“Have you ever worn real clothes?” Red asked.
Hypha didn’t look up from the rune spell book. He was halfway through a lengthy diatribe on something the author called “harness theory,” a philosophy of priming the body with magical energy in preparation to write rune spells. Hypha’s concern rested mostly in the margins, where a younger Hirruck had written some much-needed summaries. The three of them marched single-file through the tall grass, following the afternoon sun west.
“Hypha,” Red said, louder this time.
“What?”
“Answer the question.”
“I’m wearing clothes right now.”
“I said real clothes.”
“Robes are clothes.” A note of anger worked its way into Hypha’s voice. The tips of the tall grass had been getting progressively shorter throughout the day. At that moment, they were just tall enough to smack Hypha in the face, and just short enough to offer zero protection from the sun.
“They aren’t,” Red insisted.
“Yes, they are. I saw plenty of ponies in Median and Canary’s Cage wearing robes.”
“Those were dresses.”
“Same thing.”
“They’re not the same at all. Maybe you’re just too oxygen starved from living up in the mountains for so long. Ask anyone in Derecho. There’s a difference.”
Hypha’s eye twitched. The grass went, smack, smack, smack against his cheeks. “There’s no difference.”
“Even if there weren’t, your robe is busted. You looked like a compost monster.”
“If it’s too dirty for you, why don’t you wash it for me?”
Red leapt on him from behind, tackling him to the ground. Her hoof clamped over his muzzle, silencing his cry of alarm. Blue dropped to her belly beside them, her eyes trained on something ahead of them in the grass.
“Don’t talk,” Red whispered into his ear. She pointed ahead. Her voice dropped to nothing. “Listen.”
Under the wind and the oceanic rustle of grass came another sound. It sounded like a millstone crushing grain. It was getting closer.
Red let go of Hypha’s muzzle and motioned for him to crawl forward. A few meters ahead of them, a rutty dirt road split the grass, ambling west. A cart approached, pulled by a pegasi couple. Several large trunks were stacked in the back of the cart.
Red said in a quiet voice. “I’m just trying to offer some advice. You can’t afford to stick out. If you wanna last a day in Derecho, you gotta blend in.”
Blue slipped deeper into the grass and disappeared. Red rose to her hooves. Her eyes glinted, glasslike, utterly focused. Hypha heard the couple’s laugh, oblivious to the danger. They were talking about adopting a cat. The stallion purred, and the mare burst out laughing.
The details clicked together. They were about to commit a robbery. A pang of guilt split his resolve, but he buried it under cold logic. These pegasi were outsiders. They were the cruel ones. Their system had reduced him to this. Now they would reap what they sowed.
He coiled himself up on his hind legs. Another ten seconds, and the couple would be within striking distance “We need clothes,” he breathed.
Red nodded. “We need clothes.”
The cloud city of Derecho emerged from the horizon.
From this distance, the city looked like a singular disc of marble with shimmering diamond inlays. Hypha paused to squint at it, half because of its grandeur and half because of how unbearable his stolen tunic was to walk in. The fabric pinched his pits and itched in strange places.
“This is stupid,” he muttered. “Those ponies had robes, too.”
“They had nightgowns,” Red replied. “If you wore one of those outside, everyone would know you’re crazy right away.” She plowed right on through the prairie grass, which by now was down to their shoulders. If she was happy to finally catch a glimpse of her home city, she didn’t show it.
As they approached the city, the city approached them. Dust and pollen sucked up by Derecho’s convection tinged the air beneath it a bruised yellow. Drapes of gossamer rain fell from the lower strata of clouds and brushed the prairie. At first it appeared to Hypha that the whole city spun clockwise like a wheel, but as he got closer to it, and it to him, he realized the superstructure had no such grand cohesion. Entire city blocks came unmoored from their neighbors, shifted, spun, and resettled someplace else. There were dozens of such pieces, each moving independently of the others. Through gaps in the city’s foundation, he could see hints of building facades, pristine white columns and metal spires sunk into cloudstone bases.
