//------------------------------//
// Epilogue 
// Story: Pride Goeth 
// by Zurock 
//------------------------------//

	"Right this way, Princess," the mayor opened the door to her small office before leading Princess Celestia in.  "And allow me to say again what a profound honor it is to have you here in Stony Nook!"
Accepting such a noble visitor unprepared had the mayor a little flustered, and her magic went to fast work sprucing up her office.  The glow spread to every corner and the room came to life, organizing itself from a lived-in workspace to a professional reception area, cleaned as fast as a hundred invisible servants could do it.  On the bookshelf, all the lazy books who leaned on one another or were taking naps suddenly stood at rigid attention and packed together tightly before coming under the heavy watch of bookend sentinels.  The decorative knickknacks and doodads on the topmost shelf danced into a more presentable formation.  A window in the back of the office popped open and discreetly the waste basket (recently filled with an odorous, half-eaten lunch) disappeared out of it.  Atop the mayor's desk, busy chaos quickly came to pristine order as all the loose papers whizzed into folders, and then all the folders flew into cabinet drawers which rapidly piped open and closed like a trombone band at a rock concert.
The finishing touch was a little nudge to the nameplate on the desk, sliding it into the exact perfect position.  Not too arrogantly forward.  Not too far back as to seem completely unimportant.  Just the right place to be visible and casually read.



Mayor Notary Public



"Please, Mayor Public," Princess Celestia gently excused, "it's my absolute pleasure to visit."
The mayor bent so low that she would need to be peeled off the carpet.
"In all our centuries on this little river, Stony Nook has never been anything more than a simple quarry town!  We've done nothing to earn your royal presence!"
Tenderly the princess leaned down and motioned for the mayor to rise.  Not that she wasn't appreciative of the humility, but after a thousand years she had gotten very used to the overflowing, needless, endearing, and commendably infinite graciousness of her beloved subjects.
"That's not true at all," she said.  "Every one of my little ponies are special to me, and it pains me that I can't be perfect in giving all of them each the attention that they deserve.  I'm very sorry that I have not visited your lovely town for too many years now.  And in fact..."
Something mysterious slipped under the princess's words.  It didn't draw away from her apology at all, but rather fed it in some unspoken, oblique way.

"... in the future I'm going to make it an annual habit to visit Stony Nook."

Mayor Public cleared her throat awkwardly.  Her professional instincts were having a rowdy cabinet meeting, shouting over each other about how to respond to such an important pony.  Eventually she sided with her duty of promotion.
"Well, Princess, you couldn't have picked a better time to have come!  Tomorrow starts our Stone Victory Festival!  It's our annual celebration of everything Stony Nook!  The whole town'll come together and toast to the greatness of our stone and everything across Equestria that's been built with it!  We'll commend all our hardworking quarryponies who work day in and day out to provide for our livelihoods, and honor the ones who came before us, all the way back to ponies such as Crumbaloo Samantha Pie whose first quarries practically gave Stony Nook its name!"
"As I recall," Princess Celestia said, and again with something thoughtful and mournful behind her words, "the festival first began in order to commemorate a specific event, yes?"
"Ah, yes," the mayor had to really reach into her history lessons.  "Some near tragedy in our town's infancy almost four hundred years ago.  There were some vile creatures or another who threatened Stony Nook but we drove them off.  That event is still, um, celebrated of course, along with all of our history.  Though to be perfectly honest, Princess, I don't believe many ponies tell that particular story anymore.  Ancient history and all."
Princess Celestia hummed.  Again there was something hidden.

