//------------------------------// // Chapter 30 // Story: Ghost Lights // by Winston //------------------------------// Ghost Lights Chapter 30 When I got out of bed on the morning of the flight, it was almost an hour after the sun had risen. Azure had been up with it, waiting restlessly. I hadn't been so eager. There would be more than enough light in the day to sleep in a little bit and still be finished getting where we were going and back long before dark. It would also be better to delay our start until the sun had a chance to warm up the air a little so we wouldn't have to fly in the cold. My best efforts to hold out didn't last long, though. Light started growing in the windows, and the brighter it got the harder it became to fall back asleep. Finally, at the point when I was totally awake, I got up and we grabbed our saddlebags. It was very deliberate on my part that this was the first thing we did that morning to get ready. "Just bring water flasks," I told Azure, while I was still shaking out my bed-mane. "Two of them. That's really all we'll need." "Nothing else?" Azure asked. "Are you sure?" "Nothing's going to be more important than having some drinking water," I told her. "It's the only thing worth the weight." Azure nodded and we set out to the beach and then north along it. We both filled our pair of flasks from the cold, crystal-clear waterfall there. "Drink a little bit of water right now," I told Azure, after we filled the flasks. "Not too much, though. Not enough to start feeling full or heavy, but we want to stay hydrated." I leaned into the stream of water and swallowed some down. Azure did likewise. When we were done with that, we headed back down the beach. After thinking about it for a moment, I ducked back inside the barracks briefly for the one other thing I wanted. I dug through the gear I'd brought and found the two pairs of flight goggles I had, and pulled them both over my head and let them hang loosely around my neck before I went back outside. Azure was waiting for me out there. I saw her glancing at some tempting-looking young blades of grass, but neither one of us ate anything that morning. Without even having to say anything, I think we both knew that breakfast was out of the question. We'd eaten enough last night, and mixing a fresh meal with intense exercise was asking for a seriously uncomfortable ordeal. "You ready for this?" I asked. "Yes," Azure said. It was a simple answer, unassuming, yet confident in its subtleness of tone. Yes, she was ready. That was what I wanted to hear. I stared at the sea, watching the waves wash back and forth under the gray morning light. "Good. This is your final test as my flight student. It's a fitting one in the old pegasus tradition, too... because if you don't make it, you could die." I turned toward Azure and smiled at her. "No pressure, though." "Gee, yeah, that helps," Azure mumbled and rolled her eyes. "Totally seems like no big deal when you put it like that." "Oh, and here, take these." I pulled one of the two pairs of flight goggles off my neck and gave them to Azure. "I don't normally insist on wearing them, but... you know... this is one of those times when you don't leave anything to chance if you can help it. I can't think of anything worse than getting smacked in the eye and losing your sight out there with no way to land." She looked at the goggles with a little bit of surprise, then almost a sense of reverence, smiling faintly at them and then at me. "Thank you," she said. She lifted them over her own head and pulled them down around her neck, hanging there just like mine were. I looked out at the western horizon. Those two towers out in the distance were just barely visible, shrouded in the misty haze that was still hanging in the cool morning. I took a deep breath of salty air. The smell excited me with an undercurrent of anticipation. This was going to be a good day, I could just feel it. "Let's get started," I said. "I think about twelve hours will do it." Azure nodded without saying anything, and cast her spell to transform from a unicorn into a pegasus for the length of time I'd specified. Truthfully, we probably wouldn't need that much, but I thought some extra buffer was safer to have. Our preflight routine was pretty standard by now, if informal. We trotted and flapped in place for a couple minutes to start warming up our muscles, after which we stretched out. Wings, legs, and back were the important things. After about ten minutes, all of them were throughly loosened up. "We'll stay down pretty low, close to the water where the air is thickest," I said, giving her one last briefing. "Remember, though, if you get into trouble, we can't land, so don't head downward. Go straight up instead, get on top of the clouds. If worst comes to worst and we have to call this thing off, at least we can ride them back toward shore again." "Got it." Azure nodded. I pulled the goggles up from around my neck and positioned them over my eyes, adjusting the straps around the back of my head until they felt right. Azure did the same. I'm sure we looked a little bit like twins. "Time to go." I took off, flapping into the headwind that blew in off the sea. I rose from the sand, leaving the beach beneath me. Azure followed, and we set out over the water. At first, there were a few seagulls flying with us, swooping around in haphazard directions and maybe hoping to snatch fish here and there, but they prefer to be close to the shore and after a couple miles out we left them behind. Their high-pitched calls faded away and we were alone, just the two of us over the endless water. Once we passed those gulls and their cries, it hit me how profoundly quiet it suddenly was out there. Waves rolled along in swells and troughs beneath