Epilogue - A Warm Heart
Epilogue – A Warm Heart
Featherfall stirred her second coffee mechanically, watching the foamy cap whirl about like a hurricane. She barely noticed Snowdust slide back into the booth across from her.
A fresh hot chocolate slid across the table between the pegasi nearly toppling as the magic propelling it along winked out. Snowdust blocked it with her hoof before it could sail off the other end of the table. She shot a dirty look at the teenage unicorn, now ducking behind the register. He waved a hoof and offered a nervous chuckle in apology.
Snowdust took a sip of her hot chocolate and sighed in satisfaction. Featherfall looked up and smiled at her. “It's sort of like old times, isn't it?”
“Well it's not exactly Cloud Nine,” Snowdust said. She grinned mischievously, her eyes sparkling in quiet reverie. “But it'll do. Anyhow, so what happened when you got back to the police station?”
Featherfall chuckled. “Oh we didn't go back to the police station. Crackshot met us at the hospital. The entire Magical Crimes Unit got put into quarantine for a month until they were sure none of us were changelings. I don't envy Coldhorn,” she added, grimacing at the thought. She wrinkled her nose and looked out the window. “We didn't see her again for almost a year. I wrote her a few letters while she was under lock and key, but she never wrote back. I'm not sure if they ever reached her. I asked her about it when she got out but she didn't want to talk about... well, anything. All in all, I'd say I made out pretty well.”
“Pretty well?” Snowdust asked, perking her brow. “Frosty that doesn't sound so good to me.”
“Well...” Featherfall stirred her coffee one last time and took a hefty draught, consuming the peppermint mocha hurricane. She grinned at Snowdust. “Well I was in quarantine, and Crackshot wasn't allowed in! Still...” she sighed softly and frowned. Four years later and it still stung. “I got canned the minute I got out. I had really hoped he would have had time to cool down by then.”
Snowdust's eyes bugged out and her jaw fell slack. “But... But! You saved them!”
“I did,” Featherfall said, smiling. “But I broke a number of regulations. I wasn't supposed to have anything to do with that investigation and I ended up stumbling into the hospital covered in Shimmer's blood. I compromised the investigation with my presence. I was lucky things worked out as they did. If Shimmer and Riverrun had not turned out to be changelings they might have got off with seven counts of murder because of me.”
Featherfall stared into her coffee for a few moments, lost in the memories of all those other cases with Foresight. When she looked up, Snowdust was frowning at her dolefully. She could find no words of comfort for her friend.
“I don't regret it though,” Featherfall amended. She forced a smile. “I knew what the cost might be if I went, but I knew what it might be if I didn't. I had to make a choice and I'm okay with that.”
Snowdust nodded slowly, shifting uncomfortably. “Why didn't you come to me earlier though? I could have got you a job on my team years ago, Frosty.”
Featherfall shrugged her wings. “I kind of hoped I could get my job back, once Crackshot cooled off... but that never really happened. I still see most of them now and then around Canterlot. Though it's not exactly uplifting to chat with my replacement. He's... eh... another unicorn. A real go-getter, I'm told. Drives Foresight nuts.”
Snowdust chuckled quietly. “Do you still see him?”
Featherfall tried hard not to grin, but the struggle only made it worse. “Actually...” she said, and dug into her satchel. She came up with a silver chain and held it up for Snowdust to see. The ring dangling from it bore Foresight's mark in shimmering rubies. “I've been seeing him quite a lot!” she announced, grinning ear to ear.
Snowdust gasped, reaching out to still the swaying bauble. “Frosty! When did this happen?!”
“He asked me last night before I left for Hearth's Warming at Torch's,” Featherfall said and tittered softly to herself. “I think he was less nervous the day he went charging in after Shimmer.”
“Congratulations!” her friend cheered. “Why didn't you say so sooner?! You should be wearing this!”
Featherfall chuckled as Snowdust slipped the chain over her head. She beamed, feeling it resting gently against her chest. “Well...” she said. “I want to surprise Torch and Melody with it. So I was planning on showing up with it in my bag and then sneaking it on right before dinner.”
“Oh ho, that will be a surprise alright!”
“Mm hmm,” Featherfall said, nodding. The former detective looked out the frosted-over window. Snowflakes sparkled like a million little diamonds as they fluttered down in the failing evening light. “I think it's time for a new start, Snowdust. I'm really looking forward to it.”
“Bright and early next Monday!” Snowdust reminded.
Featherfall slipped out of the booth and stretched all her wings and back at once. “Speaking of, I'm due at Torch's in about an hour. I should really head that way. Thanks again, Snowdust,” she said, smiling back at her friend. “For everything.”
