Twilight drifted in the hollow of a great ship that lived and breathed, and she was silent.
For five years they had built this vessel for her—an altar or a sepulchre she knew not which—and silently watched her climb aboard. How long did she linger at the entranceway, looking out at their faces smiling or not smiling, before she turned her face away? Not long enough, she thought.
There was gravity, of a sort. Enough that she could walk if she wished, but she did not wish. Walking was slow. More than that, walking allowed too much space for thought. She was too familiar with it. In the void between the singing stars one searched for any reason not to think. Thus instead she flew. Or floated. They were not distinguishable anymore.
She began her day as she always did. She wandered. The ship thrummed and softly sang around her, pulsing with magic and life. Out the windows if she chose, she could see nothing. But she did not choose to open them. There was no prescribed route or speed.
It was good to have routine, but it was not good to be stagnant. Or, well. Too stagnant. The former princess had come to terms with stagnation. It was probably inevitable.
So, for a few hours, she wandered. The good ship Ponyville was good for that.
It was good for a great deal of things, in fact. The Ponyville had been a marvel of engineering and thaumic discipline, and in some ways it had been and was a special sort of impossibility.
How could we build such a thing? They had asked her this many times. Science could only advance so far. Magic was bound by the imagination of the caster. What she wanted was not possible, was not even remotely feasible. And she said to them, gently, that it was alright. She had given them small parts. A thousand small parts. Do this, she had said. Do this and only this, just a small task for me. Do this as you love me and return.
So they did, and a thousand small tasks accumulated as the works of ponies often do, and she guided the course that this asymmetric enterprise took and she glued it all together with a bit of help. Few if any of those who worked to build her final home understood much about it.
They knew only the physicality of it. A mile long it was and without symmetry, and yet strangely beautiful. Its hue altered every moment, now blue, now royal purple, now the white of searing pain, now the sleek darkness of night. Always it changed. They knew the coruscating hallways and the great Drive of crystal which only Twilight herself had ever touched. They knew the gentle singing of the Ship as it waited to be born. They knew the great empty halls, and the not-empty ones where the statuary sat, or the full ones where books lived, or the ones where images were held frozen in time by advanced magic. They knew about the thousand rooms and the underbelly that was Alive, and they knew the ship had a name, that it wasn’t Ponyville, that only Twilight would know.
But no one knew for sure why it had been born or created, or whatever any would wish to say, nor why it had sailed forever away. Or perhaps not forever. Again, they were unsure.
When her walk was concluded, the mare who had once been a princess returned to her room.
It was near the Heart of the ship, and so the singing was always there beneath her. She had not grown accustomed to the sound. She would never, perhaps, grow accustomed to the sound.
The room was simple. There was a bed, plain but comfortable. Bare walls, except for a painting of Canterlot from the perspective of the valley to her right, and of herself and her family to her left. A dresser with a few pictures. They were not bare in the way a prison was bare, she told herself. She told herself that a lot.
She sat, as she always sat, in the center of the room. It was not as easy to do in the light gravity. Subtle movements threw one off. But it was comfortable, and it was useful for what came next.
She reached out with her magic and touched the Ship’s heart, and shivered at the touch.
Making contact with the Ship was difficult. Not difficult as in hard, but difficult in that it was far too inviting. It would be easy to simply… leave herself behind. She was only a small mind in a small frame, and contained within her multitudes. How much more did a ship a mile long contain! But with caution, with resilience, one could keep the self intact.
WHAT DO YOU WISH OF US, MOTHER? The ship whispered, and it did whisper, for to raise its voice even a bit above that would be to strip the stars of fire. Or so Twilight felt, sometimes.
I want to see home, Twilight said. As she always said.
And so she saw home. The heart of her living vessel reached back in time and in space and into her own mind and she was once again in Equestria. Ponyville was a village, her friends were young, and the air was clean.
Not that it wasn’t. Clean, that is. It was still idylic in the way a painting is. In a distant way.
That is enough for now, she said presently. The visions died away.
WE HAVE A NEW LISTING OF POSSIBLE WORLDS, the ship reported.
She bid the ship to show her and it did, a glittering treasure-horde of planets. She stared at them. She floated like a satellite, like a cloud and observed their barren, lifeless surfaces. Each was beautiful in the way that a broken mirror is beautiful. Mainly in that they were not. To each she that it was not what she wished. That it was too harsh, too this, too that. And she moved along.
Until the Ship interrupted her. They had a guest.
She greeted the visiting stranger as he came aboard, and she was not fazed by his strangeness. Nor did she quail at the way that magic seemed to slide off of him. No, and why should she? She’d seen his kind before.
“Welcome,” she said, and smiled at his bewildered look.
“My god, what are you? How do you know English?”
“I know many things,” Twilight said, still smiling. “But you? I’ve met your kind before. But they were different. Not a parallel or a copy, but an echo, as you are an echo of them. Would you like some tea? It has been a long time.”
