//------------------------------//
// Pillory 
// Story: Cyclosa 
// by NorrisThePony 
//------------------------------//


i


The closest thing to us that was not barren dirt were the odd rock formations. With the dust storm looming ahead and promising death for anypony foolish enough to get caught up in its midst, it was in this direction that Luna and I turned and began sprinting. The dust storm was eternally growing at our backs; it seemed every time I cast a glance behind us it was larger and closer still. I could hear the wind from within, an aggressive howl that was the siren of death, and above us I saw crows and other birds I could not name flying as hard as they could in the same direction we were sprinting. Had they taken even a moment’s rest, and the strong backwinds of the dust storm would have grabbed hold of their wings, and pulled them back into the storm. 

This was hardly a threat reserved to the birds in the sky, though. Both of our cloaks were blowing wildly about, threatening to drag us backwards if we allowed the strong winds to get any closer. I continued running in a frenzy, swearing under my breath the whole while. 

“Celestia!” I heard Luna scream behind me. “Celestia, help me!” 

Without hesitation I skidded to a halt, looking behind me. The mountain of clouds took up the whole sky now, so that above and before me was nothing but dark grey clouds, growing closer and closer by the moment. But even with this incredible sight before me, my eyes focused instantly on the small blotch of blue against the grey. 

Her cloak had come loose, and had been picked up the backdrifts of the dust storm, pulling her upwards like a kite several feet off the ground. She fumbled for the twine keeping her cloak on, ripped it off, and fell to the ground. Her landing was less than graceful; she slammed hard against the dirt and did not immediately rise. 

“Luna!” I screamed, wasting no time in running back to her limp form.

The storm was pulling at my cloak, too, threatening to do to me what had just happened to Luna. I had no time to waste. With a click, my saddlebag came undone, and I ripped my cloak off next. I grabbed the bag with the bits within and laid it on top of my cloak, and then bundled the whole thing up in a ball. I placed it on my back and then lifted Luna’s unconscious body on top of it. 

My sprint to the rocks resumed, but it was much slower with so much discomfort on my back that I needed to carry with me. Luna had not been fed nearly as well as she had a right to, and as a result she did not weigh too much. Ironically, the malnourishment we had been forced through perhaps saved both of our lives; if Luna had been any heavier, I doubt I could have made it to the rocks at all. 

I felt Luna stir on my back, and while I let out a long sigh of relief, I did not stop to let her back on her hooves. Any delay, even one of mere moments, could be lethal. I could not stop when I was so close to the rock caverns. 

“Our saddlebags!” Luna said upon regaining consciousness. Strangely, it had been her first thought. “Celly, the map! Our bits! Our cloaks!” 

“Not important.” I grumbled. We had made it to the rocks, and I set Luna down. I first threw my bundled up cloak with the bag of bits into the crevice, and then waved frantically for her to get in, too.

Luna was quite a bit smaller compared to me, and she fit in the cave-like opening easily. By contrast, I had to squeeze my way in, which took just long enough for me to focus on the dreadful thought that I might not be able to fit in at all and I would have to face the full blunt of the storm. Thankfully I managed to force my way through with only a bit of effort, and the crevice seemed to widen as it deepened anyways. 

“Pass me the cloak, Luna,” I said. I opened it up once again, letting the bag of bits fall and then using the cloak to close up the crevice opening as best I could. It actually worked somewhat well, but we were instantly thrust into complete darkness once it was in place. 

Outside, the sound of the wind grew to a terrifyingly loud howl, louder and more unnerving than even the most booming of thunder rolls. Even with my cloak stuffing the entrance closed, the air was filled with dust which caused the two of us to cough frequently and made breathing a chore as time stretched on and the dust storm refused to pass. 

Thankfully, the stones had survived many dust storms and the present one was no exception. And while they did vibrate and occasionally creak as they were beaten mercilessly by the elements, it seemed I had not made a mistake in choosing them to flee to. 

“Woah!” I heard the sound of bits jingling against each other in the dark. “Where did ya get all this dough, Celly?” 

