Nurse Healing Touch hadn’t bothered closing the door to Starlight’s room, but I wished she had, the sound of the water basin and her swift strokes against Starlight’s skin almost drove me mad. I stared at the formulas and spells written in the book in front of me, even though I knew them by heart, the letters were nothing but gibberish to me. I shouldn’t be here. Next time I should just get out, go to the library or something, use it as free time, but the thought made me queasy as well. Leaving Starlight behind didn’t feel like an option anymore.
“You should take a nap,” Healing Touch called from the room, not pausing in her job.
“Huh?” I had heard her just fine but I was grateful for the conversation.
There was a pause and I could hear her toss a cloth, “You look like crap. Did you sleep at all?”
“Two hours, maybe?”
“Take a rest, Sunburst.”
Resting didn’t seem possible, but I wondered if Healing Touch would come after me if I didn’t listen to her. She’s been a nurse for longer than I been alive, and her matronly, no-nonsense attitude even made the guards stand to attention whenever she was near, and once she started hounding you about something—
“I don’t hear you moving. Go to bed.”
And there it was. I closed the book and left it on my desk before slinking across the hall. There wasn’t a point in closing the door behind me since I wasn’t actually going to sleep, so I collapsed on the bed with enough sound to tell Healing Touch I’d followed orders. Five minutes later I was drooling into the pillow. Again, the meadow, my pointless walking. A light flickered ahead. I tried my best to resist it, but I started walking faster, and the light took the shape of a ghostly mare as I reached out. But it was Healing Touch looking down on me and my eyes were focusing on the late afternoon sunlight.
“I’m all done here.”
“How long was I asleep?” I sat up, moving away from her reach.
Her green eyes narrowed at me. “An hour. Are you sure you’re ok?”
“I’m fine,” I groaned as I stood up.
She sighed and I started to wonder if no one believed anything I said anymore. “I did the hard part, but you’ll have to exercise her limbs. Don’t forget.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As she rolled her eyes, a strand of grey hair escaped her bun and fell over her forehead, which she brushed away with a dark grey wing. “And sleep more than a few hours tonight. You don’t need to stay up with her if that’s what you’re doing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I repeated for another eye roll and a huff from the serious nurse.
She didn’t offer me anything more and I could hear her hoofsteps receding into the hallway. I felt groggy and considered toppling back into bed but knew that was just avoidance. I forced myself to walk and moved across the hall, hearing the front door shut behind Healing Touch. We were alone again.
Healing Touch had fixed her hair and thankfully styled it better than I ever could have hoped to achieve. The room smelled like soap, distinctly not the kind Starlight used and at that thought, a wave of nostalgia choked me. In bed, when I knew she was asleep I would pull her tighter and sink my face into her hair, taking in the earthy but slightly floral scent. I think it had been lilies. That felt like so long ago.
“Darn it,” I croaked, clearing a rogue tear that had forced its way out.
Healing Touch explained that all I had to do was to massage and move her joints gently like I was stretching her muscles before exercise. Easy for friends. Hard when you’d just been thinking about how much you missed her in your bed.
It was my job, though, so I reached for her right foreleg, starting a smooth rotation at her shoulder. There was no resistance but no help from her either, like a doll. I tried to make that view stay put in my head, it was better to think I was working on a thing rather than—Don’t even go there, Sunburst. Don’t even put it into words or else. I cleared my throat. “I think Cadance might drop by tonight.”
I paused, again forgetting that this was not a conversation.
“She’s going to bring Flurry. You remember her, right? She’s all grown now. I’m not sure how much Twilight told you, but she’s the sweetest thing and adores her dad, she wants to be part of the royal guard when she grows up and has no interest in princess things.” I place her foreleg down carefully before moving to her right leg. “But she’s only five, so she’s got a lot to learn, she’ll come around to her duties with enough time. I, huh…well, after you left, I kind of stayed with Shining and Cadance for a while.”
My hoof landed on her thigh and paused, reminding myself that this was a doll with a deep breath. “Shining insisted, I think he was worried and, honestly, he was right. I wasn’t…I don’t know how to describe it.” This was starting to border on catharsis and the words just rolled out of my tongue. “I helped Cadance with the baby. Did stuff around the castle. Shining tried to get me to join the guard once or twice, I declined obviously, but being there kept me…from doing something I’d regret.” That was a loaded statement, and even I wasn’t sure what I meant by it, since there had been too many options then.
