There was a knock on the door.
Princess Celestia froze in mid-stride, and so did the pair of cups, saucers, and napkins following in her wake. She perked her ears up after a moment’s stillness to try and detect the voice—any voice—announcing their disturbance. Her guards with an emergency report, maybe, or Raven looking to cross one final t on her daily forms, as they had always done to intrude on her privacy after sunset.
But there was only another knock, a touch sharper and more insistent this time.
Smiling, Celestia sent her things away to settle with a teapot and crossed her chambers. “What a rare treat it is,” she said, swinging the door open wide, “to have you show the courtesy to knock.”
The unicorn waiting for her returned the smile, though it didn’t seem to reach his pale blue eyes. He stood at rigid attention to offer a short, sharp bow. “It is a rare treat in turn to be invited by Princess Celestia herself to a private meeting.”
“Oh, you won’t evade me with flattery.” She stepped back and waved him inside. “Do you know how many ponies have said to me they would rather deal with our revenue agents than with you?”
He scoffed, but followed her in, fiddling with the clasp of his cloak. “Do not compare me with those monsters. If I knew insults were all you had to offer tonight I would not have come. That said, however—” He grunted and settled for a flash of white magic to remove and drape his plain cloak on the coat rack. “I am not sure how I will be able to help you.”
The good-natured teasing fled Celestia as she took him in. A close-cut brown mane streaked with shocks of white framed his face, and the dull gray of his coat underscored the seriousness of his tone. “Honesty is all I need from you this evening. Please,” she said with a gesture and led him further inside, past the warm welcome of her fireplace and towards the secluded study tucked in the corner of her chambers. “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
“No thank you, your highness. It goes right through me.” He tossed a cursory look around as Celestia busied herself with a heating spell on the pot, but offered no comment. “Will Princess Luna be joining us as well?”
“No, she won’t. I didn’t even tell her you were coming. My sister has her own priorities to deal with before we depart.”
“Ah, yes. I suppose... congratulations on your retirement are in order?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it retirement,” Celestia said with a smile, stirring a lump of sugar in her cup. “Ponies won’t stop living their lives without us around. They won’t stop writing books either, and Luna and I have quite a few memories ready to spill out. I’m sure Twilight will need to keep at least one secretary on staff just to handle all the interview requests for us.”
“Let us hope it will be as peaceful as that. History has not always been kind to a regime change.”
That it had not. Celestia drew in a long breath over her tea, but the heavy sigh that followed spoiled her enjoyment of the sweet brew in her grasp. She wondered which instance her guest was calling to mind. Her own thoughts fell back centuries to another cup of tea she had enjoyed, one sipped over reports of a new queen of the griffons ready to open peace talks with Equestria. She had soon been struck down by a crossbow bolt, a bolt that led to a new offensive at the colony of Griffonstone that left more ponies and griffons dead. More lives thrown away.
She took her tea into the study and walked around the rich brown table, cleared of any notes or scrolls. Gretchen, she recalled. Gretchen the Wretched, the griffon raiders had chanted behind their wall, a traitor to their vast courage and stunning bravery in plundering Equestrian farmland. And then they died, just as she had. Celestia settled herself at the far side of the table, trying to remember if any of the books stacked on the shelves behind her carried the name of Gretchen inside them.
Her guest followed her inside at a measured pace, a trace of disappointment in his wrinkled brow. “I am no soldier, your highness. If you seek protection for Princess Twilight I have none to offer.”
Celestia shook her head with a wan smile. “I told you that all I needed was honesty. Twilight’s protection will fall to others.”
Apparently satisfied, he took his seat across the table, folding his hooves on top of it. He watched, and he waited.
Celestia sipped, and she thought.
“They’re calling this the end of an era,” she said at last. “The newspapers. It’s either that or a new chapter for Equestria. As if any of them can remember what the old chapter looked like.” It was rare for her to sound so dismissive of her subjects. Perhaps even unfair considering her lifespan, but he showed no reaction to her tone. “I remember their ancestors, you know. I remember being treated like a goddess. And not their early ancestors! Five hundred years into my reign! I had to reject a temple dedicated to burning crops in sacrifice to me. Some fool theory about how I could draw the energy from the food out of thin air.”
She turned her head on instinct before she remembered there was no window to point through. She settled on waving a hoof about. “I commissioned a theater on the site instead. If they were going to sacrifice their labor to me it might as well have been something I would enjoy. And at least the assassinations on stage didn’t prolong real wars.”
“Ah, the Eagle Queen for a month,” he said. “That’s what you were thinking of. She would be proud that one such as you remembers her.”
“One such as what? A pony? Another queen? Someone that wanted peace between us too? An enemy that put her subjects to the sword? Which one of those would she be proud of? Stop, I know what you meant,” she said with a hoof raised to cut him off. Silence passed between them, and she stole a glance to her shelves. So many follies of politics and history she had seen. This one wasn’t worth a debate.
