Child of Nightmares and Everfree

by Georg

Ch. 5 - The Shadow of the Moon

Morning in Ponyville was rumored to be the most beautiful in all of Equestria, with an uncanny ability to shimmer and shine far beyond all reason. Since Sunshine Symphony was walking through the center of town around noon, all the shimmering and shining was over, although there were quite a few curious glances he could pick up even from behind his sunglasses. His throbbing head appreciated getting away from the bright sunlight when he vanished into the shaded interior of the Golden Oak library, but there was something lurking there he much rather would have avoided.

“Mister Symphony? Where did you go last night? We looked everywhere for you this morning and thought you had gone into the forest!”

To her credit, Twilight Sparkle did look more concerned than angry about having a twig-decorated and rumpled Royal Guard of the nocturnal variety yawning on the floor of her library oak tree, but Sunshine took it in stride. His life seemed to have gained a trend of crazy females who lived in trees guiding his steps, although it was murder on his sleep schedule. It said something about how tired he was that as soon as he had left the forest, he had found a comfortable apple tree and gone straight to sleep even in the dark, moreso when he woke up to find the sun was already high in the sky. At least his sleep had been dreamless, which he suspected Princess Luna had something to do with, as well as his failure to awaken at moonset.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he said with another yawn. “The trees in Sweet Apple Acres were so comfortable I slept ‘til noon. I was only planning on taking a nap.” He gave another yawn. “I talked with your town’s resident head-twister last night.”

“Zecora?” asked Twilight, looking up from the map of the Everfree Forest she had spread across the library table. Her map was only the rough shape of the forest with the path to the Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters marked in clearly, but just about everything else was blank except for a few sharp hills and a number of recently-marked ruins. “What did she say?”

“I’m not sure, but it rhymed.” Sunshine drew himself up on his rump and held one hoof across his chest. “I cannot help on your noble quest, but be assured, I wish you the best.” He collapsed back onto all four hooves with another yawn. “Or at least that’s what it sounded like. She should have at least waved goodby and called out, ‘Have fun storming the castle!’”

“Uh…” Twilight Sparkle shuffled a few notes across her impromptu briefing table and cleared her throat. “Zecora was like that a lot yesterday when the girls told her about your wife. She gets right in there between your frontal lobes. Although she’s sometimes a confusing friend, her advice always works out in the end.” Twilight scowled. “And sometimes she’s contagious.”

“Outrageous.” Sunshine paused with a sour grimace, then looked over the map, which had a broad vector marked from the Ponyville Nightmare Moon clearing into the center of the forest, passing near several labeled areas with numbered tags on them. “So, what leads do you have for me to follow?”

“Us,” said Twilight Sparkle. “I’ve made arrangements with the weather pegasi to check several of the ruins today. They will be flying well above the forest and only stopping at the indicated map points, so they should be fairly safe from the Everfree monsters, or at least we hope. They’ll be back in a few hours, long before it gets dark.”

Sunshine stood and looked at the map with a frown growing on his face. “How many ponies did you have looking for me this morning, Miss Sparkle?”

“Oh, once the search parties set out, about a dozen,” said Twilight, measuring distances on the map. “I helped search the orchard with Applejack and Rainbow Dash, while Pinkie Pie looked all over town.”

“Twelve ponies looking all over town for a full-grown Nocturne who was not even trying to hide in broad daylight, and they failed,” said Sunshine.

“Well, they…” Twilight Sparkle trailed off as she looked up, then looked all around the library for the armored guard. After pacing around the room, looking behind bookshelves, and checking the ceiling, she had just started looking under tables when Sunshine slipped out of the shadow he had been hiding in.

“Miss Spark—”

Twilight gave off a high-pitched shriek and scrambled halfway across the room. “Don’t do that, Mister Symphony.” She panted in place for a few moments, keeping a fierce glower aimed at the embarrassed guard. “Point taken,” she finally said. “but they will be looking for your wife too, and she can’t hide the same way your daughter can.”

