Chapter 15
The Price of Glory
Fluttershy moved through the desert slowly, her tongue hanging listlessly out of her mouth, panting with every step she took.
She was so thirsty. She was so hot. She couldn’t imagine why anypony would want to come to a place like this to make a life, and she missed her home. She missed grass, she missed trees, she missed shade. She missed her animal friends.
She missed her pony friends most of all.
“I’m…so…sorry everypony,” Fluttershy gasped as she made her plodding way south. “I’ve…let…you all…down.”
Rarity should have been released instead of her. Anypony should have been released instead of her. She would have rather been still a captive then having the hopes of all her friends, and Princess Celestia too, resting on her shoulders and knowing that she had already failed in her task.
Princess Celestia had given her three destinations to find allies: Appleoosa, Whitetail Wood and Raven Rock. Fluttershy had decided to go to Appleoosa first, on the grounds that she at least knew some of the ponies and buffalo there, if only a little bit, which was more than could be said for the deer or the griffons. She had hoped to follow the railway line, but she had found it patrolled by zebras, and so she had retreated into the desert to get away from them.
Which was why she was where she was: hopelessly lost, hot, thirsty. She didn’t dare fly because it got even more unbearably warm the higher up she got, even assuming she still had the energy, which it didn’t feel like she did. There was nowhere to rest from the heat, and at night there was nowhere to rest from the cold. She hadn’t even seen any animals whom she could ask for help, just a pair of buzzards flying overhead who would not come when she called to them.
She was so thirsty. Her head…there were drums sounding in her head. Where were they coming from?
But, though her heart was heavy with despair, Fluttershy kept plodding along. She had to keep going, she couldn’t give up. All her friends were counting on her.
Even though she was the least likely to have been trusted with a job like this.
“Oh, if only Applejack or Rainbow Dash were here, they’d know what to do,” Fluttershy murmured miserably to herself. “If only Twilight were here, then none of this would have happened.”
“Fluttershy.”
“Fluttershy.”
She heard voices calling out to her. Faint voices, and ethereal, but possessing a quality that she recognised.
“Oh, oh my goodness,” Fluttershy gasped. “Is it really…?”
“Fluttershy,” Twilight said as she appeared in front of Fluttershy. “There you are. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Fluttershy beamed. “Oh, Twilight, thank goodness. You’re okay! How did you get out of that box.”
“Relax, Fluttershy, all that stuff’s taken care of,” Rainbow said. “Sunset Shimmer’s over. We won.”
“Really?”
“Yup,” Applejack said. “And we couldn’t have done it without your help, partner.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” Fluttershy said.
“You kept going no matter what,” Twilight said. “You were willing to make any sacrifice for the sake of your friends.”
“You’re a hero,” Rainbow said.
“An inspiration to all of us,” said Applejack.
“Almost as awesome as I am,” said Rainbow.
“Now come on, Fluttershy,” Pinkie cried. “We’re all going to celebrate with a super-awesome party!”
For a moment, all six of Fluttershy’s friends appeared before her, mugs of cider held in their hooves, raising their drinks in toast to her, laughing and smiling. And then they turned away, and began to leave her behind.
“Oh, girls, please wait for me,” Fluttershy squeaked. She tried to run faster, but her legs were so heavy with weariness, and her friends were trotting away so fast. “Please, please wait,” Fluttershy begged, and she would have cried if there had been any water left in her for tears.
“Don’t…don’t leave me,” Fluttershy gasped, as her friends got further and further away from. “Please…sta-agh!”
She had stepped off the near-vertical side of a sand dune without realising that it was there. Fluttershy tried to flap her wings, but they were so stiff and so tired that they barely held her for a moment before she toppled down the sand, tumbling as she went. She came to rest in a tangled heap in the sand, which got into her mane and her coat and even her ears.
And when she got up she walked into a cactus.
“Ow,” Fluttershy moaned as she fell onto her flank, bristles embedded in her nose.
Getting up again was a struggle, but she forced herself onto her legs. She had to keep on going. She had to keep moving. She had to get to Appleoosa. Everypony was relying on her.
She tripped, and fell onto her side, one eye looking up into the blaze of the sun.
“Too…hot,” Fluttershy whimpered. Too hot to move, too hot to think, too hot do anything but wish for the drumming in her head to stop.
“I’m…sorry,” Fluttershy murmured as her vision went black.
“Come on, girl, wake up. Wake up and open your mouth for me just a little.”
Fluttershy could feel somepony slapping her on the face. She groaned. “Angel, it isn’t time for breakfast yet.”
