//------------------------------// // 2-2 // Story: The Sparrow in the Storm // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// Following their sparring and their breakfast, Sparrow and Typhoon broke down their meager camp, loaded up their possessions, and continued along the road, plunging deeper into the west and an unknown destination. Though Typhoon was the seasoned legionary who had carried her heavy armor and equipment for long marches most of her life, and Sparrow the lanky young mare who had never owned more than a dirty knapsack, a chipped knife, and a scant few personal possessions, the latter regularly was the one to shoulder the majority of the load. Though Typhoon claimed that she needed to stay light and unburdened so she could quickly take wing in an attack, Sparrow was more certain that the old mare just wanted to take some weight off of her aching joints. Morning turned to noon, and apart from a quick stop for some food, the pair of mares kept their march going. Occasionally they would pause so Typhoon could fly ahead and double check a fork in the road that she had noted during her morning reconnaissance, but for the most part they marched along the miles in relative silence. It was only during a pause along the roadside under the shade of a large elm to rest for a moment did Sparrow attempt to break it. “The heat with all this stuff I’ve got to carry… it’s something else,” Sparrow casually stated, and when she ran her hoof through her short mane, she noted it came away glistening with sweat. “I’m not used to traveling so heavy… or for so long.” After a moment, she discreetly glanced in Typhoon’s direction, waiting to see if the legionary was willing to pick up the conversation. Typhoon only looked off into the distance for some moments, her eyes trained vaguely in a north easterly direction. But speak she did, even if it took some time for words to actually leave her lips. “The Legion had me carrying more than that when I was your age,” she recounted, though it was less the snappy remark of an elder to a member of the younger generation, and more an observation colored by wizened wistfulness at memories gone by. “Had to fly with it, too. Armor is heavy, and when you have to carry your rations and gear, it sometimes felt like you were carrying an earth pony on your back.” The corner of her lip twitched. “They’re pretty dense, if you haven’t ever tried.” “Heh, well, if you count street fighting and wrestling, then maybe,” Sparrow said, and she realized she was rubbing the old split in her lip with the back of her fetlock. Typhoon noticed it as well, and when the old soldier quirked a brow at her, Sparrow felt compelled to answer the unspoken question. “Got that when I was twelve,” she said, her memories of her short but hard life coming back to the forefront of her mind and settling there like old scars. “Somepony threw out a whole cake behind their house. I think by the noise it must have been an unwelcome present in a failing marriage, but to me it was a gift from the gods. Well, I wasn’t the only one who thought that too. A bigger colt tried to take it from me, but I wasn’t going to let him.” The tip of Typhoon’s graying mane waved as she bobbed her head once in understanding. “I take it you taught him a lesson, then?” “Psssh. I was the one who got taught a lesson. That lesson was to skip town because Crooked Bar had a knife and he wasn’t afraid to cut me to steal my cake.” Sparrow chuckled a little bit at the memory of the fight, now that the fear and pain of the moment had faded away into memory. “I broke his nose, though. Bet that cake didn’t taste too good with blood in it.” Typhoon made a breathy grunt—not quite a laugh, but something similar nonetheless—and shook her head. “You’ve got spirit, at least. Can’t deny that. I remember being fiery when I was a filly, too.” “Really? Pff. I don’t buy it.” Sparrow waved her hoof at the old soldier. “You’re like ice, through and through. Not fire. Even your magic is mostly ice magic!” The corner of Typhoon’s lip disappeared for a moment as she sucked on it, and her wings fidgeted at her sides—though Sparrow had only traveled with her for a week, she noticed that the old soldier’s little wing shuffles often marked a topic she was loathe to talk about. So she wasn’t too surprised when Typhoon quickly deflected. “Growing up will do that to you,” was her cryptic non-answer. “And I had to grow up faster than most.” Rather than linger in uncomfortable silence, Typhoon cleared her throat and broached a topic that wasn’t related to travel or training. “I don’t mean to pry, so you don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to. But I have to ask: is Sparrow your real name?” The question was a surprising