There are benefits to being immortal.

Sure, the philosophers and whatnot will rant and rave about how ponies are not made to live forever, or that it would get boring eventually, or that losing everyone you love sucks. And yeah, there are downsides, but in her opinion it's a pretty awesome deal.

The world she loves is gone, fair enough, along with a lot of people she knew, and she will carry the memory of that loss forever (or until she goes the way of Celestia and Luna, wherever they went), but at the end of the day there are advantages too. She has made countless friends through the past half millennium of her life, and she loves them all as dearly as she did her first, be they still alive or long gone. She has gotten to see the progress that ponies have made in that time, and sure the whole Equestria dividing into feuding citystates is kind of a bummer, but they have done some amazing progress on the technological front. Phones and the internet is currently her favourite invention since Applejack added alcohol to her family cider recipe.

So yeah, at the end of the day immortality has downsides and upsides, but she's mostly happy that she gets to see how the world moves apace even so long after her halcyon.

Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep

It would be nice if she could sleep in for once though.

Morning Breeze groans and rolls around in her bed, reaching a hoof out to turn off her absolute least favourite invention of the modern day; her digital alarm clock, which currently reads 4 in the morning, and accidentally pushes it off the bedside table instead.

Gonna be one of those days, then.

She spends a few minutes gathering her strength and courage, all the while fighting the siren song of sleep, before eventually accomplishing the herculean task of getting out of bed.

Her apartment lies in shadow, still cloaked in the night's cold shade. Or in layman's terms, it's dark as heck and she desperately wants to crawl back under her warm blankets because it's also cold as heck. Resistant to cold she may be thanks to her pegasus heritage, but that doesn't mean she has to enjoy it. Still, duty calls, as much as she despies it, and she has already done it for the better part of 600 years so she can probably do it again today.

If she doesn't freeze into a block of ice first.

Trotting through her humble apartment (nothing compared to the cloud mansion of her youth, but cloudsculpting isn't exactly inconspicuous these days and she's trying to keep a low profile), past her living room, kitchen, and guestroom-turned-writing room, she reaches the most important part of the whole place, and the one thing she insisted on having when she went apartment shopping; a balcony with a view east.

Her old place had been better for this, admittedly, a small cottage on the eastern slope of Mount Galloppiggen, but she had lived there for well over 70 years and the neighbours were starting to throw her weird looks, so about five years ago she had decided she needed a change of pace (and neighbours who hadn't seen her not age for decades) and moved to Zephyr Heights.

She's glad she did. Decades in the wilds with only a few ponies in the area had given her plenty of time to write (her pseudonym at the time had made quite a name for herself in the world of publishing) but it had atrophied her social skills somewhat, and being surrounded by ponies again - being able to take a stroll down to the local bakery, join a bookclub to talk about adventure books that are not quite as good as Daring Do but still pretty good, and make friends she can meet more than once a month - is like fresh water in a desert. She had not realized how much she missed it.

Living in the city did not come without some trouble though. In this case, one specific problem is why she carefully looks to the neighbouring balconies, to the street bellow, and to the houses around hers, and pretty much anywhere where someone might spot her performing her morning duties before doing anything, but there are no one around. Those who work night shifts are just leaving their places of work, and the poor suckers who work mornings are either asleep or are still waking up. She is, as far as her extremely good senses can tell, completely alone.

She takes a deep breath, then sits back on her hind legs so she can have both hooves free. With them, she reaches up to her right ear, where a small green gemstone hangs from an earring. It's not really her colour, and has gotten her plenty of comments from more fashion-minded friends (none of them are better designers than Rarity, but they're all good at what they do), but it was a gift from Celestia many centuries ago, and she can't really do anything to change how it looks.

Ironic, given what it does.

As soon as the earring is removed, the changes happen. She gains a good meter in height, standing so tall that she has to be careful not to stumble over the balcony's railing (not as tall as the alicorns of old but she's getting there). Her hair, formerly disguised as snow-white, gains her signature rainbow coloration (once signature at least, almost everypony nowadays knows her as having white hair) and starts subtly flowing in a wind that no one else can feel. Finally, a long spiraling horn grows out of her forehead, shimmering vaguely iridescent in the city lights (the last part is what makes her especially wary, given how pegasi nowadays feel about ponies with horns).

