A Himaneighan Tale

by MasterFrasca

Alternate Path

“Moon,” a whisper slipped in my ear. I opened my eyes to a darkened room, only scant amounts of light filtering through the cloth doorway. “Moon, I want to get up,” the voice said. My senses slowly came to me when I realized that the voice was Galearis’s and it was coming from the body I was practically strangling on the bed next to me. My tired mind took a second to process why Galearis was talking to me when I actually realized what she was saying.

“Oh,” I said in a half daze, letting go of Gale’s soft fur and rolling over onto my back. “Sorry about that,” I groggily apologized, rubbing my eyes, still tired from last night’s events. I could’ve sworn that we went on for hours and hours in bed. I couldn’t even remember going to sleep. It was just hours of pure ecstasy.

Gale rolled over, free from my death grip now, and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. “It’s ok, Moonie,” she said before rolling out of bed in the darkness of the room. “I just really needed to get up and take care of some business. Now if only I could find my way around.”

“Here, hold up a sec, Gale,” I called out, closing my sleepy eyes and willing a little bit of magic to my horn. Opening my eyes, I saw the soft chalky-white glow scatter off the walls, blurry as it was to my naked eyes.

“Thanks, Moondancer,” Galearis said, making her way to the curtained door. “I’ll be right back, so don’t go anywhere.”

“Hurry back,” I said, snuggling further under the warm covers. “I’m getting cold already without your warmth beside me.”

I heard her giggle before her blurry outline disappeared out the doorway, leaving me alone in the stone room. Letting my magic disperse, the room went dark once again, the fire from last night certainly fizzled out by now. A sudden yawn overcame me as I stretched my legs one way or the other to get them out of their sleepy state. One groan later and I had rolled over on my side again, rubbing the tiredness out of my eyes with one hoof as I used the other to feel around the side table for my glasses.

Bumping into them, I engulfed them with magic from my horn, the slight glow illuminating them enough for me to see what I was doing. Letting them slide onto my face, I pushed myself into a pseudo-sitting position and lit the room once again with my white magical aura. Looking around, I saw that a candle sat on the end-table next to Galearis’s side of the bed.

Levitating the wax candle and it’s holder over in front of me, I concentrated for a second, careful to not let my sleepy mind get the better of me. I bit my tongue and watched as a spark shot from my horn, lighting the room brightly for a split second and landing on the already-used wick on top of the candle. For a second, the light in the room was dominated by my ghostly white but before too long, the warm yellow glow of the candle filled the room, flickering here and there, the slight draft of the doorway threatening to put it out.

Sitting for a second more, I shot my magic around the candle, creating a sort of wind barrier so the flame wouldn’t be extinguished. The flame flickered a few times as I adjusted the tolerance of the faux screen that I had conjured around the wax lightsource, letting in more and more air until a balance was reached. Oxygen reached the candle, and the flame remained quietly burning.

I smiled at my handiwork with the candle. Like the snow-clearing spell that I had produced outside Galearis’s house, this was a handcrafted spell made specifically for situations that I found myself in, being a bit of a night owl when it came to many of my studies. A bit of arcane shielding from magics used in Alchemy to let certain substances through and keeping others out and a bit of modern shielding used in many upscale homes around canterlot to be used more as a wind barrier were mashed together to form what I dubbed the “Flame Protection” spell.

“Heya, Moon,” I heard Galearis whisper as she pulled back the curtain covering the doorway to show herself. “The mountainside is quite beautiful up here when it’s not the middle of a blizzard.”

“Is that so?” I said, setting the candle I had been messing with back down on the. “What makes you say that, Gale?”

“Well for one, you’re not getting pummeled by snow,” Galearis giggled, giving me a wink.

“Oof, you got me there,” I cheekily responded before giving another stretch. “I’d say anything is more beautiful than a face-full of freezing water.”

