“Aurora?”
Back in the present, Aurora looked away from her yak audience and faced the open kitchen door. There in the tiny room of cake-making, apron dirtied with batter but beaming with a smile nonetheless, was Bori smelling of dough. She remained undeterred in spite of the kitchen’s miserable messy state; all her hooves were clean and unstained from the batter, for one. In the back of the kitchen, Alice stirred the mixing bowl with so much vigor that drops of batter flew and splattered on Bori’s antler, ruining her cleanliness.
“What is it?” Aurora asked, holding in a teasing smile. “I was about to tell Yitterby here the good part!”
“Oh...” Bori’s eyes fluttered while she took a towel to wipe her antlers with. “You’re almost there, aren’t you?”
Aurora sighed, dismissively waving her hoof. “Yes, yes. I’m almost there.”
After a few seconds of staring down at the floor in thought, she took a step out of the kitchen. “I think I should take over,” she said.
Boggled, Aurora tilted her head and crunched her lips. “I’m the one who remembers almost every detail of what happened. Now that’s one more good and unobtrusive use of my powers aside from gift-giving!” and she leaned back on her chair, self-satisfied.
“Well... honestly, though,” Bori began, bobbing her forelegs, “I feel like I’m more suited for this part.”
“And why is that?” Aurora said, gesturing at Yitterby beside her. “We wouldn’t be hospitable to this kind yak here if we tell an incomplete story!”
“I know, Aurora,” answered Bori, eyes becoming a speck more downcast. “But I believe I should tell him how we got here… how we got to the present.”
Aurora looked off, a bit fumbled. “You want to take a break from baking, no?”
“We’re actually about to get to the heating part,” Bori said, adept in dodging the question. “At least, I think we’re getting there. Alice got the recipe from the future, so I’m not really sure. I’m taking Alice’s word on it, though.”
Aurora rolled her eyes and rubbed her hooves. “Fine. It’s strange: you talking about the past when I can see it like it’s crystal clear... but if it helps the now, then so be it.”
“Thank you, Aurora.”
So, Aurora got out of her chair and trotted slowly to the kitchen, passing by several trinkets scheduled to be wrapped into proper gifts. Her final words before entering were, “Alice! What’re you up to now with your future cakes?!”
“But it’ll be a Manehattan special! Hundreds of thousands of ponies will love it!”
“Manehattan’s just a tiny village by the island! How could it possibly house so many ponies?”
The door closed and the argument simmered down shortly after.
Yitterby was alone with Bori who’d just sat down where Aurora had been for a long storytelling while. With no windows in the dining room, he couldn’t tell if thirty minutes or three hours had passed. It felt more like the former, however; so enraptured by the old reindeer’s saga was he.
“So… uh, how are you so far, Yitterby?” Bori asked before taking a spoonful of the mint fudge she still had. “Doing well?”
The yak nodded. “Yak certainly doing well! Good story by old reindeer! Yak tell great story to family and friends back home!”
Bori smiled and cleaned her mouth with a napkin. “That’s good. But well… I hope you’re not missing the point.”
That brought Yitterby’s own smile down. “What point?”
“Seems you’ve forgotten already,” Bori said worriedly. “Stories don’t just exist for entertainment. They’re there to make the holidays… and, well, everything… a bit more magical.”
She looked back at the kitchen door, listening to the clings and clangs within. “I should know. I’ve eavesdropped,” and she chuckled afterwards.
Yitterby frowned at that. “Eavesdropping not good, right?”
“... let’s talk about that later,” Bori said with a blush, “especially when Aurora and Alice can freely talk about your past and future the way they talk about the weather.”
But her blushing smile gave way to a slump and a frown. She proceeded to take another spoonful of mint fudge, savoring the flavor and trying to let it overpower whatever had caused her bad mood.
“What’s wrong?” the yak asked, slightly rising from his chair.
Bori waved him off although she smacked her own forehead right after. With a groan, she replied, “Aurora was right about one thing: I don’t know ninety-nine percent of the details of how we got here. Technically, Aurora should still be on this chair telling you the story... but, well, Aurora’s about the past to a fault.” Her eyes gradually turned towards the kitchen door once more. “Ask her about anything that happened today, she’ll only know a thing or two before it’s back to relying on ordinary memory.”
Yitterby rubbed his dirty plate, processing what he’d just been told. “But superpower still superpower, right?”
“Not really,” Bori answered. “There’s such a thing as knowing too much... and, from the looks of it, Aurora wouldn’t be able to have a normal conversation outside of us.” A pained look came upon her, closing her eyes tight for a second. “She could try, but since she’ll know random stuff about you without having to ask for it... it gets quite embarrassing, or else, she tries to hide it, but you know she’s only faking ignorance.”
This left Yitterby resting all his weight against his chair. Sitting back in pitiful contemplation, he brought a hoof to his cheek. His pout, combined with the bangs obscuring his eyes, formed a sympathetic mien on him.