After a moment, the sun princess turned bright.
"History is in fact what spurred this visit.  (And again, I'm sorry that it took even that much to remind me to come.)"  She bowed.  "I have to thank you for the recent gift your town sent."
"Gift...?"  Mayor Public was genuinely confused.
"The book," Princess Celestia reminded her courteously.
"Oh!  That wasn't a gift-...  Well, I mean, I'm quite happy that you're pleased, but..."
Mayor Public wandered over to the most forgotten corner of her office.
Squeezed between the wall and the bookshelf was a short display case.  Nothing fancy, built of polished wood with accents of smooth stone (locally quarried, of course).  The items on display were all eccentric; the kind of things whose sentimental value had grown so old that there was more duty than sentiment to hold onto them.
There were bits of rock whose plaques didn't nearly describe their supposed importance in enough detail.  Framed there was a brown and faded photo of some quarryponies gathered around an absolutely massive stone, and no two pony's faces could be told apart because of how fuzzy the photo had grown through all the years.  Mounted high near the top was a folded town flag of a design that had been retired before the lifetime of any of Stony Nook's current residents.
But the most conspicuous piece of all was a little stone bookstand, empty of any book.  There was thriving city of dust inside the display case, but around the bookstand the dust had recently been cleared.
"... we've had that book in our care for a long, long time," the mayor explained, pushing her nose near the glass.  "We've always done our best to keep it in pristine condition of course, but our last pony who knew anything about caring for artifacts like that moved away some time ago.  After all these years, I simply thought it was time to turn it over to the Canterlot Library to take care of.  Only copy in existence, you know?"

"Yes," Princess Celestia nodded.  "I never knew Bookworm had written a volume on the founding and early history of Stony Nook."

"Ah!" Mayor Public's promotional side sparked back to life.  "There's another one of our valuable citizens!  Who would have thought that the most famous scholar of Equestrian lore to have ever lived would have been raised in our humble little town, hm?  I assure you, Princess, that if you had ever met her then you wouldn't have guessed at her simple origins!"
"Oh, I had the good fortune to meet her on several occasions over the course of her life," the princess said thankfully.  "She was always adamant about the value of our nation's history, and she worked tirelessly to promote and spread it.  It surprised me to discover that there was something she wrote which she never shared for mass publication."
"Well, 'you can take the pony out of Stony Nook, but you can't take Stony Nook out of the pony,' we always say.  I suppose she undertook this book as more of a personal matter."
"Hmm...  Personal, yes," the princess mused.
She likewise approached the glass and closely examined the empty bookstand.  The small plaque on it, rather than explain anything about the book which had so long stood there until recently, read in a dulled font:



For my two dedicated parents
The biggest heroes in my life
I love you both
Always and forever



"I'm so glad that you decided to turn it over to the archivists in Canterlot," Princess Celestia said, still peering in deep thought at the bookstand.  "It gave me the fortunate chance to read it, and I... learned some things from it which I think I never would have discovered otherwise.  I feel that more copies should be made.  More ponies should know about what happened here."
"That's... quite the praise!" said the mayor.  It overpowered her publicity-minded senses enough to squeeze out a bit of honesty, "I don't really know that all too many ponies would be that interested in learning about the old minutia of some little, out-of-the-way town they've never heard of."
"There are some who will be, I guarantee it.  Actually, I expect that quite soon you'll be getting some interested visitors from over the Pearl Peaks."
The very specific, and even almost eerie, suggestion tripped something in Mayor Public's memory.
"Oh?  Does this have anything to do with our new neighbors over the mountains?  The ones our fellows at Hamestown stumbled upon a little while ago?  The-... the... Dryponies, I want to say they call themselves?"
"'New neighbors?'" the princess smiled.  She offered the alternative, "Old friends.  And yes, I think many of them will be quite anxious to visit Stony Nook soon.  Maybe even in time for the festival tomorrow."
"W-Well, we'd be happy to have them, of course!" the mayor insisted, as if there were any other answer she could have given the royal sun princess.  "They'd be our welcomed guests, j-just as much as you!  If you're at all worried about our hospitality, would you perhaps like to personally inspect the festival preparations?  I can assure you they will meet your highest expectations!"
"I have plenty of faith that your festival will be a wonderful celebration for all comers, Mayor Public, though I certainly would enjoy the chance to meet some of Stony Nook's many, many talented ponies before things get terribly busy tomorrow.  I'm still so greatly ashamed I haven't visited more often."
Eager to please, the mayor again used her magic to prop open her office door, only this time to invite the princess out.
"Everypony is working hard to prepare, setting up just on the other side of town!  We could go right now!"
"That would be lovely," Princess Celestia stepped out the door.  "However, if you don't mind, I would first like to take some time for myself and... go for a stroll.  It's been too many years since I last had the chance to walk through Stony Nook, after all."
"In that case, I could-"
"Without a guided tour, please, Mayor Public.  Thank you."

