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// Chapter One: Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. 
// Story: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out 
// by CJOfLandsUnknown 
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	I sighed. I was doing that a lot in those days. Even that had started to become boring. Bored. Bored. Bored. I felt bored, tired as well. Not a good combination. The fact that the flame, sitting atop a stone plinth, surrounded by magic enchantments and guards, was hypnotically swaying back and forth was not helping the tiredness issue. I was being lulled into slumber by simple fire. I don’t think anypony can claim that. I sat down on one of the stone steps leading up to the flame, placing my helmet down beside me and preceded to bury my head in my hooves. “What was wrong?” I asked myself. Was I sick? Was I in a rut? Was I dying of unknown boredom and tiredness related illnesses? Many questions were asked, but none were really answered. I just sat there for while, not really doing anything. Someone else would guard it whilst I sat in contemplation. I kicked back, lying up the steps. 

No one seemed to mind that I wasn’t doing my job. I felt like shutting my eyes and letting slumber take me, but I decided against it. As much as I silently decried this job, it was all I knew. Cutie Marks have a tendency to dictate your future. They certainly did with me and my brother. Brought into the world together, working together, but ironically on different shifts. He guarded day. I guarded night. The irony of it all was occasionally quite tasty. We were nicked named The Princes as kids, after the royal Princesses. The irony of us working for them was complete lost on most, but not on us. We constantly reminded each other that we were just like them, but less important. Also, we were colts. That was probably the biggest difference. 

A twisted face appeared above me stirring me from my thoughts. The flipped perspective didn’t help the grizzled old mare. She wasn’t the most attractive on her best days. But then again, you didn’t have to be attractive to be a guard. You needed to be good, and that she was. Shining Shield was her name, we called her Cracked. “You know, you’re not paid to lie about” the old twisted mare lashed down at me. “I’m not really paid at all, I’m a state servant. We really should be paid more then 6 bits an hour on the importance of our jobs” I retorted back, doing anything to get under her skin. It was a game, and we both knew it. Neither of us was going to back down. “Come on Rusty, get up and get guarding. We’ve only got a few more minutes before the change over, and then you can go back to the quarters and snooze”.  It was almost like everything she said was like a barb attempting to get under my skin and pull out the veins. Even calling me Rusty, I hated her for it. Well, I didn’t hate her, I couldn’t hate her. We had known one another too long for hate; it had become mutual dislike, with a certain air of respect.

There were five of us. There was me, of course. Named Rusted Moon after… well, I have no idea why my parents called me that. I suppose it goes well with Rusted Sun, my aforementioned sibling. I’m your protagonist, so you better get used to me. I’m not leaving anytime soon. There was Shining Shield as well. Battle Hardened grizzled, cynical. The perfect guard. She never complained, and she never asked questions. I sometimes wondered how she did it. Then there were the two Pegasus’s. Fight and Flight. Brother and sister. Simple names, but they were simple kids. Both tried out to be Wonder bolts. Neither of them succeeded. Apparently, Fight, the brother, got far enough to be tested by the mighty Soarin’. I can only assume it ended badly, as he turned up here on his first day with a bandage around his left wing and was babbling about “Pie” and “going faster”. His sister got here before him; she was a nice enough kid, if not a bit naive. I told her that if she counted the number of Pegasus’s and how many of them wanted to be Wonder Bolts, she would have a similar number, and she just laughed it off. And then there was the unicorn. Tea Leaf was her name. She never seemed suited for this line of work, yet she soldiered on all the same. In truth, she was the most important Pony of us all. She kept the magical enchantments up, made sure the flame stayed alight. Frankly, she was probably too good for this job. Every single enchantment, every increment and incantation she wove on the light always worker perfectly. She’d never go though. Poor girl was too insecure about herself. Never believes what she did was right, or even close to the perfection that she wove.

I managed to pull myself up from the stone slabs of the staircase for a few seconds before I realized that there was no point left. The day shift had arrived. They always looked so fresh, so awake. It sickened me. But still, I knew that there would eventually be the satisfaction of me walking in fresh faced and refreshed and seeing my brother walk out a tired mess. We passed each other on the way out. I didn’t speak. He did. “Still going strong I see. I’m glad to see you didn’t mess it up for me”. That had become “hello” to us. Neither of us spoke in normal sentence anymore. We had resorted to subterfuge and lies to get around the fact that neither of us likes other people hearing us speak to one another. I trudged past him, not saying a word, choosing instead to look up at the Pegasus’s floating above my head. Flight was lost in her own world. She did that from time to time, never really concentrating on her work, or whatever she was doing really.  I just assumed that she was being constantly pulled between two different universes. Our own and somewhere unknown never truly being in one, but never being in neither, that would have been fantastic. If I ever brought up the idea, she’d look at me with confused expression, not really understanding a word I was saying. I was fine with that however, as I never really knew what I was talking about half the time. She looked down on me, and away from the empty space that seemed to constantly inhabit the area in front of her eyes. This was a strange occurrence. 

