-satisfied grin, her hooves crossed behind her head.

Stygian sat beside Sunburst, a steaming cup of cider held between his hooves. Slowly, he swayed in tempo with the music, his eyes closed. The hard shadows thrown by the fire pronounced his features. For a transient moment, he looked his age.

Under the sweet vocals of the guitarist, Sunburst leaned to Stygian’s ear and asked with a tinge of worry, “Did you enjoy coming here tonight?”

Stygian’s eyes opened, his dark lashes highlighted amber. “Of course I did.” He smiled. “And I’m sorry for earlier. I can’t always predict when… the weight of it all will fall on me.”

“Who could?” Sunburst smiled in return. His hoof raised without any clear direction, an unconscious grasp for the burden still pressing on Stygian’s shoulders. “I’m happy, though. I’m happy that you’re here.”

Stygian chuckled, taking a scanty sip of his cider. “Happy that I attended the festival?”

“About what you said earlier. In the tent.” The wind must have changed; the heat from the fire washed Sunburst’s coat with a directed intensity. “I’m happy you’re here. In this time. I’m grateful to know you.” He extended a hoof, gesturing too swiftly. “And I’m glad you can experience this. Just… the joys of it all.”

Stygian’s head dipped low. He smiled, but the expression was different on him. His brows were upturned, as though bereaved. “Joy is what I missed the most. Not just in Limbo, but when I lived back then. It was a strange kind of missing, because I haven’t known it so purely until now.” He met Sunburst’s eyes, a twinkle in his own. “But in another age, the world will be kind in ways that surprise you.”

Sunburst sat up. “That’s…”

“What was that treat you suggested to me earlier? Funnel cake, was it?” Stygian pressed a hoof to his chin in thought. “I should try some before the night ends.”

“Oh! Of course!” Sunburst sputtered. He rose, leaves shedding from his tail.

“Actually, that sounds great.” Starlight stretched as she slid out from under Trixie. “Come on, Stygian. The lines should be much shorter by now!”

The two of them were trotting down the slope past the throng of dancers before Sunburst could raise a hoof.

“Wow.” Trixie’s voice carried under the singer’s vocals. “You must be some writer, Sunburst. ‘I’m grateful to know you?’ Yawn. Remind me to never hire you as my biographer.”

Sunburst turned to see her reclining in the grass, a hoof propped under her chin. She fixed him with a lidded stare, eyebrows akimbo.

“What?” he shrugged, affronted. Searching, he looked to Maud and Mudbriar, but as ever, they were nonplussed.

Trixie crossed the short distance between them, sitting herself down on the flattened grass Stygian once occupied. “As the esteemed School of Friendship student counselor, I feel obligated to give you some advice.” Her hooves pressed together and she glared at him. “For such a maddeningly obvious pony, your little signals are not getting through.”

Sunburst shook his head. “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

From across the way, Maud piped up with all the subtlety of a rockslide. “You need to tell Stygian you like him.”

That rockslide knocked the breath from Sunburst’s lungs. He pushed up his glasses, his voice thin as he asked, “What gave you that idea?”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “You don’t think Starlight tells us everything you say during your lunch dates with her?” Her voice took on a nasally affect. “‘Stygian's opening up much more than when we first started. I think he really trusts me.’ ‘Stygian laughed at something I said the other day and it made me so happy.’ ‘Stygian made me lemonade and it was the best I ever tasted!’” She cackled. “It’s really adorable.”

"Starlight..." he hissed. For the first time that night, Sunburst mourned the absence of his robe, if only for his inability to shrink behind its collar.

“Look, I…” He stammered before gaining the wherewithal to find his way back to coherence. “It’s not that simple.”

Sunburst was unprepared for the sadness that washed him at the admittance of that small yet true phrase.

“Stygian says so many things to suggest that I'm the first stallion who’s been kind to him in the modern age. And I try to be, more than I’ve tried for anypony I’ve known.” His mournful gaze fell between the dark gaps in the crushed grass. “I'm trying to show him a kinder world is possible. The one he lived in was cruel to ponies like him. Far too cruel in ways that were both loud, and quiet.”

The slow backward tilt of Trixie's ears was a stiff acknowledgment.

Sunburst continued. “When a stallion loved another stallion then, he didn't say it out loud. He didn't know who was listening. He didn't know if the other stallion himself could be trusted with such a vulnerable secret. There was a subtle language to the negotiations of hated love.” He sighed. It was bitter. “And if my signals have been inconspicuous, it's because I'm trying to speak a language he would understand.”

“I know my history, Sunburst. And that is all very conscientious of you,” Trixie replied. “But if you really want him to believe the world is kinder now, you need to prove it.”

Sunburst’s head hung, his glasses sliding precariously to the end of his snout.

Trixie swatted him with her tail. “Come on, Sunburst! You know I'm right.”

“How is it so easy for you?”

That little signal came through. Trixie assumed a regal posture.

“Well, I'm a performer; a public figure. And now, a counselor, guiding young minds from all corners of Equestria and beyond! Being silent, that doesn't just affect me anymore.” She pressed a hoof to her chest with a knowing smile. “When ponies know I'm a trans mare in a wonderfully happy relationship with my gorgeous marefriend, they feel less alone if they relate to me at all. But of course, I can't imagine a pony who wouldn't want to relate to The Great and Powerful Trixie.”

Her head tossed, the silver crescent of her forelock gleaming. “From the way Stygian was staring at Starlight and I today, we definitely made an impression. Just think about what you could do for him if you were a little bit more honest. I'm just saying.”

Sunburst grumbled, “You're still making it sound easy.”

“Because that wasn't the hard part!" She smacked a hoof to her forehead. "Finally working up the courage to ask Starlight out? That was hard. And it wasn't based on any worry about other ponies judging us. It was Trixie getting in the way of herself. Because, despite my obvious good looks and winning personality, I am regrettably only equine. And just like anypony,” she gripped Sunburst by the shoulders and exclaimed, “I know rejection hurts!”

She let go and a rare softness came over her face. “Isn't that what you’re really afraid of?”

The silent, curious eyes of Maud and Mudbriar were on him, lit from behind by the wavering fire. Yet to Sunburst, their fixed gazes were not unlike the punitive stare of his former principal, leaning over the desk to intone, “I’m sorry, but you’ve failed your final exams. It seems we’ve made a mistake in admitting you.” They were the darting glances from Starlight as he stepped off the train to Ponyville for the first time, primed to chase after novelty rather than allow her enough time in his presence to decide she did not forgive him his absence. They were his mother’s eyes, puffy and red when he visited home to console her in the days after Dad moved out, her words rife with disbelief that love could exist only to be ripped away.

“I know how to make a good first impression,” Sunburst murmured. “But when the future arrives, it doesn’t reward me.”

To Trixie, that must have come across as cryptic nonsense, for she sighed and shuffled back to her spot beside Maud, muttering, “I can’t be faulted for trying,” as she went.

The distant crowd was blurry. Sunburst pushed up his glasses, spotting a familiar lilac coat under the shadow of the stage. Starlight was not in line for funnel cake.

Stygian was with her, a little smear of stars. Sunburst saw his mouth moving, Starlight nodding in the way she always did when she was truly attentive. Their conversation paused, the faraway tension between them sweeping across the grass to strike Sunburst in the gut. Then, Starlight made an exclamation, lunging to wrap her hooves around Stygian in a warm hug. Stygian’s face was visible over her shoulder. His eyes were closed. He was laughing, weightless.

—

“Sorry, took longer than I thought again!” Starlight was giggling as she trotted up the slope, a steaming paper plate in her turquoise aura. She set it down on the table — then jerked it toward herself as Trixie lunged to take a wide bite. They laughed in unison, settling in to share it.

The grass whispered beside Sunburst and he turned to see Stygian arrive and sit, as silent as a ghost. His horn ceased glowing, a hot funnel cake on the table between them. “Half is yours,” he said, “as a ‘thank you.’ And, because I doubt I could finish it all even if I tried!” He chuckled.

Sunburst’s smile reached up into his eyes. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

In peaceful alternation, they took turns pulling free sweet morsels of dough with their magic, the music light in the chill air. Stygian’s eyes were closed as he ate, hooves tucked below the warmth of Sunburst’s draping robe. Powdered sugar dusted the end of his snout and his tongue poked out gingerly to sweep it away. His eyes met Sunburst’s, creased with silent laughter.

Sunburst took a slow bite, but it wasn’t the cake he was trying to savor.

Dusk melted into night. The dancing crowd thinned and the singer was on her last encore. The funnel cake reduced to powdery crumbs, Stygian was caught between sleep and wakefulness, head nodding into his hoof, his robe rising and falling with slow breaths.

Sunburst crept to Starlight, who once again had Trixie’s drowsy head in her lap. He leaned to her ear and whispered under the bright vocals, “What were you and Stygian talking about?”

Her ear twitched. She tipped her head back. “Nosy Sunburst,” she giggled, and booped him.

“It isn’t my story to tell.”

—

Sunburst walked Stygian home. Ponyville was tranquil at night, lit on every corner, but Stygian had the longest way to go, his path bordering the Everfree.

They talked the whole way there, about the festival, and their ideas, and nothing at all, really. They talked just to hear the lift and fall of one another’s voices.

And too soon, the door to Stygian’s old-fashioned home came into view.

“Well,” he said, like it was the most aching word he could utter, “this is me. But, you already knew that.” He chuckled, turning. “Thank you for accompanying me home, Sunburst.”

Stygian stood in the threshold, hind hooves inside, forelegs on his stoop. Behind him, the dark mouth of his kitchen yawned.

“Of course! Any time!” Sunburst smiled with all of his teeth, pushing up his glasses. He cleared his throat. “So. Uh. I guess I’ll see you when you’ve got the next part of the manuscript ready?”

“Right.” Stygian’s eyes found something of evident interest in his yard. “That should be quite soon.”

A silence enveloped them, punctuated by each of their shuffling hooves.

“Earlier, by the fire,” Sunburst blurted, “you said something that — it was familiar. It reminded me of something.”

Stygian blinked. “Did I? What was it?”

“Inne alt naertrin, del weorld…” The Old Ponish fumbled past his tongue. Sunburst massaged his temple. “I have this antique piece of scroll hanging in my office. It starts with the same phrase.”

Stygian’s big eyes caught the surrounding lamplight with ease. “That’s right,” he said with slow recollection, as though rising into a dream state. “I’ve seen it before. The words must have been in my mind. Their message, after all, is beautiful.”