* * *
A filly sat alone on the patio out in front of Torch's little stone cottage, watching the carriages go by. Minutes dragged on like hours as each drew close to the Lights residence, only to rumble steadily past the drive without stopping. Scherzo marked each failure with a skyward groan of discontent and a stamp of her hoof. The little pegasus had nearly given up hope when Featherfall's carriage finally rolled up to the drive and stopped. She pranced back and forth, hooves barely touching the ground as she wrestled with running toward the carriage or back inside to announce her aunt's arrival. At last she settled on a harried shout “Spark! Spark! She's here!” and then dashed off through the snow.
Featherfall's bag hovered behind her, gripped in a soft indigo aura, tethered to the sympathetic glow of the feather atop her forehead The driver slouched against his carriage, scowling at her balefully. “It's not 'freakish' and I'm not trying to get out of the tip.” Featherfall barked crossly.
“Well?” the driver asked, his upturned hat floating out to her.
“You called me freakish!” she said, eyes filled with vitriol.
The driver narrowed his eyes at her. “So that's your game?”
Featherfall worked her jaw for a moment, but no words were coming out. She dug into her satchel and produced a few shimmering coins. They had almost made it to the hat when she heard Scherzo's joyous cry.
“Aunt Featherfall!” the filly shouted. Featherfall turned her head just in time to see the little red fireball of a pegasus hurtling toward her. The older mare's magic flickered out as her niece crashed into her chest, knocking her into the snow. Coins and luggage rained down around them.
Featherfall brushed the snow from her muzzle and looked up at the exuberant filly bouncing up and down on her belly. “Oomph, okay okay you got me,” she said, struggling to right herself. Scherzo hopped free and bounced around her in circles as they made their way up the walk. Spark met them at the door.
“You're supposed to get her bags!” the little unicorn protested, wide-eyed. He ran past to get them, only to end up dangling from them as Featherfall lifted them up and brought them into the entry hall.
Featherfall leaned down between them, grinning ear-to-ear. “So how are my two favorite foals!”
“It's Hearth's Warming!” Scherzo shouted as she reared up on her hind legs and rolled her hooves in the air.
“Yes, yes it is,” Featherfall said, smiling at her brother as he appeared in the doorway. “Happy Hearth's Warming, Torch. You have quite a welcoming committee this year!”
“Hey sis,” Torch said, smiling back. “Glad you could make it. We were starting to worry that Snowdust had put you straight to work!” He peered out the window by the door. “It's really coming down out there.”
“Mm hmm,” Featherfall said, scooping up her bag. “I'm not too late for dinner, am I?”
Torch chuckled and stole a greedy look toward the kitchen. “We kept it warm for you; Melody insisted that we wait.”
“Alright, just let me put my things in my room and I'll be right out, okay?”
“Okay,” Torch said, smiling back. “C'mon kids, get to the table!”
Torch's foals scurried out with their father in quick pursuit. Featherfall withdrew to her room and heaved her bag into the corner. A familiar chill hung in the air, reminiscent of all the Hearth's Warmings she'd spent in the little cottage with her brother and his fledgeling family. The window over the bed had never been particularly tight. Her breath fogged the pane as she looked out into the slowly-building snowbank. Many years had passed since the night she warped out into that dark, snowy field and Torch found her huddled on the roof.
Featherfall plucked her ring from her satchel and held it up to watch it glint in the silver moonlight. With the ring dangling from her neck she took a deep breath, and stepped out into the kitchen's warmth.
A Light that Shines in Darkness is the Light that Shines Brightest, and a Heart filled with Courage can Weather any Storm.
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Fernin is a pretty cool guy.
Oh, and don't forget to mark the story as complete.
It's Over?
2310537
It's marked now. You must've got to it pretty quick.
2310564
Fraid so. I can see myself revisiting the characters though. Cold Horn comes to mind as a possibility, maybe even Swansong. It is likely if I did a story focused on either of them that Featherfall would be around still. I really grew to love Featherfall.
Two questions:
1) what job did Featherfall get from Sbowdust ?
2) does she think about getting proper magical education now when she has some free time ?
It was her dream for some time, did not it ?
Or did she get some while working in MCU ?
2311653
The implication is that Snowdust is a weather team captain and knew Featherfall back in Flight School. Due to the sacrificial nature of Featherfall's spellcasting, it seems unlikely to me that she'll ever receive formalized training due to her relative inability to practice. When I set out to start working on the character my approach was that she would have a very low diversity of spells, but be rather good at them.
2312471
Thanks. Now I understand it better.
Regarding story ending in whole:
Not fairytale ending definitely, but very believable. May be even too believable - reminds of real life too much...
Well, anyway, I see this as rather happy ending - heart-warming and bittersweet simultaneously.
Cannot wait for your next masterpiece
2312505
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.
Just a couple of grammar things I noticed:
When a character addresses another character in dialogue, there should be a comma. E.g.
"Hello, Featherfall," Foresight said.
As for the story itself -- I really liked it.
2410877
Thanks! Recent feedback has shown me that I am bad with commas. I'm working on it. Thanks for reading and I'm glad you enjoyed it.
