Chapter 25: Around the Campfire
The road out of River’s Reach met up with the King’s Road after a few miles, and as soon as they hit the wider, flatter road, Rainbow sighed and lied down flat on the back of the wagon. Unlike the rough and bumpy road out of the town, Nymera’s main road was smooth enough that she could actually relax and lie down without bashing her head against the wood or any of her friends’ luggage. The chatter of her companions was a song as soothing as the songbirds overhead, held against a backdrop of the Glittering Run burbling and rolling over stones and little falls.
It was a great way to spend a day. The scenery was beautiful and vivid, full of life in the middle of summer. She could just talk and talk with her friends all she wanted, or she could close her eyes and catch a nap. She made good use of that option, making up for all the sleep she’d missed to be up so early. Occasionally they’d pass a wagon going the other way, and Rainbow would wave at them as they passed.
They stopped for lunch a little bit before noon; the long trek had made them hungry, even Rainbow, who hadn’t done much walking when she had the cart to ride in. Lanner darted ahead and found a clearing just past a copse of trees on their right that was big enough for them to pull the cart over and relax. Hawk sighed with relief as he finally unharnessed himself from the heavy wagon, and he took several seconds to roll his shoulders and loosen his wings. Wrangler teased him for it, wondering what kind of stallion he really was if he was getting tired before the mares. Dawn missed the joke and began to explain just how Wrangler’s size and earth pony magic meant she suffered from fatigue roughly thirty-two percent slower than Hawk did before Flurry cut her off and asked for her help getting food out of the cart for their lunch.
A wide, flat rock by the edge of the river served as their makeshift picnic table. As Rainbow sat down with her food, she traced her hoof over the initials carved into the stone. Generations of ponies had used this rock to eat and rest, and many of them had left their marks. Some even left decorative sigils in the rock above long lists of names. Many were weathered with the passage of time, almost unreadable in the worn-out rock.
“Soldiers,” Dawn said at Rainbow’s side, catching the blue mare’s attention. “Armies used the King’s Road all the time. Stopped here often to camp. Officers left names, company emblem, before passing on.” Her hoof found a recent set of inscriptions on the rock. “King’s Royal Grenadiers, 2nd Brigade. Eagle carrying a rose was their emblem. About fifty years ago.”
She searched across the rock for a second before finding another list, this one much older. “4th Heavy Lancers of Baron Redoubt. Carving is crude and worn, but their emblem was a lance breaking through stone. Four hundred and thirty years ago.” Her eyes narrowed and she took a bite out of a sandwich before adding, “Pretender to the throne. Defeated ten miles from here. Captured, quartered, head mounted on pike. Family executed. Bloody affair.” She took another bite before her eyes drifted to Rainbow’s startled face. “Bother you? I apologize.”
She shrugged and took another bite of her meal, though Rainbow blinked a few times and leaned closer to the orange mare. “Uh, n-no! No, no, not at all, Dawn, it’s just, uh…” She looked at her own meal and grimaced at it. “History’s neato and stuff, but could you save it until after I have lunch?”
“I think we’d all like that, Dawn,” Hawk said from across the rock. “I don’t want to lose my appetite talking about quartering ponies.”
Dawn huffed and crossed her legs. “Quartering outlawed for ninety years now. Piece of history, nothing more. Don’t understand qualms about discussion. Doesn’t happen today.”
Flurry just smiled and shook her head as she worked on a juicy pear, amused at Dawn failing to pick up on social cues again. Rainbow felt some sympathy for the unicorn; it’s hard to know what to talk about when you go to great lengths to avoid conversation in the first place.
While the rest of her friends took their time with their food, Wrangler began inhaling one apple after another, chucking the cores over her shoulder into the river and watching them drift away. She worked her way through two pounds of apples and two sandwiches before she was finally contented. Rubbing her stomach, she belched and lied down on her belly while everypony else ate. “That was some good grub. I’ve been waiting for lunch since we set out! Pulling the cart’s hard work.”
“With all the food you loaded into that dang thing I’m sure it is,” Rainbow said, looking over her shoulder at the loaded cart. “It’ll probably weigh a hundred pounds less by the time we make it to Mymis.”
“We gotta eat something on the road,” Wrangler said, shrugging. “And besides, now that Hawk and I got us to lunch and we’ve eaten some of the food, you four can figure out who’s going to pull until dinner.”
Rainbow, Dawn, Flurry, and Lanner all looked at each other. Before anypony could say anything, Rainbow pointed to her recovering wing. “I claim medical leave.”
“Me too,” Flurry responded, tapping her temple. “Physical exertion makes me dizzy.”
Dawn narrowed her eyes at the artist. “Concussion symptoms unlikely to last this long. Indicative of brain damage, then.”