“But it’s the perfect time of the day, Moondancer,” Galearis said, walking over and grabbing my arm, giving it a soft tug. “It’s twilight, and the Northern Celestial Lights are out!” I opened my mouth just a smidge before Galearis immediately shut down my argument. “No I’m not talking about the pony sleeping next door,” she harshly whispered, “or the other princess in Canterlot. Just come on, Moonie. It’s a really dazzling sight.”

“Alright, alright,” I quelled Galearis, hopping out of bed and on my hooves before heading to the foot of the bed. “Let me grab my sweater and I’ll come look.”

Galearis practically squeaked as she bounced ever so slightly in place waiting for me to get my sweater on. “You know,” I started, opening up the heavy wooden chest and grabbing my neatly-folded sweater from within, “you seem more excited for me to put this on than you did when I took it off last night.”

“Oh shush,” Galearis said, rolling her eyes. “I just want to show you the Northern Lights. They’re almost as pretty as you are with your sweater.”

“Well I don’t see the point in looking at them if you’re going to downplay them like that,” I joked, finally slipping through my sweater, adjusting my glasses after realizing I once again forgot to take them off before putting that old turtleneck on.

“Are you always this hard to woo?” Galearis said, a small smirk on her face. “I think I may have signed up for something I’m not ready for.”

“Alright, I’m going,” I faked exasperation, giggling slightly at the end of it. “No need to patronize nerdy old me.” We stepped outside the bedroom, the place nearly pitch black without the fire roaring as it had been the previous night. I tried to walk as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake up Twilight or Divvy.

“Well, nerdy Miss Moon,” Gale whispered in my ear as she slowly pushed open the heavy wooden front door of this makeshift house, the whipping wind pushing back and making quite a drone. We stepped outside and let the wind shut the door behind us, the crisp chilled air immediately seeping into my skin. “Have you ever seen the mountains at night?” I shook my head as she guided me towards the cave’s entrance, just left of where the door was positioned.

As soon as I rounded the corner, the awesome beauty of the pre-dawn twilight hit my eyes. The cave we were at was high within the peak of one of the taller mountains around, and the drop-off outside the entrance was dizzying. Easily hundreds of feet down was sheer rocks and snowbanks going for miles and miles around, the first sign of trees just appearing within what limited vision I had of the darkened wilderness.

But amazingly, the beautiful part was not down in the valleys, but up in the skies themselves, broken only by clouds and gusts of snow blowing past. “By Starswirl’s beard,” I muttered, taking it all in from this small indentation in the mountainside. “The Celestial Lights.” I was utterly speechless, and for a second I even forgot I was in a deserted frozen land.

“One of the reasons I chose to live up in the Himaneighas,” Gale softly said, walking up next to me and staring skyward as I was. “On a clear night like tonight, you can see the lights go on for miles and miles.” We both stood and watched as they shimmered and twisted around, the very wind seeming to paint obscure pictures before our very eyes. “Legends say that they’re the doing of all the spirits of the animals and ponies alike, dancing and making merry even in the afterlife.”

“I’d read about them and thought they would be a neat topic to research,” I responded. “Canterlot’s Scientists believe that they’re the resulting magical energy left over when the two royal sisters trade the sun and the moon. They said the year of Luna’s return, the Northern lights were bigger than they had been in hundreds and hundreds of years.”

I paused for a second to glance at Galearis who was still gazing towards the heavens. “But this, Gale,” I said, taking a second to think of what I wanted to say in such a time. “You can’t read this in a book. You can’t feel this icy wind blowing through your mane and see these lights in the sky and feel this… this…” I trailed off, looking down and locking eyes with Galearis. “Feel this way about someone.”

“Not unless the romantic fiction writer is really good at their job,” Galearis responded with a curt smile as I blushed, realizing she knew what I meant. “Of course, I don’t think I’ve read any stories about mountain romance or any that even come close to you and me, Moonie.”

My blush deepened as I took a slight step towards Galearis. I took another and felt her fur brushing against my own. Leaning over, I let Gale be my support, burying my head into her neck and just letting the cold air whisper amongst us as we stood watching the sky together. We stood there for a long time, watching the lights shimmer and change until finally, the sun came to wipe the sky clear, blue replacing the deep shades of red, yellow and green.