“I… Sure.”
Twilight, feeling rather different now, happily led her guest through the hallways. She was oblivious to his awe, or to his faint terror, or to the way he stared at her as if expecting, well. Anything. For she was alien to him and he was not so much to her, and he could feel it. He had expected… Well, to be honest it did not really matter what he expected because it was not this.
There were many rooms aboard the Ponyville, and one of them was a replica of her mentor’s sitting room. She had designed it from memory. She invited the wanderer to sit as she made tea.
“How do you know of us?” asked the wanderer.
“I met you. Not you. But others like you. But not like you,” Twilight answered, waiting for the water to boil. She had included running water. The old sitting room had not had that. Otherwise it was the same. Sometimes she valued convenience over replication.
“Have you visited our world?”
She considered toying with him, teasing him with clues, but it seemed rude. Instead, Twilight shrugged. “I visited a version of your world many times.”
“A version?”
She hummed. “Can you imagine yourself? Sitting, just like you are. Now, imagine another you beside you, or perhaps leaning against the wall. You are you, and he is you, and you are both you. But you are also different. That Earth was like your own, but alongside your own. It was not our Earth, the one that you know, but one besides our own place. Do you understand?”
“Like some kind of other dimension?”
“Crudely? You have the right idea. Well, actually, no you really don’t. You have no idea, but you’re close enough,” Twilight said kindly.
They were silent until Twilight returned to him with a tray and took her tea as if she was not making first contact.
“This isn’t how I expected things to go,” he said needlessly.
“Expectations are usually an illusion,” Twilight replied idly. “They aren’t really rooted in reality or in any coherent logic. I mean, not the normal garden-variety ones. Sure, inductive reasoning exists and we make use of it, but to imply that its useful beyond the intimately known is a bit lazy. Don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
She nodded to herself. “How do you like my ship?”
“It’s crazy. I mean, it’s just not what I… I was going to say that it wasn’t what I expected, but I suspect you would only tell me not to expect too much.”
“Or too little, really. What are you doing out here? What is your name? No, don’t tell me that, I’ll lose track of it. Do you travel alone? Have you found anything worth seeing? What made you leave such a nice place as Earth?”
He blinked. He sipped his tea hesitantly, and observed it with confusion at its familiarity.
“I’m exploring,” he said slowly. “We’re testing a new drive and this is the maiden voyage. I’m not alone, but we only have a small crew.”
“Hm. Exploration. To see the unseen. You know, I remember exploring my own world. When it was just myself and my friends, we wandered all over for this reason or that. Do you miss home?”
“Sometimes,” came the answer. “Do you?”
“Oh, always. Excruciatingly,” Twilight said easily. “I miss home like a drowning mare misses the air and the sky. Specifically like a drowning mare who misses the sky, because she can still see the sky, if you follow me. See it but never reach it! Yes, that’s a nice picture.”
“I’m… sorry.” The Wanderer seemed at a loss for words. Twilight accepted this in the same way she accepted most things. Which is to say that she did not, in any real meaningful way, accept it. But she didn’t actually do anything to change it. “If you miss it, why do you not go back? Why did you leave? No, why even ask? I miss it and I left, and I have a mission. I suppose you must have a mission of your own.”
“You could say that,” Twilight agreed.
Twilight Sparkle let the human recover and noted he did admirably.
“I have scones, actually. Or rather, I can procure some. If you wish,” she offered. “Might I tell you a story? I shall trade you in tales, one for one. Is this a bit closer to how you imagined it?”
“Cultural exchange. Of a sort,” murmured the man. “Alright.”
She began.
“A long time ago I lived on a beautiful, green world. I loved magic. I loved learning. I loved the bright sky and the green grass and the clean mountain air of my home. The city was crowded but clean, full of history and bustling. I loved the libraries and the book stores and the donut shop on the corner. I loved going to the Palace, where I learned my lessons under a watchful, loving eye.”
She told him about Canterlot. She told him about the Palace and about her teacher, Celestia Who Loved, and about the green pastures and cool forests of her home. She told him about Ponyville.
Twilight went on and on. She told him everything, through a dozen quests and a dozen trials. Until, at last, she broke off her story with the construction of her ship.
They were quiet after that. The human and the alicorn, tea between them.
At length, the human asked if those scones were still on the table. Twilight chuckled. They always asked for those. And, of course, the ship always provided! The ship provided all. It was the way of the Ship.
The Ship beneath them breathed, and it was happy. In its way, it was happy, as such things can feel a state that ponies or humans might understand as happiness. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it waited.
“Tell me of your homeworld, human,” Twilight said at last. She was also waiting, though she knew not what she wanted.
Was it the sound of his voice? Or of a voice, at all? Perhaps! Perhaps.
It was a pleasant voice, by any account. Bassy but not gravelly. Warm but not like an affectation. This was good, for the story he told was none of these things. It was not warm, it was not pleasant.
