A cold wind blew through Starlight. Not against her. Through her.
She had no eyes to open. It was proof that she didn't exist.
And yet, she could feel the night move on. The moon, which had been high overhead, drifted slowly towards the horizon, the stars rotating in their heavenly pattern along with it. The world passed on around her, time continued to flow, and life moved on. Somewhere far to the south, Sires Hollow would be sleeping, resting the night away with no concept of what had occurred. Equally far to the north, there was Riverfall, where Willow would be resting with her foals, and Maple and Amber might soon be visiting home.
The world went on, and here she was, not here at all. Yet... somehow...
The world wasn't waiting, but it felt like she had a choice.
She could feel her flanks, where a cutie mark with the power to change the world rested. She could feel her ship somewhere in the distance, named after her, her last friend she had just realized she had and wished she could save yet needed to risk to accomplish her goal. But what was her goal? Why had she gone back to fight Gazelle?
She could have trusted her friends to stop him. Or stay safe. Or Gazelle might have kept his word and left them alone, sticking to the Empire and Mistvale and everywhere they weren't in the world. She could say that killing him was a mercy. But the real reason Starlight had gone back, she knew, was that she had taken too much, she was just a filly, and she needed to let it all out, even if her idea of letting it all out caused her to disappear.
Maybe she had wondered what it would be like to not need to worry about anything anymore, if she unraveled completely in the harmony extractor and didn't have to exist to face the next day in a life without her friends. Maybe she had wondered if it would be okay to let Eylista into the lifestream to find a new pony to bother. But she didn't know for sure. All that mattered was that she wasn't here.
Whatever she had wanted, though, Gazelle was gone. Time was passing, and if he wasn't, he would have made it known.
...Something asked Starlight a question.
If she had done what she wanted, what would she do now?
It felt like the world was asking, but that couldn't be. She was the world, a fragment of it, if Honesty was to be believed. So was it something higher than the world? She felt like she was laying on her back. If she had eyes to open, what would she have seen? Could there be something above the flames of harmony, above Tetra and Glimmer and Aegis looking down on her?
She had sworn an oath, her cutie mark reminded her. An oath to make something of her life, to follow her friends' wishes, do what they wanted in Equestria and found a town on Maple's land. A promise to everything she cared about, that even though they had to part, something good could come of it. Wasn't that what she wished to do?
But she was the Immortal Dream. She was Eylista, cursed with a power that could only grant others' wishes, and never her own.
Could that stop her from wishing, though?
Starlight squeezed her eyes harder and wished with everything she had that even if their parting was ordained, that her loneliness was fate, that leaving behind her friends was the only way to save herself, that even if there was a dark future in her visions she had no understanding of how to stop and was now best faced alone... She wished that she could hold onto at least one friend. That she could keep even a single hoofhold, to keep herself from falling. She wished upon a star that she knew could only grant others' wishes, and held it in her mind and cried.
And then she opened her eyes.
Above her, the sky danced with lights, stars, but not just stars. There were cutie marks, floating and free, impossible numbers of them drifting above her head, all colors and shapes and symbols imaginable. They drifted like fireflies, some gently spinning, others bobbing or nudging against her, and several even flitted through dark outlines above her, the remains of a mesh that had once held a harmony comet.
Starlight blinked. The ground beneath her was flat and wooden.
She scrambled to get up, and for a moment, her hooves flailed beneath her, as if her body had been waiting for her permission to exist again and was still in the middle of becoming corporeal. But soon, it worked, and her hooves were beneath her, all her tiredness from the climb and scratches from the battle mystically gone. She was on a pristine wooden surface, and to her sides, she could see railings that were carefully crafted and not at all broken. In one direction, there was the bridge, still standing, almost seeming to glow in her vision. She looked through the open door, too breathless to get up. The light of the setting moon shone through its windshield, not even shattered, illuminating a control panel where a few of the instruments had burst, but most of the levers were intact and in place.
Starlight grabbed the ship and cried. "How are you still here!?"
It couldn't have been possible. She didn't recognize the terrain around her from the battle; it was flatter than a mountain should have been, yet wide and jagged, littered with clean-fractured rock and not a trace of ice or snow. She had connected herself to the harmony extractor, given it everything she had and more, wished for another explosion and surge like the one she made in Ironridge, tried to funnel that all into the engine to use it to ram Gazelle...
She had also wished the ship would survive, covered it in crystal as it prepared to fire. As if that could have done anything. It was a futile gesture when she knew her own wishes were destined to be ignored...
And yet, the ship was still here.
Starlight cried. She didn't know how else to explain it. She didn't know what else to do. She latched onto the ship like it was everything she had, because it was, even if it was a little burnt-out from her surge and wouldn't fly again any time soon. Starlight cried as cutie marks danced around her as if they were thanking her for freeing them, giving her proof that Gazelle was gone. And as she started to get the message, started to realize she had done what she wanted to do purely for her own sake, defeated Gazelle because she wasn't okay with him and made the call to fight him all on her own, as Starlight started to realize it was over and she could close his chapter in her life without any lingering regrets and move on to living a new life without her friends, the moon started to set, and the cutie marks slowly drifted away, down the mountains to where the lifestream flowed freely and they could rejoin with it and be reborn into new lives, free from the troubles of having their home torn away, or whatever fate had driven them to a heretic's execution by Garsheeva.
The last mark vanished from her sight just as the sun started to rise. But it wasn't the only light on the horizon.
To the northwest, just past where the moon had set, a glowing dot appeared in her vision, like a little moving star. But it grew closer, and larger quickly, and soon she saw it for what it was: an airship, Varsidelian in design, yet branded with the colors of the Steel District. And it was heading right for her.