“We should probably head inside and get the others soon,” Galearis said as I lifted myself off her. “We’ve got to trek back to Yakyakistan and get everything sorted out with my small town.” Her smile faded into a distant frown as she glanced back inside.

“What are you going to do when all of this is over?” I asked Gale as she turned towards the door. “I’m going to stay here in the mountains and keep on doing what I do. I love living up here, and I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

“Well,” I said, kicking some snow from in front of me. “Are you interested in maybe having a research partner? I’m kinda in a weird spot in Canterlot. I help run the Library up there, but I practically live there. It’s a pretty isolated life.”

“If you think you’re up for living in the frozen north,” Galearis said with a smile, “I’ve always got room at my small cottage. Having a unicorn helping me would certainly be great.

“I’ll let the Library know I’m doing some field research for them,” I said, brightened up at the offer. “Between you and me, I think they’ve been trying to find reasons to get me out of the place for a while. I bet they contacted Twilight behind my back for this trip.”

“Seems like it worked out for the best this time,” Gale said, putting a hoof on the heavy wooden door and pulling with all her might against the wind. I stood back, letting magic flow through my horn and envelope the heavy wood. Pulling magically as hard as my mind could manage in it’s half-drowsy state, the alert feeling from the cold already starting to fade we managed to tug the wooden door open.

We both stepped inside, shivering from the sudden realization of just how cold we were, before seeing Divvy standing in front of the fire, poking around at the ashes delicately with a hoof, probably looking for any stray coals from the blaze last night. Letting the door swing shut behind us, Divvy shook his hoof of the ashes and turned to us with a smile. “Glad to see you two are awake. Twilight and I are just doing some last minute checks before we head out.”

“So how are we getting back to Yakyakistan,” Galearis asked, going over to our packed bags and rummaging around until she found her coat. “The quick route we took to get here must be buried under dozens of feet of snow because of that avalanche. There’s no way we’re headed back that way.”

“You’re right about that. With that path gone it could take days, and maybe even weeks to make a trip to Yakyakistan. With that blizzard, I wouldn’t be surprised if the only other path to that remote town was also hit. If that’s the case, we’d need some digging equipment or a team of unicorns to get the path dug out again, both of which would take days to get out here to begin with.”

“That certainly would put a damper on this trip,” I said, rubbing a hoof along my chin. “Twilight and I are already over the few days we thought it would take to get this done. We definitely didn’t bring enough supplies for a week or more up in these mountains. It’s not like the Yakyakistans are keen to even let us back in to begin with. We didn’t exactly leave the place in the best of moods.”

“That’s where I come in,” Twilight said, suddenly appearing from within the bedroom she and Divvy had slept in, holding dozens of books and scrolls in her magical aura behind herself. Trotting over to the stone table and laying down the books in a pile alongside one of the scrolls she unfurled before us. “Forget weeks,” she said as I walked over to see the scroll was a detailed map of the various mountain passes. “I can do minutes,” she boldly stated with a smile on her face before wavering a second and adding “I believe.”

“And how are we going to travel multiple kilometers in a minute, much less multiple kilometers of Himaneighan mountain passes?” Divvy skeptically said, joining the rest of us at the table.

I looked at Galearis and winked at her saying, “Magic, Divvy. I imagine Twilight’s going to be casting her long-distance teleportation spell again.”

“Precisely,” Twilight said, hunching over the map and looking for something specific. “I’ve been studying these maps all night, and I believe I can get us to Yakyakistan from here. Moreso, I’ll be able to get us into that courtyard we arrived in, Moondancer.”

“I was curious why you were reading those things half the night,” Divvy mumbled, sitting in one of the chairs. “But isn’t magic like that nearly impossible to perform? That seems like a lot of magical energy.”

