//------------------------------//
// Epilogue Two: Memories Beneath a Hidden Moon. 
// Story: No One For the Gallows But Me 
// by Coyote de La Mancha 
//------------------------------//

Outside, the cool late summer breeze rustled among the trees. The moon was hiding her face, but the stars were shining brightly through Sunset's and Twilight's bedroom window as the two of them lay together, half-dozing in companionable silence. After a while, however, Twilight spoke.
“Hey, Sunny?”
“Mmm?”
“I have a potentially awkward question.”
“Oh, no, awkwardness. I’ll bruise,” Sunset grinned. “Hit me.”
“What were your parents like?”
Sunset’s grin vanished. Fully awake now, she glanced over at Twilight.
“You mean, aside from Celestia? I…” She shook her head. “I don’t think I had any.”
Twilight looked at her curiously, and Sunset rose up on one elbow to look at her.
“It’s really rare,” Sunset explained, “but on my old world, spontaneous generation is still a thing.”
Twilight cocked her head, studying her lover more closely. “So, you were just a, what, a creation of magic itself?”
“I think so, yeah.”
Twilight blinked, considering this. “That’s… pretty awesome.”
Sunset gave a dry chuckle. “Well, it’s not as cool as it sounds. Most of my life, other ponies – mostly foals, but also adults when they thought I couldn’t hear – said that Celestia just took me in out of pity because my ‘real’ parents didn’t want me.”  
Falling onto her back again with a sigh, Sunset stared at the ceiling
“And for years, I believed them,” she said. “But as I learned more about magic, I started putting the pieces together.”
“What pieces?”
“Well, I was found right after the most violent storm in over a hundred years.” Glancing at Twilight, Sunset added, “An unplanned storm, by the way, which even then almost never happened. When it was over, I was just… there. No note, no cloth or basket, just a naked newborn covered in the rain. And then, throughout my life, no ponies were ever found who had any claim on me. Even when Celestia offered rewards for information, nobody knew anything.
“Meanwhile, I had a natural level of magical power that was almost unheard of. Probably enough to rival Twilight’s, if I’d stayed. Granted, spontaneous generation is rare. And with every year that order grows stronger in Equestria, and chaos recedes, it gets rarer.”
Then she rolled back to her side and gave Twilight a wink.  
“But then, so am I.”
Twilight smiled. “Most treasures are.”
There was the rustling of covers as two of them embraced. They spent some time like that, simply holding one another, each enjoying the other’s nearness. Eventually, they parted, and Sunset spoke again.
“So, I’m curious. What brought it up? Were you hoping to meet them?”
Twilight shook her head. “Hm-mm, nothing like that. I was thinking of Sunrise, actually.”
Sunset nodded. “Oh, yeah. She’s probably from human parents. She’d pretty much have to be, actually.”
“Right,” Twilight agreed. “Born eighteen years ago, then abandoned in a park either during or just before a violent storm.”
Now it was Sunset who was curious. “Okay, so where are you going with this?”
“Well, consider what we know,” Twilight answered. “Sunny is almost certainly the result of normal human birth, if only for the difference in magic between our two worlds.”
Sunset was nodding. “Right. Equus magic revolves mostly around manipulation of energy and matter, while Gaia magic almost always deals with intangibles. Probability manipulation, mind stuff. That kind of thing.”
“Exactly. There are exceptions, especially now that the gates are stabilized, but that seems to be the generality. So, Sunrise was almost certainly born through mundane events. Granted, those events may have themselves been driven by sheer synchronicity. But spontaneous creation of life from lifelessness? Yeah, I think that we can rule out.”
Sunset was nodding slower now, her frown deepening. “Okay…?”
“Then I looked at Aurora Borealis. She looks a lot like you two, just a couple of years younger. The cops were looking for a target, sure, but it was also an understandable mistake. Her mom looks a lot like you guys too, along with seeming pretty young herself.  
“So, I did a little digging, and her mom’s driver’s license shows her as being eighteen years older than Aurora.”
Sunset stared.
“Which would put her at sixteen when Sunrise was born,” Twilight went on. “Just the right age to panic and…”
“Stop,” Sunset said, putting her hands to her temples. “Just, hold on a minute. Are you saying…?”
“Helia Dawn took a prolonged leave from school during her sophomore year for unspecified health reasons,” Twilight said softly. “For two months. She returned to school shortly after Sunrise’s birthday.”
Sunset fell onto her back again, staring at the ceiling.
“Two years later, after graduation, she gave birth to Aurora Borealis,” Twilight finished.
For a time, there was silence.
“Sunrise might’ve come back to save her own sister,” Sunset said at last. “Jesus. How crazy is that?”
Twilight shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of correlation between her world and ours, and trying to state absolutes based on observable synchronicities is a wasted endeavor. But it’s a strong possibility.
“That being said, is the probability of their being sisters better than chance? Statistically?” Twilight shook her head. “Again, I don’t know. How do we even define chance, after everything we’ve seen?”
“Jesus,” Sunset said again. “What do we do with this? Do we tell Sunny? Do we tell… anybody? I mean, we don’t know for certain, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, so… what do we do?”
“I’m not sure. I’d like your opinion.”
The silence dragged on between them.
“We don’t actually know anything,” Sunset said at last. “Not really. Lots of people look related to other people when they’re not. It’s… dammit, it’s too likely that we’d stir up a bunch of weird crap over nothing.”
“Not to mention that while there are a lot of strong correlations between Sunrise's world and ours, they’re never a hundred percent, and occasionally they fall near zero,” Twilight added.
“Exactly.”
“So, we do nothing.”
Sunset winced. “Yeah.”
But Twilight was nodding. “That was kind of my thought, but I wanted to check with you. You know her better than I do.”
“For what it’s worth, yeah,” Sunset shook her head. “We’re not the same person, but… yeah. I think we should sit on this one. At least for now.”
“Fair enough,” Twilight yawned. “And with that out of the way…” she snuggled deeper under the covers, and shortly afterwards her breathing had mellowed into the deep restful sound that Sunset loved listening to, late at night.
Still, Sunset had to grin as she, too, succumbed to sleep.  
Watch out, universe, she thought. There might be three of us!