It’s a moment in time like any other. But some of the important moments seem to last, every detail perceivable, slowed as if the air had turned to thick syrup.

Here, in the library room of Twilight’s castle, one of the windows has burst. Diamonds of green glass hang in the air, spinning and shimmering with flashes of light as the panes part at their seams and expand into the room like seeds flying from a dandelion puff. Beams of sunlight play over the high ceiling and the tall bookshelves and the reading tables and the purple stone floor, giving the brief appearance of a dance party to an area that is perhaps the least appropriate place to hold such an event.

In the center is the instigator, a Pegasus who loves to go very fast, but who sometimes doesn’t brake as hard as she should. As she crashed through the window she altered her course, and she is now pointed towards a reading table, some stray blue feathers clouding around her like loose petals, her ragged hair streaming back in spikes of wild color.

At the table below is a young Alicorn who loves to study very much, but who sometimes is oblivious to events around her. But the crunch of the separating panes and the spangles of dancing light on her book have roused her from her enraptured state, and she’s in the act of turning around in shock as she lets go of her book and the pages start to flip over, losing her place. Her head moves slowly, just as an oncoming train may inexorably approach in a dream. 

The Alicorn has often wondered, lying awake at night, whose lips will be the very first to touch hers. It’s a problem that has concerned her more as she has risen to a position of power and trust and seems set to eventually inherit the reins from the Diarchs. She has spent endless nights studying genealogical volumes and drawing charts, as any choice she makes may affect the state of the realm for millennia to come.  She has bided her time, knowing there’s plenty of green grass out there in the meadow, but still the thoughts keep coming back to her as she watches the silvery clouds sail across the sky on starry nights.

The Pegasus has been around the block a few times and knows how the wind blows. She’s used to being direct about what she wants, but she’s been holding back in the present case. She had seen the Alicorn reading a romance novel, so she checked it out and read it herself to learn what the Alicorn might find attractive. It was full of mushy glop that made her nose wrinkle, but she had gathered that a subtle approach was needed.

With that in mind, she’d been arranging the weather outside the Alicorn’s window for a month now, putting sunbeams overhead at dawn and pretty clouds in the night skies, with no results. So this morning, after oversleeping as usual, she’d decided that subtlety was getting nowhere, so it was back to being direct. She’d run a comb quickly through her mane and flew off at top speed; there was no point in waiting any longer.

And now here she is, bursting through the window like another impossibly slow train on the same track, and she’s just about to say something as she closes in with a cloud of twinkling panes and feathers whirling about her, and the Alicorn is turning her head at what she would later calculate was the precise rate of speed needed to ensure that the event happened. As the Pegasus closes in with her lips slightly parted and the Alicorn turns and is about to exclaim something in shock, their eyes meet and there’s a flash of mutual comprehension. And in that glacially slow instant that lasts just exactly as long as it needs to, that moment just before the irresistible force hits the immobile object, before all the crashing and chaos and flying papers and mingled feathers and the years of love and laughter in the future… 

Their lips meet for the very first time.