Ghost Lights
Chapter 5
The next night, I still found myself with questions and I wanted to discuss what I'd been asked with Azure. I was still on the midnight shift. Even so, I suspected it wouldn't be too difficult to find her, given her recent nocturnal habits.
I don't like to disturb her or anypony else in the library, but I knew she'd be in there, and given the urgency of the issue I decided that interrupting her studying if I had to this time was justified. I found her there at around one in the morning, sitting at a small table and reading silently from a thick book by the light of a brilliant pale blue glow flaring from the end of her horn. The bright point of very slightly wavering light cast sharp, heavy shadows all through the room.
It was an eerie sight. Once again, I had a sense of the ethereal and unreal.
She was so engrossed in whatever book she was reading from that she didn't hear me enter the library. The thick carpeting muffled my hoofsteps, too, as I approached a little closer to her from behind. I finally stopped maybe twenty feet away and just watched her for a minute or two. The light from her horn held steady. There was no movement and no sound except the whisper-quiet rustle of her occasionally turning a page. It was a little bit hypnotic.
I couldn't just wait all night, though, so I finally knocked lightly with a forehoof on the bookshelf I was standing next to. She startled and her back stiffened at the sudden noise.
"Hey, Azure," I greeted her. She turned to look at me, the light from her horn still glowing and casting the library in magical light. After she turned away from her book, she lowered the intensity of the glow to something easier on the eyes, not so blinding.
"Hey yourself," she responded. "Captain Dash said she asked about it and you agreed. About the Seawall, I mean."
"Well, that's kinda something I thought we should talk about," I said.
"Yeah." She nodded. "I guess it is. I mean, I hope it wasn't too much to ask. You don't have to, you know. It was just... Princess Twilight and Captain Dash both insisted they wanted somepony experienced that they trust to go out there with me, if possible."
"It's nice to know they have such confidence in me," I said, "But... still..."
"But still what?" Azure asked.
"I'd be lying if I said I didn't worry," I told her.
"About what?" Azure asked. "I don't think it'll be too bad. There's really nothing dangerous out there at the wall. I read a bunch of the summarized reports from over the years. It's been pretty much incident free."
"I know. It's not always what could hurt you from outside, though," I said. "Look, Azure. When you do a tour on the wall, you've got to understand just how alone you are out there. It doesn't go by quickly, either. It's six months. That's a long time to deal with that kind of isolation. It's a really tough thing for a lot of ponies."
"You did alright," Azure said. "You liked it! Twice!"
"Yeah, but I'm a weirdo!" I pointed out. We both grinned and laughed a little bit at that.
"And I'm not?" Azure asked pointedly, looking up at her horn, with a smile from her laughter still on her face.
"Different kind," I said, and shook my head.
"Maybe it's time I learned how to be more than one kind," Azure said.
"Nothing wrong with the kind you are," I assured her.
"This isn't the only thing I ever want to be, though," she said. "It's not all I ever want to do."
"Yeah, I get that," I told her. "Guess I wouldn't want to either. I can't help wondering, though. Why the Seawall? There's a million other things you could try."
She hesitated in answering me. "It's going to sound silly," she finally began. "You know that... letter... story thing... the journal entries you sent Princess Twilight about how you saw what was going on with her and Captain Dash? Well, I've read it. I mean, obviously I would have, it's kind of an important series of events. Anyway, though, the part that always fascinated me the most was the very first excerpt in it, where you wrote about what it was like to be at the Seawall. It sounded like nowhere I've ever heard of before. It's got this mystery... the kind of thing that you have to see for yourself to understand."
"I guess it kind of is," I sighed, unable to stop myself from agreeing.
"And also, I've never seen the beach. I've never seen the Western Ocean, or the wilderness, or even really been outside the city of Canterlot longer than a day or two at a time. It's like, there's this whole world, and I've been sealed in here," she said. "What you wrote... made me want to see it the way you have. I must have read it a thousand times, trying to capture that sense of what it's like. I have to know."
"Well, you're gonna know what it's like to eat grass for every meal," I joked. "Other than that, no guarantees. I think every pony who goes finds something different out there. Some of them really hate it."
"What could be out there to hate?" Azure asked.
"Yourself," I told her. If the answer seemed like it surprised her, I think it surprised me even more. I said it instantly and without thinking. It was one of those times when something buried deep in a pony's brain suddenly blurts out a more perfect answer than they could have come up with by any amount of conscious effort.
She thought about that for a long moment. "I understand," she finally said, quietly.
"No, you don't yet," I said. "But you will before we get home."
"You make it sound so ominous," she complained.
"I guess it's kind of what I'm going for," I admitted.
"Well, stop it," she chided me. "My mind's made up. Not that I don't appreciate you looking out for me."
"Hey, what are guards for?" I asked. "I just want to be sure that you're sure about this."