She couldn't move as the ship approached. She sat in the doorway to the bridge, upright and on her haunches, leaning against the doorframe and holding it with both forelegs, her horn tired but not in pain. The ship hummed closer, lower, and she stared at it with big eyes and limp ears until it was low enough that she could reach it with a teleport, hovering directly overhead. A door opened in the side, and a pony jumped.
WHAM!
A sturdy, broad-shouldered yellow stallion straightened up, landing heavily, a greatsword slung across his back that was somehow bigger than he was. "Starlight," Arambai greeted with a nod. "Figures we'd find you here. What happened to the dastard who stole this ship?"
Valey soared into a heavy landing with Shinespark on her back, hitting the deck with a thud and depositing her passenger before bounding closer. "Bananas! Starlight!"
A rope dropped from the ship, and Maple and Amber slid down, the former losing her grip and falling a few feet from the bottom, but catching herself anyway and racing closer. "Starlight! Gazelle stole the ship and Valey said you were moving, and we got so worried-!"
Starlight was smothered in a hug from all of her friends at once, immediately unable to speak.
She could barely even think. Her friends were here, already. She had been in trouble, and they came.
"What even happened here?" Arambai asked, standing at the railing and surveying the landscape as everyone else crowded around Starlight. "It's just a whole field of broken rock and no snow whatsoever! And there are boulders the size of Riverfall... Looks like an entire mountain got destroyed."
"That's not important," Shinespark declared, standing vigilantly. "Where's Gazelle? Starlight, have you seen him?"
"Bananas..." Valey hugged Starlight and seethed. "Apparently no one in Ironridge knew what that goon was up to. He got blown up by the Equestrian border guard right on the edge of the mountains and when Ironridge found him, they thought he was a good guy! So they let him hang out, and we got there and didn't know he was there too, and we barely had time to stretch our legs before he swiped the boat and took off back south again! And then you started moving, and... and..."
"Gazelle is dead," Starlight mumbled into the hug. "I decided to cross the mountains again to come find you. But he found me and we fought and I killed him."
"I can't believe we let you talk us into leaving you alone," Amber whispered, shaking.
Maple was holding too tight for words.
Shinespark surveyed the control panel in the bridge, and then looked up over the wire harmony comet cage. "The extractor had another surge," she commented. "Somehow less damage than the last two times. The students in Kinmari must have done good work." She glanced back at Starlight, stepping closer and sitting down with everyone else. "Did you... hook yourself up to..."
Starlight had a feeling it hadn't just been a good job from the Kinmari ponies. For a tiny moment, she and the ship had been one, and she wished it would survive... "Yes," she answered, pushing everyone just far enough away that they could see her cutie mark. "I'm sorry. It was the only way I could think of."
Maple saw what she was pointing to first, just as wordless as she had been before.
"Heh... Look at that." Amber rubbed her eyes. "How'd you get it? And what's it do?"
"A lot of things," Starlight mumbled. Whatever might have happened to heal the slices on her body or the broken flow of her horn, mentally, she was beyond exhausted.
Valey nodded, taking her hat and setting it on Starlight's head like a blanket. "Yeah... Come on. Let's not stay here where the Equestrians could find us, too. No danger at present, but they shot down Gazelle, so, you know..." She tilted her head at Starlight, folding one ear. "So, you were running across the mountains again. Ready to come home?"
Starlight took a breath. However tired she might have been, it was time to face her future once and for all.
"You're still going to go look for writs," she said. "To try and open the border and get back to Felicity."
Valey nodded. "Yup. That's the plan. But, uhh." She glanced at Maple, and then again at Starlight. "That's not really what you wanna do, is it?"
"But it is what you want to do," Starlight pointed out. "All of you want to get all of us across the border and build our town in Equestria where you can live all together and with me and with Felicity and her foal, and we'll get to build the town ourselves and make it one where we make all the rules instead of having to change another place to be how we want. And we won't have to settle for living with superstitious mares in Riverfall or politics in Ironridge or anything else, and Shinespark will get Equestrian trade to help her home, and everything else! Right?"
"...Hey." Valey sat down. "Yeah. You're right that I wouldn't be extremely cool with just breaking our promise to Felicity and settling down somewhere we don't really like and not trying to get back together again. But, like, what can we do? It's our future, and it's worth fighting for. I just... Bananas... I wish the whole thing with you and Ironflanks in Sires Hollow had worked out. That could'a been perfect. But we'll find a way to make it work. We always do, right?"
Starlight slowly shook her head. "We never do. We always run away and move on somewhere else in the end. Riverfall, Ironridge, the Empire, Kinmari... Sometimes we want to, and sometimes we have to, but we always just keep going."
"I wanna say it's what we're good at," Amber reassured. "But you look a little too tired for that to ring true..."
"It is what we're good at," Starlight said. "It's what I'm good at." She glanced down at her cutie mark. "My special talent is not giving up. I can get back on my hooves after anything and always stay determined. But who cares if it doesn't make me happy? It just hurts more and more each time I use it because the further I go, the further I see that I still can go. I could go on forever, and the next day is always doable, but I get more and more tired every time. I know I could go back to Ironridge and go on an adventure to find the Writs of Harmonic Sanction, and I know it feels like there's an ending somewhere we're all looking for, but it's so much farther and I'm so tired."
Maple touched her shoulder. "You still want to stay in Sires Hollow, then?"
"I..." Starlight took a breath. She just wanted to rest.
"No. I want us all to start our town together, and live happily ever after!" She glared up in determination at her friends, though the expression died quickly. "But I'll never be able to live happily with anything if I can't learn to live without some of the things I feel like I need. If I can't live in Sires Hollow without trying to do everything in my power to make my life better... How can I do it in our town?"
Maple hugged her. "I wish I was a good enough parent to show you."
"You..." Starlight took a breath. "You are. I'm sorry when I said you felt more like a little sister to me. You've tried a lot..."