“Don’t call me an angel until you’ve gotten to know me, darling. Now I need you to open your mouth and drink for me.”
The tapping kept on going. And Fluttershy felt as though she was moving, like she was being dragged across a coarse surface.
“What…?” Fluttershy’s eyes flickered open, to see the sun half obscured by a pony leaning over her, pulling her along, tapping her cheek intermittently.
“Awake. Excellent,” the pony said. She had a mare’s voice, and Fluttershy couldn’t see a unicorn horn, but her face was swathed in cloth that covered her like a mummy. The only detail Fluttershy could see was her eyes: one was blue, and the other green.
“Now open your mouth,” the other pony instructed. “And drink.”
Fluttershy opened her mouth as the other pony poured water from a skin onto her face. Only a trickle landed, but it felt like a flood to Fluttershy’s parched throat. She lapped at every last bit that had sprayed onto her chin.
“And a little more,” the other pony said, giving her another trickle. “No more though, or it gets dangerous.”
“Who…?” Fluttershy gasped.
“I’ll tell you all about it later, when you can remember,” the other pony murmured as Fluttershy’s vision began to darken once again. “You can rest for a little now, everything’s going to be all right.”
When Fluttershy woke up again, the sky above her was obscured by sloping canopy, propped up by a pair of sticks. No, not sticks, she realised, spears. Or things that looked like spears anyway, although one had a very nasty looking blade on it buried in the ground. Together they help up two corners of some richly decorated cloth, while the other two corners were held down on the ground with rocks.
“I thought you could use some shelter from the sun,” the same pony from before said. She was sitting on the other side of a small fire, the orange light beating against the darkness that had fallen while Fluttershy was asleep. “I’m sorry it’s a little crude, but I didn’t have a tent. So I used my flag and propped it up with whatever I have to hand.”
The mare had unwound the bandages covering her face, so Fluttershy could see that she was an earth pony, with a tan brown coat and an orange mane. Her face looked a little squashed, misshapen, as if somepony had hit her very hard and distorted her features. Her cutie mark was a harp, which was a little reassuring, though not enough to counteract the weapons she had used to construct Fluttershy’s shelter.
Fluttershy walked slowly, warily out from under the shelter of the canopy and sat down beside the fire, letting it warm her in the cold of the night.
“Well aren’t you a cutie-pie of a sleeping beauty?” the earth pony asked, her voice tinged with slight bitterness. “Not that that surprises me. As soon as I heard about you and what Virtue had done for you I knew that you would turn out to be cute as a button. Some unscrupulous mare is going to get that boy into a lot of trouble one of these days.”
Fluttershy regarded the other mare carefully. She didn’t know who this pony was, or what she wanted. On the one hoof, Fluttershy thought that she was the one who had given her water, and she had certainly built Fluttershy a shelter while she slept. But on the other hoof, she wasn’t looking at Fluttershy in the friendliest manner, and she didn’t sound very much like a friend either.
“Um, if you don’t mind,” Fluttershy murmured. “I don’t believe we’ve met.
The mare smiled, looking immeasurably cuter as she did so. “Glory Seeker, mare at hooves, at your service.”
“And are you the pony who-“
“Gave you water? Yes.”
“Thank you,” Fluttershy whispered.
Glory waved off her gratitude with an airy hoof. A hoof that, Fluttershy saw, was covered in a heavy metal gauntlet, as was her other forehoof. Glory was wearing a carapace of some kind of chitin across her chest and upper body, with shoulder pads marked with the symbol of her harp cutie-mark. “Your need is greater than my own and all that. Besides, I have to confess to an ulterior motive.”
Fluttershy rose to her hooves, her wings tensing. “Who are you?”
“I told you, I’m a mare at hooves,” Glory said. “I’ve been sent by Sunset Shimmer to drag you back to camp, dead or alive.”
Fluttershy squeaked in alarm as her wings spread outwards and her legs coiled, ready to leap.
“Wait, don’t run!” Glory yelled. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you. And I’m not going to take you back to Sunset Shimmer either. I’m not Virtue, I know my own mind. Please, sit down, and let’s talk.”
Fluttershy hesitated, her fear warring with her desire to see the good in everypony.
Glory sighed. “Look, I’m not a knight, but back home I was known as a protector of the weak. Upon my pride, my name and my mother's memory I give you my word that I do not mean you harm. I might even be able to help you.”
Fluttershy sat back down upon the cold earth, but she kept her wings spread in case she needed to take off in a hurry.
