//------------------------------// // 1 - Depart // Story: Limits of Mercy // by Beware The Carpenter //------------------------------// The sun’s rays painted the morning sky above Canterlot, meandering their way casually from house to house until they peaked gently through a window of a home and onto the face of Rainbow Dash. Setting to work immediately, the rays began poking at her through her eyelids as she tried to swat them away, but they danced merrily around this futile effort and continued until they had succeeded in waking her up. Though initially irritated at being woken from such a pleasant dream, Rainbow was handsomely compensated when she realized her situation hadn’t changed much, except now it was real. She was still being cradled in the sleeping, affectionate hooves of her sleeping husband, Silent Storm. Her efforts to sit up snagged momentarily when she realized part of her mane was lodged in Storm’s teeth, from where he’d been nibbling it while he slept. He gave grunt as she disconnected herself, then rolled over to go back to sleep as Dash pecked him on the cheek and then jumped out the window. Gaining a small amount of altitude, Dash chose several large clouds and plunged through the center of them; soaking herself with droplets which almost instantly evaporated as she went in for another dive, cleaning her of last night’s sweat. The effect was much the same that earth ponies and unicorns got from using showers, except the pegasi way was more awesome and didn’t require inventing plumbing inside cloudhouses. Rainbow had tried showers before; but never really enjoyed them until after she was married. To Rainbow Dash, indoor showers had nothing to do with getting clean. Once finished, Rainbow began taking an easy flight around Canterlot looking down at her house; two stories of wood and stone, one story of compacted cloud, and a lifetime of stories for herself and her family. After three years of active service as a Ranger, Dash had told Storm that she was pregnant and they both retired to Canterlot to start their new lives. Rainbow Dash still had piles of bits stored up from when she was a Wonderbolt, which she’d never had the time to blow, and Storm had sixteen years of accumulated army pay, which had been almost untouched by his previously ridiculously spartanic lifestyle and accumulating high interest. This was good because it let them both take a few years off to get a grip on this whole parenting business. Needless to say, when the former leader of The Wonderbolts vanished without a trace, resurfacing spontaneously three years later, married to a stallion, pregnant, with twins, caused no small stir among Canterlot media and bounties were put out for photos of the fledgling family. Unfortunately for the paparazzi, they were annoying, and Storm had fifteen years’ experience hunting changelings and slitting their throats before they could scream. The paparazzi never knew what hit them. When it became clear that privacy wouldn’t be given for the asking, Storm began taking their cameras. He collected over two hundred of them while Dash was pregnant, and a hundred more in the week after Sky Fire and Sky Blaze were born until one lucky young journalist Featherweight, (who just happened to be dating Scootaloo at the time,) was given an exclusive series of photo-shoots. After this the siege loosened considerably, kicking up again only briefly when Tungsten was born, after which they donated the entire camera collection to a charity auction to make room for a nursery. As Dash kept accelerating, a slight twinge began playing up on her right wing; causing her to slow to a more comfortable pace. Just a few months after joining Storm in the Everfree Forest, a bad miscalculation had cost her a broken wing. Storm did what he could to fix it, but it didn’t set right and by the time they finally took it to Zecora, she’d needed to re-break it in order to set it again. The result might have been a success, but Dash tried to get back into the air a week earlier than instructed and paid with a third and final break which never fully healed. She could still fly, well enough to most pegasi, but pain was now the permanent rowdy neighbor to her left wing, which crashed any party it tried to throw. But that was OK. A broken wing wasn’t the only thing that had happened to her during those first few months with Storm. It was a big adjustment period for both of them, and it went pretty rocky at first, but it was also the time when Rainbow Dash learned how to be happy. The secret was to just focus on the good bits of life and ignore the rest. Like her time with the Wonderbolts for instance; at the time their stupidity had seemed unbearable, but now she could look back and laugh at the demented, twisted little world that their minds had lived in. Or that time when they’d lost Twilight and everyone was trying to save her; virtually everything about that time sucked dirt, except how awesomely jealous Storm had gotten when she’d needed to go undercover with Shining Armor posing as newlyweds. When Rainbow got back to the house, the bed was empty and Storm was in the bathroom brushing a comb through a mane which for the last few years had been rapidly adding to its collection of silver hairs, breaking its previously monotonous obsession with black. (Rainbow Dash didn’t have any grey hairs of course. Those six bottles of hair color in the bathroom cupboard next to the baby oil were there for an… art project she’d gotten the idea for a few years ago, and hadn’t gotten around to yet… and never would.) Not that there was anything wrong with having grey hairs of course; they added a nice doyen touch to his face that she hadn’t seen before. It was very nice actually; maybe she should just… go turn the shower on and see how long it took things to steam up… after breakfast. It was still morning, no point in wearing themselves out before it was even noon. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Storm teleported into the kitchen and found his wife rearing on her hind legs to get some cereal from the top cupboard; “Good morning” he hummed, kissing her behind the ear, “Do you have any student’s today?” “Nope; I’m free for the whole week.” Storm smiled, kissing Dashie more aggressively, “I’m hungry.” “Me too.” Smiled Storm, leaning her backwards against the bench. Storm reached down, but Rainbow caught his hoof and passed it back to him, “Seriously, I wanna eat breakfast.” “…Alright” Storm dropped begrudgingly back to all fours and turned away, only to feel Dashie’s tail brush against his face, “Later” she promised, smacking his rump and then flying across the table before he could counterattack. Storm sighed, hoping that ‘later’ would be before Twilight showed up, and spent the whole day sulking around because she didn’t have anything else to do, and searched for something to occupy his time, eventually settling on the newspaper in front of the door. Putting a pot of coffee on with his magic took a seat, scanned the headline and froze. The initial surprise wore off after a moment and Storm tore the page open; reading every word article carefully before relaxing again, pouring his coffee. The article regaled in mostly accurate detail the recent arrests of several members of a cartel trying to make counterfeit quartz out of diamond. Storm’s involvement was entirely absconded, as it should have been. After he became a father; Storm’s priorities had changed, but he couldn’t sit around the house all day doing nothing; and hunting targets was the only thing he’d ever really learned how to do. By the time the twins had settled into a semi-regular sleeping routine, Storm had marshaled enough knowledge of Canterlot’s surrounding to begin bounty hunting. A policy he had made few exceptions to was never hunting anything that could be dangerous to his family and so for the most part he’d done little more than chase down petty vandals or punks who’d robbed a milk bar at knife point. There was no glory in it and little dedication, but it kept him from getting bored and furnished a little extra income; though most of the contracts that paid well were not off limits since Shining Armor had officially blackballed him from taking government contracts. Not that that really mattered though; Dashie was still known for her flying and did intensive one-on-one tutoring for the children of nobles, for which she charged some obscene and constantly changing figure; but Storm knew she didn’t do it for the money. It wasn’t for the beauty of flight either. She just liked yelling at spoilt rich kids all day; seeing how much she could get their parents to pay her for it was just icing on the cake. Storm flipped to the next page. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Alarm bells started ringing from the castle. A look out the window showed the castle was a flurry of activity; from all corners of Canterlot, off duty Royal Guards were rushing in, while scores of pegasi messengers were flying out. Whatever was going on was probably big, but Shiny would take care of it, and this really wasn’t her business; na, screw that, she was curious now. Dash stepped out the window and circled, thirty wing beats brought her above the castle walls, where it took three heartbeats for her to realize the grey cloud rising from Ponyville; Scootaloo’s house, and the last known location of her children. Dash needed to know what had happened; she tried waving down a few of the messengers that were bussing around her but none of them stopped, so she decided to tackle one to the ground and then ask nicely. She chose a nice small pegasus about forty feet below her and angled a dive towards her shoulder blades and was half way to intercepting when she saw a guard she actually knew, talking to Storm outside their house. The lucky little pegasus flew by, oblivious to her close call, and Dash fell to Storm’s side to listen in on Gust who stopped mid-sentence when he saw her; glanced towards Storm and then started again. “Buffalo attacked Ponyville last night; don’t know which tribe, don’t know why. They burned the town and took as many ponies as hostage as they could and are now running them on a forced march into the desert. Lists of who was killed, captured or escaped are being assembled; Shining Armor and his Sun Guard are heading out to intercept them in the Sunstrider and leave in forty minutes.” Gust looked between Dash and Storm, “Look, I know you two are both former Royal Guard, and your kids were at Youtherd, but Celestia is urging everyone to remain calm and not to take things into their own hooves. Shining Armor’s got this, OK.” “Of course.” Said Storm quickly. “Let us know the minute there’s more news.” Pleaded Dash, “Promise!” Gust nodded, then bolted back off to wherever he was going; Storm and Rainbow Dash went back inside; neither of them speaking a word. The next minutes passed agonizingly slow for Rainbow Dash; more than anything in the world, they wanted to leave that moment and track her kids down to the ends of the earth, but they needed to be patient: This would probably be a long journey and packing supplies now would be much better than foraging on the way, but even with pre-prepared bug out bags, nothing seemed fast enough. They needed to pack the supplies, and the camping equipment, and their weapons, and their armor, and some first aid kits, and sundries; they needed to check it all, and then they had to write some notes to her students for next week telling them to bugger off, and then they needed to give them to Sky Blaze’s pet falcon Allegiant, and they needed to lock the house! It was almost eight and a half minutes before they were out the door!