Earth is a dot in a great emptiness, he said, or it was. Or it had once been, but it was no longer. The dot was full of light and full of great troubles in equal measure, and it spread both out into the Nothing and it created more dots. Smaller dots. Different ones, with different faces. The humans adapted and changed, until it was hard to say with much confidence what was even human anymore.
Something always haunted his telling. His recounting of his people’s woes and triumphs in the cold signless vacuum of reality seemed haunted by something. And they were. Twilight knew what he would say next, and she was right. She even guessed the time and his mannerism.
She guessed he would set the saucer down, and he did, with its cup atop it. “Ma’am? If that’s the right term? I have to say, that I feel a bit inadequate here. Your world sounds like paradise.”
She snorted. “Paradise? Did I not mention the monsters?”
The human shrugged. “Eden had snakes.”
Batting a thousand, as the humans said. Every swing she hit. It wasn’t impressive. She had a pretty massive advantage.
“Yes, yes, and you’d brave a few manticores for a taste of Heaven. I think we can move past all that, it’s a bit old, you know?”
“It’s… what?”
“It’s just this time I want to do something else instead.”
“This time? I don’t understand.”
“You won’t,” Twilight replied, and then sighed. “You won’t. But that’s alright. I mean, objectively it’s actually not even close to being alright, but there isn’t much to be done about it except to spend this time productively! Or, rather, not productively.”
“You’re talking in circles.”
“It’s fun. You should try it some times.” Twilight smirked. “It really stretches the mind. That’s a lie. It doesn’t do that. But it’s fun to pretend it does. What I mean is that we have limited time and rather than pursue a tired track of discussion, one which I could recite by dull rote, let us do something else. A game, perhaps. Do you like games?”
“I do,” the Wanderer said slowly, drawing each syllable out as if trying to build himself a new floor to walk on.
“Games are a really fascinating subject,” Twilight said. “There’s a science to games. A pattern of patterns, if you will. They are fundamentally puzzles, and I’ve often thought of puzzles as nothing more but colorful equations. Everything balances.” She tsk’d and levitated a spoon, one that had not been there before. “Rainbow would say that I am talking out my ass, and she would be correct. There is a real game, however.”
“And what’s that? I’m afraid I’m a bit lost.”
“I call it Exchange. As in a Cultural Exchange. I have a device, you see, called an Ansible. Or at least, that is what the man who made it and gave it to me called it. He was one like you are, but different in his own way. Yes, another human, but a different sort. There are many kinds. There as many kinds of human as there are humans, I suspect. He said that it was like a ‘infinite-distance soup can phone’, which I found to be a charming image. Don’t you agree?”
“I do. And you want to exchange something for them?”
“Not exactly. I propose to give you one. There are two units. I shall have one and you shall have the other.”
The wanderer paused. “And they communicate, is that it?”
“Yes. You can try taking it apart, of course, but I don’t advise it. You won’t understand how it works and your attempts will break it. I’m quite sure on that. You are going to ask what the other half of the exchange will be.”
“Yes, I was about to.”
“Simple,” Twilight said, yawning. “Mostly simple. It’s not simple at all, but it appears simple and that is what matters. I want you to keep in touch. Simply set the ansible down somewhere in your ship. Somewhere fairly public, perhaps. The mess hall, the lounge, whatever passes for such things. A hallway, even. Let my calling place be a sort of roadside shrine.” She chuckled, and then her voice grew softer. “You know, I saw one of those once near Griffonstone. I asked Gilda what it was and she had no idea. ‘They’re everywhere,’ she said, as if that settled the matter.” Twilight coughed, sipped at her tea, and continued on as if nothing had happened.
“You just want us to stay in touch.”
“Yes. It’s a burden, I know.”
The Wanderer scratched his head.
“That doesn’t seem so hard,” he said slowly. “I’ll have to consult the crew.”
“Of course.”
Twilight sipped her tea. Again. She already knew what would happen. All around her, she felt the presence of the Ship, holding her up. Begin again, it whispered to her. And she thought that she had done this and much else besides it before, and that she could endure.
*
The Ansible on the ship that lived and the ship that sang sat in its own room deep within the bowels. But if she wished Twilight could access it anywhere. There were many ways.
It was her ship after all. It had been made for her, and it lived now for her, even though it was beyond her ability to know or understand. In this, the Ponyville was accommodating. If she wished to find a place, and she wished to find it quickly, then she found it quickly. Like a great puzzle it was always moving around, rearranging itself to better suit her needs.
Ponies so often think that what is best for them is what is most expedient. The straightest line is quicker, but it is not better at every point along the way. Many ponies would assume that Twilight’s vessel and caretaker made all routes short and easy for her. They would be wrong.
More often than not, her ship crafted long glowing tunnels for her to trod down that opened up into great cavernous spaces where she flew. Usually there was gravity of a sort, but not always.
Twilight found the ansible today in the middle of a vast, dark cavern. She sat beside it and pressed the only button there was.