“Yak guess same thing happen to small reindeer,” he mused soberly.
It was Bori’s turn to sigh. “I could say it’s even worse for her. At least for Aurora and me, the future is an unexplored frontier full of surprises. For Alice, she’s Ms. Know-It-All, but that doesn’t help her all the time.” Now fully facing the kitchen door, “If someone showed something new to us, Alice would be bored because she’d seen it already. If you told us some news, Alice would’ve already heard of it. A new invention ten years later? Alice probably knew it ten years before.” Bori scratched her antlers in serious thought. “Really, there’s not much to surprise her with… or, well, make her excited about until recently. Doesn’t help she can see as far as… uh, she’s told me that something pretty wild is going to happen in Equestria’s thousandth Summer Sun Celebration, but she’s keeping it between us.”
“And me?” the yak quipped, holding up a glass of water.
“I don’t know,” Bori said with a shrug of her shoulders, losing eye contact with him. “She’s pranked us before, talking small things up like big things.” She sighed once more, this one longer and more sorrowful. “Point is, it’s hard for her to live a normal life since she pretty much knows half of the future. In a way, what’s the point? Or half the point...”
The yak sighed, too, having downed his glass of freezing glacial-level water. “Yak see problem.”
A few moments of silence passed as they stared to the side, wondering about Aurora’s and Alice’s plight.
“Yak curious,” he spoke up, silently examining Bori with a piercing stare. “What is pink reindeer power?”
Perking up at the sudden inquiry, Bori answered, “Not much. I can see into the present... which doesn’t sound great.” Her ears drooped at that. “I know bits and pieces of what you want and I know what someone else far away from here may be doing now... but that’s it. I don’t know your deepest darkest secrets, I don’t know if you’re married—maybe you mentioned it earlier, but I forgot...”
“Is that bad?” the yak asked.
“I guess…” and Bori drifted off before resuming: “I guess staying in the moment makes me the leader of sorts. You can’t have a past or a future without a present, after all. And besides, in a way, we all live in the present. Kind of strange how the present’s both fleeting and forever that way… but that’s probably how it is.”
Yitterby turned his head to the side, taken aback by the drop of insight given to him. “Pink reindeer sound deep. That wisdom to take home?”
“Not really,” Bori replied, that smile returning, “but if you want, go ahead and tell that to your fellow yaks back home.”
He hummed to himself, deliberating on whether to bring the wisdom back home. Turning to Bori again, he answered, “OK, that good. That good reindeer wisdom for gifts.”
Bori sighed in relief, although she probably still had some stress in her mind to air. After bobbing her half-empty cup of cold coffee, she sighed again and let her ears droop once more.
“... looks like I’ll pick up where Aurora left off.”
Yitterby leaned in, though instead of an eager attitude like the last two times, he bore only a pensive face. He had a bad feeling about where this might lead him.
“We were able to sneak back into Rennefer undetected again,” Bori began, “though it was a close one. We were spotted by a guard a block in; he didn’t remember us coming this way, so that made him very suspicious of us. I didn’t like lying and neither did Aurora so we locked up... but Alice fibbed her way out of it. It helped that he was new to the job, so he thought he merely forgot. I’m still uncomfortable about lying to our guards, but I did my best not to think about it too much while we went home.”
Bori paused, taking a sip of the bland and watery coffee.
“The next day was a hassle for me. It was the Eve of the Caribou Carnival Celebration. We were celebrating all that time, but everyone was preparing for the big day: games, plays, songs—a party everywhere you’d go. I had to do double the work in half the time at the public’s hall, cooking so fast my legs burned.
“In the back of my mind, however, I put two and two together. If my antlers glowed and did strange things around nighttime—and so did Aurora’s and Alice’s, too—then it might happen again tonight… and what if Aurora could fly this time? She wasn’t as sturdy as me or Alice, so what if that flying thing or whatever crippled her? I resolved to myself to talk to them immediately… to talk about our weird abilities, to see what exactly they were before things got worse…” Alice took a deep breath, looking away from Yitterby for a second. “Someone had to notice unless we took care of it ourselves.
“So, when I was able to take a break from my cooking duties at sunset, I rushed over to Aurora’s house as quickly as possible...”
“I rushed over here as quickly as possible!” Bori announced with a slam! of the closing door.
Her eyes scrambled to meet Aurora sitting at a new dining table, but there also sat Alice who had a box of more bows to give on the surface. Along with her sat Thern and Austral as well, father and daughter enjoying (though maybe not together in Austral’s case) a humble dinner of vegetable and cheese pie.
“Oh!” Aurora said, eyes meeting Bori’s as she adjusted her glasses. “What a pleasant surprise. Good to, uh, have you here, Bori!” Spotting the saddle bag on her, Aurora went on, “And you brought gifts, too!”