The words sat stagnant in the air, as if she could offer some kind of insight. I cleared my throat. “You’d never guess it, but being around the baby was ok. Maybe I even liked it.” I wasn’t expecting to laugh but a chuckle escaped my mouth, the smile taking a little while to disappear. “I actually miss being there, maybe I got used to the good life,” I chuckled again, “but it didn’t make sense for me to stay once Flurry started going to preschool. Cadance tried to find some excuse but I wouldn’t let her, I…started feeling like I was trespassing—living a life that wasn’t mine.”
I finished the exercise on her right leg, then moved around to start on her left one. “That’s the thing, Starlight, I don’t think I have a life, you know? I’m Head-Stallion of the Friendship School here, and I think I’m ok at it. My record with kids is not bad but I’m not good at being in charge like you are, though I learned how as I went, so it worked out. I still see my, our friends. I still read and write and research magic, maybe more than I used to with all the time on my hooves, but that’s it. I don’t love anything anymore.”
The whisper of her felt like it was somewhere in the room but I was too distracted thinking about my own words.
I don’t love anything anymore.
I flexed her ankle absently, fighting with myself in the silence of the room. Again, what was the point of going through the past with a shell? “Maybe when you left—oh, screw it.” I gently brought her leg down and sat at the foot of the bed, my head falling to my hooves. “Screw all of this.”
That part was still locked up too tightly.
“Sunburst!” Flurry’s demanding little call was the closest thing I was getting to a salve for the wounds of the day. There’s something about the quality of her voice that always makes me smile.
“In here,” I groaned from the couch. I had decided locking the front door was pointless with all the ins and outs. Thankfully, Cadance hadn’t even bothered to knock.
Flurry appeared over the arm of the couch, her chin resting on the edge. “It’s rude.”
“What is?” I propped myself up on an elbow.
“You greet guests, Sunburst.” The adult-level exasperation in her voice made me laugh.
Cadance emerged from the hallway, stopping short by the doorway as if she saw a ghost.
I raised an eyebrow at her expression before pushing myself to sit. “Hey, Cadance.”
“Have you been eating? Sleeping, like at all?” That was Cadance in mom-mode for you. She was at my side instantly, fever checking me like I wasn’t almost twenty-seven.
“If you think this is bad, wait until you see Starlight.” My voice was playful, but as soon as the words left my mouth, I knew it wasn’t a joke.
Cadance bit her lip like she was on the verge of tears, adding another tinge of regret to my comment. “C’mon, Flurry, let’s play a game.” I moved away from her hooves, scooping up Flurry on my way to the dining table. “Mom is going to see Starlight.”
“Who’s Starlight?” Kids will ask anything that’s on their minds, even questions you don’t really want to answer. I hoisted her a little higher, hoping the swoop to the dining chair would distract her. Another thing about kids is that they hated to be ignored. “Sunburst, who’s Starlight?”
Adding my name made it clear I wasn’t getting away with it. “A friend who’s sick.”
“Like puke sick?” Her tiny face went fearful. That was her least favorite kind of sick.
“No, like, huh…” I was ninety percent sure that if I said coma she’d understand, intelligence runs very strongly in Flurry’s family, but she was still a kid. “Remember Sleeping Beauty, from the stories? Like that kind of sick.”
“A coma,” she said with the impatience she always did when I gave her a kid-answer.
I put a box filled with toys on the table with a sigh. I should have known better. “Yeah, like that.”
Flurry opened the box, pulling a couple of blocks to play with. “Mommy’s sad.”
I didn’t bother to look for Cadance for confirmation. Flurry was the strongest empath I’ve ever known, already surpassing her mother in terms of talent, and it enabled her to just know things. It wasn’t all the time, and it wasn’t perfect, but she was usually in the right ballpark. I didn’t doubt her at that moment, that’s for sure. “It’s natural to be sad when your friends are hurt, Flurry.”
“Is that why you’re sad, too?” She looked up at me expectantly.