"Don't be sorry," Maple announced, shaking her head. "It was you saying that that made me realize there was more I needed to be doing for you. And I'll still try my best, no matter where you go, but..." Her ears fell. "Are you sure you have to leave? Is that really what you want? You came all the way out here, you've gone back and forth..."
"I know." Starlight nodded. "It's my destiny to go back and forth. I can't find a balance between hurting myself by trying too hard to get what I need and hurting myself by trying too hard to be content without it. It's who I am. I can't help it. And no one believes there's a balance to be found." Her mind drifted to the Flame of Honesty, to everything it told her about the world...
"Oh yeah?" Valey raised a confident eyebrow. "And who says there isn't? I believe in you, kiddo."
Starlight sniffled.
"Same," Amber asserted, throwing a foreleg over Valey's shoulders. "No one believes there's a balance to be found? We do. And when's anyone else saying something was impossible stopped you?"
Starlight started to cry. "If I go back to Sires Hollow... I know I won't stay there forever. I know it. I know I'll run away again one day and move on in the world and keep looking for what I need to make the life I want to have! But I also know that if I don't go, I'll keep running forever unless I stop someday, and it's never going to feel perfect, and right now... at least I'll have Fluffy and Fishy and... at least I won't have nothing. And you'll know where I am, so..."
"Hey." Valey gave her a reassuring nod. "If this is what you really wanna do? Like, really want? We're gonna set a world record in writ hunting, just for you. Maybe you don't have the strength to spare, dragging yourself onward and paying the price, but you know what? We do. I've been feeling great about myself ever since Kinmari, like... Bananas, I don't even know how to describe it. And you should have seen Sparky's face at the progress Ironridge has made while we were gone. So don't you worry, kiddo. You might have to stop, but we've got a lot of miles left in us, and we'll fly them for you."
"Though that might take some adjustments of our plans," Shinespark added. "This ship won't be an overnight job to fix. We'll have to think hard about how to get it back to Ironridge if we want to fly on with it instead of making do with another vessel. And I'd rather not leave it here in the mountains..."
"Actually..." Starlight sniffed, looking up. "Can you leave it with me?"
Shinespark and Arambai gave her odd looks.
"It's like a friend to me," Starlight said. "It's been protecting me all these months. Maybe none of you can stay with me, but they won't need a Writ of Harmonic Sanction for a boat. And..." She remembered how it had felt to sit at the controls, like she was more familiar with them than she could have been, almost like Amber's cutie mark of boat knowledge had guided her with it. She remembered how she could use the harmony extractor now without disappearing... "I might be able to fix it myself somehow, too."
"Dunno how you're gonna manage that," Arambai rumbled. "Shinespark? What do you think?"
Shinespark stared at the boat and swallowed. "We... do have other ships now. And it could be a goodbye present. Something that means a lot to me." She looked back at Starlight. "I'll want to see this ship again, you hear? You had better take care of it. And it's proof that we'll be back."
"Here we go again, hmm?" Maple sniffled. "Starlight, you really want to do this? I'm sure we could find some other way..."
Starlight shook her head. "I... met Glimmer. In the mountains. The other me."
Arambai raised a thick eyebrow. "Other you?"
Starlight nodded, trusting her friends would fill him in on the flight north. "She's not from the future after all. She doesn't know anything about my visions. She was lying. Which means I know nothing about them, and... it's still my job to prevent them." She wiped her nose on her foreleg. "But even if I don't know what causes them, I do know how strong I am... I know it could be me if I don't take care of myself. I don't know if that is it for sure, but I know it's important. I have to... do what's best for me... so I'll still be able to live happily with everyone when the time comes."
"Aww bananas." Valey shook her head. "Kiddo... Starlight... Bananas. I don't want you to have that sort of stuff on your shoulders."
"But I do," Starlight said, and there was nothing Valey could do to change it. "I remembered what the Honesty flame said, too. I know just how powerful I am now. If I wanted to, I think I could destroy the world. And I don't... I really, really don't. But I have to keep not wanting to. And that means not getting so tired that I lose hope and hate everything like Gazelle... He was so close to me, except he went the other way at the end. So I have to take care of myself. And... And don't worry. If I do leave Sires Hollow again, I promise I'll remember our dream together. Maybe I'll go find the place on that land title deed, and start building something on my own while I wait for you. Or I'll go find Felicity, or..."
"You know what?" Valey announced, straightening up. "This isn't like the other day. You feel different, Starlight. Maybe it's the cutie mark, maybe it's Gazelle, maybe it's just having had time to think... but it doesn't really feel like we'd be abandoning you in your darkest hour anymore. Doesn't feel like you're telling us to leave you and save ourselves, you know? It feels like you have hope for yourself."
"My special talent is having hope for others," Starlight said. "But... I wish I could have hope for myself, too."
Maple held her closer. "So this is goodbye for good, then. You... really think going south will be better for you."
"I know it will hurt." Starlight folded her ears. "A lot. But I have to. I have to take care of myself, and that means trying to settle down, even if I know I'll fail and go looking for a way to finish our dreams again. I have to take care of myself because I know what I can do if I don't."
Shinespark nodded. "Then take the ship. That's my gift. But I promise you, while you're doing whatever you need to in Sires Hollow, we'll be doing everything we can to get those writs. And once we have them? Two is all it'll take, one for Valey to hunt you down with and one for you? She can still smell you. We'll have her come get you and Felicity and her foal."
"Yeah." Valey gritted her teeth in a pained, determined grin. "You got that, kiddo? You do what you need to for yourself, but the moment I have a good ship, I'm taking Birdo and hitting the skies for Yakyakistan."
Amber nodded up at the ship above them, the one they had all flown in on. "Gerardo is staying up there to pilot, but he says hello too, by the way."