“Yeah.” Sunshine Symphony looked over the map table with a frown. “About that.” He nudged a few of the numbered markers around on the table. “What if… she’s not hiding. What if Spark Gap… got so sick she became separated from our daughter in the woods or died or something else. You didn’t see Emerald Dreams. The way she was eating the candy was almost feral, like she had regressed into an animal or something. I mean she was chewing it all up and spitting out the wrappers. What if she doesn’t have her mother anymore? What if Spark Gap is… dead?”

“That’s…” Twilight Sparkle seemed unable to determine if she should be looking him in the eyes or staring at the table, and her gaze flickered back and forth. She moved several of the markers back into place. “The search parties might as well be blind out there if that’s the case,” she said after a while. “They could fly over or walk past your daughter a dozen times without even realizing it.”

“I’ll go join them,” said Sunshine, moving toward the library door, which promptly glowed purple and remained stubbornly shut.

“You’re staying right here,” said Twilight. “Go upstairs to my bedroom and go to sleep until the search parties get back. You’re not going to do your wife or daughter any good if you don’t get some rest. I’ll wake you up when they get back and we know more.”

At first, Sunshine was going to object, but the narrowed gaze of Twilight was suspiciously similar to Her Royal Highness, Princess Celestia, and he lowered his head to trudge obediently up the stairs. Once out of sight in her bedroom, he moved to the windows and attempted to open them so he could fly out to join the search parties anyway, only to find the same purple magic which had locked the front door was also holding Twilight Sparkle’s bedroom windows closed.

“Sleep, Sergeant Symphony,” drifted up the staircase. “Or I’ll write a letter to Princess Celestia and have her make that an order.”

Nocturne were attuned to the rising of the moon much in the same way roosters reacted to the morning sun, only with less crowing. Sunshine Symphony swam back to awareness, surrounded by soft sheets and feminine scents all around him. His heart skipped a beat as his sleep-addled mind became flooded with memories of Spark Gap, but the crush of familiar despair following his realization made him far too aware of the cold gap to his side where his missing wife should have been. He rolled out of bed by instinct, dropping all four hooves on the floor and giving a titanic yawn to clear his ears when he heard voices from downstairs.

“What was that noise upstairs, darling?”

“Just Sunshine, getting out of my bed.” There was a short pause. “Not that way, Rarity! He’s married!”

It took a few minutes to get his armor on and stumble downstairs to see the six famous mares all gathered around a table with a stack of sandwiches. The map of the Everfree was bare of the markers, but there was no look of happy discovery on any of the faces at the table.

“Nothing?” he asked with a hopeful glance at the short stack of papers in front of Twilight Sparkle.

“Nothing yet,” said Twilight. “All of the search parties reported back with no losses and no signs of any ponies living in any of the ruins, but I had the opportunity to research another approach.”

He sat down in the offered chair and ate the sandwich Spike brought over to him, but he was so distracted that he could not tell what kind it was as he waited for the Princess’s student to stop being such a unicorn and just tell him what she had up her horn. It took until he had eaten a third sandwich and polished off a glass of juice before Twilight Sparkle seemed to check off an entry on her mental checklist, gave a short nod toward the map, and began to speak to the group.

“All of my previous theories about how to locate the missing ponies depended on our ability to find Spark Gap, who as a unicorn, would be easier to locate than her daughter, Emerald Dreams. It is possible the two of them have been separated, but we know for a fact that the nocturne filly is still alive, and was headed in this direction when she left Ponyville. What I propose is to organize a very small search group of pegasi, with Sergeant Symphony’s abilities to operate at night and Fluttershy’s ability to talk to animals. This group, which I have designated Group Friendship—”

“I still think Task Force Awesome would be a better idea,” grumbled Rainbow Dash.

“—will depart from the statue of Nightmare Moon in Ponyville’s park and head into the forest along Emerald Dreams’ last known vector, with Fluttershy stopping on occasion to interrogate the local night-dwelling creatures. Politely,” added Twilight with an embarrassed glance at Fluttershy.