His slender throat bobbed with a stiff swallow and when he spoke again, his gentle voice was breathy. “What made you think of it now?”

In the wide warm dark, anything could have happened. Sunburst’s breath clouded the air, a sharp and sudden pulse beating in his throat. Sweat rolled down his nape, uninhibited by the cold. He could scarcely see past the rising condensation on his glasses.

If Stygian invited him inside, Sunburst would have dove headlong into that welcoming darkness.

But the responsibility was left to him.

“I…” He gulped. “I must've had translating on my mind, I guess! You know, since we were planning for our next meeting.” He inhaled, taking a step backward. “As always, send me a letter, when... when you’re ready.”

Stygian’s ears drooped like senescing leaves. He blinked, expression flattening. Behind his eyes, he woke up.

“Right. Will do.” Stygian moved to head inside, yet paused. He shivered, and with a dreadful parting, lifted Sunburst’s robe from his back. “Nearly forgot this.”

It levitated in the space between them like a specter. Sunburst took it with a quivering hoof.

“Oh. Right.” Sunburst balled the robe at his chest. “Goodnight, Stygian.”

“Goodnight, Sunburst,” was said like an elegy as the door closed.

—

Sunburst didn’t turn on the lights when he returned home.

Careening through the dark interior, he stumbled into bed with the enfeebled resolve of an ill pony. He buried his head beneath his hooves, robe still clutched tight under them. The soft fibers pressed to his nose.

It smelled like sugar and smoke and apple cider — and something warm he should've had a name for.

Saek-Orlae Firen (An Ill-Fated Desire)

“I messed up, Starlight.”

Sunburst hadn’t slept last night. His hide felt too tight on his body, the sheets mussed with fitful turning. In the violent daylight at the cafe, he was wretched.

Starlight, to her credit, looked at him directly. “What happened? I thought you went home with Stygian last night?”

“I walked him there. I didn’t go home with him.” Sunburst’s hoof pressed hard into the white blaze below his horn. “I didn’t. Because I’m a coward.”

His teeth were bared in a grimace, eyes closed tight. He didn’t see Starlight’s expression when she said, “Sunburst, don’t beat yourself up. You’re seeing him again in a few days, right?”

“Why would he want to see me again? I walked away. All I ever do is walk away. He was right there in the doorway in that house he lives in all alone. And if he'd just asked me to stay the night, I would’ve…” Haltingly, Sunburst’s head tipped back. The sun hurt his eyes, white hot behind the cold skin of ozone. “I would’ve said yes.”

An uncomfortable pause wedged between their conversation as the waiter came by to take their orders. It allowed Sunburst a minor reprieve.

“I’m surprised he didn’t,” Starlight said as the aproned stallion trotted away, though she offered nothing more.

Sunburst’s brow furrowed. “Did you plan this? What did he say last night?”

A mild alarm overcame her at the intensity of his stare. “‘Planned’ is a bit of an extreme word, here. You know we've wondered about the two of you.” She sighed. “And I told you last night. What he said isn’t my story to tell.”

“Please, Starlight. If you can gossip to Trixie and Maud about me, you can at least tell me this. What did Stygian say?”

“I'm not going to tell you.” Starlight’s lips pulled back. She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, it was in the old tones of her role as a counselor. “You know, he didn't even ask me to keep it a secret. Because he trusts you. You have to see that. He trusts you enough to believe you wouldn’t demand me, your best friend, to tell you what he said to me in confidence.”

Sunburst was chagrined by how right she was.

“And don’t drag your old guilt into this. You’ll only hurt your own feelings.”

Sunburst’s ears jolted forward. “What do you mean?”

Starlight pantomimed, waving her hoof like a flapping mouth. “‘All I ever do is walk away.’ As though I don’t know exactly what that means.”

“Well… it’s true. It was the worst mistake I ever made.” He knocked his hooves together atop the wrought iron tabletop. “And knowing that, I should be doing things differently this time.”

Starlight was shaking her head. “Stygian isn’t me.” When Sunburst didn’t meet her eyes, she repeated, firmer, “He isn’t me. As much as I empathize with him, we led two entirely different lives. We made two entirely different, yet nonetheless special, connections with a wonderful unicorn named Sunburst. Who I admire for his aspirations to grow from the choices he made that… caused hurt. Not just to me, but to himself.”

She reached across the table, touching the white sock at the end of his hoof. “But do not disrespect me by casting me as a martyr in your own self-pity. I’m happy! Happier than I’ve ever been.” She smiled in the truest way. “And if all you’re doing for Stygian is just a way to make up for your perceived slights against me, then… I’m not surprised you walked away. But the way you talk about him tells me it’s something different.”

The waiter arrived with their drinks, setting a chilly glass of lemonade in front of Sunburst. His magical grasp was unsteady as he dropped in a pair of sugar cubes, a grainy cloud turning with the stirring straw.

When he took a sip, it still wasn’t enough. He’d tasted sweeter.

—

Ight likhen thouth varg em vys astandan. Dae kumosi naertrin.

(I would like you to work on this next. It comes later.)

That was all Stygian's next letter said.

Sunburst laid a hoof on the fresh envelope at his desk like a caress, pressing down on its unusual lightness. When he gained the courage to slip the pages free, there were only three. Three delicate pieces of soul.

The sentences written there were blunt in heavy quillstrokes. And as Sunburst transcribed them for viewing by modern eyes, he felt like he was stripping them of their skins, exposing raw nerves, more butcher than artist.

Hollow Shades was accursed, but it's where the Pillars and I built our fortress.

The town was in possession of a great library, once. A compendium of knowledge to edify its residents. Pilgrims traveled to its halls to remedy maladies no herb could soothe. When the mind ached, knowledge was a panacea.

For years, I read there. When a new monster arose, I studied its weaknesses until all the Pillars knew where their talents would strike it hardest. No amount of reading or talent prepared them for the one monster only time could defeat.

In the town center was a well. And below it was a cistern. And within was armageddon.

At least, that's what legend claimed. Ascetics from a long forgotten faith once guarded the Well of Shade, sealing it over with a rock. Their ancestors inherited their paranoia but not their piety. Something was below us and it was rotten. That’s all they knew. That is all they had to know.

I always thought it was cruel to build a town around an anathema. If it was so despised, why did it occupy the heart of its world? Send the thing that is different and wrong away if it is so unfit to exist. At least then, it wouldn’t know how much it was hated.

I wish that’s what Star Swirl did when I fell out of his light.

This was before my journey to Ponehenge. That was merely his second betrayal.

It was not a gradual descent. In one moment I was among the stars. Up there, one feels immortal. But stars, too, die. And in their terminal blast they kill you.

I told Star Swirl something I never should have spoken aloud. It wasn’t a curse, but he received it as one.

It brought to mind Anvilhorn. Another stallion who knew only how to look at me when I was somepony else. And to ever associate him with Star Swirl made me ill.

Everything, I saw differently now. Star Swirl’s presence became cold and I glimpsed the black hole within him. But when he smiled, so too did the Pillars. And why wouldn’t they? When they were the town. They embodied the virtues of true stallions and mares.

That is when I stopped feeling among them. I was like a body left discarded on the floor, stepped over.

In the quiet midnight, Hollow Shades existed between spaces. The veil between what went seen and unseen was thin.

And as I walked the streets in the blackness, I heard him speak for the first time.

When I pressed my ear to the stone over the well, I should have foreseen that the voice below would have been kinder than any of those above.

After all, I had known this darkness before.

Laying down his quill, Sunburst pulled off his robe and clutched it to his chest, holding it long and hard, like a scream.

Beneath his nose, it didn’t smell like anything at all.

His gaze dropped below the frames of his glasses, beholding the blurry turquoise stars in a sea of navy, flashing in their flowing vacuum of space.

A bold inspiration struck him, robe tossed aside. With quivering hooves, he pulled out a sheet of parchment. What he wrote wasn't a translation, but a letter, stuffing anger behind pleasant words.

Star Swirl,

I hope you've been settling well in Canterlot. I also hope that this message is received graciously, as we haven't seen one another since you first arrived in this era.

I'd like to meet with you. It isn't urgent, but to me, it feels that way. I'm currently helping Stygian write his next book. I'd be grateful to sit down for an interview with you, just so I may represent you accurately. I want to hear your perspective on the time you spent with him.

Sincerely,
Sunburst

P.S. The former Royal Crystaller of the Crystal Empire, honorably relieved of duty, and current Vice Principal of Twilight Sparkle's School of Friendship.

P.P.S. I was the one who translated your journal.

The letter rolled and was ferried away on Canterlot’s dragonfire network. A restless energy sung in Sunburst’s gut, hoping the old wizard could be cornered.

—

To be in Stygian's presence was like gazing into an open wound. At least, that was how Sunburst felt on that following revision day.

For the first time, they met at Sunburst’s house. Like a peace treaty, he invited Stygian there, rather than the school office. He didn’t even clean up his study, hoping its honest state of disarray would appear as an act of contrition.

Stygian sat across the desk, reading with somber focus. The page was held in front of his eyes, a square of flat, blank off-white where his face should have been.

When finished, he dropped it to the desk, revealing eyes encircled in shadows.

“Looks correct,” was all he offered.

With ginger nudges, Sunburst’s magic evened the stack of pages. He opened his mouth, the air cold on his teeth as he sucked in a breath. “You look tired.”

Stygian’s eyelids drooped, as though submitting to that acknowledgement like a command. “So do you.”

Sunburst pushed up his glasses and ventured, lamely, “Were you up late writing this?”

Stygian’s posture was at an unnatural tilt, all his meager weight supported by his hindquarters. His forehooves trembled, knocking at the wrists. He looked askance. “Among other things.”

It hurt to see him this way. The desk couldn’t have spanned more than a two foot divide between them but that distance was abysmal.

Sunburst ached to ask what Stygian told Starlight a night ago. He ached to ask what he told Star Swirl an era ago.

Instead, his question was, “Is there any more you could tell me about the Shadow?”

Stygian’s shaken gaze lifted. Sunburst’s heartbeat hammered up his windpipe.

“What do you want to know?” Stygian asked.

“Whatever you’re willing to say.”

Stygian tugged at the loop on his cloak. He rubbed his neck. There appeared to be a powdery dark stain on the underside of his hoof.

“I’m sure you recall I left little to the imagination in my book. The ghostwriter encouraged me to send all the material I could on the Pony of Shadows, as it was sure to captivate with its gloomy mystique.” His stare was vacant as he said this, lips twitching back in a weak sneer. His eyes flitted closed. “When ponies pick up that book, they will no doubt have all their cravings for the sinister sated.”