Starlight swallowed. She almost expected her friends to try to talk her out of it, but this was really it.
"And, uh." Valey sat down. "I've got a gift for you, too."
Starlight looked up, but Valey just reached out and patted the hat she had set on her head. "That's yours now. Keep it."
"Your hat?" She folded her ears. "But this is yours."
"Yeah, well..." Valey shrugged. "That's what makes it special. But it's not just a hat, either. It's my ultimate weapon."
Starlight thought back to a long, long time ago, when Valey had battled Neon Nova in the Blueleaf generator. It had hardly been anything approaching a fair fight, but she did remember the stallion stealing the hat at one point, only for a banana peel to fall out and temporarily blind him... It was almost a funny image, looking back. She pulled the hat off and checked it just to make sure there weren't any of those left over.
Valey just stood there with a grin, asking if she liked it.
"Well..." Starlight scrunched her eyes shut, then straightened up, reaching around to see if she was still bonded to the black sword. "I have something for you, too."
She was, and it came. There were no runes around her barrel; she had wished them away when she used the shadow cloak to hide from Gazelle, and they had obliged. But the sword appeared, back to its normal appearance, a tiny copy of her cutie mark shimmering in its hilt.
"Huh," Arambai said, looking at the floating weapon. "Weird. Reminds me of Herman's axe... Stuff like this is supposed to be impossible."
Starlight held the sword by her side and looked at Valey. "Um... I have a thing to do... It might be uncomfortable."
Valey eyed the sword dubiously. "You know what that thing does to bats, right?"
Starlight nodded. She needed it to be something that could not be a sword... Closing her eyes and concentrating, she willed it to transform into a stick again, decorated like a staff. A magic wand. This would work. Pointing it at Valey's pendant, she activated the Star Module.
Valey's eyes widened as a beam of energy reached forth and her pendant began to glow. "Woah! What the-!?"
"It's okay," Starlight assured. "I got you stuck in this pendant. Now I'm going to put you back together."
No one could move as the moon glass pulsed, a little light drawing forth, a red sigil made from triangles within triangles. For an instant, Valey's body went rigid, and then in a wash of green flames, she was a shell again.
"Valey...!" Amber's eyes widened in fear.
Starlight kept her that way for less than a second, floating the cutie mark back into Valey's body proper where it belonged. There was one last flash, and with an identical transformation, Valey was back, looking vaguely drunken and dazed.
"Bananas... What the..." She swayed, unsteady on her hooves.
Starlight dropped the staff, reached out with her telekinesis and unclipped the pendant, it and its empty moon glass falling away from her friend's neck. Nothing happened.
"Valey, are you alright?" Shinespark was at her side in an instant, holding her up, and Amber was there too.
"Yeah, I..." Valey looked down at the pendant, then rubbed a hoof against her neck where it had been. "Buh?"
Starlight stepped forward and hugged her, burying her face in the exposed fur that was matted from so long with the pendant. "I put you back together," she sniffed. "That's my goodbye gift."
"Yeah, how the...?" Valey scratched her head and stared.
"Does somebody want to explain to me what just happened?" Arambai asked with a raised eyebrow.
"I don't even know myself," Valey mumbled. "Starlight?"
Starlight shrugged. "I told you. I... know what I can do now. It would take a long time to explain, but I'm very strong."
"Which we already knew," Maple whispered, picking up the pendant and looking at her reflection in its golden plating. "Maybe we should focus on what really matters in the time that we have."
"Yeah." Amber nodded. "Like how you're going to get back home. Isn't it a long way still to Sires Hollow?"
Starlight glanced at her flank, and then at all of her friends', seeing their cutie marks all intact and there. "My cutie mark is..." She swallowed. "It's a cutie mark in doing what you wanted. So it can do everything yours can." She looked at Shinespark, and hovered a foot off the ground to prove it. "So I can fly."
Shinespark gaped. Arambai's jaw hit the floor. Valey just chuckled. "Figures."
"I almost wonder if I had a little bit of its powers before it appeared, and I never knew it," Starlight murmured. "I was always better than I should have been at dodging your things you threw at me for training..."
"Heh..." Valey rubbed the back of her bare head. "Cheater."
"Well, that's a gift to remember me by," Maple whispered in awe.
"Heh. You got mine too?" Amber gave Starlight a shoulder-bump, now that she was the perfect height to do it. "All these superhero marks and Maple's cool storage, and then me with my boat skills? Sounds like you've got at least one that's practical for a profession."
Starlight nodded, pondering and wondering how her life had really reached the point where her friends didn't even ask questions about a power like this... and then Valey tapped her with the pendant. "Yo," she said. "If you're making it so I don't need this anymore? One more memento from me."
The golden links rustled slightly in her hooves, and Starlight stared at the empty stone still embedded in it. The tip of her moon glass sword, the very last piece that still existed... She felt a connection to it still, almost as though it would still respond if she tried to lift it with her horn without being moon glassed. She tapped it with a hoof, curious. If it was empty...
It tinkled against her. She felt the first hints of a sticky, grabbing sensation, and then her cutie mark pulsed, and it bounced away. It didn't seem she would be activating Nightmare Module emulation mode again any time soon.
Starlight pocketed the pendant, keeping it safe. She wasn't sure what it would be like to pocket moon glass, yet somehow, it felt like nothing at all.
"Looks like you really do have our cutie mark powers," Maple chuckled. That gave Starlight one last idea.
"And... I have another present," she said, shuddering. "For all of you."
Could she really do this?
Everyone looked, and Starlight looked back. She took a deep breath, focusing on all their hopes for her, and her hopes for them, and her hopes for herself and her determination to overcome her circumstances and lead a better life in Equestria. She remembered the way their last goodbye had felt, bitter and tearstained with Maple pleading for it not to end like that. Starlight focused on her thoughts for all of them, for Fluffy, for her ship and the friends she could still make in life, for the town she would found in all of their names, for anything and everything that had ever been worth celebrating in her life... and she looked at her friends and smiled.
