//------------------------------// // 1-5 // Story: The Sparrow in the Storm // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// The one good thing about the dragon sighting was it kept the Penny siblings from bickering until the three ponies arrived in the town. Instead, brother and sister kept their eyes turned skyward, searching for any sign of the dragon’s return, and even the slightest sound practically set them jumping out of their skin. Typhoon popping open her Legion canteen for a drink of water on the road made Penny Earned snap her wings open in alarm, smacking her brother in the side of the head, which made him cry out in startled shock, and the old soldier could only sigh and shake her head. There were times when Typhoon missed having companionship on the road during her lonely wanderings, but this wasn’t exactly one of them. True to Penny Earned’s estimate, it took the three ponies another hour or so to finally catch a glimpse of Green Glade as the trees around the road began to thin out. A clearing in the wood dominated the side of a large but gradual hill that civilization had carved out for its own in the middle of the woods, the abundance of lumber lending itself to the construction of four dozen, maybe more, houses and buildings dotting its slopes. Green grass had readily taken in the landscape freed up by the logging on the hillside, right down to the waters of a blue river cutting through the base of the hill, giving the settlement the appearance of an emerald sitting on top of a sapphire. But for all its beauty, there was only one thing that Typhoon cared about, and that was the lack of smoke or raging fires devastating the town and its surroundings. “The dragon didn’t attack this place,” she observed, speaking more to herself than for the benefit of her two companions. “But it came from this direction.” “Maybe it attacked somepony on the road and they ran back to the town for help?” Penny Saved offered. “That was a merchant’s wagon, I’m certain of it.” “Well, hey, at least that’s some of our competition taken care of, right?” Penny Earned offered with an uneasy smile. When Typhoon frowned at her, she fluffed out her wings and looked aside. “Just… trying to make light of it and all.” “Don’t,” Typhoon told her, and she resumed walking toward the town. “Lone dragons are dangerous. They’re also clever and greedy. They consider ponies beneath them, and if it has a hoard nearby, I doubt it takes kindly to a pony settlement on its doorstep.” “Wouldn’t it just… attack it, then?” Penny Saved asked. “Burn the whole place down?” “Yes. Normally, they would.” There were more pieces to this puzzle than Typhoon had initially suspected. She needed more information; with the Legion gone and Equestria’s authority on the borders nonexistent, small towns like Green Glade would be at a dragon’s mercy without anypony to defend them.  “Maybe the ponies in town know something about it.” Now thoroughly intrigued (and somewhat concerned), Typhoon spread her lightly colored wings and launched herself into the sky, her pegasus magic turning gravity into a mere suggestion and disregarding it. The Penny siblings cried out in indignation and dismay at Typhoon abandoning them, but they were close enough to the town that Typhoon didn’t fear for their safety. They’d be fine, and if the dragon did come back, they’d hear it long before they saw it—or it saw them. Aiming for the large clearing in the center of the town, where the slope of the hill had been negated by packed earth hemmed in by enormous logs, Typhoon alighted a few minutes later and tucked her wings back against her sides. Her ruby red eyes looked around her, but she saw nothing. There were no ponies walking up and down the streets, making idle conversation, or manning the little market stalls erected around the dirt plaza. The buildings were shuttered, dead and dormant, and not even the light of a candle escaped the dirty panes of glass that Typhoon could see. For all intents and purposes, Green Glade was a ghost town. Frowning, Typhoon turned toward the closest building and walked up to the door with measured steps. She flexed her wings once, feeling the reassuring weight of the metal blades on each one, and let her wingtips droop a little to loosen them up in case she needed to strike fast. Then, with her heavy metal hoof, she pounded three times on the door and held her breath as she listened for a response, any response, from inside. The barest scuffle slipped its way out from beneath the crack in the door—the