Chapter 21
Letter sent from disgraced former Knight Lieutenant Lofty Tale to Knight Private Emberglow. Contents passed censor, deemed non-concerning.
My dearest friend,
I have no idea how to begin this letter. I have sat down at my writing desk time and time again, put pen to paper, only to discard and begin anew each time. A dozen times I have begun, and a dozen pieces of torn, crumpled paper lie in the wastebasket next to me. Ah well. I shall endeavor to proceed, if only to be able to write at least some shred of news before rumor and her ever-speedy wings reach you first.
I have been cast out of the Knights Vigilant. It happened by my own choice, a result of my own misdeeds. And yet, given where my path has led me, I cannot say I regret what occurred, nor would I change any choice that I made.
When we were both squires, I made the acquaintance of a young mare of apparent grace and beauty. I am perhaps ashamed to admit to you that we were indiscrete together. I thought it the folly of youth, and when she professed a lack of interest in pursuing any relationship I put the whole thing out of my mind.
Just over a year after our final meeting, and after I had sworn my vows as a Knight Vigilant, she arrived at my doorstep with a foal. Our foal. She expressed no interest in rearing a foal, and instead demanded that I take charge of the young colt.
I will not waste your time decrying the selfishness and hypocrisy of my former mate. I know the colt to be mine, and when I first saw him, I was filled with love more profound than anything I have ever felt. His form is so small and fragile, and his eyes, the most gorgeous shade of sapphire, are full of such trust and hope. He shares my same fur and mane color, only reversed, with an indigo mane and white fur.
I brought these matters to the attention of my superiors in the Vigilant. I was told I had two choices: to give the foal up to another to raise, and forget my son, born of unwise love. Or to give up my Knighthood, to live in shame and disgrace. For a short time, I gave the child over to a nursemaid while I studied the scriptures of Saint Applejack. She was ever one to teach the importance of family, and the value of ties both of blood and affection.
In the end, I chose family over honor.
My grandfather has all but disowned me. I have returned, at his demand, to live in the Tale family manor outside of New Canterlot City, though he barely even acknowledges my existence. I do not care, however, as he seems just as enamored with my young son as I am. Let Grandfather Righteous hate me all he wishes; as long as he continues to shower affection on my son, I am content. Perhaps, in time, he may forgive me.
To be completely candid, I don’t care if he ever does or not. The only family I feel the need to impress now is my son. I have named him True Tale, to honor Saint Applejack even as I have dishonored her with my actions.
I pray that you will do us the honor of becoming True’s goddess-mother, though I understand if you decline. Please keep yourself safe; I am hungry for words of your more recent adventures.
Write soon,
Lofty Tale
1112 AF, Manehattan Caves
Emberglow’s head ached. That was the first thing that told her she was awake; she never had headaches in her dreams.
Actually, all of her body hurt; she was afraid to even open her eyes to see what the damage was. The worst pain was her head, of course, but her left wing was also aching badly. She could feel the pain of each twisted, bent feather. She was still wearing her armor, she realized after a moment; the enchanted metal plates dug awkwardly into her flesh, leaving her with sore muscles and chafing skin. Her mouth was dry. Idly, she wondered how long she had been unconscious.
She took a deep breath to try to clear her woozy head, and instantly regretted it, coughing with disgust and surprise. The stench was a melange of foulness; she could smell swampy, musty rot, stale stilted air, pony sweat, and blood. She could still smell blood. She hoped it wasn’t her blood, but in her heart she knew whose blood covered her armor.
Gadget…
Emberglow’s eyes shot open before the image of the dead mare could appear in her mind’s eye.
The chamber she was in was dark, nearly so dark she couldn’t see. The only source of light was a sparse growth of fungus on one of the walls, which was glowing faintly. She could hear the sounds of drips of water hitting a larger body; each drip a few seconds apart. The stones closest to her were broken, some shattered recently, and some broken ages ago, covered in limestone stalagmites and moss. She could see light coming from somewhere around a bend much further away from her; the light was moving around, bouncing in the darkness and reflecting off the glossy wet stalactites dripping down about a foot or two from the rough, uneven ceiling. She could see what the ceiling used to be; broken, cracking masonry, a dull gray color. Clearly she was not in a natural cave, but it didn’t look like anybody had lived here for centuries.
The cavern looked like it had been much larger at one point, but most of it had crumbled and caved in. The room she was in was not huge, maybe three pony lengths across and five wide, with a single exit that curved around a wall of shattered, rectangular masonry bricks. She saw a large metal door poking out from a pile of bricks; the stalagmites that had built up around it suggested it had been here on the floor for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. A metal plate on the door labeled the room she was in as ‘MAINTE…” before being cut off by brick and stone; probably a maintenance closet or something like it.