"That's it," Starlight Glimmer said, sitting on a couch in the Crystal Empire with her mane limp and ragged from the recounting, utterly exhausted. "The end."
"Um." Rainbow swallowed. "Wow."
"So what happened?" Twilight whispered. "What happened after you said goodbye? How did you wind up...?"
Starlight shrugged, emotionally rolled over from recounting her experiences in Sires Hollow and the Aldenfold. "The only way it could have gone wrong. They never returned."
Everyone stared.
"I went back to Sires Hollow," Starlight said. "It didn't take long at all until my wanderlust set in and I couldn't be happy there anymore. I tried my best, I really did, but it was barely a week before I flew back into the mountains to look for the Dream. I went out there regularly, working on it little by little each time. A few months after my friends left, a trade caravan came by, and they had the materials I was missing to jury-rig the last fix I needed to make it fly. It turns out with my cutie mark, the harmony extractor doesn't make me disappear anymore..." She shrugged. "And Eylista can easily provide enough power to keep it in the air. So I left."
Everyone listened, and Starlight continued. "First, I went back to Kinmari. Felicity was still pregnant when I got there, and I stayed until her foal was born. I talked to my friends one more time on the sound stone... Shinespark was in Ironridge when I called. She said Valey and Gerardo and Maple and Amber had kept their word and flown off to Yakyakistan, and she hadn't heard back yet. And that's all I know."
"What happened to Felicity?" Twilight whispered.
Starlight shook her head. "She didn't have a good time, but she and her sphinx both survived, at least for the first few days. I didn't stick around for too long, and don't know what happened to them after that. Shinespark got it through to me that for all everyone's bragging and aggressive planning, it's a two-month round trip from Ironridge to Infinite Glacier at the Dream's speed, and they were slower, and that was even if they did nothing there and came back immediately. So, I... went on my way and wandered. I decided to go look for Sunburst next, and hid that I had an airship and a cutie mark of my power. I wound up getting myself an education... Still had a lot of Empire gold left to pay for it. Equestria and the Empire use the same currency system, after all. While I did that, I wound up studying systems of governance along with magic. I wanted to learn some spells the normal way, rather than relying on my natural powers, just to feel like I earned them like a normal pony. But I was exposed to some ideas, and combined them with my own, and slowly started putting together a system I thought would be perfect for the whole world to work by, daydreaming of changing everything through scribbles in the margins of notebooks..."
She put her head in her hooves and sighed. "You want to know what happened to me? What finally pushed me over the edge into being a dictator?"
No one had the heart to say yes.
"Nothing," Starlight said. "There was no final edge. It was just a long, slow slide, of going years and years without hearing a thing from my friends. There reached a point where I was offered a scholarship to go back to Kinmari for a research program... You know, the normal way ponies get there, instead of having a hand-me-down airship or flying cross-continent on their own. And I turned it down because I was too afraid to see if Felicity would still be there, or if she knew what had happened to my friends, or... or anything. I turned that scholarship down. By the time I finished college, I suspect I was a year or three younger than everyone else in my class. They still thought I was a prodigy, even though I stuck to the things I learned and never showed anyone what I was really capable of. That was about eight years after my trip to the north, and I still had heard nothing."
"Well, why didn't you go back?" Rainbow frowned, throwing her hooves in the air. "Can't you just fly across the mountains whenever you want? You had a ship."
"I told you." Starlight winced quietly. "I made the decision... to stay here... until my friends came for me. To trust them to do their part and set boundaries for myself and not break them, and rely on my friends rather than fighting or breaking things to change my own fate."
Twilight's eyes softened. "So that's why you never tried to change your own history while we were time traveling."
"One of the reasons," Starlight mumbled. "But either way, I made our town. I must have been nineteen or twenty when I flew out to look for it, done with school and with no other calling to follow in the world. My friends never came back, but I still wanted to... fulfill my promise to them, even if they couldn't keep their side. Maybe I made a mess of things, maybe I was too extreme, maybe I was too jaded, but I tried. And I held onto that for several years like I had forgotten how to let go, and then..."
"We showed up," Rainbow said.
Starlight nodded. "You showed up. I thought it was my big moment. I thought I was happy there, that this was my avenue to recruit an alicorn and make the whole world look more like what I wanted so I could finally rest easy. I was too jaded to see the situation for what it was, which side I was really on. I thought you were a dumb group of friends who thought sticking together was the way to solve anything."
Twilight shrank. "When we were in the past, you asked me how the future of Equestria could depend on one group of friends."
"I did," Starlight whispered, mane limp. "When, for me, it depended on exactly the opposite. On me saying goodbye."
"Yeah, well, that's balderdash." Rainbow sprang to her hooves, glancing at Cadance, who had been quiet throughout the discussion. "We got those Writs of Harmonic Sanction, right? Where's the one for Starlight? Tell my job I'm taking a yearlong vacation, let's go back to the north and fix that!"
Twilight tugged her gently back down with telekinesis, still staring hollowly into the distance. "I don't think we can."
"What do you mean, you don't think we can!?" Rainbow gave her an incredulous look. "You heard her! She misses her friends, and that's a garbage reason to have to say goodbye! What's stopping us from just flying up there and going, hey, princess powers, where are these ponies?"
Twilight shook her head. "If it was a matter of physical ability, Starlight could have found them herself long ago, or never let them go in the first place."
Rainbow Dash stared. "So what? That was years ago! Maybe they thought they had a deal to see each other back then, but what a real friend would do after this much time is go check on them and see if they need help!"
