//------------------------------// // Chapter 23 // Story: Celestia Goes West // by DungeonMiner //------------------------------// The feather didn’t seem special when Sunny looked at it. It appeared to be a simple primary feather, and the only real quality of note seemed to be its size. If the unicorn grabbed the shaft in her teeth, Sunny could twist her head and dust the floor, making it longer than her legs. “That’s a big feather,” Marble noted. Sunny nodded as she pulled the feather out and looked up at it. She waved in the air slowly and noticed that it seemed firmer than it should be. “You could almost swing it like a sword,” she noted before giving the feather a test swing. They both could hear it cut through the air with every swing before Sunny glanced at it. Inner Celestia sighed and wished she brought Energy spells so she could actually try and figure out what it did. But the limitation was the point, so breaking it by now wouldn’t help anypony. “What do you think it does?” Marble asked. “I have no idea.” “Did you have any training on using recently discovered magic items?” Sunny shook her head. “They mostly work on their own. Of course, this one’s even weirder than normal.” “Why?” “No gem. Every magical item I’ve ever seen has a gem to hold a spell matrix. This one does not, but between all our prisoners and the fact that the feather was hidden in a secret compartment in the wall, I’m sure it is magic despite that.” Marble nodded. “Okay, so would it still do its thing on its own, or…?” “Oh yes, the real question is what triggers it?” Marble looked around, but Inner Celestia had an idea. “You know,” Sunny said. “If I had to guess, the Lusitanpec ponies probably had the feather up here in the tower for a reason.” Marble blinked. “Do you think there’s a connection?” “There might be,” Sunny said. “There’s only one way to find out, and we should probably wait for a day or two anyway so that I could heal myself up a little more.” “So we’re here anyway, and we might as well try and figure it out?” Sunny nodded. “Might as well. It’s not like we have too many other options, do we?” Marble blinked. “I guess.” She nodded. “Why don’t I go ahead and get dinner. Make sure that the camp’s set up, and when you’re done, try messing around with this feather and see if you can get anything to happen.” Marble took the feather’s shaft in his teeth and nodded. “Alright.” “I should be back soon,” Sunny said. “If I don’t come back soon, be ready. It might mean that the ponies we sent packing might have tried something.” Marble frowned. “O-Okay.” “We’ll be fine,” she told him. “The chances of that happening are small, not zero, but small.” “Filling me with so much confidence, there.” Sunny smirked. “We’ll be alright.” Marble shook his head as Sunny began to make her way down the tower’s stairs toward the jungle. “Don’t think I forgot,” Inner Celestia said. “What?” “Don’t think I forgot what you said. ‘Oh, we’re not falling in love. We’re just traveling with this pony! Never mind that he saved my life, and I’ve been a sucker for that my entire life.’” “What are you talking about?” “Do you want a list? Thunder Spark, Crimson Mask, Night Thunder, Silver Spirit, Nimble Gust—” “Okay, okay. Sky above, you’re not pulling punches today.” “You fell head over hooves for each of them, and nine of them happened to save you from one mistake you made that would have cost you your life if you weren’t nigh-on immortal.” “Look, that’s a coincidence at best. Besides, you said it yourself; it never worked out. Why are you worrying about this one?” She didn’t get an immediate answer for that one, but they both knew what it would be. “You’re just afraid we’ll get hurt again is all,” Sunny hissed, keeping her voice down in case Marble was somehow listening. “Well, we don’t have to worry about it because neither of us is going to move on those feelings. Which, you and I both know, mean nothing at the end of the day.” “They don’t mean nothing,” Inner Celestia argued. “And I didn’t think I’d have to argue specifics with the mental construct in my head. Of course, they don’t mean ‘nothing,’ but they don’t matter much if we choose.” Inner Celestia didn’t argue any further, and Sunny focused on trying to find some food. She cast another Perceive Body spell to find living fruit or vegetables that she could eat and noticed a large clump of food not terribly far away. She began making her way over, carefully avoiding the puddles of thick mud that seemed to surround her now that she wasn’t on the road anymore. Her food-finding spell pinged off a tree to her right, and she looked up to see ripe mangos hanging in the tree next to a few chimps. They watched her, curious, yet cautiously as she made her way below the tree and decided that mangos weren’t worth fighting a troop of chimpanzees. “It’s for the best,” Inner Celestia said eventually. “We don’t need another pointless heartbreak because ponies can’t get over the