The ansible itself looked an awful lot like the old radio her family had owned in Twilight’s foalhood. Exactly like it, in fact. She had been very specific that it be hard to tell it wasn’t merely that. What gave it away was how the dial and the little tuner were nonfunctional.
“Hello,” she said.
There was static. There was always static.
“Uh… someone there?” asked a voice through the speaker grille.
Twilight smiled. She rested her cheek against the machine. “Yes, it’s me. I’m here. Twilight.”
“I was wondering when you would call,” said the voice. “What can I do for you, Miss?”
“They used to call me a Princess.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Tell me about Earth.”
The voice told her about Earth. It started with the science. It started with the raw building blocks of observation. What was the planet made from? What was its climate? Science, which then as it often was, became a clever sort of avoidance that ignored the ineffable Whole for the very-effable Part and by degrees moved themselves forcefully deeper into mystery.
But eventually the meaningful parts happened. Meaningful in that it was meaningful to the speaker. It was all meaningful to Twilight, who knew it all already, who had memorized so much and could rattle it all off in a moment.
Earth was beautiful. Earth was varied. Earth was kind. Earth was not kind. It had soft places and hard ones. It was cold and warm in turns. It spun and swiftly tilted. It was the picture of the completion of imperfect things.
“What about where you are from?” the voice asked.
Twilight sighed. They always asked that.
“I’ll tell you about Equestria, then. And the rest, I guess. I don’t have experiential knowledge of the whole planet, of course. Though I doubt you do! In fact I know you probably don’t, but that’s not the point. I have knowledge gleaned secondhand, yes, but mostly from books and the occasional eye-witness and it goes a long way.”
She tapped her chin, and made a great show of humming.
“Equus. Or, well. Our word for it is actually best translated as Earth. As in the soil. The dirt, ground, you know. Equus is useful for the purposes of this conversation.
“It was and is beautiful. Stunning. Full of magic, and I mean that quite literally. For a unicorn, it was… it is like swimming, a bit. The whole world sings with magic. Thrums with it? No, forget both of those. Inundated with magic. I felt it as a unicorn all around me all the time until it was a quiet background noise but afterwards I felt it thrice as much.
“We have industry, of course. Great cities. But so much is unspoiled. It was green and alive. Canterlot, old and venerable, built into the side of the mountain with Celestia’s palace atop it. You would call it something out of turn of the century fantasy novels, I think. Or so others have said. Ponyville, sleepy and welcoming, thatched roofs and libraries inside of trees. Manehattan with its busy streets. Dark seas and forests full of mysteries that one could spend a life time chasing down.”
Twilight sighed. “Magic was and is common place. Unicorn magic, flashing spells and telekinesis. But other things also. Pegasi and batponies in flight. Earth ponies bringing up massive harvests. Crystal Ponies protected from the freezing north by a crystal heart filled with love. Love in my world was a potent magic. The ties that bound ponies together were powerful.”
She was quiet for awhile. The other did not answer.
“It was and is a wonderful world. It was very beautiful. I wish I could show you. Or that you would ever see it.”
She rambled on. She described the cities she had seen and the horizons she’d wished she could paint. Twilight reached. She had not reached this much the last time, but usually she told this all earlier. She rewarded variation. Not that it mattered.
When she was finished, she fell silent again. The voice answered.
“That sounds like Heaven.”
“So I’ve been told,” Twilight said with a humorless grin.
“Why did you leave?”
Twilight swallowed. She hated this. She hated this question. But it wasn’t supposed to happen yet. She was taken aback.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “Which one are you?”
“Ensign Calhoun. I’m the pilot. Well, I’m one of the pilots.”
“Well, Ensign, I left because it was a beautiful world. It was a wonderful, happy world. And I was no longer any of these things.”
*
Twilight blinked and yawned.
Before her sat the Great Mystery, the Equation, the Story. It was not a thing to be solved but one of those sorts of mysteries that simply exists to be, and to be undeciphered.
So, she was not perplexed by it so much as she was fascinated. It was simultaneously exhilarating and disgusting. The disgust was targeted more at herself, at her own… excitement.
What she thought of, staring down the puzzle in the void, was an old memory. She had been young, riding on her father’s back. There had been an accident, a horribly violent one. Somepony had been badly injured. Her father sternly told her to look away as he slipped away through the press of the crowd. But she hadn’t looked away, had she? Her heart, her traitor heart, had beat so quickly in her chest like a regiment set to running, pounding beat after beat, until at last for a brief second she had turned her head and through a gap between two adults she had seen…
Yes, it was that same feeling, the gawker’s remorse. She scowled.
The puzzle, the Mystery, was in the physical world she inhabited represented by a blackboard roughly fifty feet by fifty feet. Words, half-finished and abandoned equations, diagrams… it was all but full.
There had been progress, yes, but not of the sort one expected from effort so much as from what one expected of mere movement. She’d skipped along the timeline but little else.
