In Canterlot did Celestia a stately pleasure dome decree. After a snack of honeydew and the milk, Luna prepared herself for tonight’s work. First she had to deal with stately matters, which were rapidly getting worse. Luna had heard rumours of war from the frontier, which meant a lot of strange dreams by anxious ponies. In more ways than one, Equestria needed her.
She walked out on her balcony to raise the moon. The sun fell below the horizon, the silver globe of the moon was lifted over the horizon. Light fled, and the stars emerged from where day had hidden them.
Her wings rose to their full extent.
Her eyes glowed.
She disappeared into the realm of dreams.
She found herself in a very dark space. The first pony of the evening, clearly experiencing a terrible dream! This was a conflicted mind, and the princess of the night readied herself to render whatever assistance she could provide.
After she saw what the pony was dreaming, she nearly changed her mind.
The dream was like nothing she had ever seen before. She hoped she would never see it again. There was herself, her sister and Princess Cadence....doing things. Things they would never do in life, or in the mind of a sane pony. Truly, she would have to remember this place, that the pony involved received the proper care he or she was due.
She prepared to leave before things got more interesting than they already were.
“Wait!” A stallion was running up to her, pleading look in his eyes. “You’re...you’re Princess Luna!”
“Indeed!” she said with a flourish of her flowing, shimmering mane.
The pony studied her. His eyes went wide with surprise and joy. This was not part of his dream: this was the real thing. The actual princess, just as he had been hoping.
“Oh thank goodness! This worked! I knew it! I knew if I made something so....” He fell on his back, hugging his chest, laughing. He repeated to himself, “It worked! I showed them!”
“I am very happy for you,” Luna said, pleased that this...occurrence had something of a purpose. She did her best to keep it on the periphery of her vision, but found that her sight kept straying towards it, her ears picking up the tinkling of an invisible piano and the laughter of the...participants.
“Yeah. Sorry if what I made you do was a little too much, I was hoping to make Celestia’s student do more, but I wasn’t sure how she would....react...I mean, I asked her mom and...”
The more this pony talks, the worse it is. Luna nodded, smiled and prepared to disengage before things got more confessional. Anticipating her swift departure the pony got straight to business.
“You’ve got to help us! Look, I’m Mace, I’m a guard pony and me and some others are trapped in a cave in the middle of nowhere...”
“You are the ones my sister spoke of!” Celestia had been busy at court deeply involved in some crisis in a small corner of Equestria. She had kept her sister up to speed, all but ordering her to raise the moon and bring sweet dreams to plenty of anxious ponies. Juggling a frightened country and terrified student was a tremendous task.
A band of ponies was possibly lost, and the border between the Silver nation and Equestria was compromised. Celestia hoped that the guard would locate them soon.
“Yeah! Look send help! We found a cave, and so far we’re safe, but I really want to get out of here,” his eyes began to water, “I really, really don’t want to develop a taste for iguana.”
Luna smiled, which assured the frazzled pony.
“Fear not,” she declared, “I shall personally assure you that I will inform Captain Shining Armour right away about your plight.”
“Oh thank you! Thank you!”
“Close your eyes and focus your mind onto your location.”
Mace did as he was instructed. Luna nodded, noting where he and the other three ponies were located.
Oh, the phantom Celestia cooed, what a delightful tea party.
Luna began to regret having to give her word to the pony.
“Are you sure you’re not mad about...”
Luna shook her head. “My thousand years of exile have taught my compassion and kindness, my little pony. Rest assured that you have my pity.”
“Pity? So, that would make fillies...more interested in me?”
Luna rolled her eyes. Clearly he needs more than just rescue from the desert. “I imagine it would,” she said.
Mace smiled. The world faded back into the world of reality.
#
It was a beautiful night. Out here, away from Canterlot’s brilliant lights, the night sky unfolded into a beautiful black and purple canvas speckled with glimmering light. Occasionally a shooting star could be seen darting across the sky. Spray imagined capturing the sight with paint.
The flickering stars, the resolute and stately moon, and the flow of stars overhead mingling with the high and thin clouds: Spray closed his eyes, imaging putting the finishing touches on the painting in his mind. If he could pull it off, the horrible events he’d lived through today would have been worth it.
