When Twilight was decanted from the sleep-pod, the glowing hologram over her tablet had a private-message light next to the clock. She took a few minutes to let her heart beat life back into her veins, moved her hoof through "6:35 AM" to touch it, and a sentence sprang up in the graceful, flowing vectors of Celestial Oblique:

[quote][i]Come watch the sun rise.[/i][/quote]

A lifetime ago, she would have grabbed Spike, hopped into the nearest phaeton, and danced on jittery hooftips as her guards sped toward Canterlot. An age ago, she would have teleported there with a thought. Today, though, she left the message languidly unacknowledged—and her overflowing feeds untouched—while she pulled a battered cast-iron kettle from her relics cabinet and filled a tea-ball with subtly pungent leaves from the drying rack by the window. 

The eastern horizon gradually lightened as the ancient induction stove heated her water—Twilight had long ago assigned it to the placebo effect, but the tea [i]did[/i] taste better if it wasn't flash-boiled before slipping the leaves in, and today deserved the best. She allowed herself a distraction from the tea preparation once it was steeping, and hummed tunelessly to herself as she went through her morning ritual—spinning up her HUD, stepping through the cleanring and lowering her wings into the autopreen. She stared into the cobblestone streets of Ponyville, silent except for the hovering hum of the maintenance drones, as she drew her ion brush slowly through the ethereal gradient of her mane. Then, finally, she reverently lifted the kettle from the stove, floated two porcelain cups to its side, and blinked the vector-shift out of her eyes on the balcony of the Tower of the Sun atop Canterlot Castle, 120.47138 kilometers away.

"Sleep well?" Celestia said without turning around as the clock in the corner of Twilight's eye ticked to 6:55. Her voice had the burr of disuse, though it remained as gentle as ever. Her head was low, and her chest was half-leaning, half-collapsed on the broad stone of the railing. She'd ion-brushed her mane to within a degree of bursting into flames, which had very nearly managed to revive the vivid pastels Twilight remembered from Before.

"Well enough," Twilight said, and poured them both a cup of Darjeeling.

No more was said while they both lifted their cups—Twilight with unwavering field, Celestia with trembling hooves. The fading of the eastern stars, and the sky's shift of hue from deep red toward orange, both proceeded with agonizing slowness. The lightpanels behind them gradually dimmed and then winked out.

7:00 came and went. Twilight set her teacup down and glanced curiously at Celestia. Celestia—her muzzle a universe of weariness—sipped, and let her lips drift into an enigmatic smile.

The first fire of the day finally, [i]finally[/i] peeked over the Ponsylvania horizon, impossibly dim and tiny. It crept upward, arc-second by agonizing arc-second, coalescing from a microscopic filament outlining the hills into a tiny lump of light plopped atop them. Twilight's gaze flickered downward to the balcony floor—where weak sunlight was peeking in zebra-stripe patterns through the old stone railing—and then returned to the light on the hills.

"Look at that," Twilight said helplessly.

Celestia gingerly set down her teacup, then pushed herself upright and nodded. "Isn't it beautiful?"

Twilight felt a quiver pass through her horngrip, and the bottom corners of the world behind her HUD began to blur. With infinite precision, she set down the teacup on the railing, and then dabbed at her eyes with a pastern. 

Celestia was crying, too—tears openly streaming down her cheeks over a tired smile. Her eyes never left the horizon. The daylight pooled and intensified.

Twilight couldn't help but return that smile, and her own tears spilled out. "I've never seen shadows this long," she whispered. 

"You'll get used to it," Celestia said. "Or maybe not. I haven't, yet."

[i]Or this dim,[/i] Twilight didn't say. There was no need. That would change day by day.

Instead, she stepped forward to the railing alongside Celestia, draping a wing around her—and then giving up and clamping her hooves around the elder alicorn in a fierce hug. Celestia turned from the railing, legs over her withers to fully embrace her back. They held each other, laughing and sobbing, Twilight nuzzling into Celestia's damp chest and feeling Celestia's tears drip onto her forehead, until there was no more emotion left to drain away.

"I can't believe it," Twilight said. "Finally. How long has it been?"