Glory nodded. “Thank you. Are you hungry? You look like you haven’t eaten in a while.” She dug around in her pack, and pulled out a glass jar filled with golden honey. “This is the last jar of honey that I have. The second to last jar of Chevalian honey anywhere."
Fluttershy stared at the honey jar for a moment. “Um…are you just going to eat it as it is?”
“Of course I am,” Glory said. “Why not?” She deftly unscrewed the lid. “Come on, you’ll be saving me from myself if you pitch in; otherwise I’ll just make myself ill.” She took off one of her armoured gauntlets and dipped her hoof into the honeypot, bringing it out covered in the viscous, golden honey. She started to lick her own hoof, twisting her neck and turning her leg in all directions to make sure that she got it all. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”
Fluttershy shook her head. “I don’t think it would fill me up.”
Glory shrugged. “Suit yourself. I have a few plums somewhere in here that should still be edible if you’d rather.”
Fluttershy’s stomach rumbled. “Yes, please.”
Glory dug around in her pack, and tossed Fluttershy a pair of slightly squishy yellow plums. They were soft and juicy, and Fluttershy felt the juice running down her chin as she bit into them, but she was too hungry at that moment to care about her appearance. Besides which, she still looked as graceful as Rarity when compared to her dining companion, who looked as though she was doing yoga in her quest to get every last lick of honey off her hoof.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Glory said. “And when I’m done I’ll have a useful pot to keep things in.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know,” Glory said. “Balloons, birthday presents, things. How are the plums?”
“Fine thank you.”
“Good, great,” Glory glanced away nervously. She looked at Fluttershy, then looked away again. She bit her lip and started muttering to herself.
“Is everything okay?” Fluttershy asked gently.
“Not really,” Glory murmured. “I…I said I had an ulterior motive, didn’t I? Yes. Right. So, time to confess. Time to talk. Unicorns.”
Fluttershy blinked. “Unicorns?”
“Yes, unicorns, you know, big horns on their foreheads, unicorns,” Glory said, suddenly impatient. “I reckon you must know a couple of powerful ones, being one of Sunset Shimmer’s enemies. Am I right?”
Fluttershy hesitated as she tried to work out where this was going. She wondered if she might end up having to flee after all. “Well, there’s Twilight. Twilight Sparkle that is. She used to be a unicorn, but now she’s an alicorn princess-“
“Perfect,” Glory shouted. She gave a brief but high-pitched whoop. “I knew it! I knew we didn’t have to toady to that little…oh, I’ll enjoy the look on her face, you bet I will.” She glanced at Fluttershy, a grin on her face “You and me are a match made by destiny, we are. There’s a string tying us together.”
Fluttershy hesitated. “…Good?”
“Yes, good, wonderful,” Glory said. “If we stick together we’ll both get exactly what we want.”
“And what is it that you want?” Fluttershy asked.
“Yeah, right, I should probably explain what I’m talking about, shouldn’t I? Tell you why I’m here. Why any of us are here.” She gave Fluttershy a strained smile. “So: story time with Glory Seeker, are you sitting comfortably?” She laughed nervously, then rubbed her forehead as she gave a soft groan. She put on what Fluttershy recognised as a brave face as she began to speak.
“I come from a land called Chevalia. Maybe the world is called Chevalia too, don’t ask me about that stuff. But Chevalia is my country, and it wasn’t a bad place to grow up: fertile fields, wide open spaces, a good people. But for as long as I’ve been alive, ever since my great-great-great grandmother’s day, we’ve been a nation under siege. A corruption called the smooze pressed against us, trying to consume the whole world, to twist and tarnish everything it touched. We’ve been fighting it for generations, but nothing we did could stop it. It corrupted armies and twisted them to its cause, we built walls but it always found a way through. We retreated behind natural obstacles but it overcame all of them. In my lifetime I’ve seen our territory diminish by three quarters. Most of our farmland was gone, we were crammed in behind walls we had no reason to believe would keep us safe, we couldn’t feed our population even though we’d lost so many good ponies to the smooze. And it seemed like that was it: our knights and walls had failed. Our chivalry and valour had not availed us. There was nothing we could do. Unless some saviour suddenly appeared, we were all going to die, or turn into smoozed monsters tearing at ourselves and one another until there was nopony left.
“Then a saviour appeared. Not the one we wanted, but with hindsight maybe the one that we deserved.”