“In the most hokey prose possible.” Sunburst found a reason to force a laugh. When Stygian’s expression went unchanged, Sunburst winced and tried again. “What I mean to say is, like everything else in that book, its descriptions are so… lacking. In anything real.”

Stygian softened. “So you’ve said.” He took a steadying breath. “The Shadow was an ancient, vile spirit. Long before I was alive, it was locked away. It could only ever be contained. Never destroyed.”

“I remember you said it welcomed you when no nopony else did,” Sunburst said, encouraging gently. “What did that mean for you?”

“I was in a right place, with a wrong desire.” A raw desperation claimed him as he shrugged a hoof and beseeched, “What else is there to say that I didn’t write? Once more, I opened a grave. I trespassed on the resting place of an ancient evil and the rest, you know. You were there. You saw the Shadow.”

Sunburst had. What he saw had been a towering equine form in the amplitude of its stallionity. Bulky, booming, virile — a messy cobbling of power made manifest. Indiscriminately, it appropriated the visage of an alicorn in its hasty assemblage, willing even to usurp a female likeness of sovereign power to assert its might.

“Was that always what it looked like?”

Stygian flinched, as though deemed culpable of a crime. “How would I know?” And then, “I only saw it clearly, once. After that, it was all around me. So I suppose I was always seeing it.”

Sunburst did what he hadn’t the night of the festival. He grasped tight to responsibility and bravery and made a frantic marriage of them. On the floor, Me and My Shadow had been discarded after his searching final pass rewarded him with disappointment. But there was a single page he dog-eared.

The book rested on the desk, a watery flapping of quick turning pages animated by Sunburst’s magic. He opened it to the decisive line.

“‘The Shadow spoke to me with a voice like no other. I was drawn into its embrace like that of a lover,” Sunburst read. He swallowed. “That line… I’ve wondered about it.”

Stygian’s jaw hung open. Then, he fritzed into alarm.

“That is not what I wrote!”

In a sonorous voice Sunburst hadn’t heard since the antique shop, Stygian insisted, “An ill-fated desire. I was drawn into its thrall like an ill-fated desire. That is the truth of my words and she twisted them.”

He pressed both hooves to his forehead, his blunt bangs folding in strips. “Ponies read that. Like a…”

“Lover.” Sunburst’s ears hung low. “I like that word better.”

When Stygian’s face did not lift from his concealing hooves, Sunburst leaned over the desk, his head tilted, and asked, “Did you… read your book, Stygian?”

“Clearly, I should have.” He kneaded his pastern, flexing the joint. “What a fool I am, making this mistake again.”

Sunburst frowned. “Mistake?”

“Trust, Sunburst!” Stygian grasped with upturned hooves. “The thing I invite despite its continued insistence on hurting me!”

Sunburst flinched as though lashed. Then, he steadied. “Have I hurt you?”

“What?”

“You’ve trusted me.” Sunburst met his eyes. “You’ve trusted me a lot. Have I hurt you?”

Stygian became gentle again, desperation melting from him. Sunburst knew he was honest when he answered, “No. You haven’t.”

He went on. “In fact, I have put my faith in many in this age and have yet to be scorned, even as I struggled to believe them. Starlight. Princess Twilight and her friends. They assured me I would all be all right. And…” The conclusion to his sentence was left unended.

“If anything, it's I who will inevitably let them down. When I was saved, Princess Twilight told me she wanted me to be Stygian again. I’m doubtful I can fulfill that request. Stygian is a rather difficult thing to be.” He looked down, past the floor, into the earth. “After all, his bones ought to have been laid to rest a millennium ago.”

It was neither his self-referential use of ‘thing,’ nor the recurring reminder of time’s division that made the hairs on Sunburst’s nape rise in slow unease. It was the neutral voice Stygian used to evoke his own death.

At Sunburst’s expression, Stygian frowned and said, “It’s not such a sad thing.”

“No. It is.” Sunburst’s concern was undisguised. “It is.”

He stepped out from behind the desk. “Do you want to take a break?”

Stygian started. “Do you?”

“If I did, I would have asked myself.” Sunburst pointed his hoof toward his face, waving it slowly. “‘Do you need a break, Sunburst?’ No, I’m okay.” He looked sidelong. “But, I am worried about Stygian.”

With the same hoof, he reached out, smiling sadly. “Can I help you feel better?”

Stygian stared at the offering of his aiding grasp, his jaw trembling. He took it, lowering from the stool.

“I just want to do something nice with you again,” he admitted, crestfallen.

“That can be arranged,” Sunburst announced.

Stygian showed a weary smile. When he lifted his hoof from Sunburst’s, a faint gray stain was left on the cream coat of his sock.

It looked like soot.

—

Starlight gifted Sunburst with the weathered Dragon Pit box she produced during his first trip to Ponyville. It returned with him when he became a resident of the town. But it remained closed until now. Not even he and Starlight opened it again.

“Oh. It’s like marbles, or knucklebones,” Stygian commented, watching as Sunburst arranged the game board, depositing the tinkling pieces beside it.

Sunburst chuckled, unfolding the box that formed the base of the pit. “It’s a board game. Which, was derived from what you’re describing. So in part, you are correct.”

He lay on the floor before the assembled board, a relaxed leg kicked out behind him. His hoof clicked on the tile as he patted for Stygian to join him.

Stygian folded his legs beneath his barrel, making himself compact. He inclined his head to Sunburst, smiling with brows furrowed. “You’ll have to show me how it’s played.”

Summary given, Stygian lifted the die in his azure aura, turning it in a slow rotation. He dropped it with a light toss. Sunburst nodded at him to move his blue dragon along the path, and the game commenced, each of them cycling through turns in a peaceable quiet.

Sunburst was the first to break it. “You know, I made a large version of this game, once. It was interactive; my friends and I played as the dragons. It was something special I did for Starlight, when she was trying to reconnect with me after I’d been a bad friend.” He rolled the die; it clattered on a measly one. Sunburst moved his piece. “I’m good at gestures. I’m not as good with words.”

Stygian chuckled, spinning the die. “I have good reason to refute that. I’ve read your words and they’re lovely.”

“They were your words first.”

Another stretch of quiet elapsed. Stygian’s gaze was low as he said, “You speak of Starlight as though you adore her. But, she’s…”

“She’s with Trixie. And, while we love one another, we were never meant to be in love,” Sunburst confirmed. A lightness took hold of him at that direct, spoken acknowledgement. In the company of the game, he was unconcerned and free, buoyed by sentimentality. “After all, Starlight likes mares. And, I like stallions.”

The admission must have reached Stygian’s ears like the enigmatic nonsense of dreamspeak. He gave a slow blink, thoughts turning under his gaze like the rolling of Dragon Pit’s marble, spinning in its circuit, headed for the drop.

Thunk. Tiny hinges squeaked as the tile below the blue dragon piece fell out.

Like a rite of passage, the releasing of the trapdoor made its impression of hilarity on Stygian. His hooves shot out, his eyes went wide, and he let out a gleeful, rasping laugh that Sunburst never heard before.

It was adorable.

Stygian hovered an admiring hoof over the hollow trapdoor square, eyes squinted in endearment. In too high of a pitch he gasped, “That is so charming!”

Sunburst clenched his teeth in a grin. “You should have seen my first reaction. I don’t think we ever found the green dragon piece after I flipped the entire board!”

Stygian was still letting out breathy chuckles, hiccuping in the departing throes of sudden joy. He wore it well, the look of a pony who, for the moment, was carefree.

Time momentarily thinned. Sunburst was washed by an achy nostalgia for an experience he never had — a strange sort of missing.

And he said, “I wish we’d played together as foals.”

A shimmery gasp of magic sounded above. A scroll dropped, catching Sunburst on the nose.

Sunburst lifted it to read, eyes scanning rapidly, opening wide.

“Who is it from?” Stygian’s airy voice asked.

The scroll rolled up tight, the addressing name sealed from Stygian’s wondering eyes. Sunburst pulled it close.

“Somepony I need to talk to.”

—

As it turned out, Star Swirl wasn't as difficult to corner for an interview as Sunburst believed.

The return letter was enthusiastic, inviting Sunburst to meet with Star Swirl at his own residence. Sunburst’s younger self would have fainted dead away to receive such a privilege. Now, he just wondered if this gesture was a nicety.

Sunburst ensured Stygian returned home safely for the night. There was no tension or longing curiosity of whether they would cross the threshold together. Instead, Sunburst took Stygian’s hoof, and full of meaning, told him to be kind to himself. He then wrote to Trixie, asking her to pay him a visit that night. Her return message was in no short supply of colorful language at his request of a twilight hour favor, but she agreed — and Sunburst knew she was in the position to say the right things, should Stygian need to hear them.

Before a restless sleep, Sunburst pored over Star Swirl’s letter, readying himself. The next morning, he boarded a train, the landscape rushing by in the reflection of his glasses as he stared at the approaching mountainside.

Entering his scholastic Canterlot home, the first thing Sunburst noticed about the wizened stallion was that he was no longer angry. There was an amicable twinkle in his eyes and an avuncular jaunt in his step as he crossed the floor to welcome in Sunburst and entertain him in his study.

“You wrote to me at the right time. I’ve just come back from a delightful trip to Las Pegasus.” Under Star Swirl’s wide-brimmed hat, the long waves of his mane were starker, as though brightened by the crisp autumn sun he no doubt enjoyed. “In any case, let me bring us something to drink before we endeavor on this quest of personal history.”

From the kitchen, Star Swirl levitated a bottle and two glasses. As his white aura lifted, the bottle’s pale green contents became visible, swirling with thin leaves.

“It’s elderflower, lemon, rosemary, and honey. A bit late in the season to serve it chilled, but I have just come in from a warmer climate.” He chuckled. “I hope you enjoy this recipe.”

A fond smile came to Sunburst’s face as a glass was poured for him. “Actually, it’s one of my favorites.”

The sweet drink flowed into the second glass. “So, you and Stygian are working on the next installment of his authorial repertoire. You know, I read his third book while on my trip.” Star Swirl finished pouring and turned, an affronted hoof on his chest. “He characterized me so poorly!”

“Well, that’s because it wasn’t him doing the characterizing,” Sunburst said. “He hired a ghostwriter. Did you know about that?”

