I don’t remember much about the battle. Just a hazy medley of images; of the volley of magical fire that lanced out of the darkness towards us as the unicorns counter-attacked; the crisp tang of the lightning as we thundered our response towards them, lighting up the Windspear Mountains like a twisted fireworks display. The cries and shouts of my comrades as we struggled to keep airborne against the assault. The white-hot explosion as it shredded my armour and tore through my wing. The feeling of powerlessness, like a puppet whose strings have been cut as I tumbled down and down towards the cold, unforgiving ground.
And then darkness.
I couldn’t tell how long I’d blacked out for. The fall should have killed me; I had bounced off and over many jagged rocks on my plummet down the gorge until I slammed back-first onto a stone floor. Did I hear the roaring of the battle far above as I awoke? No, I’m sure I didn’t. It was quiet when I awoke. Just me, lying there at the bottom of a cold, dark cave.
Have you ever been in a cave? No, I didn’t think so. The ground’s no place for the pegasi; we were born to soar in the heavens. My father always said that this was why we were the rightful masters of this world, that nature or god or what have you had set us on high over all the other races. The unicorns might raise the sun, but the sun sat in the sky, and that was our realm and ours alone. That was why we had to fight the earth ponies and unicorns, until they understood their place.
Of course, my father said a lot of things.
I lay there, it could have been hours, could have been minutes, just listening to my own ragged breathing. I could feel a wet bubbling in my mouth, and knew it was blood. No matter what I did, what I tried, I couldn’t roll over, couldn’t even drag myself to safety.
There was a speck of light above me, tauntingly out of reach. It was about a hundred metres up, but in my condition it may well have been a thousand. I slowly became aware of the rocky floor and walls that curved up on high like pincers enclosing me. More than that though, I became aware that I was lying, broken and helpless and about to die alone in a hole in the ground.
That’s no way to die. Pegasi should be borne aloft on clouds when they meet their end, not buried under the earth. Our souls need to be set free to fly like they did in life.
I digress though.
I continued to lie there, looking up at the light as my eyes adjusted to my predicament. “Where am I?” I whispered, mostly for my own benefit, to see if my throat still worked. “Am I dead?”
And then something else. A voice in the dark.
“In that case, Hurricane,” the voice said, “I am the devil himself, come to drag you down to the pits of Tartarus.”
I froze. Or at least I would have frozen, had I been able to move at the time. I was not alone in that dark prison! How long had they been there, watching me? Was it someone from my unit come to the rescue?
My heart sank further as a figure shuffled out of the gloom. There was barely enough light to see anything clearly, but my desperate wandering eyes soon fixed on the one thing of any certainty: the horn on its head. It glowed a soft, pale sickly light that bounced off the grimy cave walls and bathed up both in a purple glow. A unicorn. The enemy.
“If it’s a fight you want, then…” I gritted my teeth and tried to move, try to make any threatening gesture – anything. To no avail. I ended my cry of defiance with one of pain. Another realisation stabbed through me. He knew who I was. He knew who I was, and I was at his mercy.
“Look…” I tried to shout louder, but he didn’t stop. He was moving closer now. I could make out more; a thin, gaunt unicorn soldier clad in badly damaged armour. Had he been part of the battle and fallen with me? Or was there another way out, deeper in the caves? “I-if you know who I am, you know my father is Commander Ironwing of the Pegasus Tribe. If you hurt me, if you do anything to me, he will have you hunted down and killed like the sc-”
“I am not here to kill you.” The stranger bent over me, inspecting me with piercing blue eyes. I tried to push him away, but could barely manage a shudder with my hoof. He shook his head. “I am here to help. You’ve got far too much to live for, my friend.”
If I had been stronger, if I still had my weapon with me, perhaps it would have ended differently. But I didn’t. Instead I all I could do was lie there like a broken toy at the mercy of the enemy. Because he had to be an enemy, didn’t he? Unicorns didn’t help pegasi, pegasi didn’t help unicorns; that was how it was. That was how it had always been.
“Why should I believe you?” I tried to rise again. Like a fool I twisted my back, the slight motion sending stabs of agony through my shattered wings. To this day, I remember that dull feeling of minor triumph. At least I still had feeling there.
The unicorn just stayed silent for a moment, illuminated in that strange half-light. Then he looked up towards that tiny speck of light, almost wistfully. “Perhaps it amuses me? Perhaps I don’t want to die here alone? My reasons are my own.”
He pulled out a bag – my bag, I realised, which must have fallen out of reach when I crashed down – and extracted my emergency medical supplies. Scissors, bandages, a vial or two of ointments. Depressingly little.
