Ghost Lights
Chapter 22
Although birds might seem peaceful enough to the ground-dwelling, any pegasus who's been mobbed by them can attest that they're viciously mean creatures if they're encountered under the wrong circumstances. It was more or less inevitable that Azure and I would have to confront this fact in the course of teaching her to fly, especially in a place like the Seawall.
It was around day ninety-one and I was taking her with me on a patrol flight when it happened. The birds in question were starlings. Their distinctive bright speckles and purple-green darkly iridescent feathers are hard to mistake for anything else. We were lucky that it was only a pair of them, and not one of the large flocks they tend to form. Being swarmed by dozens of birds would have been a bit much even for me, let alone for Azure.
We were passing over a stand of trees somewhat inland to the southeast of the wall. It must have been where the starlings had chosen to nest. Azure and I were flying side by side, with her slightly ahead. The pair of birds were already in the air as we entered the area and came at us unexpectedly from above and to the left, suddenly diving down to swoop at Azure's back while they screamed with harsh high-pitched calls of anger.
"Whoa!" Azure swerved and dropped a little in altitude to dodge after catching sight of them at the last second. "Are they crazy?! What are they doing?" she asked me.
The two birds rounded in the air and came about for another pass.
"They're--" I didn't have time to say anything else before the next attack was imminent. "Look out!"
Once again, they dove in, calling in shrill tones while Azure swerved out of their way.
"They're mobbing," I was finally able to say. "Happens sometimes, birds can get nasty."
"What do I do?" Azure asked me urgently.
"Hang on, I got this," I told her.
I flapped hard for a moment, overtaking Azure and flying slightly above her. I turned and rounded on the starlings to face them. They were still chattering their angry calls.
"Hey, birdbrains!" I shouted at them, above their noise. "Think fast!"
I surged forward and charged them rapidly, turning the tables. Now they were the ones doing the dodging. It drew their ire toward myself and away from Azure, allowing her to fly in peace again.
After the two birds scattered in different directions to avoid my charge, I turned and pretended to be fleeing, letting them regroup above me for a counterattack I knew would be coming. I was counting on this. I watched them and readied myself for it. They swooped down again, aiming for my back and coming from behind. When just the right moment came, I raised my wings high, then pumped them down in full, sweeping strokes as powerfully as I could. I flapped several times like that. My wings were fully extended and held rigid to provide as much surface area for pushing air as possible. These flaps weren't meant to generate lift, but to create raw wind and turbulence in a rough, spiraling cyclone that would be left in the wake behind me.
The starlings flew right into it and never saw it coming. It hit them like a wall. The wind grabbed them by the wings, whipping them around into haphazard tumbles while they struggled ineffectually to regain control. Their angry screeching stopped, replaced by a surprised silence now that they were suddenly preoccupied by coping with the crazy, unpredictable spins they were being swept away in.
I felt sort of a grim satisfaction as I watched the turbulence carry them away for several hundred feet. After they finally managed to break out of it and regain normal flight control, they turned and fled back to the stand of trees they probably called home. After that little surprise, we were apparently no longer worth the trouble to harass. Pegasi one, birds zero.
Still, though, discretion is the better part of valor and I didn't want to stick around to antagonize them any further. "Head down, over there," I directed Azure, pointing toward a clear field away from the tree cover. She nodded and we descended to it together.
"Are you alright?" I asked her after we landed.
"I'm fine," she said. "I was gonna ask you the same thing. Thanks for getting them off me."
"No big deal," I said. "They're usually pretty harmless."
"It's a little unnerving," Azure said. "I've never been attacked by wild animals like that before."
"It happens. Birds aren't really too smart, you'll find out. Not their fault, though. Sometimes pegasi trigger their predator freak-out instincts. They see a large wingspan and think we're hawks or something. You figure out ways to deal with them, I guess. If nothing else, they'll back off once you're far enough away from their nest, most of the time," I said.
"Or you could just blast them away in the wind, apparently," Azure said.