“Ah, yes!” Thern said happily, slightly bowing his head down towards the visitor. “Getting ahead of yourself, and that’s not always a bad thing! Too bad you didn’t help Aurora cook, knowing your expertise, but who am I to complain?”
“I am,” Austral muttered with a roll of her eyes right before stuffing her mouth with savory pie.
“Aww!” and Thern pinched her cheek. “Your snarky responses are so creative, don’t you know?”
While Austral had a hard time chewing her food with a pinched cheek, Alice kicked back and rested a hoof on the table. “I told you Bori was coming in less than five minutes.”
Aurora’s and Bori’s eyes bulged. The reindeer silently gestured at Alice to quit talking about the future, with Bori rapidly shaking her head as covertly as she could.
“Ah, I remember!” Thern said, raising a glass of orange juice to his lips and slapping Alice on the head in merriment. “Calves these days are so much smarter than we were! How exactly did you know Bori was coming here so soon, Alice?”
Alice turned to him and pursed her lips, eyes darting everywhere but Thern’s. “I, uh… lucky guess?”
Austral raised a brow, having swallowed her morsel of cheek-pinched pie. “A very lucky guess, considering you don’t even check schedules at all.”
“I-I don’t?” Alice repeated, blushing in distress. “I-I must be, uh, very lucky today, ya’ know? Just happens from time to time, eh-heh...”
Austral rolled her eyes and returned to the fresh hot dinner on her plate. “Eh, not that—”
Shifted the lights and the shadows in the room.
Everyone froze, but terror didn’t fill their minds. Instead, they looked out the window.
Out there, the sun had run much of today’s course. It was hard to see much of the orange horizon past the city walls, but they saw the sun slowly descend, sinking the final stretch from its noonday apex. The sky darkened, reddening in the cloudy and wintry climate before switching to a murky violet. Glittering stars twinkled into view, and in the sun’s place rose the moon, shining bright with its soft glimmering glow. Everything had become chillier, the blazing flame of the sun extinguished for the night.
Bori bit her lip, trying to maintain a calm face without looking skeptically at her antlers. “So... uh, what’s the occasion for, uh, all of you coming here? I thought Aurora was busy wrapping gifts.”
“Oh, it was supposed to be just the three of us family and Aurora doing that!” Thern replied, rubbing Austral’s mane against her will. “Sadly, dear Olenek couldn’t come; had to call in to help with the ol’ Cervidi meet-and-greet. Must be great to work for the monarch himself for this night only, but I miss her.” Gesturing towards a busily eating Austral, “She misses her, too, and I bet we’d all don’t want her to go if she were here.”
Alice placed a bow on Thern’s head, derailing his train of thought.
“Bori,” Alice said, rotating the chair towards her, “to explain myself: I so happened to decide to crash in here... I mean, uh, knowing you and also how you do with Aurora, I, uh, hazarded a guess that you were coming in short notice.”
In a failed attempt to look natural, she shot a hoof across the air, feigning confidence in her words.
“... right, Bori?”
Austral smacked her forehead in embarrassment.
Bori looked out the window. It was still night. It hadn’t changed immediately to day, though she wished it would to skip the weird glowing antlers thing altogether.
Aurora eyed her thoughtfully. “Is there… anything you want to talk about, dear?”
“Maybe not now,” replied Bori quickly. “It’s still early—”
“What’s early?” Thern cut in, wiping the splatter of pie filling from his gray coat. “Surely, you don’t mean the Celebration coming up midnight, eh?”
Bori smiled sheepishly. “Uh, yes! It’s still quite early to talk about that. We wouldn’t want to dampen the mood for tomorrow,” and, imitating Alice, she shot a hoof across the air as well, though it came across as awkward.
“Then you do you!” Thern said, refilling Austral’s empty glass with more orange juice although she hadn’t asked for it. “We as a family talk about it for as long as we want, right, numpkin?” as he hugged his daughter.
Austral sighed, never deigning to touch the glass. Not yet.
“Sort of, Dad,” she said.
“That’s the spirit!”
Thern hugged her again, trapping her in his loving embrace. It didn’t reach choking levels yet, but Austral tried to get out of it like she was being choked anyway. She grabbed her pie and risked splashing the pie all over her father’s face just to recommence dinner.
“Psst!”
Bori swiftly looked at Alice who was cupping her mouth.
“Now’s a good time to bail,” she whispered to Bori and Aurora, tugging the latter’s neck closer to her. “We should be upstairs in thirty seconds while they’re distracted. Aurora, tell them you’ll continue your gift preparations upstairs—they’ll believe you for about two hours.”
“What?” Aurora whispered back, staring at her with her unbelievable and incredible words.
“Just roll with it!” Alice ordered. “It’s from the you-know-when!”
Aurora couldn’t deny that the future was coming up, however Alice saw it, so she tapped the table and caught Thern’s and Austral’s attention.