“You’re talking to an Alicorn, Div,” Twilight chuckled. “I’ve taken on things much worse than teleporting four travelers and baggage a few kilometers.”

“She did teleport us to the town a few days ago all the way from Ponyville,” I said, reassuring Divvy that he was in good hooves. “But in the middle of the courtyard?” I turned to Twilight a doing my best to convey a sense of worried skepticism. “When we came here, we were off from the town by a good distance. What makes you think you can suddenly teleport us to exactly the town’s courtyard. I don’t want to be off again and risk another fusing incident.”

“What’s a ‘fusing incident?’” Divvy asked from his spot at the other side of the table.

“Trust me when I say you don’t want to know,” Twilight said to him with a shudder. “I know I can be this exact because we’re only traveling a couple of kilometers, not a couple hundred. Plus I realized my mistake last time I cast the spell. I didn’t account for the extra distance caused by the curvature of the earth I won’t have to worry about that this time because I’ve redone my calculations.”

“If you say so, Twilight.” I said with a sigh. “I’ll trust you, but I swear if I break a rib from falling a few stories onto hard concrete, you have to visit me at the hospital every day during my recovery.”

“Deal,” Twilight said with a wink. “So does that mean you volunteer to be the first teleportee?”

“I suppose that I might as well get it over with,” I said, stepping away from the table and headed towards our room, intent on grabbing my bags and my coat and many scarves. “I’ve got a way to contact you to make sure it worked anyways.”

Throwing my coat over my body, I grabbed my bags and set them on my haunches, walking back to the main room. Pulling up the cover of one of the bags, I reached in with my magic and produced two simple stones that I had cast a spell on years ago to magically link them together. “These are special stones,” I explained to the three ponies in front of me. “What I do to one happens to the other, for the most part.”

I picked up one and sent a pulse of magic through it, vibrating it slightly in the air. No sooner had I done that when the one still sitting on the table vibrated with a loud buzz, the stone resonating with the stone tabletop. “One buzz means I made it no worries. Two means I’m in trouble, but alive. I hope you know what silence means.”

Twilight nodded her head solemnly. “I’ll make sure you get there safely, Moonie.”

“As will I,” Galearis said, stepping boldly beside me and putting her hoof up against mine in reassurement. “You can send multiple ponies at once, can’t you? I’d like to be there just in case something happens.” She glanced over and caught my gaze with her eyes. “It’ll be like a buddy system. She’ll watch out for me and I’ll watch out for her when we get there.”

“Smart thinking, Gale,” Divvy said, stepping up next to Twilight, putting on the same white coat and goggles that had started this whole feud to begin with. “You never know what these mountains are going to throw at you. I’ll stay behind then and look out for the Princess here.” He threw a hoof around Twilight and gave a quick half-joking squeeze.

“It shouldn’t be much harder to extend the teleportation zone to two ponies. Just a matter of calculating in a bit more error,” Twilight mumbled, looking at the map once more.

“I’m telling you Twilight, no multiple stories now” I said again as the alicorn chuckled.

“I’ll catch you and fly us to safety, Moonie,” Galearis said, giving me a hug herself, using her wing instead of a hoof like Divvy had. “You’re not breaking a leg or a rib on my watch.”

“Can you even fly in that coat?” I said, looking back at the heavy clothing draped over her back. “How do you get your wings out?”

“It’s magic,” Galearis joked, waving a hoof in front of her in a faux-showy style as if she was a stage performer. Reaching back she pulled up the fur to show a small slit near where her wings would normally be. “Also known as ‘zippers,’” she finished with a sly wink in my direction. She reached back and undid one of the zippers on the jacket and unfurled her purple wing from it. “Bit of a tight fit, but they still function like pegasi wings.”

I rolled my eyes at her joke before looking over at Twilight. “I suppose if the mage herself is ready to go, then so am I,” I said, pushing up my glasses and shuffling my back to make sure my bags were snugly secure. I was certain that this teleportation was going to be rougher than the average one.