Emberglow tried to see where the light up ahead was coming from, but it was blocked from her view by a twist in the cavern. She struggled for a moment, ignoring the raspy pain of thirst in her throat as she tried to rise to her hooves. Her wings flexed involuntarily as she struggled to her hooves, and she hissed with pain as the muscles in her left wing protested the movement. As she tried to relax her wing, she felt something on it, and looked back. There was a rough splint tied to the appendage with a few torn bandages. She didn’t recognize the handiwork or the knots; whoever had done the first aid had meant well, but the trained doctor within her winced at the untrained efforts.
Despite someone having apparently treated her wing already, she still would have to cast a diagnosis spell to figure out the real damage. With a bump of her left hoof, she triggered the release that opened the canister of her rune gauntlet, pushing the battery out so she could check the charge.
All three green gems were dull and lifeless, and the yellow gem as well. The red glowed very slightly, much like her namesake, like a dying, flickering ember in this dark cave. Still, it would be enough for a full body diagnosis spell, if barely. She quickly replaced the spell battery in its slot and traced the runes in the air in front of her.
Emberglow’s spell let her see every single break, every single injury that her eyes could rest on. This meant she couldn’t check on any head injuries, but she could look back at her wing. There were plenty of broken feathers, but the bone itself was intact (thank the Diarchs!). The sprain was fairly bad, and she figured it would be at best a few days, maybe even weeks, before she was flying at her full speed again. She looked at her other injuries. Minor nicks and bruises from the fight with the Knights Discordant from before, nothing too severe. There was a lot of blood on her armor though…
Don’t think about the blood don’t think about whose blood her blood her blood oh no Gadget please no…
Emberglow choked back a desperate sob as her concentration failed and the spell faded, the motes of magic twinkling in the darkness as they dissipated. The last bit of the glow from her spell battery was surely gone by now, so Emberglow didn’t bother to look.
Breathing deeply and purposefully, she took a moment to stretch each of her legs, one at a time, checking the normal way for other sprains or strains. While stiff, none of her legs were injured. She closed her eyes, taking a calming breath, before letting her emergency training take over. The first thing she needed to check was her equipment. Her armor.
In the darkness, she could pretend that the red splotches covering her otherwise white armor were merely paint, or maybe mud. There was mud on the floor, right? She checked around with one hoof; indeed there was mud. With her heart rate going down somewhat, she inspected each joint and plate by hoof, making sure nothing was damaged. The canister for her spell battery was clearly intact, as was the rune quill built into her right hoof. The smaller spell battery powering the armor’s wing shields, located at her back between her wings, was bent; she tried to reach back with her (mostly) uninjured right wing to trigger the release, but the battery was jammed inside. She tried to activate her wing shield; nothing happened. She tried not to be too disappointed; it was not like she would be doing any aerial maneuvers anytime soon anyways.
Her saddlebags were still attached to the outside of her armor, and a quick, cursory rummage through them showed that while most of the contents had been jostled about, there wasn’t much damage. She was a little surprised that whoever had treated her wing hadn’t bothered to look inside her bag; she had much better bandages there than whatever cloth her secret doctor had made her bandages from.
Emberglow froze suddenly as a voice echoed off the cavern walls. Outside of the room she was in, the faint light source continued to shift and bob, but it was now accompanied by singing. Bad singing. The words he was singing were complete nonsense, something about a ‘winter wrap up’ that made no sense, but she recognized the voice. Even with the distortions of the cave, the echoing walls, she could hear the strangely theatrical tones of the heretic with the mismatched eyes.
Adrenaline shot through her, and she forced her body into motion. She looked around her for a weapon; she couldn’t see her spear, and there was nothing else in the room except rocks, moss, bricks, and one incredibly frightened Knight. Oh well; her hooves would work well enough if she could get the drop on him.
“You awake yet, Sister?” the heretic called out, stopping his song as he got closer. Emberglow said nothing, trying to be as silent as possible as she moved around the moss-overgrown pile of rubble that served as a wall next to the door into the room. “I must say, I don’t do the nursemaid thing very well. That might be more your thing.” Emberglow tried to hold back her shock. The heretic had tried to tend to her wounded wing? The unicorn heretic?
She winced as she knocked a few loose stones or bricks about in her attempt to get ready to ambush the monster. She was trying to gain just a little bit of a height advantage by climbing on top of one of the larger piles of bricks. He seemed to be unaware of her presence, continuing to babble his mouth off.
“But what do I know?” The Knight Discordant had moved around the corner; his horn was lit, glowing with a yellow light. She saw a brown burlap sack, surrounded in a yellow glow, floating in the air next to him. It was full of something. “Maybe you’re the one Knight Radiant that doesn’t get all aflutter over the chance to tend to some wounded creature. Maybe it’s different if you’re wounded yourself… hey!”