“I’m awfully sorry for this,” she began. She got up from her chair and pushed her plate away. “I have to get back to wrapping and boxing my gifts. Alice and Bori would be of much help, so they’ll come with me.” A cough, and she went on: “You can help yourself to the rest of the food storage… just leave some for me, OK? Or else...”
Thern gulped, displaying a rare sign of agitation. “Uh, don’t worry about it! We aren’t greedy! Trust us! That’d be really bad since greed is, uh, bad!”
Austral smacked her own forehead in embarrassment a second time.
“Uh-huh!” Bori muttered, trotting upstairs with her hooves clanking on the steps. “Let’s, uh, make sure you end things early so you can relax as soon as possible, Auri!”
“I, uh, wha—” but Aurora loosened her shoulders and followed her up. “OK. I’m a-coming!”
“That’s how you do it, Gramma!” Alice yelled on her way up, too.
Only to be met with an unforgiving “I’m not your Gramma!”
As the three reindeer headed upstairs, they heard Thern cry out, “Be careful out there and don’t cut your hooves on accident! But if you need anything, then just call me! I’ll be right here at your beck and call!”
After reaching the top floor and not heeding Thern’s offer for gift-wrapping help, they turned a corner in the hallway. They passed by a few precious paintings of snowy landscapes to enter Aurora’s bedroom.
It was a decent enough bedroom, its scent containing hints and notes of well-cut wood. At the end of it lay a simple bed; lying around were a couple straw rugs. At the corner rested a sewing table and a lantern on the wooden surface for reading and letter-writing. On the floor were strewn a few doodads and thingumajigs for wrapping and boxing up into even more valuable gifts.
They closed the door and locked it to tight with a confirming snap!
A few seconds were spent staring at each other and their antlers. Mouths and jaws hung open. The intense uncertainty sticking in the atmosphere was thick enough to be cut with a knife.
“Alice told me what we’re here for,” Aurora said, becoming the reindeer to break the silence. “What’re we supposed to do with… all of this stuff going on with us?” as she pointed at her antlers and her head.
“I don’t know!” Bori blathered, backtracking close to the wall. “I came here to see if any of you had answers! I mean…” resting her head on a stretched out hoof, “this isn’t a fluke; this isn’t a one-time quirk. It’s happened twice now, and who’s to say it won’t happen a third time?”
They stopped and looked at Alice who had watched the conversation with wide open eyes.
Alice raised her hooves in protest. “I didn’t say anything! Really!”
“Yeah, but you randomly know stuff from the future,” Bori pointed out. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen tonight? Are we going to help another stranger with strange gifts?”
“Um...”
Bori shook her head and groaned. She trotted back to the center of the bedroom where the other two stood.
“Come on, Alice!” she encouraged or at least she hoped it sounded like encouragement. “You know what’ll happen tonight, don’t you?”
It was Alice who backed away this time, alarmed by Bori’s tone.“It’s like… it has to come to me!” she reasoned. “I didn’t ask for it… it asked for me!”
“How does that make any sen—”
Aurora raised her hoof and Bori looked her way.
“I… I think that’s what’s happening to me, too,” Aurora said, coming to Alice’s defense. “I didn’t ask for knowing things about reindeer’s and ponies’ pasts and histories. They came to me.”
With these revelations out, Bori closed her and eyes took a deep breath. She felt her apron still on her chest, wondering how she’d forgotten to leave it at the hall, but there were more important points to discuss now.
“OK, I… at least we know that’s settled… sort of.” Bori paced around for a while. “Now, how come we can fly?!”
Alice almost jumped from the shout. “Yeah... I didn’t like that.” Lightening up, “I liked the adrenaline rush, though!”
Bori slapped her own face with her hoof. “Do you think that’s going to help?”
“Maybe?” Alice suggested.
However, she scratched her chin and peered at Bori with mistrust. “Well, you seemed comfortable flying the second time through. No crashes, too!”
Pressed to reply with something sensible without sounding crazy, she said, “That’s because I somehow knew how to be comfortable with it!”
This left everyone in silence. Bori could hear her own breathing and theirs, too, standing on the crumply, ancient rugs of straw. Aurora and Alice gazed at her with terrified wonder in their faces.
“I don’t know how,” Bori continued in half a blabber and fully shaking her head, “I don’t know why—”
“But you haven’t exhibited your special power, yet, so there’s that,” Aurora edged in. “At least that’s what I’d observed... or what the past brought to me.”
Bori groaned and sent dagger eyes at the older cow. She regretted it and resorted to a terrified face of her own. Hooves on her head, she said “This is freaking me out. Two friends suddenly gaining powers, Alice and I can fly, and you may fly, too, Aurora...”
She glimpsed around for a window to see the night sky through, but there was none.
“Me?” Aurora croaked, pointing at herself. “Fly?”
“Yeah, you… but you’re... well, uh, how am I supposed to put this?”
“Old?” Alice blurted out, looking at Aurora with an innocent enough smile.
“Hey, I’m not that old!” and Aurora stuck out her tongue at the technically truthful Alice. “I’m just experienced!”
