//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: Up the Avalon // Story: Malign Spirits // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// Keen Trader and his crew were doomed. They had boated down the Muddy from Stalliongrad, their riverboat Mare Mustang full of furs from the Northwest, furs that should fetch a fine price among the furriers of Colton, at the foot of Mount Avalon. It was a good plan for a venture, and it would have worked, had not Keen Trader gotten too greedy at the last. He had, of course, traveled in company with one of the regular trading-fleets down from Stalliongrad. Keen Trader was bold, not stupid, and well he knew that the Northwest was infested wth bandits, especially along the river. Keen grasped that a target as tempting as a fur-laden flatboat could safely travel those streams only if she either traveled in convoy, or carried at least a squad of well-armed and armored guards. The latter solution was so expensive as to be impractical. Royal Guards were unavailable for deployment in such penny packets, mercenaries might be hired, but they were costly; competent armsponies would cut so deeply into the profit margin as to render the whole voyage pointless. A big merchant house could hire a section or company of mercenaries and deploy them strategically through a large fleet; such tactics were unavailable to small fry such as Keen Trader. Traveling in company was by far the most prudent choice. The disadvantage, of course, was that a convoy goes at the speed of the slowest boat -- generally a big wallowing barge carrying bulk cargo. Mare Mustang was a fast boat, equipped with both oarlocks and the ability to step a mast and raise a yawl rig, with both a flat bottom and a retractible keel board, for the best performance in both the shallows and deeps of the river. Half her capabilities were wasted in a slow convoy, and Keen Trader knew it. And the first boats to reach Colton could catch the furriers when their demand was the most keen, allowing the furs to be sold for the highest possible prices. Hence, an ambitious trader such as Keen could not be satisfied to amble along, slowly grazing with the herd. No, he would want to gallop ahead of the others, racing to his destination! At some point, all the brave merchants broke away from the herd to make their final, frenzied dashes up the River Avalon toward the great mountain atop which gleamed the capital of Canterlot, and Keen Trader was no exception. The Muddy River was dangerous, poorly-patrolled. But the Avalon was watched over directly by the Royal Guard, including by platoons of sharp-eyed Pegasi stationed on the Palace towers, and higher still on outposts closer to the summit of Mount Avalon. Equipped with strong telescopes, they could see everything that passed in the Vale of Avalon, and be there within minutes of swift-winged flight. Any bandits who dared to operate in the Vale would have to do so in small groups and from concealment. Surely, the Avalon would be safe! Keen Trader was mostly correct. There had been only two flaws in his reasoning. The first was that, while most of the Avalon between the ruins of Junction, where the boats turned off the Muddy, and Colt Creek, where the boats turned off the Avalon, was safe enough, that was not entirely true of the stretch between where Junction had been and the town of Saddle Lake. There, the north bank is mostly desolate, its villages sacked in the late wars, and the south bank is even worse, holding as it does the northern fringes of the dark and dismal Everfree Forest. Indeed, some of those villages on the northern shore had been wasted neither by contending armies nor even bandits, but rather by that which had come out of the Everfree to raid across the river, when the Royal Guards were busy in the Northwest fighting against the hordes of the vicious Griffon Chief, Guntram the Black, three decades and more past. There were things in the Everfree that did not like Ponies, not at all, and they did not always remain within the forest's borders. In consequence, both shores were there almost entirely lacking in any Ponies on lawful errands, and prime lurking-grounds for bandits. Such bandits would of course have to brave the terrors of the Everfree, or of the lands right across the river from the Everfree, but they would of course be armed, and inured to danger. The second flaw in his reasoning is that he did not consider that Pegasi, no matter how sharp-eyed, cannot see through fog. The fog had swirled thick over the water as Keen Trader captained the Mare Mustang around the dangerous confluence of the waters, and Brown Roarer, the big young dun stallion who had replaced Ken's usual pilot, had gone pale as he conned the boat past jagged rocks and into the fog spilling out from the Avalon. He