2235162
This.
The story (and the characters!) were interesting, but it felt rushed, incomplete. I wish the story took more time to develop the characters and explore them more thoroughly; you certainly have some intriguing ideas. However, aside from Coldhhorn and Featherfall (that whole "self-mutilation sacrifice for power" gave me the chills) everyone just seemed to blur together in an interchangeable and indistinguishable swirl of names.
2602754
Thanks for your feedback! A common trend I'm getting is that the story was too short, and so only a few characters got much by way of real depth. In retrospect, I would love to have made this a full length novel, exploring her time in Cloudsdale, and developing her relationship with Shimmer and Blaze more.
I was pretty satisfied with Torch and her father (partly because the point of her father was to be an absent parent, missing from her life in increasingly inexcusable ways). Unfortunately decreased emphasis on the case and retrospective sections, robbed me of most of my opportunities to provide interaction with Swansong. Ideally, I'd like to do another story focusing on Coldhorn and Swansong, probably set before this one because of the events in chapter 5.
A longer, more in-depth story would also afford me more opportunity to develop the relationship between her and Foresight and maybe ultimately put more development into the murders. The story certainly metamorphosed on me in an unexpected way, as it became more and more about Featherfall and the path through her life that beat her up so thoroughly, but in doing so equipped her to survive the cellar.
I think the thing I am most happy with, is the development of the horn file, and what it represents, starting as a symbol of everything that's wrong with her life and eventually, everything good in her life arming her with it as a very literal weapon and shield against the things waiting in the dark cellar. That symbolism was one of my primary goals in writing Featherfall, and I hope that we all find a sword in hand when we meet our demons in the cellar.
Thanks for reading,
~Frost
I failed to notice that this was an old story, and I was all set to give it a review. I guess there's no harm in doing so anyway, though I apologize if I'm complaining about things you fixed in your later work.
The good: a cohesive world. A lot of darkfic for this fandom doesn't really integrate the dark elements of the fic into the fluffy elements of canon MLP. In this fic, I could believe that everything was happening in the same world as the show, just in a part of it we don't normally see. In a similar vein, Featherfall's abilities make sense by the story's logic, and you don't bend the world around her or make her too powerful for the story.
The bad: you don't actively control the speed at which the reader reads. This is hard to explain in general terms, so let me give the most obvious example: when most authors begin a flashback, they use a separator like
- - - -
to signal the reader to slow down a moment and change from a "this is the present" mindset to a "this is the past" mindset. You don't use any sort of separator, so I barreled straight into the flashbacks before I realized that hey, this is a flashback, I have to reorient myself. (There are more advanced techniques associated with this--for instance, when I want to keep the reader reading at a moderate pace, I pick my words carefully to alternate stressed and unstressed syllables as much as possible, in a rhythm of da-DAH da-DAH da-DAH. This is rather more precision than most authors put into it, but it's still worthwhile to read back through your writing and see where you read it really slowly or really quickly.)
The mixed: the characterization. The earlier review covered this pretty well--you've got the frames of some interesting characters, but you don't take much time to flesh them out. I feel like the department as a whole could have supported a story more than three times as long as this one (though admittedly, this individual case couldn't have been stretched out that long.)
Overall verdict: pretty okay, probably not something I'll remember for long. Still, I'll keep an eye out to see what else you write.
3202537
She wanted to play with her food
3202569
Greetings! I'm glad you liked the story.
I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, but I've been in the process of moving and was more or less offline-ish for a few weeks there.
I got a lot of feedback about not having scene breaks when Featherfall starts to reminisce. In a few places it was certainly jarring. I tried to indicate it generally with a name shift, something I'd seen Terry Pratchett do in his Discworld novels. I think probably the preening flashback was one of the few that was as seemless and obvious as I wanted. I am in the process of writing another story involving some number of flashbacks and I'm taking these things into account.
As for the other characters, yes, there was certainly room to develop them more, and I had planned to write another story: Mourning Glory (about Coldhorn), which would be next in the cycle, probably culminating with a Swan Song story, but at the moment I'm not 100% certain. The Coldhorn story, as laid out in my notes, is particularly grim and I feel it would probably not be well-received because of some of the thematic elements.
Honestly I think my one regret about Featherfall is I didn't add another chapter with a flashback covering the Cloudsdale years to really drive home who Snowy was.
Huh, why did this only have 29 likes... well here is number 30.
I really enjoyed the varied characters and character abilities. I can indeed imagine that a magical crimes unit would search out such interesting individuals with such unusual talents.
Still I thought firing Featherfall was a mistake, yes she broke regulations, but it was her first major break, and I doubt that her 'replacement' would be nearly as useful. If your going to be willing to hire criminals you should stay a little flexible when it comes to rules. Eh Crackshot's loss is Snowflakes gain.
You can has review!