//------------------------------//
// Then There Was One 
// Story: The Olden World 
// by Czar_Yoshi 
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"What's wrong?" Shinespark asked, climbing up from the engine room. "Why have we stopped moving?"

"We can't say!" a puzzled Equestrian replied, part of a crowd that was gathered on the roof of the bridge. "They've just... stopped going!"

"We clung to the coast for as long as we could without losing significant time, just in case anything happened," another said, scratching his head and lowering a hoof to help Shinespark onto the roof. "You'd think if they were going to mutiny, they'd have done it in the first four and a half days. But no, they wait until we're two more out in the open ocean..."

In front of the prow, the two brood beasts had stopped pulling and were content to tread water, making a show of lounging around. The pegasi had their thunderstorm positioned directly above them, crackling ominously with electricity, but the beasts didn't appear to have a care in the world.

"If we shoot them, it's supposed to kill them!" a pegasus complained, one of the ones staffing the cloud. "They're supposed to be working so that we don't!"

"They're too smart for that," a third sighed. "They know if we kill them, we'll be stranded."

Another bit his lip. "They probably think they're going to die when we reach Kinmari anyway, and just want to take us down with them."

Shinespark blinked owlishly at the noise from the arguing pegasi. "So what's your contingency for this?"

"It was supposed to be fear of the storm cloud..."

More ponies were starting to emerge on the deck, though it was an hour before dawn and most remained sleeping. "What seems to be the matter?" Gerardo Guillaume asked, peering out from the rear doorway.

Shinespark glanced back at him. "This brood beast plan has stopped working. Find something to motivate them. I'm not in a mood for this."

"Shinespark...?" Amber joined the deck as well, rubbing her eyes.

Gerardo winced. "I'm not sure we have the most in resources for this sort of thing, but I'll see what I can do. Do we know anything they particularly hate? Aside from griffons..."

"What's going on?" Starlight asked, appearing at Amber's side.

Shinespark sighed heavily. "For everyone just arriving, we've stopped moving."

Still in her Riverfall poncho, Starlight frowned, and her horn gleamed midnight blue. A pillar of crystal rose from the deck beneath her, elevating her to the roof with an ease that indicated she'd been practicing.

Most of the pegasi were too busy debating or doing nothing to pay much attention to the filly, and she easily squeezed through them to the prow with Shinespark. "Are they too tired?" she asked.

"What do you think?" A stallion shrugged as one of the brood beasts made a rude hoof gesture up at the ship. The other blinked with its blank, yellow eye.

"If you want to do your usual thing," Shinespark invited, "this wouldn't be a bad time."

Starlight's face instantly darkened beneath her hood. "I don't want to have a usual thing," she muttered, lighting her horn. "Do you have a rock?"

"Um, no?" The closest guard blinked at her. "Why?"

"I have a rock!" another volunteered. "It's a keepsake. What do you need it for?"

"I'll give it back," Starlight said, taking it... and hurling it straight up, as high as she could.

Both of the brood beasts watched with lazy indifference. The rock soared in a high arc, turning about and starting to fall toward them, barely the size of a Starlight's hoof yet gathering speed... and suddenly her horn pulsed again and a crystal laser fired forward, striking the stone and encasing it in a massive crystal boulder bigger than the beasts' heads. It struck one directly with a titanic clunk, earning a loud groan of pain.

Starlight dispelled the crystal, floating the rock back up with her telekinesis. "I can do that all day now!" she warned. "Now swim!"

The brood beasts growled and rammed the ship.

"Fire!"

The world briefly went white, and a thunderous boom crackled across the deck as a pillar of energy smote one of the beasts, utterly charring it. If it was still alive, it wouldn't be pulling the boat again any time soon.

"You want to think twice about stopping now, do you?" one of the storm pegasi threatened the survivor. "We'll do that to you too!"

"One of two engines is permanently offline," a deck pegasus muttered. "Why does this have to happen when I'm on rotation for travel duty...?"





The ship was moving again, but at less than half the speed it had been. Starlight sat in Shinespark's old room, the only place on the ship where she was willing to take off her poncho.

"It doesn't feel like my magic," she whined, Valey snoring loudly in the background. Maple was the only other who was both awake and present, and she quietly listened as Starlight talked. "It looks different, and it feels like the magic is coming from somewhere else. It's exactly the way I feel when we're in a crystal palace and the trees are helping me. But then everything else about it does feel like mine! It doesn't feel like I'm using someone else's horn, or anything. But it looks like it! I don't know..."

"I've never seen a pony's magic change color when they got a cutie mark," Maple admitted. "But then, I haven't seen a lot of unicorns get cutie marks. Amber was the only pony I ever knew in Riverfall who got hers while she was a filly. Everyone who got one did it after the age where all the unicorns would sail away for Sosa."

"This isn't a normal cutie mark, though," Starlight mumbled, turning in circles and watching her flanks. It was the same abstract triangular pattern she had seen when she visited the Night Mother in Mistvale, not any sort of pictogram or glyph with meaning like most ponies had. Her mind didn't feel changed at all, and she couldn't figure out how to directly use it... "It feels like it's not properly mine, or I can't do something with it I should be able to, or... I don't know."

Maple's ears fell. "At least it's helped your horn not hurt when you use magic like usual, right?"

"I don't know." Starlight looked at the floor. "I don't know how else to say which parts of my magic feel different and which feel the same. It feels like something changed that shouldn't have changed, and something didn't change that should have changed at the same time. And for all I know it's not even the cutie mark that's doing it. This is the first time I've been able to use it since we got back to Equestria, and I never overused it when I was living here the first time..."

"I'm not sure what to say," Maple apologized. "But... Starlight, tell me what that artifice is supposed to do, again."

"What it's supposed to do?" Starlight shrugged. "I don't know. Did Garsheeva ever even say? She was mysterious."

Maple shook her head. "No. What it's supposed to mean. The virtue it represents."

"Oh." Starlight looked at the triangles on her flank again. "This one is for hope, and Valey's is for love."

"And how much are you hoping for, right now?" Maple asked. "How many wishes or plans or ambitions do you have?"

"Not a lot." Starlight glanced back at her. "Can I afford to? I don't want to start any new things right now. I just want to get somewhere safe and get away from everything that could go wrong."

Maple gave a wry smile. "So you have a cutie mark in hope, and you're not being very hopeful. Starlight, I might never have gotten someone else's cutie mark or had a broken unicorn horn, but I have gotten my own mark and learned soon after that I wouldn't get to do the thing I got it in. Me and Amber both did, after Willow told us we wouldn't be going to Ironridge... It felt confusing and aimless for a while, and we got by by finding new things to care about and other ways to use them. But trust me. You're not alone."

"Right." Starlight stepped over and settled in by the side of the bed. Even with her best intentions, Maple was only skimming the surface of what was on her mind. She sure felt alone... but maybe she'd try again to tell herself it wasn't true.