“Alright,” Twilight said, sliding her maps and books into her bags and procuring a few sheets of scrap parchment that had an amazing anomaly of calculations and notes sprawled over its surface in low-quality ink. “I did my calculations from precisely outside the front door of this place. I wanted to be in a place where I wouldn’t accidentally damage anything important. This spell is going to take a lot of magical energy to perform.”

“Thanks for the consideration” Divvy said, picking up his own bags and coat, “But I’m really not worried about too much of this stuff. “Perks of being a trader up here is that you get whatever neither party wants. A lot of stuff around here is rejected by the others for whatever reason.”

“Well, with the new ‘Yeti’ scare, I’m not surprised why,” I commented, putting on my many scarves and heavy winter coat that I had borrowed from Galearis’s place. “Shall we get on with this adventure?”

“Let’s,” Galearis said, pushing the heavy wooden door open to let the pulsing wind in. “As much fun as this adventure’s been with you two,” she said, looking back at me and Twilight. “I’d like to get home soon and tend to my plants that are probably worried sick about me.”

“I’d like to get out of the mountains soon,” Twilight said, heading out the door with me, Galearis, and Divvy. “I’d really like to see my friends and get back to my student-in-training. I think Starlight can get a little restless if I don’t have something for her to do.”

“So,” I commented as we let the door shut us out, the wind whipping by us and the skies starting to brim with light now that the sun was out and not impeded by a blizzard. “Gale, are you ready to go?”

She merely nodded as she took my hoof in hers and looked to Twilight as if to give us the ok. Her demeanor was very different from the gung-ho one she had shown inside Divvy’s house. I could see the fear in her eyes. She wasn’t as ready as she had led us to believe. I could even feel her hoof shaking slightly as it gripped mine, although if it was from fear or cold I couldn’t tell.

“Give me a bit to charge up the magic and set the coordinates of everything,” Twilight said, closing her eyes and breathing slowly. Her horn started to glow and spark as she prepared the long distance teleportation. It was at that moment I realized that Galearis had probably never been teleported before, and that’s why she was scared.

“Gale, look at me,” I said softly, gripping her hoof with my own. “Teleportation is one of the safest ways to travel. It’s feels just like diving underwater for a brief bit. You’ll feel a lot of pressure because we’re being launched through another dimension, but the best thing you can do is stay calm and let the teleportation occur. So just hold my hoof tightly and don’t let go. We’ll be absolutely fine inside Yakyakistan before you can say ‘See you later gator.’ Ok Gale.”

I paused and looked into Galearis’s eyes. The fear was still there, but I could tell she trusted in my words. She blinked a few times, her eyes never wavering from my own. A few seconds passed as I heard more spurts and sparks erupt from beside us, Twilight’s magic growing more and more. “Ok, Moondancer,” she said, lowering her hoof and instead pulling me into a hug. “I trust you.”

I gave her a few pats on the back as she continued to stay in the embrace while turning to Twilight. “Twilight, how much longer until we’re off?”

“Just, ung...” she grunted, stepping back shooting out a bolt of lightning that hit the wall next to us. “There,” she said, eyes still closed. “That’s as far as I dare build. Here we go.”

She opened her eyes up to reveal glowing purple pupils bursting with magic. It was just as terrifying to behold as the first time she sent me to the Mountains. A thick beam of pure magic slowly sprouted from her horn, as if she had concentrated her magic into some form of paste. “Hold tight, Gale,” I said to the pegasus still gripping me in an embrace, although it had escalated from a friendly hug to a death squeeze. “We’re about to leap.”

The magic beam finally hit what seemed to be an invisible wall, spreading out like a shattered egg until there was a solid glowing magical dome around us. Twilight disappeared behind the wall of magic, a solid purple enveloping us. The ground seemed to fall away as I got the feeling of floating, a soft hum from the ball beginning to grow. Soon we were surrounded by purple and I could feel every hair on my body stand on end, magical energy coursing through my fur.

