In the heart of the City of Neo Ponyville, beneath the arcane glow of the mag-lev rails, rests an ancient statue that has stood strong for millennia.
The statue depicts two mares lying next to each other. One, a unicorn with a cutie mark of three diamonds, is working a stone facsimile of a device believed to be a primitive hoof-operated sewing machine, a sheet of broken slate flowing out from the petrified mare.
Next to her is an alicorn, her worn wings folded by her sides as she studies a strange tablet that those who had visited the nearby Ponyville Museum would recognize as a "book." The faded six-pointed star surrounded by smaller stars on her flank mark her as Princess Astra, who reigned at the end of the Age of Alicorns, which is when experts in thaumo-dating say the statue was created.
The vagaries of time have long since cracked away the inscription on the statue to nothing, and even the best geo-techs have only been able to reconstruct the phrase "Love Persists" and "Precious Beauty." Because of this, the statue is known to the ponies of Neo Ponyville as The Princess and Her Precious Beauty. Who this Precious Beauty is has been lost to time, though scholars believe that she may have been one of the mythical Pillars of Equestria, each of whom represented a different virtue: sorcery, honesty, kindness, loyalty, hope, and beauty.
Next to The Princess and Her Precious Beauty is a pair of adamantine figures standing guard over the lovers. One figure is a ferocious tiger poised to strike any who might threaten her charge. The plaque beneath her names her as "Opalescence."
On the other side of Opalescence is an owl whose eyes seem to glow in the reflected light of the neon signs of the stores set up to take advantage of the visiting tourists. The owl's plaque declares his name to be "Spike."
Historians have dated the figures to approximately two hundred years after the Third Reformation, or one thousand years after the last known legends of the Alicorns, and as such the existence of "Spike" and "Opalescence" continues to be a topic of intense academic debate.
However, no one denies the love that the Princess and her Beauty have shared, and all who come to pay homage to the legends of the past agree that whomever this Precious Beauty was, she must have been a true rarity to draw the affections of a princess.