As soon as he saw she wasn’t where he’d left her, he spun, just a little too slow. She pounced down upon the unsuspecting unicorn, her armored front hooves extended towards his head. Though the heretic looked shocked, he made no move to dodge.
Her hooves impacted something hard, but then were suddenly shunted away, a flash of yellow light appearing in a spherical shield around the heretic. The yellow shield spell pulsed when she struck it, and she bounced away. She flapped her wings by instinct to try and gain her bearings in midair before tumbling to the stone floor with a gasp of pain, landing hard on her side.
“You know what’s wrong with your generation? No gratitude,” the heretic knight said casually, making his voice sound like an old grandpa pony. He tittered at his own joke. “I go to all this trouble to patch up your wing and make sure the cave monsters don’t nibble on your supple ponybird flesh, and you decide to jump on me. No gratitude at all.”
“You’re speaking nonsense,” Emberglow rasped back, her dry throat burning with the words. “We’re enemies. Why would I be grateful to you?” She rose unsteadily to her hooves, trying desperately not to shake with soreness and weariness as she did so.
“For saving your life, maybe? I’m not kidding about cave monsters. I’m sure there’s hundreds of them waiting, right in the shadows, for the merest chance to chew on you.” The heretic laughed again, a grating hoot that immediately got on Emberglow’s nerves. She stared at him, a hundred questions rushing through her dazed, aching brain. She felt dizzy.
“Why?” Emberglow asked.
“How should I know? I’ve never tasted you. I’m sure you’re delicious, but…”
“Not what I meant!” Emberglow snapped. The heretic giggled, waving a hoof at her.
“Relax, Sister, I…”
“Don’t call me sister! We’re not… I mean, you’re not…” She wasn’t being very coherent, she realized. Probably a concussion, her inner doctor noted. The heretic waved a hoof again, in a placating gesture.
“Calm down. I was just kidding. I know what you meant.” The heretic sighed, some of the mirth leaving his voice. “Honestly? I don’t know much about the Caves, but from what I’ve heard, we could be stuck down here for days. And I might have been exaggerating a bit about the creepy crawlies down here, but there are creatures that live here. And they may or may not have a taste for pony flesh.”
“You’re proposing a truce?” Emberglow asked incredulously.
“Why not?” the unicorn shot back. “We’re much more likely to find a way out of the Caves if we at least aren’t trying to kill each other. And I for one don’t wanna die by starvation or exposure or some other such indignity,” he practically spat the last word. “At the very least, let’s agree not to fight each other.”
“How do I know it’s not a trick? Get me to drop my defenses so you can ambush me?”
“Oh please,” the unicorn said, his voice dripping with contempt. “Oh no, you’ve stumbled upon my master plan. Step one; bandage and clean your wounds to the best of my ability. Step two; find food and water for the both of us, offer it to you for free. Step three; murder you after having gone to all the trouble of keeping you alive. C’mon, Sis… ahem… uh, whatsyername, you look smarter than that.”
“Maybe you want something other than to kill me,” Emberglow argued back. “Heretics are vicious brutes. You could be out to… to take advantage of me!”
“You… I… but…” the heretic sputtered, laughing. “You think what? You’re incredible. First of all, you’re cute, but I don’t go for girls in armor. Not my thing. Secondly, I’m involved in a stable, long term monogamous relationship, and I’m only interested in consensual sex. And despite my numerous hints in that direction, my partner seems completely uninterested in bedroom shenanigans involving three or more players.” She flinched at his casual sexual references, and he rolled his eyes. “By all the alicorns, are you really that repressed? Hunger and thirst must be making you loopy.”
For a second, she wondered what an ‘alicorn’ was that he had sworn by. Perhaps some sort of made-up heretic nonsense?
His horn ignited with its yellow glow again, gathering up his sack from where it had fallen when she tried and failed to tackle him. He levitated the sack over to her, depositing it silently at her feet.
He made sense, she realized as she opened the sack carefully with her hoof. She really wasn’t thinking quite straight. Inside the sack was a canteen, sloshing with liquid when she nudged it. There were also about a dozen fungi.
“Those are safe,” the unicorn said, his voice losing the sarcasm. “The water came from an underground stream, not one of the fetid pools that gather around here. Moving water, fed from beneath us somewhere. The mushrooms are safe to eat. Or at least, I hope, if I identified them right. If not, I’m gonna have a bad night. I don’t suppose you have a remedy for extreme gastrointestinal distress in that doctor bag of yours?” Emberglow stared at him, uncomprehending. His shifts in subject matter were a little too quick for her sleepy, injured brain to keep up with.
“No matter,” he continued with barely a pause, lifting one of the mushrooms with his magic and floating it over to his mouth. She flinched back from his blatant use of forbidden magic, but he didn’t react. “They don’t taste like much,” he mumbled through a full mouth, chewing on the fungus. “But they’re food. Eat. Drink. I promise I didn’t poison anything.”