I could also feel Gale’s grip tighten even more than it already was, her heartbeat pounding into my chest, starting to race. “Keep your eyes closed,” I said, stroking her mane as the sound built up around us. “We’ll be there before you know it.” A vibration surrounded us as bolts of magic struck inward at us, sending very small shocks through me. I heard Galearis yelp as a few hit her. The humming grew and the shocks increased. The walls seemed to be vibrating and spinning and spinning and vibrating faster and faster until suddenly the purple energy exploded inward towards us.

And then came the void. Galearis sat gripping me, all sound seeming to have gone, all light having left. I could feel Galearis’s heart pounding and her arms gripping my body. I kept holding her hoof and petting her mane, trying my hardest to keep her calm in such a barren existence. Before the magic haze returned, I saw the ghost of a pony in the blackness. It looked just like a miniature version of Galearis, only with an orange mane instead of a golden yellow one.

“You’ll never amount to anything with an attitude like that,” a harsh voice called out to the filly. “Goofing off all day with your friends. You need to buckle down and study.” I realized that it was my mother’s voice. That was what she had told me when I was younger. I didn’t know why this filly Galearis was being told that. My mother’s form appeared over the filly, shouting at it now. “You’re a worthless child! Failing your tests and disappointing your parents. Is this how you want our legacy to go? Well, tell me!”

“No mother,” I said in unison with the smaller filly.

“Then straighten up!” the ghost of my mother shouted, pulling out a ruler and raising it high above her head as the filly screamed and I flinched not wanting to see the punishment but not wanting to look away.

Before anything could come of it, the ghosts burst into purple smoke before the stuff surrounded me and Gale, finally lighting up everything again. With a sudden pop, the world burst into view, the familiar square of Yakyakistan greeting us. A clean hold in the snow below us was carved out as we both fell mere centimeters to hit the impacted water

“Gale, we made it,” I said, giving the pony a shake, a smile creeping along my face as I realized that Twilight had successfully gotten us to the middle of the square safe and sound. I looked down to see gale looking back up, letting go of me ever so slowly with a shocked expression on her face. She looked paler than she should’ve been even considering the climate. I realized something was up. “Gale what’s wrong?”

“Moonie, I saw…” She trailed off, blinking a few times before looking back at me “Moon, I saw my dead sister in that void. She was getting yelled at by this demon pony and she was about to get hit when we…”

“Gale, hey,” I said, pulling her chin up to look her in the eyes. “Those were memories, and tainted ones at that. It’s called the Dizzy Dream Effect, named after it’s founders, Dizzy Style and Dream Catcher. When two ponies go through a teleportation together, their thoughts and memories can get mixed into each other. It’s almost telepathy, but it’s more chaotic than that. That wasn’t the ghost of your sister, it was your memory of her.

“Oh…” she said, taking in a deep breath and looking at the ground, letting it out, the steam being whisked away by the wind. I picked up the stone from my bag and gave it a buzz to let Twilight know that we made it before looking around at the city, as deserted as it had been when we first came.

“And that demon was my mother,” I said with a sly smile.

“I’m sorry Moondancer, I didn’t mean—”

“Moon, it’s ok,” I said, giving her a quick hug and putting the hood up on my jacket. “I’m not exactly a fan of her either. She wasn’t the nicest of Moms.

“Oh…” Galearis embarrassedly muttered, looking once again at the snow and shuffling her hoof before looking back up at me “Sorry…”

“Don’t be,” I said as another pop resounded beside us, Twilight and Divvy appearing right next to us. “We’ll timed,” I commented. Let’s roll.”

“HALT!” A booming voice called out from behind us. “YOU ARE TRESPASSERS TO YAKS.”

“Oh geeze,” Twilight said as we all sighed. “Not this song and dance again.”

Author's Note:

It's amazing what I use from mynoise.net for inspirational music.
Like these three songs.

Read, Comment, Enjoy!
-MasterFrasca

Comments

[redmar]

I hope the Yaks aren't going to make things to difficult.