fact that we’re royalty. Besides, outliving friends is bad enough. Outliving a husband would be devastating.” Sunny agreed. Though a thought did pop in her head. “Of course, we’re not a Princess anymore, though.” “No!” Inner Celestia roared as she pounced on the thought to rip it to shreds. “Don’t even think about that! We just agreed it’s for the best.” “And I agree,” Sunny said. “I’m just pointing out that we’re not royalty anymore.” “You are opening a door,” Inner Celestia accused. “You’re opening a door, and you’re doing it deliberately! Are you trying to fall in love with Marble? Is there a reason you’re making excuse after excuse?” “I am not falling in love with him.” “My eye, you’re not!” “Please, what do I get out of falling in love, hm? Ooh, I get to pretend to have a relationship for a few weeks before Sunny drops off the face of the earth. Then what happens? He gets a summon from Lady Celestia to her manor house and finds out that the mare that walked him through the jungle was lying to him about who she was and started crushing on him on their journey. It’ll go over so well, with no way of ever going wrong!” “Then why are you pursuing this?” “I’m not!” she nearly shouted before realizing that she just yelled in the middle of the jungle like a mad mare. “I’m not pursuing this. I’m not pursuing anything other than a little adventure in the jungle.” “Doing a very terrible job of that,” Inner Celestia said with an eye roll. “Because I have a mental projection of my boring, responsible self breathing down my neck. Let me make this perfectly clear: I am not in love with Marble, I was never in love with Marble, and I certainly don’t plan on ever being in love with Marble. Are you satisfied?” The wind howled. A maelstrom erupted behind the unicorn and nearly picker Sunny up off the ground as trees creaked, groaned, and snapped in the sudden storm. She glanced up and saw a tornado spun up above her, throwing half-buried boulders and trees through the air. Sunny barely held on the ground, and she needed to use her magic to open up a ditch in the dirt to hide in as debris smashed past her. Sunny glanced up to see the clouds rushing past at terrible speeds before a boulder smashed into her ditch and blocked her view of the sky for a moment before the wind picked it up again. Sunny realized with horror that whatever caused the storm that tore the boat apart had unleashed itself again. And then a terrible thought struck the mare like a lightning bolt. Marble. He was alone in the tower, and this storm could have just ripped the whole structure away. He could be dead. The thought stabbed deep, and she began looking for any sign of cut stone in the raging winds above her. Large, smooth boulders and tree trunks answered her, giving her no answer. Biting her lip, Sunny did the only thing she could think of. She teleported. Sunny made a short jump that she should be able to pull off, and she appeared in the middle of the wind. Debris battered against her, and the mare could barely keep her eyes open. Sunny forced her eyelids open for a second and saw a massive tree trunk flipping end over end in her direction. She made another jump, teleporting out of the way of the giant club that the storm just tried to smash her with, before trying to make her way back toward the tower. And then the wind slowed. Almost as quickly as it picked up, the storm faded, leaving only destruction as the sign that it passed through. Sunny wasted no time. Now that she wasn’t fighting the wind, the disguised Lady began rushing for the tower, leaping over the fallen trees in her wake. Her hooves pounded into the dirt as she rushed back to the tower, and she finally saw it in a break in the trees. It mainly seemed intact, though her blood ran cold when she saw the very top, where the room—the same one she found the feather in—lay cracked open like a broken egg. She galloped to the entrance, and began climbing the stairs, and ran head-first into Marble. “Oh, Celestia! Sunny, you’re okay!” “Me? The room at the top of the tower is destroyed! I thought the wind tore you out!” Marble took a deep breath. “No, no...I...I found out how the feather works.” “What?” “Uh, come on up to the camp. I’ll tell you there.” “Okay,” Sunny muttered. Marble began heading back up the stairs, and Sunny followed shortly after him, her heart still pounding in her chest. “So feelings don’t matter, huh?” Inner Celestia asked. “It certainly doesn’t have us rushing into a storm to go save him?” Sunny ignored her. Even though she was right. ---☼--- “So, I finished setting up camp,” Marble explained, “and I went back up the room at the top of the tower. Looking at the pedestal, pulleys, and ropes hanging from the ceiling, I wondered if there was a connection between all of them and using the feather.” Sunny nodded, following along. Marble’s assumption made sense, and since this was the second set of ropes that they found in as many towers, she