Way to aim for the heart, kid. “One of the top three, sure.” Just falling short of—
“Ok.” I was relieved that my explanation was good enough for Flurry to just move on to the regular games we play with the blocks. I tried to throw in a magic lesson now and then, this time being no different, but Flurry was too young and impatient for my teaching style just yet. We made some pretty impressive structures together until Cadance walked in behind us.
“Come on, honey.” Cadance held out her hoof for Flurry to take, pulling her daughter towards the bedroom. For a second, I couldn’t move, unsure as to why Cadance would take her foal to see that.
Stop it, it’s not like she’s a corpse. She’s still Starlight. She’s still alive no matter how much you tell yourself—I grind my teeth. I counted to ten and waited until I was sure I wasn’t going to cry before I stood and followed Flurry’s voice to Starlight’s room.
Flurry, in her infinite childlike ability to be amazing, was sitting on the bed and talking to Starlight like she was her new friend. Unbothered by Starlight’s dull coat, unconcerned by her thinness that was starting to make her a little too angled, uncaring that Starlight couldn’t talk back. She continued to rattle off her stats for her, her little hoof over Starlight’s unmoving one. “And I love ice cream, too, even though mommy says too much will make me sick. Not like you sick, but like puke sick and I hate puke sick but sometimes I think mommy’s lying because ice cream is just so good.”
She moved from sitting to leaning over Starlight, her little hoof pressed to Starlight’s cheek, turning it. Cadance reached for her, but she shook her head. “No, mommy, wait.”
“Flurry, be careful. I told you Starlight’s sick.”
Instead of backing off, Flurry moved closer, putting her other hoof on Starlight’s other cheek. “She’s talking, so wait.”
Me and Cadance exchanged glances. Cadance looked surprised but I felt like I was about to faint. Flurry’s words hit me like a kick to the stomach.
Flurry clicked her tongue in frustration, sitting back on her haunches as she crossed her hooves over her chest. “She can’t do it for very long.”
“Do what?” I croaked, the only thought on my mind being she can’t live for very long.
“The way she tries to talk. It’s too hard. It hurts.” Flurry sighed, looking back at me with the same disappointed look on her face as when I didn’t greet her at the door. “And the other way, she says you’re not doing it right, Sunburst.”
“Flurry, stop it.” Cadance picked her up off the bed. Her eyes were more focused on me though, the same look she gave her husband when she was appraising how wounded he was from training.
I rushed over to her, picking Flurry up out of her mother’s hold. “What other way?”
“The meadow.”
My legs felt like rubber and for a moment I was afraid I would drop her. “The meadow…?” I let her slip out of my hooves so my knees could buckle, sending me into a hard seat on the bed.
“Sunburst,” Cadance tried to keep her voice from raising or sounding frantic. She was gripping my shoulders but I was too woozy by dreams bleeding into reality to focus on her face.
“Cadance, what should I do? How am I supposed to do it right?” I was halfway to tears again.
“Lie down, Sunburst.” She eased me back to the foot of the bed, my head right next to Starlight’s covered hip. “I’m going to get a doctor.”
“N-No, Cadance, don’t…” I sighed, letting a hoof come to my face. “Just some water, please.”
She hesitated before lifting Flurry and putting her next to me on the bed. “Flurry, if Sunburst doesn’t keep his eyes open, scream.”
“Ok.” She pressed a hoof to my chest as if to show another measure with which she would watch me. Cadance left the room with a determined swiftness. “Did I scare you?”
“A little bit,” I laughed weakly.
“I’m sorry.” Her nose wrinkled in that pre-cry way of hers, so I reached out and patted her blue and pink curls.
“Hey, it’s not your fault. You were just trying to help Starlight, right?” I pulled her towards me, hugging her to my chest and she clutched tightly back.
She sniffled once, but that was it, and she forced herself out of my hold. “You are going to help her, right?”
Cadance came back, a glass of water floating in her magic on her left while furiously scribbling a letter to her right. I gave her a withering look, “I don’t need a doctor, I’m fine.”
“I was going to send this in case you still looked like you were going to pass out.” She placed the letter and the water down on the nightstand before sitting next to my head, the bed now completely crowded.
