//------------------------------// // Prisoner Again // Story: Legends Never Die: The Return of the King // by bookhorse125 //------------------------------// “This is the worst,” Imara groaned. “I officially hate it.” “You’ve said that about everywhere we go!” Sunny protested, nudging her and trying to be cheerful - and failing. “Come on, just give it a chance?” The changeling groaned and dragged herself off the rock she was currently napping on, looking out of the mouth of the cave to the pouring rain storm outside. “Let’s see. Think positive. What do I like about this place?” She frowned, pretending to carefully study the terrain. “Well. The numerous amounts of cacti are just lovely. The bare desert really adds a feeling of home. And, to top it all off, we haven’t seen a single living creature yet! And we’re stuck here for stars know how long until this clears up.” Sunny sighed. “Well, at least you gave it your best.” “I like it,” Kailani supplied from the back, where she was huddled against the cave wall, next to Ash, who was maintaining the small fire - they didn’t want to attract any more attention than necessary. She shivered and wrapped her wings tighter around herself. “At least, when it wasn’t raining. When it was sunny out - that big, blue, open sky without a cloud in sight, and there was nothing holding me down and I could just fly away, fly as far as I wanted to without stopping…” She let out a contented sigh. “Paradise.” “The heat didn’t bother me at all,” Ash offered. “In fact, it wasn’t anything more than what I was used to. I think you’re just determined not to like anywhere else other than your kingdom.” “Can you blame me?” Imara waved her hoof at the downpour. “My kingdom was never like this!” “We aren’t in your kingdom,” Sunny reminded her, looking up from the map she was studying, trying to pinpoint their location. “You said that you always wanted to see what life was like outside the hive - what kinds of places you would see. Well, this is it. This is the rest of the world - take it or leave it.” Imara shrugged and stalked back over to her rock. “I honestly thought the rest of the world would also be like one big hive - and now that I know it’s not, I guess I’m not sure what to think.” She turned to Kailani. “I did like Mount Aris, though. Nice to be somewhere where shapeshifting isn’t something that makes creatures scream.” “Other creatures haven’t seen magical transformations like you and I have,” Kailani said quietly, standing up and walking over to Sunny. “They’re just not used to it. Whatcha got there, Sunny?” The earth pony looked up, startled. “Oh… it’s just my father’s journal. He recorded all of his findings in here - and when he… disappeared, I took it and kept going.” She laughed. “Most of it was just me writing down the questions I would ask a unicorn or a pegasus if they ever turned up on my front doorstep.” “Why not changelings?” Imara asked, looking offended. “What’s wrong with us?” Sunny laughed. “Nothing, I just hadn’t heard of you yet.” She pulled out her other journal and set it on the cave floor. “But that changed when I found… this.” Kailani picked up the book and flipped through it, skimming passages. She stopped on a page about hippogriffs, and from the little she could see of it, Sunny knew that it was the entry that three little fillies named Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo - the Cutie Mark Crusaders, they liked to call themselves - had been called by the cutie map (which was the magical map inside Princess Twilight Sparkle’s castle - apparently it could call certain ponies to anywhere in the world to solve a friendship problem) to Mount Aris to help a hippogriff named Terramar, who couldn’t decide if he wanted to live above the sea or below it. “Where did you find that?” Imara asked, taking the book from Kailani as she passed it to her. The changeling flipped a couple pages back, looking for something about changelings. “Woah, it talks about King Thorax in here!” She grinned. “We always learned that he was a peaceful king - he wanted to be friends with the world instead of hiding from it.” Sunny laughed. “Now, that is a philosophy I can live behind,” she said, “and to answer your question, Imara, I found it in this abandoned airstation in Zephyr Heights that my ancestor built to try and get the three pony tribes to reunite. She and her friends wrote that journal and published hundreds of copies so that every creature could learn about the power of friendship, even if they didn’t come to their school.” “It’s amazing,” Kailani whispered. “Like… even though they’re gone, the spirits of the past are still here, guiding us and helping us along the way.” “Did you hear that?” Ash said suddenly, leaping to her feet and shaking her head as if there was water in her ears. Sunny stopped. “Hear what?” She cautiously slipped her father’s journal back into her bag and stood up, looking around apprehensively. Kailani and Imara did the same, Kailani taking the Journal of Friendship and hugging it against her chest. After several tense moments, Imara laughed. “You silly dragon,” she giggled, “there’s nothing out here but rain and-” The rest of her sentence was cut off, and Imara dropped to the ground, out cold, a small dart protruding from her neck, the end tipped with bright red, black, and white feathers. Before Kailani had a chance to react, she was shot, too, and collapsed as well. Sunny whirled in a circle, trying to see who was shooting at them, and something grazed her hoof, she looked down and saw that the dart had skimmed her leg, and while she now felt sleepy, she didn’t drop to the floor as quickly as the others. “Ash?” Sunny murmured, stumbling towards the dragon. “Go get-” Her hooves gave out from under her before she could finish. As her eyes closed, Sunny saw large, dark creatures run into the cave and surround Ash before she blacked out. “Ugh…” Sunny staggered to her hooves, still a little woozy. Those darts must’ve held a tranquilizer, she thought ruefully. Whoever had been using them was smart. As her foggy mind began working again, she