“Ah...I’ve been saving up. Put that down, would you?” 

“You didn’t steal these, did you?” 

“Luna, give them here,” I blindly reached into the darkness, and amazingly managed to grab the bag of bits regardless. “Are you alright? Nothing’s broken?” 

“Nope! I’m good.” 

“You had quite the fall there. Are you sure?” 

“Yes,” she said impatiently. “You don’t have to treat me like a filly you know…” 

“Sorry,” I sighed. 

As we sat in silence, listening to the wind outside refusing to lessen in intensity, my thoughts wandered to my horn, and before I knew it I was feeding magic into it simply to see what would happen. For a long while, nothing did. It produced a barely audible hum and I felt it vibrate ever so slightly, but whatever I was hoping would happen ultimately seemed unwilling to. 

And then, after a long while of focus, a burst of light erupted from my horn, illuminating the small cavern. Luna’s eyes grew wide in amazement, as did mine, and the revelation that the cavern was actually infested with insects was not nearly enough to break through my awestruck expression. 

Light magic is hardly anything special, it’s most commonly the first spell many unicorns learn after levitation, but nonetheless for a pony who had never had any reason to cast magic at all, it was nothing short of astonishing. 

“How are you doing that?!” Luna gasped. 

“I...I’m not exactly sure,” I admit. “It just sorta...works.” 

Unfortunately, the light flickered out as suddenly as it had sprung to life, thrusting us back into complete darkness once again. I tried to take note of what exactly I had done to pull off the light spell, but I earnestly could think of no logical progression of thought that had led to its conception. 

We lapsed back into silence again, and in the blackness I heard Luna’s breathing gradually begin to ease into a pattern of sleep. The dust that had been assaulting our senses when we first arrived had settled down as we became motionless, making breathing much easier than it had been when the air was plagued with a thick cloud of the wretched stuff. 

After another hour had crawled past, the sound of the wind outside finally began to die down, and after yet another it had vanished completely. Nervous bird song could be heard from outside, and I shook Luna awake as I removed my cloak from the entranceway and led the way back into the Grey Wastelands. 


ii


The dust storm had removed nearly every trace of the carriage tracks that we had been following. I screamed a loud cry of frustration as I saw this, while Luna watched on with speechless apprehension, while beating her recovered cloak free of an immense weight of sand. 

“Perfect!” I seethed, once my animalistic fury had weakened enough that words could be formed. “Now what do we do? Those tracks were everything! We don’t even have the damn map!” 

“The sun is setting…” I heard Luna say. I followed her gaze, where the sight of the sun approaching the horizon could be seen only as a flare of light beyond a thin cloud of grey dust that still remained. 

“Oh, brilliant. We’re hopelessly lost in the middle of the Wastelands without a map, and it’s going to be night soon.” 

“But doesn’t the sun set in the West?” she asked. “Can’t we use that to find North?” 

“The sun sets in the West?” I irritably questioned. “Where did you learn that?” 

Luna shrugged. 

“In one of my storybooks. The sun always rises in the East and sets in the West.” 

“Luna, those are fairy tales. How could the sun know where to rise and set?” I recalled the other senseless, magical things in those stories, the things that were a vast contrast to how orderly life in Erisia was actually supposed to be…

And the more I recalled them, the more I realized I was more willing to take the words of ancient, imaginative fools than I was the chaotic rules Discord’s reign enforced. 

“Alright, fine,” I said, taking a moment to orient myself properly. “So that’s West. That makes this direction North.”

And in that direction we walked, as the sun dipped into the Western horizon and the Moon rose overhead. Little by little as the night turned around, the looming remains of the dust vanished away. Miles from the grasp of the city the sky was free of the looming pollution, and as the  musty grey shifted first to an inky blue and then a resolute black, the sky began to populate with millions of beautiful pinpricks of light where only clouds had ever been. 

“Stars,” Luna gasped. “They’re beautiful.” 