"Heh... yeah. Or that."
I looked around the field we found ourselves in. The soil was a bit rocky and sandy, made up of dirt that mingled with eroded stone particulate washed down from the nearby mountains to the west. There was some sparse grass growing in tufts, but it was mostly overshadowed by daisies shooting upwards with profusions of their small flowers of white petals surrounding yellow eyes. Out of curiosity, I took a bite of one and chewed it. It was an edible plant, but tasted a little bitter and left an astringent feel in my mouth that I didn't like.
"Could you teach me how to do that trick?" Azure asked.
"What, the turbulence wash thing I did?" I asked. "It's not that hard."
"Yeah, that!" Azure nodded. "I want to learn how to fight in the air like that."
That made me stop and a little chill hit me, coursing down my back. I looked around, not responding for a few seconds. A soft breeze was blowing, making the flowers sway back and forth in waves here and there throughout the field.
"Why do you want to learn to fight?" I asked.
"I want to learn everything about flying," Azure said, with an idle shrug.
I looked over at her. She paid me no attention in return, since she was momentarily occupied by admiring a small butterfly with pale blue wings. She smiled while it flittered rapidly in its erratic flight from flower to flower to feast on nectar, obviously finding the daisies much more tasty than I had.
"...We'll see," I finally told her.
The butterfly took off on its way and sped along on a scattershot flight of random direction changes. Azure watched it curiously until it was out of sight.
"Let's go a little further today," I said, once she was done studying the insect. "On the way back we can swing around somewhere to avoid this area and the birds should leave us alone. Ready?"
Azure nodded and we prepared to resume our flight.
Lost in thought, I don't think I said a word on our entire flight back. Remaining mostly silent is nothing unusual for me, though, so I don't think it was particularly noticed.
"So have birds always given you trouble?" Azure asked, after we'd returned.
The sun was setting by then. It turned the clouds over the ocean a warm orange color while we stood outside watching. I felt a knot start to form down in the pit of my stomach at the sight. The memory of my dream sprang back up in my mind, the message it brought hanging in my thoughts. I knew the time to deal with this was upon me now, but I felt unprepared. It seemed too sudden. I didn't know how exactly to explain all the things carried in the warm colored light those clouds were glowing with.
I just knew that somehow I had to guide her right, not let her walk into this blind.
I fumbled forward trying to do that as best I could in the moment. "You could say that," I said. "I mean, not really that often, but the times they have, it's been..." I shook my head.
"That bad, huh?" Azure asked. "Well, that's why I should probably learn to fight them off, right?"
"Yeah, about that... I'm not so sure." I shook my head. "This isn't something I want to be hasty about."
"Why?" Azure's voice carried a note of annoyance at the possibility of being denied.
"Because of a crow," I told her.
"What about it?"
"I killed it," I said. It surprised me how easily the words slid out. I didn't think I'd be able to talk about this, but it felt... natural, somehow.
"...Oh." Azure looked like she wasn't sure what the significance was or how to respond to that.
"I thought I was ready for that kind of thing," I said. "That was the day I found out the hard way that I didn't know as much as I thought I did."
"What happened?"
"My mom's a farmer. A gardener, really. She grows vegetables, lots of different kinds. It's where we got most of what we ate while I was growing up, and she would sell the extras in the market in town for some income. Any farmer has to deal with pests. That turned out to be something having a pegasus daughter came in handy for, since I was faster than an earth pony and I could fly. Usually it wasn't such a big deal. Just go scare the critters off, and they move on. Well, not one year. One year, in the summer... some crow decided that it really liked my mom's vegetables. She just couldn't stay away. We tried a few things. We tried a scarecrow, but those don't really work because crows are smart, they know it's not real. I tried chasing her off over and over again, hoping she'd take a hint and give up, but it just made her try harder to be sneakier."
"Sounds annoying," Azure said.