There would be an answer. But not yet. Not right now.
Now she had an appointment with a human.
*
“Do you like your ship?” she asked. She’d asked every other question to at least one of them before at this point. She was working on the mundane things now, really just sitting this conversation out.
The voice this time was softer, feminine, given to short declarations over long speeches. She liked it. She’d conversed many times. Ensign Faisal, who worked with the drive. Twilight was always sad when it was time to talk to her.
“I like the ship quite a lot,” she said. Her voice was musical, her pronunciation slightly off but in a way that was harmonious rather than not. “It’s new, you know! The Drive is a work of art. I heard that the maiden voyage was just one lone pilot out in deep space for a year. It sounds lonely.”
Twilight sighed. “Yes, it does. So the Drive is new? I’m sure you’re excited to be working with it.”
“Oh, very,” Faisal said. “Sometimes I worry we’re not as familiar with it as we should be, honestly.”
Twilight did not say: No, no you aren’t. Instead, she continued on. “I remember what that was like. The feeling you get when you study hard but then the test comes and you still aren’t sure?”
“Right! I mean, I was rated well on it before we left, so objectively…”
“Ah, but the facts rarely get in the way of feelings in the ways we wish they would,” Twilight said quickly. Irony was not her favorite flavor of conversation.
“Yeah.” Faisal chuckled.
“You’ll do fine,” Twilight lied.
“I hope so.”
“It will work out,” Twilight lied. Again. “Besides, you aren’t alone. There are two of you, aren’t there?”
“Oh yeah. Honestly, they should have had at least one more person on this engineering team. It’s a bigger ship than people expect, and there’s only four arms between us.”
Twilight grit her teeth. “Your captain said something similar once.”
“Yeah, I know he’s trying to make do and not run us ragged,” Faisal said.
“He’s got a head on those shoulders,” Twilight said, keeping herself civil and nuetral and thus avoiding a lie and the truth. Tightropes were hard to walk, but for now? Worth it.
*
Sometimes, she thought they were imaginary.
It wasn’t that much of a stretch, honestly. What was there of the humans that was verifiable, really? Sounds, words, a faded memory of a man in a crisp uniform with an unassuming face smelling faintly of sandalwood, his short blond hair neatly trimmed, his body strange and bare with his skin showing in such a bizarre way. How alien he was!
How fake that memory seemed.
Honestly! Honestly, she would say to herself. Think about it.
Meeting another ship in the void?
Think, she would continue. Think! Dwell on the void and its contradictions. Imagine infinite space, fail, try again, settle on something more manageable, then expand it until your mind quails and your senses fail to grasp the nature of space and distance.
What are the chances of two tiny flaring souls, hers and the captain who walked aboard her ship over and over again, what were the chances after all of such a thing happening? What were the odds of two ships coming across each other even under the most normal circumstances, let alone these extraordinary ones?
But she had met them. Many times.
The second time and the third time she thought that the void had finally broken her. Hells below (wherever below was), the very first time she had thought that.
You don’t listen to ponies or people or whatever dying over the radio and come away unscathed, after all.
The first time she had been heartbroken, horrified, crushed. And then, she wasn’t sure how much longer along, she met them again. The second Captain she scared, Twilight remembered. She was all over him, trying to see if he was real, asking him questions. That had not been as productive a ride around the cycle.
The third began her investigation. The third was when she started keeping up with it all on her blackboard. The Ship that Sang had grown it for her, and she had remembered to say thank you before she continued, because more of the old Twilight was alive then.
Not that she thought of herself now as some sort of “new Twilight” because she was always a new Twilight in some way or another. But she had been a bit different.
With every iteration she got closer to the beginning. The whole mystery or story or puzzle or whatever it was, the incident that kept occurring, that had not yet stopped from occurring—she was headed back. Life was lived one way, as she had often noted, but understood in the opposite. So it was fitting that she would be headed back.
She had ideas about what had happened, of course. Fairly solid ideas, in fact. Over the course of a dozen or so different iterations of meetings and conversations, Twilight had worked out a sound theory of what exactly had gone wrong.
But that was less important in the present. It would be important later.
What occupied her now was the feeling of intense unreality. When she was at the Ansible, speaking and listening, it felt very real. Every comment felt vital and warm. The exchange was interesting and alive. She felt like she herself was real, when she spoke to them.
But as soon as she went elsewhere, mere moments after the talk died, she would feel hollow again and unreal. She would be doubting that the conversation had even happened, an hour later. An hour later from when she remembered it happening, anyhow. Empirically proving to herself that she had indeed talked to another living being only went so far in easing the troubled feeling in her gut.
*
Ensign Riley today.
“So… your ship.”
Twilight smiled, and stirred her tea with a spoon. “Yes, my ship. What about it?”
She always enjoyed Riley. Each and every time. He usually came around the middle of the cycle. It was the last conversation she could be happy in. It was downhill from here.