had previously been only a cub pilot -- this was his first experience of piloting alone, and he clearly did not appreciate such a challenging baptism in chief-pilotry. Crusty, old experienced White Foam, Keen's regular pilot, had broken two legs by managing to walk off a pier at Pietown. White Foam was a really good pilot, but he did tend to drink too much in port, which had been his bane. It might be months before White Foam would be healed enough to rejoin the boat, if he ever was -- it would certainly not be until the next voyage, or the one after. For now, they would have to make do with Brown Roarer -- he had been the only decent pilot available. They were heading into the wind as well as the current as they took the first leg of the Avalon. The channel was narrow and the stream strong. Both tacking and rowing were impossible, and towing difficult here where there was no maintained towpath. That left poling, and that is how they went up this part of the river: a slow and weary process of walking down the deck holding long poles, the motion of their hooves actually pushing the boat upstream while the poles coupled them to the river bottom. They felt every ton of the boat and her cargo, every pound per square inch of the current against the hull, and every yard of their progress upstream. It was a tough job, but the only way to bring the boat past this part. Keen Trader and Brown Roarer stood astern, crewing the tiller and as necessary augmenting the steering capabilities of their rudder with the long stern sweep. It was vital to keep the Mare Mustang's bow into the current; they could not afford to let her swing broadside on; possibly capsized and certainly swept far downstream in such a situation. To complicate matters, the fact that they were poling meant that a sudden shift in attitude could eassily result in crew overboard, and it forced them to keep to shallow water. What was more, sometimes the broad shallows were on one side of the river, sometimes on the other; so every now and then they had to maneuver under oar across the main channel, trying to lose as little headway as possible. The fog made it worse. When poling, of course, their progress was sufficiently slow that visibility was not much of an issue, though in the densest patches, Keen sent a crewpony forward to watch for shoals and at certain points cast the lead, calling the mark back through the streamers of mist. Mare Mustang, even laden, drew less than a fathom, but it was important to know the general trend of the bottom to avoid grounding. This was not a stretch of water upon which one wished to find oneself helpless. But when they rowed across the channel, it was nerve-wracking. If they rowed too slowly, they would lose too much headway before they reached water shallow enough to continue poling. If they rowed too fast, they risked grounding or worse, fetching up on a rock or snag. Mare Mustang was a sturdy boat, but Keen did not care to try her hull against solid stone, or the tough, twisted wood of a great fallen tree. They laid their bets, and they took their chances. And, fortunately, they won. It was a long and weary morning. But toward noon the fog burned off, the river stood plainly revealed, and far to the north-northeast the peak of Mount Avalon rose above the low and rolling hills. The river widened and the current slowed. They raised the mast, lowered their side sweeps and set sail, into a north wind. At first, the river's course went directly into the wind, and they had to tack, working their sweeps furiously to aid each turn to avoid falling off too far to leeward. Then the river bent eastward, and soon they were broad-reaching down a long lake, bounded by hills to north and south. As the wind shifted, they sailed sometimes closer to one side and sometimes the other, getting a good look at both. The north shore was a green and pleasant forest, limned by marshes and broken by clearings, the wooded hills rising behind. Between and upon the trees squirrels frisked, and in the meadows rabbits browsed. Ducks and geese swam in the swamps, sometimes whirring into the air in great noisy flocks when the Mare Mustang passed too close. It was idyllic and lovely: reminiscent of the White Tails or the Foals. Here and there, though, were reminders that these woods had a darker past. There were the ruins of towns, the remains of many villages that had been on the North Shore. Fire-blackened chimneys stood stark besides the hummocks that had been houses; looking lonely down upon the lake. In many places stockades still stood, but with broken gates and no Ponies manning the watch-towers. The land was fertile, but desolate. Many of the ruins were scorched, sacked in the Leveller Risings of many decades past, or overwhelmed by bandits who bred and swarmed while