Limits of the Horizon

by Beware The Carpenter

2 - Tinderbox

Shining Armor poured more of his energy into the Sun Strider’s engines, willing the small airship to go faster. There was a groan, and the Strider lurched forwards, only to be met by another gust of desert wind, slowing their progress back to a casual drawl.

It was now six days since Shining Armor had left Canterlot. Six days of relentless, hostile winds which prevented them from closing a lead that hadn’t been more than eighty miles to begin with. One day of favorable winds would be enough to overtake the buffalo and rescue the hostages, but good winds never came and the blurred testimony of the prisoners trail showed that the situation was fast becoming desperate.

Buffalo may be accustomed to running for days on end; but ponies weren’t. When the prisoner’s trails began weakening as they passed into buffalo territory, Shining Armor hadn’t worried, believing the buffalo would soon stop in some fortified hill or ravine and make their demands. There, Shining Armor would either negotiate for the prisoner’s safe return, or, more likely, cast a plethora of small energy shields to protect the prisoners, then blast the buffalo into oblivion with the Sun Strider’s cannons.

The buffalo didn't stop in their own territory; they didn’t even slow down. They cut a line across their lands like a knife and kept stampeding west into the Zaharren Desert; a sand steeped wasteland which made their own barren plains look like fertile woodland by comparison; that was when prisoner’s tracks began teetering on collapse.

So far Shining Armor had passed over eleven bodies that had had their throats slashed when they were unable to keep pace with the rest of the army. The bodies of nine ponies enraged Shining Armor; but what mortified him was that two of the bodies were buffalo, and one had been a gray-haired elder, still wearing the badge of a patriarch. Buffalo had been renowned for their filial respect for centuries.

Shining Armor considered simply landing the ship, and leading the Sun Guard after the buffalo on hoof. If they ran for about eight hours, rested for four, then ran another eight, they might catch the buffalo by dawn tomorrow; but that plan had three obvious problems; numbers, endurance and 'the box'. The Sun Guard were the most elite veterans in Equestria, but there were only thirty-three on board and the buffalo were estimated at four hundred to four hundred and fifty. Even against those odds however, with him there, Shining Armor felt they could still take the buffalo… or they could run sixteen hours through a blazing desert, they couldn’t do both.

Those were the two problems that Shining Armor understood, the box he knew only by reputation. Buffalo were magically inept, but reports from Ponyville continued to arrive by telefire, claiming, in frustratingly vague detail, that a very powerful ‘magic something’ had been involved in the attack, blasting through buildings like straw and shooting pegasi out of the sky by the dozen.

Any hope that Shining Armor had that the reports had been mistaken were shot down when a contingent of about a hundred and fifty police and reserve military pegasi from Los Pegasus had intercepted the buffalo, planning to stay air borne and dispatch the buffalo via crossbow. Less than half of the pegasi survived their attack, and for the sacrifice of the fallen nothing could be ascertained except the ‘powerful magic something’ was the ‘blue box’ the buffalo carried at the head of their column, though whether they controlled it, or it controlled them, no one could tell.

Unable to afford the loss of the cannons, or time for reinforcements, Shining Armor was stranded on his own ship, teetering along just slightly slower than a fast walk; while anything could be happening to his children. He knew they'd been seen in Ponyville by dozens of ponies in the hours immediately after the attack; helping put out fires and tend wounded; but after that they seemed to have vanished into thin air. Shining Armor could only guess that they'd attempted to go after the prisoners; if this was the case, Shining Armor hadn't found their bodies meaning they'd probably become hostages themselves. Shining Armor knew he could never face himself, or Cadance, if he let his children die out in the desert; but he also knew, from a rational standpoint, that he wasn't the only soldier on board believed to have family among the dying hostages.

As a final nail in the coffin of the crew's moral, they were now flying over the outskirts of the Zaharren; home of the zebras. Shining Armor had passed this far west twice before, and on both occasions had hoped he would never have to come here again. Those Sun Guards who had been with him the longest, deftly avoided mentioning the last time they were here, as if there was even the slightest chance Shining Armor had forgotten and they didn’t want to remind him.

The younger recruits believed they were the first Equestrian troops to pass this way in decades; though most of them were perceptive enough to guess that there was more going on then the threat of the prisoners being massacred by desert heat, or sparking international conflict by flying an armed warship into a country Equestria had no diplomatic ties to.