“How is this group going to be able to see at night like I do?” asked Sunshine.

“With this!” declared Twilight Sparkle, bringing out an old scroll covered in mystic runes. “Back when I was a student, I found a spell in the old archives that allows the superimposition of characteristics from one type of pony to another, much like the cloudwalking spell allows non-pegasi to walk on clouds.”

His heart beating a little faster, Sunshine sat up in his chair. “So you can transfer Fluttershy’s ability to talk to animals to me?”

“Um…” Twilight Sparkle fidgeted, setting the scroll back down on the table and exchanging a nervous glance with Fluttershy again. “Not exactly. There’s no known way to transfer a pony’s cutie mark—”

“Thankfully,” said Applejack.

“Agreed,” said Rarity.

“—but I can ‘copy’ your abilities as a Nocturne to Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash,” completed Twilight Sparkle with only a brief glare at the two interrupters.

There was something wrong about her plan, but Sunshine squelched his feeling of unease. It would get him out into the forest, looking for his daughter, and that was the important part. Fluttershy was the key to the whole plan. Emerald Dreams was fast, and she was probably just as good at hiding as Sunshine, but she could not hide from a whole forest full of talkative creatures.

Fluttershy looked less than convinced, even after Twilight Sparkle went on and on about the spell being only temporary and easily reversed, but after some convincing, she took her place next to him with only a little shiver down her sides.

It took Twilight several references to her scroll before she lit up her horn, causing scintillating magic of every color of the rainbow to surround her two subjects. For Sunshine, it just felt cool and warm at the same time, with tingles running up and down his spine, but the shy little pegasus seemed to be far more affected. Her wings shimmered and stretched, with the feathers merging together and shifting into flawless expanses of dark membranes like dragon’s wings while her bright yellow coat and pink tail darkened to a mustard and magenta hue respectively in order to blend into the night. She closed her eyes in a pained wince, and when they opened, the pupils were slit vertically like a dragon’s eyes. Then the spell cut off and the new batpony fell to the floor with a cry of pain.

“Oh, no!” declared Rarity, flinging herself forward and cradling Fluttershy in her forelegs. “We didn’t realize this would be so painful, so nerve-wracking, so… gorgeous.” Rarity ran a pristine white hoof down Fluttershy’s face, from tufted ears to jaw and across her soft mane. “Your colors are so dark now. Darling, you’re going to need a whole new wardrobe and a really big stick.”

“A stick?” asked Rainbow Dash, hovering overhead. “Why would she need a stick?”

“To keep the stallions away, of course.” Rarity put a hoof under Fluttershy’s chin and lifted her face up for closer examination of her eyes. “You’ve got your natural beauty and that dangerous exotic touch of the unknown now, dear. Those eyes are just ravishing, like…”

“Like Nightmare Moon!” declared Pinkie Pie with a bounce around the room, trailing a banner that proclaimed ‘Nightmare Moon II — The Sequel.’

The other shoe Sunshine Symphony was waiting to drop, did.

He stared in muted horror at Twilight Sparkle, who was smiling and had her horn lit up again as she turned to her next pegasus friend. “That was far easier than I thought,” she said with a leering cackle that ran little bits of ice up Sunshine’s back. “I don’t have to stop with Rainbow Dash like I planned. I could transform hundreds of pegasi all across town, but why even stop there? We could blanket the entire Everfree Forest with search parties if I transformed every pony in—”

Sergeant Sunshine Symphony of the Royal Guard could not help himself.

He hit her.

Not just an open-hoofed slap, or a gentle pat on the cheek either. This was a full punch from the body with every muscle he had into it delivered directly to the madly cackling unicorn’s jaw. Twilight Sparkle rebounded from the impact, bounced off a bookshelf in a shower of periodicals, and landed back on the map table with all the grace of a bag of walnuts. The sound of books hitting the floor and a rain of little map markers which had gone flying to the corners of the oak tree library slowly died out, replaced by an incredible silence as all five remaining members of the Elements of Harmony, the heroes of Equestria who had personally saved Princess Luna, his Dread Sovereign, all stared at him with wide eyes.

