Flying in the rain was hardly something to sing about, in Typhoon’s experience. The rain was cold, the winds buffeted her feathers and constantly tried to blow her off course, and the raindrops spattering into her face were both irritating and blinding, all while the heavy water drenching her coat and wings tried to drag her back down to the ground. She didn’t understand why some pegasi loved it so much, but then again, ponies often asked her why she enjoyed flying in the snow when most would rather be inside sitting next to logs crackling in the hearth. It would be hypocritical to judge, wouldn’t it?
But winter was far away, and Typhoon didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter before her. Normally, she would fly above the clouds to avoid the rain, but if she flew up too high, she couldn’t see the hot springs dotting the countryside around Boiling Springs. As she flew through the wet and gray malaise, the aging pegasus did her best to scan around the city, trying to find something that was sufficiently isolated to draw in the kelpie without risk of somepony else stumbling across it, while still close enough to the city to be believable that somepony had decided to fly out to it on a whim. It was a tough job trying to find the perfect candidate, and Typhoon felt like she was trying to find the coin under a hundred cups after the showpony had shuffled them around. The best she could do was take a guess and hope she was right. If she wasn’t, then she could only pray she’d still have a chance to try again tomorrow. She didn’t want to think about what she would do if the kelpie found another victim and didn’t resurface for a month, since catching her was part of her deal with Deep Blue.
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
As she circled over the lake in the center of town in ever-widening circles, Typhoon spotted a promising candidate a little bit toward the south end of Boiling Springs. There, crumbling boulders that had rolled down one of the nearby hills lay scattered about a slightly elevated hillock, and the shelter they provided allowed a sparse copse of trees to rise out of the thin and grassy soil. The trees provided enough cover from the air that Typhoon couldn’t clearly see into their center as they swayed in the wind, but even through the rain, steam rose just high enough for Typhoon to know that there had to be a spring concealed within the perimeter of tree trunks. It was a long walk but a short flight from town, and anypony walking around it wouldn’t be able to see what was happening within the copse without stepping hoof inside first.
“If there’s any place to get murdered by a seahorse, that’s the one,” Typhoon muttered to herself. Turning her wings and putting the wind at her flank, she began to glide back down to earth, feeling like the cold rain on her back was pushing her towards the ground. Or, perhaps more accurately, toward the hungry maw of her would-be fey predator.
At least she could appreciate the warm waters of the spring for a little bit before freezing them solid…
She flared her wings and put a few extra flaps into them to slow herself down before she touched down on the ground, but even that wasn’t enough to stop her from sinking in the cold mud up to her fetlocks. The mare grimaced at the feeling of the mud squeezing into the frogs of her hooves, and she pulled them out of the squelching mud one at a time and did her best to shake them off before continuing onwards. “Been too long since I was on the campaign trail,” she muttered again, her mind wandering back to any of the many expeditions she once campaigned in, either as a young soldier or an officer. A pang in her heart reminded her that she would never see those days again, those simpler days of serving her country, and she did her best to push it down. The last thing she needed was memories of the good old days distracting her while bathing with a fey.
As she drew closer, however, her ears twitched at the sound of music… or more accurately, singing, faint and solo. Her features hardening into a wary frown, Typhoon cautiously pushed forward, her left wing idly reaching for the missing scabbard latch for the sword that was supposed to be at her side. She paused before cresting the hill, her heart beating a little faster without the usual skysteel assurance she was so used to carrying around, but at the last moment she reminded herself she was overthinking it. Deep Blue had said the kelpie would come to her, not the other way around. But then again, neither he nor she had discussed what they would do if somepony else beat her to the springs. What if the kelpie went after the wrong target?
The old soldier’s frown sharpened, and she pushed up the last few strides of muddy hillside, determined to flush the stranger away from the spring so she could have it to herself and maybe end the kelpie’s body count in Boiling Springs one pony early. But when she made it to the top of the hill and cleared her throat at the brown figure soaking in the water and singing to herself, the challenge resting on the tip of her tongue instantly evaporated when a blue and pink eye looked back at her, startled. Instead, after an awkward moment, Typhoon could only blurt out, “What are you doing here?”
Sparrow froze, her singing abruptly stopped. After a moment to read Typhoon’s face and the look of surprise that covered it, the unicorn sank a little lower into the bubbling, steamy waters. “What does it look like?” she asked. “I’m trying to enjoy myself.”
With her initial surprise wearing off, Typhoon’s brow lowered. Just because it was Sparrow and not some other pony didn’t mean her end goal was any different; the young unicorn needed to leave now, for her own good. “Go enjoy yourself somewhere else,” Typhoon said. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s not safe.”
“Why? Because of a little rain?” Sparrow stuck her tongue out at Typhoon and, as if to prove a point, slipped down into the water until the steaming, frothing water lapped at the hairs of her chin. “You want in? Fine. I can share. But I ain’t going anywhere.”
Typhoon bared her teeth for a moment in frustration, and her tongue recoiled in her mouth to deliver a rebuke, but she stopped herself. If the kelpie was nearby, she couldn’t let slip that she knew anything about the dangers of being in the water alone during a storm, and she certainly couldn’t channel her empatha and freeze Sparrow out of the waters without showing her hoof far too early. The entirety of the plan relied on the kelpie being unaware of Typhoon’s magic, or that the aging pegasus even knew she existed in the first place. The water had ears as well as eyes, and a shiver ran down Typhoon’s spine as she imagined a fey was watching her from the spring, from the steam, from the rain itself. Could she drag Sparrow out of the spring without tipping her hoof to the kelpie?
