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// Rendezvous at Farpoint 
// Story: As Long as the Earth's Orbit 
// by Cynewulf 
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Farpoint Station, a new heart for a new polity. Equus is far behind, not forgotten but no longer the center of things. Alliances are forged, would-be enemies pacified, deals are struck here. Ponies and griffons and zebras and dragons meet new civilizations here. One thousand years have ponies and their friends plied the void between shining stars, and forged bonds of friendship inviolate and lasting. Farpoint is where those ties that bind are tied together.
Twilight and her loving consort walk the great processional to the delight of adoring crowds. Lady Rarity, the envoy of a thousand years of peace, and her wife, the gentle guiding hoof of that peace. Thousands of beings cheer for them, call out to them. This celebration is not only of the peace, but of the mare without whom none could imagine it enduring. 
Lady Rarity is as old as the Princess? Asks a young thestral. Her father scoops her up to sit on his back, and he nuzzles her.
Time dilation, he explains. She sailed for a very long time from world to world, returning when she could. Back then, our ships could go very fast, but the time would… it would be different. You would spend a week on your ship, and outside a year or more might pass.
That sounds weird, his daughter says, and he laughs. She waves fiercely at the proceeding duo.
It’s very weird. But we got better at managing it, he explains. The lag, the difference between those times, is not so extreme now. But she travels so much that it hardly matters. She’s a very busy pony.
I’m glad she gets to come home, says the filly.
I am too, says her father.


Rarity blows a kiss to the crowd. 
Her hooves shine, chrome and golden filigree. Her legs are as much flesh as machine, now, a choice made for aesthetics but also for practicality as age advances. She has outrun the long calendar-count for so long, and she maintains her solid lead, but not even the avatar of the avant-garde can outrun time forever.
Every inch of both Twilight and her own regalia has been chosen with care to mix the ancient custom and the modern sentiment. The fashions and traditions of the member worlds of the Commonwealth are represented. The fields of Harmony and Frontier, the jungles of Ales IV, the mountain holds of Drugia, the gentle hills of Equus. The laurels they wear are from Hrogathar and Jilugar, gifts of the mercantile lords of the eastern rim. The stars of Twilight’s ethereal mane show the stars of the Commonwealth itself. 
Rarity has spent weeks on all of it, coordinating across vast distances, barely stopping until she reached Farpoint.
And then, because with age had come wisdom, she handed all of her notes to Raven, the new Raven, and spent every waking moment with Twilight for the next week.
So much about her has changed. Not just physically—machine and flesh in happy marriage, her horn inlaid with filigree and circuitry—but holistically. The Rarity of Equus had strutted defensively, always aware in the back of her mind that every inch of ground she won in the universe was hard won. But the Rarity of the Galaxy had no one left to prove herself to.
At least, so she told herself. Wasn’t it true, she insisted wordlessly, internally, that there were no more inner circles to gain audience with, and no more snooty socialites to impress? Was she not free of them?
But as she waves to the crowds, on this the thousandth year of ponykind’s reaching for the stars, Rarity knows that no pony truly outruns the ways in which life shapes her.
She has grown enough to understand that this need not be a bad thing. Twilight is still Twilight, after all, and she is the first to insist that this is a wonderful thing. Twilight never entirely left her nervous studious past, even as the anxiety was domesticated into kinder and kinder strains of perfectionism. Rarity never quite left behind growing up on the outside looking in at worlds of glamor and success and beauty. 
She’d come up with so many reasons, over the years, why she had taken to this life. 
She looked to Twilight, who was already watching her with a smile.
I am glad you are home, Twilight says.
Oh, darling, this isn’t home, is it?
I’d say home is wherever we are, Twilight replied evenly, and Rarity could not dispute her.