It was many years since the first time Rarity had told Sweetie Belle the story about the Aether Express. That had been a coronation day, and so was today, and that had made her remember being a filly.
Of course, Princess Cadance wasn’t being crowned again -- that would have been silly and absurd and Rarity already had a dress picked out and plans drawn up just in case it happened anyway, because Rarity was the kind of pony who spent a lot of time thinking about the Royalty. Not in the way the ponies at the tabloids did, not anymore. She’d long ago learned that the tabloids only wanted to find fault. Rarity wanted the Royalty to shine like diamonds.
Today, instead, was the day one of her friends ascended.
It was a grand ceremony. It was also one Rarity hadn’t planned, even a little. It wasn’t that she thought Twilight Sparkle was unworthy -- Twilight was one of her best friends! She’d been tutored by Princess Celestia, foalsat by Princess Cadance, and given every opportunity in life to succeed.
And yet…
Twilight lived in a tree. She was a librarian. Brilliant, yes, and a powerful wizard, but she didn’t have the kind of quiet dignity that Rarity expected from the Royalty. She was an adorable, fumbling mess, the kind of pony that was easy to befriend but who needed to be escorted to events to make sure she attended them instead of spending the night indoors and alone with the company of books.
Yes, Twilight had been their de facto leader, in a certain way, in the trials and tribulations she and her friends had been through. But they had all faced those dangers. They had all faced down gods and monsters and certain death. Most importantly, Rarity herself had faced all those things down, and with noble dignity!
So why was Twilight the only one rewarded?
Rarity felt ashamed somewhere deep inside even considering that thought. It was unworthy to be so jealous of another pony’s accomplishments. They were justly earned! Nopony could deny it. What ate at her was the sure knowledge that Twilight, as special and wonderful as she was, was not the only special and wonderful pony, and yet there was only one pony being crowned today.
“May I sit?” a quiet voice asked. Quiet is perhaps the wrong word here, actually. It sounded quiet, it didn’t carry far, but the voice imposed itself, impossible to ignore or mishear.
Rarity looked up and saw a pony she didn’t expect. She gasped and stood up, bowing.
“Princess Luna!” she gasped, again. “I am so sorry! I didn’t see you approaching! Am I in your seat?”
“Nay, Miss Rarity,” Luna said gently. “I simply wished for the company and saw you sitting alone. I thought you may wish for some companionship as well. If I am wrong, I shall take my leave.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rarity said. “Can I offer you a drink? I believe I still have half a bottle of rather fine wine here.”
It was a little less than half a bottle -- Rarity had been sitting alone for some time now with thirst and her own thoughts as her only companions. She’d told her friends she needed to get some air, but in truth, she had just needed to find a way to collect herself. She was still working on that front and was finding too many pieces still had jagged edges when she reached for them.
Princess Luna took the glass with polite dignity, holding it in the air against the light of the moon and looking at the contents, the red light filtering through it and splashing on her face.
“It’s terrible,” Princess Luna said.
“It is?” Rarity examined the bottle of wine again. Had it become skunked? She was sure she’d only opened it an hour ago. Certainly, she was drinking faster than she normally did, but she’d poured carefully to make sure no sediments had gotten into the Princess’ glass.
“Not the wine,” Princess Luna explained. “Living in the shadow of another pony, even one you love.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Rarity said carefully.
Princess Luna nodded faintly, accepting the lie. It was one Rarity was telling herself and would have been rude to point it out.
“It is sometimes difficult for me to speak to Twilight Sparkle,” Princess Luna said. “I am forever grateful to her and to all of you. You saved me from myself.”
It was true. Their first adventure, the first time they’d met, was in the pursuit of defeating the nightmare creature Luna had become. They should have become heroes in the process. Instead, their accomplishments had been hidden behind the dark side of the moon. Most ponies thought that Luna had simply come home from a long vacation.
