//------------------------------// // Chapter Six: Tell them, "It goes on, and we along with it." // Story: On a Riverboat to the Sea // by Jarvy Jared //------------------------------// Velvet stopped talking. Her mouth was dry and her throat felt like a vice was clamping down around it. A heavy blanket of sweat covered her body. Briefly, she wondered if Frigid and Misty had followed her in, but for some reason she couldn’t hear them.  She didn’t dare look. She didn’t dare turn her gaze.     Galahad was watching her. Throughout the story he hadn’t stopped looking at her, but he also hadn’t moved away from the safety valve, nor had he let go of the pipe wrench.     “So that’s why you’re on this boat?” he croaked. “Just to get away from it all?” “I… guess so. To be honest, I didn’t really think about it until Frigid asked.”     He nodded at that. His gaze turned thoughtful, but nothing about him or his weapon changed.      “But ponies like you.”     “They… do, yes. Does that bother you?”     He was quiet.     Velvet racked her mind for something else to say, or a reason for him to move away. But she couldn’t think of any. She considered simply grabbing him with her magic, but how fast could she do that?  He could wildly swing the wrench and snap off the valve, or hit one of the pumping pistons, or some other unspecified method of damaging the vessel. There was no way Velvet could fix a boiler, let alone a whole ship. She had to snuff out the fuse before it reached the fireworks at the end.      She had to buy time. Time for either the engineers to awaken, or for the captain to come running—if he’d even stop by.     “Galahad? What are you doing?” Misty’s voice broke through the silence.      Galahad’s eyes sharpened to something behind Velvet. The wrench jerked upwards.  “S-stay back! I-I don’t want to have to hurt anypony e-else!”      Misty stepped forward. She looked at the first fallen engineer, then slowly raised her head. “You don’t have to hurt anypony.” There was a faint tremor in Misty’s voice, and her wings fluttered restlessly. “Just talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”      All three of them flinched when the valve let out an unusually high-pitched whistle. It made Velvet’s hide stand on end.      “You know what’ll happen if you plug that,” she heard herself say.     Galahad nodded. “It’ll stop the ship.”     “And overheat the boiler. That could cause a fire. And on a ship that’s mostly made of wood…” Velvet trailed.     His eyes were shaky. He knew it. But he still wouldn’t budge. Velvet’s heart sank. She’d have to force him.  Her horn began to glow.  Misty’s wings spread outwards. The magic fizzled away from Velvet’s horn once Misty blocked her view. Velvet leaned left, catching Misty giving a near imperceptible shake of her head.  “Galahad, I know you,” she said. Perhaps it was the heat getting to her, but the tremor in Misty’s voice had subsided. She seemed… calm. “I know you wouldn’t want to hurt anypony, not even if you thought you had to. You probably wouldn’t want to risk there being an explosion, right?”  Galahad didn’t speak, but his chest seemed to relax.  “But you want to stop the ship. Does… does that mean you didn’t want to go on it in the first place?” “No!” Galahad’s shout stiffened the muscles of all three mares. “No, that’s not—I did want to go on this trip, I did!” “Then… why? Was one of the crew members mean to you? Or…” A noticeable edge crept into her voice. “Was it that pony who yelled at you during the engine room tour? Did he make you do this—”  Galahad’s response, a squeak and a furious shaking of his head, was surprisingly violent. His eyes were tightly closed, and he appeared on the verge of tears. “Then why—” “Because I don’t want to go back!”     His cry reverberated all around them, filled with such wretched desperation and anguish that it made Velvet’s heart twist up. Another sound accompanied it: a hefty, disjointed rhythm of something that faintly resembled breathing.     Galahad wiped his face. “It was nice,” he mumbled. It was hard to hear him above the din. “Mostly everypony on this ship was nice to me. The crew, the passengers… but afterwards, when we get back, it won’t be like that. It’ll go back to—”     His words died as another high-pitched squeal filled the air. But Velvet didn’t need him to finish. She understood. That pony who’d scolded him in the engine room was just one in a long list of those who were unused to a griffon in their presence. Distinctly, she recalled Frigid’s own words—the casual way which she’d spoken, and how nonchalant she was about admitting that this was what she thought. Velvet glanced behind her, and saw Frigid bearing a somewhat guilty expression.  He gulped. “I thought I could change that. But I can’t change who I am. I’m a griffon, an orphan, and…” He furrowed his brow, searching for the right word. “... an outsider. And it doesn’t matter how many boat trips I take—that’ll always be the case. Won’t it?”      Misty’s face was the worst Velvet had ever seen it, but she recognized that look. “Heartbroken” was the weakest way to describe it; “shattered” was more appropriate. This was the face of a pony who knew the weight of Galahad’s words, knew, too, that they would no doubt prove true; this was the face of a mother rendered helpless not by the presence of worry, but the fulfillment of absolute dread and fear. The illusion of protection, which must be cultivated early, was in ruins—the pieces glinted like molten tears. What mother could defend her child from the harshness of that kind of reality?      Velvet’s own words back at the parlor now seemed like a poor joke.      “Even so,” Velvet said, “you… can’t stop the ship. Not forever.”      “Of course I know! But I just wanted to enjoy this a little longer! I just wanted to trick myself into thinking I was normal, that I could fit in, that ponies didn’t have to be afraid of me wherever I go…”     His voice warbled. His grip shook. He looked at the two mares, then at the engineers, then at nothing in particular. “I don’t want to be left alone again.”     Misty’s voice emerged, broken, in a half-sob. “Oh, sweetheart.”     