It made Hypha seasick looking at it. Sure, the Stonewoods mountains could float. But they didn’t move.
“What a mess,” he surmised aloud.
A few miles outside Derecho’s shadow, Hypha heard the rumbling of carts and trailers. A teeming convoy of ponies and yaks and griffons and even a diminutive dragon or two plodded along beneath the city. Brass jingles and grinding wooden wheels and smells of incense and sweat and pepper overloaded the air. A few sang. A few ommm’d in a timbre unfamiliar to Hypha. Most toiled silently. All of them kept pace with Derecho in its long arc across the grasslands.
“How do we get up there?” Hypha asked.
“We?” Red and Blue shared a glance. Something significant in a language Hypha couldn’t understand passed between them. A sly smile split Red’s face. “Okay, sure. We can rent a sky chariot.”
Hypha breathed a sigh of relief. “And how are we gonna handle the cloudwalking problem?”
“I’m a quarter pegasi. Blue’s half thestral. We’ll be fine.”
“I’m an orphan.”
“Sympathy’s not gonna work on these guys. We’ll still have to pay to ride.”
“I mean I don’t know who my birth parents are. I don’t know if I’m any percent pegasi.”
Red frowned into her coin purse. “All that fancy monk magic, and you’re telling me you can’t cloudwalk.”
“Earth ponies can’t cloudwalk, Red.”
All the bells and jingles and wind chimes and singing voices made Red’s ears twitch. “They’re not supposed to fly, either.”
Their rental sky chariot touched down in the east square, which today happened to be on the northwest side of town.
Hypha tested one of his front hooves on the cloud ground before stepping down.
“Did it work?” Red asked.
Hypha nodded. The place had a faint spin, like the rocking of a large boat on calm seas—barely perceptible, but there nonetheless. His stomach clenched.
“I was kinda hoping clouds would be softer,” he said.
“If you didn’t get the enchantment, it would feel like nothing was there.”
The motion of the city seemed to have a calming effect on the two mares. Blue’s face melted into a smile. Even Red seemed to relax a little. “This isn’t too far away from the fountain,” she said to no one in particular. She turned suddenly. “C’mon, I want to show you where Blue and I grew up.”
Hypha followed without hesitation. He didn’t want to be the one to ruin her good mood.
They wove through throngs of travelers and shoppers until they arrived at an open square lined with fancy shops and open air cafes. The fountain sat in the center of it all. A plaque at its base said it had been crafted in the western griffon city of Kluegenhein. When Derecho’s legions wiped out the city three hundred years ago, prisoners from the battle had been forced to uproot the fountain and carry it back east as a spoil. After they put the statue down, they were all summarily sold at auction.
“Seems kinda weird to include that,” Hypha said.
“The what?”
He pointed to the plaque. “The price they got for the prisoners.”
Red rolled her eyes. “Just enjoy the fountain. Jeez.”
Dust and rain and daily traffic had worn away most of the inscriptions on the side. The pipes that fed water to the spouts had all shattered with age and inadequate maintenance. The centerpiece still survived, however. It displayed two young lovers, a mare and a stallion rearing up in a heroic pose. They each held a dagger. The blades pointed towards each others’ hearts.
Red gestured to the gaggle of foreigners standing at the lip of the fountain, admiring the worn-down statues. “We used to pickpocket ponies here all the time,” she said, her voice thick with nostalgia. “Remember Blue?”
Blue wasn’t content to merely remember. She melted away into the shadows. Hypha saw a flicker of motion in the crowd by the fountain. Then Blue was back, a shadow materializing into a pony. She shook her hips from side to side and winked at Red. Coins jingled inside her saddlebag.
“You idiot.” Red put her arm around Blue’s neck and gave her a big smooch. “We don’t need that kind of heat. Don’t do that again.”
Blue smiled and angled her cheek towards Red, an unspoken demand for another kiss. Red obliged.
“So how do the mushrooms work, exactly?”