Rarity had been happy to forego the fame to allow Princess Luna her dignity. If it had been known that jealousy had turned her into a creature of darkness and evil, ponies would have turned against her. Worse, it would have tarnished the name of the Royalty.
Having a secret shared with the Royalty was nearly as good as being a part of it, or at least it had been.
“It was my duty,” Rarity assured her. “And my honor.” She added.
Princess Luna swirled the wine around her glass. “Sometimes, Miss Rarity, I wonder. My sister raised Twilight Sparkle. She forged her into the mare she is, much the way a blacksmith forges a spear to point at the heart of an enemy. The spear is innocent of guile, but not the smith.”
“I don’t think Princess Celestia ever wanted to hurt you,” Rarity said. Was she consoling Princess Luna? If she was the type to have a personal checklist of things she wished to accomplish in her life, being a confidant for the Royalty was near the top.
“No, but she did want to stop Nightmare Moon,” Princess Luna said. She finally took a sip of wine. A long sip. The kind that ended with the glass empty and placed back on the table. “One was more important than the other, and always has been.”
Rarity wasn’t the kind of pony to understand that Princess Luna wasn’t merely speaking of her sister’s desires, but instead about which pony cast a longer shadow on history.
“I needed to tell you something,” Princess Luna said. “My sister and I sometimes have true dreams, glimpses of what is to come. I have not told anypony else yet, but I have had such a dream about you, Miss Rarity.”
Rarity felt a tingle of excitement shoot up her spine. The Royalty dreamed of her?
“Is it something you can tell me about?” Rarity asked.
“I feel I must,” Princess Luna said, avoiding Rarity’s eyes. “I know you had dreams of your own as a foal. Ones you have never let go of, even as an adult. They are good dreams, Miss Rarity. The dreams you hold onto are the ones that shape you.”
Rarity nodded. She thought she knew what the Princess meant. Ponies who chased their dreams were different from the masses who let life come to them.
“I saw you, in an uncertain future. You left the world behind to go after your heart’s true desire. I don’t know how the journey ends, but I know you are destined to stand at the crossroads and be given a chance to turn back.”
“Should I turn back?" Rarity asked cautiously.
“As I said, I do not know how the journey ends. All I know is that it reminded me of a story. A road between worlds joined with a train.”
“The Aether Express…” Rarity whispered. She was, despite the passage of years and the disappointments and disillusions that came with those years, young at heart. Somewhere deep inside, she still believed in magic older than unicorn sorcery.
Princess Luna nodded. “Yes. Take care, Rarity. I am not sure how your journey ends, but I know that it started long ago.”
Rarity sat at her drawing board. She had come home. Twilight Sparkle hadn’t. Or perhaps Canterlot was her home now. It was an odd thought. She’d only been in Ponyville for a few seasons and yet Rarity found it difficult to imagine the town without her. There was an empty place. Literally. They’d have to hire a new librarian.
Still, Canterlot wasn’t far away. It wouldn’t be such a burden to have their outings among the refined shops and gourmet restaurants in the capital. Twilight had always been the kind of pony who was all but allergic to spontaneous visits, and their time together as friends was not only marked on the calendar but included itineraries and checklists. Having to plan around her new duties as Royalty wouldn’t be much more of a burden.
Perhaps.
If she had time. If she could do the things she used to do. If they could still see each other simply as friends and not as part of a grand banquet or royal visit.
For the first time since the coronation, Rarity felt something besides the jealousy that she’d been trying to convince herself she wasn’t feeling at all. She felt the yawning gulf of distance between herself and a pony who had ascended so far beyond her station that she wasn’t sure what they were anymore.
Friends? Ruler and subject? Something between the two?
Rarity had been trying to distract herself by designing something. Anything. She’d seen hundreds of dresses at the Coronation, and given such short notice there hadn’t been a set style or theme aside from a celebration of Twilight Sparkle, and certainly no time to have anything custom-made. It had resulted in the rich and famous diving deep into their wardrobes to find something they hadn’t worn before.
