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// Bonus #5: It's Not the End If... [Slice of Life] 
// Story: Thirty Days, Thirty Twilights 
// by Esle Ynopemos 
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((Prompt: All good things must come to an end.))

It was Manehattan. That was where we started to sense it. There was that moment when Rarity mentioned the idea of staying in the city a while longer, and we all looked at each other. Sure, the one mare from the fashion show arrived at that point and put things back to normal. But I think that moment in Manehattan was the first time we truly realized that it wasn't going to last forever. Six mares galloping through Ponyville, having our little adventures. It was a dream, and we knew then that we would eventually have to wake up from it.

Time is a terrifying thing. It never stops—and believe me, I've tried to make it. It marches onward into the future, utterly blind to the precious things that are lost in its relentless wake. The great unicorn Starswirl the Bearded spent half his life studying time. He invented fifteen distinct time-spells, with up to a dozen variations on each, and yet, for all his obsession with the passage of time, he never once developed a spell to send a pony forward in time. “A pony falling from a great height will seek to conjure a parachute or wings, not an anvil,” he once wrote. All his spells were concerned with the slowing or reversal of time, and history notes his frustration with the fact that none of them were permanent.

Given what happened in Manehattan, I suppose we all assumed Rarity would be the first of us to leave Ponyville. Either her or Rainbow. They were the ponies who had always had ambitions far beyond the little town of Ponyville. That it turned out to be Applejack who left first caught us all by surprise, her, most of all.

Appleloosa had a nasty blight in their orchards, and Applejack could not let her kin down. She packed a bag more full of apple seeds than her own belongings and boarded a train out to the west. It was only supposed to be a week's stay, but that week stretched into two when the blight proved more stubborn than she had thought, and two weeks became a month as Applejack stayed to dig a new well in anticipation of the dry summer season. Before anypony really knew it, Appleloosa was her home. Applejack's next trip to Ponyville was only to collect the rest of her things and let Pinkie throw her a more official goodbye party.

Applejack moving out was a shock to all our systems, but Rainbow's most of all. For all her talk of big dreams flying with the Wonderbolts, I think she had grown comfortable in her role here in Ponyville. Now there was a big, Applejack-shaped hole in her daily routine. Napping in an apple tree lost its charm when she didn't have a friend coming to buck her out of it. Negotiating with Big Mac over the weather for Sweet Apple Acres just wasn't the same at all, and she had nopony to challenge to hoof-wrestling contests anymore.

So she stopped dragging her hooves and stepped up the application process for the Wonderbolts. They accepted her immediately, of course. She had proven her worth to them time and again, and all it really took at that point was for her to say go. We all cheered for her at her debut show. She was an incredible rainbow streak through the sky, and we all wiped tears from the corners of our eyes as that streak slowly faded into mist and dissipated into the open blue.

Scarcely a day after Rainbow's big show, Pinkie announced that she had been doing some serious thinking lately. I joked with her that thinking was a dangerous business, and she should probably leave it to the professionals. She smiled. She didn't laugh.

She said she had been thinking about Cheese Sandwich, and what he had been doing. Being the permanent party pony of Ponyville was great, but her encounter with Cheese had got her thinking of what life would be like as a traveling party pony instead. The idea of meeting new faces every day, of waking up each morning in a new city, really appealed to her. Ponyville would always be her home, she said, but it was perhaps time for her to let her hooves wander for a while, and see where they take her.

And like that, half of us were gone. Rarity, Fluttershy and I spent a lot more time together than we used to before. Where spa dates had once been a weekly thing between Rarity and Fluttershy, I joined them twice a week after Pinkie left, and one of us would have the other two over for tea nearly every other day. We were clinging to each other. I could see the glint of fear in each of their eyes, and knew it was in mine as well. Each of us dreading the day, wondering which of us would be the next one whose life would pull in another direction.

Something unusual happened between Rarity and Fluttershy in that span of time. Somehow, their desperation slowly became affection. More and more often, one of them would visit the other for late-night wine and comfort, speaking in hushed tones and sharing their secrets with one another, and usually staying over the whole night. The two of them had always been closer friends with each other than they had been with me, but more and more, I began to feel like a third wheel at our get-togethers. When they finally came out as an official couple, I...

...I was happy for them. Of course I was. Two of my very best friends had found happiness in each other, and it would be selfish for me to resent them for that.

Spike was devastated. I think he understood that this time it wasn't some flight of fancy over some vaguely defined idea of a stallion she'd never actually met. Rarity had finally found her fairy-tale prince... er, princess, as it were, and she was every bit as tender and chivalrous and courageous as Rarity had ever dreamed.

And I call Fluttershy courageous with no trace of irony whatsoever. Rarity's parents had a... narrower view of what love should be than some ponies do, and when they expressed their dissatisfaction with Rarity's choice of mate, Fluttershy did the bravest thing I have ever seen her do—and it bears reminding that this is a mare I have witnessed stare down a cockatrice and scold a full-grown dragon into submission—she sat down and talked with them. She explained to them, thoroughly and respectfully, exactly how she felt about their daughter, and how Rarity felt for her. How Rarity's heart was her own to give, and how they could respect her decision or not, but they could not change her mind. She never raised her voice. She never got angry. And by the end, Fluttershy and Rarity had their blessing.

I still see them, from time to time. I still see all of my friends, on occasion. Pinkie still swings by Ponyville now and then, bursting at the seams with stories about her adventures that I'm not sure I should quite believe all of. Rainbow Dash still spends the off-season in Ponyville, and Applejack takes the train back here for every Summer Sun Celebration and Hearth's Warming Eve.

But nopony can say it's the same as it was. We're different ponies now than we were before. I think we all understand that in some sense, that part of our lives is over.

Time, like the rising tide, topples all the sand-castles we spent our lives building. It will always happen, no matter how deep a moat we dig around them or how hard we try to prop up the crumbling spires with our hooves. It is the way of things.

But it's not the end. Those times with the six of us all running about in Ponyville, they aren't gone, so long as we hold onto those memories. It's not the end, so long as we remember the lessons we all learned together. It's not the end, so long as Harmony shines within our hearts.

I sit in my study, writing this entry in our shared journal. Of course I am the one to keep it; I'm the librarian, after all. These pages are filled with the trials, the triumphs, and the tales of our friendship. I can't count the number of times I've read them all, and still they warm my heart every time.

I think I shall visit a friend today.