They must have been another thing Luna would have seen in her storybooks. We certainly would never have seen them in Cyclosa. Where she had gotten the name for them, I truly do not know. 

We stayed under the cover of the stars for a long while as our tired hooves carried us across the desert and through the night. I know it was only a matter of time before exhaustion got the best of both of us, and without shelter for miles it truly would be catastrophic if it did. Both our throats were parched as our bodies desperately begged for food and water, and we had not even been in the desert for more than two days. With the map lost, I was forced to recall as best I could how far the city of Pillory was simply from the memories I carried of my brief glance at it. It did not seem considerably far, but that was assuming we were going in the correct direction, which I could not even be certain of. 

While I did not dare express it, I walked on with a bitter sense of dread and doubt, knowing I had made a grave and foolish mistake bringing Luna with me when I myself was not prepared to survive. Frankly, I did not have much confidence I had not led us into certain death, and so it was with immense relief that I noticed the terrain we were trotting over seemed to be changing, many hours after we had left the dust storm behind. 

Gradually our hooves began carrying us over rising hills instead of flat desert. The hard-packed sand under our hooves seemed to be changing, too. It looked more like the fertile dirt which had the miraculous ability to sustain plant life, and less like the dead grey sand that we had been surrounded by.

The grass was another sight entirely. It poked freely from the dirt in odd clusters at first, but soon it’s frequency changed to become more regular as different plants began sticking out of the dirt, too. I speechlessly led the way  into a forest of strange looking trees, standing tall and proud with their leafless arms stretched towards the star-filled sky above. Bats and small birds flew freely through this strange, isolated forest, which had not appeared on any maps and had no place in the dead wasteland. 

It was then that I realized that the world outside of Cyclosa was not dead. The cities were not divided by miles of nothingness, and the earth had not been damaged beyond repair. Life had carried on where the tendrils of pollution had not yet reached. And life carried with it something else entirely, not a material thing, but something equally as powerful. I felt hope as I led Luna through that forest, as well as a sense of determination that was stronger than the foreboding dread I’d carried not an hour prior. True, the odds were against us, and we would eternally be in danger from now until the end of Erisia, but the end of Erisia was not out of our grasp. 

In Pillory, we would find an airship. I was sure of that now. Surely we would be able to pay passage aboard a smaller one, and from there we could be heading North at a swifter pace than our hooves could take us, and without the risk of exhaustion or hunger. 

The leafless trees had more life to them as our trek took us deeper through the forest, and soon enough we came upon a pond of murky water. It was less than appealing, but Luna and I gratefully drank anyways. It was as good a place as any to rest for several hours, and so I slumped down next to the water, my back on the dirt and my eyes trained upwards at the stars peeking through the thin foliage of the tall trees above us. 


iii


I knew we were approaching the city when the lush trees around us started becoming more and more thin and straggly once again, victims of the dust and pollution just like the ones on the outskirts of the forest. Eventually, there were no trees at all, and instead a grey field of dirt dividing us from the great Southern city of Pillory. We were standing atop a small hill which gradually fell towards the dry, apocalyptic field I’d grown accustomed to seeing.

The city looked much grander than Cyclosa even from our great distance, and the elevation of the hill we were on showed us that it was built in a pattern much like a wagon wheel, with a main and pronounced center, half a dozen districts working their way out towards a brick wall of a dozen feet circling the entire city. At the very center of Pillory was what looked like some sort of garden, but like the trees outside of the town it looked like it had seen more life in better days. In the center of the garden a taller spire towered into the sky, looking as though it’s purpose was solely aesthetic. Age had reared it’s teeth at the spire, for it was now at a slight angle, in a few dozen years it would probably fall, and crush a few houses and kill a few ponies, and no one outside of the vicinity would know or care.

About a mile outside of Pillory, the first few drops of rain started falling from the sky, starting as a simple light drizzle. For two weary and exhausted fillies, the cold water falling from the sky in a gentle spray was welcomed and indeed quite refreshing, but I knew that if it escalated anymore than we would be wandering into town shivering and dripping wet, which was a state I was in no mood to be in.

