"Sorry... I think that's all I can manage for now," Starlight finished, her voice reduced to a dry rasp from far too much talking with far too few breaks.
"I'll say," Twilight agreed, frowning in concern. "You sound terrible. I was half-considering stopping you if you tried to go much further. I guess the end of Stormhoof is further away than I was thinking it was?"
Starlight shook her head, resting on a cushion by the railing of Rainbow Dash's borrowed airship, her prismatic friend lounging by the wheel and Twilight sitting across from her. "We didn't find an answer for Shinespark's mana core right away. After the breakfast with Lord Stormhoof, we spent about a week just living in the tower, going out to explore the town below, and not having very much happen. Honestly, I'm thinking of glossing over it, since it would be very easy to summarize."
"Now, see..." Rainbow noncommittally raised a hoof. "When you say not very much happened, do you mean actually not much, or not much compared to all that other stuff that happened? Because wow, I wish my life was that exciting."
Starlight grinned apologetically.
"I just can't understand how you remember all this," Twilight mused, rubbing her temple. "Ironridge was one thing, but the Griffon Empire feels like... I don't know, like every tiny detail is somehow wrong or important or interesting. But even I'm having trouble keeping everything straight, and living it must have been so much more overwhelming! How do you remember so many things that aren't like you'd expect them to be?"
"Easy, Twi," Rainbow gloated, idly hovering and doing a backflip. "Just keep a general idea of how cool everyone is, and boom, that's all you need to know."
She grinned cheekily at Starlight, who sighed and shook her head. "No, it's... mostly because later on, when I finally did understand more about how the Empire worked, I can just guess what I saw from that. Believe it or not, just like Ironridge there were reasons for everything we saw and that happened. Though you've probably noticed I'm focusing more on other characters' perspectives than my own."
Twilight nodded thoughtfully. "I noticed that early on in Ironridge, too..."
"It's a lot easier for me to remember my friends' reactions to new things than my own," Starlight explained, shrugging and leaving it at that.
"Heh. So!" Rainbow flipped onto her back, steering with one upside-down hind leg. "Million-bit question, right here: is Valey eligible?"
"Rainbow Dash!" Twilight swatted at her with a wing. "She'd be like twice your age!"
"That's a good question," Starlight murmured, gaze briefly drifting. "Though I think we established I'm not answering anything about what happened to my friends or where they are now."
Twilight instantly clammed up, scooting an inch closer to Starlight and shooting a serious glare at the offending pegasus.
"Oop! Sorry!" Rainbow's ears went back. "Yeah, best leave that alone. I take it the whole evil dictator thing wasn't, uhh... something that came out of the blue."
Starlight sighed, and looked at the ground. "You keep asking me about this, and you keep forgetting why you don't want to know the answer."
"Different subject!" Twilight loudly announced, ready to cover her ears if the conversation went the wrong way. "Starlight, something I need to know: how powerful is Garsheeva? Say, relative to Celestia?" She defensively tensed, and it was clear she didn't know what she wanted to hear.
"That's better." Exhaling, Starlight relaxed. "I'd say they're about equals? Both immortals, both supervising large, vaguely theocratic nations... They definitely know each other. And speaking of Celestia, don't forget you haven't yet formally introduced me to her as your student."
"Huh." Twilight looked satisfied by the answer. "Her style of governing certainly seems different. I wonder how many of the differences between Equestria and the Griffon Empire are thanks to them..."
"Probably almost all," Starlight said. "Neither country is influenced by its history before when their deities showed up. In fact, no one on the eastern continent knows what it was like prior to Garsheeva at all, even the batponies in the Misty Mountains."
"Oh! Them!" Rainbow frantically raised a hoof. "Two questions, actually. First, where do you find batponies in Equestria? Or are they sarosians? I'd really like to meet one."
Twilight pointed to the spires of Canterlot in the distance, their ship lazily drifting in the area between it, Cloudsdale and Ponyville. "Most of them work for Luna, don't they? I think we've seen them once or twice with her..."
Starlight nodded, and Rainbow went on. "Yeah, that was my second question: is Luna this Night Mother they keep going on about? Wouldn't she still have been Nightmare Moon back then?"
"That's more complicated," Starlight began, taking a breath. "Originally, yes, she was. But what do you think happens to a group of ponies when someone they worship gets banished and they don't want to admit it?"
