Luna was far too chipper in the evenings, her mornings.
I had been up for several hours and had just gotten off my shift, Smooth Stone was still putting the finishing touches on one of the final replacement statues and it wouldn’t be done until the end of next week.
Thank goodness. Even with a small team of unicorns and the sculptor himself helping out, those statues were incredibly heavy.
The two of us made our way down to the communal dining room where most of the palace staff took their meals, Luna skipping and humming to herself by my side. She had insisted on eating with me before court and I didn’t have a good reason to tell her no.
The palace staff was more than used to Luna’s eating with me, most of them had even stopped bowing the moment that they saw her. We were greeted with friendly waves and smiles.
“Good evening, Master Stoke, Princess,” said Windsor, appearing at my side silently.
“How do you do that?” I gasped after my heart rate returned to something within the normal range. “You have hooves and the floor is marble!”
He didn’t reply, just gave me a patronizing smile.
“Good evening Windsor,” Luna chuckled. “I see you still enjoy terrorizing Feather here.”
“My father always said to relish life’s simple pleasures, your Highness,” my butler replied primly.
“Traitors, the both of you,” I grumbled.
The two of them laughed at my expense.
“If you don’t mind, Princess, I have already taken the liberty of arranging your breakfast.”
“Wonderful, thank you Windsor.”
My butler led us over to a small table with four chairs. A pristine white linen covered the surface and there were three places set with delicate and silver inlaid china. The princess took the seat closest, Windsor holding the chair out for her and pushing it in as she sat.
The moment that I took my seat to the right of the princess, two smartly dressed unicorns approached the table, each with a plate held aloft in their magic. For Luna, they provided a plate with a massive stack of pancakes, drenched in buttered maple syrup and honey, just as she liked them.
“Thank you,” I said as a relatively simple bowl was placed before me, filled to the brim with diced cantaloupe, my personal favorite.
“Are you going to join us?” Luna asked Windsor as he stood at my shoulder.
“Please,” I added.
My butler smiled at the two of us and took the seat across from me and quickly asked one of the waiting grooms to bring him a cup of tea, which was brought promptly.
He sipped at his drink as Luna and I dug into our meals, all three of us enjoying the comfortable quiet that descended between us.
In that moment, we didn’t need conversation, just our presence, with each other, was more than enough. The two of them knew that the past few days had been difficult, especially after Evening Song’s visit the other night.
Luna hadn’t asked what we discussed and I didn’t tell her, but I could tell that she knew that something had happened.
As much as I hated to admit it, I felt better after speaking with the High Marshal. She and I had talked for hours and hours, deep into the morning. It was like floodgates had been opened. I couldn’t stop talking.
And I told her everything.
There had been more crying, more yelling, she swore a lot, and I felt like I had been put through a blender. When I tried to obfuscate or avoid a subject, she made me confront it.
“Good evening, dear sister,” came a voice over our shoulders, breaking my train of thought and causing all conversation in the dining room to die around us as ponies took notice of our visitor. “Feather Stroke.”
“Your Highness,” I replied, standing and giving Princess Celesita a formal bow.
She gave me a small nod and sat herself across the small table from her sister, on my left.
“Can I get you something to eat, your Highness?” asked Windsor, getting up from his seat as well and looking decidedly uncomfortable.
I knew how he felt, I just hoped I was hiding it better.
“No, thank you my little pony,” replied the Solar Diarch, giving him a small smile. “I just wish to have a conversation with your master and my sister.”
I winced as I saw the scowl cross Luna’s face.
“Tia,” growled Luna, her turquoise eyes narrowed.
Princess Celestia ignored Luna, focusing her magenta eyes directly on me as I retook my seat.
“Feather Stroke,” she began after searching my face for a long moment. “How have you been? I know that this time of year is difficult for you.”
“About as well as can be expected,” I replied evenly as Luna audibly ground her teeth. I took a bite out of the diced cantaloupe still in my bowl.
“I see,” Celestia sighed. “I was wondering if you had heard from-”
“Tia!” exploded Luna, interrupting her sister with real anger in her voice. “Really? This is what you want to speak with Feather Stroke about? Now?”