Celestia's armies were engaged in the Northwest against Guntram the Black two decades ago. The wood was rotting away, leaving only skeletons of brick and stone to stand after less sturdy structural components fell back into the soil. In some cases, though, stone itself had melted and run, or been half-dissolved by acid or warped in stranger manners. These were the marks of foes far feller than mere Leveller fanatics, of that which had come out of the Everfree while the Guards were away in far-off wars. Hydras, Star-Beasts, and more nameless creatures had been emboldened to cross the Avalon and fall upon the homes of Ponykind. The Militias, Equestria's last reserves in emergencies, had mustered and beaten the monsters back from most of the Vale of Avalon, but these lands had been hard by the hell-forest, and the Militias could not arrive in time to save these settlements. Keen Trader was thirty-six years old; he had been born in YOH 1233, when the Leveller Risings had been recent memory. He had been a colt and young stallion during Guntram's attacks, when it had seemed for a time as if all the Northwest would fall and be lost to Equestria for ever; the tale of the Realm's rise now ending and that of its decline beginning. The sight of these ruins moved him; they were scars remaining from those wars, a reminder that Equestria had not yet come all the way back from the harm done it by her own unruly demagogues and the demoniacally-vicious Griffon tribal warlord. As a young stallion he had wished to run off and join the armies fighting Guntram. His own master, Gray Bale, had convinced him that his brains and talent made him far more valuable -- both to Equestria and to all who cared for him -- as a merchant than he ever would have been as a soldier. Keen knew that what he and his fellows were doing, by bringing the riches of the Northwest back to Equestria and hence encouraging further settlement and exploitation, was serving the Realm in a fashion far more effective than he might have ever done with his sword -- though he'd had to use his sword more than once anyway, defending his ventures from river-pirates. Still, he knew little of the northern shore. The biggest town had been Lake Landing; he'd heard that it had been a fairly nice place before the Levellers had burned it down. The destruction of Lake Landing had undermined the defenses of the whole Lower Avalon, and one village after another had fallen to one or another foe. He knew the other villages only to the extent that their larger ruins were useful navigational marks; had he been a pilot, of course, he would have memorized them all. He knew even less of the southern shore here. He had heard legends -- essentially wonder-tales -- that there had once been a great castle and city deep within what was now the Everfree, and had then been a veritable Garden of Paradise, and that castle and city had been the capital of a great Realm. That Realm had been ruled by two Alicorn Sisters who had quarreled, the younger rising against the elder to become a monster, the very same Nightmare Moon who figured so prominently in the harvest-festival of Nightmare Night. In their battle, the castle and city and Realm had all been cast down, and the forest cursed forever to be the abode of monsters. He did not know, of course, that the Realm in question had been Old Equestria, and the elder Sister the very same mare who now sat on the throne at the Palace of Canterlot. Keen Trader was an intelligent Pony, but he was no scholar, and even scholars had long since forgotten these things, gently nudged to do so by the social manipulations of a super-equinely charismatic Ruling Princess who really did not like to hear this tragedy spoken of in her presence. Once labeled myth, the label had stuck. Likewise, he had heard stories about ghosts haunting the very section of the southern shore he was passing: deadly ghosts, set there by Nightmare Moon to consume and slay the living. He had even once heard a song about a bard who had been kissed, and horribly-scarred, by a ghost mare with glowing golden eyes. He had never actually seen any ghosts along this shore, though of course he'd never made the passage by night. He had no desire to see any, either. Least of all super-powerful ones, able to harm the living. All he could see from the stern of the Mare Mustang was that the southern forest was deeper, darker and thicker that that to the north of the lake. The air was noticeably warmer there, as if there were some strange source of energy within: Keen Trader was minded not so much of a roaring bonfire as of some vast steaming compost-heap rotting away somewhere beneath the soil; a fancy rendered more plausible by the stench of decaying vegetation -- and other organic materials -- wafting across the water to his nostrils. He