Ghost Lights
Chapter 32
Over the next few days, I kept flying patrol flights as usual. They became more solitary, the way they had been at the beginning of the tour before Azure had figured out how to give herself wings. She joined me in the air only on occasional breaks from working on the new version of her spell. Things were pretty quiet. I noticed that suddenly I had a lot of time to just think, all by myself, exploring up and down the rocky coastline and listening to the waves. Being around Azure almost constantly while I was teaching her wasn't by any means an unpleasant thing, don't get me wrong, but these long stretches of time all to myself on the wild shores were my favorite part of this place, and I had missed them. It was nice to have that back again for a little while before our tour was over.
I returned to the barracks in the mid-afternoon of one day after one of these lonely flights to find Azure reading from the black covered book she'd brought. She'd been doing that a lot lately. I'd already suspected that the book had something to do with her transformation spell, and this added more evidence since it and her investigation of modifying that spell seemed clearly connected.
I didn't have too long to wonder about it, though, because on this particular day Azure surprised me by bringing the book over to my half of the room.
"I'd like to show you something," she said.
"What is it?" I asked, glancing curiously at the book.
This caught my interest. I thought that maybe I would finally find out just what this mysterious volume was about. Azure opened the book's front cover, to a blank plain white endpage. What was revealed to me, however, wasn't quite what I expected. It wasn't something written. Instead, what mattered at the moment was what had been tucked into the book between the cover and the endpage.
There was a single pegasus feather there, a flight primary, and one that looked like it had seen its best days long, long ago. It was ratty and beaten, notched with broken and separated barbules like it had been through the ravages of time far past the point at which it would have been molted and replaced. It had been pressed completely flat, too, which I could only infer was from being stored under heavy objects or inside books for an extended period of time.
The real surprise, though, was the color. It was sunny golden yellow... exactly matching...
"It's one of yours," Azure spoke quietly, saying just what I was thinking. "It's kind of weird, but... I've had this feather for thirteen years."
"Ummm... okay." I was a little bit confused. "Why?"
"It's the feather you dropped that night you found me out in the halls and gave me a ride back to my room," Azure said. "Way back when I was little. You remember, the time I asked you what a fillyfooler was?"
"Oh, right. Yeah, I remember losing a feather, and having you pick it up." I nodded. "I wrote about it in that journal. Never thought I'd see this guy again, though." I stared at it. In all the years since it had dropped, I'd never given a second thought to where it had ended up any more than I had about the thousands of others just like it that I'd gone through. There were usually only two possibilities. "I would have thought it would have just been thrown away, or made into a quill," I said.
"Normally, yes, but this was sort of special," Azure said. "I kept it because it was the first time I'd ever touched the wings of a pegasus, and I wanted to remember. For a long time, wings were this mysterious thing that I never thought I'd understand. I wanted to, but I was sure I never would, not really. This feather felt like the closest I could get, so I held on to it. It was... a good memory, at least. I didn't want to lose it."
"It meant that much to you?" I asked, surprised.
"Yes." Azure nodded. "That night and this feather are important. I wouldn't be where I am without it. It was one of the biggest pieces I needed when I was figuring out how to finish making the spell work. See, at first in order to catch the... uhhh... I don't know how to explain it, exactly, but basically, the pegasus... essence... and use it for transmuting, I needed an object filled with the signature of pegasus magic. I chose this. That's kind of why I was thinking about it just now, actually, because I need to do the same thing again, only with unicorn magic to transform another type of pony into a unicorn. Going through that process and those experiments again reminded me of this."
"So you can't turn into a pegasus without that feather?" I asked.
"Oh, well, no, I can, actually." Azure shook her head. "I haven't exactly needed it since the first time I succeeded with the spell, because I've gotten the feel for that pegasus kind of magic and memorized it. But that's what I was thinking about: how I don't need it anymore, and how it's changed because of how wings aren't a mystery like they were. Now it's just an old feather."
She held it out and offered it to me with a soft smile. "So I thought maybe it was time to give this one back."
"Hmmm..." I returned the smile, looking at the torn-up, pathetic plume. "Appreciated, but it's a little late. I'm pretty sure I grew a new one to replace that sucker about thirteen years ago. But... yeah, you're right, you've definitely earned your own, you don't need to borrow anypony else's." While I said that, an idea was suddenly coming over me, a sense of something needing finality that wasn't resolved yet. There was something had to be done, and a voice from inside spoke, telling me that this was important.
I was a little uncertain about it, at first. I knew what it was, but not exactly every part of how it should go, or if there was some sort of "right" way and I was just going to screw everything up. Still, the urge pushed me to do it while it was still fresh in my mind, before I could overthink it to death and lose the meaning of the moment. That was what counted. The details weren't the important thing, they'd get figured out as we went... but it should be now. It had to be, I knew that much without a doubt.
I must have been getting pretty alright by then at not chickening out and running away, because I didn't.
"You know what? Come on," I told Azure impulsively. "Follow me."
"What? Where?" she asked.
"It doesn't really matter where," I said. "There's just something we have to do."
"Uhh... Alright..." Azure sounded confused, but she complied.
I started heading outside and reached the doorway before I turned to look back briefly. "And bring that feather," I said.
"Okay..." Azure duly carried it with her as I led the way.
We went outside, walking a short distance inland, away from the Seawall. There were a few small stunted trees that were swept by the wind, and little patches of low shrubs. I hunted around in these until I could gather up a small bundle of mostly dried out sticks. I piled them up on a bare patch of the ground, then looked around for some rocks to arrange into a ring around them. After a few minutes, we were ready.
