Sunny and Marble moved at a forced march. They moved as fast as they could from sunset to sunrise, taking the fewest rests possible. Using simple oil lamps fueled by coconut oil, which they made using the unicorn’s magic, they managed to maneuver through the darkness. Even still, navigating a jungle by candlelight proved dangerous, and they frequently needed to take detours through flatter ground, let the mare tumble and get her leg caught in a hole.
Sunny felt the burn in her legs every morning and dropped to the ground when they made camp. The humidity of the jungle kept her whole body soaked straight through, and without the sun to evaporate what little moisture off her that it could, it left her breathing heavy and miserable.
She hadn’t felt this alive in years.
A race against the clock, while being pursued by a massive monster of incredible strength and toughness, while also carrying an artifact that had enough power in it to hold nations hostage? This was the sort of adventure that Sunny could have only dreamed of.
She dropped to the ground smiling as she felt her heartbeat thud in her legs before she lowered her simple lantern and blew out the cotton-strip of a wick that hung out of the broken coconut, and sighed as the half-light of dawn spilled over her.
Marble dropped next to her but kept on his hooves as he wavered. “I’ll set up the hammock,” he muttered, “then take a quick look around.”
Sunny nodded, a token gesture of acknowledgment before she stared up into the pink-colored sky still splattered with stars.
Inner Celestia didn’t say anything.
She’d been present but quiet for the past few days. The mental projection of her more royal self merely sat in one corner of her mind, drinking tea and waiting. Sunny didn’t even need to guess what she was waiting for, as it was all too obvious. Inner Celestia sat waiting for the moment everything went wrong so she could swoop in and say, “I told you so.”
The mental princess loved to do that to her. Nevermind the fact that literally everyone else received only gentle rebukes from the mare. No, Sunny wouldn’t receive such a luxury.
Marble hovered back down. “Alright, I got it hooked up, come on, let’s get you up there.”
Sunny shook her head. “No, I need to get food first.”
“Then you better hurry up. The sun’s coming up. I’ll be right back.”
Sunny groaned as she rolled to get her hooves under her, but she managed to stand. She used her spell to find some edible plants before she slowly collected a few things to eat. Once she gathered enough food for the night, er, morning, and Marble returned, she stood on her hind legs so the pegasus could hook his legs under her armpits to carry her up into the canopy. Marble lifted her into the air carefully before slowly dropping her into the hammock, which hung several hundred feet into the air.
Sunny passed Marble a mango, and the pair began to eat until they managed to finish both pieces of fruit.
Sunny sighed. “We’re doing well.”
Marble nodded. “We are. I’ve got good news too.”
“What?”
“I found some more ruins ahead,” he said. “And it seemed habited. Or at least, inhabited by a handful of black-vested ponies that looked like they were up to no good.”
The news cut through Sunny’s fatigue in a second, and she glanced at him. “What? You mean, we’re there?”
“We have been running hard for the past three days,” he offered.
“How far away?”
“About six miles,” he said. “As long as the monkey doesn’t catch us, we might get there in a few hours.”
Sunny shook her head and smiled. “We might just do this,” she said. “We’d get there a few hours into the night. We might catch them during the change of the guard even. We can stop this Lady Dusk figure and then start getting you home in the next few days. We’re going to do this!”
“You sound so excited about it,” Marble noted.
“Either I am, or I’m so tired that I’ve gone giddy. Or mad, or both.”
“You were sane to start with?”
“I mean relatively,” she replied.
“Ah.”
They sat in the hammock a little longer, with only silence between them. Sunny’s gaze slowly drifted over to him for a moment before she realized she was staring. She tore her eyes away before her mind began remembering the kiss she sneaked in while he carried her into the air.
Neither of them spoke about that moment, even though it’d been three days. They’d had time to think about it, but neither of them broached the subject.
Was he just pretending that it didn’t happen? Was it an attempt to let her down easy? She felt her stomach slowly drop as she thought about it before she pushed the thought aside.
You’re overthinking this, she thought. It’s fine.
Inner Celestia sipped tea in the back of her mind. Waiting.
Marble spoke up.
“I’ll go ahead and take the first watch. You can go ahead and rest up. I’ll get you up for the change.”
She nodded. “Sounds fair.”
More silence.
Sunny bit her lip, wondering if she made the right choice with her spur-of-the-moment kiss. A part of her told her that it was not the right choice, and she was acting like a dumb teenager working through her first crush. Another aspect of her disagreed, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it.
“You’ll be fine, Sunny,” Marble said. “Just go to sleep.”
She nodded and laid her head down on the hammock, closing her off in the fabric and shutting away the light and the noise. Marble was on the other side of the hammock, watching the jungle around them.
Sunny lay there for a long moment thinking about everything going on around her, the nearby ruin, the mandrill chasing her, and the kiss. Oh, Sky Above the kiss.
She sat there, laying still as her mind spun in circles until finally, the exhaustion in her body overtook her.
---☼---
Marble stared at the jungle, looking for any sign of danger while his own mind ran with the wheels spinning.
It’d been three days, but he still couldn’t shake the thoughts that plagued him from the night they left the temple. He’d barely managed to save her back when the temple collapsed, but he did manage it.
Then again, barely wasn’t a significant threshold when dealing with her life. “It’s alright,” a sarcastic part of him said in Sunny’s voice. “It’s fine that you only saved half of me. The rest will grow back.”
He shoved the thought away and tried to think about something else.
And that left the kiss.
Maybe it wasn’t a kiss. Maybe Sunny just brushed against him when he flew into the air. After all, she hadn’t talked about it, so either nothing happened, or she didn’t remember it happening. Either way, he couldn’t just bring it up. The resulting conversation would be a disaster.
“Hey, about that time you kissed me?”
