//------------------------------//
// 3 - Wishes in the Night 
// Story: Cammie 
// by Jarvy Jared 
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There was a time before she went to take the train job when she awoke in the middle of the night to hear the quiet sobbing of her son.  Because Juniper’s room was next to hers, the sound easily crawled from there to her ears, and it seemed to infect the whole shop with an atmosphere of chilling vulnerability. 
She found him hunched over on top of his bed, the covers clutched under his hooves. Turning on the light, she saw his eyes wet with big, drooping tears. “Oh, honey,” she said, wrapping him in a hug, feeling his face soak her fur, “what is it? What’s wrong?”
“I had a bad dream,” he said. This was why, later, when he awoke early much to her surprise, she’d asked if he’d had a bad dream. 
“What was it about?”
“It was about Daddy.” By then he should have been too old to call Astral “Daddy,” yet that habit had persisted—perhaps because, to Juniper, that’d all he’d been; he had not gotten to the point where Astral could be called “Dad.” 
“I dreamed I was talking to him, but then all of a sudden, I couldn’t see his face.”
“Couldn’t see his face?” 
He shook his head, and pulled back to look at her. “No. I couldn’t even tell what color he was. And then in the dream, he was asking me a bunch of stuff”—that he could only speak of “stuff,” of vague things, struck her hard—“but I couldn’t answer him. He asked if I didn’t remember, and I realized I couldn’t, and then I still couldn’t see his face and—”
Chamomile buried his face in her fur again just as more sobbing took over. She willed herself not to cry—she’d shed enough tears for a lifetime. “Shh, shh,” she was saying. “It’s okay, it’s okay. It was just a dream, just a dream.”
This was not the first time he’d had such a dream, however. A few months after Astral’s death, Juniper had come to her in the night.  In a low, trembling voice, he’d revealed he’d dreamed his father—or somepony who said he was his father—had visited him, but he couldn’t recognize him and had gotten scared. “That pony got sad,” he’d said, “and then I got sad and woke up. Was that Daddy?”
She couldn’t answer him right away. The pain was still too immediate. He must have seen this in her face, paled by the fingers of the moon, for his face scrunched up and, while he did not cry, he gave the impression of being perturbed by her silence. “I’m sure it was,” she said quickly. “It’s okay. Sometimes I dream about him, too.”
“But I couldn’t tell if it was him,” he insisted. He’d been stuck on that point until she’d at last soothed him into a sleep undisturbed by any dreams. 
Similar incidents had played out throughout the years. Some were as minor as that, and others as intense as this one. After each nightmare, Juniper would spend a few days feeling guilty. Guilty! As though his subconscious was committing a crime under his discretion! She’d try to assuage his guilt; sometimes it seemed to work. He’d go a few days, maybe a few weeks, or, blessedly, a few months, without dreaming of his father. Then he would dream of him—or rather, dream of a lack of recognizing him—and the cycle would resume. 
During those times, Chamomile would sometimes feel resentful towards Astral. This, in turn, spawned her own guilt, a second shadow to her name. Still, she could not help but think: it was Astral’s passing that made her son absorb guilt into his skin like a poor drink. If he had not passed… But it was useless to think about that. She knew this, yet some part of her still held on to that ludicrous idea.
She was thinking about all of this when Juniper, sniffling, murmured, “Tell me about him. Please.”
She hesitated only a moment. The window had its curtains pulled to the side—she couldn’t recall if she had done this, or if Juniper had—providing a view of Bridlewood’s darkness, thinned by the presence of light crystals which that ditzy, bubbly unicorn, Izzy Moonbow, had introduced a few months ago. It made her think about her son’s lack of magic again, and she was tempted to close the curtains. 
She did as he asked, which he had asked every time he’d dreamed that kind of dream. 
The two things that Juniper had inherited from Chamomile were her brown eyes and dark-brown mane, which, at times, he liked to wear as she did hers, tied up in a bun whenever she was working and didn’t want her mane to fall into the cups. Everything else came from Astral. Juniper had such a similarly colored coat that you would have been forgiven if you thought them the same color, and his mane had one bang periodically stick out, stubbornly refusing to be combed back, just as Astral’s had, to his amused annoyance. His nose was short like his, and his body was that same slender physique that seemed to indicate an artist more than a worker-pony. 