A short moment later the two ponies exited the small building which had served as Stony Nook's town hall since the village's founding centuries ago.  They emerged onto the same main road trotted upon by all those citizens who had come before, still unpaved and made of beaten dust.
Not much had changed for Stony Nook over the hundreds of years.  Everything was still stocky buildings which stood sturdy thanks to the solid strength of Stony Nook stone, clustered against the large and gentle riverbend everflowing.  Perhaps the only real difference was that the town had grown larger.  One road no more, there were new side streets which split off from the main road; little teeth that jutted and dead-ended to the south.  Newer structures done up in the same classic style had flocked to either side of them, a mesh of homes and businesses which had cropped up to serve the slowly, slowly, slowly growing population.  The town likewise had extended further to the west as well, having become over twice as wide as it had been in the days of yore.
And dead in the middle of it all, the main road pushed through what was once, a long time ago, a huge stone wall.  Besides for what had been knocked down to allow the road and side streets passage, all of the wall remained standing.  Unsurprisingly to any pony in all of Equestria who knew something proper about Stony Nook stone, the leftover wall was as firm and durable as the day it had been built, with not one elderly crack or one blemish of removed stone to be found along the entire face of it.  It had, though, become quite sunbleached over the years.  Only new residents tended to wonder why the northeast corner of town was tucked away behind an old stone wall, but for everypony else it was just one of those normal, senseless-to-question things.

Princess Celestia had to politely and pleasantly refuse the mayor several times over before her wishes were finally clear.  Mayor Public at last went on ahead, leaving the princess behind and trotting westward along the main road.  Down the way, past the gap in the great wall, beyond the very final buildings of town, there was a celebratory banner raised across the road which announced the Stony Victory Festival.  In open lots on either side of the road, whole gaggles of townsponies were busy setting up for their triumphant celebration.
The road inside town was left unusually lonely, especially for so near midday.  The only ponies there were Princess Celestia and her retinue: four pegasus members of the Royal Guard, two standing free and two still harnessed to the sky chariot which had flown the princess to Stony Nook.  Their bright, golden armor offered proud shimmers from the noon sun.
All the guards reflexively stood at attention and gave salutes with their wings the instant that Princess Celestia walked up to them.  She in turn gratefully bowed her head to them, and then she reached her magic into the chariot.

Out floated an elegant bag, no bigger than an ordinary tote but certainly far more refined, specifically of whatever fashion was all the rage in Canterlot those days.  Something inside was hard and rounded on its tall face, defining the bag's shape.

Princess Celestia started down the main road, the bag drifting through the air beside her.  The two unharnessed guards needed no explicit orders; they followed behind her immediately.  While the princess had told the mayor that she would go for a stroll about town, she didn't head in that direction.  She walked with a pensive determination to the east.
They crossed the bridge over the river, rebuilt only once in all of its history, and the second time in a fashion identical to the first.  True to Stony Nook construction, it had been invincible to generation after generation of hoofclops.
On the far side of the bridge were also a few buildings new to Stony Nook.  At some point in the intervening years the town's borders had at long last been brought past the natural line of the river itself: a small trading post, a home or three, a new post office, The Riverside Saloon (still not successfully competing with the longstanding Old Totaler's Tavern), and yes, the long-awaited train station to save on trips to Mule's Head.
None of those are what Princess Celestia had wished to see, however.  She turned her small entourage north, heading up a thin dirt pathway which had been decorated deliberately with many fragrant flowers.  They gave the long, winding path a strong scent of comfort from grief.
At its end the pathway came to a wide parcel of land surrounded by a low stone fence.  The only entrance was an open archway without a gate.  There were no signs, or words, or inscriptions to identify the location save for on the arch's prominent keystone, which bore a well-known symbol: three ponies in repose, all of different tribes yet all with angelic wings.

As Princess Celestia passed under the arch, she solemnly ordered her two royal guards, "Wait here."
Excellent and faithful solders which they were, they without a word immediately took up posts outside the archway.