“It’s okay Lu,” I sighed, putting a hoof on her withers. “For the record, no, Princess, I have not heard from Star Shine. Not since she left.”
“Ah,” Celestia replied, suddenly finding one of her golden shoes very interesting. “Thank you, but that wasn’t what I was going to ask.”
“Oh,” Luna and I said together, Luna looked more than a little sheepish.
“Really Luna,” Celestia scowled, giving her sister a dirty look. “I am not so heartless as to ask that.”
“Could have fooled me,” Luna snarked, her wings flaring.
“Who are you looking for, Princess?” I interrupted before tempers could rise any further.
I saw Luna roll her eyes at my use of her sister’s formal title.
“High Marshal Evening Song, Feather Stroke. From the reports that Silver Quill has passed to me, from the both of you, there are several members of the combined guard that have taken ill.”
“Song’s sick?”
“I’m afraid so,” confirmed Celestia with a nod. “The High Marshal has simply been the most recent and most prominent member in the chain of command. I was wondering if you had heard from her.”
I had seen the disclosures from the Lunar Sentinels and the Solar Praetorians, they were impossible to miss. At first, I hadn’t thought too much of the reports, given the current calamity, ponies, even the guard forces, were bound to fall ill.
“I didn’t know that she was sick. What about Silver Fang? Is he okay?”
“I do not know the whereabouts of her son at the moment, I hadn’t looked too deeply into the matter until I read today’s reports. I was hoping that, given your relationship with the High Marshal, you would know more.”
My what?
“Our relationship? Your Highness, we’re just friends. Colleagues, really. She’s teaching me how to fly, that’s all. I’m sure that there are several Lunar Sentinels that could claim to know her better than I do.”
“And not a single one of them knew that she had taken ill.”
“To be fair, I didn’t either,” I frowned, trying to remember the past few nights since Evening Song and Windsor had confronted me about my self-destructive behavior. Now that the Princess had mentioned it, Song hadn’t been looking well, paler and somewhat shaky on her hooves.
“I should have noticed that the High Marshal was under the weather,” grumbled Luna. She had crossed her forelegs over her chest and was pouting adorably.
“How many of the guard forces have reported as unable to fulfill their duties?” I asked both Princesses.
“At least forty-five percent of the Lunar Sentinels,” said Windsor, drawing all of our attention to him, effectively reminding the three of us that he was there. “And thirty percent of the Solar Praetorians.”
That was way too many and way too fast, even for a common cold or the flu to have taken root in a population of very healthy and fit ponies.
“Where did you see that information?” Celestia asked before I could say anything.
“It was in the daily roster reports that Master Feather Stroke receives from Silver Quill, your Highness.”
The two of them broke off and continued to discuss the roster reports, the princess asking more and more detailed questions and my butler answering with precision; my mind raced.
Could it be food poisoning? Something in the water?
Unlikely, but possible. There would be way more than just thirty and forty-five percent of the guard, not to mention the rest of the palace staff and the pampered nobles.
“Windsor,” I interrupted, cutting Princess Celestia off mid-sentence. “Sorry for interrupting, your Highness, but I need more information.” I turned to my butler, really looking at him for the first time in what felt like years. He was decidedly a paler shade of grey than his usual warm pewter, a little green around the gills too. “Who else has said anything about feeling unwell? Palace staff? Nobles? I need to know everything that you know.”
Windsor looked between the princess and I, she nodded at him, clearly studying our interaction.
“Several, Master Feather Stroke, several,” He started, then coughed into his napkin. “The absence notices aren’t as detailed as the ones from the guard, but the numbers are more than a little worrying.”
“When did this all start?”
“Earlier this week, Master Feather Stroke.”
“Day, please Windsor.”
“I believe it was Tuesday.”
He coughed again, and sniffled.
My eyes widened. Several things slid into place in my mind.
“What’s your temperature Windsor?”
“W-what?”
“Your temperature, what is it?”
He gave me a long and very tired look before sighing, barely stifling another cough.