"It was. She was really getting on our nerves more and more. I started to get tired of it, and there was this feeling building up of... it made me angry. The way I saw it, that was my job, you know? We both had a part. My mom's the earth pony. She grows things. I'm a pegasus. I make the weather right and I... I grew up hearing the stories about how we're the ones who fight when something needs fighting. Seeing that crow come back to steal vegetables over and over again and not being able to do anything about it was like being taunted. It was like that bird was trying to prove I was no good, and she was winning. I started to feel more and more furious about it sometimes."
"So..." Azure scraped the ground with one hoof. The look on her face said she probably knew where this was going.
"So toward the end of the summer that finally just boiled over. It's kind of funny, though, because there wasn't any one moment where I snapped all of a sudden. It doesn't work that way. It was just this slow buildup where I barely even noticed how I was getting more willing to go further and further, getting closer to really hurting her - really wanting to hurt her. Finally there was a day when I just said the heck with it, there's only one way this is gonna be over. I didn't care anymore. I was just going to do whatever I had to," I said.
Azure didn't say anything, she just listened to the story unfold.
"It was right before sunset one day," I continued. "I had a feeling like I knew I'd find her out there in the garden, so I snuck around and flew some recon overhead, and sure enough I caught her. I had surprise on my side and she couldn't outrun me, so I flew her down, and... some vicious instinct inside of me took over and I let it. I wanted it to. But what happened - it was bad. It was so bad. I was like an animal. I got blood all over my hooves, and all up and down my forelegs. I didn't realize how much--" I stopped.
I caught myself in what I was saying. Something stopped me. I didn't want to talk about that. It was something I hadn't ever really wanted to even think about again.
"And then what?" Azure asked.
"And then I dug a hole and buried that crow, and went home and took a shower and tried to clean it all off and forget about it," I said, skipping forward a little bit to hurry past the most uncomfortable parts.
"Just like that?" Azure asked. "Like nothing happened?"
"No." I shook my head. "Not like nothing happened. Like a big deal happened, only I couldn't talk about it. That was kind of horrible for a while. There was this weight of knowing what I did and I couldn't get any relief. I couldn't ever go to my mom with it. She's just a gardener who never hurt a fly in her life as far as I know. I didn't think she'd understand, so I just... never told her. Feeling like I had this big secret wasn't easy. I remember the next day. I really didn't feel like I could deal with anything, so I told my mom I felt sick. I just stayed in bed and didn't bother getting up."
"Wow. Did she ever figure it out?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe sort of. I think she realized something must have happened. I mean, that crow was showing up to raid the garden like clockwork, and then one day the bird just kind of... disappeared and never came back. I know she noticed. But I guess she didn't want to ask, and I didn't want to talk about it, so... we didn't."
"I'm really sorry," Azure said. "I didn't know this was something you were so uncomfortable with."
"No, no, I'm fine now. I don't like what I did but I've had a long time to figure it out and I'm not really bothered too much anymore. What I'm worried about is more you than me," I said. "When you start fighting, learning to do things like that, there's a certain mindset that tends to come with it, and these things have a way of creeping up on you when you let that start being who you are. You can find it affecting things in your life in ways that aren't really too good."
Azure just looked at me, with an expression of distant thought on her face, and nodded.
"I'm not trying to tell you it's something you should never learn, just that there's certain things you don't get to go back from," I said. "You need to think carefully about what kind of pony you want to be."
"You're right." Azure agreed. "You're very right."
The warm colors of the clouds had deepened by then as the sun continued setting, going from fiery oranges to mostly rosy-hued pink and vibrant purple-reds. We were both quiet for a while longer, watching it. In that changing light, my anxieties had loosened up and fallen away. Instead, I found myself relieved that the two of us had talked about this. We'd faced one of the hard conversations I was afraid of, the kind that I had no idea how I'd handle until the moment came, and it was good to feel like I'd done alright... so far.
I also didn't doubt, though, that there would be more of them ahead. How would I handle those? Would I do as well? Would they even happen, for that matter, or would I be the coward I am, the one that runs away from these things?
I didn't know.