//------------------------------// // Chapter 24 // Story: Ghost Lights // by Winston //------------------------------// Ghost Lights Chapter 24 The reports that Azure had to write back to Canterlot were, without exception, thoroughly unexciting. Most of their content revolved around verifying that we were both still alive, the weather was still cloudy with intermittent rain, and the Seawall was still standing. She sent them once every seven days without fail, as required. At some point after we'd been there a while it occurred to me, catching me a little by surprise, that I didn't even know what day of the week report day was anymore. I'd lost track. Tuesday? Sunday? I had no idea. I don't think I really cared, either. Their names had ceased to matter. Maybe that was because in a lot of ways, every day was the same day. Without seven different artificial labels to make them into different things, the flow of time felt much more natural and less chopped up into pieces. Sometimes I felt like the two of us were walking on a paper strip wrapped around and glued back onto itself in an endless ring, or like we were immersed in a lonely but pleasant dream out here in the wild, and there was nothing much to do but enjoy it until two new dreamers came to replace us and the time came for us to wake up again. Actually, I think I felt like it was being back in Equestria that was the dream, the illusion we'd lived most of our lives in. Maybe out here, we were in the real world, awake for a brief moment before we would have to go back and sleep once more. Whatever it was, on one particular instance of this endlessly replayed cloudy day Azure was sitting at a small desk in the far corner of her half of the barracks, hovering a quill in her telekinetic magic and writing one of those reports. I was laying on my back on the bed in my half of the room, staring upward out a window at the unbroken light gray sheet of thick clouds in the sky and listening to the soft scratching sounds of the report being penned. Noises of quill on paper paused for a moment while the writer pondered something. "How many times did it rain this last week?" Azure called over to me. I kept staring up at the sky from my bed while I thought about it. I had no answer. This was another thing I didn't bother to keep track of. The rains, intermittent and random, were just as endless as the clouds that brought them. "Uhh... I dunno," I said. "A bunch?" "Very helpful," Azure said sarcastically. "Meh. I'll just say it rained every day." "Sounds about right," I shrugged. The quietly scratching song of writing resumed. Azure worked diligently for a few more minutes while she finished up. After a silent final proofreading, she put away her quill and folded up the report for sealing and sending off. The focus crystal that was provided for the purpose of zapping messages all the way back to Canterlot over the distance was on the desk next to the completed report. Azure's horn glowed with magic, and the crystal began to glow along with it. With a sudden but slight pop (which Azure once explained to me was the sound of air rushing to fill in the vacuum left behind when an object was teleported away), the report disappeared and the glow of magic faded out again. With that task completed, she got up from the desk and walked slowly with soft, measured hoofsteps over to a window on her half of the room. She stared out at the sky, much like I was. "Another cloudy day," she sighed, looking forlorn with her chin resting on the windowsill. "All day, every day," I agreed. "Not always!" Azure said. "I actually saw some direct sunlight and a little bit of blue sky about week ago." "Huh. I musta missed it." I shrugged. "You were out flying somewhere," Azure explained. "Oh," I said. "Well, then I probably saw the sun that day too. Just from a different viewpoint." "Flying over the clouds is cheating," she huffed. "What? You mean I've been teaching you to cheat this whole time?!" I sounded mock-indignant. "Why didn't you tell me I was tarnishing the integrity of the princess' student?" "Because it's so fun," Azure replied. "Also, we've mostly been sticking to lower altitudes. I haven't flown over the clouds, exactly." "Well, why haven't we?" I asked. "I don't know," Azure shrugged. "I didn't really think much about it. I just assumed you had your reasons for flying us lower." "Most of the time it's good to be able to see the landscape, sure," I said. "But there's no particular reason you couldn't fly that high if you want." "Now that you mention it, I do want," Azure told me. I rolled off my bed and stood up, taken by a sudden idea. "Then let's go get some sun." I was bored, she was tired of gray skies... it seemed like an ideal solution for us both. Azure looked at me blankly in surprise for a second. "What, like... now?" "I'm not doing anything, and you're done with the report for the week... is there ever going to be a better time?" I asked. Without really waiting for an answer, I walked outside and Azure followed me. A few seconds later she'd worked her magic and unicorn was replaced by pegasus, an act that was by now so routine it seemed completely unremarkable. "So where are we going?" Azure asked. I tilted my head back and stared directly upward. "Straight that way," I said. I took off and Azure followed me. We ascended at an easy rate for a while until we closed in on the soft fluffy wall of white above us. I sped up for the final push. Azure did likewise, keeping pace. Before too long, we plunged in, and after a few seconds of being enveloped in hazy white, we burst through the top and into brilliant sunlight. I arrested my climb and hovered, lowering myself slowly back down onto the surface. Azure came down next to me and we landed. She looked around at the dome of the endless sky above us. It was a bright robin's egg blue that just about matched the color of her mane, while the clouds underhoof matched the pure snowy white of her coat. In that newly revealed symmetry of color, I was struck by a sudden sense that... this was where she was supposed to be, in the clear air and the shining sun. It was in her hair, her coat, the way the sun infused glowing life into her amethyst eyes, even in her very name - Azure Sky. I wondered why I hadn't thought to bring her up here before. For just that moment, it was easy to think that she'd never been a unicorn at all. She belonged here, my sister pegasus walking on the clouds. Azure looked around herself, taking in the sight of the clouds she was standing on while taking a few steps, testing out the feel of them with her hooves. "This reminds me of a story I heard about my mom," she said. "She visited Cloudsdale once." "Didn't