Warily, she looked at the canteen. It looked like standard Diarchy Army issue, probably stolen in a raid of some kind. The army’s decal had been scraped off the canteen with a knife, leaving small gouges in the metal surface of the canteen. She slowly pulled the cap off the canteen, gently inhaling at the opening, smelling the liquid inside.
“Oh for Celestia’s sake, would you get on with it? You’re boring me to tears,” the heretic moaned.
“I’ll thank you not to blaspheme in my presence,” she said primly. He groaned. “If there is going to be a truce, you can at least try to be civil.” He rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Sensing and smelling nothing amiss in the water, she raised the canteen and trickled the first bit into her mouth.
The small splash of water that she allowed to slip onto her tongue was nearly icy, and it felt like heaven. Emberglow forced herself to be patient, rolling the mouthful of water around, wetting her tongue, cheeks, and the roof of her mouth before finally letting it slip down her parched throat. She didn’t know how long she’d been out, but she didn’t want to guzzle the liquid down and make herself sick. The heretic appeared to be waiting patiently, though one of his front hooves was tapping against the stone floor of the room. Slowly, carefully, she drank the water in tiny sips.
“I’ll agree to a truce,” Emberglow said cautiously after she finished drinking. “With some conditions.”
“Number one. No blasphemy?” he asked snarkily. She nodded, ignoring his attitude.
“More importantly, what happens when we get out of the Caves?” she asked. “Do we go back to trying to kill each other?”
“I’d say we separate. You go one way, I go the other. We don’t look back and pretend this never happened.”
“That easy?” Emberglow narrowed her eyes suspiciously. She couldn’t believe she was actually considering this. Better to die, her old instructors and mentors would say, than to make even a temporary truce with evil. But she remembered the way he’d waited behind, while his comrade had died in her arms. She remembered the look in his eyes, when she’d brought his comrade’s body back. She remembered the gentleness in the heretic’s own eyes when he had lifted his friend out of her hooves, carrying him away into the trees. Nobody could act that well.
“That easy. I’m willing to extend you a little trust,” he said, seriously, and with a start, she realized he must be as worried about her ambushing him as she was worried about him attacking her. Emberglow decided to show a little trust herself. She lifted up one of the mushrooms, putting it on her tongue for a moment before chewing.
It was one of the most flavorless things she’d ever tasted. She wondered how much nutritional value a tasteless cave fungus could really have. Oh well. If things became truly desperate, she was sure there was some other sort of plant life in this cave she and her erstwhile ally could stomach.
“See? Nopony’s dead yet. No weird hallucinations, either. I hope. You’re still there, right?” the unicorn asked, peering intently at her face.
“While many fungi are known to have hallucinogenic or psychotropic effects, no species I’ve encountered takes effect that quickly. It will likely be several minutes before we feel significant psychotropic effects, if any at all,” Emberglow said flatly. The heretic grinned.
“You have a lecture voice, too? Heh, you sound just like…” he cleared his throat. “Never mind. So, let’s come up with a plan for exploring this place and finding an exit. First off, how are you feeling?”
“Sore. Injured. Thank you for trying to splint my wing, by the way.”
“Trying?” the heretic asked, sounding offended.
“You did your best, I’m sure,” Emberglow said. “I’ll let you redo it, and give you some pointers if you like.” She knew he’d go on to use that knowledge to help her enemies, but for now, she couldn’t really immobilize her own wing. “Also, I don’t know what to call you.”
“Oh my!” the unicorn exclaimed. “Just a few hours in a dark cave, and already I’m acting like a savage cave pony. Where are my manners?” His voice became quite dramatic again, reminding her of a circus ringleader at a performance her parents had once taken her to as a filly. The heretic extended a hoof with a flourish and a small bow. “My name is Heartwing, of the Knights Discordant.” He said it simply, with no rank or further title. She wondered what that meant.
“I am Knight Private Emberglow, of the Knights Radiant,” she said. She knew it would be a bit rude, but she didn’t bother to shake his hoof. This wasn’t that kind of introduction. “Now, a plan?” she reminded him. He pouted a bit as he withdrew his hoof. The childish expression looked strange on his face, but he otherwise said nothing about her snub.
“Ah, yes. Well, I don’t recognize where we are, but I know of at least two entrances to the Caves situated about four or five miles to the west from where we were above ground, before my… hrm… somewhat ill-fated teleportation malfunction. I can keep us moving in the right direction with some simple pathfinding spells, and we can work together to forage for food and fight off any unwanted animal attention.”
“What should we expect?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” Heartwing said cheerfully. “Ever since the city was destroyed after the Siege of Manehatten, there have been all sorts of magically enhanced and mutated creatures wandering around town. I’ve heard that many of them take to the Caves to hide, to hunt, and to make their homes.”