Star Swirl blinked and shook his head, bells jingling. “I cannot say that I did,” he said. And then, “That explains a lot.”

Sunburst leaned in. “What do you mean?”

Star Swirl took a somber pull on the cordial. His eyes were closed when he returned it to the table, the wet ends of his mustache curling over his frown. “I was expecting to find a very different depiction of myself in Stygian’s autobiography. I knew how I appeared through his eyes. I have always known. And when I didn’t see that represented, it made me… sad. I was ready to confront my greatest failing. I’m surprised he wasn’t.”

A funny grin came to him. “After all, who doesn’t get a thrill out of bashing their betrayers in literature? He ought to have dressed me down until there was nothing left but meager scraps of beard. Or, would that be the first thing to go, hm?”

Sunburst couldn’t comprehend how any of this was amusing the old wizard. He inhaled, cutting to the chase. “Stygian’s been much more honest in the writing he sent me. In fact, the reason I’m here is because recently… he wrote that a long time ago, he told you something in confidence and was hurt by your reaction.” Elbows on the table, Sunburst steepled his hooves flat together, resting his chin on their peak. “I want to know what it was.”

Only now did Star Swirl begin to sober. A glaze of recognition overcame his eyes and he sighed, true and deep. “Ah. That was when we all lived together, in Hollow Shades. Those were some of my happiest years. Until now that is. I no longer have to quantify happiness from scarcity. I’m rich with it today.”

Sunburst’s lips dropped into a condemning grimace. “If only we could all be so lucky.”

The comment wicked off Star Swirl. He lifted his head, beard curling. “In any case, my tale I will tell.”

Star Swirl let out a rumbling cough, clearing his aged throat, but before he began, Sunburst raised his hoof. “Wait — may I record you? You know. For the book.”

Star Swirl blinked rapidly. “Ah, that is new magic isn’t it? Of course, by all means. I’m rather delighted to see it in action.”

From Sunburst’s horn, a pale golden ball dropped to hover an inch from the tabletop. It susurrated with magical energy.

“All right,” Sunburst said, eyes fixed on the old wizard. “It’s ready.”

The sphere pulsed in time with Star Swirl’s voice as he began. “I was the first of the eventual Pillars Stygian ever met. For a few years, it was just the two of us, traveling lands that would become Equestria. He didn’t talk extensively of why he left his home village, but I knew a hurting pony when I saw one. I taught him skills I was privileged to have acquired in my later age — things I wish a mentor would have offered to a younger me.

“This vision of what I was to Stygian was clear to me. However, I don’t believe our eyes ever saw the same.”

A beleaguered sigh dredged up from somewhere low within his ancient chest. “I was a different pony, then. A wizard who fought monsters to relieve battles left undefeated in his past. I had become ruthless, preoccupied with survival. I had lost my capacity to listen with a caring ear.

“Stygian must have been feeling the loneliness creep in. He’d known a short, dedicated life with the Pillars and I. We were his world. But the world itself needed us more. Our renown had become recognized among courts across the land. I was well into my mentorship of Celestia and Luna. Clover was like yet another son. There were so many ponies who were special to me. That was no longer Stygian’s exclusive title.

“So, one day, he made a confession.”

Star Swirl paused with immense gravity. His eyes lifted, bags pronounced beneath them where the hide of the lids was thin. He took a deep breath and said, “He had amorous affections for me.”

There was not a word in Ponish, new or old, for bittersweet validation. Sunburst adjusted his glasses, his nostrils flaring with a firm exhale.

Star Swirl’s gaze remained on the far wall, lost to the distant past. “I remember how he looked as he said it. He was terrified. Not excited, not joyous. Terror — that is not the emotion a pony should feel when admitting to love.”

Sunburst’s breathing picked up pace. “Of course he was terrified. A secret like that in your time… it was an incredible risk. He couldn’t predict how you’d react.”

Star Swirl let out a single, embittered chuckle. “Oh, react I did. I told him a number of unabashedly cruel things. I said, ‘I cannot hear that. I cannot know that about you.’ Because he had pulled back the veil. He was no longer the younger version of myself I had longed to be shown gentle guidance. He was the one I could not bear to look at.”

Throughout his story, Sunburst’s ears had laid flat against his neck. Steadily, they began to lift.

With a stunning clarity that could only come from an eon of introspection, Star Swirl said, “I was so willing then to submit to absolutes. All I saw was his differentness. Maybe a part of me rationalized that if I turned from him, if I commanded him to repress himself, I would be sparing him from ponies who would do far worse than I.

“When you’ve lived as long as I have, you know the foulest of horrors are committed not by monsters, but ponies. I could tell you stories, certainly. To repeat any of them now would be gratuitous. They would be heartbreaking and offer little value to either of us.”

A light jingle sweetened the air. Star Swirl turned back to Sunburst, a glint playing in his eyes. “Besides, I don’t live in that world anymore. And an old stalluvji like me is just grateful to be in a future filled with so much… love.”

The following silence was loud. A continuous, shimmering hum from the recording spell attempted to fill it.

“You were an inspiration, you know,” Sunburst murmured. “For those of us who felt different. Stallions who never wanted to be something like a guard, or an athlete, or… a blacksmith.”

“So I’ve been told.” Star Swirl folded his hooves rather pleasantly. “I have also read all the rumorous books written about me. The ones who remarked on my lack of wife or offspring. Those that speculated about my relationship with Commander Hurricane — how bold to presume. And, the texts that deemed me a stalluvji outright. Well, I say, if they insist on that term, then it belongs to me now!” He clapped his hooves together in a seizing motion, laughing brashly.

Sunburst was nonplussed. His gaze was low. “Why didn’t you help him?”

Star Swirl’s laughter faded. He sighed, a pained rattle in his breath. “When you’re surrounded by hate, some of it slips into you, masquerading as pain. It becomes dirty and festering, until you forget that the ugly new hate you now possess was ever pain to begin with.”

He reached a hoof partway across the table, easing the distance. “That doesn’t excuse what I did. You’re right, Sunburst. Stygian should have been helped. But I couldn’t have been the one to do it. I had nothing but wrong answers for him.”

Ill at ease, he said in pleading tones, “Stygian was just shy of thirty when we banished him and ourselves to Limbo. He was the youngest of all of us. Far younger than I'd been in a long time — not that either of those things matter much any more. It would not have been right for me to reciprocate his infatuation, to take advantage of his trust. Not when he never had the chance to know a pony who could love him without the long burden of our ten years behind us.”

That didn’t exactly make Sunburst feel better. “There were other ways to be kind. He didn’t need reciprocation. He needed understanding.”

Star Swirl continued to wear an air of remorse. “If I ever offered him kindness in all of my misplaced cruelty, there was but one. I kept his secret, just as I kept mine. I wrote a broader story in my journals, one where he was merely power-mad. A vague truth. Not a complete lie. He still took the artifacts. He still traveled to Ponehenge. History will remember him turning out of envy. It didn’t need to know the complicated underbelly.

“Because when I rebuffed him, it was the Shadow he turned to for comfort. I know this, because I heard it, too.”

Sunburst’s chin jerked up, keenly unnerved.

“We never should have built our fortress in that accursed town. But as always, I felt the pull of duty. Knowing what it held, I wanted the Pillars and I to be the first defense against the Darkness, should it wake. But it had never been asleep. At night, it whispered. It told you things you wanted to hear. It looked like what you wanted to see.”

A shade of the Star Swirl that Sunburst remembered came to the fore when he said, “I avoided it like death. I trained my mind against its ill desires. I looked upon what it showed me and allowed it to move through me.”

His head dropped, preparing for a terrible admittance.

“But when Stygian crashed through our door, wreathed in darkness, it was clear he hadn’t looked away. I knew exactly what the Shadow showed him when the monster he transformed into was all that he never was — and all that he never had.”

Sunburst covered his mouth, choked by the acknowledgement.

“My efforts yielded their own futility,” Star Swirl continued. “Because in the end, when Limbo closed in, I was just as lonely. Of course, I thought of the Pillars, lost to this fate with me. I thought of my students. But there was a space left beside me. A stallion I never met, a love I never had. And that was my fault.”

He smiled, faintly. “At least now, I’ve won the future. And that no longer has to be true.”

With that, Star Swirl said no more. This evident conclusion reached, Sunburst completed the spell. The golden sphere lifted, a story swirling within, and was pulled up into the tip of his horn.

He stared at the old wizard opposite him. “I'm going to show him this recording.”

Star Swirl nodded. “Of course. He’s owed that.”

Bitterness still rolled under Sunburst’s hide. “I think you should meet with him some time. It won’t be enough just to hear your voice. He has to see that you meant it.”

“You cannot possibly know how many times I’ve told myself to do just that. I don’t know how many more years I have. A decade, perhaps? Two, if I’m lucky. With that knowledge, all I’ve wanted is to enjoy my new life, to meet new ponies, and know love I’ve yet to experience.” Star Swirl’s rapt far gaze suggested he was already in pursuit.

He continued. “With all that remains unfinished between us, I do not feel right seeing him until I know he is content. I don’t want the wounds of our history to reopen in my presence. I want to know he has somepony to love him.”

A brilliant conviction rose in Sunburst’s chest.

“He does.”

... (Lost in Translation)

The golden sphere reflected in Stygian’s pupils like a pair of small suns.

They subsided into darkness as Star Swirl’s echoing voice departed with the spell. Stygian’s hooves cupped the dissipating light like a perishing soul.

“Star Swirl was… like me,” he said, both an accusation and an invocation.

Sunburst nodded. “I’m sorry he never told you.”

Stygian turned, facing him. They were in his kitchen, at the table. The hearth glowed, filling the room with a charcoal-sweet heat. Behind the window, dusk settled in shades of murky violet. Candles burned in the sill, gummed by heavy layers of pooled wax.

“In a way, I always knew. I knew without knowing. There were signs, if I looked for them.” His eyes dropped. “Sometimes, I thought I was convincing myself. Others, I was certain.”

Sunburst’s hoof slid across the worn wood table, taking Stygian’s own in his grasp. “That doesn’t change the fact that your trust was broken. Now I know just how badly.” He sucked in a shuddery breath. “Every time you took responsibility for your own happiness, you were hurt. That never should have happened.”

Stygian’s neck lolled, a tired smile rising on his face. “Not every time.”

Sunburst gripped his hoof tighter.

They enjoyed a moment of grounding quiet, holding tight to one another. The cold exposed skin under Stygian’s fetlock was warmed by Sunburst’s grasp.