“What’s up, Moon Boy!” She squeaked in her strangely high pitched voice. This name I didn’t mind as much as Rusty. It wasn’t said with any undertones, no mutual dislike. She was genuine. The only reason she was so genuine was because she was naive, but I didn’t mind this. It was nice to have a change of pace.

“Just wondering weather or not all Peagusi furniture has wings” I stated, bluntly.  A collective “What” came from my four compatriots? When no one was talking to each other, a conversation between two of us could easily become a conversation between the five of us. It could be quite irritating when you were trying to talk about important and personal stuff.  “If Earth Ponies and Unicorns can’t walk on clouds, how do you get stuff to stay on the cloud? Logically, all furniture must have tiny wings” I said with a cold indifference. It’s not like I didn’t know the answer, I just wanted to break this cold air of silence and odd tension that always permeated the air when the swap took place

“Well, we don’t really have furniture; we sleep on clouds, so it’s not really needed!” Flight responded, once again with that squeaky voice. I don’t think she had gotten the fact that I didn’t really want an answer. She was stupid like that. Loveable, but stupid.

“Why do you ask such stupid questions” enquired the old Earth Pony following us at a distance. It’s not like she didn’t want to be seen with us, she just couldn’t keep up anymore. We were walking at a swift pace, all of hungry for breakfast, with her lagging behind. “I don’t ask stupid questions” I responded in kind, cold and uncaring as she was to me. We continued to walk on in a silence. My eyes continued to watch the flight path of the peagusi above me. I had always wondered why a pair of peagusi could be born to an earth pony and a unicorn. It just didn’t make sense, but some questions were best left unanswered. Who was I to question life’s basic building blocks? I lowered my head as we headed towards the canteen.

The canteen always felt grimy. The stone walls were not inviting. The food smelt awful. It wasn’t a nice place to be. The fact that we were always the only ones left in there didn’t help the uninviting feeling. All the day shifts were at work, and all the night shifts were in bed already. We were the latest change over for some unknown reason. We picked up our food and strolled over to one of the smaller tables, the one we had designated our own. Tea Leaf, after much begging and pleading, had carved a symbol and message onto the table with her magic. The symbol, a moon blazoned with fire, and the message “There is A Light That Never Goes Out”. It was rather apt, we all thought. I mean the cleaners wanted to rip our heads off, but we convinced them to leave it and not just magic the statement away. As we slapped down the trays, a thought popped into my head. What if it went out? It had been a thought that had occasionally bounded off the inside of my brain from time to time, but I had never thought about it in detail. I choose to continue this trend, instead turning to the food in front of me. It was just a few apples and a poorly constructed omelet. Another thing I hated about this job, the food was awful. But, we soldiered on, and we all tucked in, well, three of us did. The Peagusi and I chomped down on the meal in front of us. Tea Leaf was, as usual, precisely organizing herself before she began to eat, whereas Shining Shield wasn’t doing anything. She was just watching the three of us chomp down our breakfast. She said nothing. We said nothing. We all just sat there, eating or watching. 

I finally looked up, after flicking the final piece of soggy omelet into my mouth to look at Shinning Shield. She looked tired, more so then usual. She normally could conceal it behind the grizzled looks, but it showed today. Maybe tonight was a rough shift for her. But that didn’t make sense, it wasn’t anymore rough as any other shift we’ve had together. I thought no more of it, as a wave of tiredness suddenly smacked me across the head. My vision went woozy, and my head suddenly gained around 30 pounds of mass. I needed sleep. I stood up, and carried by tray over to the sinks, not planning on washing it. I was followed by Shining Shield, who had yet to say a word in the canteen. We walked out, side by side, neither saying a word, walking to the dormitories. They were split into rooms of five; we all slept in the same room. I kicked back onto my bed, spreading my hooves towards the ceiling before allowing them to fall back down, before curling up into the same position as every other day, and finally allowing slumber to take me.

This process would repeat itself time after time, day after day, week after week, month after month. It was the losing days I waited for, as much as the winning ones. Any form of change was welcome to me back then, good or bad. They came and went; change was a transitive thing after all. It was on that one in particular, however, as the one day I didn’t take some form of pleasure from change. It was on that same wander, that same amble between breakfast and bed we had made thousands of times in silence that she spoke to me. She said a few words, but these words would hit me, and hit me hard.

“I’m being promoted. They’re moving me up to guarding The Elements of Harmony”

And so, my life was set on a path that can never be changed. And yet, there is still a light that never goes out.