For Velvet, the only time comparable to this night was when she was a student and Night Light snuck her into the observatory. Seeing the stars and the planets in such detail had been remarkable. She had been appreciative for her coltfriend enabling her to see the wider universe with such clarity.
Both Spray’s sketchbook and her notebook had dried out; they had been reverently ripped into tiny pieces, and a couple of rocks banged together until they sparked, so they had a tiny fire. Quickly dimming and burning away into ash, providing next to no heat, but it provided a tiny bit of comfort following a very trying day.
Half an hour ago Mace had woken from his sleep, and laughed with joy. He informed them that, as he had planned, Luna had found him, and help was on it’s way. Velvet had almost forgiven him for asking crass questions about her daughter before he fell asleep. Almost. They sat at the mouth of the cave. It was cool inside but they didn’t feel ready to creep back in, particularly if they were not expecting to remain here for long.
“How’s your wing?”
Spray extended it, wincing. Putting it under any strain would not be smart.
“I wasn’t looking forwards to being our pathfinder, anyways,” Spray said.
Cartography and navigation had been a class he had missed out on. He could a tell the difference between a mountain and a hill only because hills traditionally were not as tall or pointy and did not have snow on them all year round. What use he could have been helping them back was questionable, but it had been a nice thought.
Velvet nodded, looking back to the sky. “This hasn’t been the adventure I thought it would be.”
“My dad always told me that an adventure is a pony in deep trouble a long ways away.”
Velvet chuckled. “Well, I can see the truth of that.”
She sighed. She watched several ponies die today. It would make it difficult to write about death from here on out, now that she had an idea about it’s arbitrariness and cruelty. Death was something she had always treated with the gravity it deserved, but now it just seemed so enormous.
“I don’t know how Shining handles it. He dodges the question a fair bit.”
“Does he hit the cider hard?”
“No,” Velvet replied. “He does get distant, quiet and cold, and I don’t like that because it’s so unlike him.”
“That happens,” Spray said. “As long as he’s got good support he’ll be okay.”
One advantage to the millennia long tradition of the Kicker family was that sensible ways of handling the stress, deprivation and loss of the guard had been expertly managed. Granted, they were easier to enforce within the bounds of a family.
And the Kickers were just the most obvious, most public, aspect of the guard, Spray thought. That’s a lot of incentive right there.
If his family as big as it occasionally claimed, it would have to take responsibility for many of the things that had led to this moment, and he doubted that the vanity of the Kicker clan could have taken the hit. He had never hated his legacy or his family, but they were frustrating almost to the point of madness sometimes.
“I doubt I would have made a great guard.”
“You’ve been doing well,” Velvet replied. “I’d never have gone back for our things if I was in your situation. I think that was very brave of you.”
Spray sat there, not doing nothing, as anything he did would be construed differently than what he would have wanted. A shrug would have indicated modesty, false or real, or indifference; a shake of the head would be discourtesy or frustration with adoration. He didn’t feel any of that. He just felt serene and calm about it. He just did it, that was all.
“I suppose. But when you grow up knowing exactly what you want to do, and you get force fed stories about your family’s glorious past, and are expected to memorize every single one of their victories, from Nightmare Moon down to the Lords of Castamare, you feel a little small inside.”
Spray watched a shooting star streak across the sky. So brief, so beautiful.
“After my cousin Cloud inadvertently made my decision for me, and my parents wouldn’t let up, it felt like I was becoming something else, something I knew I wasn’t meant to be, but felt like I was being forced into anyways. I tried to like it, and I failed.”
“Hey,” Mace said, “I think you’re being too hard on the guard. We’re not all a bunch of stuck up, family honour worshipping, grunts!”
“Yeah. You lucky son of...”
“Sorry. What was that?” Mace asked sweetly.
Pinon frowned. “When we get out of here,” here said, “you’re going to hit up a tavern, go straight to the first filly you see, and tell her that you have the personal pity of Princess Luna.”
“Yes,” Mace said smugly. “Yes I will.”
“Well...how am I supposed to compete with that? How am I supposed to compete with a pony who has the personal pity of a princess?”
“I just don’t know,” Mace replied. “I guess you’ll have to rely on her having pity of your luck with mares then.”
Velvet rolled her eyes. “Some of my illusions about the Royal Guard have been shattered.”
“Mine were never high to begin with,” Spray said. If you were a Kicker, the ponies in the guard immediately thought you thought you were better than they were, and Spray was slowly coming around to that line of thinking. Today couldn’t have been more of a disaster if it was planned.
