Ghost Lights

by Winston


Chapter 36

Ghost Lights

Chapter 36


It took a few minutes for Azure to calm down and stop crying, but I waited for her and we got there eventually. She pulled away from my embrace, breathing more slowly and evenly than she had been in her previous distress.

"Feeling any better yet?" I asked now that the tears had stopped.

"Yes." Azure nodded. Her eyes were still puffy and dark when she looked at me. "Just... Still just kind of tired, I guess."

"Me too," I said. "Well, we don't have to stick to a strict schedule. The trip back isn't as time-sensitive as getting out here was. Nopony's waiting for us to relieve them now. We have time to rest a little more if you want before we get started on hiking for the day."

"That might make it easier," Azure agreed.

"Don't think too much about things," I said. I reached up and rubbed her shoulder with my forehoof. "Try to just get some sleep this time. In a couple hours you'll feel much better if you can do that."

"You're right," she said. "I will."

Azure and I laid down close to each other. Her eyes closed peacefully and small, soft breaths soon told me that she was asleep. I still struggled to find a comfortable state of mind in a world that was too quiet without the sea's waves, but somehow managed to follow her into sleep shortly after. For the next two hours we napped to help make up for the lack of restfulness both of us had experienced during the night.

I dreamed nothing, or at least nothing that I can remember. I was thankful for that. Any dreams I had at that point, I was sure, would have been something unsettled and unpleasant. I just wanted to recharge without having to think for a while.

When I woke up, the sky was brighter than it had been, with the sun higher up and partially coming through some of the thinner cloudcover. I felt much more energetic now. Azure wasn't quite up yet when I was, but I could tell she'd had a rough night lost in her thoughts, and I still didn't feel like pushing just for the sake of staying on track for a tight schedule anyway, so I just sat quietly on the ground and waited for her.

Eventually she opened her eyes, but didn't get up right away. She spent some time laying still on the ground and staring off at nothing. I didn't say anything to hurry her along. This inaction, though, couldn't last forever, and we both knew it. "We really do have to go back, don't we?" she sighed after a while.

"It's that time, I'm afraid," I said.

"Guess I have to get moving sooner or later, then," Azure said. She stirred and pushed herself up off the ground and then dusted off the side she'd been laying on. Once cleaned off, she started gathering her saddlebags and getting ready to move on. "Back to the grind."

She was right. It was a grind to hike, but maybe it didn't have to be. When I thought about resuming our journey, something perhaps somewhat unconscious that I'm sure had been lurking in both of our minds came to the surface. It had been a passing thought yesterday, but I'd been unsure then. Doing things in a normal way seemed important to beginning the process of readjusting ourselves to the expectations of normality in the home we had to return to. Having seen Azure in the state I just had, though, I could tell she could use at least one last taste of the freedom we'd enjoyed so much of here, and it seemed that maybe it shouldn't be denied.

"You know... I've been thinking, dealing with the brush is kind of annoying," I said. "We don't necessarily have to walk home through it, if there's another way you'd like to travel..."

"I thought you'd never ask." Azure grinned. She obviously took the hint and was instantly eager to run with it. She focused and her horn glowed, and in a few seconds she stood before me in the familiar form of a pegasus once more, wasting no time.

My question was answered. It was better, I knew then, for her to have every last second in the sun that she could.

We finished packing up and getting our saddlebags situated, then took to the air moving south-east as we flew side-by-side.


Flying made our travel swift, and within that day we found the western end of the old unicorn road we'd followed much of the way out here. For the next two days we flew along above it, following it home. The journey was a very different experience from the air than it was being bound to the land. Aside from being faster, it was noticeably more comfortable at night since we were able to survey more ground to spot the most ideal camping sites to sleep in. We were also able to find our choice of wild grasses and plants to eat instead of sometimes having to settle for whatever we could reach most easily on hoof. There weren't any nights we had to go to sleep hungry.

Early on the fourth day of travel, we reached the eastern point at which we were finished following the road. It kept stretching on further into the east, but our more optimal route back into the center of Equestria departed to the south, so we left it behind where we'd first joined it on the way out.