sound of a hoof sliding across wood, perhaps. Knowing that meant somepony was at least alive inside, Typhoon knocked again and raised her voice. “Come on out, I need to speak with you. I have questions.” The noise inside immediately stopped—if only for a moment. “What are you doing outside?” came a muffled voice from within the house. “If she sees you out there, she’ll eat you!” “Who?” Typhoon asked. Then her brow lowered. “If you’re talking about the dragon, it flew east an hour ago. I haven’t seen it since.” “She could come back!” was the hissed response. “You don’t know that she won’t! Safer to wait until tomorrow!” Typhoon rolled her eyes. “I’m a soldier,” she said. “I’ve fought dragons before—and lived.” She waited to hear how that response was received, and after a few more seconds, the groaning of an old iron latch sliding through its ring was her answer. The door opened up just enough for a unicorn to stick her head through, her sky blue face and straw-colored mane turned up to the sky as if she expected the dragon to drop down on her house the moment she showed herself. When that quickly proved not to be the case, she turned purple eyes to Typhoon, frowning for a second at the beat-up armor she wore. “Legion?” she asked her. “I thought you were all gone?” “Nihil erit post Legionem,” was Typhoon’s response, though it was all-but muttered to herself. Then she shook her head. “The Legion is gone, but there are still legionaries who fight in its name.” “A legionary is what we need right now.” The unicorn nodded and opened the door a little wider. “Come on,” she said, “before she comes back. Erm, ma’am.” She slipped deeper into the building, and Typhoon followed her inside. She didn’t bother shutting the door, though the unicorn quickly fixed that with a look and a brief glow of magic to push it shut. Once it was closed behind her guest, the unicorn pulled over a wooden stool and sat down on it, deflating as she let out a long sigh. “I’d offer you something to eat, but, well…” It was then that Typhoon noticed how skinny the unicorn was; it wasn’t too hard to count her ribs with just a glance. Though she must have only been in her twenties, hunger and frailty left her looking nearly twice as old. The way she leaned against the table to support herself left Typhoon wondering just how long she’d gone without eating. “What is happening here?” she asked her. “The dragon,” the unicorn said—though groaned would have been a more accurate description as her stomach pitifully gurgled and she tried to silence it by pressing a hoof into her gut. “She’s the problem…” Typhoon sat down opposite the unicorn and dug into her saddlebags. A few moments later, she dropped a piece of bread on the table accompanied by two daisies and her canteen. The sight of food immediately made the unicorn stop, and the mare bit down on her lower lip as her eyes locked onto the closest thing to a proper meal she’d had in a long time. “Here,” Typhoon said, nudging a chunk of bread closer to her. “Eat it—slowly. Too much too quickly will be the end of you.” As soon as Typhoon offered the bread, the unicorn snatched it in her magic and stuffed it into her mouth. She moaned in pleasure as food hit her tongue, but a stern look from Typhoon made her freeze for a moment. The soldier’s warning heeded, the unicorn slowly chewed through the bread and swallowed it bit by bit, and she hesitated a moment before taking the next piece in her magic. “By the divine Sisters… I’ve been living off of grass for two weeks. I ate my last loaf of moldy bread a month ago, and blight rotted my potatoes…” “What is happening here?” Typhoon asked her now that she had some food in her empty stomach. “How can I help?” “Do you think you can kill a dragon?” the unicorn asked her. “Because that could help, Miss…?” “Typhoon,” the old soldier said. “I have experience fighting dragons before.” “Well… that’s good, Typhoon, ma’am.” “Don’t,” Typhoon said, holding up her flesh-and-blood hoof. “I would prefer it if you didn’t.” The unicorn, though surprised by the request, hastily nodded. “Sorry. I’ll try to remember that. I’m Bluegrass, by the way.” When Typhoon nodded in acknowledgement, Bluegrass stuffed another piece of bread in her mouth, swallowed it, and tapped her hooves together. “Well… I guess I can start with the Legion going away. You soldiers used to do a good job keeping the frontier safe. Sure, we had to deal with things like timberwolves and the occasional manticore, but they weren’t anything Green Glade couldn’t deal with