After thanking the nice ponies for giving us shelter for the night, we were given rooms to sleep in: one for the boys, Edge and Seedling, and one for the girls, me. Spike slept outside, as he was a bit too big to fit inside the small village house. I had an uneasy night for multiple reasons. The first was nightmares. As I slept, I dreamt of my cousin. He was locked up in a cell, in an unlit room, sitting there, completely helpless. He was given very little food and water. He was abused by his cruel captors; they whipped him and laughed at the poor pony. They told him that if his parents really loved him, they would have sent the Heart already. After, he would cry himself into an uneasy sleep, without a bed to sleep on and with very little hope in ever being rescued. I tried as hard as I could to send him a message, tell him that we were on our way to save him. I’m not sure if the message got to him, but I like to think Luna got it across.
The second reason for my uneasy sleep was probably the tight bindings I had been placed in. I awoke with a start to find that my hooves and wings were tied tightly behind myself, almost to the point of being numb. A gag was placed in my mouth, just a simple dish cloth. From the taste, I could tell that my kidnappers hadn’t bothered washing it first. My first thought was wondering how they bound me up this tightly without waking me up. Okay, that’s a lie, my first thought was, “What’s this disgusting taste in my mouth?”. However, back on topic, it was most likely a sleep spell performed by the tall unicorn who had eagerly welcomed us.
Fortunately, my captors seemed to be out of the room, making my escape all the easier. I wriggled in my bondings, attempting to break free, but to no avail. Second, I tried using my inner magic to teleport free. Again, no such luck. My mother did say I never was great at performing under pressure. I needed help. And to get help, I needed the boys to wake up. In a bit of brilliant thinking, if I do say so myself, I wriggled off the bed and rolled myself over to a nearby bookshelf. The bookshelf was just far enough from the wall that I was able to squeeze behind it and knock it over. This, however, had the unintended consequence of alerting my imprisoners that I had woken up, and was trying to escape. As they rushed into the room, the unicorn fired another sleeping spell, causing me to feel drowsy. As I fell into unconsciousness, I heard a pounding on a nearby door. Knowing that Edge Blade was awake allowed me to black out knowing that I was safe.
When I awoke several hours later, I had the events that followed retold to me by Seedling. He told me that after hearing the bookcase fall, Edge shot awake. He tried to get the door open, but it had been magically sealed. He then woke up Seedling, alerting him that I needed help and that they needed a way out of the room. After a bit of thinking, Seedling had an idea. The doors and windows may be magically reinforced, but the wall probably weren’t. To do so for an entire room would have taken some serious magic power. So, Edge Blade then used his sword to slice through a section of wall and kick it open. Seedling added a sound effect and gesture of the wall falling over here, but I’m not sure how to express that in writing.
With that, Edge and Seedling burst into my room, which did not have a magically sealed door. It would seem that my kidnappers were not as worried about me escaping my room. Edge held the two ponies at sword point, forcing them outside the room while Seedling undid my bindings. Seedling then carried me outside the house where Edge Blade reported the two to the local authorities. They woke up Spike and we took off into the night.
“Do you know what I think I learned tonight?” Seedling asked me, “Some ponies are willing to do some really bad stuff to get what they want.”
I looked at the colt strangely, “Well, yeah, of course. We’re on this quest because the changelings are holding an innocent pony hostage to get the Crystal Heart.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I guess that it’s not that ponies do bad things, it’s that the ponies that do bad things don’t necessarily have to look bad.”
“What do you mean?” I questioned.
“When I was younger, my mama and my auntie used to tell me stories of dark things that would try to gain power through evil means. Things like Discord and King Sombra and Nightmare Moon and Tirek. Classic stories of good against evil, chaos against harmony. I guess I began to associate those bad things with those bad people, that only these obviously, obnoxiously evil people could do such bad things. But tonight, I think I realized that even ponies who don’t look bad can be bad. Sometimes ponies don’t even think what they’re doing is bad. Sometimes they think that what they’re doing is good, and that they’re the only ones that can see it. Sometimes they realize that they’re doing bad things but see it as a necessary evil, that the ends justify the means.” Seedling explained.
“Wow,” I responded. I couldn’t help but feel that after a deep and complicated speech like that, my response was lacking, dwarfed by the gravity of it.
That night, we slept outside in some nearby hills. As we set up tents, I thought about how we were probably going to be using these tents more often than we originally thought, as asking for shelter now seemed less likely. That night, I had similar nightmares, but I was in my cousin’s place. The changelings loomed over me, mocking me, and both I and they knew I was powerless to stop them. I woke with a start, and went outside my tent. I walked over to Spike and asked if I could sleep with him for the night. He uncurled his tail, signaling me to lay down beside him. As I cuddled deeply against the side of my friend, I thought about what Seedling had said. Warmed by the dragon’s fiery gut, I thought ‘We can take on any kind of evil, big and small, obvious or hidden.’