I almost laughed at the thought that a week ago, no pony even came to my house, and now I was lounging in a bed with three mares. “I feel better now.”
“Sunburst, you have to help her.” Flurry’s patience usually only lasted two adult sentences.
“Oh, Flurry, don’t be rude.” She ran a hoof through my hair in the same way I’d watched her do to Flurry a million times. I should’ve felt embarrassed, but Cadance had done a lot of nice things for me in the past, and at the moment this was the nicest thing she’s ever done. “You’re going to push yourself too hard for her, Sunburst, I just know it.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “I can’t help myself. Guess I’m a masochist.”
“Both of you are idiots,” she muttered, pulling her hoof from my hair. “And you, my little Flurry Heart,” Cadance pulled Flurry into her lap, almost sending a rogue hoof into my muzzle. “I know it’s some talent we’ll figure out when you’re older, but in the meantime, you have to be careful of what you say so you don’t make ponies uncomfortable.”
Flurry pouted and hid her face against her chest, her white wings coming over to cover her head. I waited for some kind of argument from Flurry but when she was silent, I poked at Cadance’s foreleg, drawing her attention back to me. “She was right, Cadance,” I explained the dream to her, and the alicorn frowned in confusion.
“My daughter’s right about you not frolicking with Starlight in your dreams the right way?” She sighed, pointing at the nightstand. “That sounds like I should be calling the doctors right now, maybe even my sister-in-law and my husband.”
“I’ve dreamt twice about her since she got here, it has to mean something.”
“Sunburst,” her voice raised in frustration. She pressed a hoof to her face for a moment before taking a deep breath. “Let me guess, you want me to keep quiet about this.”
“See, Flurry has a lot to learn from you.” I patted her knee. “Just hold on to it for a couple of days, please? I need to observe this, make sure this is not a fluke, I got a feeling these dreams are the key to helping Starlight.”
“All I’m hearing is Cadance, let me put myself in danger.”
“You worry too much.”
Danger, if there was any, was a small price to pay. If it could be me, if I could break this curse somehow, maybe I could break myself free in the process.
It was déjà vu to look at a real garden now, that dream coming every time I shut my eyes for more than a few minutes. Still, it wasn’t encouraging much sleep since each time was more frustrating than the last, she seemed to move further and further away by the end of each segment. What am I missing? Flurry had said I wasn’t doing it right as if there was a right way to chase a comatose mare through a dream. Sure.
I turned away from the window and opened a book about the psychology of dreams, trying to make sense of the images in my head but each book had a different interpretation, no author seemed to agree with what my dreams could mean. The one to ask would probably be Princess Luna, but she was somewhere in the south, deep in the Savana of the Antelope Tribe, doing whatever princesses do when they retire. But dreams were her realm, shouldn’t she have sensed this abnormal nightmare by now? Why wasn’t she stepping in to save Starlight?
I put aside the psychology and picked up the arcana instead. I wasn’t a psychologist like Starlight or a dreamwalker like Luna, but magic was the cause of all this, so magic would be the solution. It was my talent, after all. There weren’t many books about dream magic, but there were enough for me to work with and draft a theory. I started writing the formulas and sketching magic circles, and I found myself scribbling furiously at the blank scroll in an attempt to make some of it stay and make sense.
“Sunburst?” I swore I heard Starlight’s voice, but when I turned it was Healing Touch, her lips pressed together in a thin line.
I dropped my quill, pushing the scroll behind me as if I were going to be able to hide the mad mess of ink. “Oh, hey.”
“You’ve been writing for hours.”
I stood achingly slow from the bench, feeling the strain in my legs and lower back. “N-No, huh, I just started.”
“Sunburst,” her tone instantly told me everything before she uttered another word. “I already saw to Starlight and everything. You wrote the whole time. You didn’t even realize I came in, and I have the feeling you didn’t even sleep again last night. On top of that, have you eaten today? Showered?”
“Of course.” Had I? It was true, the days were starting to blend together, so maybe I had missed a meal or two.
“Bullshit.”
I had never heard Healing Touch swear, and the word hit me. “I swear, I just…got a little carried away with my research, it happens all the time, just ask anypony—”
“Liar.” She walked around me and headbutted me away from my desk, forcing me down the hallway.
