... Warm.
Cuddly.
Soft.
Warm. Soft. Cuddly.
Cuddle soft warm soft cuddle warm cuddle soft warm.
If Sandbar could live his whole life cuddling Ocellus, he would. Her soft giggling just made him feel warmer.
"Sandbar."
He rubbed his cheek against her's and then nibbled her ear a bit.
"Eep! I, uh, think he's waking up."
Waking up? Wait.
Sandbar blinked a couple of times, then moved his mouth away from Ocellus' ear. Looking up, he saw Celestia and Luna laying in front of a door, with Gold Strike between them laying his head against Luna's shoulder. A soft giggle to his right drew his attention to his friends, though not before his vision passed over Twilight and Fluttershy. Looking back at Ocellus, he only just realized that he was laying on top of her.
"Uh... Wrong time?"
The grown creatures then joined the younger ones in laughter.
Gold Strike wiped a tear from his eye. "Take it from me, kid. When you're close enough to your girl, there's never a wrong time for love."
Luna nuzzled her Kirin. "Except perhaps on the battlefield."
Battlefield? "Wait, where's our eighth member?"
Twilight pointed in the one place Sandbar hadn't looked yet. "She's right there."
Sandbar craned his head around to his left. Lying there was a grown mare with dark colors. "Wait, isn't she the one that found us in the forest after our battle with Fluttershy?"
Twilight nodded. "Yes. She is. You met her before and she was about to meet you again anyway, so fate was drawing her towards you. Gold Strike mentioned her as a Unicorn who lost her horn and her way, but it was only when Gold Strike was describing what we needed in the eighth member that I who he was talking about when he said that."
"So she knew for sure that Tempest Shadow had the potential to use our power, she would be a different element from the rest of us, and she had combat training. And to think I mentioned her without knowing she would join us."
Sandbar continued to stare at the unconscious mare. "How much is fate going to dictate our lives?"
Gold Strike sighed. "Let me put it this way. I ended up in a hospital at one point and overheard someone planning on overthrowing Celestia. I would have thought it was an odd coincidence if I didn't already know how our power acts at times."
Celestia's eyes were darting around. "You... did stop them, right?"
"That was before I got sealed away."
Celestia smiled and sighed.
Gallus was anything but smiles. "So we can talk about the big stuff now, right?"
"Yeah?"
"Then what the heck happened with the E.E.A.? Everything else I can chalk up to you faking the bad guy role, but not that!"
Everyone else gasped.
"That's right! You admitted to that!"
"Is that true?"
"You're behind that?"
Everyone was talking at once. Everyone except Gold Strike, who covered his head, his eye twitching and body shaking.
And Luna.
"SIIIIIIIILEEEEEEENCEEEEEEE!"
Half a mile away, a flock of birds fled their tree.
Luna, seeing the others silenced, placed her hoof on Gold Strike's head. "Goldie?"
The Kirin sighed and closed his eyes. "I didn't want it to go that far. I wanted Neighsay out of the way for the time being, so I sent an anonymous letter to the Night's Embrace. 'If Neighsay had his way, the White Cursed would be spread across the world.' I knew they wouldn't want that, so I knew they would do something."
Smolder put her hand to her chin. "But they reacted more viciously than you wanted them to."
Gold Strike stopped shaking. "I expected them to blackmail or kidnap him, or the entire E.E.A., maybe kill Neighsay at worst. I never thought they would just kill the entire organization."
Ocellus' face softened. "I see. So it was an attempt at manipulation gone horribly wrong. Or right, depending on how you look at it."
"Alright, that's answered. But I have something else." Celestia produced a small scrap of paper from her mane.
As if in response, Luna produced a note with a scrap torn off, took Celestia's scrap, and put them together.
To the Princess of the night.
You're still so stubborn. You haven't responded to my letters, and don't think I didn't see you scowl at me when I was in the crowd earlier. If you don't like me, well, I apologize.
However, do not think I have abandoned the thought's I have of being yours. Living life alone is not good for one, no matter what they think or desire. Yet, you value your loneliness above all else, possibly even the night itself.
Since that is how I see you, I will take what is most valuable to you.
Celestia looked at the letter. "That's why you wrote that? A cheesy love letter?"
"Cheese is delicious."
Luna started laughing, prompting Gold Strike to give her a toothy smile.
Celestia only lowered her eyebrows in response. "That's the last thing. You can control the minds of others. How do I know Luna honestly loves you?"
The eldest lovers looked at Celestia, then at each other. Then they smiled.
The Princess of the Sun turned away. "Nevermind. It's not important." Her eyes shot wide, then her entire face tightened up. "Hey! No! It is important! Don't try to-"
The Princess of the Moon and her lover started laughing.
"D-don't laugh! I want an-"
"Uh, your highness?" Fluttershy's smile was considerably softer. "I think he just answered your question."
Celestia's jaw hung open as she tilted her head. "How?"
Ocellus managed to roll over while still under her lover. "Well, think about it. If he didn't want you to think about it, why not just force it out of your mind entirely?"
Twilight's smile was more to the right of her face. "I think we overestimated what Gold Strike is capable of. When he made me kiss Fluttershy just now, it felt like my body was grabbed and forced as opposed to moving on its own."
Sandbar's ears perked up. "Wait! I missed you two getting it on?"
Everyone else looked at Sandbar.
"Er, I mean, kissing."
Everyone else roared with laughter.