also wondered if there was a connection. “So, I set the feather onto the pedestal and started looking around for something to try and get it to work.” Marble motioned vaguely in front of him. “I tried messing with the ropes, but I didn’t see what they did, and then I pulled one of them, and a hole in the ceiling opened up. Sunlight flooded in, and the next thing I knew, the feather lit on fire.” “What?” Sunny asked, surprised. “Yeah, the sunlight just lit the whole feather on fire,” Marble explained. “I wasn’t sure how it happened until it was too late. A moment later, the fire was out, the feather was gone, and the storm happened. It tore through the whole jungle, ripped the wall apart, and...well...you kind of figured out the rest.” “So the feather combusts, and as it does, it causes a storm?” Sunny asked. “I think so,” Marble said. “I even think that the window I opened could have had intervals that allowed a certain amount of sunlight to hit the feather.” “To control the rate that the feather burns?” Sunny asked. “Which might control how strong the wind blows from the feather. That’s what I think, at least, but I don’t have any way of proving it without another feather.” Sunny nodded. “So, I guess we need to find another one to prove the theory, then?” He nodded. “More importantly, this means that the Lusitanpec ponies could alter the weather and probably used these feathers to change it at these towers. That alone would have made the Lusitanpec tribe a powerhouse just because they were an all-earth-pony tribe that had access to weather magic.” Sunny nodded. She knew of several tribes that tried to take control of the other tribe’s works. An excellent example would Talatitlan tribe attempted to control the sun without unicorns by using the Rings of Scorchero. She didn’t claim complete control of the sun at the time, but Celestia still warned them that if they used all the rings, it might just usher in eight hundred years of incredible heat. Regardless, the point was that it wasn’t unheard of for ponies to try and work around peace and unity. Because apparently, playing nice was just too tricky back in the day. “I can see how that’d be useful,” Sunny said. “More than that, it means that hundreds of references that describe the Lusitanpec ponies as using the storm were being literal and need to be re-examined to look them over again. The implications are staggering!” Sunny smiled. “I’m glad you’ve found something to bring back.” “Well, I need a feather if I’m going to present it with actual proof if it’s going to be considered valid.” “Well, we know this Lady Dusk character wants them, and we should probably stop her anyway, what with seeing as how she seems to be rather flippant about causing massive storms and puts very little value on pony lives.” “She does have a murderous monkey backing her,” Marble said. “On the other hoof, isn’t that beyond us? Shouldn’t we let the Guard handle it?” Sunny glanced over at Marble for a moment. The pegasus, well, he certainly wasn’t a fighter. That wasn’t any fault of his own. Most ponies weren’t made for fighting, and those who had the constitution to fight typically wound up in the Guard anyway. Forcing Marble into an adventure was perhaps a little unfair, not to mention that she should probably get him to safety first. “Not to mention that keeping him around is only going to make the inevitable breakup all the worse,” Inner Celestia muttered. “You make a fair point, Marble,” Sunny said. “We can’t all have guard training under our belts, I suppose.” “Yes, thank you for remembering there are normal ponies out here.” “But, if you want another feather, then we still might want to hit another ruin before we start booking it for the coast. Does that sound like something you want to try, or do you just want to head north?” Marble hesitated for a second. “We can...we can try. If things get difficult, we can pull back out and try again. I don’t need to get one of the feathers right now. It’d be nice, but it’s not too important.” Sunny nodded. “Alright, that sounds like a plan then. We’ll try to find another ruin, see if we can’t find a feather, and hope that we don’t run into any more of these ponies until we get you to safety. Once we do that, you can go back to Equestria, let the Guard know I’m hunting these ponies down, and I’ll do what I can.” “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Marble asked. “I mean, you saw me deal with the team in the tower,” Sunny replied. “I can deal with most ponies without too much trouble. I might need to be a little careful when dealing with other unicorns, but I can certainly work with it.” Marble frowned. “It’s a little dangerous.” “Of course it is,” she replied. “But I’ll be honest, I signed up for a little danger on this one.” Marble continued to frown. “Don’t worry about it,” Sunny said. “I can take care of myself, despite what my recent burn says.” “If you say so,” Marble replied.