Twilight sighed. "I have to admit, I want to too. And I don't think I can stop you if you want to go yourself. But weren't you paying attention to what the flame told Starlight in her memory? I think we're the kind of friends it told her to look for. We've used the Elements countless times to protect the world, and yet we still live here in more or less day to day peace. Right?" She shrugged. "And the pressure usually only gets to us when something really big is happening, which, right now, it isn't. While something could have happened to Starlight's friends, maybe gathering that many writs just is a task that takes decades."
"Uh huh." Rainbow curled her lip. "What about the one Yakyakistan owed them? Valey could have taken that and come right back to find Starlight and let her know they were okay. You think she wouldn't have done that if it turned out it was going to take a lot longer than planned?"
Twilight wilted.
"Twilight gets it," Starlight murmured from the corner, beyond drained and exhausted. "Look at me. Do I look like I'm ready to go running off on another adventure to the land that took so much out of me? For the first time in my entire life, I have a legitimate hope that I'm somewhere where I belong, and... my friends aren't somewhere hanging barely on and waiting for me to save them after all these years. I want to go home. To Ponyville. And live, for a change."
Twilight nodded firmly. "And maybe one day, we will go back. I'd like to go there with you, at least. But that day will not be today. You've been through so much, and... I think I understand what Princess Celestia was trying to tell me, now, when I asked her earlier why the rest of the world sounded so messed up in your story and she said she kept this pocket of harmony so that ponies like us who have the power to change things could remember and be shown the way the world is supposed to be."
She got up, stepping toward Starlight, and offered a hoof, helping her up. "We can make a difference in the world, but we'll only hurt ourselves if we try to do it all at once. Right? And right now, the biggest difference we can make, Rainbow and Cadance and I, is by offering you the place you need most to rest and get back on your hooves."
"Thank you..." Starlight slumped against her into a loose, limp hug. "That's why I told this whole story. So that you would understand. You get it."
"But..." Rainbow let her hoof fall. "Someday. Fine. Someday, I wanna go and see Ironridge for myself, though, you hear?"
Cadance chuckled, laying on her back in a reclining chair and massaging her growing foal but slowly getting to her hooves. "It sounds like a nice dream for the future. But this sounds like a thing for the three of you, going back to the north or going to Ponyville and relaxing. I have some family and princess duties to attend to, or else I'd love to stay and talk more..." Her eyes shadowed. "But mostly sleep. Good night."
Rainbow Dash looked around as Cadance left, Starlight still hanging limply against Twilight. "So, uhh..."
"Let's go home," Twilight agreed, helping to steady Starlight. "We've got long lives ahead of us. No one can say where our adventures will lead us next, but for now, we should make the most of the time we have to go home and continue living."
Rainbow shot her one last, pleading glare. "But we're at least gonna ask Celestia if she ever followed up by going back to Ironridge to look for them, right?"
Twilight giggled. "Of course."
Starlight managed to stand on her own, her legs strengthened a little by the prospect of going home. "I guess things worked out happily in the end..."
"That's what we do," Twilight reassured.
"If you want to see it..." Starlight hesitated. "The Immortal Dream is moored in the canyon in the Everfree near your Tree of Harmony right now. I sat in the entrance room of the crystal palace for solace, sometimes, when I was feeling lost these last few months... I could never work up the courage to visit the flame at the bottom, though. I guess I knew, deep down, that I had gone astray. We could visit both of those..."
"Only if you want to." Twilight shook her head. "I wouldn't say no, myself..." She couldn't suppress a tiny, eager giggle, but quickly blushed to hide it. "Obviously. But I get the impression you want to live a little more mundane for a change."
Starlight nodded hesitantly. "I do want to do something to thank you, though."
Rainbow squinted, eyeing her critically. "You, uhh... You have something in mind, don't you? Something you're not sure if it's a good idea to say."
Starlight sighed. "Am I really that transparent?"
"What is it?" Twilight asked politely, stepping back to give her some space.
Starlight shook her head. "It's nothing. It's... It's probably nothing anymore. Or maybe it's not. I don't even know. I don't want to get involved in the north again."
Both mares stared curiously at her.
"...Fine." Starlight took a deep breath. "Twilight... I wouldn't give this to anyone else... but here."
She held a hoof to herself and unpocketed a worn beret, perfectly matching her description of Valey's.
"Oh, Starlight." Twilight's face softened. "That's yours. It's a nice gesture, but-"
Starlight cut her off with a shake of her head. "It's not a gesture. Valey wasn't kidding when she said this was her ultimate weapon."
Twilight's gaze became a little more concerned.
With a shimmer of teal, Starlight rotated the beret in her aura until it was directly facing the duo, the little crystal chip Valey had sewn to the front as a homemade insignia glinting and sparkling from her light. "Do you remember what this is?" Starlight asked.
"Valey's beret?" Rainbow tilted her head. "I mean, I was curious how it would look on me, but..."
Twilight squinted. "Are you talking about the crystal? It looks sort of conspicuous, and I recall you describing it once, but no, you never said what it meant."
"I did," Starlight replied, "long enough ago that you've probably completely forgotten. I don't even remember if Rainbow Dash was listening when I mentioned it. But this chip is a memory device containing an audio recording from Yakyakistan."
Twilight's lips slowly, slowly pursed in surprise.
"Do you remember Fire?" Starlight asked. "The crystal unicorn who was present in the skyport? She gave this to Valey and I as we were casting off from Ironridge. She said it's a recording containing a full, unabridged explanation of Yakyakistan's activities during the forty years between Blazing Rain's war and when the windigoes were unleashed on Ironridge. I've never listened to it, but I can't imagine the information inside is anything short of nation-shaking, if it pertains to why they would have revived monsters that almost froze over the world two thousand years ago."
"Oh," Twilight said.