It took ten minutes for Twilight Sparkle to be encouraged into waking up, and another five before Fluttershy allowed her to sit up and take a drink of water. All during that time, Sunshine sat quietly a short distance away and did not say a word or move a muscle, other than to take the occasional glance out the library window at the risen moon. It was the end of his journey to find his wife and daughter, as well as the end of his career and most probably the last time he would be anywhere without bars on the windows.

He had struck Princess Celestia’s prize student. He was so bucked.

“So…” started Twilight, seemingly poking at a loose tooth in her jaw. She looked at Sunshine, then at the transformed Fluttershy, then back at Sunshine. “Princess Luna transformed your race right before she turned into…” Twilight trailed off and chewed on her bottom lip, eventually lighting up her horn, floating the scroll with the transformation spell on it out into the center of the table, and setting fire to it.

Once the last ashes of the scroll had been collected in the center of the table, she turned back to Sunshine Symphony, who expected much the same treatment. Instead, Twilight Sparkle gave a curt nod. “Thanks. And don’t ever do that again.”

“I’ll try,” whispered Sunshine. “If you don’t.”

“What, no apology?” snapped Rainbow Dash, who was hovering over the table and stirring the ashes of the former transformation scroll with her downwash.

“It wasn’t his fault,” said Fluttershy with a sharp frown. “Twilight should have been more careful with an unknown spell.” She paused and stretched out her wide, dragon-like wings. “Even if it worked really well,” she added.

“Well…” Rainbow Dash landed and gave Fluttershy a careful inspection while still keeping an eye on the immobile guard, then glanced back at where Twilight Sparkle had settled into a similar immobile stance. “You did kinda freak us out there, Twilight.”

“Thought you was gonna go full Nightmare Moon on us, sugarcube.” Applejack took off her hat and turned it over between her hooves. “Don’t know if any of us woulda been able to shake you out of it, but that weren’t no reason for him—”

“It was my fault,” said Twilight Sparkle. “Let’s learn from our experience and go from there. We have some lost ponies out in the forest to find.”

“If you say so,” said Rainbow Dash. “I suppose I can get a cool set of night vision goggles from Pinkie Pie’s Spy Kit and we can go out looking tonight, just to see how well this works. It’s too bad about the spell, though. I’ve always wanted to see if my top speed goes up when I’m turned into a griffon like Gilda.”

“Um… Rainbow?” Fluttershy fidgeted and seemed to be trying to hide behind her mane, which was working better than she expected in the evening lighting of the library. “You can’t go.”

“What?”

When Fluttershy did not continue, Sunshine Symphony spoke up. “You can’t be quiet. You’ll scare my daughter away.”

“Hey! I can be quiet! I can be ten times as quiet as you.” The pegasus paused, looking at the silent and immobile guard. She settled down on the table and struck a mirroring pose, holding perfectly still… well, mostly still except for little darting glances… somewhat still except for a few twitches and a fierce glare…

“Quiet is overrated!”

“Ten seconds flat,” said Applejack, checking the clock on the library wall. “A new record.”

Far above Ponyville, ‘Group Friendship’ glided in the direction of the Everfree Forest, just as silent as a falling leaf. The two dragon-winged ponies passed over the statue of Nightmare Moon, glistening in the light of the full moon, before changing their course and drifting along at almost a walking pace.

“Should we be looking for owls?” asked Sunshine. “They might have seen my daughter.”

“Some owls,” said Fluttershy with a shudder. Many long, slow flaps later she added, “You shouldn’t feel guilty.”

“It doesn’t help,” said Sunshine. “I know flinging myself solo out into the Everfree to look for my wife and daughter is just another stupid way to deal with my guilt, but I won’t be much of a husband or a father if I get myself killed trying to find them. Maybe if I went back to Canterlot and got some of the researchers who have experience with the forest. Form a real expedition. Do this the right way.”

