Twilight paces back and forth, murmuring fretfully. Her mane, longer now than ever before, is unkempt. Her feathers itch. They are out of sorts. Her regalia, the gorget and the crown at least, were cast hastily and wearily on the divan. Her golden greaves and hoofboots clank on the ancient stone floors.
Rarity sits enraptured in the chase lounge she brought from Ponyville to rest in their sitting room. The hologram projection before her shows the creatures from beyond the stars as they land. The Talmans, so the Equestrian press is calling them.
“I have to see them.”
“You’re seeing them now,” Twilight said. She was not brusque. Just focused.
Rarity nods at her indulgently.
“Yes, I know. I meant in person.”
That brought Twilight up short.
“In person?”
“Yes. In the flesh, so it were.”
“But you'd… you’d, ah.”
“Darling. Come here. Stop pacing.”
“I’m sorry,” Twilight said. She cleared her throat and came to sit beside Rarity.
“It’s quite alright. But you are going to wake the poor attendant outside. And no, don’t go scold him. It’s two in the morning and he’s not supposed to be up. I know what you are going to say. I know you so well. But… Even so.”
“Even though it will be another year?” Twilight says.
And Rarity’s heart feels… not broken, no, but torn. The year was hard, but it was not miserable. They wrote frequently. She heard Twilight’s voice through ansible wave and read her letters. And they had had a few years here in the palace after.
She thinks of the veranda and the view of the hills on Frontier, her meandering thoughts in the hot summer sun. The way a sudden gust pulled at her voluminous hat and how as she paused her letter to catch it, she found herself looking out at the horizon and wishing something would arrive. If the thought of going was a wound, then the thought of what might yet be beyond the horizon had become a wound as well. It was an old wound, a cold wound, a deep wound. A yearning for ever more complexity and discovery, a yearning that until this earliest of mornings she had quietly been content to never have fulfilled.
“I have to,” she says softly.
“Why?”
“Because all my life I have wanted to know, Twilight. You read books. I made things with my magic and my hooves. But we both learned, and we both explored. I have reached the end of where I can explore with my craft. I reached it years ago. But… here? I have lived and breathed art my entire life, and before me is an entire universe of art. A whole new collection of feelings and actions and thoughts and struggles and agonies that we call a culture. And I have to know more. I have to experience it like I chased after every one I came across here.”
Twilight swallows. She nuzzles Rarity.
“I think I understand. I think.”
“I can only try to explain,” Rarity said, and lifted the Princess’s chin for a kiss.
“What is love but trying to understand?” Twilight said with a smile.