“But still,” Bori said, raising a hoof, “if you suddenly start flying and you smack yourself through those painful trees… I don’t think we’d be able to explain away you limping around once we get back up. The guards would be all over us.”
That forced Aurora to look at her frail and fragile self, with her legs thinning and the outline of her bones beginning to show.
“... you make a point there, Bori.”
Bori indulged in a little chuckle before trailing off and resuming her serious face. “Look, I know (and Alice probably knows) I just want this madness to end. No more uncalled-for flying, no more random knowledge about total strangers, and no more urges to get stuff and leave Rennefer which we’d never done before. That’s what I want: no more of this.”
And she came off panting, beads of sweat sparkling on her face creased with the strain of what she’d just said.
She looked down, ears drooping again. Sat down on the floor, slightly surprising the other two as they held stifled gasp.
Bori closed her eyes. Rubbed her hooves on those eyes, sporting a pout and a wearied, drawn-out sigh.
“For all that... i-it felt good to help ponies like Rack Ramble and Oat Milk.” She beheld the unfinished gifts left on the floor “If anything, it’d be nice to give to more than the reindeer here, much as I love them. It’s surprising to think… and to really think about the ones we just let pass by, and they just struggle without us knowing, and we don’t even know they were there in the first place...”
It ended with Bori closing her eyes again. Shook her head at the floor, at the straw rug which had no words for her.
Aurora managed the strength to get to stoop to her leve on the floor, garnering Alice’s attention. She wrapped a hoof around Bori’s neck.
“I agree,” Aurora said. “Much as this past-seeing thing has startled me, helping those strangers was real nice.” Wistfully looking up at the ceiling whereupon a lantern hung, “I guess that makes knowing the past… less startling.”
“It was so scary for me when it all started out,” Alice said, joining in by sitting on the rug as well, “but I just realized how lucky we all are. We get to spend Carnival time with every single one of our family and friends, and the gifts come to us from all over the land… then we have those poor ponies traveling so long and so far just to make their Hearth’s Warming trips!”
“Ah, Hearth’s Warming!” Bori repeated with a flourished hoof. “Isn’t that the ponies’ winter holiday? I remember you telling me that, Aurora.”
Aurora nodded, relaxing her forelegs on the rug. “You remember the tale, too, don’t you? Three tribes uniting in a cave with a friendship fire thingy: that’s how it was. ”
“And I remembered you telling me that way too much last Carnival,” Alice added, putting up a sick face.
Aurora tilted her head, puzzled. “What? I don’t have many other good Carnival stories; that’s why you got Velvet Fallow for the big ol’ storytellin’ time!”
“But that’s strange,” Bori said, ignoring Aurora’s rant about Fallow and storytelling time. “Were ponies always passing by our town like that, or was it only this year? Is it their magic doing strange things to us?”
“They should’ve detected it by now if that were the case,” Aurora said, easing herself back into the topic at hoof. “Warrants itself a town-wide lockdown or worse if they’d ever find a pony messing with Rennefer.”
“But they seem nice,” Alice said. She widened her eyes, letting them glisten like a dog extracting pity for its errors. “I don’t think they’d be faking their niceness that bad, especially with Oat and his leg… I mean, I know he wasn’t faking it since I see him in his home’s ward two days from now.”
“That just makes it even stranger,” Bori said, trying not to wince at getting tidbits of the future. “For some reason, we can fly, you and Aurora have knowledge powers that go beyond what’s normal, and we’re being randomly called to help ponies passing by for no apparent reason—Aurora, what?!”
Aurora simply stared back at her. “What’s wrong? Something stuck in my teeth again?”
Alice opened and closed her mouth up and down like a dying fish, eyes wide open for a different reason now. “You’re… you’re flying!”
”I… I’m what?!”
Aurora frantically looked down and saw she wasn’t sitting on the ground, nor was she touching it. She was a few meters above the ground and her friends, in fact. Weightlessness fell upon her along with the sense of being untethered, and so, in a panic fit, she flailed and whirled her hooves around, but to no avail: she was floating higher still, almost touching the ceiling with her massive antlers.
“How am I supposed to get down?!” Aurora cried out, looking down at her fellow reindeer.
“I don’t know!” Alice hollered back. “I—”
Looked down, saw she was floating, too.
“Agh!” she screamed so loud her tongue zig-zagged in her mouth. “I don’t wanna go through the forest experience again!”
“I guess it’ll be the three of us flying!” Bori said nervously, looking at herself hovering away from the rugs.
“Who turned off gravity?!” Alice blurted out, spinning around in frantic horror.
Silence. A common silence gathered when their antlers glowed pink and blue, each reindeer noticing this oddity once more.
Bori shuddered, biting her hoofnails. “Oh, no… i-it can’t be... i-it’s way too early for this!”