“You’ve brought me answers I never expected to receive,” Stygian murmured. “I cannot say I feel better. I won’t for a long time. But I feel… relief. Like something is about to start and end, all at once.”

Sunburst said, “Maybe you’re seeing the story’s conclusion.”

Stygian stared at him. His hoof twitched as though expecting Sunburst to let go, but he didn’t.

“I'm sorry you had to hear all that,” Stygian said, swallowing roughly. Hastily, he explained, “Whatever I once felt for Star Swirl, it came from a place of desperation. I just… wanted him to stay. He was everything to me, once. I thought if I was something more to him…”

He ran his unheld hoof down the bridge of his long snout. As it dropped free, so too did the final vestiges of illusion.

“Nopony has ever spoken on my behalf the way you spoke to him.” A deep pool of disbelief shrouded his countenance. “Was all of that real?”

So absorbed by passing along Star Swirl’s disclosure, Sunburst forgot the presence of his own voice in the preternatural recording. He smiled.

“Every word.”

The peaceful quiet returned. A crackling pop rose from the hearth.

When Stygian did eventually let go, it was to rub the inner curve of his pastern, flexing the joint. “Trixie came by last night. She said you sent her.”

Sunburst squinted, nodding. “She’s a counselor. She knows how to make sure somepony is safe.”

“She said that. ‘Do you feel safe tonight?’” Stygian continued to wear his shock openly. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that. I was safe, though. I know my home borders the Everfree, but the animals have never posed any danger.” He paused. “Then, she asked, ‘Can you name a reason to keep living?’ That struck me. Because, again, I’d never been asked. But also — because I had an answer.

“‘Sunburst,’ I said. ‘If I wasn’t here, he would be sad. We would never finish the book.’”

“And, I’d miss you.” Sunburst blinked past a sharp sting of tears. “I’d miss you a lot.”

The flickering candlelight in the windowsill washed Stygian’s coat, a cast of gold on silver. His slow breaths were audible in the peaceful quiet of his kitchen. A rustling whispered below as his bobbed tail swished in thought. Miniscule flexions of muscle shifted under his hide as his posture adjusted, the chair creaking with him. His eyes were wide and searching. Sunburst could not imagine the absence of his presence, not when it drew his every sense.

“Lastly, Trixie asked if I had any live coals in my hearth.”

Sunburst’s heartbeats skipped. His voice was gentle when he asked, “Did you?”

Stygian gave a jerking nod.

“Oh, Stygian…”

“I didn’t touch them,” he assured. “I made that promise to Trixie.”

A deep silence dropped over them. Again, the hearth crackled. A fine cast of candlelight edged Stygian’s exhausted face.

“Why do you do that to yourself?”

It was pleading, the way Sunburst asked it. Stygian blinked, an earnest sadness in his eyes.

“Because, from the age of five, it’s what I was told. This is how weakness is killed.” He reached to the window sill, cupping a hoof over the top of a candle flame. Sunburst gasped, until he realized Stygian wasn’t reacting, made immune by the callus of scar tissue between his heel and fetlock.

He pulled his hoof away with a curling trail of smoke. “You notice things nopony else does, Sunburst. No doubt you saw the soot on my hooves the other day and sent Trixie to check up on me, believing I was a danger to myself.” A slow smile rose to his face. “Your instinct was right, just on the wrong occasion. The night after the festival, when I was feeling at my weakest, reaching for that old punishment was all I wanted to do. But I stopped myself. I sat down at my desk, and I wrote. I wrote out all of my ill feelings until the hearth stopped burning. I didn’t rest until I had scooped up all the dead coals and buried them outside.”

Stygian paused, and said, “When I lit the fire last night, it was only to keep me warm.”

Sunburst wasn’t aware of the stiff tension in his shoulders until those relieving words were spoken. He breathed easy again and let out a firm sigh. “I’m sorry I walked away.”

At Stygian’s puzzled look, he continued. “After the festival, I didn’t want to stop being with you.” An unbidden quaver entered his voice. “All this time, I had been trying to speak your language. To communicate to you what I felt in a way that was safe. I was worried if I said anything real, then…”

Stygian was shaking his head. “I’m not Star Swirl.”

Sunburst started. “Of course not.”

Stygian pressed his hooves firm on the table, running back and forth, scraping at the grain.

“Real,” he echoed, the belief just beginning to manifest. “So that means…”

“Yeah.” Sunburst let out a breathy chuckle, eyes creasing with his grin. “It does.”

Stygian’s lips parted in a faint smile, his brows turned upward. He laughed without voice behind it, a rough exhale that could have been a sob if Sunburst wasn’t looking at him, seeing him clearly as he was.

As though crept upon by a foul recollection, Stygian jerked and turned his gaze to the fireplace — then above it. Sunburst did, too. The black dagger hung there like a dark wound in the brick. Liquid firelight reflected off its jagged edges.

“I’ve told you so much,” Stygian murmured, gazing upon it. “I wonder, when will you stop accepting it?”

“I won’t. I won’t stop.”

“If we’re going to finish the book, there’s one last thing you need to know.”

“I want it all, Stygian. Not just for the book. When I said your truth was valuable, I meant all of it.”

“Then, perhaps, this once — may I show you, rather than tell you?” He met Sunburst’s eyes, his ears low. “It will be easier on me that way.”

Sunburst nodded, but said, “Don’t show me this only if you think it might push me away. If this is a strategy – a test – I won’t take it as one. I’ll just be with you.”

Stygian smiled with a culpable squint. “Always clever.”

An azure aura grasped the hilt of the dagger, bringing it down from its display on the mantle. The inscription of hlight foresetten plight was illuminated amber as it passed over the hearth glow. Stygian laid it on the floor, coming to stand over it, head bowed.

Sunburst joined him, hooves inches from its severe edges. He hadn’t been this close to the dagger since he pulled it from its stand at the antique shop. This weapon would have become a similar, glittering mantlepiece in his own home, had he decided to keep it that day. Knowing now the hooves that made it, Sunburst paled to believe he ever thought it was crafted with love.

“We need to travel to Hollow Shades. If I bring this there,” Stygian gestured to the dagger, “I can use the ambient magic to conjure a representation of… what I intend to show you.”

Sunburst nodded, recalling the revenants of the Pillars that appeared when their artifacts were aligned at Ponehenge, a vivid display of the Shadow’s banishment to Limbo along with them.

Stygian asked, “Can you teleport?”

Sunburst shook his head. “Not really.”

“Then I can bring us both.” He rocked back on his haunches, forelegs raised. “Hold out your hooves.”

Sunburst did as asked, soles upturned. Stygian’s hooves were smaller than his when he laid them down.

They gazed at one another, matched in their resolve. Sunburst did not look away as a brilliant blue nimbus ensconced them, his eyes still on Stygian as the interior of the kitchen blurred behind his head and the blunt-cut ends of his mane fanned in the rush, the craggy gray landscape of Hollow Shades closing in like a terrible apparition.

—

What remained of the cistern below the Well of Shade hunkered at the bottom of a blown crater. From the view of the cosmos, it appeared as a black star on the surface of Equus. A voidspace, emptied of light after the cleansing spectrum from the Elements of Harmony had erupted from it heavenward.

Stygian approached its edge like a supplicant. He laid down the blade. Its weight sunk into the powdery dirt.

Sunburst came to his side. Wordless, he bent to touch his nose to Stygian’s ear, eyes closed. A hoof rose to cup his face as Stygian breathed deep. They remained here, sheltered together, until Stygian was ready to let go.

“As the Shadow continued to speak to me, I was losing my ability to ward it off,” he began. “I needed to be stronger. I needed to possess the same fortitude as my companions. I needed to be a Pillar.

“I studied long in the library. And that is where I discovered a story. A legend of an old wellspring of magic at the base of Foal Mountain, where the waves of thaumaturgy were high and able to be taken hold of by a pony’s magic. Ponehenge.”

There was a cut of guilt in Stygian’s expression when he turned to Sunburst and said, “You know where the story proceeds from here. I stole the Pillars’ artifacts. I believed I could harness them together — to empower my own.”

He ran a hoof along the blade, brushing away granules of dirt. This revealed the murky reflection of his face, deep in its penumbral heart.

“Of course they afforded me no explanation. I broke their trust; I deceived them. And when Star Swirl was the first to extend his hoof in exile, it felt deserved.”

He looked at Sunburst. “But before they arrived, my spell had already been completed.”

Sunburst’s ears pricked. “You did it?” His face appeared beside Stygian’s in the dagger’s reflection. “So this was…”

“Imbued with a copy of their magic. My artifact.”

He rose to his full, slight posture. “You might think me foolish for it, but that was only the beginning. What I did next, that was when I became a fool.”

Stygian’s horn glowed; the dagger did in turn. A rivulet of magic rose and dropped over the perilous edge of the broad crater, spiraling down into whatever trace remained of the Well of Shade below.

A powerful wind blew back Sunburst’s mane. He held his glasses in place as a spectral scene unfolded like an aurora, revealing the truth of the past.

Stygian’s sharp shoulders rose above his head as he scraped at the earth, panting. He was crouched over the dirt-crusted center of the Well of Shade, the dagger levitating above his bent neck as he dug with furious strokes.

As the rock became visible, his horn surged with a lurid blue field. Crying out, he blasted a crack in its center.

An opaque sheet of blackness shot upward. It knocked Stygian to the ground and he hurried to right himself, his limbs quivering as he took hold of the dagger in his aura, brandishing it before him.

“I believed if I killed it, I would return to them, triumphant,” Stygian said. His mournful eyes were locked on the scene above. “They would accept me again. They would see I was… good.”

The Shadow poured upon the edge of the well. It coalesced into a series of vague shapes, stallion bodies pulsating through a contiguous sequence, no clear division between them. For a moment, it appeared as a looming thin figure, clad in pointed hat and cloak, leaning over Stygian as he trembled, beard curling wetly with dripping black. It reached out a hoof, touching Stygian’s face.

Stygian swept the dagger wildly, striking nothing but air as the Shadow dodged and undulated.

“How could you hurt me now?” An eerie whisper spoke. “When I would never hurt you?”

Stygian was coughing and heaving with exertion, his strikes losing force. The dagger hit the dirt as his magic flickered and expired. He fell to his belly, dragged forward by a single foreleg, all his slithering desperation laid naked in that moment.

“I will be with you, always,” spoke the Shadow.

“Please,” Stygian replied.

A dark appendage caressed the top of his head. Another coursed into his mouth.