“Ever since you ponies destroyed the city, you mean,” Emberglow corrected.
“You ponies? Whatever do you mean by that?” Heartwing said innocently. She scowled at him.
“You know what I mean. Unicorns. You did this. You destroyed Manehatten, and now you have to suffer from the consequences of your ancestor’s irresponsibility.”
“Oh my,” Heartwing said with a shocked look, casually picking up another mushroom. He began chewing on the fungus, speaking while chewing. “I’m being held responsible for a war that took place seven hundred years ago. I feel so chastised. I’ll have you know, missy, that I wasn’t even there. Completely absent from that fight.”
“Well, yes,” Emberglow sighed, growing annoyed at his obtuseness. “But your kind still bears responsibility…”
“I wouldn’t talk about responsibility for past actions, if I were you,” Heartwing snarled, his voice lowering dangerously, and she cringed away from his sudden mood swing. His grey tail began to lash back and forth angrily as he glared at her. “You’re an ignorant little filly, and you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Prove me wrong, then,” she huffed back challengingly. “Are you going to deny that unicorns destroyed Manehatten? Destroyed all of Equestria? We’re still recovering, centuries later!”
Heartwing opened his mouth to argue back, then closed it with a sigh.
“There’s no point,” he said, his voice resigned as his ears flattened. “Tell me, if we did have ourselves a little religious debate, would you be open to anything at all I had to say?”
The first thing that popped into Emberglow’s head was a scripture. ‘Beware the heretic’s bite; his teeth are hidden behind a sweet smile, but drip with lies and venom.’ A personal favorite of Sir Steadfast’s. There was another: ‘Let not yourself be led adrift by every current, but hold fast to the rudder and steer your own ship’.
“There’s nothing you could say that would sway me,” she said. Heartwing nodded. “Is that why you proposed the truce? For a chance to corrupt me?”
“You wouldn’t be the first,” Heartwing said.
“Horseapples. You’re just boasting. Knights are stronger than that.”
“Is that what they’re telling young Knights these days, hmm? Interesting.”
“I’m not listening to this,” Emberglow said, standing. Her stomach growled, but she refused to share a meal, even a scant one of mushrooms, with a liar. “Let’s start scouting for a way out.”
“Just tell me one thing, then I’ll leave it alone,” the heretic said, his voice earnest. He waited for her reluctant nod. “Be honest. If you were wrong, would you want to know?”
“I…” she said, beginning her answer before her mind had even fully registered his question. Would she? If she were wrong? But she wasn’t wrong, so the point was moot, right? “It doesn’t matter. I’m not wrong. Hundreds of years of history are on my side.”
“But hypothetically. If you were wrong, if you were lied to, even though you know you haven’t been, would you want to know about it?”
“Of course I would!” Emberglow cried angrily. “That’s such a stupid question! Who would want to stay ignorant of the truth?!”
“Who indeed?” Heartwing asked cryptically. “You done with the mushrooms? I can hear your tummy growling from here.”
Wordlessly, she picked up one more of the mushrooms, putting it in her mouth and deliberately chewing it politely, with her mouth closed. It was a little passive aggressive in response to his earlier bad table manners, but she didn’t really care about the feelings of a heretic.
“I’ll show you where I found the moving stream. You can wash off your armor a bit there, if you’d like.” She nodded, and the two of them left the small room, picking their way through the uneven rubble and stalagmites.
A narrow cave, not even wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side, connected Emberglow’s little cave to a much larger cavern. Much like the smaller one she had woken up in, this one had clearly been made by pony hoof, with crumbling and destroyed bricks everywhere. The room was vaguely square shaped, ending in a slight valley, like a dry riverbed, only clearly pony made. Running down the center of the dry riverbed was the remains of a rail; it took Emberglow a moment to realize she was probably looking at the remains of some sort of underground train system. She could see the rails extending off in two directions, but both pathways ended in collapsed tunnel walls.
Heartwing led, his horn lit up to illuminate the much darker room. The shadows it cast were strange, moving and dancing across the rubble and the short limestone columns. Emberglow tried not to think too hard about the fact that it was a unicorn creating that light.
“Emberglow,” Heartwing began suddenly, coming to a halt. His voice was serious, and he turned to look at her in the eye. “I will never lie to you.”
“Um, okay?” she replied, a little confused at the non-sequitur.
“I promise. I swear, on my honor as a Knight, that I will never lie to you.”
“Your honor as a Knight? That means nothing,” her response was automatic. But suddenly she wasn’t so sure. They had kept the truce when Emberglow retrieved her fallen, after all. “Your kind aren’t true Knights, you’re monsters.”
