Being in stone was just like being asleep. And while I was "asleep," I had "dreams."
I dreamt my sister and I were in the kayak again.
The water was still. It was dark, like night, but there weren’t any stars out. Just a faint, blue glow all around the ceiling and the walls. The walls were pitch black stone, with a tint of blue cause of the light.
We were in a cave.
Not the biggest cave I could possibly imagine, but it was pretty damn big. Big enough that it echoed every time you made a noise.
I chipped a piece off from the wall. I dropped it into the water. I could hear the noise it made as it fell in and made little ripples.
The air was heavy, being so far underground. I had to squeeze my belly in just to push air out. And I had to open my mouth real wide to take the air in. And it would settle, in the bottom of my lungs. Like a warm, fuzzy lead pillow.
I was holding the paddle. I took us to a corner of the cave, where the blue glow was a little brighter.
There was a pale gray filly sittin’ across from me on the kayak. Her mane wrapped in gray, barely blue curls. Her wings flopped to the side, barely folded in properly. Bags under her eyes. She looked deader than Biscuit’s corpse when I dragged him to the river. But she was alive.
“Sister? Is that you?”
The gray filly nodded.
She took a big breath in. Her mouth opened. It went small, it went big, and then somewhere in the middle. Like she wanted to say at least a couple sentences to me.
“S…s…sp…Spur,” was all that actually came out. Her voice croaked, like a little old frog.
I never really remembered how my sister used to sob, you know. Not cry, sob. Took me a while to figure out what was happening to her. She breathed more shallowly. She blinked faster. And tears came out. For real. It felt real—
—did it?
“T-tell me this a’int a trick, sis. I…wanna believe you, I really do. But after all that’s happened…tell me something. Tell me somethin’ so I know that it’s really you.”
She told me nothing. She leaned forward, almost overboard. She dipped her head in the water, no more than a few seconds. She came back up. After all the extra water drained from her head…
…the curls in her mane settled flat. And they stayed flat.
Yes. It’s her. My real sister. Before the voices came to get her.
There was a little good part of her. Even as the demon got bigger and bigger. When we sat in the kayak together in the bayou, when we sent her off to Ponyville, even when she was in Tartarus. She’s always been here. A little piece of the real her, not possessed by the demon.
“When were you engulfed by this…demon?” I asked her.
She immediately frowned. “En…engull…” She looked at me confused.
“Surrounded.”
“Surrr…oou…” she leaned forward and studied my mouth movements. She still couldn’t get it. The demon must’ve destroyed her brain. Destroyed her brain to the point she’d forgotten words, sentences.
She pointed her hoof at me and said, “S…S…Spur.” She smiled. That word she remembered.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“S…S…Sister.”
“Yeah.”
“Long. Long time.”
“Yeah.”
“Alone.” She pointed to herself.
How long had it been? Could be ten, even eleven years. Whenever the evil mist first infected her. “I’m sorry, sis.”
“Sorry.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” she said again.
“You are sorry? For what?”
“Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
She pointed her hoof at me. Hard. “Sorry.”
“I am sorry.”
“SORRY!!!” She yelled at me so loud until the walls of the cave began to rattle.
She was crying. Cryin’ alone.
Alone.
I stopped using the word sorry.
Tell you the truth, I don’t think I ever had kayak time with my real sister. I’d been kayaking with an impostor for the past ten years.
This was my first kayak time with my real sister.
My sister was trapped in the cave, and the cave was called Cozy Glow.
Alone.
“You,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“You! YOU!!!” she yelled. “You you you you you NO!!!” Each “you” had a different pitch, a different volume. Each one feeling like a different emotion.
What I think is that she tried to call out for me in my dreams, Spur, Spur, Spur, but every word that came outta her mouth got garbled by the demon into scary words. Evil words. So that’s why I heard the demon.
What would I have heard from the demon instead? As my sister was tryin’ to call out my name.
Spur! Spur! Spur!
Spr! Sr! Pu!
Ggl! Js. Pr.
Kll! Just Plee.
Kill! Just like me.
I sighed. “I’m sor—I mean, I wanna talk to ya. I wanna get to know ya better. Yer my sister, after all.”
My sister reached behind her and opened up a basket she’d loaded on the kayak. She brought provisions. She opened up a thermos and drank whatever was inside it. I was thirsty, and I almost reached for Cozy’s thermos, but then she pointed to another one next to me.
I opened up the thermos and I drank.