"Would you mind lighting those?" I asked Azure and pointed to the sticks. "I didn't bring matches."
Azure nodded, despite still looking unsure about what was happening, and a quick burst of magic flashed in her horn. A momentary wave of heat radiated from the wood and a few sticks at the bottom of the pile suddenly darkened to charcoal and embered with a bright cherry red, then burst into little flames that quickly grew. In about a minute we had a fire going that was small but sufficient for the purpose.
I stared into the flames and thought for a minute about how to start this. After a little bit of pondering over it, something that felt right came to me.
"Way back when I killed that crow, for a while I didn't know how to deal with it," I began. "I didn't really know how to feel and it was hard for me to understand just what it meant. When I told my dad about what I'd done, he told me to bring him a crow's feather, so I looked around until I found one and I took it back to him."
I let the fire burn for another few moments while I thought.
"The first thing my dad told me was that killing is terrible, but sometimes it can't be avoided," I continued. "It surprised me. I thought he'd be upset about what I did, but he wasn't. He said he wasn't the one who could decide whether there was anything to be upset about or not. Since I was the one who was there, fighting to protect the garden, it was my call to make. I was the one who had to decide whether or not killing that crow was what I had to do... and if I was making those kinds of decisions, I had to be ready to be a grown mare."
Azure sat and listened patently.
"He said it was a funny thing to be a parent, because I would always be his little filly," I continued. "That would always be a part of how he thought of me, but at the same time, it was inevitable that I'd grow up into a mare... as the pegasi put it, he knew that someday I'd be full-fledged and have all the feathers I needed, ready to leave the nest and fight my own enemies. He thought that what happened with the crow proved that that day had come."
"I suppose a crow is a... safe choice for a first enemy to take on..." Azure said ponderingly.
"Yeah, well, where was I gonna find a wild griffon?" I asked with a smirk. "Besides, what made the difference wasn't just that I killed her, it was that I followed through after that. Killing is easy. Respect is harder. My father was proud that I'd buried her instead of getting scared and running off right away and leaving her to rot without dignity. As a creature of the air, she really should have been burned and sent back to the sky in the smoke, but my dad let me off the hook for that because it was easy to understand if I'd been upset and not thinking about that at the time. At least I'd tried to make it right by doing something suitable instead of making things worse by doing nothing."
"Yeah," Azure said, looking into the fire and seeming to be deep in thought.
"It's important that we respect our enemies," I continued. "That's what my dad said. Enemies can teach us things. Without their challenges, we'd never know what we can do. At the same time, though, we have to keep them within their limits. The crow could only go as far as the point at which I killed her. Staying fixated and letting her haunt me with useless worrying after it was over wasn't good. He knew that. That's why he built a fire and had me burn that crow's feather that I brought to him."
I stared into our fire here and now, remembering that day. "We burned it," I said quietly, "and sent that crow home, the right way, finally."
"Did that help?" Azure asked.
"Yes." I nodded. "It was... not what I was expecting, but it was what I needed. When we did that, I realized that when I told him about the crow, I'd gone to him expecting some sort of judgment. I went there with the mind of a little filly, who wanted to be told if what I did was good or bad, and if I should have done it at all. But I left with the mind of an adult because I started to really get it. Sometimes there aren't easy answers you can just be given. At some point you have to decide for yourself what these kinds of things mean and what to do about it from there."
I looked away from the fire and at Azure, locking eyes. "I think that's where you are," I said. "You decided to take that flight, and you made it. Most pegasi won't ever even try one that difficult in their entire lives. That proves that you're full-fledged if anything ever does."
I glanced down at the beaten old yellow flight primary Azure was holding in place on the ground with one hoof. Her eyes followed mine and we both focused on it.
"You don't need anypony else's feathers anymore," I said. "Do you?"
Azure lifted the hoof that was holding down that feather just slightly. Her horn glowed softly, and she levitated it into the air in front of her with her telekinetic magic, looking at it for a second or two. I moved over next to her until we brushed up together, side by side, and I draped my wing across her back.
Slowly, ponderously, she began moving it toward the fire and lowered the feather into the flames. In seconds it flared up, burned away, and fell to ashes. A curl of white smoke rose from it, drifting into the sky in thin wispy tendrils that reached upward eagerly, like something set free after languishing in an imprisonment that was far too long. We both sat and watched together until it disappeared.
"I didn't believe you until now," Azure whispered.
"Huh? About what?" I asked, not sure what she meant.
"Way back before we left, you told me that everypony finds something different out here," she explained.
"Just themselves." I nodded, remembering as soon as I was reminded.
"I... I get to decide, don't I?" Azure asked slowly, like she was weighing out this idea carefully, feeling around at it.
"You don't just get to..." I said. I rubbed her back with my wing. "At some point, you have to."
Azure turned toward me and I could see that there were tears just beginning to well up and spill over. She reached out and wrapped her forelegs around me in a hug. I pulled her in closer and hugged her back.
"I'm more proud of you than I've ever been of anything else," I told her.
I could feel her chest shaking as it pressed against mine, and she started sobbing quietly. Whether it was from sadness, joy, relief, something else entirely, or maybe all those things at once... I wasn't sure.
I just held her in my hooves and let her cry for as long as she needed to, until the fire had died down and the flames had flickered out, leaving behind only the warm ashes of the wood and that old feather that was finally free now.