did not, in truth, know why the Everfree was so much warmer than the forest on the north shore, less than a mile away. He only knew that it was unnatural, and he did not like it, any more than he liked the ancient twisted trees; the way their gnarled branches moved -- sometimes to no visible wind -- or the vines which draped those branches, and sometimes seemed to squirm, especially when he saw them from the corners of his eyes. Nor did he like the sounds he heard when he passed the hell-woods: the strange hoots, howls, shrieks, snarls, growls and other calls emitted by creatures little-known in the rest of Equestria. Least of all did he like what he sometimes saw when he passed too close to that horror-haunted shore. The glimpses -- and sometimes more than glimpses -- which he had been vouchsafed of forms both shocking and manifestly predatory convinced him to never make this run by night, and to always keep crossbows and half-pikes ready on deck when passing this place. It was thus each time with a sense of relief that Keen Trader put the Mare Mustang turning to port, and away from that dreadful riverbank. Brown Roarer knew these waters, and the leadspony Mark Gainer was alert, but Keen could not rid himself of a certain nagging fear that his boat might come to some grief on the Everfree shores; wrecked on some hidden rock, and they all leave their bones mouldering in the hell-forest. The notion took root in the back of his head, in the same place from which he got his best trading hunches, and try as he might Keen could not dislodge it. He felt it as a coldness on his croup, an irritation as if some predator were about to leap on him from behind, a wrenching in his stomach, a constant unease. Sweat broke out upon his brow, and his mouth went dry. He could not afford to show fear before his crew. Nothing would demoralize his boys faster then the awareness that their captain was afraid, and that would put them all in very real danger should they balk at some maneuver. So he kept up a brave front; remained alert for any obstacles ahead; snapped out his orders in the normal fashion; and hoped that they would soon be clear of this terror-shadowed stretch of river. He was glad that the direction of the wind kept the crew from literally smelling his fear. At one point the wind shifted full abeam, and they ran broad-reaching right down the center of the channel. Keen Trader relaxed, allowing himself a soft sigh of relief. They were now about as safe as they could be in these waters. Soon they would reach the end of the lake. The river there turned north-eastward again -- but here it would be broad, shallow and slow-flowing. The main channel would be deep enough for their keel-board at full draft, which would let them continue to sail even close to the wind; while they could augment the sails with the sweeps, and with their combined power, make good headway against the current. Five miles of that, and they would make Saddle Lake. where they would be in full view of Mount Avalon and have plenty of room for maneuver. An easy row across the lake, and they could dock for the night at Saddle Lake Towne, get some well-earned rest. From there on, they would be in well-patrolled and routinely-cleared waters, all the way to Colt Creek -- no more than two or three days from Colton and the end of their voyage. They would be home. Home. Home meant his wife, Mare Counting Scroll, after whom he'd named his riverboat. Small, smart, pretty and businesslike -- and with a hidden passion she'd shown only to him. She was his lover and helpmate, who ran the Colton end of his ventures, contributing as fully to their success as did his foreign labors. Home meant their three children -- studious, ten-year-old Wellborn Scroll, a colt so intelligent that Keen felt awe at having sired him; six-year-old Sugar Scroll, who always begged him so sweetly for candy, or whatever else her heart currently desired, and to whom he found it very difficult to refuse; and little No-No -- he should arrive just in time to celebrate her first birthday. Home meant warmth and love. Home meant happiness. Home was why he made these long, wearying and dangerous trading ventures in the first place. He could have made an adequate living working in a counting house or as a shore factor. He could have even saved enough to gradually build his investments in trading ventures to the point that he would have enjoyed a comfortable living for himself and his family, with an adequate fortune on which to retire. But for his family, he wanted something more than merely adequate. He wanted to make them rich, so that his wife could show herself to the world in style, and his children enjoy top educations. He was almost at that point already. Indeed, if he could bring in and sell this cargo -- especially