Immediately due south of that road, of course, we overflew the same henge of standing stones we'd stopped at six months ago. There was some scattered forest north of it which we flew over low, buzzing the treetops and weaving around them. The woods broke up into open cleared fields, meadows of short green grass, and the ring of stones was standing there in the middle of it, lonely as ever, right where it had been for thousands of years.

Azure slowed down her pace as we got closer. She motioned downward toward the ring of stones, signalling me that she wanted to stop. I nodded back to her and flared my wings to airbrake myself. We hovered down slowly and landed in the midst of the ring.

"Well, isn't this familiar?" I joked. "Seems like were just here."

"Still feels too soon." Azure shook her head.

"We have been moving pretty fast," I said. "We have a lot of extra time. Nopony would expect us back for at least another three days, at the earliest."

"Wouldn't Princess Twilight be surprised if we dropped in early?" Azure asked, with a little hint of sardonic irony in her voice.

"I'm sure she would love to see you, actually," I said. "I doubt there's anything she's looking forward to more in the whole world right about now after these six months. That would depend on if you're comfortable explaining to her how it is that you're home so early, though, of course."

Azure paced a little bit around the inner perimeter of the circle of upright stones. "That's... something I've been thinking a lot about," she said. "You were right, though. Thank you for stopping me and not letting me be so stupid because I'm afraid. I think I know that it's not going to be as bad as I'm scared of. I'm just gonna have to confront this head-on and finally really talk to her."

"That's good." I nodded. "And you're welcome."

"Before that, there's a few other things I want to take care of," Azure said. "One of them might be here. You asked about whether I could make an earth pony or not. I think this is where I can find the answer, if you're still wondering."

A sudden thrill of excitement ran through me, reviving the idea that I'd almost totally forgotten about because I thought it was relegated to impossibility. "I am," I said.

"Alright," Azure said. "It's gonna be a few hours, since I'll need to wait for the spell making me a pegasus to wear off and turn back into a unicorn. Once I have my magic back, I should be able to tell if enough earth pony essential magic is still left in these stones. They built this henge, and I didn't feel any unicorn magic in it last time to mask over it, so I think it's pretty likely."

I agreed gladly and we waited there for a while. The stones in the circle were the major feature, so I spent most of the time examining them one by one. It was remarkable how similar all of them were in their dimensions, cut with a precision that seemed highly expert. Their surfaces were indistinguishable from one another, all smooth and without visible tool marks, although whether they'd been made that way originally or if a few thousand years of weather had helped was hard to tell. Colorful lichens grew irregularly across the surfaces and some soft deep green moss grew around the edges of where they sank into the ground.

After a while that started to get boring, so I took the opportunity to eat. The meadows around the stones were filled with grass and clovers that tasted good and I grazed on them until I was satisfied but not too stuffed.

Azure's spell finally wore off and left her a unicorn again. She started working on doing something magical with her horn involving the stones around us. I think it was just an examination at first, getting a sense of whatever it was that might still be in them and whether or not she could use it. I didn't interrupt to ask about the details. She dug the black covered book out of her saddlebags and consulted various pages in it once or twice.

"Okay," she finally announced. "I think I've got it."

I stood up from where I was sitting while I waited. "Ready to try it out?" I asked.

"It's very close to the pegasus-to-unicorn spell," Azure said. "It only takes one substitution, which is incorporating the character of earth pony magic in place of unicorn magic. There's enough of that signature saturated into these rocks, so yeah, I'm ready."

"Alright." I nodded. "Hit me."

"How long?" she asked.

"Let's say a couple hours," I told her. "Not too long, but I guess I can just have you zap me again if I need more time."

"Sounds good," Azure said.

I nodded, signaling her to start. Her horn glowed, and the light enveloped my whole body, much as it had worked before. The moment of transformation had a different feel this time. There was something close to the same sensation in my back as my wings vanished, but nothing in my forehead like there had been when turning into a unicorn. Instead, I felt something in my legs. It was hard to define, exactly, a kind of a surge that was subtle but distinctive and I'm not sure how to describe. I can't tell if they were really stronger or not in any significant way, but I felt a little easier and springier on them, I think.