There was no stopping her, even as I tried to get away from her. “Healing Touch, seriously, I’m fine!” The begging didn’t work.
It wasn’t until she herded me to the mirror in the bathroom that she stepped back. I almost wished she hadn’t since I needed somepony to ground me. Instead, my hooves came hard to the edge of the sink, keeping me steady. My eyes were sunken, my coat was a mess, and my goatee had grown along with the beginnings of a beard shadowing my jawline. Really, it looked like I was the one wasting away.
“Now tell me again you’re eating and sleeping.”
“I get it.”
“Look,” her wings fluttered slightly on her back, “if this isn’t different by tomorrow, I’m telling the Princess that you can’t handle this. I understand that Starlight is important to you, but we can’t lose you either.”
“She’s not…” A wave of nausea, with a side of something close to self-loathing, hit my gut and threatened up my throat.
She sighed. “I’m going to exercise Starlight today. You’re going to shower, get dressed, and leave this house to get something to eat. Like sitting down at a restaurant. Then you’re going to go grocery shopping. Until all of that happens, you are not allowed to come back, and if you try to skip a step, I’ll tell Princess Cadance today instead of tomorrow.”
“What, am I supposed to bring you receipts?” I grumbled.
“You don’t lie well, Sunburst. I’ll be able to tell.”
I did as I was told because Healing Touch had never told a greater truth: I’m a terrible liar.
Every day after, I made sure to be washed, dressed, and fed by the time Healing Touch came by. I even forced myself to nap while she was in the house as if to quell every last one of her complaints. She left me alone for the most part, no more forced momming.
However, she’d probably have something to say if she knew the way I spent my nights. Like now, after a meager dinner consisting of half an apple and a cup of tea, followed by many hours of research, the clock struck 3 AM and I found myself drifting towards Starlight’s room, sitting on the chair next to her bed waiting for a miracle or some kind of change. By this point, I would have slept an hour or two, mostly filled with a stretched-out rendition of the same dream, the same meadow, the same light drifting further and further. Now was the time to think. To sit and think about how I was doing this wrong.
“How did Flurry talk to you?” I murmured. “It has to be just her, right? Something special about Flurry because if you could talk, wouldn’t you have talked to Luna or Twilight or maybe even me?”
I replayed the memory in my mind for probably the hundredth time, following the logic that Flurry was just being Flurry, one of a kind, powerful, innocent Flurry. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation or being too close to the problem, but it took me this long to actually see it. I left my seat and moved to the bed, sitting next to her on the mattress.
I made a point to never touch her, never get on the bed unless it was absolutely necessary. It felt wrong otherwise. My hooves cupped her face and I had to bite back the emotion, the memory of holding her like this still fresh in my mind. Maybe Flurry wasn’t talking, exactly. She was still a foal in many aspects, and what she knew about magic and how it works was limited. So maybe this was just magic at work.
But what kind of magic? Empath? Telepathy? Dreamwalking? How do I connect with her without her being here, without her being prepared for me or instructing me on what to do? I wasted too much time already, I’d just have to try. Thinking about the past, thinking about all those strange adventures, I focus on her and us, letting my magic unfurl towards her, and then I almost screamed in anguish, sure for a second that I had fallen asleep because I was back at that Celestia-damned meadow. But it was all wrong, no single circle of grass but a whole field of wildflowers underneath a starry sky surrounded me. I looked around me and let out an almost contented sigh.
“Sunburst…” and this time it definitely was her voice, not a mistake, and my head swiveled in every direction, trying to catch sight of her. I wondered if she’d have short hair here.
“Starlight?” It didn’t matter where I looked, she wasn’t there. But she had to be because she was the one that called me here and it only made sense for her to be here, somewhere.
“It hurts.”
I groaned. Maybe I had fallen asleep, maybe this was some new kind of nightmare as time and grief continued to weigh on me. She was dying and I was failing and this would be the new way I’d be reminded of it every night.
“Help me.”
I couldn’t stop the scream of frustration, “How?” But all I got in return was a searing pain behind my eyes. When I could refocus, I was back on the bed, my hooves still holding her face. “Darn it.” I brought a hoof to my face, wiping at my mouth, and when it came back all I saw was blood.