Astral was an artist, of course. He’d worked as one of Bridlewood’s only newspaper ponies, and despite the fact that there wasn’t much news, he always did his job with a smile on his face. And what a smile! When he looked at her, it was like he was saying she was the whole of his world. It was the way any mare would want to be looked at. During their time together, it created a sense of intimacy between them—for there was no need to hide anything out of shame. That was one of the first things she’d fallen in love with. 
“Aside from newspapers,” she told Juniper, “he liked to write other things. He wrote poems and letters to friends, even if they were only a short walk away, and sometimes he wrote songs, too, but he never sang them—I think it was because he was embarrassed, even though I tried to encourage him. We met at a poetry festival a few years before you were born.”
Usually she’d go on to describe more about Astral—the same song and dance which, in the past, had provided comfort, but which, in the intervening years, had gradually lost their splendor, like how gold, when rubbed over and over, loses its sheen—but her son suddenly said, “How was I born?”
It was an awkward question. Every parent must consider it, as well as what to say when their child inevitably asks it, but for that moment, Chamomile felt her brain freeze up. A particularly visceral, unusually passionate image burst in front of her eyes like a supernova before vanishing. She coughed so as to mask her embarrassment, then remembered a new way of telling it.
She said Juniper had been born under a very special star, one that could grant wishes. Not a magical star—because back then, of course, anything magical was forbidden—but a star made of wishes and generous in giving them to the right ponies. She didn’t bother trying to make Juniper believe this story or ask him if he did, because even though he may have been at that age where the old magical tales used to capture the hearts and minds of children begin to lose their sheen, some trace of their trueness still remained. 
“You were our wish child,” she explained. “We’d wanted one for a while, but it took until we made that wish for you to come into our lives. And your name, well, Astral came up with that. He was looking at some of the plants growing in the back and thinking about how we’d built this place together, and how the garden needed something like we did, and he thought that a juniper tree might serve that…”
She detected his breathing had changed and looked down. He was falling asleep, not out of disinterest but because dreams and nightmares are an exhausting business. Smiling, she wiped his eyes then helped him back under the covers. She stayed there until she was sure he was asleep again. Then she stayed a little longer, before she kissed him on the forehead, gave him another hug, and left the room. 











There were things she didn’t tell him about the star, though—things that she did not intentionally hide from him, so much as let sleep somewhere where mentioning them was not something she considered. One thing was that she’d never wished upon a star until she met Astral, and another was that she hadn’t believed in it until Juniper had come into her life.
Astral was the one to point the star out to her. One night, some years into their burgeoning relationship, he’d invited her to use a telescope he’d created all on his own. When she came out that night, confused but intrigued by his presentation of a date, he stood in an area of Bridlewood that permitted a view of the sky unobscured, grinning and shuffling on his hooves excitedly, like a colt with a secret to spill.
“Have you ever looked at the stars?” he asked. She said she hadn’t. He showed her the telescope, a white tube on a tripod pointing up towards the nameless dark. He demonstrated how to use it, then pulled out one of his journals—he had many—to show her his notes. They were largely mathematical in nature—coordinates and diagrams and little descriptions of the things he’d seen. 
“There’s so much out there, so many things larger than us,” he said, his voice containing all the wonder left in the world. “One day, I’d like to map it all for somepony else to see.”
“But if you map it all, what’s left?”
“What does that matter? It’s that I can that matters, really.” 
“You are such a strange stallion, Astral.”
“I know. But that’s why you love me, isn’t it? Here, let me show you what I mean.”
Astral’s love for the sky, for the cosmos, was not wholly something that took her by surprise. He’d spoken at length about his discoveries, about stars and galaxies and things called “nebula,” and of the moon, its darkness, its riveting beauty—he’d spoken so much about those kinds of cosmic wonders that she supposed she’d become an expert in them by proxy.