“Just over one hundred and four degrees.”
“And what is the average body temperature for an adult unicorn stallion of your age?”
“One hundred-point-five.”
I wanted to swear. I wanted to rush everypony out of the room right that instant. Away from my butler.
Then I heard it.
There were other ponies in that room coughing, sniffling, and, now that I really looked, most of them looked terrible.
“Princesses Celestia and Luna,” I said evenly, not taking my eyes off of Windsor. “Please magic yourselves into a bubble or something. I would ask you to leave here right away, but I have a feeling that I’m going to need your help.”
For once, neither of them questioned me, blue and gold bubbles sprung into existence around Luna and Celestia’s respective heads.
“Windsor, my butler and friend,” I sighed, still pinning him to his seat with my eyes. “Why on Equus did you not say anything?”
“You had enough on your mind, sir, I didn’t want you to worry.”
Touché.
“Well, I’m worried now,” I insisted, putting my hoof on his withers. “Are any of the others sick? Orchid? Cherry? Swift?”
“No, sir!” he exclaimed. “I sent them away as soon as I felt unwell. Orchid’s herd is still expecting and I cou-”
“It’s fine Windsor, I understand. I would have done the same thing had I been paying attention.”
I sat back in my chair, still watching my butler as he blew his nose into a new napkin, his horn sparked.
“What are we going to do?” Luna asked, her voice oddly modulated by her magic bubble.
“Until we know whatever this is, I have no idea.” I turned to the Solar Princess. “Do you have any ideas, your Highness?”
“A few,” she replied, closing her eyes and sighing. “But I fully admit to not being the most medically knowledgeable pony, what little I did know is centuries out of date by now.”
I hummed to myself, trying to wrap my head around our situation.
“I think we can rule out food borne toxins,” I thought outloud. “Way more ponies would be ill, and they probably wouldn’t be unable to work for longer than a couple of days, at the most. Plus there’s the coughing and other respiratory symptoms to consider.”
Both Princesses nodded along with my reasoning.
I used my fork to spear another bite of melon before I looked at it and put it back on my plate and pushed the entire thing away from me.
Neither Princess made to touch anything on the table, not even with their magic.
“I think that the best course of action, until I can get back, would be to place the entire palace on lockdown. Send everypony to their rooms and have them stay there until further notice. If they don’t live in the palace, we should find them rooms to stay in.” I turned to the two Princesses, the both of them giving me incredulous looks. “The two of you especially.”
“I do not think that the situation is that bad, Feather Stroke,” Celesita said through a fierce scowl. “That would only send ponies into a panic.”
I sighed and had to stop myself from rubbing my eyes.
“I understand the reluctance, your Highness, I really do.” I paused and then continued. “Harmony only knows what this is.” I stood from my chair and looked away from them, turning to my butler. “Windsor, I need you to get to bed and rest.”
“What is it that you plan on doing?” Celestia asked, her scowl having morphed into a frown behind her bubble of golden magic as I started to walk away from them, Windsor at my side.
“I plan on going to the nearest hospital and finding out everything that I can, hopefully I’ll understand some of what they tell me.”
“That’s right, you are a medical professional.”
“I was, yes.”
“Did you not think to pursue that upon your arrival here?”
“No, Princess, I did not.”
“Why not? Surely it could be your special talent!”
“It was a job, Princess. Sure, I enjoyed it and helping children was always a joy, but it was just a job. A job that brought in good money. Kept us well fed, put a roof over our heads, and paid the bills. That was all.”
Her frown deepened.
“I don’t understand you, Feather Stroke.” She said after a while. “Even Star Shine got her cutie mark, shortly after your arrival, if I recall correctly. A constellation, right?”
“Yes, that particular one was special to her back home.” I answered, a familiar dead weight settling in my heart. “She was always so obsessed with astronomy, it was her passion.”
“Surely you must have something similar?”
“Is now really the best time, sister?” Luna interjected.
“I’m just trying to understand your regent Lulu, he confuses me. I want to know him better. It's very hard to do that without knowing what he’s good at.”