"Oh, Sandbar." Yona started crying from laughter. "You should watch what you say."
"I like," Silver had to catch her breath before actually talking, "I like how it's not, "you're in love?" Or, "he made you kiss?" But, "I missed it?" Like he already knew you two loved each other."
"Well, Uh." Sandbar was having trouble keeping a straight face himself. "I happened to overhear a few particular conversations that made it sound like they were already dating."
Twilight was the first to get her laughter under control. "No. Not yet. But it won't take long for our first date."
Fluttershy rubbed her cheek against her lover. "And I know you'll make it romantic."
Sandbar looked around. "Where are the other teachers, anyway?"
Gallus wiped his tears from his eyes. "They're in the castle, helping out. There's a bit of clean-up going on, but we don't need to worry about that. We did take care of the big stuff, after all."
Celestia let out one last chuckle before looking at Gold Strike again. "So, what exactly is the limit of your power?"
"Well, I can give brief commands to others, and they usually can't tell that I sent them if they even realize that they acted strangely. I can trigger specific receptors in the mind, making them feel things I want them to, such as pain or warmth. If I'm touching them, I can completely hijack someone's mind and body, but that requires constant contact."
Smolder, at some point, had moved several of the pillows into the shape of a throne. "Is that why you're a one on one fighter? Because you can win your fights easily that way?"
"It lets me win fights with little to no risk of harming or killing my opponent."
Luna was watching Gold Strike out of the corner of her eye. "Translation; it lets him fight like a coward."
The yellow Kirin buried his red face into his hooves.
"So forcing Luna to love you for all of these years was..."
"Impossible." The exasperated male pulled his hooves down his face. "Even if I managed to do that, I would have needed to stay somewhat close to her to maintain it. Close enough that I would have needed to be in the castle the whole time."
"And it definitely would have cut off when I was sent to the moon." Luna giggled. "Though I must admit, the "trap the moon" ultimatum I made was actually his doing."
Twilight's wings shot open, as did her eyes. "Wait, really?"
Celestia's body and expression mirrored her student's. "But that's the kind of thing you would have done to get someone off of your back!"
"That's why I didn't mention that fact until now. I figured he was being overconfident and, if he succeeded, he deserved a date with me."
Luna's lover pressed his head against her neck. "And look where we are now."
Celestia's face had her usual expression. "Well, that's everything off of my mind."
Sandbar raised his hoof. "In that case, may I ask a few things?"
Gold Strike shrugged. "Shoot."
"What happened with Chrysalis?"
"I led her and her cronies to Fluttershy and let things play out on their own."
"You seem rather casual about putting other lives on the line."
Gold Strike rubbed the side of his head. "I had no idea the E.E.A. members were gonna die, Chrysalis didn't die, and I haven't really put anyone else on the line."
"What about your old team?"
"There are so many reasons I blame Sky Blitz for that."
Celestia spoke up, "You don't really like him, do you?"
"He tried to make us celebrities, he kept trying to treat us like soldiers when we weren't, his insistence on us all attending minor missions that only needed two or three of us led to Discord attempting his takeover and Nightmare Moon getting sent to the moon, and he yanked us from our homes when we had a teleport system set up so we wouldn't need to be."
"Woah, Woah, Woah." Silver was waving her claw around. "That all makes that Sky Blitz guy sound like a bad leader, but what was that about a teleport system?"
"The airship has a teleporter room in it. We used it to go on our missions before he decided we needed to actually live on the thing. It's how I led you six to the ship and the mirror in the first place."
Ocellus put her hoof to her chin. "Okay, that leads to two more questions. First, why wasn't the ship flooded when it was at the bottom of the ocean?"
"Protective wards we had in place to keep our powers from going through the ship and dropping onto some unfortunate innocent's head."
"Second question, what was the airship's power source?"
Gold Strike's expression went blank, then he looked out the window. Everyone else followed his gaze.
The airship was flying towards them.
"What? How?"
"It's flying again?"
"It's not gonna hit anything, is it?"
Gold Strike shook his head. "It'll hover a mile above us. It's barely sapient enough to not ram into things willy-nilly."
Ocellus stared at the ship, then her jaw dropped. "Don't tell me. Did you design the airship to use Erebus as a power source?"
Gold Strike's mirthless smile told the others everything they needed to know.
Twilight's eye was twitching. "I'm sorry, but are you really using the monster that caused so much despair, tried to kill us all, and caused nearly every incident past and present as a battery?"
"We made the airship energy inefficient on purpose."
Twilight's jaw hung open, then hoof met face. "That means yes."
Celestia pat the yellow creature on his back. "It's the same logic as keeping Discord in our garden. It's better to keep that kind of thing somewhere you can monitor and react to it rather than somewhere secluded, where it can get out without you knowing until it's too late."
"I think that was the ship builder's logic. We used to keep it on a pedestal in a safe house, but someone nearly destroyed it, meaning we needed to make a new base of operations that isn't as easy to get to. We had a Magnetism Guardian at the time, and he decided to use Erebus as a fuel source while building the ship to keep it as weak as possible and somewhere we could keep track of it without it possibly getting loose."
Everyone else looked between each other and Gold Strike.
"What?"
Silver was the one to talk, "I'm sorry, but Magnetism... Guardian?"
Gold Strike blinked twice, then lifted the right side of his mouth. "Oh, right. You wouldn't know. Before we were called the White Cursed, we were referred to as Guardians, and our power was called the Guardian's Blessing."