us, but made no noise since they were no longer breaking at this distance from the shore. All the noises of the shoreline had faded away, and the silence became eerie, as if the sea was warning us that we were beyond safety. The barren, desert-like calm of the water this far out was just waiting... waiting, and watching intently, ready to swallow us as easily as it swallowed all other noise if we proved unequal to our ambitious aim in this long flight. It was enough to bring creeping doubt and lurking shadowy fears to mind, but there was nothing else to do but keep going forward and trust in the knowledge that we both had more than enough in us to make it. Time passed and the pace we fell into was steady, moving forward at a speed that was good but still easy and maintainable. As we flew, we borrowed the trick that geese use, with one of us flying slightly behind and above the other to benefit from reduced wind resistance. Every fifteen minutes to half an hour we switched, depending on when the lead flier started to get tired. I tried to stay out in front as much as I could, letting Azure preserve her energy. On this particular flight it was especially important to make that effort to be efficient, since the headwind blowing in off the ocean and toward the land was constant and we were flying directly into it. It was also because of that headwind that the goggles proved to be a good call. I knew from experience that our eyes would have quickly become watering and sore from windburn without them. Through the comfort of their lenses, though, both of us easily watched the towers grow continually closer, making small course corrections and navigating toward them by sight. Even more than watching the towers, I also liked to look down and watch the surface of the ocean. As our shadows passed over the water, I saw schools of fish scatter in surprise. It made me think of the erne that I'd seen on top of the clouds, taking refuge from the rain. Had we been more like that bird, we would have found the fish we were looking for and had a feast many times over. I watched our reflections glide along the surface of the water underneath us while I thought about how in the same way, we were making the flight it took to find sustenance, only the kind we found would be of the heart and the soul, not the stomach. After four hours in the air, we finally heard the sound of waves breaking again. The noise was soft at first as we approached the slightly closer southern tower, then became progressively louder as we got closer to where the water crashed on the barren rocks that made up the tiny islet it stands on. Most of that irregularly-shaped islet's surface was covered by the tower's circular base, with no part of it more than maybe ten or fifteen meters from the edge of the sea, and in some places closer. The tower was conical, about thirty meters across at the bottom. It reminded me of a lighthouse, except that the top was wide open to the sky, since whatever used to be up there had long since fallen apart and blown away. All that was left was the shell of stone blocks, hollow on the inside. The structure, what was left of it, was about ninety meters high, angling inward as it rose so it was only about fifteen meters wide at the top. At the bottom the walls were very thick to support the weight above and resist the impacts of the odd wave here and there that broke high enough over the islet to reach the building, but they gradually tapered down to be much thinner at the top. They were still wide enough to land and perch on. That was what I did as soon as I could reach it. Azure was immediately behind me, and she landed directly opposite to me on the other side of the tower's upper rim. I rested there, just catching my breath for a few moments after the very long flight. Once I started to feel a little bit recovered, I pulled my goggles down, leaving them hanging around my neck. They'd been starting to fog a little bit on the inside. Looking around the islet now that my eyes were clear again, it was just like I'd remembered it from the last time I was here years ago. There were no plants, only some strings of algae and seaweed clinging to the rocks that flowed like long green streamers with the motion of the waves. A little bit of encrusting lichen that somehow managed to grow in small patches on the stone blocks the tower was made from was the only terrestrial life of any kind here, and it seemed like a miracle that even that was present. After I'd cooled down a little bit, we flew to the ground and landed on the rocks at the base of the tower. I pulled out one of the water flasks from my saddlebags. "Drink," I instructed Azure. My voice was rough and my throat was sore and felt like sandpaper from thirst. She got out one of her own flasks. I was so thirsty that I emptied my first flask more or less without stopping. Almost immediately I started feeling better. Such a long nonstop flight directly into a headwind had taken a lot out of me, as I'd expected it would. We stayed on the ground recovering for a while, slowly walking a circle around the base of the tower. It took us some time. After we did, something funny struck me that I'd never realized before, something that should have been there but was apparently missing. "There's no door," I said. "We've walked all the way around the ground level, and there's no openings anywhere. Why'd they build it with no way in?" "Unicorns didn't need a door," Azure said, staring at me a little strangely, like this was obvious. "They could just teleport." "Oh." It hadn't occurred to me, but with that pointed out, this strange architectural design choice suddenly made a lot of sense. Without a door at the ground to create a weak point, the tower would be much more resistant to waves and