Lanner gasped and spun towards Flurry. “Oh my gosh! Are you feeling alright?!” She held up a foreleg. “How many hooves am I holding up?!”
“One,” Flurry said, “And no, I think I’m fine. It’s only when I do things like pulling heavy carts that it flairs up.”
Rainbow chuckled and rolled her eyes. “Sounds like brain damage to me. Lazy-itis is a terrible disease.”
Flurry opened her mouth to shoot something back at Rainbow, but Lanner wrapped her legs around her shoulders. “It’s okay, Flurry! I’ll pull for you, you and Rainbow just get your rest!” She turned to Dawn and smiled. “Come on, Dawn, it’ll be you and me! We’ll have lots of fun being harness buddies!”
“Heavy cart, harnessed in for six hours, Lanner’s mouth next to my ear.” Dawn’s eye twitched as she categorized the nightmare she was about to deal with. “Start singing and I’ll remove your mouth.”
Lanner blinked. “You can do that?”
“I wish I’d known that earlier,” Hawk said, smirking at his sister. “Think you can make it permanent?”
Dawn opened her mouth to say more, but Rainbow quickly placed her hoof over it. “Let’s not give her any ideas, okay? The last thing we need is the super powerful unicorn going on a power trip and taking over the world.”
“Not interested,” Dawn stated flatly. “Means I’d have to interact with ponies. No peace and quiet. Too many currying favors or begging to have their towns spared. Prefer the quiet life.”
“We should probably get moving,” Wrangler interjected, forcefully steering the conversation away from that topic. “Don’t want to burn more daylight than we’ve already spent.”
They broke up quickly and packed their leftover food away before getting back to the cart and hitting the road. Both Wrangler and Hawk had to work together to get the harness on Lanner and keep her still until it was tightened down; she was simply too excited to be pulling with Dawn. That excitement turned into disgust when she actually tried to move the cart and realized just how heavy it was. Dawn suggested that it would be easier to move if they took some of the weight out of it, and then proceeded to pick up nearly two hundred pounds of food and sculptures in her telekinesis and held it over their heads. For the next hour, Lanner was too scared to sing or chatter away, instead keeping one eye trained on the crates hovering overhead and the other on Dawn to make sure that she didn’t break her concentration. She let out a huge sigh of relief when Dawn finally decided to put the crates back in the cart and claimed that they were starting to tire her.
Meanwhile, Hawk, Rainbow, Flurry, and Wrangler followed at the sides or behind the cart, chatting with each other or with the two mares pulling it. Rainbow took the time to admire the scenery and keep her nose turned to the weather. It was blue skies and sunny now, but she could see clouds gathering far in the west, growing larger and taller as the hours passed. It’d probably be storming by midday tomorrow; she just hoped that they’d be someplace sheltered by then.
When Hawk drifted over to talk to Wrangler some more, Rainbow turned her attention to Flurry, who was lagging behind the group with her eyes on the road. Biting her lip, Rainbow drifted back to Flurry’s side and poked the mare in the shoulder. “You alright? Something on your mind?”
Flurry jumped at Rainbow’s touch, startled out of her thoughts. When she saw it was Rainbow, though, her ears flattened and she narrowed her eyes. “Oh. Nothing.”
The two walked side by side in awkward silence until Rainbow sighed and darted in front of Flurry, trotting backwards so she could look her in the eye. “Can we talk? Because I really think we should talk.”
Flurry frowned and bit down on her tongue like she was trying to stop it from saying something vicious. Instead, scowling, she simply came to a halt. “Fine. What do you want?”
Over Rainbow’s shoulder, Hawk and Wrangler both broke off their conversation and looked in the direction of the two mares. “You two alright?” Hawk asked.
Rainbow held up a wing. “Yeah, we’re fine. Go on, we’ll catch up.”
Hawk and Wrangler looked at each other for a moment before shrugging and resuming their conversation. Rainbow and Flurry watched them go until they were a good hundred or so feet further down the road before they continued after them. Eventually, Rainbow broke the ice with a blunt question. “Why don’t you like me?”
“Whatever gave you that impression?” Flurry grumbled back.
“Because, Miss Ice Queen, the cold shoulder’s freezing my ears off, and I’m kind of getting sick of it.” Exasperated, she looked right at Flurry, who was doing her best to just stare dead ahead. “We used to be friends, and then the whole Jubilee Day thing happened, and now you hate me! Why?” When Flurry didn’t answer, she pressed a hunch. “Is it because of Hawk?”