I sighed and waved for Windsor to continue on without me with one wing. The two of them were going to start arguing, again.
“You want to know what I’m good at, Princess?” I asked, not looking at either of them.
She turned to me from her sister and I could see her nod from the corner of my eye.
“I’d like to know as well,” I admitted, restarting my trot away from the diarchs. “If you find out, be sure to tell me.”
I didn’t hear either of them say anything more as I headed towards the nearest Palace exit.
/＼ ^._.^ ／\
The Royal Canterlot Medical and Trauma Center was in total pandemonium by the time I arrived. Outside of each entry way, there were at least four or five Canterlot Regulars, the general police force, preventing ponies from entering the hospital.
No pony stopped me, they even saluted.
Within the main foyer, I was given a scan, had my temperature taken, and had a protective bubble placed around my head.
I had barely placed a hoof past the secondary checkpoint when I was accosted by a very harried looking doctor.
“Finally!” he cried, rushing over to me, several nurses following him. “You’re here!”
I gave him a questioning look as he and his entourage began herding me away from the checkpoint.
“Lord Feather Stroke,” he began once we had secluded ourselves in a conference room. The nurses with him casting what I assumed were cleansing spells all over us and the room at large, when they finished, the protective bubbles were dispelled. “We have been sending message after message to the palace, trying to get someone out here to make a proclamation.”
All of them looked at me with hopeful eyes.
“Wait, wait, what?” I asked, confused.
“We have been overrun by sick ponies, my lord,” continued the Doctor, he had bags upon bags under his eyes. “We’ve run out of room, we’re sending sick ponies away.”
I stared at him.
“What!?”
It was their turn to look confused and I continued:
“No messages have made it to the Night Court, Doctor…?”
“Bedside Manner,” he clarified. “We’ve been sending messages to the Palace for days now, since Tuesday.”
“It's been bad since Tuesday?” I queried, shock and worry writ large upon my face.
That shouldn’t have been possible. There was no way that an illness could have spread that fast and been that serious for them to have run out of beds on the very same day that we’d had our first reports.
“Yes!” one of the nurses cried.
The doctor gave him a severe look before turning back to me.
“As nurse Healing Hoof just said, yes,” he said tiredly. “Though it started small, just a couple of sniffles and minor burns, it turned into a frenzy in our emergency department. When I arrived for my shift, we already had thirty-three cases, all of them in isolation rooms. All of them with frighteningly similar symptoms.
He then started rattling off a laundry list of, very basic, descriptors and even explained several things to me. Some of the terminology was different than what I was used to, but I understood it.
“Doc,” I said, interrupting him as he started in on explaining the varying temperatures in each tribe. “I was a nurse before coming here, give it to me straight. What is going on?”
“Feather Flu, or, more accurately Sub-Arcanic Disharmony,” he replied as he readjusted the stethoscope around his neck.
“When you say ‘sub’,” I stared, the familiar feeling of professional detachment settling over me as my years old training came crawling back. “Do you mean ‘less-than-normal’ or ‘below the usual’ amount?”
“A little of both actually.” If he was surprised by my question, he didn’t show it.
“Can you elaborate please?”
“Sub-Arcanic Disharmony usually, as ‘disharmony’ in the name implies, affects the base level harmonies in all ponies. It hinders their connection to their internal magics by pulling them out of sync with Harmony.”
“So we just need a big enough tuning fork, right?”
The doctor and the nurses give me deadpan stares.
Nice to see that my bedside manner hasn’t improved.
“It’s a magical disease,” I said, moving on from my gaff. “As in something that can be dispelled?”
“Oh, no, not at all Lord Feather Stroke, Sub-Arcanic Disharmony is just the name for the condition that the Streptococcus Equi bacteria causes.”
I knew what Streptococcus meant back home, it was part of our natural fauna and it could cause some very nasty infections.
“O-o-okay, then it’s just a round of antibiotics then?”
“Normally, yes, it would be a simple matter of sending the High Marshal home with specific instructions on limiting her interactions with other ponies, to come back if her fever ever went over one hundred and seven degrees, and a few prescriptions.”