“Still, even if it’s worth nothing to you,” he said quietly. “I still swear.” He began to walk again, and she followed, her mind spinning. What did he mean? What kind of trick was this? Why bring it up now? And why did he have to sound so sincere?
“Why is it so important to you?” she asked. He was silent for a long time. The two of them reached the broken rail, and he turned to watch her descend into the pit that held it, a critical eye on her wounded wing. Was he making sure she didn’t fly down and injure herself more? Odd. She ignored his extended hoof as they climbed out the other side.
Now on the opposite side of the rail, she could see where the wall had collapsed outward into a more natural looking cave. She could hear the gurgling of water, probably from a stream somewhere in the darkness up ahead.
“I made a promise. A long time ago, in another life, practically. I broke that promise, and hurt some ponies I loved in the process. I thought I had good reasons for doing so at the time, but when I saw the results…” he trailed off and let out a sigh. “It wasn’t worth it.” His eyes looked distant; though he seemed to be scanning the cave ahead for obstacles and threats, she could tell his focus was miles away. “I considered myself a pretty honest pony before that, but afterwards, the whole concept of promises and honesty started to mean something different to me. I take my word seriously now, and I never knowingly speak a lie.”
It was just annoyingly vague enough of an answer to make her curious. Emberglow wondered if it would make sense to ask him about it later, but then dismissed the thought. He was a Knight Discordant, after all. She'd always been told they were mysterious, sneaky, deceptive, and not to be trusted. But still, she was starting to see him as a real pony, and not just a monster. That might be dangerous, but she had more important things to focus on for now.
The natural cavern was wide, and the stalactites were much shorter than in the pony-built rooms. There were more of the same mushrooms they had eaten before spread across the floor, which was covered in a thin, dusty soil. Emberglow could see Heartwing’s hoof prints from the last time he had passed this way. The stream was becoming louder,and as they turned a corner, and Emberglow could see the twinkling of light from Hearthwing’s horn reflecting off the moving water in the narrow stream. It looked like molten gold in the light from his horn.
The stream intersected with the cave they were in, carving its own path as it flowed slightly downhill, nearly perpendicular to the cave. It was flowing into a small cavern of its own, nearly deep enough for a pony to stand without crouching. There was even a tiny pool, where the water swirled into a small cubbyhole. It would work nicely as a bath, though she was fully unwilling to remove her armor and clothing in front of Heartwing, even to wash it.
“I already used this to wash off my own armor, as much as I could.” The stallion reached back into his own saddlebags, removing a damp cloth. “I tried to clean it, but it’s not perfect.”
“It will do. Thank you,” she said, reaching out to take the cloth. She stepped into the eddy in the icy stream, gasping and jumping back in shock as the frigid water swirled around her hooves. She scowled back at Heartwing when he chuckled. “You could have warned me.” She noticed he had turned around, facing away from her. It was an oddly affecting gesture both of trust and decency.
“Yeah, but it was funnier this way. Tell me, Emberglow. What does Saint Rarity teach about something like this?”
“You mean making ill-conceived alliances with mortal enemies?” she asked, dipping the rag into the water. She wasn’t usually sarcastic, but it was helpful to not have to think too hard about what she was doing. About whose blood she was washing off of her…
“No, I mean taking the time to keep your armor shiny and spotless. To look beautiful. You know, fashion and beauty and glamorousness.”
“’Do not be overly concerned about your outward appearance,’” Emberglow quoted, scrubbing the wet rag against the glossy metal of her armor. It was still dark, and with Heartwing turned away, she couldn’t see the vivid red of the blood. The mud, she corrected. It was mud. “’Beauty is superficial, actions and thoughts are real. Do not be concerned about what you wear; clothing is ephemeral, beauty fades.’”
“That’s a quote? From Rarity’s scriptures?” Heartwing asked.
“Yes, from Saint Rarity’s scriptures,” she corrected icily. “You sound like you don’t believe me. Haven’t you even read the Book of the Saints?”
“Not all the way through, really,” he replied, sounding oddly sheepish. “I wasn’t really exposed to it growing up. I wasn’t raised in your faith.”
“But everypony in the Diarchy is raised in the faith!”
“Is that so? Hmm…” he replied, nodding his head slowly. She snorted angrily.
“Stop that. That’s such a condescending thing to say, and now it’s the third time you’ve said something like that. If you disagree with something I’ve said, you can either keep your mouth shut or say something. None of this passive aggressive stuff.”
“Very well then,” Heartwing said, and went silent. This wasn’t exactly what Emberglow wanted; a good angry argument, with plenty of screaming and shouting, would have been perfect to distract her from her task. She scrubbed at the armor, restoring as much of the white sheen as she could in the dark cave. She wished she had a mirror; there was sure to be blood on her face, as well.