flooding if the seas turned rough. It also gave me a humbling reminder that I was in the remnants of what used to be a unicorn's part of the world, something they built only for themselves and their own kind, not one that I could view through the lens of what I was used to. Magic was probably as integral here as flying is to living in Cloudsdale. I realized that this place would always have mysteries I would never fully comprehend, a past I could never really put myself in the horseshoes of. In this place, not having a horn made me a stranger. It made me think for a moment about the question I had for Azure, but this was still not the time or the place, so I set it aside for now. We kept exploring - as much as there really was to explore on such a tiny, featureless islet, at least - and intermittently sipping more water. After an hour or so, we'd both finished off our second flask, and our saddlebags were now empty. At that point, we made the short flight to the northern tower. It was mostly the same as its southern counterpart, just an old stone shell with whatever had been on top long gone by now. Again, there was no door or other obvious ground level entry. Azure flew up to the top of the tower, and I followed. Landing on the rim, she peered down inside. There was nothing visible in there, just inky blackness. Azure looked around briefly, then tapped her hooves a few times on the stone blocks until she found a loose chip the size of a small pebble. She gripped it in her teeth, held it over the opening, and dropped it into the tower, then cocked her head sideways and listened. A second or two later there was a small splashing sound. "Huh. Must collect a lot of rainwater," Azure said. "With no openings at the bottom of the tower and nothing covering the top, I guess it has nowhere to flow out so it just floods the inside. Too bad. I suppose that means there wouldn't be any old unicorn artifacts to find in there and take home as souvenirs." "Nope." I shrugged. We flew back down. Both of us sat on the stony ground and rested for a while. "It's weird to think that some of my ancestors were the unicorns who built this." Azure stared at the tower, looking like she was deep in thought. "But when I come here, I come as a pegasus." "I guess the past can't necessarily tell you what the future has to be," I said. "I'm glad it doesn't," Azure said. She scooted over close and leaned against me, sitting side by side. "If unicorns and pegasi still hated each other as much as they used to back then, I doubt I ever would have met you." I put my wing around her back and hugged her. "I'm also glad things are different now," I said. "Otherwise I might not even exist, coming from an earth pony mother and a pegasus father." "The world wouldn't be the same without my big sister." Azure smiled at me. We rested for the next hour on the ground, waiting until we were recharged enough to sustain another long stretch of flight. There wasn't really a whole lot to do. I spent most of the time watching the ocean waves roll up and down across the rocks. A few sea stars were clinging to them. They were a kind I'd never seen before, different than the ones at the shore near the mainland. These were a striking purple color. The mussels and clams they were after were the same, though. Some sort of crab I didn't recognize, with long formidable looking pincers, shuffled around. We stared at it. It ignored us and eventually slipped back under the water. Over the time we were there, the tide was slowly going out, with the water level gradually dropping. Small tidepools between the rocks were starting to form, separating from the rest of the ocean until the high tide would come back in and flood over them again. A sea urchin covered in sharp spines grazed along the bottom of one, alongside a scattering of small marine snails with delicately patterned shells. With the ebbing of the water, our strength was returning. After two hours, I felt like it was getting to be about time for us to be on the move again. I wanted to be sure that we would be back on the right side of the shore well before dark. "About ready to go?" I finally asked. "Yeah," Azure said. She looked around, though without really seeming to find anything to hold her interest in the bleak surroundings of ruins and rocks. "I thought it would be... maybe more exciting, but you were right. There's not really much to see here, just old broken stone shells of whatever these used to be." "Kinda anticlimactic, isn't it?" I shrugged. "Sorry." "Well, that's not important, anyway," Azure said. "The point was the flight. That's the part that was worth doing." "Yeah." I grinned. "We still have the back half of it left, too, although I think that's going to be the easy part." "Hmmm, maybe one thing." Azure looked around for a moment, then scratched at the ground with her hoof until a small piece of rock with some sharp corners separated and came loose. She picked it up in her mouth and walked to the base of the tower, then scratched her name into a stone block at head level. Her mouthwriting wasn't as good as her telekinetic magic penmareship, but most ponies who have to write with their teeth can't really match a unicorn's horn. "Okay." She dropped the stone and smirked in a satisfied way at her work. "Now I'm done." I liked her idea, so I looked around and picked up another sharp stone, then signed the tower just beneath where she had. Having finished, I spat the stone out. It left a lingering sharp tang of sea salt mixed with limestone on my tongue, a flavor that I knew I would never forget. That was what I would take from here, to carry with me forever. "Yep. Looks good to me. Our work here is finished," I declared. We pulled our goggles back up over our eyes, and prepared to fly for home.