“Welcome to Pillory,” I muttered. “There, Luna, look…”

One of the six districts of the city looked like it was devoted entirely towards airships, for dozens were moored there and one was presently in the process of taking flight into the cloudy sky. That was apparently the district we had to head for, but before we could even think of moving past Pillory we had to worry about finding somepony else flying North and willing to let two young fillies pay passage aboard as passengers.

And besides, this was provided we could even enter the city without it being a problem. If Pillory were anything like Cyclosa, the only entrances into the city would be guarded. I did not know whether or not word of our escape from Cyclosa had already reached Pillory, but if it did then I could not count on using the front gate that the trodden path from atop the hill lead to.

I explained all this to Luna and she nodded in understanding. 

“The walls look kinda...old,” she suggested. Indeed, she was right. Pillory was much larger than Cyclosa, but it was also much older, and this was no more evident then in the walls surrounding the city. They had been beaten mercilessly by the ages, and seemed to be crumbling apart in places. Nopony cared if anyone came or left the city, and as such no move had been made to fix them. Discord’s guards could not have cared less if the occasional dust storm seeped through the cracks and destroyed some poor ponies house. 

“Maybe we can find a crack big enough to fit through,” Luna said. 

“Yeah. Good idea.” 

It took us shy of thirty minutes to scale the steady decline until the towering walls of Pillory were before us. It perhaps would not have taken as long if we would have followed the pronounced path in the dirt leading to the front gates, but our desire for secrecy made it an impossibility to do so. As such, we descended at a diagonal, and reached the wall at a position where we were clearly beyond the range that any guard could have spotted us. 

We circled the immense perimeter of the town for another half an hour. The rain grew as if to accompany my billowing dread. Soon it was pouring down our manes, weighing down our cloaks and sending shivers down both our spines. The dirt under our hooves quickly became sloshy and unpleasant, as if we were travelling through a marsh. I knew that too long in the wet and cold would make us sick in no time, and my desperation grew as the rain mercilessly beat down. 

Finally, our trek heralded an entrance into the town. It was a section of the wall that had collapsed significantly, so that bits of destroyed concrete formed a crude incline into an abandoned, roofless building that at one point could have been a factory. Gratefully, we scuttled up the miraculous entrance, and into the city of Pillory. 

We entered on the second floor of the abandoned building. The floor was riddled with holes and signs of decay, and it groaned and creaked as we moved towards the broken steps and descended them. The first floor was empty also. Even with the roof of the second floor above us it was still covered with at least an inch of water, and the concrete ceiling sagged down at intimidatingly steep declines, but nonetheless we both lay down on the floor to rest. 

“Celly…” Luna said once we were both sitting. “My...my forehead feels funny.” 

My blood curdled as I recalled the feeling of pain in my sides, several months ago. I had gone to sleep in slight pain, and when I had awoken the beginnings of my wings were already jutting from my body. Could the same thing be happening to Luna already? 

I was in the middle of contemplating whether I should tell this to Luna or simply let it happen, but it seemed I did not need to decide. 

“I think my horn might be growing in.” 

Silence, save for the patter of water outside.

“That’s...wonderful,” I said eventually. 

“It hurts though. It hurts really bad.” 

“How long has it been hurting?” I asked warily. I didn’t like the idea of my sister being in pain and me being oblivious to it for so long. 

“Since...since a little after the dust storm,” she admit sullenly. 

“Come on, Luna! You need to tell me about stuff like this! Are you alright?” 

“Yeah, yeah. It’s honestly not that bad, Celly,” she said, although the sudden grimace seemed to differ. I had no way of knowing for certain, but I imagined the pain associated with a horn growing from a pony’s forehead would have been quite significant. Not that my wings had been a walk in the park, but the complaints Luna recounted of intense headaches and the times she almost lost consciousness led me to believe she had it much worse. 