No, no, it wasn’t blood, it wasn’t—
She scrubbed the cloth at her cheeks and muzzle, rubbing as hard as she could. Now that the thought had taken hold, she was sure she could still feel the blood. Hot blood, life blood, splashing on her face, dripping over her muzzle, her eyes, her mane…
“Are you okay, Emberglow?” she heard Heartwing ask, and she realized she was hyperventilating. She threw the rag to the shore and ducked down, dashing her entire face into the icy water. She ignored the pain of the cold, scrubbing desperately with her hooves at the blood she knew was there, she was sure. She could practically taste it. Eyes closed, she could see Gadget there in front of her. Gadget’s smile, her ears twitching with curiosity when she asked Emberglow questions, her eyes full of love when she talked about her father Gearsmith, her lips moving gently against Emberglow’s.
The kiss. The forbidden kiss. The taste of the mare’s lips, her tongue. The electricity shooting down Emberglow’s spine, the growing heat in her... The all-too-brief moment of peace and beauty and fantasy when she pretended that everything was as it should be. The lies they both told themselves, the lust she saw in Gadget’s eyes.
The way the flesh of her neck had parted before the enemy’s blade, showering them both with blood. The happy, dancing eyes lifeless and glassy. The lips, those sweet lips, spattered with blood, moving silently, wordlessly, then still. The panic in her face…
There was noise in the cave. Somepony was screaming. Emberglow was screaming. Sobbing. Tears flowed down her face, mixing with the cold water on her matted fur. Somepony was calling her name. Heartwing was calling her name. Him. The heretic. There was no way. She couldn’t do this. This alliance with the monsters that had killed Gadget was too much.
She sobbed, her throat raw and burning. Her face hurt from how hard she had been scrubbing it with her hooves. She spun around, splashing water about her as she rounded on the heretic, muscles tensing to pounce on him again. Heartwing’s horn was still lit, though he had turned around, surveying her with a calm, pitying expression. It made her hesitate, but her anger raged. She snorted.
“It was you,” she said, her voice cold and hard. “Her blood, her life. It’s your fault.” She knew she was being incoherent again, but given the look on his face, he understood.
“I know,” he said. “Her, and hundreds others like her, heretic and faithful alike. I’m so sorry.” He sounded resigned, as if he had been expecting this outburst. Emberglow didn’t care.
“Don’t you dare!” she shrieked, her voice shooting through octaves. “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry! You can’t possibly be sorry!”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, too calmly. “But can I ask you a question? Before you try to kill me, that is.”
“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”
“It’s not for you, it’s for me. I saw, from a distance, you cradling Night Star’s head as he passed. He was speaking. What did he say?”
The question seemed out of place, and it took the legs out from underneath Emberglow’s rage.
“What?” she asked, her brain temporarily short circuiting. Heartwing watched her patiently.
“I want to know what the last thing he said was. If we are going to fight, to break our truce, right now, this will be my last chance to know. I want to be able to tell Night Star’s father what his last words were.”
“He didn’t say much,” Emberglow stammered, shaken by the conversation. “He was asking for his mother. Over and over. I… I held him while he cried for his mother.”
Night Star. A name to the face. She burned with guilt. How dare he tell her what Night Star’s name was? It had been so easy, setting her spear against the nameless unicorn’s charge, aiming it just right for the gap in his armor, feeling the resistance as the sharp end pierced and penetrated pony flesh. Now his name burned in her mind. “I killed him, then held him while he cried for his mother.” She didn’t realize she’d said the last part out loud until she saw Heartwing nod.
“What was her name?” Heartwing asked.
“Gadget,” she replied simply. Now he could burn with guilt, like she was.
“Would you like to tell me about her?”
“No.”
“Would you like to hear about Night Star?”
NO!
“…yes.” Why did she say that? She stepped out of the water, her fury cooled by the conversation, and the slight breeze of air through the tunnel. Heartwing handed her another cloth, this one dry, and she began to wipe at the water on her face and muzzle.
“He hated me,” Heartwing began. “Took many opportunities to tell me so. More than I’m comfortable with.”
“Weren’t you on the same side?”
“Oh, sure. But just because we shared the same philosophy, didn’t mean he had to like me. We both agreed on the importance of what we do, he just had a pretty good reason to despise me, though he was trying hard not to. You see, I got his sister killed. His little sister. Now I’ve killed him too.” Heartwing wiped at his eyes.
“How did she die?”
“She joined the Knights pretty young, before he did. He protested, argued with her, begged and pleaded, but she wouldn’t listen. She was good, too; trained harder than any I’ve seen in years. She was a unicorn, and her special talent was healing spells. We put it to good use; lots of raids were only successful because she was there.
"But then a raid went sideways. The squad got split up, and she got separated from the rest of her team. She was caught out and torn apart by three Mystics.” He eyed her. “I didn’t even bother asking them politely to return the body.” There was a cold finality in his voice, and Emberglow knew she wouldn’t need to ask him what had happened to the three Mystics.