Life aboard the Sun Strider was tense, tempers were short and Shining Armor had already been obligated to discipline two of his soldiers for fighting. The example had been taken by the rest of the crew; but having nothing to do but sit and wait for a good breath of wind had everyone melting in restlessness… well… almost everyone.

Spike was sleeping like a baby.

Three hours after leaving Canterlot, Shining Armor had been hit with a letter from Spike, telling him about the attack. Shining Armor replied, saying he already knew and asking Spike to help care for the survivors. Instead, Spike wrote back, asking to come with him.

Years ago, when Twily had set out for her first archeological dig, Spike had chosen to remain in Ponyville to be with his fiancé Sweetie Bell. Twily had offered them the library, but Sweetie Bell made it vehemently clear she had absolutely no intention of ‘becoming Twilight’ so Spike moved out; and began digging out an underground manor into the side of Whitetail Mountain, overlooking Ponyville. They’d planed to get married as soon as the first stage of the manor was complete, but three weeks before the project was planned for completion, Sweetie Bell got sick. Twelve days later, she died.

After the funeral, Spike moved alone into the recesses of his mine and was rarely seen again. Most people in Ponyville romanticized the tale and believed Spike was still mourning the loss of his beloved. For the first year or so that may have been true, but by now Shining Armor believed Spike when he said that he had simply found living in a cave, by himself, to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience.

Separated from ponies; Spike’s mind was slowly transforming into typical dragonish thoughts of sleep and hoard building. Once every few months he would come down to Ponyville with a bag of precious gems and buy either several hundred pastries from Sugarcube Corner, or a wagonload of apples from Sweet Apple Acres. He’d eat, listen to the latest news and occasionally say a few sentences before shuffling back up the mountain to sleep for the week.

Given a recent activity record like that; the last thing Shining Armor had expected was for Spike to ask to come on the rescue mission. He’d said no, but Spike reminded him of a time when he and Twily had been near Appleloosa, and encountered a tribe of buffalo who had shown him inexplicable, unconditional reverence, second only to the chief, just for being a dragon. Spike thought that if anyone could reason with the buffalo it would be him; Shining Armor doubted that these buffalo were looking for reason, but agreed to send a chariot to pick him up. Spike wrote back one last time asking for five chariots; one for him, and four for his hoard.

When Spike arrived, he'd sniffed the airship up and down until he found a spot near the back of the deck that he liked, poured his gemstones into a pile, spent about five hours re-stacking them until they were ‘just right’ and then gone to sleep. Every twelve hours or so he would wake up, eat around six quarts of gems, then go back to sleep again and hadn’t left his hoard except once, to go to the toilet. That bathroom was still under repair.

How Spike could act so relaxed with so much at stake was something Shining Armor both envied and hated. If he hadn’t known Spike better, he would have thought the dragon simply wanted to joy ride on an airship for all the concern he was showing, but Shining Armor knew that Spike did care. He just knew there was nothing he could do and so instead of worrying, Spike was the only person on board who was actually being successful at doing nothing.

Usually when Shining Armor was this annoyed at a soldier, they deserved a flogging. In Spike’s case a medal would probably be more appropriate though both would be redundant as, if he were given either, Spike would probably eat the medal and then sleep through the flogging.

Shining Armor trusted Spike, even though no matter how well he thought he knew Spike as a baby, drake Spike was becoming more and more of a mystery. Why hadn't Spike ’t matured like the other baby dragons entrusted to Celestia’s students, turning into a giant, greedy monster overnight. Shining Armor knew that Spike had told Twily that it had something to do with him attending The Great Dragon Migration, but nothing more.

Until Twily had followed Spike on that one expedition, Shining Armor had expected that the migration consisted of hundreds of fully grown dragons, ripping each other to shreds for each others hoards. Instead Twily had described thousands of dragons, of varying age and size, moving peacefully among piles of gems which were left free for the taking, and not doing much of anything that she could tell. At the time it had seemed like the trip revealed little about dragon nature, but whatever it was Spike had failed to understand as a baby, he certainly appreciated now, and told to no one.

Twily had begged, and pleaded with him for years to tell her why the dragons migrated to a different place around the world once every twenty years; and each time Spike was true to dragon nature, telling her that The Migration was dragon business and that she wouldn't understand even if he told her. Aside from that he gave no clues except the changes in his biology that started soon after he got back, slowly at first, then in earnest after his isolation began.