you say your mom was a unicorn?" I asked. "Well, she had wings at the time," Azure explained. "Oh. Runs in the family, then, huh?" "Oh, no, not like these," Azure shook her head. "They were more like butterfly wings than pegasus wings." That struck me as an odd thought. I tried to imagine it. The image it conjured in my mind, a pony with the wings of an insect, was very strange. The closest thing I could envision was a breezie, but those are really more insectoid all around... not to mention much more fragile than even the daintiest pony would ever be. "Weird." I shook my head. "Yeah." Azure nodded. "Apparently, it was Princess Twilight who did it... although she was just regular Twilight the unicorn back then, I think. Twilight and my mother go way, way back, all the way to days when they both lived in Ponyville." "You've never been there, though, have you?" I asked. "To Cloudsdale, I mean?" "No." Azure shook her head. "Although I'd like to someday." "I could take you to see it when we get back," I offered. "I don't know if that's going to be an option," Azure said, "considering it would require being a pegasus I don't exactly know if I can be in Equestria." "Then I suppose you should enjoy the sun while you can," I said. "I guess we all should, for that matter." To that end, I laid down on my belly on the soft clouds and sprawled out, spreading my wings and sunbathing. "Yeah. I suppose for the moment, you're right." Azure did likewise, but laying on her side. "Oh. Oh, wow!" she exclaimed in a voice full of bliss. "This is... the most comfortable thing I've ever felt. Why have I never done this before?" "Ancient pegasi secret," I told her. "We can't have all the other ponies up here crowding our skies, can we?" I closed my eyes and basked in the warm light. She just rolled onto her back and stretched her wings and limbs with a contented sigh, sunning her belly and staring up into the blue expanse of the sky's dome. "Hey, there's still more clouds above us," she noted after a few minutes. I glanced upward briefly. Although most of the sky was clear, a few thin wispy scraps still floated higher up. "Yep. Little bits of cirrus," I told her. "What can you do?" "I'd say nothing, because from what I've read, cirrus clouds are probably out of reach, even for us," Azure reasoned. "Right, too far up," I said. "Where those guys are, the air gets too thin for your wings to even get enough lift to support your own weight. Anyway, even if you could get up there, you'd find out the hard way that those clouds are made of super-cold ice crystals, not water. Pegasi may be the most cold resistant ponies, but even we can get frostbite." "How high can you fly, anyway?" Azure asked. "If I was really trying? High enough to hurt myself," I said. "Pegasus fillies and colts are sometimes known to try to outclimb each other playing games to see who chickens out first. My dad warned me about it by telling me how he and my aunt Spitfire did that one time when they were kids and how stupid it was of them. They both coughed up little streaks of frothy blood in their spit after they came back down. Pulmonary edema from the low air pressure. They're probably lucky they didn't get the bends, too." "Hmmm. Well, if too far vertical is bad news, how far horizontally can you go?" she asked. "Absolute endurance limit? Keep moving until I finally drop like a rock from complete exhaustion?" I asked. "Sure." Azure nodded. "No idea," I said. "Pretty far, but I've never pushed it past the edge like that. Never felt a need to go quite that extreme." Azure was quiet for a while, laying on her back in the sun. Eventually, she rolled over onto her belly. She scanned the horizon and her eyes fixed on something. "What about those?" she asked, pointing off into the distance with a forehoof. I looked to see what it was. She was pointing westward, out into the sea, toward the two ancient watchtowers on the little islets that sat way out there. "That far? Sure," I said. "I've done it before." "Over the open ocean, nonstop?" "Yep." I nodded. "I've been out to those at least once on each of my two previous tours before this one. Heck, those aren't even really off-limits for non-pegasi, sometimes. On my first tour, the unicorn who was here with me was able to teleport herself out there, if you can believe that." "She must have been very talented," Azure said. "That'd be a tough teleportation even for me. I think I could do it, but it wouldn't be easy." "Her name was Morning Mist," I said, recalling my rather mysterious unicorn counterpart from thirteen years ago when I'd first been here at the Seawall. "And I think she was pretty skilled, although it's hard to tell. She never really showed off her magic or talked much about herself." I wondered for a moment what had ever become of her. After we arrived back in Equestria, she parted ways from me just as I was reporting back to Canterlot for new orders - the ones sending me to my first royal guard posting for Princess Twilight - and I'd never seen her again. I thought that if Morning Mist was an exceptionally talented mage Azure might have recognized the name, but if she did, it didn't show. I don't think being concerned about it was on her mind at the moment, though. She stared out at the little twin points on the ocean. Her eyes were intensely focused on them, the look on her face hard and pondering. "I'd rather get there as a pegasus," she said suddenly. "Hey, whoa now," I responded. "I said it can be done, not that it's necessarily a smart idea. It's kinda risky, you know?" I wondered where this was coming from all of a sudden. "Did that stop you?" Azure asked rhetorically. "Well, obviously not," I admitted, "but you've got a much brighter mind than I do." "It's not like you're stupid yourself, either, though," Azure said. "There isn't really much to see, anyway," I continued. "It's just ruins. They're bare rock islets with broken down old stone shells of towers on them. That's about it." "It's not about what's there, though, is it?" Azure asked. Laying on her belly, she stared out at those towers with distant eyes filled with thought. They were almost glowing, shining with their bright amethyst color that thrived in the sunlight up here. "It's about the trip out there. It's about flying." She was right. She understood completely. It was just the kind of thing I was worried she might say. I wasn't sure how to reply other than to stay nothing and keep sunbathing. I hoped the notion of a flight like that was only a fleeting idle thought that would soon leave her mind. It was hard to be optimistic about the chances of that happening, though. It didn't just leave like that for me. It never had and never would.