//------------------------------//
// Love You 
// Story: The Olden World 
// by Czar_Yoshi 
//------------------------------//

Starlight could think of no way she would rather wake up.

It was dark. She didn't need to open her eyelids to feel the lack of light touching against them. She was under a roof, within walls, on a soft, plush bed that shifted just enough to form a nest around her... and she was warm. Maple curled around her, having woken herself or else shifted during her slumber, leaving Starlight toasty but not quite uncomfortably hot. She stretched anyway, exposing more of herself to the air and rolling over so her cool side was against Maple and the bed.

Pretending she was back in Riverfall, waking up in Maple's house after a harrowing trip down a waterfall wasn't hard at all. She still held a tiny shred of cold deep in her core, left over from the icy blizzard, more a memory than anything physical, but it was fighting a losing battle against reality: she was safe, alive, and loved, and so was the pony holding her in her sleep.

Starlight shifted again, laying a foreleg over Maple's shoulder, too small to wrap it all the way around like her mother was doing for her. Any troubles the world could throw at her were distant nightmares here. One day, she'd have to think about how she almost died, or about recordings and countries and passes to Equestria, or about what was fair and right and what she would do with herself in the world. But none of that mattered. All of it could wait. Right now, this was perfect, and she wanted as much as possible... so she did exactly what she had that first time in Riverfall, and drifted off back to sleep.





The next time Starlight awoke, someone was licking her ears.

"Maple..." she murmured, feeling the mare's rhythmic motion against her as Maple rooted through her mane and worked out snarls with patience and teeth.

"Shh," Maple gently commanded. "Your mane is a mess. I'm fixing it."

Starlight held still, letting her work.

"You have a horn," Maple suddenly whispered in surprise.

That caused Starlight's ears to perk in concern. "Maple?"

"You... that wasn't..." Starlight lit her horn with the barest of glows, allowing her to see Maple's dusty brown face and watery pink eyes. "Oh." Maple's eyes clenched in pain. "I-I thought I was dreaming again..."

"Maple?" Starlight nosed her in worry, keeping her voice low. "We're on Shinespark's airship. We're flying back home, and we'll be there soon. Don't worry. We're safe, okay?"

Maple kept her eyes closed. "No..." she protested. "No, we're not on an airship! We're at home! We never left! Ironridge was a dream... We were planning to go this morning, but it's a bad idea... Tell Arambai we're not going. I want to stay here..."

Starlight listened, but could still feel the faint magical hum that told her they were in a ship, and not a house on the ground. "Maple, it's over," she consoled. "No more Ironridge. We're going home."

"We never left home!" Maple insisted. "Please... Ironridge wasn't real... Aspen, tell me it wasn't real..."

"I'm Starlight," Starlight whispered, the warmth she had felt disappearing and being replaced by fear. "Maple? Are you all right?"

"No!" Maple shook, scrunched, curling tighter into a ball. "No, no... Starlight... Please be Aspen... I don't want to wake up... Don't send me back..."

"Maple!" Starlight raised her voice, getting her forelegs beneath her. "Ironridge is over! We're not going back! Things are going to get better, remember? We never have to go back there."

Maple continued to shake. "That's what I thought... I never wanted to be there again..."

Starlight frowned. "Again? Maple, did you have a nightmare? We're awake now. It's okay..."

"I wish it had been a nightmare..." Maple's pink eyes opened, and they were more lucid than before. "That was real, wasn't it? We went to Ironridge after all... We..."

"Yes, but it doesn't matter!" Starlight protested, wrapping her forelimbs back around Maple. "We're out now and nothing more is going to happen! We're okay!"

Briefly, she recollected the dreamlike vision she had experienced while disembodied, with the gray world and dead monsters and older, injured Valey. Wait... Maple hadn't seen the same thing, had she? Could that be what this was about?

"I need to do something," Maple suddenly panted, struggling to get up. "Other than laying here! I'm... I'm hungry! Come on, Starlight. Will you come get a snack with me?"

Starlight quickly agreed. She wasn't particularly hungry herself, but Maple was likely wobbly enough to need her support at the very least, if not be outright carried. And she badly wanted to talk to her about everything that had happened... even if Starlight was the one who would be being leaned on, most likely.

She brightened her horn, helping push Maple out of bed, and realized there was a black shape curled at the far end a respectful distance from where they had lain. "Mrrgrrgh..." Valey grunted, her hat missing and forehooves wrapped cutely over her face. "Buzz off, chumps... Five more minutes..."