A long, slow breath escaped Typhoon’s lips, and the old soldier decided instead to step down into the water. An idea started to form in her mind, and for the moment, she put the concerns about the kelpie aside. The water was warm and inviting, instantly chasing away the chill of the rain and the cold gusts of wind that accompanied it, and dissolving the clingy cold muck stuck to her hooves. For the time being, at least, being present in the same spring as Sparrow would stop the young mare from becoming the kelpie’s next victim, and it was still early in the morning. Typhoon was fairly confident she could outlast Sparrow in the spring when the young mare grew bored or hungry, and then she’d have it to herself.
And even then, spending a day in the hot, soothing water wasn’t exactly the worst way to kill time. Though the injury to her ribs had mostly subsided in the days following her fight with the dragon, the warm waters of the spring helped to chase away the lingering aches, at least for a little while.
When she finally slipped into the spring up to her shoulders, Typhoon sighed, found a submerged rock to sit on, and leaned back against the stone rim of the spring and closed her eyes. It was a delightful combination of sensations, truth be told; the warm water on her body and her open wings, floating limp in the water by her sides, massaged out the aches in her joints, while the cool rain falling on her face kept her from overheating in the water. The bodily comfort began to pull at the back of her mind, where her brain had started to remind her that she hadn’t slept the night before, and she felt herself beginning to doze off.
But before she did, she drew in a breath and opened one eye. Sparrow still sat across from her in the water, her muzzle practically submerged, and watching her with her mismatched eyes. Typhoon saw something in those eyes—was it wariness or intent? Fear, maybe?—that stirred the old soldier to speak. “I’m… sorry about what I said to you,” she began. “Yesterday. I didn’t need to be that blunt.”
Silence held, save for the rainfall hitting the leaves of the trees around them, and the soft popping of millions of tiny bubbles as they rose to the surface of the spring and broke apart. On and on it dragged until, finally, Sparrow raised her muzzle from the water to speak. “It’s fine,” she said, her voice quiet, unsure. “I understand.”
She slid a little closer, and though Typhoon raised an eyebrow at the seemingly peaceful resolution of what she thought was going to devolve into a shouting match, she didn’t question it. “I’m… glad,” Typhoon started, and she closed her eye again and leaned her head back until her muzzle was pointed at the sky, where the growing raindrops continued to patter on her face. “It’s just…” A sigh. “I knew a mare your age, once upon a time, who wanted what you wanted. She thought it would be all glory and bravado. But she could never be a part of it. She was a unicorn, for starters. That didn’t mean all that much then, but I was the one who had to tell her no. And it hurt her. Hurt our relationship. I don’t think we… I don’t know.”
After a moment, Typhoon groaned and raised her head off the ground, rubbing at her temple with a wet wingtip. “I didn’t want to tell her no. I didn’t want to crush her dreams like that. But they were impossible dreams. Because of who we were. And I wonder if maybe, if I hadn’t had to have said no, if I’d still be in Everfree now. I just… I don’t know.”
Sparrow had slid around the perimeter of the spring, and had closed almost to Typhoon’s side. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know…”
“You wouldn’t have,” Typhoon said, dismissively waving her wing. “I’m not one to talk about my past. What’s done is done.”
They sat in silence once more, all the while as the winds of the storm blustered through the leaves of the trees and the grasses of the prairie, and the downpour of rain grew heavier and harder. But that silence was broken when Typhoon’s ears twitched at the sound of panting approaching from the direction of Boiling Springs, and she opened her eyes to see a mare standing at the edge of the spring, soaked to the bone from the worsening storm, her legs and belly caked with mud…
…And with one blue and one pink eye set in her brown face.
In a split second, the quiet and stormy day exploded into chaos. Typhoon had just enough time to register what she was seeing before she realized the sudden mortal peril she was in. She began to channel her magic and lean away from the Sparrow in the spring right as the illusion disappeared over its face in a burst of steam. Where once the face of a young unicorn with mismatched eyes and a scar on her lip had been, a creature with a long, translucent blue muzzle with two dozen long and curved fangs jutting up and down from its lips appeared. The kelpie’s eyes were like two black whirlpools surrounded by bony spines, and a spiked and spiny coronet ran down her head and neck in place of a mane. Spiny fins protruded from her neck at the base of her jawline, colored in a swirl of blue, white, and yellow like the rest of her body, and powerful muscles under the spiny armor on her neck flexed as she lunged forward with her snapping maw, sinking those malevolent hooked fangs into Typhoon’s shoulder.
But that was the kelpie’s mistake. Her hooked fangs had barely cut into Typhoon’s skin before the pegasus’ magic burst outwards in a cloud of supercooled frost. The kelpie’s eyes widened and a surprised and pained scream strangled in her throat as ice overtook her, freezing her head and neck solid with a loud crack before spreading out over the surface of the spring. In a split second, Typhoon’s sudden outburst of empatha had frozen the entire spring solid, kelpie and all, and with a pained grimace, the pegasus wrenched her shoulder free of the kelpie’s frozen maw, clutching at her coat as blood began to run down it before her magic froze the wounds shut.
All this happened in the blink of an eye, and when it was over, Typhoon leaned back against the spring, gasping as her racing heart hammered in her chest, driven on by the sudden surge of adrenaline. Only after several seconds and many gulps of air did Typhoon shape her magic to free herself from the ice and crawl out of the formerly hot spring. Even then, she stumbled back a bit before sitting down at the base of the nearest tree, her ruby red eyes warily looking on at the frozen monster in front of her.
It was then that Sparrow, standing at the edge of the frozen spring and too shocked to move, finally found her voice. “What the fuck is that?!” the young mare screamed, recoiling from the kelpie ice statue jutting halfway out of the spring.
Only when Typhoon’s heart slowed down did the soldier answer her. “What I was here for,” she breathlessly said. And then, finally, she clutched the pendant hanging around her neck and held it to her lips. “Deep Blue, your fish is frozen.”