remembered another time when she had been knocked out cold - and had woken up to find her friends’ memories of each other being erased. Panic set in, and she whirled around in a circle, trying to get her bearings. She was standing in what looked like a… tent? Several poles spread out in a circle connected at the top, and several large pelts were draped over the poles, keeping out the elements. Her friends were there - Imara and Kailani in the back of the hut, sleeping soundly… and Ash was nowhere to be seen. “Ash?” Sunny called, and when there was no response, she tried again, but louder. “Ash?!?” Once again, no response. Sunny took deep, calming breaths to keep the tears from forming, trying to convince herself that, wherever the dragon was, she would be safe. “Where are we?” Sunny whispered to herself. “You’re in Appleoosa territory.” Sunny turned to see that a creature had entered the tent, smaller than a pony, with an arched back and thin, long legs. She had a black coat and a straight gray mane, and she was wearing a headband with two feathers sticking out of it. Her wide eyes were the color of the sky, and she walked like she was used to hanging out in the shadows. “Who are you?” Sunny asked, tilting her head at the creature. “And, I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but what are you?” “My name’s Little Braveheart, and I’m a buffalo,” she whispered. “And you’re Sunny Starscout.” “I am.” Sunny studied the buffalo and decided that she didn’t appear to be much of a threat. “How do you know my name? Have you also been told that I want to lead the ponies to eliminate and exterminate all non-ponies?” “No,” Little Braveheart said, shaking her head and looking horrified. “Do you?” “Nah.” Sunny grinned. “It’s much easier to just enslave them. That was a joke,” she added, seeing Little Braveheart’s eyes widen. “I don’t want to hurt any creature - in fact, I want to stop other creatures from hurting us, too.” She turned and looked at her friends, still peacefully sleeping. “Are my friends going to be okay?” Little Braveheart nodded. “The tranquilizer only lasts a little while - they should be waking up soon,” she explained. “You must understand, it’s much easier to bring trespassers in this way-” “Woah, woah, wait.” Sunny held up a hoof. “Trespassers? We’re not trespassers.” “We found you hiding in one of our caves,” Little Braveheart informed her. “You’re complete strangers on our land. That makes you a trespasser.” Sunny opened her mouth to speak, but found that words had temporarily failed her. “Okay, yeah, I can see why that would make us look guilty, but we’re just passing through - honest! The only reason we were there was to take shelter from that storm. Please, just let us go, and we’ll be out of your manes before you know it-” “I’m sorry,” Little Braveheart said, lowering her head. “But I can’t do that.” Sunny sighed. “Can you at least tell us where Ash is? She’s my friend - a dragon - about yea tall with blueish gray scales? Any idea?” “My father’s talking to her right now,” Little Braveheart said. “We have great respect for dragons-” “Urgh…” muttered Imara as she blinked her eyes open. “Wha… where are we?” “Buffalo territory,” Sunny told her, reaching out a hoof to help haul her friend to her hooves. “They say we’ve been trespassing. But apparently the Legion of Doom skipped them.” “Legion of Doom?” Little Braveheart frowned. “Who’s that?” “A group of villains,” Sunny explained, “made up of a pegasus filly named Cozy Glow, a former changeling queen named Chrysalis, and a magic-stealing centaur named Tirek. They want to rule Equestria, so they’ve been spreading lies to all the other tribes about how the ponies want to exterminate them all, so that the other tribes will want to fight the ponies, and once the ponies have been beaten and the other creatures exhausted, the Legion of Doom will take over and carve the world into their own kingdoms. “But they might not even get that far, because they’re working with two other ponies who I’m not exactly on the greatest terms with - I saved the world from their evil schemes, if you’re wondering - and from what I picked up when I was their prisoner, they might stab Chrysalis, Tirek, and Cozy in the backs and take Equestria from them. So me and my friends here are trying to stop them.” “That’s right,” said Kailani, standing up and wobbling a bit on her feet. “Woah… I’m good now.” Little Braveheart hesitated. “That seems… very important.” She glanced behind her, out the tent flap. “I suppose, maybe you should go save the world… and then we can arrest you for trespassing-” A roar suddenly rose up, and all the creatures jumped. A stampede of buffalo, all larger than Little Braveheart, their shaggy hair in different shades of brown and black, all with war paint on their faces and feathers in their manes, were running towards their tent, shoving the tiny buffalo out of the way and seizing Sunny, Imara, and Kailani. They dragged them outside, and Sunny saw that they were in a large camp, with many tents like the one she just came from in a circle around a fire. “Destroy the trespassers!” boomed the largest buffalo of all, standing off to the side and holding back Ash as she tried to intervene. “Especially the pony - before she can obliterate us all!” Little Braveheart tried to stop them, but at every attempt, she just got knocked out of the way. Seeing her being pushed around like that, Sunny felt herself growing angry, felt her wings and horn appear, felt a new kind of power flowing through her veins, heard herself roaring with anger, the buffalo holding her dropping her, but she didn’t fall to the ground, she spread her rainbow wings and lit up her horn, her mane flowing freely though there was no wind. Her eye glowed white, and in her head, admitst all the magic, Sunny heard a tiny, familiar voice say, Aha. “Sunny?” Imara scrambled off the ground, her jaw dropping at the sight of her friend. “Woah.” There was a blast of white light so bright that all the buffalo in the camp were blinded, and when it cleared, Sunny and her friends were gone.