Aurora spotted the saddle bag Bori had all this time, still wrapped around her barrel as a gem floated out of it. “Uh, Bori, is that a—”
Bori gasped and yanked the airborne gem, putting it back into the bag.
Alice gulped. “The gem makes tons of sense… but I don’t think we’ll like it who’ll appreciate it at the bottom.”
“What do you—woah!"
And Bori floated away them, speeding to the door and smacking herself against it. Her own body repeatedly bashing itself against the locked door with loud bangs! but failing to open it.
“I think we need to open it!” Alice suggested, looking down at her poor friend stuck at the door.
Bori rolled her eyes at Alice floating above her. “You think?”
So, she quietly unlocked the door.
“Woah!”
And she flew mindlessly away from the room and into the hallway.
Aurora and Alice followed her in their uncontrollable flight, Alice smoothly sailing with the breeze while Aurora was still flailing her hooves helplessly, the lack of ground pinning her down instilling fright and fear in her head and all over her body.
Her head did pirouettes in that blind trip through the air, whizzing by and catching glimpses of those landscape paintings and a couple vases she barely missed, all in a blur. She wished she wasn’t flying crazily right now, so she tried pulling her body back to the ground… somehow. She didn’t know how; all she did was grunt and stretch her legs to the ground, which didn’t help, given she still felt the current of flight coursing by her.
A whiplash of cold air later, she closed her eyes, briefly hearing a crowd before that faded away, replaced with the whistle of lonely air. She couldn’t confirm it with her eyes, but she felt taken higher, higher, higher—
“I recommend you don’t look down, Auri,” she heard Bori say.
So Aurora opened her eyes and looked down.
Down there dwelt Rennefer, lustrous with so many lights on every block, at every corner, hanging from every building. The plethora of reindeer below, those reindeer trotting and talking and eating and drinking and laughing and playing and singing and dancing… they were mere ants in her sight, this far from the ground and this high in the sky.
“Agh!” and she closed her eyes again.
“Hold on!” Bori yelled, voice cutting through the wind’s uproar. “You’re gonna—”
Aurora no longer felt flying. She felt falling, endless falling racing around her, all over her, all in her while she felt spinning in the air.
“Aaaahhh!”
“Alice, you have to help her!”
“I don’t know how! I can’t… I can’t—ow!—can’t seem to get to her! She’s too fast!”
“I don’t wanna cushion the crash myself! We’ll both be dead!”
“Maybe if we crash into the dragon over there!”
“That’s a bad idea! Wait, a dra—”
Thud!
Agony, extreme agony everywhere from her head to her hooves, from her brain to her tail, meriting itself an ear-piercing shriek. The cold of snow, the rough of the dirt, and the unforgiving chill of the outside wind only deepened the pain.
“We’re so sorry!” she could hear Alice say through snow-muffled ears pricked by melting water. “We’re… sorry! We’ll make it up to you, um, Mr. Dragon!”
Aurora’s eyes went wide. The prior layers of suffering hadn’t been enough to snap her wide awake from her flying nightmare.
A hoof grabbed her barrel and stings of pain rushed forth, escaping as anguished moans from her mouth.
“Stay still, Auri!” she heard Bori say to her.
Enduring the slowly subsiding mess of compounded pain on her whole self, Aurora could feel her body being set up, picked up and put on the ground on its hooves.
Opened her eyes, moonlight too bright and bleary for her now. First thing she saw after fast recovering from the eyesore: Bori’s face, a sight for her kind of eyes.
“Ah, you’re alright!” Bori said, looking over her shoulder and frowning. “Mostly. You got a few scratches on your left, but, surprisingly… you’ll be fine.”
Aurora nodded, though her neck’s back was aching, crying out to her to please stop moving its stiff tissue.
“At… least I c-can rest through it… when we get back.” Aurora shot a hoof to her neck, massaging away as much pain as possible with only one hoof. “Just have to power through it…”
Her eyes snapped open again.
“Wait, a dragon?”
Bori donned the sheepiest smile she could muster. “Yeah… there’s a dragon behind me. That might end up being a problem.”
Aghast by the news, Aurora leaned to the side to verify Bori’s claim.
Behind Bori, Alice blubbered apologies to a dragon five times her size; he towered over her and the rest of the reindeer. The offense committed on him had showed in his snow-covered face, obscuring his vicious fangs and the horns protruding from the top of his head, not to mention his huge wings and his shiny orange scales each of which appeared sharp enough to cut like blades.
“Sorry about that for the twelfth time!” Alice said, running out of breath. Then, she beamed and clasped her forehooves. “Uh... just to let you know, um, you should, uh, not be worried, even though you’re, uh—”
The dragon wiped the snow away from his face, revealing his long and pointed snout and his fiery orange eyes.
Alice trembled with shaky hooves planted on the ground, not noticing Aurora and Bori united in trembling with their own planted hooves.
Alice managed, “Eh-heh! Well, um... what if, uh, I told you that, um, you’re not going to eat us? We’re, um, capable of running away really fast and you’d certainly be tired after that!”
