Seabreeze took a deep breath and watched the orange glow seep into the purple and pink of the sky. If he cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, he could imagine he was back at his home, looking through the arched window of the toadstool instead of the arched window of the palace. Finally, he turned away and drifted down.
This chamber housed nothing particularly exciting. All the walls and the floor could have been carved from sapphire, and though there were darker swirls and teeth-like blocks in the manner of pegasine architecture, the room was otherwise utterly empty of decorations.
In the middle was a flattened pebble, and standing on either side were two Breezies. A hundred more hovered around the margins as though wondering what they were doing there. Seabreeze joined them.
Trussed from neck to sting with grass-blade rope, the Flutter Pony glowered at the Breezies and clicked its pincer-like tusks together. From time to time, it hissed and spat at them.
“What a creepy-crawly,” murmured Hugglenut.
“That’s just the language of the Flutter Ponies,” said Piffle, and he sniffed his pointy nose at the thing. “I remember meeting them years ago when I flew east to the Honey Swamps. It’s not too hard to understand them. Flutter Pony talk isn’t too different from ours.”
The other Breezies leaned closer. Not that anyone kept score, but it was said by many of the elders that Piffle had ventured out into the wilds more often than the rest of the swarm put together. He certainly spoke as though he had; confidence radiated from him like bristles on a hedgehog, from his stiffened legs to his spiky explosion of a white mane.
“So what is it saying, then?” Seabreeze said, and he remembered too late to keep the bite of impatience out of his voice.
Piffle gave him a cool sideways glance, but nodded all the same. “She isn’t saying much of interest. It’s just a lot of insults and threats.”
“Why would it want to break through the portal?” said Jingo Belle. As usual, the wide-eyed Breezie was vibrating, though whether out of fear or the thrill or sheer anger, no one could tell. “Doesn’t it know how things work around here?”
“It’s a creepy-crawly,” insisted Milktears in tones usually reserved for words like ‘monster’ or ‘killer’. “Who knows what crazy idea got into its head?”
“Here’s a crazy idea: why don’t I ask her what she wants?” said Piffle irritably. “I can speak Flutter Pony just as well as I can understand it.”
Several of the younger Breezies murmured amongst themselves, but the elder ones nodded, and most of the rest just shrugged. Seabreeze folded his forelimbs and waited for the buzz of talk to die down. He had no intention of stepping in. They could figure things out on their own, for a change.
Coughing to clear his throat, Piffle began a series of hisses and spitting fits. At once, the Flutter Pony fell silent and focused on him, staring and measuring its chances of a strike. It was just possible, listening to the speech, to pick out the odd word that rang a bell, but it was like seeing shapes in a pond after someone had fallen in. Most of it was nothing more than stuff that was always there anyway. Not a lick of sense came out of the whole.
When the Flutter Pony hissed and spat back, Piffle wiped his brow with a forelimb. So you do not know everything, thought Seabreeze, and he was surprised to find himself disappointed by this. Piffle was one of the few Breezies who didn’t go to pieces at the first sign of difficulty.
The old Breezie coughed again. “She says, though this isn’t her exact wording, ‘How dare you tie me up as if I’m a common thief. Don’t you know who I am?’”
Everyone around the chamber began shuffling their twiggy legs. If it wasn’t for the duty, all of them would’ve been outside enjoying a sip from the pond. Long years of dipping in and out of the Big World, however, had rubbed off on them. Until a couple of years ago, this room used to be just somewhere nice to visit whenever they felt like it.
Seabreeze shuffled along with his neighbours. Not for the first time, he wondered if they were becoming too much like the Equestrians. The younger Breezies talked endlessly about the fancy castles and well-dressed nobles and gigantic cities, but then they were also told endlessly not to wander off or get distracted. That was pony life. Breezies simply gathered the ingredients and left as soon as they could.
From a quarter of the way along the perimeter, Gusto floated over their heads. It had been her idea to turn this room into some kind of testing place, and now she was nodding her head as though mentally ticking items on a list.
“Tell her,” said Gusto in a clear voice, “that she knows why she’s here and that it’s not important who she is. She broke the rules.”
Nervous glances were passed around the circle. “Rules”. It was another one of those things they’d picked up from the ponies. Up until now, there had been no rules, not as such. Breezies did what Breezies did. They drifted through life like dandelion seeds in an updraft.
“What rules?” said Hugglenut, frowning.
“Our rules.” Gusto spoke in the same clear, slightly patronizing voice of one explaining something to a child; it was earning her a few glowers from the elderly. “No one but a Breezie can go through the Ring Portal. She also refused to listen to us, and she attacked the Breezies watching the Ring Portal.”
“Those aren’t rules,” said one of the elderly Breezies, and Seabreeze recognized him as Woodchip. “That’s just how things are. We don’t have to have rules for things like that.”
It would be like having rules for the sky, thought Seabreeze, who was nodding along with his neighbours among the crowd.
“All the same, the Flutter Pony broke them. We need to teach her a lesson.”
Piffle shrugged and passed on the words to the captive, making the Breezies near him draw back from his flying spittle. In reply, the Flutter Pony focused immediately on Gusto.