“You just said ‘normally,’” I interrupted, not liking where my thoughts went. “What does that mean in this context?”
“I was getting there, please, Lord Feather Stroke, let me finish.”
“Sorry.”
“As I was saying, the High Marshal is in excellent physical and thaumaturgical condition, SAD should not be able to keep her off her hooves for long.”
“That is an incredibly unfortunate acronym, I can see why ponies call it ‘feather flu’,” I chucked with a shake of my head.
“Indeed. Now, there is that complication that takes this illness out of the ‘normal’.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.” I said through a wince.
“To be frank with you, my Lord, we don’t either, but the High Marshal insisted that we give you as much information as possible.”
“She’s here!?” I all but shouted. It hadn’t been my plan to find her at the moment, it was only second to getting this information back to the Palace.
“I thought that you knew, we assumed that since you were here, instead of somepony else, that you knew.”
“I didn’t know, Doc, if I had known, I would have been here much much sooner.”
One of the nurses behind the doctor rolled her eyes and muttered something about thestrals. She was silenced by the two nearest her giving her extremely dirty looks.
“She insisted?” I asked, ignoring the nurse and returning my full focus to the doctor.
He gave me a look.
“Did you not have laws governing the privacy of patients where you came from? Even a direct order from either of the Princess’s own hooves would not have been enough to circumvent those laws.”
“Oh, yes.” I apologized. “I’m sorry, I totally forgot my place here. I’m not family, just a friend, I get it. Thank you for being forthwrite with me.”
He nodded, taking a clipboard from a waiting nurse.
“You are not ‘just a friend’ in this case, my Lord, but I digress. The High Marshal requested that we run as many tests as possible on her when her son brought her in after a fall and instructed us to give as much information to the Royal Representative as we could when they arrived. Hence, we are telling you.”
Both he and I knew that I wasn’t the literal royal representative that the hospital was waiting for but neither of us commented on that. I was as good as they were going to get at the moment, probably better than they expected actually.
“Streptococcus Equi is a natural bacteria and SAD is a common enough condition,” the doctor explained. “Generally seen in foals under ten years of age.”
“I’m following you,” I stated when he looked up over the clipboard at me.
“In the case of the High Marshal,” He continued, lowering a pair of glasses over his muzzle and flipping through a few pages. “Streptococcus Equi is only part of the problem.”
“Let me guess,” I drawled as I rubbed the bridge of my snout with a hoof. “All of the chaos rifts have mutated this thing into some superbug, right?”
“Correct.”
I took a step back, shocked.
“Really? I was being sarcastic.”
“Sarcasm or not, you are correct.” The doctor then sighed and floated the clipboard over to me. There were charts and thaumaturgical equations all over it. “This particular strain of the bacteria has, and I hate to use this word, harmonized with the extreme amounts of discordic magic bathing Equestria and, probably, all of Equus right now.”
I sat back on my haunches and rubbed both of my eyes with my hooves.
“By Luna’s left legs, this is not my day.” I swore under my breath.
“To further elaborate, the High Marshal is, without a doubt, suffering from Sub-Arcanic Disharmony.” He pressed on having either not heard my mutterings or doing me the courtesy of ignoring them. “She is also suffering a mild case of flightlessness and bilateral subcutaneous plumage generation of the patagium between her second and fourth autopod.”
I held up a hoof to stop him, my brow furrowed.
“You mean to tell me that she’s growing feathers?”
“That is what I said, yes.”
“She’s a thestral, doc.”
“Sub-Arcanic Disharmony does strange things to everypony. Earth ponies become delirious and weak, pegasi lose their weather control magics as well as severe rachisitis. With unicorns, like myself, well, you learn to duck.”
“Huh?”
“We unicorns lose basic, primary control of our expressed magical traits.”
“So, things tend to explode?”
“Not unheard of.”
“Wonderful.”
We were silent a few moments while I flipped through the doctor’s notes on Evening Song.
“I have two questions for you, Doctor Manner, if you have a few more moments to spare.”
He nodded.