The transformation takes barely a second, but once it's done the mare standing on the balcony is no longer Morning Breeze, the adventure writer who's always a bit tired and never gets enough sleep, but Rainbow Dash,once element of Loyalty and now the immortal alicorn of dawn and shepherd of the sun.

"Okay, let's do this one more time."

First, as always, she takes a look across the sky, seeing both with her eyesight that can see through the dark and with her magic that can sense the movements of the firmament. Not that she needs to, since the moon has as always been moved in its orbit. across from where the sun will rise. She doesn't know why she even bothers to check, nothing short of being eaten by a dragon could stop the alicorn of dusk (her friend, no matter how bad their last argument was) from being on schedule - wherever in the world she currently is.

Having ensured that she's not about to make the sky look really messy, she focuses, and her horn lights up in shimmering magenta light. In her mind's eye, the orbits of the celestial spheres are laid out before her. Somepony once showed her a map that charted the heavens, but the explanation had been so boring and confusing she fell asleep halfway through the explanation. But here, with her magic reaching out and sensing the cosmos in its true glory, with the movements of the heavens laid bare before her like a melody so complex it could never be put into notes, she understands it all perfectly.

She will never get tired of this. Getting out of bed, sure, that part is a pain, but this? Tapping into the grand cosmic dance, the neverending cycles upon cycles that continue unto eternity beyond any mortal or immortal ken, and then fulfilling her role in it? There are no words that can describe how amazing it feels.

She would remain like this for ages if she could, it is a siren song more tempting than even sleep was just a few minutes earlier, but she knows she has a job to do. With her magic, she reaches out for the (in her most humble opinion) grandest of all cosmic wonders, and finds it precisely where she left it. She grasps it, and before it can start to burn her as it did the unicorns who raised it before even Celestia's days, she gives it a light push. It's weird that it doesn't take more than that, but when she first did this she remembers it felt like the heaviest thing in the world, like lifting entire mountains with her own hooves. Now, with centuries of experience, it feels as light as a marble in a foal's game.

Her task done, she lets her grip on the firmament go, and opens her eyes to the real world to see the fruits of her labour.

The sun rises. It is a cloudy morning, so its rays won't reach the rooftops of Zephyr Heights' royal castle for another few minutes, still hidden in the veil of clouds that lie across the horizon, but above those thick and heavy stormclouds there are others, light whispers of watervapour stretching across the sky from east to west, and the sun's rays does reach those, bathing them in gold and pink in a way that even the greatest of painters could never hope to recreate with so simple a medium as oil and pigment.

Like every other morning in her long life, it is the most beautiful thing Rainbow Dash has seen.

Across Zephyr Heights, pegasi who have just woken up and pegasi who are returning from work look up to the sky and out of their windows, taking in the sight for themselves. "What beauty nature creates," they will say, chalking the rising sun up to the mysteries of physics, or maybe the work of a distant deity. They will never know that the sun's shepherd lives among them, writes a popular series of adventure novels, and has her coffee with six shots of espresso at the Roastery Café in Atlas Boulevard every morning.

Rainbow Dash doesn't really mind. There's an admittedly pretty big part of her that longs for the adoration of the crowd, but she would probably have to work herself half to death like Celestia if anyone knew who she is.

And speaking of death, it's time for her to return to the closest thing she can get. Reattaching the earring and returning to the form of Morning Breeze, she closes the balcony doors behind her and trots back to her bedroom, finding her bed waiting for her with warm blankets and comfortable pillows.

While the sun continues to rise outside, bringing light and warmth back to the world, Morning Breeze returns to her dreams of adventures past, friends present, and the many more sunrises to come. And in a small village, far away from Zephyr Heights, the alicorn of dusk once known as Twilight Sparkle looks up to the sky and thinks of her friend.

Author's Note

Morning Breeze's appearance is based on this drawing I made of Alicorn Rainbow before I coloured in her mane.

Comments are super appreciated and make me do a little dance of joy!