//------------------------------// // Age 3: The Lover // Story: The Seven Ages of Pony // by ObabScribbler //------------------------------// Age 3: And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Part of me was surprised when he turned up. Part of me thought maybe I should have expected it. He was a master of time travel, after all. He could arrive and depart in my life whenever he wished, as he so often had before. “Starswirl.” “Hello there Celestia.” He had the same wrinkles he’d had when I was a child, though not as deep. I wondered when he was speaking to me from. “Would you like me to send down for some tea?” His bells jingled when he turned his head, looking this way and that around my chambers. “You’re taking my sudden appearance in your bedroom rather better than I might have thought.” “You’re far from the most unusual thing that has happened around here lately.” “I am?” I almost laughed at his offended tone. “This morning I was summoned to fix a spell one of the students had cast that accidentally turned the entire classroom into custard and opened a rift to a dimension of sentient frog creatures.” Starswirl blinked at me. “Ah. I see. And in answer to your question, some tea would be nice.” I yanked the appropriate bellpull, abandoned my paperwork and settled at the low table in the centre of the room. Starswirl arranged his robes neatly around his hooves and studied me. “Hm. You changed your mane and tail.” “Is this the furthest forward in time you have travelled so far?” It took slightly longer than a moment for him to reply. “No.” “I know better than to ask you what you’ve seen or what will happen.” He lowered his eyes. “It seems not only your appearance has changed. You’ve grown into yourself, Celestia.” “Excuse me? “You … exude more wisdom than you did when I last saw you. A more princessly air.” I barked a laugh. “You mean I’ve grown up?” “If you want to boil to down to the most basic terms.” If he had possessed feathers, he would have ruffled them. “Then yes, you seem more grown up than when we last spoke.” “And yet that didn’t stop you from warming my bed back then.” I stared at a particularly interesting whorl in the table’s woodwork. “Or leaving it cold when you disappeared one morning and never came back. Some wounds hurt no matter how old you get. Or I get.” Starswirl at least had the decency to sound embarrassed. “You know I can’t tell you why.” “Just like every other time,” I sighed. “I sometimes wonder why I put up with you.” A maid arrived carrying a tea tray in her aura. If she was surprised to find me with an aging stallion in my chambers, she was professional enough not to let it show on her face. The tray alighted deftly with a vague whoosh as her magic evaporated. “Will that be all, your majesty?” “Yes thank you, Truly.” She nodded and withdrew. Starswirl watched her go. “Barely more than a child,” I heard him murmur. “She’s twenty-six,” I replied as I levitated the milk into the air, adding it to my own teacup but not his. I remembered that he always preferred milk added last. Such a strange thing to retain more than a century between visits but it stuck in my mind like a particularly determined hook. “I was a year younger than her when you first found me.” “You were?” He frowned. “A very old version of you.” I allowed myself a small smile. “I didn’t understand you at all back then. All that talk of destiny and fate. I thought you were some old codger who had drunk too much arrowroot mead.” “It’s entirely possible I shall be someday.” His horn lit up and he plunked two raised teaspoons of sugar into his cup. “Though the thought does fill me with some trepidation.” “I was astounded when I saw you next - as young as I but still recognisably you. I thought maybe I’d met your grandfather that first time.” “Mmm.” Starswirl watched as I poured first his cup and then my own. “Time travel is a confusing business.” “Not something you need to tell me.” I regarded him pensively, looking for that smooth-faced stallion I had met so long ago. I am an immortal. Starswirl is not. Was not. Will not be. Ugh, time travel certainly is confusing. Yet every time I saw him, he seemed so much older and wiser than I could ever be in all my eternity. We had learned together, studied side by side so long ago when life was simpler and knowledge all that mattered. Yet, as was always the case with longevity, eventually he had to leave my side. Just as duty called me, the inexorable pull of time dragged Starswirl back into its embrace. He was my lover of old but I knew I could never capture his heart the way time had. “Will Luna come back to me in the future?” I asked despite myself. I hadn’t seen Starswirl since her banishment and had fought with myself over whether I would ask the question if I ever see him again. Starswirl paused blowing steam off his tea. “You know I can’t answer that, Celestia. I can’t disrupt the timeline.” “That’s not what old-you said when I first met him.” He frowned, though whether at my temerity or himself I could not be sure. “Hmm. I’m not sure why I would jeopardise things so much. Was I specific or vague?” “Vague,” I had to admit. “You said I had a great destiny ahead of me and would be put through many trials but that many ponies would rely on me to look after and nurture them.” I smiled sadly. “I thought you meant I was destined to be a mother of many foals someday.” “Oh. Oh dear.” He winced. “Celestia, I apologise for what I said. Um, will say.” I nodded and sipped my own tea. “I reconciled myself to it a long time ago. All the ponies of Equestria are my foals now.” He seemed to cogitate for a moment. “I will say that … you shall be happy again someday in the way you were in the past, if not more so.” I looked up sharply. “What does that mean?” He shook his head. “To give you any more detail than that would be foolish on my part.” “But - ” “Please, Celestia. Don’t ask me any more than that.” He levitated a teaspoon and stirred his tea rhythmically far longer than was necessary. “I did not visit to talk of the future.” “Oh? Then why are you here? I would have thought rationing out your life to different time periods meant you couldn’t waste it on any non-essential visits.” He continued to stir his tea. “To be truthful, I … missed you.” I nearly dropped my cup. “Excuse me?” “I’ve seen things, Celestia. Things a mortal pony should never see. Things I cannot unsee. Sometimes … it weighs on me. Those are the times I think of you. My happiest times have all been when I visited you.” His smile was tiny and tragic and so genuine it actually hurt to look at. “I have often thought that, had my life been different. Well, had both of our lives been different … I might have loved you. Been in love with you, I mean. Maybe tried out that marriage and foals thing.” My heart lurched. “That thought has crossed my mind a time or two as well,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. That was a churlish thing to say. A sense of my own … mortality has made my tongue too loose.” He finally looked up at me. I suddenly wished I was twenty-five again and could vault the table to hug him like a pony who didn’t have a care in the world except making her friend feel better. “I saw my own death,” he said softly. “I made a mistake and landed in a time before I should have. Witnessed the whole thing.” His voice actually trembled. “Nopony should know something like that.” I choked down my gasp. “You’re right.” “I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go from there except here. To you. Rather silly of me, really.” “I don’t think so. Friendship is a powerful thing.” “Yes. Yes, I suppose it is. You have told me as much before, I suppose. How silly that it’s only … at times like this that I begin to believe you.” He sighed as if letting out a breath he had been holding for a millennium. Maybe he had. I wondered what he had seen, yet did not even consider asking. “Are those custard creams?” “Your favourites,” I chuckled, sending the plate over to him. “I developed a taste for them myself.” “I did always have excellent taste.” His eyes flashed. “In biscuits and in mares.” I felt my cheeks burn. Only he had ever been able to make me blush like that. “I missed you too, Starswirl.” We ate our biscuits and drank our tea, chatting amiably. He gave me teaching advice and we perused the curriculum I had been writing up for my school, which had proved harder to corral than I had initially thought. Ten years of teaching and I still found new things to take into consideration for my students each and every day. I told him stories of the earth pony filly who could miz potions even stronger than her unicorn tutors and the pegasus colt who had graduated and gone on to found a farm that grew the best carrots I had ever tasted. To my own embarrassment, I blossomed with pride under Starswirl’s praise for what I had accomplished with the school. Sunset drew near and I stepped out onto the balcony to lower the sun, somehow knowing that when I went back inside that he would be gone. “Until next time, Starswirl,” I whispered to the dissipating magical haze. “Whenever that may be.”