It was sweet. Like water. I always knew water was sweet. But one time a couple years back, I fell into the water while kayaking with Cozy in the bayou. And I got a taste of the mud in the icky bayou water. And the demon laughed at me.
And so for a while I thought water wasn't sweet anymore.
In the basket, next to where Cozy's thermos went, there were tea cakes too. Swiss rolls. Rolled up tightly, like my sister’s mane. There was a little plate of them, and I almost grabbed one at the same time as my sister, and we almost touched hooves—but we missed by about half a second.
We chewed at the same time. Held the cake in the same way.
Sis could barely bite through the soft cake, so she took tiny bites, and little crumbs fell out as she ate. And then the cake got stuck in her throat, but she still shoved more into her mouth. It was really good cake.
We did not talk, but it felt like a hundred thousand words were being spoken.
I leaned forward for a hug. To try to patch things up. And she sat there and stared at me for a minute, and then she washed her tears off with a splash of water and scooched towards me. I pulled my body close to hers, and it actually felt nice. She hadn’t cut her belly fur in a while. It was thick. And soft. Like a little foal’s fur.
I heard a quiet little whimper of happiness. I realized it was me.
I was so close to her body, that I saw the split ends in her mane.
My sister started wheezing.
“Are you ready to go?” I asked my sister.
“Mmm.”
She picked up the paddle (she was barely strong enough to lift it), and she steered us toward a tiny skylight in the ceiling of the cave.
The hole was too small for me to fit through. Barely 9 inches wide, if I had to guess. Only a pony as thin, tiny, and scrawny as my real sister would fit through.
“Yes,” she said, looking down at her body, and then up at the hole. “Yes yes yes, yes.” She faced me and smiled.
She’d been starving herself so that she’d be tiny enough to fit through the hole.
Fog from the outside was pouring into the cave.
With the last bit of strength she had left in her, my sister smiled, she flapped her wings,
And she flew into the light. And I watched her fly until her colors blended in with the fog.
And she was one with the mist. That great, big, blended mist up in the sky.
That’s when the air suddenly got real thick. First it was like breathing through water. Then a second later, it was like breathing through molasses. Then it was like tar.
"Sis? Sis?" I could barely whisper out. My muscles got so weak I couldn't hold the paddle up no more.
I gave up and let myself go faint. I closed my eyes and I felt my head fall back. It was about to hit the solid wood of the kayak real hard...
THUMP
...and I blacked out before the terrible blow in the back of my head could even start to hurt.
“Spur, are you okay?”
"Ugh...where am I?" I saw the plate of peach biscuits on the table, still uneaten. And that's how I knew I was back in the castle with Twilight.
My head didn’t hurt. The pain was in another world. I realized I was on my back. I stood back up. “Yeah. What hap—”
“I reversed the spell. I thought it couldn’t be done, but…by simply reciting the lines of the spell backward, while using a reflector shield to prismatically split the sun into six beams of light…it was analogous to the Elements of Harmony! And it freed you!”
Freed.
Twilight was bouncing on her hooves like some hyper kid in a candy store. “I mean, Spur, isn’t that incredible!?”
How free my sister must feel. In the sky mist. Flying, in the air, through the air, with the air.
She is the air now. Like a whiff of vanilla swiss roll cake.
I took a bite of the peach biscuits. They were just…odd. The peach flavor tasted artificial, the cookie dough was like cardboard, obviously factory made.
When I get back home, I’m gonna make a nice plate of peach biscuits. It can’t be that different from peach cobbler. Just tweak the dough to more of like a shortbread.
“How are they?” Twilight asked me.
“They taste like crap,” I joked. “Some time, you can come on down to the bayou, and I’ll make you some that’re a million times better. I promise ya."
“Okay.” Twilight giggled back. “Maybe someday. When we’re finally cured.”
“I’ll look forward to someday.” Any ol’ someday’s fine by me. Someday could be tomorrow. Or five years from now. That’s fine.
I like the ground I’m standin’ on. I’m not ready to fly yet.
Not forever, at least.
“Tell me, Spur, what happened?” Twilight helped herself to a biscuit and we sat down at the table in the library. “Tell me all about what happened when you started to get petrified. Did it hurt? What did you feel? I’ll take notes, and then tomorrow I’ll prepare the amulet.”
“Well, first, when the beam of light hit me…” We talked all night round that table. And as I was sittin’ I swear I could feel the seat rock.
Like we were floating on a kayak in the water.