It had resulted in styles from across decades and seasons all together at once, pairings of accessories and layers that hadn’t been seen before. Some particularly striking styles had caught Rarity’s eye, and she was sure with a few tweaks and some changes, they could be next season’s defining look.
But every time she started to draw, all that came out of her pen were sketches of trains. Train tracks ran along the borders of her drawing pad, crisscrossing in a way that looked beautiful but would have driven engineers to madness.
“I just can’t focus,” Rarity sighed. She took a sip of her coffee. Tried to take a sip of her coffee. The cup was frustratingly empty. This was the fifth time it had failed her this evening alone. She was going to need to invest in a larger cup. Again.
It didn’t help that her taste in coffee was refined, by which it is meant that her taste was expensive. Rarity wasn’t a foolish pony, of course. She knew that her palette wasn’t so refined at two in the morning to tell the difference between coffee grown in the jungles of some far-off exotic land and the cheapest grind at the local grocery store. However, she would never serve her guests the latter, and so she kept only the best in her pantry.
Rarity made her way down to the kitchen. The lights were off in the rest of her home, but she could navigate the way to the coffee pot even if she was totally blind. In fact, many of her mornings were spent doing exactly that. It was sometimes difficult to face the day without at least a cup of coffee in one’s body.
The moonlight streaming through the curtains provided more than enough of a glow for her to traverse the steps. She was alone in her home, but still took the time and effort to move with catlike silence. It was that time of night when one felt like an intruder even in their own home.
Rarity took a step, and one of the stairs creaked. Rarity sighed silently to herself. It wasn’t as if she needed to be quiet, but it was more dignified, wasn’t it? The creak felt like she’d failed the self-imposed challenge and--
Another stair creaked. This time, instead of disappointment, her blood ran cold, because she’d paused on the stairs after that first creak, and instead of it coming from under her hooves, it had come from several steps behind her.
Rarity shrieked, in a dignified and ladylike way. A scream that called out for a knight to rescue her. She was also a hero, so Rarity didn’t need anypony to rescue her, but it would have been a polite gesture for somepony to show up at that moment and sweep her off her hooves.
Her mind conjured visions from a dozen stories, half of them tales of blood-chilling horror, and half of them about gentlestallion thieves who found ladies of virtue and seduced them with roguish charm. She hopped down to the landing halfway to the bottom of the stairs and turned, ready to defend herself.
“I warn you, I may be a beautiful and dignified lady, but I’m also…!” Rarity looked up the stairs at what had been behind her.
A formless mass of darkness, like shadows floating in the air, boiled and tore at the air. It was halfway between a living creature and a cloud, as vicious as the first and untouchable as the second.
“Forgotten,” the cloud whispered. It surged, not directly at Rarity but around her, cutting her off from her only escape route. “Tossed aside.”
“If you can speak, then you must also know how to listen!” Rarity lit her horn, blaring light around her. It carved out what little open space she had, the walls of the cloud close enough that she could reach out and touch them if she wanted. “I command you to leave!”
The black walls closed in. “You are like us. Used. Cast away.” It hissed at her. Rarity thought she saw eyes in the darkness. It was all she could see. It had grown into a dome around her, and now she couldn’t make out the walls of her home. She was alone inside the creature.
If she had been Twilight Sparkle, she could have tried teleporting away, Perhaps it even would have worked. But she was not Twilight Sparkle. She would not have been approached by the darkness if she was, because it didn’t want somepony like that. It wanted somepony like Rarity.
“Go away!” Rarity yelled. She tried firing a blast of magic into the storm. Her magic had never been strong, but she was trapped by a cloud! Surely she could produce enough force to put a hole in vapors!
The beam of force and light was swallowed up by it. It was simply gone.
“You have a hole in your heart,” the darkness whispered. “Let us in.”
