Ghost Lights
Chapter 29
For a long time that night, and into the next day, those last two words Azure spoke kept running through my mind. Something about it resonated with me. I kept hearing them, thinking about just what they meant.
Immortality or happiness...
Pick one.
I knew that this was a fork I'd stood at long ago on the road of my own life, and my choice was made. I just hadn't thought about it in these terms before. When I did, it was recast into a different view. I found a sudden clarity in this perspective, using the lens of that metaphor. The new light it brought washed away the last of any uncertainties and doubts I might have been harboring about all of this.
By the same token, Azure's sudden firmness of resolve after that sunset seemed to galvanize her. She was like a pony suddenly made of steel instead of flesh, and bounding with energy. Nothing I did could seem to grind her down. She could be out of breath, she could be pouring with sweat, but she wouldn't let herself break down and stop.
On that day's long-distance flight, I pushed us both for hours at a high speed and with a minimum of breaks. It was enough even to give me trouble, and certainly to tire us both out, but Azure persevered through it. We'd left shortly after sunrise, and was dark outside by the time we finally arrived back at the barracks. I managed to just about exhaust us both with the pace, which was a good thing. It meant it was a highly productive day of training.
"You're doing really well," I told Azure that night, after all our cleaning up was finished and we were finally able to rest and begin recovering. "I think we're close."
"How close is 'close'?" she asked.
"Well... I think you've finally decided that you really want this, and today it showed," I said. "That's going to be more important than anything else. I think the one big barrier that might have still been there in front of us is gone now. Your mind is ready. The rest is easy. Your body will be strong enough soon, too."
"Hmmm. I hadn't thought about it that way, as a mental thing." Azure looked a little surprised while she considered this. "I've just been focused on getting in good enough shape, really."
"Gotta want it before it's gonna happen, to use a Dash-ism," I said with a small smile.
"I guess we all have to make choices in life and decide what to go after," Azure said. "I think you're right. Sometimes that is the hard part."
"Well, deep down, ponies want what they want," I said. "The trick is just... knowing what that is. Once you do, everything is so much easier."
"Not knowing is what really kills you," Azure agreed.
"I think a lot of the time, that's really what I run away from," I said. "Things I don't know."
"Like when you left for Cloudsdale?" Azure asked.
"Sort of." I nodded. "That also led to another decision I made, though. It had a lot to do with what you said yesterday, and I think I only just now completely realized it. It was something that came down to two things." I lifted one front hoof. "Immortality..." I lowered my hoof to the ground again, then raised the other one. "Or being happy during the time you have." I put my hoof back down on the ground again. "And sometimes you have to choose."
"Hmmm?" Azure looked interested by this. "How would you have been immortal?"
"After I moved up to Cloudsdale, I started hanging out pretty often with my aunt Spitfire. I'd watch her and help her practice. Sometimes she even let me race her and some of the other Wonderbolts."
"Oh? How'd that turn out for you?" Azure asked.
"About as well as you'd imagine." I rolled my eyes and grinned a little bit at the memory. "I got my sorry flank whipped bad every time. Dead last by a wide margin. I gradually got faster and did better the more I tried, but it was never even close, really."
"Ouch," Azure said sympathetically.
"Well, it didn't really hurt, it was expected." I shrugged. "I wasn't there under some sort of impression that I could win. I was just having fun working out with my aunt. I always finished the race, anyway. I kept moving forward and working at getting better. That was what mattered."
"Yeah," Azure said. "I guess so."
"The point came, though, where Spitfire said she thought I had the potential, so she made me a standing offer. She said that if I stayed there in Cloudsdale after I graduated high school and just focused on training and working out with her for a year or so and got all polished up under her coaching, the Wonderbolts academy would be a breeze and when I graduated I'd be a shoe-in for the active team," I said.
"What?" Azure's jaw dropped a little. "If the captain of the Wonderbolts basically offered you a fast-track invitation, why aren't you one right now?"
"Because... well, it was hard to say why at the time, but looking back at it, I know now that I felt like it wouldn't really be me, you know? Ponies would look at me, and they'd see what they want to, which would be a carbon-copy of my aunt," I explained. "That's what I'd have to become. It'd be like, having to live in her shadow. Having to turn into it. I'd always be compared to her and expected to match up. If I wore that same uniform and flew on the same team and walked in her hoofsteps like that, I don't know if the image of who I am could ever really be separated from her, with as famous as she is, and especially not with the way we look so alike by having the same coat and mane colors."
"Oh." Azure looked down at the ground in thought. "Yeah, I... I get it. It still must have been hard to walk away from that, though."
"Well, sorta," I said. "But at that point in my life it was about time to find a real job and I was thinking about something military anyway, so Spitfire convinced me to at least go into a flight specialty. That way after my first enlistment was up, if I discovered that I didn't really like the army and changed my mind about the Wonderbolts thing I'd still have a chance. She said I should go for advanced combat flier. Apparently a lot of Wonderbolts come out of that."
"Well, obviously, you're here, so you didn't quit the regular military for the Wonderbolts..." Azure noted.
