A quick and easy flight, made faster still by a swift prevailing wind, brought Celestia speedily to Ponyville’s only train station. As she circled and prepared to land, she glanced away to the Castle of Friendship, lying tranquil beside Twilight’s school. The early afternoon sunlight played across the reflective crystal rooves, and before Celestia knew what she was doing, she had banked and was gliding rapidly down towards the Castle. It would do no harm to pay a little visit to one of her other Ponyville clients. She alighted on the doorstep and rapped briskly on the vast surface of the door. At least here she wouldn’t have to worry about ducking. An alicorn ten times her own size would still easily fit in the cavernous rooms of Twilight’s old home.
The door creaked open, pulled by the sparkling magic of a particularly cantankerous-looking blue mare.
“Hello, Trixie!” Celestia said brightly, trying hard to shake off the disappointment that her visit to Sweet Apple Acres had brought her and go into her next mission with an open mind. “I’m here to see Lustre Dawn.”
“Hmm,” Trixie answered dubiously. “Probably a good thing. It’s not been going well.”
Celestia’s ears came forward at once. “What do you mean?” Please, not another failure. She wasn’t sure she could take a second in one day.
“You’d better go up and see her for yourself.”
Trixie pointed Celestia towards the wide staircase and left her to traverse its sweeping length alone. Undirected, Celestia wandered the halls for a little while searching for traces of Lustre Dawn’s magical signature and before she was able to follow them to their source.
From a deep, many-cushioned nest, Lustre Dawn looked up at Celestia. Her face was pallid and streaked with tears. Her mane hung in knotty strands around her face, and tissues were strewn across the floor like bones outside a dragon’s lair.
“Auntie Tia?” she asked, in such a small, foal-like voice that Celestia’s heart went out to her.
“Oh, my dear,” was all she said, and she went to sit beside the bed.
Lustre’s face crumpled again and she buried her head back into a pillow. Her thin shoulders quivered.
“Oh, Lustre Dawn,” Celestia said again, in that very gentle voice she had used the first evening after Luna’s return, when she had woken her newly adolescent sister to welcome her back to her first Equestrian night. She put a hoof against Lustre’s side, and could feel her ribs heaving even through the many blankets Lustre Dawn had swaddled herself in. “What went wrong?”
“S-she didn’t show up,” Lustre said into her pillow, almost inaudibly. “She just didn’t come.”
Celestia moved her hoof against Lustre Dawn’s shoulder, stroking her in a manner that she hoped was soothing. From Lustre Dawn’s reaction, she had been sure it had been something much worse; some sort of screaming fight in a restaurant, some bombshell about somepony’s past — something a little more substantial. But she couldn’t very well say that to Lustre Dawn; the poor thing was in pieces.
“That must have been very confusing,” she said softly. “But are you sure Little Cheese didn’t just…forget? Or perhaps go to the wrong restaurant?”
Lustre Dawn’s head whipped up, her eyes suddenly blazing. “She hid herself from me, Princess! I went to everypony she knew, practically, and they all said she wasn’t there!” As suddenly as it had come, the anger left her face, and she sagged once more into the cushions. “It was deliberate. I know it was. She decided she didn’t want to see me any more, and rather than talk to me about it, she just…didn’t come.”
Celestia smoothed Lustre Dawn’s mane back from her face. It was evident that the poor child felt that she had offered herself to somepony, and been rejected most cruelly. The move seemed very…uncharacteristic of Little Cheese, who had always struck Celestia as a pony deeply concerned with honour and doing the right thing. But Lustre said it had happened, and Celestia wasn’t going to disbelieve the closest thing to a grandfoal she had had in over four hundred years.
A fresh fit of crying wracked the poor little creature, and her horn ignited to bring the box of tissues closer to her face. Celestia, seeing that the box was already emptied, hurriedly dug in her golden-tooled saddlebags for her own handkerchief. She had it ready in her magic to offer to Lustre Dawn when she turned dispiritedly away from the empty tissue box. Lustre took the hanky in her own magical field, tears still rolling down her face, and blew her nose hard.
Celestia felt her own heart ache a little in sympathy with Lustre Dawn. The young felt everything so keenly.
“Never mind, dear,” she said, softly. “It is better to find out now that you weren’t compatible, than it would be had things gone any further.”
Lustre Dawn only cried harder. “I really liked her, Auntie!” She sobbed into the sun-embroidered handkerchief, tears distorting her voice. “I thought she really liked me!”
Celestia, helpless to aid the prostrate filly before her, could do nothing but hold her as she wept.