But when he guided her eye to the telescope’s eyepiece and adjusted the focuser, something new opened up to her—something larger than anything she could have imagined, which hinted at something larger than the silliness of being afraid of a certain word or two, or of the other tribes. A somewhat blurry white glob coalesced into the moon, with shadows that covered half of it in a way that seemed to suggest something on it was alive. He showed her another star, another planet—which was a bit dark to look at, shifting blue, looking cold and lonely yet also with a strange beauty attached—and then he asked her to step away. “There’s something else,” he said. “It reminded me a bit of you.”
He adjusted the telescope for a little while, and she watched him. There was nothing extraordinary about the moving of the scope, yet there seemed an enticing energy about what was happening in front of her, the kind a pony feels when they are so full of love that even the minutest of things are somehow precious and immortal. Three years later, this would achieve a special tragic irony, but at that moment, all she could think about was how his face shone brilliantly under moonlight, how her heart seemed to burst when he had to swipe at his face when that annoying bang tickled his forehead, and how lucky she was to enjoy this moment of solitude with somepony who made her feel all of this in the first place.
“Where are you… Ah! There we go! Here!”  He was excited, and she was getting there, too. “Look at this.”
She peered through the eyepiece. At first, there didn’t appear to be anything. “Use the focuser,” he said. “It’s there, trust me.”
She did so slowly with a hoof, like she was handling a full cup of tea. Then she involuntarily gasp. 
There was a star. The star. It shimmered and trembled with the same passion as a dancer, and was the same color as her coat. Somehow this finding felt both profound and humbling. It was the former because it was like she was out there, herself, in space, spinning and dancing through the cosmos attached to the pendulum of fate. And it was the latter because here was something obviously larger than her, more powerful than her, with, perhaps, its own kind of magic to tether it to its home—and Astral, upon finding it, had thought, “This is her!”
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, even though she felt that such a description was paltry.  “You must have found this recently.”
He laughed, but there was a nervous energy behind it. She looked at him questioningly. “No, not really. I found it a bit of a while ago, to be perfectly honest. Actually, it was a little before we met.” His eyes twinkled. His grin achieved that knowing status. But the truest testament to his emotions was the blush on his face. “I, uh, found it, and made a wish on it.”
“A… wish?”
He nodded. “I wished that I’d meet somepony special.” He looked at her again, and his voice lowered to a whisper. “And, to my surprise, that wish came true.”
Later on, they would make wishes on that star. The wishes were, at first, small and innocent—Astral wished that when he woke up the next day, the coffee pot wouldn’t spill on his apron, and Chamomile wished that her burgeoning garden would survive the fall. They made these wishes with the air of superstitious reverence, with quick, knowing glances and giddy smirks that some ponies commented on but never quite asked about. It was assumed that they were simply acting in the way all ponies act when newly in love; their relationship became a safe haven for something as silly and as unbelievable as wish-making.
Then, one night, Astral asked if she’d like to have a child. After she’d thought about it, they went out into the backyard, found the star, and asked what it thought—and it had answered, some months later, in the form of a coddled baby resting like moss on a boulder in the languishing comfort of the forest’s shade. 











After she left Juniper’s room, Chamomile considered returning to bed. She even stood outside her door, about to enter. But something prevented her. Her ears flicked, but she heard nothing. She scanned the darkened hallway for something that wasn’t there. She looked back at Juniper’s door, listening to see if he’d wake up, but no sound came from the other side.
She trotted softly down the hall. Twisting past an assortment of domestic items, she found herself under a square trapdoor in the ceiling with a string hooked in the center. She pulled it down, and steps dove out, leading up to the attic.
She went up. She turned on the light to see a space filled with old things. A familiar, lonely safe sat in the corner. There were mattresses and blankets and other spreads. A storage chest was propped against the attic wall, but she couldn’t remember if it was locked or not, and didn’t bother checking. What drove her through the attic, now, was the sight of the telescope which, covered in a light coating of dust, faced the window, and this she approached cautiously, like she didn’t want to spook it.