The dragon did nothing but stare at her silently.
Alice gulped. In a quiet, cute whisper: “Please take the signal to leave us alone!”
He merely cracked his knuckles and snorted smoke out of his huge nostrils. “Give me one good reason not to cook you for dinner,” the dragon said in a husky growl.
Alice smiled although her teeth and her dimples faltered thanks to the dragon’s brutal voice. “Um… fear me because I know the future and I say you won’t cook us for dinner—eeyah!”
The dragon had picked her up by the tail, watching her scream and flail for help and mercy. “Nice try.”
He brought a cage from behind his back.
“Alice, no!”
Slam!
Inside the cage went Alice and would-be right-hand reindeer Aurora, cramped in the tiny cage with each other. On the top of the cage were scrawled the words, My food. Over very high heat.
“Aurora!” Bori yelled, watching her elder and feeling feeble while the dragon gently put down the cage of squished reindeer.
The end result was Ow!’s from the two of them.
“Agh! Don’t worry!” Aurora cried out, waving a hoof at Bori. “I’m going to—”
“Ouch! My antler!”
“Sorry, there, Alice, my b—Ow! That’s my antler!”
“Aurora!” Bori called out, standing firm in case the dragon would push her away. “Try using your past powers on him!”
Aurora gulped against all the pain still running through. With a bold face, she turned to the dragon to withstand him.
He had sat down on the snow, twiddling his thumbs while watching his caged prey persisted through the lack of personal space.
“Do not mind me,” the dragon said. “I am here to entertain myself with how you will try to fool me.”
Aurora took the taunt head-on and replied with, “You better hear from me, sonny!”
The dragon tilted his head, coughing out of amusement. “And why should I hear you out, something-genarian?”
“You should hear me out because I know why you’re here, Pyrite!” Aurora declared, exaggeratedly raising both her forehooves and hitting Alice’s antlers, but Alice had to bear this one for now. “You’re here because you’re hungry and…"
She gasped, seized right there.
“You… you th-thought of c-c-coming t-to… to r-raid—”
Pyrite raised his claw and Aurora stopped. A grin graced his scaly face.
“I shall stop you there, old one,” Pyrite said, lowering his claw.
They could hear Alice clattering her teeth.
“Let me say that I am impressed with your knowledge and that you have guessed why I’m here, as unseeming as you may be, old one.”
He craned his head up. It aimed at the city on the mountaintop.
Alice gasped. “I knew it! You were going to raid Rennefer!”
The dragon chuckled, smoke coming out of his nostrils again. “Yes, that is true. In short order: I bided my time and spent it scouting the area. I’ve learned that you have this yearly winter carnival where gifts abound, and that, when the clock strikes midnight, everyone will be gathered to celebrate and give those gifts to all.”
The smile on his face widened further, becoming a smirk not of happiness but of malevolent planning close to fruition. “What if... I swooped down on your defenseless village and took all I want? Would make a good hoard for me. I wouldn’t even need to travel all across the land; I can just wait here and let all the merchants converge here."
He kicked a patch of snow into the air. “It is a great plan, no?”
This is when all three reindeer gasped together in common dismay.
“You can’t do that!” Alice shrilled.
“Oh, yes, I can,” Pyrite said, rubbing his claws and his huge fingers, “and if you think of trying to stop me with those puny muscles… that’d be pitiful.”
“You dragons want gems, right?!” Aurora yelled, pointing at Bori and her full saddle bags. “She’s got gems!”
The dragon turned to Bori and smacked his lips together, eyes dilating in anticipation. “You have gems?”
Bori grumbled, gritting her teeth. “Aurora, why?! You should’ve kept it quioayh!”
She dangled by her tail, the dragon licking his lips to further enjoy holding this reindeer by the tip of her short tail. One slip and it’d be a nasty fall to the bottom. Alice and Aurora screamed in unison; Bori’s fate was on the line this very moment.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” Bori said in spite being upside-down and a dragon’s temper away from being shoved into the cage for dinner. “You want to get us and the gems! Um, uh… wouldn’t that make you sick?”
“You know nothing of dragon biology,” Pyrite boasted. He rubbed his belly “Our stomachs know no bounds.”
“Then... what… about we give you all the gems inside the bag and you leave us alone?” Bori hastily proposed, closing her eyes since this felt like her last move.
“You mean spare the three of you while I burn the rest of your home down?” the dragon asked. “You are strange reindeer, I must say.”
“No!... I mean... i-if you burn our town, that’d be it! It’d be a one-time thing!”
“Then I shall not burn the town down,” the dragon said. “I shall merely come once a year to feast on your shiny gifts… which I’d been planning to do anyway, so you really changed nothing.”
