"Starlight's old home?" Fishy asked, leading the party off the bridge and onto a quieter street down the riverbank. "Well... these days... I don't suppose you all are in the mood for a story?"
Starlight's ears were already down. "What happened?"
"I don't know that it's my place to tell you..." Fishy's tone was hesitant, but her stride and poise were those of a mare who was fully used to telling ponies things they didn't want to hear. "And maybe your old parents told you already. You know they adopted you, right, honey?"
Starlight nodded. "I knew that for a while."
"Well, the reason they adopted you," Fishy continued, "was that your father couldn't have children. But he wanted one, and your mother cared about him enough to humor him, and so when I first got you as a helpless little thing, they were the ones I went to, asking if they could take care of you, and they said yes. You ever know I got you before they did?"
"I heard that an archaeologist found me in the mountains," Starlight replied.
Fishy instantly winced. "You did? So you heard about... Uh. I made them promise not to burden you with that..."
"I heard from the archaeologist," Starlight insisted. "His name is Doctor Caballeron and he works as a professor at a school far east of here. Right?"
"Well, I'll be." Fishy wiped her brow. "Yes indeed, he was the one who found you first. He gave you to me to find someone proper to care for you. Anyhow, your parents here... They were..." She glanced at the rest of Starlight's friends, uneasy. "I'm not sure how to say this."
Starlight shook her head, feeling cold at what she was about to say but ready to say it regardless. "If you're going to tell me something happened to them because I left, it's fine. I didn't really care about them anyway. Probably because they didn't help me deal with it when I was upset about Sunburst."
Something in Fishy's expression cracked. "You blame them for all that?"
Starlight's focus shrank, blocking out all the familiar houses and trees and sights around her until her world was very small. "I was miserable. I'm still not alright. That's why I came back. They should have done something to change it, or to help me, or... or... It was their job!"
Fishy moved to block her path. "Hold on, honey. You can't blame them for everything. Starlight, your parents were... Your dad had more enthusiasm than experience. He was real friendly and happy and did a lot to make ponies like him, but he didn't know what to do when the going got rough and would sometimes panic and freeze up and hope the bad times would just blow over. He probably tried extra hard to be a good sport when the times got good in hopes that it would compensate for it. And he was the one who really wanted you. Your mom cared about you because he cared about you and she cared about him. That doesn't mean they weren't fantastic ponies through and through. I was friends with them for a reason. But if you're going to blame someone for all that stuff that happened, don't you blame your parents for having their flaws. Blame me for putting what my friends wanted over finding ponies who would be best for you."
Starlight stood perfectly still, the horizon dark in her vision. "Do you really mean that?"
"Things didn't happen all at once, you remember," Fishy said. "I know you started going downhill after they sent Sunburst off to magic school. But it was still quite a while until you left. I saw you, and I could have said something. Could have done something. But every time, I just couldn't bring myself to tell them they weren't doing enough for you. I think all three of us knew it, and we all knew that once I spoke up, it would amount to calling your dad a failure and not giving him any more chances. So yes, I do mean it. I tried to put my friendship with your parents above you, and have been kicking myself for months every single time I see a kid walk by because of it. If you want someone to blame, honey, you'll have to look right here. Because like I said, your parents aren't around here anymore."
Starlight stared. Someone was right in front of her, standing straight and offering to take responsibility for every bad thing that had happened to her? No, not for the bad things: for her being on her own through them. For her lacking everything she had seen in her vision at the flame of love, where she was the parent and her own child had a friend move away.
Fishy was right there. Starlight trembled.
"...I forgive you," Starlight eventually said. "A-And them."
Fishy's brow creased. "What?"
Starlight took a breath. "I didn't have a good time. I had a very bad time. It hurt. A lot. And you didn't think of me, and I ran away because I thought the mountains would be better company than anyone here! But that's not going to change if I throw you away because I'm mad at you. I don't want fewer ponies in my life. That's the whole problem! I'm lonely! I'm lonely and I don't have a home. And I've been traveling for months, and everywhere I go I try to be nice and helpful because all I want is for someone to return the favor, and no one's going to like me if I fight back. So I forgive you. Because I don't have what I need, and the only way I'll ever get it is by giving ponies another chance."
Mentally, she added a wish that this philosophy would please be proven true. Doing the wrong thing wouldn't get ponies to care about her; that much was certain. All of her actions were based on the assumption that the opposite was also true... but maybe it wasn't, and she was screwed either way. But she couldn't consider that. Not yet. That would mean giving up.
"...Well, then." Fishy stared at her, so short that she wasn't even a head taller despite being a full-grown mare. "You've had a much harder life than even I'd thought."
"Thanks for reminding me," Starlight deadpanned, waiting desperately for anything to happen.
Her wish was somewhat granted when Valey stepped up. "Bananas. So, uhh... What happened to her parents?"
Fishy gave her a look that suggested she was interrupting, but it wasn't entirely unwarranted. "They split up. It was a cute little romance when they got together. They treated each other like they were on a honeymoon that never ended. But her father got real down after she left, feeling like he had failed her, and wanted to get another kid and try again. Her mother said no, bad idea, we're not ready... I backed her up on it." Her ears folded. "Eventually, they were so emotionally in tune with each other, she decided she needed a break because his desperation was going to get her down, and since they couldn't agree on what to do next anyway... Well, you know. She said he needed space to come to terms with what had happened and not feel like it was some wrong to be righted. He didn't take it perfectly, but eventually agreed. So one day, she headed east on a boat, he moved one town south, and they made a fairy-tale promise that once they'd both worked through their issues, they'd get back together again. And that was the end of that."
"Oh," Starlight said.