Nausea turned in Sunburst’s gut. But he did not look away.

Stygian’s back seized as his eyes ran with black ichor, the Shadow entering and enclosing him — the dagger dragged along with it. As it rose, dripping into its settled form of stallion bulk, it brandished the dagger in a dark field. Its fanged grin parted, uttering its first, wretched laugh.

Skeletal wings snapped upward from its back. They beat down and it launched skyward, slicing through the clouds.

The scene swept by, a blur of pallid blue. Its glow fuzzed the edges of Stygian’s features, his eyes flicking, waiting for the next event to land.

“I had little control over it, once it took hold of me,” he murmured. “I was a mere thought in the back of its greater mind. All my agency, forfeited. It decided where we went next. Though, where it went was someplace it must have believed would satisfy my desires.”

Sunburst pressed close to him.

A little village appeared. The Shadow’s massive hooves crashed down outside a small, thatched house. And it waited.

Alerted by the sound, the door swung open. A burly stallion galloped out, teeth bared in a defensive grimace. He had a dark gray coat and a black close-shorn mane, the tangle of a beard below his chin. Unclothed from the sleep he had been awoken from, his flank was visible. It bore a dark anvil mark.

The Shadow spoke with Stygian’s voice, “Do you see me now?”

A rope of blackness shot forth. It whipped around Anvilhorn’s throat before he could make a sound, flinging his body into a broad bricked structure beside his humble home. His smithy groaned from the impact, debris crumbling from its edifice.

“You told me not to come home unless I killed a monster.” The jagged dagger descended, poised above Anvilhorn’s sinewy throat, the heavy stallion struggling to rise.

“But home belongs to the worst monster I know.”

A sharp infant cry split the air. The Shadow turned.

In the doorway of Anvilhorn’s home, a mare clutched a foal to her chest. Her horn emanated a violent light, her terrified face in sharp relief. Doors of the surrounding homes swung open, ponies rushing to the commotion, murmuring and shrieking.

“I did kill a monster that day,” Stygian whispered. “But, it wasn’t him.”

The Shadow’s chest jutted outward and it screamed. Stygian’s hooves split through, prizing apart its liquid pitch hide. He broke free, skidding to the dirt and sprinting to the smithy, twin shadow trails bubbling from his black eyes.

His neck jerked, attempting to gain control of the hilt with his magic. The dagger clattered to the ground, dropped by the Shadow, yet unable to be lifted as an inky coil wrapped to shut off Stygian’s access to his horn.

“What are you doing?” the Shadow screeched, but went unanswered.

His magic indisposed, Stygian clutched the blade with his hooves, pulling against the tendrils rushing to restrain him. He pressed it below his jaw at the jugular vein, eyes closed for the terminal stroke.

Sunburst sobbed, “I can’t watch this part.”

Yet, he didn’t turn away. How could he — when Stygian stared with unblinking attention, a stream of tears below his eyes. Sunburst’s pasterns folded over him in a shielding embrace, as though he could stand between the past and the present.

When the flinty impact of metal in flesh slitted the air, Sunburst cried out.

A dark trickle spilled from Stygian’s throat. He rattled with agonal breaths, face slick with spittle and tears, running dilute black.

And he collapsed at his father’s hooves.

“It didn’t work,” Stygian rasped. His hoof rose, touching the faint scar below his jaw. “I believed if I killed the Shadow's host with a blade blessed by the Pillars' magic, that would be enough to defeat it. But when I woke, I was within the Shadow again. It must have healed me—”

“Stygian!”

His ears lurched upward.

The Shadow was a roiling, formless cloud in the air above, its shape lost without a soul to anchor itself — but it hadn’t been the one to cry out.

“Out of the way! Move!” A pony broke through the gathered crowd. It was a mare, her ash-brown braid thumping at her neck as she skidded to crouch above Stygian’s inert body. Her coat was a stark paper-colored cream, melding into the woolen shawl draping her shoulders.

“Turning?” Stygian’s voice broke.

With a surgical focus, Turning Page’s horn lit a pale shade of elderflower green. Her magic caressed the wound at Stygian’s throat. It sealed, just as smoothly as it opened.

“Turning… Turning…” Stygian wept. He staggered closer, her image above him. His hoof rose, unable to reach through time. “Your hair grew out… your eyes, so tired. What did they do to you?”

Sunburst came to his side, a hoof on his shoulder to caution him back from the edge of the crater. “That’s an incredibly powerful healing spell,” he gasped. “No ordinary unicorn apothecary could perform it! Only an expert spellcaster.”

Stygian could only sob, holding onto Sunburst as they witnessed the scene’s unforeseen conclusion.

Turning Page pressed her ear to Stygian’s ribs, eyes sealed. “Come back,” she whispered. “You could never be so easily defeated.”

An agonizing moment stretched by.

Stygian’s eyes snapped open.

They were black.

As he gasped in a ragged breath, he was seized by a thread of inky darkness. Turning leapt back as his body vaulted upward into the Shadow’s waiting mass.

It congealed, taking its recognizable form. The Pony of Shadows boomed a spiteful laugh, ropes of black liquid spat from between its teeth.

Before it could speak, it was struck by a shearing green blast. It snarled, blurring at the edges.

Horn sizzling with a blinding flare, Turning Page’s eyes were alight with fury, lips pulled back from her teeth. “Let him go!”

But Sunburst knew that would not happen.

Affrighted by her display of power, the Shadow’s bulging white gaze swept the crowd — Anvilhorn, his second wife and child, and Turning Page, standing before them all. Like a champion.

It beat its wings and shot upward, hurtling toward the Pillars’ fortress to enact the final beat of its storied history.

Seen by the town, nevermore.

—

Stygian’s hooves were clasped over his eyes, weeping prone long after his spell winked out. Sunburst was pressed beside him, sheltering him under his star-studded robe, his chin resting on Stygian’s quivering shoulders.

“She was there,” were the first words he managed. “I never saw her again. I didn’t think… It was her. She saved me. Not the Shadow — my friend!”

“She won, Stygian,” Sunburst said to soothe him. “The whole town watched her defeat a monster. I'm sorry it was a monster that had you in it. But, she must have been seen as a hero.”

“Did she live? Did she love?” Stygian gasped. “Would history books be able to show me that? If she ever found a mare who…?”

“I don’t know,” Sunburst answered honestly. “But we can look.”

When Stygian was ready to rise to his hooves, Sunburst held out a hoof to help him stand. Stygian wiped his face, his throat rasping as he gasped and sniffed. “When I brought you here, I believed I was disclosing my greatest shame. That I tried to take my own life, and failed, dooming the Pillars to the sacrifice that was mine to bear. But, instead…”

“You were helped,” Sunburst concluded. “Even when you believed all you had left was the Shadow, somepony still loved you.”

“That’s all I wanted!” Stygian cried, validation ripping it out of him. “A parent — a friend — a lover. It didn’t matter. I loved only those who could not love me in return!”

“But you were worthy!” Sunburst said. “You were so worthy of love, and I’m sorry that wasn’t given when you needed it most.”

As his posture lifted, so too did the warmth of conviction rise in his chest. Not like a star, but the sun.

And he recited, “‘Inne alt naertrin, del weorld ama prijen thouth luvji.’ Because in this age, I love you.”

Sunburst wrapped him in his forehooves, holding him long and hard, like a promise. “And you are meant to live.”

They remained this way, folded into one another, no clear division to indicate where one of them began and the other ended.

“I want to live.” Then again, with agonized force, Stygian arched his face to the heavens and screamed, “I want to live!”

A brilliant glow struck the darkness. Sunburst’s coat prickled the way it always did when magic was in the air. The pressure dropped. And a corona beamed around Stygian, shafts of light piercing the cloak concealing his flank.

Stygian stumbled backward with a gasp, putting a hoof to his chest as though a bodily affliction hit him just as hard as that sudden light. Scrabbling at the loop on his cloak, he forgot the aid of his magic, loosening the knot with bare hooves and tossing it over his head.

This revealed his flank, no longer vacant gray. Stygian bore the mark of an unrolled scroll and a black feather quill, his once more. It shone in the night air until the light dropped away, the image becoming as solid and real as the hairs on his coat.

He stared with wet eyes, breath clouding from his lips. Helpless, he looked to Sunburst. “What does this mean?”

Sunburst’s hooves danced in place before he galloped to Stygian. He swept him into another embrace, shaking in giddiness.

“You discovered something yet to be known,” he gasped, his snout tickled by Stygian’s mane. “Your mark’s meaning — it’s yours again.”

His heart was beating with such ferocity, he wondered if Stygian could feel it pounding where their chests pressed flush together. Sunburst certainly felt Stygian’s elated, gasping laughter, riding the edge of overwhelm. He was weightless.

Sunburst, his voice still bright with joy, nodded to Stygian’s reclaimed mark and said, “You look good like this.”

Stygian was beaming, a smile more effortless than Sunburst had yet to see on him. It pushed back against the deep gray below his eyes, pupils wide and shining with the soft light of the moon.

He grasped both sides of Sunburst’s face and kissed him.

There was a desperate, heart-pounding force behind it, the end of Sunburst’s nose wrinkling from the quick press of his muzzle. Sunburst’s eyes shot wide, then flitted closed, hooves grasping for Stygian’s shoulders as their lips formed a hasty seal.

A sudden gasp and the warmth of his mouth was gone. Sunburst’s eyes opened as Stygian pulled back with vivid shock in every line of his expression, pupils shrunk to pinpricks, hooves held up as though he were a pony accused.

In a flash of blue, he disappeared.

Sunburst yelped as he careened forward. His chest hit the ground, his glasses knocking free. His hoof shot out, located them, and hastily affixed them to his snout.

“Oh no,” he gasped, turning on a small pivot, taking in the barren landscape. “Stygian?”

Rubbing his temple, Sunburst squeezed his eyes shut as his horn ignited, golden sparks of light and beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. “Come on, come on…” he breathed, mind fritzing to recall the teleportation spell he had attempted, and failed, so often long ago in school.

A magical burst struck the air and Sunburst yelped again, leaping backward. Stygian jittered in front of him, hoof outstretched.

“You can’t teleport!”

“I was trying to follow you!”

Their voices overlapped.

Each of them went rigid as nerves faded and comprehension returned. And they both erupted into laughter.

“Why did you do that?” Sunburst asked, gripping his shoulders.

“I’m sorry. That was foolish.” Stygian shook as he chuckled, clutching Sunburst in return. “I made myself nervous, I suppose. Of your reaction.”