She shook her head and said again, “I know what you meant. I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen princes and generals and lords and ladies born, grow, wither and—” Her voice caught, and she drained her cup to try and clear it. “And die. I’ve even been at their side when the time came. And all of them, for over a thousand years, some would right out and ask, or some would just have a look—”
“Doubt,” he butted in, lowering his eyes to the table. “They would wonder, ‘What have I done?’ At the end—with no more chances, no more changes—they would look to their ever-living sun goddess and wonder about their life before it was etched in cold, hard stone.”
Celesia nodded solemnly. “Generations of ponies have said these exact same words to me. Did I matter?”
He let out a sound, something between grunting and humming, and he steepled his hooves to rest his muzzle. His eyes closed in thought and a moment later, he shared her nod. Even so, she could see his shoulders tense before he looked at her again. “And what do you tell them?”
She dismissed his question with a shake of her head. “Be honest with me. Did I?”
He held her gaze. “I don’t know.”
“That’s no answer.”
“You ask something that is not in my nature, your highness. I can’t know.”
Celestia managed to keep herself contained, her face passive, but her forehooves clenched each other under the table. “If you can’t know then who else can? Luna wouldn’t understand. She was gone.” Her voice nearly cracked, and she turned her head away to collect herself. “There is no one else. Luna was gone. Starswirl and the Pillars were gone. No one has seen the world change as I have seen it.”
Laughing to herself, Celestia managed to turn back with a smile. “I suppose I just need to hear things turned out better than if Discord had reigned these thousand years instead.”
His steely gaze remained unchanged. “They did not.”
“That—” She blinked, and her moment of cheer fled. “That was sarcasm, friend.”
“I know.”
She could do nothing but stare at him. There was not even enough indignation in her to overcome the absurdity she felt and raise her voice. “He, he made ponies his puppets. Literally. Luna and I would cut the strings and—”
“I warned you I would not be able to help you, your highness. You asked to hear what influence the two of you have had on the world, and on that score you and Discord are even.”
A flash of white brought one of the books down to the table. Her guest took care with the old pages as he flipped through them. “Do you know how many ponies died under Discord’s brief reign, your highness?” He gently passed the book across to her. “Zero. There are all kinds of accounts—like this one here—of his twisted humor, but you have those stories because the ponies survived to tell them. Even after his escape some years ago, not a single pony was killed by his antics.”
She did not even glance at the offered tome. “No. No, I will not accept that. You can’t make that equivalency between a thousand years—”
“How many ponies have died in those thousand years?”
Again, she managed to control herself, though the urge to shout him down was rising. “I am a pony, not a god. I don’t even think Discord has that much power, to stop a millennium of aging and the course of nature. And even if he did, do you think it would have been worth it? Do you think ponies would have appreciated spending eternity as his playthings? They begged for someone to stop him, both in daylight and the dream realm. Luna and I couldn’t escape their cries if we wanted to. They were happier with him gone.”
He raised a hoof. “I will leave the philosophy to the two of you. This is the way I see the world, your highness: neither you nor Discord wanted to rule a graveyard.”
Celestia turned to the shelves this time, and she tossed a collection of medical treatises on the table. “Do you know how many unicorn mothers keep a jar of leeches around to drain the horns when their foals get magic surges? Zero.” She found the right page and turned the book towards him. “The scholar Wellspring first proposed they were useless, and he did so because of research from Micro Lens, who studied the creatures for years. Thought, knowledge, wisdom, I tended to them as if they were a garden, just as I tried to support the arts.”
He hummed a note to himself. “I did not say there was no pride to be found in your rule. You have been a source of pride yourself for your court, even your guards from what I have heard. Not to mention the comfort you have brought your ponies. Perhaps you would be better served by speaking with them than with me.”
“No, I want you to explain yourself. What else would you like to know?” She went back to the shelves and scanned the titles. “I have a copy of the journal by Captain North Wind, who circumnavigated Giraffrica and made contact with the tribes there. Here is the collected Arts of War given to me by the Empress of Neighpon. We were the first nation to establish trade with them.”
“Trade means nothing to me.”
Another book smacked the table. “What about altruism? You’re right, I didn’t want to rule a graveyard, nor did I wish that on anyone else. All the times I’ve extended a hoof to our neighbors, you expect me to accept that was worthless?”
“I do not,” he said, reading through the pages. “Ah, the Great Drought of the Zebra clans. Altruism indeed. Famine brings no shortage of desperation.”
“A horror Equestria has not seen, thankfully.” She clenched her eyes shut to banish a vision of the reports of the withered dead and dying. “No creature deserves that fate. Worse, if that’s even possible, when food is more valuable than gold, even your neighbor could turn into a bandit. And we stopped it.”
