//------------------------------//
// Villagers 
// Story: Children of Darkness and Light 
// by Aquaman 
//------------------------------//


===


“She had this pendant: a little shard of the Crystal Heart, I guess from when it was attacked all those years ago pre-war, glowing bright enough you could see it even against her coat. I didn’t know what kind of magic was in it, still don’t, but you’d feel exhausted just looking at it, like it was sucking the life out of you through your eyes. Like it was angry, and it wanted something, and didn’t want to wait a second to get every bit of that thing it could take…”


===


Twilight blinked, and Flurry Heart stared impassively back at her. Garnet got the impression Twilight had already told Flurry exactly why she’d come all this way, and Flurry wouldn’t proceed with their conversation until Twilight said it out loud.

“I just… wanted to see how things were going,” Twilight began.

“They’re going well,” Flurry replied. “Anything else?”

“And I wanted to speak with you,” Twilight said next. “About how things are going. The direction they’re going in.”

Now Flurry blinked — once, quick and unreadable, the rest of her face still as stone. “I was under the impression we’d discussed that already.”

“The Alliance has,” Twilight answered. “All our generals and advisors and a thousand other creatures who all think they know what’s best for everyone else. But we haven’t. Just the two of us.”

Flurry glanced Garnet’s way. “And a staff sergeant, apparently,” she said, circling the table to stand nose-to-nose with her fellow Princess. To her credit, Twilight didn’t flinch or shy away.

“He seemed trustworthy,” Twilight told her.

“He is,” Flurry agreed. Neither mare blinked for several more seconds — and then both blinked at once. Flurry inclined her head towards the tent door, still shuddering slightly from Garnet’s recent passage through it.

“Let’s get some air,” Flurry suggested. “Feels stuffy in here.”

The younger Princess turned in place and swept out of the tent without waiting for the older one’s reply, leaving a charge in the air behind her that raised the hairs on Garnet’s legs and neck like the first warning of a lightning strike. He suppressed a shudder, kept his face blank even as the lines on Twilight’s deepened, and silently followed in her wake when she hurried outside. 

By the time they caught up with Flurry, she’d already stopped at the top of the hillock hiding the Crystallian outpost from the valley below. For a while, the three of them simply observed that valley in silence, Garnet standing a few steps behind the Princesses and, as subtly as he could, craning his neck for a better view.

The city in the distance wasn’t the Mizuman capital. That was farther northeast, past the craggy mountains blackening half the valley with jagged early-morning shadows. But looking at it from here, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise — for admiring the efficiently networked streets built for both old-fashioned wagons and modern powered carts, and noting the stark boundary at the city’s core where cramped residential blocks became hulking smog-choked factories, and marveling at the monument to the native Mizuman spirit towering over the harbor, its immaculate symmetrical frame and intricately tiled roof stripped of all references — ancient or otherwise — to the Empire across the sea which had once claimed this part of the world as its own, and whose Princess now gazed placidly down on her exiled domain from afar.

“You know what this place used to be?” Flurry said suddenly, and in a disarmingly chipper tone. “Before all this, before the Crystal Empire, even? Fishing village. Just a few reed huts on wooden stilts, sunburned Kirians hunched down in the mud, trawling the marsh for sprouts and onions while the boats out in the bay hauled in red snappers. And look at it now. All grown up.”

As Flurry fell silent, Twilight took a bracing breath. Before she could let it out in the form of words, the Crystal Princess spoke up again. “Still hard not to think of it as Larimar,” she murmured. “Never seen it called anything else on a map. But now it’s… I can’t even remember what the Mizuman word is. Something like ‘Long Cape’ or ‘Broad Island’ in their language. Real creative. Probably why I don’t remember it.”

“Flurry…” Twilight softly said — two mournful syllables, and a gaping void beneath them.

“Sorry. Nerding out. Weird what little factoids stick in your head from briefings, huh?”

“Flurry, stop. This… this isn’t you. What you’re planning, it’s…”

“What I’m planning, huh?”

Flurry’s tone hadn’t shifted, but her body had — each muscle tightened with potential energy, every tendon coiled with kinetic intent. Standing in the late-summer sun, flies buzzing around his head and heat wavering in the air around him, Garnet shivered and felt the hairs on his neck rise again.

“What the Alliance is planning,” Twilight said, seeming to pluck each word delicately from an invisible tangle of thorns around her head. “An invasion, it’s… it’s not worth the cost. Thousands of our soldiers will die. Millions of Mizumans. And I know the Emperor here has been cruel, and they’ve killed millions already and have plans to kill more. I know we can’t just do nothing. But this isn’t what Cadance would’ve wanted. It’s not what…”

Twilight froze, and Flurry seemed almost amused at her discomfort. “Go on,” Flurry told her. “You came all this way to say it. So say it.”

For a moment, Garnet thought Twilight wouldn’t say anything at all. Then her spine straightened and her face hardened, and something like fury flashed in the gaze she turned on her niece.

“It’s not what your father would’ve wanted. What Shining would’ve wanted. And you know it.”

Flurry said nothing. Garnet shivered again. Beneath and beyond them all, the great machine of the Mizuman city spun on in silence.