The space around Rarity closed tighter. The light from her horn started to flicker, fear and the darkness itself overcoming her tiny ember of magic.
“No!” Rarity shrieked. “Somepony, help me!”
The darkness surged in. Rarity fell into it, and there was no bottom to hit.
Rarity gasped and sat up. She was sore all over. That was mostly because of the bed she’d been lying on. The sheets were cotton, and not terribly fine at that. More importantly, the mattress was thin and worn to the point that she might as well have been lying on a wooden bench.
When she’d been a foal, Rarity had tried to train herself to feel a pea under a mattress. This had not borne fruit, except for some rather bruised apples and squashed grapes, but that sort of fruit wasn’t suitable for eating and her parents had made her clean up the mess.
“Where am I?” Rarity asked. Or groaned. She was a young pony, but sleeping poorly made her feel like an old one. The last thing she remembered was darkness, and then the total blank interval that meant the deepest type of sleep.
“You’re in my home,” a pony said quietly.
Rarity squeaked in alarm. She’d not expected an answer to the question and had certainly not expected a mare to have been watching her sleep. She covered herself with the thin blanket. It was poor cotton but it was also at least opaque.
The mare’s horn glowed, and she cast a spell into a lantern, filling the room with light so pale blue it was almost white, but only almost, and Rarity’s eye was keen enough to tell the difference.
“Princess Luna?” Rarity gasped.
The mare was tall, with a dark coat. She was also wearing a dark coat. Or a hooded cloak, at least. She pulled back her hood, and Rarity felt a blush rise to her cheeks at her assumption. The mare’s hair wasn’t the swathe of living night sky that the Princess’s was. It was short and pale blue, and now that Rarity looked closer at her, she seemed younger than Princess Luna, perhaps only a little older than Rarity herself, which meant the mystery mare was quite young herself.
“I apologize, I just thought--” Rarity wasn’t sure how to end that. She thought she was important enough to warrant a rescue from a Princess? That was hubris. It didn’t mean she didn’t want it, just that she knew that she shouldn’t ask for it.
“I’m flattered at the comparison,” the mare said, smiling faintly. “Please, call me Diana.”
Rarity swallowed. “I apologize again for the intrusion, Diana.” She glanced around the room. She wasn’t in Ponyville -- she could tell that immediately. She knew every building in Ponyville, and this was older and more worn down than any of them. If there had been a pony living like this in town, Rarity wouldn’t have been able to rest until they were more comfortable and less… dusty.
She politely coughed at the tickle of dust on the back of her throat.
“Would you like a cup of water?” Diana asked. Rarity nodded and slid to the edge of the bed. The taller unicorn poured water from a faded pitcher into a glass and gave it to Rarity. It was lukewarm, but that was for the best. Rarity had enough of a chill already from her experience and she wouldn’t demand anypony put on a pot of tea just for her.
Unless they offered, of course.
“How did I get here?” Rarity asked. “The last thing I recall, I was in my home in Ponyville.”
“I found you in the forest,” Diana said. “It’s a dangerous place. You weren’t on the path, and it is full of savage beasts. I brought you here.”
“How odd…” Rarity mused. “Not you, darling. I can’t recall what happened after…”
She remembered falling into darkness. It felt like that pit was right there when she closed her eyes, and the vividness of the memory was like living it again. She almost dropped the glass she was holding.
“Are you injured?” Diana asked.
“I don’t believe so,” Rarity said. She was polite enough not to mention how sore she was. It would have been rude. “May I ask where I am? I don’t know if we’ve met. I apologize if we have and I’ve forgotten, my head is a bit jumbled after such excitement.”
“Hollow Shades,” Diana said.
“Ah,” Rarity nodded. She was vaguely aware that the town existed, largely through reputation. It was another town near the Everfree’s borders. Whatever had happened to her, she’d somehow crossed through the forest on her own. Dangerous, but not so fearful that it was unthinkable.