"It certainly [i]feels[/i] like two and a half million years," Celestia said.

Twilight smiled, eyes returning to the slowly rising sun. "You don't look a day over ten thousand."

"Well, you know," Celestia said, "relativity."

A piercing beep sounded from a speaker grill on the side of the tower as their HUD clocks ticked to 7:05. Celestia silenced it with a hoof gesture, then sighed.

"We've five minutes past aphelion," she said. "I'm letting the moment linger—for you, and for everyone. But I shouldn't delay sunrise much longer."

"Yeah," Twilight conceded quietly, then looked back at Celestia with a warm smile. "But thank you."

Celestia, for the first time, lit her horn. Equestria's sun sprang up obligingly—soaring in moments past the thin wedge of light on the horizon, and climbing into the morning sky to bathe the land in brilliance. 

The dim and distant flame remained on the horizon below the sun, but its shadows immediately vanished.

[hr]

Twilight knew exactly where her next stop was—682.0027 kilometers straight-line, or 688.1638 following the curvature of the planet—but she wanted to start catching up on current events, so she hopped on a magtrain north to the Crystal City and started paging through the Hoofweb chat boards while the landscape shot by. 

Page after page of topics were nothing but buzz about Hope (as they'd named the new sun). It wasn't news, of course—not to the chat crowds, nor to her. The last time Twilight had been awake, a century ago, she had helped astronomers at the planet's most powerful telescopes first pick out Hope's faint glow from the stellar background radiation. She skimmed some encyclopedia entries for historical photos captured since then. Hope had been visible to the naked eye for decades, and had been the second-brightest object in the sky for years, as they hurtled ever closer toward it through the void. 

Hope—being essentially at a fixed point in the starfield as their planet slowly spun at its traditional rate—orbited Equestrian skies in a lazy 24-hour circuit, which in some ways made it already feel more like the sun than Spark (as they'd named the tiny-but-close stellar fragment that Celestia rotated around the planet). Spark had long ago been shifted to a 19.1-hour orbit, which made for miserably abbreviated day-dark cycles, but offered Celestia a nearly optimum tradeoff between acceleration and recuperation. Given the distances involved, they wanted every little edge they could get.

For the past several months, Twilight noted, Celestia had been posting announcements counting down to the morning of the first "official" dual sunrise—the first time that Spark and Hope would crest the horizon near-simultaneously after Hope had finally crossed the Magnitude 12 threshold. That meant it cast about as much light as Luna's old moon—though from a single warm and tiny point rather than a ghostly white disc—and, in a satisfying cosmic coincidence, also meant they had passed to within the embrace of Hope's gravity well, where the final gravitic manipulations were being made to slow Equestria into a circular orbit in the habitable zone.

The current Zebra poet laureate—an old mare who had been named Matumaini at birth, in a fit of retroactively justified optimism—had composed for the occasion an epigram in the millennia-old style of Before:

[quote]Today, the flame from Hope's bright spark
Illuminates a sky once dark,
And with her love provides the key
To liberate equinity.[/quote]

The most-upvoted response to it had come from a pod maintenance technician by the name of Gyro Gearheart—one of Pinkie Pie's five granddaughters—who had been decanted about a year ago in preparation for the mass awakenings that would be scheduled closer to Hope:

[quote]I'm looking forward, as sleep ends,
To introduce you to old friends.[/quote]

Pinkie herself had asked to be the very last pony to be decanted. "I've only got one party left in me," she had said Before, her breathing labored but her smile never wavering, "and I want to throw it for [i]everyone[/i]."

[hr]

When Twilight ambled out of the train into the gleaming streets of the Crystal City, Flurry's geoloc was—predictably—the control room of the palace's High Tower, upon which was mounted the central interferometer for the Crystal Array. Twilight took a leisurely path there, filling her lungs with the cool northern air and the omnipresent silence, and paused for a long while in the throne room. Radiant, calm Cadance and frail, white-maned Shining Armor were slumbering in pods snuggled side by side, both with a hoof pressed to each other's side of the pod, separated by only the thin film of their sacs as they hurtled through the light-years. 