Maple glanced at her as they passed, leaning so heavily on Starlight that she might as well have been being carried. Starlight got the door with her magic, remembering to turn left to reach the staircase, since they were on the opposite side of the hall as usual.

They proceeded slowly and carefully, neither slipping nor stumbling, and didn't run into anyone else in the ship's dark interior. Starlight kept her horn lit for illumination, a niggling thought pestering her brain: hadn't there been a time yesterday when she felt it stopping her from crossing some invisible threshold, right after she used a strong spell? She didn't feel that now, her telekinesis and lighting working freely, yet the faint touch and influence of the tree's magic was still there, guiding her just like it had for reinforcing a spell after her first visit. Something was different about her magic, and there was a chance it was permanent. Mentally, she made a note to think about it and figure it out later, once Maple didn't need her attention.

In the dining room that took up most of the bottom of the ship, Starlight paused. The giant table that could serve for banquets or conferences was gone... No, not gone. It had somehow been retracted up to the ceiling, its sturdy legs folded against it. That left the room empty, probably done to help hold ponies when Gerardo was using the ship for rescuing. It also made obvious what the table was covering when in place: a giant, rectangular window of reinforced glass, set as a pane in the floor and providing a bird's-eye view of the landscape below.

Starlight stopped to stare. The Yule River snaked its way east below her, swollen to a point where water was visible between the treetops that banked it, reflecting the red of sunset. Yet the ground wasn't gouged away like the eastern valley; the river had spilled its banks but not annihilated them completely. There must have been some choke point upriver, trapping all the water in Sosa and forcing it to drain slowly. Hopefully that meant Riverfall would be okay.

"I'm hungry," Maple panted, reminding her of their destination.

Together, they staggered into the kitchen, a room Starlight hadn't been in before. Immediately adjacent to it was the storeroom, and that was the target Maple's nose led them for. Horn pulsing, Starlight opened a door, and suddenly they were surrounded by sacks, barrels, and strings of things hanging from the rafters. Maple was practically salivating.

Starlight sat back as Maple tore open a bag and started munching. "I'm not waiting to cook food," she announced, devouring something very crunchy by the hoofful.

Cautious, Starlight picked her way around the room and sat down next to Maple, close enough that they could lean against each other. "What are those?"

Maple held a small, circular chip out on a hoof. "They taste like bananas," she offered.

Starlight tried one. They felt good for snacking, but she could wait until dinner. Or breakfast. Or whenever someone decided to cook something.

Eventually, Maple had her fill, sighing and sitting back against Starlight. "Feel better?" the filly asked.

"A little." Maple sighed again, shuddering once. "I don't want that to have been real, Starlight..."

"Sorry," Starlight murmured. "I didn't want to get separated. Really..."

"It's too much," Maple whimpered. "I miss my friends... I wish I had them to talk to. They would understand..."

"Can you talk to me about it?" Starlight offered, unsure if she wanted anything more to deal with when she was at least somewhat stable, yet desperately afraid of how bad Maple had been when she had first woken.

Maple deflated. "Maybe. You weren't there for... for everything I went through before you showed up..."

"But you told me about it." Starlight leaned patiently into her. "And Amber, and Willow. You had a husband, and he left, and a foal that died. Aspen."

"Miscarried," Maple corrected. "But that wasn't all. Every time I had set my life to doing something, it was like I had a door slammed in my face. Remember, Starlight... I know how you feel about cutie marks, but I got mine preparing to go to Ironridge many years ago. And then that plan died, and there was nothing at all I could do about it..." A tear dripped from her muzzle, and she didn't wipe it away. "So I tried to start a family, like Willow... and then that happened... All of it. It feels horrible. It feels like..."

She swallowed, thinking. "You're laying in bed. It's morning. And you think about everything you could or should or want to do for the day... and you don't believe it will be worth it, so you stay in bed. You're afraid things will just go wrong again, and think because things always go wrong for you, it's because of you. You hate yourself for being afraid to try, and when that's not enough to get up, you hate yourself for not getting up. But the more you hate yourself, the harder it is to get up, even when you tell your body to move and it just doesn't, and then it's noon and evening and you're still there... and you'll eventually get up for the bathroom, and that will be good enough, and you'll go back to bed and do it all over again the next day, and the next, and so on..."