"Nope!" I shook my head. "I went through basic flight combat, like every pegasus, then continued into scouting flight school as a specialization. I never went on to advanced combat flier, though. I qualified to, but the more I heard about it, it just seemed really not fun. Like, the months of vicious beating during training kind of not fun. Scouting and recon was a hard school and that was enough for me. Advanced combat flight is just... over the top."
"I'll bet. Captain Dash said there was a lot of dropout when she went through," Azure told me.
"Yeah," I said. "I hear something like fifty percent don't make it, usually. Just beats them up and rips them apart too badly for them to take it. Didn't really matter, though. I still could have gone to the Wonderbolts from being a recon flier, except... every time my enlistment contracts were up, I just kept reenlisting instead of getting out to pursue it. I realized I was happy doing this. I mean, I love it. Recon flight was fun, I got to work on my own and explore remote places. Then I got royal guard duty for Princess Twilight, which is great. A little boring sometimes, but the ponies I work around are genuinely nice and I feel like I do something important. At the bottom line, I like my life the way it's going without being Wonderbolt, so I figured I probably shouldn't quit unless that changed. Why should I ruin a good thing? And at this point, I'm definitely past the age where it would make any sense to try to become a new Wonderbolt anyway, so I suppose I'll just be sticking with this for a while longer."
"You don't regret it at all, though?" Azure asked. "Not being one?"
"Sometimes I used to wonder if I should or not, but... well, happiness or immortality." I said. "The way you said it made me feel a lot better about this decision, actually, because now, instead of looking at it like a lost chance I didn't take, I see how it was really a chance to be happy that I did take. Now I know that this was the right decision for me. I used to think a lot about 'what if', but I think it's going to be pretty easy not to anymore."
I walked over to Azure and hugged her.
"When I think about that, I think I really get why you have to make this flight," I said softly. "And I promise you, it is going to happen."
Azure hugged me back. "Thanks," she whispered.
After that, we extinguished the lights and went to sleep. It was still sort of early in the night, but today's training had been an exhausting ordeal, and undoubtedly tomorrow would be another one. I felt good, though. I slept more calmly and easily than I think I had in a while.
For the next two weeks, days went by, one after another, and the combination of changes in perspective within both of us fueled a new fire, changing the tone of our workouts. They were faster and harder, rapidly pushing us to the edges of our endurance and expanding them. We continued the same pattern of alternating days between intense runs and long-distance flying. It was a good system, since it gave the different muscle groups involved every other day off to recover somewhat.
I don't think I've ever been more proud of anything than I was of my student during that time. She'd risen to the challenge and discovered what it took inside of her to make this flight. We were relentless, because those towers were getting closer with every workout.
Then eventually, one day, we were there.
It came as a surprise, actually, since it had almost crept up unseen, in a strange way, underneath the intensity of how hard we were training. That last blazing push had the effect of causing us to become somewhat blinded to all else, paradoxically including just how far we'd come. Being focused on improvement for its own sake was motivating, but oftentimes that doesn't have any external markers for absolute measurement. It was easy to get lost in that sense of it being a never-ending process with no ceiling. It wasn't until it occurred to me to take a time out and step back to look objectively at where we were compared to where we ultimately needed to be that I saw this.
Having figured it out, though, on day one hundred and fifty I declared a halt on training.
That morning, I woke near dawn to the sounds of Azure already starting to fumble around with her chainmail coat, trying to put it on in preparation for the run she was anticipating. "No need," I told her. "We're taking some time off for a while."
She was a little confused at first, understandably. Her efforts with the coat paused and she looked up at me curiously. "What? Why are we doing that?" she asked.
"Because we're as good as we need to be," I said. "For at least a week now, we've been flying nonstop stretches of distance longer than what it would take for us to reach where we're going, and we aren't having problems with them. If anything, we'll be overtraining if we keep driving harder. That has its own risks if we're not careful."
"Oh." Azure stopped trying to pull on the coat, and set it resting at the foot of her bed instead. "Okay. So what's next?"
"We take a break for a week," I said. "We'll need that time to rest and recover to be in absolute top shape. No heavy exercise. I want to stick to just some short patrol flights and stretching."
"Alright." Azure nodded. "I wasn't really looking forward to running in armor anyway." She glanced at the crumpled pile of steel rings that was now laying limp and motionless on her bed.
That was a sentiment I couldn't disagree with. In that spirit of taking time off, I decided a little bit of laziness was something I could afford, so I rolled back into bed to sleep in.
After all the work we'd been doing, those next seven days of rest seemed to take a long time to pass with no intense running and no long-haul twelve hour flights to devour the time. It was great for the first day or two but soon we both got restless. Azure filled it with reading, writing, and sometimes practicing her magic, polishing back up and knocking off the rust since she hadn't been doing very much of it when we'd been so heavily occupied with training.
I passed the time by doing what I always did at the wall, exploring outside on my own, watching the sea, pacing up and down the rocky shores and thinking about things. Actually, over those days, a new question was building in my mind, something I had only recently thought of. I kept it to myself for now. It was something I would need to ask Azure about, but not before the big day came and our flight was over. That alone was more than enough to deal with for now, she didn't need any other distractions.
With all the necessary preparation complete, we waited and rested, gathering all our strength until day one hundred and fifty seven came.