Misty zipped to Galahad, folding her wings around him. The pipe wrench trembled in Galahad’s claws. Misty had flown so fast to him that he hadn’t had time to swing the wrench into the valve. Still, he was in the perfect position to swing it—but not without hitting his mother.  For a moment, and even as Velvet knew otherwise, all other sounds, all other movements, all signs that there was a world out there, faded. The silence that pervaded could have stopped any heart.      Then Misty, softly and tearfully, spoke. “You’ll never be alone. Not while I’m your mother.”     The wrench toppled from Galahad’s claws, landing on the floor with a hollow thud. The echo brought back the world, and with its return, Velvet heard hoofsteps rapidly approaching from behind her. She didn’t have to turn her gaze to know it was the captain.     He might have said something to Frigid, perhaps questioning what happened to the engineers still unconscious, but Velvet’s attention was squarely set on the two forms in front of her. She listened intently without meaning to.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”     “Shh, shh. I’m here. I’m here now.”      There was something in Velvet’s eye, and she brought a hoof up to wipe it away.   Dear Twilight,     I hope this letter finds you well, or at all—it’d be rather improper if the letter of the princess’s mother ended up lost in the mail pile. (That’s a joke, sweetie, don’t worry!)      Anyway, I meant to write this sooner, but the oddest thing happened. I wasn’t sure of what to write. There was so much I wanted to say, or thought I should say, or could say, that I ended up having no way of knowing how to say it. Honestly, I think if I’d tried to power on through the letter when I started to write it, I’d have ended up writing absolutely nothing: no words, no message, zilch.      But I suppose that’s kind of the thing about some letters. Sometimes you do end up writing about nothing. But the important thing is that you wrote this nothing to somepony—you said, “I have nothing to say, except you are the one to whom I want to say nothing.” Many things change, but I think that sentiment will last for as long as there is need for creatures to communicate, to let themselves be heard by somepony else, either as a moment of cherished vulnerability, or as a simple reminder that we exist.     I don’t feel like I say this enough, and I do know you know, but… I love you, Twilight. And I am so proud of you, for all that you’ve done and had to do. And I will always love and be proud of you. No matter what comes our way, that’ll never change.      And even though our lives probably aren’t the ones we thought we’d have, I think it’s important we don’t forget that it’s not whether or not these are the lives we wanted to have that matters. It’s how we live them that counts.     Well, I don’t mean to wax philosophical—maybe another time. Anyway, let me tell you about this trip your father and I took. It was his idea, actually, but, surprisingly, it ended up being a very memorable trip.  We were on a riverboat to the sea…     On the eighth day of the voyage, the Equestrian Regent dropped its anchor into the seafoam-green waters of the southern bay and came to a complete stop. Just as the world was leaving the inky blackness behind and approaching the deep indigo band of dawn, Velvet came out of her cabin and trotted quietly through the decks until she reached the main one. The sailors were up, but none asked for her business.     She trotted up to the bow of the ship, right where the crescent front dipped into the water. She sat. Her tail swished behind her. She kept her eyes on the horizon, waiting.      Some uncountable amount of time passed before she realized a presence approaching her. She wasn’t surprised that it was Night Light. She heard him yawn, making her smile, and then he slowly trotted to her side and stood there for a moment. His blue coat kept him shrouded in the morning dark, but his eyes seemed to glow like the scales of a golden dorado.      “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.     “Not a wink.”     He knew what she was thinking about, for she had told him all about it. But instead of commenting on that, he said, “In our old age, we need our sleep, you know.”     “We’re not that old, but I know.”     He shuffled a bit on his hooves. She tapped the spot next to her with a hoof, and bent her head.     A moment later, he had sat down, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. She could smell the ocean and the riverboat on him. And though it was still quite dark, when she looked up at his head, she could see in his mane a few stray streaks of mercury casting comet-like tails across the swirling thickness.      His tail swished. Hers as well. Then they came together in a neat knot.     They were now watching the horizon together. And Velvet was thinking how nice it was to be here. For now. For that was the most important part of it. Tomorrow, if not later today, that now would pass; the ship would raise anchor and reverse course; Equestria and the world would soon take them all back. It was inevitable. They had come out of the world’s reach only to return.     She wondered about Galahad and Misty. No doubt when they returned, the world would greet them not with the same open arms it had given others. In this way the world was selectively cruel. It hurt her to think that nothing, not even the lives of two precious creatures, could change that easily. Yet at the same time, they had each other, and perhaps that would be more than enough to weather the storm.     It had been enough with her, at any rate. Even when her own world was flipped upside-down due to the machinations of fate or destiny or whatever, she had her children, and they had her. She suspected that that would suffice.      The indigo of the sky started to waver. Somewhere far off, a pony was doing her best, and Velvet, despite being so far away from her, felt a swelling of utmost pride and love in her chest. It banished what uncertainty had lingered in her, casting it back with the speed of a tailwind.     When the sun finally rose, Velvet couldn’t look away. THE END