//------------------------------// // A Vow to Uphold // Story: Winds of Change // by theOwtcast //------------------------------// Despite the bad weather at the outer limit of the Crystal Heart’s protective reach and my expectations of how harsh the surrounding blizzard would be, crossing the threshold into unprotected airspace was quite a shock, both physically and mentally. The winds were raging much stronger than the ones I remembered from my arriving flight into the Empire months ago, and the blizzard created a curtain almost impossible to see through. I kept relatively close to the ground, or at least what I thought was the ground, in hope to retain some sense of direction and minimize falling damage in case a gust of wind should knock me down, but after a while, I wasn’t sure which direction I was flying in anymore. I hoped I was at least going roughly south, but there was no sure way to tell! For all I knew, I could end up back in the Crystal Empire any minute! The one thing I took comfort in under the circumstances was that the other changelings would have had to pass through this same snowstorm, no matter what their final destination was, and I was fairly sure I could guess where they were going. With any luck, they would end up getting lost and flying in circles, thus either wasting time and allowing me and the help I’d find to catch up to them before they reached their likely destination, which would make it much easier to deal with them, or they would end up accidentally returning to the Crystal Empire and hopefully run into any remaining ponies capable of standing up to them! But several hours of strenuous wing-flapping later, my hopes began to sink as I realized the snowstorm wasn’t as strong anymore as it had been just after I’d left the Crystal Empire. Either it was calming down, or I’d successfully flown through it! And if I’d made it through, so would have the other changelings! If they’d kept their course, they could be miles away by now, considering the headstart they had, and I didn’t even know yet for sure whether or not I’d flown in the right direction, not to mention the strain on my wings! I was starting to wish I’d waited for the train. A few extra hours of lying low might have been a smart compromise in exchange for a safe passage through the snowstorm with the luxury of being protected from the vile weather and knowing the train wouldn’t unexpectedly head in a wrong direction! Then again, I’d forgotten to take any money for the ticket, and I really, really, really didn’t want to go back to the Crystal Castle under the circumstances. Besides, what if some changelings had anticipated that somepony might see them and run away to save themselves or get help, and transformed into coins that the said pony would take, so they would stop him or her in time? Get a hold of yourself, Thorax! What are the chances that such a pony would take the right coins - or the wrong ones, depending on the point of view - and how would they know which pony would take the coins? How many changelings would it have to take to replace enough money in the Empire for such a strategy to make sense, anyway? They might as well have launched a full-scale invasion again with those numbers! The storm was clearing completely, or maybe I was reaching the end of it, and once I got past the mountains, a magnificent sight opened in front of me: the morning sun shining over a landscape with meadows and forests and fields spreading wide, a number of cities here and there, more mountains on the horizon, and a rainbow-hued river almost directly below me. If only I weren’t on an errand of emergency; I could have stayed here all day and relished the beauty of this land that I recognized from my previous travels as Equestria proper! I breathed a sigh of relief. I was on the right path after all! But where were the changelings I was after? I couldn’t see any specks in the distance anywhere in the air around me, not a trace of anything that might resemble a group of creatures with cocoons in tow. It seemed reasonable to expect they wouldn’t have had any major difficulties in passing through the snowstorm after all, so if I hadn’t gotten lost or misdirected, they shouldn’t have either! Had they hidden somewhere? I didn’t think they would; it could increase their risk of getting discovered if they picked a wrong hiding place, and anyway, Chrysalis would want her captives delivered as soon as possible! Of course, it could be that their mission was to take the cocoons elsewhere, or maybe some of the changelings were too injured by the snowstorm to keep flying… Possibilities were many, and I was alone! How was I supposed to search every abandoned house and every forest and every cave and- I froze in place. Cave… The thought triggered a memory of a find from my journey of searching for friends, the memory of a day when I’d stumbled upon a village in a wasteland and a nearby cave where a team of Chrysalis’ soldiers dispatched to hunt me down had taken shelter. Unaware of my presence, they’d discussed the latest update to their mission, or better said, a reassignment to a new one: having failed to find me in months, the hunter teams had been recalled, except for a few that, from what I’d overheard, had been tasked to prepare for a mission even they hadn’t known the particulars of at the time. Even then, though I’d failed to learn anything about the supposed mission, it had felt like something incredibly important. After all, why would Chrysalis just give up looking for a traitor she’d undoubtedly wanted badly to punish and send the same soldiers who had hunted that traitor to do something else? Whatever her reasons had been, they must have been of an even bigger importance than exacting punishment for the most serious offense a drone could commit! Unfortunately, I’d never learned anything more about the said mission, having chosen my survival over investigating some nefarious scheme I’d known nothing about and might have been unable to do anything about even if I had! I’d also vowed that, if I ever found out what that mission entailed and was in a position to cripple their efforts, I would. And now, I believed I finally knew what they’d been preparing for. Of course it would have been a higher priority to Chrysalis than hunting me down! If I’d died, the hunters might not have found my body anyway no matter how hard they tried, but if I’d survived long enough, having control of an empire would make looking for me much easier! Chrysalis hadn’t cancelled the hunt for me; she’d just postponed it until she could gain more power, something she was always working towards regardless of my actions! In fact, for all I knew, my escape may have actually postponed her plans to replace the Crystal Empire’s royalty until her soldiers could find me or at least until she could be reasonably sure there was nothing to find! But why would she replace the leaders of a relatively small empire in the middle of a frozen wasteland? Surely the princesses of Equestria would come to aid- Oh, no… The significance of her having assembled several teams for the mission, plus backup announced for a later phase of the preparations, suddenly clicked. My heart sank at the thought of what I might find when I finally reach Ponyville. Get going already! Pushing my feathered wings to flap faster than my undisguised ones would, I shot through the air, hoping against hope I’d find nothing catastrophic had happened there before I could have stopped it.