The attitude towards her had changed immediately upon her mention of Gambien. Rainbow Dash was whisked inside the castle and taking into a large dining room lit up by torches where she was placed at the head of a long table. Griffons ran and flew all around her as they prepared a great banquet while Rainbow Dash looked on in stunned surprise. She hadn’t even had a chance to say anything and now here she was watching servants throw plate and bowl after plate and bowl of food on the table in front of her.
Those six teenage griffons joined in, sitting on the sides of the table, while the lady sat directly across from Rainbow Dash at the other end. Another male griffon, one quite elderly and wearing a fur cap, sauntered in and took a seat beside the lady as well.
Rainbow Dash didn’t really know what to make of this or what to say so she just sat there for now and looked at the food. A lot of the dishes were clearly for griffons. She knew that because they were meat, the sight and smells of so much cooked meat almost made her queasy but she kept it down. Most of what was placed in front of or close to her was salads, vegetable broth soups, breads, and other specialty vegetable dishes. So at least they knew what a pony ate.
“I hope the food is to your liking,” her host said to her once everything was fully placed
Rainbow Dash decided to find out for herself and dunked her face into the nearest salad bowl, eating up a huge chunk of it and tasting how it was. It didn’t compare to Shibu’s cooking but it was a lot better than gruel. She looked up at the griffon across from her and nodded. “It’s good.”
“Wonderful, you can eat as much as you like, you’re our guest of honor now,” she said back to Dash, although there wasn’t any warmth in her voice. She was being polite but treating Dash as she would a business partner. Serious and informal.
“Thanks,” Rainbow said. “So I didn’t catch your name? Figure I should at least know who’s treating me so well.”
“I am Galia of House Stormwing. Currently the interim leader of the House until an appropriate replacement can be found,” at that she glared at the various teenagers sitting around the table.
Rainbow Dash tilted her head. “What do you mean interim leader? And who’s he?” She asked, pointing at the elderly griffon next to Galia.
“This is my uncle, Greely, castellan of our House. And I’m the interim leader because only male griffons can be considered the true leaders and heir of any House in our society. But at the moment we don’t have any adults from the main bloodline of my family that can take the role, so I’m temporarily doing it,” Galia told her. She then gestured with a talon towards the other teenage griffons. “The children you see here that you’ve already met are my assorted half-brothers and sisters from my father’s second wife.”
“He was the former leader of the House before his passing,” the teenage male who had been rude to Dash earlier said right before chomping into what looked like a large, cooked rat.
“Oh,” Rainbow Dash said.
“And that topic brings us back to why you’re sitting here,” Galia said, clasping her talons together and staring at Dash. “Gambien is dead, isn’t he?”
Rainbow Dash grimaced and slowly nodded. “Uh, yeah. Sorry to tell you. Are you related?”
“He was my brother,” Galia calmly replied.
“Oh, uh… then I’m really sorry,” Rainbow awkwardly rubbed the back of her neck and looked away.
“He was a moron and I’m assuming he died doing something moronic. Either way it isn’t important, the fact that he’s dead is the only thing that matters,” Galia said, quite a bit of icy anger seeping into her voice.
Rainbow Dash really didn’t like how she didn’t seem to care at all that her brother had died. She narrowed her eyes at Galia. “That’s all you have to say? He was your brother and you’re going to say that about him?”
“Gambien is the reason for our current predicament. He got a foolish idea in his head and threw away all of the obligations he had just to chase his selfish passion. Forgive me if I don’t speak fondly of him. We had suspected something had happened to him for some time now thanks to our own investigating done in Ice Valley but we weren’t willing to check further. We’ve been treating him as dead or gone for good this whole time, now we at least have confirmation.” She shrugged and sat back, a more solemn look coming over her. “Thank you for telling us this though. He was still at one point the heir to House Stormwing and he deserves to be properly acknowledged as such and his true fate recorded if possible. We owe you for this.”
“Well alright...” Rainbow Dash picked up a spoon and had a little soup. After swallowing it she looked back up at Galia with a questioning expression. “So you had heard that something happened to him but you didn’t know what?”
“Somewhat. Gambien had been going on and on about his dream for ages and when he finally finished building that stupid ship he said he was going to come back after its first flight and brag to us about it. He never did. We later learned that he arrived in Ice Valley looking for passengers and other things before setting off again. From what others in Ice Valley said he never came back there either. Nor did any of his passengers.”
Rainbow Dash gulped, knowing the sad fate of all those creatures.
“We lacked the ability to search and investigate more thoroughly than that,” Galia finished.
“I guess I’m glad I came along so you could learn the truth then,” Rainbow said.
“Yes,” Galia nodded. “But how exactly did my brother die?”
Rainbow didn’t know if she should tell the whole truth right now. Applejack would but she wasn’t Applejack and she honestly didn’t see any benefit to telling them the whole story about what had happened on The Glory of Gambien’s maiden voyage. It would probably just make them uneasy and angry… even though they didn’t exactly seem to care about or hold their deceased brother in high regard. And she certainly didn’t think it would be good if they tried to look for the one responsible for Gambien’s death either.
Better to just keep it simple. Even if it made Gambien look a little worse than he was.
“He crashed. Or—well—his ship crashed. I saw it on a mountainside down south somewhere and flew down to investigate. Found his journal and everything but I didn’t bring it with me, sorry. But uh, anyways, he wrote down that the pilots had fallen asleep or something in the middle of the night. And that’s why they crashed. He was injured in the crash and I guess they were stuck in a really remote place… so none of the passengers ended up making it back to Ice Valley and Gambien just kind of… died there on the mountain with his ship,” Rainbow Dash told them.
Galia sighed and picked up a slice of meat, taking a bite out of it and chewing for a second before swallowing. “I see.”