on its own. But once monster dens weren’t being hunted down and destroyed anymore, well, that’s when things started to get bad.” “So I’ve heard,” Typhoon interjected. “But a dragon isn’t a monster. Not in the sense of a timberwolf or a manticore or even a hydra. But they’re usually solitary, and when they do cross paths with a town, rarely is there a town left standing when it leaves.” “That’s because Marquise Firestorm isn’t like other dragons, or so she claims.” At that, Bluegrass scowled and crossed her forelegs. “I don’t know where she came from, but after the Legion disbanded, she flew in from somewhere and put all of us under her scaly claw. She calls herself our feudal lord and demands that we pay taxes to her if we don’t want her to burn down the town. Green Glade, Tawneyton, The Crossings, we all have to give her tribute every fortnight or she’ll kill us all.” Bluegrass gulped and added, “And she’s proven willing to do it. Some of the ponies in Hill-On-Hollow refused to pay her tribute and attacked her when she came to demand it from her. She burned the whole town down and killed everypony she got her claws and teeth on. She… likes to remind us about it. Regularly.” “Tribute?” Typhoon asked, one eyebrow climbed up her forehead. “Frontier settlements aren’t particularly wealthy, not like cities are. What sort of tribute does she expect from you?” “Anything anypony could deem has value,” Bluegrass said. “If we manage to collect any bits, we have to turn them over to her. But since we only get bits if we sell things to caravans, she pushes us to sell everything we can produce, or give her things of worth. We’ve had to sell almost of our food instead of saving the harvests for ourselves, or we trade it and any crude crafts we can make for shiny bits and baubles the merchants sometimes bring with them. We’re starving and she won’t even let us keep enough wealth to buy or trade for food so we don’t die!” Typhoon slowly nodded. “I assume you’ve tried to bring this up with her, then.” “One stallion did, yeah,” Bluegrass said. “Sycamore Shade was his name. The Marquise ate him on the spot and then told us we had one less mouth to feed. Nopony’s had the courage to say anything since.” “Why not leave, then? Surely it isn’t worth it to be rooted to one spot and starve to death.” At that, Bluegrass anxiously rubbed her hooves together and looked around, as if the mere question was dangerous. “We can’t leave,” she said, her voice dropping in volume. “We’re peasants and Firestorm is our lord. She won’t let us leave, and she’s made it pretty clear what will happen to us if she catches us on the run.” “Death of the cruelest magnitude, I assume,” Typhoon guessed, and Bluegrass gave her a nod in the affirmative. “Do you know where her lair is?” she asked the unicorn. “Apart from to the east? I’m not sure,” Bluegrass admitted. “Look for any mountains or caves. I think dragons like those. But…” She shook her head in frustration, and she looked at Typhoon with worried eyes. “What are you going to do? You can’t kill her by yourself!” Typhoon shrugged. “I don’t know if I can kill her,” she admitted. “It’s one thing to hold your own against a dragon. It’s a different thing to kill it. Only a couple of ponies in history have ever managed it by themselves, and those were mainly the strongest wizards of the Diamond Kingdoms of old. Of the pegasi, only Commander Hurricane and his son pulled it off.” Taking a breath, Typhoon stood up with a quiet rattling of her armor. “Ideally, I’d take a century of legionaries with me to deal with this. But I don’t have a century. I’m just one mare. But if I can’t kill this dragon, I may be able to chase her away. I’ll see what I can manage.” “You’re going to fight her by yourself?” Bluegrass asked, shocked. “If she won’t listen to reason, then yes.” The unicorn blinked in incredulity. “But… she’ll kill you!” Typhoon shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t plan on dying.” She turned around and opened the door with a wing, but paused in the doorway. She looked back at Bluegrass and added, “There are a pair of merchants on their way with a wagon full of supplies. Tell them that I said they’re to distribute it to you all for free. I’ll bring their payment back from the dragon’s hoard. If they don’t, I’ll set fire to their wagon when I get back.” Bluegrass blinked. “Should… should I tell them that part, too?” The old soldier looked at her for a moment. “Only if you want to,” she said. Then she stepped outside and shut the door behind her.