“How contagious are we talking here? As in a common cold or a full blown pandemic?”
“We don’t know, but I’m going to have to lean toward the latter. Every single one of our main isolation rooms are filled by ponies with similar symptoms as the High Marshal and I suspect that that number is going to continue to rise before it ever goes down. We’re scrambling, every single unicorn on staff, from the surgeons down to the janitors are being taught isolation and cleansing spells. We even have beds lining the halls.”
“Make it three questions, prognosis?”
“Most ponies will be fine after a week or two of being miserable. Even with the discordic element altering the biomechanics of the bacteria.”
“You said ‘most’ again.”
“Sad to say that not everypony will be able to fight this off.” He paused and his eyes widened and he looked panicked. “That’s not to say that we won’t do everything in our power to help them, nonononon-”
I stopped him with a raised hoof.
“Doctor Bedside Manner,” I said firmly. “If there was any doubt in your and your colleagues skill and dedication to the ponies under your charge, I would be arranging to have had Evening Song moved into the Palace’s infirmary at this very moment. As you can plainly see, I am not doing that, nor do I plan to.”
He and the nurses looked relieved.
“Last question, I promise, you said that Evening Song was brought in by her son, where is he?”
“In the bed next to her,” he replied sadly.
Detachment fled, burning away as worry and anxiety took its place.
“What?”
/＼ ^._.^ ／\
Nopony would let me into Evening Song and Silver Fang’s room and, as much as I wanted to be angry with the nurses and doctors that barred my way, I couldn’t blame them. Even with the protective bubble back around my head and the ward over the door, there was too much risk of my catching SAD.
So, I parked my butt outside of their room and requested that they bring me every bit of information that they could.
From their combined notes as well as the interviews that I conducted from my bench, this current infection of SAD had gone from zero to sixty in the span of a few hours.
If I had been back home, I would have insisted that I was staring in one of those bad medical dramas that I loved to watch.
But I wasn’t back home.
And this was frighteningly real.
I was broken out of my thoughts as a clanging bell rang from down the hall and at least a dozen ponies galloped at full tilt towards it. There was shouting and the familiar sound of spells being fired off one after the other.
I had to stop myself from getting up and investigating.
If it were anything like our ‘Doctor Strongarm’ procedures, the Regulars would be here any second.
There was a knock at the door behind me and, when I looked, I saw Evening Song’s face looking at me worriedly from behind the inset window. Her eyes were bloodshot and her normally glorious amethyst coat had dulled to a grey-lavender. I could see the top of Silver Fang’s head from his perch atop her head, he was sleeping fitfully and, though I couldn't hear it, I could see his shoulders and withers shudder as he coughed.
I put my hoof on the glass, right over hers and gave her an encouraging smile.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I mouthed at her.
She gave me a small smile in return then coughed, almost hard enough to dislodge her son.
I gestured with my head, nickering, my wings inadvertently flaring at my sides. I wanted her to get back in bed and rest.
Evening Song didn’t have anything to worry about as long as I was there.
The mare put her hoof back on the unseen ground and heaved a massive sigh. She turned and, before trotting back to her bed, she looked over her shoulder and mouthed at me:
“Thank you.”
I stood there for another several moments, just watching them.
Evening Song gently pulled her son off of her head and placed him on her bed. I noticed that his wings were covered by something that looked like over-sized oven mitts, they were a sky blue and had little sunflowers on them, no doubt there to stop him from chewing on his itchy appendages.
Once situated, Evening Song gave me another warm smile before hopping onto the bed herself and curled around her son, draping her own covered wing over his sleeping form.
I don’t know how long I stood there, watching the two of them, hating the fact that I couldn’t be in there, with them, more than anything.
“My Lord?” came a voice from behind me. I turned and Doctor Bedside Manner was there, by himself, and looking more exhausted then he had a few hours ago when I interviewed him. He had rushed off to continue his work after greeting me upon my arrival and had only had time for a very quick secondary meeting.
“How can I help you, doctor?” I asked, backing away from the door and turning to face him.
He didn’t reply, just floated a black folder over to me.