Hollow Shades was a town with a bit of a reputation. It was a haunted town. Not a ghost town, exactly, since ponies did live there. It was simply that some of the ponies also un-lived there, if one believed the rumors.
Rarity was the kind of pony to believe the rumors.
“If you were looking for the Aether Express, you’re in the right place,” Diana said casually.
Rarity forgot about the rumors of ghosts because there was abruptly no room for trivial things in her mind.
“The-- the Aether Express?!” Rarity squeaked, for the second time. This time it was even less dignified. A squeak of alarm or shock was acceptable, but to have her voice crack like a filly’s? It made her feel foalish. “How did you know--?”
“You were talking in your sleep,” Diana explained. “You seemed almost feverish. I couldn’t wake you, but I stayed by your side to make sure you didn’t turn for the worse.”
“I see…” Rarity muttered. “I didn’t think it really existed.”
That was only partly true. She did believe. It was just not a belief that she was willing to share with another adult mare. It was a story for fillies, like the Tooth Breezy, or the Boogeymare. It was easier to deny it in public and fantasize when she was alone.
“It exists, though it only passes through once in every pony’s lifetime,” Diana said. “Are you going to board it?”
Rarity nodded quickly. “If it’s real, I must! Of course, first I’ll have to go back home and tell my friends and family. My parents will need to find somepony to watch Sweetie Belle, of course, and Fluttershy can look after my cat while I’m away…”
She had deadlines with clients, too, but she could make those excuses later.
“The train is leaving tonight,” Diana said softly. “You can return home, but if you do, you’ll miss its departure.”
“And it only comes once in a lifetime,” Rarity continued the thought.
Diana nodded with faint sorrow. Everything the mare did was faint, like she was only lightly touching the world with her existence.
“I have to go,” Rarity said. She felt sudden desperation. This was her one chance. Not just at the Aether Express, but at something grander. At whatever was at that final destination. At being something other than--
An extra. A stepping stone for others. Watching others live the grand stories she wanted for herself.
Diana smiled. She reached into her cloak and produced a slip of silver foiled paper. Rarity took it carefully, though when she touched it, she could feel it was far from fragile. It was indelible and indestructible.
It was also, more importantly, a train ticket. One wrought of silver and parchment and bearing the name of the Aether Express in ornate script.
“If you’re determined to go, I’ll give you this ticket, if you’ll agree to one small condition.”
“But this must be worth…” Rarity couldn’t even estimate the value. How did one put a price on infinity? “What’s the condition?”
“It’s a long and lonely journey,” Diana said. “I was going to leave on the train myself, and I have need of a companion to come with me. Would you care to travel with me, Miss Rarity?”
Rarity didn’t notice that Diana had used her name without being told what it was. Even if she had noticed, she would have assumed she’d said it in her sleep, or that she was famous enough to be worthy of the mare’s attention and memory.
“I couldn’t possibly refuse,” Rarity said. She knew she was excellent company. Really, the other mare was also getting a good deal. “Were you just going to go alone if you hadn’t found me?”
Diana closed her eyes, still smiling. “I don’t know if I could bear it. Loneliness can weigh a pony down until it becomes an unbearable burden.”
“Yes, I suppose it can,” Rarity agreed quietly. “I suppose I’ll have to apologize to my friends after I’ve returned. I’m sure they’ll be terribly worried. Perhaps I’ll find some souvenirs for them along the way to make up for being so careless-- ah! I don’t have any bits, or luggage!”
“The Aether Express will provide everything its passengers need,” Diana assured her. “There’s no need to worry about incidentals.”
“A full-service experience,” Rarity said to herself. It made sense. After all, it was the train of dreams and destiny! The opportunity wouldn’t be put in front of a pony and then be torn away because of something as small as a lack of bits. The lack of hats and outfits was a touch more concerning, but perhaps she’d find a way to make do.
“I look forward to the journey,” Diana said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”