She pulled the curtains to the side to show a cloudless night. The canopies of trees could be seen just below the rooftops of Bridlewood’s houses, and past them rose the thick fog that had, for years, kept them isolated from the rest of Equestria. She now knew that there were two other cities of ponykind beyond them. She wondered if there were ponies there who also looked through telescopes once upon a time, who made wishes to voiceless celestial bodies.
But she hadn’t made a wish in a while. The last time she had, the disappointment of it not being fulfilled had so crushed her, she’d resolved never to wish again. She’d taken the telescope out to the back, lined it up with the sky, and sought out her star. 
“I wish Astral was here,” she’d murmured. But it was not to be. And afterwards, seeing that things had continued either way, she’d packed the telescope up and put it in the attic to rest, to rot. 
Her memory, now, came alive, but burdened. She cleaned the dust off the telescope and adjusted its angle, trying to line it up with an open patch of sky. She peered through the eyepiece and adjusted the focus several times, scanning each quadrant visible.
But her star was no longer there. 











Of all the things Chamomile expected about a train, that the steady rumbling of the wheels, muted through each interlocking corridor, could induce sleep, was not one of them. It was with a sudden jolt that she realized she’d been asleep.
She’d been dreaming, but the dream was already out of her grasp. All she could recall was that it had been about Juniper. Her hoof instinctively found its way around her bag, and she tapped it, twice, as though to reassure herself it was still there. 
It took a second for her to get her bearings. She was in one of the passenger cars, one outfitted with a rich, mahogany-wooden frame, plush seats, and automatically activating wall sconces that would turn on once it was dark enough. Ponies sat in their seats, and all were asleep. She saw Clip Styles and Polar Blast a few seats away, both also sleeping.
Her legs and neck were stiff—she’d curled up in an awkward way. She got off the seat, craning her neck side-to-side until her joints were limber. Nopony else was awake.
She looked outside. She must have been asleep for a while. It was past evening, and the full moon painted the sky in a soft luminescence, letting her see just enough through the window. The view was alarmingly peaceful. Tall trees and perfect, grassy plains rolled by at an even pace, and distant clouds hung in the air. It was a far different thing, this open peacefulness, from Bridlewood’s sequestered, sometimes stifling tranquility, and, combined with the hypnotic rumbling of the train, Chamomile could feel herself growing drowsy again.
She stepped out of her row, carefully avoiding making a sound. It was then that she noticed that, while she could place Polar and Clip, Gaea was missing from her seat. Had she woken up, too? 
Chamomile shrugged. Well, if she ran into Gaea, she’d say hello. At any rate, she was interested in the train—they hadn’t had a proper tour, and she had no idea if there’d be time for one once they started working. If nothing else, she knew Juniper would be curious about the ride.
She decided to proceed to the back of the train, leaving her bag in her seat. She made for the passenger car’s exit door, and upon opening it, was met by the thrill of the night itself. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her just how fast they were moving, and so the wind blew back her mane with such abruptness, she might have tripped back. She grabbed onto the safety railings to steady herself.
Soon, the wind calmed, and she could stand without falling over. For some reason, she thought Juniper might have liked this feeling, if only for the thrill.
The next car’s door, when she entered, led to a passenger compartment in much the same vein as hers, with the only noticeable difference being the color of the seats. A few ponies were awake, however—three earth ponies who had taken one of the booths to play some cards. The other pegasi and unicorns were asleep. The earth ponies looked up, faces coated in shadows cast by the wall sconces. She froze. Maybe it was out of surprise to have them all turn to her, or maybe it was out of shyness. What was at most a second or two seemed to last much longer.
“Excuse me, miss,” said somepony behind her.
It was a dining cart pony. She was smiling kindly at Chamomile, but clearly had to pass. “Oh, sorry,” Chamomile murmured. She stepped aside, into one of the open booths, letting her pass.
When she had gone, the card players had gone back to their game. 