The large tract of land inside the fence had unnaturally tight groves of trees scattered about.  The normally independent trees had been planted that way to offer occasional shade to guests, for those unhappy days when crowds had to come to that place.  Other than the trees, everything belonged to the forever-yellow grass which carpeted the smooth and shallow contours of the ground.

And also to, of course, all the gravestones which stood in ordered rows.

Generations of Stony Nook ponies had been laid to rest there.  Since the beginning it had been the local burial ground.  Like most folks, the townsponies had chosen to set their grief somewhere not too near and not too far.
Every headstone plainly belonged to Stony Nook.  The same locally quarried stone which had been used to make the doorposts of their homes had also had been used to fashion the tombstones of their graves.  Looking across the cemetery, the style of the headstones had aged little throughout history: thin, with rounded tops, largely unadorned except for little pommels on their peaks, and around their bases were croppings of small stones.
Fresh bouquets were a common sight close to the cemetery's entrance, laid reverently on top of the rocks circling the headstones with the most recent dates.  The further from the entrance, the fewer flowers there were, and the older the dates became.

Princess Celestia kept a respectful distance from the graves and followed the trail of aging dates back in time.  Her journey into the past brought her closer and closer to the back of the cemetery.
She read the names on every headstone she passed.  Many of them she recognized, though she often couldn't be sure that they were the same ponies whom those names evoked in her; too many lifetimes and too many repeated names.  Rarely some names did foist a burden of certainty onto her, bringing heavy memories into her hooves.  Regardless of how known or unknown the buried pony, she bowed her head respectfully to each and every headstone.
Again she accepted her shame and exuded sorrow.  If there were ponies laid there which she should have known – should have held eternally in the bosom of her heart – but couldn't now recognize because she had forgotten them or what had made them unique, then that was only more clear evidence of how inadequate a single pony like her could be.
Only more evidence of the painful lesson.
More evidence of the need for faith and trust.

All the headstones were well maintained, even towards the very back of the cemetery.  Cracks existed only as repaired scars, scrubbed-away moss had left behind only slight discoloration, and the engraved words had been kept sharp and readable.  Maintenance done completely out of love and respect for the stones themselves of course, if not also for the ponies buried before them.
When the dates on the headstones began to reach within a few decades of Stony Nook's founding, the princess greatly slowed.  She took the time to very carefully read each and every word inscribed.  She searched, sparing nothing, until at last she found the grave she had been looking for.

The one she hadn't known had long been here, until recently.

The one she had been looking for far, far longer a time than just today.

Nothing much distinguished the headstone from any of the others in the cemetery.  It was a Stony Nook grave, same as the rest, welcomed among them.  Like a few of the other headstones, there was no known date of birth; only a date of death.  But unlike all of the others, this one did not have any name written upon it.  Only an epitaph.
It read:



OUR UNKNOWN HERO

Every stone comes from the earth
And again in time is buried
But few give love such lasting birth
They blossom new just like a seed

You will never be a stranger to our hearts
Thank you

REST IN FRIENDSHIP



The silent princess stood for a long time at the foot of the grave, resting her sorry eyes on the headstone's engraving.  Eventually she lowered her tail to the grass, sitting slowly, and softly she floated her bag down onto the ground beside her.  Then, following a chilly silence which lasted even longer than the first, she folded her forelegs under herself and sat completely.
She said nothing.
Her large mane, flying like a flag and glowing with all the rainbow colors of light, reached out towards the headstone.  It floated above the grave.  The very ends of her hair came so close to brushing the stone, wiggling for it like fingers straining to touch something they could never reach.
Still she said nothing.


Reunited at last.

The last she had ever seen of him had been his angry backside as he had stormed out of the throne room in a fury, having moments before thrown a medal she had awarded him back at her face.

Reunited at last.

And four centuries had not been enough time to prepare something to say, even to just this stone memorial.


There were too many boisterous emotions to give any one of them a meaningful voice.
The holes regret had punched into her heart, still bleeding.
The shameful pressure of cowardice on her back, heavy and hurting.
The aching, empty sorrow which so desperately desired to be filled by repentance and absolution, an echoing void.

