//------------------------------// // Chapter 9: Can't Go Chasing Fairy Tails // Story: Desert Spice // by Bugsydor //------------------------------// Horizon “I see you enjoyed the peach.” By which I meant that she’d mauled that poor, defenseless peach carcass like a coyote that caught a lamb by itself, complete with sound effects and juice-soaked muzzle. A little disturbing, really. “Oh. Yes. Yes I did.” Amber Spice blinks, then brings a pastern to her damp muzzle and pulls it away wet. She turns and dunks her face in her somewhat murky, frothy bathwater and swishes it around. Once she’s apparently satisfied, she pulls her head back up and lights her horn as steam starts to waft from her freshly cleaned muzzle. “Merry Weather wasn’t kidding about peaches,” she says. “The flavor, or the mess.” Her face turns thoughtful. “I guess I should slice them up with my knife first in the future… “But Rize!” she says, turning her attention back to me. “It’s good to see you. This is a lot earlier in the day than usual. Don’t you have lots of vanguarding to do?” “No, I’m off of guard duty for the foreseeable future. When we’re not moving, there’s no real ‘van’ to guard.” I give her a wing-shrug. She’s never had problems interpreting pegasus gestures, even the ones with wings. Come to think of it, I’ve always understood the little gestures she makes with her horn. She’s talked about having trouble reading camels, and I’d bet peaches to kumquats they have the same problems with her. “Fair enough,” she says with her own weird horn-waggling shrug. “But… what are you going to do with your day, now that you’ve run out of vans?” She blinks, her eyes widen, and then her horn lights up and her golden hairbrush floats up to her mane and starts trudging through it. A moment later, a wood-rimmed oval of glass-coated silver floats up from her bag to join it. “Oh, you know – or maybe you don’t… Stuff like lending a wing where it’s needed, enjoying fresh fruits and vegetables, making sure the Tornado Trio don’t light anything too important on fire, offering tours of the oasis to strange mares… Maybe I’ll see if the mess tent needs help. You always seem to be having adventures over there, and I’ve been kinda starved for that lately.” “Heh. Now there’s a thought,” she says. “‘Hey Rize, what’s taking you so long to chop up those cucumbers? Don’t you do this sort of thing all the time?’, or ‘Uh, Rize? Could you clear away these worshippers for a second so I can get this food out to the counter?’, or better yet, ‘Aw, Rize, stop being such a baby. It’s only a little fire!’” She lets out a snort of laughter, and I can’t help but grin along with her, even as I raise a hoof in protest. “To be fair to me, though, my job generally involves a lot more stabbing and kicking than actual chopping.” “Hmm. Stabbing… That kinda gives me an idea,” she says as she finally tugs her hairbrush free of her frizzy mane. It actually looks pretty nice once all the mats are out of it. Like a big, rusty cumulus. “You see, you guys don’t really have utensils as I know them, and I’ve been feeling pretty constrained by the resulting need to have every meal be something you can fit into a pita or else something you just” – her face wrinkles in disgust – “stick your face in like a common animal.” I raise an eyebrow, and she completely fails to notice. “So now I’m thinking,” she continues as she sets down her golden hairbrush and picks up her rectangular, wooden one and sets to work on her tangled coat, “what if I served the food speared on some kind of spike? Stars, what if I cooked them on one? The small size and open airflow would make cooking evenly easier, which could mean less cook-time and less drying out…” It’s fascinating to watch her mind work, but I figure it’s time to pull her back to reality once I notice she’s been brushing the same patch of coat for the past minute. I cough, and then point at her brush once I have her attention, and her grin turns briefly sheepish as she moves the brush to another patch. “Sorry, I guess I got carried away,” she says. “Still… do you have anything to add? I don’t know whether I’d have the skewers made from metal, or wood, and I’d like to get a local’s perspective on which would be more feasible.” “Hmm. Shining Glaze seems to like you, so you might be able to get some metal skewers from her, but it would be a real longshot to get enough from her to serve the entire mess tent. It could work with your cooking idea, though, as long as you’re okay with scraping them into a bowl after. Wood would be better for your serving idea, but I’d worry about them catching fire” – I catch her grimacing at that – “so you’d probably have to soak them or something. Not likely an option when we’re underway, but we are stopped at an oasis right now.” “Good points, I suppose.” She cranes her neck and twists her back to try to catch her tail’s reflection in her shiny, flying oval, and then deflates. “Oh, sunspots. It’s going to take me hours to get all these mats out. I knew I should have packed more than one mirror. Unless…” She turns her head back to me, wearing a sheepish expression and floating her hairbrush towards me. “Rize, could you do me a huge favor and help brush these mats out of my tail? That’s something friends do for each other around here, right?” ‘Sort of?’ I start to reach for the floating brush with a hoof, then my mouth, before finally settling on a wing as my best option for gripping the awkward diamond-shaped golden brush. “Close enough,” I say with half a shrug as I walk around back and sit down to get into position. —_(\\_/\_//)_— Blue Aegis Not long after sunset, I hear some voices below my clouds. “So that’s the grand tour, and without my getting pelted with food this time.” My ears and then eyes turn to lock onto the source of the conversation: Horizon and Amber Spice. Those two have been spending a lot of time together lately, and the friendship’s been good for him. “First of all,” she replies, “you started it. Second, you had it coming.” She sticks her tongue out at him. They keep walking through the date palms. Towards me. “Well, there she is.” He sweeps a wing at me. “Not sure why you wanted to find the world’s biggest grump with wings, but that’s your business.” “Liar,” she says. “You know full-well why.” She turns to shout up at me. “Hey, Blue Aegis! Can I call you Blue? Aegis is kinda hard for me to say. Anyway, Rize and I were about to swap tragic backstories over a couple bottles of my mom’s extra-special, saffron-infused mead, and I thought you’d like to referee.” “And besides,” Horizon shouts (but not as loudly), “your shift ended an hour ago and you know it.” Well, I did say I’d listen if I was off-duty, and I am off-duty… I flutter down to join them so we don’t have to shout. “Okay, I’m in. And yes, I suppose you can call me Blue.” “Alright, let’s get going!” Horizon says with more bravado than he apparently feels. “I know where to get some cushions and dishes that won’t be missed, and Spicy here can start a fire anywhere.” —_(\\_/\_//)_— The food had been acceptable. It hadn’t been amazing, but then again it hadn’t been made by Amber Spice. The drink, on another hoof… “This might be the best wine I’ve ever had,” I say. “You say you made this out of honey?” “Yeah, and a few other things. My mom makes the best mead on Terra’s Horn. And anywhere else, apparently. I’d really like to tell her that someday.” We let that sentence hang in the air for a few seconds as the fire crackles to fill the silence, before Horizon speaks up. “What I don’t understand is, why all this trouble over a cook and some pastries?” “Hey, give me a little credit, here. I wasn’t just ‘some cook’; I was the best spark-spewing cook on Terra’s Horn! Royal Chef to their Majesties themselves.” “That’s impressive and all, but it doesn’t exactly sound like the sort of person you exile to make an example of. Sweep you under a rug and keep you out of the public eye, maybe, but exile? Why did they think you were such a threat?” She closes her eyes for a moment in slightly inebriated contemplation before speaking up again. “Y’know, maybe things aren’t going so great at home as I’d thought back then. You’ve got to understand: Our whole culture is based on the idea that unicorns are the best and the brightest that the world has to offer, and that the royals are the best of that. Being as close to royalty as I was on a constant basis had already pretty-much disillusioned me of that notion. I meant almost every word I said during that show trial. And the ponies I’m meeting here… “Well, you remember how bad I said Pierce the Omnipotent was? I had to assume that every single pegasus and earth pony was worse than him in every way. Otherwise, the world couldn’t make sense.” “Well, that would explain how you acted when we first met,” Horizon chimes in. “Yeah. Sorry about that, by the way.” “Well,” I say, “you seem to be doing pretty well for someone who’s had their world flipped upside-down and everything they worked for stripped away. How do you do that?” She blinks a couple of times, and then a slightly sad smile grows on her face. “Maybe… Maybe it’s because, deep down, I never really believed in all that.” Even the fire’s crackling seems subdued. “And that, Horizon,” I say, “is why they thought she was dangerous enough to exile.” We each contemplate our mead for a while, and then Amber Spice speaks up. “Okay, Rize, now I’ve told you my story. What about yours?” —_(\\_/\_//)_— Horizon It all happened one year and seven months ago. Fairy Tails and I, we were engaged to be married. The big day was about a month away at that point. We had both been pretty stressed about the looming wedding. Excited, but stressed. Between everypony we knew (and more than a few camels as well) pestering us at all hours about it… Well, Fae suggested we take a day or so to get away from it all. And I knew just the place. “Are we there yet, Rize, Honey? I think my wings are about to fall off.” Fairy Tails wasn’t built for soaring. She had… smallish wings. A body made for dancing, and the way her mane fluttered when she twirled through the air… “Just a little longer, Fae,” I shouted back to her. “You’ll know it when you see it.” “This had better not be one of those things where ‘it was all about the journey’ or, I swear, I will make you sit through the entire thirty hours of the Ipposiad. Every. Last. Ver—” Her breath caught as a bit of green and blue peeked over the edge of the world. “Wait, Is that what I think it is?” “That, and more!” I shouted, diving down to our destination. A few palms bearing wild fruit, a small, shaded pool, and just the cutest little lizards you could find… It was perfect. A tiny oasis off the beaten track, known only to me and Sweep. Or so I’d thought at the time. And now I was sharing it with her. We landed next to the pool. Well, I landed. She alighted. She twirled, slowly, taking it all in. “Wow. This place is magical! I half-expect a djinn to spring forth from the pool to offer me a wish.” “What if one already had, the last time I was here?” I gave her a cheesy grin. “Then they would have been gravely offended that I wasn’t there, and probably turned you into a tortoise in a fit of pique. Djinni are like that, you know.