Ghost Lights
Chapter 14
For as much flying as I did while we were out there, sometimes it seemed like Azure practiced her particular skills even more. There was magic flowing from her horn, day in and day out. Levitation of impossibly heavy boulders, complex patterns of teleportations, alchemy... too many kinds of spells to spend the space rattling off a list, really. Whatever kind of magic can be imagined, I'm pretty sure Azure practiced at it at some point.
I tried to tell her she could afford to cut back and give herself at least a few days off here and there to relax and not think about all that, but she didn't seem very interested in hearing that. She had to keep her abilities sharp, she said. This left me sort of worried. Hadn't Captain Dash mentioned that part of the reason they let Azure come out here was to take the pressure off and get some relief from feeling so burned out?
When she wasn't firing off spells, she was reading. It surprised me to find out that she'd hauled a couple of thick books all this way, but I suppose that knowing her I should have guessed she might. One of the two books was bigger and had an old looking brown colored cover with a long and complicated title that I've since forgotten, written in ornate-looking script. The other was thinner and had a newer looking black cover. Two things caught my attention about that one. The first was that it didn't have a title written on the outside. The second was that at the bottom of the spine, it had a small mark of the Royal Library of the Sisters. That was interesting because it meant that this book didn't come from the library in Princess Twilight's palace.
I asked Azure about that. She just said that Princess Luna had recommended it and let her borrow it, but didn't explain what it was about. It didn't weigh on me enough to try to read the book myself to find out, though. I had no doubt it was something having to do with advanced and esoteric magic and I wouldn't understand a word of it, so I considered it just as well to leave it alone and simply accept that this one was probably beyond me.
Besides, it wasn't her reading I was most concerned about.
This might seem strange given that I'm in the military, but the truth is that I'm not used to giving orders. I've never aspired to authority and command. I was promoted to sergeant a long time ago and there are some advantages to it, like getting paid more than I used to, but Princess Twilight's guard isn't exactly a posting in which rank is some kind of huge deal. I don't have underlings and I don't run things, I just keep an eye on the place. Most of the time I'm patrolling around on my own without needing to deal with other ponies, and that's how I like it.
We don't always get everything our way all the time, though. The point finally came at which I felt like I had to step in and make Azure give it a rest. I told her that she had to take at least three days a week off from heavy magic practice and relax or do something else instead.
She wasn't happy about it. A guard telling her what to do was, I suppose, rather the horseshoe being on the other hoof compared to what she was used to.
"I'm not even an actual soldier," she protested. "How can you give me orders?"
"It's a military posting," I told her. "You knew that. It means you're a soldier in the Equestrian service for the time being as long as you're doing this job, like it or not. And for that matter, you're straight out of that Dawn's Hammer boot camp. If you were enlisted for real, that'd put you at a rank somewhere on the low end of being a corporal. I'm afraid I'm several paygrades up on you, so... looks like I'm in charge."
"Ugh," she grumbled. "I can't believe you're pulling rank on me. I thought you were cool." She sounded resentful.
"Well, now you know the awful truth," I smirked. "Underneath all those years of pretending to be nice and acting like your friend while you were growing up in Twilight's palace, I'm actually just a big lame pushy old meanyface."
We both laughed. "Alright, alright," she finally agreed. "I guess it wouldn't be so bad to spend more time outside and do some exploring and stuff."
Azure was true to her word and spent less time on magic from then on. Seeing her get some rest now and then made me feel better.
What I didn't know was that by that point, she'd already unraveled particular magical secrets that would change things in ways I never even knew were possible.
I'm not normally a morning pony. I don't really think Azure is, either, but nonetheless, in the routine that we fell into during our time at the Seawall, Azure almost always got up earlier than me. Truthfully, in the absence of any real schedules to follow there was no pressing need to ever get up early, so I tended to sleep in a lot.
On that fateful morning, then, it was no surprise when I woke up in the barracks alone. Azure and I had divided the little building in half between ourselves. Mine was the right side, to a pony walking in the entrance, and Azure's was the left. When my eyes cracked open and I looked around, that left side was unoccupied.
