The temple offered them little else. The two ponies rested in the small structure at the top of the pyramid before moving on the following day. Although they left it behind, Marble carried the experience the entire time.
The black-vested ponies that infested the lower levels left him wondering what was going on. Sunny seemed convinced that those ponies were after whatever used to be in the vault room, but Marble couldn’t think of anything so important that dozens of ponies just threw their lives away.
He wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Below him, the unicorn cut her way through the jungle, swinging the machete in powerful chopping motions as she waded through the water. The road they were following led them into either the same swamp they found the hydra in or another swamp altogether, though neither was sure which one. Regardless, Sunny had Marble on the lookout for any sign of the hydra just in case it tried to hunt this far north.
Despite the less-than-ideal direction the road took, Sunny insisted that they continued to travel along with it. The vegetation, while still thick, was far less dense going down that way than their other options, and Sunny didn’t want to lose that advantage.
She chopped down another vine and splashed her way into what could be called a clearing before she noticed some water lilies growing nearby. “We’re getting close to the end of the day,” Sunny said. “I can’t be incredibly sure without seeing the sun, but I’m fairly certain. Can you check the sky for me?”
“Sure,” he replied before flying up into the sky to check the sun’s position. He broke the canopy with relative ease before he glanced around at the sky and noticed the sun beginning to set over the trees. It’d probably take an hour or so before it officially set, but that was just his best guess without the horizon to check against. He dropped back down to hover over the water before reporting. “I think we have an hour or so before it gets dark. It’s hard to tell for the trees.”
Sunny blinked as she looked up at him. “Really? Then we either started late, or I lost track of time on the march.”
Marble shrugged. “I’m not going complain. The faster we get out of the jungle, the better.”
Sunny nodded. “I guess. I guess it’s also lucky we ran into these lilies because we need to set up camp now and start getting ready for the night.”
“And how are you going to start a fire when you’re up to your knees in water?”
“That’s where you come in,” she replied with a smile. “We’re going to camp in the trees tonight.”
Marble blinked. “What?”
“While you were checking the sky,” she said as her horn lit up, “I found this.”
A large flat stone rose from the water, pulled up by her magic with seemingly no effort.
“You’re...kidding, right?” Marble said.
“I am not,” she replied before she raised the rock above her head and planted it right in the middle of a fork of thick, sturdy-looking tree branches. “There we go, a perfect place to have a campfire.”
Marble glanced down at her. “You’re kidding,” he said again, hoping that stating it as a fact might somehow change the mare’s mind.
“Just carry me up there,” she replied.
Marble did, but he wondered the entire time if it was a good idea or not. Still, he managed to pull Sunny to the top of the tree. When he set her down on one of the branches next to her stone, she smiled and got to work, ignoring Marble’s panting. “Now!” she said as she stood by her giant rock. “Setting a fire on top of any old rock, especially igneous rock, is a terrible idea,” she said as though lecturing a student. “Any water caught in the middle of the rock will expand and eventually explode. Dry sedimentary rocks work best, but we don’t have many options either way,” she said.
Marble shifted nervously on his branch as he watched Sunny go to work.
“Luckily, we do have magic,” she said with a smile, not even noticing Marble’s concerned face.
He watched as the unicorn’s horn lit up and began to wave carefully around the stone in slow, fluid motions that reminded Marble of a window washer’s squeegee. Water began to form on the top edge of the rock before Sunny pulled it away with her magic and opened her waterskin. “The good news is that this water is as clean as it can get.”
“And...and it’s safe now?” Marble asked, wondering why he had simply accepted this as any kind of reasonable.
“Basically!” she said. “We’ll have to keep it a small fire so that the rock doesn’t heat up and light the wood on fire, but it’s a pretty big rock, so we should be able to dissipate the heat fairly evenly.”
Marble shook his head. “Okay, okay, we’re doing this apparently.”
“More importantly,” Sunny said, “it means that we have a chance to actually relax for once. We have food, water, and firewood all within easy reach, so we don’t need to go very fall to get everything we need.”
“I guess,” Marble said with a defeated sigh before he began glancing around at the other branches for one that looked comfortable enough to sleep on. Though, again, it seemed like Sunny was already ahead of him. While he still searched around for a place to lay down, she just finished tying her hammock to both branches of the fork, giving her a place to sit on the other side of her rock.
Marble hovered by a branch that looked like it would support his weight before he began unpacking his bedroll from the bags he wore and hoped that he wouldn’t fall off in his sleep.