Twilight rubbed her chin. "Well, like you said, they can't just point to a physical incarnation and say, 'there she is'. Which was part of why the Empire didn't like them, right? They never had any proof that their goddess was real, while you've made it sound like Garsheeva was right there for anyone to see."
"She was," Starlight cut in, nodding. "Her castle in Grandbell is something incredible. It's a giant hole cut straight into the ground, with tiers down the walls where houses and buildings are made, like a perfectly vertical Stone District, and her throne is at the very bottom protected by a transparent forcefield to block falling debris. Anyone there can look over the edge and see her, and she flies past the entire city every time she enters or leaves. It took a while before we got to see it, but it was impressive."
"Woah, hold on!" Rainbow Dash interrupted. "They had proof, didn't they? Those dusk statue things? That let them talk to..." She slowed down, blinking. "Wait a sec, if Nightmare Moon was locked up by Celestia, who were they talking to through the statues? Was someone else pretending to be her?"
Twilight gave a soft gasp. "But the moon glass came here from space, you said. And you thought it had something to do with Nightmare Moon, so there had to be some sort of physical connection maybe she could also use to..."
Rainbow's ruby eyes widened. "So you're saying maybe they were talking with Nightmare Moon?" She rubbed a fuzzy ear. "Woah. She was kind of cackly and insane when we met her, but I wonder what she'd be like if you were actually one of her children looking for advice..." She blinked harder. "All these batponies weren't getting told to do crazy things like blow stuff up, were they?"
Starlight felt herself smiling stupidly. "Oh, I'm not telling. Keep guessing! This is so much funner than I thought it would be..." She glanced down at Ponyville. "Maybe we should invite the others too... Keep speculating!"
Twilight seemed to take that as a challenge. "I want to know if Garsheeva had a secret avatar. Like how Shinespark was able to split her cutie mark from herself and put it in a second body... If Garsheeva was that old and that powerful, you'd think she'd know how to do it. It feels like everyone in power in the Empire is just in it to have fun, so you'd think being able to sneak around without anyone knowing about it would be a big advantage... Meltdown, maybe?"
"Yeah, what's Meltdown's deal?" Rainbow asked, pointing a hoof. "Does she have, like, fire magic or something?"
"Meltdown..." Twilight rubbed her chin. "I feel like we don't know enough about her to say for certain. I'm still waiting to see if it looks like she has any allies. She effectively taxes the Empire by charging for energy, right? Where does she get it? Does her company just own all the mana wells? Why would Garsheeva let an independent pony do all that? Or..."
She trailed off, blinking in realization. "Oh. Oh. You just said Garsheeva's castle was a giant hole in the ground! And an easy supply of infinite energy someone could sell... after what you found in Ironridge..." Her eyes widened at Starlight. "There's another Tree of Harmony in the Empire, isn't there? And Garsheeva built her castle on top of it, and outlawed making ordinary mana wells so she can sell the mana power she generates from the flame... That would mean Meltdown has to be linked to her somehow, doesn't it!?"
Twilight started to bounce, giddy from a combination of too much sitting and a major discovery. Starlight couldn't help herself and smiled so hard her mouth hurt, nodding along. "Good guesses, but I'm still not saying how close. Keep it up!"
"Not saying how close..." Twilight bent her neck, falling into a stupor of murmured and muttered theories.
"Yeah..." Rainbow Dash stood up and stretched. "Sorry, Starlight, but I think I just got my rear handed to me in the guessing game. All my predictions would've been stuff like 'random street dude is Chrysalis' or something. I'm still just trying to catch up on all the stuff I missed."
"Well, there's still a ways to go," Starlight sighed, mostly hoping the others would keep talking so she wouldn't have to. "And at least you'll be here for the entire Griffon Empire. How are you liking it, by the way?"
Rainbow shrugged. "Aside from the fact that I can't follow half the stuff that's going on, it's great! Some parts sound a little familiar. I think I once heard a story about that Giovanni Goldfeather guy you occasionally mention, but I don't remember what it was about."
"Giovanni Goldfeather?" Twilight perked. "He was Gerardo's ancestor, right? Or am I misremembering? It could have been someone else..."
