Jinx Evergreen lit up her horn, and the window in front of and a little above her glowed a bright forest green and rattled. The young unicorn struggled to move it for a minute before giving up, her horn and the window dimming as she sat down on the grund.
“It’s no use,” she told her companions. “It’s locked.”
“That’s why we have you,” Lofty Skies insisted, flapping her wings so she could hover just off the ground. “Obviously I could open the window myself, but I can’t undo the lock from out here.”
“Can’t you do a magic spell or something?” Rose Blossom asked, still looking hesitant about why they were doing this.
The small unicorn shook her head dejectedly. “I can’t do many spells yet,” she said mournfully. “All I can do is levitate a couple things - and even then, I’m not very good. I nearly impaled my dad’s glasses with a hairbrush once. They are very dangerous weapons.”
“It doesn’t need to be a spell,” the pegasus insisted, soaring over to the window and gesturing to the frame. “The lock is right there. It just needs to be jiggled a little bit.” She looked expectantly at Jinx, who sighed and lit up her horn again, this time wrapping her magic around the small switch on the top of the window frame, gently moving it from one side to the other. There was a small click, and the lock gave way.
“Yes!” Lofty Skies pushed open the window and gestured to her friends. Jinx and Rose looked at each other before Rose Blossom took a step back and just barely managed to leap through the open window. Jinx surrounded herself with her magic and shakily lifted herself through the window.
“Ow!” she cried as she bumped her head on the top of the frame. “Ack!”
“Why are we doing this?” Rose asked, looking around the abandoned lighthouse and taking a step closer to her friends, then took a step back, as if she couldn’t decide whether or not to stick with them so they could protect her or distance herself so that it looked like she had nothing to do with this whole scheme. “We shouldn’t be doing this. Let’s go home.”
“No!” hissed Lofty Skies, already over by the elevator. “There’s something I want to show you - something our parents aren’t telling us!”
“Our parents already don’t tell us anything!” Jinx retorted, using her magic to slide the window closed. “For all we know, you could be showing us a fascinating new bug that you discovered that was supposed to be extinct or something.”
“It’s not that! Well, that would be very cool,” Lofty Skies admitted after both the unicorn and the earth pony foals gave her a dirty look. “But this is different! This is really important!”
“Please just make it quick?” Rose Blossom asked as she and Jinx stepped onto the lift, and it began to rise as soon as it felt their weight. “My parents have a curfew, and it already started, and if I’m caught, then they’ll probably be really angry and I’ll never be able to play with you guys again.”
“That would be bad,” Jinx agreed, stepping closer to her friend and wobbling a bit as the lift continued to move. “But we’d still play with you anyway.”
“Besides, they’ll probably make an exception for this,” Lofty Skies assured them both, having given up on flying after she failed to keep up with the lift and ended up nearly flattened. Now, she was standing precariously close to the end, trying to act as if this was what she had been wanting to do all along. “Seriously, girls, this could be the end of the world.”
Jinx rolled her eyes and whispered to Rose Blossom, “She probably just found out that there’s going to be this mayonnaise-apocalypse-” She paused, her eyes going wide, and she said, like it was second nature to her, “Bing-bong!” before her voice lapsed back into her normal tone. “-thing that’s going to, I don’t know, destroy ketchup and mustard.”
“That would also be bad, but this is different!” the pegasus insisted, huffing as she jumped off the lift as it arrived at the top floor. “Come look!”
The top of the lighthouse took both Jinx and Rose’s breath away. The walls and roof were made of glass, and in the center was the massive lens that stood taller than all three of them stacked on top of each other. Underneath the lens was a small lamp and six small figures of ponies - the two foals could recognize earth ponies, pegasi, a unicorn, and what looked like a mix of all of them in the bunch. The small toy ponies were surrounding an indent in the metal base, which used to hold three crystals that represented the three different tribes, but now-
Now it was empty.
“They’re gone?” Rose Blossom burst out, running up to the contraption and pushing Lofty Skies aside to see for herself. The pegasus wobbled a bit, spreading her wings to regain her balance.
“But… how? And who? And why? And how?” Jinx spluttered, joining her friend.
“You expect me to know?” Lofty Skies flapped her wings, lifting into the air and hovering over her friends. “And that’s not even the beginning.” Her friends turned to her, their matching expressions both suggesting that, if this wasn’t the worst part of it, they didn’t want to know what the worst part of it was. “You might want to sit down for this.”
The two other foals sat in perfect unison, their wide eyes trained on Lofty Skies as she gently landed in front of them and folded her wings in.
“A few days ago,” she began, “I was flying by here, and I saw a pony up here, reading a book - and it was Princess Zipp.” Jinx and Rose gasped - they knew the ponies who had worked to bring magic back, and that they were now considered traitors for reasons they didn’t know. “I thought, she couldn’t be here. So I came back the next day, and I peeked inside, and they were all there. Zipp, Pipp, Izzy, Hitch, Sprout, and a new pony I didn’t recognize, but she had wings and a horn. But Sunny wasn’t anywhere. I looked every day, and I never saw her.”