Cadance—though she was one of the very few who could survive the trip awake—had begged not to spend a minute more than she had to without him, and there was no way that Celestia could tell her no. On the other hoof, Flurry—barely decades into adulthood, Before—had leapt at the chance to define herself without the chafing influence of an immortal mother. 

[i]Two thousand years[/i] of definition. 

Twilight wondered, not for the first time, if her brother and stepsister would even slightly recognize the mare their daughter had become.

[color="#808"][i]> oms twi ltnh[/i][/color]

A subcutaneous hum and a gentle chirp deep in her ear accompanied the acronyms blinking into the bottom of her HUD. Twilight smiled, tapped her tongue to her palate twice to engage speech-to-text, and subvocalized back as she walked. "Hi, Flurry. I figured I'd take the scenic route here, and give myself a chance to catch up on the way. I see a hundred years hasn't cured you of talking in abbreviations."

Some dots immediately sprang up at the bottom of the display, and it took a number of seconds for them to resolve into words with another chirp:

[color="#808"][i]> Sorry! 8,:D You know the Alicorn of Communication has got to be split-second twenty-four-seven for my zebs on the web, and it's easy to forget to compensate for fogies like you. Get up here, you big goof.[/i][/color]

Twilight grinned. [i]Oh m w less than three,[/i] she subvocalized back, and after a split-second's vector-shift calculation, was nuzzling her niece in jubilant reunion.

"It [i]must[/i] be a big deal that I'm back," Twilight said, focus flicking one last time to her HUD before she set its transparency to 100% and drank in the sparking 3-d webbing effect that blazed through Flurry's ethereal violet mane. "You set your status indicator to 'Busy'."

Flurry laughed and lunged in for another hug. "It's alright. I'm livestreaming this to a generation of zebras who have only ever seen you asleep. Say hi to your fans."

"Hi to your fans," Twilight dad-joked, as she always did when Flurry put her on the spot. "Should I have prepared a speech? I feel obliged to say something momentous. We're here. We're finally here."

"Nah," Flurry said with an easy shrug. "We've had enough of momentous with everypony who's anypony. Even Tia has been pulling herself away from her slingshotting for a few minutes here and there to stand in the room for the biggest parties." She nuzzled Twilight's neck again. "Don't be an alicorn, Twi. Just be you."

Twilight closed her eyes for a moment, trying not to think about the hundred years that had seemingly melted away when she and Flurry had hugged. Just be you, indeed…a legend come to life, hugging a living legend. It was a testament to Flurry's domain that she could give Twilight news like being unexpectedly livecast to the world on Equestria's most important day in generations, and somehow not reduce her to a gibbering wreck.

…In generations. [i]A hundred years.[/i] Or an eyeblink of dreamless sleep. 

All but three of the world's sentient races—ponies, ungulates, gryphons, dogs, breezies, qilin, seafolk—had crammed into sleep pods when they first realized their world was going to have to flee the Dark. Dragons (too large for the pods) went into deep hibernation, and changelings (unable to use their own pods, and unable to survive for so long without food) went into mass dormancy. Only the zebra, for reasons of their own, had refused to go to sleep—vowing to live and breed and die beneath pitch-black skies and Shard's weakened light, and shepherd the world through its age of slumber. They—and the few experts who had been roused from their slumber for short periods of interstellar navigation, or pod maintenance, or oversight of automated factories and algae farms—literally were Equestria now, and Twilight was being introduced to the children's children of the friends she'd made while last surveying the stars.

Small wonder that so few wanted to wake up until Hope shone for good in the sky.

"Equestria to Twilight," Flurry said, interrupting her train of thought and waving a hoof in front of her eyes. "Not that I don't want to support you being you, but you're getting that faraway maudlin look again."

Twilight shook her muzzle, blinked her eyes back into focus, and glanced around the room, eyes alighting on a wall-display with a diagram of concentric rings. She silently took in its dots and discs before her brain put two and two together. "…Planets?" Her muzzle curled into a grin. "Planets! Hope has [i]planets?[/i] We weren't nearly close enough to confirm that when I went to sleep!"