“What? What are you talking about? Why would I kiss you?”
Yes, absolutely brilliant that would be, wouldn’t it? He sighed and focused on his surroundings, the jungle, and the screaming wildlife that hid just out of sight.
He forced his mind to think about the pyramid ahead of them. He tried to focus on the ponies working through the trapped hallways and trying to find secrets that could put the world at knifepoint.
Yet despite that, his mind wandered over to Sunny.
He had to tell her.
He shook his head. He couldn’t tell her that! He couldn’t possibly let her know so much. If she knew, if she knew what a failure he was, then she’d probably leave him alone, and he’d never make it back.
But he had to tell her.
He couldn’t let her know.
“Sunny, are you awake?” he asked.
Sunny didn’t respond.
“Sunny?” he called again. “Sunny?” this time with a sing-song tone added to it.
She didn’t answer either call.
He sighed. “I just don’t know what to do about you, you know that? The last mare I met that was as confident or crazy as you were, was my sister. In fact, if she’d be on this trip, you two would have hit it off and dragged me into the jungle laughing all the way.”
He paused for a second and glanced back at the form of the sleeping unicorn. Sunny hadn’t even shifted during his entire little speech, but he still wanted to be sure that she was asleep.
“I think both of you would have hit it off. Vanilla was the real historian between us. She’d probably take your theories and run them through her head until she saw exactly where you were coming from. Then, if she thought it was good enough, probably accept it as viable and force it into the universities until there wasn’t a first-year archeology student that didn’t know about it.”
Sunny still didn’t reply.
“She was the brains, and I was the brawn. I would go ahead and make sure that the traps would miss us, and she’d rip every ounce of knowledge or secrets out of the ruin to report back to the university. We were quite the team back then.”
The jungle kept roaring.
“I...I failed her,” he said. He could remember the temple perfectly. Tenochtitlan pyramid to an ancient feline creature and enough suns drawn on the walls that they looked so pitted that you’d think someone fired stones into them with magic. “We were making our way down the temple, and...and I missed a trap.”
He let the silence hang for a moment.
“I don’t know how I got past it, but I did. I just skipped over the trap, and then the next thing I knew, Vanilla was screaming. She’d been pierced by a spear that shot up from the ground. It went through her at an angle that managed to miss her heart, but it did get her lung. After her first scream, she began coughing up blood, and her voice grew weak.”
He paused for a long moment.
“She died slowly. Because I made a mistake. All it took was one. Because I missed the trap, she died. It’s my fault. It’s my fault, and I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for that.”
The pegasus wiped his eyes, catching the tears before they started falling as he remembered that day. “And now, here you are, standing in the same place, doing the same things. Meanwhile, I’m watching and can’t help but think about Vanilla, about my failure to save her. Every moment I have to myself, and I can’t help but think about her and how the two of you would have been such great friends, and how you never can meet her because I failed her.”
He took a deep breath that threatened to become a sob before he took a moment to glance back at Sunny.
“I…” he began, “I’m not going to let it happen again. I promise. With Celestia as my witness, I promise you that I won’t.”
He stopped, forcing himself to breathe. He wrestled for control for a long moment before he finally got back his composure.
He stared down at the sleeping mare and opened his mouth to try and continue, but he just couldn’t bring himself to talk. The words caught in his throat and threatened to rip his composure to shreds.
He couldn’t keep going.
Marble sighed before he glanced around back into the jungle.
There...he told her.
Another part of him argued that she was asleep, that none of this counted, that he did the equivalent of talking to a wall.
At the same time, after all, he somehow managed to feel better after he said all that. Somehow.
---☼---
The evening came quickly. Sunny managed to pick a few more mangoes for both of them and ate quickly. “Well, if nothing else, this is going to do wonders for my figure,” the unicorn muttered.
“I’m so glad for you,” Marble said. “I was pretty happy with my figure.”
Marble took her down back to the ground and began to work on the hammock while Sunny began lighting the small coconut lantern that would help her maneuver in the dark. By the time the darkness encompassed them, they were packed and ready to dive back into the jungle.
“So, which way are we heading?” Sunny asked.
“The pyramid’s in that direction,” Marble said, pointing with a wing.
“Alright, we move carefully. Once we get to the temple, we snuff the light and start looking for this Lady Dusk. We don’t need to fight the rest of the ponies there. We just need to deal with the boss. Her treatment of them will be enough to turn them against her as soon as we can get her on the ropes.”
“And the traps?” Marble asked. “If things go well, we won’t have to deal with them. If we need to, though, you take the lead.”
Marble took a deep breath nodded. “Okay.”
Sunny smiled, and they began pushing their way toward the pyramid. After a few hours, they began to see the pinpricks of torchlight in the distance.
Sunny extinguished her lamp, and Marble landed beside her as they began to slowly make their way through the underbrush.
Before long, they found the temple, another massive pyramid that towered over the canopy of trees with expertly cut stone. A spiral of glowing lights surrounded the temple as torches flickered in the open air. Ponies crawled around the ancient structure like ants, and many of them were visibly armed as they moved between the giant coatl carvings that draped across the entire building.
“With luck,” Sunny whispered to Marble standing beside her, “this Dusk figure will be at the top. We just need to sneak past all of these ponies and take care of her.”
“Oh, is that all?” Marble asked sarcastically. “Besides, I’m pretty sure she’s inside, just because she’d want to be close to the vault for more feathers or whatever it is she wants. That means we’re going to have to sneak up and in. It’s not going to be the easiest job sneaking in there.”
Sunny nodded. “I think we can do it, though.”
Marble shrugged. “We might be able to.”
“Come on, we don’t have all night. If everything goes well, we’ll have this whole problem taken care of by the time the sun comes up.”
Marble raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything as they began to slip forward toward the pyramid.