Though Flurry kept her face neutral, Rainbow didn’t miss the irritated twitch of her wings. Sighing, she hung her head and slowly shook it. “Look, I… I-I’m sorry, okay? I get it, I do, I just—”
“I’m sure you ‘get it’, alright,” Flurry spat back, her voice filled with venom. “I’d been trying to court Hawk for months, and he never batted an eye at me. But you?” She whipped her head toward Rainbow, who shrank back a bit. “You show up out of nowhere with no memory of who you are or where you came from, and you have that stallion eating out of your hoof. How can a mare who doesn’t know shit do what I’ve been trying to do for months? Huh? Explain that to me!”
Rainbow’s ears fell flat against her head and she wilted under Flurry’s onslaught. “I-I don’t know, Flurry, it just… just happened, okay? I don’t know what you want from me, I’m just as clueless about all this as you are!”
“What I want from you,” Flurry growled, “Is for you to leave. Find out where you came from and go back there. Leave us alone and let everything go back to normal. To how it should be.”
Rainbow stopped in her tracks, all but slapped in the face with how vicious Flurry’s words were. But even still, she gnashed her teeth together and galloped back up to the storming mare’s side. “Flurry, just… just listen to me! I’m sorry! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, but I can’t help it who I love! Hawk can’t help it who he loves! Why can’t we all be friends again? I liked that!” She felt her eyes prick with moisture and she violently shook her head to chase them away. “You guys are my friends! My only friends! Please, I don’t want this stupid thing to break us apart!
Flurry didn’t say anything back. Instead, she only picked up her pace, her hooves kicking up little clouds of dust on the dry road. Rainbow just watched her go and shivered, hugging herself tight with her wings before following her.
Alone.
-----
They continued down the road as the sun slowly went from their left to their right. Soon enough, the land rose around them, becoming more hilly and rough, while the river dug itself down into the rocks. Before too long, the six found themselves on winding roads navigating the rough and rocky terrain with trees all around them and the shadows of the hills covering the trail.
It'd slowed their progress considerably, as Hawk and Wrangler often had to get behind the cart and push it to try to get it up some steep inclines or manually drop the brakes before going down a hill. After two miles of that, they decided to swap out Dawn and Lanner, since they were stronger and could better control the cart from the front. Lanner had managed to crawl into the back of the cart, munch on an apple and drain a canteen of water, and promptly passed out, snoring between a crate of carrots and some of Flurry’s sculptures in their boxes. Dawn was little better herself, and she only reluctantly climbed into the back of the cart with Lanner when she realized that they weren’t going to stop for another few hours and she could hardly walk in a straight line anymore. Rainbow thought it was funny how Dawn napped; the unicorn tucked her legs under her, propped her head up on the edge, and shut her eyes. She looked like she was attentive and merely sitting on her stomach, even though she was out cold.
Meanwhile, Rainbow and Flurry kept to opposite sides of the cart where they didn’t have to interact. Rainbow trotted along at Hawk’s side, but Flurry followed the cart at a distance at Wrangler’s side, and neither could see hide nor hair of the other. Though Flurry’s nastiness in their confrontation stung Rainbow, she tried to keep it to herself. She didn’t want her feelings to tear apart the group not even a day into the journey. Flurry, at least, seemed like she was on the same page with that, and the few times they’d had to speak to each other along the way had gone smoothly, if a bit frosty.
But eventually, they had to come to a stop for the night. The sun had long since set, and the sky had slowly darkened until there was only the moon and the stars overhead. It wasn’t enough light to travel by, even with a lantern lit on the cart, and Hawk and Wrangler began complaining of exhaustion. So they found a place to pull the cart off to the side of the road, put together a fire pit, and soon had a crackling orange flame to gather around while they ate and prepared for bed.
Rainbow sat by Hawk’s side, their wings pressed together and feathers interwoven, as they ate some of their packed food they’d saved for dinner. Across from them was Flurry and Dawn, with the fire in between. Wrangler and Lanner sat on the left side, joking around with each other, while the cart was off to the right, straddling some tree roots so it’d be hard to steal in the middle of the night. It was peaceful and relaxing, and the chirping of crickets and the hooting of owls helped to relieve some of Rainbow’s anxiety. Instead of keeping a worried eye on Flurry, she could relax against Hawk’s side.
Dinner passed, and one by one, Hawk and his friends began telling stories about their youths. Lanner had the most entertaining tales by far, supplemented with Hawk’s observations at certain points, like how he explained that Lanner first tried to sit on a peregrine egg herself before moving it to a simple incubator when the mother died of a sickness, or how she once accidentally swallowed a strip of raw mouse meat when offering it to one of the birds. Rainbow had gotten a good laugh at Lanner’s face when she tried to describe the taste to the rest of them. ‘Overripe asparagus’ was not something that she would’ve thought to call raw meat, but it seemed fitting. She hardly liked the taste of the cooked meat that Hawk and Lanner ate on occasion, and it did awful things to her stomach. The ponies of Nymera seemed hardier than wherever she was from if it didn’t bother them. Or maybe she never saw them in the throes of crippling indigestion.