"Maple..." Starlight cringed, something inside her shying away from thinking of her mother like that.

"It's horrible." Maple's voice sounded hollow, haunted by memories of a distant life. "There's nothing you can do to escape it. You have to get up and do things, and convince yourself that you can do things worth doing, and the moment you stop, it all goes away. I still don't understand how I came back... but I had friends who tried just as much as I did, and no shortage of miracles that helped me see the world brightly again. Miracles like you." She sniffed, gently nuzzling Starlight's cheek.

"I never wanted to feel like that again," Maple whispered. "I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I'm scared of thinking I've done enough, still, because if I stop and sit down, a part of me remembers not being able to get up again. But I'm also scared of being unable to think I've done enough, because if I start being unhappy with what I have done, I might not think it's worth doing any more. Finding a balance is hard. It involve not worrying, and hoping things will turn out good..."

Starlight suddenly realized where this was going. "And then you pushed us to do something on the third day, right? To go back for White Chocolate, and then to do something about the fighting, and to help Valey? And we went too far and got in trouble again when we had finally gotten safe?"

"...Yes," Maple choked. "But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was when I got stabbed by that stupid griffon's sword..."

Starlight's eyes widened, and she gently nodded.

"He was sitting there afterward, when we were starting to group up," Maple murmured, sounding like she was barely holding back tears. "Telling me all about how scary it certainly was, and how I'd be just fine, and how everyone who got cut with it said it was like nothing they had ever experienced..."

Her teeth suddenly grated, nearly spitting sparks. "And it wasn't! It was exactly... exactly how I had felt before... It didn't matter what I thought, or how much I screamed at my body to move. I just laid there in a heap, able to look around and breathe and do nothing else! I never wanted to feel like that again! I used to rage at myself for not moving, to imagine throwing myself out of bed and willing my muscles to make me walk and having absolutely nothing happen! It was so hard to escape from that... It took so much, from me and my friends, and there I was again..."

Openly, she started sobbing. "I hate that sword. It's evil. I don't care how much he says it saves lives compared to a real weapon, or that it's just some trinket he bought from an enchanter. That sword is bad. Even carrying a windigo heart didn't make me feel that way. I can still feel it. If I didn't know how long I could stay there for... I'd still be in bed right now. In my mind, I still know everything to do, to believe in myself and that it's just a magic curse instead of some hormone imbalance or just me... but it didn't help. I made it for so long, reminding myself of why the world was good and who I cared about that was still in it, like you and my friends. And then G-Gerardo stuffed me alone in the engine room, and hooked me up to a machine, and left me there for so long, and I was alone...!"

"And then I..." Starlight's heart dropped through the floor.

"And then you came back!" Maple screamed, clutching Starlight and wailing. "And were going to use that machine with your horn hurt that much, and I wanted to warn you, and I knew I should have warned you earlier and it was my fault and I couldn't do anything but sit there and watch..."

"I-I'm sorry," Starlight managed, unsure how she was still able to talk.

"I couldn't. I saw it. It was my fault," Maple sniffed. "And I knew what was about to happen. Gerardo said it would wear off, but it doesn't take magic to keep me like that. If you died, and it was my fault... I'd probably stay like that until I died. I was so afraid. Afraid for both of us... I didn't want that to happen..."

Starlight choked out a few noises that might have been the beginning of an apology.

"I don't know how I did it," Maple whispered. "I knew I was still me, and that I had to believe things could be better, even if there was no possible way... I saw you fading, and I refused to let you die... and then..." She was silent for a moment. "Holding you hurt. It was like the overcharged flame, like I could fly apart at any second and be annihilated. I thought I would drop you after only a second. But there was something holding me together, too, that was even stronger. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was both of us... It never got easy, but it got easier, once I realized I could hang on. Once I had hope that I could do it, that there was a real possibility..."

She trailed off for good, leaving the silence punctuated by only an occasional sniffle.

"...Don't worry," Starlight eventually said. "I went back for White Chocolate. They're all on the ship too. If you don't want to deal with them and Willow, I-"

"No." Maple cut her off, still holding her close. "I will. The sword might be magic, but I... n-need to feel like I'm doing something. To remind myself I can make a difference. I'm still scared, Starlight. I need my friends. I need to hear them remind me that that's not who I am, just like they always have..."

"We're going back to Riverfall," Starlight reminded her. "We're almost there. At least, we better be..."