Seashell
IV
From the journal of Sunburst, April 27, 1329 YS:
I don't think that Princess Twilight actually likes her palace all that much. She'd never say that out loud, I'm sure, but it seems to be getting more and more apparent now that I've been here for a little while.
The other day, several of the large paintings from one of the main halls were removed for some restoration work. Temporary replacements were going to be hung. When the princess was asked which ones she preferred, she would only say that she didn't care, they could put up posters of the Great and Powerful Trixie (whoever that is) for all it mattered. She sounded annoyed to even have the subject brought up.
After that, out of curiosity I started paying a little closer attention to what decorations do matter to her. The answer seems to be none of them. She never really looks at the paintings or the statues or whatever other artifacts line the hallways. I think they're just so much clutter to her.
I wonder how this princess got here. She seems so out of place. Not on the surface, of course, but the sense of it is growing in the subtle things I see the longer I'm here.
Every day that I stand guard and end up watching her during official business or even during what should be her personal time, she seems so distant from every other pony - very alone.
She watches other ponies. She studies them. I can see her doing it, and feel somehow as if I know exactly what's going through her head, when she looks right through the ponies who come to her court like they were made of glass. She watches and she sees and she understands. She's very, very smart, anypony can see that.
But she is alone.
It's like she's a sculpture made of ice. She's the centerpiece of the table, everypony can see her, but nopony would touch her. They know and she knows that some sort of barrier of cold makes it impossible, or at least too damaging to endure.
It's a little like an accusation my own mother teased me with, in the past, when I continually failed to ever have a date or hang out with any other ponies from school.
"If you're going to be an ice queen," she said, "you'll never have any friends."
I stopped myself from impulsively answering completely honestly that I thought that would probably be fine with me. It would have upset her. She wouldn't understand.
I think she was just worried about thinking I was having social difficulty. Oh, I'm not so inept as all that, though. I can talk to other ponies without much trouble. I've had friends, and I know how to make friends, but they haven't been a center of my life, is all. They've always just been the sort of friends that are a peripheral feature of the place I happen to be. The kind that get left behind when you leave, I suppose. I just never really met anypony I stayed in touch with across the distance. I don't know why, exactly. The bond was just never all that deep.
The princess seems personable enough. She's polite and everypony who comes through here seems to take away a good impression of her. I like how she can talk about anything and make it relatable, and she can make decisions and make them understandable even if they're not what you wanted to hear. Most importantly, she's always honest, not just a politician with a silver tongue.
She would easily make a lot of long-lasting friends, I think, if she was anypony else but the princess. I suppose the demands of her office don't really allow it. She stays here, they move on, and that's that. The only lasting fixture is that constant movement enforcing detachment.
The one exception might be her personal student. She's a little unicorn filly, with a white coat and powder blue mane, named Azure Sky. I made her acquaintance soon after I got here when our paths crossed in one of the hallways. She spotted my cutie mark and apparently took a keen interest in it.
"You have a sun cutie mark!" she smiled up at me with her big pale purple eyes. She's such a cute kid. "Like Celestia."
That was a little uncomfortable of a comparison to just come up off the cuff. "Oh... Not really," I said. "It's smaller and the design's different. I think Celestia's is a bit more important. I just got this one by clearing away clouds over my mom's garden when I was a kid. She needed more sunlight for her flowers, that's all."
"Hope you didn't fly too high toward the sun," she giggled. "You wouldn't want to make Icarhorse's mistake."
Icarhorse, the ancient story about a pegasus who flew so close to the sun that the feathers on her wings burned up, whereupon she fell to her death. It was a pretty geeky joke, but I got it. I laughed a little. "No, I'm not worried," I assured her. "No pegasus can fly that high."
"Nah, I guess not," she agreed with an enthusiastic nod. "Hey! Speaking of stories, were you in the war?" she asked suddenly.
"No," I shook my head. "It was just over by the time I was old enough to join the army."
"Oh," she looked a little disappointed. "Sometimes I ask ponies what happened, but mostly they won't talk about it with me. The other guards say maybe they'll tell me when I'm older. Except Captain Dash. She won't say anything at all. She just kind of freezes up a little bit and goes to do something else. Isn't that weird? And Princess Twilight seems really sad but she won't tell me why. She just tells me to keep studying..."
"Azure?" The voice of Princess Twilight was suddenly nearby and she rounded a corner and found the two of us. "Come on, kiddo. Time for today's lesson," she smiled warmly at her student.
"Okay!" the little filly smiled back. "I just met... Uh..." she looked at me blankly.
"Sunburst," I told her my name. "Pleased to meet you."
"I see," the princess nodded at me briefly. "I hope Azure Sky here wasn't any trouble." She turned and started walking. "Come on, let's not bother the guards anymore," she said while her student fell in next to her.
"No, princess," I said. "She's no trouble at all."
"Did you see her cutie mark? It's the sun, like Celestia's!" Azure said to the princess. I cringed a little bit. Being compared once again to our illustrious solar princess, and to another princess of all ponies, was embarrassing. "I hope mine is something cool like that. When do you think I'll get one?"
"Well, you're about that age," the princess smiled down at her student while they kept walking away side by side. "It'll be soon..." Their voices faded down the hall as they got further away.
It was pretty clear that the princess regards her student warmly. Maybe there's even a permanent bond solidifying between them, probably, seeing as how the princess is basically raising that filly. Even that, though, I think is no substitute for a truly personal friend. There has to be a pretty clear delineation between student and teacher, and aside from that there's things you can't just talk about with a child. At the end of the day she still seems alone.
I guess we're the same, in that way. How we got here is the difference. I know that I chose this because I'm comfortable with it. This is where it's easy for me to be. But what about her?
Is this who she is, or is it who she's made to be as the price for being Princess Twilight Sparkle?
My kind being the exception among most ponies, I have to think it's the latter.
I almost wish I could just ask her without that being a horribly inappropriate affront to the decorum of subordinance that must, of course, be kept between the royalty and her guard.
Maybe it's a chicken-or-the-egg problem that even she doesn't know how to solve - nopony can really be close enough to ask why she doesn't like her palace, and that's why she doesn't like her palace. I think she came from somewhere smaller, where she was smaller... Somewhere she misses. I can only guess that maybe there's some ponies she misses, too, because in a smaller place they could get closer. Moving into here just meant moving into a big cage, with bars that don't keep her in so much as they keep everypony else out.
As a guard, maybe I'm one of those bars. It's a strange feeling, and not really a good one. If I am I don't want to be, but the job is what it is.
Day by day it's increasingly clear that princesses are not necessarily the creatures they seem on the surface. I wonder what else I'll discover before I'm done here.
Enough for now.