“But it is a poor thing,” he said slowly. “To die in the darkness.”
In that moment, it became clear. I knew exactly what he wanted – the same as me. He wanted to live. When rescue came as it surely would – I knew my father would not let me go missing for long – he wanted to make sure he would be unharmed.
“Look, if you help me,” I began, trying to extract some sort of bargaining posture and dignity from the situation, “I’ll tell them, when they come for me. You know they will. Even if the unicorns find us first, we’re deep underground, it’s a heck of a fall. They’d break their necks or smash themselves to bits getting down. The pegasi will get to us first, no matter what. I’ll make sure they rescue you too. I promise. Deal?”
Just silence. I grinned inwardly at this, even as outwardly I was wincing in agony as the unicorn tugged at my broken hooves, wrapping bandages around them. He pushed a ball of cotton wool into a wet spot on my throat that made strange, gurgling squelching sounds and I felt my vision blur and my eyelids get heavy.
“No.” His voice was clipped, urgent, as he slapped me around the cheeks and picked my head up. “If you fall asleep, you die. That is how it happens. That is how you die in a place like this.”
“All right. Whatever.” My throat was still raspy, but some of the gurgling had stopped. I took that as a good sign rather than a bad one. I screwed my eyes up to relieve some of the aching, and then looked at my rescuer anew. Just a blue unicorn soldier. No-one I recognised, not that there were many I knew by name. “You know who I am, who are you? I hate being at a disadvantage.”
Frustratingly, my would-be rescuer just smiled. “I am a nameless soldier, amongst thousands,” he said softly, spraying some of that stinging ointment onto my wounds. “No-one important like you.”
“I’m not important.” I winced at the spray, but did my best not to cry out and show weakness. “Not yet. Once my father’s old or, you know… Once then, I’ll be Commander and in charge.”
“In charge of the war?”
“Yeah.” I had never thought of it like that. The war was just a fact. It wasn’t a choice, it was just a part of our lives, like the clouds and the air and the sun. You didn’t question it, how could you? That was how it always had been.
“I fell. In a battle. I still don’t know what it was for.” The unicorn looked up at the speck of light again. It was getting dimmer. And colder, I realised. Night was coming.
I blinked. “The uh, the unicorns had retaken the Windspear mountains and the pegasi were driving them out. You out. It happens every few years, you think you should have the mountains, and we have to chase you off.”
The unicorn looked down at me sadly. “Is that a good reason to die?”
“The uh… the mountains touch the sky, you see, and the pegasi, we…” The words dried on my throat. “Because we can fly, see, we’re above everyone else, and uh… better?” It was more a question; the words of my father fled from my mind.
“But you cannot fly.” My saviour grimaced at me. Through the dimming light, I saw a flash of teeth in his smile. “You lie here broken on the ground. And yet with my magic I could cast a levitation spell and fly out of this pit. Does this mean I am your moral superior?”
I glazed over his words as a sudden panic clutched at my chest. “Please.” I grasped weakly at him, all sense of fight lost. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me here; I don’t want to die alone.”
“Who does?” He settled back down on his haunches besides me. “Don’t worry, I am not going anywhere.”
We sat there all night and talked. He kept me alive, didn’t let me drift off into sleep once. We talked about normal things, not about war, but like we were two friends who had just gone on a camping trip. He told me about his hopes and dreams growing up, and how that had somehow turned into joining the army when his time came, leading him here. He wanted to be a librarian, not a soldier. Who did? I told him about my father and the pressures on me, and how I had found myself fighting thinking it was the right and proper thing to do.
All this time I thought about how he could have just left me there and saved himself, but he didn’t. He made sure I was okay. Perhaps there was hope after all; perhaps there was a world where we didn’t have to fight forever?
Finally, cracks of light burst into our tomb as dawn broke. And voices from above.
I could hear the flapping of wings, knew they had come for me. I turned to my rescuer and gave a weak grin. I was in charge now. “Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you.” I wanted to reassure him, to let him know we were still friends now that the balance of power had changed. They were descending from on high, coming for me. “I’ll let them know what you did, that you’re a friend.”
And he smiled. "It is a poor thing," he said again. "To die in the darkness."
The rescue team told me that they pulled me out of that cave delirious; wounded, but alive, rambling about the unicorn that had saved my life. They said that in the dark pit, half alive, I must have been able to summon the strength to bandage my wounds on my own. I did not believe them until later, when I went back and could see for myself.
For in that cave, there was a unicorn.
But he had been dead for many long years.