Starlight read a whole, entire page of Fluffy Fleece's sketchbook before it thoroughly snared her attention.
The inside of the cover was a table of contents, but Starlight had read textbooks before, and this wasn't like any she had ever seen. Because this wasn't a textbook, it was a picture book, and Fluffy had made the directory a picture.
It was a borderless drawing of a wide-open room, presumably her bedroom, drawn with straight lines and cluttered with furniture and an organized, scribbly mess that would be at home in any normal filly's room. A self-portrait of Fluffy herself sat hunched over on the bed, glancing back and forth between her workspace beneath her and a self-facing mirror propped up in front. At first, Starlight thought it was a self-portrait of Fluffy making a self-portrait, and that was impressive enough. She couldn't even count how many viewpoints her new friend would need to imagine at once to properly draw this, let alone imagine them herself.
But the longer she looked, the more she paid attention to the rest of the room, and the more she realized the point of this sketch wasn't a self-portrait at all. The walls were mounted with mirrors clad in elaborate frames, and more mirrors sat on the floor or were propped against the bed or hung from the ceiling at awkward angles. Starlight first thought they were framed drawings, but that clearly wasn't so: every one of them reflected the room at a perfectly correct angle from where she was looking. There weren't even faint imperfections in the directions of the lines where Fluffy had gotten an angle half a degree wrong. It was as if the room really had held them, and she had stood right where she drew it from.
And upon a third look, the mirrors didn't even show the room as it was. Each one reflected the same space, but with different decorations, angled perfectly so that each one showed some distinguishing decoration or feature, like an icon representative of a greater whole. Fluffy hadn't just gotten the viewing angles on the mirrors right, she had positioned them in the first place so they would be looking at interesting things. And in the tiny margins formed by the mirror frames, titles and page numbers were written in an impossibly small script. Each mirror was an entry in the table of contents, and half of them were empty and unlabeled.
All of this, and it was clearly still a rough sketch that only spent effort on the important parts.
Starlight couldn't even turn past that first page. She was too busy staring. How did Fluffy do this? If she had ever tried to draw, she would have felt legitimately outclassed, but as it was she couldn't even bring herself to make a comparison. Wasn't she the filly who could do anything, as long as it was necessary to survive? She could kill windigoes and fight Crystal, but even seeing this and trying to process all the angles broke her brain.
How did Fluffy not have a cutie mark in drawing? She was so good...
Starlight was so impressed, it took her a long while to even realize what that meant, and when she did, she sat back and stared at her hooves. She... thought her friend was cool. She was interested in what she could do. She wanted to ask her about the drawings, actually ask her because she wanted to. Somehow, she wanted to do something that was as simple as going up and doing it.
If Fluffy had been there, Starlight would have wanted to talk about this. But she never got excited about things, and the things she respected, she did so because they would either keep her safe or were dangerous. What had changed, and did she care?
For once, Starlight was frustrated by someone not being around, even though her reason for wanting them would be perfectly valid in the morning. It was a problem she didn't have to do anything but wait to solve, a problem so ordinary most normal ponies probably had it multiple times per day. Yet it still frustrated her.
Was this what she wanted?
It felt... almost exhilarating.
Starlight wondered if she would laugh again, but she didn't. That was far out of her reach, apparently. But what had changed? She'd been having a hard time since returning to Sires Hollow, but maybe all of that emotional stress was actually going somewhere?
Usually, she would have chased that train of thought around and around, accidentally ensuring it didn't go anywhere at all. But right then, she had the unique situation of her stubborn brain wanting to do something else more.
Starlight took the book, climbing onto her unmade bed and laying on her back and holding it open in the air with her horn in stubborn defiance of her situation and desire to keep going when she was ahead. She flipped to the next page, wondering if this one would be as interesting as the table of contents.
Fluffy Fleece's next drawing, which was probably the first one this book had received, was clearly made by someone somewhat less-practiced but with just as much natural skill. In it, the room's walls had been lined with upright, lashed-together logs, like Fluffy had wanted a log cabin but made a fence or stockade instead. But maybe it was a fort she wanted? Twisted ropes tied the logs together, and a pith helmet hung from a branch stub that hadn't quite been cut away. Her bed was propped up on its side, forming a support as part of the wall, and her bedding itself was on the floor in the middle, surrounded by a stack of three sandbags that gave her cover from her door. It probably was a fort!
Starlight stared wistfully at the design, impressed by the skill but also reminded of a time when pretending about adventure and military establishments could be fun. Now that she knew what they were really like, though... She frowned. Wasn't not needing to adhere to reality the whole point of pretending? If Fluffy wanted to make a fort that was cool, it would probably be that way, even if real-life ones were anything but. The drawing sure made it look exotic.
If the fortress page was uncivilized or primal, the second was frilly and entirely too cultured. Little splotches of pink stained the paper in strategic places to make the entire room look pink, added to lacy trim as highlights and accents and achieving maximum effect with as little effort as possible. Though there were a few bits that were out of place: it looked like the double-page drawing had accidentally stained itself on the opposite pages when the book was closed, like the pink stuff wasn't quite dry. Starlight sniffed it, and it smelled very faintly reminiscent of Jamjars. Some sort of cosmetic material, perhaps?