“What is it? I mean, like, the Captain made it sound like it was alive.”
“Oh, but it is.” Twilight hummed softly, and then gave the answer that she had played over and over again. “My ship is as alive as you or I am, but in a very different way. It has the same magic running through it that I do. But its mind is very… different. It would take me a long time to build the theoretical knowledge for you to understand even a simplified explanation. I do love to teach! But I’m afraid I don’t have the, ah…” Twilight blinked.
The ansible sat in the room not unlike her old family home’s living room. The saucer, the tea cup, all of it like her mother’s. She stared blankly at the device, then at the table it sat on, then at the wall behind it.
“I’m afraid we don’t have the time,” she finished.
“Wow,” the ensign replied, oblivious. Absolutely oblivious.
She’d tried to warn them a few times. It had always ended in them shutting off communication, or discovering the problem but not being able to solve it and then being erased, or…
Twilight swallowed. “What about your ship, hm?”
“Hadn’t you already talked to the engineers?”
“Yes, of course. But what do you think of it?”
This was supposed to be her cycle off. This time around would be a rest period. She’d already decided. But it was hard. She just wanted to keep digging and feeling warm and they kept answering her inane, pointless questions and being congenial and it made her feel strange.
“Well,” the ensign began slowly, humming. She tried to imagine him. Tall, lean, hair cut short in a military style, outrageously blond. Young. “I guess for starters that its an Absolution class ship and that means that it’s state of the art. You can tell, too. Like, everything is so sleek, and it’s all designed for zero-g in case we lose the low grav. Lots of handholds and such. It’s mostly white, and it kinda makes me sleepy when I’m going through the spine. That’s the middle part of the ship, the main hull section.”
“Do you like it?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s really great. Not just because it’s new or fancy, but more because the ship itself is just… it’s beautiful, really. It’s less a work of engineering and more a work of art. Don’t tell the gear girls I said that, though. Faisal wouldn’t take kindly to it.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” Twilight said. “I promise.”
Not that she had anyone else to talk to.
*
The night that Twilight’s mother had died was the first time she dreamed of sailing the stars.
Twilight Velvet, beloved writer, mother, wife, friend. Et alia, so on and so on. She’d died peacefully enough and left her only daughter to fall asleep roughly propped up on her old home’s roof staring at the stars.
In her dream she had left the roof behind, left her room behind, left her family and friends behind, left Canterlot and Equestria, left everything and walked out into a great shining darkness. Her footfalls had been like bells on an unseen roadway leading upwards and somehow inwards.
It had been a lovely dream. She’d never forgotten it.
That had been the birth of some things, and the beginning of a long, slow decline in others. Twilight and her father alternatively clung to each other or found the other intolerable. Death shook her, and though there was no tragedy except for the final sort, Twilight found herself beginning to lose traction in everyday life.
Until she woke up on a beautiful world, a happy world, and she was neither.
Twilight Sparkle wakes slowly, lazily, and the Singing Ship greets her.
“Good morning, Mom,” Twilight says, greeting the Twilight Velvet as she does every “morning”.
*
The unexpected question comes at the end of a long hall, where the ansible had been moved.
“Don’t you ever get lonely?”
Twilight Sparkle, so known for her mind, still answered without thinking. “Yes. I never stop.”
“Oh… I’m sorry, Miss Twilight. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“No! No, it’s alright. Stay,” she added, and then winced. “It’s fine.”
“I… well. I already asked, so: is that why you gave us this thing? The, uh…”
“Ansible,” Twilight said mechanically. “And yes.”
He was quiet for awhile. Twilight wasn’t sure what she thought of that.
“I’ll make sure we talk to you more,” he said at last. “I mean, besides for the whole cultural exchange thing and the fact that you’re like, the first alien ever. Nobody should have to be in deep space all by themselves.”
Twilight had no answer.
*
Things went off the rails quickly.
To be fair, they already had. None of the ten person crew had ever asked her if she was lonely before. It wasn’t a variation she had accounted for, and frankly it had been some time since she had logged a deviation from the stock changes to the various temporal echoes of the human ship. She should be excited.
But she was not. Not in a pleased way. Excited did not communicate the raw nervousness that stirred in her gut.
It was just a hunch. Just a feeling. But it was a strong one: she was getting close to the beginning.
And she had no idea what to do when she got there.
Twilight had considered the situation, sure. She had imagined how she might save them from their fate with some fantastic spell, or through sheer daring-do pull of some heroic rescue. But none of it was substantial. None of it was based in knowledge.
She just didn’t know enough.
But if she were anywhere close to the first time… If this, in fact, was the first time they met… then she had no idea. How would she even know?
Twilight took a deep breath.
“Ship? Ah… Mom?”
The Ship sang as it always sang.
“I’m going to need your help. And I’m going to need to catch up with those humans. I’ll be up on the bridge in a moment, alright?”
Its affirmation manifested as a feeling of warmth on her coat and she gave a weak smile.