The glow faded. Nothing had a stand-out feel of 'different' in an immediate sense, other than being unable to use my wings because I didn't have them. Like before, however, this wasn't particularly bothersome as a physical sensation.

From the perspective of a unicorn or a pegasus who's never experienced it, I can imagine that there could be a temptation to think of this transformation as a downgrade to a less privileged form. Having lived it for myself now, though, I don't think of it in that way at all. To do so is an injustice to earth ponies. They are different, but not without their own special qualities that are no lesser.

The great strength of an earth pony is an awareness of the subtle ties to the environment. They feel the land and its complexities just as surely as a pegasus can feel every current of the air passing over their wings. I realized this in the first moment I took a step. Just walking became a sublimely different thing. I could never have imagined it if I hadn't felt it myself.

The grass and plants in the meadow brushed against my legs and around my hooves with a feeling like soft velvet. The soil underneath conveyed a tactile texture through my hooves that felt pleasing, with an instinctive sense that it was healthy and right. I could sense a slightly spongy spring to it... just a little moist, but airy and not bogged down or muddy. It was something very close to the kind of rich black topsoil that my mother had taught me about and that gardeners prize, though as a pegasus filly at the time I'd never particularly seen it as a very interesting subject. Now it held my attention. Life practically surged through it. I paced across the field, and in a gentle, unassuming way, it told me all these things as it spoke to me through every hoof-fall.

When I walked to one of the stones and reached out to feel it, there was something else. It was strong - stronger than anything I'd ever had a sense of before. These stones were the bones of the earth. The texture of them was actually awe-inspiring, smooth and hard, laced with the organically simultaneous orderliness and unevenness of nature. Their unmovable mass felt like an eternal bastion of strength.

All these sensations ran through me, and when they did, I realized that I suddenly understood something. I thought about the Equestrian violet growing in her little flowerpot that I'd left in Bright Bloom's care. My mother's words when she gave it to me were that a pony should always have something green where they live. I hadn't payed a lot of attention. That always seemed to me like a sentimental notion that was ultimately just a trivial nicety to decorate and brighten up a room.

But to her... to an earth pony like her... it was so much more. It was everything.

It was a vital connection to the life of the world itself. Without this presence, the essence of a pony who depended on it would wither and die, leaving them a hollow, suffering shell until they could find it again. Without the green life of the fields and the sensations of connection to the earth present in their existence, an earth pony was a pegasus with their wings cut off, a unicorn with their horn broken.

Only then did I finally understand how much that Equestrian violet meant. It was my mother's love and all the best wishes she had for my happiness. In the way that she understood, the way that her instincts spoke to her, this was how she was trying to provide for me that same kind of connection to something that sustains the soul. Whether it was conscious on her part or not, it was her way of trying to make sure that I would always have the one thing that was, to her senses, the most important.

There's a difference between knowing something as an idea in the mind and really feeling it as an experience in the heart. I know that my mother loves me. I always had. In that moment, though, it was different. I felt it, more strongly and more surely than in a long time. I understood like a flash in that moment of realization how deep it ran and how eternal it was. There could be no doubt because it filled me in a way that left no room for that.

She's my mom, and she loves me more than anything... and that can never change. The Equestrian violet was just one of the many little signs throughout my life that proved it, and I appreciated them all now that I could understand why she had done them in the ways she had.

I laid down in the long grass, feeling it against my side and on my face, brushing against my cheek. I bathed in that connection to the earth and to the life that flows in and through it. My eyes started watering as I felt the love of my mother reflected in it. I also realized how much I love her, too. It had often been difficult, so frustratingly difficult, to show it, but it was always there.

I closed my eyes and just soaked in the feeling and tears ran down my face.

"Are you alright?" Azure asked.

"I'm fine," I said. I smiled in a way that felt better and more genuine than anything in a long time. "Everything is absolutely fine."