She flipped a few pages further, wondering what happened when she got more recent.
The page Starlight opened on next was different. Rather than fantasizing or wishful thinking, this was a grid of miniature top-down blueprints for furniture arrangements, each one keeping the same door and window placement but moving around Fluffy's bed and other affects. The whole set of prints only took up one page, and the page across from it was filled with detailed notes, titled What to do with my new bookshelves. Some of the blueprint panels used the bookshelves as room dividers, others split them up along multiple walls, others had them side by side and another had them back to back. The notes looked like a comprehensive analysis of the pros and cons of each position.
Starlight read about half of them, utterly baffled by their existence. No one needed this much thought to choose what to do with their room layout. Absolutely no one. And yet here this text made it plainly obvious just how much thought Fluffy put into this, thought she didn't need to spend at all.
There had to be a reason she would do a thing like this, spend so much effort on these plans. And Starlight was fairly certain that reason was because her friend found this very fun.
Maybe she really should ask Fluffy to help her decorate her room. If she was having that much fun, it might residually bleed over to Starlight as well.
But right then, she didn't need residual fun to not be bored. She had this sketchbook, and she had barely started reading.
The next page was finished with blueprints and back to realism, though instead of the fantastical nature of the early drawings, it looked like Fluffy had done everything with things she could find around the town. Hangers on the ceiling holding sheets and using them to color the roof or form dividers... The drawing was a cutaway, allowing her to see several different sections of the room rather than looking from inside it.
Starlight flipped another page, her eyes locked on the book, thoughts of her own situation chased further and further from mind.
"Starlight? You up here? Bananas, you're quiet..." Valey stuck her head in Starlight's door, saw her and blinked. "Woah, you're using your horn? Everything alright?"
"Mhm." Starlight didn't pay Valey much attention. The sketchbook still floated above her, and she had only seen half of what it had to offer.
"...Uh." Valey tilted her head, trying to get a better look and giving up. "Well, food's about ready, and we've got the folks who were still on the boat showing up here to hang out, so... you wanna come down?"
Starlight folded her ears. She didn't really need a reminder that her friends were all leaving soon, especially not when she was feeling relatively good. At the same time, her present indulgence would still be there tomorrow, and in fact she could pursue it and talk with Fluffy more then than she could now. She didn't want to, but she needed to pull herself to her hooves, face this party and say goodbye to her friends.
It would only hurt more in the end if she didn't.
"I'm coming," she grunted, closing the sketchbook and letting her horn go out rolling to her hooves. She briefly stopped, glanced at her desk, and wondered if she should have a mirror so she could fix her mane herself. With all the ponies she knew who cared about them, maybe it would be a decent pastime for herself, now that she was living regularly in a town instead of being a traveler in an airship. But she didn't have a mirror and she didn't have time, so she would stay the way she was for tonight.
The hallway and kitchen were brightly lit and loudly decorated, just like something Fluffy could have made up. Maple was bustling about the kitchen, Shinespark was absent, and Gerardo and Amber were chatting and sampling food and waiting for everyone else to arrive.
"Starlight!" Amber greeted, the filly instantly catching her attention. "What's up? Where were you?"
"In my room," Starlight replied, even though the question more likely meant to ask what she had been doing. "I'm better than I could be."
"Well, that's the goal." Amber flicked at a low-hanging streamer with her tail. "We put a lot of effort into all this. Gotta pause things on a positive note, so you've got at least a little something to tide you over until we get back."
Starlight looked away. "Shouldn't I be making other friends instead of regretting what I lost? Otherwise I'll live in my head and stay lonely."
Amber smiled gently, ruffling her mane. "Starlight? You gotta do that too. But that's no excuse not to hold onto us at least a little. Just because we'll be away for a while doesn't mean we're no longer your friends."
"Indeed," Gerardo agreed, sipping from a glass something that looked like punch. "Shinespark is off rousing the rest of our crew. After all, you can't go through all we have together without a real, proper sendoff." His voice quieted. "I know it's no perfect answer, and not what you've been hoping for all this time, but... do bear in mind that if nothing else, we're fully intending to return."
Starlight bit her lip. Being told to hold on and wait for them to get back wasn't conducive to letting go.
Why did they have to have a party, anyway? She knew it would be hard, picking up the pieces after it was over, but at least she would have no choice, and the chance for work to pay off and make her future better from there. But waiting, delaying the inevitable fall? It would be far better to rip away the waiting and anticipation. Hardships were always harder when the future was inevitably bleak. She knew she was better at coping with hope on the horizon. The moment her defenses broke again, the way they had been cracked dozens of times already that day, still having the parting in the future would just make it hurt even more.
...But her friends were adamant that this party would help, and she trusted them. So she would do her best to have a very good time.