if he could beat the other boats into port -- he really would be rich. Rich enough that he could afford to quit leading the ventures himself. He could hire captains on a share basis, remain in Colton to manage the firm, taking a smaller cut of more ventures and growing even richer. He could hang around the coffee-houses, conferring with his fellow-merchants, keeping an ear up to the buzz of commerce and an eye out for profitable investment opportunities. Would he become bored? Certainly there would be fewer physical challenges. He wouldn't have to remain alert on dark nights, his whole body crying out for sleep, steering past sandbars and snags. Or stay on top of some complex deal in an unfriendly town while shivering with some foreign fever. Or lead his crew in fending off a pirate attack. All of which, at one time or another, there had been no choice but for him to do over the last decade of his life. Such adventures made exciting tales, but they were hell to live through. He would miss the wonder of seeing new places, but he would not miss the pain and fear of dangerous voyaging. Besides, as a rich merchant he might still travel, both for business and pleasure. His travels would simply be far easier and safer, that was all. And he would get to see his family every evening. He could sleep next to Mare every night. He would be able to watch their children grow to adulthod, marry and have children of their own, as it happened rather than as a series of vacations home followed by the next long voyage. He would grow old, happy and rich and respected, warmed by his hearthfire and the love of his family. He looked up at Canterlot, shining on the slopes of Mount Avalon, and his gaze shifted down and to the left, his mind filling in the homely walls and towers and rooftops of Colton to the west of that great eminence, nestled in the foothills by Colt Creek. Colton, his home town. Colton, where was his family. He looked -- and suddenly made up his mind. This would be his last personal venture. From now on, he would be the investor who equipped and organized the voyages. He chose home and family over excitement and adventure. When he came home this time, it would be for good. He smiled, contemplating his happy future. But first, of course, he had to get past this next bit. Ruby drifted over the treetops, a thicker patch of the mists that hung over the Everfree. She didn't bother to manifest mortal eyes, and hence was blind in the light octaves, but such scarcely mattered to the Wraith. Her spectral senses informed her of the patterns of magical energy flowing beneath and through the haunted forest, while her Talent for Finding rendered her almost incapable of becoming lost in any case. She had slipped into a deeper dream after dawn, as was her wont; mortals imagined Wraiths were driven back by cockcrow, but in truth they recked little of the behavior of male jungle-fowl, of which Sunney Towne had been in any case bereft for over seven hundred fifty years. Nightmare Moon had accidentally slain Three Leaf's original flock and the Wraiths had been utterly-uninterested in acquiring a new one. What actually drove Wraiths back was sunlight: something about the solar radiance disturbed and disrupted their spectral forms in a way no mere firelight nor even most magelights could. This was why Wraiths shunned daylight, and were normally most active by night. As a mortal filly over three-quarters of a millennium ago, one way in which Ruby had often been bad was that she had refused to go to sleep at bedtime. The realities of farming meant that at some seasons she was so tired that she dropped off immediately to bed when night fell, but when she wasn't too tired, she often sneaked out of the bed and crept out to think her private thoughts under the beauty of the night sky. Indeed, it had been while engaged in this solitary pursuit that she had first met Princess Luna, with momentous consequences for both of them. Now, as a Wraith, Ruby no longer actually needed sleep. Instead, she spent her existence in a constant waking dream, in which she blindly repeated the same actions -- especially those of the last few hours of her life -- again and again each day, unless she made a special mental effort to avoid doing so. And every evening, she was once again murdered -- the few times she had skipped that she had become deeply and horribly exhausted. She knew that her ritual murder sustained her through its link to the Curse; if she avoided that too often, she would risk the True Death; and she did not want to pass for real until she could redeem all her kin. Most especially the one who had specifically killed her. But she had discovered that, if she let herself relax and sink into a deeper trance for a few hours every day, she could make herself focus better