The three of them sat outside a cafe on the edge of the square, blowing through the stolen money at astronomical speed. Imported coffee with sweet cream and cayenne, croissants with chocolate cores, fresh greens with candied walnuts and raisins, and half-crushed meringue cookies stuffed with pecans littered the table.
“Well, for starters, mother sky works specifically through earth pony magic. So the enhancing effects don’t work for pegasi or unicorns.”
“There were pegasi and unicorns at Canary’s Cage. They were are taking it.”
“The visions and sensations work regardless of your race. I’ve been meaning to ask, by the way. What did you see that night on the trail?”
Red grew quiet. She sipped a rare Zebrican birdflower tea and shuffled a little closer to Blue. “Old stuff.”
“Did you see any animals?”
“Birds.”
“What kind?”
Blue shot him a withering look. He was ready to drop the whole conversation when Red put a hoof on Blue’s shoulder. “How much do you know about this stuff?”
“I grew up with it.”
“So you know a lot of ponies who took it.”
“Yeah. You’re the first non-monks I know who partook, though. That’s why I’m curious.”
“You could have asked the ponies in Canary’s Cage.”
“I don’t think I could go back there and ask them about it.”
“Heh. Fair.” She took hold of Blue’s hoof. “Okay, lemme give you some context first. When I was born, my parents named me Rosefinch. That’s not my name anymore, so don’t call me that. But that’s what it used to be.” She closed her eyes. “Back there on the trail, I saw a rosefinch.”
“What was it doing?”
“Just standing on a tree branch. I think it could see me. But I wasn’t there physically, cuz a real rosefinch would never let a pony get that close to it. And there weren’t any trees on the trail, so mentally I was somewhere else.”
“What you see doesn’t have to be right or wrong. Just acknowledge you saw it.”
“Okay. I was certain I was there, wherever there was.”
Hypha nodded. “What did it feel like?”
“It wasn’t scary. The bird and I were just looking at each other, not saying anything.” She opened her eyes and looked at Hypha. “What does it mean?”
“Your visions aren’t going to make sense to me. They’re up to you to interpret.”
Red snorted. “Some zen master you are.”
“I’m just an acolyte.”
“Right.” Red stuffed a meringue into her mouth. “Oh, and then right after that, a big cat came outta nowhere and bit the bird’s head off. That was why I was crying when you found me. The bird was hopping around on the branch, and the cat had all these feathers poking out of his mouth, and it was looking at me like, ‘You’re next’, and I just—” She let out a harsh laugh. Little crumbs of meringue flew everywhere. “Are these visions literal? I don’t wanna actually get eaten. That’d suck.” She paused. “You okay, Hypha?”
All the blood had drained from Hypha’s face. His hooves clutched a scalding mug of spiced coffee, but he could no longer feel the heat. She had seen a snow leopard, too? What could that mean? “I’m fine,” he said, his voice chipped and shaky.
The two mares shared a concerned look. Blue discreetly poured out a pitcher of water and slid it his way, in case he needed something to vomit into.
Red said, “It’s okay. It’s just motion sickness. Happens to everyone.”
Hypha swallowed hard. He didn’t feel like correcting her. “Thanks.”
“You’ll get your sea legs in a day or two. Just ride it out.” She took another croissant from the pile and took a bite. In between a spew of crumbs she asked, “So, the earth pony magic thing. How does that work?”
The cafe spun, though it might have just been the entire city spinning. He gripped the edge of the table, and that seemed to help a little. One tiny island of stability in a shifting ocean. “You wanna know the chemistry of it?”
“No. But I wanna know how Blue got superpowers for an hour.”
Hypha nodded. His stomach eased itself down from his throat, inch by inch. “It’s not superpowers,” he started. “It’s magic. The same ordinary magic everyone else has. All the mushrooms do is amplify it. Canary’s Cage mushrooms aren’t nearly as potent as organic mother sky, but you two got past that by eating an ungodly amount.”