Dawn’s turn lasted for about five minutes of a lecture on the anatomy of a squirrel she dissected when she was nine before Flurry asked her to stop in the interest of keeping her dinner down. The unicorn hardly seemed disappointed; Rainbow guessed that she might have actually been telling a disgusting story in the hopes that exactly that would happen, because then she didn’t have to talk anymore.
Then it came to Rainbow, and an awkward silence settled over the group. When it dragged on for a few seconds, Hawk nuzzled Rainbow’s cheek. “It’s okay, Rainbow,” he said. “We understand.”
Rainbow shivered, but just as Hawk was about to take his turn, she cleared her throat. “I’ve got one,” she said. When everyone fell quiet again, she smirked faintly. “It’s not a story from when I was a filly, but it’s the thing I remember the most clearly.”
She had everypony’s attention now, even Lanner’s, who finally stopped rocking the log she was sitting on back and forth just to listen. Dawn watched with the same measured attention she gave everything, and Flurry stopped preening her wings and watched Rainbow out of the corner of her eye. Wrangler and Hawk watched her with interest, wondering just what exactly she had to say.
“It wasn’t that long ago, but there was a time when I was completely alone. I was confused and… well, scared,” she admitted, blushing slightly. “And I was hurt and didn’t know who I was or where I was or anything. And though I don’t remember everything—not even close—I feel like a pony now, not a blank slate or something like that. And I have Hawk to thank for that.”
She nuzzled up against his side and closed her eyes for a few seconds. Even far away from River’s Reach and the post office, he smelled like birds: the musky scent of tree leaves mixed with the open air of the sky. “The very first thing I remember is opening my eyes and seeing him there. And he did his best to calm me and be my friend and take care of me when I was too weak and afraid to go anywhere, and without that…” She shook her head. “Well, I wouldn’t be here. That’s for sure. And I wouldn’t know you guys. I’m so thankful to have you all as my friends. All of you. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
She pointedly looked at Flurry as she said that, and Flurry narrowed her eyes at her. But Rainbow held her gaze, and eventually Flurry self-consciously shuffled her feathers and looked away, clearing her throat as she did so.
Rather than dismay, Rainbow felt a sense of accomplishment. She’d win her back over yet. All it’d take her was patience and dedication. For some reason, she thought Twilight would’ve liked that.
The night beat on and on, and one by one, Hawk’s friends retired for the night. Wrangler was the first to go, and all she did was toss an old, worn, dusty pillow on the ground and flop her head onto it before she was asleep. Flurry and Lanner followed suit, Flurry taking an awful long time to get her sleeping bag just how she wanted it, while Lanner crashed and began snoring almost immediately. Dawn carefully rearranged her meager possessions, made a pillow for herself with her saddlebags, and once again fell into that curious upright way she slept. Soon, it was just Rainbow and Hawk sitting side by side, staring at the full moon overhead while their friends snored.
“It wasn’t always like that, you know,” Hawk said, idly.
Rainbow’s ears perked; she was on the verge of falling asleep against his side, and she had to force herself back awake. “Hmm?”
“The moon,” he said, pointing with a wing at it. “Something happened a year or two ago. There used to be this crater pattern in it that looked like a mare’s head, then it just disappeared one night. Nopony could explain it. All the best mages in Nymera couldn’t explain it, but they were going to devote their efforts into figuring out what went wrong. Some ponies claimed that an ancient evil that had been bound in the moon had been set free, but if so, we haven’t seen anything about it.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what to make of it myself, but nothing changed. Life went on, and we’re still here now. That’s all that matters.”
Rainbow thought about it for a few moments; something about that tickled that murky place in her mind she just couldn’t wade through. “I guess that sounds familiar,” she said, frowning. “I mean, I’d probably remember that, too, no matter where I came from. But it’s like… well, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “It feels really familiar, actually. Like, I was there when it happened. Or something. I don’t know.”
Hawk smiled at Rainbow and kissed her ear. “You’re just full of mysteries, aren’t you?”
Rainbow smirked back at him. “Stallions like mysterious mares, too, it’s not just the other way around.”
“You could say that.”
They sat in each other’s company for almost another hour before Rainbow could hardly keep her eyes open. Instead, she shut them and leaned against Hawk. “I forgot my sleeping bag… what will I do now?”
Hawk chuckled, and his eyes momentarily flicked to Rainbow’s sleeping bag sitting in the back of the cart. “I guess there’s enough room in mine for two. Is that okay with you?”
Rainbow smiled and kissed his shoulder. “That’s fine with me. I’m sorry for being such a bother…”
The sleeping bag wasn’t meant for two ponies, but they didn’t mind. It only made sure they wouldn’t roll away from one another as they slept.