“Sunset Shimmer?” Fluttershy asked, trying to imagine the cruel, vain pony who had imprisoned Twilight and put her friends in chains as anypony’s saviour. She found she could not do it. She had seen too much of the ugliness that lay behind Sunset's beauty to imagine her wreathed in a halo of light, descending from on high to cleanse the world of all its ills.
“Sunset Shimmer,” Glory confirmed. “She offered us a deal, she offered us life, and because we wanted to live we took the deal without thinking about it too hard. She had something, she called it the Lodestone, and she said that she was sufficiently powerful a magician that she could seal our people inside this magic stone. Like, shrink them down or something, it’s magic, it’s all a bit weird as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, she said that she would seal us inside this stone, and carry us away from Chevalia to a new world, where we could start again free from the smooze. And so we agreed, and that’s when things started to go wrong.”
“Because Sunset had lied to you,” Fluttershy said.
“Not in as many words, but she certainly hadn’t told us everything,” Glory said. “To start with, she didn’t seal all of us away. The best warriors, like me and Virtue, were kept out. Sunset took us with her. Then she told us that we’d be expected to help conquer a homeland for ourselves, and defend it for Mistress Sunset against some nebulous enemy. And then she told us that she wouldn’t release our people until she had everything she wanted, and then the final insult it turned out that the Lodestone was quite fragile, and that if we didn’t do as Sunset Shimmer said then she’d smash the stone and kill everyone we knew, everyone we cared about. Our princess, Virtue's sisters, my dad, everypony.”
“How awful,” Fluttershy murmured.
Glory nodded. “So that’s why we’re here. Me, Virtue, all our folk, fighting for Sunset Shimmer because we’ve got no choice. Or she thinks so anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Fluttershy asked.
Glory stared at her for a moment. “What are you doing out here? You take care of animals, if I’ve heard it right. So what are you up to?”
Fluttershy hesitated.
“Come on, you can trust me,” Glory insisted. “If I betrayed you now, what would it get me? You could sell me out in return. I have to know that you have a plan. I believe that we can help each other, but I need to know.”
Fluttershy blinked. “I’m trying to get to a town called Appleoosa. There are a lot of ponies there, one of them is a relative of my friend Applejack, and there are friendly buffalo there as well. I was hoping that they would help against Sunset Shimmer.”
“And after that?” Glory asked.
Fluttershy said nothing.
Glory nodded. “I see. Wise of you. Well, you told me something anyway, and I can think I can guess the rest: you’re raising an army, aren’t you? Don’t answer that if you don’t want to, the point is I can go along with that. Like I said, we can both get what we want from this. You want to save your friends and your people, I want to save my people and shove a spear up Sunset Shimmer's backside. I don't see why we can't work together to make all that happen.
"I’ll help you. I’ll follow you, protect you, keep you safe from anypony or other creature Sunset sends after you. And in return I ask two things: first, that we get the lodestone out of Sunset’s hooves before we attack her, I won’t risk her killing my entire people in a rage. Second, that when all this is done your Twilight Sparkle has to free the Chevalians from their confinement.”
Fluttershy frowned. “And if I say no?”
“Don’t say no,” Glory replied.
Fluttershy hesitated. Do I trust her? She sounded honest enough, I don’t think she was lying. But why is she the only pony like her who is doing this? And what about the others? And if what she says is true, what if Sunset threatens her? “How do I know I can trust you?”
Glory smiled. “Are you asking what will happen if Sunset threatens to smash the Lodestone, or are you worried that I’ll flip flop all over the place like Virtue?”
“Both,” Fluttershy said.
Glory chuckled. “Well I’m not going to advertise my treachery until I have to, but mostly I’m hoping that the continued loyalty of the other Chevalians, real or apparent, is worth more to her. Sunset knows that if she broke the stone there isn’t a Chevalian who’d stop until they saw her dead. And as for the other, the short answer is I’m not an idiot. I don’t believe in living by a code as a substitute for having morals, I don’t believe that there’s anything to be celebrated in giving yourself over body and soul to somepony else and letting them do all your thinking. And I certainly don’t believe in bowing and scraping, yes mistress, no mistress, to anypony else. I’m nopony’s dog and I make my own decisions. And I decide to help you, so that I can help everypony I care about.”
Fluttershy smiled. “Okay then. I promise to help you too. I pinkie promise: cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.” She gently placed her hoof on her eye.
Glory’s eyes widened. “What’s that?”
“That’s a pinkie promise,” Fluttershy said. “That means it can never be broken.”
Glory shook her head. “You’re a strange folk in this country.”
Fluttershy said, “Just wait until we get to Appleoosa.”