on doing new things when she wasn't actually re-enacting her murder. This was the equivalent of sleeping, for a Wraith, and most of them did this at the height of the day, when the harsh sunlight kept them in the halfworld, or under cover, and during which their ghostly powers were restricted in any case. The Wraiths spent this time in their own individual ways. Her mother Mitta Gift semi-slept, either in their cottage in the village, or her bed in their secret inner sanctum in the cave on Falls Hill. Her father Gray Hoof rested in their old family house with his mistress Three Leaf, when she wasn't staying in her own hut working on experiments. Her eldest half-sister Starlet usually slept with her beloved Roneo -- any issues of pre-marital respectability having been washed away by that last devastating blast from Nightmare Moon -- the one that had slain her and Roneo both, as they embraced in mingled love and terror, so many centuries ago. They would never wed, nor would Starlet bear Roneo any foals, in or out of wedlock. Gladstone -- her eldest half-sibling, and the least favorite to her of her kin -- he was often doing something nasty with one of the mares of his squad of Skeletal Guards, who were bound to obey his every command, and were in any case usually pathetically-grateful for his attentions. He always acted as if this were some great achievement on his part. Ruby had been rather personally innocent when she had died. After over 750 years of unlife, she was no longer quite so innocent, at least in terms of observational knowledge. And the notion of carnal union, in general, had never actually bothered her. She grew up in an age where there was much less privacy, helping her family to farm. She had known where foals came from. But something about what Gladstone did bothered her. She was not bothered by the fact that her father loved Three Leaf (though she wished that Grey Hoof, Mitta and Three Leaf had all made the Morgan-Marriage they had obviously wanted after her grandmother Dainty Hoof's death, two years before the Curse, a plan spoiled for ever by Grey Hoof's murder of Ruby herself, which would have led to Mitta leaving Grey Hoof, had not Nightmare Moon rendered the issue of divorce entirely irrelevant with the blasts of focused gravitation which cut down husband, wife and old mistress down alike in death). Nor was she at all bothered by the love of Starlet and Roneo. What she supposed bothered her was that this was not love. She knew this, because Gladstone did not restrict himself to just one mare at at time, nor did those mares show much inclination to avoid Passing On any longer than those he did not choose. It was rape, or very close to it, and it reminded Ruby too much of a certain terrifying moment when she and her mother had been attacked by bandits, over eight years before they had both died. Grey Hoof had saved them then, but there was no one to save Gladstone's victims, for they were directly bound to Gladstone: the most Ruby herself could do was tell them that it was possible to Pass On, and how. It was just another way in which the Ponies of Sunney Towne had, themselves, essentially become bandits. She knew this always in the back of her mind, but when she saw the misery in the fiery sparks that glowed in the sockets of Gladstone's victims, she was forcibly confronted with its truth. She hated bandits. And when she saw his victims, she hated Gladstone. Which she should not, as he was her brother. Or half-brother, in any case. Sometimes, she even hated herself. But not right now. For she was doing something she loved. She was searching. Ruby had been a non-conformist in matters of sleep when in her breathing days, and death had not changed her in this. While most of the Wraiths slept all afternoon, and awoke only for Ruby's combined fifteenth birthday and murder-party, Ruby preferred to nap in the early morning, and then rise in the late morning or early afternoon. She had fallen into this habit in her subterranean sanctum, and then discovered that as long as she stuck to the shadows -- easy in the Everfree Forest -- she could flit from shade to shade, sometimes sinking into the ground to cross sunlit patches, even on a sunny day without much difficulty. And on foggy or even overcast days, she could roam about outside in almost complete freedom. She still had to worry about breaks in the clouds, but even direct sunlight only caused her pain and exhaustion and drove her back into the shade or the ground for a time. That was a risk worth taking, for the fun of exploration. The sting of sunbeams was simply part of the game she played; and unlike tangible undead creatures, Wraiths could only be disrupted and repelled, rather than truly harmed, by the power of the Sun. The others feared the Sun; Ruby did not. That