*
She explained the plan to herself over and over, biting her lip until it was raw. She went over every contingency. She tried valiantly to find some other way.
The ship had continued its display of warm affection. She felt its encouragement on her mind. She felt its love like a warm blanket wrapping around her, like the warmth from a tea cup, like her mother. The ship, Ponyville or Twilight Velvet, knew the score. It also knew that Twilight was prone to doubt. It knew much that it did not say. But mostly it knew that it loved her.
She loved it. She loved it fiercely, with a desperate sort of love. She loved it the way that a lonely mare loved her only friend, for that was what it was.
And it was sure.
Of course, all of her worry might be for nothing. Twilight clung to that idea. If they caught up with the humans before they made the Jump, the fateful Jump, she would be able to piece together what was happening quickly enough. Namely, because the original Jump was going to be clean of the magical baggage the others had. Had she felt it, during the brief encounter? No, but she hadn’t been feeling for it.
She cursed herself. Complacency!
Besides, the incident would be like a warning klaxon in her brain if she were near it. The wrongness of it, the wrongness of acolytes dabbling in unknown arcane arts, would be both repulsive obvious and horrifyingly present.
How much longer? Her ship was far faster.
An hour, the Ship told her. She saw an image of herself lying down, as the ship urged her to rest.
But she could not rest. Not like this. Not with what was right in front of her.
To her credit, she did try in the end. She laid down in her bed and wondered what it would be like to be alone again. She tried to tell herself that this wasn’t the last cycle through, that this iteration was not the original, that she could keep repeating it.
But then, of course, reality set in. Repeating it would mean consigning the poor humans to their fate. Twilight could not do that. She simply couldn’t. Not when she could help them. Not when they needed her help.
Rainbow Dash had told her once that loyalty was more than just important. It was essential. It was about more than just being there, or saying things, or even doing things. Loyalty was love. Loyalty was an acknowledgement of another’s existence, and without that?
Affirmation made the world go ‘round, she’d said at the time with a little smile.
She groaned softly. But no tears came.
Time passed agonizingly slow. Knowing how dangerous it would be kept at bay even the most animal pleasure of lying in her soft bed. One moment, she wanted this unsteady calm to last on and on. The rest of her just wanted it to end.
She would have to meet them all in person. These people, these humans, that she had been talking to at a distance for so long would be irrevocably real, and there was something frightening about that. Held at a distance, company could be escaped. One had power over one’s own environment. But in person, face to face, knowing even as one was known? It was the epitome of helplessness. To be always under the scrutiny of others filled her with nervous aching.
There wasn't any helping it.
At some point, she fell asleep, for the Ship woke her with a shrill song.
Twilight, alarmed, tangled herself in the sheets and went sprawling over the side of the bed where she lay astonished for a moment as her friend and vessel urge her to get up. It was time.
Twilight flew to the door and opened it to reveal a hall. A hall she had not seen in a long, long time. This was not the changing corridor of earlier. This was the original deckplating of her ship, when it had slept on Equus and ponies had milled around inside midwifing it.
She galloped along the hallway, flaring her wings. With a great leap, she was airborne, taking a sharp turn where the straight passage met another and intersected. Even after so long she still remembered the layout of her own vessel.
She tried to feel for the human ship with her magic, but felt nothing.
Twilight tried to ask the Ship what was wrong, but it did not answer her question. It only prodded at her to hurry, hurry.
And she did. Regardless, if her hunch was correct, she had little time.
The operation would be delicate, and failure would lurk just out of sight at every moment.
Twilight reviewed it all in her head in detail as she came at last to the great powered doors that opened to the bridge.
First, she would have to cast the greatest dispel of her life through the Ship’s arrays at precisely the right moment. Done correctly, this would yank the human vessel out of the ill-fated FTL jump that had caused it to come unstuck in time in the first place.
They had dug too deep. Their drive was effective, but they did not understand it at all. But Twilight had studied it furtively secondhand for so many cycles now, studying its wake, getting clues in conversation. The Problem that she had worked on was that drive. Whatever they had intended, they had punctured the arcane veil in the worst possible way and it had destroyed their vessel.
But it had done more than crush them under their own weight. It had unstuck them in time, copied them over and over, sent millions of them perhaps, to die over and over again across the stars, reliving the same meaningless tragedy over and over.
But she could stop it. She could do this.
This was the kind of situation that Twilight Sparkle felt competent in. Risk, life, death, action. She was a mare of science and lore, yes, but above and beyond that she was a mare of action.
As she entered the bridge, she saw that the Ship had already brought the human vessel well within visual distance. At least, visual distance for the magically enhanced duraglass.
Twilight walked over to the control panel in the center and grounded herself. “Top of your game,” she muttered. “Top of your game here, Sparkle. Just… just think of it like a normal training session. You’ve done this spell a thousand times.”
Yes, but never this big.