"You don't think that's kinda..." Rainbow rubbed the back of her head. "Important?"
"It is important." Starlight nodded. "Or, at least, it was. This was the better part of two decades ago, and I don't know that anything more has come out of Yakyakistan since then. It wasn't information they were counting on being public. It was just an explanation so someone would know. Fire felt they weren't worthy to be trusted with it after what they did to Ironridge."
Twilight had already taken the beret in her aura, magic shimmering around the crystal. "This has an unusual structure," she remarked. "It's not uniform at all. Is there some kind of physical data encoding going on? It doesn't seem to be enchanted..."
Starlight nodded. "It's a standard-format crystal memory card for a machine known as a KarmaTech Thirty-Four. This is why Valey was trying to fix the ship's terminal while we were on the Arc Manta going to the crystal palace... She wanted to have it available to read the contents of this chip in case discussions with Princess Celestia went south and there was any knowledge about Yakyakistan she could possibly use as leverage. I don't know if she actually listened to it, but... there you have it."
Rainbow gawked. "That thing? I knew something was up with that!"
"And you still have one on your ship," Twilight said, tilting her head. "But why give this to me? I thought you wanted us not to go off to the north again. Isn't a thing like this... you know... begging to be the start of a new adventure?"
Starlight shrugged. "First, it's many years out of date. I don't know how relevant it will be anymore. Second, you don't have to use my ship's terminal. I figured you would be someone who might enjoy trying to figure out how to decode it on your own. You could learn a lot about northern technology from it if you wanted, I'd bet. But mostly..." She let out a deep breath. "It's a way of saying I trust you. To... stay home with me even if you want to go running off after my friends... Face it. If I'm wrong and this does make you want to go back there, the chip will just be an excuse. I can see what you really want. And I would want it too, if I could let myself."
Twilight nodded solemnly in acknowledgement. "And one day, you will be able to. I swear it as the Princess of Friendship."
"But not today." Starlight looked up at the exit to the room.
"Yeah... Point taken." Rainbow shrugged in disappointment. "So, save-the-world party in Ponyville? Did you ever figure out what was up with those spooky visions? We don't have a bad future still to avert, do we? Or did that get sorted somehow?"
Starlight hesitated. "That's... another story. But you do remember there was an older Valey in the very first vision. So, I suppose, if we've left each other behind?"
Twilight bit her lip.
"And..." Starlight nodded. "There's one other thing, too."
A shimmer of midnight blue clouded an open desert sky, nothing moving except for the wind and the tumbleweeds.
It was a rocky desert, the kind where clay was plentiful, without much sand to be seen. Once, it could have been fertile had the rains willed it, but those were days of the distant past. And then a wooden ship hull hovered close overhead, and with a thump, four hooves landed.
Starlight Glimmer stood in the desert and surveyed the land, a bandanna tied into her mane to keep out the heat. She had grown into her adult proportions, with wider shoulders and a rounder barrel and larger legs, but still stood a few inches shy of being fully grown. Her mane and tail were longer, things she actually took care of now that she had spent years living in society and surrounded by ponies who weren't her close friends.
Her horn pulsed, sending out a massive, paper-thin field of telekinesis and dragging it across the ground to get an idea of the lay of the land. In her teeth, she held a homemade map, still not quite having kicked her foalhood habit of avoiding magic as much as possible. She stared down at the map, took a few steps, and found herself at the top of a ridge, looking down into a valley.
It was natural and sheltered, sloping earth around it protecting it from the winds and making her wonder if it would be a little more hospitable to growing food and crops. To the east, a dry riverbed ran, providing drainage and preventing the valley from turning into a flood zone. Far in the distance, she could see a faint, ramshackle shack: a train station, built out to the middle of nowhere, the end of its line and looking like it hadn't been visited in centuries.
Funny. Whoever had built the rails must have known there was something out here, and yet no one but her had ever come. But she had an airship, so she wouldn't need to take the train.
She jumped into the valley and rolled down the sheer, sloping edge, never having lost her athletic edge from fighting so long ago. She had college sports programs to thank for the practice, though she made a point of only practicing with teams, never actually joining up like they wanted her to. That wasn't her future, and she knew it.
Starlight easily regained her balance, landing on her hooves at the end of the drop, and strolled forward, the sun beating down on her lilac back as she applied her imagination to the field. A bulwark of raised earth in the middle, creating a platform to build on that any mountain floods would go around... Perfect. She'd need to plan the village tightly to maximize space efficiency, because she would probably be moving all the earth herself... A single street, how about, with houses lining both sides. Brilliant.
Her gaze turned northward, to the mountains. The Aldenfold seemed to skip foothills here, ramping straight up into snowy, mountainous peaks after a single wall of low, dusty hills. At least water wouldn't be a problem, since they could climb the mountains and melt snow. For that matter, the snow was so close to the desert... She suspected there was something magical about the area that allowed it to fall here. Like the magic that had once affected the weather in Ironridge, creating an unnaturally warm cauldron of air for the Earth District.
Just more proof that she had found the right place.
Starlight lit her horn and flew, approaching the mountains. Already, she could see a myriad of paths and tunnels and caves. If these became as impassable as the rest of the Aldenfold, it wouldn't be for a while. But that was good for her, since caves provided useful building opportunities, like storage. Or she could use them like Icereach for shelter to grow food...
She thought about what Icereach cuisine must actually taste like. What did you even grow in caves, mushrooms? You could make mushroom soup, mushroom stew, mushroom sandwiches... mushroom muffins...
Hopefully the local ingredient supply would turn out to have more possibilities than that.
Starlight landed in front of a cave deeper in the mountains, one at the end of a long ice bridge that gave her a good feeling for reasons she couldn't quite place. The first thing she needed to find, if this was truly the place she owned, courtesy of her mother's last gift, was the Tree of Harmony.