She went through the other cars without, thankfully, further incident. She trotted through the kitchen and dining cars, marveling at how staples of pony livelihood had been converted to fit the form of the train. The staff were kind but busy, greeting her with quick nods and a few words before returning to their task. She passed cleaners, dishwashers, the occasional conductor, and others who were all in the business of keeping the comforts of conventional life in safe reach and working order.
Finally, she seemed to be reaching the end. The last car, a bit dim, was for storage, with bags, suitcases, and carry-ons laid across and under metal racks. By then, she thought her legs were newly awakened, and considered turning back now. Just as she was about to, a pink shape crossed the window of the door on the other end of the car—a pink shape followed by a trailing, honeydew mane. 
Gaea. What was she doing outside?
Something compelled Chamomile to watch. Gaea was leaning over the railing. Her face was hidden from view through the window, but something told Chamomile she had her eyes closed. She seemed almost at peace, just like the land itself, despite the fact that the wind whipped her long mane around. 
Chamomile opened the door. Gaea remained oddly undisturbed. Chamomile stepped outside, nothing that above them was a metal square roof which prevented the wind from knocking her over as it had previously. After closing the door behind her, she stood next to Gaea. She opened her mouth, meaning to greet her, but sensed that would be inappropriate. 
After a time, Gaea opened her eyes and turned her head. “Oh,” she said, surprise mildly blossoming in her voice like a butterfly bush in the summer. “It’s Chamomile, right?”
Chamomile nodded. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“I did, but then I woke up and couldn’t fall back into it. Thought I’d take a walk.”
“And you ended up here?”
Gaea laughed, in a manner both self-conscious and strangely innocent. “Well, I just sort of wandered until I came to the end, I guess. You couldn’t sleep, either?”
“No,” she decided to say, even though it was a lie. 
Gaea nodded. Below them, the metal tracks scuttled towards the retreating sky like a land snake. The wind died down just enough for Gaea’s mane to settle over her shoulders. She had her lower lip slightly protruded, almost like she was pouting, but her eyes didn’t betray a sense of sadness in them. 
Chamomile felt she was on the verge of intruding on something, or if she wasn’t, that she’d just caught sight of something private being exchanged. She suddenly felt awkward, standing so close to this other mare. And yet, Gaea didn’t indicate she wanted her gone, nor did Chamomile feel as though some wall had been constructed between them. The silence—that was the awkward thing, she decided. It needed breaking.
“On the car ride over,” she began. “You were talking to Polar and me about the trams.”
“I remember. They’re not quite like this train.”
“What are they like?”
“Smaller, for sure,” Gaea said thoughtfully. She raised a hoof to her chin. “We usually use them to get from one marketplace to another. There were two companies, actually—small ones, too—one that was for basic transportation, and one that Canterlogic sponsored.”
“Canterlogic?”
“Right, I guess that’s not really common knowledge. It was this big company we used to have in Maretime Bay.”
“What did they sell?”
Gaea looked abashed. “Er… not exactly quality products, in retrospect. Metal hats with anti-telepathy rods. Binoculars that could scan the skies. Things to… you know… keep us safe from unicorns and pegasi.”
“Ah.” There wasn’t much else Chamomile could say to that.
“We don’t have those anymore,” Gaea interjected. “In fact, the whole of Canterlogic has been rebranded. It’s focusing more on inclusivity for all the tribes now. It’s changed,” she added, then, in a murmur, she repeated: “It’s changed.”
They were quiet again—some disturbing barrier had been erected, something that threatened to bury the conversation altogether. Chamomile seized on that last statement, however, and said, “Everything’s changed.”
Gaea seemed relieved. “Yes. Everything.”
“For the better, do you think?” The question was out of her before she had time to think what she meant, and, instinctively, she looked at Gaea, hoping she understood.
“For sure,” Gaea said. “I mean, everypony’s got their magic back. That’s gotta count for something good, don’t you think?”
Not everypony, Chamomile thought. 