“No.” Fluttershy cast a look back over her shoulder at him with a flash of teal eyes making Sunshine suddenly think of Luna and one of her stern looks. “The more ponies we take into the forest, the more the shy creatures will hide or flee, just like your daughter flew away from you. Besides, researchers have gone into the forest before, and they didn’t find your wife or daughter then.”

“True.” Sunshine considered all of the papers and books he had read about the mysterious forest. “Still, most of the researchers only went out during the day, or at least the ones who came back.”

They flew in the direction Emerald had gone, stopping every so often so Fluttershy could talk to a local bird or bug while Sunshine kept watch. His opinion of the shy pegasus continued to climb with every stop as she whispered to wasps, buzzed to bees, and squeaked to all manner of creatures both large and small, some of which had more teeth or spines than he could count. It left little time to talk to each other, which seemed to be a mutually acceptable solution to their uncomfortable situation.

So he watched the forest, while the forest watched him back. It seemed oddly as if he were being examined by a vast green monster, curious as to why two little creatures were intruding into its body and asking questions of the insects who lived in its fur. Still, being examined beat being digested by a considerable margin and made him consider just exactly how the forest might have reacted years ago to the various research groups who chopped their way in while capturing whatever interesting creatures they found. Most of the expeditions had only stayed in the forest for a few days or a week at most before disaster struck in the form of a giant beast or a localized earthquake. Then they would limp out with their wounded to write books and research papers and most probably tell tales around the faculty fireplace, all tasks which would rid the world of trees in one way or another.

There were only a few expeditions which had remained for months at a time in the deepest of the forest, and they were mostly just made up of one or two researchers, typically old stallions or mares who most of their peers considered crazy at first and written off as eaten after a few months. Then the old ponies would come strolling out of the forest with reams of sketches and observations, publish a few papers or books, and vanish back into the woods again, over and over until they no longer came out.

Most of the book sketches Sunshine had seen while researching the forest seemed completely unbelievable, but after actually seeing some of the creatures Fluttershy was casually talking with, they made much more sense. Any successful Everfree researcher would be fascinated by the flora and fauna, and most probably inevitably eaten by one or both of them no matter how skilled they were.

Still, their journey was slow going, as Emerald had flown as fast as she could toward a known destination but the two of them were limited to short hops between talkative bugs and night-dwelling animals. It would have given him time to think, except for a sincere desire not to wind up having to explain to Princess Luna how one of the Elements of Harmony was eaten by a carnivorous plant while he was distracted.

It really was difficult not to be distracted by the forest, as every stop they made involved yet another strange creature who Fluttershy would talk with just as if it were a friendly neighbor she had not met yet. At every stop they made, more creatures poked their noses or other scent-gathering appendages into their vicinity just to see what was going on. Some were chatty and seemed to like to talk with the odd yellow nocturnal pegasus, some were less interested in talking and more in digestion, which made Fluttershy and Sunshine take longer leaps ahead.

In particular, there had been some sort of creature looking a little like a weasel with dental issues, who hissed and snapped around its fangs until Sunshine noticed a large number of similar fanged weasels moving into ambush positions around them. He had reacted by grabbing and quite nearly throwing the Element of Kindness straight up in the air while following close behind, although not quite close enough to prevent a pair of the ambushing weasels from managing to get their teeth into his tail hairs. Since Fluttershy was ahead of him and climbing up into the starry sky, he only felt a little bad about kicking the ravenous little beasts in the heads and watching them plummet back down into the clearing they had just left, but it turned his stomach the way the rest of their brethren swarmed over the bloody little creatures.

Fluttershy restricted herself to talking with creatures in the higher branches of the trees for a while afterwards.

Sergeant Sunshine Symphony was a Royal Guard of the Night Division, which meant he was perfectly able to stand in one place in the pitch dark and remain totally unmoving⁽*⁾ for hours on end. At one time as a cadet, he had been assigned to guard a royal museum which housed quite possibly the most disconcerting painting in Equestria. Hour after hour, he had stood immobile in front of Celestia Among The Flowers until he could swear the painted little colts and fillies frolicking across the green hill were actually moving, and the indeterminate expression on Celestia’s painted face seemed to leer at him out of the corner of his eye whenever he looked away.
(*) Provided he had not had any coffee, and used the bathroom before duty.