But, even if she did have it worse, she certainly did not show it. Even as a filly, Luna was one of the strongest ponies I’d ever seen. Through hardship, discomfort, pain, she did her best to not let her good nature waver. Any longer in the slums of Cyclosa, and I doubt that she would have been able to maintain that resilience, however. I truly believe I saved her at the dwindling moments of her equinity, and I believe by doing so she managed to save my own.

The abandoned building was hardly an ideal place to be staying, and when Luna began to cough uncontrollably I decided that finding an airship and getting the hell out of Erisia was more important than resting our hooves. Besides, we had both gone nearly three days without food and were both incredibly hungry. 

At the prospect of food, and seeing airships, Luna was ecstatic. Before trotting into the city, I took care to make sure my cloak was secured well and was successfully concealing my wings. I did the same with Luna, although it did not matter too much with her. 

The district of Pillory we entered into seemed to have fallen into disrepair. It seemed the building we had entered into was not the only abandoned one; this entire section was a maze of old factories and other tall buildings whose purposes had seemingly been deemed useless, and whose presence now served no purpose. It was largely uninhabited, although the ponies who did inhabit such a decrepit part of the town were not ones I would have liked to encounter. The shattering of bottles and burning of barrel fires confirmed they were indeed there, but through the darkness of the storming skies overhead we silently made our way towards the center of Pillory so that we could find the airship district. 

It might have been noon or it might have been the middle of the night. It was impossible to tell with the sky nothing but a sheet of black cloud and descending rain. There were no torches or streetlamps until we finally left the ghost district behind, and entered the center of the town. The tall spire loomed ahead of us, it’s spindly top stretching far into the sky. It might have been a monument or it might have actually had some sort of purpose. All I know for certain was that it was a hideous eyesore that I tried not to pay attention to. 

Even if it was primarily a garden, the center of the town seemed to be where many of the ponies were, and as such we steered clear of it. From the garden the town split into six different directions, but I had no idea which one led where. Bewildered, I stopped dead in my tracks and frantically wished for some sort of sign to help me distinguish where I was supposed to go.

There is little to be described of Pillory that would not simply be a reiteration of what I have already explained of Cyclosa. In many ways the larger city was an improvement over our home town. Perhaps if the rain had not reduced the streets to a hideous sludge my opinion on the city would have improved. The buildings were taller, some as much as five or six stories, but many of them seemed to be abandoned just like the first district we had entered. 

The town had guards who resembled the ones in Cyclosa almost exactly. Fortunately, the crowd was dense enough even in the middle of the night that their attention could never have solely fallen on me and Luna. 

Even though it’s purpose was to be a garden, the center of the town seemed more like a clustered hub of all the districts compiled into one. I smelt burning food and I could see vendors and other ponies trying to sell rotten looking fruit. It was a mad congregation of ponies with every possible purpose.

There were many more barrel fires, some of which seemed to be in use as makeshift cookstoves. Luna seemed to noticed them too, because she tugged on my cloak and pointed. 

“Uhh...Celestia…” she muttered uneasily. “W...what’s that on the spit?”

I followed Luna’s gaze, and the moment I caught sight of the skinned red carcass above the flames I felt as though I was about to be sick.  

“It’s cattle, Luna,” I said, my voice quavering as I realized how savage this city truly was. “They eat meat here.”

“Dear Discord…” Luna murmured, unwillingly using his name as an expletive like we all had grown accustomed to doing. “That’s...that’s disgusting! It’s murder!”

Round and round the dead creature spun, but worse than the cow itself was the nonchalant, uncaring expression of the stallion spinning it. He was preparing a sentient creature to be devoured and he did not look even remotely bothered by it.

“They aren’t even a little guilty about it!” Luna echoed my thoughts.

“Come on, Luna, let’s keep moving.”

For the first time, I realized there were signposts next to each of the six spoke-like pathways. Realizing how preemptive my bewildered panic had been moments later,  I approached them with a slightly amused smile. 

My smile was quick to fade when I saw a sizable sign depicting of a young white mare posted on the side of a brick building directly beside the signpost. Crude though it was, it was unquestionably supposed to be myself. 