But also a relief, and a wonder for the painful irony and strange serendipity which both saved and stung her.
Her wretched, four hundred year old mistake had at long last been recently corrected by Twilight Sparkle, who had restored Harmony with the wayward Dryponies.  But that joyous event had come with a brutal and heartbreaking crash of hopes: the Dryponies had no answers for her about Prideheart.  Now suddenly, a short time later, by wholly independent coincidence, those missing answers had been delivered to her very home in the form of a simple book.

Was it fate?  Had her deserved punishment been long ago decided by whatever powers existed above and judged the hearts of ponies, and only now had she been allowed free?
Or had it all been of her own weak choices?
Every single day after Prideheart had left in self-exile, she had prayed.  She had prayed to herself that one day – one day – she would make things right with him.  But always terror and tears had chained her and drowned her, and always by the end her prayer had become: tomorrow – tomorrow – she would find the strength.
Until finally one day did come, but not the day she had wanted.

A day came when, out of the blue sky, like her sun appearing in the dead of night, her broken heart realized that she had waited too long.

Her craven fear had hastened time itself, and too many years had breezed by.

Prideheart, wherever he had gone, whatever he had done, whoever he had become, was no more.
She had not needed to see it to know it.
He had – however, wherever, whenever – joined all of her innumerable beloved little ponies who had gone to final rest.

A pony as long-lived as her knew that such was the nature of time and life, even if she would have sometimes liked to have forgotten.


The day she had realized that she had lost the chance for direct atonement had been one the rare days that the sun never rose.


In the years since then, all she had left for the hero had been her prayers that the exiles who had gone with him would one day find Harmony again, and the lesson in faith and trust he and his sacrifice had forever seared onto her heart; the lesson she had so determinately practiced ever since.
But, sitting before his grave, she said nothing.
Her heart could cry out all it wanted.  Her rational side knew that any words, whether pain or pride or mourning or apology, would have only been heard by the worms in the dirt and the birds whistling in the trees.
Sadly she sighed.

A ray of sunlight surrounded her horn, and her magic reached into the bag she had brought.
Out of it came a golden helmet, very similar to the ones which her royal guards wore but not of the same exact design.  It was something older, not only in style but very much so physically.  The shine had faded away, worn off not by any amount of use but by sheer time.  The crest on top had been eaten down to the now-empty holder.  Most noticeable of all was the old damage on it: burns, from black dragon fire, around where a unicorn's horn would have poked through.
She set the helmet down next to the headstone.

The helmet had been most of the bag's skeleton.  Once removed, the bag had folded over flat.
But it was not empty.

Again Princess Celestia's magic reached in, and this time it withdraw a medal on a ribbon.  The ribbon was new but the medal, like the helmet, was old.  It was bent, too.  On the backside a date had been stamped, the text now warped by the fold in the metal.
It was the very same Medal of the Valorous Heart she had tried to honor Prideheart with four hundred years ago.  The very same which he had flung back at her in outrage and disgust.  She had for centuries kept it safe in a box in her royal bedchamber.
The date on the back was the day Prideheart had selflessly taken wounds to save the lives of everypony in Canterlot.
And now she offered the medal to him again.
Her magic draped the ribbon over the little pommel on top of the headstone, and the medal hung down in front.

Then the princess reached into her bag a final time and took out another Medal of the Valorous Heart.
This one had been freshly stamped, perfect and new.  Yet incongruously, the date on the back was very old.  Three hundred and sixty years ago, to be precise.
The date on the back was the day Prideheart had selflessly taken wounds to save the life of one filly.
Princess Celestia draped that medal so that it hung next to the first.

There was nothing more she had come to accomplish.
With Prideheart honored, she at last took several minutes to let out her quiet, proper grief, sprinkling the grass at the foot of the grave.


Even in mourning and in tears, there was comforting closure to understand that at the very end, despite everything, Prideheart had still been the same hero.


When she finished, Princess Celestia picked up her empty bag and stood.  Prideheart's mementos she left behind.  She made her way towards the cemetery entrance.
There was to be a beautiful festival tomorrow!  A bevy of fun and joy, light and life, togetherness and love!  An event rich with the wonderfulness of the lives that ponies share with one another!
She was so happy and excited to join.
So many of her little ponies to meet, and enjoy, and love.

A precious, powerful, and worthwhile goodness which she thanked him for having protected.




END