Sunburst shook his head as his laughter subsided. “If you wanted to kiss me, you should’ve just asked.” He brushed a tousled lock of fringe behind Stygian’s ear. “I would’ve said yes.”

The back of Stygian’s neck was hot under his hoof. His expression slackened, and his muzzle inclined upward. “Can… Can I kiss you again?”

Sunburst felt him shivering, surely not just from excitement. “Let’s go back home first, out of the cold — and away from here,” he said gently. “Then, yes. Of course you can.”

Stygian nodded. His forehooves returned to the ground and he shuffled, narrow shoulders rolling as he concentrated his magic. His horntip ignited, then waned.

“Wait—!” He extended a hoof. “There’s something I have to do first.”

Touching his chest, his hide ruffled under his brusque kneading as he calmed himself. “The dagger,” he breathed. “I need to get rid of it.”

“Oh.”

Sunburst and Stygian turned in unison to where it remained at the edge of the yawning crater. Stygian approached, tracing a hoof over the lettering.

“When I felt it resurface, it terrified me. I hated the thought of it being out there, free in the world. To think it could come into another pony’s possession, it unnerved me. And…” He paused. “To have it again was something of a comfort. Should I ever lose myself again, it would be a last bastion against… me.”

Sunburst shook his head, his brows furrowed in deep regret. “I should never have given it to you. If I knew—”

“You’re innocent, Sunburst.” Stygian looked over his shoulder. “If I could go back to the antique shop, I wouldn’t change anything. If you’re fearful you gave me something meant to be my end, you didn’t.” A true smile rose to his face. “Without you, I wouldn’t have been rewarded with this beginning.”

With that, Stygian leaned his head down. His blunt teeth closed over the hilt, lifting the dagger in the most intimate way a pony could. Stepping to the edge of the sheer rock face, he let go.

The dagger sliced downward into oblivion.

As it clattered faintly at the unseeable bottom, Sunburst said, “Let’s hope it doesn’t show up in another antique shop.”

“If it does,” Stygian said, turning from the dark pit to look up at him, “I won’t be there to find it.”

—

Stygian stumbled as he and Sunburst flashed into his kitchen. Sunburst crouched beside him, supporting Stygian’s weight on his shoulder.

“Sorry, I’m a little drained,” Stygian rasped. “I haven’t used this much magic in a long time.”

“That’s okay,” Sunburst said tenderly. “You should rest.”

“But…” Stygian’s eyes were wide, a hazy yearning behind them. “I don’t want you to leave. Please, don’t leave.”

"I won't,” Sunburst assured. “What do you want, Stygian?”

“Just,” he breathed, “lay down with me?”

They walked in step to his bedroom. Stygian didn’t light the candle at his bedside. He barely mustered the strength to pull his threadbare cloak over his head, donned for the briefest moment of transporting home. Sunburst unclasped his robe, hanging it on the same chair Stygian laid his own garment. He lifted his glasses from his snout, tidily setting them beside it.

When Stygian rolled back the covers, Sunburst didn’t join him until Stygian’s hoof patted the mattress. Language, here, was unneeded, a hindrance for once to the subtle gestures of them adjusting into bed, side by side, the blankets safeguarding them from the chilly night outside.

Stygian lay on his back, the covers over his chest rising and falling at a quick pace. Sunburst’s hoof slid across the mattress, finding Stygian’s own. He flinched, then relaxed, reciprocating the grasp.

They were linked by this gentle hold for a matter of minutes, before the separation began to feel like pain. Sunburst worked closer, pulling Stygian to himself. He stroked the small of his back until he stopped shaking.

Stygian’s muffled whisper rose from below Sunburst’s chin. “I’ve never slept beside…”

“I know,” Sunburst said, just as softly. “It’s easy. You just sleep. But you have somepony to hold you.”

He pressed his nose beneath Stygian’s horn, to the furrow between his brows, creased as though by the stroke of a sculptor. For a while, Stygian breathed fast, running hot with nervous energy, slender forelegs tucked neatly at Sunburst’s barrel. It took a stretch of time for him to gain the courage to embrace him in return. It took longer for him to fall asleep.

When he did, it was with his ear pressed to Sunburst’s chest, soothed into slumber by the beating of his heart.

—

Sunburst woke up too early.

A gray skin of pre-dawn light washed the walls. It was the hour of liminal quiet, one that so few ever heard. The emptiness of it became vast when Sunburst reached out beside him to find a space on the mattress losing warmth. Stygian wasn’t there.

A dull alarm jumped in his chest. He sat up groggy with his mane in a tangle and rubbed his eyes to clear them, before realizing his sight was useless without his glasses.

He didn’t have to wonder long on Stygian’s whereabouts. The hinges of the door sighed a faint squeak as the blurred figure of him trotted on featherlight hoofsteps back to bed.

“Sorry, did I wake you?” His voice was creaky with fatigue.

Sunburst didn’t retrieve his glasses as Stygian climbed under the covers with him, coming within his close sight. “You’re okay,” he murmured with a slow smile. “I think I just felt that you were gone.”

“Sorry,” Stygian said again. “I was feeling restless. I thought about starting on breakfast for you, but, the time. It’s much too early.” He chuckled.

Sunburst shook his head with a smile. “You’ve already made me a delicious meal. The next one should be my turn, right?”

Time passed with a graceful steadiness as they continued to speak back and forth like this. They talked about favors to be exchanged, and future hopes, and nothing at all, really. They talked just to hear the lift and fall of one another’s voices.

The serenity resolved into a question from Stygian. “What happens now?”

“Well,” Sunburst chuckled, squinting, “we certainly have an ending to the book.”

Stygian smiled, a press of worry in his brows. “After the book. What happens, then?”

Sunburst blinked the final dregs of sleep from his eyes, present and conscious. “I keep loving you.”

Stygian met his gaze. “I keep loving you, too.”

A sharp pulse hammered in Sunburst’s throat. Stygian’s coat, visible from his shoulders upward above the blankets, was washed silver by the window behind him, dawn just below the horizon. His chest bobbed ever quicker, his throat flexing with a hard swallow. His eyes were earnest, pleading in their clearest blue.

And Sunburst knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life waking up to this vision of him.

Sunburst cupped his face and Stygian leaned into his touch, eyes falling closed.

“You know,” Sunburst murmured, “you never got that second kiss.”

Stygian shook his head. “I hope it’s not too late,” he breathed.

Guiding him closer, Sunburst said, “It never is.”

It was different this time, a careful articulation as their lips drew together. Sunburst’s hoof slid to the base of Stygian’s neck above his shoulders, the bumps of his spine under his touch. Stygian reached for him too, a tentative, clumsy grasp for Sunburst’s body, gaining familiarity with the lean muscles of his shoulders, the soft sides of his belly. A faint note hummed in his throat as he trembled to explore the feeling of another stallion beneath his hooves, long-sought and unknown — until now.

The air shimmered with Sunburst’s magic as he rolled back the covers, allowing freedom in their movement. He lowered Stygian into a more comfortable position as he pulled back for a deep breath of air.

“Can I keep touching you?” Sunburst asked, crouched above him. Stygian’s bobbed mane was fanned out behind his attentive ears like a halo. Sunburst’s beard tickled his chin.

“I haven’t—” Stygian swallowed, hooves braced around Sunburst’s shoulders, holding steady against perceived inadequacy. “This is all new to me. I'm nervous that...”

“It's okay. I'm a little nervous, too,” Sunburst whispered, a frisson leaping through his stomach. His brows furrowed with his soft smile. "Just feel. You won’t disappoint me.”

A desperate gasp heaved in Stygian’s chest at that direct, accepting permission. “Then — yes,” he breathed. “A thousand times, yes! Please, Sunburst.”

Their noses pressed together, melding into another kiss as Stygian allowed himself to feel.

Sunburst kissed him many more times after that. He took his aching hooves and kissed the bare patches below his fetlocks. He kissed his throat that should never have been opened by a blade. And as he dipped his head, horn brushing Stygian’s chest, he kissed places left untouched for the stretch of a millennium, closing the gap between time and longing as easily as he closed the distance between lips and flesh.

When his hooves rested on Stygian’s pronounced ribs, he felt the rough shudder of his breath as though he was surfacing from underwater. Stygian’s eyes were closed tight, creased at the corners, even as his lips parted with quick vocal gasps.

Sunburst caressed his face, easing him to open his eyes, and Stygian caught his hoof, clutching it hard. He blinked, eyes running with tears, beholding a new and dazzling brightness, the rush of dawn rising to meet him.

Stygian felt sunlight for the first time.

Del Weorld Ama Prijen Ouser Luvji (The World Will Liberate Our Love)

The next years were kind.

A long line trailed from the entrance of the small Canterlot bookshop. Ponies held books under wings and clutched covers between hooves, swaying with eager jitters or standing tranquil. All of them waited to meet the visiting author on his release tour throughout Equestria.

From across the bookshop, Sunburst watched Stygian with a swell of loving admiration. Stygian signed the thousandth dedication page of Reward Prefers Risk with a plumy black quill and handed the copy back to a chartreuse-colored pegasus colt with a curly blond mane who clapped his hooves tight on the hard covers, pulling it to his chest.

“Thank you so much,” the colt said, his stuttery voice just past the edge of puberty. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to come today.” He rocked subtly, as though the motion could coax the words. “My parents are really strict.”

Stygian listened with patient attention, his eyes squinting behind his thin-framed glasses. “I’m sorry to hear that. I can imagine how difficult your journey must have been.” He smiled. “I’m grateful you’re here, nonetheless.”

“I am, too. Guess I really took the title’s advice.” He laughed, Stygian along with him. “Because, I had to meet you. I just want to tell you — your book really inspired me. I like stallions, but my parents don’t know yet. I think they’ll accept me after a while, but I'm nervous to finally tell them.”

Stygian’s hoof reached to rest on the table. “You’re very brave to hold off until you feel safe. That takes so much courage.”

Behind the yellow-green colt, those standing in line leaned forward, their attention rapt on Stygian’s words.

“The not-knowing will be difficult, but it won’t break you. And when you get your answer, whatever it may be, I hope it brings relief.” He paused, smile growing. “And no matter what, know that out in the world, a sentimental old author wants you to live and to love. Nopony can take that away.”

—

As the signing event drew to a close, Sunburst approached the table. His golden aura wrapped around the few remaining unsold copies of Reward Prefers Risk, boxing them for their return to the store shelves.