It was insanely dangerous. Normal burnout was harsh, but this would require tapping into the Ship’s vast network of thaumic pathways. If she couldn’t keep up with it, it would do more than cause mere burnout and give her a migraine. Potentially? If she lost control of it absolutely she would quite literally burn from the inside out. If she mistimed the casting? They died, she supposed. And again, a dispel without a solid target would be messy at best. Generally, manageable. But the array would make even tiny mistakes magnified a thousand fold.
There were other ways to do this. But this was the one that preserved everyone. It didn’t matter that the one most in danger was herself at this point. Twilight Sparkle did what she had to.
Twilight grit her teeth, readied herself, and began to call on her magic. Synapses that had lain dormant sprung to life, filling her with arcane power. It was a rush beyond belief—to be suddenly full of power! Stars, how she had missed this without even knowing. Her doubt fell away. She could do this. More than that, she would do this.
“Ready?” she asked the air.
And the Ship sang.
Many things happened at once.
First: the human ship’s drive came to life, and she knew that her hunch had been correct. This was it. This was the first jump.
Second: Twilight Sparkle realized that the answering singing was both affirmative and mournful.
Lastly? Lastly, Twilight felt as if a great hand had grabbed her and she cried out in alarm.
Her vision blurred. Not from stress or sleep or anything else. No, she knew exactly what was happening. She had done this to herself so many times, after all. It was teleportation.
She tried to call out, knowing already what Twilight Velvet was planning. She tried to protest, to plead. But she couldn’t. The spell was strong and she’d already opened herself to the array and found that it had wrested control from her with ease. This was her own magic now, used against her.
The spell pushed the air out of her lungs. She felt a brief second of absolute chill and then she was crumbling to the floor.
Or she would have, if the gravity had been higher. Instead she floated distressed in an alien vessel, on what could only be a bridge, as panicking humans milled about yelling each to each.
“The drive! I don’t—”
“What the fuck just happened?”
She ignored them. She couldn’t spare them even a second of her attention. Her wings spread and with a flash of magic that caused her eyes to water at the strain, she righted herself and flew to the window.
She saw it. Her Ship, her own. Her friend in the long darkness. It was utterly beautiful, and only now did she realize that she had never seen it after boarding it that last day. She had never seen it hanging in space as it did now.
She hit the glass hooves first, bile and panic rising in her throat.
Twilight pawed at the window. “No. No no no. No, please,” she said, kicking at it now, as if she could break it. And maybe she could. Wasn’t she an alicorn? Hadn’t her kind been all but goddesses on Equus? Hadn’t she personally broken the back of evil at home?
But then she felt it again, the comforting warmth of her ship’s presence enveloping her. Her vision blurred again, but not because she was being torn away. The shouting of the humans, the warning sirens, the opening portal to hell that their drive had opened, it all fell away.
She saw her mother again, ghostly and indistinct, as if through a glass dimly. She was smiling. This was her Ship as she had always been. They were, at last, face to face.
“Please don’t,” Twilight said, her voice cracking. Weakly she pawed at the image. “I can do this.”
For the first time, the Ship spoke with only words. Perhaps. But you would die. I have foreseen it.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
You aren’t. You don’t have to be. I’m very sorry, Twilight.
There was really nothing else she could say. Her eyes were full of tears. They streaked down her cheeks and she could not care an ounce less than she did about it. She could hardly believe the evidence right in front of her.
Velvet jumped into action, throwing itself towards the widening warp portal. It was a baleful thing, bending light in strange ways so that looking at it dead-on hurt one’s eyes. The stars around it seemed to bend. The human ship was being drawn in already, but her own ship was faster. It headed the humans off and their craft shuddered as magic pushed them away.
That wouldn’t be enough. The singularity would keep growing until it was dispeled or it was fed.
Velvet would do both. The Ship glowed with power that sent Twilight reeling. The image of her mother fell away, and her vision was filled with her ship channeling its own magic.
But it barely knew how. Not like this. It only knew what she knew, and it hadn’t the experience to throw magic far. There wasn’t time to learn. There’d been no need.
And so it turned and Twilight imagined against all she knew that she could hear its engines roaring as it silently cast itself into the growing distortion in space. There was a blinding light, and then it was gone. Her ship. The singularity. Her last ties.
Twilight drifted. When one of the humans grabbed her and brought her down to the deck, she barely noticed.
They tried to ask her what had happened. At first they were panicked. Then, as time passed and frustration grew, they tried to calm their voices. But none of it mattered. It was done. She knew it. No more cycles. No more ansible talk. No more singing.
The captain, the one from before, was in front of her. She spoke at last, explaining hollowly all that happened. They believed her. What choice did they have? But she couldn’t care.
At last, cowed, he spoke. “Miss, you’ve saved us. I… I’m not sure how you did, but I know enough to know that the drive was about to crush us. We can never repay you.”
“You can,” she croaked.
He seemed taken aback. “Anything.”
“Take me home.”