A bottle of ink, a quill, and one my notebooks was sitting next to my bed, and like every morning, the first thing I did after I got up was to open the notebook to its first page and scratch down another hashmark, keeping count of the days we'd been here.
That morning made thirty four marks so far, just over a month. Third tour, day thirty four. Out of all the hundreds of days I've spent at the wall, that's the one that stands out the most importantly.
After I was done with my notebook I spent a minute stretching out, popping my joints and cracking my back. I shook out my mane, smoothing it a little from the tangle of bed-hair I knew it was in. After a little bit of movement got my blood flowing and my eyes opening up, I headed outside to see what was going on. Nothing, I was sure. What ever happens here? It'd been a month and nothing much had happened yet.
I stood by the Seawall, on the inland side, looking around at the land and giving some thought to where I would fly on my patrols today. I considered a southerly direction. I'd been working the northeast lately, but I was sort of growing tired of it. Maybe a change of direction and some new sights would be interesting...
"Oh, come on... are you kidding me?! Why don't these darn things work??" Unexpectedly, I heard a voice drifting faintly on the air, muffled, coming from over the wall. It was Azure, clearly unhappy about something and mumbling complaints to herself. My first thought was that she was at it again, up early and pushing herself hard to get some spell just right. It wasn't against her orders and I wasn't mad, since she'd been taking the prescribed time off lately and she was entitled to do some practicing today if she wanted. It just made me feel kind of sad for her that she seemed to be frustrating herself.
I cleared my throat. It was still a little froggy from just waking up. "You alright over there?" I asked, loudly enough for her to hear.
The speaking stopped and there was dead quiet in the air. It was the kind so heavy it can almost be felt, the kind when a parent walks in on their colt or filly with a hoof in the cookie jar and they just freeze up and stare back with wide eyes because they know they're busted. Somehow I could sense it even without being able to see her.
After a few moments of silence Azure spoke again. "Hey, uh... Sunburst?" Her voice, now timid sounding, came up over the wall, calling me from the other side.
"Yeah?" I answered back.
"Could you, ummm... could you come over here?" she asked. I could hear strange apprehension in her words. "I kinda have something to show you... also, I need some help."
"Sure, just a second," I called back. Now that made me curious all of a sudden. What would she need my help for? I braced myself mentally for what I thought were two equally likely possibilities: that I'd either laugh at some absurd situation she'd gotten herself into, or be dismayed and horrified at the all too serious results of whatever she was working on.
Please don't let her be summoning some creature from Tartarus or something nuts like that, I thought to myself.
I spread my wings and hopped up into the air, taking flight for the top of the wall. I reached the upper edge and passed over, looking down for a second into the walkway that was recessed between the two thinner outer raised edges, about chest-height, that would keep a pony without wings from accidentally having an unpleasant fall.
When I completely cleared the wall and looked down to see Azure, the scene was actually very undramatic... at least in terms of the kinds of things I'd feared.
I didn't speak, I just slowly flapped my way down, landed, and stood in front of the white pony with the light blue mane and tail I saw. I couldn't believe what my eyes were showing me. It was Azure's face, Azure's mane, Azure's colors. Her cutie mark was the same. It was the same pony, I was one hundred percent sure of it. The thing that was hard to believe, the thing that left me feeling stunned and confused, though... it was that she didn't have a horn. There was an unnerving wrongness about that. Unicorns have horns, my mind insisted. Azure was a unicorn. Therefore she had a horn. Or at least, she always had one until that morning.
Also, unicorns, with a very few special and well-known exceptions, don't have wings.
Why did the pony I was looking at have wings? Something was very wrong here.
"Umm... so... you're probably wondering--"
"Why the hell are you a pegasus?" I interrupted Azure unthinkingly. My voice, in my surprise, was more flat and harsh than I'd meant for it to be.
"Well, I said I had something to show you," Azure said weakly, "And, uh... yeah. Bet you're surprised!"
To say that I sure was may be the biggest understatement in all the writing I've ever done.