CHAPTER 43
Caged
Shining Armor woke up to find himself in a cage on transport to who knows where. He stood up from where he sat, to find that Princess Cadence was no where to be found. He recalled that the night before, he had noticed that Cadence wasn’t acting like herself, but he didn’t think anything of it. It was a weird event that had happened. Was he deceived into thinking that Cadence had just found him, or was this some sort of mind trick? He heard chatting ahead of his cage cart, and saw some pegasi, and some changelings pulling a long chain of carts. All Maybe she hadn’t been caught. He stood up trying to keep his balance while the cart bounced about along the gravel road. In the instant that he decided to give up on searching, the caravan stopped at an uncomfortable speed. He heard a fight up ahead, he tried to bring himself up as tall as he could be, but there were too many carts in front of him to do so. “Hey can you tell me what’s going on up there? You see I’m looking for somepony who was with me.” The pony in front of him responded “There’s a princess apparently trying to fight off all of them up there.” Shining Armor jumped at the response, and teleported out of the cage. He wouldn’t have earlier because of how many of them there were, but now was a different situation. He rushed up to the front of the caravan to see Cadence fighting off six changelings at once. When she saw him she seem to be flowing with more energy than before. Shining casted his spells, and did what he could to help Cadence. They both during the fight gave each other glances, and were happy to see that they were both completely fine. Cadence seemed to be getting less and less tired the more she looked at Shining, and grew happier as she saw him fight the best he could. Shining Armor finally decided that enough of them had been dealt with that he could cast his protection spell to get rid of the rest of them. He started to cast, and had to focus on just the changelings, he knew that after the spell he would have to regain his strength, and fight off the others that weren’t changelings. The spell was finally finished, and a few seconds afterward he was flung off of the cliff due to a crazy pony who saw what he had done, and wouldn’t let his friends go without being avenged. This pony was also known as the changeling TrioFeet. Cadence saw this event, and went diving for Shining. They both reached the bottom of the cliff, but before hitting the ground Cadence started to fly upward, while also using her magic to slow Shining Armor down so he wouldn’t die or get injured from the fall.