Flurry's eyes lit up. "Oh my stars, Twi, you have [i]no[/i] idea! One's even got its full orbit in the inner habitable zone!" She pointed at a side wall, with two blotchy, severely over-magnified pictures of a blue circle, one of which had erratic white patches and one of which had hints of green to one side. "Water! Clouds! Life! It's [i]got[/i] to be them."

She paused. Her face fell, and her ears lowered.

"[i]Had[/i] to be them," she murmured, and it was the first time Twilight had ever seen Flurry at less than full intensity.

[hr]

In the times Before, Equestrian was a land of tamed and tameable villains. There were dark hearts. Beings who wanted power. Beings who would ravage and plunder and destroy. But there was also Harmony, and there was Friendship, and when the darkness and the light met head-on, it was like a torch setting new tinder ablaze: the Light could not help but spread, until the world was wholly at peace, allowing the steel spider of technology to spin them all into a single web.

And then Luna started falling into fever dreams, muttering wild and chilling gibberish about the Dark. It wasn't the Nightmare, and it wasn't the Tantabus—they established that quickly. In her more lucid moments, it also terrified her—survivor of the Nightmare, survivor of the Tantabus—beyond words. For the next decade, she alternated her time between the deepest recesses of the Restricted Archives, and huddled trembling in bed.

That was when the rest of Equestria discovered that, one by one and cluster by cluster, faster and faster, the stars were winking out.

Luna vanished one night, and an emergency worldwide hunt began. Twilight deciphered what she could of Luna's final cryptic notes, and the Ahuizotl-Do family used all their archaeological know-how to trace her to some pre-Equestrian ruins in Brayzil, where Luna was found repeatedly muttering a string of numbers like a mantra. By then, half the sky was a few lonely bright points in a sea of utter blackness, and even those brightest and closest stars were beginning to snuff out one by one.

She stirred to consciousness when Twilight and Celestia made their way to her side. "No light, no light," she whispered. "Three four eight one seven zero seven two—"

"We have the numbers," Twilight interrupted, cradling Luna's head and trying to catch the gaze of her rolling eyes. "Six columns of sixteen. What do they [i]mean[/i]?"

Luna, blessedly, focused in. "Hope," she whispered. "Coordinates of the guide-star, and distant Hope offering distant shelter." She gathered her hooves underneath her and staggered upright, and for the first time in ten years, she looked regal—a gleam of hard intent in her eyes. "Alphys, brightest of Pegasus, doomed in seventeen years, and us in nine. But if she flings us away—" Luna whirled on Celestia. "Sister, do you understand?"

"No," Celestia said gently, "but I want to."

Luna closed her eyes, pressed her hoof to her forehead, and let out a ragged breath, lower eyelid twitching. "A near-light-speed shockwave from the galactic core," she said, and Twilight's heart dropped into her gut. "It is not evil, sister, and we cannot fight it like evil; it is [i]nothing[/i], shriveling all it passes into cold dust, and we must flee or we too are dust in the wind. There is no rainbow. There is no time. But we have friends, and one chance to reach them. Do you trust me?"

Yes, Celestia said, and yes, a terrified Twilight said, and they set up the Slingshot.

[hr]

The idea—Luna had said, before they finally coaxed her into the balm of dreamless pod-sleep, and swore to her on everything they held dear that they wouldn't wake her until she could hear the song of a star that wasn't doomed—wasn't hers. It came, she said, from the inhabitants of a planet around the star she called Hope. 

Twilight crunched the numbers and realized that Hope was literally a galaxy away, 2.5 million light years distant. She knew Star Swirl had experimented with dimensional magic on the border of literal insanity, but even so, the idea that aliens were breaking the light-speed barrier to advise ponykind on an impending extinction that they wouldn't even be able to [i]observe[/i] for a geologic age…was somewhere west of unthinkable. Nevertheless, it was a possible solution for a problem with approximately zero acceptable answers, and the math checked out, so she didn't question it too closely.