And it was unquestionably an alicorn being depicted. 

“Have you seen this mare?” The sign asked in harsh block capitals. ‘Missing’ or ‘Wanted’ signs were nothing new, but any hope of anypony passing this one by was quickly snuffed out by the capitalized, painted red word directly underneath, confirming to anypony too stupid to see both wing and horn that this particular refugee was an alicorn. 

There was a short descriptive passage, too. Fully understanding the risk of somepony bearing witness to me looking at my own Wanted poster, I took a moment to glance at it. I saw my name, the word alicorn too many times, and the word Cyclosa. Fortunately, the other name I’d been dreading was not mentioned. 

My name had most likely been provided by one of the guards from the scrapyard. But I’d never told them of my sister, let alone given them her name. While I had been identified, Luna was at least safe. And, considering she was not included in the depiction, it seemed she was not even a target. I breathed a sigh of relief and led Luna onwards, even though she was still heavily focused on the poster. 

“Celly, that was—”

“Shut up! Don’t call me that!” I cut her off sharply. 

“Celly?” 

“Shut up!” I hissed again. “Yes!” 

I leaned down to tell her more directly. The streets were relatively deserted, but I did not want to take any chances. 

“You saw the poster. Ponies are gonna start looking for me, so if you go around blurting my name for them all to hear…” 

“Oh my gosh!” Luna gasped. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t—” 

“It’s fine.” I smiled. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. If anypony asks your name, it’s Selena, alright?”

Luna let out an amused snort. 

“I thought you were Selena.” 

“It works better for you,” I said, shrugging. 

Luna’s response was lost to a hacking cough, and a grimace as it further led to an intensification of the headache caused by her growing horn. Wishing for nothing but warmth before her sickness got worse, I increased the rate of my trot into the shipyard, any of our rarely occurring good humor dying off in an instant.

So they knew. In time, all of Erisia would know. That made things considerably more problematic. 

All I could do now was simply hope we could find an airship pilot who either had not seen the posters, or had some shard of mercy in them that they would pretend they hadn’t. If even for a moment they made an attempt to pry into our stories (or remove my cloak) then I would swiftly deny passage and flee without a second thought. 


iv


Pillory’s shipyard was a maze of airships all docked haphazardly in a space that seemed to small to support them all. But I was not hoping to secure passage in the yard itself. Surrounding the yard itself were several filthy looking bars, and it was towards them that I trotted. Luna stayed outside while I nervously pushed the door of a gondola-turned-bar open and strode in as confidently as I could manage. I’d raised the hood of my cloak, largely concealing the tell-tale signs that I was a foolish young mare quite clearly out of her element. 

Eyes turned to watch me regardless, but I ignored them as I eagerly approached the counter. 

“Excuse me…” I greeted the stallion on the other side. 

“Evening, young mare.” he said, his grin showing teeth I’d have prefered not to have seen. “Are you lost?” 

He guffawed at his own joke, and I grimaced and narrowed my eyes. 

“No. I’m not. I need passage on an airship that’s flying North.” 

I was well aware of the fact that I had an audience, but I dared not turn around to greet them. I was trying my hardest to appear purposeful and confident, but truly I was nearly shaking in uncontrollable fear. I’d seen another poster of myself on the way into the shipyard, and I was praying that one had not been presented directly to this stallion or anypony else in the shipyards. 

“North? Where’s about? Gotta give me town, young mare.” 

“No, I don’t. I’ll discuss that with a pilot.” I said. “And not one in this dump.”

I turned from the counter angrily. I knew full well I had made a grave mistake entering the bar, and with dozens of gruff ponies watching me as I exited I came to the conclusion that I would get Luna and sprint as far from the shipyards as possible and think of something else. 

I hurried outside whilst doing my best not to look like I was hurrying. Luna was by my side in a moment. 

“That was fast! Did you get us a ship?” 

“No, I didn’t.” I said, bring a hoof to my nose and grimacing. “Come on, Luna. Let’s go.” 