As Bori slowly felt pulled towards the cage, she sent her mind reeling. Thoughts of being roasted alive in a pot by an evil dragon filled her, although she found a sliver of comfort in being roasted alive with her friends. It still wasn’t a nice ending, however, and Bori didn’t particularly like being the idea of being delicious game to this vicious creature—
Bori blinked. She felt her antlers pulsate. One look at them: they glowed and pulsed.
Pyrite hesitated. “Wha…? What’s going on?”
Still upside-down, she wore a sympathetic smile. “Pyrite, what do you doubt?”
The dragon paused even more, tightening the grip on Bori’s tail. “Huh?”
“A dragon isn’t supposed to be in the Frozen North, you know,” Bori answered, confidence rising in her tone. “You should be back in… wherever your very hot homes are. So, that raises the question: What brings you all the way out here?”
“That is none of your business, OK?” the dragon whispered, half-embarrassed really. “I don’t like it when my food talks back at me!”
“But what if it talks about something very important,” Bori reasoned, “like, maybe you’re running away from something.”
Pyrite growled. “Alright, that’s it!”
He shoved her into the cage to the painful shouts of Aurora and Alice. More cramped, more pressure on many sides of their bodies—squished and squeezed. Bori’s antlers felt pressed against the ceiling, the immense strain on them against the metal coming awfully close to a crack in those bones.
The dragon picked up the cage and lugged it with him on his short journey away from his target town. “I’ll take care of Rennefer as scheduled, but I’ll help myself to an early, fiery feast, hm?”
Alice and Aurora looked at Bori, silently sending their hopes to her. Bori bit her lip once more, not knowing what to say… but her antlers glowed.
She looked at Pyrite from the cage. “So you’ll have a fiery feast… like a feast of fire?”
The dragon flinched, glanced down at Bori. “What did you say?”
“I said, Feast… of Fire.”
Pyrite gargled something in his mouth and spit it out on the ground, leaving himself with an unimpressed face for Bori to see.
“I’m not bluffing, Pyrite. I… i-is this my power?” Bori then said to herself. “I don’t know… but, I’ll say it anyway, Mr. Dragon.”
She inhaled one big and deep breath, cheeks bulging.
“You… you don’t have to run away from your loved ones, Pyrite.”
The cage was thrashed to the ground, sending the reindeer flying and hitting each other in dizzying rolls, gathering up snow along the way.
“I didn’t say anything!” Pyrite shouted at the then stopped cage. Wagging a finger at Bori, “You say you’re bluffing… I won’t believe it!”
“But I know… I really know what you’re going through, Pyrite,” Bori said, pleading with him. “You’re… you’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be back home, celebrating wh-what’s supposed to be a great get-together in that Feast of Fire of yours, and… and it’s a shame this will be the first time you’re missing out on this.”
Pyrite clenched his claws into fists. The rumble in his stomach grew, the grumble in his mouth grew. His slit eyes sharpened, and he bared his teeth into an array of natural knives.
“Consider your family!” Bori continued despite the display of force. “I don’t know if it’s a thing for dragons to go around and do things on their own at such an early age... but they always had you back when the Feast came around!” She sighed, catching her breath through a stressed out throat. “... If you want… you could talk about it—”
“Argh!” and a dragon’s fist came hurtling towards them.
The reindeer huddled together, murmuring their last words to each other, saying they loved each other, hugging each other for one last time—
Nothing. No pain. No being crushed. No being taken out to be cooked right away with fire breath. Nothing.
With nothing done to them, they opened their eyes.
Snap!
The cage door opened, yawning out to the snow-laden ground in a gesture of freedom and liberation from the dragon.
The reindeer slowly trotted out of the cage, Alice coming first though she rather tripped to the ground since the cage had been so tight. After she recovered, Aurora came forward next, walking slower than usual due to her compounded pain all the way from the crash landing a dozen minutes ago. Finally, Bori walked out as serenely as she could, keeping up a warm smile for Pyrite while her antlers continued to glow in the cold winter night.
Bori looked up, seeing a morose dragon shamefully covering his face with his claw.
“I… I know this might not be the time to say this, but thank woah!”
Was picked up, had the saddle bag yanked from her. The strap broke and she fell to the ground.
She got up, shrinking away from the new pain given to her legs, but undeterred, she looked up at the dragon again.
Pyrite examined the bags which were tiny on his humongous claws. He opened one of them and his eyes glistened. He crammed a finger inside, came back with a clawful of gems, and ate them all with a deafening crunch—the reindeer covered their eyes and held on to their teeth.
And he left, taking the bags with him, traveling the clear path cut through the trees. Pyrite spread his wings and flew, flying high above the trees and disappearing in the horizon above, his figure growing darker until it perfectly blended with the violet sky.
The reindeer stood there, gandering at the sky needlessly.
“Should we… uh, go back home?” Aurora asked.
“Yeah, Auri,” Bori said. “We should.”
She looked at Alice whose teeth were clattering again.
“Uh, Alice, what’s wrong?”
“I… I have an even worse feeling about this..."