Equestria's stellar neighborhood was a three-body system—a C-class sun that had an age ago triggered a subatomic chain reaction converting it into a not-entirely-Euclidean substance known as unicornium; a small, rocky planet of normal matter enriched by countless millennia of unicornium black-body radiation; and a wandering pure-unicornium comet that mages had long ago captured and circularized the orbit of. Unicornium, of course, was amenable to the nonlocal effects generated by applied willpower channelled through enriched horn-matter—efforts which were still called "magic" out of respect to the immense contributions of pre-classical researchers to the field, but which had been thoroughly documented and explained as a sub-branch of physics in the decades after Twilight Sparkle's ascension. The sun and moon, as purely unicornium bodies, were incapable of normal gravitational or energetic interaction with Equestria—but the efforts of sufficiently powerful unicorns, or an alicorn such as Celestia or Luna, could essentially selectively drag aspects of unicornium bodies into three-dimensional space. Every day and every night, they basically grabbed the wandering bodies which otherwise would drift away, and forced normal three-dimensional gravity to apply until they shot around the planet, and then forced them to shine, bathing Equestria in heat and light and the subtler but necessary black-body emanations of the moon.

Luna's idea—the people of Hope's idea—was to slam the moon into the sun at an angle (physical and mental) that would knock a tiny chip of the sun off, a protruding sixth-dimensional piece which hadn't quite converted at the same time as the rest of it and thus (according to some brain-destroying dimensional graphs) was ripe for breakage. Once that was accomplished, the next step was to line the main piece of the sun up with Alphys, turn on gravity but neither light nor heat, and send Equestria (and the mini-sun Shard) slingshotting toward Alphys ahead of the shockwave. It was a tremendous sacrifice—and would leave them with a frail, tiny ball of transdimensional fusion products that would run out of fuel in under 10,000 years—but no alternative plans could accelerate the planet and a heat source fast enough to both escape the Dark.

Even that initial acceleration, technically, wouldn't be enough to save them—at least, not without tidal forces tearing the planet apart long before the Dark could do it in—but Luna pointed out that they could further accelerate mid-trip. If Celestia grabbed Shard and "raised" it to in front of Equestria—leveraging unicornium's unique properties to do so without pushing the planet backward and "slowing down" Equestria in normal three-dimensional space—she could then turn on its gravity and have it pull the system's center of gravity forward. Shard's total acceleration capability that way was barely enough to be felt against the inward pull of the planet's gravity, but over the distances of interstellar space, those tiny nudges added up to a lot. In the eight light-years to Alphys, in fact, they could accelerate to very nearly half the speed of light—just barely sprinting in with the cold breath of the Dark on their tail.

Once there, if they lined everything up carefully, they could slingshot around the star closely enough to alter their trajectory—flinging themselves "up" out of the shockwave's path—by hiding in the light-shadow (and gravity-shadow) of Shard for the brief time they'd be close enough to Alphys to get roasted. It would be an extremely unpleasant hairpin turn, but unpleasant beat the cold and silent alternative. 

And once clear of the shockwave, it was just a matter of continuing to accelerate through the void of interstellar space, trying to make enough distance to find a new home—and a new sun—before Shard burned out. The distances between galaxies were impossibly huge, but they had relativity on their side: the closer to the speed of light they got, the more time passed for the outside world for each tick of Equestria's clocks. In fact, if Celestia devoted her full-time attention to Shard manipulation (accelerating them continuously until the halfway point, and then continuously decelerating them back down to zero again so that they didn't blow by their destination in a heartbeat), the 2.5 million light-years to Hope could be covered with an intergalactic banishment of just under two thousand subjective Equestrian years.

The irony, Twilight often noted, could not have possibly been lost on Celestia.

[hr]

Twilight's third destination was literally as far away as equinely possible (1712.9481 kilometers straight-line, 2690.6130 following the curvature of the planet), which by all rights should have given her all the reading time she needed. But no trains—mag-lev or otherwise—went to the far side of Equestria, and she didn't fancy a flight around the world. She compromised by returning to the comfort of her palace to catch up on current events for several days—and to exchange a languid series of webmails with Celestia and a rapid, disjoint stream of snapchats with Flurry—before teleporting. 