Her horn flattened the darkness, effortlessly lighting the interior of the cave. Ever since getting her cutie mark, she had never again been faced with her foalhood trouble of headaches and limited power. After that, her horn just got tired like a normal unicorn, like trying to exhale when your lungs were already empty, and she had never managed to push it to a point that took more than two days to fully recover. Yet still, she had trained, spent many long days at school learning to increase her magical stamina, and now the task of lighting her way in the dark, once so daunting on her very first journey through the Aldenfold, was accomplished without even thinking.
Starlight drifted through the caves, occasionally shooting the walls and leaving tiny crystals so she would have a trail to follow back to the surface. She floated through cross sections, dove to the bottoms of underground ravines, chased the floor of the world and always went down, her heartrate increasing when the walls became luminous enough to see by, traces of energy sluggishly making their way to the surface. Starlight dove, searching lower and even lower, an eagerness in her step as she squeezed through cracks so tight they scraped both sides of her barrel and soared down chasms that would have exhausted any rope supply she could carry.
And then, just when her control on the first crystals she had planted was beginning to wane, their forms existing too far away for even her practiced, improved horn to keep ahold of, she drifted around a wall and found herself face to face with a wall of crystal.
"A crystal palace," she breathed, taken so far into the past by her location she was surprised when she didn't sound like a filly. "Maple... I found it..."
Starlight put her hoof to the crystals and used her horn to control them, and they shifted obediently, creating a way for her to step inside.
The inside of the palace was chalky, covered in the same residue she had seen at Ironridge and south of Kinmari. No one had been here but her, it seemed... This place was hers. A faint voice called to her from outside her comprehension, welcoming her and calling her deeper. Starlight shakily obliged.
Should she really be here? She had left her friends and the north and all of its magic behind, abandoned its role in her life, never used her cutie mark when others were looking and held it sacred as a reminder of her friends. Did this equate to going back?
No. She was keeping her promise, doing what she had always said she would, living out her friends' dreams even though they had never returned to do so themselves.
Even the brief acknowledgement of the fact caused her to tremble. Starlight slumped to the chalky floor, suppressing a long-restrained sob.
There, there... Don't cry. This is a place for happy times, not mourning. Haven't you made a big accomplishment, just getting here?
Starlight could feel the flame, farther down beneath her. She kicked into a run, foregoing flight, jumping down stairs that were so chalky they were closer to ramps with ridges. If she didn't, she might second-guess herself, turn back... Eight whole years since she had left her friends. Just as long as she had lived between the meteor strike and first meeting them. Those adventures had been half her life ago, and here, at long last, she was daring to face them again.
What would she see? What would she find? Had her choices over the past decade changed the future? Would she be met with more grayness and warnings, trying to call her back into action to protect and save the world, or else scare her away from harming it? She skidded into the map table room, its perfect sigil catching her eyes... The last one she had seen was in the Honesty palace, in a memory she magically remembered and still wasn't sure sat properly in her head. It had been disrupted and disturbed, a jagged distortion where the Aldenfold scrunched two continents together. But this flame had none of that.
Was it showing her a lie, hiding from what the world was? She didn't see any missing dots from the two flames she had been told no longer burned in their palaces, either.
Or maybe it was showing her what it wanted the world to be.
Come here!
Starlight ran into the spiral staircase, dashing along the walls, lower and lower until she reached the tree room, a great crystal-walled chasm over a sea of darkness, the ether of the lifestream itself. Starlight charged out onto a bridge connecting the wall to the great crystalline trunk rising from the lifestream, the core of the palace, the heart in which the Flame of Harmony burned. She ran, breathless, harder than she had charged since her adventures eight years ago, dashed through the twisted, knotted entrance between the tree's crystal walls, skidded into the brazier room, and leaped, touching the flame, unable to hide from her future any longer. What was it? Had it changed? Was it worth it? Was it over?
...Her hoof touched the pedestal, welcoming fire coiling around her like a hoofshake. No static clawed at her vision. No grayness rose to claim her. It was over.
"It's over," Starlight panted, staring into the brazier in awe, draped like a doll over its edge. "I did it. It all counted for something after all..."
Why the long face? Aren't you happy?
"I..." Starlight was happy. It was hard to realize, almost hard to accept, but she was. A rush of memories cascaded through her brain, of Valey's fear that she came from moon glass, of Starlight's own fear that she could destroy the world, of each and every one of her friends and their own worries, and all those stacked up next to her own. Her days in Kinmari swam through Starlight's conscience, her crippling fear of herself even as her friends unwound and shed their troubles and worries, and she remembered each and every time Glimmer had told her that the future wasn't safe for her to know.
All of it came down to this.
All of it came to this crystal palace right here, half her meaningful life later, where she touched a harmonic flame and the future was changed. No vision arrived to warn her. She had done it.
"I did it!" Starlight rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.
Hooray for you!
"I did it... It was enough..." Starlight started to cry. "Who are you?" she asked, looking back at the flame. "Which one...?"
I am Laughter, the flame informed her. And you deserve to celebrate.
A key turned somewhere in her chest, and Starlight tipped back her head and laughed.
"So that's how it is," Twilight said, nodding as Starlight finished the coda to her story. "I'm... so proud of you."
"Proud of me?" Starlight blinked, just a little bit more drained after the last epilogue to her tale. "Why?"
"I don't know." Twilight shrugged. "It's hard to articulate. But hearing that, it just felt like I needed to say it."
Starlight nodded. "Well, thanks."
"For everything, I guess," Twilight added, not ready to let it drop. "But..." She ran out of words to say, glancing towards the exit. "Well. Shall we go home?"
"Home." Starlight sniffed. "Thanks, Twilight. Let's... Let's go home."