He peered up at her. “How much more food did the earth ponies yield that year?”
“Sixty-three percent,” she answered from memory. “Perhaps they could have done more, but they worried about overtaxing their fields for the next year’s harvest. But a sixty-three percent surplus for us to ship across the sea with pegasus help to feed hungry bellies.”
“And in so doing, you established Equestria as the breadbasket of the world.” He closed the book and studied her for a moment. “And how long was it until the griffons came to your shores? Twenty years or so?”
“Around and around it goes. Is that your point?” She snorted and sat down. “I traded zebra dead for my own ponies? Is that it?”
He nodded. “You would make that trade again.”
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation. “I would. The griffons could have been reasoned with. I failed in the end, but I would take that chance again. Hunger left the zebras with no choice, but when someone is in front of you—thinking, talking, breathing just like you are—there is always a way forward. I had to believe that.”
“And I believe in the simple mathematics of life,” he said, gathering all of the books they had laid out and floating them back towards the shelves. “Every year there are only a certain number of births. No more, no less. The number varies, of course, but once the year turns over that is it. For the rest of time there would only be that one number of ponies born in one year. And every year that number wilts away. Again, the number changes with the seasons, but the end is the same. In time there comes a day when that year just stops in the pages of history.”
He snapped the books back into place with a unanimous thud. “Gone. And done. What does it matter if all those ponies were happy? What does that even mean to the sands of time? What does it matter how many goods or how much gold surrounded them at the end? The sun rose on a new day. A new round of endings. You saw to that.”
Celestia bristled. She could almost feel the needles in her coat. “Don’t you dare say it that way. I did not ask you here to lecture me. I’ve seen the generations pass with my own eyes. If you think I didn’t care—”
“Of course you cared,” he said in his usual calm manner. Infuriatingly calm. “No pony would do a fraction of what you have done if they did not care. Those memories you keep there are all the proof I need on that point. You cared because it was in your nature to do so. But they are gone.” He looked over his shoulder, to the rooms she had known for so many years behind him. “And in a week’s time, you will be too.”
His words cut into her, and a retort died on her tongue. “Is...” Celestia rubbed the bridge of her nose and let out a long, deflating sigh. “Was this all that simple?”
He raised his hooves to rest his chin on them. “In your own words, you are a pony. We have both seen ponies face a moment like this. Every day they live, on some level, they know that they can do something. They breathe, they move, they have power of some sort. The reality of that coming to an end, the fear of that moment... you are not a fearful mare, your highness. Whatever doubt might have possessed you to invite me here, it will pass.”
Celestia barked a single ha, but could not meet his eyes. “Will wonders never cease? That almost sounded like comfort.”
With a small grin, he spread his hooves and shrugged. “Conversation is not my specialty. I have given you my honesty. Think of it what you will.”
He rose to leave, and Celestia followed him on shaky legs, chiding herself as a foolish old mare along the way. She didn’t begrudge him his answers, only that she had somehow failed to see them herself.
There was one point, however, she remained convinced that he had missed. She had spent centuries cultivating her land and her friends and subjects to grow and improve on what had come before, in thought and in deed. She should be no different. Their ancestors did not simply end. Such a thing just wasn’t possible.
It was in her nature, as he said, to hope so.
He looked back as he reached for his cloak. “I don’t suppose I will ever see you again?”
Celestia merely offered him a sly smirk. “Surprise me.”
“Now that, young one—” He chuckled as the pitch-black robe fell over his body, and flipped the hood over his eyes so that only his toothy grin remained. “That is my specialty.”
With that, he faded from her sight, and a chill crept down her spine when he was gone. Nothing another good cup of tea wouldn’t fix, and she readied a spell to reheat the pot. But once her horn was alight, something felt off. Rather, she felt something drift past, towards her balcony, and Celestia looked over in time for the flash of blue light.
“Celestia, I—” Luna spun around, sweeping her gaze around the entire chamber. “I would have sworn I felt—” She shook her head. “He... was he here?”
“He was. He came to... pay his respects, as it were.” She started to prepare a cup for Luna. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think you would be this eager to see him again.”
Luna scoffed and made her way to Celestia’s side. “No. No, I’m not eager, but are you all right? What did he say?”
Celestia held her thoughts a moment as she finished stirring in the sugar. She flicked her eyes to her sister, and that was enough to draw out her giggles. “Nothing as serious as that face needs! We just chatted a bit.”
Relaxing a bit, Luna accepted her offered cup. “Well, what did you chat about? Is there a problem?”
“Yes, in a sense,” she said, still holding onto her giggling smile. “The problem is I haven’t figured out how to stop making mistakes.” She brushed Luna’s cheek with her own and jerked her head to the balcony. “Would you sit with me, sister? I have something I should have asked you instead.”