one, and it took Sparrow a moment to think it through. When she did, a faint warmth colored her cheeks and she abashedly glanced away from the soldier sitting across from her. “I mean… it’s the only name that anypony would know me by.” “So it’s not your given name, then.” “No… not really…” Sparrow let out a little titter when she saw Typhoon arch an eyebrow at her. “Okay fine. My, uh, real name is Hydrangea. You know, because of the eyes? Hydrangeas can be blue and pink; at least, that’s what my mom told me when I was a foal. She was an earth pony, so I took her word for it. But I hate the name, so please don’t start calling me that.” “I won’t,” Typhoon assured her, though Sparrow caught the ghost of a smirk on the soldier’s whitening muzzle, if only for a flash, and already knew that Typhoon would find some way to tease her about it later. “Though if you’re sensitive about your eyes, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to be reminded about it.” Sparrow cringed at the reminder, and she squeezed her blue eye shut. “Yeah… Let’s just say that I would wear an eyepatch to cut out all the attention if it meant I wasn’t half blind in back alleys. Nothing good comes from the eyes. Ponies remember me at a glance, which made it hard living on the streets for a lot of reasons. Plus there were always the creeps who wanted to bed something exotic…” At that, she made an exaggerated gagging noise and angrily swished her tail across the grass she sat on. “The other urchins were the worst, though. Crooked Bar used to say I was so poor I couldn’t even afford matching eyes. At least in Boiling Springs, Wren and Juniper also had striking marks and colors, so I felt more comfortable running around with them than hanging by myself…” Typhoon nodded in understanding. “My hoof and armor attracted plenty of stares wherever I went, so I know what you mean about unwanted attention,” she sympathized. “But as for your name, if you didn’t like Hydrangea, why call yourself Sparrow? I don’t see the connection.” “My father was a pegasus and he used to call me ‘Little Bird’,” Sparrow said, and when Typhoon cocked her head and furrowed her brow, Sparrow shrugged, already knowing what the mare was wondering. “I assume that my mom had some unicorn blood on her side, and I ended up being lucky enough to get the horn. I’m a mutt, yeah, but I like to think that just gives me a little bit of something good from every race. Maybe there’s some Crystal in there, too; that’d be neat, wouldn’t it?” To Sparrow’s surprise, Typhoon seemed to trip over one or two potential responses that died in her throat. When she finally did speak, it was accompanied by a fluff of her wings as if to ward something away from her. “Considering the implications of how exactly Crystal blood would have to have gotten into your family tree, given when I was your age they had only just stopped burning villages and abducting unicorns to try and have Crystal unicorn foals, it would probably be for the best if there wasn’t any,” Typhoon simply noted. “Alright, yeah, maybe that wouldn’t be neat,” Sparrow conceded. “But uh, yeah, I was already used to my dad calling me Little Bird when I…” She swallowed hard, and though she tried to push it away, she felt shivers overtaking her. She closed her eyes and flattened her ears as nightmares assailed her senses. The thunderous crack of crumbling stone and rock, gigantic monstrosities armored in black chitin picking through the ruins and sinking their paralyzing fangs into those who couldn’t get away, the screaming, the screaming… Sparrow gasped, her eyes fluttering open as she shook herself free from her trauma. Across from her, Typhoon’s wings flared in alarm, and the old soldier’s left hoof was halfway raised in the air, as if to reach out to Sparrow, but when the two mares made eye contact, she lowered it back to the ground. Swallowing hard, Sparrow slowly continued in a trembling voice, trying to use her teenaged bravado to push her terrors away as if nothing had happened. “I, uh… t-the spiders sank my village when I was ten. Everypony I knew… gone. Just like that. The spiders didn’t take me because I was buried in the rubble of my house. I could only catch glimpses of what was happening outside. I still have nightmares about it sometimes. But they took everypony, and they would have found me eventually, but the Legion arrived and drove them off.” Typhoon’s ears perked and her eyes widened almost imperceptibly, but she refrained from saying anything about what caused her reaction. Instead, she only silently listened as Sparrow allowed herself to open up with a story few ponies had heard in the past six years. “I couldn’t see much of the fight, but I could hear it. There was lots of shouting