Though I wished I could have another full day to help Gabriella get used to living with us, I still had to send her off to school with Rising. He gave me his usual goodbye hug, and he told me his plans for the day, but Gabriella only nodded once and thanked me. She seemed… “reserved” would be a nice word for it, but it felt closer to “detached.”
As I went through my day, keeping watch over the harbor, it occurred to me that maybe she acted like Guiding, only letting a few really close friends know how she actually felt — and then only in private. I just had to become somepony she trusted.
It became abundantly clear that she really needed somepony like that. When Rising got home, he told me about how, when Gabriella met up with him at recess, everypony he hung out with drifted away.
That was just awful. Worse, I knew it wasn’t only something that happened with the foals; lots of adults, who should know better, shied away from her kind. They weren’t ponies, but they weren’t monsters. We shouldn’t treat them like they had a disease or something. Guiding got more up in arms than I did about making sure that we treated everyone with respect, and we both made sure to raise our son right. But I could do more than that; I could lead by example.
So, I made sure to train Gabriella where everypony could see us, right in the middle of the park. We got a lot of weird looks, and a good number of ponies gave us a wider berth than they needed to for the gusts we made. I mean, other pegasi ran more extreme training routines throughout the park, and nopony avoided them as much as us. I planned to keep going to that one spot until everypony got used to us.
Later that night, my little Star continued his tradition of not quite getting the point of a logbook by telling me what he wrote in it. His friends had never disappointed him before, not like this. I made sure to point out that, only a couple days before, he’d also been a little hesitant to befriend Gabriella, and his father and I had needed to talk him up to it.
To his credit, though, he sure tried his best to continue fixing his attitude towards griffons. The very next day, he tried making friends with the one in his class, Iron Claw. Rising had heard that a couple of nice ponies had adopted Iron at a young age, which explained the name to some extent.
When my little colt approached him, Iron flew off before Rising could even talk to him. Way back in my memory, I saw foals running and flying from me, and more recently, a griffon chick cowered. I preferred to think of myself as intense or enthusiastic, but sometimes I just ended up scaring ponies, so I knew how he felt. Though, I couldn’t imagine my little colt doing anything to get that reaction.
That night, a mailbox enchanted to let us send letters back and forth with Guiding — one of his few indulgences — activated. We always waited for him to send the first letter since the first few days he had to load up cargo from the other ports on the way. In his message, he told us how much he missed us and how the trip had gone so far. They had set out to deeper waters earlier in the day, and they would hit the weather-pegasi-driven trade winds after a few more hours’ sailing. He also said that he’d take letters from Gabriella to her parents.
Rising responded like usual, telling his father about what he had learned in school and his friends. Then, he asked me if he should get Guiding’s advice for how to talk to Iron Claw. I was right there, but if he wanted to ask his dad, I knew Guiding would love to tell him how to approach the situation. So, that went in his letter.
Gabriella didn’t want to write to her parents, and I understood that. It was weird at first, when we started writing to him. Rising was barely old enough to string a sentence together, let alone write it legibly, so I always had to help. And it had felt strange, writing love letters to him. At least, that’s how it had started out. But by now, it was a part of normal everyday life. As I wrote what had to be my hundredth letter to Guiding, I thought Gabriella would warm to the idea like I had.
When I went to pick them up from school the next day, I couldn’t find them right away. After a few minutes of searching for him and not yelling at the teachers — I was talking at a reasonable volume for the situation! — I found them behind the school. As it turned out, Guiding gave Rising very good advice… but about eight hours too late; Gabriella had already figured out how to fix the situation. By the time his response had come in the next day, Rising had talked to Iron thanks to her intervention. Just like Guiding thought, Iron Claw saw Rising as another one of the “cool foals” who would make fun of him. And just as Guiding wrote, Gabriella managed to convince him otherwise.
So, that left me with another griffon in the house for the weekend — Rising invited Iron for a sleepover. Granted, he had guests over often enough anyways — the little social butterfly — but usually I got some sort of warning. I couldn’t blame him, though. Sometimes, you needed to make a big gesture to impress somepony and gain their trust. Really, I brought this on myself, bringing him up like I had. And besides, I really liked having a full house. The more, the merrier, I always said.
Iron Claw’s adoptive parents, an old earth pony and pegasus couple, brought him over for the weekend, and things went pretty well, considering Rising, Iron, and Gabriella hadn’t really ever played together before. They relaxed around each other by the second day and looked pretty tired. I’d heard them whispering late into the night. But after a bleary-eyed morning where they all nearly fell asleep at breakfast, Iron had to leave.
We fell into the rhythm of everyday life with Guiding away. We got a letter every few days from him, and Rising went to his friends’ homes to play pretty much every other day and even went to a cute-ceañera. He got a little pouty when he had to explain what they meant to Gabriella, so I had to give him the time-honored speech about how the late bloomers are the most beautiful. Gabriella absorbed this for a while, watching us quietly, then very calmly and respectfully said we ponies were an odd bunch for letting our rears guide our lives. I couldn’t figure out how she managed not to sound insulting, but I chalked up good portion of it to her accent. As a nine-year-old colt, Rising was obligated to start making butt jokes, and we all ended up laughing together. All in all, that day had gone well, I’d say.
That night, Gabriella even admitted that I cooked terribly. I wasn’t a chef by any means, but I’d thought I cooked at least decently. Apparently there was more to cooking meat and fish than throwing it in the oven. Now, I wouldn’t let “terrible” describe anything about me, so I resolved to get better. I planned to talk to the griffons who sold me Gabriella’s food and get their input. Celestia help me, but I planned to become the best meat-cooking pony in Baltimare, not that it would take much effort — I could probably count my competition on my primaries.
