“Sunny. It's okay. You did everything you could.”

“I... I thought it would work,” she said, slowly, all the passion bleeding out of the little pony. “I was so, so sure of it.”

“THERE’S A THIRD PIECE!”

“What do we do now, Sunny?” Zipp asked, brows furrowing.

“YOU GO GET THE CELESTIA-DAMN THIRD PIECE!”

“I'm sorry for all the trouble I caused you…”

“FOR FUCK’S SAKE…!” Rarity snarled again. “GO BACK TO YOUR HOUSE, Darling, AND GET THE THIRD TWILIGHT-FUCKING-PRINCESS-DAMNED PIECE!!!”

Sunny Starscout, unheeding of the spectral unicorn she could neither see, nor hear, sighed, and began to walk away.

Pipp cried, “Sunny! We can't give up!”

“I thought that I could make a difference,” Sunny just said, deflating. “But everywhere I go, I just make things worse.”

“That's not true. We're all in this together, right?” asked Izzy.

“Yeah!” agreed Pipp.

Zipp nodded. “Of course!”

Sunny Starscout was quiet for a moment. And then, she sighed.

“I'm so sorry I let you all down.”

“NOOOOOO!” Rarity shrieked to the heavens above. “NO! NO NO NO!”

She stamped her hooves, and then threw herself at the insufferable Sunny’s throat. Which didn’t do much, it must be said. Rarity simply flew through the filly’s body, and drifted painlessly through the air behind her.

“I was so GODDAMN close!” she cried out, flailing her forelegs as she spun helplessly across the sky.

Rarity blew a snort from her nose, and growled like an animal. Then, still practically boiling, she began talking to herself.

“Three thousand years!” she snarled. “I’ve been sitting in that ghastly little lighthouse for three-thousand years waiting for somepony to finally get it! And now? I trip on the bleeding finish line!”

She tilted her head to one side, her mane flattening down and adopting a remarkably familiar set of bangs.

“Don’t worry, Rarity,” she sang out in a voice very reminiscent of a particular purple princess she once knew, “Ponykind can’t possibly go more than a few years without friendship! Why, you’ll be back with us in no time! I just need you to watch out for them until then.”

Rarity’s mane snapped into a curly-curly poof, and her eyes slightly unfocused.

“For sure, Rares!” she said in a nearly-perfect Pinkie Pie pitch. “I bet you’ll be a googly ghostie for like, a week tops! Then you’ll get to follow us all to Elysium and hang out with Spike, and the kids, and your friends, and all the other ponies from before this happened!”

She scoffed, and a ghostly Stetson materialized on her head.

In the most… Applejack way she could, Rarity then said, “An’ on account o’ yer sins, stayin’ ta watch over the next generation’ll be a good way ta git in guud with the Upstairs, ya ken?”

Rarity snorted.

“No, I do not KEN, Applejack, dear! That shirtwaist factory fire wasn’t my fault at all! Oh, but I suppose covering up for Spikey wasn’t the best move either…”

She continued to float there, amid the clouds now, fuming and stamping impotently in her wrath.

“And it’s not like anypony liked Suri,” she added with a disdainful sniff. “Or missed her. Or missed the missing cement. But still, this is just unfair!”

“I thought you didn’t like to whine?”

Rarity paused in her ramblings. Her eyes narrowed, and her nostrils flared again.

“Why am I not surprised?” she hissed, turning slowly to see the one who’d just said that.

Even thousands of years later, she could never quite get over Discord’s mismatched aesthetics. Not least because of the stress of being a ghost for so many millennia, but there were certain universal rules of fashion that carried on despite the passing of ages.

Discord offended them.

“Because you always lacked the imagination,” Discord chuckled. He drifted lazily alongside the off-white unicorn, keeping level with her at all times through his own bizarre magic.

“What are you doing here? Now of all times!”

“Well, I heard somepony hollering and wailing in abject misery, and I decided to come by and have a giggle at their expense,” he laughed. Then, a light frown touched his grin. “And then I noticed it was you…”

“Disappointed?”

“Of course!” Discord pouted. “Remember what Fluttershy said? If you don’t get to move on, I can’t either!”

“Can you even die, Discord?”

“No, but Flutterbutternutter would be peeved as all hell if I showed up without you.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here anymore,” Rarity sighed. “The last one who could see me besides you was Argyle! And all he wanted to do was catalogue gemstones, or talk about fashion.”

“I thought you loved fashion?”

“For the first millennium? Naturally!” Rarity snapped. “But even I need more in my life! Er, after-life.”

The two continued to drift, hardly noticing they were almost directly over Maretime Bay again.

“And now?” Rarity groaned. “Now, I’ll probably be looking over this Sunny’s descendants for another thousand years before I get a new chance!”

“Could be worse,” Discord said, eyes watching the ground below for some reason.

“And pray tell, how?”

He shrugged.

“You could be the target of a vicious bit of ethnic cleansing via a giant robot.”

Rarity paused, and frowned again.

“Darling? That’s… awfully specific.”

Discord nodded, slowly, and pointed down.

Glancing that way, Rarity could make out what appeared to indeed be a bright red machine, like one of those apple-farming behemoths Big Mac’s sixteenth generation grandcolt got sucked into after one too many bottles of cider.

And it was smoking and grinding and trudging its way right into Sunny’s lighthouse.

“Oh… what the shit?”

“I understand now. It's not the crystals that need to be brought together. It's us. We can bring back everything that was lost, but it's up to us. We can stay separated by fear and distrust, or we can choose friendship. We can choose love. That's the true magic.”

“OH, SO YOU’RE SAYING IT WAS THE FRIENDS WE MADE ALONG THE WAY…?”

“Rarity…” Discord sighed.

“That’s what she sounds like!” She whined.

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Rarity…”

“Look, it’s finished. We’re done. She’s got the damn wings, now GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

And with that, Rarity and Discord finally, finally, began to move on to the afterlife.

Directly down.

Discord noticed first. “Oh.”

“What the… oh. Right,” Rarity growled and bit her lip. “The murders...”

“On the plus side, I have it on very good authority that it’s really not the heat but the humidity that gets to you…”