A season of new beginnings approached, which meant the current season was one of endings. This might not be the last time Twilight and Celestia took tea in the Canterlot palace gardens, but it might well be the last time Celestia could act as hostess. Even if they met next week, it wouldn't quite be the same.
Celestia had insisted on framing it as between equals as much as possible, doffing her tiara and regalia, even going bare-hooved. Thus Twilight realized that Equestria did have a nudity taboo, but it only applied to reigning alicorns.
She savored a sip of the oolong blend Celestia had prepared as she screwed up her courage. After swallowing, she said, “Celestia? May I ask you a personal question?”
And without the slightest crack in her composure, Celestia answered, “I’m afraid the rumors of the solar seraglio are greatly exaggerated.”
“Princess!” Twilight's wings spread in shock. Her teacup, released from her magic, clattered to the table.
“Terribly sorry, Twilight," Celestia said with a not at all apologetic smile, "but you actually used my name without a title! I thought I could let down my hair a little." She ran a hoof through the undulating pastel energy. "In a manner of speaking.”
Twilight just glowered at her.
“But yes, you may ask me anything. Though I may refuse to answer.”
“Understandable," Twilight said after a deep breath. "Sunset Shimmer and my human counterpart have been analyzing religious beliefs in both worlds and it got me wondering… What do you believe in?”
Celestia's eyebrows rose as she set down her own teacup. “Ah. That is a simple question with a rather complex answer. Did you know that I’ve been revered as a goddess myself?”
“It’s hardly surprising," said Twilight, trying not to think of her sun-praising phase. "You do raise the sun every day.”
“Not for much longer," Celestia said with the proud smile Twilight had sought for much of her life. "And that doesn’t make me divine. I’m not a goddess, or a spirit, or anything another than a very large pony who happens to have a very powerful and unique special talent. I may be immortal, but I am still equine. Flawed. Capable of making mistakes.” The absent gold emphasized the point. Celestia's majestic size looked almost absurd without her usual accessories.
The thought twisted in Twilight's gut. “I really don’t want to agree with that.”
“You know it better than most, given how you’ve dealt with many of my old mistakes coming back to haunt me." Celestia sighed, her ears folding back. "Having to banish Luna to the moon forced me to face my own fallibility. I'd practically thought I was the sun itself before then. I haven’t let myself forget my place since."
She snorted. “Not that that’s stopped other creatures. They see the power to raise the sun and draw their own conclusions. I’ve had to quash no fewer than four churches of sun worshipers over the past millennium, and that was just ponies. And phrases like ‘Celestia knows’ or ‘Celestia as my witness’ still slip through the cracks." Celestia looked out across the garden to some unseen, idiom-spouting crowd. "I don’t. I’m not. Please stop.”
“Hold on," said Twilight. "Even non-ponies have worshiped you?”
“Goodness, yes." Celestia gave a lopsided grin. "I think may still hold the record for the griffins’ longest revered object of worship. And that was after I unambiguously told King Gareth that I had no power to hear or answer prayers."
Twilight gave her a flat look for several silent seconds.
Finally, Celestia said, "What?”
"I say this with all due respect, but…" Twilight took another sip of her tea for courage. "When you say ‘unambiguously,’ do you mean you told him the words ‘I can’t hear your prayers,’ or did you offer some vague parable about… I don’t know, ants and a firefly?”
After another length pause, Celestia's head drooped. She muttered, “It was wasps and a firefly, actually,” into the tablecloth.
“I see,” Twilight said in her best "disappointed headmare" voice.
“It seemed clear enough to me,” Celestia said in a defensive tone that usually only came out when she was arguing with Luna. And losing.
“This kind of thing is why I was more worried about accepting help and getting a bad grade on a test than saving the Crystal Empire.”
Celestia cleared her throat. “In any case, I think we’re getting off-topic. We’re not talking about how creatures have tried to worship me, we’re talking about what I believe in.”
“We are, and I’d love to find out. Though could we circle back to how you quashed those churches later?" Twilight winced in anticipation of purple robes and buildings decorated with massive versions of her cutie mark. "I get the feeling I’ll need to know.”
Celestia nodded. “Almost certainly, I’m afraid, and I’ll be glad to. But as for me, how to put it best..." She toyed with a snickerdoodle as she thought. "You know how I have the gift of prophecy?”
Twilight blinked. Her jaw dropped. “I’m sorry, you what?”
“Wait," said Celestia, "did I never tell you that?”
“We were just talking about your communication issues. You can see the future?" Twilight's mind went into overdrive as she considered the implications of such a thing. "What, do you have a… a Celly Sense?”
“Well—”
“Does your mane go limp when there’s a menace to Equestria? Do your frogs pinch when the national debt spikes?" Twilight's mind settled on the worst-case scenario the moment it found one. "Is the country doomed if I can't figure out ESP?”
“Twilight." With one word, Celestia established that she didn't need her regalia to exert authority. Once Twilight had calmed down a bit, she continued the statement. "I do not have a variant of Pinkie Sense.”