"Well, I am," she told me. It was a very confident, matter-of-fact statement. I couldn't counter it with anything else. That was the kind of certainty I was looking for to make me feel better, I suppose.
"Alright," I finally said. "Well... I guess those lonely dark halls aren't going to patrol themselves all night. I'd better get back out there."
"Right," Azure nodded. "I'll probably be in here a while, if you want to talk some more or anything. Guess you probably could have figured that out, though."
"I have kind of been wondering, do you ever sleep these days?" I asked.
"I take naps, here and there." She shrugged. "For some reason it's just been hard for me to sleep for any one long block of time like a normal pony, I guess."
"Try not to wear yourself out too badly," I told her, before I left the library to get back to my more usual routine of guarding over the palace through the dead of the night. Absolutely nothing more happened on that shift, as expected. Have I mentioned that sometimes this job gets a little dull?
Despite the nighttime conversation I had with Azure, I think the fact that this trip to the Seawall was really happening didn't actually sink in until about two days later. That was when Azure abruptly disappeared from the palace. Captain Dash informed me and the rest of the guard that she'd been sent out for training with some of the Dawn's Hammer, as had been planned. She would be gone for about the next two months, until a few days before it was time to leave on the long journey out to the wall.
It struck me more strongly when she left to train because actions speak louder than words. She'd followed through and really done it, taken that first step. Now I knew that she was really serious.
Accordingly, that's when my anxiety really kicked in.
The palace felt emptier without her. Business went on as usual, the hustle and bustle during the day of ponies in and out of Twilight's court. That much didn't change. Azure had very little to do with the princess's official functions or administration, truthfully she was more of a lurking presence that just stayed out of the way most of the time.
That didn't stop us the least bit from missing her.
It was... quiet. She was always quiet anyway, but there's still that background noise when somepony is around. Their life, their presence, has that particular kind of feel to it. That was gone. When Azure departed, she took that essence of herself with her. I could walk by her room and just know it was dark and empty and silent as a tomb in there. Nopony ever went in. The door stayed locked and undisturbed for the whole two months.
I felt particularly bad for Princess Twilight. She has so few ponies she can really just talk to in a personal way, thanks to the demands and social distance of her position, and she was very close to her student. After Azure left, a lot of the time the princess's mood seemed sullen and chilled. In her personal time, after business finished up for the day in the court, sometimes she looked bored without any instruction or teaching to do. Captain Dash was there for her to offer comfort, which I think helped. I observed them spending more time together and getting more cuddly with each other than they had in a long time. There was a lot of public display of affection and they didn't seem to care who noticed. Nonetheless, she was still sometimes listless and walked through the palace in an unhappy and lonely way that reminded me of something I hadn't seen since those early days in my first guard tour, before she and Captain Dash had acknowledged their feelings about one another.
I tried to think about what it must be like. She'd lost a close friend. That was easy for me to understand. Azure was my friend, too. More than that, though, it was like her own foal had gone away. Azure had lived here for years. She'd grown up under the Princess's watchful eye, following her, learning at her side. I've never raised anything. I've never even really had a pet. I have a houseplant that lives on the window-sill in my apartment, but the extent of our interaction is that I water the soil in her pot and leave her in a good spot to soak up the sunlight, and sometimes in the spring she thanks me with a few purple flowers. Not exactly the same thing, is it?
All fillies and colts have to grow up into mares and stallions at some point. I don't think anypony would deny that with her talent, Azure was always on course to become something extraordinary, and that was going to mean she wouldn't be a mere student forever. Her venturing out into the world had to be faced sometime. It could have been in a different way, though, maybe at a different pace. It could have been something here in Canterlot, where she'd be able to visit the princess and the bonds of their relationship wouldn't be stretched and pulled apart so far and so suddenly.
Am I taking her away from the place she should really be, and from the ponies who could actually use her, to go on a glorified camping trip at an ancient curio in the middle of nowhere? Have I misled her? Is she making a mistake, and is it because of what I wrote?
I couldn't stop asking myself these kinds of questions.
The guilt I experienced about that made me feel pretty bad at times. It seemed like my fault that Azure was gone for two months at a Dawn's Hammer bootcamp, and it seemed like fate was only rubbing it in with the fact that after that, I'd get her back - indeed, I'd have her all to myself - for the next six months out at the wall while Princess Twilight would have to endure that half a year probably without so much as being able to get a letter from her.
Some days, I wished I'd never described the Seawall as I had. I wished I'd never expressed what it meant to me in a way that another pony could find alluring or appealing, because the reality was that to most ponies, a place like that was anything but. It was considered a difficult deployment for a good reason, and those six months were not something ponies who got the assignment generally looked forward to.
How did I trick Azure into thinking that it was a good idea?
I didn't mean to.
In those times when I saw Princess Twilight looking so sad, I kicked myself and wished I'd never included that stupid first excerpt.