Daylight came earlier than I wanted it to. It was hard to tell the passage of time in the dungeon, but soon enough I could hear the castle wake up and get to work. I heard Neo turn over in his cell, it was hard for me to tell whether he had gotten any sleep or not. I reached my hoof through the bars like I had the night before and rested it on his shoulder. I could feel him shiver beneath my hoof and I became aware that he was sobbing softly under his breath.
"How are you feeling Neo? Just as bad as yesterday?" I felt him exhale as his body shivered again.
"Worse. I kept waking up during the night and hoping that I would wake up back home." Neo rolled towards around the face me. His eyes softly glowed gold in the darkness. "My dad was going to teach me how to fly today." He laughed sadly.
"You don't know how?" Neo shook his head.
"It's not like I'm ever going to learn now. Hay, I don't even know if I'm going to see him again." He shook as he tried to suppress the urge to cry again.
"Maybe I could teach you. I am a pegasus after all, and I know how to fly."
"No, flying for draconequus works differently. We fly using magic, our wings alone aren't actually used for flying."
"And now thanks to those horrible ponies, you can't use magic either."
"Well, we shed our horns every couple of years anyway and grow new ones." he sighed, "But with my rotten luck, I'll be long gone by then."
I heard a rough grinding sound and a blinding light filled the dungeon. A guard stepped in and lit the torch next to the door. "Wake up call for Rose Everfree." He said gruffly. I said goodbye to Neo and followed the guard out into the halls and back to my station in the kitchen. The ponies there refused to talk with me. When they did it was always "Please fetch the large pot for me Miss Everfree.", or "Miss Everfree, I told you to keep an eye on that soup!". So began my new routine. In the mornings before wake up call and in the afternoons once my work was done, Neo and I would share stories about each other while I changed his bandages. He always loved telling my about his homeland. The more I heard, though, the more I realized that the draconequus weren't monsters at all. I felt like everything I had ever been told about them was a lie. They fell in love. They raised families. They protected each other every bit as much as any pony ever did. It occurred to me, that the only monsters I had ever met were the alicorns.
I realized that I was sick of being lied too. This whole life, which had been fabricated with doctored truths to the point where I could finally stand the taste of them, was fake and unfamiliar to me. I realized, that something had to be done. Innocent ponies could get, and in fact already had been, hurt. So one night, having realized these things, I rolled over in my cell and woke Neo.
"Neo, I need to talk to you." Neo turned to me and blinked his eyes a few times to clear the fatigue from them. "I've suddenly come to the shocking revelation, that I have been lied too."
Even in the dark I could see a grin form on his lips and he laughed before responding, "Only just now?"
"I know, I'm truly ashamed of how dim I am. But here's the thing," I turned my ear to the door to reassure myself that nopony was listening or hiding in the shadows, "we're getting you out of here."
His smile faded as quickly as it had come and he tensed as if he were expecting to be hit. Perhaps he was. "Rose, we can't do that. If I escape than you get charged with high treason. They'll kill you. Besides, even if that weren't a concern, in what possible way could a pegasus and a still useless draconequus possibly hope to escape from a dungeon that is not only directly beneath a heavily armed citadel, but in the very center of a giant city full of blood thirsty war ponies?"
"You aren't useless, Neo. I feel like we have to try something though. The only reason why I'm being allowed to heal you, is so they can kill you later. And sooner than that, General Standard is going to attack the Southlands. It's going to be a thousand times harder getting you home if there's a war going on."
"Even if I agreed to go, it's not like we have a plan."
"At what point did I say I had no plan? I have a plan. It's a very stupid plan with a slim chance of success that will have you out of here and on your way home by morning with nopony the wiser."
Neo allowed himself to smile again. I could practically see the wheels in his head turning. With the minuscule bit of magic he had retained, he made a line of rocks roll around in swirling patterns on the floor. He watched them go around for a while to help him think of how to respond to me. I didn't press him, I knew he would answer me eventually. Finally, it seemed as if he had come to a decision, one that made him smile wider than I had seen him smile before. It's beautiful and terrifying at the same time to see a draconequus wear the kind of manic grin that Neo wore then.
"Alright, but on one condition. You're coming with me."