“Oh. Okay." Breathe in calm, breathe out stress. "Good to know.”
“My glimpses of the future aren’t as… dramatic as Pinkie’s. They're also less frequent and scarcely more clear. They come to me in dreams; they have since I was a filly. I only get one when something truly important is on the horizon, a glimpse of things to come. I dreamt I would raise the sun alone. I dreamt of Luna’s return, and her fall, though I only understood the second in hindsight. I dreamt of Tirek making his move a few years ago, when he first escaped from Tartarus.
“Luna has watched the dreams, seen them come from a direction in the dream realms she cannot track, some ineffable source that she says lies beyond dreams as we know them." Celestia's gaze moved to some unseen something in a corner of the sky. "But they must come from somewhere."
Twilight barely managed to keep from looking herself. "Where?"
Celestia shut her eyes, a thin grin on her muzzle. "Ah, that's where we come to the matter of belief. For a time, I believed it was the forces of Harmony, guiding me to a better, brighter future."
"For a time?"
That got a wingshrug. "Well, the Tree's recently attained consciousness and you-shaped avatar makes it clear that if there is a higher force of Harmony, it may be truly unknowable to beings like ourselves and finds us equally difficult to understand."
"Right. That thing." Twilight cringed. "And I thought the cosplayers were bad..."
"That should clear up in a few decades, aside from Nightmare Night." Celestia frowned at some unpleasant memory. "Though expect it to come back in vogue in about a century."
"Right, we still need to talk about coping with immortality." Twilight shook her head. "But that's for later; we've been sidetracked enough on this one. So if you don't think it was Harmony guiding you, what was it?"
"Well, I never said it wasn't. The Cutie Map made it clear that Harmonious forces are capable of communicating with us to effect great positive change, if even more ambiguously than my dreams. But..." Celestia gave the sad sort of smile she reserved for her long-shot projects. "It may sound equinocentric of me in this more inclusive age you're ushering in—excellent work, by the way—but I always imagined somepony looking out for me the way I look out for Equestria."
Some puckish part of Twilight, encouraged by the absence of tiara and peytral, took over her tongue for a moment. "Performing essential tasks, most of which you've never heard of, while offering vague advice that you usually understand in hindsight?"
Celestia just nodded and beamed. "Yes, exactly that. Look at my favorite, most faithful student. I'd say she turned out well."
"More or less." Twilight cleared her throat and let her blush die down a little. "So you'd say it's princesses all the way up?"
"I'd like to think so. I have met spirits, demons, even those who style themselves as gods. It seems that anything that calls itself divine is vastly more petty and ignoble than most creatures." Celestia shook her head. "Egos like balloons, all of them. Puffed up with self-importance until you poke a hole in them. I have to believe that there is someone out there, some higher standard of being, who we can all look up to and emulate.
"Still, we may never know for sure." Celestia blinked, as though just realizing with whom she was speaking. "Mind you, you shouldn't take that as a challenge."
"I won't," Twilight lied.
Three generations of princesses later, as Luster Dawn's grandstudent Parallax Shift took the throne, Twilight Sparkle was a vague footnote in the historical databases and a played-out trope in holodramas. Most agreed that she was a folk hero synthesized from the deeds of at least five different notable ponies of the era. Some old tales even recorded her as various corruptions of her name, like "Starlight Glimmer."
Twilight herself had a lab on the far side of the moon, where she'd spent the last several centuries poking and prodding at the fabric of the universe. Finally, as the crown came to rest on Parallax's mane, she mastered the final secret behind the weave. With an elegant pulse of shaped magic, Twilight summoned a portal to the realm of the divine.
The hole in space was wholly opaque, for even a being with as much power and experience as she wouldn't be able to handle a glimpse of the empyrean without immersing herself in its substance.
Twilight knew the moment called for some momentous speech, but there wasn't anyone present to appreciate it. There hadn't been for a long time. In the end, she just glared at the portal, muttered "You had better be worth it," and stepped through.
It was the smoothest transition between worlds she'd ever experienced, and she'd experienced quite a few. The protective, stygian darkness cleared into dim light hinting at vaguely familiar shapes. Ones that tickled the deepest, most cherished parts of Twilight's memory. But there was no way that—
"SURPRISE!"
Twilight blinked. Specifically at the wonderfully, impossibly familiar smiling pink muzzle dominating her field of view.
"Were you surprised? Were you, were you, huh?" said Pinkie Pie.
Twilight tried to ruffle her wings and found they weren't there. "Very surprised." She looked around Golden Oaks, packed with what seemed like the whole population of Ponyville. "Libraries are usually quiet." She grinned. "But I think I can make an exception this time."
Pinkie gave a sly grin. "Heeeey, that's not what you said last time." She went back to her default smile and nudged Twilight with a knee. "But that's okay! Half the fun of New Game Plus, am I right?" Then she trotted off to mingle with the partygoers.
After the pure shock wore off, Twilight thought about what had just happened with a mind that had contemplated the nature of the ineffable for multiple mortal lifetimes. She concluded that she needed a drink.
She still managed to pour herself a cup of hot sauce.