Time had seemed to stand still then, but it certainly felt as if it were traveling backwards now.

The focus of the temporal anomaly was a slower than average long-armed sloth, who was speaking very slowly (of course) to Fluttershy in the top of a tree. Their conversation had been going on for about three and a half centuries, if Sunshine’s sense of time was correct, and looked as if it would go on until Celestia’s first wrinkle. As if the thought had triggered it, the first bright spark of sunlight burst over the eastern horizon and lit up a nearby tree in a most unexpected way. He did not want to leave Fluttershy alone, but the tree was worth investigating, a quandary which was solved when the pegasus in question quietly fluttered down out of the tree top and landed next to him.

“So, did your speedy little friend say anything interesting?” asked Sunshine, keeping an eye on the surroundings as the creatures of the Night finished their activity and the creatures of the Day began to emerge.

“I think he may know something about your wife, but I’m not sure,” said Fluttershy. “He said he saw Emerald Dreams and her mother around, but he sounded as if they were both flying. The sun rose before he was done.”

“Well, you could just wake—” Sunshine looked up at where the sloth had been, but the only sign of his presence was a lump on the bark about sloth-sized. “Oh,” he added, “a tree sloth. I should have known. This place is crazier than my wife.”

Fluttershy did not say anything, but her pained expression spoke louder than if she had shouted at him.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I’m just worried about her. Being isolated from ponykind, particularly here, is dangerous for the mentally ill. Also…” Sunshine swallowed a lump in his throat and nodded at the tree. “Nevermind. We should get back.”

“It will be hard to find this place again if we fly back to Ponyville,” said Fluttershy. “There are no good landmarks, and we could wind up taking just as long to get here as it took us today. Last night,” she corrected. “We should find a place to hide, like a den.”

“I… don’t think that’s going to be a problem.” Sunshine nodded down at the comparatively small tree he had noticed before, which was nestled against the thicket of towering pin oaks they were perched on.

“It’s a house?” said Fluttershy.

“Habilis ficus, or the Convenient Hollow Tree, much like Zecora’s house,” said Sunshine. “Several of the explorer journals had entries about them. They’re a rare Everfree species which seems to show up at the very end of a day, just when an explorer is about to make camp. There’s a lot of really wild theories about them, but since the domestic Library Oak is an offshoot of the species, most of the reputable researchers just seem to hum loudly and stick their hooves over their ears when the topic comes up.”

They poked their noses in the front door, which was well-balanced and only squeaked a little when opened, revealing an empty high-ceilinged main room with a few side rooms. It was simple, a little dusty, and quite nearly the last thing Sunshine had expected to see in the Everfree, but he relished his momentary supremacy of knowledge over Fluttershy, as following behind her for the entire night had made him feel a little superfluous. He really could not help chattering about the references he had found about the strange trees while inspecting the furnishings, all wood, of course, and ‘stuck’ to the floor or walls. There was even a writing desk of sorts looking out of a vine-covered ‘window’ with a good view of the clearing outside, but his introspective gaze was interrupted when Fluttershy cleared her throat.

“Um… Mister Sunshine? Did one of the explorers you were talking about have a cutie mark of a book with a leaf on the cover?”

It took a moment to think about his own research into the forest, but one of the authors did stand out. “Yes, an old stallion named Leaf Press. He wrote around four books and a couple of papers, but he vanished about—”

Sunshine ran out of words as he turned around and looked at the door Fluttershy had stopped in front of. It was overgrown with wood, as if it had once been a whole door, but the tree was slowly reclaiming the contents of both it and the small room beyond. On the door in a faded carving, there was an open book with a leaf inscribed on the cover, just like the cutie mark of Leaf Press embossed on each of the books he had written about the Everfree Forest. From the rate of tree growth, in less than a decade the door would be completely overgrown, and the resting place of the elderly stallion on the other side would become one with the weird and creepy forest he had lived in for his final years.