Rather than walking upright, Spike now walked on all fours, with legs disproportionately longer than a pony’s that moved in a sort of canterous lope as his standard gait. Spike was a head taller than Shining Armor was in full battle armor, around three times heavier and at least five times stronger, all wrapped in resilient dragon scale and tipped with teeth and claws that devoured steel.

And he had wings now.

Spike said that his sides had started itching soon after the migration and a year later, small flaps of skin had begun to appear. Probably due to delayed development, his wings weren’t proportionate to the rest of him and were now just slightly larger than an average pegasus. He couldn’t quite fly yet, but Spike said he was getting closer each year, and had every intention of flying to the next migration.

The doors to the lower cabins burst open to make way for a yellow unicorn galloping up the stairs with a glint in her eyes that told Shining Armor that there might finally be some good news. Shining Armor followed her to the back of the ship where she was busy prodding Spike who woke with a groan.

“Is it finished Point Star?” Shining Armor asked eagerly as Spike rolled over and looked at them sleepily.

“Almost” quipped Point Star excitedly, “I just need to run one last test; if everything goes as I expect, Spike should be smelling great within two hours.” Point Star lowered her horn and began casting thin rays of light into Spike’s nostrils which he tolerated wearily, “Now breathe in… and out… in…”

Shining Armor stood back and waited anxiously as Spike begrudgingly subjected himself to Point Star’s intrusions. Shining Armor knew from Gallopoli that Spike could track better than a bloodhound. When they caught the buffalo’s trail at the end of the first day, Shining Armor had asked Spike to go to the surface and see if he could smell any new information; but Spike said that the high altitudes had blocked his nose, and it would take more than a day on the surface for them to clear.

Shining Armor’s innate solution had been to use magic, but his chief navigator, Point Star had vehemently objected. She said that the blood vessels inside a dragon’s nose were extremely delicate and if Shining Armor tried to use a spell designed for ponies, he could cause serious harm.

Knowing what was at stake, and that it was virtually impossible to do any lasting damage to a dragon, Shining Armor was would have risked it as any clue Spike found could be vital in saving the prisoners. Spike was even willing to let Shining Armor try, but Point Star implored them both to give her a few days to reformulate the spell.

How Point Star knew enough about dragon biology to confidently modify the spell was beyond Shining Armor; but he’d known Point Star long enough to simply let her be brilliant without demanding credentials for every piece of information that came out of her mouth. He agreed, and Point Star disappeared below decks to like a rabbit down its hole, or like Twily when she was working on a project, resurfacing only to perform intermittent tests on Spike which he tolerated so long as they didn’t involve leaving his hoard. Those tests were now running on five days; and while most spell weavers might take weeks or even months to do what Point Star had accomplished, it was still five days later than Shining Armor wanted.

“Now hold your breath,” Shining Armor did so and Point Star scribbled some notes down on a parchment, “Now if you could just-”

Spike grunted twin jets of flame into the air, “I know what to do Point Star, you’ve had me do this four times! Just clear my nose so I can smell already.”

“I know, but I need to be careful. If your nose has partially adjusted itself since my last test and I used outdated information, I could hurt you. Now if you could just open your mouth just one last time.”

Spike complied Point Star made her scan and jostled down notes that seemed eerily familiar. Point Star had a good heart but fell prey to the typical arrogance that often accompanied genius. It wasn’t like her to check her work so many times.

Point Star ticked off points on her notepad and then turned to Spike, “Stay here, I just need to check my checklist and then my spell will be ready.” Since when did Point Star use a checklist?

“You’ve already checked your checklist.” growled Spike.

“Yes Spike, but I haven’t triple checked my checklist.”

Spike cringed. Shining Armor froze.

As Point Star turned to leave, Shining Armor got one final glance at her notepad, and finally recognized the writing. A fast revealment spell passed from his horn and an audacious purple mare came into focus.

“…TWILY!!!!”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Twilight stopped, and took a deep breath as her illusionary disguise vaporized around her. “Hi B.B.” she smiled, as he spun her to face him, trying to conjure the non-magical illusion of calm.

“What are you doing here!? Where is Point Star!?”