If Twilight hadn't known exactly where to go, it would have been impenetrable jungle. The Dragon Lands had historically been cleared to bare rock by generations of fire breath—and being on the far side of the star during the Alphys slingshot, with centrifugal forces flinging loose objects into space and squirting fresh lava through a thousand new volcanoes, hadn't improved its livability—but no amount of past trauma could keep life from squirming its way into the ashes. Literally. Grasses and trees took root in the rich volcanic soils, and once they had achieved a hoofhold, there was nothing awake to hold them back.

The friend she was visiting didn't care, and probably wouldn't for a few centuries yet.

Twilight lit her horn for illumination in the giant, silent cavern, watching for a moment the ponderous rise and fall of the enormous purple chest, and the equally massive sky-blue one curled up alongside it. She looked at their entwined tails, and the foreclaws clasped together in sleep, and thought of Cadance and Shining, and wondered if maybe there was something to the ancient theory that dragons were so long-lived because they understood all the hidden truths that alicorns knew but had simply chosen not to specialize in any.

She walked forward to alongside Spike's muzzle, brushed her hoof to the scales underneath his eye, and then settled in to rest alongside his cheek, feeling the reassuring solidity of his scales. 

"We're here, Spike," she said. "We made it." The darkness of the cavern beyond her tiny ring of hornlight swallowed her words, but she felt a muscle deep in his muzzle subtly twitch, and his breathing hitched for a moment, and his next exhalation came out with what might have been a slow-motion huff.

Twilight pressed her cheek to his and smiled. "I can hardly believe it. Nobody can. We're already passing the orbit of Hope's outermost planets, and there's about a month of deceleration left and then a year or so of maneuvering into our final orbital path. It's so strange to have a sun in the sky that nopony has to touch, even if it's barely as bright as the moon yet." She pressed an ear to Spike's muzzle, hearing the faint rumble-hiss of his breathing, and smiled. "Speaking of which, Celestia wants to move Shard a little further from Equestria once we don't have to use it for propulsion any more, and give it to Luna once she wakes back up. We won't need its heat or light any more, but it's still unicornium, and it'll still be able to keep the planet enriched enough for magic for…I don't know. Longer than I'll be alive."

Ember chuffed in sleep, and a brief flare of fire illuminated the contours of the cavern. Twilight blinked the flash out of her eyes and tried to adjust her sense of scale. It had to be half as large as Ponyville.

"Speaking of Celestia," Twilight said, "she's going to sleep herself once we're in orbit. Not pod sleep, alicorn sleep." She looked down and sighed. "She gave this everything she had. And even with the affinity she built up for Shard over her millennia singlehornedly raising it…I don't know how she manages to stay [i]conscious[/i] after this long, let alone manipulate it every four and a half hours. I tried to help, but she wouldn't let me…she knew this would happen, and said she wanted somepony she could trust to coax ponykind back to life with both her and Luna indisposed." Twilight laughed humorlessly. "Indisposed. The world is going to wake up, and the alicorns that saved them are going to be asleep. They'll never hear the praises of a generation."

Twilight fell into contemplative silence.

"It's just going to be me, Spike," she said quietly. "Pinkie's got her farewell party, and Applejack might have a few decades left with luck and Granny Smith's genes, but the first generation is almost gone. There's no telling when you'll wake up. Celestia's going to be out for a century or more, and Luna…well, we promised to wake her once we arrived, but I know how she felt about her millennium alone, and I guarantee you she'll want to go right back to bed until she and Celestia can wake up together. And Cadance…Shining Armor is hanging on as best he can, but he doesn't have long, and she's going to be devastated for a long, long time when he goes."

Twilight sighed, body drooping, and rolled a little pebble around on the floor of the cave with the edge of her hoof.

"There's Flurry Heart, of course, but she [i]already[/i] lives in another world, and while I love her to death, I can't ever shake the feeling that every time we talk she's just visiting for a little while before sneaking back away again. And I've [i]tried[/i] to keep up with the zebra world, I really have, but every time I start getting close my heart starts ripping apart with thoughts of all the sleeping friends I'm forgetting piece by piece. And it'll be great to have them back, but I've seen so many things they haven't." Her voice softened. "That's not fair…we're [i]all[/i] going to wake up in a changed world in a few days. Like we've been pulling back on the sling of history for two thousand years, struggling to keep it from firing, and all of a sudden we're launching forward all at once, and there's nothing left to hold onto but each other as we hurtle through the void."