“I’m so proud of you,” Sunburst said as Stygian crossed out from behind the table, stretching his legs, stiff from the hours of sitting.

He chuckled, the untuned instrument of his laugh hitting a clean pitch more often than not these days. “You always say that at the end of these.”

“Well, it hasn’t stopped being true!”

They met, closing into an embrace. Stygian’s coat was bare, save for a tan sweater wrapping his forelegs against the chill of the winter season. His old cloak hung in his closet, untouched for a long time. He was soft under Sunburst’s touch, having put a little weight on his lithe figure after enjoying a steady diet of the meals they shared, a consistent trade off between his own expert cooking and Sunburst’s burgeoning acumen as a chef still-in-training. In their home, they always ate well.

As they walked the streets of Canterlot, headed to the train station, Stygian suppressed a yawn. “I hope I make it to Starlight and Trixie’s Hearth’s Warming party.” He rubbed his chest. “If I start nodding off tonight, promise you’ll wake me up before Trixie can draw anything embarrassing on my face.”

“Like I wouldn’t be right there by her side,” Sunburst laughed, bopping the end of Stygian’s pointed nose. “You’d look good with a mustache. Maybe a second pair of glasses?”

“I would not!” Stygian chuckled, batting his hoof away. For good measure, he snatched Sunburst’s glasses and layered them over his own. He blinked, his eyes huge under the double lenses. “What do you think? Do I look good?”

Sunburst squinted at the doubtlessly handsome gray blur in front of him. “That is not a question I can answer in confidence right now.”

Stygian returned his glasses, stroking his cheek. “Then we better not risk finding out at the party tonight.”

The train ride home was Stygian’s saving grace. He napped on Sunburst’s lap, lulled by the shifting rumble of the wheels over the tracks. Sunburst watched the horizon from the window, the low sun reflecting in his glasses, the world sweetened by its honey-gold glare — and the gentle weight of his husband.

Their first anniversary was approaching. In a few months, they would be wedded for a full year, that time stretching longer than any thousand.

Stygian still teared up when he used the word husband to introduce Sunburst, a word he never imagined uttering with ownership. At the wedding, he’d been beside himself. The event was kept to a small, close circle. Ironic, considering its party consisted of celebrated heroes. Starlight had been Sunburst’s best mare; the Pillars stood behind Stygian at the altar. And as the reception rose into full swing – Somnambula tying on her blindfold in preparation for Sunburst’s bouquet toss, Rockhoof softening his giddy steps on the dance floor – Star Swirl had found his way to Stygian.

Their conversation was brief, but amicable. Star Swirl was the only Pillar who stood not at the altar, but in the crowd, watching in humble solidarity. When he met Stygian on the reception floor, an elderly tan stallion with a combed back pale pink mane was by his side. Star Swirl introduced him as his date and Stygian had smiled, shaking the old stallion’s hoof.

As Sunburst watched from across the room, he rubbed his beard, trying to tease out his stirring of recollection. Leaning to Maud, he asked, “Isn’t that your old rockology professor he’s with?”

Maud’s expression hadn’t budged an inch when she said, “This is the funniest moment of my life.”

—

“Okay, my secret gifter is clearly Mudbriar,” Trixie said, indulgently holding up the opened box to reveal a chocolate frosted yule log, dusted with powdered sugar. “Very clever. You know, since it’s wood-themed.”

“Technically,” he announced, “no cleverness was needed. It is a very common dessert for the holiday.”

“Uh-huh — anyway! Starlight!” Trixie gestured grandly to her wife, teeth bared in a smile. “Let’s see yours!”

Starlight giggled, standing to look over the pile of gifts in the center of the chair circle they had pulled together in her and Trixie’s living room. A festive clip resembling a holly sprig was pinned in her mane, Sunburst’s secret gift to her last winter. He and Stygian were side by side, two warm mugs of elderflower tea between them.

“Aha!” In her magic, Starlight lifted a neatly wrapped box with her name on it. She unwrapped it to reveal — “A Neighponese desk sand garden! That’s so lovely.”

Rotating the box, her brow furrowed in thought. “Is this from… Maud? You know, ‘cause… rocks?” She grinned, pointing at the stones pictured on the lid. But, Maud shook her head.

“It’s actually from me.”

Starlight turned to Stygian, beaming in pleasant surprise.

“My old therapist had one in his office,” he said. “I know it’s been a long time since you were the School of Friendship counselor, but I’m sure your students may still appreciate it on your desk. It’s very soothing.” He smiled, raising his mug to take a diffident sip of tea.

“I love it, Stygian. And so will the students.” She held it to her chest.

Sunburst turned to Stygian, smiling as he nuzzled his ear. “I told you she would like it.” He nodded to the remaining gifts. “Your turn?”

Stygian moved to get up, but Starlight raised her hoof in pause. “Actually, I’m going to break tradition.”

Stygian and Sunburst shared a glance as Starlight reached among the pile of gifts and pulled out a box with a curled red bow spilling over the edges. “Funny enough, we were each other’s secret gifter. I know, I’m no fun for ruining the surprise. But this one’s special.” Her face grew sentimental. “Too special to guess about.”

Stygian’s eyes were wide as the parcel levitated to his lap. Gently, he pulled free the ribbon, peeling back the taped wrapping. Inside was a delicate journal. Its pages were yellowed, torn at the edges. Stygian rested a light hoof on the cover, sensing its age.

“It took a long time to find. And a lot of cross referencing for accuracy. Twilight was a huge help with the entire process.” Starlight chuckled knowingly. “But, this is it. I found her.”

Stygian looked between her and Sunburst, realization dawning. “Did you know about this?”

Sunburst shook his head, equally amazed. “Starlight, you really did it. You found Turning Page?”

She nodded, her smile reaching up into her shining eyes. “Open it. She’s the dedication.”

Stygian turned the cover, translating as he read, “My beloved, Turning Page. May these cantos sing for you where my voice cannot.” His hoof grasped his mouth.

“The author’s name is Lavender Belle,” Starlight explained in gentle tones. “We traced her family line. She would have been alive at the same time as Turning.”

“I’m also very sure they went to the same school together,” Trixie said with an insinuating giggle.

Starlight nodded rapidly. “And, it gets better.”

“It’s… already more than I could have hoped.” Stygian’s hoof reached below his glasses, wiping his eyes. Sunburst’s hoof was around his shoulder, equally tearful.

Down from her wall, Starlight levitated a small frame. Inside was a sheet of paper that was printed with the Old Ponish phrase, ‘Inne alt naertrin, del weorld ama prijen ouser luvji,’ recreated to match the original text by an expert calligrapher. It had been Sunburst’s wedding gift to her and Trixie.

“The hoofwriting is so similar to Lavender Belle’s,” she said. “I don’t know if it can be fully confirmed, but…”

Her voice faded as Stygian choked on a sob. Sunburst pulled him close, sniffling along with him. Their embrace was joined by Starlight, then Trixie, Maud and Mudbriar following shortly thereafter. At the center of their bowed heads, Stygian’s face rose with a beatific smile.

“You did it, Turning,” he cried. “You won.”

—

The hearth crackled, keeping Stygian and Sunburst warm.

Lavender Belle’s journal was held light in Stygian’s magic, each page turned with the utmost delicacy. Sunburst leaned into his shoulder as they rested together in their home, reading alongside him with matched fluency.

“She was so loved,” Stygian’s awed voice said.

Sunburst nodded. “More, I’m sure, than even these poems suggest.”

He kissed Stygian’s cheek, his lips coming away wet with tears. He brushed Stygian’s mane. “Are you okay?”

Stygian sniffed, closing the journal and setting it on the coffee table. “This has probably been my most tearful Hearth’s Warming yet.” He laughed, his eyes glittering in the firelight. The bags under them were faint. “But that’s to be expected, I suppose. I’ve never been this happy.”

He touched his nose to Sunburst. “Thank you,” he breathed. “I’ll never stop thanking you.”

Sunburst caressed his cheek, slowly shaking his head. “You should thank you.”

Still bleary, Stygian asked with a little smile, “What do you mean, love?”

“I don’t ever want you to forget the kindness you showed yourself,” Sunburst said. “All your choices that brought you here, I’m so glad you made them. Just knowing they would bring you to this moment, sitting on this couch by the fire — with me.”

Stygian’s smile warmed Sunburst more than the hearth ever could. “How about another good choice?” he said, easing Sunburst in for a slow kiss.

As they embraced in the wide warm dark of their bedroom – Stygian’s ear turned to Sunburst’s heartbeat – Sunburst’s drowsy, sleep-ferrying thoughts were on the wonderful mystery of the Old Ponish phrase hung high in his office, and the beauty of its connections across time.

Sunburst wondered often about the future ponies who would read Reward Prefers Risk long after it was out of print, only able to be discovered in secondhoof bookshops or dusty blind-buy barrels. He wondered how many hearts would go on to be touched by the words of long departed author, Stygian Flare.

But most important were the words that touched his own, arriving on the novel’s final page.

…When I was pulled free from the Shadow, I was saved in more ways than one. The torment of my greatest shame had been defeated. I had fallen into a world made anew. And I had landed at the hooves of a pony who would one day show me love I never expected — or believed I deserved.

Sunburst, you didn’t know it then, but in the future, you and I make the world a kinder place for one another. We meet in the present in a shop where one glimpses stories of the past. And you return to me an ancient dagger I once believed necessary for my story to end.

But it was not my end. Because I have chosen to live.

A long time ago, I believed my life was over. That to die would be the bravest thing I could do. I was so, so wrong.

Don’t fear the future. You’ll never know how it might reward you.

I am rewarded every day in new ways I never thought possible. I am rewarded by long nights of reading, by sunlight on my coat, by learning new recipes, and even by washing dishes, because my husband is beside me. I am rewarded by his smile, and the smiles of my friends, never to be shaken by adversity. There is gentle power in that. The world is not so large that it cannot be changed.

Sunburst, you insist you didn’t save me. That I overcame that battle myself — through living, and being. Let’s agree to a compromise, then. You must love and be loved to win the future.

And when I am no longer a part of that future, I will miss it and hope I am missed in turn. You were right, Sunburst. It is a sad thing to be gone from this world. I cherish that now. Because the love remains, even when you are not there to see it.

But my bones will rest easy one day. For in another age, they will rest beside yours.

—

Author's Note

Thank you for reading!

I've added some bonus drawings I made after completing this story and hope you all enjoy them. Thinking about these two has continued to bring me joy ♡

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