I recoiled away from it.
“No,” I gasped. “How?”
“They were older,” he sighed gently and led me back over to my bench. “Earth Pony, eighty seven years old, retired baker. They were already here after they took a bad fall in their home.”
I sat down heavily, my breath gusting out of me. Doctor Manner sat beside me, one hoof rubbing my back.
“How many?” I croaked.
“They make four,” he replied, his voice soft.
The number echoed in my mind. Four ponies that would never see their families again. Never see the moonlight again. The sunshine.
Gone.
“How?”
The doctor sighed and leaned back, resting his back on the padded seat.
“It was just too much all at the same time. We did everything we could do. From emergency injections to manual respiration and arcano-cardiac massage.”
Unable to reply, I watched as the doctor added the black folder to the ever-growing stack on the table next to me.
He turned to look at me with a serious look on his face.
“My Lord,” he began, his eyes roaming over my tired form. “How long have you been here?”
“Since you first saw me and gave me the rundown.”
His eyes widened.
“Have you slept since then?”
“When would I do that?” I snorted with a shake of my head. “And where?”
“My Lord, it’s been two days!”
“No,” I said with a wave of my hoof. “There’s no way. It’s been half a day at most.”
“What day do you think that it is?”
“Saturday.”
“Try Monday, or at least it’s Monday now.”
I opened my mouth to reply and he shoved a newspaper in my face.
The date on the cover of the Nightly Dispatch, sure enough, read Monday.
I stared at the paper in shock.
“Respectfully, my Lord,” started the Doctor in a grave voice. “I’m ordering you out of his hospital and back to the Palace. You need to look after your own health. It is a wonder that you haven’t gotten sick as it is and I will not allow you to do so while under this roof.”
I wanted to argue, to say that I couldn’t leave Evening Song and Silver Fang here, alone.
He silenced me with a fierce look.
“I understand that you want to be here for the High Marshal and her son, but you have to look after yourself as well. Neither of them would want you to join them.”
That didn’t mean that I didn’t want to join them.
“And no, you won’t want to join them either, my Lord,” he continued, reading my mind. “Misery does not love company.”
“Is everypony a mind reader around here?” I asked with a tired chuckle. “First it was my butler, then the princess, and now you.”
“I see it all the time,” The doctor replied, helping me gather the stack of folders and reports and used his magic to tie it all together before placing it on my back. “Especially when it involves special someponies.”
I sorted and shook my head. First Princess Celestia and now him.
“I’ll be expecting updates on their condition, doc.”
“And I’ll have them sent.”
“Directly to the desk of Princess Luna this time, I don’t want the messages to go to the wrong pony again.”
“Of course, my Lord.”
/＼ ^._.^ ／\
If I thought that the Royal Canterlot Medical and Trauma Center had been chaotic when I arrived, nothing had prepared me for the insanity that gripped the Palace upon my return.
Four different guard unicorns ran cleansing spells over my coat and threw overlapping bubble spells around my head. They, immediately, marched me into the palace proper and hurried me into the Throne Room.
There, my ever loyal butler, Windsor was waiting for me.
He looked terrible.
His normally pressed and starched shirt and jacket were missing and he was holding what looked like a back of ice against his forehead.
“Where have you been?!” he cried as soon as he laid eyes on me. Even his voice wasn’t his own, a raspy and hollow shell of the tenor I had known.
“At the hospital,” I replied as I hurried over to him.
He stopped me before I got too close.
“We sent runners all over the city, we thought that something had happened to you.”
“What’s going on?” I asked before he could work himself up even more.
“It's the Princesses,” came a voice from my left, his right.
We turned and Princess Celestia’s assistant, Silver Quill, limped over to us and blew her nose into a handkerchief. Her mane, normally tied back in a neat bun, was loose and frazzled. Her bloodshot eyes looked at me from a sallow face.
There was a rumble from off in the distance, the entire palace shuddered and one of the last remaining stained glass windows shattered.
Outside, through the broken panes of glass and frame, the sun and the moon hung in the sky. Together.
“They’re sick.”