//------------------------------//
// Concerns and Old Ink 
// Story: That Which was Lost 
// by LadyRFC 
//------------------------------//

   “Oh, I hope Discord is alright…” 
Fluttershy’s soft murmur went unnoticed by Twilight, who was staring out at the quickly moving scenery outside the train window and thinking about the uncertain looks exchanged between Celestia and her sister before they departed. The princess had apologized for being unable to be of much help in briefing them on the Eastern nation. In the end, all they had been able to give her was an older book written by the palace scribe at the time of their last visit nearly five hundred years ago. Despite Twilight’s assurances that she could well read the older text, claiming her experiences reading Star Swirl the Bearded’s work as experience, the new alicorn looked down at the faded leather book wearily. 
“He’ll be fine,” she heard Rainbow carelessly respond a few seats behind her. “He’s a draconequus. I don’t think he'd die from a simple cold.”
“Cold?” Fluttershy’s tone bumped up a notch with worry. “Oh, do you think he has one? I- I don’t think I brought a warm bottle…”
At the sound of somepony, likely Fluttershy, rummaging through luggage, Twilight sighed and turned her head to face the two pegasuses behind her. 
“We’re not sure what he has, Fluttershy,” seeing the mare’s panicked face, Twilight quickly pushed on, “But I’m sure it isn’t too bad. From all the reports we’ve gotten, it seems the worst the desert can do is make you very, very tired.”
“And take away yer magic,” Applejack added, walking between the colorful seats to Twilight’s side, her face just as worried as Fluttershy’s. She looked right at her alicorn friend. “Twilight, are you sure you’ll be alright? Ah mean…” her eyes glanced at Twilight’s cutie mark, “magic is your special gift, after all. What might this place do to you?”
“Applejack is right, dear,” Rarity chimed in, walking up to them. “We have no idea exactly what’s going on with this place. It…” Rarity put one of her hooves on Twilight’s shoulder, careful not to hit her wings, “It might be too dangerous for you to leave the station…”
Twilight’s eyes darted amongst her friends to see them all sharing Rarity’s concerned expression. Even Pinkie Pie looked unusually grave, though she also looked a bit silly as she still had the fake mustache on her face that she’d been using earlier in an attempt to calm down Fluttershy. 
Twilight gave them a reassuring smile and carefully took Rarity’s hoof off her shoulder. “It’s alright, girls. I’ll be just fine. The effects of the desert seems to only get serious after a great deal of exposure,” her eyes narrowed in determination, but her smile remained. “And I plan on having this issue resolved as soon as possible.”
“Aaaaaand,” Pinkie’s voice cried out loudly as she bounced from atop one seat’s headrest to the next, “you have us! We’ll keep anything bad from ever happening to you. Together we can do anything!”
The worry in everyone’s faces seem to dissipate as if blown away by a breeze and Twilight was relieved to find that many began smiling again, though Rarity still looked a bit concerned under her blinking eyes. 
“Pinkie’s right,” Rainbow said, using her wings to hover above the wooden flooring of the train car. “Twilight is Equestria’s newest princess,” she shot her friend a look of pride that made Twilight blush, “and we’re her guards.” She slammed down to the floor and gave a snort of power, “Nothing gets past us. Magic or no magic!”
Twilight sighed, though it was a content one this time. “No, Rainbow, I told you. You’re all my friends. I don’t need guards.”
The world went dark for a second as Applejack’s hat was placed on her head and dropped over her eyes. The earth pony smiled warmly at her. 
“We’re yer friends and yer… uh,” her nose wrinkled in thought.
“Entourage,” Rarity supplied.
“Yeah,” Applejack nodded, “that.”
Twilight raised a hoof and prodded the hat up to smile at her friends. It was then she realized she had heard nothing from Spike and she turned to look to the seat next to her. The small dragon had the leather book open and was staring at it intensely.
“Spike?” she asked cautiously. “What is it?”
The dragon didn’t answer at first. When he finally did, his large eyes looking up at the mare who had raised him, his voice was a mere whisper. 
“Dragons.”
Twilight’s eyes grew large and she quickly levitated the book in front of her. Black, red and gold colored dragons bordered the sides of the yellowing pages. It was beautiful art. Each stroke was of a varying thickness, but the lines remained precise. The red eyes of the lizard-like creatures seemed to stare up at her. She looked at the small scrolling text and frowned. It was quite old, the sentence structure confused and the grammar slightly off. And as she attempted to read she quickly found it to be far more tiring than the spells from Star Swirl she’d worked on in the past. Spells had a pattern, a flow of language. Once a pony got used to them, filling in blanks and translating the meaning was fairly easy. But text that could be talking about anything at all was another matter entirely. It didn’t help that some of the ink was faded. Thankfully, Twilight had a fix for that. 
Thinking of the spell needed, Twilight’s eyes squinted at the book before her, stealing herself to release the power for the spell. But the pages before her shifted, or the focus of her eyes did. Regardless, Twilight immediately lost concentration and the book fell. 
“Are you alright, dear?” Rarity asked.
Twilight shook her head as Spike spoke up, his voice louder now, “What’s it say about dragons?”
“I’m not sure,” Twilight levitated the book off the floor and the sight of the crystal clear font made her eyes widen in surprise. “I… I’m not… sure,” she repeated slowly, her mind racing. No power had left her for the spell. At least no power seemed to. 
“Can’t you read it, Twilight?” Spike’s voice was near a whine, but before she could answer him, his claw gently grabbed her wing and instead of talking, her head snapped around to stare once more at the strange items attached to her back. That’s when she remembered. She was an alicorn now. Even her use of magic was different. The pulling of the train car as it came to its final stop matched the feeling in her stomach. 
Nothing was what it once was. Her life had changed and she still didn’t even understand how much.
“You may now disembark,” called out the train conductor loudly from the front of the car. "This is as far as our train goes. The last eastern town of Equestria.”