“So what now?” Rainbow asked, wondering if she was going to immediately be kicked out of the castle or something.
“Nothing,” Galia shrugged. “We finish with our meal and… as a token of gratitude I’ll allow you to stay here for a few days if you’d like. You said you’ve traveled far and have been on an adventure, if you want to see our home and how the various Houses of us northern griffons live you may. I’ll vouch for you and allow you to acquire whatever you need while you’re staying with us. No other families will give you the trouble we have.”
Sounded good to her. “Alright, let’s eat then.”
She managed to scarf down a massive amount of food since it was basically the first real meal she had had since leaving the mammoth city. It was good to eat stuff like this again. The sight of the griffons tearing into meat and cooked animals wasn’t exactly a backdrop she loved but she could deal with it. It wasn’t the first time she had seen griffons eat. Along the walls of this dining room a number of servants stood, patiently watching and waiting until a dish was empty before coming to take it away. Seems whatever turmoil House Stormwing may have been in they were still pretty well off.
Rainbow Dash wondered what the rooms for guests were like in this castle.
Decent.
Galia and Greely had both led her up one of the castle’s towers to what would be her room. It honestly wasn’t that much different in size from her room back home but it had a large four-poster bed with drapes around it. There was a single window with a wooden shutter over it that didn’t do much to block the cold from outside but there was also a brazier for heating that she could light up from time to time. All in all not too bad, just not lavish to the level of something like Canterlot Castle. That was fine for Dash though, she didn’t exactly need the extra comfort, she was tough.
“This will be your room obviously. Don’t hesitate to traverse the rest of the castle, however. Nowhere is off-limits to you, do what you like.” Galia said.
“Cool, I was planning on exploring anyways,” Rainbow Dash said as she looked all over the room.
“Right,” Galia rolled her eyes. “If you have any questions about the castle or us, now’s the time to ask.”
“Well I’ve been in a few castles in my life, besides what I’ve already seen what else more is there to this one?” Rainbow Dash asked.
Galia rubbed a talon under her chin for a second as she thought. “We have a library, the bathhouse, a few hidden patios if you like someplace quiet and breezy to relax, the kitchens if you want something fresh, I suppose you could always see what my idiot brothers and sisters are up to. Besides the eight of us it’s only servants that still live in this castle.”
That’s still a lot more than Twilight’s castle. Rainbow Dash idly thought. The library sounded… she didn’t want to say interesting exactly but maybe they had some cool books up here. Griffons liked action stories too, right? She could at least check it out and see if there were any fiction stories or if it was just a bunch of dusty old tomes. The bathhouse though was definitely somewhere she was gonna go. And relaxing out on some balcony or whatever while she looked up at the clouds didn’t sound so bad either.
She didn’t exactly have much desire to get to know those teenagers though.
And now after the meal and getting brought to this room it was moderately late. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go look around or just sit here until she was tired enough to sleep.
“Is there anything else you wanted to ask?” Galia asked her.
“I think I got it for the most part. How many other Houses like House Stormwing are there though?”
“Four. You’ll be able to see the four other castles similar to this one on these mountains. Everything else is a private residence of other families or some other building, like our observatory. But the four other major houses are House Snowfall, House Razorbeak, House Lightfeather, and House Frozenflower. I’ll be sending missives to all of them telling them about you. I don’t see any reason why you’d want to visit any of them but if you’re curious then go ahead. Their castles are much the same as ours,” Galia told her.
“Alright, thanks then,” Rainbow Dash grinned up at her.
“Whatever. Go and do whatever you want for the next few days. Let’s go, uncle.” Galia said and walked out of the room, Greely giving Rainbow Dash a curt nod before he left too.
“Definitely not the friendliest of hosts,” Rainbow Dash muttered under her breath once the door closed.
She flapped her wings and floated right up onto the bed, laying down and looking at the canopy above her. Was this place going to be the site of her newest adventure? Honestly she wasn’t so sure. Things seemed pretty quiet, there didn’t seem like there was any conflict between the Houses, at most House Stormwing just had a minor succession crisis cause the only available choices were a couple of immature brats. She’d give this place a chance and maybe help out and look around for a few days but if nothing came up she’d just keep going north. If nothing else, having someplace to rest for a little with good food was pretty nice.
Not every place she stopped at would have something crazy going on. Maybe.
“Kind of lame that a castle doesn’t even have guards or soldiers or anything,” Rainbow said to herself. After a blink and a frown she realized that the lack of those things meant any kind of serious conflict among this society of griffons was really unlikely. House Stormwing was clearly in some kind of trouble but apparently they didn’t think they were in danger or had to worry about anything like that. So these northern griffons probably didn’t have what she wanted while on her awesome adventure.
“I should probably at least learn the names of those kids though even if I don’t plan on hanging around them too much. Why didn’t Galia tell me their names? Why didn’t I ask?” Rainbow Dash frowned and flew off the bed for a moment, gliding over to the window.
She could feel the cold easily seeping in from outside. Something that would probably get worse the later it got. Rainbow Dash opened up the wooden shutters and stared outside. The window was facing west and she was able to see a good portion of the other mountains that had buildings on top of them. She saw at least one of the other castles that belonged to a major House out there, the rest of them were out of her field of view. But like Galia had said the castle was pretty similar to the Stormwing one she was already in. Rarity would probably think they had boring style up here.
A lot of the smaller buildings did kind of look like villas or other big houses, she didn’t see anything that looked like an observatory but that was something she wanted to check out. If nothing else this would be yet another cool place to see a different way of life. Rainbow Dash shrugged to herself and closed the shutter, for all the good it did, and flew back over to the bed. All the blankets and pillows wrapped tightly around her at least made her somewhat warm.