“Night Star blamed me, as he was right to. It was my mission. But he joined up anyways, right after. He was never as good as Sunrise, his sister. But what he lacked in natural talent, he made up for in determination and guts,” Heartwing sighed. “He told me once, that he wanted to make them all pay. Every Mystic he killed, he would say, was another pony’s sister that got to keep drawing breath. Now I have to go tell their father that he’s outlived both his foals.”
“What about his mother?” Emberglow asked.
“Night hadn’t seen his mother since he was a foal. She disowned him years ago. Their father told me she was faithful, living back in one of your cities.”
“Oh,” Emberglow said dumbly. She didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t even know if there was anything else she could say. The silence dragged, and Emberglow couldn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t want to see the pain there. “Why? Why fight, if it hurts you so much?” Emberglow asked before she could censor herself. Heartwing looked away.
“Because it would hurt more to not fight. Something has gone horribly wrong in this world, and fighting this battle is the only way I see to fix it.” His posture softened a little suddenly, and his eyes drifted into a melancholy gaze. “If I don’t try, how could I ever look her in the eye again?” That last was whispered; Emberglow got the feeling she wasn’t supposed to hear that bit.
“Her? You said earlier you had a special somepony,” Emberglow said. The moment for violence had passed; now she wanted to distract both of them, and maybe move on and salvage their truce. It wasn’t that she had forgiven him, not by a long shot. But she felt like she didn’t have enough energy to even be mad anymore.
“Huh?” Heartwing looked up, then laughed bitterly. “Oh no, ‘her’ is somepony who died a long time ago. If you must know, my special somepony is a stallion, not a ‘her’.”
“You’re… homosexual?” she asked, surprised, and quite displeased at the sudden sense of kinship and sympathy she felt for him.
“Pansexual, actually,” he replied, snickering at her look of confusion. “I don’t imagine it’s a term you’ve ever heard before. It fell out of vogue a few hundred years ago, and I don’t really see your church being too encouraging of sex-positive identity terms.”
Emberglow had no idea what he was talking about, and was somewhat suspicious that she was being mocked somehow, so she didn’t respond. Wordlessly, she picked up the cloth she had discarded before her… whatever it was her outburst could be called. In silence, she finished washing her armor as best she could.
Gadget, I’m so sorry.
The silence was not helpful. After a few minutes of working on her grim task, her vision had already become blurry. She thought of her own mother, at home in New Canterlot. What was she doing right now? Emberglow couldn’t even tell what time of day it was; perhaps Needle Point was working in the shop, running the front counter. Maybe she was in the back doing custom alterations, or perhaps it was evening, and she was at home with Textile sharing a meal at their small wooden kitchen table. Her throat tightened as she thought of her parents, wanting nothing more than to collapse into her mother’s hooves and cry until she couldn’t any longer.
“Did you love her?” Heartwing asked. She glared at him. She didn’t want to talk about Gadget. Not now, not with him, not ever. But who else was there? If she died down here, in these goddess-forsaken caves, who else would care what she and Gadget had shared, however brief?
“No. I couldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t, you mean.”
“No, couldn’t. It’s a sin.”
“Only cuz your made-up cult says so. I’m pretty sure I’ve never had one of the magical sky goddesses strike me with lightning while getting hot and heavy with my stallionfriend.”
“Sin isn’t about immediate punishment or vengeance,” she intoned, shoving her own fury at his flippancy deep beneath a calm facade. She somehow managed to keep her voice steady. “It’s about damage to your soul.”
“I’m gonna call that voice the Sparklevoice,” he laughed. Emberglow opened her mouth to protest, but then stopped.
“I don’t even know why I’m bothering,” she muttered. “Let’s go. Didn’t you tell me you have a... pathfinding spell?” She could feel the bile rising in her throat at the thought, but it wasn’t like she had any other choice.
“Of course,” his horn began to glow, forming a glowing yellow arrow in the air in front of his muzzle. The arrow spun around a few times, before pointing away in a direction that moved past the spring, and slightly up. “That’s west. Hmm, we must have lost more depth than I thought. I suppose this path will be better than any other. If you like, we can continue our discussion while we walk.”
“Our argument, you mean?”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Heartwing said. “What if I only ask questions?” He pointed with a hoof past the stream, down the cavern, and she looked at him skeptically until he shrugged and stepped across the stream, in front of her. She wasn’t quite ready to have him behind her yet. Especially not while he was casting spells.
“That still feels like a trap,” she replied, following behind him. The glowing golden arrow disappeared, but his glowing horn remained to shed light on the tunnel ahead.
“If you have the truth, it will stand up to challenge. If you don’t…”
“Ask your questions, heretic.”`