The pegasus filly was pacing in front of her friends, getting agitated. “Why would Sunny Starscout’s friends - who are all considered traitors - be hanging out at Sunny’s lighthouse, while Sunny herself is nowhere to be found? I don’t know. Then, one day, they left, and I came in here to investigate, and when I came up here, I found that.” She pointed at the lens behind them. “The magic crystals are missing!”
“Okay, this is very strange,” Rose Blossom interrupted, glancing up at the moon visible through the transparent roof, “but I still don’t see why you’re acting like this is the end of the world. These ponies have saved the world before - they’ll figure it out in the end. Right?”
“Listen to me!” Lofty Skies stood in front of her friends now. “Sunny Starscout, probably the most powerful pony in Equestria, is gone. The magic crystals that brought magic back and symbolize unity between ponies have been stolen-”
“We don’t know if they were stolen,” Jinx interrupted, holding up a hoof. “Maybe, when you saw everypony here, they were getting the crystals for… something.”
“Why would anypony take a week to get three crystals?” The pegasus spread her wings, angry that her friends weren’t hearing her. “And if they weren’t stolen, then how do you explain… this?” She stepped back to reveal an ugly black scorch mark on the floor. “Because this definitely wasn’t here before.”
Jinx Evergreen opened and closed her mouth, at a loss for words. Rose Blossom saved her.
“Look, Lofty, I get that you want to find out what’s going on, but maybe we should leave this to the big ponies.”
“No!” The pegasus shook her head. “No, no, no! They wouldn’t understand! Not like we do! We sort of helped save the world last time - we can do it this time, too! I know that we were meant to do this ourselves!”
Her friends exchanged a look, uncertain.
“Something’s wrong,” Lofty Skies said, her voice pleading. “I can’t explain it, but I can feel it in my heart. Something isn’t right in the world, and something terrible is coming. The grown-ups don’t have the kind of friendship that we do - you saw how easily they were willing to separate again! We can’t just sit here and do nothing! We have to do something. We have to protect our magic. We have to protect our friendship.”
Jinx stood up, took one more look at the empty space where the crystals should be - and the figures of ponies around it. “Okay,” she sighed. “I’m in.”
Lofty Skies blinked. “What? Really? You - you mean it?”
“You guys are my friends,” Jinx said fiercely, stepping forward and lifting her head. “I’m not going to lose you. Besides, I’ve been having a strange feeling lately, too. Something is definitely off, and I’m all for finding out what it is.”
Lofty Skies grinned and leaped forward to hug her friend. The two then turned to Rose Blossom, the question written all over their faces. The earth pony foal bit her lip.
“Okay, fine,” she relented. “We already ran off before… if it means saving the world, I guess I’m willing to do it again.”
The pegasus grinned and spread her wings, pulling in her best friends for a hug. “Thanks, guys,” she whispered. “You’re the best, you know that, right?” She released the other two fillies and put her hoof in the middle of the circle they made.
“From now on, we are the Crusaders of Harmony,” she said, lifting her head and folding in her wings. “We will do whatever it takes to keep harmony and friendship alive in Equestria.”
Jinx put her hoof on top of Lofty Skies’. “I’m in,” she said.
Rose Blossom did the same. “Me, too.”
“Crusaders of Harmony on three,” the pegasus said, grinning irresistibly. “One… two… three!”
The three foals threw their hooves into the air and all shouted in unison, “CRUSADERS OF HARMONY!” Then they burst out laughing for a few seconds before Jinx Evergreen got serious again.
“So, where do we go first?” she asked, looking to her friends for advice.
“We follow Sunny’s friends,” Lofty Skies suggested, and then realized the flaw in her plan before the others could tell her. “But we’d have no idea where they’re headed. We need to ask somepony for help, somepony we can trust…”
Rose Blossom gasped as the answer came to her. “Midge! We can talk to Midge and the other creatures in the Everfree Forest!”
“Yeah! I bet they’ll at least know something!” Lofty Skies turned to her two friends, her expression and tone both completely serious. “Girls, we leave for the Everfree Forest at sunrise. Leave a note for your parents, gather supplies, come up with a story - anything. Something tells me we’re not going to be seeing Maretime Bay for a while. Um, Jinx, what are you doing?” For she had just noticed that the unicorn was standing at the window and staring at the path that led out of Maretime Bay, hardly listening to a word her friend was saying.
“Huh? Oh, I was just… I was just wondering why Queen Haven and Alphabittle are coming to Maretime Bay.” The unicorn pointed a hoof out the window, and her friends rushed to join her.
Sure enough, a group of pegasi guards were trotting stiffly into Maretime Bay, with their queen and Alphabittle at the lead. The two looked a bit uncomfortable, like they were suddenly expecting the surrounding guards to turn on them at any moment. But they rounded a curve and disappeared behind the pastel buildings of Maretime Bay.
“Hm.” Lofty Skies tapped her chin. “Seems like something’s happening - something I think we should know.”
Rose Blossom paled. Jinx Evergreen said, “You aren’t suggesting-”
“Please?” The pegasus’ eyes widened and she rearranged her face into a pouty expression. “I can’t stand not knowing things, you know that!” When her two friends hesitated, she seemed to take that as an agreement, and she let out a whoop as she flapped her wings, lifting her a few feet into the air before she landed again, leading the way to the lift, saying, “The very first mission of the Crusaders of Harmony is a go!”