In vivid detail she remembered the moment that magic returned, when all the unicorns suddenly came alive. The streets of Bridlewood had been lit up with newfound energy. She herself had felt a curious vibration in her head, a sort of inner humming that suggested she had been re-connected to a symphony beyond sensation. This itself should have served as memory enough of that event.
But what she always remembered—what had stuck with her in the days and weeks to come—was Juniper’s face, how his eagerly excited expression flickered, then faltered, when he realized that he still could not use his magic. 
She detected Gaea watching her, curious and concerned. Chamomile did not want to dwell on the topic any longer, so she changed gears. “What do you think about what—” She almost said “Princess Zephyrina,” but, remembering the request, amended herself: “—about what Zipp said?”
The slight pause between Gaea’s answer revealed she was taken by surprise by the change in focus, but she recovered. “You mean how this is an entirely different expedition than the one we were initially recruited for? I mean, I guess it was rather surprising.”
“But you didn’t turn back from it.”
“Obviously not.”
It was a bit of a sarcastic statement, so surprising since it came from Gaea, that Chamomile actually smiled a little. “Obviously not,” she repeated. “But, well, I guess I’m kind of curious about that.”
“About… what? Me deciding to keep going?”
“Well, yeah.” Chamomile turned to face her. In that moment, she was surprised to see that behind the other mare rose the moon, and it seemed to fall on her in such a way as to highlight her profile with alarming intensity. Looking at her, Chamomile had a feeling she would remember Gaea looking this way sometime in the future, as though the image of her side-profile was so acute, it achieved a kind of immortality.  
She sensed she was staring, and quickly looked back at the door to the train car, hoping Gaea hadn’t noticed. “I’m just curious,” she repeated in a murmur, feeling embarrassed again.
“It’s all right,” Gaea said. “Truthfully, I’m asking myself that very same question. Why am I still going if this wasn’t the job I signed up for?”
She returned to the railing, then swept a hoof out as though she was displaying the landscape. “Part of it is a simple understanding of distance,” she continued. “We’d already gone so far from Maretime Bay, it seemed pointless to want to turn back. And now, here we are, on the rails, heading north…”
She lowered her hoof. “This is the furthest I’ve traveled outside of my town, actually. Before that, the furthest I’d gone was to a toymaker’s shop on an alcove to the west, and that was only when I was a little filly.”
“So you want to keep going because you’ve already made it this far?”
“Sure, a little. Don’t a lot of ponies? Don’t they want to see what more is out there?”
Chamomile said nothing. What “more” existed had been buried three years ago in that grove. Now she was just going through the motions of life. 
Gaea furrowed her brow. Her mouth was half-open, but then she closed it. The gesture was not lost on Chamomile, but she refrained from commenting on it.
Chamomile looked up at the sky. She heard herself say, “This is the furthest I’ve gone from my home, too.”
“And we’ll just keep going further and further,” said Gaea.
“Yes.” Chamomile thought Gaea sounded oddly wistful. 
Chamomile could count the stars—so many, too many. But not one of them looked familiar to her. It was as though they had entered an entirely different world; or perhaps, the sky itself had changed from the one in her memory. She wondered if her star had simply burned out, had eaten through its fuel reserves, and quietly returned to the void from whence it came. 
They were out there for some time, watching and waiting, before a yawn suddenly overcame Gaea. She blushed heavily, and Chamomile smiled at her in spite of herself. “Yeah, I’m getting a bit tired, too.”
“And a bit cold.”
“That as well.”
“I guess it’s getting late. Have you seen a clock?”
“There’s probably one inside, but it’s definitely past midnight by now.”
“Yikes. And we’ll probably need all the sleep we can get.” She stiffened up as another yawn momentarily melted into her voice. “Oh, goodness, I am so sorry!”
“There’s no need to apologize,” Chamomile said. “Here. Why don’t we both head in?”
She went to the door and opened it, and instead of going in first, she held it open and gestured to Gaea. For some reason, the other mare stared at her in shock, and her blush had not abated. Something about that tickled something in her, but she sought to ignore it. “Well?”
Gaea blinked twice, then nodded. In three quick steps, she entered through the open door, and Chamomile followed shortly after her.