“But...but the ship!” I was already heading back in the direction we came, but Luna had stayed behind and was motioning upwards at the flickering sign of the shabby bar I had just exited. 

“Let’s go.” I snarled. Seeing my urgency, she quickly obeyed, but it was all too late. 

“Wait!” A voice called after us as I started to leave. “You wanted passage North?” 

“I changed my mind.” I said without turning around.

“Are you sure? Me and my wife are more than happy to offer it…” 

That had been enough to cause me to stop and turn around. I’d been expecting to see a gruff, harsh looking pony. What I saw instead was an older stallion with an honest grin and a beautiful mare standing next to him. The Earth pony couple both had vibrantly coloured and well-groomed manes and coats, the stallion had a bright pinkish-ivory coat with a red mane, while his wife had a similarly coloured coat but with a mane of a deeper pink.

“Who the hell are you?” I rose an eyebrow. The thought of anypony wanting to help us seemed ridiculously suspicious, even if this...oddly happy looking couple were the ones offering it. 

“Rose. Mr and Mrs. Pleased to meet you, Miss…?”  he offered a hoof, one that I did not shake. 

“Solana,” I said, taking a step back. “And my younger sister Selena.” 

“Pleased to meet you two,” he smiled. “So you need a ride North?” 

“Yeah. You have an airship?” 

He nodded eagerly. 

“ The Damask Rose. As I said, we’re pleased to offer help.” 

“Not for free, I presume,” I questioned. That would be too good to be true. Evidently, he also thought so, because his grin faltered at the urgency of my question. 

“Well, no. We can take you due North a couple hundred klicks for…let’s say a hundred and fifty bits.” 

“A hundred and fifty?!” I exclaimed. “Are you nuts?” 

In the coin purse, I’d had a little over a hundred. I’d known booking passage aboard an airship would have been expensive, but a hundred and fifty bits was more than I was willing to pay in any universe. I removed my coin-purse from a deep pocket in my cloak and quickly looked at the mass of bits within. 

“How about ninety?” I offered. 

“Ninety bits for two passengers is a little shallow…” he began. “But fine. You two seem rather desperate.” 

My thoughts were a flurry of gratefulness and suspicion as I counted out nine small piles of bits and offered them to the Rose couple, doing so with my telekinesis as a simple means of exercising my magic. I was content we were getting passage for nearly half of what he had asked, but at the same time I knew damn well that his initial price was ludicrous anyways. It wasn’t as though us being in the ship came at any cost to them anyways; they were flying North regardless of whether or not we were in the ship or not. 

“Thank you!” Luna piped up, contrasting my judgmental thoughts. 

“You’re certainly welcome, young filly.” Mrs. Rose said with a wide smile, placing the bits into a saddlebag of her own. 

“So where’s the ship?” I cut in. “No offense, but we’d like to be out of Pillory before too long.” 

“Oh...we weren’t planning to depart until morning,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

“What? Seriously?!” I exclaimed. I was inches from demanding my bits back, when another thought struck me. If I made it obvious I was in a rush to be out of Pillory, there was simply no way it would not rouse suspicion. It was a miracle they had not recognized me in the first place, and I quickly decided I wasn’t going to push that miracle any further. 

“Fine. One night.” I said. “Come on Selena, let’s go get some food. See you two soon.” 

I didn’t wait for any further response. The eerily cheerful smiles they had given me had made me feel uncomfortable, and my stomach had been giving me hell for some time and I imagined Luna’s was quite the same. Strange and eccentric as they were, the Rose couple seemed nice enough, and if they had any (admittedly justifiable) suspicions of us, they did not show them. 

We traveled back down the spoke-path towards the center of the town while the rain continued falling. It had not lessened for hours, and it would not end for many hours more. Somewhere in Pillory I imagined we would be able to find some form of food that we could actually eat. If we were fortunate, we’d even be able to find a tavern to stay in. 

Come morning, we would be in an airship, leaving the steep, gritty, mud-filled streets of Pillory far behind anyways.