He flew back toward the rock Sunny set in the tree and found her sitting in her hammock as she collected small sticks and branches from around the tree and gathering in them into a pile in the middle of the rock.
A part of him hated how at ease she looked from where she sat. She could be laying back in the hammock entirely and still be lighting up the fire without even trying.
“This is kind of nice,” Sunny said with a smirk as she rocked her hammock back and forth over a fifty drop. “It gives us all a chance to unwind a bit, and you know, actually talk to each other.”
“Because that went so well when we first met,” Marble muttered.
“First impressions are important, but they can also be wrong sometimes,” Sunny said, “and besides, it’s not like we have much else to do but socialize.”
“Joy.”
“Oh, stop,” she said. “We’re stuck together, and we’re going to have to rely on each other to get out of here. We’ve both realized that at this point. It’s no surprise to either of us that we need to watch each other to make sure we both live through this. Now you very obviously had an issue with the trap back there—”
Marble felt himself freeze up.
“—But I’m not going to pry into your whole life to get an answer. It’s rude, mostly because we don’t know each other, but I do have the right to know if you’re going to be okay or not, because if not, then I need to pick up the slack.” Sunny stared at him with bright, magenta eyes that bore into his soul for a long moment.
Marble wavered.
She sighed. “Look, Marble. I’m calling it socializing, but if you want to be blunt about it, I’m trying to figure out if I can still trust you or if I need to watch you the entire time. I’m trying to be polite about it, but that’s what it boils down to. Either way, I’m going to try to make sure that you get out of here alive, but if I need to—”
“I’m fine,” Marble snarled, nearly shocking himself by the bite in his voice. “I don’t need you to watch me, and I don’t need anypony babysitting me either.”
Suny’s eyes widened slightly, and while she looked unconvinced, she did seem...pleased?
“Okay,” she said. “So you don’t need anypony watching you. Fine. I can believe that. You don’t need anypony babysitting you. You’re a grown stallion after all.”
“Are you mocking me?” Marble asked.
“No, I’m trying to figure out who you are,” she replied. “You’re obviously a very capable pony, you know a great amount of theory, and your knowledge of traps is awe-inspiring. So why are you so worried about somepony being overprotective of you?”
Marble glared at her.
Sunny kept smiling before she leaned back in her hammock. “I tell you what. Let’s do this. I’ll tell you what I think of you, and you do the same for me. That way, we’ll clear the air completely.”
“And why should I care what you think of me?” Marble asked with a growl.
“You don’t need to. You don’t need to listen to me at all—”
“Then maybe I should go first,” Marble growled. “I think you’re a know it all who has been lucky that they managed to get this far. You obviously know your way around the jungle, though I can only imagine it’s because nopony wants to be around you, so your best choice is to throw yourself into the jungle so you can at least have some company that can deal with you. You’re a pony that knows just enough useless information that you can pass as a functioning adult while hiding behind wildly inaccurate guesses that make no sense. Still, the universe itself seems to pity you, so it throws you a bone every now and then because there is no other explanation for how you’ve been right so often.”
Marble felt his chest heave as he finished roaring his accusation, and then he felt his blood run cold. “Did...did I really just say that?”
That was too far. Really, it was too far. Sunny wasn’t that bad. He was just...she got under his skin somehow and…
“Look,” he began. “I don’t—”
“I see a pony that’s very hurt,” Sunny said softly.
The words felt like a whirlwind that didn’t even disturb the leaves on a tree. It passed Marble by in a tsunami of calm, and the wake left him without anything to say.
“I see a pony that had someone watching over him, but something happened, and now you’re alone.”
Marble stared at Sunny, but his eyes didn’t see her.
“You pulled yourself up to here, and now you’re here, trying to prove that you can do this on your own. You’re hurt but healing, and you’re trying to stand on your own hooves after a long time.”
Marble stared into the darkness and could only think of one pony.
One pony dominated his mind.
His sister.
Vanilla Float.
Marble could see her screaming as the trap came down on her, and he shoved the memory away. He couldn’t see it again. He couldn’t watch that happen again.
He shivered and went silent.
Sunny watched him and flipped over the lily roots on the rock.
Marble stared at the fire as she cooked them, but he didn’t say anything else.
And there was no more socializing for the rest of the night.
---☼---
Night came faster than Marble thought it had any right to. Sunny crawled into her hammock a while ago, having eaten her lily roots and gone to sleep not long after the sun went down. That left Marble sitting on the branch, alone, next to the still warm stone with the dying fire sitting on top of it.