“She didn’t make it to the landing platform in the one hour you gave everyone and you left without her, just like you said you would. I did make it there in time, and asked to help because I’m an honorary Sun Guard, and because twelve of my students, my niece, and three nephews may be among the hostages. When I tried to sign up, you told me to stay in Canterlot even though I’m more than qualified and gave no reason for it. I was going to argue, but you were busy enough as it was so I stood back and when I saw that Point Star didn’t show up in time I… thought you might need a navigator.”

Shining Armor’s eyes narrowed to slits; “… And you just happened to have a sample of Point Star’s DNA available?”

Oh please, Twilight kept DNA samples of all the Sun Guard, as well as her students, friends, extended family, and the majority of the royal court and celebrities in Canterlot, all neatly filed away in her private lab at the university, just in case of an emergency. That said she hadn’t even needed Point Star’s DNA to cast this spell. “It wasn’t a metamorphous spell; it was just an illusion to alter my colors. Point Star and I have similar height and body shapes and know her cutie-mark from the times that I met her.”

Twilight had expected Shining Armor to be angry when he found her, instead he looked downright furious. He took several deep breaths, but that didn’t stop his face from turning dark red; Twilight looked past him to Spike, hoping for some kind of support but instead he was standing rigid on his hoard, lowering at her like she was an enemy.

“You can’t be here.” hissed Shining Armor.

“It’s too late” Twilight gestured the mounds of sand on every horizon, “We’re over the Zaharren desert. If you drop me off here, I could die of thirst before I made it back to Equestria. If you took the time to turn around and take me back to Equestria, you’ll never find the buffalo again.”

“Twily you can’t be here! Do you… Do you know the penalty for a civilian stowing aboard a military vessel, impersonating a royal officer?”

“If you pressed charges, then depending on the trial and jury I could face up to fifteen years jail or be fines more bits then I have. If I was considered dangerous I might have my horn permanently damaged or cut off and if I was seen as trying to sabotage a mission with Equestian lives at stake, I could be executed.” Twilight tried not to smile as she rattled off the possible sentences, but ended up smirking anyways. There was no way either Shining Armor or Celestia would actually try to convict her. The chances of her paying any serious consequences for this were almost non-existent.

Shining Armor looked like he was ready to throw her off the ship right then and there, she softened her gaze and tried to be reminiscent of times when they were foals, “Clastic Strain, Benefair, Crackle Jack, Winnow Hoof;” She said slowly, softening her gaze, “You and Cadance have said many times that they’re not just your children.

If Celestia had ordered you to stay in Canterlot, you have gone after them too, with or without her blessing. Aside from you, I’m the strongest mage here, and I can apply my magic to more than twice as many spells as you can; I’ve studied the Zaharren culture and language, and you need of a navigator. Let me help, ple-”

“Tell me you’re not to blame for blocking Spike’s nose!”

Twilight’s face fell, “…If you think that I would jeopardize the safety of the hostages for my own sake; then maybe you should just throw me off the ship right now. I was completely honest in my concerns for Spike, and I have worked on developing the spell for him as quickly as I know how. I was going to tell you who I was later today, after my spell were successful and you would hopefully be in a good mood.”

Shining Armor’s glare didn’t soften, though it did slide off her momentarily at the rest of the crew that was gathering around them; “Finish the spell” he growled, “But consider yourself a prisoner. When we reach a safe port of call, your position will be reviewed.”

Chapter Three >>> Inquest

Comments

[SageBrony07]

That was interesting. Best of luck with the next chapter.

[the other sans]

So... Kill all the ponies? I just think Twilight may be a little lonely being in the school with almost literally no family or other friends to be with her.

Though with what you wrote in the story summary... Twilight is going to be in some deep defecation

[Beware The Carpenter]

4151965
Thanks for the corrections

So... Kill all the ponies?

Whose killing what ponies now?

[the other sans]

4154785 Let me see... Fluttershy is dead, her husband is dead, her unborn child is dead, Sweetie Belle is dead... Rarity is insane (with possible dead cats). 9 hostage ponies are dead... I'm starting to fail to count dead ponies

[Beware The Carpenter]

4156300

I won't lie to you, people will die in this story; but so far, in a story set 22 years after SOS, I've killed 1 of the mane six and have added/ will add 13 children. I've killed 1 CMC and will add 1 child with 1 more on the way, and as for the captives I've killed 9 out of about 400.

That hardly counts as killing everyone.

(I guess you could also count Owlishious in the death count, but owl's only live to their mid/late twenties at most and I'm thinking Owlishious was already fairly old when he met Twilight. He had a good life. )