There was a deep rumble as Spike slowly inhaled, and then heat-shimmers silently rose from his nostrils.

Twilight stood, then leaned in and spread her forehooves against his muzzle, hugging him much in the same way one does a barn. 

"I love you, little bro," she whispered, then choked back a laughing sob. "And you'd better wake up for Pinkie Pie's party, or she's going to haunt you [i]forever[/i]."

[hr]

In the days to come—as Ponyville's streets slowly filled with pastel and striped bodies alike—Twilight would stare at the ever-increasing hoof traffic and think back often on the rest of that conversation with Flurry Heart about Hope.

"What do you mean, 'had to be' them?" Twilight had asked, already knowing the answer but hoping somehow, desperately, that she was wrong. She stepped forward toward the wall display, touching a hoof to the flat and blurry disc of blue. 

"Relativity," Flurry simply said.

Twilight closed her eyes. For all the time that had passed on Equestria—generations upon generations; two thousand years of zebra tending the world and creating history under Flurry's gentle guidance—the speed of light was a cruel, inviolate mistress, and the universe outside had aged further still. They had leaped a 2.5 million light-year gap between galaxies. Ergo, 2.5 million years had passed.

"How old is our society?" Flurry said. "From the first Cutie Mark to the Hoofweb? If it's older than ten thousand years, then Tia's holding out on us. And since the beings of Hope gave their interstellar navigation advice to Luna, they've done that [i]two hundred and fifty times[/i]. We're talking the sort of time scale on which mountains wear down into sand."

"You've [i]tried[/i], right?" Twilight said. "Maybe they've matured. Stabilized. It's not inconceivable a civilization [i]could[/i] last that long."

"We're well within targeted communication range, and we're carrying a light source literally visible to the naked eye from their planet. They should have noticed us and shot something our way by now. Just in case, we've done passive scanning on every frequency we know about and some we don't. Dead silence. And the dark side of the planet is as dark as the void."

Twilight scanned the planetary diagrams, struggling in the cold grip of logic. "Maybe they just had to move—they've got a moon, and it looks like that fourth planet, the red one, is in the outer habitable zone—"

Flurry shook her head wearily. "We've turned over every rock in the system, Twi. It's silent. I'm sorry."

Twilight bowed her head, staring at her hooves. It seemed so [i]unfair[/i], to owe their lives to faint and distant voices that simple physics decreed she would never meet.

"We'll look, of course," Flurry said quietly. "Statistically, it seems pretty likely that they just got hit by an extinction-level event. A large meteor they couldn't deflect, or an environmental crash, or even a bad war if they were stupid enough to investigate the sort of destructive technology Tia banned Before. But with a planet that green, there's bound to be [i]something[/i] which took over, and is working its way back toward sapience one step at a time."

Twilight drew in, and let out, a long breath. "We'll look," she quietly agreed, and pressed her hoof to the blurry image of the blue planet. "It was hope that led us here. The least we can do is keep hold of it until we can share it with everyone we find."

[hr]

She went out stargazing when Shard set that night. Hope was still a good ten degrees above the horizon, casting long shadows at her hooves.

And it wasn't the only star. In the past hundred years, they'd moved from the empty void of deep space into the middle of Hope's galaxy. Unfamiliar constellations crowded each other throughout the sky, glimmering gemstones, an unbelievable wealth of light in every direction she looked. She could even make out a faint band of stars running through the sky to mark the galactic plane. It was so full of stars that it looked like someone had spilled a glass of milk through the sky.

Maybe Hope was silent, Twilight thought, but it couldn't be the only blue planet around. And they knew how to travel now. What was stopping them from picking up again, if there were other signals—other friends—to be found?

For the first time since Before, a smile of purpose flitted across her muzzle.

"Everyone we find," Twilight whispered. [i]"Everyone."[/i]