and shrieking, though it was mostly the pegasi doing the shouting and the spiders doing the shrieking. Then they dug through the rubble and pulled whomever they could out from it. There… weren’t many. But there was me.” She felt her features brighten a little as she remembered being taken out of the dark hole that had become her town’s grave on the strong wings of armored legionaries and being presented to a stallion with a black plume of feathers running down his helmet from nose to neck. “They took me to the legate, and the legate said he would keep an eye on me until they found my parents. But they didn’t find my parents. When night came around and I hadn’t seen them, I started crying. Just… wailing. I thought the legate would have tossed me out of his command tent, but he took some of the little wooden horseheads he had in his… I don’t know, war chest? What would you call it?” “It doesn’t really have a name, but I know what you mean,” Typhoon assured her. “I’ve spent my fair share of time studying a map and moving wooden pieces around to get an idea of my and my enemy’s armies and work out a stratagem before battle.” “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I mean. He took those out and gave them to me,” Sparrow said. “It was just… just a stupid little thing, to try and get a crying filly to shut up by distracting her. But it helped, I guess. It gave me something else to think about. When I finally fell asleep, he put me in his cot, and when I woke up, there was already breakfast waiting for me. He even crushed a little spider when I saw one and screamed.” “Sounds like he cared about the lost filly camping in his tent.” “I don’t know if he did or not; he left me in the nearest town when he took his legion and flew elsewhere,” Sparrow said with a shrug. “The town was supposed to find a foster family for me, but I ran away before they could. As far as I was convinced, that was too close to where the spiders had just sunken my home, and if I didn’t run, they would catch me too. I at least felt safe with the legion, but it wasn’t like they were just going to carry me with them when they flew off again. But I… well, I did remember his name. Legate Singing Sparrow, though to be honest, I don’t think I heard him sing once while I was with him.” The corner of her lip curved upwards at the tiny little joke. “Ah… I see.” Typhoon nodded her head in understanding. “So you took on his name once you were on your own. And now I understand where your fascination with the Legion comes from, at least.” “The Legion saved me, Typhoon,” Sparrow said, swallowing hard and letting out a breath as she felt like some weight had been taken off her shoulders. “My whole life changed when the spiders sunk my town. I went from being a filly with two loving parents to being an orphan on the streets. As far as I’m concerned, Hydrangea died down there with the spiders. It’s been Sparrow’s story since then—not hers.” Typhoon was quiet for a moment, and the longer she abstained from speaking, the brighter Sparrow felt her cheeks becoming, suddenly cringing at herself for unloading her history on a mare old enough to be her grandmother. But eventually, Typhoon just stood up with a grunt and shook her wings out. “That last part may have been a bit melodramatic… but thank you for sharing that with me,” she said, and she offered her hoof to Sparrow to help her stand. When Sparrow took it, and found herself hauled to her hooves by the deceptively strong older mare, she was surprised to feel Typhoon’s wing briefly brush against her side, almost as if a facsimile of a one-legged hug. Sparrow leaned against the feathers, or at least tried to—they were already gone and back against the legionary’s side before she could even shift her weight. But she bowed her head a bit and took a step back when Typhoon let her own hoof fall away from Sparrow’s. “Yeah… anytime,” she said, but when Typhoon turned around to pick up her own assortment of things and started off down the road again, she cocked her head. “So, uh… you got a sob story you wanna share too? Make this a group therapy session or something?” “No,” was Typhoon’s flat answer. “There’s still daylight left. Let’s focus on getting to the next town, okay?” The young unicorn sighed at the evasive answer. “Fine, have it your way,” she muttered, and her magic picked up her gear and slung it over her back. But when she picked up her knapsack, she took a moment to open it up and pull a small wooden horse head out of it, cracked and splintering from time, and the paint rubbed away by the years. She closed her eyes and pressed it against her cheek for a moment before dropping it back into her bag, closing it up, and starting down the road after the old soldier.