was the difference. Sometimes she drifted about the forest, searching for hidden treasures in loot abandoned by thieves, or the many ruins that littered the forest. At times she went as far as the Castle and City Foreverfree -- there were endless fallen houses there, which she had seen slowly return to the soil, and many spaces hidden beneath the former city, which were hidden from the Sun and in which she could wander as she pleased. There were other ghosts there too, and some were willing to converse with her. Her life was over, but that did not mean that she had to be alone, or shut herself up in one small village forever, not when she had the wit and heart to adventure. Upon occasion -- and she had to plan this carefully, usually on a very cloudy day -- Ruby could wake early in the day, and make it across the river, during the decades and centuries when it was bridged. She had to travel invisbly and intangibly to do this, for there was no way she could cross those waters in any showy or solid Aspect, but then she could rest and re-form on the other side. Usually she became but a patch of mist, within which a sharp-eyed Pony might have seen a pair of wan golden eyes, peering out at them. Then she could go into the towns of living Ponies, and watch them go about their business in the markets and streets and houses, and hear their speech, and learn something of how the world that she had left for ever wended its way without her. If she planned it right, and it was a very foggy day, she could even get little things from the towns, but only things that they were throwing away, for she hated thieves and did not want to become one. These things she brought back to her Sanctum, and collected for her later enjoyment. Tapestries, and books, and clothes, and sheets of music, mostly. Sometimes -- oh, those times were wonderful! -- she found things on her side of the River. That meant that she could use her full power and bring back sizable things -- heavy clothes, or boxes and crates and trunks, or even large items of furniture such as beds and bookcases and tables. Her Sanctum was a lovely place, filled with more wealth than she had dreamed she might ever enjoy in her breathing days. She had tapestries to decorate her walls, and books to read, and bookcases to keep them in, and pretty clothes to try on and pose in, and she even rested on her own bed now. She was rich, though she had none save her mother with whom she might enjoy her treasures. She did not trust the others enough; she had never, in many centuries, shown them where it was, though she suspected they knew she had her own place. This was her place, where she could be safe from all the world, and dream of her life as it might have been. The world seemed to be getting richer. She was no expert on economics, but when she saw the riverboats and visited the towns, it seemed as if the boats and houses kept getting bigger and sturdier and nicer century by century. Almost all the houses now had those chimneys they had invented a few hundred years ago, and glass gleamed in the windows, and the Ponies seemed bigger and better-fed and healthier. And there were more and more boats on the river -- sometimes whole trading fleets sailed past her -- though the last half-century had seen some setbacks in that regard. She remembered that Luna had once told her that She and her Sister had a plan to accomplish this, that they wanted to make Equestria better and better until one day it would reach the heights of the fabled Age of Wonders, millennia ago, and then Ponies might even go beyond the Earth, though that part seemed strange to Ruby. And she supposed that the plan was coming true, even without her friend, who had been banished to the Moon -- Ruby had seen that part of it, as a new Wraith -- and she wondered if Luna could see any of this from the Moon, and if it consoled or enraged her. She sometimes wished that she might partake in the new world whose birth she was witnessing, but she knew her limitations. She was dead, after all. The world was for the living. She knew that she was lucky to see it at all -- had she lived the life she had meant to live, she would have died some six or more centuries ago anyway of old age if nothing slew her first, and missed all these beautiful things. She had her cave and her treasures, and she mostly enjoyed her unlife. Today she was excited, for her Talent had told her that there was, or would be, something really special to find on the shores of the Avalon. Perhaps a riverboat had gone aground and jettisoned some of its cargo? That was salvage, she told herself, and no thievery at all, so she could take some of it! So she drifted through the forest, a mist-cloud, and her golden eyes glowed in happy anticipation of what might at her destination be revealed.