“He’s becoming a tree.” Fluttershy traced a hoof across the faded carving on the door and brushed up against the encroaching bark. “Sometimes, very old creatures will return to their dens to die. They love where they live so much that they collapse the entrance, and no other creature will make their den in the same place.”

Although Sunshine had read about these trees, and had even been inside Zecora’s house, this was an aspect of them he had never really thought about then, and really did not want to think about now. A long flight back to Ponyville and the possibly futile search for this place later suddenly seemed to be a far better option than sleeping through the day in a living crypt.

Fluttershy did not seem upset by the prospect, and even turned away from the sealed room to check out the other two doors, one of which led to a crude ‘one-hole’ latrine and the other to a room with a soft, somewhat disconcertingly squishy floor.

“The tree survives and thrives by having somepony live in it,” she said, stroking the pale bark of the doorway into the bathroom. “And in return, it protects its resident from the dangers of the forest. We should sleep here. It will be safe. I can feel it.”

Sergeant Sunshine Symphony was feeling something too, but he really did not want to say anything about it. After all, he was inside an insane forest, looking for his crazy wife with the assistance of a pony he had thought was sane, and anything he said would only make things worse. He put the contents of his saddlebags down on the floor and arranged himself in front of the ‘bedroom’ door as a proper guard would do, ensuring that if some pony-eating creature were to break into the tree-house, it would have to chew through the guard and his armor first.

The muted sunshine filtering in through the open windows carried a gentle breeze rich with the scents of the forest, each of which made his jittery mind jump into action as it attempted to identify the odor and determine if it were preceeding some huge star-bear or flock of fanged weasels about to attack.

The morning dragged on with the songs of the early-rising birds and wind whispering in the tops of the trees, but Sunshine was unable to fall asleep, which seemed to be a common problem in the tree ‘house.’

“Mister Sunshine,” whispered Fluttershy from the dark bedroom behind him. “What was she like?”

“Uh…” Sunshine shifted positions and bit his bottom lip. “She was… difficult.” It was a very few words to describe a very complex situation, but the words continued to dribble out in little bursts. “She really wasn’t all that stable when we were married, but I didn’t see it at the time. Love is blind, and I was struck. For weeks at a time, she was perfectly normal and I would just start to think she was over it, but then she would go into these… moods where she would snap and complain about everything. Sometimes, when it was particularly bad, she would lash out. She thought having a foal would help, that her illness was just something four little hooves and a smile could fix, but all Emerald did was break her further. The stress and the feedings. The earaches. The way Emerald was my kind of pegasus instead of a little unicorn like her, which made her sleep during the day and want to play at night. I tried to do everything I could to help, but whenever I tried, I was always wrong, and it drove her crazier.”

He sat there on the warm wood floor and thought about coming home to find an empty house, with clothes strewn all over and the crib shattered against the wall. He had been so terrified of finding his child dead in the rubbish or in the yard. It had actually been a relief when witnesses had been found who said Spark Gap had taken their little foal when she had fled town, then a horrid shock when he found where they had gone.

“I found out later,” he continued without really thinking. “The doctors think she might have had an untreated ischemic stroke during labor, which would explain a lot of her irrationality afterwards. If I had caught it. If they had caught it. If… So many ifs.”

The bedroom door creaked open and Fluttershy slipped out, taking a good, long look at where Sunshine was sprawled out on the cold wooden floor. Then she nudged him, gently at first, then with a sharp poke of a hoof. “You’re not doing yourself any good by staying up out here and worrying, and I’m not able to sleep without Angel. Come on,” she said with an additional nudge and following behind as Sunshine went into the room.

It was awkward, particularly when the shy little pegasus made him take his armor off, but she was warm and comforting in his embrace, and despite his best efforts to remain alert, he was asleep in very short order.