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “A sexy tortoise, though.” “Yeah. One with impressive hangtime when I kicked it hard enough.” At which point she gradually collapsed in a fit of giggles before throwing us both into the pool. She never would have let that comment go. It would have become a little joke between us, where one of us would bring it up casually when the other least expected to make them squirt milk out their nose. That was how things were between us. After we’d played in the water a bit and splashed each other with our wings a few times, she looked at me thoughtfully. “Really, though,” she said, “what would you have wished for? Assuming you trusted the djinn.” I paused for a moment, then said “You already know the answer to that.” She smirked. “Yes, but I like to hear you say it. You can be a real bard when you put your heart to it.” “All right, then. I would have wished that the two of us could spend the next hundred years exploring the world and uncovering its stories together, and the next hundred after that retelling them. “And the next two-hundred doing it all again.” And then she darted forward and kissed me. We spent most of the day like that: in the pool or lying down and eating wild fruit, talking or resting, neither of us even thinking about flying when the most important thing in the world was right in front of each of us. As dusk was falling, I was staring into her eyes as she watched the sunset. Beautiful, pale pink eyes you could get lost in. So lost in that I didn’t notice any whuff of wings in the distance, or the clack of the blackjack on the back of my head as I lost consciousness. I could never forget what I saw, though. As the wonder in those beautiful pink eyes transformed into fear. When I came to, it was fully dark. Just me and the moonless stars… —_(\\_/\_//)_— Amber Spice “At the time, I thought I could still hear her screams in the… in the distance. But Fairy Tails and her captors were hours away by then, and… I was just so tired, and I had the biggest headache I’d had in my life.” “You’ll have a bigger one tomorrow if you don’t remember to drink some water once in a while,” I butt in. We’d already gone through one bottle of my mom’s saffron-infused amber mead, and were working our way through a second. It’s good stuff, only for special occasions. This certainly warranted it. This Fairy Tails pony sure sounded special. I want to give him a hug and let him nestle into my mane until the pain goes away, but maybe that’s just the booze talking. It is very good mead. “Right. Thanks.” He takes a sip from his water glass before he continues. “So, that’s the story of how I lost the love of my life, and Blue Aegis lost her sister.” The three of us are silent for a moment. Rize looking up at the full moon, Blue Aegis looking down into her drink, and I staring through Rize. “So,” I say, “how long did you try to look for her?” “I wanted to try, so hard,” he replies. “I asked the Commander for permission, and maybe some guards to help, but I had no idea what direction to search.” He lets out a sigh. “He told me to talk to the Sheikh about it.” His lips curl in disgust, and he takes another sip of mead to wash the taste of the memory from his mouth. “The Sheikh told me that Fate and Terra had decreed that Fairy Tails’s time among us was at an end, that she had moved on to bless another caravan with her stories, and that I was powerless to fight that. “And, well –” he shrugs his wings expansively “– the rest is history.” “Loop Terra,” Blue curses. “What has she done for anyone, anyway?” Silence reigns for another minute, before I speak up. “Y’know, I think… I think Terra doesn’t quite work that way.” Their ears slowly perk up. “I mean, I didn’t pay that much attention to her, except for the stories, but… But I think in her dreams, she wants us to be happy. But we have to take charge, and make that happen for ourselves. I mean, if she just gave us everything, it wouldn’t be the same?” My statement hangs in the air awkwardly for several seconds, before it apparently lands. “Maybe there’s… something to that,” Rize says. “Yeah, maybe,” Blue chimes in. A moment later, as I move to refill everypony’s glasses one more time, I have a flash of drunken insight. “I propose a toast.” “A what?” Blue asks, her muzzle wrinkled up. “A toast,” I say, realizing I have a little bit of cultural education to do. “It’s a way of using alcohol to celebrate something or someone in particular. “You hold up your glass, kinda like this –” I wobblily raise my glass in my drink-addled telekinetic field “– and then you say the person or thing, and something great about them. And then when everypony has said something, you all drink.” “We have a… a custom kinda like that, too,” Blue says. “Libations. ‘Tswhere you pour out a glass for… someone you miss. I like it. ‘Tspoignant. But I’ve already poured out enough wine for Fairy Tails to pickle her liver; let’s try this unicorn thing.” I nod, then focus and lift my glass again. “To Fairy Tails! The greatest storyteller in the world.” Blue Aegis lifts her glass, cupped in a wing. “To Fairy Tails! A better sister than anyone deserves.” Rize thinks for a few seconds, then straightens himself and follows suit. “To Fairy Tails! A mare of hope.” And, satisfied, we drained our glasses.