Starlight nodded. "Giovanni Goldfeather. He's famous for trying to own all the money in the Empire, among other things. He didn't succeed, of course, but it's a tale I'll be getting to before long."
"Here's a question I remembered," Twilight announced. "That creed the guards keep chanting, there's a word in it... Aldenfold? What's that?"
"I asked about that too, eventually," Starlight said. "It's the Empire's word for the mountain range dividing the north from Equestria. Essentially, as wide as the world."
"Hold on, so if the Empire is as far east as you can go..." Rainbow frowned. "What happens if you just, you know, keep flying east? Don't tell me no one's tried it."
Starlight fidgeted. "That... takes a long time to explain, but it's effectively as far as you can go."
Twilight raised an eyebrow. "Does that mean spoilers, or that your throat hurts and we should call it and not press?"
"The latter," Starlight rasped. "In fact, I wouldn't mind heading back in to get dinner at the castle, soon."
"Gotcha!" Rainbow threw a sharp salute, spinning the wheel and sending her family's airship into a slow descent towards Twilight's distant castle.
The following morning, after a rousing fireside dinner of potato soup and hours more of laughing and speculating, Rainbow Dash returned, brushing fresh snow off her coat and trailing a cute scarf as she strolled into Twilight's castle library. Starlight greeted her with a wave, sipping tea with her horn aglow and a newspaper held in her aura.
"Rainbow!" she welcomed, setting the paper aside and motioning to a nearby sofa, which the pegasus acrobatically claimed. "Mmmff... Morning! Here for more Empire?"
"Hope I'm not late," Rainbow replied, fixing her mane with a single swipe of a hoof and glancing at the discarded paper. "You, uh, feeling a little less froggish this morning?"
Starlight sighed. "I went to bed and got up at a somewhat normal time schedule, didn't talk late into the evening, and have been saving my breath all morning. And it is almost noon, so as long as I pace myself..."
"Sweet." Rainbow rolled over, showing off her fuzzy blue belly and resting her chin lazily on her hooves. "Just got off an early shift... nngh... making sure all these weather supervisors know what they're doing, and all that," she yawned. "I'm all ears."
"Well, we're just waiting for Twilight," Starlight said, poking the paper. "The headlines are all about someone's turnip cart breaking down, a new curriculum at the school, and so on... Looks like Ponyville is staying out of trouble for us."
Rainbow chuckled. "Heh. Yeah, it's always either no news or giant Equestria-endangering monsters showing up. Go figure."
"What's that about me?" Twilight asked, strolling into the room with a fresh tray of refreshments.
"Just what we're waiting for to begin." Starlight nodded while she set down the tray and helped herself to a seat, a soft flurry of morning snow drifting by out the window. "So! Where were we...?"
"You had just met with Lord Stormhoof," Twilight replied.
Starlight licked her lips. "Right. After that, we didn't see him, Meltdown, Gazelle, Kero or really anyone important for a while. Wallace and his friends kept checking up on us, though they knew about our situation with the mana core and didn't push. Shinespark offered to stay behind several times and let us go on our own, but Valey and Maple always vetoed that idea. We had fun, though, visiting the city during the day. I mostly kept busy with Shinespark's library, since I had started reading again, and a few times Maple and I visited a bookstore to look for more. Valey stuck to our room where she wouldn't get in trouble, Jamjars was mostly gone doing her own thing but always came back for the night, and that was how things went for about a week."
Adjusting her hooves, she continued. "As time passed, we did figure out Valey had probably had something done to her, because she never really got better or worse. She was stiff and sore, but could walk and stand on her own, and alternated between saying she was fine and endlessly complaining. I kept testing and paying attention to my horn, and it seemed to fully recover from being overexerted chasing Hemlock back in Riverfall. I even got the tree's magical buffer back, so I could use a little magic without getting long-term headaches. We assumed the improvement was just only there when I was already in perfect shape, so if I used too much, I had to wait for it to wear off fully before getting the boost back."
She flicked her ears. "Finally, we got a mana core. We stayed in contact with Sharpie and Brightcoil, and one day they showed up and had one, exactly the caliber Shinespark needed, and said it was ours to keep. We didn't ask questions, and they didn't offer answers, but that was the ticket we were looking for to leave and take Wallace up on his offer..."