The warm, red glow of the embers offered the only light in the trees, and by their light, he could just barely see the roots Sunny cooked for him, still uneaten, even though his stomach growled for something.
“How?” Marble thought again.
She...somehow she read him like a book. Sunny managed to open him up with the ease of a veteran surgeon and found him instantly.
“How?”
Sunny opened doors that Marble thought were locked and hidden so deep that the floorboards needed to be pulled aside to get to them. Yet she found them and opened the doors wide.
Marble just couldn’t figure out how.
Again the universe just let her guess correctly. That was the only explanation that Marble had, but...but she had been too right for that to be mere luck.
This train of thought annoyed him so much. He didn’t want to think about it, but at the same time, if he let it go, then he’d only be able to think about Vanilla.
He slowly reached out to one of the roots and bit into the now cold lily.
Marble chewed slowly before he glanced back at the canopy around them. He didn’t find anything that might attack them in the other branches, and he finally decided that he couldn’t keep watching their surroundings anymore.
He spread his wings and flew over to the hammock. He poked at the fabric and heard Sunny groan inside before her head popped out of the material. “What? What’s going on?” she asked.
“I can’t stay up anymore,” he replied. “I need you to take your shift.”
Sunny blinked with bleary eyes. “We’re fifty feet up in a tree,” she said. “At worst, we need to worry about something like a panther, but we’re too tall for that. Have you been keeping watch this whole time?”
“Well, I guess so,” he said.
“Go to sleep,” Sunny muttered. “We’ll be fine.”
Marble blinked before he moved back to the bedroll he rolled out earlier. He sighed, still reeling from the conversation he had earlier. How was he supposed to move forward from this?
He lay down on the woven mat but felt a knot in the branch stab into his back. The pegasus grunted and shuffled around, trying to get comfortable.
Somehow Marble couldn’t feel anything about it. He must have shoved it so far down that he simply couldn’t feel anything about it anymore. He heard of that happening before. Marble just pushed it so far down that he couldn’t reach it anymore. That was normal.
He shuffled again, grunting as a new knot poked him.
Marble figured he was overreacting anyway. Yes, Vanilla was gone, but it happened two years ago now, Sunny hit a sore spot, and he just reacted poorly. That was all. In fact, she took it like a champ. Maybe she spent a while being a therapist or something because she didn’t even blink when he tried to tear into her.
He grunted once more as he shifted before Sunny sighed. “Marble, are you having trouble?” she asked in an exasperated voice.
“I’m just trying to get settled,” he said.
Sunny sighed again. “Just come here.”
“What?”
“Come here, and get in the hammock.”
“Uh…” Marble hesitated.
“I am too tired to argue about this with you, and I and too tired to hear you shift all night long. Get in the hammock. Its weight has been cleared for two ponies.”
Marble blinked before stifling a yawn and spread his wings. He flew over, though he couldn’t say why when he thought back to it. He just flew over and slipped into the hammock next to the unicorn and felt exhaustion take him as he began to fall asleep.
---☼---
Sunny woke up first.
She went to bed earlier, despite the interruptions she had in the middle of the night. So it came as no surprise to her. What did surprise her was how comfortable she felt. She felt Marble’s body next to her, and the warmth radiating off of him seeped into her and strengthened her desire to stay in bed all day.
She shoved that aside and sat up, poking her head out of the hammock, only to find that nothing had climbed the tree to disturb them. Once she knew they were safe, she leaned back into the hammock and closed her eyes again.
Inner Celestia stirred.
Sunny smiled to herself as she lay back down in the welcoming warmth that separated her from the morning chill.
“Oh no,” Inner Celestia muttered. “No, you stop that right now!”
Sunny raised an eyebrow and wondered what, by the Sky, she was going on about.
“I’ve seen this before. You like him, and we need to stop.”
“What are you talking about?” Sunny muttered.
“Every time we’ve ever fallen in love, it happened just like this.”
Sunny rolled her eyes. “Sure, because I just invited ponies to sleep in my bed.”
“I am not joking!” Inner Celestia said. “This is how it started every time. You always tried to help a pony face their inner demons, get too involved, and then fall head over hooves because you just love doing that and—”
Sunny let Inner Celestia continue to ramble. She didn’t care right now. All the unicorn did was take a deep breath through her nose and relax a little longer. Right now, she could sleep a little longer just to gather her strength for the day’s journey.
Everything was going to be okay.