//------------------------------//
// Conclusion 
// Story: Ghost Lights 
// by Winston 
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Ghost Lights

Conclusion










Dear Princess Twilight Sparkle,

If you're reading this, it means that Azure Sky gave you a copy of this account I've written of our time together at the Seawall, as I promised her I would to help her explain things, and that you've come to the end of the story. This tale is as thick as a large novel, I know, and I apologize for its length. It covers more ground than I realized it would when I started writing weeks ago while I was still on leave. I hope it's not too much and that I haven't wasted more valuable time than necessary, but I felt as if everything here needed to be said for the story to be true and whole. Nothing less would be honest or right.

I also know that you and Azure Sky probably have a great deal to discuss about some of the things it reveals. She and I both know that some of what she's done, if perhaps not necessarily explicitly forbidden, nonetheless may not meet with your approval, exactly. I can only hope that this can be forgiven in light of why it was necessary. When I think about how to explain that, I find myself returning full circle at last to the question I opened my introduction with:

What's it like being a guard for Princess Twilight?

Looking back on it now, I'm amazed by how life-changing the experience has been.

Although that answer is very different from the picture I painted when I began this narrative of it being something mundane, both are equally true. The difference has proven to be, as I said then, simply a matter of perspective - of a pony recognizing when they're in the middle of a good story. Very often it's only in looking backwards after the fact that we realize the full significance of what's happened. If I hadn't been assigned to your guard, I would have never been part of this particular tale. That would be an immense loss for me. I would have never found a friend and a sister in Azure Sky, and I would have never become who I am now. I also like to think that the inverse is true, that I helped her become what she is.

For all that, I imagine that there's a question that's going to be asked: do the results justify how Azure and I got here? Was the magic that Azure Sky used while we were out there the right thing to do? And did I do the right thing by being complicit in that, teaching her how to fly and letting her take the risks she did? A story like this is complex and hard to summarize accurately without oversimplification, to quantify into a single definitive answer concerning whether it was worth it. All I can do is make my best attempt.

If all of these events and where they led us were distilled down to a single final grain of the most essential truth about their meaning, the one thing I would say is this: what we experienced and accomplished together, and what we both learned, has made our lives better.

Yes, it was worth it.

It's been an extraordinary six months. Thank you for sending us out there together. It was something we both needed. In many ways, we both came home far better ponies than when we left.

Without this, I might not have ever had the courage to get on with acknowledging the way I feel about Bright Bloom. I also wouldn't have been able to just be honest with my mother and finally heal old injuries and reach out to close the distance between us.

Because of this, I watched a wonderful unicorn named Rarity get her daughter back. Azure is blessed now with three parents - a birth mother, and a surrogate mother, and a father of sorts, all of whom love her. Few ponies are so fortunate.

Most importantly of all, Azure Sky was able to discover how to find out who she is and what direction she wants. If nothing else, the one most important thing that should be remembered is this: her transformations were not merely about flying or about being a pegasus. As I've realized, flying is only the means to some other end. This was, at the heart of it all, a search for freedom. Choosing to learn to fly was her way of learning how to choose things for herself. As she always has as a student, she excelled. She learned that her path can truly be her own, not one she's merely pulled helplessly along. She left a scared filly, and came home a capable mare. She knows that she no longer needs to fear ghost lights leading her astray in the dark as she once did.

That alone makes all of this worth having done, many times over. A feather in the wind that I shed once by mere happenstance years ago led her away to the Seawall, but she found her own way home. I can't begin to describe how proud I am of her.

I hope that you'll feel the same way, and that coming to share a deeper understanding of each other through this will bring you and your student closer than ever before.




Your loyal subject and faithful guard always,

Sunburst










The End