On one of the days Rising accompanied Gabriella and me to her training, he talked to me while she practiced making clouds. Gabriella had avoided him in school for the past few days. That seemed really odd to me since they got along so well at home. As we watched her pull together another cloud, he commented on how her leylines seemed weaker than the week before. He hadn’t needed to tell me; though I couldn’t see that directly, most of the progress I’d made with her seemed to have eroded. I needed to keep a better eye on her and figure out what was going on. I told Rising to leave the worrying to me.
Of course, that had the very opposite effect, which I should have seen coming. Only a couple days later, my little Star came to me about something she had told him. He willingly let out that Gabriella would have preferred going to the boarding school. Though he clearly wanted to avoid telling me what else she’d said, I needed to know to help, and he, as always, spilled secrets like a drunken pony with a full mug.
Bullies. Celestia-damned bullies made her lose sleep at night.
He said he planned to tell the teachers the next day. It was cute that he thought that would work. Cute, but wrong. No, the bullies would find a way; they always did. The only ways to deal with bullies were to beat them up — which was unfortunately against the rules — or to find a group of friends and cling tight. Sometimes the two went hoof in hoof.
The day after that little talk, Gabriella caught up with me while I patrolled the bay. That she had voluntarily flown here scarcely mattered once she told me how she’d carried Rising home after his stunt.
My little Star had issued an ultimatum, and it had gone poorly. I sent her back to him then rushed off to get somepony to take over my shift. Somehow, I still got home just before her — I usually don’t fly too fast, but my son needed me.
A while had passed since the confrontation at recess, but I could still tell he’d cried from the hitch in his voice and how he kept sniffling. Haltingly, he told me how he’d gathered everypony together at recess and said that anypony who wouldn’t be nice to Gabriella and Iron Claw was no friend to him.
Those sort of things always worked in the books, he explained. Gabriella shook her head and laid his on her shoulder. I think my heart melted a little, and I wrapped my wings around both of them. Having two children in my embrace felt so right… like we were a family. Then we all wrote to our loved ones while eating from a tub of ice cream. Ice cream’s true reason for existing, after all, was to make sad ponies happy.
Guiding responded that same night, saying how he felt sorry Rising had to go through his friends abandoning him. But most of his letter said Rising should expect to lose the ponies who didn’t really care for him and he should probably be a lot more selective with his friends. It seemed a bit… harsh to put it like that, but considering how many ponies Rising considered his friends, maybe some tough love was exactly what he needed. Guiding’s letter ended on a positive note, though. He said to focus on his remaining friends all the more, as only they truly mattered. Even better, they had entered the home stretch of the voyage, leaving only a week till we met again.
In that remaining time, Rising spent most of his free time with Gabriella and Iron Claw, who occasionally accompanied us to Gabriella’s training. He helped her get a better idea of how to shape clouds, which she still struggled with after about a month of work — despite cloud-shaping interesting her more than lightning or wind.
Rising talked so much about how they used their leylines for pretty much everything, and that always confused Gabriella, who came from a land with no unicorns. I tried to get them to go to bed earlier, but they both seemed so interested, and I hated breaking up a good conversation between friends.
One offhoof comment from me about how he could explain easier if they could just see the leylines at work had an unexpected outcome. Rising came up with a surprise for Gabriella and Iron Claw. Honestly, it surprised me too. I guessed he must have worked on a spell for a while, as he told Gabriella and Iron he could let them see their leylines while they practiced. Then he just did it. It was unheard of — at least to me. Then again, I’d never gone for higher education. Maybe somepony somewhere used this for something, but I’d never seen the veins of energy running over their bodies and flicking from their wings.
While they trained — very distractedly — I kept an eye on my little Star’s flank. If this didn’t earn him his cutie mark, nothing would. I mean, it was a spectacle. At least three or four pegasi crashed into trees. Meanwhile, Rising seemed to think nothing of it, just suggesting ways to blend their usual methods of calling lightning with pegasus ways.
His cutie mark never appeared. It made about as much sense as Princess Twilight badmouthing friendship.
That night, I wrote to Guiding in private about it. Even though I knew he’d be back any day, I felt like I needed to say something. I’d never worried about Rising’s future, since I saw so much potential in him, but now… That was the sort of thing I would have expected from somepony who’d already had an illusion-related cutie mark for years.
It was pretty late after I sent the letter and went to tuck him in to bed. But I found his room empty, so I went looking for him downstairs, thinking he was probably reading quietly to Gabriella while hoping he wouldn’t get in trouble for staying up late. I found them together like I expected, but he wasn’t reading. The two of them lay curled up on her bed, sleeping, and one of her wings covered him like a blanket. It reminded me so much of how Guiding and I slept that I had to put a hoof to my mouth to stifle whatever sound decided to come out. It escaped as some combination of coo, gasp, and sob. Looking at them, I couldn’t help but think about how close they had grown over the past month or so. If they spent too much more time together, I might end up with hippogriff grandfoals! I went to bed smiling at the silly, strange thought.
Once news of Rising’s spell got into the school, some of his friends trickled back to him. But Rising used what I think his father would call his “social capital” to help Gabriella and Iron Claw make some new friends. If they were the type who would leave when times got tough, I wasn’t sure if the gesture would really help, but then, some friends seemed better than none.
When I woke, I saw a letter from Guiding had come in overnight. He would finally get back later that day — after school got out, too. We could talk about Rising then, he said. I’d have to keep myself from pulling my mane out while on patrol. The last few hours of waiting definitely took the longest.
I had a long day in front of me.