Seabreeze was impressed. Normally, the youngster was as unflappable as a pebble. Yet the Flutter Pony’s glare was as hot and intense as a dragon’s breath, and a wince and slight curling of the antennae betrayed a few cracks in the Breezie’s armour.
After a few seconds of spit flying across the room, Piffle hummed in interest and translated: “Since you don’t know who I am, I will tell you for your own good. I am Tailblade, the Queen of this world. I have no care for your so-called rules, and I come and go as I please. Let me go free, and I will show mercy for your mistake. If not, then this is treason, and I will deal with you as harshly as I can.”
Echoes died away around them, but the Breezies waited for a while, faces set in ice. As one, they drifted over to the closed double doors as though to bar the way.
Jingo Belle stepped forwards. Whether through a dawning joy or through sheer nerves, she was grinning widely.
“She’s nothing but a creepy-crawly,” she said, and even she sounded afraid of her own words despite the grin. “We can’t let her go, or she’ll come back and try something even more dangerous. We can’t trust anything she says.”
Looking at the Flutter Pony hissing and spitting some more, Seabreeze found it hard to argue. The stinger flexed around the base. His memory still saw it cutting through the darkness to stab the middle of his forehead.
What made it worse was that it happened here, in their home world. A stinger belonged in the Big World, where the insects alone were bigger and meaner, and the air never stayed still and could easily knock someone down with a puff. Even there, the Breezies rarely met stingers; the griffons and the pegasi swatted things like bees and wasps out of the way if they came too close.
“Maybe, uh, we could reason with her?” said Milktears.
“No. I agree with Jingo Belle,” said Gusto. “The best thing to do is to lock her up where she can’t threaten us or break any more rules.”
“But she can talk,” said Piffle. “And that means she can think.”
“Is that a problem?” If Gusto had worn glasses, she would have peered over them.
From the other side of what was now a half-circle, Zephyrine caught his eye. Seabreeze thought he could see every emotion in her eyes – relief, anger, fear, joy, confusion – but it had only been a second, and he glanced away from the sheer pressure.
He hadn’t told her yet what exactly happened. He wasn’t sure how to begin. The Breezie sentinels only watched the portal to push away dumb beetles or curious worms for their own good. Getting stung in the face was the stuff of myths.
I am not surprised they are frightened, Seabreeze thought, watching the ones at the back edge towards the door. This is not some stupid, blundering creature, and it is not a friendly fellow being either.
Piffle coughed and curled his lip in distaste. “No,” he said. “There is no problem.”
Both Gusto and Jingo Belle nodded. To Seabreeze’s surprise, so did a few other Breezies. Everyone else was trying to duck out without being seen, a tricky task after the first two dozen had left, but at the very least they weren’t arguing. Everyone else turned away their faces.
“Then it’s settled,” said Gusto with a shrug. “We’ll put her in a room out of the way, and give her some food from time to time. I think that’s the best way to solve this problem. Now she can’t hurt anyone. Would someone help me move her down to the dungeons?”
As soon as the tide went out the door, Zephyrine and Seabreeze were side-by-side, trying to ignore the hissing and spitting that was now much less sophisticated than anything Piffle could translate. Their heads drifted towards each other, meeting with a gentle tap.
“I do not want to talk about it,” said Seabreeze, taking care not to disturb the air around his mouth too much.
“You must have been very brave,” she whispered back.
“No, I was very lucky. The others were brave. I thought they were going to fly away and hide, but they stopped the Flutter Pony.”
Zephyrine raised an eyebrow at him, making her long lashes swipe at the air with the slight jerk. “And who tried to stop her first?”
“I think this is going to get worse and worse.” He blushed at her narrowing eye and pulled his head away; he knew a leading question when she threw one at him. “Gusto is talking like a pony. There is too much of this pony-mimicking going on.”
Inside his head, a part of him gaped in outrage. But it is all true, he spluttered to it. Oh, it may be OK to learn a lesson once in a while from ponies… once in a while… but if you cut any one of us in half, the one will have the word “Breezie” written on their heart. That means we do not do anything nasty or tough or brave or strange. We follow the breeze, and our magic comes to us. If we start wandering off the path willy-nilly, we will lose.
Despite this, the face of a pegasus drifted across his mind, raising an eyebrow at him doubtfully. And then there had been the way the Breezies piled on top of the Flutter Pony. True, it worked only because there were so many, but Breezies were famed for their fighting skills. Ponies pointed and said, “They don’t have any fighting skills!”
Aloud, he growled in frustration and said, “This is so stupid! I wish I had gone with the Foragers! I know what I am doing with water. It gets collected and carried back. What is so hard about that?”
Zephyrine glanced ahead at the straggling Breezies drifting round the corner. The corridor echoed with each flap of a wing.
“It seems to be over now,” she said with a shrug. “So yet another thing blindsides us. That happens. Why not forget this one oddity and carry on as normal?”
“Hm. Maybe you are right. Maybe I am worrying too much.”
“That’s the spirit. You need to relax and find something to make you feel better. After all, we’re Breezies, not ponies.” She smirked and added, “We’re the smart ones, remember?”