“I never had a clear idea of what life in the guard was like before now,” Velvet said.
“Do you now?” Spray asked.
Velvet’s immediate thoughts were of Bright Star, and the way he died, and the pleas for help that he did not speak but were obvious in his eyes. Bright Star knew that, if his destiny was to protect and defend, than this was a realistic outcome. He did it anyways. Death he was afraid of, especially coming so suddenly, but not of the fact that he may be expected to die for Equestria.
Velvet did have uncomfortable thoughts after Shining got his cutie mark and began to talk about the guard more seriously than he had in the past. Equestria had been at peace for so long: the griffons made noise, but for the most part it only took a stern look from Celestia to set them right.
“I now have an idea of what the stakes were,” Velvet confessed. “We never tried to discourage Shiny from a military career. Part of me hoped he would go into academia, but it made him so happy. Nothing I could have ever discouraged him, and I was fine with that.”
“Lucky him,” Spray muttered. Give it a rest: Uncle Thunder had your back all the way, and don’t pretend your foalhood had been a deprived one.
“I suppose I’ll never understand what goes on in his head,” Velvet admitted. “I just have an idea of what he faces, and I’ll have to live with that instead.”
Destiny was a fickle thing. Every pony knew their destiny when the realization dawned. Spray had been drawing when his mark appeared, and it had been celebrated. It was confusing, at first, to have received questions by relatives assuming Spray had been engaged in some martial or leadership activity when he got it. Not something as useless as painting.
“You can take pride at producing the guard’s captain,” Spray suggested. “It takes a real mother to do that.”
Velvet felt a little better.
“You think the Kickers are better able to handle the responsibility of the job?” she asked. She had heard Shining, incredibly, beat out a Kicker to be guard captain, which was equivalent to being told that Twilight had magic equal to Celestia herself. She would have assumed that Hammer Kicker would have been an easy fit for the position, and that Celestia would have just penciled him in with no questions asked.
“Part of me thinks that it’s for the best that we don’t have a Kicker as captain of the guard, and I hope we never do again,” Spray explained. “We’re so big we have no idea what it’s like to be small.”
“I just wonder what I’ll write now?” Velvet asked.
“I don’t know, and I’m not going to tell you,” Spray said. “But I am very certain it’s going to be worth reading.”
Velvet nodded. A couple of minutes quietly passed. The night sky only grew more beautiful. Hopefully Celestia wouldn’t be in a hurry to raise the sun, and if their rescue took a little bit longer reaching them, then it would suit Velvet just fine.
“Anyway.” Mace picked himself off of the ground. “I’m off to use the little foal’s rock. Anything I should know?”
“If you see any plants with leaves of three,” Velvet said, “they’re the best toilet tissue ever.”
“Ah! Thanks!”
Velvet chuckled. “You’re horrible,” Spray said.
Mace jubilantly scampered down a short rise to an appropriately large boulder. He sighed with relief. Not too long before help would arrive. They wouldn’t have to spend another day out in this blasted, permanently broiling wasteland. Mace would get leave, head on do to Fillydelphia, Manehatten or Baltimare, whichever was closest, and just lose himself in the luxuries that were in short supply here but in great abundance there.
You know, a rotten day like today makes all that just a little bit sweeter, he thought, entertaining delightful thoughts of cider, mares, delicacies, mares, sleeping in, mares, idleness and mares. And, of course, the most important thing of all, mares. Especially mares.
He heard something, like a sudden cry. A mare’s cry, he thought. He shook his head, dismissing what he was certain was just a figment of his imagination. He finished his business.
He trudged back up to the cave. The fire, dim as it was, had gone out. He couldn’t see Pinion or the civilians.
“Guys?” he called. “Pinion? Spray?”
He noticed there were a lot of shadowed figures in front of the cave. Thank Celestia, the rescue party! He began to approach a little quicker.
“Thank goodness you’ve come! I’m...”
He noticed that the ponies had come in force for what was supposed to be a simple rescue mission. There were a surprising number of them. Strong, wiry ponies. All of their golden eyes burned at him.
Mace knew instinctively there were more behind him. As they struck him from behind, catapulting him into darkness and onto the ground, he had time for one last thing to say.
“This sucks.”