“So every earth pony could fly if they ate enough mushrooms?” Red’s eyes glittered. “Flying sounds fun.”
“It’s not intuitive for earth ponies to fly, so it takes a lot of practice to channel the magic and learn how to do it without crashing.”
“How long would it take me to learn?”
Hypha scratched his chin. “Twenty years.”
“Oh.”
“But certain ponies come predisposed to certain skills. Like when Blue screamed, it knocked me halfway across the prairie. That’s a latent talent she could cultivate if she wanted to.” He caught a wry smile breaking through Blue’s facade. “For most earth ponies, mother sky’s power manifests as a strength enhancement.”
“That’s it? You get to fly and Blue gets to sonic scream or whatever, and I get to be the pack mule?”
Hypha shrugged. “It’s different for everyone.”
Red gloured into her tea. For a second, Hypha was certain the liquid would evaporate. “I’m not carrying anyone’s stuff.”
“You’d only see those kind of enhancements if you partook in the rituals on a consistent basis.”
She turned her gaze on Hypha, and he was certain he’d evaporate, too. “So we can have more?”
“Have more what?”
“Mushrooms.”
“Remind me again, what are they called?”
“Mushrooms.”
“No, their name. I’ve been saying it the whole time. What’s her name?”
Red’s face somehow turned even more red. “We’ll pay you for them.”
“Mother sky. And they’re not to be sold, only given to monks of the Heavenly Peace order in good faith.”
“Do you really think anyone else from your order’s still alive?” Before Blue could stop her, she added, “If you’re the only one left, then you are the order. You can make the rules. And we’ll pay you for them.”
“That’s not how it works,” Hypha said, teeth clenched.
“Maybe you should change the rules. How about this: no sharing the mushrooms with the uninitiated. That’s fair. We already took them. That’s as initiated as it gets.”
“You have no idea what you did.”
“My visions are mine to interpret, right? Maybe the cat is the new me, and the bird is the old me, and I’m killing my old self and turning over a new leaf.” She leaned over the table and spoke in a slow, deliberate voice, “We’ll also pay you. You’ll need money if you want to avenge your friends.”
“You didn’t turn over a new leaf. You just beat up a defenseless couple and stole their clothes.”
“We.”
“That doesn’t sound like a new leaf. That sounds like the same old leaf with a flashy new robe. Oh, I’m so sorry! It’s a nightgown.”
Red’s eyes flashed with rage. She stood up. “Street trash.” She stormed off towards the fountain.
Blue flew to her side and smacked her hard across the withers. Red whirled around. Blue got ahold of her ear. She dragged her back to the table and spat her out into her cushion.
Red cast a furious look at Blue before squaring herself with Hypha. “Did all the monks get oxygen deprived up there in the mountains, and that’s why you’re acting so unreasonable?”
“Y’know what? I will help you.”
“You’ll—” Red drew up short. The gears in her head ground together. “Okay. Good.” Blue nudged her, softer this time. “Thank you.”
“I’ll help you, if after we kill Blue’s dad you help me get to Romulus.”
“Not possible.”
“All things are possible with mother sky’s blessing.”
For a moment, it seemed like Red was about to reach over the table and strangle him. Her whole body tensed. Her hooves trembled. Her ears, swollen and purple where Blue had bit them, twitched.
Then she picked up a croissant from the table and tore into it. “Deal,” she muttered. Crumbs flew everywhere. Chocolate dripped down her chin.
Blue leaned over and kissed her chin clean. Red flinched. The tension broke. “Ew, stop it! Weirdo.” Blue didn’t let up. “Stop, I mean it—”
Blue dove in and stole another kiss. Red’s eyes went wide. She grabbed Blue’s mane and pulled her in deeper. Then they were all over each other. There was a split second where Red made some very intentional eye contact with Hypha.
Hypha squirmed in his cushion and looked around, but nopony else seemed to notice. He touched his saddlebag just to make sure it was still there. Plenty of thieves in this part of town.