"Your house is... well..." Fishy shuffled in place. "This was recent enough that we haven't exactly had anyone move in yet. But it's cleaned and empty. All your old stuff is in a basement shed under my place, if you want it. Your dad didn't want to become a hoarder by taking it with him, but I knew it meant a lot to him, so I offered to take it. The mayor's mansion has a big basement."
Maple stepped up as well, the clouds on Starlight's horizon lifting and allowing the town to come back into focus around her again. Birds were flitting, ponies were hanging laundry out of second-story windows and pulling carts... Everywhere else, life was going on.
"What kind of old things?" Maple asked. "I'd love to know more about what things were like here before everything happened."
Fishy shrugged. "Toys, books... It's all boxed up in a few crates. I don't exactly go poking around there too much. Don't have much need for a filly's things I'm storing for a friend. You want to have a look at them? I'm sure he'd be happy if they made it back to you."
Maple glanced at Starlight. "Do you want your old things?"
"Maybe." Starlight didn't even remember what kind of things she used to own. "What else are we going to do?"
Fishy pointed a hoof down another road, flanked by houses with large eaves and red-wood shingles. "I can show you your old house, if you want to see the empty place. My place is right by the town hall, which is the right place to go if you're looking for lunch or just want something interesting to happen. So it depends how peckish you are. How long are you staying for, anyway? I do assume you're passing through..."
Gerardo hesitated. "We'll need to speak with that guard as well, I suspect, but the intention for most of us is indeed to move right along."
"Most?" Fishy glanced at Starlight.
Starlight's ears fell. "...Can we talk about that later? Let's just go see my house..."
During the walk that followed, Maple was the most talkative of the group, curious about all aspects of Sires Hollow's life. "You have bathtubs in your own houses? Where I'm from, we had a large communal bathhouse, though plenty of water ponies just went in the river."
"That we do!" Fishy looked proud of herself. "Took a lot of trading to get enough iron for the plumbing, but about seventy years ago some adventurous stallions built themselves a boat and sailed out with a goal in mind, and came back a year later with a whole cargo of the stuff. Every once and a while we've had to get more pipes so we have supplies for repairs, but it went a long way toward modernizing this town. Just because we're in an out-of-the-way corner of the world doesn't mean we have to live like it!"
Outer Equestria's economy, as Fishy explained it, was divided up into two major bodies of trade: the railroads, which provided a link to Inner Equestria, and the Aubergine Sea, which was the huge body of water they had crossed between the desert landmass and the shores of Sires Hollow. There were three major points where the two connected: one was on the southeastern edge of the sea, south of the desert, which was indeed connected to the mainland and grew more habitable the further from the Aldenfold one went, and another was at the sea's southwestern edge, where there were more long talons of water that stretched out like the one they had followed, only in more favorable directions. As close as that second port was as the pegasus flies, one would have to sail so far to the east to round the peninsula separating the two channels that it would still be an incredible undertaking, going there by boat.
"You know..." Valey rubbed her head. "I'm never gonna remember half of this without a map."
"That's just fine," Fishy chuckled. "Even I have to remember the geography by its oddities. Sometimes you look at things in the world that are so inconvenient or so out there, and you wonder who even thought it would be a good idea to make them that way? Like us having to sail so far to reach the big trading lines."
"You think the seas were sculpted on purpose?" Gerardo asked.
Fishy shrugged. "Legend has it these mountains all around us were made by Princess Celestia herself, the Bringer of Day. If you want to believe the rest of the world was made by someone too, it ain't my place to stop you. That aside, someone had to have made all these railroads."
"Ah, yes. Those." Gerardo nodded. "You said there was a third connection?"
"Technically, us." Fishy rolled her shoulders. "Only the rails just plain stop about three hundred miles southwest of here for no reason whatsoever. Which is about five hundred miles by hoof, thanks to the mountains..." She huffed. "You know how these mountains are straight flat horizontal east to west, from here as far east as you can go? Well, they dip down south if you go west from here. We're right up in the corner. And someone thought it would be funny to make rails that go straight north from Canterlot all the way up to that hump in the mountains and then just stop in the middle of nowhere instead of coming to us. I hear they go into the foothills and just end at a frosted station without even a town around it! You have to get off one town early, then follow the long forest roads through a lot of smaller settlements just to get to us... and the same line passes by that other port to the Aubergine Sea. Why someone would have built that is baffling."
"So this one rail line has two different roads you could take from it to reach the sea," Maple said. "But one of them, the train runs right past the water, and on the other you have to cross five hundred miles of roads because no one finished the rails, and we're on the slower one."
Fishy scratched an ear. "Pretty much. Except it isn't not finished... it just goes to somewhere nopony wants to go! I hear there's other places like this. The desert far to the east, there's a rail line that goes through there to someplace called Griffonstone? A story I once heard says that rail line has a branch into it that goes up the middle of that desert next to the mountains and just flat stops. No nothing that anyone would want to visit for miles around."
"Eh. Architects are insane," Valey replied, dismissing it with a wave of a wing. "What else is new?"
"Point is," Fishy said with a grin, "we're far enough out of the way that we're as rural as rural can get, yet close enough to the way that you've got multiple options for bringing in the amenities of a good life, and all it takes is a little determination to go get it. We're out there, but not isolated. Off the map, but there's a map a stone's throw away. I've traveled with a caravan to the southern towns once, and I've seen a little of what's out there if you go slightly further away, and personally, I love the balance we have here. More often than not, it's a real peaceful place."
"It sounds nice," Maple murmured, lost in thought. "I'm sure you're obligated to say that as the mayor, but I mean it. I'm glad we came to visit."
Fishy shook her head. "Just glad I could get your spirits back up. You wanted to see Starlight's old place? We're just about there."